Kremlin Uses Chechnya Tactics Against Russian Protesters
Filed under: Russia
Writing in the Jamestown Foundation's Eurasia Daily Monitor, Russian journalist Andrei Smirov explains the terrifying similarities between the way the Kremlin has dealt with Chechnya and the way it is dealing with the "Other Russia" protests (pictured is an attack by the Kremlin's stormtroopers on protesters at their most recent march, in St. Petersburg), specifically the use of arrests that amount to kidnapping.
More details after the jump.
Smirov writes: "Late last mouth, before an Other Russia rally in Nizhny Novgorod, the authorities conducted a special operation code-named 'Fortress' (Gazeta, March 25). This tactical plan had been devised in 2005 for police and army units to use to prevent a large-scale attack in a city in the North Caucasus. The plan is used every time the special services obtain intelligence about possible armed attack on military and police facilities. Early in the morning on the day of the rally, two local activists, Vyacheslav Lukin and Svetlana Somina, were kidnapped by FSB officers and taken to an open field outside the city. They were not released until the rally had ended (Gazeta, March 25)."
In the recent Moscow protest, the pattern was continued. Smirov explains:
For the April 14 rally, some 9,000 troops and police occupied the center of Moscow. According to Viktor Biryukov, head of the press service of the main directorate of the Moscow police, the center of Moscow had been divided into four quadrants to maintain "order." A special command center staffed by FSB and police officers was set up to control the situation (Kommersant, April 13). There were rumors that a special army unit from Tambov, which had taken part in the Chechen war, had been deployed to the Russian capital for that event. The authorities did not conceal the fact that there were armed troops hidden in trucks ready for action. Following procedures regularly used in Chechnya, the Moscow police swept the area ahead of the rally. Police and FSB officers arrested all young men whom they regarded as 'suspicious' in the vicinity of the designated rally site.
And in St. Petersburg the next day:
During a March 3 rally in St. Petersburg, security measures against the opposition looked even more similar to special operations in the North Caucasus. The siloviki ignored standard procedures in an effort to neutralize the enemy. Several days before the rally, Federal Security Service officers in the town of Petrozavodsk abducted two local National Bolshevik activists who also belong to the Other Russia and took them into the woods (kasparov.ru, March 4). The officers handcuffed the activists, put guns to their heads, and threatened to kill them if they went to St. Petersburg to take part in the March. Eduard Limonov, head of the National Bolshevik party and one of the leaders of Other Russia, was arrested on the day of the St. Petersburg rally. Limonov was "neutralized" as if he were leader of an illegal armed formation in the Caucasus (grani.ru, March 3).
In some sense, these actions may be good news for the protesters, since they indicate very considerable weakness and fear on the part of the Kremlin, which apparently views the peaceful protesters to be as dangerous as armed Chechen terrorists. However, the protesters are so few in number and the retaliatory measures so extreme that there is real danger they will be effective, just as they were in Soviet times. Countervailing pressure from the West is obviously essential.
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