Crisis and Consolidation: The Moscow Bombings in Putin’s Political Ascent
On Kashirskoye highway, Moscow, over twenty-five years after the bombings, none of the smouldering ruins of the drab nine-storey apartment that had once stood there remain. The rubble has been cleared, and smoke is long gone. Today a stone monument, topped with an Orthodox cross, has been put there in memory of the blast, the names of those who lost their lives written on its walls. Centred on it is a grid of well-tended flower beds, and the surrounding skyline is studded with new high-rise apartment blocks. The city appears to have moved on, but the forbidding stench of conspiracy still lingers. However, even a quarter of a century after the events of September 1999, few dare call them a conspiracy.
On September 4th of that year, at 22:00 local time, a car bomb detonated outside a nondescript military barrack on the outskirts of the border city of Buynansk, Dagestan. Almost all of those lodged in the five-story building, mostly Russian soldiers and their families, lost their lives as the concrete walls gave out and the floors pancaked in on each other. Sixty-four were killed, with some of them never recovered, their disembodied remains piled into one of four plastic bags labelled ‘unidentified’ by the rescuers on scene.
It was the first of four blasts, over the course of twelve days, which sowed rampant paranoia in the Russian mind and prompted a search operation of over 30,000 homes that President Boris Yeltsin personally elected to oversee. Two occurred in Moscow in the predawn hours, each killing over a hundred people while they slept, and one in Volgodonsk, in which only a boy and his dog were spared their lives.
Russian journalist Sergei Kanev, who reported on the rescue efforts on Guryanova street, Moscow, recalls how, several years after the event, he received an icon in the mail with an attached note which read, simply, ‘Thank you for your reporting, Sergei. I will never forget that gentleman calling, in his underwear, for his granddaughter’.
On the 13th of September, the Russian state Duma (parliament) speaker Gennady Seleznev announced of a fourth explosion in Volgodonsk. An attack did indeed occur in the city, only three days later. The notoriously pugnacious leader of the Liberal democratic party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, drew attention to this development in a fiercely confrontational speech on the 16th September, importuning Seleznev to explain his comments.
He later dismissed this as simply a ‘misunderstanding’, and the matter was never formally investigated.
Renowned ex-FSB (Russian secret service) agent, Alexander Litvinenko, after defecting to the UK, addressed Seleznev’s announcement in his book ‘Blowing up Russia’. ‘The usual mess up’ he said of it. ‘The second blast in Moscow was to be on the 13th and Volgodonsk on the 16th, but they got it to the speaker the other way around’. In other words, although it may not have been directly involved in the staging of the attacks, Litvinenko contended that some of those in power had at least been aware of them. His assassination by the Russian Federal Security Service only a few years later, in early 2007, by a radioactive polonium agent was widely publicised.
The unfolding events came amid continued tensions with radical Islamist factions in the de-facto independent Chechen republic of Ichkeria, led in particular by terrorists Ibn Al-Hattab and Achemez Gochiyaev, which were seeking to spread their influence within the Southern Caucasus region of Russia. Since the formal cessation of hostilities in 1996 after the first Chechen war, the Russia had been entangled in a in a struggle with armed groups, whose strategies often spilled over into terrorism. It was in this environment, with the country weakened and its population distressed, that a need arose for a proverbial ‘man of action’ to destroy those responsible.
This void was filled by an official who had been scheduled to fly to New Zealand for a meeting with Bill Clinton on the day that the third blast shook the country; a character that was then still relatively unknown after a string of expeditious promotions, most recently to the role of Prime Minister. It is widely acknowledged that Vladimir Putin, now president of the Russian federation, assumed the role of, as Scott Anderson described, Russia’s ‘saving angel’ and indeed it is difficult to imagine a world where events could have transpired in such a way that he would emerge at Russia’s helm had it not been for the bombings. Of the blasts being integral to his vault to power, as investigative journalist David Satter asserts, ‘there is no doubt’.
Putin in dealing with the situation was harsh, his speeches laconic and pithy. He declared, recognizant of the terror brought about by the blasts and appealing to the indignant nation’s sense of schadenfreude, that he would hunt down those responsible ‘anywhere’, famously declaring that if it came to it, ‘we will kill them in the toilet’ and describing Chechen terrorists, whom he was quick to attribute the attacks to, as ‘animals’, despite Basayev’s stout denial of involvement. The prime minister ordered a coordinated invasion of Chechnya and before the end of the month tens of thousands of Russian troops were engaged in a brutal campaign which was to grind Grozny, the Chechen capital, into a city of ruins. It would later be described by manifold witnesses as a ‘hell on earth’.
Several extremist Islamic militants in the North Caucasus had, as Satter insisted, both ‘the means and the motive’ to stage revenge attacks on Russian cities. The trail here points to Dagestan more so than to Chechnya. There is a clear circumstantial link between the bombing in the Dagestani town of Buynaksk and the taking back at the cost of immense bloodshed of two villages, which had previously been occupied by Islamic militants in the same region, by the Russian special forces only a few days prior. In an interview for the Czech paper Lidove Noviny a day after the third apartment block was levelled, Basayev indicated a belief that groups local to that area had orchestrated it, stating, ‘I denounce terrorism, including state terrorism committed by the Russian empire. The latest blast in Moscow is not our work, but that of the Daghestanis.’ He declared, further, that ‘Russia has been openly terrorising Dagestan’ ever since his August invasion of the region. Although they too issued a denial of involvement, it seemed that the terrorists responsible were entangled with radical organisations in the Caucasus. Those would later be mopped up by Putin’s operation, in a move that would gain him immense renown as a brutally efficient and competent politician. Yeltsin’s Russia was reeling, with the hope that many used to soothe themselves with during the 1990’s giving way to cynicism; Putin’s reputation for efficiency would carry him to the presidency in the following year.
To many, however, Vladimir Putin’s vault to power is beset from its genesis by original sin. Although ostensibly these attacks were the work of the separatist factions in the south, a far more sinister force could have had a silent hand in their staging. It was not the bombs that did go off, but rather the one that didn’t, which swings the compass of blame silently away from the Caucasus and towards the Kremlin.
Less than a week after the apartments in Volgodonsk were destroyed, at 8:30 PM, on the 22nd of September, Alexei Kartofelnikov, a resident of an apartment building in Ryazan called the police to report two unfamiliar men carrying white, unmarked sacks from a car into the basement. The men were clad in dark clothing. Whilst the license plate indicated that the car was registered in Moscow, a sheet of paper obstructed the view of the last two digits, and the number itself gave the impression that the car was local. By the time the police had arrived, the men were gone, and three sacks connected to a detonator had been left under the main structure of the eight-storey structure. The detonator was set to go off that night just after 5 AM. The substance in the sacks was tested by a bomb squad on scene, the results of which indicated the presence of RDX, an explosive which had been developed as a more powerful alternative to TNT.
The following night, a telephone service employee in Ryazan tapped into a call from a suspicious number to Moscow, which was later traced back to a telephone exchange unit working for the FSB (Russian Secret Service) offices. The latter could be heard as giving the directive to two men in Ryazan to ‘leave one at a time’ as ‘patrols are everywhere’. These men were arrested the same day, confessed to having laid the explosive device, and produced FSB identification cards. Their release was promptly secured on orders from above. Vladimir Putin praised the vigilance of the city’s residents and called for an intensified aerial bombing campaign over Grozny, in a terse and ruthless speech proclaiming that there would be ‘no sympathy for the bandits.’ Within hours, the official state narrative had been reversed in a haphazard announcement: what happened on September 23rd was an exercise, and the white sacks, in which explosive had previously been detected, were full of sugar. Ryazan’s regional FSB agency and police had not been notified of the operation, and 30,000 civilians spent the night on the streets after having been evacuated that night. Subsequent official tests offered proof that the substance was in fact sugar and concluded that the detonator had been a prop. According to Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky, whose suicide in 2011, many believe, had been staged, he had requested that several foreign experts inspect photographs from the basement in Ryazan, which had unanimously concluded the device was real. Yuri Tkachenko, a member of the bomb squad which was part of the preliminary response team called to the scene, later claimed in an interview that he was ‘absolutely sure’ that the device ‘was not a dummy’ and had been ‘prepared on a professional level’.
Private Alexei Pinyaev of the 137th Guards Airborne Regiment, who was stationed to guard a storehouse with weapons and ammunition near Ryazan, entered it in early October to find several white sacks labelled ‘sugar’, inside. He took a spoonful of the sugar to sweeten his tea and was swiftly hospitalised; the army denies that he had ever been a serving member.
The detection device he used to test for the presence of explosive was ruled to have been lacking the requisite paperwork, and hence its results were discounted. Soon after, the Russian parliament passed a motion that would classify all related documents, and an associated state court declared a Chechen terrorist group responsible. An independent public commission organised by the duma members Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Schekochikhin was rendered ineffective by a wholly uncooperative FSB and consistent failures to respond to its inquiries by Yeltsin’s government, and, somewhat predictably, both would not be permitted the luxury of remaining alive for very long. Both were assassinated in 2003.
If the version of events that runs parallel to the state narrative is to be believed, then attacks organised by Putin and Yeltsin’s government led to both a bloody Second Chechen War, from which Russia was to emerge victorious, and provided a streamlined path to presidency for the then-prime minister. He, of course, has dismissed claims of conspiracy as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘immoral’, both of which are to him contemptible qualities. Nevertheless, Moscow has put all its efforts into suppressing evidence of surrounding the bombings. The irony is palpable, but the question of who was responsible remains still to be answered