Another clue hinting at the involvement of the FSB was an open letter, published on March 14, 2005, in the Novaya Gazeta. The open letter was written by Achemez Gochiyaev, a native of Karachaevo-Cherkessia in the North Caucasus, who was sought by the police in connection with the apartment bombings.[25] Gochiyaev told how, before the bombings, he had been contacted by a certain Ramazan Dyshekov, a former classmate, with a business proposal to sell mineral water. In order to stock the water, the other had told him, it was necessary to rent basements in apartment buildings in Moscow and Ryazan. After the second explosion in Moscow Gochiyaev sensed he had been trapped, suspecting that Dyshekov was an FSB agent. He called the police and gave the addresses of other buildings where basements were rented. That is how other explosions in Moscow were able to be prevented. In his open letter Gochiyaev accused the FSB of having organized the Moscow bombings and Dyshekov of being an FSB agent. He asked for an independent, international investigation.
THE DUMA INVESTIGATION COMMISSION
In such a serious situation, in which there are allegations that a government has used state terror against its own citizens, one would expect a government to do anything to clear its name and remove any doubt. “The idea that the secret services might have had something to do with the apartment bombings evoked indignation in Putin,” the Moscow Times wrote. “To even speculate about this is immoral and in essence none other than an element of the information war against Russia,” he was quoted as saying.[26] By qualifying investigation as speculation and speculating as immoral, Putin obviously wanted to block any serious investigation into the facts. The problem, however, was that the facts that had emerged revealed so many unsolved problems and contradictions that they only strengthened the rumors of involvement of the government and the secret services. A government that has nothing to hide would be anxious that a thorough and impartial investigation would take place, in which the investigators would be given full, complete, and unrestricted access to all documents and to any further information that they deemed relevant. However, it was not the government, but the Duma that established an investigation commission in 2002. On July 25, 2002, the members of the Duma Commission organized a teleconference from Moscow with Alexander Litvinenko, Yury Felshtinsky, and Tatyana Morozova, who were in London. The first two were the authors of the book FSB vzryvaet Rossiyu (translated in English with the title Blowing Up Russia), in which they accused the FSB of being behind the apartment bombings.[27] The president of the Duma Commission, Sergey Kovalyov (the former president of Yeltsin’s Presidential Human Rights Commission), complained that the government did not give the information requested and was hiding itself behind “state secrets.”[28]
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.
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]
25
“Ya khochu rasskazat o vzryvakh zhilykh domov” (I Want to Talk about the Apartment Bombings),
26
Quoted in Sarah Karush, “Hackers Attack Novaya Gazeta,”
27
Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky,
28
Cf. “Svedeniya Litvinenko o vrzyvakh zhilykh domov v Moskve” (Testimony of Litvinenko on the explosions of apartment buildings in Moscow), interview with Sergey Kovalyov by Tatyana Pelipeiko,
32
Arkadi Vaksberg,
33
Anastasia Kirilenko, “Putin’s Old Nemesis Speaks Out After Decade of Silence,”
34
Cf. Grigory Pasko, “Russia’s Disappearing Journalists,”
35
The
36
Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky,