Under a cold, light rain, they jammed themselves up against the black iron gates of Hospital No. 13. Some held up photos for expressionless armed guards to see. In fervent, desperate voices, they pleaded. Were their loved ones inside? Had they been taken to another Moscow hospital? Were they even still alive? Had the gas deprived them of so much oxygen that they would never be the same again? The guards stared indifferently through the bars of the gates, walked away and continued chatting among themselves.
“They are hostages again!” one man shouted at the guards.
Eleven years after the collapse of communism here, the yoke of Soviet mentality still weighs heavily on the lives of Russians and their dreams of full-fledged democracy. The seizing of more than 800 hostages by Chechen guerrillas at a Moscow theater in October provided prima facie evidence.
Russian commandos reclaimed the theater after 58 hours by using a mysterious anesthetic gas that killed all but two of the 129 hostages who died in the raid. Authorities chose not to tell rescuers what kind of gas was used, a decision that deprived hostages of life-saving medical treatment.
In the days that followed, authorities still refused to divulge the identity of the gas, relenting only under mounting pressure from the international community. At first, they declared that only 10 hostages had died and that the raid was preceded by the execution of a hostage.
Neither was true.
And scenes such as the one at Hospital No. 13 gave Russians ample evidence that Soviet-era indifference to human suffering endures, even today.
Russia still struggles with a Soviet alter ego it has never completely shed. In January, the government shut down what had been Russia’s only independent television channel, TV-6. In September, Moscow’s mayor proposed returning to the center of Lubyanka Square a statue commemorating Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB and a symbol of the early years of Soviet terror.
After the theater takeover, scores of Chechen civilians living in Moscow reported being pulled off the streets or taken from their apartments by police who later planted drugs or contraband on them.
Even the Soviet Red Star came back; in November, Russian president Vladimir Putin authorized its use as a symbol of the Russian military.
“We missed our chance during the 1990s to draw a historical dividing line between the USSR and the new state that followed,” said Yury Samodurov, executive director of the Moscow-based Andrei Sakharov Foundation, named after the famed Russian human-rights leader. “And now that there is no line, it makes our attitude to our own past vague.”
Many Russians take pride in aspects of their Soviet past: the might of the Red Army, the security of a centralized, planned economy, even the sheer breadth of the country’s former reach. Two-thirds of Russians said in a recent poll that they regretted the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
At the same time, Putin has firmly set Russia’s economy on a westward course. The Russian government is paying down foreign debt, has won recognition from the U.S. and the European Union as a market economy, and contained inflation. Putin has ordered reforms in banking and corporate governance and sought to untangle Russia’s bureaucracy and internecine tax code.
It’s too early to tell what impact Putin’s aggressive strategy has had. He has set a target of 6 percent to 8 percent GDP growth for each of the next 10 years. He’s only getting 4 percent. Doing business in Russia still necessitates bribe-paying at virtually every administrative level, a reality that repels foreign investors. Putin wants a thriving small business sector, but much of Russia’s profit remains concentrated in the hands of an elite, wealthy few.
In provincial Russia, life is still harsh and, in economic terms, light years from the neon and money of Moscow. Towns in the Far East live and die on the backs of a single industry. If that employer struggles, nobody gets paid. Weeks can pass like that, even months.
The biggest problem with Russia’s economy is a long-standing one: It continues to be dependent on the rise and fall of the price of the oil it sells. High oil prices buoyed Russia in 2002, but the specter of war in Iraq clouds the country’s economic outlook this year. A regime change in Baghdad would put Iraqi oil reserves back on the market. Oil prices likely would head downward, and so would Russia’s economy.
That outlook poses a formidable challenge for Putin as he steers Russia into 2003, but it’s not his biggest.
Putin spent much of 2002 telling Russians that the three-year war to quell Islamic separatists in Chechnya was all but over. Russians did not need the Chechen downing of a Russian military helicopter that killed 119, or the October theater takeover, or last month’s suicide bomb attack at a Chechnya government building that killed 83, to see through his pronouncement. Russian soldiers die at the hands of rebels every week. The ranks of the guerrillas are fed a steady diet of new recruits, thanks in part to Russian military raids on Chechen villages that kill hundreds of Chechen civilians each year and embolden relatives of the dead to join the rebel effort.
Putin’s fix for Chechnya is a from-the-ground-up reconstruction of the tattered southern Islamic republic, rebuilding its infrastructure as well as its political framework. He has called for a constitutional referendum in the spring and presidential and parliamentary elections later. Most analysts and Western leaders believe that, as long as that plan excludes negotiation with separatists, it’s doomed to fail.
Russians heartily backed Putin when he vowed to crush the separatist movement in 1999. Now they’re not so sure. The theater takeover brought the war to the Kremlin’s doorstep. The conflict sops up hundreds of millions of dollars from social programs Russia desperately needs to tend to but has ignored for years.
A quarter of Russians live below the poverty line. For years, the country dismissed AIDS as a faraway problem; now nowhere in the world does the rate of HIV transmission grow faster than in the former Soviet Union. Russia’s birthrate, 1.17 children per family, is one of the world’s lowest. Russian men live an average of 59 years, far below the U.S. male life expectancy of 74.
Such statistics paint a gloomy portrait of the future. But Russia’s strength is its resiliency. It survived 13th Century Tatar domination, the murderous reign of Ivan the Terrible, Stalin’s purges. Look into the eyes of Russians and you see steely resolve to find a way out.
That resiliency is just as readily demonstrated by the thousands of Chechen families who have sought refuge in Ingushetia, the tiny republic just west of their ravaged homeland.
At refugee camps, home has become a small green canvas tent with a stove not much bigger than a breadbox. Chechen families blanket every inch of tent canvas with the breathtaking filigree of Chechen rugs and white lace tablecloths. It’s a matter of pride, says Lobzabid Eldohanova. “If I take them down, it doesn’t feel like home.”
Refugee schoolchildren layer themselves in sweaters and coats to attend school in a tent that is not much warmer inside than the subzero temperatures outside.
Akhmar, an 11-year-old Chechen boy with an eager smile and a smattering of English, says the bitter cold confines most school days to about two hours of lessons.
That’s not enough, and Akhmar knows it.
“We want more,” he says. “A lot more.”
