Strongman, The

just the day before Beslan, a woman blew herself up in a Moscow metro station, killing herself and ten passers-by.
    Vladimir Putin finally addressed the nation on television on the evening of Saturday, 4 September, a day after the violent end to the school siege and a few hours after travelling to the scene to meet some of the survivors. He looked deeply shaken, and spoke slowly and emotionally about the ‘terrible tragedy on our soil’. Like a priest addressing a funeral service, he asked people ‘to remember those who perished at the hands of terrorists in recent days’, and dropped his head in sorrow. But then he quickly moved on from the immediate crisis to draw far-reaching and startling conclusions that in many ways defined the rest of his presidency.
    ‘Russia has lived through many tragic events and terrible ordeals over the course of its history,’ he said. ‘Today, we live in a time that follows the collapse of a vast and great state, a state that, unfortunately, proved unable to survive in a rapidly changing world. But despite all the difficulties, we were able to preserve the core of what was once the vast Soviet Union, and we named this new country the Russian Federation.’
    The style was odd – a history lesson delivered at the nation’s moment of grief, evoking the greatness of the USSR. In his next words Putin betrayed his nostalgia for the iron fist of the communist police state, which had been replaced by laxity:
    We are living through a time when internal conflicts and interethnic divisions that were once firmly suppressed by the ruling ideology have now flared up. We stopped paying the required attention to defence and security issues and we allowed corruption to undermine our judicial and law enforcement system. Furthermore, our country, formerly protected by the most powerful defence system along the length of its external frontiers overnight found itself defenceless both from the east and the west. It will take many years and billions of roubles to create new, modern and genuinely protected borders. But even so, we could have been more effective if we had acted professionally and at the right moment.
    In an intimation of the crackdown that would soon follow, Putin went on: ‘We showed ourselves to be weak. And the weak get beaten.’
    Putin was putting a whole new spin on the terrorist attack. There was no mention of his own forces’ brutality in Chechnya – the main factor that lay behind all the home-grown terrorism. In fact, he did not mention the word ‘Chechnya’ at all. Instead he was blaming the West! He couched his accusation in strange, ambiguous terms:
    Some would like to tear from us a ‘juicy piece of pie’. Others help them. They help, reasoning that Russia still remains one of the world’s major nuclear powers, and as such still represents a threat to them. And so they reason that this threat should be removed. Terrorism, of course, is just an instrument to achieve these aims.
    The attack on Beslan, Putin seemed to be saying, was part of a Western conspiracy to dismember the Russian Federation. Foreign governments were using terrorists as an ‘instrument’ to achieve that end. He addressed his people now in apocalyptic terms, like a leader on the brink of war:
    As I have said many times already, we have found ourselves confronting crises, revolts and terrorist acts on more than one occasion. But what has happened now, this crime committed by terrorists, is unprecedented in its inhumanness and cruelty. This is not a challenge to the president, parliament or government. It is a challenge to all of Russia, to our entire people. Our country is under attack.
    Putin swore that as president he would not be blackmailed or succumb to panic. ‘What we are facing is direct intervention of international terror directed against Russia. This is a total, cruel and full-scale war.’ He warned Russians they could no longer live in such a ‘carefree’ manner, and demanded tough action from the security services. He promised ‘a series of measures aimed at strengthening our country’s unity’.
    Those measures were announced over the coming days, and they shocked those who believed Russia was already far too authoritarian. Putin’s former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov (who had been sacked half a year earlier) called it an ‘anti-constitutional coup’.
    First, in the name of fighting international terrorism, Putin abolished the direct election of regional governors.