Putin And The Rise Of Russia by Stuermer Michael

Author:Stuermer, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2008-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

More mosques

The green night-sleeper train from Kazan to Moscow’s Kazan station takes eight hours, slowly rumbling over creaking tracks, while matrons in green uniforms serve tea and vodka in ample quantities. From Moscow the east and south are seen with ill-concealed concern. Even in its reduced post-Soviet form Russia, with about 20 million Muslims, still has a much higher percentage of Muslim population than Germany with three million Turks, but comes close to France with an estimated number of seven million, mostly of Arab origin.

In Chechnya there is a sort of peace, uneasy and unpredictable. The local president Ramzan Kadyrov, an opaque character if ever there was one, for the time being collaborates with the Russians, their special forces and administrators, but has also seen to it that women wear the veil, that a mosque of enormous proportions is being built, and that Moscow does not interfere too much. Nobody can tell what his designs may be on the day after tomorrow. Muscovites do not like to imagine what Russia’s Muslim population is dreaming about for its destiny in the years and decades to come. The Muslim future will be decided less under the crosses and eagles of Moscow and more through what happens in the lands under the rising crescent. Meanwhile, everything is quiet in and around Kazan.

Putin has never made a secret of his belief that the decline and fall of the late Soviet Union was an unmitigated disaster of the twentieth century, and four out of five Russians seem to be of the same opinion. But, on reflection, the demise of the vast Soviet Union can also be seen as a kind of liberation for Russia and the Russians. Much as France, in restrospect, has to thank General de Gaulle for cutting the umbilical cord to Algeria in 1962, the Russians got rid, without major revolts and uprisings, of many millions of Muslims living in the southern republics of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. When those republics left the sinking ship in 1991, they took with them vast amounts of mineral resources, imperial glories and military installations like the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan - but they also put an end to the Soviet illusion of a peaceful multi-racial and multi-religious empire, happy and at peace with itself. The wars of succession within or between those newly invented states were cruel, notably between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The surgical separation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from the Georgian republic - not without a little help from neighbouring Russia - was mercifully brief. It became a frozen conflict on the dividing line between Russia and Georgia - only to unfreeze in the brief brutal war of August 2008.

Shedding what Rudyard Kipling in the heyday of British imperialism had called the ‘white man’s burden’ was a blessing in disguise for the overextended motherland. The Soviet Union took its leave from history, quite unexpectedly, not with a bang but with a whimper. The wars over Chechnya and along the Northern Caucasus could have been the rule, but have been the exception - so far.

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