Anger and pain – this was the first reaction all normal people felt upon hearing about the terrorist act in Kaspiisk on May 9 that killed more than 40 people, including children. Politicians and public figures then began analyzing how such a thing could have happened. The Dagestan State Council, for example, criticized the work of the region's Interior Ministry and security services, saying they hadn't done enough to fight extremism and keep up vigilance. The mayor of Kaspiisk also admitted he was at fault and handed in his resignation.

Human rights ombudsman Oleg Mironov also gave a detailed analysis of the situation. Speaking at a press conference, Mironov said the authorities are not fulfilling their commitments to protect people from terrorism. Noting that more people work in the Interior Ministry than in the Defense Ministry, Mironov said he didn't understand how law-enforcement authorities couldn't have prevented the terrorist act.

Mironov's questions are all the more justified since Dagestan has been a major target for terrorists for more than a year now. Indeed, Kaspiisk itself has already suffered terrorist attacks that resulted in a large number of victims. Mironov also noted the overall increase in terrorism. In 1999, 20 terrorist acts were registered (not counting terrorist acts in Chechnya), compared to 135 terrorist acts in 2000 and more than 300 in 2001.

Nor does the law do anything to protect people from terrorism. The 1998 law on combating terrorism doesn't define it, or contain provisions regarding victims of terrorist acts. These gaps in the law could explain why many officials wriggle out of providing prompt assistance for victims of terrorism.

Hopefully, this analysis of the situation will be followed by practical steps to strengthen the fight against terrorism. Unfortunately, the statements made by some politicians immediately following the events suggest they are less interested in getting to the roots of terrorism, and working to eradicate it, than in using populist tactics to boost their own standing by making loud noises about what they know is high on everyone's minds.

"Shoot them all like rabid dogs!" – such calls have been common on TV over recent days. This is a natural reaction from ordinary people, and one can only sympathize with it. You could even say this might be the best solution for terrorism if it were actually possible in practice to eliminate all the terrorists, and if using the death penalty didn't have serious side effects that often outweigh the gains made in fighting crime.

Legal specialists know, however, that eliminating every single terrorist is impossible, and that society inevitably pays the cost of resorting to the death penalty. Other methods of fighting terrorism may involve the state starting to act like a terrorist itself. This is especially true in Russia, where the whole law enforcement system is in a state of serious crisis and is not guaranteed against mistakes, including deliberate ones.

It's known, for example, that a man was executed for what turned out to be one of the first murders of notorious serial killer Andrei Chikatilo. Police then stopped their investigation until new victims appeared. The death penalty can also play into the hands of unprofessional investigators and judges anxious to cover things up, and into the hands of the real criminals.

None of this is news, and if well-informed people and professional politicians are appealing for an end to the moratorium on the death penalty, it's hard to rule out that they're doing so in a bid to manipulate ordinary people's natural emotions.

Bringing back the death penalty has been an increasingly popular call among many Duma deputies of late. After the bombing in Kaspiisk, Gennady Raikov, leader of People's Deputy, said that the events of May 9 had changed many people's views on the death penalty and that Russia would be unlikely to ratify the protocol abolishing the death penalty that it committed itself to signing when it joined the Council of Europe. Raikov's group is part of the pro-Kremlin bloc in the Duma. President Vladimir Putin has made it clear he is against the death penalty, but Raikov obviously figures that not agreeing with Putin on this count won't do him any harm.

There has also been more talk lately of allowing people to freely purchase firearms, even though it doesn't take much imagination to see that this will increase rather decrease crime. More liberal firearms laws will mean that people won't just have to fear professional criminals, but also ill and unbalanced people, drunks, drug addicts and even teenagers who've taken guns kept at home just for fun.

Finally, the decision to dissolve the Pardons Commission that successfully worked with the president for the last decade is another worrying signal.

If the state is unable to rein in crime and is tempted to shift the burden of looking after people's safety to the people themselves, that is only a partial misfortune. What would be worse is if all this talk is a cover, calculated propaganda to use the fight against terrorism as a pretext to tighten the screws – one of the Russian bureaucracy's age-old favorite pastimes.