Strongman, The

wooden structures of the Kremlin – the fortress at the heart of the capital – burned down time after time. In the sixteenth century Tatar invaders torched the city. In 1812, as Napoleon’s Grande Armée entered Moscow, a great conflagration destroyed almost everything, leading to the city being rebuilt virtually from scratch.
    On the evening of Sunday 14 March 2004, the Manezh exhibition hall, the former tsarist riding school which stands right next to the Kremlin, caught fire in unexplained circumstances and blazed for hours into the dark night sky. 11 Vladimir Putin climbed to a vantage point inside the Kremlin’s dark red walls and observed the scene. Television pictures showed him staring out at the inferno, then turning and walking away, with a look of apprehension in his eyes. Perhaps he saw it as some of kind of omen. It was election day. Polling stations had closed just a few hours earlier, and he had been chosen as Russia’s president for a second four-year term, with 71 per cent of the vote. Napoleon had seen his prize burn down before his eyes. Would Putin’s vision also be destroyed by foreigners, encroaching on Russia with their alien concepts of democracy?
    I have no idea whether such thoughts really ran through the president’s mind at that moment. But events a few months later in the south of Russia would show that Vladimir Putin, the strongman, was haunted by almost paranoid illusions of weakness and external danger. Another bloody terrorist attack, which ended with the deaths of hundreds of children in a school, apparently served as proof for Putin that his grip on the country was too feeble, and that Russia was an emasculated rump state surrounded by enemies. Cornered, he would lash out to prove his strength. Putin Mark II would be an angry phoenix, born in fire.
    Beslan and the ‘constitutional coup’
    The tragedy began on 1 September, the day Russian children traditionally return to school after the summer holidays. In Beslan, a small town of 36,000 people, just north of the Caucasus mountains and less than an hour’s drive west of Chechnya, children turned up at school No. 1 in cheerful mood and fresh uniforms. Just after 9 o’clock, as they held a ceremony with their parents in the schoolyard, a group of armed fighters screeched up to the school in an army truck, firing their guns into the air, and herded more than 1,100 people – children, parents and teachers – into the school building. It was a repeat of the Moscow theatre tragedy – except that the terrorists had learned lessons that made it even harder for the authorities to deal with the crisis. The hostage-takers had planned the attack meticulously and knew every inch of the school. A dozen hostages were shot within the first hours, and over the next three days the country watched horrific events unfold, as the gunmen laid trip-wires and explosives around the school and refused to allow food, water or medicine to be brought into the building. Once again, President Putin faced the most awful dilemma – how to free hostages and save lives without giving in to the terrorists’ demands, which as usual included outright independence for Chechnya. Negotiations with a doctor who had helped during the theatre siege and with a local government leader got nowhere. Packed into the school gymnasium, in sweltering heat, the children were traumatised and parched. On the third day, special forces stormed the school following two unexplained explosions. The rebels fought back. Twenty-eight terrorists were killed, but so were 334 hostages, mostly children.
    It was the bleakest day yet in Russia’s failing battle against terrorism on its own soil. The ability of gunmen and suicide bombers to wreak havoc almost at will demonstrated the impotence of the authorities and the nonsense of Putin’s claim to have ‘won’ the fight. The Beslan tragedy was the sixth major terrorist incident in 2004 alone.
    In February 41 people were killed in a bomb attack on the Moscow underground.
    In May the pro-Moscow president of Chechnya, Akhmat Kadyrov, was assassinated at a Victory Day parade in the capital, Grozny.
    In June a group of terrorists from Chechnya attacked the capital of the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia. They killed 95 people and captured a large cache of weapons which were later used at Beslan.
    In August 90 people died when two aircraft were simultaneously blown up in mid-air by suicide bombers.
    And at the end of the same month,