Russia's Social Contract

Putin has offered Russians security in exchange for liberty. Will the Moscow bombings upend this equation?

One similarity between the old Soviet Union and today’s Russia is that, to borrow from philosopher Thomas Hobbes, life can be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

This week’s attacks on the Moscow subway system demonstrate how true this is – both for the victims and those who killed themselves carrying out the bombings. Hobbes envisioned a world of constant insecurity and the ever-present threat of violence, literally a “war of each against all.” Imagining ourselves in this situation, we would willingly trade personal liberty for security.

Vladimir Putin’s decade-long “get tough” strategy with the real or perceived enemies of the motherland – be they “terrorists” from the Caucasus, enterprising journalists who believe in the pesky idea of free expression, or the Georgian government writ large – is premised upon a similar and implicit contract with the Russian people. The Second Chechen War and the more recent insurgency in the North Caucasus are Putin’s to own. But does the failure to deliver security in the heartland call into question the viability of the contract itself?

Certainly, the fear and panic that generally accompanies terrorist attacks will weaken the government’s position. Those who have long criticized the wars in Chechnya as feeding rather than solving the twin challenges of separatism and insurgency will endeavour to be heard, likely with limited success given effective state control over broadcast media.

However, the savvy ability of the Kremlin to find enemies to blame, shape the story, and respond however it sees fit should not be underestimated. All nationalist and xenophobic means will be employed.

After the 2002 hostage crisis at the Dubrovka theatre and the Beslan school siege of 2004, the response of Russian security forces caused as many, if not more, civilian deaths than the number of those purportedly “saved.” In any Western democracy with a real political opposition and an independent fifth estate, handling either crisis this way would have toppled the government. In Russia, both crises arguably strengthened the state’s hand and increased the personal popularity of its leaders.

And we shouldn’t forget what Putin has done for the country using massive energy revenues. Social and economic infrastructure, crumbling after Soviet stagnation and the massive sell-off of state assets at fire sale prices in the 1990s, has been rebuilt to varying degrees. Civil servants get their paycheques and pensions are paid out. Oligarchs and the nouveau-riche have been allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains so long as they do not venture into politics or, worse still, criticize the current regime. Superpower pride has not been restored, but Russia has certainly re-established itself as a great power with regional interests that cannot be ignored.

In the long-run, the counter-productive nature of Russian strategy – even when measured only in military and not civilian terms – may well result in some kind of political reckoning. In the meantime, Western governments will wring their hands if Russian hard-liners are strengthened, unable to do much given the blank cheque they gave Russia to conduct counter-terrorism operations post-9/11 and the current American commitment to pursue its “reset relations with Russia” policy.

Sadly, life in Russia continues to be cheap. The irony of the explosion in the Lubyanka station in particular was not lost on anyone. The station is located just below the current FSB and former KGB fortress that was once home to the political interrogations and executions that defined the Stalinist purges. If a successful terrorist attack melds the message with the geographic and architectural symbolism of its location, then it was spectacular indeed.