Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus

"I mentioned before that central to the Putin project was this savage military expedition into Chechnya in 2000 – a war Putin essentially won where Yeltsin had lost. What’s wonderful about this book is that it’s by an academic, a sociologist who comes from southern Russia but who now works in the United States. It takes an unusual look at social relationships in that part of the world, but it does not start with the war in Chechnya or nationalism. He comes from a sociologist’s point of view. To explain the title, the French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu’s secret admirer is a guy called Musa Shanib who became a rebel fighter. He started off as a member of the Soviet intelligentsia and came to the fore in the Gorbachev period. The author, who had known this guy since he was young, discovered that Shanib was reading Bourdieu, and he takes this as a starting point to look at the way the Soviet intelligentsia ended up in a place they never expected to be. He sees how one section of that intelligentsia joined in with the ripping-off of state property and self-enrichment, and another section joined various types of revolt. The way he unpicks this is marvellous, and is a subtle and unusual approach to that part of the world that confounds our expectations and stereotypes."

"Well, it’s quite a mouthful, isn’t it? I think the title of the book probably puts off a lot of people who would otherwise be very interested in it. Georgi Derluguian is a fascinating man. He’s an Armenian from the North Caucasus who worked in Africa in Soviet times as an interpreter. He’s a sociologist who then emigrated to Chicago, so he’s got this amazingly sophisticated understanding of the sociology of the post-Soviet space, but also he gets around and actually goes to these places – Chechnya, Abkhazia, Karabakh – and he’s a local as well, so the combination of those characteristics means this is really the best book at unpacking and disentangling what happened in the Caucasus at the end of the Soviet period. He’s chosen as his main protagonist this extraordinary character who is the secret admirer of Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist and thinker. His only fan in the Caucasus is this chap, a nationalist originally called Yuri Shanibov, but who renamed himself Musa Shanib. Shanib is from Kabardino-Balkaria. We get this biography about his life trajectory, how he started in the Communist party, then became a dissident, then briefly became a nationalist hero, then got marginalised by everyone else and is now pretty much on his own again. Georgi uses this story as his thread, but the bigger canvas is a very interesting theoretical explanation about how the Soviet Union ended the way it did. Back in the 70s and 80s a lot of Western scholars argued that the Soviet Union was a prison house of nations and that if it did ever end there would be an uprising against ethnic Russians and Uzbekistan might be the place where it would happen. But, in fact, it happened in a very different way. Some of the most loyal nationalities, like the Armenians, were the first to rise up, but they rose up not against Russians but against their neighbours. Very different things happened which people hadn’t expected and this book really explains how Soviet society broke down in terms of competition for resources and in terms of nationalities. He also talks about the groups who didn’t fit into the Soviet economy. He calls them the sub-proletariat and they were the kind of criminalised class that then became the fuel for conflict in the Caucasus. It’s a rich book and it’s a great read that deserves a much wider readership."