by Masha Gessen
“Berezovsky would keep calling me and asking, ‘Isn’t he fucking amazing?’” she told me years later. “I would say, ‘Borya, your problem is, you have never known a KGB colonel. He is not fucking amazing. He is perfectly ordinary.’”
“I was curious, of course, to know who this guy was who was now going to run the country,” she told me. “So I got the sense he liked to talk and he liked to talk about himself. I’ve certainly spoken to many people who were more interesting. I had spent five years writing about the KGB: he was no better or worse than the rest of them; he was smarter than some and more cunning than some.”
In addition to the forbidding task of putting together a book in a matter of days, Natalia Gevorkyan wanted to use her time with the acting president to help a friend. Andrei Babitsky, a reporter for the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, had disappeared in Chechnya in January. He had apparently been detained by Russian troops for violating their strict embedding policy: during the first war in Chechnya the media had been sharply and consistently critical of Moscow’s actions, so this time around, the military banned journalists from traveling in the war zone unaccompanied by uniformed personnel. This policy not only hindered access to combatants on both sides but exposed journalists to danger: it is almost always safer, in a war zone, not to have a uniform on you or near you. The more enterprising reporters tried to circumvent the policy—and few were better at this than Babitsky, who had for years been reporting specifically on the North Caucasus.
For two weeks following his detention, Babitsky’s family and friends heard nothing from him. Rumor soon spread in Moscow’s journalist circles, however, that Babitsky had been seen in the infamous Russian prison of Chernokozovo in Chechnya. On February 3, the day after Gevorkyan and her colleagues began interviewing Putin for his biography, Russian officials announced that Babitsky had been exchanged for three Russian soldiers who had been held captive by Chechen combatants. The Russian officials claimed Babitsky had consented to the exchange, but this could hardly conceal the fact that Russian troops had treated a journalist—a Russian journalist—as an enemy combatant.
When Gevorkyan asked Putin about Babitsky, her question elicited what she later described as “undisguised hatred.” The acting president’s flattened affect momentarily broke, and he launched into a diatribe: “He was working directly for the enemy. He was not a neutral source of information. He worked for the outlaws…. He worked for the outlaws. So when the rebels said, ‘We are willing to free a few of your soldiers in exchange for this correspondent,’ our people asked him, ‘Do you want to be exchanged?’ He said, ‘I do.’ He does…. These were our soldiers. They were fighting for Russia. If we had not taken them back, they would have been executed. And they aren’t going to do anything to Babitsky there, because he is one of them…. What Babitsky did is much more dangerous than firing a machine gun…. He had a map of getting around our checkpoints. Who asked him to stick his nose in there if he wasn’t authorized by the official authorities?… So he was arrested and he became the object of an investigation. And he says, ‘I don’t trust you, I trust the Chechens, if they want to take me, you should give me to them….’ He got a response: ‘Then go, get out of here!’… So you say he is a Russian citizen. Then he should have acted in accordance with the laws of your country, if you want to be protected by these laws.”
Listening to this monologue, Gevorkyan grew convinced that the acting president had direct knowledge of Babitsky’s case. So she decided to be direct too. “He’s got a family, he has children,” she said to Putin. “You have to stop this operation.”
The head of state took the bait. “There will be a car arriving soon,” he said. “It will deliver a cassette tape, and you will see that he is alive and well.” Gevorkyan, who had maintained decorum throughout her many meetings with Putin, was momentarily shocked into rudeness. “Hello?” she almost screamed. “You handed him over to the outlaws. Is this what they told you?”
She excused herself to step outside the room to call a friend at Radio Liberty’s Moscow bureau. “Tell his wife he is alive,” she said.
“How do you know?” asked the friend.
“From the horse’s mouth,” Gevorkyan responded.
“Do you trust him?” the friend asked.
“Not really,” Gevorkyan admitted.
But a few hours later the friend called her back. “You are not going to believe this,” she said. “A car came, its license plate so dirty we couldn’t make out the numbers. They offered to sell us a videocassette tape and we paid two hundred dollars for it.”
The video, which Radio Liberty immediately released to all media, was a grainy recording of Babitsky, looking pale, exhausted, and sleep-deprived, saying, “This is February 6, 2000. I am relatively all right. My only problem is time, since circumstances are stacking up in such a way that, unfortunately, I cannot make it home right away. Here my life is as normal as it can be in conditions of war. People who are near me try to help me in some way. The only problem is, I would really like to go home, I would really like all of this to end finally. Please don’t worry about me. I hope to be home soon.”
In fact, Babitsky was being held under lock and key in a residential house in a Chechen village. He was indeed sleep-deprived, exhausted, and, most of all, terrified. He did not know who was holding him prisoner; he knew only that they were armed Chechen men who had every reason to hate Russians and no clear reason to trust him. He was unable to sleep, fearing as he went to bed every night that he would be awakened to be taken to his execution, and he greeted every morning hating himself for not yet having devised a way to escape or gathered the courage to attempt to break free. Finally, on February 23, he was placed in the trunk of a car, driven to the neighboring republic of Dagestan, given crudely forged documents, and released there—only to be arrested a few hours later by Russian police, who transported him to Moscow, where he would face charges of forgery for the documents he was carrying.
It soon emerged that there had probably been no exchange: there was no documented trace of it, or of the soldiers who had supposedly been handed over by the Chechens. Babitsky’s arrest, his televised handover to the enemy, and subsequent disappearance had all, it seems, been an effort to send a message to journalists. Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev told the media as much: Babitsky had been singled out, he said, because “the information he transmitted was not objective, to put it mildly.” He added, “I would happily have given ten Babitskys for a single soldier.” Putin had been in office for one month and already ministers were talking just like him—just as, it seems, they had been longing to talk for a while.
What Putin apparently did not expect was that what he viewed as meting out perfectly fair punishment would inspire outrage internationally. During his first month as acting president, Western leaders had acted much like the Russian people: they seemed so relieved that unpredictable, embarrassing Yeltsin was gone that they were willing to project their sweetest dreams onto Putin. The Americans and the British acted as though the outcome of the March election were a foregone conclusion. But now the Americans had no choice but to react: Babitsky was not simply a Russian journalist—he was a Russian journalist employed by a media outlet funded by an act of Congress. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright raised the issue in a meeting with Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov on February 4, and five days later the State Department issued a statement condemning the “treatment of a noncombatant as a hostage or prisoner of war.” The unexpected scrutiny and outrage probably saved Babitsky’s life. They also made Putin bitter and angry. He knew that what he was doing was just and that a man like Babitsky—someone who seemed not at all concerned about the Russian war effort and not at all ashamed to feel compassion for the enemy—did not deserve to live, or at least to live among Russian citizens. A conspiracy of bleeding-heart democrats had forced Putin to compromise. He had successfully beaten these kinds of people back in Leningrad, and he would do it again now.
“The B
abitsky story made my life easier,” Gevorkyan later told me. “I realized that this was how [Putin] was going to rule. That this is how his fucking brain works. So I had no illusions. I knew this was how he understood the word patriotism—just the way he had been taught in all those KGB schools: the country is as great as the fear it inspires, and the media should be loyal.”
Soon after this discovery, Gevorkyan left Moscow for Paris, where she still lives. Andrei Babitsky, as soon as he was able, left for Prague, where he continued to work for Radio Liberty. But in the year 2000, in the days leading up to the election, Gevorkyan said nothing publicly. Putin’s biography was published as he wanted it; even the impassioned and telling passage about Babitsky was cut, though it had made it into an advance newspaper excerpt. With few exceptions, Russians were led to persist in placing their faith in Putin.
ON MARCH 24, two days before the presidential election, NTV, the television network founded and owned by Vladimir Gusinsky—the same oligarch who owned the magazine where I worked—aired an hourlong program, in talk-show format before a live audience, devoted to the incident in the city of Ryazan the previous September when police responding to a call had found three bags of explosives under the stairway of an apartment building. Vigilant residents thought they had managed to foil a terrorist plan.
Just after nine that evening, September 22, Alexei Kartofelnikov, a bus driver for the local soccer team, was returning home to a twelve-story brick apartment building at Fourteen Novoselov Street. He saw a Russian-made car pull up to the building. A man and a woman got out and went in through a door leading to the cellar, while the driver—another man—stayed in the car. Kartofelnikov watched the man and the woman emerge a few minutes later. Then the car pulled right up to the cellar door, and all three unloaded heavy-looking sacks and carried them into the cellar. They all then returned to the car and left.
By this time, four buildings had been blown up in Moscow and two other cities; in at least one case, eyewitnesses later emerged saying they had seen sacks planted in a stairwell. So it is not surprising that Kartofelnikov tried to take down the license plate number of the car. But the part of the license plate signifying the region where the car was registered was covered with a piece of paper that had the number that stood for Ryazan on it. Kartofelnikov called the police.
The police arrived nearly forty-five minutes later. Two officers entered the cellar, where they found three fifty-kilogram sacks marked SUGAR stacked one atop another. Through a slit in the top sack, they could see wires and a clock. They ran out of the cellar to call for reinforcement and began evacuating residents from the seventy-seven apartments in the building while the bomb squad was on its way. They combed the building, knocking on all doors and ordering residents to exit immediately. People came outside in their pajamas, nightgowns, and bathrobes, not pausing to lock their doors: after weeks of watching news reports of apartment building explosions, everyone took the threat seriously. Several disabled people were wheeled outside in their wheelchairs, but several severely disabled people stayed inside their apartments, terrified. The rest of the residents would spend most of the night standing in the chilling wind outside their building. After a time, the manager of a nearby movie theater invited the residents to come in and even organized hot tea for them. In the morning, many of the residents went to work, though the police did not allow them to enter the building to wash up or get a change of clothes. At some point, many of the apartments were looted.
Even before all the residents had made it outside, the bomb squad had disabled the timer and analyzed the contents of the sacks. They concluded it was hexogen, a powerful explosive in use since World War II (in English-speaking countries it is more commonly known as RDX). It was also the substance used in at least one of the Moscow explosions, so the entire country had learned the word hexogen from an announcement made by the mayor of Moscow. The crudely made detonation mechanism contained a clock set for 5:30 in the morning. The terrorists’ plan was apparently exactly the same as in the Moscow explosions: the amount of explosive would have destroyed the building entirely (and possibly damaged nearby structures), killing all residents in their sleep.
After the bomb squad concluded that the sacks contained explosives, the city’s uniformed brass rushed to Fourteen Novoselov Street. The head of the local branch of the FSB addressed the residents, congratulating them on being born again. Alexei Kartofelnikov, the driver who had phoned in the suspicious people with their sacks, became an instant hero. Local officials praised him and the vigilance of ordinary people in general: “The more alert we are, the better we can fight the evil that has taken up residence in our country,” the first deputy governor told news agencies.
The following day, all of Russia talked only of Ryazan. In the terrifying reality in which Russians had been living for nearly a month, this seemed like the first bit of relatively good news. If the people mobilized—if they watched out for themselves, it seemed to say—they might be able to save themselves. Not only that, the terrorists might actually be caught: the police knew the make and color of the car, and Kartofelnikov had seen the people who unloaded the sacks. On September 24, Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo, looking gaunt and haunted, spoke at an interagency meeting devoted to the series of explosions. “There have been some positive developments,” said Rushailo. “For example, the fact that an explosion was prevented in Ryazan yesterday.”
But half an hour later, something entirely unexpected and perfectly inexplicable happened. The head of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, a former Leningrad hand whom Putin had brought in as his deputy at the secret police and then chose to replace himself when he became prime minister, spoke to reporters in the same building where the interagency meeting was taking place, and said that Rushailo was wrong. “First, there was no explosion,” he said. “Second, nothing was prevented. And I don’t think it was very well done. It was a training exercise, and the bags contained sugar. There were no explosives.”
In the coming days, FSB officials would explain that the two men and one woman who had planted the sacks were FSB officers from Moscow, that the sacks contained perfectly harmless sugar, that the whole exercise had been intended to test the alertness of the ordinary people of Ryazan and the battle-readiness of Ryazan’s law enforcement. Ryazan officials failed to cooperate at first but then confirmed the FSB story, explaining that the bomb squad had misidentified the sugar as explosives because its testing equipment had been contaminated through extensive use on real explosives in Chechnya. The explanations did little to calm fears or to convince anyone who knew anything about the way the FSB worked. It seemed unconscionable but not unimaginable that a couple of hundred people would be held outside, scared and cold, for an entire night for the sake of a training exercise: after all, the Russian secret police was not known for its considerate ways. What utterly defied explanation, though, was the fact that the local chapter of the FSB had not been informed of the exercise, or that the interior minister was allowed to embarrass himself in public a day and a half after the exercise—and after twelve hundred of his troops had been mobilized to catch the suspects as they fled Ryazan.
Over the course of six months, NTV journalists had pieced together the story, riddled as it was with inconsistencies, and now they presented it to the viewers. They tried to tread carefully. Nikolai Nikolayev, the host, began with the premise that what had happened in Ryazan had indeed been a training exercise. When a member of the audience suggested that it was time to put together the entire chain of events and ask whether the FSB had been involved in the August and September explosions, Nikolayev practically shouted, “No, we are not going to do that, we are not going to go there. We are talking only about Ryazan.” Still, the picture that emerged from the show was chilling.
Nikolayev had invited many of the residents of Fourteen Novoselov Street, including Kartofelnikov, to be in the studio audience. None of them believed the training exercise story. Then an audience member identified himself as a resident of
the Ryazan building and began saying he believed it was an exercise. The other residents turned to him incredulously and, within seconds, began shouting in unison that they did not know the man and he certainly did not live in their building. The rest of the FSB’s case was as unconvincing and as shoddily executed as the act of planting a fake resident in the audience. The FSB representatives could not explain why the initial tests showed the substance was hexogen, or why the local chapter of the FSB was unaware of the supposed exercise.
Watching the program, I thought back to the conversation I had had with my editor half a year earlier. In just six months, the limits of the possible had shifted in my mind. I could now believe the FSB had most likely been behind the deadly bombings that shook Russia and helped make Putin its leader. When the agency suddenly found itself on the verge of being exposed—when twelve hundred Ryazan policemen had set out on a manhunt, armed with detailed descriptions of the FSB agents who had planted explosives—the FSB quickly came up with the training exercise story: unconvincing, but sufficient to prevent the arrest of secret police agents by regular police. The deadly chain of explosions halted at the same time.
IT TOOK Boris Berezovsky much longer to acknowledge that the unthinkable was possible and even likely. I asked him about it almost ten years later. By this time he had personally funded investigations, books, and a film that built on and extended Nikolayev’s investigation, and had come to believe that it had been the FSB that terrorized Russia in September 1999. But he still had a very difficult time reconciling what he had thought was happening in 1999 with his later view of those events.
“I can tell you with absolute sincerity that at the time I was sure it was the Chechens,” he told me. “It was when I came here [to London] and started looking back that I eventually came to the conclusion that the explosions were organized by the FSB. And this conclusion was based not only on logic—not even so much on logic as on facts. But at the time I did not see those facts, plus I did not trust NTV, which belonged to Gusinsky, who supported Primakov. So I did not even pay attention. And it never even occurred to me that there was a parallel game to ours—that someone else was doing what they thought was right to get Putin elected. Now I am convinced that was exactly what was going on.” The “someone else” would have been the FSB, and the “parallel game” would have been the explosions, intended to unite Russians in fear and in a desperate desire for a new, decisive, even aggressive leader who would spare no enemy.
