ANALYSIS:After a brutal campaign waged by the Russian army, the Caucasus has struck back at ordinary commuters, writes DAN McLAUGHLIN
YESTERDAY’S BOMB attack on Moscow’s metro system sent fear through the city and threw down a bloody gauntlet to Vladimir Putin, for a decade the driving force behind Russia’s fight with the militants of the North Caucasus.
Investigators immediately identified rebels from that region as being the most likely organisers of the explosions, which police believe were triggered by two female suicide bombers at the height of rush hour on one of the world’s busiest underground railway networks.
Now prime minister, Putin flew back to Moscow last night from a trip to Siberia, after condemning the attack and vowing that the perpetrators would be “destroyed”.
Putin has been making such pledges for a decade, since he took over the Russian presidency from Boris Yeltsin and took charge of a second war within five years against the rebels of Chechnya, a mostly Muslim republic that has chafed against the Kremlin yoke for centuries.
Putin’s war winnowed the ranks of Chechnya’s militants, but the brutality of its conduct and the corruption of local officials have pushed the insurgency into the neighbouring republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan, and allowed radical Islam to gain a foothold so that fighters who once wanted only independence now demand a Sharia emirate taking in the entire North Caucasus.
After the chaotic and humiliating 1990s under the increasingly dissolute Yeltsin, Putin promised to restore Russian pride with a mixture of toughness, efficiency and patriotism. And he filled the ranks of power with former security service colleagues to get the job done.
For the last decade, Putin has embodied the hopes of the vast majority of Russians who crave stability, security and at least a modicum of prosperity. For a liberal, politically engaged minority, he has realised their fears of a nationalist, authoritarian, one-party state.
His power, however, was unchallenged, because he presided over a spectacular economic boom while presenting a reassuringly “tough guy” image – riding in a fighter jet, practising judo, stripping off his shirt to go fishing, even supposedly wielding a tranquilliser gun to save a camera crew from tiger attack. By overseeing a rapid growth in Russians’ wages and flexing the nation’s military muscles in Chechnya and then in Georgia, Putin saw his popularity soar.
Now, however, the economic miracle is over. This month, thousands of people in 20 Russian cities from the Baltic to the Pacific protested against Putin’s government, and some called for his resignation. This was hardly a revolution and Putin is still the country’s most popular politician, but the demonstrations would have been unimaginable just two years ago.
Putin has taken to ridiculing businessmen and officials on state-controlled television to show that he is still the country’s big boss. But that hasn’t stopped inflation and unemployment rising, nor discontent growing outside the usual circles of Moscow and St Petersburg intelligentsia.
While struggling to maintain his image as a provider of prosperity, Putin also faces a huge challenge on the security front.
At least 27 people were killed in November when Russia’s premier express train was blown up between Moscow and St Petersburg, killing and injuring several officials and effectively bringing Putin’s war back into the Russian heartland from the distant Caucasus mountains.
Yesterday’s attack brought that war even closer to the heart of power in Russia, to metro stations that are just minutes away from the Kremlin.
More pertinently for the security services and for Putin, the first bomb exploded at the Lubyanka station, under the square of the same name and the dreaded building that was the home of the KGB and is now the headquarters of its successor, the FSB.
The Lubyanka was Putin’s spiritual home during his time working in Germany as a KGB agent, and he led the FSB from there in 1998-1999. Lubyanka is a symbol of the security services that, for Putin and his allies, represents the steel that stiffens the Russian state; a bomb attack beneath its very foundations is much too close for comfort.
There were also suggestions that the attacks might have been revenge for last week’s raid by FSB agents in the North Caucasus that killed a close ally of rebel leader Doku Umarov.
Umarov said last month that “the Russians do not understand that the war today is coming to their streets, the war is coming to their homes, the war is coming to their cities, they do not think that the war is coming, that it is going on only on television somewhere far away in the Caucasus and that the war does not concern them, but we plan, God willing, to prove to them that the war is coming to their homes.”
Confronted with the enormous challenge of protecting lives and infrastructure across a country that is not only the world’s largest but is poor and riddled with corruption, Putin is in danger of simultaneously losing face as the manager of Russia’s economy and as guarantor of its security.
But having largely disabled the standard democratic outlets for dissent – free elections, independent media and the right to public protest – Putin has no fear of being ousted, particularly as the only politician anywhere near him in popularity polls is his tame protege, president Dmitry Medvedev.
Putin is not a man for turning, and he will continue with his economic course and his war in the Caucasus. In any case, his forces have killed all the moderate rebel leaders with whom a negotiated peace could have been sought. There remain only hardliners on each side, and 140 million Russians trapped between them, wondering when that war will explode into their lives.
Dan McLaughlin is based in Budapest. He reports on central and eastern Europe, Russia and the Caucasus