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The Globe and Maill (Canada)
October 30, 2002
Kremlin dusts off propaganda machine
By MARK MACKINNON
MOSCOW -- On the day that Russia began to bury its dead from last week's theatre hostage-taking crisis, the old Soviet propaganda machine briefly kicked back into gear, claiming that many of the dead had been killed by gunshot wounds, not gas as doctors have been saying.
The Moscow prosecutor, Mikhail Avdyukov, sparked widespread confusion and ridicule yesterday when he stated that 45 of the hostages had died in a hail of gunfire -- directly contradicting the medical staff at various hospitals, who said that all but one of the 117 people killed in a Saturday morning special-forces raid to free the theatre died because of gas poisoning.
The statement was later withdrawn -- dubbed a "mistake" by the Kremlin -- but it emphasized once more that in the face of crisis, the old Soviet reflex to obfuscate and misinform still lingers inside the Russian government.
"They lie. They lie all the time. For Russian bureaucrats, lying is the natural way of communicating with the public," said Boris Kagarlitsky, a political scientist and the director of the Globalization Institute in Moscow. "If they started suddenly telling the truth, I'd think something was really wrong."
The government has come under increasing criticism from its own citizens for its refusal to name the gas used to end the hostage standoff, especially as doctors treating survivors have complained that not knowing what substance they're dealing with has hampered their ability to save lives.
Pressed on the point, the Kremlin yesterday trotted out its top medical professional to state that knowing the exact compound used was not necessary for the doctors to do their work. Viktor Fominykh still refused to name the substance, saying only that it was a type of general anesthetic used frequently in surgery.
"There are big questions about the priorities of our authorities in this situation," said Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the independent Centre for Strategic Studies in Moscow.
"People are still dying from the effects of this gas and yet our authorities stick to their old Cold War script of secrecy.
"These instincts aren't just Soviet-style, they've been inside the Kremlin for the past 10 centuries."
Even the government-controlled daily newspaper, Rossiskaya Gazeta, this week decried the Kremlin's withholding of information about the Saturday-morning raid. The newspaper said the "total secrecy around the rescue operation" was reminiscent of "the times when we were denied a right to information."
The whole episode has drawn inevitable comparisons to another tragedy -- the sinking of the Kursk nuclear submarine two years ago, when the official version of events kept changing as more than 100 trapped sailors were dying at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
This week, various authorities have suggested that Movsar Barayev, leader of the Chechen rebels who seized control of Moscow's Theatre Na Dubrovka, died with a bottle of cognac in his hand. Pictures of a dead Mr. Barayev with his last bottle lying beside him were splashed across the pages of Russian newspapers, even though former hostages said they never saw him smoke or drink.
The "suicide squad" of 18 Chechen women was also portrayed as a group of drug addicts with needle marks on their arms who died with syringes at their feet.
In another reminder of Soviet times, Moskovia TV was taken off the air in the last hours of the hostage crisis, when the Press Ministry said the media outlet was guilty of improper coverage.
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