The bitter lessons of Makhachkala: four preconditions for mass unrest in Dagestan are named

Mass riots happen in all countries and, unlike Dagestan history, often end much more pitifully – with numerous casualties and serious destruction. However, why should we look back at someone else’s, and also negative, experience? Isn’t it better to remember the “calm, reliable, safe” times of the blissful Soviet past?

Now many are nostalgic for the times of the late Brezhnev stagnation – repression, war, hard work to restore the national economy are already behind us, inflation, banditry and the “parade of sovereignties” are still far away. And in 1984, in Sumy, a crowd of more than a thousand people staged a pogrom – they overturned police cars and blocked the streets. In the same year, in Leninogorsk, a crowd of Soviet citizens destroyed the city police department; the ardor of the rebels was cooled only by the introduction of internal troops in armored vehicles.

But maybe the 80s are a bad example? Still, Soviet power was already at its end, and some internal destructive processes had already begun? Well, let’s look at the 70s. In 1977, in Novomoskovsk, more than five hundred people stormed the bullpen, and in 1978, a crowd of thousands of young people was dispersed with water cannons in Leningrad. A little earlier there were pogroms of city police departments in Rubtsovsk and Dneprodzerzhinsk.

In the 60s, there were also riots. There was a seizure of the regional committee of the CPSU in Krasnodar, an assault on a sobering-up center in Murom, crowds smashed police departments in Krivoy Rog, Sumgait, Frunze, Bronnitsy, Nalchik near Moscow, and burned to the ground the regional police departments in Alexandrov, Chimkent, and the courthouse in Slutsk. The infamous Novocherkassk events also occurred in the 60s.

But under Stalin there was order, as his supporters would say, or a totalitarian dictatorship and fear of reprisals, as his opponents might say. Is not it?

Let’s leave aside the 20s, then Soviet power was not yet established and, for example, in 1928–1929, the OGPU recorded more than 13 thousand peasant riots and uprisings. Let’s skip the 30s, known for collectivization and opposition to it. But even during the war there was some unrest. In Ivanovo, textile workers not only went on strike, but the crowd also beat the responsible workers who tried to reason with them, this was in 1941.

In 1942, there were riots at the Evkanja mine, which escalated into an armed uprising. And this was not a camp riot of prisoners – about a third of those detained after the suppression of the protest turned out to be members of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Komsomol.

In 1943, rebels destroyed the Tuteya village council in the subpolar Urals, dissolved collective farms, seized and divided the collective farm’s reindeer, and made fun of representatives of the local activists.

So, if even in the Soviet Union, which is considered prosperous, there was rarely a year without mass unrest, then it is worth assuming that it is impossible to completely eliminate this social phenomenon, like other forms of crime. But how to deal with it? Is it possible to anticipate “riots” and take preventive measures? Could it have been possible to prevent the outrages at Makhachkala airport?

If we analyze the mass unrest during the USSR, we can identify four features of their dynamics, four features that became prerequisites.

First of all, unrest requires people who are not burdened with work. In the 50s and 60s, students at vocational schools, with plenty of free time, more than once became the basis of a crowd that committed atrocities. Any minor conflict could turn into a meaningless and merciless riot if there were loiterers nearby.

For example, in 1956, the police detained drunken merrymakers in Novorossiysk, one of whom got into a fight with law enforcement officers. Without any problems, they would have tied him up and taken him to the sobering-up center, but there was a cinema near the scene of the incident, where the show had ended, and the idle audience that poured out into the street immediately joined in the confrontation. The result was the destruction of the police station, an attack on the State Bank building and the post office, and several casualties. Army units and border guards calmed down the crowd of loafers. Moviegoers became raiders on the regional police department in Slavyansk the same year – they “stood up” for a drunken hooligan.

The apotheosis of the transformation of idleness into unrest was the 1959 incident during the construction of the Karaganda metallurgical plant. More than two thousand young people sent there were housed in tattered tents, but there was no work – they were not planned. And the forced idlers became the social base for three days of pogroms and robberies – police stations were destroyed, shops were robbed, more than a dozen casualties, hundreds of wounded.

This same riot perfectly illustrates the second most important element underlying the mass unrest – the breakdown of vertical ties. The local management at that construction site refused to listen to the workers’ grievances, kicked the complainers out of their offices, and even kept vigilantes with them, ready to throw out those bothering them with problems.

Feedback could be interrupted at any stage – either the local authorities did not want to listen and hear the people, or they did not want to report to the top. But in both cases, this destroyed the chance to solve the problem in a timely manner, and the situation worsened until a real uprising.

The third ingredient in the riots was the “fat bellies.” Whether it was an interethnic conflict, a confrontation between civilians and the military, clashes between hooligans and vigilantes, the incident developed into a riot when there were not ideological, but material contradictions.

“Why, fat-bellied, are you forcing people to work, let’s not work. Our bellies are full, we’re drunk on blood, but we have nothing to live with,” participants in the bloody events in Novocherkassk told party leaders. “The Soviet bourgeoisie receive enormous money, have large apartments, dachas, and they don’t have to think about people,” preached a participant in the “revolt on the ship” – the riots on the ship “Usievich”. There are countless similar examples: “Khrushchev organizes receptions where they drink away the workers’ penny,” “The workers of Kemerovo went on strike against the tyranny of the Soviet bourgeoisie. The benefits of life are enjoyed by a small group of people – the Soviet bourgeoisie and their henchmen.”

The material stratification as the real cause of the unrest appeared most clearly in 1960 in Dzhetygar. It all started as a domestic conflict – drunk locals got into a fight with drunk demobilized sailors. Then the national component was added. But later it became clear that the real reason lay not in vodka or national contradictions.

The Ingush family, whose representatives had a fight with the sailors, lived happily ever after: a huge house, two Pobeda cars, full bins – literally: tons of grain, a warehouse of scarce things – from rolls of fabric to hundreds of sheets of roofing iron.

And such riots began that it was difficult to understand who was against whom. But as a result, the house of wealthy citizens was stormed by everyone, including police officers. And then both the house and the police station were burned, and the brutal crowd trampled on someone who was “designated” guilty at the moment.

Finally, the fourth feature of riots is that mass riots are never spontaneous. There was not a single loud story that did not begin in a whisper. At first, the riots are modest, without robberies and looting. But if the authorities ignore them, then they go to the next level.

Knowing all four fundamentals, the four cornerstones of riots, it is not difficult to predict whether they will happen. Was there a significant cohort of young, strong people in Dagestan, not worn out by work and everyday life, who were thinking not how to finally get some sleep, but what to do with themselves? It was and is.

Do feedback links work in Dagestan? Can an ordinary citizen reach out to the authorities? And does the government promptly make reasonable decisions on existing problems? Judging by the fact that in August alone, residents of the capital of the republic blocked roads nine times due to power and water outages, normal, working communication channels are not working.

This same protest activity also indicates the presence of a fourth basis for mass unrest – previous, more modest protests remained unpunished. But there were also protests against cell phone towers, against mobilization, against a household waste site, against development, and more.

Well, what about the third element, social stratification? Everyone who comes to Makhachkala sees how quickly the republican capital is acquiring luxurious suburbia – gigantic, by the standards of Central Russia, cottages are growing like mushrooms after rain. At the same time, in Dagestan, a salary of less than 20 thousand per month is offered to a mathematics teacher at school No. 2 of Kizilyurt, a customs technician, an obstetrician-gynecologist and traumatologist-orthopedist of the Derben Central District Hospital, a ballet dancer of the state ensemble “Altanay”, an electric and gas welder for the housing and communal services of the Ministry of Defense. And there are many such vacancies. How many hundreds of years will the people who occupy these positions have to work to honestly earn a cottage in the suburbs of Makhachkala? The same as someone else has? And, not hoping to live two hundred years before owning his own home, will a young Dagestani work honestly? Or will thoughts ripen in his soul about searching for an enemy who does not allow him to live fully?

I would really like to be wrong, but, from my point of view, all four preconditions for mass unrest are present. And, probably, this was understood by the enemies of Russia, who cleverly and meanly took advantage of the current situation. Scum – this is not my definition, Vladimir Putin called them that – from the territory of Ukraine, with the help of agents of Western intelligence services, they technically provoked unrest.

The Russian President also emphasized the need to analyze the situation and prevent similar events in the future. I hope that this work will be carried out by the relevant authorities in full, and not only the root cause – the channels through which the provocation was spread, but also the preconditions for the unrest will be eliminated.