Russia's Exploded Hope

By Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow

Lively and colorful, vigorous and buzzing, busy day and night, Pushkin Square is Moscow's Times Square. There is hardly a Muscovite who has never dived into the long underpass, colloquially known as the Pushka, that runs under the square, across Tverskaya Street and down to three main subway lines. So when a bomb went off in the cramped concrete maze last Tuesday at the height of rush hour, it did more than just tear the flesh of the 11 people who died and the 96 who were injured. It also charred the nation's hopes.

Imagine random bombs going off in your city from time to time, and you can get a sense of the pressure and fear that have tightened their grip on Moscow. The city is still traumatized by the apartment-house bombings that killed 226 last September and a pair of bombings in other cities that killed 81. At the time, Russian officials pinned those attacks on Chechen separatists--and used the explosions as justification for a bloody war that is still under way. But no one responsible for the Moscow bombings was ever caught. The latest attack may also go unsolved. Police arrested a couple of men shortly after the bombs went off but then quickly released them. There were all kinds of theories about who set the Pushka bomb, but opinion quickly coalesced around the idea of another Chechen attack. The Chechens denied any involvement, insisting that their targets are Russian soldiers, some 10,000 of whom they have killed or wounded in the past 11 months. But to many Russians, who have seen endless TV videos of their troops leveling one Chechen village after another, it's easy to believe that revenge could be a motive.

The bombings have played an important role in Russian politics. Last fall's barrage triggered the most dramatic political changes in Russia since 1991. The attacks--and the war they engendered--thrust then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin into a role of unexpected prominence and eventually into the presidency of Russia. That chain of events has also provided rich ground for a whole crop of conspiracy theories: that the bombs were planted by ex-KGB goons trying to push Putin into power, for instance. Some Muscovites and many liberal Russians are worried that the Pushka killings will become a precursor to a political crackdown. "Moscow is the capital of a country at war," warned Alexander Musykantsky, Moscow city's information minister. "People should live accordingly."

One effect of the bombings has been to encourage a kind of scrappy vigilantism. Local "committees" now patrol and protect apartment buildings. Suspicious people and unattended packages prompt immediate calls to the police--all in all, a state of affairs that is a far cry from the image of a well-managed democracy Putin has tried to show the West.

Musykantsky's alert that the country is "at war" was a jab at Russia's liberals, who have been fighting a losing battle for more civil rights. Throughout the post-Soviet reform period, Moscow's city government has been enforcing Soviet-era rules that require visitors to register with the police. Russia's Constitutional Court, the nation's highest legal authority, has repeatedly held that these rules violate the rights granted by the Russian constitution. But constitutional debate in Russia is shaped more often by shrapnel than by legal doctrine. Putin's anti-Chechen rhetoric often seems a calculated reminder that a country at war should hardly hope for enlargement of civil rights.

In some quarters, however, the bombs are upping pressure for a negotiated solution. Boris Berezovsky, a Russian tycoon who has become staunchly anti-Putin, captured that sentiment when he told TIME recently, "You can't defeat terrorism unless you have talks ...Are we waiting for a nuclear plant to explode to make us come to our senses?" Putin's view is that the only language the Chechens understand is violence. That is how he intends to talk to them. The worry in Moscow last week was that the Chechens have begun to talk back.