Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus — A World-System Biography
Georgi M. Derluguian
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago
July 2005
416 pages
ISBN: 978-0-226-14282-1
A description of Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus must begin with an explanation of its somewhat unpractical, yet intriguing title. The admirer in question is Yuri Shanibov, or as he was known in his youth and again briefly during post-communist transition, Musa Shanib. Derluguian describes how when he first meets Shanibov during a banquet in 1997, he by accident discovers — upon uttering the phrase cultural field — that Shanibov is not just a Kabardian nationalist leader and a Professor of Sociology, but also a profound admirer of the great French sociologist Bourdieu.
As the subtitle indicates, the book gives the life story of Shanibov, but only as part of a larger sociological analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The two main questions that Derluguian aims to answer are Why was the Soviet project abandoned? (or equivalently, Why in 1988–1991, why not earlier (around 1968) or later?) and Why did the end of the Soviet project lead to such different outcomes in different places?
Derluguian’s answers to these questions can be summarised as follows. de-Stalinisation under Nikita Khrushchev was embraced by nomenklatura members because it meant they no longer had to fear for their personal security, indeed, their life. But when Khrushchev started to fight corruption too forcefully, aided by junior nomenklatura members like Shanibov looking for opportunities to fill senior positions, now that the cadres were no longer periodically being purged, the upper nomenklatura stepped in and removed him from power, replacing him with one of their own, Leonid Brezhnev. Derluguian surmises that if not for this coup, the room for experimentation under Khrushchev would have led to an analogue of the Prague spring, although he admits he is sceptical whether the resulting revolution would have succeeded.
With the help of the increased revenue of petrodollars following the 1970s oil crises, corruption became institutionalised under Brezhnev and dissatisfaction was bought off with subsidised consumer goods. Derluguian argues that contrary to the pervasive image of the Soviet Union as an all-powerful totalitarian state, this essentially made the nomenklatura unaccountable, and local party heads all but irreplaceable, deriving their power from local patronage networks. Even in cases when party bosses were replaced, their successors would prove just as corrupt.
When structural problems became so great that the top of the communist party under Mikhail Gorbachev did undertake serious systemic reform, it could not rely on the nomenklatura, but had to engender a revolution from below. This revolution then quickly derailed, in large part because the freedom of Glasnost was quickly employed to voice nationalist concerns. Many of these concerns hailed back to the time when a particular territory was incorporated into the Soviet Union, but the strongly territorial structural make-up of the Soviet Union served as an essential catalyst in their coming to the fore. Besides being in economic competition, the different national territories also each possessed their own elites, for while the Soviet Union managed in many ways to transcend the national, intellectuals in the humanities in particular were constrained to their territory by the nature of their education, and the patronage systems that governed economic life further penalised mobility into territories where a person had no contacts. Some nationalist causes, like those of the Armenians and Azeris, were incompatible and clashed, reinforcing each other in the process. These were particularly difficult for the Soviet leadership to appease, since any compromise decision would keep both sides unhappy. The rising tide of nationalism could in principle have been dealt with through a combination of forceful suppression and economic hand-outs, but these were exactly the tools that the reformist leadership intended to no longer employ. Instead, the crisis was deepened by the shortages caused by the economic reform of perestroika.
In order to explain the different outcomes of nationalist revolutions in Chechnya, Georgia and Azerbaijan (chaos) and the Baltic States (liberal democracy), Derluguian employs the concept of the social class. Broadly speaking, Soviet society consisted of three classes relevant for his analysis. The nomenklatura formed the Soviet bureaucracy, the ‘ruling class’. The proletariat consisted of everyone else whose primary income was the wage they received from the Soviet State. One of the great achievements of the Soviet project was to proletarianise almost all of society, ranging from professors to farmers. Nevertheless, there were still those who came by or at least supplemented their income through other means, the sub-proletariat. This class was relatively large in the sub-tropical Caucasus, where favourable agricultural conditions allowed for independent income both directly through family plots and indirectly, through a blossoming black market. Thus, in the industrialised Baltic states, the revolution proceeded orderly because it was supported by a highly educated and liberal proletariat, and because the nomenklatura was relatively competent, accepting regime change without too much resistance, while in the agricultural Caucasus, the proletariat was weak, the nomenklatura much more corrupt and the sub-proletariat strong, inducing nationalist leaders to mobilise the latter.
Nationalist revolutions did not occur everywhere. In some places, like Central Asia, intellectuals were so weak that the nomenklatura could easily re-assert itself, symbolically adopting a few outward attributes of nationalism (although, in Tajikistan, only after a lengthy civil war). In many autonomous republics, like Kabarda, nationalist groups did mobilise, but not rapidly enough. By the time that they would have been able to take power, the Russian government had already regained enough power to allow the local nomenklatura to hold on to power. Moreover, when the pressure reached its highest point, Georgia invaded Abkhazia, provoking great sympathy for the latter among North Caucasian nationalists. (Derluguian points out that the war in Abkhazia was for North Caucasian nationalists what the Spanish civil war was for the western left or the war in Afghanistan for Islamists.) The leaders of the North Caucasian republics soon realised that it was in their own best interest not to prevent young men eager to take up arms from crossing the border with Abkhazia.
In Chechnya, however, the nationalist opposition did mobilise quickly enough to overthrow the communist elite. The driving force behind this mobilisation was the national trauma of Stalinist deportation, but it was able to proceed so fast also because the Chechen elite was not entrenched in and thus had no stake in existing bureaucratic structures, since after return from exile, Chechens had systematically been excluded from the ranks of nomenklatura.
What about the Ingush, who shared the trauma of deportation with the Chechens, but opted to remain with Russia, splitting the Checheno-Ingush republic? Appearances are deceiving, because this act of separation was in fact a nationalist revolution of sorts, of more radical local leaders against the conservative Ingush elite in Grozny, motivated by the fear of becoming a minority in independent Checheno-Ingushetia, and by the desire to regain the Prigorodny District, including half of Vladikavkaz, a territory that had been Ingush before the deportation but which remained with North-Ossetia even after the Ingush return from exile. The struggle to achieve this escalated into a short but bloody war, which the Ingush lost, burying with it the nationalist spirit.
The Ingush pattern of counter-mobilisation in reaction to the Chechen nationalist revolution was replicated elsewhere. In Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia — presumably more confident about its own independence than Chechnya — reacted with war, which it lost. In Kabardino-Balkaria, where the Balkar minority lost its representatives in the first competitive elections, no war broke out, because the Kabardian revolution itself failed, and because the Kabardian nomenklatura, which thus stayed in power, reached a power-sharing agreement with the Balkars, achieving in effect a return to the Soviet status quo.
Finally, Derluguian leaves some room for the influence of individual leaders. One additional reason why the nationalist opposition mobilised quicker in Chechnya than in Kabarda was probably that Jokhar Dudayev was simply more radical than the Kabardian national leaders. In Adjara, Derluguian goes so far as to credit Aslan Abashidze with a decisive role in shaping the outcome of the post-Communist transition. At first glance it might seem clear that the separate status Adjara was awarded in the Soviet Union should not impact on Adjarans’ self-identification as Georgians, albeit Muslim Georgians. But Derluguian points out that this outcome was in fact not so obvious, and that radical Georgian nationalists, emphasising the Christian identity of Georgia and taking over control of the economy, were quickly alienating large parts of Adjara, pushing it on the way of Bosnia. Abashidze managed to subdue these nationalists and appease the local elite, while not resisting Adjara’s entry into the new Georgian state, at least formally.
Derluguian’s account convincingly brings together structural conditions and historically accidental developments. Inevitably, however, some questions remain unanswered. For instance, why did the Ingush and Chechens not share a common national project, like the Georgians and Mingrelians, and even the Circassians, spread out over several Soviet republics? Was there Karachay independist mobilisation like in Chechnya, which one might expect given that the Karachay shared with the Chechens the trauma of deportation, and the privilege of constituting the largest non-Russian group in their republic (unlike the Ingush and Balkars)? There is also something unsatisfactory about the binary division between the outcomes in the Baltic states on the one hand and in Chechnya, Georgia and Azerbaijan on the other. What about Armenia, Abkhazia, Belarus and the Ukraine? They seem to exemplify a middle way, where nationalists and members of the nomenklatura did come to an arrangement, but which ended up short of liberal democracy. Perhaps the answer lies in the nature and relative strength of the local nomenklatura.
Bourdieu’s secret admirer in the Caucasus successfully supplements a ‘journalistic’ account of conflict with a proper scientific apparatus. But Derluguian also explicitly positions the book as a contribution to the field of sociology. The theoretical discussion, concentrated in Chapter 2, is rather dense for the layperson, and regardless of its merits, feels a bit overblown, considering that the most important outcomes for the case at hand seem to be the insight that an analysis should combine long-term structural developments with short-term historical accidents, the concept of social capital and the realisation that the Soviet Union had a sub-proletariat that played a crucial role during the collapse of communism.
The book contains a few minor details that are somewhat problematic. When the author mentions that before or during the Abkhazian war a number of mosques had been built by volunteers from the Middle East that were subsequently abandoned and even in some cases blown up, some more specification or references would have been welcome. In another instance, Derluguian describes how Aslan Abashidze shot the nationalist leader of Adjara, while he was at the time his deputy, but accounts elsewhere suggest that the person shot — Nodar Imnadze — was in fact Abashidze’s Deputy, Abashidze himself having been appointed leader of Adjara by Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Nonetheless, the overall judgement must be that the reader profits tremendously from Derluguian’s personal experience in the region.
Bourdieu’s secret admirer in the Caucasus is also beautifully published — although only the paperback edition features the cover image of Shanibov on a green background advertised online — and is virtually free from typographical mistakes. Most importantly, while it is a difficult book, it is well worth the effort, since it succeeds to a very large extent in exposing the logic behind not just the descend into chaos in the early 1990s Caucasus, but the collapse of the Soviet Union in general.
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Filed under: Abkhazia, Adjara, Balkaria, Book reviews, Chechnya, Georgia, Ingushetia, Kabarda, Russia, Wider Region, brezhnev, gorbachev, khrushchev, Soviet Union
