Expert representations of Chechnya and Russia

The point of departure of this chapter and the next is that the broader Russian public debate could have made a difference that autumn. Narratives that constructed the relation between Russia and Chechnya in terms different from those put forward in official and political elite language could have been voiced, and they could have spread to broader sections of the public, creating a pressure against undertaking a new war or, alternatively, halting it after some time. If we must put a label on the Russian political system in 1999, it was still closer to a democracy than an authoritarian regime. The much-discussed installation of the Power Vertical in Russia took time, and was not in place only a few months after Putin became Prime Minister. It is reasonable to argue that the political system prevalent at that time was fairly open. And crucially, despite increasing control over media coverage of the battlefield in Dagestan, the media scene was still pluralistic during summer/autumn 1999. The fact that the three biggest TV networks (ORT, RTR and NTV) invited politicians as different as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Governor Aleksandr Lebed and the liberal opposition politician Grigory Yavlinsky to comment on the government’s handling of the situation in Dagestan and the bombings in Russian cities testifies to this.1 The imposition of a media blockade on Chechnya was a gradual process.2 Counter-securitizing or de-securitizing attempts could have been launched at this stage. If such alternative discourses had found strong resonance with the Russian public, it would have made it difficult to undertake a new war against Chechnya legitimately. Again, developments during the first war in Chechnya (1994-1996) are instructive. The securitizing narrative offered by the Russian government at the time, which represented the Chechen regime as ‘criminal’ and focused on the need to protect Russian territorial integrity, was not well argued at the outset. Moreover, Mickiewicz (1997) contends that the Yeltsin regime proved unable to ‘manage’ the war as a daily discursive event for which it had to compete with other sources of information.3 The sharp discursive struggle which emerged as the First Chechen War unfolded between the official discourse and an alternative discourse which served to de-securitize Chechnya/Chechens was commented on in Chapter 6. This discursive struggle finally resulted in the Russian public rejecting the official securitizing narrative.4 Such a weak

foundation for the policy of war among the Russian public during the First Chechen War was undoubtedly one factor that pushed Russian authorities toward ending hostilities and deciding to sit down at the negotiating table in 1996.5 This time the situation was different. In what follows below and in the next chapter, expert opinion pieces and journalistic accounts on Russia and Chechnya from autumn 1999 are analysed. It might be objected that the selection of these groups as representing the Russian public is not satisfactory – numerically, experts and journalists make up a very small part of the Russian public. However, they are quite influential compared to their size, in terms of mediating and weighing in on discursive struggles and shaping the public debate on key issues – particularly, it seems likely, on an issue such as a counterterrorist operation, so physically and mentally distant from the daily life of the ‘man in the street’. Moreover, the choice of expert and journalistic texts as representatives of the ‘Russian public’ is highly satisfactory in terms of methodology. Such texts give direct access to linguistic representations, essential to discourse analysis. By contrast, public opinion polls or interviews at a later point in time are less reliable sources, as they give only indirect access to representations and are often mediated through questions that necessarily involve some kind of bias. Let us first see what expert representations of Chechnya and Russia in Russian newspapers looked like during autumn 1999. I identify three positions here: one stronger, in terms of the number of opinion pieces that can roughly be categorized within this position, which resonates strongly with official representations of Chechnya and Russia that autumn; another, much weaker, which can be identified as the remnants of the interwar ‘discourse of reconciliation’. This second position allows for more nuanced and less radical representations of Chechnya and Russia and also suggests less radical emergency measures than the dominant position does. Finally, I find a middle position: it seems to originate in the ‘discourse of reconciliation’, but goes a long way towards accommodating the new official representations of Chechnya. While exploring the content of these expert texts is an aim itself, a core exercise again involves comparing them against the 1999 official securitizing narrative presented in Chapter 5. Given the conceptualization of securitization as an intersubjective endeavour, it is relevant to see how expert accounts feed into and contribute to the emerging discursive consensus on Chechnya as an existential terrorist threat. While the texts of the political elite in the Federal Assembly contribute to this construction in a similar fashion as official texts, expert texts exhibit a different style and invoke different references in seeking to build authority around their arguments.