The Battle Against Western Neo-Liberalism
Since the mid 2000s, Maksim Shevchenko has been one of the most outspoken figures in the anti-Western conspiracy discourse. Shevchenko began his media career as a journalist with Nezavisimaia gazeta, covering issues relating to religion. He also published articles about the military conflict in the North Caucasus in the 1990s and the conflict in Afghanistan at the beginning of the 2000s. From 2006, he hosted a television talk show, Judge for Yourself (Sudite sami) on Channel One, which began his television career and helped to establish his public profile as one of the main commentators on interethnic and interreligious relations in Russia. Twice, in 2008 and 2010, he was selected by then President Medvedev to be a member of the Public Chamber, which was created by the Kremlin in the mid 2000s to function as a forum for the discussion of issues pertaining to Russia’s ‘civil society’. Shevchenko’s participation was primarily focused on interethnic relations, and as a result he became one of the principal spokespersons for matters connected with the North Caucasus in the Russian press. In 2012, he became editor-in-chief of the website Kavkazskaia politika (The Politics of the Caucasus), an open forum for the discussion of issues relating to the Caucasus. Shevchenko has built a profile for himself as a leading expert in interethnic relations; this allows him to promote his views on various television talk shows and radio programmes.
Like Dugin and Narochnitskaia, Shevchenko describes Russia as a great world power, which brought European methods of administration and cultural development to new territories during the Imperial and Soviet periods. Ethnic Russians served in this process as a ‘frame for the nation’ (kostiak natsii) (Shevchenko, 2010). He sees the prerequisite for Russian greatness as a combination of the three ethno-religious groups: Orthodox Russians, the Turkic Muslims who inhabit large areas of Siberia, and the various ethno-religious groups of the North Caucasus (Zatulin and Shevchenko, 2012). Shevchenko insists that if any of these groups were to disappear it would destroy Russian nationhood and Russians would fall under the control of the West. Accordingly, he offers a theoretical framework for the national cohesion of the Russian Federation, which centres on the idea of territorial unity. He considers that Russia’s superiority over the nation-states of Europe is rooted in its composite quality, the inclusion of several ‘civilizations’ in one nation. This guarantees social justice and interethnic tolerance. The Caucasus itself represents a model of interethnic dialogue because it incorporates various religious and ethnic groups.
Shevchenko has a two-fold goal when he points to the Caucasus’s unique role in the process of Russian nation-building. On the one hand, he delegitimizes the arguments of isolationist Russian nationalists, whose idea of separation from the Caucasus has gained popularity since the mid 2000s (Markedonov, 2013). In his view, calls for separation come from the same ‘fifth column’ within Russia which devastated the great country in 1991. According to this logic, Russian nationalists who advocate the separation of the Northern Caucasus from the Russian Federation cannot be Russian patriots as they support the aims of Russia’s enemies. On the other hand, Shevchenko’s admiration for the uniqueness of the Caucasus boosts his popularity among the elites of the North Caucasian region. When addressing these elites, Shevchenko stresses their region’s great past and the fact that most of the cultures in the North Caucasus are descended from ancient civilizations (Shevchenko, 2013b).
As Shnirel’man (2006) notes, the idea of ancient ancestry played a key role in shaping the nationalist discourse of the North Caucasian republics as far back as the Soviet period and has been actively developed by local intellectual elites since the Soviet collapse. By supporting this approach, Shevchenko can reinforce the notion of Russia’s greatness and claim that the great histories of individual nations within Russia combine to strengthen Russian statehood. Regarding the situation in the North Caucasus, Shevchenko utilizes conspiratorial notions and emphasizes the West’s key role in inciting interethnic conflicts. As he puts it: ‘All attempts to present the Chechen conflict as a conflict between the Chechens and the Russians, between Chechnia and Russia, originate from Russia’s mortal enemies, who wish for [Russia’s] collapse and destruction… This is my sincere conviction’ (Samsonova and Shevchenko, 2009).
The attempt to explain interethnic unrest in post-Soviet Russia in terms of conspiracy is a recurring pattern in Shevchenko’s works. Because of his reputation as an expert on interethnic issues, Shevchenko is approached by the media every time an interethnic conflict in Russia breaks out. This allows him to promote a conspiratorial reading of the event to the public and to shape public perception of the conflict’s causes. For instance, when, in July 2013, social unrest in Pugachev was triggered by a domestic fight between two men, one of whom was of Chechen origin, Shevchenko represented the conflict as part of a broader campaign to destroy Putin’s regime and bring down Russia. In his view, the event had been planned and carried out conjointly by opposition politicians, the media and sociologists who were allied to them; the sociologists apparently confirmed to journalists the existence of strong public support for the idea of separating the North Caucasus from Russia just after the conflict flared up and thus provided a basis for the anti-Caucasian rhetoric (Fel’gengauėr and Shevchenko, 2013).
Despite his use of conspiracy notions in his public speeches, Shevchenko attempts to tailor his arguments to the real social and political challenges that confront post-Soviet Russian society; this means that he positions himself at the centre, rather than the margins, of political discourse. His populist conspiratorial utterances refer to anonymous groups and individuals allegedly responsible for Russia’s social problems. In his description of the socio-economic environment in the North Caucasus, Shevchenko refers to the rampant corruption and violence of the law enforcement agencies against residents of the region. Similarly, he traces the sources of interethnic conflicts in other regions of Russia back to the criminal character of political elites, whom he regularly accuses of corruption (Shevchenko, 2013a).
Quite often, Shevchenko refuses to name the exact members of the political elite whom he accuses of conspiracy, and changes his opinion whenever he feels the situation requires this. He presents himself as an opponent of the government by means of critical remarks about its policies in the North Caucasian region. However, he was a member of the Presidential Council for Interethnic Relations, established in 2012 and hosted personally by Putin. Moreover, Shevchenko played an active part in the coalition of pro-Putin forces during the 2012 presidential elections and supported the Moscow Mayor, Sergei Sobianin, during his electoral campaign in 2013 (Azar and Shevchenko, 2013), even though the mayor’s campaign was framed by anti-migrant narratives, including statements levelled against the North Caucasus (Arkhipov and Kravchenko, 2013).
Shevchenko also regularly criticizes the Russian opposition and its alleged supporters abroad. He has argued that in the 1990s the USA established a semi-colonial regime in Russia (Pozner and Shevchenko, 2009), and that the signing of the Belovezha Accords in 1991, that destroyed the USSR, provided the means to set up an ‘oligarchic tyranny’ supported by corrupt journalists and politicians working closely with the West (Shevchenko, 2011a). Shevchenko contrasts the comparative socio-economic stability of the Putin regime with the oligarchic regime of the 1990s. In Shevchenko’s view, Putin’s regime symbolizes a return to independent decision-making in domestic and foreign policy, which makes it possible for the greatness of the lost empire and its economic stability to be restored (Shevchenko, 2011b).