#6536 #6537 #6538
#7 - JRL 6537
Profil
No. 41
November 4, 2002,
NO RIGHT TO MAKE MISTAKES
Putin has taken on a difficult task, and any mistakes could ruin his career
Author: Andrei Ryabov
[from WPS Monitoring Agency, www.wps.ru/e_index.html]
RUSSIA WILL CHANGE IN THE WAKE OF THE MOSCOW HOSTAGE-TAKING. THERE ARE NOT MANY OPTIONS TO CHOOSE FROM: EITHER EFFECTIVE PRESIDENTIAL RULE SUPPORTED BY A NEW, REAL HIERARCHY - OR CHAOS, INEVITABLY GENERATED BY THE WISH FOR EVERYTHING TO REMAIN AS IT IS, UNCHANGED.
Russia will change in the wake of the tragic events of October 23-26, just as the United States changed after September 11. Most likely, the government will change. Perhaps society will change as well.
For the government, the options may be calculated. President Putin has won the hardest fight yet in his political career; not by a knock-out, but on points.
Many observers, in Russia and abroad, are wondering why there is still such overwhelming public support for the president, even though there were so many casualties in the hostage crisis. But like it or not, for the Russian way of thinking the number of casualties was never an issue. Putin hit the mark, once again: over the past decade, Russian citizens have grown very weary of politicians who talk big but don't do anything. But Putin promised to "kill off the terrorists in the toilets", and has demonstrated how this is done in practice.
Until Barayev's gang was destroyed at the theater, Chechens had always emerged victorious from terrorist attacks. Shamil Basayev triumphantly led his detachment out of Budennovsk in 1995. Raduyev was surrounded at Pervomaisk in 1996, but he got away. Gochiyaev, after blowing up apartment buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk in 1999, evaded Russian special services and is still living the good life somewhere on the shores of the Persian Gulf.
But this time, those of the "Ichkerian freedom-fighters" who were taken captive are probably envying those who died. They did not manage to produce any televised speeches about "selflessly serving the ideals of liberty", calculated to appeal to soft-hearted Westerners. The terrorists lost, on all counts. Federal troops have not been withdrawn from Chechnya. No one is about to sit down at the negotiation table with the guerrillas. Aslan Maskhadov and Akhmed Zakayev - those two gentlemen who have created a respectable image for Chechen resistance in the West - have discredited themselves. One of them was foolish enough to start threatening Russia with terrorist takeovers of nuclear facilities. He probably didn't know that nuclear blackmail gets the same response from security services in all countries, even the most liberal nations: arrest, at the very least.
So far, the US administration has been supporting President Putin. This is also a good time to put pressure on the European Union, where a multitude of various organizations has spawned which the terrorists have used to put political pressure on Russia.
But for all these significant gains, it must be acknowledged that most of them are tactical. By declaring that fighting terrorism is his priority - wherever the threat to Russia may come from - President Putin, like President Bush, has made himself a hostage to this battle. From now on he, like his American counterpart, has no right to make mistakes, and no right to lose, since a defeat could destroy his political career. But the infrastructure of terrorism is more than a few savage terrorists. It is also a crime-ridden business sector which sponsors the war in Chechnya, and has many protectors in the bureaucracy, of course. Thus, if Putin wants to prevent the machine of terrorism from suddenly striking back in retaliation, he has to strike at its roots. But this would mean challenging the entire old Yeltsin- era order, the whole rotten, corrupt system. Obviously, it will strongly resist any attempts to really affect its interests; this would not be PR, but real policy.
Will Putin take such a risk? We will probably find out very soon. If it's true that Putin intends to create a National Guard answering only to himself, that would be the first step to creating a real hierarchy capable of stiking substantial blows at those who attempt to hinder him and maintain the status quo.
Some fear that Russia will become a police state - but those fears are groundless. A state where bribery can enable any amount of weapons and explosives to be transported from Chechnya to Moscow cannot be a police state. But a society which passes over a certain threshold of fear and senses that no one is protecting it can become angry, vengeful, and aggressive. As they wind the wheel of terrorism, Chechen guerrillas and their Arab patrons don't realize that they are creating a mechanism of anger rather than fear. God forbid that the coiled spring of that mechanism should ever be released. The reaction would be more than the guerrillas or the state could handle.
Thus, in reality there are not many options to choose from: either effective presidential rule supported by a new, real hierarchy - or chaos, inevitably generated by the wish for everything to remain as it is, unchanged.
(Translated by Andrei Ryabochkin)
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