Boris's Furious Fist
Alekberov, Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr. and Elshan
Boris's Furious Fist by Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr. and Elshan Alekberov Throughout its seven long decades, the Soviet Union was a stifling police state. Never was fear abandoned as a tool. But...
...But these traditional agents of force have grown incompetent and undependable...
...On January 9, Chechen commander Salman Raduyev and 300 of his men eluded the tens of thousands of Russian troops occupying Chechnya and advanced to the town of Kizlyar, in the neighboring republic of Daghestan...
...We would soon be free...
...is a research professor of international relations at the Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute...
...Russian spokesmen circulated, then withdrew, various lies to the effect that the Chechens had killed, or were about to kill, the hostages...
...Bungling this, they tried similar "surgical" operations with Russian elite forces...
...Then began a new round of negotiations, which served to mask Russia's further military preparations...
...Barsukov: "The only thing we could not expect was that the gunmen would run so fast...
...We thought it was all over...
...On January 22, Salman Raduyev staged a defiant press conference from his native village of Novogroznenskoye...
...Astonishingly, the Russian siege of Pervomaiskoye-a tiny village of about 30 houses-went on for more than three days...
...Where democratic institutions are new and fragile, the key task is to prevent political decisions from being made in the primitive way: by armed force...
...And then the military helicopters over us began to fire rockets...
...The next day, Yeltsin revealed his true policy toward the nettlesome (and, to be sure, terrorist) Chechens: "They have to be wiped out...
...The Pervomaiskoye operation and the whole Chechen war demonstrated that the security police and the army are no longer competent...
...Can it possibly be in the interest of the elected president of Russia to legitimize civil war as a means to power...
...What is remarkable about Yeltsin here is the insolent way he used the Daghestani negotiators and his complete indifference to the lives of the hostages...
...Chernenko, Andropov, Brezhnev, Khrushchev, Malenkov, Beria-none of these ruthless Communists dared do what Yeltsin did: destroy a whole city...
...Americans have sometimes objected that their German allies, for example, are excessively fastidious about the uses of their army and the sale of arms...
...The last general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, knew in 1990 that his political survival depended on snuffing out the Lithuanian independence movement...
...Individuals continued to be persecuted, of course-countless of them-but the destruction of entire villages and groups was avoided...
...And where the military is seethingly resentful, economically desperate, and nostalgic for the old order, it is unwise to habituate troops to the killing of innocent civilians...
...When that failed, they resorted to mass bombing, shelling, and rocketing by huge numbers of ordinary Russian troops...
...What happened next is related by a hostage who escaped, in a widely disseminated report: All were happy when the Chechen border was crossed...
...There are no other Chechens...
...Scores of choppers began to land on the field near the village...
...During the night, an agreement was reached: The Chechens would release the bulk of the hostages in exchange for safe passage back to Chechnya...
...By agreeing to slaughter, he breaches the social consensus against bloodletting...
...he allowed the job to be botched...
...Raduyev seized some 3,400 hostages-the largest number in memory-and hunkered down in a hospital...
...The incompetence and brutality of the government's new methods are mutually reinforcing...
...But they could not, or would not, do it...
...Russian actions in all of this signaled quite a change from the early years of Boris Yeltsin...
...The village was at last leveled by artillery and rocket fire, much as the Chechen city of Grozny had been destroyed a year before at a cost of 20,000 to 30,000 lives, most of them Russian, not Chechen...
...There were shouts...
...Several ambush sites had been prepared...
...On January 15, two hours after Daghestan's interior minister avowed that negotiations were "developing normally," Russia launched an all-out assault "to free the hostages...
...Under the old Soviet bureaucracy, a strongman could be more certain...
...Shortly before the end, almost half of the Chechen fighters-with the help of a relief force that somehow managed to penetrate the Russian double ring- fought their way out, dragging about half the hostages with them...
...True, some political taboos are made to be broken...
...As he loses public support, he is increasingly driven to rely on brute force and the men who can execute it: the KGB, the police, the army...
...First, they tried arming and organizing Chechen proxy forces against Dzokhar Dudayev, the dominant Chechen leader...
...There we stopped...
...The president becomes dependent on additional strata of the KGB and the army...
...At play were the vital elements of ideology, "democratic centralism" (obedience to Party bosses), and fear...
...Some of these constraints are formal (the reconstituted Communist Party hopes to achieve power by winning the June presidential election...
...Windows burst in many buses...
...Yet the experience of totalitarian life-its violence and coercion-sinks into mass consciousness and reappears as a reflexive fear of bloodshed...
...But it is turning into a vicious cycle...
...When these disappeared, the organizations began to fall apart...
...Elshan Alekberov is an economist and policy analyst in Washington, D.C...
...But after Stalin's death in the early 1950s, there existed a kind of taboo against wholesale slaughter...
...Lately, however, a new (and old) wind has been blowing in Russia...
...A taboo had formed deep in the Russian consciousness, proscribing mass bloodletting...
...The gunmen rapidly and without a single shot disarmed the policemen who manned the post...
...He allowed the security police to try some brutal half-measures...
...The iron fist has succeeded (after a fashion) only when massive forces have been assembled for the crudest, most indiscriminate kinds of attack...
...Of course, no government is obliged to honor an agreement made under duress (though sometimes it is prudent to do so...
...A taboo of this type is far stronger in societies that have suffered from totalitarianism than in countries like the United States...
...The present course cannot end well...
...In fact, a majority of the hostages survived...
...In August 1991, Gorbachev's hardline opponents faced the same dilemma when they organized their coup...
...he allowed public outcry to abort any attempt to do the job thoroughly...
...paratroopers were jumping out of them...
...This, finally, succeeded in driving Dudayev from Grozny and Raduyev from Pervomaiskoye...
...The column turned from the border and went back to Daghestan, to the roadblock near the village of Pervomaiskoye...
...It could be felt in the recent taking of hostages by Chechens and the bloody Russian reprisal against it...
...By breaching consensus, he drives away his few remaining supporters . . . and the cycle begins again: Yeltsin's camp constricts to a handful of corrupt cronies who could never survive his retirement or ouster, while he spreads through Russia a widening circle of ruin...
...Now that taboo is broken, imperiling the Russian future...
...Mikhail Barsukov, the KGB's domestic minister: "A Chechen can only kill, and if he cannot kill, he turns to armed robbery, and if he cannot do even that, he burgles houses...
...But he would not do it...
...Added Gen...
...But they were not, as some now contend, a return to former Soviet ways, at least not to post-Stalin ones...
...In retrospect, that fatal hesitation looks oddly like conscience...
...As contrasted with the American and French revolutionaries of the late 18th century, today's Russians have little desire to build new political institutions in place of fallen ones...
...about 120 hostages would be retained, to be freed once in Chechnya, so as to ensure that Russia kept its end of the bargain...
...Perhaps the root of Yeltsin's new direction is the difficulty of retaining his office by other means...
...They knew that the coup would fail unless the largely unarmed democratic crowds in and around the White House were crushed...
...But in Russia's present situation, the informal rules and limits of politics are unusually helpful...
...The newspaper Moskovskaya Pravda was forced to conclude: "Human beings in this country are of no value...
...others are psychological (the population is disillusioned, undisciplined, and exhausted...
...What offers hope is that Russian tendencies toward communist nostalgia, anti-Western resentment, imperialism, military rule, violence, and civil war are hemmed in by constraints...
...The Russian police minister acknowledged afterward that the plan had been to double-cross the Chechens and the Daghestanis who did the negotiating...
...Russian president Boris Yeltsin ordered the Daghestani government to negotiate...
...If Boris Yeltsin does not break loose from it, he will go out like a Scythian king, with thousands immolated on his grave...
...Russian impulses to reform are weak and becoming weaker...
...the Chechens themselves faced what appeared to be certain death...
...Remarked Gen...
Vol. 1 • February 1996 • No. 20
