Russia’s reaction to the terror attacks yesterday in St. Petersburg stands in stark contrast to what we have seen in public behavior in Paris, in Berlin, in Brussels following similar attacks over the past 18 months.
There is some commonality, to be sure: in every case, the head of state visited the scene of the horror to pay respects to the fallen. Vladimir Putin did just that last night, when he lay flowers at the metro station where 14 citizens died and scores more were injured, requiring hospitalization. However, Putin delivered no maudlin speech to the nation and Russian state television coverage was not dominated by images of tearful and shocked citizens lighting candles, reaffirming their faith in a free and open society and denouncing Islamophobia – all of which were the dominant themes of the media in France, Germany and Belgium.
As in the West, days of mourning for the victims were immediately declared.
However, other official reactions were more down to earth and practical. To ease the plight of the millions of residents and visitors to the city center faced with the shutdown of the entire metro system pending security searches to uncover other possible bombs, the city authorities declared that all surface transport including taxis and suburban trains would be offered free of charge for the day.
The precaution of closing the metro system turned out to be entirely justified. Within an hour of the explosion on a train traveling between two key stations of the Blue Line, Tekhnologichesky Institute and Sennaya Square, police discovered and defused a bomb twice as powerful at the Moskovsky metro station, which connects with the heavily visited Moscow railway terminal at the top of the city’s premier boulevard, Nevsky Prospekt.
Being present in the city center at just this time, I was witness to the massive flows of people along the sidewalks as we were all involuntarily turned into pedestrians to get around town. The mood, nonetheless, was calm and good-natured.
On the evening television, Thinking Russia, consisting of commentators from security experts and Duma legislators delivered their views of the tragedy: who may have been its authors and implementers, what can be done at the local, the national and the international levels to ensure public safety and protect against repeat attacks.
This is no small matter coming from a nation whose culture is perhaps best known to the world from its great 19th and early 20th century literature. Anton Chekhov summarized that culture pithily with the remark of one of his protagonists in a parlor room gathering: since they aren’t serving us tea, let’s philosophize! Russia is also the country of deductive Cartesian thinking which gave us the witticism: it works fine in practice, but how is it theory?
Russians may still enjoy verbal dueling, as we see in the popularity of their televised talk shows, but we witness more steely rationalism on the screen than heated emotion and empty pathos…