The comfortable lap of dictatorship  By Usam Baysayev, special to Prague Watchdog
Samashki, Chechen Republic
Last week, as I was driving with my family out of the tunnel along Grozny’s Akhmat Kadyrov Prospect (it used to be known as Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov Prospect), a silver Lada Priora came up behind my Lada 9. I was already doing a fair speed – the road is a good one – but the people behind me seemed to be in a hurry. Now they swerved to the right, now went back into place, almost pressing up against my fender. They could not overtake me on the left, as I was driving in the inside lane.
Observing the dangerous manoeuvres, I stepped on the gas, moved forward and let them pass. The Priora darted away at high speed. I caught up with it at the traffic lights. No sooner had I stopped than a policeman who was looking out of one of the rear windows told me to drive closer. It turned out that I was being filmed. From the car's interior an enormous muzzle with a rectangular border lens fixed its attention on me. The sight of a grenade launcher aimed at my forehead would have surprised me less, I think, and so I failed to recognize the policeman as Ruslan Alkhanov, the republic’s Interior Minister. When he asked me why I hadn’t given way, I answered that I had done so as soon as I noticed them. I wanted to add that by trying to overtake me on the wrong side they weren't abiding by the rules either. There wasn't time. The driver’s window slid down and the man at the wheel, whom I successfully identified as Ramzan Kadyrov, began to give me a telling-off. The reason I couldn‘t see behind me, he said, was that my children were standing up, blocking my view. And because of them I ought to be very careful. Larlo, in short.
The upshot was that last Wednesday I was shown on TV as a careless father who had no concern for the safety of his family. And in the final segment of the evening news on Grozny Television, too, along with a few other unfortunates who had for similar reasons got on the wrong side of the law. However, the leading figure on this television slot was Ramzan Kadyrov. Exchanging the Lada-5 that appears on his income and property declaration for a much more luxurious Priora, he was keeping law and order on the roads single-handed and in person.
The republic now has a master, and I had suddenly become the object of his fatherly concern. My children are also his, like everything else that lives, breathes and moves in the land that is under his control.
Many nations have passed through a period of paternalism in the course of their historical development. But some have got stuck there, and it seems that this is to be our fate, too, if not now, then later. The main thing is to draw the right conclusions. One of them is that the inability to obey often leads to tragedies, and deprives us of the victories that we deserve. Anarchy is not freedom. Just as law and order is not the same as the right of the powerful. But at least the latter imposes order on public life, albeit in a simplified version of feudal dependence: the master and the vassals, the father of the nation and his children. In our republic the one cannot do without the other. The same material blessings reach everyone, though in unequal proportions, of course. Although people are tired, the stability and efficiency of the present regime provide a certain sense of order and a relative prosperity.
For my own part I can only wish that we may leave behind as soon as possible this system in which we are seen by the authorities as foolish children who need to be taught everything. We will do so when we learn to respect the law. In a country where everything is decided for one, where a person is unable to govern his own actions without the control of the master, the human will disintegrates. People grow accustomed to someone else taking responsibility for their lives.
Larlo! – Watch out! (Chechen)
Photo: russ.ru. (Translation by DM) (P,DM)
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