Navalny is a leader of the smash-hit viral campaign ‘stop feeding the Caucasus’. Together with extremist nationalist fronts (which have a subtext of neo-Nazism) the campaign has hosted rallies in Moscow, pumped out YouTube videos (‘We give them money, they give us death!’) and made the demand ‘Stop Feeding’ part of standard political vocabulary.53 Navalny repeatedly asks his mantra question: ‘Why should they get more than Smolensk region?’ Then writes things like this on his blog:
Stop feeding the Caucasus. Stop feeding Ramzan Kadyrov. Stop feeding the loathsome gang of thieves known as the ‘leadership of the North Caucasus!’54
Many say he is a neurotic, knee-jerk Caucasophobe. I do not see anything exceptional about him. This is the new normal. His campaign hit a raw nerve in post-recession Russia – with even a poll on the very specific, highly liberal, audience of Ekho Moskvy showing 89 per cent agreed with the call to ‘Stop the Feeding’.55 This view is not only that of street leaders like Navalny. The urbane former deputy energy minister Vladimir Milov is onside. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘with less than 5 per cent ethnic Russian populations these provinces are de-Russifying. It’s a shock to see a Russian there now. There is something inevitable about it. Demographically they are on the way out.’
Putin is not listening, as he correctly believes the only lasting peace is economic peace. In 2011 the state announced its intention to triple funding to over $141 billion for the North Caucasus 2011–25 regional development programme. It absurdly includes several high-quality ski slopes. With infrastructure budgets being raided by corrupt officials in central Russia, leaving the roads in cities like Bryansk in such appalling state – such that one afternoon a mother pushing a baby in a buggy down a street there felt it collapse beneath her, pulling the child down a drain, where it drowned in the sewers – there is fury at huge transfers to the North Caucasus, especially to rebellious regions whose exports are migrants, coffins and bombs.
Moscow has already handed over more than $30 billion to the North Caucasus, home to only 9 million people, with a tenfold increase in subsidies since 2000.56 They reached over $1,000 per capita in Chechnya in 2010.57 This is more than six times the national average.58 Grozny’s budget has been more than 90 per cent covered by federal funds – almost double the national average.59 This may be lower in per capita terms than funding for remote Kamchatka, in line with subsidies for other poor ethnic regions in Asia such as Tuva or Buryatia, but it is what Kadyrov appears to be spending the money on that enrages ethnic Russian taxpayers.60
Grozny now has the largest mosque in the world, blue-glass skyscrapers and a $280 million football stadium, but half the population is officially unemployed. At night Kadyrov likes to drive his sports cars as fast as he can up and down the new Vladimir Putin Avenue, occasionally pulling up to the curb to heckle any women he sees not wearing their headscarves. Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, which registers 90 per cent youth unemployment, in a republic where 824 people were lost or wounded to armed conflict in 2011, somehow found the money to sign the world football star Samuel Eto’o – as the planet’s most expensive player – for $20 million a year.61 Understandably, taxpayers in Ivanovo and Chita feel they are being fleeced – and by the same people who are killing their conscripts. In Chechnya, casualties are down, but endemic conflict has flared in Dagestan. Across the North Caucasus there were 1,378 killed or wounded in 2011.62
Denied the satisfaction of peace, the country is riled by the video clips that keep rolling in of Kadyrov at play: throwing dollars into the air, playing with his tigers ‘that calm him down’ in a private zoo, relaxing on top of a sports car or hosting paid-for Hollywood actors at his birthday. He is behaving like a bandit celebrating after a bank robbery. In a sense, he is. This man inherited power from his father, a rebel who came over to Putin, whose official salary is less than $130,000 a year, but who keeps a stable of fifty stallions that costs $900,000 a year.63 The same Mr Kadyrov, who publicly stated his approval of honour killings, was observed by one US diplomat at a tribal wedding giving the newly-weds a five kilo lump of gold, whilst the guests threw $100 bills at child dancers, gorging on vodka and enjoying ‘water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian sea’.64 When asked where the money comes from, he smiled: ‘Allah gives. I do not myself know how it is possible… or where the money comes from.’65
It comes from Russian taxpayers. In the North Caucasus, the vertical of corruption has reached such absurd proportions that it has undermined what the vertical was established for: national unity. ‘Why should they get more money than Smolensk?’ This was exactly the same attitude that saw Russia jettison most of the SSRs. In Gorbachev’s 1991 referendum Muslim Central Asians voted to stay in the USSR, but were not even invited to a secret meeting between Ukraine, Belarus and Russia that killed that Union. There was embarrassment when the leaders realized they had ‘forgotten’ to invite the Kazakh leader Nazarbayev, whom Gorbachev had hoped would be his successor. Nobody cared for the others. In the end it was simple: nobody wanted ‘not to eat’ for Uzbeks and Tajiks.
The fate of the Muslim Soviet Union was thus decided not in the republics, but by the Russians themselves – I feel it will be the same way with the North Caucasus. And these words from a check-out girl I met on the minibus back from Nizhny Tagil, all flaxen hair and green come-hither eyes, captures much of the mood towards them:
‘The Caucasus – I don’t want to go there… I don’t even want them in the minimarket where I work. I don’t want to pay for them. They can go their own way. I hate seeing them around. I don’t want to pay for ski slopes for them… It’s tribute, you know? We should stop feeding them and throw them away… they are all violent tribes.’
Russia has not found its borders. Frontiers are regarded as temporary or unresolved. The majority feels this way as new borders are already developing, with the governor of Krasnodar calling in 2012 to raise ‘Cossacks’ to patrol his territory to keep out Caucasians.66 Instead of stability, what Putin has laid in the North Caucasus is a time bomb. Kadyrov is his vassal, not integrated into the United Russia system. Should Putin fall, with peace depending on the ties between two men alone, catastrophe beckons. ‘The end of subsidies for Kadyrov means death,’ says Orkhan Jemal, Russia’s leading expert on the North Caucasus, son of a Muslim leader, ‘which is why he will do whatever he can to keep the regime going.’ This is why no one can quite kill the rumour in Moscow, that ‘Putin’s Chechens’, will put down the protests should they ever breach the Kremlin walls.
Stability in the North Caucasus is an illusion. Russians realize this, with only 5 per cent thinking that the government fully controls the situation there.67 There is a real risk of renewed conflict in a post-Putin era. There are few ways to imagine that the rulers in Grozny could be made to accept anything other than the ‘vertical of corruption’, even at gunpoint. The North Caucasus is a mosaic – there is no easy way to imagine a new border being drawn. Not all the republics would want to leave. Fewer would be capable of credible statehood. Awfully, the embrace seems as necessary as it is poisonous. Nor is this bitterness just directed at them. The incompetence of the vertical means it is not just the Caucasus that Russians want ‘to stop feeding’ – but Moscow itself.