Why 80 Chechens can “Own” A Russian City of 40,000 People

This about Society, tagged , , , , was written by for on July 27, 2013

The commentator Дарман, who appears to be from Dagestan, argues that Chechens are quite different from the other North Caucasian nationalities. Apparently, minorities in Russia don’t like Chechens much more than do ethnic Russians. (Brings to mind that War Nerd quote, “They seem like one of those tribes that are either going to rule the world or go extinct but nothing in between”). He also argues that the impunity their gangs enjoy isn’t so much because of money, as AP suggests, but because they are capable of physical retaliation/revenge, making the police loth to mess around with them. His comment is reprinted in full below:

This incident brought some bad memories: when I was 8 years old I remember witnessing how Chechens operate, that day they killed an older man outside the movie theater in Makhachkala. These guys were really noisy and the man asked them to calm down. As he was walking out with his wife, the four Chechens grabbed his arms and dragged him behind the theater, where they stabbed him. I did not see the murder, but I remember the man’s wife screaming and a police officer rushed to her, but when he heard that the Chechens were involved, he turned around and walked away as she was begging for help.

Lets not mix chechens and dagestanis. Many times when dagestanis are mentioned in relation to crimes in Russia, people do not realize that 99% of times the huligans or criminals are ethnic Chechens. Over 100K ethnic Chechens live in Northern Dagestan. Dagestan is not a nationality, it is a multi ethnic region, where people called Avars, Kumyks, Dargins, Azeri, Lezgins, Mountain Jews (Gorsky Juhuro) live. These small ethnic groups are all at odds with the Chechens. Which is the case also for most of other Caucasians, except maybe Ingushs.

Ruslan Marzhamov had a couple acquaintances from Dagestan who rushed to his help but too late, and they are the ones who actually took him to the hospital, as Ruslan’s mother mentioned in her interview to the press.

Yes, the people from Caucasus have a short fuse, but it is the Chechens who are giving all Caucasus a bad name. The Chechens have a serious case of megalomania because of their formidable clan system and mafia-like organization, which makes them very dangerous.

Lets not forget that the second Chechen war started when they invaded Dagesta: – these two regions are enemies.

I do not think that Russians are cowards; they are not. Simply they lack good community organization, and that is why 80 organized Chechens can act as if they own a city with 40,000 people. Which is an absurd situation, in my opinion. Chechens are also vengeful and too many small town Russian police chiefs are insecure and prefer not to mess with them for fear of individual retaliation.

From my personal experience: if you are physically strong, not afraid of them (and in arguments they always threaten you and look you in the eyes to see if you are afraid or not, just like dogs they can sense your fear) and have a backing from a strong group of people, they will avoid picking a fight with you. The Chechens are always in groups of three and four, but they only attack if they are sure they have you cornered and defenseless. If you ever get into argument with one of them, be aware that two more will be positioning themselves behind you.

Finally, why do you think Putin is so respected in Chechnya? Because he proved that he would not blink and would level the whole republic with heavy artillery and missiles, if he felt like it. This is the only argument they understand.

….

Except a few hundred mercenaries and fanatics from Caucasus, Russia and Ukraine, the Chechens fought alone. If there is another war (and I do not believe there will be one) they will fight alone, at least Dagestan and Cherkess will fight against them for sure.

2 Murders, 3 Years, 12 Families: Why Pugachev Residents are Angry

This about Society, tagged , , , , was written by for on July 17, 2013

Though I know I missed the train on this news, one point in particular is worth drawing attention to as regard the stabbing of (the half-Tatar) paratrooper Ruslan Morzhanov by a 16-year-old ethnic Chechen, which incited the small town of Pugachev to stage a peaceful mini-revolt against the feds.

The town has seen similar tragedies before. A brutal murder was committed in very similar circumstances in 2010. Twenty four-year-old Chechen Beslan Mudayev fatally stabbed twenty eight-year-old Nikolai Veshnyakov five times during a fight that broke out right in front of Zolotaya Bochka. Locals claim that the Chechen community, consisting of a dozen families in total, has been harassing the local population. According to official statistics, there are about 80 Chechens living in various parts of the Pugachev District.

So. Two murders, committed within the space of 3 years, from a group of 80 people belonging to a “repressed” minority. The town’s population is a mere 41,000 and in such places, a lot of people do know each other.

I would be angry as well. Moreover, I would feel unsafe. If 2.5% of a certain group are murderers, then complaints that many of the rest are thugs in general become all that more credible (at least for minds not dominated by political correctness). The popular demands made by Pugachev residents to expel those local Chechens that are not employed or registered in their city – that is, merely enforcing the law on residence, as opposed to the ethnic cleansing it has been portrayed as – though perhaps quite harsh, is not obviously unreasonable given the horrifying circumstances.

One can have some issues with Navalny, co-signing a petition condemning the federal government’s limp-wristedness on ethnic crime, its opposition to legalizing self-defense isn’t one of them, and its at times heavy-handed response to airings of legitimate ethnic Russian grievances isn’t one of them.

The Western media doesn’t see it that way of course. To left/liberals, the small-town Russian protesters are chauvinist troglodytes – with Putin at times even held responsible for this “xenophobia,” despite the government’s avowed opposition to all expressions of russki nationalism; while the conservatives/neocons salivate over the prospect that the Pugachev Affair is but the prelude to Russia’s disintegration.

The Russian Imperialist Genocide In Chechnya

This about History, tagged , , , , was written by for on April 20, 2013

Hard as it is to believe, but in the wake of the Boston Bombings, many Western commentators actively trying to find the roots of the Tsarnaev brothers’ rage in Russia’s “aggression” or even “genocide” of Chechnya.

This is not to deny that Chechens did not have an exceptionally hard time of it in the 1990s. That said, what strikes one is the pathological one-sidedness of some of the commentary, such as this vomit-inducing screed by Thor Halvorssen, a self-imagined human rights promoter from Norway. In their world, it is a simple morality tale of small, plucky Chechnya being repeatedly ravaged by the big, bad Russian imperialist – and it is one that many people, conditioned in appropriate ways for two decades by the Western media, swallow hook, line, and sinker.

It’s not that simple. But rather than (re)dredging up many words and sources, let’s just suffice with one of the most telling graphs on the matter: The population graph of Chechnya since 1989.

chechnya-population-by-ethnicity-to-2010

Some people are certainly getting ethnically cleansed there alright, but it’s not who you might think it is. So this, essentially, is what the Russian “genocide” of Chechens boils down to: 715,306 Chechens & 269,130 Russians in 1989; 1,206,551 Chechens & 24,382 Russians in 2010. Russians almost entirely gone from there, even though the lands north of the Terek River – that is, about a third of Chechnya – were first settled by Cossacks during the 16th century and had never been Chechen until the 20th century. Those Russians (and other minority ethnicities) were terrorized out of Chechnya during the rule of “moderate nationalists” Maskhadov and Zakayev, whom the likes of Halvorssen describe as the “legitimate government of Chechnya,” with several thousand of them murdered outright. This ethnic cleansing continued unimpeded into the 2000s with the complicit silence of the “nationalist” Putin regime.

I really wish all the (non-Chechen) “Free Chechnya!” people could be reborn as minorities in 1990’s Chechnya in their next lives so that the likes of Halvorssen can experience firsthand the extent to which Chechens “share the democratic values of a Western civilization.”

Angsty Chechens Come To Boston

This about Society, tagged , , , , was written by for on April 20, 2013

Is discussed at the other blog.

To add a couple of things that are Russia specific:

(1) We now learn that the FBI had interviewed the older brother at the bequest of an unspecific foreign government – almost certainly Russia. Tamerlan had visited it for 6 months in 2011. I wonder if he established links with some of the Caucasus Emirate Wahhabi types while there – and if so, whether US suspicions about Russia’s “assaults” on human rights in Chechnya made them drop their guard on a man who, it is now clear, was by then fast becoming an Islamist radical. The one silver lining to this horrible event is that it will become even more obvious that the Chechen rebellion has now been completely subsumed into the global Islamist struggle – and by extension, it will encourage the West to take a closer look at its “friends” in Syria.

(2) The reactions of Russian liberals has as always been as hilarious as it is nauseating. They seriously believe that the FSB is behind this.

Vasily Gatov, state news agency RIA employee: “I am watching three TV channels and listening to the radio, and reading the Boston Globe, and I gather that the main task of the FBI is to take the suspect alive. There is a drama brewing between Watertown, Washington, Moscow, and Grozny… And who knows which other cities. But I’m sure that the greatest fear is felt in Grozny. Which is why he will be taken alive.”

Self-hating random Echo of Moscow commentator: “I will not be surprised if it turns out that the Tsarnaev brothers where recruited by Russian special forces for the execution of this terrorist act, because Russia will benefit from it. Why? Because this terrorist act will change American and Western public opinion – and hence, that of their politicians  – towards Chechnya. If before the Western public supported the Chechens’ independence struggle, it is now more likely that they will support the Russian government’s policy on the Caucasus. And this means that the Kremlin KGBists will be able to use still crueler and more barbaric methods to fight separatism on the part of the Caucasus peoples. In other words, this terrorist act will untie the hands of the Kremlin in its war against the peoples of the Caucasus.“

The Tsarnaev Brothers

This about Society, tagged , , , , was written by for on April 19, 2013

Make of this what you will.

(1) The older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, never adjusted to life in the US. “I don’t have a single American friend,” he said. His younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, had an understanding of US teen hood / SWPL culture. He was a 9/11 “truther.” That’s from the Twitter account. That said, he wasn’t too down with America either.

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Chechnya, A Once And Future War?

This about Geopolitics, tagged , , , , , was written by for on December 5, 2010

Truly, if Willian Burns were to issue an anthology of his Moscow cables during his 2005-2008 ambassadorship, I’d seriously consider buying it. Just consider this cable from May 2006, on Chechnya’s “Once and Future War”, a nuanced US view of that conflict and the cynicism and corruption it engendered amongst all its parties.

What struck me first was its reminder of the awesome magnitude of corruption and state dissolution during the 1990’s. Though Transparency International might claim that nothing much has changed in the past two decades (or even regressed), it is belied by Burns’ vision of a “military-entrepreneurial” officer corps that proclaimed President Yeltsin’s “business” was to “sit in Moscow, drink vodka, and chase women” while they did “[their] work” in the Caucasus region. And profitable work it was too. Due to post-Soviet Russia’s low domestic energy prices, it was highly lucrative to launder oil it through Chechnya, sell it on foreign markets, and make big dollar on the difference. Army officers profited from the racket; their Chechen partners spent their cut of the gravy to arm themselves for war. One of the primary causes of the First Chechen War, apart from the state’s usual hatred of separatism, was a specific desire to reassert control over Chechnya’s oil and arms bazaar.

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Core Article: What We Believe

This about Politics, tagged , , , , was written by for on January 15, 2008

In the first 5 days of its existence, this blog has been priveleged to receive more than more than 200 page views from more than 100 visitors from 18 different countries. We have also been linked to by the Winthrop88 blog and Marginalia (probably the leading English-language blog about Latvia) – of those that we’re aware of, anyway.

We have also also been receiving mail. While most of it is constructive, some is of a negative character, along the lines of us being ‘unreconstructed Stalinists’, a Nashi-sponsored ‘Kremlin mouthpiece’ and ‘shameless apologists for Putins dictorship (sic)’.

To clear this up, we will compile a list of our opinions on various topics, Russia-related and not. This will make up a Core Article. This is so that you, dear reader, don’t have to waste your time on deconstructing our articles.

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