In the summer of 1999 it was clear to everyone in the Kremlin that Putin was on the doorstep
of the Presidency.
What wasn’t clear was how he was going to gain the public support necessary to actually
be elected President.
Putin and his inner circle determined that the quickest way to ensure that the people
embraced someone like Putin as their leader, was to cast him as their protector.
But protector from what?
There needed to be a clear and present danger; a wolf at the door.
Conveniently, the Chechen minority in the Caucasus region in the south of the Federation
-- a group who historically had been at odds, often in armed conflict, with Russia -- were
available to be cast as the wolf.
In August 1999, warlords Shamil Basayev and Ibn al-Khattab led their Islamist militia
from their home Republic of Chechnya on an invasion of the Republic of Dagestan.
We need to pause here to take in an important point.
Even after the Soviet Union’s breakup into 15 independent states, the Russian federation
was still a union of 92 subject areas--think of them as akin to our 50 states and various
territories here in the United States.
This is crucial to understanding that there are still a lot of divisions within Russia
that run deep, leaving it constantly vulnerable to separatist movements and armed civil conflict.
But back to Dagestan.
The aim of these rebels was to liberate the Republic from Russian control, targeting it
because it’s the southernmost territory in the region.
Putin became the face of the Federation’s response, which acted swiftly to defeat the
invaders.
But during the final days of the summer, a series of bombings -- spread over three weeks
-- targeted civilians across Russia, killing hundreds of innocent people and sending a
wave of fear throughout the country.
The first blast hit an underground mall steps from the Kremlin, killing one.
Five days later, a car bomb exploded in front of a building housing Russian border guards
in Dagestan, killing sixty-four.
The third attack was on September 9th in Moscow when a massive bomb went off in the ground
floor of an apartment building killing 100 sleeping residents.
Four days later another apartment bomb was detonated in Moscow resulting in 118 deaths.
And the fifth attack, three days later on September 16 in the Southern city of Volgodonsk,
featured a truck bomb exploding outside an apartment building, killed 18 people.
Three additional bombs were allegedly found and defused throughout Moscow.
When the carnage was over, 301 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured.
As soon as people began to actually search for the perpetrators of the bombings, it became
clear that something wasn’t right.
On the morning of September 22nd -- just six days after the final apartment bombing -- residents
caught three Russian FSB agents red-handed planting a bomb in the basement of an apartment
building in the Ryazan Region.
They were carrying sacks of the explosive RDX, widely used by the Russian military and
determined to be the same explosive that caused each of the earlier bombings.
In fact, as reported by the Russian historian David Satter, all four apartment bombings
were revealed to have the same “signature,” meaning the nature of the destruction, the
way the buildings concrete panels collapsed, and the volume of the blast were the nearly
identical.
Even more damning is the fact that more than four hundred pounds of RDX was used in each
blast.
RDX is only produced in one place in Russia, in a single factory located hundreds of miles
away from Chechnya deep in the Perm oblast region.
This factory is guarded by the FSB.
There are many other signs that suggest the FSB carried out these attacks, like the fact
that five of the nine suspects the Russian government said they were hunting were killed,
two others fled the country, and the remaining two were caught and tried for the attacks.
But an opposition member of the Russian parliament named Mikhayl Trepashkin believed they were
being framed and planned to present evidence supporting this at their trial.
Trepashkin was himself a former member of the FSB and a lawyer, so he knew what he was
talking about.
But he never got the chance to make his case because he was arrested on a bogus illegal
weapons charge, tried in a closed military trial, convicted, and sentenced to five years
in prison.
The two bombing suspects were then convicted.
Trepashkin wasn’t the only man silenced for seeking the truth.
Two other opposition members of parliament on a committee investigating the bombings
were assassinated within three months of each other.
Then, when the prominent investigative journalist Artyom Borovik planned an investigation of
his own of FSB involvement in the bombings, he was killed when his plane mysteriously
crashed on takeoff from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport.
The French daily newspaper Le Figaro conducted an interview with Russian nationalist general
Aleksandr Lebed who, when asked if the Kremlin was behind the apartment bombings, said, quote,
“I’m all but convinced of it.
Any Chechen field commander set on revenge would have started blowing up generals.
Or he’d have started striking Internal Affairs Ministry and Federal Security Service buildings,
military stockpiles or nuclear power plants.
He wouldn’t have targeted ordinary, innocent people.”
General Lebed continued to make accusations that the bombings were a high-level government-orchestrated
inside job, until he died in a helicopter crash in 2002.
And finally there’s the former FSB operative, Alexander Litvinenko, who fled to London with
his family and began to speak out against the Putin regime’s crimes as a journalist
and author.
He picked up on troubling elements of the FSB’s involvement in the apartment bombings.
He was famously killed in 2006, becoming the first known victim of Polonium 210-induced
acute radiation poisoning.
The effects of the bombings were immediate.
I’ll quote Professor Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy here: “Prime Minister Putin
was on television nightly.
The population was baying for vengeance, and Putin became their vehicle.
Regional elites started to go over to the Putin camp...By the end of September, after
Yeltsin gave him complete control over the war effort, Putin launched a ground offensive
into Chechnya...Within the month almost half of the total population of Chechnya would
become refugees.
The destruction inflicted on the capital city of Grozny--which was, after all, a city within
Russia--was greater than any seen in Europe since World War II...
While doubts and suspicions about the complicity of the security services continue to this
day, the bombings were regarded at the time as absolutely critical in promoting Putin’s
candidacy.
Putin’s approval ratings rose dramatically through the fall, from 2 percent in August
to 45 percent by November.
Sergey Kovalev summed up the real political impact of the apartment bombings:
“Those explosions were a crucial moment in the unfolding of our current history.
After the first shock passed, it turned out that we were living in an entirely different
country, in which almost no one dared talk about a peaceful, political resolution of
the crisis with Chechnya.”
The significance of the bombings cannot be overstated.
These events revealed the risks that Putin and his team were taking to seize power and
foreshadowed the ruthless tactics to which Putin’s Kremlin would resort to keep it.
Thank you for watching part 4 in our series profiling Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
And if you feel like you learned something from these videos, you’d really like the
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