Did Putin know?Date: January 2002 issue
An excerpt from Vadim Dubnov's article "The third way to dress up as a reformer" For nearly ten years now, we have felt deeply offended after each round of talks over our joining the WTO: it was demanded that we surrender some of the rights the world's largest country thought were its for ever because of its great power status. Now, after all that has happened, the wind is blowing the other way. Why continue intimidating the world and frittering away billions of dollars on the rundown post-Soviet military bases in Cam Ranh, Vietnam, and Lurdes, Cuba? God knows, how long, without September 11, the giant tracking station antennas could have gone on spinning around, trying to catch every sound or movement from over hundreds of miles of ocean waves? Now that we are fighting international terrorism together, have caught (or so we are told) the terrorist leader Khattab at Kandahar in Afghanistan, and have found nuclear bomb-making instructions that could, by the way, have been photocopied and carried along secret mountain trails over to the Shatoi foothills in the North Caucasus, we can well dispense with all those assets without the fear of arousing suspicions of our fellow citizens. Even in Chechnya, the gloomy forebodings turned out to be false. Rather the other way round. Indeed, whoever looks for his chance in real earnest will certainly find it, if even in the craziest of ways. All came out very much Putin's way. On the one hand, shocked by the gruesome spectacle they saw on September 11, everybody suddenly cooled off on Chechnya. The phrase "talking peace" did not sound offensive any more. The turnaround was really tremendous. Moscow finally got a chance in Chechnya. If it fails to get what it wants this time, it can easily escape the blame and put it on the terrorists who, honest to God, refuse to speak a common language (this could be read between the lines.) To strengthen the administration's hand, bombs rained on the Pankisi Gorge on the eve of the summit marking ten years of the CIS. Georgia's Prez. Shevardnadze faced a dilemma - he could not possibly dodge the summit, but if he went he would have to put his case to his own people and the world at large in very strong terms without hurting Moscow's feelings very much. President Putin, he told his nation, was not to blame for the excesses of his generals on the loose. Here we come to Prsident Putin's main coup. Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, he can afford to sit on the fence and even make political capital on this. The generals are given enough leash to make themselves out to be a junta in public and go as far as bringing the nation to the brink of an armed conflict, and the public is free to weigh the chances of a successful army coup. However, the Kremlin keeps close tabs on its generals' fighting and organizational talents and, judging by the input it gets, it has few reasons to fear an army rebellion. Or overt sabotage either. Bombs falling on Abkhazian and Pankisi villages do not boomerang against the president. Shevardnadze is not so crazy as to make war on, or as much as take a stand against, one of the leaders of the international coalition fighting terrorism worldwide. Who cares about a couple of steel fragments going through the housetops in Pankisi at a time when a war is going on further south for the survival of human civilization? People close to the media magnate Berezovsky say his recent statement leaves out any mention of Russian secret services' complicity in the blowup of several residential houses in Moscow in late summer of 1999. His earlier statement, they assure us, was made in a fit of temper. Even then, his misplaced wrath was directed at the secret services, and nothing definite could be inferred about the involvement of Putin himself. That was not enough, however, to clear the president of suspicion, once and for all. The secret services, which have long taken accusations of this kind in their stride, said the man was off his rocker. Adding wryly, it was an act. If they are right, it was an act done in desperation. I say desperation because no one would care, or take the slightest interest, or go over to Berezovsky's side, even if the man had an authentic video of explosives being planted in an apartment house basement in Moscow or a genuine audio tape capturing the president's voice ordering the house to be blown up. Why? Because this age is sick with a disease diagnosed unintentionally by a famous analyst.... President Putin need not tempt providence. He may know nothing about the bombardment of Georgia or the explosions in Moscow. He may avoid picking quarrels with anyone, and keep on smiling when confronted with Berezovsky's damned question, "Did Putin know?", or fling the question back, as he did at his summer press conference, "Berezovsky? Who is he?" By the way Berezovsky no longer swears that Putin will not serve out his full presidential term. I guess, he has just clean forgotten about that. The only problem is that luck will fail one time or another. Like, well, with oil prices. And the end of the war in Afghanistan is already in sight. A new crop of oligarchs is growing up under the Kremlin's umbrella, who, by the laws of the oligarchs, could prove no more tractable than the old ones. Putin has so far succeeded when time or circumstances have cleared the way for him. Elsewhere, where a responsible decision has to be made involving a risk, no matter how small, or where a historical choice is to be made single-handed, the president's performance has been lacklustre. But time is running out fast. He has one more year, at best. Then there will be another presidential campaign. No one knows better than him that no competitors halfway through a race means nothing. Related:
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