The author of the book is an acknowleged scholar and the Director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Russian Academy of Sciences. He served as the Federal minister of nationalities in 1992, and he took part in the Russian government's proposed Russo-Chechen peace plan in 1995-96. On the one hand, Tishkov understands how impossible it is to provide a comprehensive synthetic point of view on the "Chechen problem," but on the other hand, he does give good insight into how Chechnya functions more often as a theater of war, rather than a place of everyday living. Chechnya, a 6,000- square mile corner of the North Caucasus, has struggled with Russian domination for centuries (see Politkovskaya 2003). Tishkov analyzes Chechen society as a battleground. In reflecting on the ethnography of war, he presupposes a link between anthropology and politics. But how can the anthropologist get true information about the ideology of war in constantly changing circumstances? He addresses this concern in his first chapter called "Ethnography and Theory." Tiskhov writes that traditional ethnographic fieldwork is not successful in the case of Chechnya because the former has generated "a standard repertoire of answers that turned a mass mentality into a mass media myth" (p.4). Tishkov's goal to get at how ordinary people "arrange to fill the space between their national differences with words in place of bullets. What do they say to each other then?" (Cockburn 1998:1). Tishkov primarily uses the method of the in-depth interview, and his Chechen partners helped him to conduct these both in Chechen and Russian. They asked questions about living in a state of war and future hopes and dreams. He obtained sincere and insightful texts.
In examining the formation of the Chechen "nation," Tishkov leaves room to explore the existence of basic commonalities "among representatives of different ethnic groups" (p.10) and to evaluate the possibility of constructing plural group identities. Pre-Soviet history reconstructed Chechen society usually "as a group with a specific social structure and a unique system of values" (p. 10), such as kinship/lineage teips, Sufi brotherhoods, the custom of blood revenge, and the spirit of freedom. A more recent history of the Chechens begins with their deportation by Stalin. Interviews show, however, "that for the prewar (1990s) generation of Chechens, neither their ethnic identity nor the fact of deportation constituted a central element of their identity. As for tribal (teip) affiliation, very few of them made reference to it. They were concerned with their earnings and living, their chances of getting a good education, professional careers, service in the army or various state agencies - just like the rest of the population of the Soviet Union" (p.219). Tishkov thus concludes that the Chechens are much more culturally similar to the ethnic Russians than they are different. And yet, "The war itself drew a more rigid line of demarcation between Chechens and non-Chechens and heightened Chechens' sense of group solidarity. In a sense, it is the conflict that constructs Chechens, not vice versa" (p. 10).
As for the issue of Chechen ethnicity, Tishkov questions theories of ethno-nations in USSR and modern provocative political projections about the "destruction" of small nations and the "dying out" of big nations (p.10). In the West, these transformations are defined as "ethnic" ones, while in Russia, they are termed "national problems" of self-determination because of Russia's imperial system (p.11). "The critical agenda for today," Tishkov believes, "is the de-ethnicization of the state and de-statization of ethnicity" (p.12) .
Tishkov's discussion of this problem and its proposed solution has validity outside of post-Soviet space. One of the crucial features of post-modern culture is the lack of common foundations of public life (Seligman 1992). The Cold War's legacy has been the impossibility to represent social totality and the dissolution of links among people, state, nation, and government (Balkyr 1995). Balkyr writes that "in the US and in Europe 'post-nationalism' is one of the privileged terms of an academic, economic , and political debate which delineates the transition from modernity to postmodernity, from the old order of the world to its new order·" (Balkyr 1995:25). Balkyr notes that numbers of displaced peoples in the 1990s reached the highest peak in recorded history. For these persons, the nation has become an "imaginary non-place" (Balkyr 1995:26). Thus, according to William O. Beeman, "New nations in the twentieth century have faced a great struggle in constructing national identities for themselves" (1999). And yet, the collapse of the Soviet Union has left its former citizens vulnerable to the appeal of nationalism. Dynamic forms of socio- cultural transformation at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries are like new religious movements, filling the spiritual need suppressed by the communist regime. However, the dreadful cultures of war make people feel lonely and despondent.
As in other Soviet territories in the 1920s and 1930s, the centralized government enacted contradictory policies of modernization. It "pursued a policy of encouraging cultural development among ethnic minorities and helped establish local institutions of state power, one of the results of which was the establishment of an ethno-territorial autonomous region of the Chechen and Ingush people, as well as the promotion of literary programs and the training of intellectuals and professionals. Part of the program included organizing education in a cultural group's mother tongue, which in turn entailed creating writing systems for several languages" (p.21-22). Industrialization in Chechya, however, differed from that in other places. There was a differentiation between highland and lowland Chechens (gornye and ploskostnye) (p.54), showing how the term "highlander" became a modern intra-Chechen stereotype. And the Chechen-Ingush economy was divided into two sectors: "Russian" (oil, engineering infrastructure, and vital services) and "indigenous" (agriculture, migrant labor, and the criminal sphere) (p.41). Nepotism and corruption were the norms of the late Breznev area and the beginning of perestroika.
Tishkov calls what is now happening in Chechnya "demodernization," and he defines this situation as "a radical transformation of social links and institutes that undermines the otherwise universal capacity of human communities for self-organization" (p.14). As a result, there appeared a need to make false coalitions and mythical structures. He suggests that the "Chechen people, or Chechen society as a collective body, no longer exists as an agent or locus of social action. Since 1991, Chechya has been torn apart by various violent contradictions" (p. 13).
As such, Tishkov draws on recent theories about how personal and collective identity are highly variable and constantly changing. In chapters 5 through 10, he discusses the pre-War situation, the conflict and its main political characters, and the recent phenomenon of hostage-taking in detail and without favoring one side over the other. These pages read like a sinister and dreadful thriller novel. It seems strange that such events could take place in the 20th century. In chapter 11, he investigates religion's role in the conflict. He writes that the modern generations of Chechens "who were brought up under the Soviet system, tend toward atheism or at least become non-believers" (p.168). He discusses the moderate forms of Islam practiced in Chechnya, and he explains how Wahhabi fundamentalist proselytizing was aimed especially at the younger generation. Wahhabism and other outside influences reinvented teip cleavages and political rivalries that "emerged around kin/family and fragile local coalitions striving for power and resources" (p.223). Tishkov concludes that "the Chechen revolution both destroyed the former Soviet system of rule and simultaneously indulged in an unrealized project of restoring an imagined order (based on clan structure and religion)· This egregiously war-torn society sought a future based on invented images of the past, applying answers that were, ultimately, alien to Chechen society itself" (p.223).
Two last parts of the book explain how war is like a fire: a small fire is not difficult to stamp it out, but if it is allowed to burn, there are no rivers with enough water to extinguish it. "Great Victory" is a myth, for the realities of war are broken economies, public disorder, and an ever wider-spreading feeling of madness. He asks some crucial questions in this final section. Specifically, he wants to know if there is "a reliable, unquestioned version of the conditions and events that can be accepted by all of the parties involved" (p.211). Tishkov has the wisdom to move beyond the tragedy to attempt to find a solution. He believes we should all attempt to gain perspective on the conflict. But, "That does not mean that the Chechens had no basis for constructing the image of victims for themselves–certainly their mass deportation by Stalin and Beria (both of them ethnic Georgians ) was criminal and amoral. But equally amoral was the violence leveled against the non-Chechen part of the republic's population in the early 1990s" (page 214). He sees his mission to lie "in empowering through expression those individuals whose voices, whose visions, are least of all heard in the course of a conflict, who are least of all responsible for it, but who suffer the most from it" (p.215). In his "To Eternal Peace," Immanuel Kant mused that no peace treaty should be considered as such if during its resolution the parties involved secretly maintained reasons for the next war. We can definitely apply his words to the Chechen conflict. Tishkov has shown that his analysis of Chechen-Russian relations is not only important scholarship, but it is also essential information for the world community, since the only humane course of action is to bring peace to the region.
References Cited
Yrem Balkyr. 1995. "The Discourse on 'Post-Nationalism': A Reflection on the Contradictions of the 1990's." Journal of American Studies of Turkey 1:25-31
William O. Beeman. 1999. "The Struggle for Identity in Post-Soviet Tajikistan." The Journal Meria 3(4):4. Accessed at http://meria.idc.ac.il.
Cynthia Cockburn. 1998. The Space between Us. London: Sage Books
Anna Politkovskaya. 2003. A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Adam B. Seligman. 1992. The Idea of Civil Society. New York: The Free Press.