Chechnya: Politics of the New Barbarism (Commentaries: The World at Large‪)‬

The KGB ushered in perestroika. The dying CPSU General Secretary and former KGB head Yury Andropov, anxious to reinvigorate the Soviet military-industrial state, endorsed Mikhail Gorbachev, who went on to become party General Secretary in March 1985. Fifteen years on, the Yeltsin era has ended with the appointment, as acting-president of Russia, of the head of the Russian successor to the KGB, the FSB (Federal Security Service), Vladimir Putin. The wheel of the Russian apparatus of state has turned full-circle. Notwithstanding the demise of Soviet-style communism, its principal instrument of domestic repression has returned to centre stage, secured by Russia's genocidal war in Chechnya. Yeltsin's resignation on New Year's eve was the anti-climax to eight torrid years of 'reform' in Russia, his personal debility a metaphor for the disastrous legacy he has bequeathed to the Russian people, to whom he abjectly apologized for failing to keep his promises. 'Democracy' and the 'market' were the watchwords of the Yeltsin presidency. Neither has really been achieved. Unenlightened despotism was installed on the burnt-out ruins of a parliament shelled into submission in October 1993, bolstered by a constitution imposed via a dubious referendum in December, that gave the president the whip hand over parliament. Far from a flourishing, modern market, Yeltsin's semi-Bonapartist regime (1) has overseen an 'unprecedented ... demodernization of a twentieth-century country'. (2) The savagery of the Chechen war is symptomatic of this. A weak Russian state, unable to retain the allegiances of its minority peoples either through material benefits or shared national aspirations, has resorted to barbarism to shore up its tottering multi-national federation, and in the face of external challenges to its traditional sphere of influence on its southern flank.