Russia's Dead End: An Insider's Testimony from Gorbachev to Putin

by Andrei A. Kovalev

  What should we make of the claim that Chechens committed these terrorist acts? This version is totally logical when one considers how much grief the federal authorities have inflicted upon practically every Chechen family. However, the tradition of blood vengeance is hardly relevant here. It is always directed against specific offenders and does not entail revenge on the basis of nationality. Moreover, in Chechnya a code of honor still prevails that does not include anonymity, especially regarding revenge. In several instances Chechen leaders claimed responsibility for terrorist acts they were accused of committing even though, according to the Russian special services, these leaders actually had nothing to do with them. They claimed responsibility believing that such notorious terrorist acts would bolster their authority. Finally, one cannot discount the practice of kamikaze (suicide) attacks, like those in the Middle East, by persons who make no demands whatsoever. In sum, the truth about terrorist acts under Yeltsin is complicated and multidimensional.

  In Russia the background of this series of terrorist acts was quite distinctive. A domestic political struggle was being waged between those who sought revenge for Russia’s defeat in the war with Chechnya, on the one hand, and those who favored a peaceful resolution of the Chechen problem, on the other. Against this background, I could hardly ignore what someone from the Federal Security Service whispered to me: behind all these terrorist acts stood Minister of Internal Affairs Anatoly Kulikov, who had supposedly established a secret subunit for this purpose. This sounded quite plausible, since Kulikov was one of the leaders of the “war party,” but the FSB was not exactly a trustworthy source of information. It is doubtful that, apart from those who never talk, anyone could say with assurance what the truth really was. Perhaps the whisper was intended to deflect attention away from the real guilty party and toward another agency? In any case, one sensed, at the very least, that behind several of the terrorist acts during Yeltsin’s administration stood someone in power who did not want to see a peaceful resolution of the problems Russia faced, including that of Chechnya.

  Of course, under Yeltsin the problem of terrorism was particularly acute and abnormal. After all, it was he who launched the First Chechen War, releasing the genie of terrorism from the bottle. It was on his watch that the special services began playing with terrorist acts. However, there is nothing more cynical than what Putin has been up to with respect to terrorism. His stance toward terrorism is simple: Terrorism benefits him, and he makes use of it. To do so he must lie systematically, which he does selflessly, ecstatically, mechanically, as the spy-president was taught to do.

  Putin came to power on a wave of fear evoked by the explosions in apartment houses in Moscow on the night of September 9, 1999, on Guryanova Street and early in the morning of September 13, on Kashirskoye Boulevard.8 In the absence of any evidence, responsibility for these terrorist acts was laid on Chechen separatists.

  Who could believe the later assertion by the director of the FSB that employees of his organization had furtively placed hexogen, which had been used for the explosions in Moscow, in an apartment block in Ryazan supposedly to test the vigilance of citizens? Of course, no one believed this. And then they forgot about it. It would have been better not to forget, for the result was that the authorities got away with it. After all, the FSB had been caught red-handed.

  Literally on the eve of Putin’s appointment, the second incursion of Chechen fighters into Dagestan occurred and was immediately characterized as “international terrorism.” (Since it was not on his watch, it means he was not guilty! Who recalls that he headed the FSB at the time? No one remembers.) His assertion about it being international terrorism appears to be gibberish or basic illiteracy. How could one speak of international terrorism within the boundaries of a single, albeit multinational, country? But it was neither gibberish nor illiteracy but a precise, far-reaching calculation. After the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, in the United States, Putin found the bogeyman of international terrorism extremely helpful! It was this tragedy, along with his boldly stated declaration that terrorism in Russia was not homegrown but international, that helped Putin convince President George W. Bush to insist the European Union should reconcile with Russia and not allow any further cooling of relations. Thanks to this assertion, the West overlooked the Kremlin’s outrages in Chechnya, the de facto elimination of freedom of the mass media, and all its other excesses.

  Russians were enthusiastic that a decisive man was at the helm, a man who had launched an antiterrorist operation against Chechnya. Again almost no one noticed the bald lie. From the start it was hardly “antiterrorist operations”; rather, there were broad-scale military actions, skillfully managed politically, that led to a wave of terrorism. In any case, Putin’s poll numbers shot up, which is what he wanted. According to what was long the official version, terrorism and Chechnya were indistinguishable. But the most terrible terrorist acts that occurred were so mysterious that one could not help wondering how they could take place and then end in the way they did.

  That Putin also managed to turn these major terrorist acts to his advantage raises disturbing questions. Included among these acts was the surrealistic story of some 700 theatergoers who attended the popular Moscow musical Nord-Ost in the theatrical center in Dubrovka and were taken hostage on October 23, 2002. (This figure is an estimate; the actual number of hostages is unknown.) The terrorists demanded the withdrawal of troops from Chechnya and promised to blow up the building if it was stormed. Was this another confirmation of Putin’s thesis never to negotiate with terrorists and not to withdraw troops from Chechnya? As far as he was concerned, the terrorists could just “go take a piss.” This is just how most ordinary Russians reacted: They praised Putin for not negotiating with the terrorists. In effect, they applauded the authorities for killing so many people rather than leaving that to the terrorists. Meanwhile, the international community was horrified and expressed condolences but did not raise any inconvenient questions. A routine investigation followed that spared the Kremlin any embarrassment.

  According to official figures, 129 people died as the tragic result of this hostage-taking and the subsequent storming of the theater by special forces. (On good evidence, independent experts consider this a low estimate.) Most of the victims died from an unknown and rather mysterious gas that the special services used before storming the building. Many obvious questions remain unanswered. How could such a large group of terrorists, who were armed to the teeth, enter the hall without hindrance? Where did they live and make preparations for the seizure of hostages? Where did they store their weapons and prepare their explosives? Who planned the operation? Why were all the terrorists, without exception, killed after they were helpless and unconscious following the use of the gas? Was the report about taking two terrorists prisoner—a man and a woman—true? If so, why was nothing more heard about them? Why did some of the special forces participate in the attack without an antidote (to the poison gas)? Why were the medics unprepared to receive the victims and not informed about the type of gas employed? In the final analysis, how many people died? To say the least, everyone knows that the official figures for the number of dead were far from accurate.

  The mysterious gas responsible for the deaths during the “liberation” of the hostages deserves separate mention. Contrary to the official version and according to information in Novaia gazeta, what was employed in Dubrovka was not based on fentanyl, for which there is an antidote, but rather another inhalant anesthetic, phtorotan. (In the West it is called galotan.) It needs to be very carefully controlled since in its surgical state the drug quickly anesthetizes people and makes it very difficult for them to breathe, leading to asphyxiation and death. In the words of the newspaper’s medical expert, “Apparently, those who decided to employ phtorotan were impressed by its virtues: it does not ignite, it does not burn, it does not explode, as it does in its gaseous state.”9

  Much is explained by the whispered information that it was Putin who supposed
ly personally directed the operation to “liberate” the hostages of Nord-Ost. Moreover, the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya published an article in Novaia gazeta that in any country other than Russia would most likely have led to the fall of those in power. Politkovskaya demonstrated the complicity of the authorities in the tragedy and their role in aiding and abetting the terrorists. She managed to find out that one of the terrorists who had seized the theater and was later killed, according to various sources, was working in the Information Division of President Putin’s administration with spin doctor Sergei Yastrzhembskii and had associated with Vladislav Surkov.

  Politkovskaya and the editors of Novaia gazeta believed that a certain Khanpash Terkibaev was an agent dispatched by the special services to manage the terrorist act from within. It was Terkibaev who secretly secured the passage of the Chechen terrorists through Moscow to the Dubrovka theater, which he entered as a member of the terrorist detachment and then left before the attack commenced. In Politkovskaya’s words, “It was he who assured the terrorists that ‘everything is under control,’ ‘it’s full of scum,’ that ‘Russians have again taken money,’ and all you need to do is to ‘make a bit of a noise,’ and what will come out of it is a ‘second Budyonnovsk and that way we will secure peace, and then, after the assignment is fulfilled ‘they will let us go’—not all of us, but they’ll let us go.”10 It follows from this that the seizure of hostages in the theater was initiated and organized by someone from the special services.

  After Nord-Ost, Terkibaev became a “companion in arms” in President Putin’s administration and was supplied with “all the documents enabling him to travel freely everywhere he was needed,” thereby giving him access to the Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov and to Yastrzhembskii. He was even entrusted with engaging in negotiations, in the name of the Putin administration, with deputies of the Chechen parliament and escorting them, as the leader of the group, to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France.11

  An even more terrible terrorist act was the seizure on September 1, 2004, of a school in Beslan in southern Russia, where, contrary to preliminary official information claiming there were 354 hostages, independent sources said there were actually 1,200. The preliminary official version stated that more than 390 persons died. Others claim the authorities did not include 350 unidentified body parts in the number of victims. According to official data, 700 former hostages were hospitalized. More than 200 persons (the figure of 260 is also given) were also said to be missing. Excuse me—how can they be missing?

  Yet another cynical lie: tanks and flamethrowers were involved in storming the school. The preliminary official version failed to mention this. How can this action be called rescuing hostages? Who was saving them by employing inappropriate weapons? We should thank the people of Beslan who forced the authorities to acknowledge what would otherwise have been concealed. Yet something else has not been revealed—namely, who issued this criminal command. Most likely only an extremely cynical person endowed with enormous power could act so incompetently.

  Putin took advantage of this terrorist act to further suppress democracy and escalate his cruel policies. He issued an extremely pointed statement asserting that “weakness” was the cause for what had happened. (The weak get beaten, the head of state explained, using the logic of common hooligans.) Most important, Putin characterized the seizure of the school in Beslan as “an attack against Russia.” According to Putin, terrorism is an instrument for “tearing fat chunks” off of Russia. Russia was confronting a “total, cruel, and full-scale war.” The logical conclusion was that it was necessary to strengthen the authorities. (Toward this end, during the Chechen campaigns, the president did away with the direct election of governors.)

  Why then was it necessary to kill Aslan Maskhadov in March 2005? He was the most moderate and, at the time, the most legitimate Chechen leader. Was it so there would be no one with whom to sit down at the negotiating table? And why, for so many years after what was pronounced the victorious conclusion of the antiterrorist operation, did Shamil Basaev, the Chechen guerrilla leader, remain so elusive that the question arose as to whether he possessed some sort of safe conduct document? Later, according to a triumphal communiqué, he was supposedly killed by the FSB in July 2006, but no one was able to confirm this reliably.

  Finally, why did Putin, who unthinkingly preferred to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of his “subjects” and would not “even sit down at the negotiation table with terrorists,” personally and with evident pleasure, invite Hamas to Moscow in 2006, to the revulsion of the civilized world?

  Eliminating Undesirables

  One of the problems illegitimate states face is the frequent need to engage in cover-ups with respect both to specific individuals and to their own actions. Even so, sometimes what is secret becomes known. Another requisite is the need to deny actions and information that would harm the illegitimate entity and its officials.

  A unique situation developed in post-perestroika Russia. The instruments for suppressing and punishing dissenters and for forcing the people into conformity had been disbanded. At the same time, after the breakup of the USSR, wide-scale looting, sharp and unrestrained political struggles, and many other factors logically facilitated the natural elimination, including physical elimination, of persons whom the state or individuals in power considered undesirable.

  The journalist Dmitry Kholodov, who worked for the popular scandal sheet Moskovskii komsomolets (Moscow Komsomol member), was the first victim of a notorious political assassination. He died in an explosion in his office on October 17, 1994, when he opened an attaché case that supposedly contained important documents. According to the investigation, Kholodov was gathering materials for an article in which he intended to address corruption in Russia’s Western army group. He was scheduled to appear soon at parliamentary hearings on this question.

  If the elimination of Kholodov was likely intended to cover up the theft of military property and the involvement of various officials, the killing of opposition deputies in Russia’s State Duma was quite a different matter. Gen. Lev Rokhlin, who sharply criticized the situation in Russia, especially in the army, and demanded the dismissal of President Boris Yeltsin, was killed on the night of June 3, 1998. His widow was accused of his murder but was later cleared.

  Galina Starovoitova, one of Russia’s leading democratic activists and rights defenders and a candidate for president of the Russian Federation in 1996, was shot in the doorway of her house in St. Petersburg on the night of November 20–21, 1998.

  On August 21, 2002, Vladimir Golovlev was killed. He was one of five cochairmen of Liberal Russia, a party opposed to Putin that had been initially founded by Boris Berezovsky but later turned against him. In depositions he provided the Procuracy of the Chelyabinsk region regarding privatization in the district, Golovlev asserted that several well-known persons were involved in questionable dealings. Among them he named Anatoly Chubais and Viktor Khristenko, who held high posts in Russia. The mass media reported that in all about fifty persons had been named, including the entire leadership of the Chelyabinsk region in the 1990s and a number of high Kremlin officials.

  Sergei Yushenkov, a friend and comrade in arms of the previously assassinated deputies Golovlev and Starovoitova, as well as of the leader of Russian human rights activists Sergei Kovalev, was shot four times on April 17, 2003. An investigation did not rule out the possibility that the killing of the two deputies to the State Duma and the leaders of Liberal Russia, Yushenkov and Golovlev, were linked. The killing took place on the day that Liberal Russia, the party of which Yushenkov was a leader, officially announced it had completed registration with the Ministry of Justice and declared it was fully prepared for the elections. Yushenkov had charged that Putin had come to power as the result of a coup d’état, and he accused the special services of being involved in the apartment house explosions in Moscow and Volgodonsk in the fall of 1999.

  At least one more death fits the ca
tegory of political murder. On July 3, 2003, Yury Shchekochikhin, deputy chairman of the State Duma’s Committee on Security and deputy editor in chief of the opposition newspaper Novaia gazeta, died of a sudden and raging illness. According to the official version, the cause was a very rare acute allergic reaction, although Shchekochikhin had never suffered from allergies.

  All these are widely known, if partially forgotten, facts. But no one knows how many undesirable politicians and journalists in the country were killed, maimed, beaten, terrorized, or intimidated. Few also were aware of, or paid any attention to, any cases concerning the leakage of information about several interesting documents.12

  On February 13, 2004, the Kremlin executioners turned a new page in their history when the former vice president of Chechnya Zelimkhan Yandarbiev was killed in Qatar. In Doha the Qatari special services quickly arrested three Russian citizens who were on assignment there and accused them of the premeditated murder of Yandarbiev. One of them, an official of the Russian Embassy, was subsequently released. The court in Qatar sentenced the two others, who did not enjoy diplomatic immunity, to life sentences.

  Russian authorities were suspected of numerous attempts on the life of Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze. Russia was also the main suspect in the attempt on the life of Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who was hospitalized during the election campaign in September 2004. His doctors concluded that he had been poisoned with dioxin.