The Russian project  

Putin's terror-induced power grab has weighed heavily on me for the past few days, especially so since the coverage has been kind of numb, slow, and uncritical. Isn't this the biggest world event since the US invasion of Iraq, with geopolitical consequences that could be as farreaching as the US presidential elections in November? God knows, this isn't the first step back towards authoriarian government we've seen in Russia, but it's by far the biggest and most alarming.

Part of the problem is that Putin's move was justified by terror. I wrote before about Russia post-Osetia as a mirror for US terror policy, and while it's certainly been that, the policies are so exaggerated that it feels like Putin is covering new ground. He's interpreted terror through the same Manichean framework as Bush, but the Chechans aren't al Qaeda -- their cause has some legitimacy, even if their methods don't. And Putin's response, essentially dismantling Russian democracy over a crisis that has more to do with crumbling empire, is either a monumental overreaction or a total non-sequitur. Here's his own explanation:

Democracy, Mr. Putin suggested in remarks after the school siege, does not result in stability, but rather instability. It does not unify, but rather divides. The principal threat posed by democracy in Russia today, he made clear on separate occasions in the last two weeks, lies in simmering ethnic and religious tensions along the rim of Russia where ethnically non-Russian people live. That division, he suggested, can only be controlled with an iron hand from above.

This rationale sounds very Russian, but make no mistake: it's the direct result of Bush's policies in the war on terror, which have legitimized the subordination of political rights to security and blurred the distinction between particular ideologies or causes and the methods used to fight those causes (ie terrorism or conventional war-waging). This is fearmongering, Bush-style, but in a context where fear is an even more potent catalyst for political change.