the chechnya thing...

the primary reason the chechnya thing is a bad parallel is that it isn't really a populist movement. the fairness of elections is always suspect, but the official results of elections in chechnya have consistently been to stay in russia.

i don't want to present the fallacy that i'm an expert on this complicated conflict, i am not, but my understanding of the dynamics is that it's a conflict between what are basically local tyrants (mostly western-backed islamic extremists) and the centralized state in moscow, with an ethnic group that identifies as neither. that is to say that there really isn't a significant independence movement there, but rather that there are two equally oppressive forces fighting over control of the region. for moscow, it's a slippery slope problem - let one small area break away, and deal with western-backed insurgents at every crossing point. for the west, it's destabilization. for the local tyrants themselves, there may be some religious aspect but it's just mostly about control. and for the people that live there it's about trying to escape...

chechens are caucasians, which are thought by linguists to have existed in the region between the caspian and black seas for upwards of 20,000 years. geneticists may point out that there has been large amounts of migration from arabs (and other semitic groups, like assyrians), indo-europeans (alans, greeks, armenians, persians and plausibly hittites), turks (including contemporary azeris), mongols and others, making the area more of a cultural melting pot. but, one of the arguments for this being the urheimat of the caucasian languages is the diversity of languages in the region. these languages are thought to all be of the same family, but sometimes it's hard to draw the connection. there's no really serious understanding of how the caucasian languages, turkic languages, indo-european languages and basque are related, but one idea is that they all split off roughly the same time through geographic separation some time around the last ice age, but that indo-european and caucasian may share a closer derivation. that is to say that the chechens (along with the georgians and some of the other groups in the region) seem to be the descendants of the ice age humans that lived in the caucasus mountains. it's probably not a coincidence that these isolated language isolates are mostly in remote, mountainous areas that have been able to withstand or ignore colonization happening around them; the colonizers would always argue it was easier to let them be, so long as they didn't bother them. the area was still considered uncrossable, uninhabitable and controlled by savages (i.e. not part of the civilized world) deep into the roman period.

what i'm getting at is that a greater caucasian state is an impossibility. first, you've got iranians on both sides of the mountain. second, you've got turks all over the place. third, you've got armenians, assyrians and various other types of indo-europeans and semites to the south. then you've got the russians to the north. but worst of all is that every city in the region speaks it's own language and has it's own identity. these are very insular people, that *culturally* prefer the idea of withdrawing to isolation to the idea of fighting for independence.

that makes a real separatist movement almost impossible to develop organically. they're more likely to want to define themselves in opposition to the city 50 miles down the road than work together to build a common identity. it's tribalism to the extreme. but, mostly, it's isolationism to the core.

what the chechen people want is autonomy, in the sense of being left to live alone without being forced into any kind of national framework. that is cultural anarchism that is inherently opposed to nation-building types of independence movements and is likely to see a local warlord as a greater threat than a distant oligarch. the results of the referendum are constantly reasonable, in the context of that desire for autonomy. as an anarchist myself, i can completely understand the preference for russian tanks over islamic extremists; one is a more or less benign military occupation that ultimately doesn't care about how i choose to live, while the other wants to enforce laws and dictate it's conception of society.

so, again, election results anywhere are difficult to take at face value, and the context makes them particularly difficult. yet, the idea that chechen citizens would prefer autonomy within russia over independence in an islamic emirate is entirely believable, given all the things i just typed.

so, it's a bad comparison.

hardly commie propaganda:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1440823/Most-Chechens-want-to-remain-part-of-Russia.html