next - main - previous
The Eurasian Politician - Issue 1 (May 21st, 2000)
Author: Antero Leitzinger, historian,
researcher of the Finnish Bureau of Immigration, author of several books
concerning the Caucasus, Middle East and the former Soviet Union.
Translation from Finnish by Anssi Kullberg.
Western political scholarship has been credulous of ostensibly democratising societies, such as Russia. In reality, a political culture does not change in a moment, and cannot easily be released from old habits and customs. Russia is still governed by the secret police, although its leader now uses the more democratic titles of prime minister and, since the New Year, acting president. Also among the other presidential candidates former KGB officials are strongly represented. Does this signal a return to totalitarianism?
Russia has governed her people through provocations, pogroms against minorities, and interventions against neighbours. All these methods have been used to gain hegemony over the Chechens since the 1860s, when the conquest of Caucasia was “completed“. The strategy has been based on the “divide and conquer“ method, used already by the ancient Romans, but every now and then the method has been completed with direct military aggressions (1939-40, 1994-96, 1999-) and with genocide.
“In May 1862 a series of devastating fires broke out in St. Petersburg. Their origin remains obscure, but they were widely attributed to Nihilist students. The Nihilists for their part blamed the fires on police ‘provocation’ – a word which becomes increasingly common from now onwards to describe acts undertaken or instigated by the police in order to discredit and trap revolutionaries. That the fires were started by the police was maintained on the pages of Herzen’s Bell. Whoever did or did not ignite the tinder, the result was a wave of revulsion against the Nihilists, which made it easier for the government to impose repressive measures... against freedom of speech.“ (Hingley 1990, 51-52)
The provocations reached their climax in the late czarist period, when the Bolsheviks were especially subject to the plots of the secret police, Ohrana – yet the Bolsheviks also took the lesson of the use of provocations. “Chekists very quickly learned to keep one step ahead of their quarry by resorting to the tactic of provocation, which indeed became standard Cheka practice, and a most effective one... In this, as in other techniques, the Vecheka modelled itself on the Okhrana, which had penetrated some of the main revolutionary parties – and especially the Bolsheviks – so competently through its agents provocateurs.“ (Leggett 1981, 302)
Also in Finland, the Investigating Central Criminal Police (“Etsivä Keskusrikospoliisi“, EK) was in trouble in the 1920s, when the Cheka infiltrated agents across the border among refugees, pretending to be supporters of czarist rule. In 1921-1927 a feigned conspiracy called the “Trust“ managed to damage the reputation of the emigrants permanently. (Leggett, 1981, 297.) The later president of Finland Urho Kekkonen, who was in the service of the EK at the time, planned to make the use of provocateurs the subject of his doctorate thesis. (Simola & Salovaara 1994, 55.)
Besides political parties, whole groups of people were branded by using provocations. In the 1800s, the most opportune ones for such branding were the Jews. People were commonly led to imagine that the Jews were planning a world revolution, and to prove this claim, the Ohrana falsified a document called “Protocols of the Elders of Zion“. This provocation is still inspiring anti-Semitic organisations around the world. (It must be remembered that in the 1800s the propaganda against the Jews, albeit it would sound absurd today, was taken seriously by large share of the population, in the same way that the anti-Muslim propaganda has spread today.) “A more serious by-product... was the outbreak, in spring 1881, of anti-Jewish pogroms, largely in the Ukraine. For these the Imperial authorities, including local police organisations, were partly to blame – if not for directly instigating such outrages, at least for conniving at them. ... Pogroms recurred over several years, but the nation as a whole seemed... relapsing into political apathy...“ (Hingley, 1990, 70.)
In Odessa, in October 1905, hundreds of Jews were massacred in a pogrom provoked by the Ohrana. This incident has been studied thoroughly by Robert Weinbert (Weinbert 1902, 248-289). In February of the same year, the same methods were used in Baku, in order to provoke the Muslims and the Armenians against each other. (Deutscher 1967, 68.)
After the World War II, mainly the Americans have ensured that anti-Semitism does not reach the stage of fomenting pogroms. Russian economic dependency on United States support has effected a shift in the Jews’ position as favourite target of hate-agitating allowing them to be replaced by the Caucasians, whom the Russians contemptuously call “the Blacks“, and whom they accuse of all kinds of criminality.
The Russian literature has constructed an image of savage and cruel Chechens already since the 1800s. The image was reinforced when Stalin deported the whole nation from its homeland, falsely claiming them to be loyal to the Germans, although the war had not even reached as far as Chechnya. A new slander campaign began after the fall of the Soviet Union. The targets were two prominent Chechens, yet politically totally opposed to each other, who had both in their own ways developed a hatred of Boris Yeltsin’s regime: Dzoxar Dudayev, who had declared his country independent in autumn 1991, and Ruslan Hasbulatov, who led a rebellion in Moscow one year later. Both their reputations could be damaged by fomenting fear and hatred against the Chechens both in Russia and abroad. The bloody invasion and humiliation of the Russian army, as the Chechen guerrillas liberated their capital in August 1996 – soon after Yeltsin’s inauguration – left a desire for revenge to smoulder.
Last September, bombs exploded in a shopping centre and in apartment blocks in Moscow. The culprits were never found, but it was not long before everyone “knew“ that they were Chechens. The militia arrested tens of thousands of people, judged on the grounds of being “dark“ by looks, and when the arrested proved to be largely Caucasians, the arrests were used as further “evidence“ of the “natural“ criminal tendencies of Chechens.
As early as in the summer of 1998, the Muscovian researcher Andrei Piontkovsky had been able to predict, that the next Chechen war would follow a number of explosions in Moscow. (Suomen Kuvalehti 48/ 3rd December 1999, p. 12.) In July 1999, Moskovskaya Pravda published a secret plan (operation ‘Storm in Moscow’), which predicted bombs preceding the Duma election. (Novaya Gazeta, 20th November 1999.)
Besides their prophetic function, the Moscow bombs seemed to have imitators. In the city of Ryazan, on 23rd September, three sugar sacks containing hidden explosives and a timer were discovered in an apartment block. At first the FSB (Russian secret service, former KGB) announced that the incident was undoubtedly connected with the earlier bomb blasts. (Fakty i kommentarii 24th September 1999.) Then it was discovered that the bomb had been installed by agents of the FSB! At the same time it was remarked that in the sacks there was too much sugar for the bombs to have exploded in full intensity. (Kommersant, 24th September 1999.) Finally the FSB admitted that it had installed the bomb for practice purposes, in order to test the alertness of the inhabitants. The local authorities, however, wondered why there was a bomb at all in the sack, and why nobody had been informed of any such so-called ‘practice’. (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 25th September and 12th October 1999.)
The whole thing remained an enigma, whether the wave of terror in September ended with the embarrassing “bomb simulation“ of Ryazan, or with the war in Chechnya, which Russia was suddenly perfectly prepared to start and maintain. The Russian press gave in to the power of war fanaticism, and it was mainly foreigners who wondered who and what the actual motives of the terrorists were. The only one benefiting from the bomb incidents was the chief of the FSB, the newly appointed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, whose popularity as Yeltsin’s successor was established from scratch. Through Putin, also the new party that had been founded to back the regime (‘Unity Block’, or Medved, ‘the Bear’), benefited, and won the Duma election. The traces of the bomb explosions in Moscow were patched up so quickly that any more serious investigating could not take place.
But even conspiracy theories are not necessary to explain the mysterious bomb blasts of autumn 1999. Since 1995, there have been over 40 bomb blasts in apartment blocks in Russia, none of which has been followed by a successful investigation. (Der Spiegel 37/1999, p. 197.) If the apparent ‘series’ of bomb blasts is just a coincidence, the FSB has practised rather disinformation than provocation.
One such paper was a list of bomb blasts that had taken place in Moscow underground stations. Yet there was not a single attempt at establishing some sort of connection with Chechens. The first incident dates back to the 1970s, when, among others, an Armenian dissident Stepan Zatikyan was executed on terrorist grounds, although he had an alibi and lacked a motive. At the time, both Andrei Sakharov and Amnesty International appealed for Zatikyan. When the KGB was formally abolished, the case proved an excellent means of demonstrating the arbitrariness of KGB terror, and got publicity. According to the present FSB, however, the KGB never acted incorrectly, and the innocent victims of that judicial murder were proved guilty, “dangerous recidivists“.
Another paper consisted of a vague and chaotic overview of Islamic extremist movements, but the paper aimed at exposing their heinous plans for the destruction of not only Russia, but also Europe. According to this disinformation, the Islamist goals include, among others, a) “to make Islam the second state church in France“, and b) “to lobby laws favouring Moslems in the West German parliament“. These are quite lofty goals, concerning the absence of any state church in France, and a West German parliament has ceased to exist ten years ago!
A third paper constituted a document of the Russian “Ministry for the Federation and Nationalities of the Russian Federation“, which, in its history of Chechnya, totally ignored the last war, and skipped the years between 1991 and 1997. Meanwhile, the population of Chechnya, it seemed had collapsed “due to the prevailing criminality and emigration“. The majority of Chechens is said to have “absolutely supported the war that will promote the social and spiritual revival of the Chechen people“.
Finally, a fourth paper attempted to connect Islamism, terrorism, and Chechnya with one another. Naturally it referred to Osama bin Laden, who is claimed to have been sighted, alone during the past year, everywhere on the globe from Kosovo all the way to Cambodia. It seems the goal is to make the Western public believe that bin Laden travels freely from Afghanistan to any spot around the world he chooses in order to plant bombs for the destruction of the French state church and West Germany, and that the Russian army is undertaking a crusade for the European civilisation in Chechnya!
Naturally the disinformation campaign of Russia actively neglects all questions about the relationship of the KGB with the terrorism in the 1970s, and the radical Islamism of 1980s. It mentions nothing about the support that the representatives of Iraq and Iran declare for the Russian war campaign in Chechnya, nor about the warm relations between Russia/Turkmenistan and the Taliban. It does not tell, why Osama bin Laden is known for his attacks against American, not Russian, targets. For the support of their disinformation campaign, the Russians have presented violence videos, which are claimed to present the cruelty of Chechen kidnappers against their hostages. It remains totally unclear, where and when the videos have been recorded, by whom, and for what possible purpose. Why would Chechens have wanted to frighten representatives of international help organisations and foreign reporters out of their territory after the last war? Why was the city of Urus-Martan, where the inhabitants are known to have been relatively loyal to Russia, the base of the groups running the hostage taking business? Why did Yeltsin release the Urus-Martanian politician Bislan Gantamirov from a prison in November: Gantamirov, who was convicted in Moscow for embezzlement, but who promised to serve Russia – after having rebelled against Dudayev more than five years ago?
It may be that the FSB is only guilty of mere disinformation, exploiting suitable “evidence“ or misunderstandings. However, it is equally possible that the FSB, like its predecessor the KGB, has also created “evidence“ wherever necessary. The activity, then, is better understood as provocation, where some human lives are sacrificed for advocating some ‘greater purpose’ – isolation of the Chechens, and Russian victory. Would that be too shocking to be credible?
At any rate, the September bomb blasts of Moscow, and the video tapes on so-called Chechen cruelties that have been produced during these few years, fulfilled their purpose as a most successful provocation. Nobody asks how safe life in loyal Dagestan or elsewhere in the Caucasus is, although some released hostages did remark that their kidnappers were not at all (only) Chechens.
The bad tangle of lies has yet again achieved such a scale that the Western public has difficulty believing what it sees and what it hears where Russian representatives’ claims are concerned. The army is not going to attack Chechnya, we are told – but it attacks. The army is not going to seize Dzoxar-Kala (former Grozny), we are told – and yet it rushes directly into ambuscade. Hundreds of corpses lie on the ground, but ‘nobody is killed’. There are no refugees – there are just people displaced from one place in Russia to another. Chechnya is a part of Russia, and the Chechens are ‘equal’ citizens of Russia, but they can still be enclosed in “filtration camps“, and they can be bombed.
Somehow Western reporters, researchers, and politicians still find it difficult to believe the “conspiracy theories“, when the theories hint that the FSB is capable of what its predecessor, the KGB, by the very same officials, was certainly capable of. In spite of that, Russia seems to believe that it is the rest of the world that is in a conspiracy against Russia, and that the international news agencies are working for this Jewish-bourgeois-Islamist conspiracy, when they find official Russian information suspicious.
Unfortunately history teaches that in Russia, things are often precisely as bad as they are feared to be. This is not only due to Russians, and due to the lack of democratic traditions, but due to problems of the same nature as those that are encounterable in Western attitudes at Germany in the 1930s. The outside world did not ‘believe’ – and neither did the Germans themselves at the time – before it was too late for millions of people.
***
The “Protocols of the Elders of Zion“ was based on an 1864 text by a Frenchman named Maurice Joly, attacked the Emperor Napoleon III. In the Russian version “Napoleon“ has been replaced with “the Jews“. Who had a Russian version made of the book, and why? Can it be proved that Joly did not, on the contrary, modify some genuine, common, original source? A St. Petersburg researcher Mikhail Lepekhin has investigated the issue in the Russian archives, and published the results in November 1999:
In 1899 the ultra-reactionary Ivan Goremykin, who had been fired from the post of minister of internal affairs, decided together with the co-ordinator of foreign espionage, Pyotr Rachkovsky, to convince Czar Nicholas II of their view by writing a “document“ that would show that industrialisation of the country, privatisation of state monopolies, use of foreign capital loan, relaxation of censorship, and education of the people, was a “conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons“. Rachkovsky gave the task to his agent Matvei Golovinsky, stationed in Paris, as the latter had some experience on literary falsifications.
This was how the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion“ came to existence – at first as a copy, which the confessor priest of the Czar was meant to bring to the Czar’s attention personally. The Czar family was well-known for its prejudice, suspiciousness, and fondness of mysticism. The plan, however, failed, as suddenly a wrong man was appointed to the confessor priest, and not the theologist publisher Sergei Nilus (Goremykin and Rachkovsky’s man). Now it became necessary for the conspirators to spread the idea to a larger publicity, and so Nilus published the “Protocols“ as an appendix to his own book’s second edition in 1905. The book itself did not attract much attention, but its appendix became a bestseller that found its way to the library of the Czar family, too. The “Protocols“ outlived both Nilus, who died in 1912, and the Czar family, whose members died in 1918.
After the revolution Golovinsky became a passionate communist, but he died as early as in 1920. Alfred Rosenberg had the text translated into German, and the car industrialist Henry Ford into English. Thereafter, the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion“ served the aims of the German national socialists and other anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.
***
The credibility of the Russian authorities hardly improved when Colonel Yakov Firsov objected: “The Russian military is protecting the people. It is impossible that they would attack against their own people.“ (The Independent, 6th January 2000.) At the same time Russia rejected the Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov’s offer for a cease-fire, during which foreign experts could have investigated, who had used chemical weapons.
The last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, admitted in an interview, that clarity of the matter of the responsibility for the bombings had not been achieved. For him, however, it suffices that some Chechens invaded Dagestan in August. (Der Spiegel 2/ 10th Jan. 2000.) In fact also this too has been questioned lately and has been a subject of debate since. Helen Womack, reporter of the British newspaper, speaks of a meeting of Putin’s election team, where Grigory Amnouel boasted that it was Moscow’s disinformation that had deceitfully convinced Shamil Basayev of invading Dagestan: “They were made to think that it would be easy, but it was a trap.“ (The Independent, 9th Jan. 2000.)
***
Argumenty i fakty
Der Spiegel
Fakty i kommentarii
Kommersant
Monitor
Moskovskiy Komsomolets
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
Novaya Gazeta
Suomen Kuvalehti
The Independent