This article is devoted to the origin and development of the propagandist ideology of Russian-language Jihadism, which is linked with the events in the Middle East over the last few years. It develops the idea that the jihadism in Russia should be considered not so much in the context of the Islamic issue or as a result of the influence of foreign countries, but rather as an example of post-Soviet radicalism, formed on a native ideological and intellectual base. The article states that this meaningfully diverse ideology originated under the influence of Soviet and post-Soviet intellectual traditions, which made this ideology so effective in the Russian context.

Keywords: jihad, post-socialism, radicalism, Islam, jihadism.

The first (1994-1996) and Second (1999-mid-2000s) Chechen campaigns, which began with the proclamation of independent but unrecognized Ichkeria and ended with the struggle for the creation of an Islamic state in Chechnya, led to the emergence of the so-called "Emirate" in 2007.

This work was supported by the Dutch scientific organization [project 360-70490], The Russian Language of Islam.

^1. Prohibited in the Russian Federation by decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation No. AKPI 14-1424 P of 29.12.2014.

D. Garaev Ideology of Russian-language jihadism before ISIS: Reception of the Soviet as the birth of post-Soviet radicalism.Gosudarstvo, religiya, tserkva v Rossii I za rubezhom [State, Religion, Church in Russia and Abroad]. 2017. N 3. pp. 170-201.

Garaev, Danis (2017) "The Ideology of Russian-Language Jihadism before ISIS: Reception of the Soviet as the Origin of Post-Soviet Radicalism", Gosudarstvo, religiia, tserkov' v Rossii i za rubezhom 35(3): 170-201.

Caucasus " ²-an extremist organization that, under the slogan of jihad, declared a struggle for a Sharia state throughout the entire North Caucasus.

As a result, a whole generation of jihadist ideologues emerged in the region in the post-Soviet era. Because of their" going into the woods", they have become particularly interesting to the Russian, primarily radical, Muslim and non-Muslim public. You can name such names as Shamil Basayev, Yasin Rasulov, Said Buryatsky, Anzor Astemirov, Movladi Udugov, Timur Mutsuraev and many others. They are very different people, but they were united by the fact that they could speak about jihad in a language accessible to the Russian-speaking public. In addition, they were united by the fact that all these ideologues understood jihad as an armed struggle against the Russian government. The methods of propaganda and argumentation used to justify jihad may have been somewhat different in different periods, which makes this ideology quite diverse in content, but in all cases it was based on the military understanding of jihad as a way of countering Moscow.

Although the term jihad, which translates from Arabic as "effort", has a fairly wide field of interpretations: from the struggle against one's own spiritual vices to armed resistance - in the framework of this article, I will not delve into religious and linguistic disputes about this term. The question of the meaning of the term jihad in the context of events in the post-Soviet North Caucasus will be left to the judgment of Islamic theologians. As a researcher, I am more interested in the fact that the term jihad was made a central category by the above-mentioned ideologists, around which they built their discursive strategies.

The fact that they chose jihad as the main theme of their messages allows us to call them jihadist ideologues, and the product of their propaganda work - jihadist ideology.

This article is devoted to finding answers to the following questions:: what made jihadist propaganda popular and influential in Russia in the 1990s and 2000s? What factor played a decisive role here? Such a statement of the question-

^2. Prohibited in the Russian Federation by decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation No. 09-1715 of 08.02.2010.

The sa automatically makes us think about what the jihadist ideology of that period really meant.

The object of my research is the texts of a number of well-known Russian ideologists of jihad in the 1990s-2000s, in which they have variously justified, interpreted and called for jihad. ³ I am interested in the ideological basis and semantic language of these texts: the terms and symbols they use, the authorities and ideas they refer to, the topics they refer to, and the content of the which they care about.

The emphasis on this historical period is made because with the emergence of the so-called "Islamic State" (ISIL) in the Middle East in the 2010s, extremist activity in the North Caucasus has significantly decreased, and the main combat and intellectual potential of this movement has moved to the territory of Syria and Iraq. However, without studying what this ideology was in the first 20 years after the collapse of the USSR, we are unlikely to understand the problems of today.

Taking into account the volume of this topic for a single article, I suggest focusing on a few extremely important texts of North Caucasian ideologists justifying armed jihad.

I am particularly interested in the texts of such personalities as the former president of Ichkeria Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev (19522004), the creator of the main mouthpiece of the North Caucasian jihadists Kavkazcenter.com⁴ Movladi Udugov (born 1962), ideologist of the Dagestani Sharia movement Yasin Rasulov (1975-2006), leader of the Kabardino-Balkar Jamaat, and later Sharia judge of the Caucasus Emirate"Anzor Astemirov (1976-2010), as well as one of the ideologists and most prominent speakers of the Caucasus Emirate, Said Buryatsky (aka Alexander Tikhomirov) (1982-2010). The authors were chosen due to their belonging to different stages and groups of armed confrontation in the North Caucasus, their different educational and professional experience, as well as different degrees of popularity among a wide audience.

^3. Since most of the texts I analyzed and studied during my research project in the Netherlands are prohibited for distribution in Russia, I will avoid direct quotations in this article.

^4. The resource is recognized as extremist by the decision of the Nikulinsky District Court of Moscow dated 12.09.2011.

All the texts studied are written in Russian. The fact is that not only the above-mentioned authors, but also other jihadist leaders and ideologues in the North Caucasus wrote their texts about jihad mainly in Russian, which already allows us to label this phenomenon as post-Soviet, since after the collapse of the USSR it was Russian that became the main language of Islam in Russia.⁵

The relevance of the topic is determined by the destructive impact that this phenomenon has on the Russian and international community. A significant part of the existing threats to international security is related to the phenomenon of jihadism, so a comprehensive and honest study of this issue will allow us to better understand this phenomenon and, as a result, find the keys to solving this problem.

The main thesis of my article is as follows: jihadism in Russia should be considered not so much in the context of Islamic issues or as a result of the influence of foreign countries, which has become a common place for most studies, but as an example of post-Soviet radicalism, which was formed on the domestic ideological and intellectual basis.

In particular, the Russian-language jihadist ideology of those years contained obvious Soviet and post-Soviet plots, ideas, themes and cultural codes, which were dominant in the texts of the most prominent Russian-speaking ideologists of jihadism. It is this factor that makes their language so clear and popular in the Russian-speaking environment, which consisted of people who were Soviet and post-Soviet in their educational, cultural and social experience.

At the same time, it cannot be said that this phenomenon stands alone and has nothing to do with the jihadist struggle in other regions of the world. In this regard, it is important to understand what exactly this case can add to the existing academic discussions about jihadism, religious extremism and terrorism. To do this, I suggest that you first describe the general context of such discussions.

^5. Kemper M., Bustanov A. Islam and the Russian language: sociolinguistic aspects of the formation of the All-Russian Islamic discourse. Kazan Islamic Review. 2015. N1. С. 211-221; Bustanov, A., Kemper, M. (2013) "The Russian Orthodox and Islamic Languages in the Russian Federation", Slavica Tergestina 15: 259-277.

Jihad as a global phenomenon: a historiographical digression

Today, in my opinion, the study of the ideology of the jihadist movement can be divided into two main lines:: 1) studying it as a kind of integral global Islamic / Islamist ideology and movement with a description of the universal religious characteristics that are inherent in it; 2) focusing on the analysis of regional-ethnic or subcultural-ideological origins of jihadist movements. Both lines are united by the emphasis on the study of the religious component in the justification of jihad.

A key topic for understanding jihadism as a universal phenomenon in different regions of the world is the study of social types that have contributed to the emergence of the ideology of jihadism. French orientalist and political scientist Olivier Roy suggested that such ideologues - not only jihadists, but Islamists in general-should be called "new intellectuals" ⁶ and "lumpen intelligentsia"⁷. In his opinion, they did not have diplomas of religious and secular education, which determined their marginal position and led to the creation of their own parallel institutions in the urban suburbs.⁸ This social background seems to have allowed Rua to point out later that we are witnessing the "Islamization of radicalism" - when social protest takes on an Islamic expression.

At the same time, it is worth noting that a recent study by English sociologists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog [⁹] suggests that among jihadists there is a disproportionately large number of people with higher engineering education, which partly refutes the conclusions made by O. Roy.

Of course, the lack of a systematic Islamic education among such extremist ideologues was the reason that they had little knowledge of religious sources and did not have the status of Muslim scholars - alims. In this regard, the British philologist

^6. Roy, O. (2001) The Failure of Political Islam, p. 89. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

^7. Ibid., p. 51.

^8. Ibid., p. 92.

^9. Gambetta, D., Hertog, St. (2016) Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Elizabeth Kendall, using the example of Al-Qaeda, ¹⁰ points out that jihadist ideologues compensate for their lack of religious authority by claiming that they simply receive their fatwas directly from Allah. ¹¹

The parallel institutions and networks created by such intellectuals are effective enough to establish their authority and promote their own ideas.

For example, the American researcher Mark Sageman, in explaining the problem that he calls "global Salafi jihad," focuses on social networks through which people find themselves on the path of jihadism12.

English sociologist Simon Kogti, in particular, was attracted by Sageman's data that up to 66 percent of jihadists joined terrorist organizations together with their friends, and another 20 percent already had relatives who were jihadists. In this regard, Simon Cotti tried to look at the problem of jihadism from the point of view of criminology13 - that is, to study this phenomenon in the same way as one studies the formation of gangs or so-called criminal subcultures ⁽delinquent subcultures). Cotti claims that young jihadists independently, without the participation of al-Qaeda, created their own cells and only then joined this well-known organization.¹⁴

According to Cotti, a consequence of these young jihadists living on the outskirts of European cities is that they are influenced by Western street music traditions such as rap and hip-hop.¹⁵ This is also pointed out by the Italian political scientist Lorenzo Vidino16, who is also quoted as saying:-

^10. Prohibited in the Russian Federation by the decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, dated 14.02.2003 N GKPI 03 116, entered into force on 04.03.2003.

^11. Kendall, E. (2016) "Jihadist Propaganda and its Exploitation of the Arab Poetic tradition", in E. Kendall, A. Khan (ed.) Reclaiming Islamic Tradition: Modern Interpretations of the Classical Heritage, p. 239. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

^12. Sageman, M. (2004) Understanding Terror Networks. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.

^13. Cottee, S. (2011) "Jihadism as a Subcultural Response to Social Strain: Extending Marc Sageman's "Bunch of Guys" Thesis", Terrorism and Political Violence 23(5): 730-751.

^14. Ibid., p. 738.

^15. Ibid., p. 732.

^16. Lorenzo, V. (2007) "Current Trends in Jihadi Networks in Europe", Terrorism Monitor 5(20), [http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=4499, accessed on 2.04.2011].

ruet Simon Claws. Vidino describes how in European ghettos, Islamic fundamentalism can be combined with an African-American hip-hop aesthetic, where young Muslims have a picture of rapper Tupac Shakur on their phones next to photos of Bin Laden, and marijuana use is accompanied by watching video clips about jihad. Vidino cites the example of a number of music groups and performers who use the hip-hop style to promote military jihad against "infidels" ^.17

The perception of the ideology of jihadism and the jihadist movement as a global phenomenon, which is actually a kind of network, is typical for many studies. For example, Australian international relations scholar Andrew Phillips, comparing the modern jihadist movement with medieval Calvinism, described modern Salafi, as he called it, jihadism as a kind of religious network similar to those that existed in Europe during the Reformation. ¹⁸ Andrew Phillips, referring to a book by German political scientist Gerfried Munkler, argues that the terrorism used by jihadists is a new way to reject the state monopoly on violence.¹⁹ A similar description of jihadism as a homogenous global phenomenon that challenges the state's monopoly on the use of violence can also be found in the Israeli political scientist Barak Mendelssohn, ²⁰ who illustrated this thesis with the example of the ideology of al-Qaeda.

Of particular interest are the authors ' studies, which, while pointing out the global nature of the jihadist movement, also draw attention to existing regional agendas, which may be even more relevant than the declared global claims.

An interesting example of this approach was the work of the British Arabic scholar Elizabeth Kendall, who used the example of al-Qaeda to analyze how jihadist propaganda works.

^17. Ibid.

^18. Phillips, A. (2010) "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Jihadism - Transnational Religious Insurgencies and the Transformation of International Orders", Review of International Studies, 36 (2): 257-280.

^19. Ibid., p. 257.

^20. Mendelsohn, B. (2005) "Sovereignty under Attack: The International Society Meets the Al Qaeda Network", Review of International Studies 31(1): 61.

exploits the Arabic poetic tradition. I would like to focus on this work in a little more detail. Kendall wasn't so much interested in what goals Bin Laden and his organization's ideologues were pursuing, but rather in what tools they were using to promote the jihadist movement. She analyzed the numerous poetic works of Bin Laden and his followers and concluded that jihadist poetry has obvious pre-Islamic roots.²¹

Kendall points out that the writings of al-Qaeda jihadists show that they are very much immersed in their local tribal context and that jihad is often caused precisely by internal problems. ²² In her opinion, the borrowing of forms and styles from the pre-Islamic Arabic tradition can occur either unconsciously or quite consciously, as it was with Bin Laden. ²³ In any case, the pre-Islamic origins of their poetry are not a problem for Middle Eastern jihadists; moreover, they are willing to use this poetry to assert their own power, just as they use the Koran for this purpose. ²⁴ Kendall writes that they resorted to this technique because it was of fundamental importance for them to demonstrate that they belong not to the counterculture or subculture, but to the mass Arab culture ²⁵.

This observation is important in connection with the work cited above by Simon Kogti, who suggested that the jihadist movement should be viewed as a subcultural phenomenon consisting of marginals who seek to oppose themselves to the prevailing order. However, using the example of Kendall's work, we can see that there is reason either to doubt that the jihadists saw themselves as a counterculture, or to recognize that we are dealing with different types of jihadism and that it is necessary to speak about some universal characteristics of global jihadism with reservations.

In any case, in Kendall's opinion, local cultural material has a much more important role to play than it did in the past.-

^21. Kendall, E. "Jihadist Propaganda and Its Exploitation of the Arab Poetic Tradition".

^22. Ibid., p. 230.

^23. Ibid., p. 229.

^24. Ibid., p. 229.

^25. Ibid., p. 240.

known earlier ²⁶. She argues that cultural heritage contains a powerful propaganda potential that can be reconstructed in the meanings that jihadists need, ²⁷ and therefore even non-Islamic material can be part of jihadist propaganda.²⁸

Kendall writes that for Bin Laden, who had no religious authority, the poetic cultural heritage turned out to be, to use Pierre Bourdieu's terminology, the cultural capital that allowed him to gain more power.²⁹ Through poetry, according to the English orientalist, Bin Laden and his associates made their own actions legal and logical, which looked illogical and illegal from the point of view of Islam. In the same tribal pre-Islamic poetry, they found images of warriors and their exploits that fully correspond to the modern image of the martyr.³⁰ In addition, as noted above, another consequence of the lack of religious authority among Al-Qaeda ideologues is their claim that they receive direct guidance from Allah.

Thus, on the one hand, we see the picture of the jihadist movement as a counter-cultural phenomenon, as described by Simon Cotti, Lorenzo Vidino and other researchers; on the other hand, Elizabeth Kendall claims almost the opposite - Al-Qaeda jihadists avoided the counter-cultural position and sought to demonstrate that they are an authentic part of Arab culture. In other words, there are clear differences in the strategies of promoting their ideology by al-Qaeda jihadists in the Arab Middle East and by jihadists in Europe. In this regard, according to Kendall, literary research can help shed light on the current political landscape.³¹ Elizabeth Kendall used the terminology of the French post-structuralist philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard to claim that jihadist ideologues

^26. Ibid., p. 239.

^27. Ibid., p. 242.

^28. Ibid., p. 242.

^29. Ibid., p. 238.

^30. Ibid., p. 237.

^31. Ibid., p. 230.

Al-Qaeda was being transformed into a new grand recit, or"grand narrative." ³²

In my opinion, the fact that in Europe some Muslims may be motivated to jihad by" un-Islamic "hip-hop, and in the Arab countries the same can be motivated by ancient pre-Islamic poetry, says that this big utopian narrative about the creation of an Islamic state as a result of" jihad against the infidels " is formed from improvised material. which can bring results in specific conditions. And in this case, it does not matter whether the jihadists consciously or unconsciously make this choice. If we use post-structuralist terminology, this picture is more like a bricolage, which is randomly assembled from various pieces and in which the terms jihad and caliphate³³ serve as brands that can have a wide variety of agendas behind them. For some, this may be a countercultural revolt of a migrant driven by his environment, and for others, on the contrary, it is a desire to conform to the dominant cultural tradition in order to unite against the new colonialism. The strategies and motivations of jihadists may vary, as may the ideological content of their messages, as well as the forms in which they express these ideas. What remains unchanged is that they put jihad at the forefront of their struggle in the sense of a military confrontation with the "infidels" and the Western world. Since jihadism is clearly shaped by many factors, a comprehensive analysis of all its manifestations in different regions of the world is necessary to better understand it.

Jihad in the North Caucasus - regional or global? Brief history of the issue

The study of regional examples of the jihadist movement also has a very rich and diverse historiography. The main trend of serious research on this problem is to recognize the internal causes of armed conflict.

^32. Ibid., p. 227.

^33. Comes from an Arabic word that means "inheritance". The caliphate was a Muslim state created in the seventh century by the Prophet Muhammad. Today, this word is used to refer to a large supranational Islamic theocratic state.

³⁴. At the same time, when it comes to the ideological component of this movement, researchers describe it as part of a global jihadist ideology.

This also applies to the North Caucasus. Quite a lot of works are devoted to this region, which analyze various aspects of jihadism, including the ideological dimension of this movement. As in the case of other regions of the world, there is also a dominant tendency to study this problem as part of global jihadism, that is, to identify ideological and organizational links with extremist organizations in the Middle East. For example, this type of research includes the work of an English specialist in the field of military studies, Domitilla Sagramoso, who, in particular, attributed the jihadist radicalization of North Caucasian militants and extremists to the influence of global Salafi jihadism, ³⁵ which penetrated there through students studying in Arab countries. The British political scientist Ronald Dunruther, who wrote that the Islamization of the insurgent movement in the North Caucasus is connected with its integration into the global transnational jihad, has a similar position.³⁶ This is roughly what Australian researchers Ben Rich and Dara Conduit have pointed out, writing that the Chechen paramilitary resistance has been exposed to foreign Salafist framing.³⁷ At the same time, both Domitilla Sagramoso and Ronald Dunruther note that the movement of North Caucasian militants was initially caused by local social and political problems.

The American and Russian orientalist Alexander Knysh, in his study of the ideology of the jihadist organization "Emirate of the Caucasus"³⁸, argued that in the ideas of the North Caucasian jihadists-

^34. См. Bonnefoy, L. (2012) "Jihadi Violence in Yemen", in J. Deol and Z. Kazmi (eds) Contextualising Jihadi Thought, pp. 243-258. London: Hurst.

^35. Sagramoso, D. (2012) "The Radicalisation of Islamic Salafi Jamaats in the North Caucasus: Moving Closer to the Global Jihadist Movement?", Europe-Asia Studies 64(3): 567.

^36. Dannreuther, R. (2010) "Islamic Radicalization in Russia: an Assessment", International Affairs 86(1): 109-126.

^37. Rich, B., Conduit, D. (2015) "The Impact of Jihadist Foreign Fighters on Indigenous Secular-Nationalist Causes: Contrasting Chechnya and Syria", Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 38(2):4.

^38. Knysh, A. "Islam and Arabic as the Rhetoric of Insurgency: the Case of the Caucasus Emirate", Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 35(4): 315-337. In particular, Knysh from-

There is nothing original about the Khadists. In his opinion, similar ideas of Muslim opposition to the enemies of the Ummah can be traced in the works of Salafi and fundamentalist authors Said Qutb (1906-1966) and Abu Ala Maududi (1903-1979). In addition, Knysh points out that modern jihadists from the North Caucasus actively use Arabic and Islamic terminology, which also makes them closer to foreign jihadists.

The line of study of the ideology of North Caucasian jihadism as part of the global jihadist movement continues in collective monograph ³⁹, published by the American Military College under the editorship of Stefan Blank. In this paper, the main focus is on studying the international factors that influenced the formation of the Caucasus Emirate. The authors focus on the typicality of the ideology of this organization for the international Salafi-jihadist movement.

In particular, one of the chapters in this book ⁴⁰ is of particular interest to my research. The author of this chapter, American scholar Gordon Khan, writes that the ideology of the Caucasus Emirate is exactly the same as the Salafist ideology that was preached by al-Qaeda and other groups in the global jihadist revolutionary alliance.⁴¹ Khan believes that jihadist ideology itself is an essential driving force for jihad in the region.⁴²

Without denying the importance of studying the international relations of jihadists from the North Caucasus, I believe that focusing only on this issue cuts off the opportunity to understand this phenomenon in its entirety and explain the reasons for its popularity in the post-Soviet space, to see what is its peculiarity and specificity. At the same time, it is the study of the internal factors of the emergence of the jihadist movement and its ideology in the North Caucasus that, in my opinion, is underestimated in the existing historiography of this issue.

uchal main Internet portal of North Caucasian jihadists Kavkazcenter.com and the speeches of some of the ideologists of this movement-Dokka Umarov, Anzor Astemirov and Movladi Udugov.

^39. Blank, S.J. (ed) (2012) Russia's Homegrown Insurgency: Jihad in the North Caucasus. Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute.

^40. Название которой: "The Caucasus Emirate Jihadists: The Security and Strategic Implications".

^41. Ibid., p. 4.

^42. Ibid., pp. 27-28.

However, today there is a small body of research that clearly illustrates the importance of these internal roots.

In several works by Irina Starodubrovskaya, the internal social and economic reasons for the formation of the jihadist movement in the North Caucasus are analyzed in detail43^.

There are other studies on the internal factors that influenced the formation of the North Caucasian jihadist ideology. In particular, Michael Kemper pointed out that ^there is an obvious influence of the Russian journalistic tradition and the songs of Soviet soldiers of World War II on the jihadist discourse of the propagandists of the Caucasus Emirate. Kemper also noted that the set of Islamic terms that these propagandists actively used, in fact, is not very numerous, and the Islamic phraseology there is quite simple. That is, there is no deep Islamic education behind this jihadist language.⁴⁵

Another author who drew attention to the fact that, in addition to the Arab-Islamic layer, the jihadist discourse in the North Caucasus has another - the Russian-Soviet intellectual layer, was the American historian Dmitry Shlyapentokh. In his opinion, the influence of Russian cultural and political traditions on jihadist ideology has so far gone unnoticed by researchers.⁴⁶ According to Shlyapentokh, at the first stage of the Russian-Chechen conflict, the influence of Eurasian ideas, Russian Marxism and Russian messianism was quite clearly felt in the ideology of the jihadists of the North Caucasus. However, at the second stage, in his opinion, Russian jihadists switched to the style of Islamist-jihadist ideology.

^43. Istoki konfliktov na Severnom Kavkaze [Sources of conflicts in the North Caucasus]. Moscow: Delo Publ., 2013, p. 277.

^44. Kemper, M. (2012). "Jihadism: The Discourse of the Caucasus Emirate", in A.K. Bustanov, M. Kemper (eds) Islamic Authority and the Russian Language: Studies on Texts from European Russia, the North Caucasus and West Siberia, p. 273. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Pegasus.

^45. Ibid., p. 293.

^46. Shlapentokh, D. (2011) "Jihadism in the Post-Soviet Era: The Case of Interaction of Theoretical and Practical Aspects of the Revolutionary Struggle", Iran and the Caucasus 15(1-2): 276.

Vladimir Bobrovnikov also noted explicit Soviet and post-Soviet themes in the propaganda ideology of North Caucasian jihadists.⁴⁷ In particular, he pointed out that the Islamic polemical genre of documentary films in the North Caucasus, in addition to the Islamic missionary tradition, is also largely influenced by Soviet Cold War propaganda, which includes anti-Western and anti-Semitic elements. In addition, according to Bobrovnikov, there is also the influence of (post -) Soviet pop culture, which is manifested in the way Internet clips about shahids are made.⁴⁸

Similar internal roots of North Caucasian jihadism were also pointed out by Czech researchers Emil Suleymanov and Ondrej Dietricht in their work on the blood feud factor in the region49, as well as by Russian ethnographer Akhmet Yarlykapov, who denied that militants in the North Caucasus were fighting for the establishment of a "global caliphate"50.

Of particular importance to my work is Valery Tishkov's observation that "the motives of Chechen greatness and Islamic messianism coexisted in Chechnya with the expansionist idea of liberating the Caucasus from Russia's imperial domination and creating a single "Caucasian House" or Caucasian confederation." According to Tishkov, the main ideologists of such projects were Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev and Movladi Udugov, as well as a fairly large number of writers, publicists and historians who appeared in Chechnya.⁵¹ Udugov and Yandarbiyev created quite a large body of texts in which they justified and comprehended their jihadist struggle, so they also came to my attention.

^47. Bobrovnikov, V. (2011) '"Ordinary Wahhabism' versus 'Ordinary Sufism'? Filming Islam for Postsoviet Muslim Young People", Religion, State & Society 39: 281-301.

^48.The term "shahid" is derived from the Arabic word, which translates as "witness" and is used not only in the sense of, for example, a witness in court, but also in the sense of "a martyr for the faith" who died in battle in the name of God.

^49. Souleimanov, E. Ditrych, О. (2008) "The Internationalisation of the Russian-Chechen Conflict: Myths and Reality", Europe-Asia Studies 60(7): 1199-1222.

^{Yarlykapov A.} N. Islam i konflikt na Kavkaze [Islam and conflict in the Caucasus] / / Bolshoy Kavkaz twenty years later: resources and Strategies of Politics and identity / Ed.by G. Huseynov. Moscow: UFO Publ., 2014, p. 215.

^{Tishkov V.} 51. Society in the armed conflict (ethnography of the Chechen war), Moscow: Nauka Publ., 2001, p. 466

While I fully agree with Valery Tishkov, I would also point out that this expansionist messianism of theirs had an obvious "Soviet" character, which, in fact, cannot even be called completely unconscious, since both of these ideologists in their works drew obvious parallels between their own views and the policies of the Soviet Union.

Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev: The USSR, the West and the Islamic World

A former member of the CPSU and the Union of Writers of the USSR, a graduate of the Higher Literary Courses in Moscow and the Faculty of Philology of the Chechen-Ingush State University ⁵², Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev paid great attention to the conceptual design of his political and military struggle. Therefore, he left behind a number of rather interesting works that occupy a prominent place in the corpus of texts of Russian-speaking jihadists, from which we can get an impression of what their intellectual field was.

In particular, in 1996 Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev published the book "Chechechy - the Battle for Freedom"in Lviv. This book has become a collection of his works that were written both in the early 1990s and in the middle of the last decade of the XX century. The book began with a poem by a Chechen poet, by the way, also a graduate of the Higher Literary Courses in Moscow, Avladi Shaikhiev (born in 1947), with the characteristic title: "In Chechnya - Jihad".

In his book, Yandarbiyev describes his own struggle in Muslim-jihadist terminology. At the same time, in the same collection, he published his materials of the early 1990s, in which there was still no obvious "Islamic call". These materials are evidence that already in the early 1990s he was looking for supranational forms of unification of the entire Caucasus in the struggle against the Russian government.

For example, he developed the concept of the ^so-called lightness of mind-a certain general quality of freedom of the spirit and nez-

^52. Yandarbiyev Zelimkhan Abdulmuslimovich / / The Caucasian Knot. 28.12.2016 [http://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/171845/, доступ от 01.06.2017].

^{Yandarbiyev Z.} 53. Chechechki-battle for freedom. Lviv, 1996, p. 100.

depending, as he claimed, on the characteristics of the peoples of this region. In a chapter called "The Caucasus" written in 1990, Yandarbiyev refers to Hegel's work " Philosophy of the Spirit "to prove the existence of a special"Caucasian race". In addition, according to Yandarbiyev, Caucasism is a certain nationality that unites all the peoples of the Caucasus, including the Russian Cossacks.

However, in his opinion, Moscow provokes interethnic and inter-religious conflicts among these peoples in order to colonize them. Therefore, according to Yandarbiyev, the peoples of the Caucasus need political unification against the imperialist policy of Russia. It is important here that Yandarbiyev also includes Russian Cossacks in this own project, thus denoting a certain Messianic pathos of his message, which turns out to be higher than interethnic problems.

In my opinion, Yandarbiyev in this book borrows Soviet ideological cliches in some way. His rhetoric resembles the style of Soviet propaganda, but only directed against Moscow itself - in fact, he claims that the real development of peoples is possible only within the framework of a larger supranational political entity (in the Soviet language, this is the USSR), and external imperial forces (in the Soviet propaganda language, the West) are trying to prevent this.

In order to prove the relevance of his own project of a supranational union of the peoples of the Caucasus, Yandarbiyev needed to convince readers of the failure of the Soviet national policy. For example, in the chapter "The essence and Aspects of national Unity", he criticizes the Soviet national policy, which, in his opinion, did not correspond to the interests of the peoples of the USSR.

According to Yandarbiyev, this is exactly what the Soviet dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) meant in his novel Gulag Archipelago, when he wrote that the Soviet government was not truly accepted by the popular spirit. According to Yandarbiyev, due to the deportation of Chechens to Central Asia, as well as the painful methods of establishing communist power in the North Caucasus in the 1920s and 30s, Chechens developed a clear division into "ours" and "not ours (them)", that is, the state, which they perceived as a no-man's-land.

Solzhenitsyn was not the only author who became relevant in the post-Soviet period, to which Yandarbiyev refers. In particular, he refers to the opinion of the American political scientist of Chechen origin Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov (1908-1997), who was a consistent critic of Soviet politics. Yandarbiyev refers to it when justifying his thesis that the branches of the CPSU in the national republics of the USSR did not fight for the rights and interests of the peoples they formally represented. He also quotes the Italian journalist, socialist historian Giuseppe Boffa (1923-1998), who was also considered an anti-Soviet in the Soviet Union, and his most famous book, The History of the Soviet Union, was allowed to be published in the USSR only after the onset of Perestroika. Referring to this book, Yandarbiyev argues that the course of the Soviet government led the country to a political and economic crisis. And all this together, in his opinion, pushes the peoples of the USSR to actively participate in the political life of the country.

As we can see from the subsequent events in the North Caucasus of the 1990s, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev's search for a new political project led him to support in the second half of the 1990s the so-called Islamist turn of the militants ' ideology of the self - proclaimed Republic of Ichkeria and promote the project of creating a new political entity in the North Caucasus-the Islamic state. In 2000, Yandarbiyev even published the book "Jihad and problems of the modern world", in which he explains his understanding of the place of jihad in modern times, as well as justifies the need for jihadist struggle.

I was able to find only part of this work [⁵⁴], but it already shows that Yandarbiyev talks about a bipolar world, at one pole of which is the Christian world, and its interests are protected by the UN, NATO, as well as other international organizations and governments of Western countries, and at the other pole - the Muslim world, which has such obvious problems. in his opinion, there are no defenders.

^54. On Yandarbiyev's Facebook page, which was later deleted, some parts of this book were displayed, which I managed to save in word format for my own archive.

In accordance with his position, if earlier bipolarity was provided by the USSR, which was the leader of the socialist camp, then with the collapse of the Soviet Union, bipolarity is provided by the Muslim world. Yandarbiyev claims that it is in the Islamic world that Christian countries have seen their new enemy, which has great political and economic potential. At the other extreme, along with the Islamic world, in his opinion, are representatives of other religions that are politically, economically and technologically dependent on the Western world. In his opinion, they serve as a bargaining chip for the Western world in the fight against Islam and will be destroyed if the Islamic world falls. Therefore, according to Yandarbiyev, the potential of the Islamic world makes it the leader of this second pole, in which the countries offended by the West find themselves. In such rhetoric, one can easily guess the style of Soviet propaganda, which declared the USSR the leader of the world anti-colonial movement. Only in Yandarbiyev's language did the Soviet Union take the place of the project that he supports and formulates himself - that is, the project of creating an Islamic state. At the same time, the leading flank of the Islamic world community, in his opinion, is the Chechens. The Messianic role of protecting the weak from the "strong of this world", as Yandarbiyev wrote, lies through the path of jihad, one of the components of which is "jihad in Cheka (Ichkeria)".

By jihad, Yandarbiyev a priori means precisely military confrontation, which should not only give victory to Muslims, but also bring happiness to all mankind. Despite some eschatological nuances of the text, Yandarbiyev discusses jihad primarily in a socio-political rather than theological way.

Speaking about jihad, Yandarbiyev practically does not use specific Islamic vocabulary and does not quote Muslim sources. His main argument for the necessity of jihad is based on the idea of justice, which was violated by the Western powers. This also makes Yandarbiyev's rhetoric similar to the style of Soviet propaganda. Thus, he tries to make the confrontation in Chechnya a high mission as one of the stages of the struggle for the future of all mankind.

Defending a bipolar world, where the Islamic world replaces the USSR, as well as repeating the logic and argumentation of Soviet propaganda, in my opinion, is quite understandable, given Yandarbiyev's Soviet career and educational experience.

Movladi Udugov: The Bolsheviks, Karl Marx and the Koran

Another example is Movladi Udugov. Unlike Yandarbiyev, during the Soviet years he managed to visit only candidates for membership of the CPSU, but was not accepted there because of nationalistic statements.⁵⁵ In addition to studying at the Economics Department of the Chechen-Ingush State University, according to some sources, he also studied for some time at the Journalism Department of the Leningrad University ⁵⁶ and was a journalist for the Chechen newspaper Komsomol Tribe⁵⁷. In the 1990s, Udugov became, in fact, one of the main ideologists of the militants operating in Chechnya, and in the 2000s he was one of the ideologists of the jihadists of the Caucasus Emirate. In the 1990s, Udugov was called the "Chechen Goebbels", as he, as Dudayev's press secretary, and then the Minister of Information of Ichkeria, waged an information war with Moscow. Then he was one of those who supported the so-called Islamist turn of the ideology of the militants of the North Caucasus and created the famous website Kavkazcenter.com which became the main information mouthpiece of both the Caucasus Emirate and Russian-language jihadist propaganda in general.

Movladi Udugov, like Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, also declaratively did not limit his struggle only to the North Caucasus. Its ambitions extend wider - to the rest of Russia.⁵⁸ In one of his interviews, he names such regions as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, where many Muslims traditionally live, as well as Buryatia, Tyumen, Vladivostok ^and Moscow59, where, according to him, many Russians who have converted to Islam and sworn allegiance to the leader of the Caucasus Emirate, Dokka Umarov, already live. Udugov urges other Russians to follow suit,

^55. Udugov accused the Western media of distorting the essence of his "total war" against Russia // To. 24.04.2006 [http://obzor.westsib.ru/article/71061, accessed from 31.05.2017].

^{Pylev S.} 56. Nevskaya shkola [Neva School]. 1999 [http://www.soob.ru/n/l999/2/mg/o / accessed from 31.05.2017].

^57. Udugov accused the Western media of distorting the essence of his "total war" against Russia.

^58. We took up arms to establish laws (interview with Movladi Udugov, Part 2) / / Prague Watchdog. 30.07.2008 [http://www.watchdog.cz/?show=oooooo-oooo15-ooooo6-oooo42&lang=2, accessed from 31.05.2017].

^59. Ibid.

since Sharia law, in his opinion, should become an alternative for Russia to search for a special "Russian way" ⁶⁰. That is, he does not demonize the Russian people as his enemy, but, on the contrary, discursively includes them in the project that, in his opinion, should become dominant in the world.

As we can see, the rhetoric of Movladi Udugov can be called more expansionist than separatist. Udugov offers an alternative path of greatness for Russians, but only within the larger community of the world Ummah.

In this respect, Udugov can be described as one of those Russian intellectuals, like the monarchists or Eurasians, who, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, were looking for new big ideological projects that could take the place of the bygone Soviet communist narrative.

In this regard, it is interesting that when describing the ways of fighting for Sharia, Udugov refers to historical analogies from the Soviet past, which should become examples for modern Muslims. For example, in 2005, together with his "Islamic Center for Strategic Studies", he published a major work "Reflections of the Mujahideen" ⁶¹, in which he argued that Muslims should follow the example of the Bolsheviks in their struggle for power.

Udugov believes that communism and the Muslim religion have obvious common principles. In particular, in his opinion, in the ideology of the Bolsheviks, as in Islam, the central roles were played by the ideas of self-sacrifice and social justice.⁶² In addition, in his opinion, the Bolsheviks used similar methods of organizing the state to the Muslims. For example, he compared the Bolshevik "Soviets" as the basis of the new Soviet statehood to the Islamic consultative principle of " Shuro "(translated from Arabic as "council"). as the basis of Islamic governance. Udugov generally sees a lot of obvious similarities in the history of Islam and in the history of Bolshevism. In his opinion, the Communists established their power in compliance with Sharia technology and used Islamic historical experience.

^60. Ibid.

^61. Musings of a mujahid / / Kavkazcenter. 11.08.2005.

^62. Musings of a mujahid (Part III) / / Kavkazcenter. 23.05.2006.

Udugov wrote that the Bolsheviks, as well as the Muslims, had their own holy scripture-Karl Marx's Capital. In addition, as in Islam, communism was based on the idea of a holy war for one's faith, which allowed it, like Islam, to spread to half the world in one generation. Udugov pointed out that the Bolsheviks, for example, at the beginning of their struggle also needed to make a resettlement, and this resettlement took place from the Russian Empire to Europe. Here, apparently, the reader should have a parallel with the hijra-the migration of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions from Mecca to Medina. Udugov quotes Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet People's Commissar of Enlightenment, to prove that the Bolsheviks perceived their ideology as almost religious.

Thus, Udugov argues that the Bolsheviks simply borrowed Islamic experience, and therefore modern Muslims need to remember their history. For example, in his opinion, Muslims, like the Bolsheviks in their time, should not participate in democratic systems that are alien to them.

Udugov writes that the power of the Bolsheviks was able to hold out only for 70 years. However, since the world needs a force that will resist the West, he proposes a new project that should actually replace the USSR - an Islamic Caliphate.

In the article "Reflections of a Mujahideen", Movladi Udugov refers to Marx, Lunacharsky, Solzhenitsyn, but does not cite Muslim authors. It should be noted that in his other texts, too, he rarely refers to Muslim authorities. In addition, the Udugov language was not saturated with Arabic or any very specific Islamic terminology. Like many post-Soviet authors, he criticized Western political values and institutions and offered his own special path for Russia.

In my opinion, the example of Movladi Udugov is quite typical for Russian post-Soviet jihadists. This is especially true for those jihadists who came to the forefront of North Caucasian politics in the 1990s and who were Soviet people who socialized in the late Soviet era. Most of them, like Movladi Udugov, did not have a foreign Muslim education and, as a rule, did not know Arabic. At the same time, they received quite serious damage.

Soviet experience of socialization: Soviet education, sometimes quite successful career and, as a result, Soviet intellectual baggage. This left a noticeable mark on why and how they formulated their insurgent ideology and justified jihad.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of communist ideology created not just an ideological vacuum, but also threw an entire generation on the sidelines of history, which connected its future with this huge country. In fact, such people were the leaders of new Ichkeria. Perhaps for many of them, such as Dzhokhar Dudayev, Aslan Maskhadov, Shamil Basayev and Dokku Umarov, who lived and built their careers outside Chechnya until the early 1990s, returning to Chechnya was an act of national patriotism, but in practice this return was an attempt to create a new big Islamic project to replace the collapsed one THE USSR.

Yasin Rasulov, Said Buryatsky and Anzor Astemirov: the legend of Mankurts, passionarity and Arabic vocabulary

In the post-Soviet period, quite a lot of representatives of the Soviet and, a little later, Russian humanitarian intelligentsia joined the ranks of the North Caucasian militants, who sought to give their own justification for the jihadist struggle in this region. In this justification, they included a historical argument that was supposed to justify their struggle. Thus, it formed its own mythology, created on the basis of both local historical material and All-Union/All-Russian. Jihadist ideologues sought, on the one hand, to deconstruct national and Soviet historical myths, and, on the other hand, to create their own, including through the construction of continuity with the historical past of the North Caucasus.

In some ways, the jihadists joined the so-called wars of remembrance ⁶³, which were characteristic of the post-Soviet era.

^63. For example, Said Buryatsky in his article "Heroes of Truth and Lies" tried to prove the falsity of Buryat, Karelian and even American myths. In addition, it seeks to debunk such famous Soviet mythologems as the stories of Pavlik Morozov, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya and Alexander Matrosov.

intellectual situations ⁶⁴. For example, they criticized various nationalist narratives65 and interpreted the past of their region in their own way, as did the Chechen bard, the "jihad singer" as he called himself, 66 Timur Mutsuraev, who in his work turned to the history of the Chechen people and the North Caucasus. But even more rich in this sense, of course, is the literary heritage of North Caucasian jihadist intellectuals.⁶⁷

Their inclusion in the post-Soviet wars of memory is accompanied by methods of historical justification of one's own rightness, which are characteristic of the post-Soviet language.

For example, in 2005, a former graduate student of the Dagestan Academy of Sciences, an ideologist of the Dagestan jihadist group Sharia (which in 2007 became part of the Caucasus Emirate) Yasin Rasulov published a large program work "Jihad in the North Caucasus: Supporters and opponents" ⁶⁸, which became a justification for military jihadist activity by manipulating historical facts and appealing to historical memory from the perspective of jihadism. Rasulov's work is devoted to the history of jihad in the North Caucasus from the 18th to the beginning of the 21st century.

^{Shnirelman V.} 64. Voyny pamyati [Wars of Memory]. Myths, Identity and Politics in Transcaucasia, Moscow: Akademkniga Publ., 2003.

^65. Yasin Rasulov, an Avar, criticized the mufiats of Dagestan for adhering to the trend of a sheikh of only one nationality-Avar Said Afandi Chirkavi (Chirkeyi) (1937-2012) - and being intolerant of sheikhs of other nationalities; Anzor Astemirov, a Kabardian, criticized the leadership of Kabardino-Balkaria for creating national myths; Movladi Udugov, a Chechen, criticized Chechen nationalists who had left for the West and were opposed to the Chechen Government. the jihadist struggle waged by militants in the North Caucasus.

^66. Timur Mutsuraev Interview, 1998 timur mucuraev / / Youtube. 25.11.2011 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRzabzzfKfo, accessed from 02.06.2017]

^67.In particular, the book "Chechens in the Russo-Caucasian War", published in 1998 by field commander Dalkhan Khozhaev (1961-2000), who was a graduate of the History Department of the Chechen-Ingush University and worked in the Museum of Local lore during the Soviet years, is an example of this. In his book, he collected biographies of famous Chechens who supported the all-Caucasian resistance of Imam Shamil during the Caucasian War of 1817-1864. Khozhaev described this resistance in terms of the holy Islamic war - ghazawat.

^{Rasulov Ya} 68. Jihad in the North Caucasus: supporters and opponents / / Official website of the press Bureau of the Vilayat of Dagestan. 28.11.2016 [http://vd.ag/wp-content/uploads/Knigi/896.pdf, accessed from 01.06.2017].

He published this work immediately after going underground, and it became his first and only text where he tries to somehow justify, comprehend and conceptualize the jihadist struggle in the North Caucasus.

The ideological framework of his work suddenly became the views on the historical process of the famous Soviet writer Chingiz Aitmatov (1928-2008). At the beginning of his work, Rasulov quotes a large passage from Aitmatov's novel "And a Day Lasts longer than a century", namely "the legend of the mankurts"⁶⁹.

The quotation from Aitmatov's book took up almost a third of the preface of Rasulov's work. Aitmatov's legend of the mankurts becomes for Rasulov a certain framework that justifies the necessity of his text-overcoming historical unconsciousness. He writes that, in his opinion, a person should not allow himself to be turned into a mankurt and must know his "true past". Rasulov argues that only through" historical memory " can one understand the truth about what is happening in the Caucasus at the present stage. That is, for Rasulov, a historical digression is needed only in order to understand the present, or, in other words, to justify both his own actions and the activities of his like-minded people in the Sharia movement.

Rasulov used such terms as mankurt, historical memory, and historical amnesia several times in his text. This raises a legitimate question: how did it happen that a Soviet writer was in demand as one of the ideologues of jihadism in the North Caucasus?

The fact is that Aitmatov was considered not only a classic of Soviet literature, but also an important name for post-Soviet culture. And his term mankurt in this period is becoming very popular among Russian writers, historians, ideologists of various stripes and trends. This, by the way, was pointed out by Svetlana Boym, who wrote that the Soviet intellectuals of the Glasnost period fought for ^the right not to be mankurts70. Viktor Shnirelman also notes that the mankurt figure created by Chingiz Aitmatov is gaining extraordinary popularity in the late Soviet Union.-

^69. Mankurts, according to the legend created by Chingiz Aitmatov, are slaves who have forgotten their past.

^{Boym, p} 70. Obshchie mesta: Mifologiya povednevoy zhizni [Common places: The Mythology of Everyday Life], Moscow: UFO, 2002, p. 294.

non-Soviet and post-Soviet folklore ⁷¹ (fight against Mankurtism ⁷²). Shnirelman points out that the figure of Mankurt finds a complete analogy with the ideas of Lev Gumilev (1912-1992), in particular, with his images of "chimera" and "mestizo" - people who have completely lost the skills of their ancestors. Accordingly, we can say that the metaphorical image of mankurt has become a phenomenon for post-Soviet culture, a marker of the post-Soviet language.

Returning to Rasulov's work, it is worth saying that the main thesis of his text is that all the uprisings of the Caucasian peoples against the Russian government from the XVIII to the XXI century are links in one chain: the anti-colonial movement, whose main ideology was Salafism. In his opinion, such legendary figures of the past for the North Caucasus as Imam Shamil (1797-1871), Imam Mansur (1760-1794) and Ghazi-Muhammad (1795-1832) were Salafists, and not Sufis, as the official point of view claims. Rasulov creates a heroized image of the North Caucasian rebels.

At the end of his work, Rasulov again refers to Chingiz Aitmatov, thereby convincing readers of the importance of overcoming historical unconsciousness.

The peculiarity of Rasulov's work is also that it was designed in accordance with the rules of the Russian academic tradition - footnotes, the structure of the work with an introduction and conclusion, the formulation of goals and research questions. Rasulov justifies jihad not by using Sharia arguments, but by pointing out that jihad - Salafi jihad - is a normal, historically justified way of relations between the peoples of the North Caucasus and Russia.

Developing this theme, Rasulov refers to the names of such famous Russian scientists-Orientalists as Leonid Syukiyainen, Vladimir Bobrovnikov and Alexander Malashenko. In addition, Rasulov quotes Pushkin, Russian Emperor Nicholas I, Dagestani political figures of the past and even the present-

^{Shnirelman V.} N. Lev Gumilyov: ot "passionnarnogo napryazheniya" do "incompatibility of cultures" // Etnograficheskoe obozrenie. 2006. N 3. P. 14.

^72. См.: Coombs, D.S. (2011) "Entwining Tongues: Postcolonial Theory, Post-Soviet Literatures and Bilingualism in Chingiz Aitmatov's / dol'she veka dlitsia den'", Journal of Modern Literature 34(3): 47-64; Atkin, M. (1993) "Tajik National Identity", Iranian Studies 26 (1/2): 151-158.

Russian-Israeli writer and publicist Shamir Israel. Despite the fact that Rasulov refers to the Qur'an in several places, there are no Islamic scholars and thinkers among all the authorities on whose opinion he builds his argument. Rasulov's case is an interesting example of the use of a scientific style to justify the jihadist movement in the modern North Caucasus.

Another leader and ideologue of the Caucasus Emirate terrorist group, Said Buryatsky, published a program article ⁷³ in 2009 entitled "Istishkhad: Between Truth and Falsehood" ⁷⁴. This is his first and only text that was entirely devoted to his interpretation of the causes of jihadism and the willingness of people to die on this path (istishkhad)⁷⁵ in the historical perspective-from the creation of the caliphate to the modern jihadist movement in the North Caucasus.

Buryatsky, who had some, albeit incomplete, Islamic education, as he studied in a Russian madrasah in Buguruslan, and also briefly studied Arabic in Egypt, does not appear in this text as a Muslim scholar. At the very beginning of the article, he immediately points out that he will not provide Sharia justification for the jihadist movement. In addition, like other jihadists such as Movladi Udugov, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, and Yasin Rasulov, Buryatsky does not mention Muslim authors at all in his justification of jihad.

To explain the phenomena of istishkhad and jihad, he refers to the passionarity theory of the already mentioned Lev Gumilev, which the author, as he points out, read about in his school years. Buryatsky finds the category of "sacrifice" or "self-sacrifice"attractive in Gumilev's theory of passionarity. He, retelling the scheme of Gumilev, writes that the ability of people to sacrifice is a passionate peak of development of any civilization.

By making this category central to his explanatory model, Buryatsky, in my opinion, seeks to change the meaning of-

^{Buryatskiy S.} 73. Istishkhad: Mezhdu pravoy i lizhyu [Istishkhad: Between Truth and Lies]. 11.12.2009.

^74. For more information about Said Buriatskii and Lev Gumilev, see my article: Garaev, D. (2017)" Jihad as Passionarity: Said Buriatskii and Lev Gumilev", Islam and ChristianMuslim Relations 28(2): 203-218.

^{Istishkhad -75} . an act of martyrdom. It comes from the word shahid.

the attitude of Russian society towards the phenomenon of suicide bombers - "shahids" - from a negative image of a terrorist fanatic to a more noble image of a martyr. It also tells us how Buryatsky imagined the audience he was addressing. We see that he seeks to appear before it not just as a Muslim ideologue, but as a thinker with a Russian intellectual base.

As we can see, both Said Buryatsky and Yasin Rasulov, despite the fact that they were representatives of the next generation of jihadists after Yandarbiyev and Udugov, nevertheless turned out to be very close to their ideological predecessors. Unlike them, Rasulov and Buryatsky had some Islamic knowledge and their biographies were not connected with the first and second Chechen wars, but their vocabulary and the set of authorities they refer to in justifying jihad give them, as in Udugov and Yandarbiyev, rather Russian intellectuals of the post-Soviet formation, who speak a close and independent language. understandable to the Russian-speaking reader.

Of course, it cannot be argued that all jihadist ideologues of this generation avoided copious Muslim / Arabic terminology and consistent Islamic argumentation. For example, Anzor Astemirov, who was practically the only one of the most prominent leaders of the jihadist movement of the 1990s and 2000s, received a systematic Muslim education in an Arab country, was an exception in this series. The language of Astemirov, who studied for several years in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s and had the status of a Sharia judge in the Caucasus Emirate in the 2000s, was the most arabized. In addition, he frequently referred to Muslim authors, including so-called Salafi authors (Ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328)⁷⁶ and al-Albani (1914-1999)⁷⁷). In particular, we can see this in his main work on the justification of jihad - "Jihad against Apostates", which was published in 2007.78 ^However, this case is more likely to be a case of a new religion.

^76. Muslim theologian and jurist of the Hanbali Madhhab (school of law), who is known as a critic of innovations (bid'a) in Islam. Today, it is considered a harbinger of so-called Salafism.

^77. Modern Islamic theologian and Hadith scholar, who is called one of the most authoritative Muslim scholars of the so-called Salafi persuasion.

^{Seifullah A.} 78. Jihad against apostates / / Kavkazcentre. 10.03.2007.

an exception that confirms the rule. Apparently, for Anzor Astemirov, a Sharia judge, the use of Arabic and Muslim terminology had a symbolic meaning, which was supposed to legitimize his special religious status. Nevertheless, Astemirov, like Buryatsky, Rasulov and other jihadist ideologues, obviously understood the audience he was addressing. Therefore, despite the fact that he uses Arabic words very often in the above-mentioned work, each time he gives a translation into Russian in parentheses after an Arabic/Islamic term. In addition, the reverse process took place - the use of the Russian term in the text, followed by its translation, also in parentheses, into Arabic ⁷⁹.

Thus, Astemirov's texts could be called a kind of textbook on translating Islamic terminology into Russian and back. Obviously, Astemirov himself understood that neither the majority of Muslim youth in the North Caucasus, nor the Russian-speaking audience outside the Islamic field, would understand a text rich in Arabic / Islamic terminology. This is why there was such a constant language switch code within a single text.

Perhaps this middle position of Astemirov's language may be some indication of the gradual transition of the post - Soviet Russian jihadist language to more globalized versions of it-variants devoid of those Soviet roots and post-Soviet stylistics, form and content that were both among Astemirov's predecessors and his associates in the "Caucasus Emirate"; variants that have become closer towards the style of contemporary ISIS propaganda work.

The examples of the above-mentioned jihadist ideologues of the North Caucasus are very revealing, they really speak Russian in the full sense of the word - that is, at the level of symbols, terms and cultural codes recognized by Russian-speaking readers.

^79. Another such example of Astemirov's text is the text "Amir Seifullah's Answers to Muslim Questions" published in 2006: Astemirov A. Amir Seifullah's Answers to Muslim Questions / / Kavkazcenter. 28.08.2006.

In general, we observe that these ideologues refer to those authors who either gained special popularity in the Russian-speaking environment in the late or post-Soviet period,or were an important part of the Soviet official narrative. Chingiz Aitmatov and Lev Gumilev, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Anatoly Lunacharsky are authors whose ideas and terminology do not just permeate the jihadist discourse. In some ways, the Russian jihadist discourse is formed and even born out of the ideas and heritage of these authors. In this respect, the field of Soviet dissident and official culture and Russian radicalism is sufficiently broad for there to be a place for Islamic radicalism.

It is therefore no coincidence that jihadist ideologues almost always reject Sharia and theological debates when they talk about jihad. The works of all these authors are not only the justification and justification of jihad. They sort of explore it, try to find its genealogy. Stylistically, it can sometimes be made out in accordance with the Soviet / Russian academic tradition, and not at all religious.

In the Russian-language jihadist discourse of this period, strictly speaking, there is not so much specifically Islamic. The issues raised by the jihadist authors we have studied, the forms in which they express their ideas, and indeed many of these ideas themselves, as well as the terminology and authorities they refer to, are mostly non - Muslim.

Using the example of Russian-speaking jihadism, we observe a phenomenon that has quite tangible Soviet and post-Soviet roots and which fits well into the ideological / intellectual and cultural trends of post-Soviet Russia.

In my opinion, this study does not allow us to place this phenomenon exclusively in the category of regional or global jihadism. The example of the North Caucasus shows that such a dichotomy works poorly. In our case, a third variable occurs between regional ethnic and global Islamic - (post)Soviet, that is, the related Soviet intellectual heritage and the post-Soviet political agenda. It is this third variable that largely formats the jihadist discourse, influencing its language, content, and style, thus giving rise to another example of the post-Soviet world.

radicalism, which can be put on a par with Eurasianism, monarchism and different versions of Russian imperial nationalism.

Following Elizabeth Kendall's terminology, I would like to point out that when we place the problem of jihadism between regional - ethnic or subcultural - projects and a global Islamic project, we do not take into account how the jihadist ideology can be influenced by other universalist metanarratives, in our case the Soviet one. I can assume that a post-Soviet person who is used to thinking in terms of metanarratives, in response to the failure of one of them, turns to jihad as an alternative to it, that is, as a way to continue fighting for a revolution, but a new one - under the banner of jihad.

Bibliography / References

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