Putin's Wars (34 page)
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]
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 International, “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]
Sergei Kovalev, “Putin’s War,”
New York Review of Books
(February 10, 2000). (Note that Kovalyov’s name can also be spelled Kovalev.)
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.
John B. Dunlop, “‘Storm in Moscow’: A Plan of the Yeltsin ‘Family’ to Destabilize
Russia,” The Hoover Institution (October 8, 2004), 20.
Yeltsin,
Midnight Diaries
, 284.
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.)
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.
Cf. Emma Gilligan,
Terror in Chechnya: Russia and the Tragedy of Civilians in War
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 30.
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.)
Martin Malek, “Russia’s Asymmetric Wars in Chechnya since 1994,”
Connections
8, no. 4 (Fall 2009), 88.
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.)
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.
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).)
Cf. Patrick Cockburn, “Russia ‘Planned Chechen War before Bombings,’”
The Independent
(January 29, 2000).
Giulietto Chiesa, “Terroristy tozhe raznye,”
Literaturnaya Gazeta
(June 16, 1999).
Giulietto Chiesa, “Cecenia, l’invenzione di una Guerra,”
La rivista del Manifesto
no. 6 (May 2000).
Chiesa, “Cecenia, l’invenzione di una Guerra.”
Aleksandr Zhilin, “Burya v Moskve,”
Moskovskaya Pravda
(July 22, 1999). (Quoted in Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow,” 11.)
Zhilin, “Burya v Moskve.”
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.)
Yelena Tregubova,
Baiki kremlevskogo diggera
(Tales of a Kremlin Digger), (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2003), 98–99.
Sophie Shihab, “Qui a commis les attentats de 1999?”
Le Monde
(November 17, 2002).
“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).
“Gennady Seleznev predupredili o vzryve v Volgodonske za tri dnya do terakta.”
Helen Womack, “Russian Agents ‘Blew up Moscow Flats,’”
The Independent
(January 6, 2000).
“Ya khochu rasskazat o vzryvakh zhilykh domov” (I Want to Talk about the Apartment
Bombings),
Novaya Gazeta
(March 14, 2005).
Quoted in Sarah Karush, “Hackers Attack Novaya Gazeta,”
The Moscow Times
(March 16, 2000).
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.”
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).
“Gennady Seleznev predupredili o vrzyve v Volgodonske za tri dnya do terakta.”
“Russian MP’s Death Sparks Storm,”
BBC News
(April 18, 2003).
“Russian MP’s Death Sparks Storm.”
Arkadi Vaksberg,
Le laboratoire des poisons: De Lénine à Poutine
(Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 263.
Anastasia Kirilenko, “Putin’s Old Nemesis Speaks Out After Decade of Silence,”
RFE/RL
(March 5, 2010).
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.
The
Novaya Gazeta
wrote: “Within two weeks he turned into a very old man, his skin came off and his
inner organs stopped functioning one by one. Doctors in the special government hospital
speculated that he had been poisoned. Forensic experts said the same in private conversations.
However, everyone signed the official reports confirming his death was natural.” (“Shchekochikhin’s
Case,”
Novaya Gazeta
(March 25, 2008).)
Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky,
The Age of Assassins: The Rise and Rise of Vladimir Putin
(London: Gibson Square, 2008), 242.
Yeltsin,
Midnight Diaries
, 343.
Natalie Nougayrède, “La démocratie dévoyée,” in
Droits humains en Russie: Résister pour l’état de droit
, Amnesty International Report (Paris: Editions Autrement Frontières, 2010), 15.
Vaksberg,
Le laboratoire des poisons de Lénine à Poutine
, 351.
Satter,
Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State
, 252.