Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has used terror attacks in the last decade to push sweeping legislative changes, curtail media and personal freedoms, and to settle political scores. Recent Moscow metro blasts have shown how the duopoly of Vladimir Putin and his prodigy Dmitry Medvedev is running out of such measures to keep an absolute hold on power by playing to Russian fears against terror and foreign enemies. Just as President George W. Bush and the Republican–controlled congress pushed through a bevy for laws under the “Patriot Act” that violated many fundamental constitutional principles of United States after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks; Russian leaders lose no opportunity to shrink personal freedoms and human rights when terror raises its head.
Now, after the Moscow metro blasts that killed 39, President Dmitry Medvedev has stated that “brutal” measures will be taken against terrorists and their networks. To convey the message of toughness, he even dressed like his mentor Vladimir Putin in a black suit, dark glasses and round neck shirt on a visit to Southern Russia. These measures against Chechen terrorists and their international network are unavoidable and perhaps even necessary, but the bluster by Medvedev and Putin, who oversee a highly centralized state ruled by a powerful siloviki or “strongmen” coterie, is now looking more like a toothless yawn.
In 1999, Vladimir Putin’s ascent to power coincided with a series of deadly blasts in Moscow and two regional cities, in which over 293 died. Putin lost no time in establishing his ”strong man” image and started the second war in Chechnya to deal with the Islamo-fascists that had taken control of the mountainous state. Nearly 25,000 died in this war and many thousands went missing. There was untold suffering for the civilians of Chechnya who suffered both at the hands of local warlords and advancing Russian soldiers. Faced with defeat in war, Chechen terrorists struck back with primeval barbarity. With each attack, Putin tightened his hold on power in Russia. The ghastly attack by Chechen terrorists on a school in Beslan in 2004 led to direct rule on Russian regions from the Kremlin on the sprawling country with its 11 time zones and 83 regions. Since then, all regional Governors are no longer elected by free choice–they are essentially appointed by Vladimir Putin.
The stated purpose of the changes Putin brought in was to protect Russia from a host of enemies of the Russian state–oligarchs that were undermining the Russian economy, foreign powers that were subverting Russian security with the help of former Soviet satellite states like Georgia, and the Chechen terrorists that established a defacto Islamic khanate and were a bigger threat to the world than Afghanistan ever was or could be. There was some truth to all these threat perceptions: Russia was facing many existential crises and vultures were circling. But much like his soulmate George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin took to curtailing human rights and democratic freedoms internally to fight these various enemies. He promised to strengthen the state by bringing in a “dictatorship of the law,” and ended up weakening the nascent democracy. His appeal lay in the promise that his siloviki would deliver security and a tamed oligarchy would mean wider economic growth and prosperity.
Russian economy has been in tatters since the global financial meltdown. Now the Moscow Metro blasts show that the promise has failed on both counts. What remains to be seen now is how Russian people react in the next poll to the duopoly and its attempts to hold on to power.