No doubt this was precisely what Maximov wrote in the supporting documentation sent to the General Public Prosecutor s Office, when he explained the need to close the case against the FSB under the law on terrorism. We had no right to demand heroism from the investigator. Maximov had a family, just like the rest of us, and it would have been impractical and dangerous to oppose the leadership of the FSB. It should, however, be noted that Maximov s opinion contradicted the view of Tkachenko, who could in no way be suspected of being an interested party in this matter. Tkachenko s principled stance could not bring him anything but problems. And, in fact, after the episode in Ryazan he was sent to Chechnya.
The Ryazan section of explosives specialists headed by Tkachenko was unique not only in Ryazan but in all of the surrounding districts. It included thirteen professional
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engineers with extensive experience, who had attended several courses of advanced training in Moscow at the Vzryvispytanie Explosive testing research and technical center and who conducted special examinations every two years. Tkachenko claimed that the equipment in his department was world standard. The gas analyzer used to analyze the substance that was discovered-a device which cost about 20,000 dollars-was in perfect working order (as it would have to be, since an engineer s life depends on the condition of his equipment). According to the gas analyzer s technical specifications, it was both highly reliable and highly accurate, so that if the results of an analysis indicated the presence of hexogene fumes in the contents of the sacks, there should be no room for doubt. Consequently, the imitation detonator clearly included a live explosive substance, not an instructional substitute. According to Tkachenko, the detonator which was rendered safe by the explosives specialists was also professionally constructed and not a mock-up.
In theory, a mistake could have been made if the apparatus had not been properly serviced and if the gas analyzer had retained traces of material from a previous investigation. Tkachenko s reply to a question about this possibility was as follows: The gas analyzer is only serviced by a genuine specialist according to a strict schedule: there are work plans, and there are prophylactic checks, since the apparatus includes a permanent radiation source. There could also not have been any old traces, because the identification of hexogene vapor is a rare event in the working life of any laboratory.
Tkachenko and his colleagues were unable to recall any cases, when they had needed to use the apparatus to identify hexogene.
On March 20, the inhabitants of the house on Novosyolov Street assembled at the NTV studio for the recording of the program Independent Investigation. Representatives of the FSB also arrived at the television center. The public tele-investigation was broadcast on March 24, with the participation of Alexander Zdanovich, Stanislav Voronov (first deputy head of the FSB s investigative department), Yury Shchekochikhin, Oleg Kalugin, Savostyanov, Sergiev, (the head of the Ryazan UFSB), investigators and experts from the FSB, independent experts, legal experts, civil rights lawyers, and psychologists.
Performing unmasked and unarmed, the FSB personnel suffered a clear defeat at the hands of the public. The six months-long analysis of the sugar seemed like a joke. If you claim that there was sugar in the sacks, then the criminal case based on the charge of terrorism must be halted. But the criminal case has not yet been halted. That means it was not sugar, exclaimed the attorney Pavel Astakhov, unaware that on March 21, the case really would be closed. It was obvious that different sacks had been sent to Moscow for the second analysis, not the ones which were found in Ryazan. But no one could prove this obvious fact.
Raphael Gilmanov, the explosives expert of Transryvprom was present in the hall, and he confirmed that it is quite impossible to confuse hexogene with sugar. They are not even similar in appearance. He said that the FSB investigators claim that the first analysis had been polluted by traces from the briefcase of an explosives specialist was unconvincing. Equally unconvincing were the FSB representatives claims that the
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engineers called to the scene of the incident had mistaken a mock-up for a genuine explosive device. The FSB officers explained that General Sergeiev, who had reported the presence of the detonating device and was now present in the hall, is no great specialist in the area of explosive devices, and that on September 22, he had simply made a mistake. For some reason, General Sergeiev did not take offense at being accused of a lack of professionalism, although the public statement he had made about the detonating device on September 22 had been based on the conclusions of experts under his command, concerning whose professional qualifications there was no doubt.
It turned out that the audience in the hall included a lot of military men, who unhesitatingly declared that what had happened in Ryazan bore no resemblance to any kind of exercises, not even those which were made as close to life as possible. The preparations for military exercises involved certain compulsory procedures, in particular concerning the possibility of an emergency, the provision of first aid and medication, bandages, and warm clothing. Even the most important of exercises had to be coordinated with local leaders and the government departments concerned. In the Ryazan incident, there had been no preparations and no coordination. That was not the way exercises were conducted, declared one of the inhabitants of the house in Ryazan, a professional soldier.
In general, the FSB officers arguments were so inept that the response of one of the inhabitants of the house was a curt: Stop trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Here is a brief extract from the TV debate.
People: The FSB s investigative department initiated a criminal investigation. So did it instigate a criminal case against itself?
FSB: The criminal case was instigated on the basis of evidence discovered.
People: But if it was an exercise, what was the evidence?
FSB: You haven t been listening. The exercise was conducted in order to check the interaction between various law enforcement agencies. At the moment when the criminal case was initiated, neither the Ryazan police nor the federal agencies knew it was an exercise&
People: Then who was the case taken against?
FSB: I repeat the criminal case was instigated on the basis of evidence discovered.
People: What evidence? Evidence of an exercise in Ryazan?
FSB: It s not worth even trying to explain to someone who has no idea of criminal law procedure&
People: What happened to the safety of the citizens who spent the whole night in the street, what about the safety of their physical and psychological health? And a second
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thing, you are outraged when telephone terrorists phone up and threaten bombings, but how are you any different from them?
FSB: What does guaranteeing the safety of citizens mean? It s the final effect, when there won t be any more explosions&
People: I m an ex-soldier. The number of exercises I went through in twenty-eight years, you know, and what these fine respectable people, these generals are telling us about exercises, you know, it s enough to make you sick!
FSB: As a former soldier you probably carried out military exercises. We work in a special service and that service uses special personnel and equipment on the basis of the law on operational and investigative activity& (We interrupt the argument between the people and the FSB to emphasize once again that on the subject of exercises the law On operational and investigative activity in the Russian Federation makes no mention of exercises.) People: If there was someone recording what happened during the exercise, where are those people now?
FSB: If we could only increase our staff ten times over, then of course&
People: Stop trying to pull the wool over our eyes! The people who saw the hexogene would never confuse it with sugar&
FSB: They sprinkled the powder on the lid of a briefcase they ve been taking to all their training sessions since 1995. And they even took it to Chechnya. In short, the test papers reacted to the hexogene fumes&
People: I saw the sacks from only three meters away. In the first place, they were yellowish. In the second place, they were fine granules, like vermicelli.
FSB: Sugar from the Kursk Region. Sugar from the Voronezh Region is different. And the sugar we get from Cuba is altogether yellow!
The Ryazan journalist Alexander Badanov was present in the studio, and the next day his article appeared in a local Ryazan newspaper: In the television program the people from Ryazan tried to find out what really happened. However, the FSB spokesmen failed to give satisfactory answers to most of the questions& According to Zdanovich, the FSB is now pursuing a criminal investigation based on the September events in Ryazan. Such an absurdity is probably only possible in Russia: the FSB is pursuing a criminal investigation into an exercise conducted by itself! But a case can only be instigated on the assumption that an unlawful act has been committed. What then are we to make of all the previous statements from highly placed members of the secret services that no laws
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were broken in the course of the exercise? The residents of house number 14 attempted to submit a claim for recompense for moral damage against the FSB to the Ryazan public prosecutor s office. The residents were told that under the procedural rules, they could only present their claim against the particular individual who gave the order to carry out the exercise. Zdanovich and Sergeiev were asked the same question six times: Who gave the order to hold the exercise in Ryazan? Six times Zdanovich and Sergeiev avoided answering, saying it would prejudice the investigation& The lack of genuine information has given rise to the story that the secret services really did want to blow up a residential building in Ryazan to justify the offensive carried out by federal forces in Chechnya and to rouse the soldiers fighting spirit. I saw the contents of the sacks, and it wasn t anything like sugar, Alexei Kartofelnikov said in conclusion. I am sure that what was in the sacks was not sugar, but genuine hexogene. The other residents of the house agree with him. It would seem to be in the FSB s own interests to name the person who signed the order to hold the exercise which has undermined the people s trust in the Russian secret services and their prestige.
The practical outcome of the meeting in the studio was that the attorney Astakhov became involved in the old collective complaint submitted by the people from the house.
The victims requested the General Public Prosecutor s Office to explain the goals of the operation and also to determine the size and form of compensation for moral damages.
This time the reply came back with suspicious speed: The FSB personnel acted within their competence, said the General Public Prosecutor s Office. The reason for haste is clear enough. Zdanovich had a press conference planned for March 24, at which he intended to go for the mass media, and the presidential election was set for March 26.
Following the shameful defeat of Zdanovich and his colleagues in Nikolaev s studio, the leadership of the FSB decided not to take part in anymore open debates with the public and not to go to NTV any more. It was during these fateful days for the entire country that the FSB also decided to launch the planned annihilation of NTV. On the evening of March 26, the day of the election, in Yevgeny Kiselyov s program Summing Up, Boris Nemtsov stated publicly that NTV was in danger of being closed down because it had shown Nikolaiev s program The Ryazan sugar-secret services exercise or failed bombing?
I don t know what s going to happen to NTV. After one of the authors, Nikolaiev I think his name was, told his version of the bombings in Moscow and other cities. I think there is now a real threat hanging over NTV& I believe it is my duty to protect NTV if any attempts are made to close it down. And I cannot rule out the existence of such a possibility. At least such attempts have been in relation to a number of journalists, perhaps not coming from Putin, but from his entourage.
Speaking off the record, FSB generals admitted that they had taken the decision to force the leaders of the NTV television channel, Gusinsky, Igor Malashenko, and Kiselyov, out of Russia. Literally the day after Putin came to power, he set about destroying NTV and Gusinsky s media empire Most, and the only one of the three men named above who has been able to remain in Russia is Kiselyov.
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By March 24, Zdanovich desperately needed to have in his possession a decision of the General Public Prosecutor s Office of the Russian Federation confirming the legality of the FSB s exercise in Ryazan in September 1999. Zdanovich actually received such a document just before his press conference on March 23. The General Public Prosecutor s Office refused the application made by the citizens of Ryazan for the instigation of criminal proceedings against FSB personnel for holding an anti-terrorist exercise in September 1999, on the grounds that no crime had been committed. The conclusion of the Public Prosecutor s Office was that the actions taken by operatives of the state security agencies to check the efficiency of measures taken by the agencies of law and order had not breached the limits of competence of the agencies of the FSB of Russia, with regard to a complex of preventive and prophylactic measures designed to ensure the safety of the public, which had been implemented in the course of the Whirlwind Anti-Terror operation with reference to the sharp deterioration of the operational situation in the country as a result of a series of terrorist acts. In view of this and also taking into consideration the fact that the actions of the FSB operatives had not resulted in any consequences involving danger to the public and had not involved any violations of citizens rights or interests, the General Public Prosecutor s Office had decided to reject the application for the instigation of criminal proceedings.
In the evening of that very day, the head of the department for monitoring the FSB at the General Public Prosecutor s Office, Vladimir Titov, triumphantly reported this outcome in the five o clock news bulletin on the state television channel RTR. As retold by RTR and Titov, the familiar tale of what happened in Ryazan had become quite unrecognizable:
RTR: The residents were evacuated. The explosives specialist who arrived at the scene did not find any explosive substance. At first the policemen wanted to declare the whole incident a stupid joke.
Titov: But then the head of the analysis department, Tkachenko, arrived and checked the sacks with the apparatus he was carrying. The apparatus showed the presence of hexogene.
RTR: A kilogram of the contents was extracted from each sack and taken to the proving ground. But the substance did not detonate. The sacks contained sugar. Two days later the director of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, announced that an anti-terrorist exercise had been held in Ryazan. And the experts explained why the apparatus used by Tkachenko had indicated the presence of hexogene.
Titov: The head of the laboratory was constantly performing analyses and the apparatus reacted to the presence of micro-particles on his hands.
RTR: Today a line has been drawn under the Ryazan hexogene case. Copies of the ruling of the General Public Prosecutor s Office are being sent to the Ryazan UFSB and
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for the attention of deputies of the Yabloko Duma faction, who drafted a question on the progress of the investigation.
The initial conclusions of experts that the sacks discovered in the basement of the apartment building in Ryazan contained hexogene were overturned in the course of the investigation carried out by the General Public Prosecutor s Office. Repeat analysis proved that the sacks were filled with sugar. However, the press and television carried reports that hexogene had been used in the exercise and that, in conducting the exercise, the FSB had put the public at risk.
Titov: There is only one conclusion that can be drawn, the self-interest of some correspondents, I would even say dishonesty& all they want is to cook up some tall story, that s all& just to push their circulation up.
RTR: The residents of house number 14 to 16 on Novosyolov Street will now finally learn why they had to spend all night out in the street waiting for an explosion.
Titov: It was a test for the head of the local UFSB. They had to see how he would act in an emergency.
RTR: In conclusion the General Public Prosecutor s Office has ruled that the exercise as held did not involve any danger to the public and fell within the limits of competence of the secret services. The official investigation begun by the Ryazan investigators under the law on terrorism last autumn will be closed.
On September 24, now in possession of this remarkable indulgence in which the General Public Prosecutor s Office denied the people of Ryazan the right to proceed legally against the FSB, Zdanovich launched his attack on the journalists. In a highly nervous state, speaking atrocious Russian, he began issuing unconcealed threats: I would like to draw your attention to the fact that we have not failed and will not fail in the future-I wish to state this officially-to note a single provocation which individual journalists organize against the state service, the institution of the state& That means, to take a concrete example: there is a correspondent from the Novaya Gazeta who published these articles, I am not afraid to call him a provocateur, since we have the testimony in full of the soldier who later, so to speak, was used to rehash the story in the Obshchaya Gazeta, too, about the way everything happened, and how those words were, so to speak, dragged out of him, and what he was promised for all of it. It s all proved. Under the current criminal investigation concerning this& concerning your publications, perhaps not yours, the proceedings concern some others-it will all be finished in early April.
That means your correspondent will be interrogated in the course of the criminal investigation to see why he, so to speak, committed such actions. And under this there are already specific complaints from members of the airborne assault forces, and when it has all been procedurally consolidated, and the minutes are fitted into the criminal case, and it s evaluated in the appropriate manner by the prosecutor s office and members of our
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Contractual and Legal Department, I wouldn t be at all surprised if we take formal legal action, including through the courts, because no one is allowed to engage in provocation.
Having heard Zdanovich s threats one of the journalists present at the briefing, apparently not too seriously frightened, said: Well, to be honest I didn t want to ask you a question about Ryazan, the subject doesn t interest me very much, but you launched into the polemic yourself. Can you please explain to me, say I have a private house in the country, can you hold a practice alert there and plant a practice bomb under my house, do you have the legal right?
Zdanovich s answer demonstrated yet again that although the FSB and Russian society may live in the same state, they speak different languages: Right, I understand, right then, let me say once again that we acted strictly within the limits of the law on combating terrorism. All of our actions have been investigated by the public prosecutor, and not a single action which violated one or another law has been identified. That s the answer I can give you.
There were too many events crowded into the second half of March. It was evidently because of the election that the issue of the disgraced Novaya Gazeta carrying material on the financing of Putin s election campaign and the FSB never appeared. On March 17, unidentified hackers broke into the newspaper s computer and destroyed the electronic proofs for that issue. Shchekochikhin announced that the forced entry of their computer system was only the latest in a series of incidents designed to prevent the newspaper from functioning normally. In particular, the newspaper s offices had recently been broken into, and the computer containing information on advertisers had been stolen. Over the last two years, the tax police have carried out four checks in the Novaya Gazeta offices and the Kremlin has demanded that certain of its sponsors cease financing this uncooperative organ of the press.
The management of Novaya Gazeta attempted to find out why exactly it had found itself in such serious conflict with the FSB. Novaya Gazeta journalists actually asked some members of that department to analyze the situation for them. The reply received by the newspaper is nothing if not frank; This kind of activity by the state against a publication undoubtedly indicates that you have entered forbidden territory and stepped on someone s toes. It could be that you were undesirable witnesses to one of the less fortunate episodes in the internal squabbles between the secret services. If this did happen, none of the opposed groups within the system will confirm it. It is in all of their interests to conceal it. They are clearly apprehensive that new living witnesses to the preparation of the Ryazan events may turn up.
By this time, the provincial town of Ryazan had become a place of pilgrimage for foreign journalists. As Pavel Voloshin wittily remarked, Ryazan will soon have as many foreign journalists per head of population as Moscow. All the five-star rooms in the local hotels
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were now occupied by foreign correspondents, and all of them, together with their camera crews, were besieging the local police, the FSB, and even the MChS. So the UFSB and UVD in Ryazan received orders from Moscow to break off contacts with the press. Some officers who had already given interviews hastily took back what they had said. In the Ryazan departments of law enforcement, an internal investigation into leaks of information was begun. And Bludov answered all of the journalists questions with a terse No comment.
To a man, the residents of the house in Ryazan changed their minds about taking the FSB to court, although no one was convinced the FSB was innocent. Police and FSB officers visited house number 14/16 repeatedly and tried to persuade people not to sue the organizers of the exercise. Even General Sergeiev came, asked them not to complain, and apologized for his colleagues in Moscow. When on September 20, NTV broadcast a report on the imminent first anniversary of the woeful incident, one of the woman said: That date s coming up soon, and I just feel like leaving home. Because I m afraid, God forbid, that they ll mark the anniversary with another exercise like the first one.
Personally, I have my doubts it was an exercise. I have my doubts. They treated us like scum, said another woman living in the house. If only they d at least told us early in the morning it was an exercise, but it was only two days later& We don t believe it was an exercise. I don t believe it was an exercise, said Ludmila Kartofelnikov. How can they mock people like that? On the eighth floor of our house an elderly woman couldn t carry her paralyzed mother out, and she was evacuated on her own. The way she sobbed afterwards in the cinema! The hero of the events in Ryazan, Alexei Kartofelnikov, also had his doubts: On that day no one explained to us that it was an exercise. And we don t believe it was. That s the way it is here-if something blew up, it was a terrorist attack. If they disarmed it, it was an exercise.
The residents of the ill-fated Ryazan apartment house were not the only ones who raised doubts: the Russian press did as well. If the authorities convincingly prove, wrote Versiya, that it was specifically Chechen terrorists who bombed the buildings with people sleeping inside, then we will-if not approve-then at least understand the cruelty with which our troops came down on the cities and villages of Chechnya. But what if the bombings were not ordered by the Chechens, by Khattab, by Basaev, by Raduyev? If they did not order them, then who did? It is frightening to imagine& We already understand that we cannot simply declare that the bombings were organized by the Chechens.
Finally, many foreign specialists voiced their doubts as well. Here is what William Odom had to say in response to a question about the causes of the war in Chechnya: In my opinion, Russia has fabricated a pretext for this war itself. There exists quite convincing evidence that the police orchestrated some explosions in Moscow. They were caught trying to do the same in Ryazan-and tried to represent their actions as an exercise. I think that the Russian regime has fabricated a whole series of events planned in advance in order to shape Russian public opinion and steer the country in a direction that is unacceptable to most Russians.
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Moving beyond the bounds of the law, the FSB based its actions not on the Constitution of the Russian Federation, not even on the Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure, but on its own political preferences as expressed in formal orders and verbal instructions. The arbitrary lawlessness into which Russia has been plunged has come about above all because the secret services have worked in a planned and deliberate manner to undermine the legislative foundations of Russian statehood in order to create chaos and the conditions which would allow them to seize power. In this war, the secret services most terrible weapons were the free-lance special operations groups, which they organized and controlled right across the country.