longbeard at the carnegie center moscow


our main job today was an interview at the moscow office of the carnegie center--that, and the usual mundane-but-necessary getting of groceries and maintaining of the apartment. it rained most of the day.

Somehow Sam ended up in our bed this morning. I didn't notice until about 3:30 a.m. It was stuffy too, so about 5:30 I just got out of bed.

Today's main event was a scheduled interview at the Moscow office of the Carnegie Center at 3:00 p.m. Turns out the office is just up the street; about a ten minute walk from our apartment.

By 8:00 a.m. it was pouring rain outside. So we made phone calls (I set up an interview tomorrow with the US Embassy's military attache, and Monica added four more interviews during our time here) and played with the kids inside. I told Sam about the kids books available at the Moskva bookstore (a book of Disney's Incredibles and an encyclopedia of arms, armor, and weapons of the ages for kids) and he decided he wanted to come with me to see. So around 11:00 a.m. we headed out, just in time to meet new neighbors (our landlady, Ninyel, rents both apartments) who were lugging luggage up the elevator. Ninyel, by the way, is simply "Lenin" spelled backwards: a fad name of the late 1920s and early 1930s in Russia.

Sam held my umbrella over his head as he rode in the little stroller and in ten minutes we arrived at the bookstore. Sam is at an age where it's hard to have him in any kind of store with things he's interested in unless he's firmly strapped down (which has its own hazards and annoyances). This was no different. So I quickly bought Russian language editions of Vogue and Men's Health, the Incredibles, a book about guns, and Disney princesses (all in Russian, of course).

The other nice thing would have been to find an electric razor so I could shave my long beard and trim my hair (I am starting to look like the missing link from behind); but Monica thought I should do it later in the afternoon, say, after our interview.

After we returned Sam insisted on having his new book read to him and Monica gamely started in. He kept protesting, "don't read it in Russian mommy!" But after awhile he settled in before asking if he could see the movie version (which we let him do). After a bit Sam went down for a nap Monica and Mom took Ingrid up the street to buy groceries (and lunch). They came back with strawberries, grapes, chicken Kiev, and two loaves of really good French bread. We woke Sam up and had an amazing lunch (tomatoes here actually taste like tomatoes, and Monica made a tomato salad with salt, olive oil, pepper, and cucumber).

Then it was time for us to head out for our interview. We arrived on time at Tverskaya 16/2, a modern office building and mall combination filled with shops selling clothes (Levi's for example) fountain pens, Swatch, and so on. The Carnegie Center is on the 7th floor, and after passing through security we met our host who, again thankfully, spoke fluent English.

As is usual with our dual interviews, Monica began the questions, some of which covered familiar ground ("what is your view of the prospects for an end to the civil war in Chechnya?") while others were variations of previous questions. This time some of the answers were different. It seems Basayev has competition for leadership of the Chechen resistance by the name of Zaidullaev. Our host insisted that though no one in Chechnya seriously considers independence to be desirable, there can be no end to the violence and, at best, it will take the Russian Federation fifteen to twenty years just to control 80% of the country. But why no end?

Our host answered that Putin and his advisors had attempted to use the war in Chechnya for broader political purposes, and that after September 11th they insisted (they knew it was a lie) that much of the Chechen resistance was controlled by radical Islamists from outside Central Asia (sound familiar?). The irony being that today there is actually some truth to this statement, because most of the true separatists have been either co-opted or killed; and most of the remaining resistance has devolved from a national independence movement into radical Islamic terrorism or simple banditry.

He also supported the views of previous interviewees by suggesting that revenge was a primary motivation for resistance to Russian rule. The practical consequence being that it is very difficult to negotiate a political settlement in the face of so much naked hatred. In addition, there are the economic problems (no jobs or schools), which can't be solved without massive influxes of aid which Russia doesn't have and which in any case would mostly end up in the hands of Moscow bureaucrats due to hyper-corruption. So again, the prospects for the re-emergence of a stable state called "Chechnya" are slim at best.

My own questions focused on the impact of the war on Russia's military; but I had a question that came up during our host's answers to some of Monica's questions. First, given how stubborn the Chechen people have resisted outside control since before the Napoleonic wars, had anyone ever really been able to control Chechnya? How about Stalin (one can hardly think of a more brutal master than Uncle Joe)? Our host answered by reference to Solzhenitsyn who, in The Gulag Archipelago singled out Chechens as those who never cooperated with the camp administration. In other words, he expressed the notion that Chechens were existentially hostile to political domination, even by a man as ruthless and single-minded as Stalin.

So Chechnya can't be controlled yet can't be independent. It will remain a burr under Russia's saddle for at least a generation--probably longer.

A second question had to do with something suggested by a previous interviewee. Apparently one of Russia's innovations in fighting the second Chechen war has been to change how it recruits and trains units assigned there. I heard that units are recruited, trained, assembled, and deployed all from the same geographic area (even neighborhoods), rather than, as before, drawn willy nilly from all over the Federation. The British tried this in the early years of WWI, and it had the advantage of giving combat units strong cohesion (hence greater effectiveness) in battle. The trouble then (in WWI) was that so many troops could be killed in a single battle that the casualties ended up concentrated in single villages or city blocks, thus magnifying the hurt and damage to morale at home (something of the negative effects of this can be seen in the Mel Gibson movie We Were Soldiers). The British subsequently abandoned the practice.

My concern here was less about physical casualties and more about psychological casualties. War is hard on young men under the best of circumstances. Many carry the scars of killing and having witnessed their best friends being killed forever after their combat tours end. When the war is a clear war of survival, when the laws of war have been observed in the main, and when soldiers are welcomed home as heroes, these feelings of guilt and remorse are more easily dealt with. When, by contrast, the war is a secret war, fought against civilians as much as enemy soldiers, and when soldiers are reviled at home rather than respected, these feelings can be as debilitating as having one's legs blown off. Imagine concentrating those men in one village or small town or neighborhood. What would the impact be? On the one hand, these men would have each other in ways that say, Vietnam veterans or Afghan veterans did not. On the other hand, the economic and social life of these neighborhoods might be crippled, as domestic violence and drug abuse take their fearful toll on the possibility of civil society.

To this question our host had no real answer (I'm betting the Union of Soldiers' Mothers, which whom I'm meeting early next week, will have something to say on this question).

After the interview the sun was shining as Monica and I walked back to the apartment. We stopped for ice cream (I ordered banana, which was awful, and Monica ordered strawberry, which was a delight), and arrived back at No. 4 at about 4:30. The plan was to grab the kids and head to a department store (Tsum) to search for my razor. But it never happened. Instead we farted around, improvising a nice dinner from lunch leftovers as Monica and Mom prepared to attend an opera at the Bolshoi.

They helped me feed the kids and get them bathed and into their pajamas before leaving. And it took me another hour-and-a-half to get them both to sleep. I confess I'm so tired these days that I wasn't the most even tempered about it. Monica and Mom returned at 10:15 and gave the opera, Madame Butterfly, very positive reviews. The new theater (the old Bolshoi is being closed soon for renovations, since it's built over an underground river and it's slowly settling into that same river) was stunning, and the costumes and production were wonderful. They asked if I could watch the kids again tomorrow night because they have tickets to a performance in the old theater. What can I say, no?

So I'll let you all know, vicariously, how the old theater experience was tomorrow night.

Tomorrow morning our interviewee is coming to meet us for a change. He'll call when he gets to Okhotny Ryad Metro station and we'll all go for coffee or a bite. Probably we have another interview in the afternoon but I forgot to ask Monica before she went to bed.

Good night.

Posted: Tue - June 14, 2005 at 11:37 PM          

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