#6529
#8
National Post (Canada)
November 1, 2002
Modern Russia's attitude problem
By Hugo Gurdon
Remember Waco? In weighing Vladimir Putin's handling of the Moscow theatre siege, it's worth reminding oneself of Janet Reno's massively fatal screw-up in 1993. Some 80 people died at the Texas compound, and even though the active controversy is over, there remains dispute about who started the fatal fire, the Branch Davidians on the inside or government forces on the outside. Sieges don't have to be in backward countries to go terribly wrong.
Nevertheless, there are aspects of what happened in Moscow's Palace of Culture this past week that do show how far Russia still has to go before it will look anything like a normal, modern, liberal democratic country.
First, though, let's acknowledge what was done right.
The Alpha Unit commandos who stormed the building were impressive. Amongst other things, they had pinpointed the terrorists' locations and appearance using covert cellphone conversations with hostages, and they had scoped out the scene inside the theatre using fibre-optic filaments inserted through fine holes drilled silently into the walls. This is sophisticated stuff.
Of some 700 hostages, the terrorists shot two dead. The Russians killed another 115 and sickened some 200 by pumping a powerful opiate gas into the building before storming it. Even if you don't count the 200, there are still 400 theatregoers now alive and free who might otherwise be dead.
Western special forces have used similar gasses to rescue hostages, although never in such massive enclosed spaces or with such numbers of captives. That, however, is a testament to the Russians' daring, not their recklessness.
Critics should remember that they stormed the building not on their own schedule when all was quiet, but because there was gunfire inside. The terrorists were shooting at a boy who was trying to escape and the rescuers reasonably and rightly thought the promised carnage had begun.
Nor did the Russians err in executing most of the terrorists; 39 were shot in the head while still unconscious. Objections to this do not bear scrutiny. Since it was an anesthetic rather than a deadly poison, the gas could not have been expected to have identical effects on everyone in the theatre, and it did not. Some hostages regained consciousness several times after the opiate hit them. The Russians had to assume that terrorists might also come to and detonate the explosives with which they had mined the building. The Chechens remained armed and highly dangerous combatants even though they were temporarily immobile, and they had surely forfeited their right to fastidious treatment.
So much for what Moscow did right.
And for all that, the raid exposes what a hellhole Russia still is. The country suffers under a brutal polity and brutalized psyche that were crippled and deformed by centuries of serfdom and three generations of Stalinism.
V.S. Naipaul used the title A Wounded Civilization for one of his forensic dissections of India and its afflictions. But "wounded civilization" could be applied with equal accuracy to Russia.
Only in a wounded civilization -- a maimed and scarred society -- would the government have paid such scant attention to saving the lives of hostages. The siege lasted long enough to get the gas in place for attack, which surely means the antidote could have been readied too. But it wasn't. The authorities told hospitals what was needed, but did not provide it.
The opiate appears to have made some people incapable of breathing, which quickly damages brains and other internal organs. That does not mean it should not have been used. But, tellingly, every hostage who died, did so before reaching hospital. If patients had been ventilated in the ambulances immediately outside the theatre and on the way to hospital, far more would probably have survived. But they weren't, and they didn't. What was needed was humane forethought, but there wasn't any.
And afterwards? Who will forget the sight of uniformed military guards at hospitals pushing relatives away as though they were insolent troublemakers rather than citizens frantic with worry about the suffering of their loved ones.
This cruelty and indifference -- the default attitude of modern as much as ancient Russia -- has shaped a reciprocal passivity in the people. The public does not like mistreatment by its masters, but it rarely refuses to accept it. In the West, the chemistry of the opiate would have been published in response to a bellowed public demand; heads would have rolled in the unlikely event of similarly shabby medical treatment of rescued hostages; and instead of military guards closing hospital gates on distraught relatives, there would have been welcoming counselors with open arms and a sympathetic bedside manner.
In a crisis, we all revert to type. And Russia reverted to an insouciant caste of mind that was forged, and could only have been forged, over centuries in which the suffering of ordinary people was a matter of utter indifference to those in power.
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