Towards an Explanation of Intercommunal Peace in Kabardino-Balkaria: Post-War Nationalities Policy and Late Soviet Society in the North Caucasus

Abstract

This essay examines socio-economic processes during the Soviet period to help explain the causes of peace and conflict in the post-Soviet North Caucasus. It argues that the absence of an ethnically stratified social structure in Kabardino-Balkaria is one of the reasons why this republic enjoyed relative intercommunal peace and stability in the 1990s and early 2000s. By contrast, the surrounding national republics of the North Caucasus that came out of the Soviet era with socio-economic disparities along ethnic lines witnessed higher levels of intercommunal conflict. This essay looks to the understudied topic of post-World War II and late Soviet nationalities policies to explain Kabardino-Balkaria’s divergent historical trajectory.     

Historiography and the politics of land,identity, and belonging in the twentieth-century North Caucasus

Intercommunal, socio-economic, and political relations in the North Caucasus have historically revolved around access to this mountain region’s prized pasturage and scarce farmland. Given the centrality of the land question in the North Caucasus, it is unsurprising that historiography on land relations in the region has been highly politicized. This article examines how indigenous writing on the history of land relations in the central Caucasus – a region inhabited by today’s Kabardians, Balkars, Ossetians, Ingushes, and Karachais, and dominated by the princely confederation of Kabarda before the tsarist conquest – has been subject to wide revision in response to changes in local and national political dynamics and the emergence of ethnicized identity politics. In the late-imperial and early Soviet periods, Karachai, Balkar, and Ossetian elites-cum-historians, writing for an audience of imperial policy-makers, crafted histories to influence state policies toward land reform. By the 1930s, historians from the region tailored their histories of land relations to the prerogatives of Soviet nationality policies. The ideas contained in these histories impacted the construction of national identities in the Soviet period. Post-Soviet Karachai and Balkar intellectuals, seeking to establish new post-colonial national histories for their peoples, have reinterpreted the history of land relations in order to depict their ancestors as independent of Kabarda’s land-based dominance. This revisionism is part of the struggle of the Karachais and Balkars against their historiographical erasure, which was a product of the exclusion of the Karachais and Balkars from the family of Soviet nations during their deportation and exile to Central Asia from 1944 to 1957 and their subsequent political and cultural marginalization.     

From princely fiefdoms to Soviet nations: interethnic border conflicts in the North Caucasus and the village of Lesken

This article examines interethnic border conflicts that accompanied the Soviet division of the North Caucasus into ethno-territorial autonomous districts after the Civil War. It traces the tumultuous, and often violent, events that led to the transfer of the ethnically Ossetian village of Lesken from the Kabardino-Balkar Autonomous Oblast to the North-Ossetian Autonomous Oblast. The essay shows how the Soviet-sponsored ethnicization of territory exacerbated interethnic tensions in a multiethnic region that defied neat delimitation into coherent ethno-national administrative units. It highlights the ‘dual-assimilation’ that accompanied the introduction of the national principle and the delimitation of national borders. Ethno-national mobilization of populations in defence of their ‘national’ territory from neighbouring ethnic groups, though achieved for reasons of daily survival, represented an initial lesson in the importance of national identity in the modernizing Soviet state, as villagers learned to speak national and Bolshevik. In concluding, this paper seeks to understand the larger significance of Soviet border making in the North Caucasus by exploring issues of continuity and change, both in terms of imperial governance and the lived experience of ethnicity.