Authors

Vassily Klimentov¹;  ¹ University of Zurich, Switzerland

Discussion

The paper explores development policies in the North Caucasus over twenty-five years from the Soviet to the post-Soviet periods. The majority-Muslim, at the exception of North Ossetia, North Caucasus has been a challenging region to administer for the authorities in the late Soviet era, leading, for example, in complaints to the Central Committee of the Communist Party about inter-ethnic issues in 1990 (State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), fond 10026, opis’ 4, delo 776, listy 15, 18-29). In the post-Soviet period, the region, which stayed as part of the now-independent Russian Federation, became further an issue to Moscow as local separatist attitudes led to the First Chechen War (1994-96). In the late Boris Yeltsin-early Vladimir Putin era, another war between Russia and Chechnya erupted in 1999 and then spread to the entire North Caucasus in the mid-2000s. This conflict-driven story is relatively well-known. By contrast, the Soviet/ Russian attempts to set-up development programmes in the region and the appearance of foreign humanitarian and development actors after the Soviet collapse is not. The North Caucasus has thus seen both Soviet and Russian, sometimes ill-conceived, attempts at developing tourism, including alpine skiing and mountaineering, and the rise of charities and development and humanitarian actors from the West and from Muslim countries in the 1990s. The paper analyses these development programmes showing the continuities and changes that have characterised them and the competing rationales of different actors behind them. It relies on archival research in Russia, conducted before 2022, and on interviews among the North Caucasian diaspora abroad.