The New Tsar (28 page)

“Wait a second, please,” he said. “I would like to drink to the health of those injured and to wish happiness to everyone present, but we have a lot of problems and big tasks ahead of us. You know it very well. You know the plans of the enemy. We know them, too. We know about the acts of provocation to be expected in the near future. We know in which areas we should expect them and so on. We have no right to allow ourselves even a second of weakness. Not a single second. For if we let our guard down, then those who died will seem to have died in vain. Therefore I suggest that today we put the glass back on the table. We will definitely drink to them, but later.”
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Putin’s flash visit was political theater from a political novice, but the contrast with Yeltsin was profound: youth and vigor versus age and infirmity. A dejected, divided nation could now relish a military victory, presided over by a prime minister most considered a little colorless, if they knew much about him at all. And yet Putin’s remarks also contained the seeds of caution—and, some believed, forewarning—that the conflict had not ended with Basayev’s retreat back into Chechnya.

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L
ess than a week later, on the night of September 4, an enormous explosion leveled a five-story building in Buinaksk, about forty miles south of Dagestan’s capital. The building housed Russian soldiers and their families, many of whom had settled in front of their televisions to watch a soccer match between Ukraine and France. The explosion, possibly a car bomb, killed sixty-four people. The next day Chechen militants again crossed into Dagestan, this time near Khasavyurt, the city where the peace accords ending the first war had been signed three years earlier. Yeltsin exploded in anger at a September 6 meeting of the Security Council. “How did we lose a whole district in Dagestan?” the president thundered. “This can only be explained by the carelessness of the military.”
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Yeltsin had extended sweeping authority to his new prime minister,
and after an initial success, disaster struck anyway. The predictions of Putin’s quick demise seemed prophetic.

Then, on September 9, the carnage of the Caucasus came to Moscow. Just after midnight, an explosion ripped through the center of a nine-story apartment complex at 19 Guryanova Street, not far from a wide bend in the Moscow River. The force of the blast, equivalent to hundreds of pounds of TNT, cleaved the wide rectangular building in two, as if it had been split by a giant ax. Those asleep inside were crushed in a burning pile of debris. At first investigators thought a gas leak might have been the cause, but by the next day officials began to suspect an act of terrorism, the worst ever in the Russian capital. An anonymous caller telephoned the Interfax news agency and said the explosions in Moscow and Buinaksk were deliberate acts of retaliation for the Russian strikes in Chechnya and Dagestan. The same or another caller, with “an accent of the Northern Caucasus,” had warned Deutsche Welle’s office in Moscow days
before
the explosion that there would be three bombings in the city to punish Russia. “If it is confirmed that this is a terrorist act, and everything is leading that way, we shall have to acknowledge that the echo of war in Dagestan is sounding in Moscow,” Mayor Luzhkov declared, pledging to tighten security.
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Ninety-four people died as a result of the bombing, and hundreds more were injured.

On September 11, even as emergency workers continued clearing the rubble from Guryanova Street, Putin flew to New Zealand to attend the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in place of the ailing Yeltsin. The forum gathers the leaders of twenty-one nations, and Putin’s attendance amounted to his debut on the international stage. The leaders were curious to meet Yeltsin’s fifth prime minister in the last eighteen months, though few expected he would last any longer than the others. The violence around Chechnya that summer had already raised alarms in the West, and President Clinton used his meeting with Putin to gently raise concerns about the humanitarian tragedy in the region and to urge a political resolution that could include allowing international observers on Russian soil. Putin began politely, expressing confidence that the strains over Kosovo earlier in the year were behind them and hoping for a mutual understanding of the shared threat of international terrorism. When Clinton pressed on Chechnya, though, “Putin’s mouth tightened, his posture stiffened and a hard-eyed look came over his face.”
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He drew a map on a napkin, explaining to Clinton the plans
that had already been drawn up for the limited incursion, halting at the Terek River. He stressed that the fighting in Dagestan was not merely an isolated raid, but the beginning of an invasion of Russia, supported by international terrorists, including Osama bin Laden. He told Clinton that Bin Laden, whose Al-Qaeda network had orchestrated attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania the year before, had financed Chechnya’s Islamic fighters and even visited Chechnya (though the Americans were never able to confirm that).
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Putin confided to the American president what he had not yet told his own countrymen: Russia’s military was about to intervene again in Chechnya.

Putin was still in New Zealand on September 13 when an explosion destroyed another apartment building, this time on Kashirskoye Highway in southern Moscow, not far from Guryanova Street. The death toll reached 118, and the country’s fear turned to hysteria. Reports of possible motives were confused and contradictory. Putin himself had hesitated after the first attack, stopping short of calling the bombing a terrorist attack. Now he reacted angrily, saying it was impossible to imagine that both bombings could be accidents. “Those who have done it cannot be called humans,” he said. “They cannot even be called beasts.”
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He cut short his first international visit as prime minister and returned to Moscow. Who exactly the beasts were, however, was far from clear. Dagestani extremists had reportedly claimed responsibility for the bombing in Buinaksk, but Chechen leaders, including Shamil Basayev, whose fighters were still in Dagestan, denied involvement in the Moscow bombings, even as Basayev reiterated his vow to carve an Islamic state out of Russia’s southern rump.
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A hardline Communist leader, Viktor Ilyukin, told Itar-Tass that the first attack was linked not to the Caucasus but rather to the political feuds between supporters of Yeltsin and Mayor Luzhkov. The bombings, he said, were a pretense to cancel the parliamentary elections scheduled for December. “Political hysteria is being fanned artificially,” he said.
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Aleksandr Lebed, now governor in Krasnoyarsk, told the French newspaper
Le Figaro
that the Chechens had little to gain from such attacks, but that Yeltsin and his “Family” did. “A goal had to be set—to create mass terror, a destabilization which will permit them at the needed moment to say: you don’t have to go to the election precincts, otherwise you will risk being blown up with the ballot boxes,” Lebed said.
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The panic in Moscow led to police checkpoints and sweeps that arrested hundreds of people for little other reason than appearing to
be from the Caucasus. Citizens mounted their own patrols. The police discovered seventy-six sacks of explosives in a shed at a building site in the Kapotnya district. The sacks, marked as sugar from a factory in Karachayevo-Cherkessia in the Caucasus, contained enough material to destroy several more apartment buildings.
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The discovery ended the bombings in Moscow, but on September 16, the fourth bombing of an apartment building occurred, this time in the southern city of Volgodonsk, hundreds of miles from either Moscow or Chechnya. The attack differed from the others only in the details. The blast happened at dawn when most people were home asleep. The explosives were loaded in a truck parked outside the building, rather than hidden inside, which might have minimized the damage. The force sheared off the facade of the building, but did not collapse it. This time seventeen people died. The death toll from the wave of terror had now reached nearly three hundred.

Russia’s limited air strikes inside Chechnya continued, but Putin now escalated the conflict. On September 23, Russian aircraft for the first time bombed deep inside the republic, striking Grozny’s airport and an oil refinery, which burned out of control because the local authorities had little equipment left to fight fires. The strikes were more punitive than strategic. The attack on the airport destroyed one of Chechnya’s two functional aircraft: an old biplane of no military significance. Putin, making an official visit to Kazakhstan, pledged that Russia would defend itself from “gangs of foreign mercenaries and terrorists,” but he insisted he did not plan a new war in Chechnya. When he was questioned about the purpose of the air strikes, his temper flared. The laconic manner that Russians had seen in their dour, ascetic new prime minister vanished. He sounded like a street fighter. His answer was blunt, his language salted with the slang of the underworld. “I am tired of answering these questions,” he responded testily. “Russian aircraft are only striking terrorist camps. We will go after them wherever they are. If, pardon me, we find them in the toilet, we will waste them in the outhouse.”
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I
t was a bombing that did not happen that called everything about the events that summer into question. On the evening of September 22, the night before Putin’s soon-to-be-famous remark about the outhouse, a bus driver who lived in Ryazan, southeast of Moscow, noticed a white Lada parked outside his apartment building. A young woman, clearly of Russian ethnicity, stood nervously at the entrance of the building,
on Novosyelovaya Street. A man sat inside the car. Soon another man emerged from the building, and the three drove away together. On edge because of the previous bombings, the bus driver called the police. Initially the police seemed uninterested, but when officers finally arrived, panic erupted. In the basement, a police corporal, Andrei Chernyshev, found three sacks marked sugar, just like the cache found in Moscow, and a device that appeared to be a detonator. A timer had been set for 5:30 in the morning. The police frantically evacuated the twelve-story building, while a local explosives expert, Yuri Tkachenko, was summoned to defuse the timer. He tested the substance in the sacks with a gas analyzer. It was not sugar, but a military explosive, hexogen, like one known to have been used in at least one of the Moscow bombings.
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By the next morning news reports announced that another catastrophic bombing had—miraculously—been averted.

The mood in Ryazan was not celebratory, but the residents and local police received praise. “I want to thank the population for their vigilance,” Putin said in televised remarks. As the city’s rattled residents contemplated what might have been, police investigators appeared to close in on the would-be bombers. They found the Lada abandoned in a parking lot and briefly stopped two men resembling those spotted outside the apartment building, but they showed FSB identification cards and were released. That evening a local telephone operator overheard a caller saying there was no way to get out of the city undetected. The voice on the other end of the line told them to split up and make their way out as best they could. The operator informed the police, and the police traced the call to Moscow. To their astonishment, the number belonged to the FSB.

By that evening, the FSB’s spokesman began was casting doubt on everything that had apparently happened in Ryazan, claiming that a preliminary test showed no explosive traces among the materials, which the FSB had by now confiscated and brought to Moscow. There had also been no detonator, he said, just parts of one. The next day, the FSB director, Nikolai Patrushev, spoke to reporters after attending an emergency government meeting to discuss the bombings. Patrushev, Putin’s KGB colleague from Petersburg, had followed his friend to Moscow and rose through the ranks with him. He took over as director of the FSB when Putin became prime minister in 1999 and remained one of his most trusted lieutenants. He declared that the entire episode in Ryazan had simply been a training exercise, meant to test preparations for a bombing exactly like those hitting Russian cities. He said the exercises had been
conducted in several cities—where they obviously did not work since nothing like Ryazan happened elsewhere—and complimented the city’s residents and police “for the vigilance they showed when they discovered these supposed explosives.”

“And at the same time,” he added, “I want to apologize to them.”
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Patrushev’s statement was reported straightforwardly by newspapers in Moscow and beyond, but it stunned and confused people in Ryazan. Perhaps the residents and the police would not be informed of a test of their vigilance, but even the local FSB department said it had no knowledge of any training; neither did the mayor or the governor or anyone else. The day-and-a-half delay in informing the city’s terrified residents seemed inexplicable, especially since the Interior Ministry had mobilized 1,200 officers in a dragnet to catch the suspects and search for more bombs. And the officers involved in defusing the bomb knew what they had seen. The FSB’s drill was either so convincing a test of preparedness in the face of terror or a hoax itself. That evening a caller telephoned Ekho Moskvy, then as now a radio station that encouraged reasonably open political discussion. Identifying himself as a security officer, though not giving his name, he expressed puzzlement over the FSB’s explanation. It seemed so improbable, he said, that people might start to think the FSB was somehow involved in all of the bombings.
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