Paul Goble
Staunton,
March 28 – The FSB continues to disseminate its version of the murder of
Russian opposition figure Boris Nemtsov, one that links it to Ramzan Kadyrov,
not out of any concern for getting at the truth but rather because of growing
anger at the Chechen leader and the backing he continues to receive from
Vladimir Putin, according to Andrey Piontkovsky.
The
Russian force structures, he writes, “have never had any good feelings for
Ramzan Akhmatovich and are extremely skeptical about the Putin ‘Kadyrov’
project which deprived them as they understand it of their ‘victory’ in the
Caucasus” by allowing him an autonomy they would never have permitted (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=551673923B9B4).
In addition, Piontkovsky says, the siloviki are anything
but happy about the way in which Kadyrov militants are now getting involved in
fights for control of economic and even political assets “far beyond the
borders of the Chechen Republic,” something no other regional leader has been
permitted to do.
But “the last drop apparently because the provincial
version of ‘Triumph of the Will’ at the Grozny stadium,” an action that seemed
to presage a situation in which it would not be Chechnya within Russia but “’Russian
within Chechnya,’” something anathema not only to the siloviki but to ordinary
Russians as well.
All this anger poses problems for Putin, Piontkovsky
says, but what Kadyrov is doing is posing an even larger one for the Kremlin
leader because what the Chechen head has been doing constitutes a direct attack
on “the central nucleus of Putin’s mythology,” the notion that Putin is legitimate
because he restored order by means of the second Chechen war.
But at the same time, Putin can’t “close down the ‘Kadyrov’
project” because to do so “would be official recognition of Russia’s defeat in [that]
war and at the same time a declaration of a third” Chechen war.” That in turn
would represent “a return to 1999” but one in which Moscow’s “starting position”
would be “much worse.”
Caught between the need for the superficial stability in
the North Caucasus that Kadyrov provides in exchange for massive infusions of
cash and the right to act on his own as he sees fit and an equal need to
maintain his own legitimating myth, Piontkovsky says, the Kremlin leader has
not yet come down hard against either Kadyrov or his siloviki opponents.
That “testifies to the weakening of [Putin’s] regime of
personal power,” the Russian analyst says, public opinion surveys to the contrary. Everyone must remember, he suggests, that “the
power of a dictator never rests on polls. On the contrary, polls rest on the
power” of those who have it.
“Had a sociological survey existed in the USSR at the end
of February 1953, it would have found that 99.999 percent” of the population
approved of Stalin. “But several days
later,” after the latter died, that all changed not only in the population but
within the elite itself, Piontkovsky points out.
That is something Putin has to be concerned about because
“the power of a dictator rests on the qualified subordination to him of several
dozen [senior] people.” They will support him until they don’t, until a
critical mass of these critical people decide they would be better off without
him.
By raising questions about the mythology he has used to
legitimate his rule, Putin has brought that day closer, leading more people
within the elite to question where he is going and more people in the Russian
population to wonder how anyone can square the idea of “a Russian world” with
one in which “Russia is inside Chechnya.”
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