A wall around the Caucasus: Alisa Ganieva’s dystopia of Dagestan5 min read
What happens when a rumour is more powerful than the state? In The Mountain and the Wall (Праздничная гора, 2012), Alisa Ganieva imagines Dagestan seized by the news that Russia is building a wall to cut off its Muslim-majority Caucasian republics from the rest of the country. No one knows whether the wall is real. That hardly matters. The rumour is enough to expose everything already broken: mistrust, fear, religious polarisation, ethnic suspicion, state violence and the fragile place of Dagestan within the Russian Federation. The result is a political dystopia that feels less like fantasy than a diagnosis.
Dagestan at the edge of panic
The novel follows Shamil, a young journalist in Makhachkala, Dagestan’s capital, as panic spreads through the city. The central premise is simple: people begin to believe that Moscow is sealing off the North Caucasus, abandoning it behind a border wall. This is not a conventional plot-driven novel in which one event leads neatly to another. Ganieva builds her world through fragments: conversations in newsrooms, street gossip, rumours, religious slogans, family tensions, political pamphlets, old myths and scenes of urban unease. The reader is placed inside a society where information is unstable and everyone is forced to interpret danger before it becomes visible.
To understand the novel, one has to understand Dagestan’s place in the wider Caucasus. Dagestan is one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse parts of the Russian Federation, a mountainous republic on the Caspian Sea, bordering Chechnya, Georgia and Azerbaijan. It is not a marginal setting chosen for exotic colour. It is one of the key fault lines of post-Soviet Russia.
Ganieva was born in Makhachkala and writes from inside this world, not as an outside observer. Therefore her work offers a perspective “from within” on a region too often reduced to stereotypes. That matters because the Caucasus is frequently represented through clichés: violence, clan politics, Islam, honour, insurgency, backwardness, exotic mountains. Ganieva uses these materials, but she refuses to simplify them. Her Dagestan is not a single “Muslim region”, nor a romantic mountain society, nor merely a site of terrorism and repression. It is crowded, contradictory and polyphonic. Different social worlds overlap: secular urban youth, traditional elders, corrupt officials, journalists, Islamists, local intellectuals, villagers, Russianised elites and people simply trying to live normally.
In this sense, Dagestan becomes a condensed version of the North Caucasus as a whole: a region both inside and outside Russia, governed by Moscow yet treated as culturally alien, feared as a security problem yet rarely understood as a political community.
The politics of being cut off
The novel’s central image, a wall separating the Caucasus from Russia, is politically devastating because it literalises a feeling that already exists. The wall is not only a border. It is a metaphor for exclusion.
For many North Caucasians, the question is not only whether they belong to Russia, but on what terms. Are they citizens, subjects, internal foreigners, security threats, or colonial remnants? Ganieva turns this ambiguity into a dystopian scenario: what if the centre simply decided that the Caucasus was too difficult, too Muslim, too violent, too different, and placed it behind a wall?
This is why the novel is not only about Dagestan. It is about the political imagination of the Russian state. The wall exposes the logic of securitisation: when a region is viewed primarily through the lens of danger, separation begins to look like a solution. But Ganieva shows that separation does not produce order. It produces panic, radicalisation and moral collapse.
The book makes the reader reflect not only on what is happening to Dagestan. It also sheds light on a key issue that is largely overlooked – who gets to narrate Dagestan: Soviet modernisers, Russian officials, Islamist militants, local romantics, journalists, villagers, or writers like herself.
Against both empire and fundamentalism
The novel’s political message is powerful because it refuses the comfort of choosing one villain. Moscow’s state violence, racism and abandonment are central to the book’s world. But religious extremism is also destructive. Local corruption, patriarchal pressure, ethnic suspicion and opportunism all play their part.
This refusal to simplify is what makes the novel politically mature. Ganieva does not write a nationalist fable in which Dagestan is innocent and Russia alone is guilty. Nor does she write a Russian liberal fable in which Dagestan is merely a backward region that needs modernisation. Instead, she shows a society squeezed between two forms of authoritarian temptation: the imperial state and the ideology of religious radicalism.
The wall and the mountain therefore become two competing political symbols. The wall is imposed from outside: it is the politics of exclusion, control and fear. The mountain is imagined from within: it is the dream of community, celebration and refuge. But even the mountain is unstable. Dreams of purity, whether national, religious or cultural, can also become dangerous.
The novel’s deeper message is that societies collapse when complexity is no longer tolerated. Once everyone is forced to choose between hostile camps, the ordinary space of civic life disappears.
Why Dagestan’s fiction still feels political
The Mountain and the Wall remains relevant because the politics it describes have not disappeared. Across the post-Soviet space and beyond, walls, borders and exclusionary fantasies have returned as political solutions. States still frame peripheral regions as security problems. Muslim communities are still treated through suspicion. Political rumours still move faster than institutions. Public life is still vulnerable to disinformation, fear and polarisation.
The Caucasus remains caught between imperial memories, local nationalisms, religious identities, unresolved conflicts and the pressure of larger powers. Ganieva’s novel shows that the danger is not only open violence. It is also the slow normalisation of separation: the idea that some regions, peoples or identities are too complicated to be included.
The Mountain and the Wall is not just a Dagestani dystopia. It is a novel about what happens when a state stops imagining some of its citizens as fully part of the political community. It reminds us that walls are rarely built all at once. First come the rumours, the stereotypes, the security language, the moral distance. By the time the wall appears, society has already begun to accept it.
