#13 - JRL 6524
Foreign Policy Forum
www.foreignpolicyforum.com
October 28, 2002
The U.S. Needs to Reassess Relations with Russia
By Keith S. Collins
Keith S. Collins is a writer in Washington, DC and a former executive for a U.S. company in Russia.

In the cold rationality of arithmetic, or politics, 117 dead hostages (at last count) out of more than 700 isn’t bad. It’s hard to second-guess President Putin and his government for their decision to send special forces into the Palace of Culture early Saturday morning to end the standoff with Chechen rebels, who had held theater-goers under threat of imminent death for more than two days. The government must have known there might be substantial loss of life no matter what choice they made.

But did they expect that the deaths could be caused almost entirely by their own people? Doctors are now saying that almost all casualties came, not from bullets or bombs, but from the gas the Russians spread into the theater to knock everyone senseless.

Can anyone imagine what would happen to a U.S. President who took a similar approach to a crisis? He would rightly be accused of either unimaginable callousness or gross incompetence – essentially, of putting state interests before the welfare of the people.

But state and people have a different dynamic in Russia. The government has even refused to tell doctors what kind of gas was used, so they can treat patients. It brings back memories of April 9, 1989, when Soviet troops used gas to break up a hunger strike in Tbilisi, Georgia. Order was restored, but at what price? As it turned out, it wasn’t ordinary tear gas the soldiers used. Hundreds of people were hospitalized, some died, and many others had nervous problems and hallucinations long afterward. At one point people carried flowers that had been placed at the spot of the original attack to the nearest church, and those people too were poisoned, as the flowers had soaked up the gas. According to one Georgian doctor who still, today, wants to remain anonymous, “It was Soviet genocide against their own people. No one said what kind of gas was used. No one cared how many lives were lost. The only concern was order, and the people be damned.”

The system of government in Russia may have changed from communism to democracy (for lack of a better term), but many of the people involved at higher levels have not changed (although they have changed jobs), and the Russian approach to crises – brute force, no matter the cost to individual lives – apparently has not either. The nation is called Russia now, but the Soviet mentality apparently remains.

Should the U.S. care? Yes, now more than ever. The Bush Administration is trying to make Russia an ally in the fight against terrorism while at the same time trying to bring Russia into the family of democratic nations. They are noble goals, for sure. But now those values have come into conflict in Russia, with the Putin government resorting to a very Soviet – some might say, very Russian – approach to suppressing terrorism. Russia suddenly seems very far from having an environment where democracy can flourish.

Now is the time, for the sake of both the fight against terrorism and the fight for democratic values, to draw the line and condemn strongly the Russian use of poison gas in the Moscow crisis. If President Putin had not had the alternative of gas at his disposal, would he have tried harder to find a solution that would not have risked killing so many of his own people? Even more, we need to start pushing Putin more strongly than ever to stop the fighting in Chechnya. If we don’t, we risk losing both the war on terrorism and the struggle for democracy in Russia. If we allow Russia to choose order over democracy, they will choose order. They should not be given that choice.

If we do not act strongly now, people around the world may start drawing unfortunate conclusions about President Bush’s claim that he can see into Putin’s soul, and that he likes what he sees.