Death of a Dissident (35 page)

Grozny, January 24, 2000: Chechen fighters resist the Russian army in hand-to-hand combat throughout the capital. Akhmed Zakayev, now the commander of a thousand-strong force defending the southwestern district, is severely wounded by shrapnel from an artillery shell. For the next ten days he is carried by stretcher from village to village, evading a massive manhunt by the Russian army. Eventually
he is smuggled to Georgia, after his wife bribes her way through the Russian border checkpoint with $5,000
.

The story of the September bomb scare in Ryazan began to emerge only after the New Year. Will Englund of the
Baltimore Sun
and Maura Reynolds of the
Los Angeles Times
were among the first to write about it. They each interviewed residents of the building at 14÷16 Novoselova Street and published stories on January 14 and 15, respectively. Their editors found both reports worthy of the front page. Each concluded that the bomb was real, contrary to the “exercise” claims of the FSB.

In Russia, however, the story remained unreported for another month, until the February 14 issue of
Novaya Gazeta
. Pavel Voloshin (no relation to Alexander Voloshin, Kremlin chief of staff), a young disciple of the veteran investigative journalist Yuri Schekochihin, published a detailed explanation of what happened.

On September 22, 1999, at 9:15 p.m., Alexei Kartofelnikov, a tenant of the twelve-story apartment building, called the police to report a white Zhiguli sedan with obscured license plates parked at the front entrance. Two suspicious-looking men were carrying sacks into the basement. By the time the police arrived, the Zhiguli was gone. In the basement the cops found three hundred-pound sacks of white powder. A detonator and a timing device were attached to the sacks. An explosives squad arrived and detected vapors of RDX, a military explosive used in artillery shells, the same substance that was used in the Moscow bombings. The timer was set for 5:30 in the morning.

The building was evacuated for the night and the bomb defused. The sacks were taken away by the FSB. Local law enforcement were put on full alert. Composite sketches of the terrorist suspects, two men and a woman, were distributed to two thousand policemen and shown on TV. By morning, news agencies boasted that a terrorist attack had been foiled in Ryazan. On the national evening news of September 23, Prime Minister Putin praised the vigilance of the Ryazanians and promised full victory in Chechnya.

The next morning brought a stunning shift. FSB Chief Nikolai
Patrushev went on the air to announce that the Ryazan incident was in fact staged by his agency.

“This was not a bomb,” he declared. “The exercise may not have been carried out well, but it was only a test, and the so-called explosive was only sacks of sugar.”

In their reports a few months later, however, Englund, Reynolds, and Voloshin quoted tenants, the local police, and an explosives expert who contradicted Patrushev. They all believed everything was for real: the yellowish substance in the sacks wasn’t sugar, a gas analyzer used by the explosives team had detected RDX, an explosive, and the timer had used a live shotgun cartridge as a detonator.

Voloshin’s report challenged the FSB to produce evidence to back up its claim that it was just an exercise: the records, the participants, the sacks with sugar.

After Voloshin’s article there were more stories, suggesting possible explanations for why the FSB would make its bizarre claim. Some reports held that the men who planted the bomb, FSB agents all, were about to be arrested, so the Agency needed a cover story. Others claimed that they were in fact arrested, and then released after producing FSB badges. What was established beyond doubt was that late on the night of the incident, Nadezhda Yuhanova, a telephone exchange operator, overheard a suspicious conversation: “There are checkpoints everywhere; split up and leave the city one by one.” She alerted the police. They traced the call to Lubyanka, FSB headquarters in Moscow.

On March 13, a second story by Voloshin appeared in
Novaya Gazeta
. He reported an incident at the 137th Airborne Troop Regiment base near Ryazan one night in September. Pvt. Alexei Pinyaev and two of his comrades were on sentry duty guarding the ammunition depot. Perhaps out of curiosity, or to escape the freezing cold, they entered the warehouse and found a pile of ordinary sacks labeled “Sugar.” They cut a hole in one of the sacks, removed some of the white powder, and used it to sweeten some tea. The stuff turned their tea foul, not sweet. They called their commanding officer.

The officer had been trained in explosives. He determined that the powder was RDX. Bigwigs from the FSB arrived from Moscow.
Everybody with knowledge of the episode was questioned and sworn to secrecy. Pinyaev and his friends were threatened with a court-martial for poking their nose into something that wasn’t their business. In the end all of them were transferred to Chechnya—but not before they talked to Voloshin.

On March 20, by a small margin, the Duma voted down a motion by Yuri Schekochihin to ask the prosecutor general’s office to look into the apartment bomb scare in Ryazan for possible violations of the law. By then the flagship NTV show Independent Investigations had taped an hour-long town hall discussion about the incident. Among the participants were Ryazanians from the Novoselova Street building, local policemen, explosives experts, and three representatives of the FSB. The verdict of the participants—with the exception of the FSB officers—was unanimous: the bomb was real. The show was scheduled for broadcast on March 24, two days before the presidential elections.

Many years later, in New York, Igor Malashenko, the exiled ex-president of NTV, told me about the agonizing decision he and his boss Goose had to make. On March 23, a messenger came from the Kremlin—none other than Valya, Valentin Yumashev. He brought a warning in no uncertain terms from “you know who”: if they dared to broadcast “The Sugar of Ryazan,” they should consider themselves finished. Putin’s election on March 26 was guaranteed. Should they defy him, he would go after them in force.

“This was a sign of the changing of the guard. Yeltsin would never have resorted to such blunt pressure,” said Malashenko.

They decided to go ahead with the broadcast.

Moscow, spring 2000: Details of events leading to the war in Chechnya emerge in the presidential election campaign. Sergei Stepashin, the former prime minister, discloses that the Kremlin began planning the Chechen campaign in March 1999, six months before the invasion. Speculation that the FSB or GRU could have been involved in the Moscow bombings appears in the liberal press. Putin, in a campaign
interview in Kommersant, dismisses the allegation as “raving madness,” saying, “It is immoral even to consider such a possibility.”

On March 26, Vladimir Putin won election to the presidency of Russia by a landslide.

Geneva, Switzerland, March 17, 2000: Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International urge the UN to investigate massive alleged war crimes in Chechnya. Reports from the war zone depict widespread atrocities by the Russian forces, including more than 120 summary executions and hundreds of cases of arbitrary detention, beatings, and torture. Hundreds of civilians are held for ransom by the military. Refugees report the systematic rape of Chechen women by soldiers. Villages are cut off from food and water, leading to widespread malnutrition and epidemic disease. The area is closed to journalists and international observers
.

Later on in London, two schools of thought emerged to explain why Putin, in the words of Berezovsky, “abandoned his mission to preserve and expand Yeltsin’s [democratic] policies.”

Boris believed, in retrospect, that Putin never understood his mission in political terms in the first place. Putin was “loyal and sincere,” but he never had any political philosophy and was an “underdeveloped personality.” His identity had always been defined by whichever group he belonged to: his judo team, the FSB, the St. Petersburg liberals, or “the family.” His mentality stemmed from the street gangs of his childhood: the “us-ness,” rather than the essence, was what counted, “us” against “them,” even if “they” are the rest of the world.

When he suddenly found himself at the pinnacle of power—and “the family” dissipated—he had to reinvent himself and find a new gang. He began to see himself as part and parcel of the state. The state became his gang, and he its guardian and protector:
l’état c’est moi
. He was supported in this shift by his two crafty confidantes, Voloshin and Roma. His life took on a new purpose: to prevail over the state’s enemies through strength, ruthlessness, and control, just as he had once practiced judo. Those who plotted against him became enemies of the state. How could anybody be against him without aiming at the state, when all he was doing was for the state’s sake? They had to be destroyed.

The other view was expressed by Sasha: Putin had never been his own man; he was a Kontora sleeper who was reclaimed as soon as he was returned to the FSB in 1998, or maybe he had never left it in the first place. He had been neither loyal nor sincere, fooling everyone, including Boris. As Boris, the hapless oligarch, maneuvered him to power, Boris empowered his natural enemy, a pawn of the KGB mandarins. Like a secret medieval order, these people had a two-pronged strategy to gain control: overtly, through Primus, or covertly, through Putin.

In support of his theory, Sasha provided lots of argument, starting with the revival of the “KGB cult” at Lubyanka from the day Putin appeared, to his remark at the KGB veterans day on December 18, 1999, when he reported jokingly, “Mission accomplished” in reference to his “undercover penetration of the government.”

Sasha discovered that in February 1998, three days after his surprise arrival at Lena Berezovskaya’s birthday party with a flower bouquet, Putin had appeared with a similar bouquet at the door of Vladimir Kryuchkov, the last Soviet KGB chief, on
his
birthday.

According to Sasha, the change that Boris observed in Putin in April 2000 was no change at all. Boris was merely discovering the man’s essence.