Will Putin's Power Play Make Russia Safer?

By Paul Quinn-Judge

OUTWARDLY, RUSSIA HAS not changed since the barrage of terrorist attacks that culminated in the school massacre in Beslan on Sept. 3. There are lots of police on Moscow's streets, but that's always the case. Many are traffic cops, shaking down drivers for minor or imaginary offenses. Commuters still pack the subways, even though they have been targeted by two bomb attacks in the past seven months. In Beslan, where parents are still searching for remains and burying their dead children, school resumed last week for the living.

Look deeper, and you find a nation scarred. "Externally my life is the same, but inside I feel pure terror," says Svetlana, a Moscow homemaker with three children who declines to give her full name. "I don't let my kids go to school alone anymore. I feel I have to take them." Like many who watched events unfold in Beslan, Svetlana has a changed perception of reality. "I was in the metro yesterday, and an Orthodox nun came through the carriage collecting money for a church. She was dressed in black, and she was carrying a box. I was scared." For a moment, Svetlana wondered whether the nun was a shakhidka, a female terrorist who typically dresses in black.

Even Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has cultivated an image of unyielding toughness, seems shaken. Beslan provided devastating proof that the core of his macho approach to politics--his promise to rub out secessionists--was nothing but empty words. And so he reached for a safety blanket of his own last week, announcing a series of moves aimed at consolidating political power in the Kremlin. Under Putin's plan, the 89 regional governors will henceforth be appointed, not elected. Russia's parliament, the Duma, will be elected only from party lists, not from constituencies. As most parties represented in the Duma today are pro-government, this increases even further the Kremlin's sway over the lower house. Putin claims the changes are necessary to strengthen security in the wake of Beslan, but Kremlin watchers say the plan had been in the works for months.

Putin may be tightening the screws now because he fears that his support could fade if there are more terrorist attacks and oil prices collapse. Despite widespread doubts about the government's handling of the Beslan crisis, polls continue to give Putin a wide margin over any potential opponent. "All political leaders lie," says Lidiya Grigorievna, a retired schoolteacher, as she waits at the new security check-in a Moscow art museum. "But will they give us anyone better than Putin?"

And yet reminders of the country's vulnerability are hard to avoid. Government authorities announced last week that two female suicide bombers who carried out the attacks that brought down two passenger jets in August had actually been stopped at the airport by counterterrorism officers and then released without being searched. The unspoken assumption is that they bribed their way onto the planes. And Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev posted a message on a website last week claiming responsibility for the plane bombings and the school attack, noting that Beslan had cost a total of just $9,700. The government promptly blocked access to the site.

In Beslan the mood swings from grief to talk of vengeance. A committee of teachers from school No. 1 has compiled a list of the 1,380 people who were in the school at the time of the siege--a number far higher than the government's published estimate. Meanwhile, survivors are still dredging up new fragments of their ordeal. Olga, 7, a girl who managed to escape the gymnasium where much of the carnage took place, now tells her father in bursts of panic, "Give me something to drink, even urine." For some, the child's horror is only the latest episode in a tragedy without end. "What happened in Beslan in three days has been happening here for years," says a veteran of the Chechen wars who lives in Grozny. "We have no tears left to cry."