It is just as right to call what is going on today peace as it is to call it war. The signs of this new state first came not a week ago in Beslan, not two years in Dubrovka, and not even three years ago in New York and Washington. They came back in 1999 when apartment houses in Moscow and other Russian cities collapsed due to explosions. Many specialists and politicians in the 20th century called terrorism the main threat to humanity in the 21st.
However, humanity is never ready for new threats, be they the plague or fascism. Usually, the inhabitants of several cities have to perish or several states fall before everyone else finds the right answer. The whole trick is to avoid winding up among the ranks of the unfortunate. “The weak are beaten,” as Putin commented on the monstrous attack in Beslan.
A vertical chain of authority cannot effectively fight an invisible network, the web of terrorism due to its very geometry. A vertical structure is merely a line without any area. And this structure is not mobile and because of this can’t tear the web to shreds. We need a different kind of configuration. The USSR, for example, was a ponderous pyramid of power. The authorities distributed their weight over the entire area of the country and crushed everything that crawled below. “Unfortunately,” President Putin stated, this government proved unviable. There is another approach, one where the executive branch of government is a frame to which a net is attached, a net of political, social, and corporate organizations, local government, and every other responsible part of civil society capable of getting things done and defending itself on its own turf. We could try and come up with other constructions, with only one requirement: they all take up area. Apparently, this is what Putin was trying to get across when he said that “terrorists are most effectively repulsed, when they encounter not only the power of the state, but also that of organizations embodying civil society.” In Beslan, the disordered state of society only made the government’s job harder.
Beslan has forced Russia to recognize that we are in yet another systemic crisis. The transformation of a huge country, which we are all experiencing, can only happen through a long string of crises. Sometimes these crises threaten the country’s very existence. Let us recall that in 1991 a superpower collapsed and only a very shortsighted observer would have imagined that a crisis of that scale would end peacefully before it even began. In 1993, the face-off between different branches of the government in Russia led to civil war on the streets of Moscow and once again, only the very naïve did not expect that things could continue on a much larger scale. The memorable financial crisis of 1998 was completely clear, far clearer. It touched almost every person in Russia, but it did not extend as deep into the system as those in the early 1990s—or the crisis we face now. The current crisis not only reveals the weakness of our national security forces. It forces us to take a broader view and recognize the inadequacies of our entire political system, the lack of systematic ties between the authorities and the public and between various social strata. Thus, in his national address, Putin interpreted Beslan not as a local mishap, but as a consequence of the fact that fundamental problems of how the new Russia should be structured are yet to be solved. Putin began the list of priorities by saying: “A set of measures to strengthen the country’s unity will be developed.” Let’s not be naïve this time, too. Let’s not believe that this will happen easy and quickly.

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