The general expectation was that this summer's disaster would be a repeat of last year's conflict in Georgia. In fact all of the conflict seems to have been in Russia's Caucasian republics, and it's taken the form of separate terrorist incidents, which don't really seem linked. Of course, the Russians have interpreted them as part of an orchestrated campaign by Wahabbist sects, aiming to bring down the Russian state, and install a Muslim state. I don't see it that way - if it were really a war of independence, then we'd see more attacks in Moscow. When the Catholics wanted more more power in Northern Ireland, they attacked England and London - you go for the target with the greatest political impact. The only Caucasus-related violence in Moscow is leaders of rival Chechen gangs killing each other.
So if it's not separatists, then who is it? My belief is that these incidents are more like the Boston Tea Party - acts of anger against an occupying government, that may or may not be coordinated. Over time, they will become more coordinated. Why is this happening? Because ordinary people see terrorism as the best form of defence against corrupt officials. The courts are part of the State, and civil society is snuffed out by the State, who, rightly, see it as a form of resistance against them. So there is no outlet for dissatisfaction, apart from terrorism.
It's getting worse now, because State officials in the Caucasus are having a harder time of it. Before, they could just steal money that came from Moscow, and there was a lot of it. In a way, they wanted attacks, because that would justify their request for more funds. They tolerated a few low-level incidents and the loss of a few footsoldiers, because that gave them a pretext to go to Moscow and demand more funds. The problem is that Moscow has less money to give now, and so these corrupt officials have to steal from their own people, like they did before.
Take a typical mid-level Chechen, who used to be a bandit, making money by kidnapping people, and then became legit, part of the local government, and able to skim money off from the funds allocated by Moscow for "reconstruction", and who is now using his role as head of the local police, or whatever, to skim money off the local shopkeepers, or market, or whatever. Only there is less money from these targets, because they are also fuelled by cash injections from Moscow. So the police chief/former bandit has to squeeze harder. Remember, they are not just driven by greed - they have to pay money upwards to the bosses who gave them the job, and they have to pay money downwards to the people who do their dirty work. They have to run just to stand still. It almost makes you feel sorry for them.
But just as the State starts to squeeze harder, there is less money to go around. Partly because the squeezing drives more business underground, partly because it stifles business growth. So these tactics are counter-productive, but the result is that the population becomes more angry, and the tougher-minded of them start to fight back. And this is why it's insane for Medvedev to suggest that tougher sentencing will have any effect on terrorism in the Caucasus. It will be powerless against suicide bombers, and it will just be used by corrupt local officials to threaten people, who will be forced to fight back harder.
The worrying thing about this is that this course of events could be repeated elsewhere in Russia. Driving around town yesterday (a Sunday) there were many more traffic police officers on the road than normal. The usual interpretation of this is that some official is going to drive down that road, so there are lots of police around to close it off, and ensure that some deputy prime minister won't have to endure the traffic jams that the rest of us live with. But these traffic officers were stopping cars for infringements and doing their normal work - they weren't surveying the roads left and right, listening intently to their radios, which is normally what they look like, when there's a motorcade on the way. My feeling is that it's the end of the month, they have quotas to fill (in terms of money collected as bribes) so they are all out harvesting on a Sunday. And presumably, because times are tough, there are fewer cars on the road, and motorists are less inclined to offer bribes just to save a couple of hours' hassle at the police station, so the pickings are fewer. What will the officers do? They will crack down harder, because that's the only tool at their disposal. They can't miraculously improve the economy to make people richer. They are takers, not makers.
And if this is being repeated at all levels of the economy, then it means that Russia will be driven further into recession. Which should hasten the collapse of the State, in the medium term. What does this mean for the future of Russia? Well the optimistic scenario is that the failure of the current state model should create a vacuum for another one, which could eventually lead to the modernisation of the State. There are plenty of examples of more liberal governments being elected in Latin America, on the back of an economic crisis - the Lula government in Brazil is one such. The reality though is that we will just see more muddling through - perhaps there will be some strengthening of the more technocratic parts of the state, such as the Finance Ministry, which would lead to some economic rationality being injected into the rest of the State, and perhaps less money for the looters. But it won't lead to any wholesale changes - things will have to get a lot worse before that happens.
0 comments:
Post a Comment