Origins of United Russia and the Putin Presidency: The Role of Contingency in Party-System Development, The

Demokratizatsiya, Spring 2004 by Hale, Henry E

Some observers have claimed that Kremlin insiders actually organized the apartment bombings as part of a sinister plot to make a new war in Chechnya popular and, thereby, transform Putin into a leader of irreproachable stature. Since a post-election falling-out with Putin, Berezovsky has championed the "FSB did it" interpretation, publicizing the account of a former FSB officer (Aleksandr Litvinenko) and a historian (Yury Felshtinsky). According to this story, the "smoking gun" was a strange false alarm in the city of Ryazan. On September 22, shortly after the Moscow bombings, three people later identified as FSB agents were seen placing a large sugar sack, the kind that had actually contained an explosive in the Moscow blasts, into the basement of an apartment complex in Ryazan. After the bomb was found and defused, FSB spokesmen announced that this had merely been a "test" and that the sack actually contained sugar. The Ryazan authorities who had seized the material, however, reported that the explosives and detonating device had been real.44 One thing remains unclear about the "FSB did it" interpretation: If the motive was to get an FSB-friendly man installed as president, why would the FSB have preferred Putin, a little-known "upstart" who had leapt to the post of FSB director through outside political channels, to Primakov, who was certainly senior in stature and pedigree and who was also widely reputed to have a KGB past? Another version, even more circumstantial, tries to link former "Privatization Tsar" Anatoly Chubais to both military intelligence and the explosions.45

Government officials have sought to pin at least indirect responsibility on Berezovsky himself. FSB director Nikolai Patrushev claimed to have evidence that Berezovsky had extensive economic dealings in Chechnya and the North Caucasus more generally, including the financing of Chechen separatists.46 A senior official in the office of the general prosecutor reported that his organization was investigating a possible role for Berezovsky in financing the August 1999 invasion of Dagestan by Chechen rebels as well as the kidnappings of Russian officials in Chechnya.47 Financier George Soros, based on his personal intcrprclalion of Berezovsky's operating style, even speculated that Berezovsky might have been behind the terrorist attacks themselves.48 Prosecutors, without making public any evidence of guilt, quietly secured the convictions of five men from the republic of Karachaevo-Cherkessiia for the bombings and closed investigations into the Ryazan incident, saying "nothing unusual" happened there.49

One other plausible scenario was advanced by Reddaway and Glinski, who argued that the most likely explanation pointed to the Dagestan Liberation Army, a tiny militant Islamic organization claiming to represent several small villages in Dagestan. Warnings reportedly had been issued prior to September 1999 that this group would resort to the use of explosives in Russia were anyone to encroach on their communities, which were occupied when the Russians repelled the Chechen warlords from Dagestan in early August 1999.50