Russia after Beslan

Russia after Beslan

Sep 16th 2004 | moscow | from PRINT EDITION

“WHAT country will we wake up in tomorrow?” demanded a banner headline in Komsomolskaya Pravda, a daily that was once the official organ of the Soviet Communist youth movement. The best answer anyone can give, in the light of President Vladimir Putin's latest political moves, is that tomorrow's Russian state might look uncomfortably like yesterday's one. More clearly than at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the spectre of absolute dictatorship seems to be inching closer, not fading away.

On September 13th Mr Putin stunned liberal opinion both in Russia and abroad by announcing a series of measures that will enhance the Kremlin's power and make life harder for dissenting voices. Inevitably, he justified them by citing the need to improve security after hundreds of adults and children had died in the school taken hostage by terrorists in Beslan.

Under the new measures, the governors of Russia's 89 regions will be chosen by the president (and then confirmed by local assemblies), instead of being directly elected. Mr Putin also plans to abolish the first-past-the-post contests that currently fill half the seats in the parliament. In future, the entire Duma will be made up from party lists, which will squeeze out independent legislators.

The trend of strengthening the Kremlin's control has been obvious ever since Mr Putin became president in 2000. He had already trimmed the wings of the governors by removing them from the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament; by appointing presidential emissaries to watch over them; and by centralising the appointments of regional police chiefs, prosecutors and security-agency heads. As for the Duma, it is already dominated by pro-Kremlin parties.

To many, Mr Putin seems to be exploiting Beslan to satisfy his appetite for power. Even if he really does want to correct the failures that the shootout exposed, his political tinkering will not help. On September 15th, America's George Bush expressed his concern about the undermining of democracy in Russia in unusually direct terms. But the Kremlin rejected all outside criticism.

As more details about Beslan story emerge, it is becoming clear that the lessons of previous hostage crises had not been learned. Local troops and authorities, including the FSB security service, were largely left to fend for themselves, with almost no federal officials lending support or experience. A haphazard approach to crisis management meant that under-equipped troops lost control of the situation to armed civilians. According to one report, some troops had to ask the civilians for spare bullets. Some federal orders fell on deaf ears.

Afterwards, agencies scrambled to shirk responsibility. This led to a bewildering range of official statements about how the terrorists got to the school, how many there were, and where they were from. An initial claim that there were ten Arabs among them, which Mr Putin seized on to link the attack to “international terrorism”, seems to have evaporated into thin air.

Does the president understand these weaknesses? Some other steps he is taking are designed to give the impression, to Russia and the world, that he does. He promised an inquiry into Beslan. He also promised a nationwide crisis-management system; a budget increase for the army and security services (an extra $1.7 billion had already been pledged last month, after two aircraft were blown up by suicide bombers); stiffer punishments for corrupt officials who give out false passports; a nationalities ministry to keep an eye on ethnic issues; and a federal commission for the northern Caucasus, whose main job will be “the improvement of the standard of living in the region.”

To Putin-watchers, the last item does signal a shift. Though he still blames foreign terrorists for stirring up trouble in the northern Caucasus, he also admitted in this week's speech that “the roots of terror lie in the continuing massive unemployment in the region, and the lack of an effective social policy”. He dwelt on that issue at length during a meeting of nearly four hours with foreign experts and journalists, just two days after the Beslan siege.

“Maybe he is only now realising that the poverty and social problems are the roots of these conflicts,” says Fiona Hill of America's Brookings Institution, who was at the meeting. Moreover, says Ms Hill, Mr Putin and his advisers understand how corruption has rotted the security services to the point of uselessness; they talk in private as well as in public of the need to “clean things up at the local level”. But there is no plan for how to do it. “This is an opening for the West,” she believes.

Indeed, to her and some others, Mr Putin's barrage of measures is an instinctive reaction of a leadership that fears it has lost control. Many of his moves look like frantic window-dressing. The nationalities minister will be Vladimir Yakovlev, an ex-governor of St Petersburg and one of Mr Putin's political foes. “He couldn't have chosen someone who knows less about the subject,” says Rustam Arifjanov, editor of Natsional, a magazine about Russia's ethnic groups.

Without a real anti-corruption strategy, says Alexander Belkin at the Council for Foreign and Defence Policy, a Moscow think-tank, “making changes to the structure of command at the top is worthless.” Mr Putin is trying to regain the upper hand in the northern Caucasus by sending his own Kremlin chief of staff, Dmitry Kozak, to oversee the region and the new federal commission. But Mr Kozak was also in charge of a grand plan for government administrative reform, and that now risks falling by the wayside.

As for the changes in the political system, they could eventually prove counter-productive, as well as irrelevant in the fight against terror. The more that Mr Putin consolidates power, the more he becomes the only person to blame when things go wrong. Muscovites are admittedly not a balanced sample of the country at large, but it says something that, in an opinion poll by the Moscow-based Levada Centre after Beslan, just a third of those questioned thought the terrorists “bear responsibility first and foremost” for the attack, with the rest split almost evenly between blaming the security services for being unable to prevent it, and “Russia's leadership, for continuing the war in Chechnya”.

If Russia's spooks know anything, it is how to keep unpopular regimes in power. But woe betide the country if ever-more draconian measures became Mr Putin's only way of staving off ever-growing public discontent.

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