Putin's Wars: The Rise of Russia's New Imperialism

Why this virulent, brutal overreaction by the Kremlin against a small mountain people? In a seminar organized by the Russian human rights organization Memorial that took place in Moscow in March 1995, shortly after the bombardment campaign on Grozny had started, one of the speakers, Nikolay Kandyba, already spoke of a genocide.[31] Another speaker, Mara Polyakova, attacked the criminal character of the war. She criticized the formulation of the presidential decree in which President Yeltsin had announced that the war would be conducted “with all the means that the government has at its disposal.”

A President who acts according to the laws and the Constitution, should say: “with all lawful and constitutional means….[32] He knows very well that not only are such means being used that are allowed by the law and the Constitution, but also those that are not allowed by them. The possibility of the use of such means against the population of one‘s own country is not allowed by any legal norms. Thereby, instead of repressing these acts, the President through [his declarations in] the mass media condones them and takes the responsibility for everything that happens there.[33]

Another participant, Vil Kikot from Moscow State Law Academy, referred to the historical relations between Chechnya and Russia, “in the light of which Russia must seem to be a cruel enemy to Chechens.”[34] He asked for what reason it was impossible for Chechnya to secede from Russia, and he referred to the peaceful secession of Norway from Sweden in 1905.[35] He could also have referred to another, more recent, example, such as Slovakia’s secession from Czechoslovakia. In this case not only did the secession take place in a peaceful way, but also the relative size of the territory and the population was much more important. Chechnya, with its surface of 19,300 square kilometers, occupies a little bit more than 1 percent of the territory of the Russian Federation, and its population of about 1.2 million is even less than 1 percent of Russia’s total population. Inga Mikhaylovskaya of the Russian-American Project Group on Human Rights stated “that the treaty character of the Russian Federation was illusory, since there is no clear legislative statement on the presence or absence of the right of [the] federative subject to leave the federation.”[36]

Sergey Kovalyov, a widely respected former dissident who was appointed by Yeltsin to chair the Presidential Human Rights Commission,[37] remarked that “a negotiated resolution of the crisis was also obstructed by the fact that the federal authorities did not take account of the historical role which Russia had played in the fate of the Chechen people.”[38] According to him, “the majority of Russians are not inclined to feel personal guilt [for what had earlier happened in Chechnya], and this, in my opinion, is a major obstacle on the path of our evolution toward a civilized civil society.”[39] It might be going too far, as did Kovalyov, to demand from the Russians to feel a personal guilt for what happened to the Chechens during the Stalinist era. One can only experience a personal guilt for one’s own deeds. The Russian population should, however, assume a collective, Russian responsibility for what has happened in the small Caucasian republic.[40] The reason why the Russian population was reluctant to assume a historical responsibility can be explained by two factors. The first reason would be its feeling of having been itself a victim of Stalin’s policies. The second reason would be its disenfranchised status: it never was a responsible subject of history, but rather a malleable object in the hands of authoritarian leaders. However, even taking these facts into consideration, the Russian citizens cannot deny that Stalin’s crimes were committed in their name.

On the eve of the second Chechen War, on September 8, 1999, Putin said: “Russia is defending itself. We have been attacked. And therefore we must throw off all syndromes, including the guilt syndrome.”[41] The reason why the Russian leadership did not assume any guilt or historical responsibility is different. Their denial was clearly functional. It had to do with the fact that in post-Soviet Russia Chechnya began to play an increasingly important role in Russia’s internal policy. The political elite acted upon the maxim that if Chechnya did not exist, it should have been invented. For Russian politicians Chechnya was the ideal Prügelknabe, the ideal whipping boy who could be used to consolidate their own grip on power. Sergey Kovalyov already clearly saw this role of the war in Chechnya.

The real cause of the war in Chechnya is neither Grozny nor in the entire Caucasus region: it is in Moscow. The war pushed aside that corner of the curtain that obscured the real power struggle for control of Russia. Unfortunately, it is not liberal, but the most hard-line forces—those from the military-industrial complex and the former KGB—who are celebrating that victory in the power struggle now, …the true goal of the war in Chechnya was to send a clear-cut message to the entire Russian population: “The time for talking about democracy in Russia is up. It’s time to introduce some order in this country and we’ll do it whatever the cost.”[42]

Kovalyov also pointed to the central role of the FSB—the KGB’s successor organization—in starting the First Chechen War. The FSB was not only in the forefront before the war, but equally during the war. “In the early months of the intervention, up to early February 1995,” wrote Vicken Cheterian, “it was the generals of the FSB—the intelligence services—who were obliged to lead the military operations, with catastrophic consequences.”[43] An invisible red line connects, therefore, the war in Afghanistan with the first war in Chechnya, that is, the leading role of the KGB/FSB in instigating and conducting both wars. We will see in the next chapter how the spooks of the Russian secret services equally played an important role in the preparation of the Second Chechen War, which started as Yeltsin’s war, but was, in fact, Putin’s war.

Chapter 11 The Mysterious Apartment Bombings Detonator of the Second Chechen War

The Second Chechen War was “Putin’s War.” This fact was immediately recognized by Sergey Kovalyov, who chose it as the title of an article for the New York Review of Books in February 2000.[1] Putin’s war would surpass the First Chechen War in cruelty, lawlessness, cynicism, and murderous violence. It would, additionally, become the longest war that was fought in Europe after the Second World War. There were, however, five important differences with the First Chechen War.

1. Unlike the First Chechen War, the Second Chechen War consisted of two phases, the first of which was the detonator of the second. The first phase was a secret war against the Russian population; the second phase was an open war against the Chechen population. The first phase consisted of an incursion of Chechen rebels into Dagestan in Russia proper and a series of apartment bombings in the Russian Federation of which Chechen militias were accused. However, soon allegations hinted at a possible implication of the FSB, the Russian secret service.

31

S. Kovalyov, “Neskolko replik po povodu chechenskogo konflikta,” in Pravovye aspekty Chechenskogo krizisa: Materialy seminara, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al. (Moscow: Memorial, 1995), 82.

32

M. Polyakova, “Kriminalnye aspekty voennykh sobytiy v Chechne,” in Pravovye aspekty, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al., 44.

33

Polyakova, “Kriminalnye aspekty voennykh sobytiy v Chechne,” 44–45.

34

Kovalyov, “Summary,” in Pravovye aspekty, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al., 179.

35

Kovalyov, “Neskolko replik po povodu chechenskogo konflikta,” 83.

36

Kovalyov, “Summary,” in Pravovye aspekty, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al., 176. Secession was not an option, neither in Imperial Russia nor in the Soviet Union. This fact was recognized by Yeltsin. “The Soviet empire,” he wrote, “spanning one-sixth of the earth’s surface, was built over the course of many years according, without the shadow of a doubt, to an ironclad plan. The internal contradictions were ignored. No one proposed a scenario that allowed the empire to abandon some of its territories or yield to the formation of new states. They didn’t even think of it.” (Boris Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), 53). The Chechen case was certainly not helped by the inappropriate comparison made by US President Bill Clinton during a press conference in Moscow in April 1996, when Clinton said: “I would remind you that we once had a civil war in our country, in which we lost on a per capita basis far more people than we lost in any of the wars of the twentieth century, over the proposition that Abraham Lincoln gave his life for, that no state had a right to withdrawal from our Union.” (Quoted in Thomas de Waal, “The Chechen Conflict and the Outside World,” Crimes of War Project (April 18, 2003).) http://www.crimesofwar.org/chechnya-mag/chech-waal.html.

37

Sergey Kovalyov stands out as a unique personality in post-Soviet politics. Born in 1930, he studied biology, was arrested as a dissident in 1974, and was sent for seven years to a labor camp in the Perm region. This was followed by an exile of three years. In 1990 he was elected to the Supreme Soviet (Parliament) of the Soviet Union, and from 1993 he was a member of the State Duma. As a founder and cochairman of the human rights organization Memorial he was appointed in 1994 by Yeltsin to become chairman of the Presidential Human Rights Commission. He resigned in 1996 because of the war in Chechnya.

38

Kovalyov, “Summary,” in Pravovye aspekty, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al., 180.

39

Kovalyov, “Neskolko replik po povodu chechenskogo konflikta,” 78.

40

Interesting in this context are Elazar Barkan’s remarks on the important role apologies play in improving the relations between nations. Barkan wrote that “the new international emphasis on morality has been characterized not only by accusing other countries of human rights abuses but also by self-examination. The leaders of the policies of a new internationalism—Clinton, Blair, Chirac, and Schröder—all have previously apologized and repented for gross historical crimes in their own countries and for policies that ignored human rights. These actions did not wipe the slate clean, nor… were they a total novelty or unprecedented. Yet the dramatic shift produced a new scale: Moral issues came to dominate public attention and political issues and displayed the willingness of nations to embrace their own guilt. This national self-reflexivity is the new guilt of nations.” (Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustice (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), xvii.) Although I would prefer to speak of “responsibility of nations” instead of “guilt of nations” (the latter term is too “psychological” and comes too close to collective guilt), I agree with Barkan when he writes that the “interaction between perpetrator and victim is a new form of political negotiation that enables the rewriting of memory and historical identity in ways that both can share” (viii).

41

Quoted in Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, 335. Yeltsin added: “But the guilt syndrome persists. There is a great deal of misunderstanding about Chechnya, even in Russia itself. But more often it’s the West trying to instill this feeling of guilt in us” (ibid.). Yeltsin, tellingly, referred to a guilt syndrome, qualifying guilt feelings as some kind of a psychological disorder. Yeltsin apparently rejected any guilt and considered attempts at putting the crimes committed against the Chechen population on the agenda a deliberate policy of the West to weaken Russia.

42

Quoted in Emma Gilligan, Defending Human Rights in Russia: Sergei Kovalyov, Dissident and Human Rights Commissioner 1969–2003 (Abingdon: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 203.

43

Cheterian, War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia’s Troubled Frontier, 259.

1

Sergei Kovalev, “Putin’s War,” New York Review of Books (February 10, 2000). (Note that Kovalyov’s name can also be spelled Kovalev.)