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20.08.07
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Telling All Sides Of The Story
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Comment by Alexander Arkhangelsky
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Following the principles of news rankings, I should be writing here about the explosion that hit the Nevsky Express train. I should offer up a few thoughts about the strangeness of an incident where the exposition doesn’t match up with the culmination and the denouement was announced right after the plot had been played out.
The morning after the explosion, the head of the Anti-Terrorist Committee announced that the committee had foreseen such a turn of events and long ago began taking measures to put into operation a special system during parliamentary and presidential elections; in other words: control of the electoral process by the security services will be strengthened. That’s the only precise formulation, from which no one will back down even an inch. The rest is deeply suspicious; different versions are mercilessly floating around. At first the terrorists were presented as calculating, experienced explosives experts who successfully planted and detonated a charge of considerable force in order to blow the train into the river. They were only prevented from achieving that end by the enormous speed of the train. Then the terrorists were portrayed as naive, incompetent teenage amateurs, and it’s not difficult to see why. Anyone could be behind the explosion, but there is no one against whom informational evidence can be directed since the electorate has long been told that professional Chechen terrorism is a thing of the past, the enemy has been defeated and Ramzan Kadyrov is one of us. There is no serious internal resistance and there is no way there could be, because we are all living better now, we’re more joyful and people are happy.
However, someone has to be offered up to the vexed public, and the only plausible candidate for the role of cunning fiend is the Lone Radical. First, he’s a thug so he doesn’t engender sympathy; secondly, this is the only enemy of the people that television has continually addressed. Television has had much to say about the Radical Nationalist and the Radical Leftist. All our Radicals are dilettantes; their explosions have, until now, been inconsequential both in terms of their intentions and their implementation. In order to point the finger at them, it is necessary to pretend that the terrorist act was in some way premeditated; the incompatible has to be combined: There has to be talk of a heinous plan, with fatal consequences only narrowly being avoided, while at the same time telling everyone that the bombers were complete incompetents.
But nevertheless, I won’t write about the bomb, because columnists are people too. And like everyone else they have the right to go on vacation. The only thing that separates us from normal people is that when on vacation, we continue to think political thoughts, searching for them even in the beauty of nature and at resorts.
Here in Montenegro, I am sitting in a little place called Petrovats, a thin strip of beach densely thatched with bodies – old and young, fit and fat. People have come here to get their salt and sunshine intake for the coming year. The mountains really are dark, the sea is blue-green. The fact that it’s a little bit dirty and there’s garbage lying in every convenient cleft as if I’m back in Moscow can be explained by the fact that these are the last traces of communism: Almost everywhere the Communists were in power for a long period of time, the habit of fouling nature remains. In any event, Montenegro is no dirtier than Croatia and significantly cleaner than Albania where the coastal zones look like industrial tips. The little houses in Montenegro are cozy and well furnished; the restaurants aren’t terribly expensive and the quality is good. This is still a territory that very recently was involved in a full-scale war, but Montenegro is already in the Euro-zone; its borders with Croatia and Bosnia – not so long ago enemies – are entirely open and there’s a railway link to Belgrade.
When Yugoslavia was broken up, each group decided for itself how to act and which goals to defend. The Serbians decided to aim for what the Russians, thankfully, had decided to avoid: they attempted, through force, to hold together their crumbling territories. The Montenegrins delicately dodged the Serbian hardline approach; the Croatians proudly fought on; the Slovenians quietly crawled off to the side; the Macedonians did everything they could in order that everyone else forget about them; the Bosnians, having gone through something like genocide at the hands of the Serbian regular army, couldn’t resist racist vengeance and drove hundreds of thousands of Serbs from Krajina.
In short, the 1990s in the Balkans saw almost all possible approaches to the disintegration of a federation attempted. From militarism and force to bribery and on to almost Tolstoyan abstention from the evil affairs of society. All schemes for administration were tried out; from sovereign Serbian democracy to Macedonia’s semi-rejection of sovereignty in exchange for Western support.
What was the outcome of all this? The brutal Slavic struggle for sovereign democracy resulted in isolation from the rest of the world, while at the same time cutting a deal with an international tribunal. Russia, in a loss of its international authority, defends Milosevic to the last while the Serbian authorities calmly hand him over to The Hague. Russia fights for the status of Kosovo like a real hero, but shortly while our brothers in Belgrade will hand it over without a fight, make a backroom deal and leave Russia isolated and exposed with its principles.
Montenegro didn’t prevaricate like Croatia; it didn’t ask for trouble like Serbia; and it didn’t hand itself over like Macedonia. It avoided a lot of the trouble and is now capable of supporting itself.
What is the moral of all this for Russia? Of course there is no moral. Montenegro’s route doesn’t suit Russia; it is too big and too independent to play both sides. But we could certainly employ a wonderful Montenegrin rule – there’s no point in wasting energy on offering senseless resistance to the general course of historical development; we need a policy of saving ourselves for the present to participate in the future. |
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