This comment reinforces what Rice once said on the Charlie Rose show, in 2009 I believe, about “Russians being better off than in the USSR,” again making it sound like the 1990s had never happened. Arguing degrees of repression in a theoretical or historical debate is one thing, but doing it when people are being jailed and killed is immoral. Even if the water has receded, a few feet is still enough to drown in, especially if your hands are tied.
Yes, the Cold War was over, but Putin was already fighting the next war and it wasn’t in Chechnya or against terror. Putin’s war was against Russian democracy and anyone who might stand in the way of his mission to destroy it. Those 9/11 phone calls to Bush were preemptive strikes, a targeted maneuver by Putin to undermine potential American influence against his crackdowns at home.
Unfortunately, the tactic worked quite well and it wasn’t until Putin invaded Georgia in 2008 that Bush and his administration admitted as much and stiffened their policies. By then Bush was on his way out, and Russian democracy was on its deathbed and beyond the help that foreign pressure could have provided when Putin was still vulnerable at the start of the decade.
Looking at what happened inside Russia after 9/11 is also a good way to examine one of the most critical patterns of Putin’s rule: the less pressure he felt from the outside, the more dictatorial he became inside Russia. Despite his tough-guy persona and rhetoric, Putin, especially in the first few years in office, was sensitive to external pressure over civil liberties and other abuses. It was only later, when the oil money was rushing in and all his potential domestic rivals had been destroyed, that Putin would go out of his way to flaunt his immunity to outside pressure.
During the dark days of the USSR the world understood that people like Andrei Sakharov, Sergei Kovalev, and Natan Sharansky were heroes for their nonviolent resistance. The modern Putin style of oppression is different and it has many advocates in the West, who refuse to distinguish between Putin’s regime and the Russian people it oppresses. For example, after I appeared on a panel discussion on BBC television in 2006, on a show recorded in Moscow but of course not aired in Russia, a British viewer wrote in amazed at how freely we said things that, he said, would have led to our execution not long ago. This attitude, that Russians are “better off now” and should count our blessings, has been very harmful to our democratic cause. It validates repression with absurd relativism.
The Cold War and the threat of nuclear destruction focused everyone’s attention very well on every move Russia made. As soon as that threat faded, Western leaders preferred to keep their heads in the sand and to pretend everything was fine, especially when they had more urgent and visible problems to deal with after 9/11. It took a generation of an existential threat and the real and imagined menace of Communism to produce an active moral foreign policy constituency in the West. It only took a few years for governments to outsource human rights to NGOs like Amnesty International. Human rights were no longer government business.
Meanwhile, with nothing more to worry about from the outside, for Putin the coast was clear. He continued to “consolidate” the media by shutting down independent television stations and making it clear to the press that certain topics were off limits. The harassment of the political opposition became increasingly routine. Even for established politicians and successful businesspeople it was no longer possible to oppose Putin’s principles or policies without taking on considerable risk of losing your career, your freedom, or your life.
Any doubts about the Putin regime’s willingness to spill blood were erased in the 2002 hostage crisis at the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow. A small army of Chechen militants took nearly 850 people prisoner for four days in what would become known as the “Nord-Ost” siege, for the name of the Russian musical play that was being performed on the night the attack began, October 23.
There is no need to recount every grisly detail of the siege, especially since nearly every detail is disputed. I especially wish to avoid any appearance of sympathy with the hostage-takers despite my focus on the response of the government. Terrorists are scorpions; we know their character and condemn them for it in good conscience. The true nature of the Putin regime, however, was still somewhat in doubt and is the subject under discussion.
The hostage-takers demanded the immediate withdrawal of all Russian troops from Chechnya and said that they wanted to “bring a taste of what is happening in Chechnya every day to the people of Moscow.” They were heavily armed with machine guns, grenades, and improvised explosive devices. The first night they released a large group of hostages, between 150 and 200, mostly children, women, Muslims, and foreigners. The next day, the terrorists accepted negotiations with quite a few public figures, including opposition politician Boris Nemtsov and journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the long-time war correspondent in Chechnya.
Despite every conversation resulting in the hostage-takers confirming that they were there to die, they released another large group of hostages, mostly foreigners. On the twenty-fifth they accepted food, juice, and medicine from the Red Cross for the hostages. The leader of the terrorists, Movsar Barayev, gave interviews to the press, reiterating their willingness to die and that “we are here with the specific purpose to end the war.” With such a large and well-prepared group of experienced militants and so many hostages, it looked like it was going to be a long standoff.
I was still playing chess professionally then, and at the end of October I was leading the Russian team to the gold medal for the last time at the Chess Olympiad in the Slovakian city of Bled. The news of the hostage crisis at the Dubrovka Theater shocked all of the participants, but most of all, of course, those of us who were born in the Soviet Union, and for whom the word “Chechnya” was more than just an unfamiliar geographical term.
I remember well the heated discussions of this tragic situation in the halls, when, looking one another in the eye, people would express the same hope: “The government won’t decide to use force. They won’t let hundreds of people die.”
On the morning of the twenty-sixth, Russian special forces stormed the theater. Simultaneously, a toxic gas was pumped into the theater. According to survivors and a frantic call from one of the hostages, they and the terrorists were aware of the gas and some of the assailants had gas masks. The terrorists fired at the Russian forces instead of executing the hostages, another fact that only became clear later and that was contrary to initial official reports that most of the dead had been shot.
All 40 hostage-takers were killed in the raid along with over 130 hostages: all but one of the hostages were either killed by the gas directly or indirectly by choking to death while unconscious and failing to receive medical care in time. Local hospitals were flooded with poisoned hostages they didn’t know how to treat because officials refused to identify the type of gas that had been used. Immediately afterward, officials said the attack was provoked by the terrorists beginning to execute hostages. This statement was revealed to be false only a few days later when other officials said the attack had been scheduled and planned since the first day.
Despite controversial reports that at least one of the hostage-takers was a known FSB operative, there is no way to know if the special forces knew that most of the explosives in the theater were fake, meaning the gas wasn’t really necessary before storming the theater. The Russian parliament declined to launch an investigation of the government’s conduct during the siege, which is why there are so many unknowns to this day. The government’s policy after the attack, of stonewalling or spreading misinformation about every facet of the operation, makes it difficult not to think the worst.