In the weeks since the Boston Marathon bombing, a number of Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, have made pointed comments on America's indirect encounter with the ongoing conflict between the Russian government and Islamist insurgents in the North Caucasus region. The message can be summarized in two phrases: "We told you so" and "We're all in the same boat now."
The first phrase is meant to remind Americans that Russian officials, and especially Putin, have long argued that the persistent unrest in the North Caucasus is not motivated by crimes against the Chechen and neighboring peoples by the Russian or Soviet state, but is driven instead by irreconcilable terrorists aligned with Al-Qaeda and bent on global jihad. As for the assertion that the United States and Russia are "in the same boat," the superficial meaning is clear enough: Both countries are threatened by Islamist fanatics who do not shrink from shedding the blood of innocents at sporting events, on public transportation, or in schools.
The Russian leadership, however, is also sending a more subtle message. At the core, the Putin regime is telling America that the problems we both face-terrorism first and foremost-far outweigh any differences over democracy, the rights of the individual, and political values. Without saying so directly, Putin is insinuating that the Boston bombing might never have happened if the United States had stopped interfering in Russia's sovereign affairs. Had we restrained our interventionist impulses, the argument goes, the door would have been open to closer cooperation in the war against terrorism.
There is evidence that Putin's admonition is finding an audience among American political figures. Veteran diplomats are cautioning against what they call gratuitous criticism of Putin's latest crackdown on civic activism and peaceful opposition protests. Going even further are members of a U.S. congressional delegation that visited Moscow recently to investigate the backgrounds of the Boston bombers and any failures in cooperation between Russian and American security agencies prior to the attack. The leader of the delegation, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California, placed the blame for poor communication between the intelligence services squarely on the White House. "I would say both the Obama administration as well as the Republican administration before Obama-that we have allowed attitudes, maybe the attitudes from the cold war, to remain in place that have prevented a level of cooperation that is justified." In calling for closer collaboration with the Russians, Rohrabacher even raised the possibility of joint military exercises, according to the New York Times. He also came to the defense of Putin, whom he said had been unfairly vilified in the United States, and expressed agreement with Russia's prosecution of three members of the all-female performance group Pussy Riot, who received prison sentences for a political protest action in a Moscow cathedral.
It should be emphasized that Rohrabacher and others are not simply asserting that Putin's American critics are incorrect. They are implying that these critics have weakened the security of the United States. The attacks on Putin, so the narrative runs, have pushed Russian officials to a lower level of cooperation on terrorism issues. To restore an environment of mutual trust, Putin's critics should change their tone and stop pointing to the Russian president as a leader and spokesman of the world's authoritarian fraternity.
This phenomenon-call it anti-anti-Putinism-comes at an interesting time. Last week, leading Russian economist Sergey Guriyev, a respected member of the governing establishment, fled the country out of fear that he was being set up as the next victim of an ongoing witch hunt targeting perceived liberals and reformers within the ruling elite. Indeed, reports from Moscow refer to gallows humor about purges, show trials, and 1937, the year when Stalin's political terror reached its apex. Meanwhile, the Kremlin's campaign against dissent in civil society continues to ensnare mainstream human rights organizations, election-monitoring projects, and well-regarded polling institutes. This is Putin's response to widespread discontent over his fraudulent return to the presidency last year.
Putin has also taken advantage of the Boston bombing to remind the world that he, and only he, was right in identifying the original Chechen rebellion of the 1990s as a terrorist phenomenon from the outset. He told a national audience during his annual televised call-in program that he had always felt "outraged" when Western sources described the Chechen militants as insurgents. The two ethnic Chechen brothers behind the Boston attack, he added, "have provided the best possible proof that we were right."
Well, not exactly. In fact, practically all neutral observers-human rights reporters, independent journalists, foreign diplomats-have been highly critical of the tactics employed by the Russian security forces in Chechnya and other North Caucasus republics, and blame Moscow's scorched-earth approach for making a difficult situation much worse. Assessing the conflict during the year 2002, Freedom House's Freedom in the World report described "increasingly deliberate and indiscriminate bomb attacks on civilian targets [that] caused some 200,000 people to flee Chechnya." It referred to "security sweeps in which civilians were regularly beaten, raped, or killed." And it mentioned that while "the international community issued periodic condemnations of Moscow's operation in Chechnya, the campaign enjoyed broad popular support in Russia that was fueled by the media's ... one-sided reporting favoring the official government position."
The report did not ignore Chechen terrorism, highlighting an incident in which Chechen separatists captured 800 people in a Moscow theater. The crisis ended with the deaths of most of the rebels and some 120 of the hostages, most of whom were killed by the effects of a sedative gas deployed by Russian troops.
The report goes on to note:
Following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Moscow defended its actions in Chechnya as part of the broader war on global terrorism, drawing a connection between Chechen separatists and international terrorist groups associated with Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda. Meanwhile, the West softened some of its criticisms of Moscow's conduct in Chechnya in apparent exchange for Russia's support of the U.S.-led operation against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
That Putin has convinced American legislators, diplomats, and others to mute their criticism of his abuses already stands as a victory of sorts in the Russian leader's ongoing crusade against "outside interference." But it doesn't change facts. The Kremlin's consistent use of massive, indiscriminate, and brutal force against insurgents in the North Caucasus has fueled an endless cycle of radicalization and revenge killings, punctuated by major terrorist attacks. In this environment, the largely secular and nationalist roots of the rebellion have steadily given way to Islamist extremism, once all but unknown in the region. Tragically, Russia seems to be encouraging a similar approach in Syria, yielding similar results.
One of the most important lessons of the post-9/11 period is the necessity of recognizing when governments exploit the threat of terrorism to justify internal repression and brutality. The leaders of the United States and other democracies should bear this in mind as they formulate policies toward an increasingly assertive and autocratic Russia.