Putin
And The Chechen War:
Together Forever
By Alexander
Golts
Moscow
Times
14 February, 2004
The
piercing wail of ambulance sirens, victims' bodies covered in blood,
fear in the eyes of those who managed to escape unharmed this time.
This was the scene after the storming of the Dubrovka Theater in October
2002, and after the terrorist attack at a rock concert in Tushino last
July, and after a bomb exploded on 1st Tverskaya-Yamskaya Ulitsa less
than a week later, and after the blast outside the National Hotel in
December. Last weekend we saw it all again after the explosion in a
metro car at Avtozavodskaya station.
President Vladimir
Putin may look nothing like Aphrodite, but he was born of the same element.
According to legend, the sea foam from which the Greek goddess emerged
was mixed with the blood of Uranus, castrated by his son Cronus. As
a politician, Putin rose from the blood and muck of the Chechen war,
and they have left their mark on his entire presidency.
Endless war in the
North Caucasus has proven to be Putin's all-purpose campaign strategy.
In the summer of 1999, the ruling elite was at a loss. Boris Yeltsin
was clearly not up to running the country, but no suitable successor
could be found. The obvious candidates -- Sergei Stepashin, Nikolai
Bordyuzha and Sergei Kiriyenko -- weren't presidential material. But
then Chechen separatists staged a raid into neighboring Dagestan. Putin
directed the operation that drove the fighters from Dagestan, and after
two apartment buildings were blown up in Moscow, Putin launched an "anti-terrorist
operation" in Chechnya. Suddenly Putin was the No. 1 politician
in the country.
Surprisingly, the
heavy losses suffered by Russian troops in Chechnya and the generals'
failure to establish control over the breakaway republic did nothing
to dent Putin's popularity. To give Putin his due, his modus operandi
from the day he became prime minister has differed markedly from the
leadership style of former Kremlin bosses. Beginning in the 1980s, Soviet
and then Russian leaders did everything possible to avoid taking responsibility
for ordering the use of military force. Decades passed before we learned
who had made the decision to send troops into Afghanistan. Like Mikhail
Gorbachev, Yeltsin preferred not to create a paper trail when he sent
troops into combat. When things went wrong, the top brass took the heat.
You may recall that after sending troops into Chechnya in 1994, Yeltsin
suddenly underwent a nose operation. At least a week went by before
the leadership explained anything to the people.
As prime minister,
with no formal control over the armed forces or the security agencies,
Putin nevertheless took full responsibility for starting the second
Chechen war. His trip to Grozny in a fighter jet showed everyone just
what they wanted to see. The elderly were moved by the similarity to
the famous scene of Stalin's arrival in the movie "The Fall of
Berlin." Middle-aged Russians were impressed by Putin's fitness
-- after a flight in a supersonic war plane, he was able to haul himself
out of the cockpit. Young people liked his cool, tough image: a mixture
of Batman and James Bond.
Starting "small
victorious wars" to boost a leader's popularity is nothing new.
But even Putin's spin doctors could not have foreseen that his authority
would not suffer despite his failure to emerge victorious or even to
keep the war small.
The war's value
for the presidential campaign was obvious to both sides from the start,
during the battle for Grozny. The Chechen fighters were operating on
the assumption that the Kremlin would not tolerate substantial losses
on the eve of the election. This is why Chechen detachments flouted
military logic and remained in Grozny after it was surrounded, continuing
to offer fierce resistance.
Putin's campaign
managers also assumed that heavy Russian losses would hurt his chances
at the polls. As the fighting in Grozny took its toll, they feared that
by election day in June 2000 Putin's support would have evaporated.
This concern probably explains Yeltsin's decision to step down early,
bringing the election forward by several months.
As we now know,
those fears were groundless. Heavy Russian losses had no impact on Putin's
poll numbers. The four years of Putin's first term, during which the
war raged on unabated, have made clear that Russian voters are prepared
to endure endless lies from their leaders about the latest "phase"
of the "operation" in Chechnya, as well as a staggering number
of Russian dead.
I doubt that any
Russian politician today would have the nerve to remind Putin of the
promises he made back in 2000. He vowed "to crush the terrorist
scum" once and for all, to restore law and order in Chechnya and
to ensure the safety of the Russian people. Realizing that it would
be a good idea to restore at least the semblance of order in Chechnya
before the recent State Duma elections, the Kremlin staged a constitutional
referendum, arranged for Akhmad Kadyrov to become president and then
rigged the parliamentary vote so blatantly that even Central Elections
Commission chief Alexander Veshnyakov couldn't keep quiet about it.
None of this changes
the basic facts in Chechnya. The army has more or less taken control
of the entire region, destroying large groups of separatists along the
way. But it seems never to have occurred to the generals who proudly
announced the destruction of all organized resistance in Chechnya that
from that moment on, the fighters, operating in small groups, gained
a tactical advantage. A war of diversions and land mines gripped the
entire region. To establish control the army was forced to divide its
forces among garrisons all over the republic. In the absence of large
groups of fighters, the army's greatest advantage, its aviation and
artillery, became useless.
We have come full
circle and are back at the first Chechen war. Once more soldiers are
holed up in their fortified checkpoints and headquarters, allowing the
fighters the freedom to move at will. As before, army checkpoints have
become collection points for tribute payments. Federal forces are defending
themselves, and brutally and blindly avenging their dead comrades in
"sweep operations." They kidnap people, torture them and demand
ransom from their families, trying at the same time to recruit their
victims by means of forced confessions and neighbors' fearful denunciations.
Such "informants" are in no position to learn of future terrorist
attacks, of course. The army's tactics neither reduce the number of
separatists nor break their will.
The failure of the
so-called power ministries to crush armed resistance in Chechnya is
all the more glaring when you consider that under Putin, the generals
have been given free rein in the region for the last four years. Yet
these same generals now say the conflict could drag on for decades.
The only way the government can justify the fact that Russian soldiers
are dying every week is by claiming that thanks to the war in Chechnya,
the wave of terrorism has not washed over the rest of Russia.
The Chechen terrorists
therefore focus their attacks on Moscow. When metro cars blow up, it
becomes harder to follow Channel One's advice and "think about
the good things," a slogan that pretty much sums up Putin's election
campaign.
Russian voters are
just happy that Putin has demonstrated decisiveness, persistence and
force of will. In his book "In the First Person," Putin declared
that his primary mission as president was to solve the Chechen problem.
Under his leadership the country has been at war for four years. Now
he plans to devote his second term to the same senseless, brutal "anti-terrorist
operation." The war is more than just a campaign stunt for Russia's
second president -- it seems to be his means of existence.
Alexander Golts, deputy editor of Yezhenedelny Zhurnal, contributed
this comment to The Moscow Times.