MOSCOW -- With the killing of Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov by the Russian FSB security forces, President Vladimir Putin has put political assassination on the table of his tactics.
The Russians killed Maskhadov and allowed the television cameras of Russia's NTV to see and show his half-naked corpse and the telltale bullet hole beneath the left eye of a man who had once been president of Chechnya. This video was Putin's message to the Chechen rebels, Russians at home, and his critics abroad. It was his way of saying, "Bring it on."
From liberals in Moscow to voices of the European Union, the critics of the Russia's operation against Maskhadov are wrong on at least one point. What happened in Tolstoy-Yurt on March 8 was not a clumsy operation botched by the Russian FSB security forces when they killed a relatively moderate Chechen leader who was supposed to have been taken prisoner and then brought to the negotiating table. Putin eliminated Maskhadov precisely because he was the one Chechen separatist leader with whom Moscow could negotiate.
The Chechen leader was in fact a former Soviet era military officer with whom the Kremlin could do business.
Three facts reveal Putin's hand. Fact one -- under former President Boris Yeltsin the Kremlin had done business with Maskhadov, who accepted the 1996 truce. Fact two -- representatives of the European Union had been making contact with Maskhadov in hopes of brokering a diplomatic solution to the Russian-Chechen War. And a third and inescapable fact: The Chechen rebel leadership is now entirely in the hands of such radical Islamic terrorists as Shamil Basayev, who carried out the September massacre of the Russian children in Beslan. There is no one with whom Moscow could negotiate.
The September massacre by Chechen terrorists of more than 350 Russians, including 150 children, is Putin's 9/11. Immediately following the massacre, he appeared on Russian television scarcely able to control his anger -- not just against the Chechens but against the ineptitude that has typified the Russian state since the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the time, Shamil Basayev taunted Putin for his inability to protect Russian women and children and threatened Putin's two teenage daughters.
In November, when Putin visited Ukraine, he took the opportunity to meddle in the Ukrainian presidential campaign. His main purpose, however, was to visit children survivors of the Beslan attack who were receiving therapy in Ukraine. A fatherly Putin posed with them for the cameras of Itar-Tass, and calculated his next move.
His nationalist supporters at home get it. In the words of Boris Kargalitsky, head of Moscow's Institute for the Problems of Globalization, "Putin's nationalism is first and foremost anti-Islamic."
Secondly, Putin practices Russian nationalism in the patriarchic style of the late-19th-century czar, Alexander III, who was fond of saying that Russia must go it alone and her only allies would be her army and navy. Putin is going it alone in Russia's war on terrorism, with his only real ally in the security forces of the FSB, successor to the KGB.
He has taken out Maskhadov and probably can take out Basayev. His enemies, however, believe that they are not alone in the Islamic world and welcome the challenge to wage not a separatist war for Chechnya but a jihad for all of the North Caucasus. The next move is theirs.
Nick Hayes is a history professor who holds the University Chair in Critical Thinking at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn. He is in Russia on a research project.