#16 - JRL 8377 - JRL Home
From: "Vlad Sobell" <Vlad.Sobell@dir.co.uk>
Subject: Russia after Beslan
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004

Daiwa Institute of Research Ltd.
20th September 2004
Russia after Beslan
Putin’s strengthening of regional oversight is a return to Russia’s political tradition, hopefully as a prelude to authentic Russian democracy
By Vlad Sobell
vlad.sobell@dir.co.uk

--The terrorist atrocity in Beslan has imparted another indelible mark on Russia’s post-communist evolution. Despite their outrage at the apparent ineptitude by the authorities and the security forces, the population is likely to rally around President Putin and will support his response.

--Since one of Putin’s responses has been the strengthening of Kremlin’s control over regional governors, the president has come in for a fresh wave of international and domestic demonising. This note argues that while Russian democracy has probably been diminished, the net practical impact of the proposed changes will be insignificant.

--Rather than depicting Putin as a latter day Mussolini, it may be useful to consider that genuine Russian democracy needs to organically develop from Russia’s own political traditions, not from yet another abortive experiment with mechanical imports of foreign concepts. There is still hope!

--President Putin’s thinking must also be judged in the context of his priorities ­ the preservation of the Federation’s integrity in the face of oligarchic corruption and terrorist insurgency. Russia is more vulnerable than Western armchair democracy builders might imagine. Given the lingering Western reluctance ­ in some quarters, at least ­ to unambiguously accept Russia’s legitimacy as the successor of the rump USSR, Putin’s apparently “paranoid” response is understandable.

Russia’s 9/11

In early September Russia experienced yet another tremor certain to impart an indelible mark on its post-Soviet evolution ­ the terrorist attack in the North Ossetian town of Beslan, which resulted in the death of a large number of hostages, half of them children . This outrage was preceded by terrorist downing of two airliners and a suicide bombing in Moscow.

The Beslan atrocity has rightly been compared with the 11th September 2001 events in the United States: although Russia, unlike the US, has long been the target of Chechen-led terrorism, the methodical slaughter of Beslan schoolchildren has plumbed a new depth of moral depravity, not only in Russia’s but the global terror experience.

Events of these proportions cannot but shake up not only the authorities of the state in question, but also the population’s psyche. On the one hand, they generate a wave of revulsion against the authorities for failing to prevent the attack and/or “botching up” the rescue operation. (Incidentally, any objective assessment must be that in Beslan the authorities faced a no-win situation, whatever the scale of alleged mismanagement). On the other hand, they also fuel national cohesion and solidarity, as occurs at wartime.

Russia has clearly been no exception, with the (supposedly cowed!) media having a field day, unsparingly attacking the security organs ­ widely seen as corrupt and incompetent ­ and ridiculing the misleading early official accounts of the atrocity. But it has also displayed the opposite, with the population ready to accept President Putin’s interpretation of the situation and his response: chiefly the measures to strengthen the country’s cohesion as the basic condition for further development of the defences against terrorism. A poll taken after Beslan revealed that over 70% of those questioned believed that Putin should remain president, with only 16% saying he should resign. A Moscow rally organised by the Yabloko opposition party to protest President Putin’s changes in the political system reportedly attracted a mere handful of some 30 participants.

Putin’s coup?

The Beslan carnage, and the regime’s response, has also produced strong reverberations in the regional and international dimension. While the Western media and governments of course professed unconditional sympathy for the victims of terrorism, these sentiments have generally been accompanied by a fresh wave of censure regarding the Russian government’s policies towards its intractable Chechen quagmire. Often the implication has been that the regime is in one way or another indirectly co-responsible: had Moscow handled Chechnya less clumsily, the terrorist outrages might not have occurred.

Furthermore, since some of President Putin’s response apparently amount to a diminution of democracy (see the final section of this paper), the legions of the president’s foreign and domestic critics have concluded that Putin has callously misused the terrorist attacks to abolish democracy and establish his personal dictatorship. Accordingly, the demonising of Putin has reached a new pitch, with Russia’s president being likened to some of the worst villains in history. For example, no lesser a scholar than Zbigniew Brzezinski, once a leading Sovietologist and the national security advisor under former US president Jimmy Carter, has darkly intoned that Putin’s rationale for restricting democracy “is reminiscent of Hitler’s use of the Reichstag fire to destroy the remnants of democracy in Germany”. The analysts’ reaction has generally been very negative, with commentators using labels such as “coup”, “putch”, “counter-revolution” and “restoration”. International censure, most notably from the US and EU, has followed.

Putin’s fears for Russia’s integrity

It may be useful to examine President Putin’s own thoughts in the hope that we may get a better understanding of what is going on. The reading from the “horse’s mouth” might provide a chink of light in these confusing times.

This exercise has been made much easier by President’s Putin’s readiness to offer his views on the situation, first in his brief address to the nation on 4th September and secondly in his unprecedented meeting with a group of Western journalists and academics at his Novo-Ogarevo residence in 6th September. Although fragmentary and incomplete, the press coverage of Putin’s discussion nevertheless permits sufficient insight into the Russian leader’s perception of his country’s predicament.

Putin’s assessment is subtle and complex, thus eluding a neat summary. Nevertheless, its “centre of gravity” is his preoccupation with Russia’s exposure to the threat of international Islamist terrorism, which has been allowed to emerge, like a genie from a bottle, in the last phases of the Cold War and in the immediate post-Soviet period. The Soviet-US rivalry in Afghanistan gave rise to Bin Laden, while Soviet mistreatment of the Chechens as well as post-Soviet Russian errors in Chechnya (which Putin readily acknowledges) have provided the soil for the likes of Shamil Basayev, the Chechen warlord who has claimed responsibility for the Beslan massacre and other attacks. In this scheme, the objectives of the Beslan attack can be seen not only as the blow to Russia, but a device to further inflame regional tensions in the Caucasus, thus preparing conditions for the creation of a Taliban-like entity in the region.

Whereas his domestic and Western critics see the post-Soviet Caucasus and Central Asia as patchwork of states (with varying degrees of stability, and struggling against Moscow’s “imperialism”), the Russian leader sees a tinderbox, as tensions long suppressed and/or created by the Soviet juggernaut surface. Where Putin’s critics focus on Russia’s alleged failure to match Western democratic standards, the Russian president is concerned with a potential fatal threat to his country’s integrity and ultimately its survival.

The story does not end here, for an important strand of Putin’s reading of the situation is his belief that certain elements in the West ­ thus nominally on Russia’s side in the terrorism war ­ are actually hoping that terrorism will bring about Russia’s disintegration; at a minimum, they are, in his view, hoping to bring enough pressure to bear on Moscow to keep Russia preoccupied with its survival and hence externally weak. As he put it in his post-Beslan TV address: “Some would like to tear off a ‘juicy piece’ from us. Others help them. They help them because they believe that Russia, as one of the major nuclear powers, is still a threat to them. A threat that should thus be removed”. Putin also repeated this theme in his Novo-Ogarevo discussion, while pointing to the folly of flirting with the prospects of Russia’s disintegration: Russia’s collapse would trigger massive, continent-wide instability, which would, again, be exploited by the Islamists, ultimately rebounding on those in the West currently playing with this particular fire.

President Putin can of course be dismissed as living in a world of feverish paranoia and conspiracy (after all, as no commentator fails to remind us, he started his career as a KGB spy). Indeed, some analysts now implicitly or explicitly worry that the president has “lost the plot”. Or, to put it in the context of the above analogies with the likes of Hitler, he has either lost the plot (and is being manipulated by evil plotters in his retinue), or he understands the plot only too well, being the chief evil plotter himself.

We need not wait to see how this dilemma pans out to appreciate that any credible leader in Putin’s situation must of necessity entertain such thoughts. It is very much a part of his job description. The facts speak clearly. The demise of communism has been marked not merely by the advance of democracy and prosperity. Another side of the coin have been the bloody ethnic conflicts in Yugoslavia and former USSR, with Chechnya plunging into a classic chaotic “failed state”. Should the resource-rich Russian Federation, whose state structures ­ including the army and security forces ­ have been fatally corroded by disinvestments and corruption succumb to these pressures, the ensuing vacuum would lead to a cataclysm of global proportions. A leader ignoring such a threat would indeed be “losing the plot”.

As for Putin’s complaints that some “forces” in the West are actually colluding with the terrorists, here too he has a reason for suspicion. The Russian government has long expressed its concern over what it sees as Western double standards in allegedly harbouring the representatives of what it considers as terrorist organisations. From Moscow’s point of view, such a conduct is equivalent to Moscow hosting the representatives of Bin Laden.

Indeed, the persistent and reason-defying Russophobia in influential official Western quarters and media can perhaps be explained only by these quarters’ inability to unambiguously accept the legitimacy of the Russian Federation as the leading post-Soviet state. Assuming that the Soviet Union was “illegitimate” because it was oppressive, is it not logical that Moscow’s writ over its largest (and richest!) chunk should also be pronounced “illegitimate” ­ on the same grounds of “lacking democracy” and “ethnic oppression”? The Russian president may well be exaggerating, but it is his duty to remain open to all potential threats.

The above reading of Russia’s post-Soviet predicament also explains what Putin’s critics consider as his obsession with Russia’s oligarchs. Ever since his arrival at the scene in 2000, Putin has talked about the need to rebuild the collapsed state, restore the central control over the Federation and keep the oligarchs (whose wealth enabled them to manipulate the fragile democracy at will) at bay.

This struggle ­ as documented in the clash with Menatep-Yukos ­ has overshadowed all other conflicts on the Russian political scene and has been so uncompromising and bitter as to cause a costly “collateral damage” to Russia’s case as an investment destination. The most recent developments ­ chiefly the forthcoming takeover by Gazprom of the state-controlled oil company Rossneft leading to the strengthening of state control over the gas giant ­ confirm that the plan has been to establish the state as the key player in Russia’s energy sector ­ the objective pursued by former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky. This is no small prize, considering the current state and future outlook for global energy demand.

In the president’s thinking, both the menace of the Federation’s implosion and the oligarchic carve-up of its resources represent but two sides of the same coin: an alarming vision of Russia decaying into a fragmented territory of the former USSR, with the various bits, controlled by the oligarchs, becoming mere resource-rich appendages of the global economy.

Again, Putin’s critics imply that such visions are paranoid and that the fight with the oligarchs is certainly not worth the price of the erosion of democracy in Russia. (A less charitable, more conspiratorial, strand of criticism is alleging that Putin and his siloviki cadres are actually driven by their own self-interest, wanting to appropriate Russia’s assets for themselves ). Nevertheless, it is hard to see why any credible leader in Putin’s position would not want to ensure that the state retains (or, rather, restores) the ultimate discretion over the country’s strategic resources.

The net effect of Putin’s political reforms is likely to be insignificant

The criticism of President Putin’s “coup” ­ the replacement of direct elections of regional governors by presidential appointments, subject to approval by the local legislatures ­ has correctly focused on the notion that centralisation by the Kremlin is precisely the wrong and counter-productive tool for the combat of terrorism and Russia’s disintegration. At a minimum, it must be acknowledged that centralisation has little or nothing to do with the fight against terror. (Indeed, it has been assumed that Putin had planned the move anyway, merely throwing all hesitation to the wind in the wake of the recent escalation of terrorism). While the standard theory sees the expansion of democracy, decentralisation and civic society as the most effective weapon, Putin ­ true to type, as his critics would argue ­ has reached for the opposite. Indeed, in his discussion with Western journalists the president left no doubts about his views, arguing that democracy can be “counter-productive” unless it is in conformity with the development of society.

We concede that Putin has probably over-reacted and committed a major error. He and his supporters argue that the proposed new system for the installation and control of regional bosses is superior, because their election by direct vote has been open to abuse by the dreaded oligarchs. The beefed up centralised control is thus merely the logical conclusion of the struggle with the oligarchs. But genuine democracy and civic society is unlikely to be stimulated by a greater dose of Putin-style “managed democracy”. Oligarchs are not always irreparably corrupt, while everyone knows that democracy everywhere in the world would not exist unless fuelled by cash. Besides, the bureaucratic appointments system is in reality likely to turn up just as corrupt and inefficient as the current one based on the direct regional elections.

Even conceding that the regional elections were in any case “heavily influenced” by the Kremlin, and that the net practical impact of Putin’s proposed changes will be virtually zero (or the acknowledging in practice what has been happening informally anyway), it has probably been unwise to generate so much domestic and international opprobrium for such an insignificant and/or unproven gain.

Putin asserts Russia’s sovereignty

Yet granted that all this is true, an accurate interpretation of recent developments in Russia would still be lacking. The idea that post-totalitarian Russia could simply mechanically transfer Western democratic procedures and models to its soil now looks hopelessly naïve. Mechanical transfers in Russian history have regularly turned sour or as a great disaster ­ Marxism too was borrowed from the West. It is now clear that the error was repeated in the 1990’s, when under the rubric of liberal reforms Russia’s assets were privatised and parked abroad. President Putin has signalled that he is not interested in this kind of “democracy”, a stand apparently widely supported by the population. His latest sin is that, in the face of terrorist outrages, he has dared to draw his strategy to its logical conclusion, regardless of what Western pundits may say.

An influential and persuasive Russian school of thought argues that before the modernising regime of Vladimir Putin can build the foundations of genuine Russian democracy, the country needs to re-discover its oldest political traditions. Only then can genuine, democratic culture and meaningful political discourse along its lines evolve. A shortcut ­ such as importing democracy through the likes of Yabloko (now widely derided by the population) or allowing the country’s assets to be used for financial rescue of London football clubs ­ simply will not do. Russia has been on this path too many times before for a responsible leader to indulge in such fantasies again.

Putin’s constitutional “coup” should, therefore, be interpreted primarily as a fallback on these traditions. Russia has never been a “country”, but a multi-ethnic empire, which has expanded eastwards and southwards from its Moscow/St Petersburg centre, with regional governors centrally appointed and monitored. While re-creating the empire, the Bolshevik regime imposed on it an infelicitous federal structure: the system looked democratic and federalist, but everyone knew that in practice it was more authoritarian than its Tsarist version. A superficial federalism, in line with mechanically imported Western models, was introduced in the 1990’s as the central state imploded: this has produced more genuine democracy, but also an unprecedented degree of the abuse of democracy by the new moneyed class. Putin is not abolishing democracy, but scrapping a flawed experiment and starting again.

Of course, as we have pointed out above, we cannot be sure that the retreat is the optimum way to proceed at this point. Instinctively, however, it seems that the judgement of an elected and popular Russian leader is more credible than that of his foreign detractors, especially of those drawing naïve historical analogies. Falling back on its own political traditions and ending the mechanical import from the West would amount to a new historic departure for Russia.