The Maritime guerrillas: a sign of things to come? Dmitry Shlapentokh considers the significance of the Russian authorities' response to a series of attacks on policemen in the Russian Far East.

• Author: Shlapentokh, Dmitry
• Position: Essay

In the summer of 2010 a few young men from the Maritime Provinces in Russia engaged in the systematic killing of several policemen. The event looks trivial in the context of recent Russian history marked by the spread of violent crime. Still, it is potentially a quite important event. Unlike ordinary criminals, those who took part in the murders were motivated by political ideology. They regarded the entire post-Soviet state as oppressive and were ready to die fighting it. The event has another important implication--the fighters were ethnic Russian rather than members of Muslim minorities and they were supported by a majority of the local population. The event indicated the potential emergence of a new centre of terrorist activity far away from the northern Caucasus and Volga region, as well as raising the spectre of the Russian Far East splitting away from the Russian Federation.

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In May/June 2010, a group of young Russians killed or wounded several policemen in the Maritime Provinces in the Russian Far East. After some effort, the authorities were able to find the young men. In the ensuing standoff two of them committed suicide and the others were arrested. The trial of the remaining boys continues to the present. The event seems trivial, from both the Western and Russian points of view, or at least it should be considered so. Indeed, in the West any attack on the police is not usual and would in most cases not be considered of great interest outside the immediate area. And such an attack as occurred in the Maritime Provinces should have been of even less interest to the Russian public, which should have been used to the wave of criminal violence. It has been on-going for almost a generation, when the collapse of the Soviet system with its repressive and controlling functions led to the proliferation of all sorts of outrages.

Still, this event stirred up the Russian public as have very few events in recent history, and compelled the authorities, clearly reluctantly, to gauge public opinion in this respect. And when they discovered that the majority of respondents approved the action of the young men, the authorities (if one would trust Russian public radio) decided not to reveal their findings. It seems that even before gauging the public mood the authorities were quite concerned. It was said that hundreds, if not thousands, of law enforcement personnel had engaged in the hunt and--this was even more amazing--that not just...