Why can’t Putin beat terror?

There has been another blast in Moscow. The explosion at the baggage-belt of Russia’s largest airport was tragic—dark, shaky clips began circulating online minutes afterwards—but for Russia depressingly familiar. Last March bombers struck the Moscow metro, killing 40 people, one mockingly detonating herself at the station bearing the name of the secret service headquarters, ‘Lubyanka.’

Vladimir Putin came to power after a wave of terror in the Russian capital, gaining popularity through his aggressive response to the threat. “If we find them (terrorists) in the airport,” he said at the time “and excuse me... if we find them in their toilets, we’ll kill them in their outhouses.” Yet despite having rolled back democratic freedoms and given huge power to the secret services, why has the ‘Alpha dog’ president been unable to stop terror’s return to Moscow?

The answer is corruption. “Putin is not a great leader, but a macho leader for whom the interest in reform stops the moment it would interfere with the interests of the Kremlin,” sums up a senior German official.

In the North Caucasus region on Russia’s southern frontier, the Russian army is fighting militants with an Islamist agenda. Last year Russian losses in this region were greater than America’s in Afghanistan, and the military has estimated they have been losing as many as six troops a day since October 2010. These heavy losses are, at least in part, due to the stagnation, corruption and lack of reform undermining the capability of Russian forces. Alexander Kanshin, Chairman of the Public Chamber Committee for military veterans, personnel and their families, warned in 2008 that a third of funds spent on the armed forces are lost to corruption—a total of $13 billion a year.

Things are no better in the security services. Anna Chapman, the redhead agent seemingly more concerned with Facebook than espionage, is symptomatic of malaise in the agencies where corruption has undermined the ruthless meritocratic efficiency of the KGB. Her father was a Russian diplomat, and her aptitude for the job dubious. Last year the journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan confirmed this picture of Russia’s corrupt security services in their book The New Nobility, describing a country in which the FSB, the SVR (which spies abroad) and the Interior Ministry often employ petty criminals to cover their tracks and live luxurious lives above the law.

Indeed, it seems the same problem infects every part of Russian society. In December race-riots erupted in Moscow after the Caucasian murderers of a football fan were seen being acquitted and driving away from the police station in a flash car. This came during the same weeks that it was alleged that the state oil-company Transneft had stolen $4.5bn from a project upon which Russia’s future depends—the Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline.

Corruption may now be eroding Putin’s capacity to rule. In December 2010 28 per cent of Russians believed they were living in a time of rising anarchy and 58 per cent did not believe themselves protected by the law. And now even figures within the system are speaking out. In October, after a family of 12 were slaughted and burned in their home by gang members that had infiltrated the provincial government of southern Krasnodar, Valery Zorkin the Chairman of the Constitutional Court furiously denounced the state of his country.

“One has to admit, honestly, that the organised crime disease has too deeply infected our country,” he wrote in the state newspaper Rossiyskya Gazeta. “Crime is undermining the foundations of our fragile legal system…corroding the fabric of our still immature civil society." The judge noted that a “fusion of authorities and criminals” had taken place in many parts where it was becoming impossible to distinguish between local government and mafia operations. If the mafia isn't pushed back, he warned, “it will raise the question whether Russia can survive beyond the next 10 years.”

Russia finds herself struggling to cope with the upsurge of militancy in the Caucasus or prevent deaths in her flagship airport and metro stations because corruption is corroding the state. The mafia murders in the village of in the Krasnodar region shook the nation because they told a story of what Russians fear of their future. Corruption had cannibalized state capacity.

The irony is that what Russians really need is a president who would do what Putin promised when he took power: come up with a workable strategy in the North Caucasus and, above all, establish “the tyranny of law.” Alpha-dog or not, it seems Putin isn’t up to the job.