Russian Officials No More Capable of Managing State Terror than They are of Managing Anything Else, El Murid Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 11 – Russian officials lack the capacity to manage terror in a systematic way and so it is inevitable that it will slip out of their control and be used by various forces for their own ends, including ends at odds with those of the Kremlin, according to Anatoly Nesmiyan who blogs under the screen name El Murid.

            That means, the blogger says, that the powers that be who are now involved in conducting terror are likely to fall victim to it and that at least some of them may decide that given Russian realities, state terrorism has to end to avoid that (t.me/anatoly_nesmiyan/19454 reposted at kasparov.ru/material.php?id=6690138D2BC81).

            This is hardly a new observation, but it is important because so many people believe just the reverse of what Nesmiyan is saying and believe that state terror can be effectively controlled by the Kremlin without any risk to those who are behind using that tactic to maintain themselves in power.

            That view has its origins to a large extent in Arthur Koestler’s novel about the Stalinist purges, Darkness at Noon, which posits that the state controlled everything and could control its use of terror as well without any adverse consequences to itself however many there were for the population it ruled.

            But a far more adequate description of the shortcomings of the use of terror by the state and a discussion of the ways in which it can rapidly grow out of control is to be found in Victor Serge’s novel about the Kirov murder, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, which shows that those who launch terror in that case rapidly lose control of the way it is used.