Death of a Dissident (45 page)

The film was the last straw for the Kremlin. On the day of the world premiere in London, the FSB responded by announcing that Berezovsky was “financing terrorist activity” in Chechnya and accused him of taking part in the kidnapping and murder of an Interior Ministry general in 1999. FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev went on TV to state ominously that the FSB would “duly document” Boris’s terrorist activities, pass them on “to our partners abroad, and wait for a proper reaction from them.” The prosecutor general’s office added that “for the safety of investigators, witnesses and the preservation of evidence, we cannot yet make public the documents in our possession about Berezovsky’s involvement in the events in Chechnya.” But the announcement left no doubt that the Kremlin was gearing up to strike back.

In the aftermath of Sasha’s book and Boris’s film, the educated classes of Russia plunged into a bout of soul-searching. Was it possible that their vlast was not just a mildly authoritarian regime, which, many argued, was something that Russia needed in order to emerge from oligarchic chaos, but an embodiment of evil itself, rooted in the original sin of killing some three hundred innocent souls in their sleep?

The angst was well reflected in a thoughtful article by Dmitry Fur-man, a sociologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, explaining why so many Russians readily accepted the horrific allegation. The theory that the FSB was behind the bombings, he argued, had inner logic: blowing up the apartment houses and blaming it on the Chechens would provoke a war, a response whose assertiveness would boost Putin’s popularity on the eve of the elections. The plot appeared rational and successful, except for the disappointing mishap in Ryazan. “The villains in this theory are clever, resourceful and demonic.”

The trouble with the official claim that Wahhabi terrorists were behind the attack was “that it is not based on a model of rational behavior of clever villains, but the behavior of idiots, whose motives are impossible to comprehend…. There is a striking disparity between the carefully executed plan and the fact that its aim is absolutely incomprehensible.” The analogy to 9/11 did not work, argued Furman,
because bin Laden had a rational plan: to damage America and provoke anti-Islamic backlash. But why would Wahhabi terrorists want to blow up the working-class apartment houses? Was it to stop the war, or to provoke it? To damage Russia? It didn’t make sense. “The second idiocy, implied by the official version, is the idiocy of the FSB. The Ryazan operation (if it was an operation, and not an averted terrorist act) is so ridiculous, that all attempts to explain it fail.

“That the first version implies rational behavior, and the second, idiocy, does not mean that the first is correct, and the second is not. But when people face something very frightening, it’s easier for them to believe in a devil’s plan, than in the actions of idiots or some absurdity. It’s easier to believe that the [young Prince] Dmitry was killed by Boris Godunov, and not the official version, that he stabbed himself to death with a small knife.”

Thus, Furman concluded, Russians had a choice: deem their vlast criminal or idiotic. Berezovsky had already won, regardless of the truth.

But it was not good enough for me. I needed the truth. Granted, Putin was the quintessential KGB man, a murderous type. But being murderous does not automatically mean being guilty of every murder. And there were other murderous types out there, as I learned while watching the towers go down on 9/11. At heart I was a research scientist trained to treat evidence skeptically. Here I differed with Boris, a mathematician, for whom logic, not evidence, was supreme. For him, Ryazan was sufficiently convincing. For me, Ryazan was impressive but circumstantial. I had no scruples trumpeting the FSB theory in the media because of the obvious official cover-up. But I still wanted to get to the bottom of it.

I was not alone in this. Almost unnoticed among the guests at the London film premiere was Tanya Morozova, a quiet thirty-one-year-old woman with large brown eyes and high Slavic cheekbones. Her mother was killed at the bombing at Guryanova Street on September 9. When introduced to her, those present at the London event tended to become reflective, if only for a moment, reminded of the human stakes that somehow got lost amid the high drama of the Kremlin power intrigue.

Yuri Felshtinsky had discovered Tanya in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she lived with her American husband and a four-year-old son. He explained that we were continuing to investigate the bombings. There are two views as to who could have killed her mother. Of all people, she was one who must want to know the truth. We would like her to come to London, hear us out, and decide for herself.

Tanya agreed. In London, she did not say much; she came to listen. But after seeing the film she called her younger sister, Aliona, in Denver to say that the rumor that they had brushed off as sheer madness might actually be true. There were serious grounds for believing that their own government could have planted the bomb that killed their mother and ninety-three of their neighbors. Would Aliona agree to be part of a committee to investigate the allegations?

Aliona was a survivor of the Guryanova Street blast. After Tanya had married and moved to Milwaukee, Aliona, who was twenty-three at the time, stayed with their mother in the one-bedroom apartment in which she had grown up, in a working-class neighborhood of Pechatniki. On the evening of September 8 she was out with her boyfriend, Sergei, who lived in the section next to theirs in the huge apartment block. On the way home they stopped to chat with some friends on the leafy patio with benches and a playground in front of the building.

“Let’s have some dinner and watch TV at my place,” Sergei said. She agreed. Shortly after midnight Sergei said that he was going to the kitchen to have a cigarette. Those were his last words.

Initially Aliona thought an earthquake had struck. In her shock she heard no noise, as if the sound had been turned off in a movie theater. The wall with Sergei’s bookshelf and TV suddenly detached from the rest of the room and slid down, leaving her on the couch at the edge of an abyss. She did not lose consciousness, and her hearing returned within seconds. As the sounds of the street reached her from the outside, she realized that she was looking across the gap that had formed in the middle of the building. Somewhere in that gap lay her boyfriend, his kitchen, her mother, and their entire apartment, which went down with the nine floors that collapsed around the two central entrances.

She was rescued by firefighters. As she wandered distraught through the pandemonium filled with smoke, police, fire trucks, and paramedics, a CNN crew spotted her.

“Were you in the building? Do you need to make a call? You can use my phone,” yelled a man with a camera over the noise of the sirens.

“I have no one to call, my sister is in America,” she said. “I don’t remember the number.”

Eventually, courtesy of CNN, she contacted her sister. The next morning Tanya flew to Moscow.

They never found their mother’s body. They became frustrated by the nearly inhumane insensitivity of the countless officials whom they had to see because without their mother’s body there could be no death record, and all their documents were destroyed. One day, they stood in front of their apartment block with the gaping hole in the middle—four entrances out of six were still intact—amid the crowd of survivors and journalists, separated from their old courtyard by a police line. The powers that be had decided to raze what remained of the block. When the demolition charges boomed, they quivered and burst into tears and clutched each other. Somewhere under that rubble of dust and concrete that bulldozers were about to level lay their mother.

A year later, in the aftermath of 9/11, the contrast to how the Americans handled the consequences struck them.

“The Americans went with a fine-toothed comb over the World Trade Center wreckage, looking for the tiniest clue,” Tanya told me. “Why didn’t the FSB look for evidence? Why did they bulldoze the place? Did they have something to hide, perhaps?”

It took Aliona three months to restore her papers. As soon as she could, she got on a plane to Chicago. She stayed at Tanya’s house for a while. The following fall she enrolled at the University of Denver, majoring in computer design. She had no intention of ever returning home again.

“As for who did it, somehow it did not matter to me initially,” recalled Aliona. “They told us it was the Chechens, but I didn’t really know much about them. Politics never interested me. They might as
well have said ‘the Martians.’ Eventually I learned all the politics behind it, that someone was playing with us as if we were tin soldiers. But that was much later.”

Before going home after the London film premiere, Tanya attended a brainstorming session in Boris’s office to decide what to do next. The group included the two Duma members, Yushenkov and Rybakov, Boris, Sasha, Felshtinsky, and myself.

One idea was that Yushenkov set up a commission in Russia to investigate the bombings. He would try to get official Duma support for that. We agreed that Boris should not be a part of it, since he was too controversial. Tanya and Aliona would represent the victims. Felshtinsky and Sasha would continue their investigation, and I would be in charge of the publicity campaign outside Russia.

There was someone in Moscow, Sasha said, who could be very useful to Yushenkov. His name was Mikhail Trepashkin, a former FSB investigator, currently a lawyer. Sasha vouched for him. He offered to call Trepashkin to ask him to see Yushenkov as soon as possible. Also, Sasha noted, Aliona and Tanya were officially considered crime victims. By Russian law, they could get access to the investigation file and participate in court proceedings if anyone were ever to go on trial for the bombing. He suggested that the sisters retain Trepashkin to represent them. Tanya duly signed a power of attorney to Trepashkin.

As we were saying goodbye, I could not help wondering how this newly formed brotherhood would be reflected in the operative report that Russian intelligence would shortly submit to Putin. I tried to look at things through the eyes of the services, as Sasha had taught me in Turkey. Surely all our movements and communications were being watched. Would we be classified as a “subversive émigré organization” in the Soviet style? Or “a terrorist sympathizer cell” in the modern way? How many spies would monitor us?

On April 23, 2002, Sergei Yushenkov arrived in Washington with a large box of copies of
Assassination of Russia
. His schedule, organized
by the IFCL, included the usual circuit for an overseas visitor who wanted to make a point to the makers of U.S. foreign policy: the State Department, Congress, key journalists, the expert community. Sergei was not concerned about the absence of direct evidence. He was a politician: he looked at the bombing story from a totally different angle.

“I don’t have to prove anything,” he explained. “The government has been accused of mass murder of its own citizens, and half of the people believe it; this is enough for me. Presumption of innocence does not apply to governments; it’s a device to protect people from the government. Putin has an obligation to dispel the suspicions. Instead, he is covering up. What else is there to prove?”

The meetings in Washington were tough. Tom Graham at the State Department had warned me that barring direct evidence of official complicity in the bombings, the film—and its promoters—would be discounted in Washington.

We brought Aliona from Denver. She and Yushenkov hit it off immediately. They were kindred souls, two Russians on a hopeless mission in the disinterested imperial city.

“The bombings in Moscow? This is like our 9/11, isn’t it?” asked a congressional staffer who listened politely to Yushenkov. His expression of deliberate attention could not conceal profound skepticism: these guys are saying that their secret services did it. Well, some people, the lunatic fringe, say that the WTC attacks were the work of the CIA.

Our visit to the State Department was also discouraging. We were received by a junior officer from the Russia desk, who politely took a copy of the film and uttered some platitudes. We were indeed discounted, as Tom Graham had warned.