Chechen "Black Widows" Bomb Moscow

Two women carried out a suicide bomb attack on the Moscow metro early this morning. The attack, which took place at two subway stations, killed at least 38 people. Over 100 people were injured.

The two women accused of carrying out the suicide bombing are believed to belong to the Black Widows. The Black Widows are a Chechen separatist organization composed of women who have lost relatives, usually husbands and brothers, in the conflict with Russia.

“The terrorist acts were carried out by two female terrorist bombers,” said Moscow’s mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov. “They happened at a time when there would be the maximum number of victims.”

Vladimir Putin has vowed that the terrorists will be "destroyed."

"As far as possible we will try to avoid civilian targets, but for me there are no civilians in Russia," Doku Umarov, the separatist leader, said in an interview in July. "Why? Because a genocide of our people is being carried out with their tacit consent."

“If Russians think that the war is happening only on television, far from the Caucasus, and it will not touch them, then we are going to show them that this war will return to their homes,” Umarov said in February.

Jonathan Eyal of London's Royal United Services Institute said the killings were a challenge to Putin's authority. "This is a direct affront to Vladimir Putin, whose entire rise to power was built on his pledge to crush the enemies of Russia ... It's an affront to his muscular image," he told Reuters.

Chechen separatist attacks have been quite common for Russia in its recent, post-Soviet history. If the Chechens want to be independent so badly, then why not just let them be independent? Chechnya is a very small and underdeveloped region. There is no way they could ever be a major offensive military threat to Russia.

Things were never perfect in the Soviet Union, but the Chechen-Russian conflict seemed to be less intense back in those days, at least when times weren't tough for everyone (like during WWII). I would like to prove this by showing this passage from a New York Times article:

The older Chechen fighters like Mr. Basayev occasionally refer to a common Soviet past when communicating with Russians. Maksim Shevchenko, a Russian journalist who interviewed him frequently during the first war, recalled one such appeal by Mr. Basayev, who wears the long beard of Islamic radicals."He switched off the tape recorder and he said, `You think I was always this bearded fighter with a machine gun?' " recalled Mr. Shevchenko, who at the time was writing for the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta. " `I also sang the song, "My address is not a home or street; my address is the Soviet Union." Those were very good times.' " (“With Few Bonds to Russia, Young Chechens Join Militants.” NYT November 19, 2002.)

Bring back a new and improved Soviet socialism, give Chechnya more autonomy if it can't be freed entirely, and all of these racial and ethnic conflicts will disappear. Why? Because Marxism provides for equality. The aim of socialism is equality. Inequality in all of its various and ugly forms is what causes ethnic, racial, religious, and class conflicts.