Staunton, September 17 – Vladimir
Putin has no need of Chechnya, Abkhazia, South Osetia or Crimea, Aleksandr
Podrabinek says. He has moved against all of them “not for territory but for
his own self-assertion and personal power, things which only the state of war
can guarantee him.”
That is how he began his rise to
supreme power in 1999 with the apartment bombings, the Moscow commentator says
in an essay on Grani.ru, and that is how he will continue in Ukraine and
elsewhere given that, to use George Orwell’s expression, he is interested only
in building and retaining personal power (grani.ru/opinion/podrabinek/m.233046.html).
“The
shedding of blood preceded Putin’s ascent to power,” Podrabinek says. And “this
was not an accidental coincidence: it was a necessary condition for his rise.”
In his case as in many others, “war became the occasion for a change in power
and a change in course.”
To
have a war, he needed “a casus belli,” and he “did not look for one but created
it,” blowing up the apartment buildings in Buinaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk and
only failing to blow up another in Ryazan when alert citizens sounded the alarm
that the local police arrested and then were forced to release FSB officers who
had planted the bomb.
“On
that very same day, September 23 [1999], the first bombing raids were made on
Grozny. More bombings followed and “thus began the second war in Chechnya,”
whose conduct was now in the hands of “a young, energetic and decisive
president.”
There is no other
explanation than official involvement for what happened in Ryazan, but Russians
prefer “not to remember” or if they must to do so “exclusively in an emotional
key and not in an analytical one. Unfortunately, this is the normal way of
things in Russia,” the Grani commentator says.
Efforts to find
out the truth were quickly drowned out by meetings about the tragedies. “Such
is the nature of our national character,” Podrabinek says. “The beauty of
suffering overwhelms everything else – justice, curiosity, honor and duty
before those who have died.” Ceremonies are enough to get Russians to come to
terms with their past as officials want.
But 15 years on, “an understanding of the events of the
fall of 1999 is essential in order to correctly evaluate the moving forces of
Putin’s current policy.” That was when the Putin era began. It “began with
terrorist acts and wars.” Indeed, it was precisely those that allowed Putin to
come to power and “in a planned fashion take civil rights away from society.”
In the intervening period, “each military event and each
terrorist act has been used by [Putin] to tighten the screws still more, to
make the laws harsher and to strengthen his personal power. War is his life, his means of existence. It
is a pretext for the salvation of society … Only in an atmosphere of war can he
exist.”
“Peaceful
life is full of political discussions and elections,” a state which Putin will
find himself on the losing end and he “understand this” very well. He always
has and always will need an enemy.” Even when he installed the superficially
more liberal Medvedev in his place, Putin “compensated with a war with Georgia.”
“In
the absence of a foreign enemy,” Putin is “ready to use the image of an
internal one,” throwing “healthy national forces” against those as well. He need only shout “’The Fatherland is In Danger!’”
and this lumpen including former military personnel, imperialists, fascists and
radical Orthodox will “joyously” throw themselves against that enemy too.
No one should
forget that this is Putin’s “cadres reserve, his last hope for preserving power
if it suddenly turns out that he doesn’t have enough forces to withstand a
foreign enemy.” That is how he began and
that is how he is continuing, Podrabinek says, concluding that to keep himself
in power forever, “force [too] is not a goal but [only] a means.”
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