Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus

“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.” Read more...

The best books on Putin’s Russia

Simon Pirani, Historian

“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.” Read more...

The best books on Conflict in the Caucasus

Thomas de Waal, Foreign Correspondent