The pogrom in Dagestan

On October 29, a rioting crowd spilled out onto an airfield in Dagestan, a multiethnic Russian republic adjacent to Chechnya on the Caspian Sea. The black-clad men with Palestinian flags were searching for the “Jews” that just flew in on a plane from Tel Aviv.

They were under the bizarre impression that the “Yahudi” colonizers were fleeing en masse from Palestine and now want to occupy the blessed land of Dagestan. So the mob was there to repel invasion, looking for the Jews everywhere, even in the turbine of the landed plane. They robbed the kiosks, chased the bus, there were shots, but the police finally managed to evacuate the passengers by a military chopper.

There were not many “Jews” on the plane, but it is rumored that there were several children that received medical treatment in Israel. Dagestani medicine is not something to write home about.

There are three components to the pogrom.

One is the unbridled antisemitism running wild in the Caucasus, a region has undergone a profound Islamization since the fall of the Soviet Union. Dagestan is a beautiful and mountainous land I have spent years frequenting.

Back in 1999, prior to the Second Chechen War, Dagestan already had “sharia zones” where federal law was declared null and void, and the republic was ruled by strongmen surrounded by loyal gangs.

The mayor of its capital city Makhachkala survived 15 attempts on his life, mostly in retaliation. As a result, he was paralyzed from the waist down.

In one case, a defective grenade from RPG struck a wall above his head but didn’t explode. In another, the perpetrators blew up the whole street. 18 people were killed, four of them children.

All this proved beneficial for Moscow — when the Salafis from Chechnya invaded the republic in 1999 in order to “liberate” it from the infidels, the local cadre sided with Russia. As another worthy, a mayor of Khasavyurt, Saigid-Pasha Umakhanov, indignantly told me, “They [the Salafis] didn’t even consult us!”

All the while, there was a resurgence of traditional Sufi Islam competing with the newfangled Salafi creed from Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Both were very keen on Jerusalem and Jews. Back in 1998 there was a guy in Dagestan named Nadyr Khachilaev, and he accidentally captured the local Government House. It wasn’t really planned, he just got into a quarrel and as a result captured the building. The people who inadvertently participated in the process told me that this was the biggest bank robbery in history, as there was cash in every safe of every official. Lots of cash.

Khachilaev, apart from his Government House–capturing hobby, was also a writer. In one story, he fantasized about liberating Jerusalem from the Jews.

I don’t remember a single guy from that time who was of import and didn’t kill people.

Vladimir Putin clamped down on all this flourishing diversity and gradually substituted dull gray bureaucrats for local warlords. But that’s the problem — the bureaucrats can’t really manage the prancing horse, and I suspect the local clans had their field day at the airport, showing off as much to Moscow as to Zionists.

There’s no civil society in Dagestan, but there are clans that can muster hundreds of people in an hour. In the 19th century, the head of such a clan would have been a big landowner, but now he’s sponging off the federal budget.

The other reason, of course, was a marked change in President’s Putin behavior. For many years, Putin didn’t exhibit any signs of antisemitism and, indeed, was close with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. One would have expected he would try to play middleman after the October 7 Hamas attack, just like Erdogan did with Russia and Ukraine. , making himself indispensable, getting concessions from both sides, increasing his regional influence.

Instead, Putin put himself firmly in Hamas corner, even going as far as hosting a Hamas delegation in Moscow after the attack.

But the most bizarre story happened in Chechnya, ruled by Putin’s formidable ally, Ramzan Kadyrov. Kadyrov’s teenaged son Adam severely beat a Russian prisoner, a young man named Nikita Zhuravel, whose crime was that of burning the Koran. But Zhuravel didn’t burn Koran in Chechnya. He burned it in a totally different region of central Russia. He was apprehended, arrested and ceded to Chechen authorities.

What followed was even more bizarre. Not only was the beating shared proudly on the Internet, but Adam Kadyrov also got two medals from two Russian regions with predominantly Muslim populations.

To those that can read the tea leaves, that looked like a clear capitulation. Maybe Putin doesn’t believe the West is strong enough to survive. He looked at demography and decided it’s better to side with the Global South.

In the Caucasus, the local clans are very sensitive to these things. The moment they saw Kadyrov’s awards, they decided to procure some for themselves.

Finally, there’s a third and strangest component for the pogrom. The pogrom was initiated by a Telegram channel called “Morning Dagestan,” which organized anti-mobilization protests in Russia a year ago. A politician named Ilya Ponomarev claimed it was a successful operation of his, undertaken “in cooperation with a group of Islamists from Dagestan.”

Ponomarev is a strange guy. He is a former deputy of the Russian Duma now residing in Ukraine and a self-proclaimed “decolonizer” of Russia. He is fronting, presumably, some Ukrainian group that is much more powerful than Ponomarev but prefers to stay out of the limelight.

Thus, it was Ponomarev who claimed credit for the murder of Darya Dugina, the daughter of Alexander Dugin, a far-right Russian ideologue and warmonger. To be more precise, he claimed that some “Russian partisans” whom he knows carried out the killing. Washington Post sources believe the assassination was carried by the Ukrainian security service.

After the pogrom, Ponomarev declared that he ceased all communications with the channel a year ago, yet only two months ago he was calling the channel “ours.” There’s no reason to insult Ponomaryev by suspecting he ever tells the truth, but it is safe to suppose at least that the people who killed Dugina may also have had a hand in stirring the airfield pogrom. After all, they are rooting for “decolonization” of Russia, and this is exactly what “decolonization” looks like.

Yulia Latynina, a writer and journalist, worked for Echo of Moscow radio station and the Novaya Gazeta newspaper until they were shut down as part of the war in Ukraine. She is a recipient of the U.S. State Department’s Defender of Freedom award. Her books “Niyazbeck” and “The Land of War” are set in the Caucasus.