Trying to put pressure on the investigation and declaring a criminal case classified were illegal acts. According to article 7 of the law of the Russian Federation, On state secrecy, adopted on July 21, 1993, information& concerning emergencies and catastrophes which threaten the safety and health of members of the public and their consequences;& concerning instances of the violation of human and civil rights and freedoms;& concerning instances of the violation of legality by the agencies of state power and their officials& shall not be declared a matter of state secrecy and classified as secret. The same law goes on to state: officials who have made a decision to classify as secret the information listed, or to include it for this purpose in media which contain information that constitutes a matter of state secrecy, shall be subject to criminal, administrative, or disciplinary sanction, in accordance with the material and moral harm inflicted upon society, the state, and the public. Members of the public shall be entitled to appeal such decisions to a court of law.
Unfortunately, it looks as though those responsible for classifying a criminal case will not be held to account under the progressive and democratic law of 1993. As one of the residents of the ill-fated (or fortunate) building in Ryazan put it, they have pulled the wool down hard over our eyes.
Certainly, in March 2000 (just before the presidential election), the voters were shown one of the three terrorists (a member of the FSB special center ), who said that all three members of the group had left Moscow for Ryazan on the evening of September 22, that they had found a basement which happened by chance not to be locked; they had bought sacks of sugar at the market and a cartridge at the Kolchuga gun shop, from which they had constructed mock-ups of an explosive device on the spot, and the whole business was concentrated together to implement the measure concerned& It was not sabotage, but an exercise. We didn t even really try to hide.
On March 22 (with four days left to the election), The Association of Veterans of the Alpha Group came to the defense of the story about FSB exercises in Ryazan, in the person of lieutenant-general of the reserve and former commander of the Vympel
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division of the FSB of Russia, Dmitry Gerasimov, and retired Major-General Gennady Zaitsev, the former commander of the Alpha group and a Hero of the Soviet Union.
Gerasimov declared that live detonating devices were not used in the exercises in Ryazan, and what was used instead was a cartridge containing round shot, which was meant to produce a shock effect. Since the impression produced by the detonating device really was shocking, from that point of view the exercise had been a success.
In Zaitsev s opinion, the story that live detonating devices had been involved in the exercise came about because the instruments used by the UFSB for the Ryazan Region were faulty. He announced that members of Vympel had also been involved in the exercise in Ryazan, and that a special group had left for Ryazan in a private car on the eve of the events concerned, and had actually deliberately drawn attention to itself. A cartridge containing round shot was bought in the Kolchuga shop; The ill-fated sugar, which some later called hexogene, was bought by the special group at the local bazaar.
And, therefore, it could not possibly have been explosive. The experts simply ignored basic rules and used dirty instruments on which there were traces of explosives from previous analyses. The experts concerned have already been punished for their negligence. Criminal proceedings have been initiated in connection with this instance.
The naiveté of the interview given by the member of the special center and the simplemindedness of the statements made by Gerasimov and Zaitsev are genuinely astounding.
First and foremost, it could well be true that three Vympel officers did set out for Ryazan in a private car on the evening of September 22, that they did buy three sacks of sugar and a cartridge from the Kolchuga shop. But exactly how did they try to attract attention to themselves? After all, it was sugar they were sold at the market, not hexogene. What was there to attract attention? A single shotgun cartridge bought in a shop?
Patrushev evidently also believed that in a country where sensational murders take place every day and houses with hundreds of inhabitants are blown up, suspicion should be aroused by people buying sugar at the market and a shotgun cartridge in a shop.
Everything that the supposed terrorists planted was bought in Ryazan, the sacks of sugar and the cartridges, which they bought without anyone asking them whether they had any right to do so. A minor point, of course, but now we have a mystery: just how many cartridges did the FSB operatives buy, one or several? (The purchases could have been an operation to cover for the real terrorists, who planted quite different sacks containing explosives in the basement of the building in Ryazan, sacks that had nothing to do with the Vympel group. In that case, the Vympel operatives themselves might not have known the purpose of the task they had been assigned of buying one cartridge and three bags of sugar.) Finally, Zaitsev deliberately misled his readers by claiming that criminal proceedings had been initiated against Senior Lieutenant Yury Tkachenko, the explosives technician at the engineering and technical section, for conducting the analysis incorrectly, when they had actually been initiated against the terrorists who had turned out to be FSB operatives. On September 30, Tkachenko and another Ryazan police explosives specialist, Pyotr Zhitnikov, had, in fact, been awarded a bonus for their courage in disarming the
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explosive device. Incidentally, Nadezhda Yukhanova, the telephone operator who intercepted the terrorists telephone conversation with Moscow, was also paid a bonus for her assistance in capturing them.
The only thing that can be said in Zaitsev s defense is that a technical expert does bear criminal responsibility for the quality and objectivity of the results of his analysis, and if Tkachenko had carried out a flawed analysis and issued an incorrect result, then criminal proceedings would, indeed, have been taken against him. But as we know, this was not done, precisely because the result provided by the analysis was accurate: the sacks contained an explosive substance.
The testimony of the member of the special center and Zaitsev also suffers from serious inconsistencies of time-scale. The terrorists were spotted near the building in Ryazan only shortly after 9 p.m. On a weekday, they could not possibly have covered the 180 kilometers from Moscow to Ryazan in less than three hours, and then they still had to select a building in an unfamiliar town, buy the sacks of sugar, buy the cartridge at the Kolchuga shop, and put together the mock-up. On a weekday, the market in Ryazan closes at 6 p.m. at the latest. The Kolchuga shop closes at 7 p.m. So just when and how was the sugar bought? When was the cartridge bought? When did the terrorists leave Moscow? How long did the journey take? When did they arrive in Ryazan?
It is obvious that the entire story about the evening trip from Moscow by Vympel operatives is an invention from start to finish. Zaitsev himself provided legally valid proof of this. On September 28, 1999, a press conference was held by members of the departments of law enforcement and the armed forces in the office of the Kolomna security firm Oskord, at which the representative of the Alpha Group veterans association, G.N. Zaitsev explained his position with regard to the incident in Ryazan: Training exercises of this kind make me really angry. It s not right to practice on real people! On October 7, a report on the press conference was published by the local Kolomna newspaper Yat. The only conclusion which can be drawn from Zaitsev s statement is that he had taken no part in the Ryazan escapade. But with only four days to go to the presidential election, when all forces were mobilized for Putin s victory, and the end justified any means, Zaitsev was forced to appear at a press conference and acknowledge his own blame and the involvement of Vympel operatives in the Ryazan exercise. Naturally, those who involved Zaitsev in this propaganda show were not aware of his press conference in Kolomna.
Zaitsev s false testimony of March 22, 2000, served to emphasize an extremely important point: the employees of the secret services will lie if it is required by the interests of the agencies of state security, if they have been ordered to lie.
Half of the criminals in Russia make themselves out to be lunatics or total idiots. It s better that way; you get a shorter sentence or even simply get off ( What can you expect from a fool? as the Russian saying has it). Patrushev calculated correctly that for terrorism against the citizens of one s own country, you could get life, but in Russia, you wouldn t even get sacked for being an idiot. (In any case, just who could have sacked
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Patrushev? No one but Putin!) Not a single employee of the FSB was sacked as a result of the Ryazan escapade. Indeed, according to Shchekochikhin, Patrushev was made a Hero of Russia, and he has recently been promoted to four-star general!
Patrushev s psychological calculations proved correct. It was more convenient for the political elite of Russia to regard Patrushev as an idiot than as a villain. Commenting on Patrushev s statement about exercises in a live broadcast on the radio station Ekho Moskvy, chairman of the State Duma deputies grouping The Russian Regions, Oleg Morozov, said: It seems monstrous to me. I understand that the secret services have the right to check up on what s being done, but not so much by us as by themselves. In addition, he said it was difficult to imagine yourself in these people s places (in Ryazan) and, therefore, it wasn t worth it, there was no way such a price should have been paid for a check on the activities of the FSB and the vigilance of the public.
Morozov declared that it might be possible to forgive the actions of the FSB, if the FSB promised there would be no more terrorist attacks. That was, in fact, the main point which he made: Russians had to be saved from the FSB terror. The subtle diplomat Morozov offered the terrorist Patrushev a deal: we don t punish you, and we close our eyes to all the explosions that have taken place in Russia, and you halt all operations in Russia for blowing up people s homes. Patrushev heard what Morozov was saying, and the explosions ceased. Patrushev was branded an idiot and allowed to remain at his desk.
Perhaps the question of just who turned out to be the idiot in this situation should be regarded as undecided.
There were some people who were of the opinion that Patrushev was not an idiot but insane. On September 25, 1999, the newspaper Novye Izvestiya carried an article by Sergei Agafonov which, in view of the circumstances, failed even to offend Patrushev: I wonder just how accurate an idea the head of the FSB actually has of what is going on?
Does the head of the secret services have an adequate perception of surrounding reality?
Does he not perhaps confuse colors, does he recognize his relatives? My soul is tormented by these alarming questions, since there seems to be no possible rational explanation for the FSB s all-Russian special training exercise using real people.
Agafonov assumed that General Patrushev is seriously unwell and he should be released from the excessive burdens of duty and given urgent treatment.
Of course, the FSB itself could not be unanimous in its attitude to Patrushev s operation.
After the fiasco in Ryazan, even his own subordinates were prepared to criticize the head of the FSB (and Patrushev was prepared to tolerate this criticism abjectly). For instance, the press secretary of the UFSB for Moscow and the Moscow Region, Sergei Bogdanov, called the exercise in Ryazan crude and poorly planned work (if they were caught, their work must have been crude). The head of the UFSB for the Yaroslavl Region, Major-General A.A. Kotelnikov, replied as follows to a question about the exercise : I have my own point of view concerning the Ryazan exercises, but I would not wish to comment on the actions of my colleagues (as if there were any way that he could!).
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Note that not a single acting or retired senior member of the FSB made any attempt at a serious analysis of the actions of his colleagues. The professionals of the armed services departments left that honorable task to the journalists, who did the best they could in the face of the attacks made on them by the FSB. They began, naturally enough, with the sugar.
The three sacks of sugar bothered everybody. Supposedly, the terrorists from the FSB (but probably it was a quite different group of FSB operatives) bought the sugar at the local market. They said that it was produced by the Kolpyansk Sugar Plant in the Orlov Region. But if it was just plain ordinary sugar from the Orlov Region, why was it sent off to Moscow for analysis? More importantly, why did the laboratory accept it for analysis?
Not just one laboratory, but two in different state departments (the MVD and the FSB).
And why was an additional analysis carried out later? Surely it should have been possible to recognize sugar the first time around? Further, why did it all take several months? It only made sense for Patrushev to have the sugar brought to Moscow for analysis, if he wanted to take the material evidence away from his colleagues in Ryazan, and only if the sacks did contain explosives. Why would Patrushev insist on sacks of sugar being sent to Moscow? His own men would have made him a laughing stock.
In the meantime, the FSB press office issued a statement saying that in order for the contents of the sacks from Ryazan to be checked, they were taken to an artillery range, where attempts were made to explode them. The detonation failed because it was ordinary sugar, the FSB reported triumphantly. One wonders what sort of idiot would try to explode three sacks of ordinary sugar at an artillery range, the newspaper Versiya commented ironically. Why, indeed, did the FSB send the sacks to the artillery range if it knew that exercises were being conducted in Ryazan, and the sacks contained sugar bought at the local bazaar by Vympel operatives?
Then other sacks which did contain hexogene were discovered not far from Ryazan.
There were a lot of them, and there was just a hint of a connection with the GRU. In the military depot of the 137th Ryazan regiment of the VDV, located on the territory of a special base for training intelligence and sabotage units close to Ryazan, hexogene was stored, packed in fifty-kilogram sugar sacks like those discovered on Novosyolov Street.