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In the summer of 2004, Russia suffered what must be one of the deadliest series of terrorist acts on record. In a matter of days, 90 people were killed in simultaneous air crashes, Moscow's subway system was attacked, and then, in Beslan, 330 North Ossetians, mainly children, died during a Chechen-led hostage-taking.
Terrorism was not, of course, anything new in modern Russia. The first Chechen war began in 1994 officially in part to end the lawlessness that had produced a number of bus hijackings by Chechens in the North Caucasus. The war itself brought hostage-taking into the Russian republic (Budyonnovsk) and Daghestan (Kizlyar), and prompted a threat by Chechen President Djokhar Dudaev to bring the war to Moscow. Terrorism was also central to the resumption of war in Chechnya: a series of bombings of Russian apartment blocks killed around 300 people in September 1999 and led, that October, to the start of Russia's military campaign in Chechnya.
President Vladimir Putin declared a war on terrorism, and terrorist attacks in 1999 in Uzbekistan reinforced his fear that radicals wanted to form a single Islamic state along Russia's borders. In 2000, well before the 9/11 attacks in the United States, Russia threatened to bomb militant training camps harbored by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and. After 9/11, the conviction that the West might now understand Russia's own war on terror underpinned a major improvement in relations with Washington. But the West has failed to provide the type of understanding Moscow expected, and a failure by some Western states to take action against perceived terrorists – by granting, for example, asylum to some Chechen rebels – has soured relations. Perceptions of anti-Russian bias have also strained relations with international bodies like the
Council of Europe. Meanwhile, Russia continues to make its own efforts to counter terrorism, through admission (as an observer) to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, closer relations with Arab countries, and through a new anti-terrorism unit of the Central Asian security grouping, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
In this special report, RFE/RL documents and analyses terrorist attacks on Russia and Moscow's response.
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