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Moscow Times
September 13, 2004
Painted Into a Corner
By Yevgenia Albats
President Vladimir Putin is caught in a trap of his own making. By placing his trust entirely in his old KGB colleagues, and by shutting out all other interest groups and institutions -- such as business, political parties and the press -- Putin has left himself no room for maneuver.
In the aftermath of the tragedy in Beslan, however, it has become clear that the president can no longer rely on his power base, much less trust it. During the hostage crisis and after its catastrophic resolution, law enforcement and the security services consistently lied in order to avoid taking responsibility.
In a meeting with foreign journalists and analysts last Monday, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, himself a former intelligence officer, said that there were no ethnic Chechens among the terrorists who seized the school in Beslan. His statement was made on background, apparently intended for policy briefings in Washington, London and other Western capitals.
But it was an outright lie. The Russian media have carried reports, based on information from the government's crisis headquarters in North Ossetia, indicating that at least six of the terrorists were from Chechnya. State Duma deputies who were present in Beslan during and after the crisis have corroborated this information.
Ivanov's lie was obviously intended to divert the world's attention from the failures of the Kremlin's military and security policy in Chechnya, and to present the tragedy as the result of the invisible, faceless phantom known as "international terrorism."
In a televised meeting with Putin a couple days later, Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov -- who is in charge of the investigation into Beslan -- announced the official body count. Yet as a number of newspapers reported, Ustinov's figures were low even according to other government estimates. While the official death toll rose to some 330 over the weekend, a source close to the Putin administration has put the actual number of dead in Beslan at close to 600.
In a town as small as Beslan, the authorities obviously won't be able to conceal the truth forever. So why does the government continue to lie? According to my Kremlin source, one reason is that delivering the bad news in dribs and drabs rather than all at once will dampen the public backlash against the government.
Second, lower casualty figures make the Federal Security Service, which headed up the rescue operation in Beslan, look less incompetent. In an operation like this, a death toll of 20 to 30 percent is considered unavoidable. But if 600 of the roughly 1,200 hostages -- 50 percent -- have died, this would indicate that the FSB failed miserably in Beslan.
The Interior Ministry, headed by another KGB alumnus, Rashid Nurgaliyev, has been serving up its own string of falsehoods. One day it announced that the terrorists had bribed police on their way to Beslan, then turned around and said they hadn't. First the ministry said that the terrorists had accomplices in the local police and had planted explosives and weapons at the school in advance; then it reversed its story. And on it goes.
It doesn't really matter whether Putin reads the papers, or if he relies on his inner circle for information. The president has painted himself into a corner. He has packed the government with security service alumni, who are also busily taking over the country's energy sector. And the chekists know that they have nothing to fear from the president. Unlike his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, Putin has no other power base.
In fact, the situation is even worse. Putin faces mounting pressure from the most conservative wing of the Moscow political establishment to tighten the screws and adopt a harder line at home and abroad. Rodina, a nationalist faction in the State Duma, has launched an aggressive campaign calling for the government of Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov to step down.
Rodina is known to enjoy the backing of many former and current members of the security services who are considered hard-liners even by the chekists' own standards. Their goals are clear. The first is to get rid of any remaining reform-minded moderates within the government and take control of the country's financial and natural resources. The second is to cut Putin off from the influence of the few liberals -- such as Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref and Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov -- who are trying to resist pressure from the bureaucrats in epaulets and to keep economic reforms going.
In short, the chekists want Putin to become a dictator along the lines of Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, thereby assuring their own survival. Will this help the state in the battle against terrorism? Ekho Moskvy radio asked its listeners if Putin could win this battle. Of the 5,900 people who called in, 93 percent said "no."
Yevgenia Albats, who hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio on Sundays, contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.