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Last Friday, terrorists attacked Moscow’s “Crocus City Hall” music venue, killing over a hundred people. My condolences to their families. Within a day, leaked footage showed a suspect getting his ear cut off and being made to eat it. Additional footage showed a suspect in great pain with electrical equipment attached to his genitals.
It was the type of gruesome footage from which we tend to turn away. We form our private opinions and don’t discuss them. I fear the silence allows some observers to regard this as extreme but effective justice. Perhaps people will tell themselves the word that has justified centuries of Russia’s self-inflicted tyranny: “order.” Marquis de Custine wrote 200 years ago, “Officially, such brutal tyranny is called respect for unity and love of order.”
To say nothing about the dangers of presumptions of guilt and unconstrained authority, this episode points to important differences between Russia and the West, which most of us do not understand and, I fear, cannot understand. But I will try to explain them anyway.
An accused Moscow attack suspect. YouTube screen grab.
Russia is a society held together by fear and threat. Creating fear is almost always the first thing they do. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, one of their first actions was to kidnap Simferopol resident Reshat Ametov, a Tartar activist, and leave his body to be discovered later with signs of torture. Weeks later, when they invaded Donbas, one of the more outspoken pro-Ukrainian city council members, Volodymyr Rybak from Horlivka in Luhansk Region, was similarly kidnapped. He was drowned, and then his body was mutilated and left to be discovered. These stories never gained much traction. Russian disinformation was so good that everybody was discussing if Russia was invading and never got to describing how they were invading.
The terror worked for Russia. It drove opposition underground and helped the Kremlin’s propagandists and useful idiots in the West proclaim that the regions were pro-Russian. We in the West do not think that lies could be so vulgar and horrific, but they are. For Russia, this is normal. The world is held together not by laws, customs, and social norms but by barbarism. If you want to be beautiful, just murder everyone who might say otherwise, and you will be beautiful.
Some examples are more subtle. During a 2016 meeting with former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Putin, likely knowing of Merkel’s phobia of dogs, arranged for a large Labrador to be in the room with them.
I know from eyewitnesses that, in 2022, during their invasion of Ukraine, Russians flew jets low and loud over highways choked with fleeing refugees. This caused some panicked people to drive too fast in the opposite lanes against oncoming traffic, leading to deadly accidents. They also arranged for these ridiculous little metal contraptions to be placed on rooftops and road intersections all over the country. Though the devices did nothing, they sowed rumors that they had to do with targeting for air raids, heightening everybody’s paranoia.
The bombing of the Mariupol Drama Theater was clearly meant to demonstrate Russia’s disregard for the theater, which was clearly marked “Children.” About 600 refugees were killed. (Side note for many of Russia’s useful idiots: They were probably Russian-speaking Ukrainians.)
There’s a joke in Ukraine that you shouldn’t believe anything until the Kremlin denies it in two mutually exclusive ways. About the Drama Theater bombing, the Russians said it was used as a military base, and they said the Ukrainians blew it up themselves to make Russia look bad. Similarly, while some Kremlin propagandists denied the Bucha massacre atrocities, another television program discussed how it was a good thing because it intimidated Europe.
If such a society produced prosperity, we would all be speaking Russian, but it doesn’t. It creates corruption and misery. There is no ideal of a “man of his word” in Russia. Telling the truth all the time is something that weak people do. Their ideal is that of the Tsar—a dangerous person who is above the truth. As Russian commentator Kamil Galeev observed, a “treaty is to restrain the Tsar’s power, a condition he abides to commit. That’s a dishonor, and he breaks [the] treaty at the first chance.”
Examples abound. A day after signing a grain deal with Ukraine, Russia bombed the Odessa port that was to be used for shipments. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov said that the Budapest Memorandum, by which Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for security assurances, expressed no non-nuclear restrictions that might contradict a Russian invasion. This is not the type of lie that attempts to deceive. It’s the type of ridiculous lie that strives only to intimidate. The Heritage Foundation, before the sharp pivot it made in its Russia analysis, pointed out that “Russia has rarely, if ever, signed an arms control treaty that it did not violate.”
There is a philosophical underpinning to this madness. Philosopher Ivan Ilyin, whose remains Putin had exhumed in Switzerland and re-buried in Russia, provides it. He produced a very strange version of Christianity where either God was flawed or the process of creating the world was flawed. Because of this, facts do not matter very much. I interpret him as very close to the post-modern philosophers of the radical left, except Ilyin puts everything through the lens of Russian nationalism. In fact, he concludes that God’s imperfect world can only be made right if Russia prospers and unites the world. He’s a little vague, but there’s something about creating “order.”
So, to return to the titular question of why Russian authorities cut off the suspect’s ear and made him eat it, they did so because they need to instill fear as the foundation of everything they do, because they see laws and social norms as fragile facades which are not only fake but insulting to their ideal of an all-powerful, unconstrained Tsar, and because, like people waiting for a messiah, they await the return of a more barbaric world in which the norms of that naive, intimidating, undeserving Western world will be swept away, and their supposed superior adaptation to a world of savagery will finally elevate them to the station they’ve thus far been unjustly denied.
Roman Skaskiw is an American of Ukrainian ancestry. He lived in Ukraine for ten years, where he founded and ran a software company. He’s also a U.S. Army veteran.
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