PSCRP-BESA Reports No 87 (Oct 4, 2024)
On September 18, official Russian media reported about a shooting in the heart of the Russian capital, near the head office of Wildberries, Russia’s largest online marketplace. Video footage of the incident instantly surfaced on the Internet. It was a violent attempt to seize assets in the style of the 1990s — a brief period of relative democracy in Russia, marked at the same time by wars between armed gangster groups vying for spheres of influence. Russian media abroad immediately rushed to declare the “return of the wild 1990s” as one of the consequences of the Russian-Ukrainian war.
The rise of criminal violence in Russia is undeniable, but in this case we are more interested in the ethno-political component of the shootout at the Wildberries office and the conflict surrounding this company. The thing is that some of those who stormed the Wildberries office were Chechens, including officials in the law enforcement agencies, while its defenders were mainly Ingush and Dagestanis. This is not surprising, given who is behind the conflicting sides: on one side is the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, and on the other side is Suleiman Kerimov, a Senator of the Russian Federation from the Republic of Dagestan, who is of Lezghin ethnicity. Two guards, Adam Almazov and Islambek Elmurziev, were killed in the shootout. Both of them were of Ingush nationality.
This is how the opposition website Kavkazsky Uzel describes the reaction of the Ingush people to the conflict: “The murder of Adam Almazov and Islambek Elmurziev in a shooting incident at the Wildberries office in Moscow caused a great resonance in Ingushetia, and many young and old people came to say goodbye to the dead, as evidenced by videos of the funeral published by the Ingush Telegram channels. […] The bodies of Islambek Elmurziev and Adam Almazov, who were killed in a shootout outside the Wildberries office in Moscow, were taken by plane to Magas airport on the evening of September 20. People lined the roads to escort ambulances with the bodies to Dolakovo and Kantyshevo” (native villages of the victims, where they were buried — V.Ch.).
The deaths of two Ingush at the hands of Chechens caused an explosion of anti-Chechen sentiment among the Ingush, including calls for blood feuds. Given that the strengths of Ingushetia and Chechnya are not equal in terms of demographics, economy or military power, attempts were immediately made to avoid the criminal conflict turning into an inter-ethnic conflict. The media published numerous statements by figures claiming to be experts who emphasized that the nature of the conflict was purely a matter of “business interests”. However, the opposition Ingush news site Fartanga quotes statements by Ingush people who took to the streets when the bodies of their compatriots killed in Moscow were brought to the republic, and these show that the people of Ingushetia do not share the opinion of these “experts” at all: “Our guys have proved their bravery, but it’s a violation of our manhood and our nation. It is important for me to show that I show solidarity with my people”, “The Kadyrovites and all those who support them have repeatedly shown their sincere hatred of our people over the last decade”, etc.
Apparently, attempts to downplay the inter-ethnic nature of the conflict have failed. A video recording of a recent meeting in Moscow between Chechen and Ingush delegations at which the parties attempted to resolve the conflict, is circulating on social media. The recording was posted on the official Instagram of the Chechen television channel, Grozny. The participants in the talks were communicating in the mutually intelligible Chechen and Ingush languages. The Chechen delegation was headed by Adam Delimkhanov, a close associate of Ramzan Kadyrov and a Russian State Duma deputy from Chechnya, who held Bekkhan Barakhoev, a Russian State Duma deputy from Ingushetia, responsible for the conflict. Judging by the Russian translations of fragments of the negotiations that appeared in the media, Adam Delimkhanov openly threatened the Ingush representatives.
The following statement by Adam Delimkhanov, made during the above-mentioned negotiations, is noteworthy: “In all my time in Moscow, I have never heard that we Vainakhs have clashed with each other in defense of someone from another nation. We have always avoided it.” Without going into the veracity of this statement by Adam Delimkhanov, it is appropriate to draw attention to the fact that he presents Chechens and Ingush as members of a single, Vainakh nation opposed to all others.
It should be clarified that the cultural and linguistic proximity of Chechens and Ingush is so great that in the late 1920s Ingush linguist Zaurbek Malsagov proposed to consider the whole set of Chechen and Ingush dialects as a single “Nakh language”. In 1934, the Chechen Autonomous Oblast (created in 1922) and the Ingush Autonomous Oblast (created in 1924), which were previously separate autonomies within the RSFSR, were united into the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Oblast (in 1936 its status was raised to the level of an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic) precisely on the basis of treating Chechens and Ingush as a single ethnic community, which, following the Russian linguist Nikolai Yakovlev, has been referred to as Vainakhs in scholarly works since the late 1920s.
During the 1960s through 1980s, after the return of Chechens and Ingush from deportation by the Soviet authorities in 1944, and the restoration of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR in 1957, a unified Vainakh identity was being intensively inculcated into the public consciousness of Chechens and Ingush. Therefore, the idea of “Vainakh brotherhood” is now taken for granted. This term usually refers only to Muslim Chechens and Ingush, although from a purely linguistic point of view the Batsbi Christians living in the Akhmeta district of Georgia also belong to the Vainakhs.
Nevertheless, despite their great linguistic and cultural proximity to Chechens and a unified Vainakh identity firmly rooted in public consciousness, the Ingush are a separate people. It is no coincidence that during the initial national-territorial division of the USSR they received their own autonomy. In the post-Soviet period, the destinies of Chechens and Ingush diverged. On October 1, 1991, the Provisional Supreme Soviet of the Chechen-Ingush Republic (former Chechen-Ingush ASSR) announced its division into the independent Chechen Republic and the Ingush Republic within the RSFSR. Subsequently, the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria became embroiled in a bloody war with Russia, while the Republic of Ingushetia entered into armed conflict with the neighboring Russian Republic of North Ossetia-Alania over disputed territories in the latter’s Prigorodny district.
Both Chechnya and Ingushetia suffered heavy defeats in these conflicts. Chechnya lost its independence, while Ingushetia was forced to accept thousands of Ingush refugees from North Ossetia and effectively renounce its territorial claims to the latter. During the Ossetian-Ingush conflict, the Ossetians, most of whom are Orthodox Christians, received support from the Russians, but Chechnya failed to help the “Vainakh brothers”, despite the fact that it had quite powerful armed formations at the time. This was a kind of punishment for the fact that the Ingush preferred to separate from Chechnya and remain within the Russian Federation. The formal pretext for refusing aid was that the then military-political leadership of Chechnya considered itself an independent state, and the Ossetian-Ingush conflict, accordingly, an internal affair of the Russian Federation.
Military cooperation between Chechens and Ingush against Ossetians took place at the next stage of the conflict, in the early 2000s, when, after the Russian armed forces defeated the military formations of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria during the Second Chechen War, Islamist terrorists became the main force resisting the Russians in the North Caucasus. The largest manifestation of cooperation between representatives of the two Vainakh peoples in the framework of armed Islamist resistance was the terrorist attack in the North Ossetian town of Beslan on September 1, 2004, during which more than 300 people, including 186 children, were killed. Two-thirds of the 32 Islamist fighters who took part in this attack were Chechens and one-third were Ingush. They were led by an Ingush, Ruslan Huchbarov.
By this time, the current collaborationist regime of the Kadyrov clan had already been established in Chechnya. The father (Akhmat) and especially the son, Ramzan Kadyrov, had managed to turn the Chechen Republic into a state within a state, with a unique status within the Russian Federation, receiving regular colossal subsidies from the federal budget and possessing many of the features of an independent state, including virtually its own armed forces.
These resources were used by the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, against Ingushetia in 2018 during a territorial conflict in which a “territory swap” agreement was imposed on the Republic of Ingushetia. As a result, it handed over 26,000 hectares of land to the Chechen Republic, receiving only 1,000 hectares in exchange. This unequal treaty sparked mass protests in Ingushetia, which lasted from October 4, 2018 to March 27, 2019 and were put down by force. The federal authorities supported Chechnya in this conflict, but the head of the Republic of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, who signed the above-mentioned treaty with Chechnya, had to resign and even left Ingushetia for Moscow, where he took a position in the Ministry of Defense.
Surely, this conflict has not been forgotten in Ingushetia, and it has once again come into focus against the backdrop of the current Chechen-Ingush conflict in the center of Moscow. It is the memory of the national humiliation suffered by the Ingush in 2018 that makes many of them view the criminal confrontation in Moscow, which claimed the lives of two Ingush security guards, as a national insult.
At this point, the Ingush elites will have to yield to the Chechen side of the conflict again, ignoring the protests of their own people. Given the current balance of power between the two Vainakh republics, the Ingush elites have no other option, just as Yunus-Bek Yevkurov had none in 2018. They will have to exert pressure on ordinary Ingush in order to prevent the republic from being drawn into a hopeless conflict in which the federal authorities will inevitably take the side of the already much stronger Chechnya in one form or another, just as they did in 2018.
However, the political situation in the North Caucasus and in the Russian Federation as a whole is by no means static. A qualitative deterioration of relations between the federal center and Chechnya is quite likely in the foreseeable future. The fact is that the special relationship between the federal center and the Chechen Republic that developed in the early 2000s is based on the personal interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kadyrov clan. There are too many variables in this equation. It is already clear that the inviolability of this relationship has been called into question, which is why Senator Suleiman Kerimov has dared to challenge Ramzan Kadyrov, whom Russians learned to fear. This is exactly how many commentators viewed the confrontation between these two figures even before the shootout outside the Kremlin.
Even with the collapse of federal power in Russia, when a war of all against all in the North Caucasus seems very likely, Ingushetia will not be able to stand up to Chechnya — alone. But it may turn out to be a valuable ally for other, stronger opponents of Chechnya. And then Ingush anger against the “Vainakh brothers”, which has been accumulating for years, could become a real force.