John Uskglass
Venerable Relic of the Wastes
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040927&s=gessen092704
Countries, like people, do not cope well with fear. But countries, unlike people, cannot run away when they are frightened. So they act like people in other ways. They reach for totems they hope will protect them, such as the flag; they become withdrawn, barricading themselves with visas and security checks; they get aggressive; often, they panic. Frightened countries can be extremely dangerous to themselves and to others. Russia right now is a frightened country embarking on steps that gravely threaten its own people and, most likely, the people of other countries.
To be blunt, Russia is about to turn itself into a dictatorship. Using as a pretext the fear that has gripped his country, President Vladimir Putin has announced sweeping political reforms that will eliminate all direct elections except those for president, who, through a convoluted process, will effectively appoint members of parliament. With the state in control of all broadcast media and increasingly dominating print media, the presidential election will also be orchestrated by the Kremlin. Still, as the new political system takes shape, the person at the helm--the actual dictator--might not be Putin. The new leader could actually be a fascist head of an aggressive, nationalistic, war-mongering Russia.
The fear gripping Russia is not necessarily new. In fact, it has just celebrated its fifth anniversary. In September 1999, a series of explosions leveled two apartment towers in Moscow and one in a city in southern Russia, killing more than 300. The random nature of the explosions made them particularly effective terrorism, since they suggested that any anonymous working-class person might go to bed one night only to be buried under piles of collapsed concrete. The consequent fear translated into overwhelming support for a new attack on separatist Chechnya, which was presumed responsible for the explosions, though the connection has never been proved. The fear also boosted the political ascent of the man who would lead the fight, Vladimir Putin.
Putin, who became president in 2000, has in fact based his entire political life on the idea that he is the only man who can keep Russia from disaster. He is a man of few public words, but, more often than not, these words have concerned enemies, external and domestic. He has not boasted of his success in combating these enemies--indeed, with the current war in Chechnya entering its sixth year, he has little to point to. Putin's main political argument has been that, if not for him, things would be even worse. He began his campaign for a second term in office with a State of the Federation speech that warned, from the start, "We are faced with serious threats." Putin's list of enemies included terrorists, developed countries that will not let Russia compete in the world, nuclear arms, a weak economy, a dwindling population, an inefficient political system--hardly a list one would expect to hear from an incumbent president unless the president's strategy was to keep his people in a constant state of fear. With help from a servile broadcast media, Putin got his message across. Even as Putin won by a landslide in March, polls showed that Russians did not believe he had done a particularly good job in his first term--but that all other possible candidates were worse.
This month's Beslan massacre seems to have proved to Russians that it can't get any worse. The Beslan school suffered staggering casualties: 339 are dead, more than 90 remain missing, and about half of those killed were children. The sight of the bloodied bodies of children being carried out of the school and the terrified schoolchildren in their underwear, running out in a hail of bullets, was more than any human could bear to watch. But what outraged Russians even more than the sheer horror of the bloodshed was the stream of official lies that accompanied it. For the first three days of the siege, Russian officials claimed that there were only 354 hostages in the building, when in fact there were more than 1,000. Since the siege ended, they have claimed, falsely, that the hostage-takers included Arabs, a black man, and two women who blew themselves up in order to kill 20 hostages on the first day. All lies. A tape of the interrogation of one of the supposed terrorists--the sole man Russian special forces claim to have captured--was broadcast by state television. The man sounded like he was reciting a prepared text. Then, former hostages told journalists they hadn't seen this man among the terrorists. It turned out he had committed a crime several years earlier and was supposed to be in prison when the hostage-taking occurred. Either he was a terrorist who managed to buy his way out of prison, or Russian officials plucked him out of prison to play the role of the captured terrorist.
This mistrust is now widely held. According to a study by the independent Levada Center, 80 percent of Muscovites believe they were not told the truth about Beslan, and 63 percent blame either the government or the security forces for the disaster. According to an eyewitness, on September 7, a young man emerged from the rush-hour crowd at a Metro station not far from Red Square, shouted, "Shit, I can't take it anymore," poured gasoline on his body, and tried to set himself on fire. He was immediately seized by police, but he seemed to be expressing the popular sentiment: Russians really can't take it anymore. According to the Moscow poll, 77 percent believe the government and its security forces cannot protect them from terrorist attacks in the future.
The government is clearly aware of the threat of public outrage, and Putin is fighting back. The Kremlin has tried to redirect public fury by organizing antiterrorism rallies across Russia. Participants are bused in from factories or universities, each of which is told ahead of time how many bodies are required. Protesters are given prefab posters with slogans such as we oppose terrorism and we support putin. During a recent 130,000-strong rally in Moscow, people carrying alternative, self-made posters were not allowed to join the crowd, which was delivered to Red Square and then sealed off by a line of riot police. The speakers--mostly public officials and actors--promised decisive measures, which included reestablishing the Soviet system of residence permits (when one could be arrested for spending the night at a friend's house); fingerprinting everyone; bringing back the death penalty (which should be especially effective in punishing suicide bombers); and vastly expanding the powers of security agencies.
The rallies are part of Putin's broader strategy, which features the only things he knows how to do: crack down on what's left of civil liberties and political freedoms. On Monday, Putin announced his plan to overhaul the electoral system, trashing the Yeltsin-era constitution and returning to the Soviet system of centralized control. By creating a tyranny of the bureaucracy, the Russian government can, on the one hand, show it is taking measures to protect its people and, on the other, silence anyone who says otherwise. The process was already underway before the siege. Several of the most outspoken Russian journalists were prevented from getting to Beslan. Newspaper reporter Anna Politkovskaya was hospitalized after she passed out on her plane to southern Russia. She was poisoned, and she believes the poison came from the security forces, which wanted to keep her from the scene. Meanwhile, Radio Liberty reporter Andrei Babitsky was arrested at a Moscow airport for allegedly getting into a fight, which he believes someone picked with him after prodding from the security forces. Babitsky was allowed out of jail the day after the crisis ended. Then, two days after the massacre, the editor of Izvestia, Russia's largest broadsheet, was fired following the newspaper's detailed and graphic coverage of the crisis.
Repression is the only weapon that Russian governments have traditionally known, and it is certainly the only weapon that former KGB Colonel Putin knows. But it will not be enough to fix the North Caucasus, Russia's southernmost region, which includes Chechnya and North Ossetia, where the hostage-taking happened, and which may erupt into all-out interethnic war. Even during the Beslan siege, when the small town was dominated by police and federal troops, the authorities could not control local residents. Men came to the school with their rifles and machine guns, jumped into the firefight when it began, and succeeded in lynching at least one of the suspected terrorists. Now the residents of North Ossetia are gathering daily to demand the resignation of their governor and to call for avenging their dead by going to war against the neighboring republic of Ingushetia, from whose territory the terrorists seem to have entered Beslan. Observers fear that, when the traditional Russian Orthodox 40-day period of mourning is over, the North Ossetians will make good on their threats. Making the situation even more volatile, neighboring South Ossetia, which is part of independent Georgia, is already at war with the government in Tbilisi--a war in which it is backed by Russia.
Nor will repression be enough to prevent future terrorist attacks. Whatever the original source of the five-year wave of terrorism, by now, terrorism has taken on a life of its own. The events leading up to the school siege showed clearly that the latest ten-day string of terrorist attacks was well-planned: It included two explosions in Moscow and two simultaneous airplane bombings. The Russian security forces were clearly clueless. Even as the wave of terrorism unfolded, the security forces did not think to fortify the Chechen borders or to increase their presence in the surrounding regions.
No, the fury and the fear in Russia are now so extreme that, when the next terrorist attack occurs, the country might well explode. Putin has made this more likely by eviscerating the political system, privatizing the courts, and castrating the media, a process that began with the Kremlin takeover of the private TV channel NTV in 2001, continued with a series of show trials this past year, and has now been completed with Putin's electoral reform. This has left Russians with no place to voice protest--other than the street. There may be a revolution, and it won't be pretty. It could be a fascist revolution.
There are two reasons the next Russian government will be a fascist one. First, Putin has annihilated all opposition except for the Kremlin's pocket opposition, an extreme nationalist party called Motherland. The Kremlin's creation of Motherland was part of a time-honored government strategy of advancing false dichotomies to demonstrate that the sole alternative is far worse than the incumbents. But, almost as soon as it was created a year ago, Motherland took on a life of its own and has become a relatively popular political force.
The second reason is that fascism is what Russians want. They tell pollsters they are willing to sacrifice their freedoms. They say they want all Chechens to be evicted from Moscow and other large cities. They crave an extreme crackdown. "A totalitarian state cannot be blackmailed by the threat of death of civilians," said Mikhail Leontyev, one of Russia's most prominent pundits, in his nightly commentary on federal Channel One, the most-watched network. "Terrorism happens only in democracies." Leontyev's words express both the Kremlin's and the public's agenda: Polls show that a majority of Russians will readily cede their civil liberties to security services. The security services, in turn, are behaving accordingly. Last week, Moscow police beat up a Chechen man, famed cosmonaut Magomed Tolboyev. Human rights advocates say beatings of ordinary Chechens and other Muslims are now commonplace occurrences in Russia.
In fact, the population has become so extreme that Moscow is actually trying to tamp down its wilder impulses. In an effort to control extremism, the Kremlin has directed anger at outside forces. It has led rallies to suggest that the United States and Great Britain are heading a worldwide conspiracy against Russia, using the Chechens as pawns--but pawns to be annihilated--to weaken Russia. This view, too, has been voiced by the extremely popular Leontyev, who said, "You have to understand that the cold war did not begin with Churchill and did not end with perestroika and the new thinking. And we are not the ones who started this war." He then argued that Americans are funding Russia's enemies, including the Chechens and Georgians.
Yet, while Russia is verging toward fascism, Putin might not benefit from the tide. His once-unshakable electoral rating has been falling steadily for months, and in August, it hit an all-time low. In a Levada Center poll, only 38 percent of respondents said Putin had fulfilled the hopes they had when he became president. And that was before the wave of terrorism. After the Beslan tragedy, a third of respondents said they disapproved of Putin's actions during the crisis--an extremely high figure for Russia, where only 10 percent were critical of the president two years ago, after a botched operation to save hostages in a Moscow theater. By cracking down now, Putin is trying both to do what Russians want and to strengthen his own position at the helm. But, if his measures do not prove sufficient to protect his people, Putin will likely lose power. And, in a country with no democratic mechanisms for changing leaders, that change of regime could well be violent, a combination of popular riots and a rebellion of the security forces. As the anger overflows, Russians will demand a leader willing to take even more extreme measures.
Who would emerge from the violence? Right now it's hard to predict. One candidate is Dmitry Rogozin, leader of Motherland and former leader of a fascist political organization called the Congress of Russian Communities. Another possible candidate is Eduard Limonov, a writer whose Nationalist Bolshevik Party is the only viable grass-roots political movement in Russia today. The Kremlin is scared of the ultranationalist Limonov, who was jailed for his political activities and released just over a year ago. But Limonov, though he inspires many young Russians to tackle politics, may ultimately prove too Western for Russia, because his platform makes no reference to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Or it may be someone else. In the near-total vacuum that is Russian political life today, a new name can surface very fast. But the fact that Rogozin and Limonov are the two names most often bandied about points to the part of the political spectrum from which the new leader will emerge: He will be an extreme nationalist dictator. There is indeed something to be more terrified of than terrorism.
Countries, like people, do not cope well with fear. But countries, unlike people, cannot run away when they are frightened. So they act like people in other ways. They reach for totems they hope will protect them, such as the flag; they become withdrawn, barricading themselves with visas and security checks; they get aggressive; often, they panic. Frightened countries can be extremely dangerous to themselves and to others. Russia right now is a frightened country embarking on steps that gravely threaten its own people and, most likely, the people of other countries.
To be blunt, Russia is about to turn itself into a dictatorship. Using as a pretext the fear that has gripped his country, President Vladimir Putin has announced sweeping political reforms that will eliminate all direct elections except those for president, who, through a convoluted process, will effectively appoint members of parliament. With the state in control of all broadcast media and increasingly dominating print media, the presidential election will also be orchestrated by the Kremlin. Still, as the new political system takes shape, the person at the helm--the actual dictator--might not be Putin. The new leader could actually be a fascist head of an aggressive, nationalistic, war-mongering Russia.
The fear gripping Russia is not necessarily new. In fact, it has just celebrated its fifth anniversary. In September 1999, a series of explosions leveled two apartment towers in Moscow and one in a city in southern Russia, killing more than 300. The random nature of the explosions made them particularly effective terrorism, since they suggested that any anonymous working-class person might go to bed one night only to be buried under piles of collapsed concrete. The consequent fear translated into overwhelming support for a new attack on separatist Chechnya, which was presumed responsible for the explosions, though the connection has never been proved. The fear also boosted the political ascent of the man who would lead the fight, Vladimir Putin.
Putin, who became president in 2000, has in fact based his entire political life on the idea that he is the only man who can keep Russia from disaster. He is a man of few public words, but, more often than not, these words have concerned enemies, external and domestic. He has not boasted of his success in combating these enemies--indeed, with the current war in Chechnya entering its sixth year, he has little to point to. Putin's main political argument has been that, if not for him, things would be even worse. He began his campaign for a second term in office with a State of the Federation speech that warned, from the start, "We are faced with serious threats." Putin's list of enemies included terrorists, developed countries that will not let Russia compete in the world, nuclear arms, a weak economy, a dwindling population, an inefficient political system--hardly a list one would expect to hear from an incumbent president unless the president's strategy was to keep his people in a constant state of fear. With help from a servile broadcast media, Putin got his message across. Even as Putin won by a landslide in March, polls showed that Russians did not believe he had done a particularly good job in his first term--but that all other possible candidates were worse.
This month's Beslan massacre seems to have proved to Russians that it can't get any worse. The Beslan school suffered staggering casualties: 339 are dead, more than 90 remain missing, and about half of those killed were children. The sight of the bloodied bodies of children being carried out of the school and the terrified schoolchildren in their underwear, running out in a hail of bullets, was more than any human could bear to watch. But what outraged Russians even more than the sheer horror of the bloodshed was the stream of official lies that accompanied it. For the first three days of the siege, Russian officials claimed that there were only 354 hostages in the building, when in fact there were more than 1,000. Since the siege ended, they have claimed, falsely, that the hostage-takers included Arabs, a black man, and two women who blew themselves up in order to kill 20 hostages on the first day. All lies. A tape of the interrogation of one of the supposed terrorists--the sole man Russian special forces claim to have captured--was broadcast by state television. The man sounded like he was reciting a prepared text. Then, former hostages told journalists they hadn't seen this man among the terrorists. It turned out he had committed a crime several years earlier and was supposed to be in prison when the hostage-taking occurred. Either he was a terrorist who managed to buy his way out of prison, or Russian officials plucked him out of prison to play the role of the captured terrorist.
This mistrust is now widely held. According to a study by the independent Levada Center, 80 percent of Muscovites believe they were not told the truth about Beslan, and 63 percent blame either the government or the security forces for the disaster. According to an eyewitness, on September 7, a young man emerged from the rush-hour crowd at a Metro station not far from Red Square, shouted, "Shit, I can't take it anymore," poured gasoline on his body, and tried to set himself on fire. He was immediately seized by police, but he seemed to be expressing the popular sentiment: Russians really can't take it anymore. According to the Moscow poll, 77 percent believe the government and its security forces cannot protect them from terrorist attacks in the future.
The government is clearly aware of the threat of public outrage, and Putin is fighting back. The Kremlin has tried to redirect public fury by organizing antiterrorism rallies across Russia. Participants are bused in from factories or universities, each of which is told ahead of time how many bodies are required. Protesters are given prefab posters with slogans such as we oppose terrorism and we support putin. During a recent 130,000-strong rally in Moscow, people carrying alternative, self-made posters were not allowed to join the crowd, which was delivered to Red Square and then sealed off by a line of riot police. The speakers--mostly public officials and actors--promised decisive measures, which included reestablishing the Soviet system of residence permits (when one could be arrested for spending the night at a friend's house); fingerprinting everyone; bringing back the death penalty (which should be especially effective in punishing suicide bombers); and vastly expanding the powers of security agencies.
The rallies are part of Putin's broader strategy, which features the only things he knows how to do: crack down on what's left of civil liberties and political freedoms. On Monday, Putin announced his plan to overhaul the electoral system, trashing the Yeltsin-era constitution and returning to the Soviet system of centralized control. By creating a tyranny of the bureaucracy, the Russian government can, on the one hand, show it is taking measures to protect its people and, on the other, silence anyone who says otherwise. The process was already underway before the siege. Several of the most outspoken Russian journalists were prevented from getting to Beslan. Newspaper reporter Anna Politkovskaya was hospitalized after she passed out on her plane to southern Russia. She was poisoned, and she believes the poison came from the security forces, which wanted to keep her from the scene. Meanwhile, Radio Liberty reporter Andrei Babitsky was arrested at a Moscow airport for allegedly getting into a fight, which he believes someone picked with him after prodding from the security forces. Babitsky was allowed out of jail the day after the crisis ended. Then, two days after the massacre, the editor of Izvestia, Russia's largest broadsheet, was fired following the newspaper's detailed and graphic coverage of the crisis.
Repression is the only weapon that Russian governments have traditionally known, and it is certainly the only weapon that former KGB Colonel Putin knows. But it will not be enough to fix the North Caucasus, Russia's southernmost region, which includes Chechnya and North Ossetia, where the hostage-taking happened, and which may erupt into all-out interethnic war. Even during the Beslan siege, when the small town was dominated by police and federal troops, the authorities could not control local residents. Men came to the school with their rifles and machine guns, jumped into the firefight when it began, and succeeded in lynching at least one of the suspected terrorists. Now the residents of North Ossetia are gathering daily to demand the resignation of their governor and to call for avenging their dead by going to war against the neighboring republic of Ingushetia, from whose territory the terrorists seem to have entered Beslan. Observers fear that, when the traditional Russian Orthodox 40-day period of mourning is over, the North Ossetians will make good on their threats. Making the situation even more volatile, neighboring South Ossetia, which is part of independent Georgia, is already at war with the government in Tbilisi--a war in which it is backed by Russia.
Nor will repression be enough to prevent future terrorist attacks. Whatever the original source of the five-year wave of terrorism, by now, terrorism has taken on a life of its own. The events leading up to the school siege showed clearly that the latest ten-day string of terrorist attacks was well-planned: It included two explosions in Moscow and two simultaneous airplane bombings. The Russian security forces were clearly clueless. Even as the wave of terrorism unfolded, the security forces did not think to fortify the Chechen borders or to increase their presence in the surrounding regions.
No, the fury and the fear in Russia are now so extreme that, when the next terrorist attack occurs, the country might well explode. Putin has made this more likely by eviscerating the political system, privatizing the courts, and castrating the media, a process that began with the Kremlin takeover of the private TV channel NTV in 2001, continued with a series of show trials this past year, and has now been completed with Putin's electoral reform. This has left Russians with no place to voice protest--other than the street. There may be a revolution, and it won't be pretty. It could be a fascist revolution.
There are two reasons the next Russian government will be a fascist one. First, Putin has annihilated all opposition except for the Kremlin's pocket opposition, an extreme nationalist party called Motherland. The Kremlin's creation of Motherland was part of a time-honored government strategy of advancing false dichotomies to demonstrate that the sole alternative is far worse than the incumbents. But, almost as soon as it was created a year ago, Motherland took on a life of its own and has become a relatively popular political force.
The second reason is that fascism is what Russians want. They tell pollsters they are willing to sacrifice their freedoms. They say they want all Chechens to be evicted from Moscow and other large cities. They crave an extreme crackdown. "A totalitarian state cannot be blackmailed by the threat of death of civilians," said Mikhail Leontyev, one of Russia's most prominent pundits, in his nightly commentary on federal Channel One, the most-watched network. "Terrorism happens only in democracies." Leontyev's words express both the Kremlin's and the public's agenda: Polls show that a majority of Russians will readily cede their civil liberties to security services. The security services, in turn, are behaving accordingly. Last week, Moscow police beat up a Chechen man, famed cosmonaut Magomed Tolboyev. Human rights advocates say beatings of ordinary Chechens and other Muslims are now commonplace occurrences in Russia.
In fact, the population has become so extreme that Moscow is actually trying to tamp down its wilder impulses. In an effort to control extremism, the Kremlin has directed anger at outside forces. It has led rallies to suggest that the United States and Great Britain are heading a worldwide conspiracy against Russia, using the Chechens as pawns--but pawns to be annihilated--to weaken Russia. This view, too, has been voiced by the extremely popular Leontyev, who said, "You have to understand that the cold war did not begin with Churchill and did not end with perestroika and the new thinking. And we are not the ones who started this war." He then argued that Americans are funding Russia's enemies, including the Chechens and Georgians.
Yet, while Russia is verging toward fascism, Putin might not benefit from the tide. His once-unshakable electoral rating has been falling steadily for months, and in August, it hit an all-time low. In a Levada Center poll, only 38 percent of respondents said Putin had fulfilled the hopes they had when he became president. And that was before the wave of terrorism. After the Beslan tragedy, a third of respondents said they disapproved of Putin's actions during the crisis--an extremely high figure for Russia, where only 10 percent were critical of the president two years ago, after a botched operation to save hostages in a Moscow theater. By cracking down now, Putin is trying both to do what Russians want and to strengthen his own position at the helm. But, if his measures do not prove sufficient to protect his people, Putin will likely lose power. And, in a country with no democratic mechanisms for changing leaders, that change of regime could well be violent, a combination of popular riots and a rebellion of the security forces. As the anger overflows, Russians will demand a leader willing to take even more extreme measures.
Who would emerge from the violence? Right now it's hard to predict. One candidate is Dmitry Rogozin, leader of Motherland and former leader of a fascist political organization called the Congress of Russian Communities. Another possible candidate is Eduard Limonov, a writer whose Nationalist Bolshevik Party is the only viable grass-roots political movement in Russia today. The Kremlin is scared of the ultranationalist Limonov, who was jailed for his political activities and released just over a year ago. But Limonov, though he inspires many young Russians to tackle politics, may ultimately prove too Western for Russia, because his platform makes no reference to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Or it may be someone else. In the near-total vacuum that is Russian political life today, a new name can surface very fast. But the fact that Rogozin and Limonov are the two names most often bandied about points to the part of the political spectrum from which the new leader will emerge: He will be an extreme nationalist dictator. There is indeed something to be more terrified of than terrorism.
