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The reason behind this secret meeting on the French Riviera would seem to have been that—however implausible this might seem at first sight—the Kremlin and Shamil Basayev shared parallel interests. Basayev was a Wahhabi jihadist who wanted to establish a Caucasian emirate in the North Caucasus. He was a fierce opponent of the Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, a moderate Chechen nationalist, who considered Basayev’s expansionist jihadism a danger to Chechnya’s independence. A small war was in Basayev’s interests, because it would destabilize Mashkadov and at the same time enhance Basayev’s status inside Chechnya, opening up political prospects. The Kremlin equally urgently needed a small victorious war in its “Operation Successor.” In the alleged meeting on the French Riviera the Russian side is thought to have promised that there would be no real resistance in Dagestan (as a matter of fact some weeks before the conflict the Russian border troops would be withdrawn from Dagestan’s borders—to the great surprise of the local authorities). It would be a “Potemkin war,” a quasi-war, a theatrical, hardly serious armed exchange, so that in the end both sides could claim victory.^[10] Are these allegations of a secret understanding between Basayev and the Kremlin true? We don’t know, because until today definitive evidence is lacking. It is clear, however, that if Basayev had trusted a Russian promise that the conflict would remain restricted to a theatrical skirmish, he would have fulfilled for the Kremlin the role of a “useful idiot.” After the Chechen incursion into Dagestan Putin immediately declared an all-out war as an answer to the Chechen provocation.

Storm in Moscow

But would Basayev’s attack on Dagestan be enough to trigger a wave of public anger in Russia? For the average Russian citizen the events in Dagestan were far from home and certainly had nothing to do with daily life in a country that was just recovering from the deep financial crisis of 1998. It was clear that in order to succeed, “Operation Successor” had to be accompanied by more powerful measures. Then, suddenly, in the first weeks of September 1999, in the Russian Federation there began a series of terrorist attacks. On September 4, a massive bomb exploded at a military housing complex at Buikansk in Dagestan, killing eighty-three people. On September 8 and 13 there followed explosions in working-class apartment buildings in south Moscow, leaving 228 people dead. On September 16 a truck exploded in the southern town of Volgodonsk. These explosions were real massacres. Hundreds of Russian citizens—men, women, children—were killed, dismembered, and maimed, when bombs, placed by unknown criminals in the basement of the apartment buildings, exploded. The explosions always took place early in the morning to kill a maximum of victims. In just a few weeks over three hundred people were killed and over one thousand wounded. The wave of terrorism led to widespread panic and fear in the population. And for everybody it was clear who was the culprit: it was the work of Chechen terrorists.

A Strange “Exercise” by the FSB