What’s horrible about terrorism is the unjust, sudden way it takes perfectly innocent people away. I didn’t know anyone killed in the bombing of the Moscow to St Petersburg Nevsky Express on Friday evening personally. Friends of mine did. Everyone is shaken.
It was a horrible enough tragedy even without the bombing. Much has been made of the Nevsky Express’ popularity with business men and senior civil servants - the chinovniki who run Russia, and who the terrorists were apparently targeting. But the train line between Moscow and St Petersburg is probably one of the busiest in the country. Everyone uses it - even those, like me, who would rather take the overnight sleeper than fork out the extra rubles for the four-hour express. An accident on any train is traumatizing. A bombing is frankly sickening.
What makes it more sickening is that it was not the first such attack. In August 2007 a near-identical bombing succeeded in derailing the Nevsky, but failed to kill anyone. The terrorists apparently had a good think about what went wrong, and came back with a refined plan.
This time they buried 7 kilograms of TNT-equivalent under the tracks, five kilograms more than last time, and for good measure left behind a secondary charge to hit the investigators.
They killed at least twenty five people and hospitalized at least 90. Most of the casualties were in the rear two carriages, which cart-wheeled when they hit the break in the track caused by the explosion. If the other carriages had not by some fortuitous chance skipped the gap, the death toll would probably have been in the hundreds.
The second bomb didn’t hurt anyone, but in the bizarre way tragedy is sometimes accompanied by comedy, it apparently blew off the hat of the Chairman of the Investigative Committee when he arrived on the scene on Saturday afternoon.
The prime suspects for Friday’s attack are Russian nationalists and North Caucasian Islamists. Most experts have dismissed the nationalists as too amateurish to carry off an attack so sophisticated, but in 2005 a neo-nazi who had apparently picked up the requisite skills while fighting in the former Yugoslavia bombed and derailed a train traveling from the Chechen capital of Grozny to Moscow. In 2003, a suicide bomber killed 44 on commuter train near Grozny. Two men from Ingushetia, a North Caucasian republic neighboring Chechnya, are currently on trial for the 2007 attack.
It is likely that apologists for the terrorists will point out that the reason North Caucasians are immediately suspected is that this kind of thing happens in the North Caucasus all the time, but no one makes much of a fuss about it. That is fair: bombings and assassinations are as ubiquitous to that part of the world as to Iraq or Afghanistan, and Russians are as inured to the violence there as Westerners are to the campaigns in the Middle East. But weariness at bad news from far away is no crime. And, as if it needs to be said, the passengers of the Nevsky Express were not responsible for the low-level war in the Caucasus.
Someone clever once wrote that Russian literature is wreathed in steam, or that a locomotive runs through every page of it. That was apt, if not original. And while the 19th Century preoccupations of the likes of Lev Tolstoy may have been overtaken by history and better writers, the importance of the railway to Russia has not.
Russia’s roads are awful, and internal air travel, though expanding all the time, remains ill-developed, costly, and unreasonably dangerous. For a lot of people, the trains are what hold the country together. Whether you are traveling in the barrack-room like hard class coaches, or the petit-bourgeois four-berth compartments, or one of the first-class carriages with flat-screen televisions, the train is a familiar most people’s first choice of transport from city to city.
I leave it to lovers of Tolstoy and hawkers of travel guides to decide what this says about the Russian character. The pertinent point is simply that Russians are very dependent on their railways, and Friday’s attack was a frightening reminder of how vulnerable railways are to those inclined to sabotage and murder. The horrible truth is, as one official at Russian Railways put it in a recent radio interview, it is physically impossible to defend 86,000 kilometers of track.
