Rating on blood

You feel as if you are walking through viscous, sticky mud: your legs slide, move apart, there is nothing to grab onto, it seems that just a little more - and you will find yourself in this disgusting mess, from which you can only get out on your stomach. Screaming, calling for help, waiting for an outstretched hand is completely useless: everyone around you is kneading this mud, falling, trying to get up, but they end up on their stomachs. The name of this mess is Russian politics, where security officers and political strategists are responsible for the quality and consistency of the mud.

It’s not even disgusting that there is dirt all around, it’s disgusting that you can’t do anything about it, neither get around it, nor go around it, and if you get out of one sticky puddle, then there will definitely be another one, just like it. And so on until the dirt is removed.

The murder of Aslan Maskhadov and especially the way it was framed, with endless lies, countless official and semi-official versions, with the showing of a half-naked body on TV and the poorly justified refusal to hand over the murdered man to his relatives for burial, is another illustration of the abilities of those who control Russian politics today . But if other cases - somehow: the Yukos affair or the merger-dissociation of Gazprom with Rosneft - affect the majority of fellow citizens indirectly and in some unclear perspective, then everything that concerns issues of national politics is relegated to the category of hostages everyone without exception: where it will catch fire, in what place the new Beslan will happen, on which plane it will crash - these are just details of the almost inevitable.

Someone said: “The strong walk over corpses when there is no other way out, the weak - because they don’t know how to do otherwise.”

If it is possible to find at least some arguments in favor of eliminating Maskhadov, then it is impossible to explain why it is necessary to humiliate millions of Russian Muslims. Specialists in active measures do not know, and there is apparently no one in the Kremlin to explain to them, that the public display of a half-naked body is a shame not only for the murdered person, but also for his entire clan, all close, distant and very distant relatives. The refusal to hand over the body for burial (and according to Muslim custom, it must be buried within 24 hours after death) offends the feelings of not only believers of all major faiths in Russia, but also those who remember the tradition only on memorial days.

The conviction of Kremlin political strategists that “a week or two will pass and everyone will forget” is the conviction of stupid and illiterate people: they will not forget. Death and everything connected with it belongs to the category of the irrational; a deceased person belongs to another world and is under the control of other forces, in whose actions earthly rulers are not free and should not interfere. What is forgiven in relation to the living is never forgiven in relation to the dead.

The prosecutor's office states: "After completion of investigative actions in accordance with the law on combating terrorism, A. Maskhadov, as an active participant in the international terrorist network, will be buried in an unmarked grave - without notifying his relatives or releasing his body to them." These words belong to Deputy Prosecutor General Nikolai Shepel. But was Maskhadov tried? Did the court - and only he has the right to do so - recognize him as a terrorist? The answer is known: no, they were not tried, no verdict was passed. Consequently, there are no legal grounds for refusing to release the body to relatives, and there are no legitimate justifications - that is, arguments that would be recognized by the majority of Maskhadov’s co-religionists - also. The argument that Aslan Maskhadov’s grave will become a place of pilgrimage where people will swear revenge on infidels is completely ridiculous. Neither the grave of the murdered first president of Chechnya, Dzhokhar Dudayev, nor the grave of the second president of Chechnya, Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, killed in Qatar, became such. But calls not to forgive the abuse of Maskhadov’s body in the mosques of Saudi Arabia are already being heard, every next day that the body lies in the morgue, tens and hundreds of new avengers are recruited not only in Chechnya, but also in Dagestan, in Karachay-Cherkessia, in Tataria, in Bashkiria - the list is open. Because if this can be done with the dead, then what can be done with the living?

The question arises, although this exercise is completely pointless: what is the logic of the Kremlin’s actions?

Well, with the murder of Maskhadov it is more or less clear: to spread fear, and not only among the Chechens. Why they trample on a dead body is more difficult to understand. Firstly, due to stupidity (however, “stupidity” should already be taken out of the brackets of any actions of the Russian authorities and considered as a mandatory correction factor). Secondly, for the sake of increasing the rating of V.V. Putin - imagine him as a kind of St. George the Victorious with a spear standing over the corpse of a defeated enemy. As long as there is a corpse, there is someone to stand over.

A couple of days ago, I asked Valery Tishkov, former Minister of National Policy and Director of the Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, what is all this bacchanalia for? In response, he told an interesting story. A year after Putin was first elected president, in 2001, his rating began to fall, partly because the war in Chechnya got bogged down again, and it wasn’t very possible to “get wet in the toilet.” Then the Kremlin technologists, Gleb Pavlovsky and Konstantin Shchedrovitsky, came up with what they saw as a great idea that could raise the ratings of their main client: to declare war against migrants, that is, against people from the Caucasus. They say that Putin protects the rights of indigenous Russians. Tishkov then grabbed his head: even during the years of Soviet power in the Caucasian republics - in Chechnya, Dagestan, Karachay-Cherkessia - there was a problem with jobs, tens of thousands of people annually left to work in central Russia. Now the situation is much worse: according to Ramazan Abdulatipov, former deputy prime minister and former minister of nationalities, in Dagestan there are 160 people vying for one job. Locking Caucasians in their national republics means achieving one thing: rampant crime and the recruitment of young people into gangs. Combat reports from the North Caucasus, from the same Karachay-Cherkessia, indicate that this is exactly what is happening.

The creation of openly nationalist youth organizations like “Nashi”, such a still soft version of the stormtroopers, obviously pursues the same goal: with the help of sovereign and chauvinistic slogans, to support the rapidly falling rating of the president. And this is already a vicious circle: they raise the president’s rating - in response we get an even greater radicalization of sentiment throughout the Caucasus, which spills out into the vastness of Russia with explosions and hostage-taking. The president's rating is falling again - and it is being raised again using the same methods, including the demonstration of Maskhadov's corpse. But after some time, the rating will inevitably fall again, and then all these “walking with Putin” will come to the fore - to protect the president from those who interfere with him, not only in the North Caucasus, but, above all, in Moscow.

Recent months have clearly shown: Putin, from a president of hope, as sociologists wrote about him, has turned not only into a politician standing in the way of Russia’s development, but also into an outright threat – including to the safety of fellow citizens.