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In this continuing debate about Chechnya, I can accept any position and any arguments except outright lies. And today, unfortunately, both in our own country and in the world, there are people who unfairly juggle the truth. They say that it’s not the Chechen terrorists who are committing aggression against Russia, but the Russian army that is committing aggression against “free Chechnya.” It’s not terrorists who blew up the buildings in Moscow but the Russian security services, in order to justify their own aggression. . . . It is a professional and moral crime to spread such blasphemous theories about how the second Chechen war began, especially in view of material evidence collected in an investigation of the Moscow apartment-house explosions: Mechanical devices and explosives similar to those used in the Moscow bombings were found in rebel bases in Chechnya. The names of criminals, who went through training at terrorist bases in Chechnya, have been established; their immediate associates have been detained. I am convinced that this case will soon come to trial. Nevertheless, the falsehoods continue. Some find it very profitable to maintain lies.^[37]

Yeltsin wrote these words in 2000. However, the investigations of the Duma Commission, established two years later, were prematurely halted because of lack of cooperation on the part of the government, and thirteen years later still no Chechen terrorist has been tried for the apartment bombings. The whole affair has been declared a state secret by the authorities, and the many—too many—strange events and unexplained circumstances that point to an alleged involvement of the secret services, far from having been investigated exhaustively, have been subject to a cover-up. According to a report by Amnesty International, “the responsibility for these attacks [in Moscow and Volgodonsk] should rather be sought on the part of the FSB. Until today the question of Russian state terrorism remains still open. The Russian secret services, at that time, seem to have set in motion a sinister scenario of a power change in the Kremlin against the background of explosions.”^[38] Arriving at a similar conclusion, Arkadi Vaksberg, member of the Duma investigation commission, wrote: “Murders and attempted murders that, judging by the traces they left behind, had been ordered by the Kremlin and the Lubyanka [FSB], happened, one after the other, [they were] sometimes of a surprising scale and cruelty: I’m thinking especially of the apartment explosions at the eve of the election of our beloved president.”^[39] David Satter expressed himself even more clearly. He wrote: “Both the logic of the political situation and the weight of the evidence lead overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the Russian leadership itself was responsible for the bombings of the apartment buildings. This was an attack in which many of the victims were children whose bodies were found in pieces, if at all. There can be little doubt that persons capable of such a crime, regardless of how they present themselves, would not give up power willingly but would react to a threat to their position by imposing dictatorial control.”^[40]

Notes

1.

Sergei Kovalev, “Putin’s War,” New York Review of Books (February 10, 2000). (Note that Kovalyov’s name can also be spelled Kovalev.)

2.

Skuratov would soon be dismissed. On March 17, 1999, a video was broadcast on state television showing him naked on a bed with two prostitutes. This was a classic case of Russian kompromat (compromising information). During a press conference a few weeks later FSB director Putin and Interior Minister Stepashin confirmed that the man on the video was Skuratov and that the prostitutes had been paid for by individuals who were being investigated for criminal offences.

3.

John B. Dunlop, “‘Storm in Moscow’: A Plan of the Yeltsin ‘Family’ to Destabilize Russia,” The Hoover Institution (October 8, 2004), 20.

4.

Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, 284.

5.

How serious the threat of a coup d’état was in May 1999 became clear from the publication in the Novaya Gazeta of July 5, 1999, of the leaked text of the draft presidential decree, in which emergency rule was to be instituted from May 13 “in connection with the aggravation of the political and criminal situation.” (Cf. Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow,” 23.)

6.