Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 12 – Yesterday,
Nikolay Patrushev, secretary of Putin’s Security Council, warned that Russia will
face a serious terrorist threat if and when militants from Russia who have been
fighting with various Islamist groups in the Middle East return home (interfax-religion.ru/islam/?act=news&div=58119).
But he said nothing about what may
be a more immediate and serious threat: the return to the Russian Federation of
pro-Moscow “volunteers” who have been fighting in Ukraine, a group that is far
more numerous than the relative handful of those in the Middle East and that
consists largely but not exclusively of ethnic Russians.
Patrushev’s concentration on
Islamist groups, of course, reflects Moscow’s desire to position itself with
European countries and the West more generally as a potential victim of
Islamist violence and thus to suggest to its own population and to the West that
any measures it takes against such people are justified.
Russia’s record of dealing with the
return of large numbers of people who have fought abroad either under orders
from the government or freelance is not encouraging. In 1825, the Russian
government brutally suppressed the Decembrist uprising against stardom that was
led by Russian officers who had seen Europe in the Napoleonic wars and hoped
for better at home.
After World War II, Stalin secured
Western help in the forced repatriation of five million Soviet citizens who had
found themselves abroad as a result of that conflict, executing many and
sending many more to the GULAG lest they challenge his order. And even after
his death, these people suffered the stigma of having that experience abroad
recorded in their documents.
More recently, the veterans of the
Soviet campaign in Afghanistan – the so-called “Afgantsy” – sparked a crime
wave at the end of Soviet times and formed a significant portion of the
criminal underworld in the 1990s, where their ranks were swelled by Russians
demobilized after fighting in the two post-Soviet Chechen wars.
Now, with thousands of Russian
citizens who have been sent to fight in Ukraine by Moscow or who have
volunteered to do so at the point of a possible return, Moscow faces at least
three challenges about which Patrushev and his colleagues in the Kremlin are
likely concerned even if they do not speak about it yet in public.
First, most of these groups have
been radicalized by the experience of fighting in the Donbas and support
radical groups, some allied with Putin like the Anti-Maidan but others very
much not. They are thus likely to become involved in street politics, and
because of their experience with weaponry, they are likely to become
increasingly violent.
The experience of the Freikorps
movements in Germany in the 1920s whose members helped power the rise of Hitler
may be instructive in this regard. The Nazis were delighted to have their
backing, until Hitler took power. Then, recognizing the threat such people
posed because of their radicalism, they were suppressed in the Rohm purge and
other actions.
Second, some of those “veterans” of
the Ukrainian fighting who do not become politically active are likely to move
into the Russian criminal world, leading to possibly dramatic rises in violent
crime. That prospect is all the more likely given the dire economic straits
many of them will face on returning home.
And third, those non-Russians who
have gone to fight for Moscow in Ukraine are likely to create problems as well.
While they are not terribly numerous except for the Chechens, some of their
number are likely to be radicalized as well, and on returning home, they may
turn their anger either at their own non-Russian governments or at the Moscow
authorities who back them.
In either case, they too will
present a problem for Putin, yet another unfortunate result for Russia and
Russians of his criminal policies in Ukraine.
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