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Moscow Times
September 10, 2004
Silence of Political Elite Is Deafening
By Francesca Mereu
Staff Writer

As the 52-hour hostage siege came to a bloody finale Friday, Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov announced the government's privatization plans for 2005 on state television.

During the standoff, he addressed the issue once, a full day after it started, and ordered his government to "normalize the situation as soon as possible."

The rest of the country's political elite, meanwhile, kept painfully quiet. State Duma deputies did not cut short their vacations to discuss the school crisis, and only a few have commented about it since it ended.

Vyacheslav Volodin, deputy head of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, which controls the Duma, could not be bothered to discuss Beslan when approached by a reporter on Stary Arbat last Saturday. "I have the right to have a private life," he said.

Perhaps the best explanation for the deafening silence was inadvertently given last Sunday by an anchorman at Kremlin-controlled Rossia television. Explaining why the Beslan crisis had ended badly, he blamed "generals, the military and civilians" for refusing to act "until the president gives them an order."

In President Vladimir Putin's Russia, the political elite keep silent out of fear of antagonizing the Kremlin, and they particularly did not want to talk themselves into a corner during the school siege, said Igor Bunin, director of the Center for Political Technologies.

"Nobody but the president said anything," Bunin said.

"Our system has been transformed into one that is more administrative than political. In this kind of system, everyone waits for the president to speak first in a crisis," he said.

Politicians weren't always like this. Duma deputies convened a special session in 1999 to condemn the NATO air strikes in Yugoslavia. Although they were not on vacation that time, they were on summer break in 1998 when rushed back to Moscow to address the Aug. 17 debt default.

When the country faced a hostage crisis in June 1995, then-Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin held telephone negotiations with guerrilla leader Shamil Basayev -- on national television. Basayev led a group of rebels in taking 2,000 hostages in the southern city of Budyonnovsk and issued the same demand made in Beslan: for federal troops to leave Chechnya.

Fradkov -- who analysts see more as a figurehead than a prime minister but was nevertheless appointed by Putin in March as the country's second-in-command -- has had little to say about Beslan even in the week after the crisis ended. At a Cabinet meeting Thursday, he said the government should take measures to assist the town's families.

Politicians and bureaucrats should not be blamed for their silence, analysts said, because they are just cogs in a Putin-built system in which all power is concentrated in the Kremlin.

"Institutions have been dramatically weakened. Public politics is generally over in Russia, and this is the result of Putin's rule," said Masha Lipman, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

"His consistent policy is not to have any political opposition inside."

Putin thought that putting everyone under his strict control would let him manage the country better, Lipman said. "But as we see, this reduction of the political system by ridding the country of political rivals is not helping to keep the country secure or, in fact, under control," she said.

Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panorama think tank, said the Duma was able to decide on its own whether it should call an emergency session when Boris Yeltsin was president.

"This time, the Duma was waiting for orders from the Kremlin, but they didn't come," he said.

"The Duma has lost its role to such an extent that Surkov has simply forgotten about it," he said, referring to Vladislav Surkov, the deputy head of the presidential administration who supervises United Russia's activities in the Duma. "They even forgot to pretend the Duma has a role."

Oleg Kovalyov, head of the Duma Management Committee, said the Duma will hold its plenary session on Sept. 22 as planned. He said the session will be devoted to Beslan, not the results of the Olympic Games as planned.

Four committee chairmen met last Friday to discuss measures to increase security in airports, metro stations, stadiums, outdoor markets and other public venues.

"The deputies will discuss these measures on Sept. 22," Kovalyov said.

Deputies are not the only ones who have been silent this month. Senior security and law enforcement officers have kept out of sight. The few opposition politicians who have spoken out got little media exposure.

"There hasn't been a single person -- politicians or experts -- offering his own opinion on television. Television airwaves were completely sterile, completely purged of anything that might stir up public sentiment," Lipman said.

Curiously, even Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky, a vocal critic of Putin in the previous Duma, has not uttered a word against the president, confining his criticism instead to the crisis in general and how federal forces handled it.

Yavlinksy and his party failed to get into the Duma in elections last December, and the Communists lost half their seats, in what Lipman said was a lesson from the Kremlin to the opposition. The lesson appears to be well-learned because during Beslan, politicians kept silent, she said.

"Once intimidated, these people are unwilling to break their silence at risk of infuriating the Kremlin. This is the political scene that has been created in Russia," Lipman said.