When Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, he made one thing clear immediately: he would be different from his predecessors – Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union – in his response to terrorism.
That difference would be manifested in his declared determination never to wilt under pressure. Like many officers trained in the KGB and traumatised by the collapse of the Soviet Union, Putin was convinced the Russian state was so fragile that it could collapse at any moment if its enemies were given an inch. To Putin and his KGB friends, the famous phone call made in 1995 by Yeltsin’s prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, to a terrorist leader to save the lives of hostages in a hospital in Budyonnovsk, was the worst possible way of dealing with terrorists.
Broadcast live on Russian television, Chernomyrdin’s call resulted in the release of women and children and the end of the first Chechen war, which was seen as a humiliation for the Russian army. It also led to a traumatic soul-searching in the Russian security services and special forces.
Putin will have none of that. In the years that have followed, he has responded to every new terrorist attack with more restrictions that have made it impossible to bring any public pressure to bear on him and his agencies during or after a terror attack.
Strict information censorship around terrorist attacks was introduced. I was investigated by the FSB (the federal security services) for the first time for publishing a critical account of an FSB operation in October 2002, when more than a thousand people were taken hostage in a Moscow theatre. The special operation ended with a horrible loss of more than 130 hostages, most killed by a gas used by the FSB.
Any criticism of the Russian security services’ response was ruled out and the idea of relying on the Duma to find the truth was completely compromised after its attempt to investigate the Beslan school hostage-taking and siege in 2004.
By 2006, Putin’s obsession about not giving an inch to his enemies had been formalised into a major piece of Russian anti-terror legislation “on countering terrorism”, which replaced Yeltsin’s 1998 law. It had a striking definition of terrorism: “Terrorism is an ideology of violence and practice of influence on decision-making by bodies of the government, institutions of local government, or international organisations, by means of intimidation of the population and (or) other forms of illegal violent actions.”
That new legislation placed a strong emphasis on terrorism as something aimed at the Russian state, while Yeltsin’s 1998 law had defined it as something directed at civilians. The Russian security services got the point, and so did terrorist groups. In the 1990s and early 2000s, terrorists took hostages and made political demands, hoping to force the Kremlin into negotiation. Thereafter they switched to brutal, senseless acts of terror, knowing that Putin’s Kremlin would not respond to any demands.
Terrorist groups in the North Caucasus first killed security services personnel, but then progressed to massacre by blowing up a Moscow airport and attacking public transport.
Putin is a very systematic person. He has stuck to his policy of protecting his agencies throughout his reign. He has kept the successor to the KGB, the FSB – his longest and most beloved investment – well supplied with resources, and made sure it is completely immune to any criticism.
That has deeply affected its culture as the main Russian security agency responsible for counter-terrorism. The FSB became very efficient and innovative at repression. Nowadays, the Russian security and intelligence services are world experts in killing and torture. Russian society has seen plenty of recent examples of that: Alexei Navalny’s horrible death in February, the plight of political prisoners, the assassination last month of a Russian defector in Spain, and the hammer attack on a political exile in Vilnius, Lithuania.
The FSB is also rather competent at investigating attacks after the event, thanks in large part to video surveillance, combined with up-to-the-minute facial recognition technology. We saw this in the FSB’s response to the Crocus city hall attack in Moscow. Four suspected perpetrators were identified, pursued and arrested within 24 hours. And, sure enough, they were immediately tortured – one of the suspects had his ear cut off and was forced to eat it by special forces, all recorded and at once leaked to pro-Kremlin media.
But these are not the qualities that help to prevent attacks happening, and time and again, the FSB has failed as an intelligence collection agency because other things are needed: information-sharing capabilities between agencies, both domestic and foreign, and trust between those agencies and within those agencies. They also need to be trusted by the population, and they need to be ready to say very uncomfortable things to the generals – even to the country’s leader.
In this country where no freedoms are allowed and political discussion is strongly censored, trust in national security services is in short supply. Of course, the harassed population will go along with the government narrative, but fear and mistrust has already led to the blossoming of all sorts of conspiracy theories, questioning and undermining everything the Kremlin has said about Friday’s attack.
At some point, the Russian people came to realise that Putin will stop at nothing to achieve his objective, and that he would be fully capable of committing any crime against his own people, however horrible. That’s a problem he faces in the aftermath of attacks: big brother technology, brutal force and repression can only get you so far.
Andrei Soldatov is author of The Compatriots: The Russian Exiles Who Fought Against the Kremlin
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