08.09.2004

Putin follows in the bloody footsteps of Stalin and the tsars

No to Russian oppression, no the Chechen terrorism, says Eddie Ford

Communists utterly condemn the actions of the Beslan school hostage-takers and cannot but feel dismay at the huge loss of life, which includes very many schoolchildren.

The order of events which led to the storming of Middle School No1 in North Ossetia is still unknown. What we do know is that the hostage-takers demanded independence for Chechnya. But, regardless of the precise sequential details and whatever the exact composition - and motivation - of those who seized the school, such acts of brutal terrorism are antithetical to our communist morality. The cause of human emancipation demands winning the masses, and cannot be advanced through acts of wanton cruelty. In that sense we view the Beslan massacre in the same way as we did the September 11 atrocity in the United States - as a reactionary crime.

Hence it follows that communists and socialists will have no truck with any attempt to paint the grim events in Beslan in the light of ‘anti-imperialism’ or ‘national liberation’. The Beslan terrorists have brought nothing but grief and bitterness to ordinary Ossetian and Russian citizens and objectively aided the forces of reactionary nationalism and chauvinism.

Clearly, by this disgusting and stupid act the hostage-takers played straight into the hands of the current Russian administration. The Chechen masses, suffering under the weight of ruthless Russian occupation, will now have to endure further acts of state terrorism - and will gain even less sympathy from the minority in Russia which instinctively supports national self-determination and opposes oppression.

Vladimir Putin’s weekend television address to the Russian people provided ample evidence. His populist mixture of Russian chauvinism and pan-Slavic paranoia, Soviet nostalgia-mongering and ‘war against terrorism’ rhetoric gave us a strong hint of what is to come. So, looking suitably grim and solemn, Putin declared à la George Bush that “international terrorism” had declared “a full-scale war” against Russia. Russian borders were “too porous”, continued Putin, and stressed the urgency of “mobilising” the nation before the “common” enemy of terrorism.

There was more. Putin evoked the idea that there was a sinister plot to encircle Russia: the collapse of the USSR, he claimed, had left the country “without defences either to the east or west” and conjured up generally lurid images of a frightening external threat. Perhaps having sudden flashbacks to his former life as a KGB apparatchik, Putin went on to virtually accuse the United States of supporting anti-Russian terrorism and of trying to emasculate Russia as a nuclear power. He ended with dark warnings about those who want to dismember Mother Russia: “Some would like to cut a juicy piece of our pie. Others help them. Terrorism is just one instrument they use.”

Putin’s address was a shameless bid to inflame and exploit Russian chauvinism and to exacerbate anti-Chechen sentiment. Under such conditions of heightened emotion and state-encouraged hysteria, it will be a comparatively easy task for Putin to enhance his already considerable powers.

The dead of Beslan have been conscripted into this ideological offensive. Extremely distastefully - but showing the legendary tact and sensitivity of all Soviet-style bureaucrats - Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the parliament, flew to Beslan, whereupon he informed the grieving relatives: “We are at war with terrorism and, sadly, in that war there are victims. I agree with president Putin, who said we must strengthen law enforcement and work to make the country more secure.”

In this drive to “strengthen law enforcement” and “make the country more secure”, Putin has been steadily increasing the power of the FSB - that is, the renamed KGB. For Putin and his supporters there has been constant talk of restoring ‘vertical’ governance. Thus parliament’s upper house - the federation council - has been significantly altered so that regional governors and legislative leaders no longer sit in it. Now there is talk of the president directly appointing governors, thereby doing away with troublesome elections.

Under the impact of Beslan, more ‘anti-terror’ measures are already in the pipeline, which threaten to further infringe democratic rights. The Interfax news agency reported a statement from Stanislav Vavilov, head of the federation council’s committee on law, to the effect that Russian citizens were prepared to lose some democratic rights if it ensured their safety - on the grounds that “we now live in a different country”. Possible measures include cracking down on the right to travel from one part of the country to the other, similar to the old Soviet practice. So back to the future with Vladimir Putin and the FSB. Naturally, authentic communists and democrats in Russia will resolutely oppose such measures and proposals.

Part and parcel of Putin’s plan has been to stifle, if not utterly crush, all and any media outlet which has the temerity to express independent or critical opinions of the Russian state and its president. Quite incredibly, Putin and his cronies virtually control the media - lock, stock and nearly every barrel. The only independent national television channel, NTV, was taken over by the state (ie, Putin) four years ago.
Predictably, the Beslan atrocity has seen yet further attempts to muzzle what vestiges of a free press still exist. Just like in the Moscow theatre siege of two years, it is the instinctive reflex of the Russian authorities to censor any opinions or facts which might embarrass those who hold senior office. To question the infallibility of the Russian state-governmental apparatus is intolerable. In this draconian vein, Raf Shakirov, the editor of Russia’s best known daily newspaper Izvestiya, has been duly sacked. The paper questioned the initial claim by Russian officials that the number of hostages taken was only 350, reported that parents of the hostages were the first to enter the school ahead of the security forces, and published a powerful column denouncing the censored coverage of the events by state TV. In the words of the Izvestiya column, “We’ll be showered with more lies and muck”.

Such “muck” is inevitable, especially when you consider the fact that any journalist deemed to have ‘unsound’ views on Chechnya was not even able to get near Beslan, let alone report on it. The authority’s determination to prevent these free-thinking journalists from approaching ‘ground zero’ saw a series of bizarre ‘mishaps’. One journalist was arrested for “hooliganism” after being attacked by two unidentified and untraceable individuals; another was taken mysteriously ill on a plane to Beslan, afterwards claiming - with the support of her doctor - that her tea had been poisoned. Such thuggish - and old-time Stalinist - practices from the Russian authorities is entirely plausible. In fact, it would be amazing if the Putin administration did not resort to skulduggery and gangsterism in order to preserve its monopoly over the media and oppressive hold on power.

Then, critically, there is the burning issue of Chechnya - and the national question in the region as a whole. Chechnya was forcibly incorporated into the Russian empire in 1859 and still remains under duress within the Russian federation. The Chechen people must have the right to self-determination - and in current circumstances of seething national hatreds, especially in view of the fact that the Russian people in general support, or at the very least passively acquiesce in, Putin’s oppression of Chechnya, on balance that means calling for full independence. Forced unity has nothing to do with internationalism and can do nothing but fan the flames of nationalism: on the one side an increasingly irrational and fanatical Chechen nationalism, and on the other a Russian nationalism that not only oppresses minorities, like the Chechens, but oppresses the Russian people themselves with anti-terrorist laws and other such draconian emergency measures.

Of course, there is nothing new about this. Indeed, for most of the Soviet period, from JV Stalin onwards, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - in theory committed to socialist internationalism - was in fact suffused with that Great Russian chauvinism which Lenin so violently detested - so much so that, in despair at the insensitivity, arrogance and hamfistedness he saw around him, famously commented that the fledging workers’ republic was the “old tsarist state lightly anointed with Soviet oil”.
Stalin - ironically the Bolshevik’s first commissar of nationalities - was more guilty than most of reviving old tsarist ways. But what was a scratch in 1920 had by World War II turned gangrenous. Stalin - now a fully fledged ‘red’ tsar - convinced himself that the people of Chechnya were ‘collectively guilty’ of collaborating with Hitler and in 1944 he deported them en masse to Siberia. Their republic was dissolved and only re-established in 1957, when Khrushchev allowed those exiles who had survived to return to their homeland, which was hypocritically called an “autonomous Soviet socialist republic”.
Of course, like the others, the Chechen-Ingush republic had no real autonomy whatsoever. It was, in essence, a colonial possession of the bureaucratic Soviet state. But, so long as the Soviet Union existed, it served to suppress - though not eradicate - non-Russian, non-Soviet nationalism.

The collapse of bureaucratic socialism in the USSR unleashed all these forces. Not only did the Soviet Union break up into its 15 component parts; there was the danger of Russia itself, which still contains many different minority nationalities, going the same way. The Chechen-Ingush republic within the Russian federation cleaved down the middle and saw the Chechen half declare its independence from Moscow. In 1994 Boris Yeltsin ordered 40,000 troops to invade. Defeated and thoroughly humiliated, Yeltsin was forced to sign a peace treaty with the Chechnya government in 1997 - only for Putin to re-invade in August 1997.

From then onwards, the Chechen people have been bombed, beaten, raped and terrorised day and night by the Russian armed forces, which has been guilty of the most shocking atrocities and massacres. Around 250,000 Chechens have been killed, including some 40,000 school-aged children.

This is the blood-stained soil from which those who seized the Middle School No1 in Beslan were nurtured and raised - callousness begets callousness; cruelty begets cruelty.