Russia, for our officials and foreign policy leaders, is an
increasingly scary and strange place. We don't seem to know where we
are or what we are doing.
The Chechen war climaxed a crescendo of bizarre and troubling events.
The Moscow journalist Dmitri Kholodov, who was investigating
scandalous thefts by army generals, the training of mafia hit men by
the army, and FSK (ex-KGB) destabilization operations against
Chechnya, received a briefcase from the FSK. When he opened it, it
exploded and he was killed.
Attention was called to the private armies that exist not only in the
Caucasus region but in Moscow when a millionaire's "security guard"
was attacked in the street by masked gunmen who turned out to be
members of Yeltsin's personal bodyguard. The Moscow KGB came to the
aid of the "security guard" and struggled with Yeltsin's guards; the
upshot was the dismissal of the Moscow KGB chief and the
subordination of the Moscow KGB to Boris Yeltsin's bodyguard.
This bodyguard, under the former KGB major Alexander Korzhakov, and
the larger Main Guards Department under KGB General Barsukov have
become a center of uncontrolled power with forty thousand troops
including tanks and paratroops, and is metastasizing into the
provinces. Korzhakov is now passing on the acceptability of new
ministers and issuing directives to the prime minister to halt
economic reform. His new "analytical center" is framing plans for a
"National Guard," a kind of parallel army, like the Red Guards, the
SA, or the Waffen-SS, which will extend through all the provinces and
answer directly to Boris Yeltsin. Such events, amid the swirling
rumors of canceled elections, emergency presidential rule, and
Yeltsin's blind-drunk binges or terminal illness, display both
megalomania and panic. None of this inspires confidence.
