Lying under a potted palm on a hot Roxbury evening, I am snapped back from the edge of sleep by my phone shaking itself off my coffee table and thudding onto the rug below. It’s a text from my friend Julianna. “My friend suggested Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucuses by Giorgi Derluguian. He’s Armenian!”
It’s not uncommon for Armenians to receive messages like this one–a friend or acquaintance reaches out, excited that they have found some lesser-known member from your tribe who has made their mark somewhere. People say about cats that they train their adopted families to accommodate their madness in ways that nobody understands. Well, Armenians sort of work the same, obsessing in ways we don’t realize until our friends and partners are scanning film credits for names that end in “ian.” I used to ridicule my mother for it, but I cannot deny the dopamine hit I get from this act of love–especially when the name in question is a “good one.” Derluguian turned out to be a good one.
His seminal book, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucuses, deconstructs societal transformations in the Soviet Union, especially on its periphery, and charts the social forces that shaped its collapse. The question Derluguian asks is straightforward: Does globalism inevitably breed ethnic conflict? Put another way, was the prying open of the Soviet Union bound to crack along nationalist fault lines, or was the USSR’s undoing a less than clear-cut alchemy that might have broken in any number of different directions?
Prying Apart the Soviet Monolith
Sorting out the causes underlying ethnic violence in the wake of Soviet collapse is no small feat considering the multitudes contained within the peculiar form of empire that was the USSR. To manage this problem of scale, Derluguian focuses his inquiry through an approach that reads like social archeology, cutting cross sections into the hulking mass of soviet society to excavate local particularities that reveal the fine grain. He focuses on the North Caucasus and casts a central hero, Yuri Shanibov, an unlikely political dissident from the region of Kabardino-Balkaria. Shanibov is the oddball (my words, not his) who inspired the book title, and his eccentric profile is painted on the cover. Shanibov’s home, Kabardino-Balkaria, neighbors Chechnya, a comparable once semi-autonomous Soviet state of related indigenous heritage whose fight for independence devolved into horrific ethnic bloodshed. Kabardino-Balkaria avoided Chechnya’s fate, managing a mostly peaceful transition through the Soviet collapse. This juxtaposition presents one among several opportunities for systemic comparison that Derluguian uses to pick apart how the fates of Eastern states, inside and outside of the USSR, were determined when Moscow finally lost its grip.
Derluguian works through his analysis from the systems level down to the USSR’s smallest unit, Yuri Shanibov, a single protagonist put forward to illustrate social changes that might help explain the transformations that preceded and followed Soviet collapse. This deconstruction includes Derluguian’s class analysis, one notably carried out over a system that purportedly eliminated class through its revolution. It’s at this level–the level of classes and competing networks of power–where the book is at its most compelling, peeling back the face of the USSR to reveal what Derluguian offers as the underlying mechanisms behind societal reproduction and metamorphosis.
Capital Ego Death and the Petri Dish of Post-Structural Analysis
Derluguian’s cartography of shapeshifting groups, movements, and identities constitutes the “good stuff” that I had been looking for when I first reached out to Julianna. Julianna is a childhood friend who made a late-career pivot to anthropology. My partner got me started reading sociology and anthropology (fields that feel less distinct to me every day), beginning with Arturo Escobar’s Encountering Development. The hooks were in, so I continued to smash the “add to cart” button on Amazon for months, and leaf through the delightful ways that these scholars could map invisible social bodies, like classes and identities, and track their movements through the chaos of history like academic whalers sounding vast shadows hidden in the deep. When I learned Julianna had also been bitten by the anthropology bug, I reached out to learn from her experience. I will return to Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucuses in a moment, but for the purposes of this review, it is worth foregrounding why I am so drawn by these traditions of analysis.
Earlier, I used an example of peeling back the face of a clock to reveal its gears. That analogy speaks to the hubris with which we often aspire to unpack the mess of social phenomena, which are determined not by particles of physics, but by unpredictable people with unknowable wills. Most of us understand this on some level, yet at the same time, we are quick to internalize deterministic frameworks to explain how things happen.
As an example, let us turn to the subject of Dereluguian’s study–the spectacular collapse of the USSR. Consider a popular narrative that presents the defeat of communism as a testament to the power of global market capitalism and its tendency to liberalize society. The story goes that, in the end, the collapse of the Soviet Union was the inevitable outcome of market inefficiencies produced by a system that removed profit incentives from the cycle of economic growth. The clash of civilizations between East and West boiled down to a technical question about the power of free markets to outdo the central planning of bureaucrats, dooming the USSR from the outset. The free market had proven its mettle as an unrivaled catalyst for innovation and social change, propelling society toward greater prosperity.
This understanding is what political scientist Francis Fukuyama called in 1989 “the end of history.” Soviet defeat marked the triumph of free markets and constitutional republics over all competing forms of government. Capitalism and democracy were neatly conjoined on one end of the spectrum, opposite communist authoritarianism on the other. In this conception, communism was always fated to accept free markets, if it ever hoped to keep pace with the West. The trouble is that free markets augment social mobility before hurling society headlong into snowballing protests, produced by nascent middle classes asserting their demands for Western freedoms. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, history had reached its inevitable final destination. The optimism of the 90s was characterized by a sense of living out a prophecy of social progress, delivered by the unyielding engine of capitalism.
While serious scholarship never assimilated this deterministic view, this thesis endured broadly in the public imagination, surviving even the reality checks engendered by the major recessions of the 2000s. To many, economic crisis revealed the limits of this brave new frontier, but did not undermine the great effort spent to reach it. Despite arriving at the Pacific Ocean of financial volatility on the other side of globalist economic orthodoxy, its colonization was thoroughly complete. There was no going back.
Today, it is easy to mock The End of History in the face of a worldwide backslide into war and abundant examples of entrenched authoritarian governments that feel little threatened by the liberalizing force of free markets. But if the famous clash of civilizations does not inevitably point in one direction, then what forces pulled apart the USSR? When we’re not working our way back from the end of history, but instead working our way forward, we can ask if globalism was always preordained to win the Cold War, and if that victory was always slated to trigger ethnic violence across the Soviet periphery. Framing this same question in the deterministic manner of a Fukuyama-styled strawman, one might ask if territorial Nationalism is the inevitable final destination at the end of globalism’s new frontier.
Not according to Derluguian. His map of social forces does not trace any binary clash of civilizations nor any linear concatenation of unfolding historical chapters. Instead, he tips over the clumsy boulder of macroeconomics under which so many had buried the Soviet Union, revealing beneath its mossy underbelly a variegated universe of microcosms teaming with social life; coalescing, pulling, and competing in every direction. In place of macro analysis, Derelugian treats the USSR like a petri dish, reaching for finer tools to painstakingly delineate the interlocking groups, territories, and interests that shaped the distinctive periods of the massive socialist state, ultimately, attempting to identify the variables that helped produce the differing fates of its former subsidiary territories. Those variables serve more to confound meta-analysis than guide it toward any predictive model for ethnic violence, but Derelugian does not leave us with a shapeless mess of random events.
Derelugian’s analysis succeeds in shaping the face of Soviet collapse at multiple levels, but it’s probably easiest to address his analysis at its simplest level, that of its chosen protagonist. To do that, we must turn our attention to the question beckoned by the book’s title.
Who is Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus?
Yuri Shanibov could have been many things. Indeed, Derelugian’s eccentric associate literally wore many hats. It was, in fact, the contradictions within Shanibov’s social performance that led Derelguian to write his book in the first place.
Derelguian was visiting the obscure Russian territory of Kabardino-Balkaria, in the North Caucasus, to update his analysis of current affairs with some fieldwork. The region was formerly the domain of Circassians, an identity that comprises multiple ethnic groups across the caucasus, often with distinct languages but broadly sharing a faith in Islam. It was also the region of his birth.
Derelguian met Yuri Shanibov at a banquet. Shanibov’s entrance immediately changed the atmosphere in the room to one more befitting national Islamic political rally, with toast after toast to the pride of Kabardin Circassians. On Shanibov’s head sat a silver-gray Papaha hat, something like a wooly fez worn by shepherds in the region, and an odd fashion pairing with his expensive leather trench coat.
“We, the Kabardin Circassians, did not take off our hats even for the Russian Tsars!”
Dinner devolved into frustration for Derelugiuan, whose attempts to steer the conversation to anything specific were inevitably derailed by nationalist proclamations. Shanibov boasted of his refusal to remove his Islamic headdress while visiting the Turkish Ministry of Defense (during more secular times). “We, the Kabardin Circassians, did not take off our hats even for the Russian Tsars!” The room cheered their toastmaster.
To the eyes of an outsider like Derelugian, here in plain sight were the famous Islamic nationalists who had inevitably risen in revolt during those tumultuous years of Soviet collapse. Who could peacefully integrate such identities and passions into a liberal global order?
Wearily attempting to keep the conversation alive, Derluguian fumbled along before inadvertently letting slip a reference to the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. He sounded out the words “cultural field” at the table when the atmosphere changed just as abruptly as before. Shanibov exclaimed, “My Armenian brother! Now I see that you are not a spy–forgive our confusion, but you seemed to know too much of local affairs and my security could not figure out if you worked for the CIA [or for the FSB]. Now I recognize you as a genuine sociologist.” Escorted away to Shanibov’s office, Derluguian was stunned to learn that his Islamic revolutionary was in fact a sociology professor, like himself, and a disciple of Pierre Bourdieu. Choses Dites had been the second most influential book in his life aside from the Holy Quran.
The dinner had been a charade. Then again, the closer you look at National Identity, the harder it is to distinguish it from performance. If one had met Shanibov in the late sixties, one would not have met the Islamic revolutionary at Derluguian’s banquet, but a secular and urbane intellectual on the frontlines of soviet reform. The target of Shanibov’s rabble-rousing then would not have been the Russian yoke, but rather the co-ethnic Nomenklatura. You know the Nomenklatura today as the ruling gray bureaucrats of the USSR who sat atop the patchwork of principalities woven throughout Eastern Europe.
Shanibov was part of an exceptional generation of Soviets, who fought not to disband the USSR but to reform it; trumpeting lofty ideas like self-governance and democratic socialism. To understand the significance of the moment when Shanibov came of age, it is worth retracing Derluguian’s account of Soviet evolution.
A Brief History of Social Order in the USSR, According to Derluguian
The Bolsheviks did not win the Russian Civil War alone but with a wide tent of ethnic coalitions in their camp. In exchange for support. The revolutionaries promised greater autonomy to the disenfranchised peoples of the Russian Empire. While some in Lenin’s inner circle feared that ethnic loyalty might supersede integration into their nascent state, the opposite proved true. The more the Bolsheviks made good on their promise of local autonomy, the more loyalty they commanded. Ethnic mobilization proved so effective that the revolutionaries started to invent whole nations where none existed before, grouping loosely related villages into new ethnicities to be conscripted into the war against the Tsar.
Under Stalin, the inchoate USSR began a radical project of industrialization. Millions of peasants were relocated into new urban centers and pressed into factories, often at gunpoint. Through the ferocity of Stalin’s police state, an industrial base was raised overnight, as rural farms were melted down and recast as cities and towns, with central squares and rail lines. Many who might have cast off Stalin’s brutal imposition were instead welded to his leadership by the genocidal Nazi invasion, elevating Stalin as their demi-god protector, marshaling his empire against the forces of evil. For those who still resisted, Stalin’s gulag proved an equally effective source of coercion. By the end of his rule, Stalin left a society wholly remade, with a cult-of-personality-sized hole in the middle.
Nikita Kruschev was the first true reformer. De-Stalinization meant not only rolling back the police state and its censorship but also doubling down on civil infrastructure. For the first time, remote and rural areas like the North Caucasus were given universities, cultural centers, and theaters; spaces where many experienced cultural awakening, for example watching their folk tales canonized into operas. The USSR was investing in culture, encouraging local expressions of ethnic identity, and bringing to fruit the first generation of college-educated specialists, intellectuals, and career professionals.
Most significantly, their soviet masters, the Nomenklatura, were not Russian imperialists but loyal co-ethnic vassals of the state. Kabardins ruled Kabardins, and the newly ascendant young professionals expected that they too would find their place atop the bureaucracy. Kruschev, after all, was urging them on while politely inviting the stale old guard into retirement. In other words, much of the Soviet periphery was heavily invested in maintaining a state that had delivered social mobility, delegated much of its authority, and promised meritocratic reform. The fever of the 1960s avoided reactionary nationalism because many young activists were less inclined to imagine their future in independent nation-states, but rather in a more open soviet democracy. Take Yuri Shanibov. He was living out the manifest promises of the Bolshevik revolution. He had been spared the misery of peasant existence for life as a jazz-loving sociology professor who derived his status from the Soviet developmental state. As the 60s progressed, the state seemed primed for its next leap towards Democracy–but this experiment was cut short.
The Nomenklatura could not tolerate Kruschev’s reforms and the chaos that openness wrought. Kruschev was ousted for Breshnev, who began the conservative counter-reform movement that ossified into the rigid state of Western caricature, one that would eventually crumble under its own stubbornness. The counter-reforms were nothing more than the Nomenklatura reasserting their class dominance over the system. Yuri Shanibov and his fellow reformers flattened their noses on the doors that Brezhnev slammed in their faces, as they were pushed back into the lower rungs where they would remain. Their invitations to the ruling class had been lost in the mail. Meritocratic reform was replaced by disinterested corruption, as the Soviet Union insulated itself from change, and subjugated discourse that threatened the status quo, including cultural expression. This embittered a generation, costing the Soviet government much of the credibility it had accumulated, what Bourdieu refers to as cultural capital, and transferring that cultural capital to the disenfranchised intellectuals, who were revered as martyrs for change. Their cultural awakenings were reclassified as threats by the state, which transformed them into noble causes of resistance to the public. In other words, ethnic identity itself became a broadly well-regarded cultural field of opposition to an increasingly corrupt and oppressive state.
By the time Gorbachev tried to reopen the doors of reform, it was too late–the rot had penetrated too deeply. Civil disobedience roared back with vengeance, but this time, Gorbachev could not trust his security services to screw the lid back on–after all, these were the same services who had ousted Kruschev, his spiritual predecessor. As Moscow lost its grip, the Soviet reformers found themselves without a system to reform, and the conservative Nomenklatura found themselves without a state to conserve. The seat that they had been struggling over had vanished.
Derluguian’s Final Analysis
This brings us to Derluguian’s conclusive insight, which I shall try to summarize through analogy. If collapse can be viewed as a game of musical chairs, then when the central seat vanishes from play, the succeeding shape of power is determined by whichever seats of power remain. Those seats exist both as ideological fields of common purpose and as functional networks. While the USSR’s primary cultural fields of opposition took the forms of democratization, economic liberalization, and national identity, these established forums did not exist in equal parts across the empire and among its vassal states.
The functioning networks of power were equally variegated. In the North Caucasus, a class Derluguian refers to as the sub-proletariat had long operated mob-like shadow networks. These were former peasants who had never assimilated into Soviet wage employment and therefore behaved as a distinctly different class from the proletariat. The sub-proletarians instead supported themselves through the black market, subsistence farming, and complex exchanges of personal favors. The elite Nomenklatura also had patronage networks of their own, systems of loyalty built on the corrupt hoarding of resources. Finally, Shanibov’s academics, though prominent, found their networks too fragmented to perform usefully in the absence of the Soviet state. Their social discourse largely took place over everyone’s heads, in public conversations with prominent reformist intellectuals in Moscow. Unfortunately for them, these reformers had few lateral interactions with their counterparts in other Soviet Republics and nothing like a grassroots movement capable of mobilization.
As an example of how distribution informed local power dynamics, consider this quick comparison between Kabaridno-Balkaria and Chechnya. In the Kabardino-Balkaria capital, the Kabardins and Balkarias comprised the metropolitan elite, but in Chechnya, the Chechens were almost solidly sub-proletarian peasants, encircling a capital city of Russian elites. In Chechnya, this produced a dynamic much more akin to a colonial arrangement.
Collapse took different shapes. The Baltic states quickly let go of their territorial disagreements making democratization their primary focus, while further East, the Nomenklatura more successfully reinvented themselves as Oligarchs. Capitalism was not a great force sweeping away their power. Instead, it merely transformed their Soviet villas into grotesque marble palaces. As new orders overturned old dynamics, peculiarities persisted even where collapse reached a fever pitch. When Armenia and Azerbaijan descended into the dark depths of pogroms and guerilla warfare, even during the worst fighting, Armenian generals were capable of calling their former Azeri colleagues to request nightly pauses in hostilities for bathroom breaks and rest. The Armenian would make the call in Azeri Turkish and his Azeri counterpart would respond in flawless Armenian.
In Kabardino Balkaria, the tide of independence rose and fell quickly. The insurgent protest increasingly drew sub-proletarians who had never taken much interest in Democratic Socialism but responded fervently to vague religious and ethnic proclamations of independence. The reformers had no commensurate mobilizing force, but as credible antagonists, they did have personal appeal in pitching themselves as statesmen for a free Kabardino-Balkaria. Soon Shanibov shed his academic robes for his Papaha hat and found himself leading eloquent rallies for a Circassian revival. He changed his Russian name for a more nationalist Circassian appellation, calling himself Musa Shanib. The professor would even find himself smuggling arms, and might have gone out in a blaze of glory had he not seen what happened to the Chechens first. When the Chechen situation spiraled into violence, the Kabardins stepped back from their own simmering tensions with the Balkarians, and hashed out a new power-sharing arrangement. Musa Shanib changed his name back to Shanibov, and resigned himself to life in the new Russia.
By the time Shanibov met Derluguian, he had returned to academic life. Shanibov mused, had things turned out differently, he might have ended up the dictator of some failed state.”Try not to judge Yuri too harshly,” Shanibov’s Dean remarks to Derluguian. “His whole life, he has been fighting for really the same principle: self-governance. Only the reference groups of his self-governance projects have been shifting.”
Conclusions on Power, Identity, and Dreams of a Better Story
Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucuses asks if globalism inevitably breeds ethnic conflict. I would end this meditation on Derluguian’s book by answering its central question with another question. If ethnicities are imagined communities, how can ethnic conflict be inevitable? Think of those African ethnicities that were created by the horrid colonial practice of sorting human beings based on nose measurements and hair texture. Today, those same groups kill each other over a difference imagined by the whims of crackpot European administrators. Why should such distinctions endure above all others?
Just as Shanibov changed hats, so do we all. In America, we experience this often through political realignment, as parties shift between references of class, race, or the interminable culture wars that dominate our current climate. We imagine that absent the imposed order of empire, the Armenians, Chechens, Georgians, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and Azeris will eternally fight to claim some piece of the board, but they once shared a common civic identity as citizens of a developmental state that, at least for a brief while, inspired many hearts and minds.
One does not need soviet nostalgia to find hope in that story, and to realize that in the end, human civilization is about stories–maybe more so than anything else. The available reference points of the human imagination have much to say in determining the shape of political competition, but there is nothing fixed in those references. Globalism is no different. After all, how were the nation states of Europe ever convinced to dissolve their borders in the first place? Globalism displaced national tension between bitter rivals like the French and the Germans by telling a more compelling pan-European story.
Just as Fukuyama once declared “the end of history”, today, scholars like Peter Zeihan confidently proclaim “the end of globalism.” The trouble is that in a world where the stories we tell about ourselves determine so much, we must accept that, unlike economic cycles, stories defy predictive models. I find that comforting because while it seems like the myths that once restrained our darker instincts have lost their hold on the public imagination, the adage remains true that individuals succeed every day in those same efforts where nations fail too often. Case by case, people are quite capable of putting aside differences that states insist upon reinforcing–of imagining better stories of common values instead of ethnic competition. I can think of one line that has endured in both the Turkish and Armenian imagination. If you’re brave enough to dig down to the bottom of those conversations, you hear it all the time: “For years, we lived together as neighbors.” I do not know where we go from here, but I do believe that sentiment leaves us with plenty of raw material to work with.
