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Secrecy and lack of cooperation on the part of the authorities was not all. It soon became clear that it was extremely dangerous to air critical opinions on the events. One example was Duma member Sergey Yushenkov of the party Liberalnaya Rossiya (Liberal Russia). In March 2002, after the news emerged that Duma speaker Seleznev had been informed of the Volgodonsk explosion before it took place, Yushenkov declared “that the episode with the note seems still further proof of the involvement of the FSB in the explosions that took place in Moscow and Volgodonsk in the autumn of 1999.”^[29] Yushenkov was gunned down and killed at the entrance of his Moscow apartment block on Thursday evening, April 17, 2003.^[30] A colleague of the victim, Liberal Russia member Yuly Rybakov, who would later investigate the bombings, speculated in the Moscow Times “that Yushenkov could have been killed for his attempts to show that the security services were guilty of a series of apartment block bombings in 1999.”^[31] A similar assessment was made by Arkadi Vaksberg, who himself was a member of the commission. “In fact,” wrote Vaksberg, “Yushenkov has clearly paid for his uncompromising position on the Chechen war, he knew without doubt the persons who were really responsible for the apartment explosions in Moscow.”^[32] A late and intriguing testimony on Yushenkov’s death was made in 2010 by Marina Salye, a member of the St. Petersburg Duma, who, in the early 1990s pushed for Putin’s resignation as the city’s deputy mayor after implicating him in a multimillion-dollar kickback scheme. She said “that she decided she needed to lie low after receiving a fright while visiting a colleague, State Duma Deputy Sergei Yushenkov, with whom she was hoping to forge a political alliance in the early part of 2000. ‘We were going to cooperate politically. I always had good relations with Sergei Nikolayevich. . . . When I came to his office, I saw a person there who I didn’t want to see anytime, anyplace, under any circumstances. I’m not going to reveal his name. But I then understood it was time to go. And Sergei Nikolayevich was soon killed.’”^[33]

The apartment of the journalist Yelena Tregubova was bombed on February 2, 2004, after the publication of her book Tales of a Kremlin Digger. She escaped a certain death only because, having already left her apartment, she returned for a few minutes. It was at that precise moment that the bomb exploded outside her front door.^[34] The former KGB colonel, Alexander Litvinenko, who, together with Yuri Felshtinsky, wrote the critical book on the apartment bombings with the title Blowing Up Russia, was poisoned in London in November 2006 with the radioactive substance polonium 210, a substance which one must assume can only be procured from a government agency. Litvinenko’s suspected murderer, Andrey Lugovoy, a former KGB bodyguard, fled to Russia. He was offered a seat in the Duma by Zhirinovsky’s Liberal-Democratic Party, thereby getting parliamentary immunity that prevented him from being extradited to Britain. The murder of Litvinenko prompted the journalist Yelena Tregubova to leave Russia and ask for political asylum in Britain. Another victim was probably Yury Shchekochikhin, a Duma deputy for the liberal Yabloko party, member of the anti-corruption commission of the Duma, and deputy editor-in-chief of the opposition paper Novaya Gazeta. It was Shchekochikhin who initiated the 2002 Duma investigation into the apartment bombings. He died on July 3, 2003, after two weeks of agony. There were grave suspicions that he was poisoned, but this suspicion could not be verified because the results of his autopsy were classified a “medical secret.”^[35] Even his relatives never received an autopsy report and “when they tried to initiate criminal proceedings, their request was denied.”^[36]

Yeltsin on the Apartment Bombings

In his memoirs Boris Yeltsin referred to the rumors that the secret services may have been involved in the apartment bombings.