• On the morning of September 24 government statements that a terrorist act had been averted were replaced by FSB director Patrushev’s assertion that the entire event had been a civil defense exercise.237 Yet the local FSB chief in Ryazan had rushed to the scene once the bomb was defused, and he had congratulated the residents for “being born again.”238 After Patrushev’s statement, the local FSB in Ryazan responded with outrage to what they believed was an obvious canard: “This announcement [by Patrushev] came as a surprise to us and appeared at the moment when the [local] FSB had identified the places of residence in Ryazan of those involved in planting the explosive device and was prepared to detain them.”239 The local FSB station, having started an investigation, refused to stop it, even after Patrushev’s statement. Major General Oleg Kalugin, a retired FSB official writing from the United States, went on record saying that in his opinion, the story that this was an FSB training exercise was “complete nonsense.”240 When one of the two residents of the targeted apartment building in Ryazan, Vladimir Vasil’yev, who had phoned in to the local police initially, heard that according to the FSB there had never been a bomb, he responded, “I heard the official version on the radio, when the press secretary of the FSB announced it was a training exercise. It felt extremely unpleasant.”241
• Journalists noted the similarities between the Moscow apartment bombings and Ryazan, the “training exercise.” This similarity became more sensitive when it was revealed that RDX, the material used in at least one of the Moscow bombs, as announced by Luzhkov,242 and planted in Ryazan, was an explosive available only from a closed military installation in Perm. The FSB then announced that the sacks that had been “defused” in Ryazan had actually been filled with sugar, not hexogen. Novaya gazeta’s Pavel Voloshin conducted an extensive study on this detail and concluded, based on interviews with local FSB officials, the police, and the bomb squad, that “the Ryazantsi were not wrong. The technology and the people worked professionally. Inside the so-called ‘training’ bags was hexogen.”243 The local bomb squad, headed by Yuriy Tkachenko, stuck to their story that they had detected a bomb set to go off at 5.30 A.M., consisting of an armed detonator and three sacks of explosives. Tkachenko restated this on Russian television, and the picture of the detonator taken by police on September 23 was also released.244 Faced with the sheer stubborn unwillingness of local authorities to concur that the substance had been sugar or that the detonator had been a fake, the FSB changed their story, now saying that it had been a mixture of a number of chemicals made at a fertilizer factory in Chechnya.245
Russian journalists investigating the Ryazan bombing quickly came to the conclusion that all the bombings may have been inspired by the government to deepen the anti-Chechen mood in the country as a prelude to launching a wider war in Chechnya, over which electoral politics and the need to boost Putin’s image were paramount. “May God grant the federal troops victory,” Aleksandr Zhilin wrote. “In this case it won’t be necessary to conduct another series of blasts in Moscow and other cities, designed to lay the conditions for a state of emergency because the serious increase in Putin’s ratings gives the ‘Family’ the chance to get out of the political stalemate without violating the constitution.”246 Novaya gazeta investigators found two conscripts on a base of the 137th Ryazan Paratroop Regiment who had been assigned to guard a warehouse full of fifty-kilogram bags marked “Sugar.” When they opened one for tea, it tasted so bitter that they reported it to their superior, who had it tested. It came back positive for hexogen. The conscripts were berated for “divulging state secrets,” and FSB officers arrived to advise them to forget what they had seen.247
Other aspects of the bombings became known and further strengthened the argument that the bombs were part of a centrally inspired plot. A liberal member of the Duma from St. Petersburg, Yuliy Rybakov, provided a transcript to Aleksandr Litvinenko of a September 13 Duma session in which Speaker Gennadiy Seleznyov interrupted the session to announce, “We have just received news that a residential building in Volgodonsk was blown up last night,” when in fact that bombing was still three days away.248 Later that week, when a parliamentarian asked Seleznyov why he had told them on Monday about a blast that did not happen until Thursday, the questioner’s microphone was simply turned off, according to Duma member Mikhayl Trepashkin, a lawyer and former FSB agent.249
Other opposition lawmakers joined with Trepashkin in calling for a Duma investigation of this incident, and indeed of all the bombings. At the end of 2003 the remaining two of the nine suspects the Russians had sought for complicity in the bombings were due to go to trial. (Five of the nine had been killed, and two others had fled the country.) Trepashkin was certain that these remaining two were framed, and he intended to present evidence at their trial. As insurance, he gave Moskovskiye novosti all of his evidence, including the fact that in August 1999 he had recognized the man whose identikit picture had been posted by the authorities after the Moscow bombings. As the newspaper subsequently stated, he shared his own dated photo of the suspect, a person known as Vladimir Romanovich, whom Trepashkin had detained several years previously in connection with the criminal shakedown of the Sol’di Bank in Moscow by a group that included FSB officers—an investigation that Trepashkin maintains was stopped by Patrushev in 1995, when he was head of the FSB Directorate for Internal Security.250 At that time Trepashkin believed that Romanovich, who was set free, must have had ties with the FSB. Now, in 1999, when he showed his own dated picture to his former superiors in the FSB, their only reaction was to change the identikit picture to lengthen the face and diminish the resemblance to Romanovich.251
Before Trepashkin could present his evidence in court supporting an FSB plot, he was arrested for illegal possession of a firearm. After a closed military trial, despite protests about due process from the International Commission of Jurists, he was convicted and served five years.252 Needless to say, he was not able to testify in the defense of the two remaining suspects, and they were convicted. Many newspapers subsequently reported that Romanovich had fled to Cyprus, where he was killed by a hit-and-run driver in summer 2000.253
A parliamentary investigation was indeed launched, however. (At this time the Kremlin did not yet control the Duma.) Before his arrest, Trepashkin acted as a lawyer to the committee; the other three parliamentary leaders of the independent investigation were Sergey Kovalev, Yuriy Shchekochikhin, and Sergey Yushenkov. The investigation was not able to reach any conclusions because the government refused to cooperate with it. Rybakov, like Kovalev and other liberals, lost his seat in the 2003 elections, lamenting, “Now, as private figures, we will get only meaningless answers.”254 Kovalev told an Ekho Moskvy radio interviewer in 2002 that his commission had received testimony from the person held responsible for renting the space in Moscow where bombs had been placed—despite the fact that the FSB was still “searching for” this person.255
The person the FSB was searching for was Achemez Gochiyaev, an ethnic Karachai (not a Chechen) from the North Caucasus who served in the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces and who in 1999 lived in Moscow. He testified that he had used a fake passport of a deceased man to rent the spaces. He provided written and video testimony to Novaya gazeta256 and the Russian historian Yuriy Felshtinskiy,257 in which he confirmed that he had indeed rented the space in the Moscow buildings; that he had done so at the request of an FSB friend; and that when he realized he was going to be framed for these horrible acts, he was the one who called the police and alerted them to the location of the additional spaces that he had rented (at Borisovskiye Prudy and Kapotnya). He also categorically denied having anything to do with Ryazan.258 Later, in 2003, however, the owner of the Moscow apartment space on Gur’yanov Street, Mark Blumenfeld, told Moskovskiye novosti that when he was shown a picture of Gochiyaev by the authorities while under interrogation in Lefortovo prison, he told them, “I have never seen this person. But they strongly recommended that I identify Gochiyaev. I understood what they want
ed and never argued, and I signed the statement. But in fact, the man whose picture they showed me and who was called Gochiyaev, was not the man who came to me.”259 Despite considerable skepticism in the opposition press that Gochiyaev was in fact the person who rented the spaces used for the bombings, the FSB continued to blame him.
Kovalev stated that while the Duma’s efforts to have a full investigation had been stymied, he had his own “interim” view of what happened in Ryazan: “In my opinion, the following version sounds quite trustworthy. The explosion of an apartment building was not planned, but a training exercise was also not planned. What was planned, we may say, was the following action, a propaganda action. First, to show the citizens that terrorists are active, that they have not abandoned their murderous plans, and at the same time, the second point was to show that the brave [security] organs perform their duties excellently, rescue citizens, and unmask these villainous plots. Why not this version? That plan, possibly, existed and failed. Honestly, I am very reluctant to believe that any sort of security services, obeying our supreme authorities, were capable of blowing up the sleeping inhabitants of their country.”260
The fact remains that not only was Trepashkin sentenced to five years, but both Yushenkov and Shchekochikhin died in 2003. Yushenkov was assassinated outside his apartment building in Moscow on April 17, 2003, and Shchekochikhin, who had traveled to Ryazan in June 2003, came back suffering from a high fever, a sore throat, and a rash. He died in the Kremlin’s Central Clinic on July 3; his father-in-law, a retired professor of pharmacology, stated in an interview, “He was very dangerous for the authorities. He penetrated into things he should not have.”261
Similarly Artyom Borovik told Yabloko Party leaders that he was conducting an independent investigation of FSB involvement in the bombings for a series of articles in his journal Sovershenno sekretno; shortly afterward, in early 2000, he died in a plane crash.262 By 2004 over a dozen men of “Caucasian nationality” had been sentenced in camera to extended periods in prison. Still dissatisfied with the government’s failure to provide a public accounting of the events in 1999, Novaya gazeta published a list of questions for Putin and the other presidential candidates. They provide an apt summary of the issues raised by the troubling incident as the country entered the election season:
• Why did the authorities prevent the investigation of the events in Ryazan, where the FSB officers had been implicated in blowing up an apartment building?
• Why did Duma Speaker Gennadiy Seleznyov announce the explosion in the Volgodonsk apartment building three days before it happened?
• Why has the detection of RDX in sacks marked “sugar” on a military base in Ryazan in autumn 1999 not been investigated?
• Why was the investigation into the transfer by NII RoskonversvzryvtsentrXIX of RDX from military depots to front companies closed under pressure from the FSB?
• Trepashkin, who established the identity of the FSB agent who rented a room for planting [a bomb in an] apartment building on Gur’yanov Street—why was he arrested?264
Opposition politicians also began to question the government’s version of events. Most were self-serving, but a pointed interview given to Le Figaro by the blunt nationalist general Aleksandr Lebed was picked up by the Russian press. He was quoted by Moscow’s Segodnya saying, “As I understand it, an agreement was made with [Chechen rebel leader Shamil] Basayev, especially since he’s a former KGB informant. I’m absolutely sure of this. [Lebed had been the Yel’tsin envoy that negotiated the end of the First Chechen War.] I think Basayev and the powers that be have a pact. Their objectives coincide. The President and the Family have become isolated. They don’t have the political power to win the elections. So, seeing the hopelessness of its situation, the Kremlin has set itself just one goal: to destabilize the situation so the elections can be called off.” When the general was asked whether he was sure that “the hand of power,” as he put it, was behind the apartment bombings, he replied, “I’m all but convinced of it. Any Chechen field commander set on revenge would have started blowing up generals. Or he’d have started striking Internal Affairs Ministry and Federal Security Service buildings, military stockpiles or nuclear power plants. He wouldn’t have targeted ordinary, innocent people. The goal is to sow mass terror and create conditions for destabilization, so as to be able to say when the time comes, ‘You shouldn’t go to the polls, or you’ll risk being blown up along with the ballot box.’ ”265, XX Lebed continued to make troubling allegations of Kremlin involvement. He died in a helicopter crash in 2002.
Konstantin Borovoy, a Duma deputy, received a document warning of imminent terror attacks in September 1999, which he communicated to the FSB. He then received information about the FSB’s involvement. In an interview on Ekho Moskvy in 2010 he recalled, “[Anatoliy] Sobchak asked me to support [Putin]; it was in the middle of 1999, but then there began the . . . bombings of the apartment houses. A member of the special services gave me as a [Duma] deputy a very serious document. As a deputy I held a press conference, during which I said that . . . the FSB is organizing these explosions. Putin immediately made a [sarcastic] declaration that this Borovoy should be sent out to defuse the bombs. Why was he lying? You understand that I grasped everything that had taken place in that September 1999. I wrote him a letter that I could not support him because it is wrong to resort to such methods. My relations with Putin came to an end, so to speak, in 1999.”267 Borovoy then added a critical detail: “When the bombings of the apartment houses took place in September 1999, I held a press conference. Into my possession there had come information, very serious information. . . . I began to transmit it to the Security Council. And the person who presented this witness’s testimony, that the FSB was a participant, that person telephoned me after his meeting with the representative of the Security Council and said, ‘Why did you send me to the FSB? Those are the very same FSB-shniki [FSB workers]. I was telling them what they were [already engaged in] doing.’ ”268 Borovoy’s warnings were the subject of newspaper articles in mid-September 1999, after the first Moscow bomb but before the second. An article on September 16 concluded, “For a long time [the special services] had information about imminent terrorist attacks but did not take any measures, so as ‘not to sow panic.’ . . . Inasmuch as one of the obligations of the special services is to check such information, the impression was formed that the special services intentionally did not conduct active operations and did not inform the government of Moscow concerning a terrorist act being prepared, since connivance was profitable to the Kremlin for its political goals. The enormous misfortune which befell the populace quickly squeezed off the front pages of newspapers and from television screens the theme of corruption in the presidential ‘Family’ and the scandal with the New York bank.”269
While doubts and suspicions about the complicity of the security services continue to this day, the bombings were regarded at the time as absolutely critical in promoting Putin’s candidacy.270 Putin’s approval ratings rose dramatically through the fall, from 2 percent in August to 45 percent by November.271 In early spring Sergey Kovalev summed up the real political impact of the apartment bombings:
Those explosions were a crucial moment in the unfolding of our current history. After the first shock passed, it turned out that we were living in an entirely different country, in which almost no one dared talk about a peaceful, political resolution of the crisis with Chechnya. How, it was asked, can you negotiate with people who murder children at night in their beds? War and only war is the solution! What we want—so went the rhetoric of many politicians, including Vladimir Putin—is the merciless extermination of the “adversary” wherever he may be, whatever the casualties, no matter how many unarmed civilians die in the process, no matter how many Russian soldiers must give up their lives for a military victory—just as long as we destroy the “hornets’ nest of terrorists” once and for all. And it doesn’t matter in the least who this “adversary” is—the fighters Ba
sayev or [Ibn al-] Khattab, the elite guard of President [Aslan] Maskhadov [of Chechnya] (who had nothing to do with the raid into Dagestan, or, of course, with blowing up apartment buildings in Russian towns), or simply a member of a local militia who is defending his native villagers from Russian troops that suddenly swoop down on them.
Russian politicians began to use a new language—the argot of the criminal world. The recently appointed prime minister was the first to legitimate this new language by publicly announcing that we would “bury them in their own crap.” It was after saying this that Putin’s rating in the polls began to rise astronomically: finally there was a “tough guy” at the wheel. . . . In fact, now, after three and a half months, more and more people recognize that the “Chechen terrorist” version of these crimes has not been confirmed by any facts at all. At least, no evidence, either direct or indirect, has yet been presented to the public to support the claim that the terrorists are to be found on “the Chechen trail.” What little is known about the people suspected of having some responsibility for the explosions indicates that this is likely a false trail: the individuals in question are not even ethnic Chechens.
But the absence of evidence doesn’t prevent the population from continuing to enthusiastically support the government’s actions in the Caucasus. The explosions were needed only as an initial excuse for these actions.
While I do not believe Putin himself created this excuse, I have no doubt that he cynically and shamelessly used it, just as I have no doubt that the war was planned in advance. And not only in the headquarters of the Russian army, but, as I have suggested, in some political headquarters as well.
Which political headquarters? It is a question that is unpleasant even to contemplate. These plans do not bear the stamp of the older generation of Communists or the fanatic younger supporters of Great Russian Statehood, whose reactionary influence on the life of the country I so feared at one time. Instead, they are in keeping with the bold, dynamic, and deeply cynical style of a new political generation. It is unlikely that, after next March, President Putin will either resurrect Soviet power or resuscitate the archaic myths of Russian statehood. More likely he will build a regime which has a long tradition in Western history but is utterly new in Russia: an authoritarian-police regime that will preserve the formal characteristics of democracy, and will most likely try to carry out reforms leading to a market economy. This regime may be outspokenly anti-Communist, but it’s not inconceivable that the Communists will be tolerated, as long as they don’t “interfere.” However, life will not be sweet for Russia’s fledgling civil society.272
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