In Russia, the tragic sense is not limited to Chekhovian intellectuals or tyranny’s victims. Even the privileged few, insulated by high office and a pride of bodyguards, know the truth when they care to look out a Kremlin window. In the post-Soviet period, Russian fatalism was captured best by a former prime minister and natural-gas magnate, Viktor Chernomyrdin, when he remarked, after yet another disaster of state, “We wanted it to go better, but it turned out as always.” The hope that the collapse of Communism would lead to the evolution of a liberal, democratic order in the East remains a working proposition in Poland, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere in the region. But in Russia it has, in many respects, turned out as always. Some of the crises were predictable from the outset of the post-Communist era. It will take many years for the national economy to recover from seven decades of Communism, not to mention centuries of feudal autocracy; it may take another generation for the national psyche to heal. But only those with the most well-honed tragic sense could have imagined that in 2004 Russia would be ruled by a President whose language and instincts were shaped by his career as an officer of the KGB, and that the country’s most urgent threat would come from ruthless Chechen terrorists who increasingly modelled their tactics and ideology on the jihadists of the Middle East and South Asia. Among the results of the fall of Communism was the dissolution of the “internal empire,” the fifteen republics of the old Soviet Union. And because Russia itself was made up of eighty-nine regions, some with a complicated history, Russia’s borders, too, came into question. In the euphoria of the period, President Boris Yeltsin encouraged the various regions to assume as much sovereignty “as you can swallow.” After decades of Soviet centralism, he was thinking of a reform of degrees. But Chechnya, which had bridled under Moscow’s rule since the nineteenth century and suffered mass deportations and killings under Stalin, declared outright independence. In 1994, Yeltsin invaded, encouraged by a circle of advisers who promised a “small and victorious war.” It was neither. The Russians shelled Grozny. They rampaged through villages with tanks intended to make war on NATO. More than eighty thousand Chechens, almost all of them civilians, died. Grozny was reduced to rubble, and the republic to a state of lawless ruin much like Afghanistan after its war with the Soviet Union. And out of a terrible war came terror. Excerpted from an article by David Remnick in the September 20 issue of ‘The New Yorker’
