www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Atheism and Orthodoxy in Modern Russia

Even Putin had mercy on Pussy Riot, and pardoned them.

And to wrap it up in Khodorkosvsky's release, too. Yes, his cynicism was quite breathtaking, wasn't it? Nobody asks why these people were unjustly imprisoned in the first place, do they? They'll just remember the beneficence of Good Tsar Vladimir.

Sorry about that, I was under the impression that you were in ROCOR.

That's okay. If there were a ROCOR parish near me, that's probably where I'd be. I was chrismated in the OCA. I attend an Antiochian parish. My spiritual father is Greek Orthodox. I love to pilgrimage at ROCOR and Romanian monasteries.

I am very pan Orthodox.

[In other words, a *true* Orthodox soul!

With the recent bombings, do you think we will see a different side of Putin?

With the recent bombings, do you think we will see a different side of Putin?

He really doesn't care about catching the actual terrorists, or with preventing future terrorist attacks,

Of course he cares.

On October 23, 2002, about 800 spectators were taken hostage in a Moscow theater by 40 to 50 Chechen terrorists, many of them women in hijabs. A few dozen young children and foreigners were soon released. In the next 58 hours, non-government negotiators came and went, occasionally bringing out a hostage or two or an agreement to let through water and juice (which never reached the hostages because authorities could not agree on protocol). The terrorists’ demands, Gessen writes, were “almost laughably easy to fulfill.” They wanted Putin to declare he intended to end the war in Chechnya and to order a troop withdrawal from any one district in their tiny homeland. In the early morning of the third day, gas was pumped through the vents and everyone was unconscious
within minutes. Entering the building, the Russian commandos killed all the hostage-takers with shots to the head. The explosives with which the Chechens had threatened to blow up the theater were never activated. Later, independent investigators plausibly surmised that the “black widows” wore “dummy” martyr vests.

Poisoned, unconscious, sleep-deprived, and severely dehydrated, the hostages were carried out of the building and, instead of being rushed to the hospital next door, were laid on the steps of the theater on their backs. Many died there, without regaining consciousness, chocking on their vomit. Later, the dead
and unconscious alike were loaded onto buses for downtown Moscow. They were transported sitting up.

More choked when their heads flipped backward. Still more died after reaching the hospitals because the authorities refused to tell the doctors the composition of the disabling gas. In the end, 129 hostages died.

Two years later, on September 1, 2004, in the North Ossetian town of Beslan, militants who were mostly Chechen took more than 1,000 children and their parents hostage on the first day of school. Woven from the testimonies of independent experts, Gessen’s account of what ensued is heartbreaking and damning.

From the very beginning, the hostage-takers were willing to negotiate and named several people they wanted to talk to. One of them, the president of North Ossetia, Alexander Dzasokhov, was prevented by the Russian troops from entering the building. But the former head of neighboring Ingushetia, Ruslan
Aushev, did manage to get in. Along with 26 women with infants, he brought out the terrorists’ demands.

They were the usual opening bid: independence of Chechnya, troop withdrawal, and an end to the war. The “president” of the self-proclaimed Chechen Republic (“Ichkeria”) and then perhaps the most wanted man in Russia, Aslan Maskhadov, agreed to come to Beslan to negotiate.

As the terrorists, hostages, and thousands of family members behind the troop cordon waited for Maskhadov on the third day of the siege, two explosions shook the school building. According to her, what the hostages remember as a “giant
ball of fire” came not from the explosives detonated by the terrorists but from Russian grenade launchers fired directly at the overcrowded school gymnasium. The hostage-takers then ordered those who could move to go into the school cafeteria and stand in the windows, to show that troops were firing on women
and children. The troops, according to Gessen, responded with tank shells, grenades, and flamethrowers “at a point-blank range.” As the terrorists repeatedly tried to move women and children into rooms not yet on fire, local police pleaded in vain with the Russian troops to stop firing. In the end, 334 people were killed, 186 of them children.

Once the hostage-taking occurred, the government task forces acting under Putin’s direct supervision did everything to ensure that the crises ended as horrifyingly as possible—to justify continued warfare in Chechnya and further crackdowns on the media and opposition in Russia and, finally, to quell any possible criticism from the West, which, after 9/11 was obligated to recognize in Putin a fellow fighter against Islamic terrorism. There is a reason that Russian troops in both Moscow and Beslan acted in ways that maximized bloodshed; they actually aimed to multiply the fear and the horror. This is the classic modus operandi of terrorists, and in this sense it can certainly be said that Putin and the terrorists were acting in concert.

Three months later, citing the need for unity and security, the Duma rubber stamped a law that cancelled gubernatorial elections. Henceforth all the regional governors were to be appointed by the Kremlin. In the same month, a constitutional amendment abolished direct elections to the Duma; by which time half of the seats had been filled. The entire parliament was to be filled by deputies elected from the lists of the Kremlin-approved (“registered”) parties. There was, Gessen perceptively notes, only one official directly elected by the Russian people: the president

This is a man who used his security service to blow up apartment blocks in Moscow as a provocation for a renewed war in Chechnya.

This is a man (and a people) who face a terrible threat from Chechnya terrorist on the doorstep.

So, you're excusing the head of a government using government security forces to murder the very citizens he is sworn to support so he can gather into his hands the tool he needs in order to suppress a threat he largely created.

While I abhor the Chechen terrorists,