ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
Owen Matthews on why many Muscovites
believe that the Kremlin was behind the bombs
Moscow I HAVE never seen anything like it in my life, and hope never to again. I have seen buildings cratered, gutted, ruined, toppled. But never — not in Sarajevo, Beirut or Afghanistan — have I seen an eight-storey apartment block flattened, reduced at a single stroke to a 30-foot-high pile of smoking rubble. A bombed-out building is desolate, crippled, but at least still recog- nisably a building. But a bombed-flat building is just an terrible, aching vacuum.
Muscovites used to be a pretty phlegmatic bunch when things went bang in the night. For many years it was considered fashion- able among the city's rival Mafia groups to blow up each others' offices, apartments and Mercedes sedans with a few hundred grams of TNT. The explosions caused some impressive wreckage but usually harmed no one but the intended victim and his flunkeys.
However, the three major bombings in the capital in the past fortnight have wrought a strange and radical shift in the usually non- chalant mood of Moscow's unshockable natives. Corruption scandals caused a brouhaha in the Western press and ruffled feathers in the Russian media and political elites, but didn't cause much of a stir among ordinary people (they had assumed for years that their rulers were crooks). Yeltsin's lat- est change of prime minister evinced only passing interest. Even the prospect of a pro- longed guerrilla war in distant Dagestan didn't get anyone very excited. But, by God, these bombings have sent shock waves through Moscow greater than all the putsches, devaluations, shootings, scandals and intrigues of the last decade.
What shocks Muscovites most is that the two biggest bomb attacks were not directed against some public building, police station or government office but at archetypically ordinary suburban apartment blocks. Panic, old-fashioned, irrational panic, has set in across the capital. Russians are used to looking to the state to provide enemies to explain failure, war and terror. But this time — or should we say once again — the state has failed: the enemy has no face, no name and no easily discernible goals.
Though official Moscow, from interior minister Vladimir Rushailo down, has point- ed the finger of blame squarely at Islamic militants who have been fighting Russian federal forces in Dagestan for the past six weeks, no one has claimed responsibility or put forward any demands. As a result, Moscow has been rife with uncharacteristi- cally paranoid conspiracy theories. Unchar- acteristic, that is, in their extraordinary cynicism, for after all Russians are second only to the Lebanese in their love of con- spiracies. The theory is this: that the Moscow bombs were set off not by crazed Chechen terrorists but by the Russian secret services at the instigation of the Kremlin. Why? To give the authorities an excuse to introduce a state of emergency, cancel upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections, and maintain their hold on power — or to embarrass the politically ambitious mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, and to puncture his soaring popularity.
Crazy? I think so. But thousands don't, including many Russian colleagues I used to take somewhat seriously. But what is most interesting are not the ins and outs of the theory itself — more about that later — but the fact that so many otherwise intelligent people are inclined to believe that their rulers could stoop to perhaps the most breathtaking act of political cynicism since the burning of the Reichstag.
Certainly, history has a lot to do with it. After decades of official lies about Stal- in's purges, the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, the decadence of the West and so on, it's hardly surprising that Russians view the Kremlin's motives with some suspicion. Nor has the KGB been above a spot of murder, bombing and riot-fomenting in its time. In fact there is still a department of the SVR, or foreign intelligence ser- vice, which trains recruits in 'destabilisa- tion and diversionary tactics'. But blowing up close to 200 innocent Muscovites?
Perhaps what makes the theory more underStandable is the recent spate of stories in the West detailing the extent of the regime's corruption. I said ordinary people as a whole didn't take much notice of the latest Bank of New York and Mabetex scan- dals. They didn't, but only because they con- firmed what most people already knew that someone had robbed the country blind over the last decade. And they didn't need the New York Times to tell them that that someone was Yeltsin's friends and family. Yeltsin, who came to power as a kind of Cory Aquino figure, riding a wave of popu- lar support and promising to weed out cor- ruption, risks leaving it more like Ferdinand Marcos. Therefore, goes the logic, the Kremlin circle will stop at nothing — not even at killing hundreds of civilians — to avoid prosecution, exile or worse when they are defeated by the popular alliance of Luzhkov and the former premier Yevgeny Primakov at the next election.
But the logic behind the Kremlin bomber theory is flawed. For a start, the law invoked by the anti-Gorbachev putschists of August 1991 to introduce a state of emergency is simply no longer on the books. Second, any nationwide emergency measures can only be enacted by the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, and not the Kremlin. The Federation Council is made up of regional governors, many of whom are already allied with Luzhkov, who are unlike- ly to take kindly to attempts by the Kremlin to seize direct executive power over the whole country. That said, Yeltsin is not that much of a stickler for constitutional niceties. He did, after all, order tanks to shell Rus- sia's parliament when it tried to remove him in October 1993.
Even so, the bomb attacks are clearly connected to the recent fighting in Dages- tan. But that raises another question: why would Chechens launch such a barbarous terrorist campaign now, when they never resorted to such extreme measures (at least not on this scale) during their bloody two- year war with Moscow? The answer may lie in the person of Khattab, one of the lead- ers of the latest Chechen-led guerrilla incursions into Dagestan and a devotee of the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect. He was born into Jordan's large expatriate Chechen community, and grew up in the Middle East of the 1970s and 1980s. He seems to have adopted the methods of dis- possessed Palestinians in his fight for an Islamic republic in the North Caucasus. It's a measure of how unstable and self- obsessed Russian politics has become that Russians look to the enemy within — or at least, the enemy above — to explain terror- ist bombs. They seem to have forgotten, in all the fear and loathing of domestic poli- tics, that not all the enemies of Russia live in the Kremlin.
Owen Matthews writes for Newsweek from Moscow.
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