'They
declared war on us!' exclaimed Sergei Ivanov, Russia's defence minister
and president Vladimir Putin's closest associate, when he learned about
the terrorist attacks on two Russian passenger planes in August. Loyal
journalists immediately explained that Ivanov had wanted to say
international terrorism had declared war on Russia. But that wasn't
what he said. Ivanov's outburst was a Freudian slip and closer to the
truth than the sanitised version offered by the Russian media. There is
a war going on inside Russia, but it is taking place within the
country's elite.
Then came Beslan. This town in the southern Russian republic of North
Ossetia became the stage of one of the worst hostage crises in modern
history: about 1,500 people, half of them children were involved. On 1
September terrorists occupied School Number One, to which kids, on
their first day of classes, were accompanied by parents and relatives.
As the hostage crisis in Beslan reached its culmination, more and more
voices started denouncing the FSB: the government's security agency and
Putin's main support base within the state apparatus. However, it is
not the FSB but military intelligence, the GRU, which historically has
the experience, knowledge and capabilities necessary to prevent attacks
like the one on Beslan. Russian military intelligence has a near
perfect record of infiltrating Chechen terrorist organisations. (It was
also involved in training such famous terrorists as the Chechen warlord
Shamil Basayev.) On this occasion, though, the GRU seemed to do nothing
to prevent the attacks. Call it bureaucratic sabotage, if you like.
Such things happen in government agencies in many countries. But in
Russia the consequences are particularly grim.
Terrorist attacks are not the work of isolated madmen. But neither are
they always the result of an ideologically or politically driven group.
In Russia terrorism is simply how the battle for power is waged.
Different security agencies competing for influence, rival
bureaucracies struggling to control the decision-making process,
economic elites quarrelling over privatised property, and terrorist
groups running around and offering their services to interested
parties: this is the reality of Russian politics under Putin.
As the crisis in Beslan developed it became clear that Putin's regime
was facing a serious political crisis. The military didn't want to
storm the building, the North Ossetian authorities were clearly against
violent solutions, and security experts were negotiating with Chechen
separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov, asking him to help resolve the
crisis. Through his London representative Akhmed Zakayev, Maskhadov
promised to travel to Beslan and convince the terrorists to release
hostages - without any political conditions attached.
But for Putin that would have been a terrible humiliation. In fact, the
authorities' assault on School Number One started as a result of an
'accident', with 'unidentified' snipers opening fire at the terrorists,
thus provoking chaos during which the Russian military and Ossetian
militia had no choice but to start an attack. In the ensuing battle at
least 400 hostages lost their lives. The outcome of the Beslan crisis
was a disaster of unprecedented proportions.
Russian society was traumatised; not only by the scale of the
fatalities or because so many of the dead were children; but also by
the massive and stupid lies that were showered on our heads by the
state and the government-controlled media. Most of those lies were
exposed within hours, leaving people with the impression that those in
power were not only cowards and deceitful but also totally inefficient
and ignorant.
They lied about the numbers of hostages. They declared the assault on
the terrorists a success. They claimed to discover Arabs and a 'negro'
among the dead terrorists (later explaining that those who seemed to be
Arabs were Russian Tatars, and that the 'negro' was just a man whose
face was burned by an explosion). They have spoken about foreign
terrorist intervention and convinced nobody. They tried to revise down
the number of the dead. They kept saying that the assault was an
'accident', thus humiliating the soldiers and special forces' members
who, in fact, acted on orders.
Some of the terrorists were identified, and it came out that before the
attack on Beslan they were reportedly serving prison sentences in
Russia. They were not reported as having escaped or being missing from
prison, so it became increasingly clear that important sections of
Russia's own security apparatus were involved in forming a terrorist
group.
In truth, the tragedy of Beslan can only be understood if we recognise
the increasingly mafia-like character of the Russian state. We caught a
glimpse of this earlier in the summer, when the Kremlin began to clean
out key members of staff in the military. Take the firing of general
Anatoly Kvashnin as chief of the armed forces' general staff.
Kvashnin's dismissal sent the pundits into overdrive: at one end of the
spectrum, analysts argued that it was long overdue; at the other, many
maintained that it wouldn't change anything. Nearly all commentators
linked it to problems within the military. And there is no question
that the Kremlin has become increasingly concerned with the situation
in the military: heads would not have rolled otherwise. But that
concern has nothing to do with the armed forces' professionalism. No
one was punished or promoted on the basis of their job performance. The
issue is not how military operations in Chechnya are faring or the
progress of much-vaunted military reforms. The only real problem that
had to be solved was that, despite Kvashnin's loyalty to Ivanov,
Putin's team did not have full control of the entire military, security
and law-enforcement apparatus.
In the final analysis, the Putin team trusts no one but its own. The
'civilian' Ivanov, who, like Putin, served in the foreign intelligence
arm of the KGB, has also had to contend with the solidarity of the
military top brass. Kvashnin wasn't exactly a true-blue general
himself, of course, having graduated from a non-military university and
'sneaked into' the military though the back door, as many regulars
believed. But compared to Ivanov, he looked like the genuine article.
Now command of the military has been unified. Next up: the GRU, which
until recently existed in a world of its own. The mutual hostility
between Russia's military and civilian intelligence is well-known, and
first emerged in the Soviet era. Since then commercial rivalries have
been added to the mix. Serving ideology or the interests of the state
is a thing of the past. The security services are increasingly
dominated by free-market principles. Agents trained in surveillance now
offer their services to private clients. Those trained in munitions
make their money blowing things up. The closed system in these agencies
makes it very easy for agents to launder money from their questionable
moonlighting work.
Right after this reshaping of Russia's military and security forces
started, I wrote in The Moscow Times that it was pointless to talk
about a war on terrorism in such a context: 'All sorts of nasty
incidents will occur with increasing frequency, providing journalists
with endless opportunities to divine when real extremists are involved
and when we are dealing with a provocation. And, barring other
unexpected problems, those in power will regain control of the
situation sooner or later, deal with the troublemakers and redirect the
revenue streams. But for that time something is needed that the friends
of the Kremlin might not have.'
Unfortunately, these predictions came true very quickly.
Russians believe that August is a fateful month. The 1991 coup, the
1998 debt-default crisis, the 2000 Kursk submarine disaster: they all
happened in August. And in August 1999 there was a wave of horrific
terrorist attacks against apartment blocks in Moscow and other Russian
cities. This August two passenger jets fell from the sky, killing all
90 people on board. At the very end of the month a bomb went off
outside a Moscow subway station, killing nine people.
And one day later, the siege at Beslan began.
The difference between the authorities' reaction to the attacks of 1999
and those on the two planes this August is startling. Back in 1999 the
dust hadn't settled after the explosions before officials were
explaining to us in great detail that terrorists had planted the bombs.
They told us who was to blame and where to find them. As it turned out,
the government's response had been painstakingly planned out in advance
- like the US invasion of Afghanistan. But this August, and in defiance
of eyewitness reports, the same government stubbornly insisted that
there was no evidence that terrorists were responsible for the downing
of the planes. Instead, officials mumbled something about poor-quality
fuel. Only when they realised that the public did not believe them and
was convinced that terrorists were to blame was it reluctantly
announced that traces of the explosive hexogen had been discovered in
the wreckage of both planes.
The officials were the same in 1999 and this year, and the situations
were very similar, but those officials reacted in very different ways.
What changed? Most likely, the people behind the attacks. One way or
another, the bombings five years ago fitted right into the regime's
grand strategy. The plane crashes this August clearly did not.
It used to be the case that terrorists would claim responsibility for
their actions and issue demands. In Russia today it is the authorities
that offer the explanations. Government officials tell us who is behind
terrorist attacks and what the perpetrators hope to achieve. The
government and the security services speak for the mysteriously silent
terrorists, functioning as some kind of press service. It goes without
saying, however, that in doing so the regime is pursuing its own ends.
In 1999 the regime needed something like the apartment bombings as an
excuse to start another war in Chechnya, which it required as a
backdrop for the upcoming elections. The death of hundreds of people
and the destruction of property presented the regime with a welcome
opportunity to set the military and political machine in motion.
Kremlin propagandists squeezed all they could out of the terrorism
issue. Now terrorism has reared its ugly head once again.
Terrorist attacks are designed to send a message. But to whom? To
Russian society? That's not an option. There is no point in trying to
frighten average Russians, because the state does more than enough to
keep us frightened most of the time. And why send a message to society
in a country where the people have no real power? Explosions can
influence the public consciousness in Spain and the US, and maybe they
could in Russia five years ago. But today Russia just tallies up the
corpses and, with masochistic satisfaction, observes that August is a
dreadful month.
Worldwide, there has been a massive increase in security in recent
years. The existing security system is more than enough to deter the
average terrorist. But when terrorists have friends in high places,
when they are employed by state security services, or when they
themselves are government agents posing as terrorists, then they are
capable of penetrating any security system. And tightening security
will not help.
The story of 9/11 is full of contradictions and gaps because no one in
the US government is prepared to consider the possibility that the
terrorists might have had accomplices on the inside. Russians are more
cynical, or perhaps just less naive. The possibility of a connection
between the security services and the terrorists comes up every time
something blows up. Russian society is left frustrated and angry.
The Putin team is prepared to use 'revolutionary' methods to realise
its agenda, to solve all of its problems and meet all of its
obligations in one fell swoop. It will strip pensioners of their
benefits, herd university students into the army and curtail free
education and healthcare. It will try to undermine the power of local
government by redrawing administrative boundaries and amalgamating
various regions. The liberal intelligentsia will be kept off the
airwaves, and the Communists will be driven out of politics. A new and
improved oligarchy will be hastily created to replace the old disloyal
one. But will any of this work after Beslan?
After all, revolutionary methods work well during a revolution, but you
cannot destabilise a country in which revolutionary chaos already
reigns. Putin's regime has no real plans to unleash revolution, or even
counter-revolution, but what it certainly is achieving is chaos.