Unlike Americans and Europeans, Russians
are unfortunately used to terrorism. Nearly three decades of their lives, beginning in the 1990s, have been punctuated by attacks. In Putin’s first term, they were a regular occurrence as he waged the second Chechen War and then years of so-called anti-terror operations in the North Caucasus. In 2002, nearly 200 people were killed when Russian special forces gassed a theater full of Russians held hostage by Chechen terrorists. In 2004, hundreds of children and teachers were killed in Beslan. That year, two female suicide bombers simultaneously brought down two passenger planes, killing about 90 people. The Moscow metro has been bombed repeatedly, as have outdoor concerts.
In the areas of southern Russia that border the country’s restive Muslim regions, attacks of one sort of another—a truck plowing into a police post, a suicide bombing—
were near daily occurrences, even as Dmitri Medvedev temporarily took over the presidency. In 2011, on his watch, terrorists bombed Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, one of the busiest in the world. Russia’s Investigative Committee tallied
31 terrorist attacks in 2013 alone. In the following years, blasts continued in the Russian republics of Chechnya and Dagestan. (None of this is a coincidence, given Russia’s brutal, scorched-earth war against Chechen separatists and Muslim insurgents, as well as the reportedly 5,000 Russian citizens fighting alongside ISIS and other jihadist groups in Syria.)
Perhaps not surprisingly,
Russians have become largely inured to terrorism. According to a sociological study conducted by the independent Levada Center in 2016, most Russians view terrorism—as well as the wars they’re told are prophylaxis against it—as “background noise and routine.” The center’s polls show that, even though anxiety about terrorist attacks briefly spikes after high-profile attacks like those in Paris or Sharm el-Sheikh, the overall level of worry is not very high.
The majority of Russians both expect terror attacks and feel their security services are doing enough to fight terrorism. They also strongly approve of Russian operations in Syria, largely buying the Kremlin’s public argument that it is fighting terrorists before they hit Russia. The fact that, last night, Islamists allegedly killed two policemen in the Russian city of Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea, barely registered in Russia.
If there’s too much of it, it seems, terrorism stops being terrifying.
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