Waste the terrorists in their shithouses

“Waste the terrorists in their shithouses” is Vladimir Putin’s blunt promise to deal violently with terrorists, made shortly after Boris Yeltsin designated him as his heir apparent. The phrase sets the tone for Putin’s presidency: a coarse, memorable threat that helps present the new leader as a forceful answer to a war whose justification remained contested. Its later circulation as a joke among the National Bolshevik Party gives it a second life, turning presidential language into a parody of everyday menace.

Origin in the 1999 crisis

Six months before the presidential election, Boris Yeltsin presented Putin to the public as his successor. In the book’s account, the election already seemed almost a formality, and a war could help make the newcomer appear to be a savior. The stated pretext was a series of bombings in buildings on the outskirts of Moscow in the fall of 1999, which killed more than three hundred civilians. The attacks were blamed on Chechen terrorists, but the narrator emphasizes that proof was lacking.

The account also describes a widely circulating theory that the Federal Security Service had carried out the bombings. General Alexander Lebed, journalist Artyom Borovik, former Federal Security Service officer Alexander Litvinenko, and Paul Klebnikov, the narrator’s cousin, publicly expressed this theory; all four later died violently. The book presents the allegation as both paranoid and not entirely implausible, and notes the striking coexistence of suspicion and electoral support: many Russians reportedly believed Vladimir Putin guilty, or at least capable, of such a crime, yet repeatedly voted for him.

A threat becomes a catchphrase

A few months after his promotion, Putin declared his intention to “waste the terrorists in their shithouses.” The phrase’s crudity is part of its force: it makes a promise of state violence sound immediate, physical, and deliberately unceremonious. In the narrative, it marks the point at which the image of the modest, unsullied heir gives way to a more openly hard-edged presidential persona.

The phrase also travels beyond its original political setting. Members of the National Bolshevik Party turn it into an inside joke: “Hey, pass the vodka or I’ll waste you in your shithouse.” The mock threat borrows the president’s language and redirects it into banter among his opponents. Its comic repetition does not erase the violence behind the slogan; instead, it makes the presidential formula recognizable enough to be used casually, even among those who do not know what awaits them under the political order taking shape.

Political and narrative significance

The phrase links the 1999 bombings and the renewed war in Chechnya to Vladimir Putin’s public emergence. Its compact, vulgar wording gives the promise of force a memorable form, while the surrounding allegations leave the basis for that force unsettled. The contrast between a threat uttered by a rising president and its vodka-fueled imitation by National Bolsheviks makes the slogan both a marker of political power and an object of ridicule.

The book’s retrospective framing sharpens that irony. The joke’s speakers do not yet know what awaits them, just as the powerful figures who helped bring Putin to power do not foresee their later fates. The catchphrase thus carries more than its immediate threat: it anticipates a presidency in which those who assume they control the new leader will discover that the language of power is no guarantee of safety.