‘Scratch a Russian and you’ll find a Tatar,’ George said

The Russians did it the Russian way. Moscow’s Strongman, President Vladimir Putin, proved — bloodily enough — that he was true to his legend. In the early hours of yesterday morning, he dispatched his Special Forces (Spetsivatz Internal Security) troopers to smash their way into the theater were 700 theater-goers and actors had been held hostage by Chechen "terrorists" since late Wednesday night.

The four-day hostage drama had been all the more humiliating to Putin, since the intrepid and insolent band of Chechen rebels, numbering about 50 men and women in all, had seized the theater only five kilometers away from the Kremlin itself. (The captives had included over 30 children and 75 foreigners, 18 of them from Western countries such as the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany and Holland.)

Now, 36 of the Chechens had been slain outright, including their avowed leader, Movsar Barayev, a previously obscure nephew of a former Chechen rebel chieftain, Avdi Barayev. But it seems, while the death toll remained unconfirmed up to this writing, that dozens of the civilian hostages might have died, too. It’s speculated that the Special Forces injected "sleeping gas" into the theater in a bid to knock out the Chechens, or render them drowsy, in order to prevent them from killing the hostages or detonating the bombs they had strapped to themselves, as well as sowed all around the building. Nonetheless, the infiltrating troopers, who obviously staged their strike with survical precision, encountered gunfire and some resistance. Their achievement was to have prevented any exlosives from being detonated, and to have lost none of their own commandos in the operation.

Some of the Chechens were able to "escape" into the neighborhood, the authorities reported, and were still being hunted down. (They had, by their lightning intrusion, at least brought the "forgotten" war in Chechnya back into the headlines, and right into the heart of Moscow from 1,600 miles away. Yet, aside from this, they failed.)

Putin, although his fantastic popularity (they’ve composed pop songs in his honor, and besieged him with hosannas in the past year) could be slightly dented, has come out the winner. He’s sent a message to all terrorists and rebels: Don’t screw with me!

Perhaps we ought to borrow him for a few months to map out our own strategy against kidnappers, hostage-takers, the Abu Sayyaf (our local Chechens) and other armed troublemakers. But, alas, we aren’t Russians. We don’t possess the kind of streak which I’ll try to explain later.

* * *

For starters, there’s a long history of bad blood between the Russians and the Chechens, with treachery and slaughter on both sides. The feud had its origins in the 18th and 19th centuries (sound like those ancient Christian-Moro wars in Mindanao) when the Russian Tsars vanquished the Caucasus region, that chain of tremendous mountains which stretch west to east from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, with narrow passes serrating them along the coasts. The most warlike and difficult to squelch of all the tribes were the Muslim Chechens on the North Caucasus. They were a Turkish people, ringed in the east by Dagestan and to their west by Ingushetia and North Ossetia.

The Communist Dictator Josef Stalin, who used to be a seminarian in mostly Christian Georgia virtually next-door to Chechnya through the mountain passes, although a confirmed atheist himself – nursed an immemorial deep-seated antagonism towards the Chechens, and invoked a false accusation that the Chechens had "collaborated" with the Germans when the Nazis were making a drive to capture the Caspian oil fields to punish them. In February 1944, he ordered the KGB to herd all of them into trucks and railroad cars and "deport" the entire nation to Kazakhstan.

Even the Chechens who had been fighting in the Red Army discovered when they returned "home" that their families had been shipped hundreds of miles east in cattle cars and dumped, shelterless, into the freezing plains. Many thousands died there.

Only in 1957 – when General-Secretary Nikita Khrushchev (the shoe-banger in the United Nations, remember?) admitted this deportation had been an "error" – were the Chechens permitted to return.

* * *

The grievances run deep. Even the great novelist Leo Tolstoy was moved to pen a terrible tale of the 40-year conquest of Chechnya by the Tsarist Empire called Hadji Murat.

When the Soviet Union fragmented and self-destructed in September 1991, the Chechens declared their independence anew, held an election, and voted Jokhar Dudayev president.

In the beginning, Boris Yeltsin, trying to consolidate his own powe in the new Russian Federation, let Chechnya alone. In the latter part of 1994, however, Yeltsin began to realize that if he allowed any of the republics like Chechnya to break away, some of the other 19 repulics and oblasts might demand independence, too. Irritating Yeltsin, as well, was the fact that, under Dudayev and his "cronies" (yep, that’s the very pejorative term Moscow used), the self-proclaimed Chechen Republic had become a base for smuggling, gun-running, and drug-dealing. The Moscow and Odessa "underworlds" were, in fact, teeming with Chechen gangsters. Drug lords and Mafiyoshi were strutting around with a coterie of Chechen gangs. Even "legit" businessmen and bankers were hiring Chechen bodyguards to protect themselves from other Chechens.

Yeltsin seized on this "reason" to damn Dudayev and subsidize his enemies, like Doku Zavyayev and other pro-Moscow insurgents, so a puppet regime replacing Dudayev’s could be established. The trouble is that this effort couldn’t remain covert, since Russia’s newly-free media sent TV crews into the field and shocked the nation by filming Russian-made tanks and Russian troops actually fighting the Chechens – and 120 Russian troops even captured by Chechen fighters!

In the disastrous "first" war that followed, the formidable Red Army which had crushed Hitler’s legions and kept the collective might of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in check for 40 years, vying for superpower status with the United States, was virtually "defeated" by a tiny nation of 1.1 million Chechen guerrilla fighters.

When General Aleksander Lebed (who died, by the way, only a few months ago in an airplane crash) was given the impossible task of solving the Chechen problem, he surprised everyone by making peace with them. It was a tentative one, but it enabled the Russians to "leave" with some sort of face left. The deal Lebed had forged with Aslan Maskhadov – the Chechens’ commanding general, later to be elected Chechen President in 1997 – was for the Russian military to withdraw, Chechnya to postpone any question of "independence" for five years – until, incidentally, December 31, 2001 – when the two governments would discuss the "basic principles of relations". The last Russian troops departed in January 1997. The war had cost 50,000 lives, including those of 4,500 Russian soldiers. The Chechen capital Grozny had been reduced to rubble. At least 650,000 people had lost their homes. Every industry (except "kidnapping" and banditry, of course, their traditional cottage industries) had been destroyed.

The rebel leader Dudayev, it must be recalled, had been killed, too, in April 1996. It was an interesting "assassination" carried out by the Russians. Dudayev had been using his portable satellite telephone – enabling Russian intelligence to plot his precise location. A rocket attack obliterated poor Dudayev.

Lesson: be careful when you use your cellphone. Somebody may have your number. Then, "boom".

* * *

There was no way Putin, a former KGB toughie himself, could permit the Chechen "terrorists" to gain points by staging a successful hostage-taking which "forced" the Russians to withdraw from Chechnya – as they had announced was their aim. The Chechens have tweaked the nose of the Russian bear much too often for Putin to have let them have their way this time.

For instance, on June 13, 1995, when Moscow boasted that with the taking of Shatoi, a village in the Caucasus mountains, the last center of Chechen resistance had been toppled, a Chechen force of 200 under the command of the "folk hero" insurgent Shamil Basayev, infiltrated 40 miles inside Russia itself and seized Budyonnovsk. He rounded up over 1,000 hostages in a hospital there. The Russian army attacked the captured hospital twice, wreaking much damage – and killing 100 of the hostages in the process. They failed, on the other hand, to breach the Chechen defenses.

Finally, then Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin had to go to Budyonnovsk to "negotiate" with the Chechens – and Basayev and his commandos were allowed to leave after a week of defiance. The rebel returned to Chechnya in a "victorious" convoy, taking 150 people along with him. Afterwards he went on to audaciously hijack an airliner flying from Russia to Turkey, and rob a number of banks.

Basayev used to brag: "Perhaps we should restate Churchill’s three rules about Russians – don’t believe the Russians, never make friends with the Russians and never let a Russian into your cow shed." Gee whiz, did Winston Churchill really say that? I know he never trusted the Russians, but yet, Winnie ceded the Balkans and all of central and eastern Europe to them. (I never figured out what Russians would do, as what rascal Basayev had intimated, if one let them into the cowshed.) Anyway, that quote comes from The World in Conflict, by John Lafin (Brassey’s, London, Washington, 1997).

On January 9, 1996, Chechen fighters launched another commando raid, this time into Kizalyar, in Dagestan to the east. They grabbed dozens of hostages and herded them into a local hospital — they must have this thing about hospitals. Their commander, Salman Ruduyev, a son-in-law of Dudayev, held out against Russian counter-attack. After negotiations, the Russians agreed to let the commandos march out, unscathed. When Raduyev and his guerrillas, with 150 hostages in tow, got to the small border villae of Pervomayskoye, the Russian army attempted to ambush them there. The Chechens beat off assaulting tanks and infantry. The Russians, claiming that the Chechens had murdered their hostages (untrue, as it turned out), bombed the entire village to pieces. To the Russians’ amazement, a rescue group of Chechens managed to stage a counter-attack from the rear! Before the Russians recovered from their surprise and shock, the besieged Raduyev and his remaining band were able to break out and escape.

Yeltsin was embarrassed by this episode, and other setbacks. Putin, his successor, is determined not to be humiliated in the same manner.

Yeltsin was embarrassed by this episode, and other setbacks. Putin, his successor, is determined not to humiliated in the same manner.

Let’s not forget that it was Putin who re-started the war three years ago. The Chechens provided him with a casus belli. A series of blasts in Moscow, which tore down buildings, claimed 300 lives in September 1999. Putin – then Yeltsin’s Prime Minister – fixed the blame squarely on Chechen saboteurs and sent the Russian army back into Chechnya. The casualties have been heavy. Up to 80,000 deaths have been recorded since 1999, counting the Chechen rebels and civilian slain, and Russian federal army fatalities. The Financial Times of London last Friday said, "That is perhaps twice as many as in the previous conflict."

* * *

It’s ironic that the Chechen hostage-takers may have done Mr. Putin a favor. While his popularity ran to unprecedented heights, support for his war in Chechnya had waned disastrously to under 30 percent. In the backlash, let’s see how Russian public opinion shapes up.

Moscow has long argued, FT’s correspondent in Moscow, Andrew Jack, and London editor Mark Huband report, that "foreign fighters and money have played an important role in the three-year conflict in the breakaway republic. . ."

The FSB (Russia’s security police, the new name for the old KGB) estimates that funding to rebels (largely from countries in the Persian Gulf) ran to about $6 million a month in 2000, but had declined to $1 million per month after September 11, 2001. An FSB spokesman was quoted by Jack as saying that each action has a price tag: $100 to kill a Russian soldier, up to $1,000 for an officer, and $5,000 to destroy a helicopter. The FSB alleges that with the exception of Shamil Basayev (who fights on), the other nine principal rebel commanders are foreign Muslims, including a Jordanian commander named Khattab (said by terrorism experts to be a "protégé of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden).

Added Jack and Huband: "There have been reports that Zacarias Moussaoui, a man detained by the US in its investigation into the September 11 attacks, may have recruited at least two acquaintances to fight in Chechnya, and that three Algerian militants had been trained in Afghanistan and Chechnya."

The faction of Aslan Maskhadov, the breakaway Chechen "president" and top rebel chieftain, has loudly denied (as the Washington Post said yesterday) that they have anything to do with the hostage taking. They blame, instead, a separatist faction with "a reputation for brutality and fanaticism, and possibly with links to Muslim groups abroad."

Well, it seems that in brutality and fanaticism, the hostage-takers have met their match.

Putin cancelled his trips to Germany, Portugal and, finally, to the APEC in Los Cabos, Mexico, where he had been due to meet with US President George Bush, to handle the hostage crisis. (Now we know the name of that theater: It was the former "House of Culture of the First State Ball Bearings Factory" on a long-term lease to stage the musical Nord-Ost which had become a stage hit, as a symbol of Russia’s economic and cultural "revival". Whew, what a jaw-breaker of a name – no wonder the broadcast media never mentioned it!)

In any event, the Islamic hostage-takers met their equal in the ball-bearings House of Culture – the steel balls of Putin.

Why are the Russians so unrelenting, even cruel, in their military assaults? Even in the past, military commanders – whether Red or White – never hesitated to inflict civilian casualties. My old professor in the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), of the Johns Hopkins University, had an explanation for it. When I went to school there, in the days when I still ambitioned getting a Ph.D. in foreign relations, we were fortunate to have the renowned Dr. George Kennan ("Mr. X" of Soviet and Eastern European expertise fame) on loan from the Hoover Institute.

Ambassador Kennan, for months, tried to explain how the "Tatar yoke" had formed the Russian mentality. Referring to the 250 years, beginning in the13th century, when the Tatars and Mongols from Central Asia had overwhelmed and ruled Russia with an iron hand, imposing a harsh regime and Islamic control over the land, he pointed out that this Tatar mentality is what inspired the "scorched earth" policy which had starved Hitler’s invading Panzers and armies to death – as they had Napoleon’s.

"Scratch a Russian," he sometimes quipped, "and you’ll find a Tatar." (Don’t let that blonde or red hair, or those blue or green eyes fool you, I suppose.)

I guess Putin has proven himself the Tatar King!