"Ten days of pain, impotence and shame". Such was Isvestia's judgment yesterday on the latest Chechen hostage crisis which President Yeltsin has proclaimed at an end. It was rounded off by the surrender last night of the group of Chechen gunmen who seized a ferry in the Black Sea in support of their comrades in the pulverised village of Pervomaiskoye. The affair has many political and economic ramifications for Russia, quite aside from the immediate military questions thrown up in the ten day siege.
Any audit of the siege must take account of such liberal criticism of how it was handled by the political and military authorities. Mr Yeltsin's staunch defence of their conduct was to be expected but given the revelations of military incompetence his credibility has been put seriously in question. Confusion extends to the number of hostages and Chechen gunmen who were killed or escaped and to the contradictory accounts given to journalists. The massive and crude use of force has left many of the military themselves more humiliated and bewildered than before.
So much for the pain. The impotence is intimately bound up with it. Mr Yeltsin and his advisers opted for such crude tactics for fear of being seen as weak in the face of provocation by the small Chechen guerrilla band. Impotence would be judged extremely harshly by a Russian electorate altogether frustrated by the dire social consequences of economic reforms which drove them to vote in such numbers for former communist and new nationalist parties in last month's parliamentary elections. These ten days have demonstrated how closely bound up security and economic policy have become with Mr Yeltsin's hopes to be reelected president in June. He made such a linkage explicit yesterday when he justified the sacking of the leading economic reformer, Mr Anatoly Chubais. This is despite Mr Yeltsin's continued commitment to economic reforms, which he said it would be disastrous to abandon.
It would be a mistake, however, to draw from these events the conclusion that the Russian electorate will necessarily opt for more liberal parties in this campaign. The complexities of the third dimension identified by Isvestia shame are likely to ensure that this is not the case. It has certainly been a bad week for Mr Yeltsin. But it is significant that he has chosen to tilt so sharply to the nationalist right in response to these events. The idea that Russian pride could be so humiliated cuts deep after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
All the more reason for Russia's international partners to be fully aware of how volatile a cocktail these events leave in their wake. The outcome makes it virtually certain that Chechen terrorism will continue in the absence of the alternative, and still far preferable, strategy of negotiations pursued by the prime minister, Mr Victor Chernomyrdin, last summer. Relations with Turkey will be more difficult now that the campaign has been spread to the Chechen diaspora there. It will be necessary to combine principled scrutiny of Russia's human rights record with a renewed appreciation of its deep sensitivity to international criticism in this traumatic period of transition.