Putin's Wars

by Marcel H. Van Herpen

  Another clue hinting at the involvement of the FSB was an open letter, published on March 14, 2005, in the Novaya Gazeta. The open letter was written by Achemez Gochiyaev, a native of Karachaevo-Cherkessia in the North Caucasus, who was sought by the police in connection with the apartment bombings.[25] Gochiyaev told how, before the bombings, he had been contacted by a certain Ramazan Dyshekov, a former classmate, with a business proposal to sell mineral water. In order to stock the water, the other had told him, it was necessary to rent basements in apartment buildings in Moscow and Ryazan. After the second explosion in Moscow Gochiyaev sensed he had been trapped, suspecting that Dyshekov was an FSB agent. He called the police and gave the addresses of other buildings where basements were rented. That is how other explosions in Moscow were able to be prevented. In his open letter Gochiyaev accused the FSB of having organized the Moscow bombings and Dyshekov of being an FSB agent. He asked for an independent, international investigation.

  The Duma Investigation Commission

  In such a serious situation, in which there are allegations that a government has used state terror against its own citizens, one would expect a government to do anything to clear its name and remove any doubt. “The idea that the secret services might have had something to do with the apartment bombings evoked indignation in Putin,” the Moscow Times wrote. “To even speculate about this is immoral and in essence none other than an element of the information war against Russia,” he was quoted as saying.[26] By qualifying investigation as speculation and speculating as immoral, Putin obviously wanted to block any serious investigation into the facts. The problem, however, was that the facts that had emerged revealed so many unsolved problems and contradictions that they only strengthened the rumors of involvement of the government and the secret services. A government that has nothing to hide would be anxious that a thorough and impartial investigation would take place, in which the investigators would be given full, complete, and unrestricted access to all documents and to any further information that they deemed relevant. However, it was not the government, but the Duma that established an investigation commission in 2002. On July 25, 2002, the members of the Duma Commission organized a teleconference from Moscow with Alexander Litvinenko, Yury Felshtinsky, and Tatyana Morozova, who were in London. The first two were the authors of the book FSB vzryvaet Rossiyu (translated in English with the title Blowing Up Russia), in which they accused the FSB of being behind the apartment bombings.[27] The president of the Duma Commission, Sergey Kovalyov (the former president of Yeltsin’s Presidential Human Rights Commission), complained that the government did not give the information requested and was hiding itself behind “state secrets.”[28]

  Secrecy and lack of cooperation on the part of the authorities was not all. It soon became clear that it was extremely dangerous to air critical opinions on the events. One example was Duma member Sergey Yushenkov of the party Liberalnaya Rossiya (Liberal Russia). In March 2002, after the news emerged that Duma speaker Seleznev had been informed of the Volgodonsk explosion before it took place, Yushenkov declared “that the episode with the note seems still further proof of the involvement of the FSB in the explosions that took place in Moscow and Volgodonsk in the autumn of 1999.”[29] Yushenkov was gunned down and killed at the entrance of his Moscow apartment block on Thursday evening, April 17, 2003.[30] A colleague of the victim, Liberal Russia member Yuly Rybakov, who would later investigate the bombings, speculated in the Moscow Times “that Yushenkov could have been killed for his attempts to show that the security services were guilty of a series of apartment block bombings in 1999.”[31] A similar assessment was made by Arkadi Vaksberg, who himself was a member of the commission. “In fact,” wrote Vaksberg, “Yushenkov has clearly paid for his uncompromising position on the Chechen war, he knew without doubt the persons who were really responsible for the apartment explosions in Moscow.”[32] A late and intriguing testimony on Yushenkov’s death was made in 2010 by Marina Salye, a member of the St. Petersburg Duma, who, in the early 1990s pushed for Putin’s resignation as the city’s deputy mayor after implicating him in a multimillion-dollar kickback scheme. She said “that she decided she needed to lie low after receiving a fright while visiting a colleague, State Duma Deputy Sergei Yushenkov, with whom she was hoping to forge a political alliance in the early part of 2000. ‘We were going to cooperate politically. I always had good relations with Sergei Nikolayevich. . . . When I came to his office, I saw a person there who I didn’t want to see anytime, anyplace, under any circumstances. I’m not going to reveal his name. But I then understood it was time to go. And Sergei Nikolayevich was soon killed.’”[33]

  The apartment of the journalist Yelena Tregubova was bombed on February 2, 2004, after the publication of her book Tales of a Kremlin Digger. She escaped a certain death only because, having already left her apartment, she returned for a few minutes. It was at that precise moment that the bomb exploded outside her front door.[34] The former KGB colonel, Alexander Litvinenko, who, together with Yuri Felshtinsky, wrote the critical book on the apartment bombings with the title Blowing Up Russia, was poisoned in London in November 2006 with the radioactive substance polonium 210, a substance which one must assume can only be procured from a government agency. Litvinenko’s suspected murderer, Andrey Lugovoy, a former KGB bodyguard, fled to Russia. He was offered a seat in the Duma by Zhirinovsky’s Liberal-Democratic Party, thereby getting parliamentary immunity that prevented him from being extradited to Britain. The murder of Litvinenko prompted the journalist Yelena Tregubova to leave Russia and ask for political asylum in Britain. Another victim was probably Yury Shchekochikhin, a Duma deputy for the liberal Yabloko party, member of the anti-corruption commission of the Duma, and deputy editor-in-chief of the opposition paper Novaya Gazeta. It was Shchekochikhin who initiated the 2002 Duma investigation into the apartment bombings. He died on July 3, 2003, after two weeks of agony. There were grave suspicions that he was poisoned, but this suspicion could not be verified because the results of his autopsy were classified a “medical secret.”[35] Even his relatives never received an autopsy report and “when they tried to initiate criminal proceedings, their request was denied.”[36]

  Yeltsin on the Apartment Bombings

  In his memoirs Boris Yeltsin referred to the rumors that the secret services may have been involved in the apartment bombings.

  In this continuing debate about Chechnya, I can accept any position and any arguments except outright lies. And today, unfortunately, both in our own country and in the world, there are people who unfairly juggle the truth. They say that it’s not the Chechen terrorists who are committing aggression against Russia, but the Russian army that is committing aggression against “free Chechnya.” It’s not terrorists who blew up the buildings in Moscow but the Russian security services, in order to justify their own aggression. . . . It is a professional and moral crime to spread such blasphemous theories about how the second Chechen war began, especially in view of material evidence collected in an investigation of the Moscow apartment-house explosions: Mechanical devices and explosives similar to those used in the Moscow bombings were found in rebel bases in Chechnya. The names of criminals, who went through training at terrorist bases in Chechnya, have been established; their immediate associates have been detained. I am convinced that this case will soon come to trial. Nevertheless, the falsehoods continue. Some find it very profitable to maintain lies.[37]

  Yeltsin wrote these words in 2000. However, the investigations of the Duma Commission, established two years later, were prematurely halted because of lack of cooperation on the part of the government, and thirteen years later still no Chechen terrorist has been tried for the apartment bombings. The whole affair has been declared a state secret by the authorities, and the many—too many—strange events and unexplained circumstances that point to an alleged involvement of the secret services, far from having been investigated exhaustively, have been subject to a cover-up. According to a report by Amnesty Intern
ational, “the responsibility for these attacks [in Moscow and Volgodonsk] should rather be sought on the part of the FSB. Until today the question of Russian state terrorism remains still open. The Russian secret services, at that time, seem to have set in motion a sinister scenario of a power change in the Kremlin against the background of explosions.”[38] Arriving at a similar conclusion, Arkadi Vaksberg, member of the Duma investigation commission, wrote: “Murders and attempted murders that, judging by the traces they left behind, had been ordered by the Kremlin and the Lubyanka [FSB], happened, one after the other, [they were] sometimes of a surprising scale and cruelty: I’m thinking especially of the apartment explosions at the eve of the election of our beloved president.”[39] David Satter expressed himself even more clearly. He wrote: “Both the logic of the political situation and the weight of the evidence lead overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the Russian leadership itself was responsible for the bombings of the apartment buildings. This was an attack in which many of the victims were children whose bodies were found in pieces, if at all. There can be little doubt that persons capable of such a crime, regardless of how they present themselves, would not give up power willingly but would react to a threat to their position by imposing dictatorial control.”[40]

  Notes

  1. Sergei Kovalev, “Putin’s War,” New York Review of Books (February 10, 2000). (Note that Kovalyov’s name can also be spelled Kovalev.)

  2. Skuratov would soon be dismissed. On March 17, 1999, a video was broadcast on state television showing him naked on a bed with two prostitutes. This was a classic case of Russian kompromat (compromising information). During a press conference a few weeks later FSB director Putin and Interior Minister Stepashin confirmed that the man on the video was Skuratov and that the prostitutes had been paid for by individuals who were being investigated for criminal offences.

  3. John B. Dunlop, “‘Storm in Moscow’: A Plan of the Yeltsin ‘Family’ to Destabilize Russia,” The Hoover Institution (October 8, 2004), 20.

  4. Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, 284.

  5. How serious the threat of a coup d’état was in May 1999 became clear from the publication in the Novaya Gazeta of July 5, 1999, of the leaked text of the draft presidential decree, in which emergency rule was to be instituted from May 13 “in connection with the aggravation of the political and criminal situation.” (Cf. Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow,” 23.)

  6. It was Sergey Stepashin, critical of the war in Chechnya, who, in an article in the Nezavisimaya Gazeta of January 14, 2000, revealed that this meeting was held.

  7. Cf. Emma Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya: Russia and the Tragedy of Civilians in War (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 30.

  8. In a second article in Versiya in August 2000, the exact date of this meeting was given: July 4, 1999. (Quoted in Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow,” 40.)

  9. Martin Malek, “Russia’s Asymmetric Wars in Chechnya since 1994,” Connections 8, no. 4 (Fall 2009), 88.

  10. This version of a simulated Chechen attack on Dagestan finds support in a report by Florian Hassel, the Moscow correspondent for the Frankfurter Rundschau, who, in October 1999, met five Dagestani policemen who had briefly fought Basayev’s troops: “Basaev’s [Basayev’s] attack on Dagestan was apparently organized in Moscow,” said one policeman, Elgar, who watched the Chechens retreat from the village of Botlikh on September 11. “Basaev and his people went back comfortably in broad daylight with about 100 cars and trucks and many on foot. They used the main road to Chechnya, and were not fired at by our combat helicopters. We received express orders not to attack.” (Quoted in Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow,” 47.)

  11. Cf. Novaya Gazeta (February 14–20, 2000) and David Satter, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 29–30.

  12. Sergey Topol and Nadezhda Kurbacheva, “Terakt predotvratil voditel avtobusa” (Bus Driver Prevented Terrorist Act), Kommersant (September 24, 1999). In March 2000, the Moscow Times wrote about a paratrooper, Alexei P. “While guarding a storehouse last fall, Alexei and his friend discovered hexagen [i.e., hexogen], the explosive that the Ryazan authorities say was found in the apartment building. The hexagen was in large sacks marked ‘sugar,’ and the soldiers said they broke one open hoping to be able to sweeten their tea. When their tea tasted strange, they informed their supervisors, who had the white powder tested. In the end, FSB officials sent from Moscow scolded the soldiers for ‘exposing state secrets,’ and advised them to forget what they had seen.” (Sarah Karush, “Hackers Attack Novaya Gazeta,” Moscow Times (March 16, 2000).)

  13. Cf. Patrick Cockburn, “Russia ‘Planned Chechen War before Bombings,’” The Independent (January 29, 2000).

  14. Giulietto Chiesa, “Terroristy tozhe raznye,” Literaturnaya Gazeta (June 16, 1999).

  15. Giulietto Chiesa, “Cecenia, l’invenzione di una Guerra,” La rivista del Manifesto no. 6 (May 2000).

  16. Chiesa, “Cecenia, l’invenzione di una Guerra.”

  17. Aleksandr Zhilin, “Burya v Moskve,” Moskovskaya Pravda (July 22, 1999). (Quoted in Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow,” 11.)

  18. Zhilin, “Burya v Moskve.”

  19. Zhilin, Aleksandr, and Grigory Vanin. “Burya v Moskve: Sushchestvuet li sekretnyy plan destabilizatsii obstanovki v stolitse?” (Storm in Moscow: Does There Exist a Secret Plan to Destabilize the Situation in the Capital?), Novaya Gazeta (November 18, 1999). (Quoted in Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow,” 12.)

  20. Yelena Tregubova, Baiki kremlevskogo diggera (Tales of a Kremlin Digger), (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2003), 98–99.

  21. Sophie Shihab, “Qui a commis les attentats de 1999?” Le Monde (November 17, 2002).

  22. “Gennady Seleznev predupredili o vzryve v Volgodonske za tri dnya do terakta” (Gennady Seleznev Was Warned about the Explosion in Volgodonsk Three Days before the Terrorist Act), NEWSru.com (March 21, 2002).

  23. “Gennady Seleznev predupredili o vzryve v Volgodonske za tri dnya do terakta.”

  24. Helen Womack, “Russian Agents ‘Blew up Moscow Flats,’” The Independent (January 6, 2000).

  25. “Ya khochu rasskazat o vzryvakh zhilykh domov” (I Want to Talk about the Apartment Bombings), Novaya Gazeta (March 14, 2005).

  26. Quoted in Sarah Karush, “Hackers Attack Novaya Gazeta,” The Moscow Times (March 16, 2000).

  27. Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky, Blowing Up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror (London: Gibson Square, 2007). A transcript of the teleconference of July 25, 2002, is published in this book (254–284). The original Russian edition of the book was printed in Latvia and brought into Russia to be distributed by the Prima Information Agency of ex-dissident Alexander Podrabinek. On December 29, 2003, the 4,376 copies were confiscated by the Ministry of the Interior and the FSB. The copies were ultimately destroyed in 2009. The reason given for the confiscation was “dissemination of state secrets.”

  28. Cf. “Svedeniya Litvinenko o vrzyvakh zhilykh domov v Moskve” (Testimony of Litvinenko on the explosions of apartment buildings in Moscow), interview with Sergey Kovalyov by Tatyana Pelipeiko, Ekho Moskvy (July 25, 2002).

  29. “Gennady Seleznev predupredili o vrzyve v Volgodonske za tri dnya do terakta.”

  30. “Russian MP’s Death Sparks Storm,” BBC News (April 18, 2003).

  31. “Russian MP’s Death Sparks Storm.”

  32. Arkadi Vaksberg, Le laboratoire des poisons: De Lénine à Poutine (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 263.

  33. Anastasia Kirilenko, “Putin’s Old Nemesis Speaks Out After Decade of Silence,” RFE/RL (March 5, 2010).

  34. Cf. Grigory Pasko, “Russia’s Disappearing Journalists,” Robert Amsterdam Perspectives on Global Politics and Business (December 14, 2006). After the bomb explosion in the entrance of Tregubova’s apartment, she was questioned at the Criminal Investigation Office. The officer, Vadim Romanov, “wondered whether Tregubova happened to be acquainted with former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko. She replied
that she did not know him, and asked why this would be of interest to the investigator. ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’ Romanov answered her. ‘After all, in your book [Tales of a Kremlin Digger], you write the same thing Litvinenko is saying—that Putin is involved in the bombings of the apartment buildings in Moscow.’” Tregubova has described the events around the bomb attack in the first chapter, titled Kak vzryvali menya (How they blew me up) of her 2004 book Proshchanie kremlevskogo diggera (Farewell of a Kremlin Digger), (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2004), 10–65.