Book Review: ISHII Hidetoshi, "The Coming Collapse of Russia", OKADA Kazuo, Filmmaker

Book Review: ISHII Hidetoshi, "TheComing Collapse of Russia"

OKADA Kazuo (Filmmaker)

ISHII Hidetoshi's "The ComingCollapse of Russia" is an interesting book that delves into the issues of the 7th Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum, held on August 1st and 2nd, 2023, at the House of Representatives First Members' Building Large Conference Room and other venues, by ISHII Hidetoshi, who worked hard on the Japanese side to hold the Forum. He and his partner, ISHII Yoko, who acted as interpreter and moderator on the second day, conducted repeated follow-up interviews.

The significance of this 7th Forum was that we were able to hear the real voices of the problems faced by various ethnic groups in various parts of the Russian Federation, mainly in NortheastEurasia, which have not been introduced much in Japan until now. This book does not simply introduce the remarks of participants at the conference based on video recordings, but continued follow-up interviews until early summer 2024.We commend the couple for their efforts. The current fight against black imperialism, centered on Russia and China, is similar to the collapse of theSoviet Union from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, with the situation changing rapidly from day to day, and the record of the 7th Forum alone has limited value.

As ISHII honestly explains in this book, he was originally an activist who had been reaching out to the liberation movements of oppressed minority groups in Tibet, Uyghur, Southern Mongolia, Honkong, and other areas throughout China that were suffering under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party regime, but he was not involved in supporting the oppressed minority groups in Russia/the former Soviet Union. While this is certainly a weakness, I strongly feel that this was precisely why he was successful this time. This is because, for someone like me who spent five years of his youth in Moscow in the early 1960s, who has since looked at the formerSoviet Union and witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union up close, that bitter experience often hinders bold judgment.

This book is divided into several blocks. The author gives an overview of the forum's activities through his own encounter with the forum and an interview with the forum's founder, UkrainianOleg MAGALETSKY. Next, the program introduces the thoughts of the leaders of the groups in Ukraine that Russia and its fighters are fighting against, and then moves on to introduce the activities of various ethnic groups and groups that have fled to outside of Russia. The program concludes with a three-way discussion between the moderator of the first day of the forum, Professor Yoshihiko OKABE of Kobe Gaku in University, and Ukrainian international political scientist Andriy GLENKO, about the future of the Ukrainian war and the Tokyo Declaration adopted at the forum.

The groups actually fighting Russia inUkraine were represented at the Tokyo Forum by Inal SHERIP, the foreign minister of the government in exile of the Chechen Republic (Ichkeria), andIlya PONOMARYOV, the political leader of the Legion Free Russia, a Russian volunteer corpus fighting on the Ukrainian side. Both are noteworthy figures, but I have focused particularly on the former, Inal SHERIP (born 1971), because he is an extremely unique figure in the Ichkeria government in exile. In this book,  ISHII introduces Inal's stories of his family's contributions to their homeland, Chechenia, which have continued for generations. This information is fresh in itself, and I learned a lot of things for the first time.

However, I would like to add the following. First of all, Inal did not directly participate in the fighting in the First and Second Chechen Wars. He was born in Grozny, the capital of Chechenia, to Spianbek SHERIPOV, who is also a film director. He became familiar with chess from the age of five, and in 1988, at the age of 17, he became the Russian chess champion. However, instead of becoming a professional chess player, he studied film directing under Vladimir Naumov (1927-2021) of Mosfilm studio as well as professor of feature film directing at the All-UnionState Cinematography Institute (VGIK). The author studied under directorMikhail ROMM (1901-71), so we are senior and junior in the same school. After graduating, he worked in film production in Moscow for a while, then moved to the United States during the Chechen War, worked in the Hollywood film industry, and obtained U.S. citizenship. Later, dissatisfied with the entertainment-oriented Hollywood movies, he moved to Belgium. Several of his films that won awards at international film festivals were made in Belgium. In addition to chess and film production, he also became a successful art investor. He is one of the leading collectors of Belgian Impressionist paintings.

He has been friends with Akhmed ZAKAEV(born 1959), leader of the Chechen government in exile, for over 30 years, but at the same time, he maintained ties with Russia through chess and film. After the fall of the capital Grozny in 2000, many independence leaders were forced to leave the country, and the guerrilla activities of those who remained in the country were almost completely destroyed by 2010. In the meantime, Inal traveled between Moscow and Grozny and engaged in covert operations in Russia from 2008 to 2011. On the surface, his activities were camouflaged by using his success in film production in Western countries as a weapon to establish the Chechenfilm studios in Grozny and co-producing a feature film version ofChekhov's novel "Tosca" with Mosfilm.

In this book, ISHII writes that Inal wasappointed Minister of Culture of the government in exile in 2012, which meansthat Inal sensed the danger and ended his own subversive activities in Russiaand Chechenia. Akhmed ZAKAYEV was seriously injured while breaking through theminefields surrounding the capital at the end of the battle for the capitalGrozny in early 2000, and was given first aid by plastic surgeon Hassan BAIEV(born 1963) in the suburban village of Arkhan-Kala and taken out of thecountry. Since then, he has been forced to work abroad. Inal took over theundercover activities in Russia and Chechenia in his place, but I think it wasrare to find someone who could fulfill the complex task of being required towork autonomously.

When Inal became Minister of ForeignAffairs of the government in exile at the end of 2022, he proposed a fresh strategy. It was the idea of ​​reviving the North Caucasus (Mountain People'sRepublic) Federation, which is introduced in detail in this book. The plan is to make the whole area from Dagestan on the Caspian Sea coast to the north of the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea coast independent as a federalre public in one go. In the current Russian Federation, this area is two regions of the Russian Federation, Krasnodar and Stavropol, and seven ethnic republics.At least 20 ethnic groups with various languages ​​and religions of Caucasian,Indo-European, and Turkic languages ​​live there. Therefore, the more knowledgeable specialists are about the Caucasus issue, the more you question whether it is impossible.

The idea that caught my attention is that Chechenia, located in the eastern part of the North Caucasus, would take the initiative to connect with Circassia in the west and create a belt consisting of Crimea and Ukraine. Many people in Japan do not know about Circassia. This is understandable. In early modern Europe, Circassia was completely wiped out after the Russian Empire launched a 100-year-longRusso-Circassian War, and even its memory was erased in the course of theRussian Empire-Soviet Union-Russian Federation. Circassia (Adygea Hek) was an independent state that existed from the 15th century to 1864, with its capitalin Sochi on the Black Sea coast.

Its downfall was due to Westerncountries' failure to allow Circassia to die when it pleaded for support.Russia massacred more than 1.5 million people in defeated Circassia over thecourse of a few years. It then exiled the few survivors to Ottoman Turkey, theAnatolian Peninsula, and Central Asia. Ukraine is currently fighting Russiadesperately because if it loses, 21st century Circassia awaits, and the NorthCaucasus diaspora living in Turkey raised their voices against the GenocideOlympics at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics in protest of the Circassiangenocide. In Japan, we were captivated by the success of Yuzuru HANYU and theefforts of Mao ASADA, but the Winter Olympics venue was built on top of a massgrave of Circassian victims.

The main attraction, or rather the heartof the book, is not the restoration of Circassia or the achievement of Chechenindependence, but the grandiose plan to revive the Federation of MountainousPeople's Republics of the North Caucasus, which was a legitimate state that hadalready been internationally recognized by neighboring countries after thecollapse of the Russian Empire at the end of World War I, but was crushed byforce by the Bolshevik regime. The international recognition of the restorationof independence for the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) was seen asan independent state during the interwar period regaining sovereignty fromillegal invasion by the Soviet Union. The book aims to apply the sameinternational norms to the North Caucasus.

If the recapture and liberation ofCrimea does not materialize in the Ukrainian war, it may become a pipe dream, but if it does, a military alliance between Ukraine and the North CaucasusFederation will block Russia's access to the Black Sea, and it will fall into the role of a regional superpower. The author senses that this is a very real possibility, and believes that the impact will spread throughout the RussianFederation, leading to the "collapse of Russia" as the title of this book suggests.

Akhmed ZAKAYEV is a former stage actor, good-looking, and eloquent. He was one of the leading field commanders since the First Chechen War. He has drawn a line between radical Islamism and theChechen separatists, and while he believes in Islam, he has aimed to create as ecular democratic state. He has certainly built a good relationship with the current Ukrainian government, but at the same time, he has not been able to completely integrate the separatist forces. Even among the Chechen troops fighting in Ukraine, there are groups that do not follow his leadership and control and are fighting separately. Many Chechen volunteers have been fighting on the Ukrainian side since Russia's seizure of Crimea in 2014, but ZAKAYEV moved his base from London to Kyiv much later, after Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. The existing armed groups and the unit under ZAKAYEV's command, the OBON (Independent Special Task Battalion), are separate entities, and this unit is mainly composed of young people who have recently joined the war from exile in Western countries, and veterans who have gained combat experience fighting against the Assad regime in Syria. In order to preventRussian agents from infiltrating, strict standards have been set, such as holders of an Ichkeria passport issued by the exiled government and passing a polygraph (lie detector) test imposed by the Ukrainian National Army, and integration is a future issue.

In the fall of 2023, at the NorthCaucasus Federation Reconstruction Conference held at the European Parliament in Brussels, Akhmed ZAKAYEV was appointed as the future Minister of Defense. The future president will be Iyad YOUGHAR, a Circassian with American citizenship, and Inal SHERIP will be the future Foreign Minister. What does this lineup mean? I believe it is proof that Inal has the coordination ability to handle the real politics of a complex situation.

At the end of the interviews with the two men, the book includes a map of the possible territorial boundaries of theNorth Caucasus Federation. The borders are carefully drawn to exclude Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which are internationally recognized as Georgian territory and whose current ruling powers seek to incorporate them into Russia. However, if the North Caucasus Federation becomes a reality in the future, it is much more likely that the residents of these two regions separated from Russia will seek to integrate into the North Caucasus Federation rather than submit toGeorgian rule.

Let us also briefly touch on Ilya PONOMARYOV (born 1975). His family was at the top of the nomenklatura(privileged class list) of the former Soviet Union. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the situation of the privileged class has not changed much.Not only was he a member of the Russian Duma, but his mother, Larisa, who is currently in exile in Poland, was a senator. And above all, his uncle Boris PONOMARYOV (1905-1995) was involved in controlling the international communist movement in the Soviet Union from the days of Comintern when Stalin's GreatPurge began, and controlled the international communist movement for a long period of time as head of the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1955 until his retirement in 1986. As someone who witnessed firsthand the tyrannical foreign policy of the Communist Party of theSoviet Union during that time, I can sense the intelligence of an educated person in the affable Ilya, but I cannot help but take a more detached stance and observe his more recent activities, particularly his being the only member of the Russian Duma to oppose Russia's seizure of Crimea in 2014 and the organization of the Legion Free Russia in exile in Ukraine, although I view them positively.

 Following them, the book introduces the activities of the movements of various origins participating in the forum. At the beginning, Denis UGRIMOV, an activist of Free Ingria, is introduced. He happened to be sitting next to me on the first day. He was wearing a badge of the Ingria national flag. Denis's ethnic origin is unknown, but as the book introduces, his position is a regionalist movement, and he wants to separate and make independent St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast from the RussianFederation under the name of Ingria.

Although this area is now a part ofRussia, it borders Sweden and Finland, and on the western edge it bordersEstonia, and there have been complex territorial disputes. In Japan, thenational epic poem Kalevala is generally known to be from Finland and RussianKarelia, but the Kalevala tradition has spread to Estonia via Ingria. AlthoughI am not an expert, I knew from films such as "Wind of the Milky Way"(1977) and "Echoes of the Kalevala" (1989) by Lenn art Meri (1929-2006, President of Estonia after the restoration of independence), who was also an outstanding ethnographic filmmaker, that this region betweenKarelia and Estonia was also home to Finno-Ugric peoples.

The Russian Empire was indeed a"prison of peoples," but the former Soviet Union that toppled it was an even greater prison of peoples. During the Soviet era, all peoples who had relatives abroad across borders were subjected to severe persecution. In that sense, the Ingria Finns are one of the endangered peoples. Therefore, it was inevitable that a movement to restore ethnic rights and revive ethnic culture would arise in this area. However, it is hard to shake the sense of incongruity that regionalists are using Ingria as a banner to advocate the separation and independence of Leningrad Oblast and St. Petersburg, detaching themselves from such ethnic and cultural issues. I can understand their dissatisfaction and resentment towards the current situation in Russia under Putin's rule, and their armed resistance movement, but isn't this a movement far from gaining widespread popular support? I don't know why the Ukrainian National Army refused to form the Ingria Platoon, but isn't it the result of a calm assessment of the gap between the Free Ingria movement and the general population of Ingria?

The book continues with interviews with exiled activists from Kalmyks, Buryatia, Bashkirs, Tatars, Sakha, and CrimeanTatars. The ethnic groups from which these activists come also walked a difficult path in Russia and the Soviet Union. Looking back, I have had some kind of contact with people from these six ethnic groups, whether they were classmates I studied with, acquaintances who helped me, coworkers on the same team, or interviewees in my works. Therefore, while reading the interviews, I was reminded of the words spoken in 2004 by Murat AUEZOV (1943-2024), a literary scholar who is a representative intellectual of modern Kazakhstan and served as the first Kazakhstan ambassador to China.

The Kazakh people have experienced various hardships, such as being forced to go from nomadic to sedentary, the GreatFamine in which 2 million people died due to the failure of agricultural collectivization, the transformation of their habitat into an archipelago of concentration camps, the acceptance of forcibly relocated ethnic groups, the huge number of war casualties in World War II, and the exposure to nuclear testing. However, it is because of these accumulated hardships that Kazakhshave been able to acquire a deeper and richer humanity as a people. And we cannot remain indifferent to the fate of other ethnic groups that were for cedto share their hardships with us.

In the same conversation, AUEZOV also spoke about the forced deportation of the Kalmyks. The 1944 deportation of the entire ethnic group resulted in the deaths of about one-third or even half of the Chechen population, but the residents were still expelled en masse.However, the Kalmyks were separated into families and scattered acrossKazakhstan and Siberia. As a result, they were unable to maintain their important traditional culture as an ethnic group. The difficulty of reviving the culture of Kalmykia is truly heartbreaking.

The reason I bring up this story here is because the Kazakhs and the Oirats of Dzungaria (present-day Xinjiang Provincein China), from whom the Kalmyks originated, were neighboring nomadic peopleswho had been fighting and hostile to each other for centuries. Kalmykia is located on the west bank of the Volga River, but the great steppe region up to the east bank of the Volga was controlled by the Kazakhs, and when the Oiratswere driven out of Dzungaria by the Qing Emperor Kangxi at the end of the 17-th century, they could not simply flee westward. The nomads only migrated with their flocks of five livestock (cattle, horses, camels, goats, and sheep). Theyavoided repeated attacks by Kazakh nomads, and made their way westward until they reached the Volga River basin, where the Kazakhs could not reach. The mouth of Russia's great river, the Volga River, is a large marshland thatformed a delta, and here, in early summer, beautiful lotus flowers bloom. I think this is probably from the lotus seeds that the Oirats, who were devoutTibetan Buddhists, brought with them. AUEZOV, as a sincere Kazakh intellectual, was concerned about the modern suffering of the Kalmyk people, regardless of past conflicts.

This may be understandable as a result of the destruction of ethnic culture caused by the long period of Soviet rule, but I felt that the participating activists were culturally shallow. Maria KHANHALAEVA of Buryat was advised by those around her to contact Mongolian language scholar Katsuhiko TANAKA (born in 1934) when she went to Japan. When asked about the phone number she had brought with her, I advised her to call and speak to the person who answered in Buryat. If the person who answered wasProfessor TANAKA, he would understand Buryat, so continue the conversation.Maria confessed with a sad look on her face that she could not speak Buryat. Although she was fluent in Russian and English, she could not speak her own ethnic language. In fact, this was a common problem for many former Soviet intellectuals. A talented opera singer, she woke up to ethnic issues and threw herself into the fight against Russia. I hope that the issue of language will be addressed, both to add depth to the story of the battle and to foster solidarity with the Mongols scattered across Eurasia. I would like to see theMongols not only live in the deserts and grasslands, but also in the forests ofSiberia, where they built a rich ethnic and cultural sphere.

The book concludes with a three-way discussion between Kobe Gakuin University professor Yoshihiko OKABE, who served as moderator for the first day of the Tokyo Forum, and Ukrainian international political scientist GRENKO Andriy. The content of the discussion is twofold:the near future of the war of aggression in Ukraine, which is inseparably linked to the collapse of the Russian Federation, and the idea of ​​a"Free Eurasia Coordination Center" based in Japan, which is the subtitle of the discussion.

I think that this was omitted because the title and theme of the book are about the collapse of Russia, but a major feature of the 7th Forum was the ISHII's long-standing involvement with China's ethnic minorities, and the participation, comments, and volunteer support for the Forum's progress from young people who have moved from China to Japan and are standing up for their ethnic minorities. Although they were not noticeable at the venue on the first day, on the second day, the author was observing the behavior of the volunteers living in Japan who were participating in person, while listening to the mostly online participants from all over the formerSoviet Union who were ignoring the progress and time limits of the speaking session and saying whatever they wanted.

It is true that the situation of oppressed ethnic groups is different in Russia or the former Soviet Union andChina, but many problematic ethnic groups such as Mongolians, Evenki, Nanai-Hezhen in the Far East, and even Uighurs, Kazakhs, Tatars, Kyrgyz, andTajiks who live on both sides of the current border with Central Asia andKazakhstan are groaning within Chinese territory. There are also issues in HongKong and Tibet. As for the meaning of this forum, separate from the one mentioned by Inal SHERIP, wouldn't it be better to have a center that is not limited to post-Russia, but that reaches out to the oppressed peoples and peoples in the two black imperialist nations and the countries that are in an axis with them? There will always be the issue of funding, but I think that unless we set high ideals, we will not be able to gather people, money, or anything else.

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