Moscow bombings: Putin and Medvedev have only themselves to blame

Russian authorities have blamed North Caucasus separatists for yesterday’s Moscow underground attacks without releasing a shred of evidence in support or any claims of responsibility. The death toll in the Lubyanka and Park Kultury metro station bombings rose to 39 today after a young woman died in hospital. 71 others remain in hospital, five critically injured. Russian Intelligence services say the bombs were planted by two women wearing belts packed with the explosive hexogen and metal shrapnel. It was FSB boss Alexander Bortnikov who said those responsible had links to the North Caucasus but he offered no supporting evidence of his charge.

Meanwhile Russia’s tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee leaders Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin tried to outdo each other in fatuous condemnation without either making any effort to apply wisdom to the situation. Medvedev said “they were simply beasts” without really saying who these beasts were. But whoever “they” were, Medvedev went on to make the ludicrous claim “I don’t have the slightest doubt: we will find and wipe out all of them.” Putin was no better, apparently blaming the attack on dogs or horses when he said those responsible for the attacks would be “destroyed”.

The fact is the Russian government is sowing what it reaped with these and other so-called terrorist bombings in recent years. After the Russian annihilation of Chechen separatists in the 1990s, the opposition has turned to a more extremist Muslim leadership with Saudi Wahhabist leanings despite the fact that most people in the area have peaceable Sufi leanings. The extremists want to declare a Caucasus Emirate and have killed 5,000 people since 2002 in their jihad against Moscow.

The Guardian said the two latest targets appeared to have been carefully chosen to represent a symbolic attack on Russia’s government. The first bomb went off opposite the headquarters of Russia’s FSB anti-terrorism intelligence agency at Lubyanka in the city centre. They say the second bomb may have been intended for Oktyabrskaya station, next to Russia’s interior ministry in the city’s south west.

However it is not beyond the realm of possibilities these may have been false flag operations. The FSB has form in this department. In the Russian apartment bombings of 1999 which led directly to the Second Chechen War, the failed attack on the building in the city of Ryazan was carried out by FSB operatives who were arrested by police. A hugely embarrassed then FSB director Nikolai Patrushev laughed off the incident as a “training exercise”. Those in Grozny did not see the funny side of it as 50,000 civilians were killed in the massive military assault.

Chechnya has had peace of a sort since then but it is a Russian imposed peace and a low-level insurgency continues. And as the Guardian’s Tom Parfitt said last year, Chechnya’s peace is based on murder. Its Kremlin backed government is run by a 33-year-old thug named Ramzan Kadyrov who was appointed by Vladimir Putin. Kadyrov brooks no dissent in his fiefdom, and his soldiers have repeatedly been accused of torture, kidnappings and extra-judicial killings. He has killed off his political and media opponents while Moscow has turned a blind eye. As Parfitt notes Russia has signed “a Faustian pact with [Kadyrov] to quell insurrection and stop terrorist attacks reaching the Russian heartland, in exchange for wide autonomy on his home turf.”

But that is proving an elusive goal. Chechens are still succeeding in bringing the war to Russia’s own turf. The two suspected suicide bombers are part of what the media loves to dub “black widows”. These were women who lost husbands or brothers to the Russian war and who made a spectacular leap into public consciousness during the Moscow theatre siege “dressed in black chadors, their waists and chests adorned with bombs”.

But while the bombs might be hidden behind chadors, the war of ideas is hidden by the bombastic rhetoric of Putin and Medvedev. Their naked greed and imperialism is taking Russian into a dangerous and almost fascistic phase. They have plundered the country’s wealth, killed with impugnity and destroyed the hopes of democracy inherited from the work of Mikhail Gorbachev. They are the real murderers, the “beasts” which should be “destroyed”.

Putin shuffles the deckchairs

Vladimir Putin has confirmed the worst kept secret in Russian politics by saying he had “accepted an offer” to become the country’s Prime Minister. This will now happen if his handpicked successor Dmitri Medvedev is elected President in March as the Prime Minister is a presidential appointment. Analysts have painted this as a deft manoeuvre for Putin to maintain the reins of power despite the constitutional obstacle of a maximum of two presidential terms. But the announcement heralds shifts in power factions behind the scenes.

Medvedev is a hot favourite to win the Presidential election with the full weight of incumbent approval behind him. Putin endorsed Medvedev for the presidency last week and Medvedev responded by saying he wanted Putin to serve as Prime Minister. The motto appears to be “Elect Medvedev and keep Putin." With opinion polls consistently showing that almost half of Russia’s electorate would back Putin’s chosen successor, and strict media controls denying oxygen to opposition parties, the path seems clear for a Medvedev victory, most likely in a second run-off election.

The 42 year old Dmitri Medvedev would then become Russia’s youngest leader since Tsar Nicholas II. Medvedev is a graduate of St Petersburg’s State University where he gained a doctorate in law. In 1990 he was appointed to a consultancy position in the city’s council. Here he first encountered Vladimir Putin who was also a council advisor. He moved into national politics in 1999 becoming Government deputy chief of staff. He led Putin’s presidential election campaign a year later. He was rewarded for his loyalty in 2005 with the role of First Deputy Prime Minister, a position created specifically for him.

Medvedev is part of the Kremlin’s technocrat wing, which has strategic control the state-run gas monopoly Gazprom. Putin’s support for him is a repudiation for the hard-line military and intelligence “siloviki” faction (pdf) which backed former defence minister Sergei Ivanov for the presidency. Ivanov still has formidable weapons at his disposal for the election. The Siloviki remains the most powerful of the Kremlin cliques and controls the military, administrative and legal agencies including the FSB (the rebadged KGB).

But an opinion poll released yesterday by the Yury Levada Analytical Centre shows clear support for Medvedev over Ivanov. 35 per cent said they would vote for Medvedev with 21 per cent favouring Ivanov. The 66 year old current Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov is third with a 17 per cent approval rating. Medvedev’s rating has increased five percentage points in four months while Ivanov’s has dropped a dramatic 15 per cent in the same period when the hugely popular Putin announced his intentions. Putin won in 2004 with over 70 percent of the vote.

With power top-heavy in the hands of the president, it is not clear how his switch to Prime Minister will operate in practice. Putin is unlikely to want to accept orders from his new “boss”. Putin said in his speech to the closing session of the United Russia party congress on Monday he was ready to continue their “joint work” and that he would not seek to change the legal authority of either office, and that he was ready to work with Medvedev "without changing the distribution of powers between the president and the government". That means all the key "power ministries", such as the Foreign Ministry, Defence Ministry, and Interior Ministry would report directly to Medvedev. It remains to be seen who will really be pulling the strings of their joint work.