Orders to Kill

by Amy Knight

  Interestingly, Kumarin claimed that he had never known Vladimir Putin and had no business connection with him or his St. Petersburg allies, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Chaika himself acknowledged the ties between Putin and Kumarin in the above-mentioned secret conversation reproduced by WikiLeaks. And Aleksandr Litvinenko, in his book The Gang from Lubianka, observed: “The Tambov gang would not have lasted a day in St. Petersburg if its leader, Kumarin-Barsukov, were not friends with Patrushev and Putin. They had dachas next to each other. They fried kebobs together.”35

  Presumably Kumarin has hoped that his denials about ties with Putin would mitigate his possible prison sentence on murder charges and improve his conditions there. But perhaps he is just lucky to be alive. Russian journalist Viktor Shenderovich, who has documented the close ties between Putin and Kumarin in the nineties, had this to say about Kumarin’s fate: “If I were in his place, I would worry about my life, because apparently he made an agreement to be silent in exchange for good living conditions in prison.… But Putin will not stay in power and new people might make a contract with Kumarin where good living conditions are exchanged for a story about his years together with Vladimir Vladimirovich. I think Putin understands this.”36 In other words, Kumarin cannot count on Putin protecting him.

  Questions Remain

  The Starovoitova case is officially closed. But for many, including Starovoitova’s sister, her son, and others, it remains open. Glushchenko and Kumarin do not hold up credibly as those who ordered the murder, because neither had a motive to kill such a prominent figure as Starovoitova. Olga Starovoitova told an interviewer in 2016 that she did not consider Glushchenko guilty of the murder, adding that she could not help but compare it to the killing of Boris Nemtsov: “They kill those who the people listen to, who can’t be bought or have their mouths shut.”37 Human-rights activist Lev Ponomarev, who was very close to Starovoitova as a fellow leader of Democratic Russia, observed in August 2015: “The special services in some way participated in the affair. And of course the head of the agency [then Putin] bears specific responsibility. All the more so since everything has dragged out for so long and we see that the mastermind is still not known. The idea that Kumarin might be the one who ordered the murder is crazy.”38

  It strains credulity that the Russian investigative organs would have had such a hard time solving this murder, where they had a witness, Linkov, the three weapons that were used, with fingerprints, plus numerous eye-witness accounts of what happened before and after the crime. Clearly, the FSB had to build a scenario that would incriminate people who were already known in the criminal world, elicit confessions, and ensure that those who had ordered the crime were protected. The Starovoitova case was the beginning of a pattern that has continued under Putin ever since. The strategy is simple: drag out the case for as long as possible so the public loses interest, and yet give the impression that investigators are doing a thorough job, supposedly leaving no stones unturned.

  As FSB chief and shortly thereafter the Russian president, Putin could dictate the course of the investigation of Starovoitova’s murder, with the help of his trusted friend Cherkesov. In the end, Putin achieved two goals: getting rid of his nemesis, Starovoitova, and imprisoning for life the men who knew too much about his criminal activities in St. Petersburg. It might be added that it is probably no coincidence that Starovoitova’s murder came just three days after FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, accompanied by several colleagues, appeared in a nationally televised press conference to announce that their FSB superior had ordered them to kill Boris Berezovsky, then head of the National Security Council. This dramatic announcement caused a huge uproar, leading to Litvinenko’s imprisonment, exile, and subsequent murder, which is discussed in detail later in this book. But luckily for the FSB, it was soon overshadowed by news of Starovoitova’s killing.

  As for Linkov, by all accounts he is a strange character. Devoted to Putin and claiming that they shared a close personal relationship, he may or may not have been a collaborator in the murder. But clearly he was enlisted early on by Putin to further the official line that extreme-right politicians were the perpetrators of Starovoitova’s murder and that Putin could not have been behind the crime because he had always supported her democratic efforts.39

  Linkov, capitalizing on his fame as a victim of the 1998 crime, and portraying himself as a human-rights activist, published a book, Zapiski nedobitska (Notes of a Survivor) in 2007.40 Disappointingly, for those who had hoped to learn more about Starovoitova’s murder, the book had little to say in that regard. Although Linkov talked about the need for legal protection of dissidents, he carefully avoided saying anything negative about Putin. Indeed he wrote fondly that Putin, in 1990, had had his driver take him and Starovoitova to meet with voters for the Duma elections in districts of St. Petersburg. Ten years later, he said, Putin himself reminded him that he had done this. As an analyst for the Russian paper Kommersant observed about the book: “If Linkov is for democracy, then I am against it.”41

  There were plenty of people who wanted Starovoitova out of the picture in 1998, and the atmosphere of lawlessness and unaccountability for assassinations in St. Petersburg provided ample opportunity for would-be killers. Nonetheless, Starovoitova was such a prominent political figure that potential killers would have known that there would be a huge outcry, along with demands to find the perpetrators that far exceeded the clamors for justice in earlier murders. Thus it is difficult to imagine that whoever killed Starovoitova would have embarked on this dangerous mission without the assumption of protection by someone high up in the security services. There were three people who occupied such positions in November 1998: Vladimir Putin, head of the FSB; Viktor Cherkesov, his first deputy; and Cherkesov’s replacement as FSB chief in St. Petersburg, Grigor’ev. All were well connected with the underground criminal world, and yet it took their agency, the FSB, four years to even make any arrests in the crime. And still, after close to twenty years, no credible zakazchik has been identified.

  The September 1999 bombings.

  (Photograph courtesy of STR/AFP/Getty Images)

  4

  TERROR IN RUSSIA: SEPTEMBER 1999

  What?! Blowing up our own apartment buildings? You know, that is really … utter nonsense! It’s totally insane. No one in the Russian special services would be capable of such a crime against his own people.

  Vladimir Putin, First Person (2000)

  Maybe I’m afraid of finding out the truth because the truth might even be worse than what happened.

  Svetlana Rozhkova, who lost her mother in the bombing of a Moscow apartment house

  Nineteen ninety-nine was not a good year for Russia’s relations with the West, which came under increasing strain. President Bill Clinton had been a firm supporter of the Yeltsin presidency, despite the strong objections of Washington to the first war in Chechnya, launched in late 1994. Indeed, Clinton and Yeltsin met an unprecedented eighteen times during the period when both were in office. (On one of Yeltsin’s trips to Washington, he brought Nemtsov, then still first deputy prime minister, and reportedly introduced him to Clinton as his successor.)1 Clinton had pushed strongly for a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty with Russia, but the treaty was defeated by the U.S. Senate in October 1999 because of concerns about how it would affect the strategic balance. Meanwhile, the Kremlin leadership felt threatened by NATO’s expansion of the alliance into Eastern Europe in that September to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, and also by U.S. plans to build a national missile defense system. Then there was the war in Yugoslavia, where Russia’s ally Serbia was bombed by NATO forces in an effort to stop Serbia’s “ethnic cleansing” of Albanians in Kosovo. And, although Clinton had supported the IMF’s granting of billions of dollars of loans to Russia, growing evidence of Russian money laundering and corruption, including a huge scandal involving the Bank of New York, had caused an uproar among Russia’s Western critics.

  It was again
st this backdrop, along with growing discontent with Yeltsin at home, that four apartment bombings occurred in Russia in September 1999. These devastating terrorist attacks were, for Russians, what 9/11 would be for Americans two years later. As Russian human-rights activist Sergei Kovalev observed, “the 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.”2 Indeed, the bombings changed Russia’s political landscape irrevocably, in particular by catapulting Vladimir Putin into the Russian presidency and giving Russian authorities an excuse to blame almost every subsequent political murder or act of terrorism on Chechens or other ethnic minorities from Russia’s North Caucasus regions. The attacks, not surprisingly, created a sense of extreme vulnerability on the part of the Russian people and made them highly receptive to the allure of a strong, no-nonsense leader (unlike the ailing and unpredictable Yeltsin). Enter Vladimir Putin.

  Weak Response from Russian Authorities

  It is important to note that a prelude to the September series of terrorist attacks occurred early in the evening of August 31, 1999, when a bomb exploded at an underground shopping center at Moscow’s Manezh Square. One person died and dozens were injured. The Dagestan Liberation Army (Dagestan being a republic of the Russian Federation in the North Caucasus) claimed responsibility for the explosion and said that such attacks would continue until Russian troops left their territory. Two Dagestani terrorists were later convicted of the crime.

  This attack should have put the Russian security services on high alert in order to prevent further terrorism. But the authorities were remarkably complacent. In fact, on September 2, Nezavisimaia gazeta published an interview with FSB chief Patrushev in which he was asked whether additional security measures were being taken because of the blast. Patrushev responded that heightened security was already in place due to the beginning of the school year on September 1, but that “there is no basis for a more intense regime because of the bomb at Manezh Square.”3

  The initial September bombing occurred on the fourth of that month at an apartment building in the city of Buinaksk, Dagestan, killing fifty-eight people and wounding more than a hundred others. The apartment building housed soldiers from the 136th Motor-Rifle Brigade of the Russian Ministry of Defense, along with their families. But the majority of those killed were Dagestanis, not ethnic Russians, and the region had already been rife with conflict, so the attack did not generate a great deal of reaction.

  The second bombing took place on the night of September 8–9 at a nine-story apartment house on Gurianova Street in Moscow, killing one hundred people and wounding over six hundred. Prime Minister Putin went ahead with a planned trip to New Zealand, as if to demonstrate that there was no cause for panic. Then on September 13, a powerful explosive blew up at an eight-story apartment building on Kashirskoe Highway in Moscow, killing 124 and wounding seven. And finally, on September 16, a bombing took place at an apartment house in the city of Volgodonsk, Rostov District: nineteen people died and eighty-nine were wounded.

  As the Russian journal Itogi noted on September 21, Russians did not voice indignation over the fact that their government had taken no exceptional measures until after the second Moscow blast. But looking back a decade later, Russian journalist Vladimir Vedrashko was incredulous: “Imagine that the New York twin towers had been blown up within an interval of several days. Could an American possibly imagine that after the first blast, authorities would take no action that was outside the normal?”4 Such was the climate in Russia at that time, despite the heady years of democracy under Yeltsin. Most people were schooled in the Soviet era, when outrage over government malfeasance, if it was felt, was simply not expressed.

  Historian John Dunlop, in his path-breaking study of the September bombings, reports that in fact the FSB and some members of the Security Council received a detailed warning on the day of the first Moscow attack that there would be further bombings. An officer of the GRU who had been serving in Southern Russia approached liberal Duma deputy Konstantin Borovoi with information about planned attacks, along with a list of participants. Borovoi duly passed on this warning to members of the Security Council with ties to the FSB and sent the GRU officer to speak with them, but they ignored the information and took no preventive measures.5

  Aftermath of the Bombings

  As Dunlop shows, the authorities afterward deliberately kept the circumstances around these terrorist attacks murky, with highly contradictory versions of what had happened and who was to blame. Indeed, journalist Iulia Kalinina observed in 2002: “The Americans several months after 11 September 2001 already knew everything—who the terrorists were and where they came from.… We in general know nothing.”6 The brother of Luba Morozova, who perished in the Gurianova Street blast, voiced a feeling that was probably widespread: “There are bigger fish involved. That is why it is taking so long.”7 But, aside from some courageous investigative reporters, Russians kept their doubts to themselves.

  Morozova’s daughters, Tatiana and Aliona, both now residing in the United States, were among the few who did everything they could to find answers as to who was responsible for the blasts. They enlisted a lawyer, Mikhail Trepashkin, a former FSB officer, to help. But Trepashkin’s efforts to get crucial documents from the authorities failed. And in October 2003, shortly before the trial of two men accused in the Moscow bombings, Trepashkin was arrested for possessing an illegal weapon and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. An additional charge of divulging state secrets was later added. (Trepashkin had made himself an enemy of the FSB well before he became involved with the bombing cases. In November 1998 he had participated with Alexander Litvinenko in the now-infamous press conference where they accused the FSB of ordering the murder of Boris Berezovsky.)8

  The Russian people grown skeptical over the years of what their government has told them about these terrorist attacks, in particular about the role of the security services. In August 2015, Ekho Moskvy conducted a poll asking respondents their views of the bombings, along with the October 2002 hostage-taking at a Moscow theater and the September 2004 siege at a school in Beslan. Only 35 percent said that they believed these terrorist incidents were a complete surprise to the Russian security services. Thirty-three percent thought the security services knew of the attacks beforehand but were not able to prevent them; another 11 percent said that the security services knew about preparations for these acts of terrorism and deliberately did nothing; and 4 percent thought that the security services actually enabled the attacks. In a second poll, Russians were asked whether they had a clear idea as to who perpetrated the September 1999 bombings. Over two thirds of those polled said no.9 This was after fifteen years of investigations, trials, and official pronouncements! The poll results become even more significant when considering that some respondents would have been hesitant to express their opinions openly on such a highly sensitive topic.

  Of course, it may well be that the views of Russians on the 1999 bombings are irrelevant, given that they have been powerless to do anything about what happened. The efforts of an independent commission to investigate the bombings, created in 2002 under Sergei Kovalev, were continually frustrated by the government’s refusal to cooperate. The commission, which Trepashkin assisted before he was arrested, was not allowed to interview witnesses under oath and was denied access to key documents and testimony. After one of its members, Sergei Iushenkov, was shot to death and another, Iurii Shchekochikhin, died of an apparent poisoning, its work ground to a halt.

  The Kremlin Pursues Its Story Line

  The bombings are best understood in the context of the political intrigues that were occurring in the Kremlin at the time. Yeltsin, suffering from alcoholism and ill health, was faltering badly as the Russian president, and it was clear that he could not possibly run for another term in early 2000. Thus, as noted earlier, the group that surrounded him, known as “the family,” had to come up with a successor w
ho the Russian people would support, but who would also protect their own interests—i.e., guarantee that none of them, including Yeltsin, would be prosecuted for corruption. The family—which included Yeltsin’s daughter Tatiana Dyachenko, Valentin Yumashev (a journalist and adviser to Yeltsin, who later married Tatiana), Aleksandr Voloshin (head of the presidential administration), and oligarchs Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky—settled on Putin, who Yeltsin appointed as prime minister on August 9, 1999. But Putin was virtually unknown to the Russian public: something was needed to jump-start his candidacy as Yeltsin’s successor.

  Russian military forces were at this time carrying out anti-terrorist operations in Dagestan, following an incursion there by Chechen militant Islamist leaders Shamil Basaev, Movladi Udugov, and Khattab (an ethnic Saudi), an attack that was apparently encouraged by Berezovsky, Putin, and others because it was used as an excuse for Russian military intervention. According to a close associate of the late Berezovsky, Alex Goldfarb, Berezovsky had been negotiating a deal with the rebels in exchange for their incursion into Dagestan:

  In the spring of 1999 on the threshold of the autumn Duma elections, there was achieved a secret agreement [dogovorennost’] between Basaev and Udugov, on the one hand, and the Kremlin top leadership, on the other, for a short victorious (for Russia) war in the Caucasus. To achieve this end, Udugov even flew to Moscow. It was proposed that, in response to the provocations of the Wahhabis [radical Islamists] in Dagestan, Russia would begin limited military actions which would be crowned by the return of the Upper Terek District of Chechnya [to Russia]. As a result, the [moderate] Maskhadov regime in Grozny would fall, and his place would be taken by Basaev and Udugov.10