In light of this past Friday’s Russian March, noted political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky examines the growing Russian nationalist movement and its origins in the Second Chechen War and ongoing conflicts in the North Caucasus.

The Russian March to Nothingness
By Andrei Piontkovsky
November 3, 2011
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

In a country where the political regime is made up of a longtime diarchy of bandits, Putin and Kadyrov, the popular slogan “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” cannot be seen as something nationalistic or patriotic. Regardless of all its apparent radicalism, it is a deeply ingratiating, slavish, plebeian exhortation.

It means “we want to feed all of our own crooks and thieves: Putin and Abramovich, Sechin and Chemezov, Medvedev and Fridman, Deripaska and Timchenko, the Rotenburg brothers and the Kovalchuk brothers.

It means “we want to return Kadyrov’s criminal offshore accounts here to Putin’s domestic “lawful” arena, even if it requires an third, even bloodier, Chechen war.”

“We want an empire, but without black-assed people” – this is the fatal contradiction of the Russian national consciousness, decisively entangled in its own complexes.

Russians do indeed feel humiliated, offended, and robbed within their own country. As do Russian citizens of other nationalities.

Kadyrov’s palaces, motorcades and parties with Western and Russian superstar-prostitutes of both genders that cost millions in budget money are just as disgusting as the even more extravagant bells and whistles of Mr. Botox. But they have the same attitude towards the “feeding” of the overwhelming majority of North Caucasians as Abramovich’s yachts have towards ocean cruises for participants of the Russian March.

Russian laws definitely don’t operate in Chechnya. But does anybody really still believe that they operate in Russia?

The problem of the North Caucasus is much deeper and more catastrophic than the ratio of the amount of budget transfers to different regions.

What’s going on in the North Caucasus is increasingly surpassing the bounds of a serious regional conflict and is turning into a central existential problem for the Russian Federation. All of the mistakes, failures, and crimes of Russia’s post-communist government in the realms of security, economics, national policy, and federative organization have become entwined in the Caucasus.

Why did we fight two wars in Chechnya? For Russia’s territorial integrity. But territorial integrity does not imply scorched, unpopulated earth. We fought to prove to the Chechens that they are citizens of Russia. But we simultaneously destroyed their towns and villages with planes and salvo rocket systems (and the “Grad” system in open fields, with Putin and Stalingrad behind us) and kidnapped innocent people whose corpses were later found bearing signs of torture.

We have constantly proved to the Chechens the very opposite of what we proclaimed – we proved to them with all of our behavior that they are not citizens of Russia and that we have not considered them to be citizens of Russia for a long time already – but their towns and villages are Russian. And we proved this convincingly not only to the Chechens, but to everyone in the Caucasus. They were good at memorizing the visual lessons we taught them.

And this is the fundamental, tragic absurdity of the war that determined its inevitable result.

We lost the war against the Chechen separatists. One of the most brutal field commanders, Ramzan Kadyrov, won. He has such a degree of independence from the Kremlin that even the Soviet officers Dudayev and Maskhadov would never even dream of.

Having had to choose between the very bad and the monstrous as a result of his pre-election policies, Putin, I have to give him credit, chose the very bad. Admitting his defeat, he gave all the power in Chechnya to Kadyrov and his army and paid him compensation. In response, Kadyrov formally declared not so much loyalty to the Kremlin as his own personal union with Putin. The monstrous choice would have been to continue the war to the point of total destruction – in the spirit of Shamanov and Budanov.

Ms. Latynina, with her poetic nostalgia for the romantic times of the Circassian genocide, clearly sees this choice as a shameful rejection of the white man’s burden and a cowardly capitulation before the liberal-leftist dictatorship of multiculturalism. Oh, how wonderfully those shining Russian aristocrat officers butchered the natives back then, and even wrote in their journals – the Yezhednevny Zhurnals of the time – such intoxicating lines: “I f… and cry!”

War on Chechen separatism in the North Caucasus has been replaced by a different war, one generated by the first – the war on Islamic fundamentalism.

Over that time , Islamic terrorism has crept over the entire North Caucasus, where its number of followers has grown and the structures of its Jamaats have strengthened. And just like during the Chechen wars, we are increasing the number of Islamists with our policies. Take, for example, the rhetoric of our (at least for the time being) supreme commander, who is apparently experiencing a certain syndrome of a lack of brutality compared to Uncle Volodya. The entirety of his reaction to the terrorist attacks on Russian territory consists of uninterrupted calls to “utterly destroy” and punish everyone, even “those who do laundry and cook soup for the terrorists.”

Knowing the moral integrity of the counter-terrorism soldiers from Khanty-Mansiysk, sent off to the Caucasus as if on a temporary work assignment, Mr. Badminton, or at least his groomers, can’t be unaware that the only result of these calls is going to be a marked rise in the number of extrajudicial murders of people who are in no way involved with militants and reprisals against relatives of suspected terrorists. And this, in turn, increases the number suicide bombers and leads to new terrorist attacks on Russian territory.

This is the twelfth year we’ve been fighting this war without understanding the scale of ongoing tragedy – the entire country is sliding into a civil conflict between nationalities – which the government’s policies are entirely responsible for creating, having long burned this wick from both ends.

In the Caucasus, having unleashed and lost the war, the Kremlin is paying compensation in exchange for a sham submissiveness not only to Kadyrov, but to criminal elites in all other republics. This is used to purchase palaces and the golden pistols that dangle off the rumps of local leaders. But the young, unemployed residents who have lost touch with their communities take off to join in Allah’s wars or are squeezed out of the Caucasus onto the streets of Russian cities.

But that is where a generation of children whose parents have utterly and forever lost out because of the failed economic reforms of the past twenty years has already grown up.

Televised cultural rulers and other masterminds have explained to them that all of their problems have been caused by “uncles in pith helmets” and “non-indigenous criminal gangs” who want to break them apart. Gangs of teenagers from working-class backgrounds who have been deprived of their future have a hard time getting to “uncles in pith helmets” or the heavenly residents of Rublevka, and so they unleash their accumulated fury by beating to death “persons of a non-indigenous skin color.”

And today the two armies of desperados, deceived and robbed by, as it were, the exact same people, have been thrown at one another.

Mentally, there is a growing gap between Russian and Caucasian youths, who have grown up in the midst of a brutal war, first Chechen, and then Caucasian in general.

Young Muscovites march around the city with cries of “f… the Caucasus! F…!” and the young mountain youths walk around the streets of Russian cities in a demonstrably defiant and aggressive fashion. They have developed the psychology of the victors. In their minds, Moscow has lost the Caucasian war.

In mind and in spirit, the Caucasus and Russia are vastly separate entities. Although neither the Kremlin nor the North Caucasian “elites” are prepared to make a formal separation.

The Kremlin is still living with its phantom imperial illusions of wide zones of privileged interests that lie far beyond Russia’s borders, and local leaders, starting with Kadyrov, don’t want to turn down the transfers from Russia’s budget.

The Islamists don’t want to separate, either. They have dreams of a caliphate that includes quite a large part of the Russian Federation.

A situation so humiliating for Russia cannot go on forever.

But there is no easy way out. In today’s political system, with this government, there is no way out in general.

An attempt to put an end to Putin’s “Kadyrov project” by force, as is openly advocated by the professional Russian – poor Zhirinovsky – and therefore by default the majority of demagogues in the Russian March, would mean a full-scale third Chechen war that would become a military, political, and moral catastrophe for Russia. Even those who hate Kadyrov and the Chechens who suffer because of him, and moreover his personal army, would never agree to submissively return to the times of the total tyranny of the federations. To make the same mistakes three times in a row would be total lunacy. Even Putin, the most obstinate about the Chechen issue, understands that.

But that wouldn’t stop the “party of blood,” which hasn’t managed to come to terms with the loss of Chechnya as a zone to feed off of and, perhaps more importantly, as a zone to exercise its drunken power over the lives and deaths of any of its inhabitants. The Kadyrov project has stripped many federal siloviki of these two basic pleasures, having made them exclusive to Kadyrov, and they are genuinely hateful because of this.

They say the price of their support is possible allies in the clannish, inter-Kremlin dismantlement – Kadyrov.

The siloviki who have an infernal desire to work again in Chechnya, of course, are mentally closer to Putin and his gang than to anyone else. But they understand perfectly well that Putin will never purge Kadyrov.

Putting an end to the Kadyrov project would be an official admission of Russia’s defeat in the second Chechen war and the proclamation of a third. This would be a return to 1999 from a much worse starting point. It would mean the total political delegitimization of Putin as “the savior of the fatherland in 1999.”

Our best political publicists have equally convincingly and passionately explained to us that our children were burned in Beslan and the hostages suffocated in Nord-Ost for the sake of the greatness of Russia and the triumph of her geopolitical interests. And where now is this greatness or this triumph?

Putin will definitely become one of the first political victims of the third Chechen war. During all twelve years of his rule I have said repeatedly that the Putin regime is not compatible with the life of the country. But God forbid we escape from Putin at such a price. Moreover that it wouldn’t let us escape from Putinism and its roots.

In 1999, the most notorious Kremlin blackguards (their names are well-known) who lead Operation “Heir” entered into an alliance with siloviki who were thirsty for revenge and, after Basayev’s campaign to Dagestan and the apartment bombings in Moscow, Volgodonsk and the failed one in Ryazan, unleashed the second Chechen war in order to bring their own, as they thought at the time, obedient marionette to power. It is they who are they real murderers of Kungayeva, Budanov and the other tens of thousands of people, Chechen and Russian, who fell during their small triumphant war.

Speaking at a meeting dedicated to the work of law enforcement agencies in the North Caucasian Federal District, Prosecutor General Deputy Ivan Sydoruk said that the number of attacks in the region was up 100 percent in 2010.

The rise comes despite 30 counter-terrorism operations carried out in the North Caucasus in 2010, in which more than 300 militants, including 17 prominent leaders, were neutralized. In addition, police had confiscated 1,665 firearms, 91846 rounds of ammunition, more than 1200 kilograms of explosives and more than 110 explosive devices from weapons trafficking circles.

The admission by the prosecutor general’s office follows conflicting statements by Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and leaders in Chechnya and Ingushetia over the success of counter-terrorism operations in the North Caucasus.

During a November 19 meeting on comprehensive measures to ensure stability in the volatile region, President Medvedev said that information presented to him indicating an improvement in the criminal situation was “nonsense.” “I have no faith in these statistics, they’re often nonsense,” said the president. He also said that the operative situation in the Caucasus “has practically not improved.”

In response, Ingush President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov issued a joint statement saying that President Medvedev was incorrect.

“The president said that it was ‘nonsense.’ But it’s clear to us that that’s not the case,” said Yevkurov. In an interview with Interfax, Kadyrov said he could not rule out the possibility that militants had been eradicated from Chechnya altogether.

In his turn, Russian Internal Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said last week that the number of terrorist threats in Russia remains high.

The region has seen 352 attacks by militant Islamist separatists in the first nine months of this year, four times the figure of a year ago, North Caucasus Deputy Attorney General Ivan Sydoruk was quoted as saying.

More than 200 security force personnel have been killed in attacks between January and September, while 400 militants have been killed, he said. The number of civilian victims was not provided.

Authorities have to date always insisted that they had the situation under control. Sydoruk however conceded that the government’s recent anti-terrorism operations were not having the desired effect.

In addition to the worst-affected republics of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, other regions, such as Kabardino-Balkaria, were also seeing increasing activity by militant separatists.

In the latest violence in the Caucasus, six people were killed and 10 injured in a suicide bombing in Dagestan Saturday, just days after six people were killed and 17 injured in an attack on the Chechen parliament.

Article copyright DPA

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty repots:

More than a dozen people have been killed in an explosion in the Russian republic of North Ossetia that officials say was the work of a suicide car bomber.

The midday explosion took place in a busy central market in the local capital of Vladikavkaz. Grisly video footage from the site showed dead bodies lying unattended in pools of blood and frantic doctors carrying injured victims in their arms.

Officials variously put the death toll at 14 or 15. It was unclear if the bomber was included in either figure. At least 80 others were reported injured in the blast, including a number of young children.

Officials in North Ossetia and Moscow say the explosion was the result of a suicide bomber who parked a car packed with explosives near the market entrance.

The Interfax news agency quotes the North Ossetian Interior Ministry as saying the Volga car involved in the bombing had a number plate from the neighboring republic of Ingushetia.

Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the Russian Prosecutor-General’s Office, said a terrorism investigation had been launched into the attack.

A second explosive that failed to detonate was later detected at the entrance to the market.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin condemned the car-bomb attack. Speaking during a meeting with the chairman of Russia’s Union of Muftis, Putin said the bombing was “aimed at sowing enmity between our citizens,” and he expected Russian Muslims to make a “decisive contribution” to combating extremism.

The North Caucasus has been a growing source of concern for the Kremlin, as Islamic extremism and violent attacks continue to rise.

A suicide car-bomb attack on September 4 at a Russian Army base in Daghestan left at least five people dead, and came just days after an assassination attempt on a local Daghestan official.

Many local authorities say endemic poverty and the presence of hostile Russian security forces have contributed to the general unrest.

North Ossetia, which is predominantly Orthodox Christian, has generally seen less violence than other North Caucasus republics. But it is notorious as the site of the Beslan school siege tragedy, in which more than 330 children and adults were killed in September 2004.

North Ossetia also has its own history of bomb attacks. Alan Tskhurbayev, a former correspondent with RFE/RL’s Russian Service, spoke to RFE/RL from the scene of the blast.

“It’s necessary to say that this isn’t the first blast in the Vladikavkaz central market. It’s been the site of frequent explosions, starting in 1999, when 52 people were killed here,” Tskhurbayev said. “If memory serves, this is already the fourth blast here, or something close to it.”

Today’s market blast comes 11 years to the day after a bomb destroyed an apartment block in the Russian capital Moscow, killing 94 people.

The Kremlin blamed the blast on Chechen militants and used the incident and subsequent blasts as a pretext for initiating a second federal war in Chechnya.

The document was written by two of Solidarity’s co-leaders, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former Deputy Energy Minister Vladimir Milov. As Nemtsov puts it, the pamphlet is meant “to tell the truth about the results of the rule of Putin and the tandem,” as the relationship between the prime minister and president is commonly referred to.

Immediately after the authors presented the report, its host website was hit by DDOS hacker attacks that rendered it completely inaccessible. Then, on Tuesday, police in St. Petersburg seized 100 thousand copies of the published report, a tenth of the total million that were printed by the organization.

As the Moscow Times reports:

Police seized pamphlets criticizing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on the eve of a high-profile business forum showcasing Russia, opposition leaders said.

St. Petersburg police confiscated 100,000 copies of a new report on Putin’s decade in power co-authored by Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, said Olga Kurnosova, head of the local branch of the opposition United Civil Front.

Kurnosova and Nemtsov contended that police were trying to keep the 32-page report [in PDF form; 48 in MS Word form – ed.] from the public and visitors at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which started Thursday.

“The police had the task of preventing the distribution of the report during the forum among its participants and citizens,” Kurnosova said.

St. Petersburg police declined to comment.

Police held the driver of the vehicle that was delivering the pamphlets for several hours, Kurnosova said.

She said police told her that they had sent the pamphlet to be checked for evidence of extremism — a tactic that opposition politicians say authorities sometimes use to stifle criticism — and that the check would take two or three days.

Nemtsov has co-written several reports highlighting corruption and other problems that he contends have gotten worse since Putin was elected president in 2000.

On Thursday, Nemtsov wrote on his blog that another 100 thousand copies of the report had been confiscated from the printing house by Federal Security Service (FSB) officers:

Instead of arguing with the theses in the report, denying the basis of the theses, they decided to show their effectiveness by acting in a Putin-like manner. Grossly violating citizens’ right to information, they decided, like in the good old days, to liquidate the opposition’s literature.

The reason is that facts and figures of the true results of Putin’s rule are laid out in the report. They tell us that they’ve built an effective state, while in fact, the level of corruption has reached monstrous proportions (on the level of the most backward African countries) in these ten years of rule. They assure us that the birth rate is rising, and that the death rate is falling – as a matter of fact, under Putin, Russia has been losing half a million people per year. They tell us that he has gained victory over the oligarchs and poverty – actually, there are more than 60 billionaires in the country, and 20 million poor. They tell us that Putin has pacified the Caucasus and gained victory over terror – as a matter of fact, in the ten years of his rule, the number of terrorist attacks has risen six times, and the regions of the Caucasus, receiving many millions in subsidies, have wound up outside of the Russian legal realm.

This is the truth that, in Putin’s opinion, Russians mustn’t know. This is where the actions of the security officials come from.

While distribution of the pamphlet started in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Solidarity is planning to release copies of the report all over Russia. For now, and especially given that police have apparently seized 1/5 of all of the printed pamphlets, the organization is encouraging citizens to print their own copies and distribute them in samizdat fashion.

“Putin. Results. 10 Years” is available in Russian by clicking here.

President Kadyrov’s debut as an official predator of press freedom comes as no surprise following last year’s surge in violence against journalists in the North Caucasus. The report cites 5 journalists killed in that region in 2009 alone, and 22 since 2000:

Often referred to as “Putin’s guard dog,” Ramzan Kadyrov shares the Russian prime minister’s taste for crude language and strong action. President and undisputed chief of this Russian republic in the North Caucasus since April 2007, he has restored a semblance of calm after the devastation of two wars. A high price has been paid for this superficial stability, the introduction of a lawless regime. Anyone questioning the policies of this “Hero of Russia” (an award he received from Putin in 2004) is exposed to deadly reprisals. Two fierce critics of the handling of the “Chechen issue,” reporter Anna Politkovskaya and human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, were both gunned down – Politkovskaya in Moscow in October 2006 and Estemirova in Chechnya in July 2009. When human rights activists blamed him for their deaths, Kadyrov was dismissive: “That’s bullshit, that’s just gossip,” he said.

The report blames the Kremlin for buying Kadyrov’s loyalty and for using government-run media outlets to create the veneer of a legitimate press. The analysts were equally scathing of the prime minister himself:

“Control” is the key word for this former KGB officer: control of the state, control of the economic and political forces, control of geopolitical strategic interests and control of the media. The national TV stations now speak with a single voice. …The Nashi (Ours), a young patriotic guard created by the Kremlin in 2005 at the behest of Putin and others who lament Russia’s imperial decline, sues newspapers critical of the Soviet past or the current government when it is not staging actual manhunts. As well as manipulating groups and institutions, Putin has promoted a climate of pumped-up national pride that encourages the persecution of dissidents and freethinkers and fosters a level of impunity that is steadily undermining the rule of law.

Putin and Kadyrov found themselves among fifteen other presidents and prime ministers condemned as predators of press freedom, including Chinese President Hu Jintao, Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. All over the world, says the organization, 9 journalists have been killed since the beginning of 2010, and another 300 are sitting behind bars. In Russia alone, the Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that 19 journalists have been murdered as a direct result of their work since 2000. A murder conviction has only been handed down in one of those cases.

In light of the revelations that last month’s suicide bombers were both natives of the North Caucasus Republic of Dagestan and young widows of deceased militants, Pamfilova spoke about what she saw as the reasons why such young Caucasians would turn to violence. Noting that she had just returned from a trip to the region, the rights activist said that young people in the Caucasus were confused and lacked direction as a result of unemployment, nonsensical social policy, and a lack of public control in the region. She also blamed Russian special forces for failing to consider the consequences of some of their tactical operations, which can often tear entire families apart and leave the survivors without a place to live.

“This is an intellectual war, and therefore there should be a stress in the region not of a nonsensical nature, but of an intellectual one. This is precisely the way that the intelligence agencies must win the war against terrorist ideologues,” Pamfilova said.

She also stressed that the main source of the region’s social ills was widespread, endemic corruption, which would not be possible, she said, without the support of the federal authorities. “We will never eliminate corruption in the North Caucasus if large amounts of money sent there are being ‘skimmed’ by officials in Moscow,” Pamfilova said at the press conference.

The Civil Society Institution and Human Rights Council was created in 2004 by then-President Vladimir Putin, with the ostensible goals of informing the president of the state of human rights and freedoms in the country and to create proposals to further the development of those same rights. It currently consists of thirty-six representatives from a variety of public organizations, including former Soviet dissident and prominent rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva. The last meeting in November focused on fighting corruption, specifically within Russia’s law enforcement agencies.

The War on Terrorism: Medvedev Takes Putin’s Path
By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan
April 8, 2010
Yezhednevny Zhurnal

In the week that has passed since the bombings on the city metro, President Dmitri Medvedev has actively intruded upon Putin’s personal domain – which the war on terrorism is considered to be – and proposed a few solutions. Clearly, they should demonstrate that his approach to this problem differs from the last one, which, considering what happened, has obviously not proven its worth. Today there are three initiatives – a presidential decree regarding transportation safety, the appointment of a new security force in the North Caucasus, and the introduction of a scale of terrorist threats.

The decree entitled “On the creation of a complex system to provide safety to the population on transportation” calls for the creation of a system to prevent emergency situations and terrorist attacks, most of all in the metro. Judging by the text, this would involve equipping public transportation with special technology to deal with “acts of unlawful interference,” and also systems to collect information about emerging emergency situations and threats of terrorist attacks. That is to say, additional systems to monitor passengers, and also all possible devices to determine the presence of poisonous, toxic, or other malicious agents in the air.

According to the document, the most vulnerable facilities should be equipped with this special technology by the end of next March, and the entire safety system should be completed by 2014.

Insofar as this is the only open document adopted after the bombings in the metro, one can make the conclusion that the state is intent on investing funds to prevent terrorist attacks at the last stage – when a terrorist with a bomb or poisonous gas cartridge is already moving toward a goal and falls into view of technical or other systems of control.

Meanwhile, it’s entirely obvious that cameras and censors don’t help to stop terrorists in the middle of a crowd in the metro or in a train station; at the very least, there have been no such examples of this happening in the past ten years. Moreover, as Russian experience has shown, barriers can be an obstacle to entering a defined area, but they won’t hinder a terrorist from detonating a suicide bomb in a crowd of people. At the Krylya festival in Tushino, a suicide bomber was unable to enter the stadium and blew herself up in the line at the barrier.

Of course, video cameras can help to quickly establish the identity of a suicide bomber, and, it’s true, that turns out to be helpful in the search for the terrorist’s accomplices; although, recently, as a general rule, they skillfully disguise themselves, covering up with caps and using glasses to change how their faces look. But none of this has anything to do with preventing a terrorist attack itself, and, at best, eases the investigation of a tragedy that has already happened.

In London, the world’s most developed video surveillance system (official figures say that Great Britain has one camera for every twelve people) couldn’t prevent the underground and bus terrorist attacks in 2005, although, as consequently became clear, the terrorists fell into view of the cameras numerous times on their way to the sites of the explosions and as they made preparations for the attacks.

British police already admit that all of this technology is practically useless even against normal crime, let alone terrorist attacks. The head of video surveillance management at Scotland Yard, Mick Neville, said at a 2008 press conference that less than one of every thirty crimes is uncovered with the help of CCTV – with its help, but not thanks to it exclusively.

Moreover, for understandable reasons, the metro and above-ground transportation in large cities cannot be equipped with the same safety measures that are used in airports (barriers, x-rays, all possible kinds of detectors). The head of the city metro, Dmitri Gayev, has spoken about this numerous times in the past few days.

The second initiative announced after the Moscow terrorist attacks was the scale of terrorist threats, which the National Anti-terroristt Committee is intent on introducing – not the same type that was introduced in the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

It’s obvious that this scale is meant first and foremost for the population, since the intelligence agencies already have their own internal plan of action for any terrorist threats that show up. For example, before the 2005 terrorist attacks in London, the threat level was decreased. Moreover, experience has shown that raising the threat level only increases the nervousness of the population. Normal people who aren’t trained to identify dangerous behavioral indicators are inclined to see them in everyone that looks or behaves “just not right.” This, naturally, leads to a growth in suspiciousness and xenophobia. At the same time, the intelligence agencies wind up swamped with a humongous quantity of garbage information that they’re required to respond to.

Medvedev’s third step was a staffing decision in the North Caucasus. Having visited Dagestan, the president appointed Deputy Chief of Internal Forces Yevgeny Lazebin, who head the United Group of Federal Forces in 2005-06, as the supervisor of the Internal Ministry in the North Caucasus.

All three of these decisions proposed by Medvedev in the wake of the terrorist attacks have one quality in common: they are a direct continuation of the strategy formed by Putin in the beginning and middle of the last decade.

The Internal Ministry has been investing funds in a system to control the population, including with video surveillance, since at least 2005. The scale of terrorist threats has been the beloved brainchild of Nikolai Patrushev even since during his tenure as FSB director, and they’ve been trying to introduce it since 2004. However, while the effect of these two initiatives is simply doubtful, the appointment of an Interior Forces general belongs in a separate category.

The Kremlin began to systematically move the Interior Forces into the main role in the North Caucasus back in the middle of the last decade. Back then, the highest-rated terrorist threat was an attack on a city by large detachments of militants, as happened in 2004 when Basayev’s detachment took control of Nazran within nearly twenty-four hours. Therefore, the main task was considered as having heavily armed detachments of special forces on hand to deflect an attack and carry out tactical operations in the city or forest.

In appointing Lazebin, Medvedev has shown that he continues to consider attacks by powerful militants to be the most dangerous threat. It’s obvious that such an approach has nothing to do with preventing terrorist attacks by suicide bombers, which most of all demand intelligence work – not the Interior Forces’ strongest point.

Moreover, Medvedev’s choice demonstrates that the Kremlin isn’t planning to even begin a battle for “the hearts and minds” of the North Caucasus. The interior forces have a fully developed reputation in the region. There are no such words that could convince the local population to enter into cooperation with the crimson berets. But this scarcely worried Putin, and as is becoming clear, doesn’t interest Medvedev even a bit.

Translation by theOtherRussia.org.

Two suicide bombers have killed at least 38 people and injured more than 70 in separate attacks on the Moscow metro during the Monday morning rush hour. Russia’s Federal Security Services have labeled the attack as an act of terrorism and suspect insurgents linked to the volatile North Caucasus region to be responsible for the incidents. Both attacks were carried out in high-traffic metro stations – one at Park Kultury and another at Lubyanka, located directly underneath Russia’s federal security headquarters.

The attacks are the deadliest Moscow has seen since 2004, when a suicide bomber killed 10 people outside the metro station Rizhskaya. The most recent attack elsewhere in the country occurred late last November, when 26 people were killed in the Nevsky Express train bombing between Moscow and St. Petersburg. Russian officials confirmed on March 6 that a security operation had been carried out a few days earlier in the North Caucasian headquarters of an Islamic extremist group it claims was responsible for the attack, killing its top leader and a number of others militants. Some media reports are speculating that Monday’s attacks could be retaliation for this and other recent deadly Russian operations in the area.

The opposition movement Solidarity has issued a statement regarding the bombings in Moscow.

Statement by the bureau of Solidarity in connection with the terrorist attacks in Moscow

We in the Solidarity movement express our condolences to the relatives and close ones of those killed as a result of the utterly cruel terrorist acts in the Moscow Metro, and wish a safe recovery to those wounded. Right now, they are the ones suffering most of all.

According to media reports from Russian intelligence agencies, the terrorist suicide bombers were Caucasian immigrants and followers of Islamic extremist organizations. Islamic extremism has flourished in the Caucasus as a result of unresolved problems in the Caucasus. As a consequence, the number of terrorist acts in the country has risen 50 percent in just the past half-year.

Solidarity takes note of the failure of the Russian government’s policy in the Caucasus. The vigorous announcements by the Kremlin and intelligence agencies about the destruction of this or that militant should fool no one. While Putin’s regime remains supported by corrupt thugs in the Caucasian republics, the number of terrorist acts will continue to rise, and we will constantly feel that we are in danger.

This problem will not be resolved without a change in policy towards the Caucasus. Obviously, the security agencies, whose financing has increased ten times over in the past ten years, have turned out to be unprepared for the fight against terrorism even right next to FSB headquarters.

After the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings, Putin vowed “to flush all the terrorists down the toilet” and thereby won over the support of the entire nation. In the forefront of the war on terror, he became president. Under the guise of the war on extremism, he imposed censorship throughout the country, abolished gubernatorial elections, and turned all other elections into a farce.

The sorrowful result – terrorists, outfitted with suicide bombs, work their way unchecked into the center of Moscow and blow up the metro.

We know that in discussions on the fight against terrorism, there will be an increase in repression and pressure on the opposition and hatred towards Caucasians will be propagated. However, neither of these things will solve the problem. The problem will be solved with a change in policy and a return to the rule of law, civil rights, and constitutional order.

After today’s terrorist acts in Moscow, Medvedev has an obligation to dismiss those responsible for the failure of anti-terrorist activities and policy in the Caucasus in their entirety: Vladimir Putin, Aleksandr Bortnikov, and Rashid Nurgaliyev.

Translation by theOtherRussia.org

For more information on the March 29 Moscow metro bombings:

• New York Times: Subway Blasts Kill Dozens in Moscow
• Radio Free Liberty/Radio Europe: FSB Suspects North Caucasus Link In Deadly Moscow Bombings
• Life News: Photo gallery of bombings and aftermath
• List of those killed in the attacks (in Russian)

In an address to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev on Saturday, FSB Chief Aleksandr Bortnikov said that genetic and material evidence indicates that notorious Caucasian gang leader Sheikh Said Buryatsky took part in the November 2009 bombing of the Nevsky Express.

After investigators established that Buryatsky’s group was likely involved in the attack, the FSB conducted a raid in the Ingush village of Ekazhevo on March 2 – 3, in which eight militants were killed and ten were detained. Buryatsky, whose real name is Aleksandr Tikhomirov, was among those killed, reportedly having put up armed resistance to the police.

A search of the militants’ basement laboratory turned up more than a ton of explosives, as well as firearms and ammunition, Bortnikov added.

The bombing of the Nevsky Express, which federal authorities labeled as an act of terrorism, killed 26 passengers and injured approximately 90 on the luxury train. Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov had originally taken responsibility for the bombing.

Russia’s railroad directorate and manufacturers of the railway cars on the Nevsky Express have come under criticism for their flimsily constructed seats, many of which came loose during the explosion and flew down to the end of the cars, trapping and maiming passengers. While both parties have refuted the claims, the cars on the Nevsky Express have been changed nevertheless.

Public transportation in Russia has been targeted by Chechen separatists for a number of years. Sixty people were injured in an analogous attack on the Nevsky Express in August 2007. Fifteen people were injured in the 2005 bombing of a train headed to Moscow from Chechnya, and a suicide attack in the Moscow metro killed 41 and injured approximately 120 in 2004.