End of an Era: Ramzan Kadyrov’s Decision to Step Aside Leaves a Power Vacuum, and Raises Questions

I don’t think I was alone in assuming that the Chechen Republic’s bigger-than-life, flamboyant, authoritarian president, Ramzan Kadyrov, would stay in office as long as he possibly could, whether by hook or by crook.  He is just the type we would expect to bend every rule to try to keep himself in power past his constitutional expiration date, just like (to take two examples in the news this week) Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni or Bolivia’s Evo Morales—or, indeed, like Kadyrov’s sponsor, protector, and ally, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

But I was wrong, and the rest of the world was surprised too when Kadyrov told the media on February 27th that when his term of office ends in April he will step aside and retire from politics.  “My time is past,” he said.  “Every human has a limit.  I believe Kadyrov has passed his peak.”  (Like his pet attack-dog Tarzan’s namesake, Kadyrov likes to refer to himself in the third person.)  “Family, personal life, Islamic studies,” is how he summed up his plans for retirement.  The following day he pleaded with the public to cancel planned rallies to get him to change his mind.

Kadyrov and Tarzan

But why is he stepping aside, instead of, say, grooming a close advisor as a successor and continuing things from a nominally secondary position—the way Putin did when he got around term limits by switching places with his prime minister Dmitri Medvedev for a term?  In the Russian and Chechen political world, no one would have so much as blinked an eye.

Perhaps it had something to do with the report released four days earlier by a leader in Russia’s political opposition (such as it is), Ilya Yashin, who runs a protest group called Solidardost (its name, meaning “solidarity,” inspired by Poland’s anti-Soviet mass movement from the 1980s, Solidarność).  That document described Kadyrov—utterly accurately—as a virtual dictator of a regime that is in most concrete ways a de facto autonomous state (de jure, it is a republic within the Russian Federation, one which does significant damage to Russia’s international reputation (such as it is), and threatens to do worse.  Yashin referred to Kadyrov’s Islamist autocracy and his much-flaunted lavish lifestyle enabled by corruption and embezzlement.  He wondered aloud how smart Putin was to allow Kadyrov to run his own separate military, answerable only to himself, which fights as a separate state military in conflicts such as the civil war in Syria, where Putin and Kadyrov back the embattled Shi’a Arab dictator, Bashar al-Assad.  Could this private army one day turn on Russia itself, as it did in the Chechen Wars?

Kadyrov’s Instagram account is one of the strangest places on the Internet.

Yashin also asserted what most aware people not blinded by Putinist propaganda already believe: that there is “no doubt” that armed thugs under Kadyrov’s personal direction assassinated the dissident leader Boris Nemtsov in Moscow last year.  Kadyrov responded to Yashin’s report on his favored channel of communication, Instagram, dismissing the accusations as “blather.”  But maybe he noticed that the Kremlin did not exactly leap to his defense when the report hit the public.  (Compare this to the case of the anti-Putin dissident Andrei Piontkovsky, who fled the country this month after his criticism of the Putin–Kadyrov political friendship prompted Putinists in parliament to brand his inquiries “an incitement to separatism and extremism.”)

There are good reasons why Putin might not be all that happy with Kadyrov lately.  First and foremost perhaps is Kadyrov’s quiet takeover this month of the oil firm Chechenneftekhimprom, detaching it from its Russian parent company Rosneft and putting it under direct Chechen Republic control.  This effectively meant Kadyrov would own it after the transfer is completed in March.  Chechenneftekhimprom oversees nearly all of Chechnya’s energy industry.  Chechen operations constitute only 0.23% of Rosneft’s total oil extraction, and lower prices of Siberian oil have made them less profitable, but for tiny Chechnya, local control of the resource makes de facto independence more viable.  Control of oil resources was a major struggle in the Chechen wars for independence in the 1990s.  It does seem odd that Kadyrov would execute such an economic coup just weeks before he leaves the picture entirely.  It’s not too far-fetched to think that when the takeover was planned he hadn’t yet decided to step aside.  Did the oil grab finally push Putin to the point where he decided that Kadyrov had to go?

In a viral video he created, Kadyrov, on prayer mat,
faces down—and later grapples with—a serpent representing radical Islam.

Or perhaps the Moscow–Grozny axis had simply become weighed down by too many historical, political, and ideological contradictions.  In fact, it is still baffling that the alliance ever existed.  To understand why, a quick history lesson.

Chechnya and the Kadyrovs: a short history lesson
The Chechen people, like other peoples of the North Caucasus region, are mostly Muslim, and they came under Moscow’s control only in the 1870s, when they were wrested from the Ottoman Empire’s sphere of influence as part of the general Czarist push to dominate the Black Sea at Turkey’s expense.  (Warm-water ports have always been a constant overriding preoccupation in Russian foreign policy.  It’s hard being an empire or a superpower when the only harbors you can set sail from, other than the Black Sea—whose exit is controlled by Turkey—are St. Petersburg (which is at the mercy of the Swedish and Danish waters that have to be passed through on the way to the open sea) and ice-bound Vladivostok in Siberia.)  The Czars held onto the North Caucasus brutally and with difficulty.  Most of the dirty work was delegated to Cossacks.  It is very arguable that the tactics Russia used in this era against the Chechens and their neighbors amounted to genocide.

During the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917, the North Caucasus peoples rebelled and tried to establish a rival Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus in alliance with the Ottomans.  It was even diplomatically recognized by Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and two other newly declared states, Georgia and Azerbaijan.  The ruling Bolsheviks in Moscow promised the Mountain Republic that they could keep their autonomy if they helped defeat the Mensheviks.  Chechens dutifully helped defeat the Mensheviks, but then the Bolsheviks reneged on their promise.  Chechnya became a mere “autonomous” okrug (district) within the Mountain “Autonomous” Soviet Socialist Republic within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  What this meant is that, like the rest of the U.S.S.R. it was ruled directly by the party dictatorship in Moscow.

After the Second World War, Chechens were accused of having sided with the Nazis.  (Indeed, some did; mostly, they were just trying to survive.)  Along with other groups like the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks, they were forcibly removed by Josef Stalin to points east, in Siberia and the Central Asian republics.  During this ordeal, somewhere between a third and a half of the Chechen and Ingush nations died from executions, starvation, and cruelty in the work camps.  (It was during the Chechen diaspora in the Kyrgyz S.S.R. that the Tsarnaev family nursed a resentment toward Russians and Christians; generations later, in 2013, two of their grandchildren in the United States would carry out a bombing attack on the Boston Marathon.)

Hundreds of thousands of Chechens were deported by Stalin in 1944;
almost half did not survive the ordeal.

Nikita Khrushchev, in the 1950s, reversed many of Stalin’s more repressive policies toward minorities and allowed Chechens to move home.  Chechnya was part of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic, within Russia, until 1991.  As the fully separate republics of the U.S.S.R., like Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan won independence, the new Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, told republics to “take as much autonomy as you can stand,” and even seemed to be contemplating letting the two most independent-minded republics, Chechnya (which had separated itself from its Ingush half) and Tatarstan, to secede as well.

Dzhokar Dudayev, independent Chechnya’s first leader

A young soon-to-be-ex K.G.B. agent in Yeltsin’s cabinet named Vladimir Putin had other ideas, though.  First as chief of staff and then as a minister responsible for minorities (the same job Stalin had held before becoming party secretary), Putin urged harsh dealing with the independent Chechen Republic of Ichkeria that declared itself in 1991.  The proud and eager Chechen rebels fought the underpaid, half-hearted post-Soviet army to a standstill, and by 1994 Chechnya had agreed to join the newly minted Russian Federation but in reality ran itself as a de facto independent state under the rebel leader Dzhokar Dudayev, who dissolved the local parliament and anointed himself dictator.  Dudayev was fiercely Russophobic and steeped in paranoid superstitions; he believed that earthquakes in the Caucasus were caused by diabolical “earthquake machines” in the Kremlin.  Most of his time was spent fighting the rival Chechens who kept trying to overthrow him.  In 1994, Yeltsin had had enough and let Putin try to retake Chechnya, which he did by leveling the capital, Grozny, in a pitiless carpet-bombing campaign that killed tens of thousands.  Dudayev was killed in 1996.

Grozny, the Chechen capital, in 1995, courtesy of Vladimir Putin

There was peace for a while, until 1999, when some of the many foreign Islamic fighters that had flooded into Chechnya in 1994 to fight the Russian infidels needed a new crusade and crossed over the mountain passes into the Russian republic of Dagestan to declare an Islamic State of Dagestan.  It was one thing for Chechnya to be a tiny Islamic-run republic that minded its own business, but Putin, who succeeded Yeltsin as president the following year, would not stand for Islamic radicalism spreading within Russia.  He soundly defeated the Chechens in what came to be known as the Second Chechen War.  His “Gulf of Tonkin”–type pretext was the terrorist demolition of four Moscow apartment buildings in late 1999.  He blamed Chechens, but there is strong evidence that the K.G.B., under Putin’s orders, blew up the buildings to provide a rationale for war.  The new president who took over in 2003, Akhmed Kadyrov (father of Ramzan), was, like Dudayev, under whom he had been chief imam, and like most Chechens, very moderate, even mystical in his Islam.  Most Chechens are traditionally Sufis, with not much use for the doctrinally rigid salafism or Wahhabism emanating from places like Saudi Arabia and Taliban-run Afghanistan.  But by now the Second Chechen War, unlike the first, became a jihad, fought to a great extent by battle-hardened salafists flooding in from all over the Islamic world.

A turning point in the war came early on, when Kadyrov switched sides and brought his vast extended family of militiamen into the pro-Russian camp.  It may never be clear in what order things happened here.  Perhaps it was Putin who initially convinced Kadyrov that if he betrayed the more Islamist fighters (like the radical separatist Chechens who carried out the Beslan school siege in late 2004), then he would allow Chechnya to be his personal fief as long as it had a Russian flag flying over it too.  Or perhaps the deal was made with his son Ramzan after the elder Kadyrov’s assassination (by whom?) in early 2004.

Anyway, in the end that is what happened: from 2007 until now, Ramzan Kadyrov has been allowed to run Chechnya any way he pleases.  He imposes a form of shari’a law which tolerates polygamy and honor killings, he loots the treasury so that he can live like a medieval king, and in return Putin has rebuilt Grozny with massive projects like Europe’s largest mosque and Kadyrov makes sure to fix local elections in Putin’s favor, such as the national vote in 2012 when an absurd 99.89% of Chechens supposedly voted for Putin—the man who practically bombed their country off the map only a few years earlier.  But most of all, Kadyrov’s personal army has served as a crack battalion much like the old-style Cossacks (who still exist also), doing battle wherever the Czar—I mean, Putin—feels Russian interests are at stake.

Kadyrov’s father’s assassination, at a military parade in 2004,
was captured on Russian television.

This means that Kadyrov’s fighters have, over the years, aligned themselves with the Armenians against the Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh; with the Serbs against the Bosniaks and Croats in Bosnia and against the Albanians in Kosovo; with the Russians against the Ukrainians and Tatars in Crimea; and, most recently, with the Alawites (and, increasingly, Kurds) against the Sunni Arabs in Syria.  Yes, that means that Kadyrov has been sending the youth of the Chechen nation to kill Muslims in the service of Russian Orthodox Christian colonialism and Islamophobia.  Did that begin to weigh on his conscience?  Or was there an Islamist insurgency preparing itself in Chechnya? or perhaps only the fear of one?

Chechen mercenaries go wherever Russian—not Chechen—interests are threatened.

A clue may lie in a bizarre episode that occurred only eight days before Kadyrov’s announcement, when he was obliged to publicly deny reports the previous day that he had instituted a plan for all young men to obtain “spiritual-moral passports” documenting their Islamic commitments.  The news had appeared on the website of the Chechen parliament and in official government news agencies and had described the initiative as Kadyrov’s own.  The new passports, to be issued to all men aged 14 through 35, would have listed each man’s name, nationality, patrilineal ancestry, clan, denomination (of Islam, of course), and, for Sufis, the individual order (vird) to which he belongs, as well as the names of senior male relatives “responsible” for the holder’s moral behavior.

In his denial, Kadyrov called all talk of such passports “fantasies,” adding, “There is only one passport in our country—citizen of Russia!”  I would guess that Kadyrov was quickly forced to backtrack after a warning from the Kremlin that such a passport requirement would be baldly unconstitutional.  But why this, and why now, when Chechnya is already run under virtual shari’a?  Were the spiritual passports an attempt to mollify anti-Kadyrov sentiment among the more radical sectors of Chechnya?  Or was Kadyrov communicating to Putin that, despite their relationship, he is still a Muslim first?  We may never know.

In any case it is ironic that not long before Kadyrov’s announcement, Akhmed Zakayev, the moderate prime-minister-in-exile of the old self-declared Chechen Republic of Iskerria—the anti-Russian separatist entity with which the Kadyrovs used to be aligned—told Radio Free Europe in February that Kadyrov is “here to stay.”  According to Zakayev, who lives in London, this was because of Chechnya’s fiercely loyal private armed forces: “Any attempt to remove Kadyrov by decree or to appoint another leader of the republic would spark uproar in Kadyrov’s ranks.  In order to remove him, security forces would need to conduct operational measures within his close circle.  If they don’t, the reaction will be very negative and Putin won’t be able to get rid of him with a simple decree or a stroke of the pen.”

Eventually, Kadyrov will have to get friends wherever he can find them.

Another reason Zakayev thought Kadyrov would cling to power is that, if he ever fell out of political favor—and he has lots of enemies, many of them radical Islamists—where would he go?  “Three, four, five months ago,” Zakayev said, “there were still places he could leave for: Turkey, Sunni states, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates.  He has now lost these possibilities because he supported the conflict in Syria together with Putin and backed and sided with the Shi’a to defend Bashar al-Assad.  By doing this, he has blocked the escape routes that he had spent several years preparing.”

That, of course, was all said before Kadyrov said he would leave politics.  Now, though, the questions are many.  Who will replace Kadyrov?  Will his successor be a more conventional republican president, or will Chechnya still be an autonomous Islamic statelet?  Will Putin appoint a president of the republic, as he does in the case of the more volatile nationalities?  To whom will Kadyrov’s army be loyal?  Will they in reality be the ones who choose Kadyrov’s replacement?  Or is Kadyrov’s talk of leaving politics a ruse?  Will he really run things from behind the scenes?  Or will there be a manufactured crisis between now and April to justify extending his term or instituting emergency powers?

Yes, they’re throwing money at him.  Like he needs it.

Perhaps Kadyrov tipped his hand a bit when he made his announcement the other day, saying, “Family, personal life, Islamic studies—that’s where I see myself.  If there is a need for me to take in hands a shovel, an assault rifle or a backpack—I can do that.”  Wait, did he say “assault rifle”??  Something tells me it may be a while before we’ve seen the last of Ramzan Kadyrov.

[You can read in detail about Chechnya and other sovereignty and independence movements both famous and obscure in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Near Russia’s Arctic Rim, Karelians Bristle under Putin’s Rule

Vladimir Putin, as this blog tirelessly points out, is a hypocrite when it comes to separatism.  Though the authoritarian Russian president arms and funds separatists in places like Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and—perhaps soon—Syria, within Russia it is (as I have reported in this blog) a crime, as of last year, even to publicly advocate secession from the Russian Federation.  I have detailed how the Russian government has cracked down mercilessly on activists arguing even for enhanced autonomy in Russian regions like Circassia (in the north Caucasus and nearby steppes) and Siberia (see articles here and here), to say nothing of demands for self-determination by the Tatar minority in Crimea, which Russia reconquered from Ukraine last year.  A Crimean Tatar activist, Rafis Kashapov, was the first person tried under the new advocacy-of-separatism ban.  But the latest flare-up of resistance to Moscow rule is not along one of these familiar fault-lines but to the Sub-Arctic extreme northwest of the country, in the Republic of Karelia.

Last week, on October 26th, Vladimir Zavarkin, a municipal deputy (equivalent to city councilman) in the Karelian town of Suoyarvi (population ca. 10,000) became the second person, after Kashapov, to be put on trial for promoting separatism.  He is is being tried in Petrozavodsk, the Karelian capital, for advocating separatism.  The charges stem from an address he gave in May.  “Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin,” he said in the speech, “I propose to you: get rid of the wool over your eyes, look at what’s being done in Karelia.  Forests are being felled down to the root ... everything is being moved to St. Petersburg, Moscow, taxes aren’t being paid.  What will be left for our children?  Nothing!  So we, probably, if the Russian government won’t hear us, will stage a referendum, I think.  If Russia doesn’t need Karelia—let’s secede.  That would be the most honest!”

Vladimir Zavarkin, who is on trial for promoting the idea of a referendum on Karelian independence

Zavarkin’s attorney, Dmitry Dinze, said that the real reason behind the arrest is Zavarkin’s criticism of the Karelian governor, Alexander Khudilainen, who, like other governors of Russia’s constituent republics and provinces, is not elected but appointed directly by Putin.  But the Kremlin is also very keen to nip internal separatism in the bud wherever it appears, be it Chechnya or Tatarstan, but especially in areas rich in natural resources like Karelia.

Karelia (upper left) is one of many “republics” within the Russian Federation, but it has no autonomy.

Also last week, Anatoly Grigoryev, chairman of the unofficial Karelian Congress, used the occasion of the post-Soviet regime’s annual Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression to point out that the Putin regime downplays the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s repression of Karelians and ethnic Finns in Russia.  In fact, Stalinist iconography is enjoying a resurgence in Putin’s Russia, with little apparent awareness of the barbarity of his genocidal crimes against minorities.

Karelian rebels in the days of the Russian Civil War

Karelia spreads northward from near the edge of the former imperial capital at St. Petersburg and thus has always been in Russia’s backyard.  Tensions between Karelia and the Kremlin sharpened in 1917, when, in the midst of the Russian Revolution and the disastrous civil war in which nearly every region of Russia tried to split away from the new Bolshevik dictatorship, Finland—up to that point part of the Russian Empire—became the first and only nation in the Civil War to succeed in its secession bid.  While Finland was establishing its independence, a Karelian nationalist insurgency controlled Karelia and in 1918 voted to secede and to merge with Finland.  This makes sense: the Finnish language is nearly mutually intelligible with Karelian—both being members of the Finno-Ugric language family that has no connection to any other European languages and also includes Estonian, Hungarian, Saami (Lappish), and the languages of numerous small nations in Russia’s north.  There is no agreement on where to draw the line between Finnish and Karelian languages and cultures; some call them two branches of a single nation.

Karelian is one of the Finno-Ugric languages.
Of these, only Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian have speakers numbering over 1 million.

There was also a move among the Finno-Ugric-speaking Ingrian people of the area around St. Petersburg to become an independent Ingermanland (a.k.a. Inkeri or Ingria) or to join Finland as well—and you can imagine how popular with the Bolsheviks was the idea of either losing St. Petersburg or seeing it cut off as an exclave separated from the rest of Russia by hostile territory.  Self-declared Ingrian and Karelian republics held out against the Reds until the early 1920s, with Finland too busy fighting for control of Finland proper to worry about annexing areas to the east which Russia was fighting tooth and nail to retain.

In the Second World War, Finland was an Axis country, allied with Nazi Germany, which led to the “Winter War” of 1940, in which the Soviet Union tried unsuccessfully to retake Finland, and to the political demonization of any species of Finno-Ugric nationalism as somehow pro-Nazi—even though Finns aligned themselves with Adolf Hitler mostly as a way to protect themselves from Russia.  (This is very analogous to the way in which Putin’s propaganda machine today brands any anti-Moscow feeling in Ukraine as neo-Nazism.)

Some Karelian activists today fly the flag
of the short-lived Republic of East Karelia of the 1920s

Stalin upgraded the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1940 to create the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic, which it was hoped would grow as larger and larger chunks of Finland were annexed—which did not quite happen.  In 1956, Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, downgraded the Karelo-Finnish S.S.R. to the Karelian A.S.S.R. again—this during a period when other nationalities victimized under Stalin were being repatriated and recuperated and seeing their statuses restored.

Marching in Finland for Karelian–Finnish solidarity

As for Karelia, the bare facts are that a referendum on independence, even if it were permitted to be held, would avail Karelians nothing.  Even under Stalin, Karelians were a minority in their own republic, at 37% of the population, outnumbered by the 57% majority of ethnic Russians.  Today, Russians are 82% of the population, and Karelians are only 7.4% (and only 5.1% in Petrozavodsk, the capital), with ethnic Finns and Vepsians (another related Finno-Ugric-speaking nationality) making up 1.4% and 0.5%, respectively.  Much of this demographic drop is due to Karelians emigrating to Finland to escape Stalinism, where some assimilated, or passed, as Finns.  At least 10,000 Finnish citizens today identify as Karelian.  Karelian is not even an official language of the Republic of Karelia.

The Karelian national flag

If Karelia were to split away, it would disconnect Murmansk Oblast (province) to the north from the rest of Russia.  Murmansk’s local population includes Russia’s portion of the Saami (Lappish) indigenous territory stretching west into Norway, Finland, and Sweden—though today Saami form only 0.2% of the oblast’s population, which is 89% ethnic Russian.  Losing Murmansk, including the Kola Peninsula on the Arctic Ocean, is an even more important possession for Russia, economically speaking, not only for the harbor at Murmansk but for the larger slice of the pie of the Arctic, with its potential energy bonanza beneath the slowly melting ice.

So Zavarkin, who can be guaranteed a predetermined verdict in a Putinist kangaroo court, is not quite grasping the problem when he says, “If Russia doesn’t need Karelia—let’s secede.”  Putin does need Karelia.  It’s the Karelian people that he couldn’t give a damn about.

The flag of Russia’s Murmansk oblast

[You can read more about Karelia, Ingermanland, and other sovereignty and independence movements both famous and obscure in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Why Does Abkhazia Get to Host the 2016 “World Cup” for Aspirant Nations?

[Special note to readers: This article elicited a strong reaction from ConIFA, which contributed a statement to the effect that it considers itself a “non-political” organization.  For that statement, please see the comments section at the end of this article.  This blog welcomes and encourages a full discussion of the political and ethical implications, if one feels there are any, to ConIFA’s relationship with Abkhazia, Transnistria, Magyar irredentists, and other entities which many see as playing a negative role, to say the least, in European politics.]

We are used to international geopolitics inserting itself into the world of association football (that’s “soccer” to Americans).  World powers sometimes use the game as a proxy war for their own tussles over what is and is not a state and where national borders lie.  Examples include the ban on holding FIFA games in Russian-occupied Crimea, Spain trying to block Gibraltar, which it still claims, from member-state status, and ongoing politically motivated fan violence in Balkan hotspots like Bosnia and Kosovo.  But now a smaller football league that was supposed to be aloof from the rougher political edges of FIFA (the French acronym for the International Federation of Association Football) is courting similar controversy.

This league, the Confederation of Independent Football Associations (ConIFA), a new organization devoted to aspirant or unrecognized states ineligible for FIFA membership, decided this summer that its 2016 football (soccer) world cup would be held in the Republic of Abkhazia, a de facto–independent Russian puppet state in what most of the world outside Russia regards as part of the Republic of Georgia.  Despite damage and economic instability resulting from a recent history of separatist war and ongoing diplomatic limbo, Abkhazia and its capital city, Sukhumi, can, ConIFA promises, offer “top-class infrastructure” for a sporting event.  But Abkhazia is bound to be a divisive choice, considering that Russian support for violent separatism in Ukraine since early last year—a political situation which closely parallels Abkhazia, which split away as the Cold War ended—has led to calls to boycott the Russian-hosted FIFA World Cup planned for 2018.

ConIFA is not the first league of its type.  A predecessor was Viva, which doesn’t stand for anything but is a play on the name FIFA, also set up for national teams of unrecognized states.  Viva’s first world cup, in 2006, was originally to be held in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a puppet state that every country in the world other than Turkey recognizes as part of the Republic of Cyprus.  Northern Cyprus ended up ceding hosting duties to Occitania (southern France) after a brouhaha over Northern Cypriot demands to vet participating teams—probably the result of Turkish skittishness at that time about any kind of recognition of any kind of Kurdish entity, since northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region was also a participant.  Viva has successfully kept politics out of the team-selection process in the four subsequent Viva cup finals hosted by, in turn, Sápmi (the northern Scandinavian homeland of the Sami, or Lappish, people), Padania (separatist northern Italy), Gozo (the Republic of Malta’s smaller island), and Erbil, the Iraqi Kurdish capital.

Sami (Lapp) footballers competing in Östersund

Other participating Viva teams over the years have included Monaco (not a pseudo-state, but too small for FIFA nonetheless), Provence, Zanzibar, Arameans Soryoye (the team of the Christian Syriac people), Darfur (southwestern Sudan), Raetia (the linguistically distinct Ladin, Friulian, and Romansh speakers of southeast Switzerland and northern Italy), Tamil Eelam (the Hindus of northern Sri Lanka), and Western Sahara (the Moroccan-occupied Sahrawi homeland).  Customs red tape and other logistical problems have mostly prevented Southern Cameroons, West Papua, and Tibet from participating.  But no one was deliberately excluding anyone, or being remotely provocative.  Even the Northern Cypriot team graciously conceded defeat to the Kurdish team in the 2012 Erbil games.

(Yet another organization, FIFI (Federation of International Football Independents), in 2006 held a one-off exhibition “Wild Cup” tournament in Hamburg, Germany, where Northern Cyprus triumphed over Zanzibar, Gibraltar, Greenland, Tibet, and the Republic of St. Pauli—this last being a fictive micronation (fictive even by micronational standards) consisting of Hamburg’s red-light district.)

The ConIFA European cup this June, for its part, was hosted in Hungary by Székely Land, a proposed state in western Romania’s ethnic-Magyar (Hungarian) region.  Padania (northern Italy) won that 11-match series, with the County of Nice (in southeastern France), the Isle of Man, and Felvidék (Slovakia’s “Upper Hungary” region) ranking second through fourth, in that order.  The first ConIFA world cup, in 2014 in Östersund, Sweden, hosted by Sápmi (Lappland), was won by the highly impressive Niçois team.

Magyar nationalists displaying the Székely Land flag in Transylvania

And here, with this ConIFA line-up, the observant reader who is familiar with the minor nationalisms to which this blog is devoted will have caught perhaps a clue as to why Abkhazia, of all places, was selected to host the 2016 ConIFA cup.  Start with Székely Land, an autonomist cause with nowhere near the popular momentum enjoyed by, say, Scotland, Catalonia (both of which keep a plenty high profile in FIFA football), Padania, Kurdistan, or Tibet.  In fact, the idea of giving autonomy to the Magyar-dominated parts of western Romania is mostly a pet cause of the extremist far right in Hungary and Romania (as discussed once in this blog).  Autonomy for Romania’s Szeklers (Magyars) is in particular an abiding emotional rallying point for Jobbik, the neo-fascist ultranationalist party in Hungary, which in an election last year became Hungary’s third-largest party.

Jobbik armbands on parade

Felvidék, or “Upper Hungary,” the formerly Hungarian-ruled parts of Slovakia, is an even obscurer cause.  Slovakia is a stable, increasingly western-style state, and Hungarian is an official language in areas where speakers are more than 20% of the population.  (They are 8.5% of it nationwide.)   Slovakia’s Magyars are hardly separatist, but Jobbik has not forgotten them.   The party specifically calls for the revocation of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.  That agreement, part of the dismantling of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War, whittled the newly independent Hungary down to its current size, stripping away territories that had been under the Hungarian crown within the empire: all of Slovakia, a third or so of modern Romania, the Vojvodina province of northern Serbia, Ukraine’s Transcarpathia oblast, and significant territories which are now along the edges of Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia.  Jobbik wants all these lands back.  Only small bits of them have ethnic-Hungarian majorities today, but under Habsburg rule the German-speaking Austrian and Magyar élites ruled over smaller ethnonational groups in a political structure that was almost feudal.  Hungary, when it was an Axis country during the Second World War, tried and failed to use that conflict to regain lost territories.

Light green is modern Hungary;
darker green are those areas stripped from
the Kingdom of Hungary after the First World War

The County of Nice, too, is mostly a right-wing, even neo-fascist, irredentist cause.  In the years of conflict leading up to Italian unification in the mid 19th century, this Mediterranean city and its environs were ceded by the Kingdom of Sardinia’s House of Savoy (soon to become the ruling house of unified Italy) to France in exchange for help fighting the Austrians.  This stuck in the craw of the unification hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, a Niçois native who once famously said, “If Nice is French, then I am a Tatar.”  Thus Nice shifted from a mostly Italian-speaking city to a francophone one.  A claim on Nice was revived by Benito Mussolini during the Fascist era, and it is also included by the far-right, xenophobic, anti-Brussels Lega Nord (Northern League) in northern Italy as part of its dreamed-of “Greater Padania.”  Oh, and of course Padania is prominent in ConIFA too (as it was in Viva).  A ConIFA delegation to Nice in May of this year is prominently featured on the ConIFA website.

Football fans waving the Niçois separatist flag

Abkhazia, next year’s ConIFA host, is one of two ethnically distinct parts of Georgia which split away from Georgia after the fall of Communism in the early 1990s—the other being South Ossetia, which, like Abkhazia, is also a ConIFA member “state.”  After the brief South Ossetia War in 2008, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin shored up their de facto independence and granted them diplomatic recognition, something only a handful of other tiny states have followed the Russian example in extending.  Abkhazia and South Ossetia are in fact just the longest-standing parts of an archipelago of Russian-backed puppet states in non-Russian parts of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Others (discussed at length elsewhere in this blog, e.g. here) are Transnistria, in Moldova; the Armenian-dominated Nagorno-Karabakh Republic in Azerbaijan (the N.K.R. is also in ConIFA); the Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” established last year in eastern Ukraine; and, less concretely, possible future separatist entities in places like Transcarpathia (see discussions in this blog here and here), Ukraine’s Odessa oblast (see reports from this blog here and here), and ethnic-Russian parts of Kazakhstan, the Baltic States, and elsewhere.  Another emotional issue for Armenian nationalists and their Turkophobic puppetmasters in the Kremlin is another ConIFA “member,” Western Armenia, a proposed N.K.R.-type entity many Armenians would like to carve out of what is now eastern Turkey.  (Turkey is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and has been a bugbear of Russian nationalists since Ottoman days.  Turkey and Azerbaijan are both allies of the U.S.)

Transnistria, it will be no surprise, is also a target of ConIFA diplomacy, in the form of an official ConIFA visit just before June’s European cup to Tiraspol, capital of this tiny, Russian-backed sliver of a pseudostate consisting of Moldova’s eastern edge abutting Ukraine.  ConIFA would like Transnistria to host a future tournament.  It also features prominently in contingent Russian plans for a takeover of more of the southern, ethnic-Russian-dominated areas of Ukraine, which mostly extend in a belt across the northern shores of the Black Sea, extending to Odessa oblast, which borders Transnistria.

Transnistrians in Bessarabian folk costume in a flag ceremony in Tiraspol

Putin’s proxy expansionism, while it exploits Soviet iconography and terms like “people’s republic,” is in fact a right-wing type of enterprise, and to this end it is not surprising that it has gained the support of far-right parties in the west that might otherwise talk a lot about “freedom”—such as (see discussion in this blog) Jobbik, Lega Nord, Flemish separatists in Belgium, libertarian-leaning separatists in Venice, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), and high-profile right-wing conspiracy-mongering nuts in the United States such as Lyndon LaRouche and Ron Paul.  Putinism shares with these far-right movements a suspicion of the European Union (E.U.), NATO, and multilateralism in general; xenophobia focusing on a nakedly bigoted Islamophobia; and an infatuation with muscular militant nationalist leadership that in fact has more in common with 1930s Fascism than with Soviet-style Communism.

Putin is a darling of xenophobic Padanist separatists like these Lega Nord activists in Milan

To be sure, leftist aspirant states are in ConIFA too, including the Aymará indigenous nation of Bolivia; the disinherited Chagos Islanders of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, who live in exile in England; and Cascadia in the American and Canadian Pacific Northwest.  But even some of these are causes which appeal to Putin’s anti-Western imperialism.   The Aymará nation includes Bolivia’s left-wing president, Evo Morales, who sided with Putin’s invasion and annexation of Crimea.  Bolivia was one of only ten countries which sided with Russia in voting against a March 2014 United Nations resolution that upheld Ukraine’s right to territorial integrity following the Crimea annexation; the others—all of them (as discussed at the time in this blog) mostly profoundly undemocratic societies—were Armenia, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Syria, Sudan, and Belarus.  Even Iran, China, and Myanmar had the decency to at least abstain.  The Chagos Islanders’ cause, too (see discussion here and here), is one which Putin is keen to highlight because it is an example of a serious human-rights abuse which can be laid at the feet of NATO.  Along with the prominence of the above-discussed obscure neo-fascist irrendentist entities like Upper Hungary, Székely Land, and Nice, most of the teams prominent in ConIFA are ones that conform to the anti-Western, anti-NATO, anti-E.U. agenda of Putin’s new imperialism in its “near abroad.”

Aymará Indian demonstrators with their national flag

One possible result of a tournament in Abkhazia next year, and a possible later one in Transnistria, would be to spread the popularity and prestige of the Russian puppet-state model among separatist groups across the political spectrum and around the world—fitting the new pattern of parties like Lega Nord, France’s National Front, and Jobbik—even the otherwise-leftist Basque nationalists in Spain—lining up behind Putin’s imperialist agenda in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine.  Playing in Abkhazia is sure to be willfully misinterpreted as a de facto recognition by these aspirant nations.  It is worth asking who is running ConIFA—or, perhaps, who has taken it over or whom it serves.  While Putin plays hardball in Ukraine, the lurch to the right in separatist soccer may be playing into the hands of his stealth “soft power” offensive against the West.

[You can read more about Abkhazia, Transnistria, and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]