Blasts in Krasnodar: Are We Ready to Repulse New Attacks?

Early in the morning on August 25, citizens were peacefully standing at a trolleybus station on their way to offices, but suddenly the place turned into the front line
The reality is gradually getting out of hand; it consequently reveals the gaps of the black chaos. The world sags like the clock in Dali's pictures and turns into a clockwork bomb. At every corner we stumble on surrealism; terrorists come to quiet provincial cities turning bus stations into sinister objects killing people. The division of population into the military and civil is getting more and more relative.

Early in the morning on August 25, citizens in the Russian city of Krasnodar were peacefully standing at a trolleybus station on their way to offices, but suddenly the place turned into the front line. The calm morning coolness was split with explosions. Clockwork mechanisms were set to 7.30 a.m. and fixed in three spots of the city.

The explosions claimed lives of three people, an aged man and two young women. People suffering from different wounds were taken to local hospitals. As could be expected, the authorities have quickly become very active: the entries and exits of the city were blocked; police officials were recalled from their vacations; all telephone lines and mobile phones were immediately tapped. However, all the measures proved to be ineffective and terrorists managed to escape (as it usually happens, to tell the truth). 

In fact, nothing effective could be taken in the situation as terrorism is a very subtle thing. The problem could be easily solved if in reality all sinister terrorists looked typically and demonstrated their malicious intentions with every movement they made. But in fact terrorists may be also wonderfully dressed people, smoothly shaven; the type of their faces can be European not Caucasus at all. This is at a regular war that enemies are dressed in different uniforms, speak different languages and are separated from each other with the front line. The situation is radically different at peace time hostilities when everything is mixed. Is it normal that ordinary people can be blown up at a trolleybus station? If people can find themselves in such rather extreme situations we may soon start suspecting our neighbors with whom we discuss latest football events of being connected with terrorism. Indeed, this suggestion cannot be ruled out.

Until recently people from quiet provincial cities of Russia have had immunity: may be the sound conservatism protected these people from the nightmare of twenty-four-hour patrolling of the streets. Explosions have become awfully frequent in Moscow and life in the place goes on the brink of psychical pathology. Explosions are no longer a surprise in Caucasus cities seized with the war. Nobody could expect that such cruel terrorism might reach Krasnodar.

The city of Krasnodar is not a simple place. The city resembles the city of Rostov in the mode of its life and the conservatism. For a very long period the Rostov-like mode of living served Krasnodar a shield protecting the city from rude consequences of the epoch-making events going on in the heart of the country: perestroika, coup d'etat, change of the parliament and presidents. While the central cities of Russia competed with each other for the status of Russia's criminal capital, Krasnodar watched the events from the outside.

As recent opinion polls conducted in the city of Rostov, the one with which Krasnodar has been compared above, reveal that people no longer feel safe there. They fear that next to Krasondar more acts of terrorism may follow and even in Rostov as the cities are situated close to each other.

Indeed, in the situation when civil people apprehend the danger of terrorist acts, explosions and catastrophes every day, their lives turn into everyday wars. Some of the questioned add that it would be better to introduce Stalin's order in the Caucasus to somehow prevent spreading of terrorism.

Grigory Molokhov