The foundations of the Beslan tragedy were laid by Boris Yeltsin, who, in my opinion, bears the lion's share of responsibility for the death of children from a small Ossetian city. Having released the terrorists from Budennovsk together with the hostages in 1995, the first Russian president set a precedent for their victory when they, being covered by civilians, were able to force the country's leadership to retreat and shamefully roll back to the peaceful Khasavyurt agreements.
I will not write about the misfortune of children. Much has been said about this, and probably Beslan is one of the most terrifying terrorist acts of our century, since no one has deliberately condemned hundreds of girls and boys, beginning with unconscious babies, to death and monstrous suffering in a dry hunger strike on the territory of the European continent. The cause of this horror was the Budennovsky syndrome.
Yeltsin released Basayev from the Budyonnovsk maternity hospital under the influence of the West, who in those days hysterically pressed the Russian leadership, urging not to endanger the lives of the hostages, while the situation itself behaves in a completely different way. An uncompromising no has been declared to terror in the West. Precisely so that the terrorists would not be tempted to check the European authorities for weakness. When it is completely clear that any attempt to blackmail the state with the life of civilians is doomed, no one tries to repeat them. A separate topic is the attacks of martyrs, which are living deadly mechanisms, their goal is not to intimidate the state, but society.
Basaev’s bandits were not martyrs. They followed victory, not death. And the then authorities did not just allow them to win this victory - they were proud of the manifest humanism, they bathed in approving responses from European capitals. They generally believed that they had opened a new page in history.
In fact, they released deadly forces from the underground, which over and over again sought to reproduce this victory. The campaign of the Basaev and Rayev gangs in Dagestan at the end of the first war was more likely a breakdown, and quite successful. Raduev also took the hostages away, and the Russian negotiators went to him to agree on the ransom and release of the people. It was impossible to imagine anything uglier.
And in parallel there was a slave trade. Militants abducted people in Russia and sold them. Bought returned new stolen.
Why is the West, which believes that there can be no agreements with its own terrorists, considered Chechens to be freedom fighters and called the raid in Budyonnovsk an act of peace enforcement? He believes that cannibalism, if it concerns Russia, takes on the form of vegetarianism, since terror in human society is absolutely intolerable, but normal with us. Freedom-loving bandits kill the totalitarian. The first, of course, is better.
Nazism of a new type, which fully manifested itself in assessments of what happened in Budyonnovsk, completely fantastically migrated to the understanding of the tragedy in Beslan by the Western public. Famous French philosophers, now deceased, found arguments to totally justify this unprecedented crime, although at the state level, Europe was still breathing with difficulty. The bestial nature of the Chechen underground was already irreversible once and for all.
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But even here there were many hunters to equalize in the cruelty of the attackers and the defenders. The domestic liberal community was especially rampant, precisely calculating which tank had hit the wrong way, which bomb detonated in the gym, how many children could be saved by losing to the terrorists. They did not yield and saved many.
The final convulsion of the Budennovsky syndrome was Dubrovka. The answer to this attack was put an end to. No other serious attempts to force the Russian leadership to recognize the right of the territory, which has become the source of the most unbridled terrorism, to exist, have been made no more. There were (like the second series) suicide bombings, but even they, due to their complete inability to make Russia numb with fear, quickly came to naught.
We live in the complete elimination of the very prospect of repeating Budennovsk. And this is the merit of those who, having come to power in the country, used the same basic principle in their relations with terrorists: no negotiations and concessions. Thanks to this, Beslan was one, not several.
The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.