what you have to understand about the rise of totalitarian/proto-fascist russia - potentially a world disaster - is that it has all been driven by chechnya. in a way, this could have been a remote, obscure independence movement. but yeltsin tried to put his foot down: it was the almost-arbitrary point at which he decided to stop his empire disintegrating. the russian army, the russian nation, and the russian president were humiliated there in the way a tiny, fierce, cohesive people can humiliate a decaying empire. that humiliation led to the election of putin, and to the route he has taken to creating and preserving power: a crypto-fascist nationalism. his fundamental early strtategy was to do absolutely whatever was necessary to crush chechnya, a task he accomplished with a brutality which, even at this late date, was notable: russia literally leveled and depopulated groszny with thermobaric weapone, set up a string of blacksite torture/internment facilities and associated mass graves, emptied the area of much of its population, displacing the women and children (they killed most of the men) into neighboring provinces, then displacing them from there. meanwhile, putin used the terrorist response, both the real paroxysms of violence of a dying people and the agent provocateur simulations, to create a police state in russia's cities, seize control of the media, economy etc. each new killing in the worldwide campaign of murder will, one finds, trac e back to criticism of the chechen genocide, or to revelations of the reality. the extremely unfortunate thing is that this coincides with a boom in the russian economy, which floats putin essentially above any international criticism. by the time we really take stock, we will have a world fascist superpower to contend with.
an odd fact is that the nationalist crypto-fascist mood has been mirrored in washington through this decade, and if anyone can understand putin, it's bush: the oil, the money, the flag, the militaristic assertion of national pride and vengeance, the secret prisons. it's a little like the little nascent signs of fascism in thirties america: huey long and father coughlin, lindbergh, the bund, etc, though these people never got control. but these things do sweep the earth as a mood. at any rate, i vibe the us turning away, though the consolidations of executive power will hardly be reversed. on the other hand, one possible response to the iraq debacle would be: we are now going to level your cities with thermobarics. but in russia you have a truly grave situation for wthe world and for one thing, every murder that putin commits with impunity will make him grin and commission five more. we're goling to wake up one morning and suddenly see that the russian army is a lot, lot better than it was in 1992.