A Low, Dishonest Decadence: A Letter from Moscow

June 1, 2003 Topic: Civil SocietySociety Regions: RussiaEurasia

A Low, Dishonest Decadence: A Letter from Moscow

Mini Teaser: It is shortsighted to judge Russia's progress by superficial materialist measures--or have we forgotten what the Cold War was really about? At a deeper social and spiritual level, the country remains in peril.

by Author(s): David Satter

Among the reasons for the lethality of Russian life is that when a
life threatening situation does occur, Russians can rarely count on
timely help. In January of last year, Taras Shugayev, a young Moscow
resident, left a pool hall drunk and awoke to find himself inside a
moving garbage truck, dodging massive blades that were slowly
grinding collected refuse into pulp. For 23 minutes, according to a
transcript of a series of calls made on his cell phone to Moscow's
rescue service operators, he pleaded and cried, saying he was being
squeezed and begging for help. The operators, however, only advised
him to alert the driver by banging from inside the truck. No
discernible action was taken by Moscow's various police forces that,
according to one rescue service spokesman, dismissed the report as a
prank. "Are you in a joking mood to be calling us like this at 6
o'clock in the morning?" a police dispatcher reportedly said.

By Shugayev's fourth call, during which the rescue service was mainly
concerned with trying to learn who might have put him in the truck,
Shugayev was desperate. His last recorded words were, "This is it, I
think I am suffocating. This is it." The police only responded 24
hours later after Shugayev's family reported him missing. They then
pieced together what had happened with the help of phone records. By
that time, however, there was nothing to do but sift through a
suburban dump, looking for possible remains.

Besides the hazards of everyday life, the low value assigned to
Russians' lives is reflected in the readiness of the government to
sacrifice them. In a general sense, this was reflected in the nature
of the economic reform program that was undertaken with little regard
for its effect on the health of the population and was accompanied by
five million premature deaths. The death rate in post-communist
Russia was not an accident. It was the product of specific policies
that reflected the authorities' lack of concern for individuals. In
the first place, the government removed all restrictions on the sale
of alcohol. The result was that at a time when the purchasing power
of the average Russian was cut in half, his salary in relation to the
cost of vodka increased threefold. The era of cheap vodka coincided
with the peak of the privatization process and the resulting
tranquilization of the population lowered resistance to the criminal
division of the nation's wealth, albeit at a cost to the nation's
health.

At the same time, the government failed to finance the system of
public health. For the first time, Russians had to pay for many
medical services, from necessary medicines to lifesaving operations,
and the inability to pay led many to give up on their own lives. The
government even failed to finance adequately such hospitals of "last
resort" as the Vishnevsky Surgical Institute in Moscow, which was
underused despite the surge in the death rate.

The disregard for the value of human life has also been reflected in the
Chechen wars in which the authorities have shown little concern for the
lives of either Russian soldiers or Chechen and Russian civilians.
But there was no more graphic, specific illustration of the
authorities' indifference to human losses than their actions during
the hostage crisis when in late October of last year 800 persons were
taken captive by Chechen terrorists in Moscow's Theater on Dubrovka.

From the moment that the theater was seized, it was clear that what
was involved was a test of the government's attitude toward the lives
of its citizens. Never before had so many persons been taken hostage
in a major capital. The terrorists included 18 suicide bombers who
had bombs strapped around their waists. Dozens of other bombs were
fastened to the building's main supports. The terrorists threatened
to detonate the bombs and obliterate the theater if their demands
were not met.

As the crisis began, President Putin said that saving the lives of
the hostages was his first concern, and there were clear indications
that a peaceful solution was possible. The terrorists initially
demanded an end to the war in Chechnya and the withdrawal of Russian
troops, steps that, according to polls, were supported by 65 percent
of the Russian population. On October 25, the second day of the
crisis, the terrorists even agreed that the hostages would be freed
in exchange for a statement by Putin that the war was over and the
verified withdrawal of troops from only part of Chechnya.

At the same time--and perhaps more important--many of the terrorists'
bombs, including a huge one in the center of the hall with a force of
forty kilograms of dynamite, had not been activated. This suggested
that the terrorists never really intended to blow up the building and
kill the hostages. The FSB was aware that many of the bombs had not
been activated because an FSB agent was among the hostages, and he
provided detailed information to his superiors by cell phone about
the number of terrorists and the condition of the bombs.

Despite the fact that negotiations appeared possible, however, the
Russian authorities never engaged in, or apparently even considered,
serious political negotiations with the terrorists. The authorities
did not react to the proposal for a partial withdrawal from Chechnya;
instead they agreed to talks between the terrorists and Viktor
Kazantsev, a presidential representative, at 11 a.m., October 26. But
this was only a diversionary maneuver. The theater was flooded with
toxic gas and stormed by FSB and special forces units six hours
before the talks were scheduled to start.

In the end, the Russian forces killed all 41 of the terrorists,
shooting many of them while they were unconscious. The number of dead
hostages has been variously put at 129 and 136, with 75 persons who
were believed to have been in the theater still missing. All but
three of the dead hostages died as a result of poisoning by the gas
used to "rescue" them.

Not only the refusal to negotiate but the nature of the rescue effort
suggested that the storm was undertaken to destroy the terrorists,
and that saving the lives of the hostages was a very low priority.
Doctors arriving at the scene were not told that the hostages had
been gassed and not provided with the antidote that had to be
injected immediately. The order for ambulances to proceed to the
theater came 45 minutes after the beginning of the operation, the
result being that many hostages had to be taken to hospitals in
buses, microbuses and cars. In one case, 30 hostages were put in a
twelve-seat military microbus, including on the floor, and a 13
year-old girl was crushed under other bodies and died en route.
Although the Moscow health authorities had days to prepare for the
aftermath of the storm, nearly one hundred persons who died from gas
poisoning or other causes could have been saved if the rescue effort
had been properly organized.

Besides criminalization and society's disregard for human life,
Russia's future is threatened by a more fundamental problem: a deep
spiritual malaise that reflects the inability, so far, of Russia to
find a new moral orientation in the wake of the fall of communism.

The communist regime was based on "class values", the notion that
right and wrong are determined by the interests of the dominant
class. In the wake of communism's fall, moral coherence for society
could, as a result, only be achieved through the establishment of
universal values. That, as a practical matter, required the efforts
of the Russian Orthodox Church and, perhaps, the government. The
church, however, was crippled by its history of collaboration with
the KGB, and successive governments emphasized not the sanctity of
the individual as a source of values but the prerogatives of the
state.

The story of the post-communist Russian Orthodox Church is one of
lost opportunities. After the failure of the 1991 pro-communist coup,
Gleb Yakunin, a dissident priest and member of the parliament, was
briefly given access to a section of the KGB archives which showed
that the top hierarchs of the Moscow Patriarchate were agents of the
KGB. The most important KGB agent was the Patriarch, Alexei II,
himself. Yakunin wrote to Alexei and said that he and other church
leaders should deny the charges of collaboration or ask for
forgiveness, pointing out that "our people are forgiving." But only
one archbishop, Khrizostom of Lithuania, had the courage to
acknowledge that he worked as an agent for the KGB and to reveal his
codename, "Restavrator." All of the other implicated church leaders
remained silent.

With the transition to capitalism, the church quickly became the
beneficiary of official privileges, including the right to import
duty-free alcohol and tobacco and to trade in diamonds, gold and oil.
Not surprisingly, this gave rise to widespread corruption. Although
the church claimed to lack funds for charitable activities and
religious education, its business interests produced enormous profits
that then had a tendency to disappear. For example, in 1995 the
Nikolo-Ugreshsky Monastery, which is directly subordinated to the
Patriarchate, earned $350 million from the sale of alcohol, and the
Patriarchate's department of foreign church relations earned $75
million from the sale of tobacco. But the Patriarchate reported an
annual budget in 1995-96 of only $2 million.

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