Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 26 – The run up to
the Sochi Olympics, scheduled for next February, has kept Moscow from
addressing the problems of the North Caucasus in a new way and thus contribute
to a degradation of the political and security situation in the region,
according to a Moscow analyst.
Indeed, to a Russian
parliamentarian, terrorist violence in the North Caucasus means that only
Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan currently suffer more victims from it
than do Russians, even though most of the Russian Federation is stable or at
least more stable than it was a decade or more ago.
But the drumbeat of violence in the
North Caucasus and the apparent inability of President Vladimir Putin and his
regime to deal with it in an effective way, other Russian writers say, is
increasingly calling into question not only this broader stability but also the
Putin regime as such.
Citing Duma deputy Yuri Nagernyak’s
observation that Russia now ranks just behind Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and
Pakistan in the number of victims of terrorist actions, Aleksey Polubota of “Svobodnaya
pressa” then interviews four Moscow commentators on the meaning of this
situation in terms of Putin’s much-vaunted “stability” (svpressa.ru/politic/article/73049/).
Pavel Svyatenkov, an MGIMO professor
and political activist, says that “the overwhelming majority of terrorist
incidents in Russia take place in the North Caucasus,” an “extremely unstable
region” comparable to what is taking place in the Middle East but “somewhat different
from what is taking place in the rest of Russia.”
Indeed, he points out, that “if you
take the statistics of victims of terrorist actions in Russia outside of the Caucasus,
then the situation is much more stable on the remaining territory,” although
there is evidence that terrorism is “being exported” to other regions, such as
the Middle Volga.
“The thesis about Putin’s stability
is propaganda,” Svyatenkov says, but everything depends on comparisons. Putin’s
era has been “more stable” in Russia than was Yeltsin’s, but “no ‘Putin
stability’ can be compared with the level of security in the United States or
Great Britain.”
Lidiya Sychyova, chief editor of the
Red Line television channel, takes a somewhat different view. According to her, stability in Russia exists “only
for Putin and his closest entourage.”
Everyone else lacks real stability and has lacked it since the end of communist
times.
Andrey Epifantsev, head of the Alte
et Certe Analysis Bureau, says there is more stability now than in the 1990s
but that such stability is not equivalent to well-being. Moreover, he argues,
the terrorist actions that are occurring in the North Caucasus now are very
different than those that took place in the earlier decade.
In the 1990s, he says, terrorists
advanced political demands like Chechen independence, but now they represent
struggles among clans and other groups, struggles that Moscow finds it useful
to describe as being the work of “radical Islamists.” That is just one of the
reasons why the Russian government has lost authority and cannot impose order
without changing itself.
“Up to now,” Epifantsev continues, the
federal center has used “two methods” in the North Caucasus: war and buying off
the North Caucasus elites. The first failed, and the second is failing because
it is allowing those elites to undermine Russian statehood and importantly to
be seen to be doing so.
If Moscow
continues in this way, Russia “will sooner or later lose the Caucasus,” he says.
To avoid that outcome, he calls for “the establishment of real democracy”
there, something that both the Putin regime and the local elites currently in
power fear.
The current Russian president
initially did act to get the country out of “the chaos” it found itself,
Epifantsev says, but his failure to see that the situation has changed and that
he needs to act differently now is undermining his accomplishment. “If you try
simply to preserve what is, you will inevitably begin to deteriorate.”
A major reason that Putin has not
addressed these problems as he should is his decision to hold the Sochi Olympics.
Epifantsev says that there is unlikely to be a terrorist incident at
Sochi but if there are real battles “a hundred kilometers away, this will have
a very negative impact on the image of Russia.”
More seriously, the Sochi Olympiad
has become an excuse for putting off any serious attempt to address the
problems of the North Caucasus “already for two years.” No one wants to change
course so rapidly that the situation might get worse, and the Kremlin is
confident that the Games themselves will show that Russia is “recognized” as a
great power by others
In this regard, Epifantsev concludes, the
average Russian, “who does not understand anything in politics” will conclude
that we are a world-class country” and thus will “vote for this [regime] even
if he doesn’t himself have the money to attend the Sochi Games.”
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