An explosion reportedly killed at least 35 people today at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, sparking fears of a new wave of terrorist attacks in Russia.

The scene inside the arrivals hall at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport was
like a battlefield: heavy smoke stung the eyes, bodies were stacked in
heaps. By the wrecked Asia café at least 15 corpses were jumbled
together in a tangle. “There were many people with terrible wounds; many
had lost limbs,” says 27-year-old Alexander Dimchenko, a taxi driver
who says he was just 10 yards from the blast but was saved by a concrete
pillar. “We loaded bodies on luggage trolleys … The bomb was stuffed
with metal that ripped up human bodies.” The latest casualty count
stands at 35 killed and 168 injured. Anna Mishutina, a celebrated
playwright from Ukraine, was among those killed, according to her friend
Natalia Antonova. The head of a dark-skinned man police believe to be
the bomber was found at the epicenter of the explosion in the public
area of the airport’s arrivals hall.


A man wounded in a blast is carried away at Domodedovo airport in Moscow on Jan. 24, 2010. (Photo: Ivan Sekretarev / AP Photo)


As Russian television showed images of Domodedovo’s bright
International baggage reclaim hall strewn with debris and darkened with
smoke, many Muscovites revisited the sinking feeling they experienced
less than a year ago when over 40 people were killed by female suicide
bombers on the Moscow metro. For many of the capital’s citizens, the
beige-and-red interiors of the Domodedovo are almost as familiar as the
metro itself.
Moscow’s Domodedovo airport is a symbol of the new prosperity brought
to Russians under Vladimir Putin’s rule, their post-Soviet freedom to
travel—and, as Monday's explosion proved all too grimly, the Russian
State’s failure to bring security to its people.
A dozen years ago, Russians signed up to a clear, if unspoken, deal
with the Kremlin. In September 1999, a series of unexplained bomb
attacks demolished apartment buildings in Moscow and South Russia,
killing 293 people. Vladimir Putin, then a relatively unknown former
spook, was promoted to prime minister on the promise to protect Russia
from secessionist terrorists from the breakaway republic of Chechnya.
Within weeks Russian troops were rolling into Chechnya, and Putin’s
political career was launched. The bottom line of the deal Putin offered
Russia was this: Voters surrendered many of the freedoms they had
enjoyed during the chaotic Yeltsin years in exchange for protection.
Many Russian voters were only too happy to accept everything that
followed—the rise of the Kremlin, Putin’s squashing of the oligarchs,
the crackdown on independent media and the end of local
elections—because they believed that the state would fulfill its primary
role, to guard the security of its citizens.

Perhaps the most
surprising thing about the decade of terror is that Russian voters have
signally failed to blame their leaders for their lack of security.
Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. Chechnya itself was quickly
subdued, by the ruthless but effective expedient of arming one of the
rebel groups and using them to torture, murder and intimidate their way
to victory. But the Kadyrov clan’s victory in Chechnya, and the broader
Russian-enforced peace across the North Caucasus, didn’t bring the
terror to an end. Instead terror and Islamic radicalism metastized like a
cancer across the North Caucasus and infected the volatile neighboring
republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia.
The immediate result was that the Putin era has been punctuated by a
steady drumbeat of terrorist outrages—from the Moscow theatre siege in
2002 to the Beslan school massacre in 2004, to the Moscow metro bombings
last spring which between them left 495 dead. But apart from those
high-profile attacks, smaller terror is an almost weekly occurrence in
the South Russian borderlands with the North Caucasus. Just counting the
incidents with double digit-fatalities over the last 12 months, bombs
destroyed a racetrack in Nalchik, a market in Vladikavkaz, a cultural
center in Stavropol, a military base in Buinaksk. Terrorists from the
Caucasus derailed a high-speed train between Moscow and St. Petersburg,
attacked a power station, and bombed numerous police stations across the
region. Effectively, the Kremlin is fighting a low-intensity war in
South Russia. But if a decade ago Russia was at war with Chechen rebels
with a clearly defined set of goals focused on the independence of
Chechnya, now the enemy is a shadowy plethora of tiny Islamist groups
with a range of grievances against the Russian state, from blood feud to
plain-vanilla ethnic nationalism.
One thing that is clear, though—the authorities’ methods of fighting
the insurgency, ranging from kidnapping of family members of suspected
militants to extrajudicial executions and well documented by
human-rights groups, aren’t working. More, there is evidence that terror
groups, some driven simply by the desire for revenge, have a covert
network in place to facilitate a series of attacks. “There is very well
concealed network of terrorists with explosives in Moscow,” says Gennady
Gudkov, a former KGB colonel who now heads the Russian Duma’s security
committee. “Terrorists are helped in Moscow by this underground network.
I believe that a terror attack like this, using a bomb that weighs
several kilos could not be arranged without a web of underground
supporters.”
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the decade of terror is that
Russian voters have signally failed to blame their leaders for their
lack of security. On the contrary, Putin built his tough-guy image on
such swaggering promises as “rubbing out the terrorists in the
shithouse.” Polls regularly show that Putin is more trusted on security
issues than his baby-faced, handpicked successor Dmitry Medvedev. Though
the failure to bring lasting peace to the Caucasus is Putin’s, it’s
likely the more liberal Medvedev whose ratings will suffer from
continued terror. “If Russia is hit with another wave of terror attacks
or armed conflict, people will look to Putin,” says Alexei Grazhdankin
of the Moscow-based Levada Center. “He is seen as a strong defender of
the Russian state.” This evening Medvedev announced that he would be
cancelling a visit to the Davos conference to deal with the bombing.
Putin’s toughness is no mere rhetoric—at his instigation, a decade of
very hands-on violence has been applied to the Caucasus, with little
result. No one can reasonably blame the Kremlin for tonight’s appalling
bomb attack on Moscow’s busiest airport. But it's equally clear that
Putin has built a police state that’s good at cracking down on dissent
but bad at delivering security—not to mention honoring its basic
contract with the people who surrendered their freedoms in exchange for a
quiet life.