But would Basayev’s attack on Dagestan be enough to trigger a wave of public anger
in Russia? For the average Russian citizen the events in Dagestan were far from home
and certainly had nothing to do with daily life in a country that was just recovering
from the deep financial crisis of 1998. It was clear that in order to succeed, “Operation
Successor” had to be accompanied by more powerful measures. Then, suddenly, in the
first weeks of September 1999, in the Russian Federation there began a series of terrorist
attacks. On September 4, a massive bomb exploded at a military housing complex at
Buikansk in Dagestan, killing eighty-three people. On September 8 and 13 there followed
explosions in working-class apartment buildings in south Moscow, leaving 228 people
dead. On September 16 a truck exploded in the southern town of Volgodonsk. These explosions
were real massacres. Hundreds of Russian citizens—men, women, children—were killed,
dismembered, and maimed, when bombs, placed by unknown criminals in the basement of
the apartment buildings, exploded. The explosions always took place early in the morning
to kill a maximum of victims. In just a few weeks over three hundred people were killed
and over one thousand wounded. The wave of terrorism led to widespread panic and fear
in the population. And for everybody it was clear who was the culprit: it was the
work of Chechen terrorists.
Then something strange happened. On the evening of September 22, 1999, a bus driver,
returning home in Ryazan, a city about 130 miles southeast from Moscow, saw two suspicious-looking
men carrying big sacks into the basement of the apartment building where he lived.
On the license plate of their car was pasted a piece of paper with the number 62,
the region code of Ryazan. The man immediately called the police, and when the policemen
arrived they discovered in the basement three 50 kg sacks of a white powder. The sacks
were connected to a detonator, batteries, and a clock with the timer set for 5:30
next morning. Immediately thirty thousand residents in the neighborhood were evacuated.
The sacks contained the highly explosive substance hexogen that had also been used
in the previous bombings. The local police, analyzing mobile telephone calls that
were made immediately after the event, arrested two men in connection with the terrorist
attempt. To the great surprise of the policemen, the two suspects showed ID cards
of the secret service FSB. It took the FSB some time to react. But on September 24
FSB chief Nikolay Patrushev announced that it had only been an exercise to test the
vigilance of the police and the population. The substance of the sacks, identified
by experts as hexogen, was said to have been just ordinary sugar. This version, however,
was contested by Yury Tkachenko, the explosives expert who had defused the bomb. In
an interview in February 2000 with Pavel Voloshin, a journalist of the paper
Novaya Gazeta
, Tkachenko insisted that the vapors coming from the sacks had been analyzed by a
sophisticated gas analyzer and that the device had clearly indicated the presence
of hexogen. Also the detonator was a professional one, one that was used by the army.
[11]
According to the paper
Kommersant
an explosion in the twelve-floor building in Ryazan would have killed about 240 people.
[12]
Other strange things happened in this period—even before the wave of explosions started.
There were, for instance, two Western journalists, who—quoting anonymous sources—announced
the events two months
before
they actually took place. On June 6, 1999, Jan Blomgren, the Moscow correspondent
for the Swedish paper
Svenska Dagbladet
, wrote that one option being considered by the Kremlin and its associates was “terror
bombings in Moscow which could be blamed on the Chechens.”
[13]
A similar statement was made by Giulio Chiesa, the Moscow correspondent for the
Italian paper
La Stampa
, who wrote an article in the
Literaturnaya Gazeta
of June 16, 1999, with the title
Terroristy tozhe raznye
(There are also different kinds of terrorists), indicating that terrorist methods
can be used, not only by rebel groups, but also by governments.
[14]
In a second article, written after the explosions, Chiesa emphasized the plausibility
of the latter option, pointing to the extreme professionalism of the terror attacks.
According to him, for the nine explosions that were planned the terrorists needed
more than two tons of hexogen and “in Russia hexogen is produced only in a factory
in Perm, in the Urals,” which would mean that “tons of explosives disappear from a
top-secret factory and circulate throughout Russia.”
[15]
Chiesa also stressed the fact that the explosives “were positioned in an extremely
professional way, under the bearing structures of the buildings, in such a way as
to make them collapse like a house of cards.”
[16]
Not only these two foreign correspondents, but also Russian journalists predicted
with unmatched foresight the coming events, hinting at involvement of the highest
political authorities. On July 22, 1999, Aleksandr Zhilin published an article in
the
Moskovskaya Pravda
with the title
Burya v Moskve
(Storm in Moscow)
.
[17]
In this article Zhilin wrote that “the city is awaiting great shocks. The performance
of loud terrorist acts (or attempts at terrorist acts) is being planned involving
a number of government establishments: the buildings of the FSB, MVD [Ministry of
the Interior], the Federation Council, the Moscow City Court, the Moscow Arbitration
Court, and a number of editorial boards of anti-Luzhkov publications.”
[18]
In a second article, published after the bombings, Zhilin wrote that he possessed
a leaked document on which his first article was based. He said he had showed the
document to the deputy premier of Moscow and to colleagues from the TV: “Everyone
said that this could not be true,” he wrote. “Today I understand that those journalists
who rejected even the theoretical possibility of the existence of a plan of destabilization
in Moscow, one that included terrorist acts, were reasoning like normal, decent people.
They could not understand in their minds how, for the sake of some political goals,
someone could commit such barbaric acts.”
[19]
Another Russian journalist, Yelena Tregubova, who had close contacts with the Kremlin
at the time, wrote that, as early as September 1998—this is
one year
before
the apartment explosions took place—the head of the presidential administration,
Valentin Yumashev, warned her “that we have received secret information from the special
services that the country finds itself on the eve of mass rebellions, in essence on
the verge of revolution.”
[20]
Tregubova considered this an indication that a “Storm” scenario had already been
envisaged. It is clear that the real truth could not emerge in this climate of rumors,
predictions, alleged leaked documents, and so-called exercises in which FSB agents
were caught while putting sacks of sugar in the basement of an apartment building.
There was only an “official” truth, and this truth was that Chechen terrorists were
responsible for these acts. Sophie Shihab, at that time the Moscow correspondent for
the French paper
Le Monde
, returned later to these dramatic and fateful weeks. She wrote about a young French
businessman with close contacts with Berezovsky, who had called the bureau of
Le Monde
in Moscow in September 1999. “On the telephone,” wrote Shihab, “he has lost his considerable
self-assurance and renounces his friend: ‘Boris is announcing more attacks. He has
gone mad. It is finished, I’m having nothing more to do with him. He must think that
by creating chaos he can put his strong man into power.’”
[21]
Strange? But there were other strange things that happened in this period, although
it would take two and a half years before these emerged in the press.
One of these strange things was the fact that Gennady Seleznev, the speaker of the
Duma, was informed of the explosion in Volgodonsk three days
before
the explosion actually took place.
[22]
It happened on September 13, 1999, during a session of the Duma and LDPR leader
Vladimir Zhirinovsky told how it happened: “Somebody from the secretariat brought
a note. Clearly they had called to warn the speaker about such a turn of events. Seleznev
read us the news on the explosion. Thereafter we waited for announcements about the
event in Volgodonsk on the TV news. But when this only happened three days later,
I was the only one who asked the speaker about it at the plenary session of September
17, 1999.”
[23]
Seleznev did not answer: he simply turned Zhirinovsky’s microphone off. When, in
October 1999—after the war had started—a Russian GRU officer, Aleksey Galtin, was
captured by the Chechens, the man declared on a video, received by
The Independent
: “I know who is responsible for the bombings in Moscow (and Dagestan). It is the
FSB, in cooperation with the GRU, that is responsible for the explosions in Volgodonsk
and Moscow.”
[24]
The Russian authorities immediately claimed that this confession had been made
under torture and contained no truth. But after his return to Russia, Galtin repeated
his version of the facts in an interview with the opposition paper
Novaya Gazeta
, and this time he could not be accused of making his statement under pressure.
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.
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]