HuT has been formally banned in Russia since February 2003, when the country’s Supreme Court designated it and fourteen other entities as terrorist groups. The Russian government has steadily persecuted the group since, launching a number of investigations into suspected criminal and terrorist activities by its members. Nevertheless, HuT’s activities in Russia have grown steadily over the past decade, with evidence of HuT cells stretching from Tatarstan to Siberia. 25
The growth in radical Islamic ideas has been accompanied by a surge in religiously motivated violence. In the summer of 2012, for example, Valiulla Yakupov, a prominent Islamic cleric who had previously served as the deputy spiritual head of Tatarstan, was shot and killed outside of his home in Kazan. Almost simultaneously, Ildus Faizov, the region’s chief mufti, was injured by a bomb planted in his car. 26Both men were well known for their active opposition to the spread of radical Islam and their work in preaching a more moderate, inclusive brand of the faith. 27As such, the attacks represented a very public rejection of the established religious status quo in the region.
Tatarstan is not the only part of the Russian heartland locked in an intensifying battle with Islamic radicalism. Neighboring Bashkortostan—whose capital city, Ufa, serves as the spiritual seat of Muslims in eastern Russia—is also under siege. There has been a marked growth in grassroots Islamist militancy and widespread banditry in the region over the last three years. 28This instability contributed to the ouster of the region’s long-serving president, Murtaza Rakhimov, in the summer of 2010, and his subsequent replacement with a new, Kremlin-selected strongman, Rustem Khamitov. A new offensive against Islamic militants and ethnic separatists followed. 29Nevertheless, sustained violence by both Islamists and extreme nationalists became so acute over the following year and a half that in December 2012, the Kremlin took the unprecedented step of dispatching internal security forces to quell the instability—the first time it had done so since the fall of the Soviet Union. 30
For years, experts such as Yana Amelina and Rais Suleymanov of the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies and Gordon Hahn of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, have warned of the growing influence of Wahhabis in the region. 31To them, the steady growth of radical Islam is part of a deepening struggle for the soul of the Russian state—a struggle that Moscow has not yet begun to fight in earnest.
HARD POWER, NOT SMART POWER
The rise of Islamic radicalism in Russia underscores the bankruptcy of the Kremlin’s approach to counterterrorism. Russia’s leaders long have gambled that their counterterrorism policies, however bloody, would remain popular so long as ordinary Russians believed the Islamist threat to be both marginal and distant. Yet numerous high-profile terrorist incidents in recent years—including the 2002 hostage-taking at Moscow’s Nord-Ost theater, the 2004 Beslan school massacre, the 2009 bombing of the Moscow metro, and the 2011 Domodedovo attack—have increasingly made that gamble look like a losing one.
Why have Russian efforts to combat Islamic radicalism failed? Much of the problem lies in the way Moscow conceptualizes its struggle with Islamic forces. Indeed, while some in Russia recognize the need for an “intellectual war” against Islamic extremism, 32the Kremlin’s approach remains overwhelmingly kinetic. The Russian military’s engagement in the Caucasus over the past two decades can best be described as a scorched-earth policy that has left more than a hundred thousand citizens dead. (In 2005, an unofficial Chechen estimate placed the combined death toll from the two Chechen wars at 160,000. 33Official tallies offered by Moscow are more modest.)
Belatedly, the Kremlin and regional governments have begun to try a softer approach that includes greater economic investment in the Caucasus and outreach initiatives designed to engage, and moderate, regional Islamists. 34But the brutality of Russia’s hard-power policies have overshadowed these steps and led to widespread disaffection with Moscow.
The feeling is increasingly mutual; as the Carnegie Moscow Center’s Alexei Malashenko has put it, most Russians have come to see the Caucasus as their “internal abroad”—an area qualitatively different from the rest of Russia, which must be pacified rather than engaged. 35
Runaway regional corruption plays a large role in this hostility. The Russian government has come to rely on a succession of Kremlin-approved strongmen to maintain local order in its majority-Muslim republics—and to preserve their allegiance to Moscow. It has also subsidized most of their expenses; estimates suggest the Kremlin currently provides between 60 and 80 percent of the operating budgets of regional republics such as Chechnya. 36But accountability and transparency have lagged far behind. Not surprisingly, corruption and graft have proliferated, and the Caucasus has gained global notoriety anew for its criminality and lawlessness.
In response, Russian officials have proposed an array of remedial measures intended to make regional governments more transparent and accountable. 37Yet these steps remain mostly notional; experts say that substantive changes to entrenched cronyism are hard to find.
The Kremlin’s response to Islamism has been particularly feeble in Russia’s heartland. Despite the warning signs, there is still little official recognition from Moscow that the country’s heartland is fast becoming a battleground between insurgent Islam and the state, much the way the North Caucasus did some two decades ago. In December 2012, for example, Fariz Askerzade, the head of Tatarstan’s Shi’a community, penned an open letter to Russian president Vladimir Putin beseeching him for protection against rising Islamic radicalism in the region. 38He’s still waiting for an answer.
This passivity has been encouraged by regional officials, who have been quick to reassure the federal government and the general public that radical Islamic activism remains “under control.” 39
THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD
For years, the Russian state has waged unrelenting ground warfare against Islamist elements on its periphery instead of implementing a real, broad-based strategy to combat and compete with radical Islam. Such an approach, however, is unsustainable.
Although Russia has experienced a post-Soviet religious revival, observance among Russian Muslims today remains limited—a legacy of the Soviet Union’s forcibly imposed atheism and religious repression. According to Russian studies, just one-fifth of the country’s ethnic Muslims actively practice the faith. 40And among those who do, support for Islamism is not widespread. 41
But the Kremlin’s policies have the ability to change all that. As Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation puts it, “Russia’s entire counterinsurgency strategy is in question. Its primary goal is ‘to make the local population less afraid of the law enforcement than the insurgents,’ but the overly violent Russian approach has often produced the polar opposite.” 42Moreover, experts caution against underestimating the resilience—and the appeal—of radical religious ideas. “All this talk of Abkhazis, Ossetians or Tatars not being pre-disposed to major Islamism is nonsense,” Moscow-based scholar Yana Amelina maintains. “Unfortunately, all [of them] are susceptible to radical Islamist ideology.” 43
Even more crucial, time is working against Moscow. Negative demographic trends have hit Russia’s Slavs the hardest, while Russia’s Muslim population is thriving. The practical effect is that the Russians most adversely affected by the Kremlin’s draconian counterterrorism policies—the country’s Muslim underclass—are the ones emerging as the most decisive demographic group and important political player in Russia’s future.