Lesson 2

1. Reading and Speaking.

What is apartment bombing? When did a series of such bombings shock Russia? Read the text for detailes and say why and which investigation details differ or don’t agree?

2. Vocabulary. Read text 2 Russian apartment bombings and find the English equivalents of the following words and word combinations:

возложить вину на, в ответ, утверждать, узаконить, привести к власти, потребительство,

взрывчатые вещества, взрывать, траур по жертвам, сравнять с землей, осколки, обломки, незаконные военные формирования, улики, указывающие на; лишать полномочий, силовое решение, наносить авиаудар, спланировать, приговорить к пожизненному заключению, выдавать преступника другому государству, независимое расследование, не сработать (о взрывном устройстве),пересмотр дела.

3. Vocabulary. Contextualize the following vocabulary and give the Russian equivalents to the following word combinations:

led the country into the Second Chechen War, give credence to, siege, alleged that, indicated the presence, be underway, insurgent, an emergency readiness exercise, bring under heavy surveillance, the Russian domestic intelligence service.

Text 2. Russian apartment bombings

(abridged)

The Russian apartment bombings were a series of bombings in Russia that killed nearly 300 people and led the country into the Second Chechen War. They happened over a span of two weeks in 1999. The Russian authorities, directed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, blamed the bombings on Chechen separatists, and, in response, ordered the invasion of Chechnya. However, former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, Johns Hopkins University and Hoover Institute scholar David Satter, and Russian lawmaker Sergei Yushenkov asserted that the bombings were in fact a "false flag" attack perpetrated by the FSB in order to legitimate the resumption of military activities in Chechnya and bring Vladimir Putin and FSB to power.

The bombings

The first bombing, which did not target an apartment, occurred in Moscow, the Russian capital, on August 31, 1999. A bomb exploded in a mall, killing one person and leaving 40 others wounded. A note was left saying the bombing was a result of increasing Russian consumerism.

Buynaksk

On September 4, 1999, a car bomb detonated outside an apartment building housing Russian soldiers in the city of Buynaksk, in the province of Dagestan. Sixty-four people were killed and dozens of others were wounded. Russia blamed separatists from Chechnya, and days later invaded the province of Dagestan.

Moscow, Pechatniki

On September 8, 1999, 300 kg to 400 kg of explosives detonated on the ground floor of an apartment building in southeast Moscow. The nine-story building was destroyed, killing 94 people inside and wounded 150 others. A total of 108 apartments were destroyed during the bombing. A caller to a Russian news agency said the blast was a response to recent Russian bombing of Chechen and Dagestan villages in response to the invasion of Dagestan.

Moscow, Kashirskoye highway

September 13, 1999, was supposed to be a day of mourning for the victims of the previous bomb attacks. But on that day, a large bomb exploded at an apartment on Kashirskoye Highway in southern Moscow. The eight-story building was flattened, littering the street with debris and throwing some concrete hundreds of yards away. In all, 118 people died and 200 were wounded.

It was at this time when Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin declared a war against the "illegal military units" in Chechnya. Though there was not much evidence pointing to Chechens, preparations were made by the Russian military forces to re-enter the province and to strip the Chechen government of its powers.

Volgodonsk

The motive for the forceful solution was clinched when a truck bomb exploded September 16, 1999, outside a nine-story apartment complex in the southern Russian city of Volgodonsk, killing 17 people.

In response, Russia launched air strikes on Chechen rebel positions, oil refineries, and other buildings inside that province. By the end of September it was clear another war over Chechnya was underway, and by October Russian troops had entered the province. The attacks would not be the last in Russia or Chechnya.

Ryazan incident

Interior minister Vladimir Rushailo reports on a diverted apartment bombing attack in Ryazan. 24 September 1999. Putin would give the same explanation some time later.

On the evening of September 22, 1999, an alert resident of an apartment building in the town of Ryazan noticed strangers moving heavy sugar sacks into the basement from a car. Militia (the local police) were called to the site and all residents were evacuated. The first test of the powder from the sacks showed the presence of an explosive. All roads from the town were brought under heavy surveillance but no leads were found. A telephone service employee tapped into long-distance phone conversations managed to detect a conversation in which an out-of-town person suggested to take care and to watch for patrols. That person's number was found to belong to an FSB office in Moscow.

FSB director Nikolai Patrushev reports on an emergency readiness exercise in Ryazan. 24 September 1999, 30 minutes after Rushailo's report.

Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti declared that the incident was a training exercise forty-eight hours later. The original chemical test was declared inaccurate due to contamination of the analysis apparatus from a previous test. The public inquiry committee could not come to a complete conclusion on this and other incidents due to incoherent answers from federal bodies. The General Prosecutor's office has closed the criminal investigation of the Ryazan incident in April 2000.

Official investigation

According to the official investigation, the apartment bombings were planned and organized by Amir Khattab and Abu Umar, Arab militants fighting in Chechnya on the side of Chechen insurgents, both of whom were later killed. The planning was carried out in Khattab's guerilla camps in Chechnya, "Caucasus" in Shatoy and "Taliban" in Avtury.

This particular operation was led by an ethnic Karachay Achemez Gochiyayev. The explosives were prepared in Urus-Martan, Chechnya at the fertilizer factory by mixing hexogen, TNT, aluminium powder and nitre with sugar. From there they have been sent to a food storage facility in Kislovodsk which was managed by an uncle of one of the terrorists, Yusuf Krymshakhalov. Another conspirator, Ruslan Magayayev, had leased a KamAZ truck which the sacks were stored in for two months. After everything was planned, the participants were organized into several groups which transported the explosives to different cities. Most of the people participating were not ethnic Chechens.

Attempts at independent investigation

The Russian Duma rejected two motions for parliamentary investigation of the Ryazan incident. Duma, on a pro-Kremlin party block vote, voted to seal all materials related to Ryazan incident for the next 75 years and forbade an investigation of what really happened. An independent public commission to investigate the bombings chaired by Duma deputy Sergei Kovalev was rendered ineffective because of government refusal to respond to its inquiries. Two key members of the Kovalev Commission, Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin, both Duma members, have since died in apparent assassinations in April 2003 and July 2003 respectively. The Commission's lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin has been arrested in October 2003 to become one of the better-known political prisoners in Russia. Another member of the commission, Otto Lacis, was brutally beaten in November 2003 and two years later on 3rd of November 2005 dies in the hospital after a car accident.

Theory of FSB involvement

The Ryazan incident on September 22, 1999 prompted the initial speculation in the Western press that the Moscow bombings were organized by the FSB, the Russian domestic intelligence service.

The FSB were caught by local police and citizens in the city of Ryazan planting a bomb with a detonator in the basement of an apartment building at the address of 14/16 Novosyelov on the night of September 22, 1999. Explosives experts arriving at the scene found that the bomb tested positive for hexogen (i.e., RDX). On September 24, 1999, Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB, said on the NTV channel that the bomb in the basement of the apartment had been a dummy and that the FSB had been conducting a test. The FSB claimed that the gas analyzer that detected hexogen had malfunctioned, and that the substance in the dummy bomb was sugar.

In December of 1999 Robert Young Pelton interviewed GRU officer Alexei Galkin while in Grozny during the Russian siege. Galkin admitted to Pelton that the apartment bombing in Buynaksk was organized by a GRU team under general command of head of the 14th section of the Central Intelligence Office Lt. Gen. Kostechko and GRU director Valentin Korabelnikov. Pelton writes about this in his book Three Worlds Gone Mad. The interview was shown on CNN Turk and was presented to the Clinton Administration.

Yet, Yuri Tkachenko, the explosives expert who defused the bomb insisted that it was real. Tkachenko said that the explosives, including a timer, power source, and detonator were genuine military equipment and obviously prepared by a professional. He also said that the gas analyzer that tested the vapors coming from the sacks unmistakably indicated the presence of hexogen. Tkachenko said that it was out of the question that the analyzer could have malfunctioned, as the gas analyzer was of world class quality, costing $20,000 and was maintained by a specialist who worked according to a strict schedule, checking the analyzer after each use and making frequent prophylactic checks. Tkachenko pointed out that meticulous care in the handling of the gas analyzer was a necessity because the lives of the bomb squad's experts depended on the reliability of their equipment. The police officers who answered the original call and discovered the bomb also insisted that the incident was not an exercise and that it was obvious from its appearance that the substance in the bomb was not sugar.

Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent, alleged that agents from the FSB co-ordinated the apartment block bombings. On 29 December 2003 Russian authorities confiscated over 5000 copies of the book en route to Moscow from the publisher in Latvia. Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London in November 2006.

Boris Berezovsky supported a documentary film "FSB blows up Russia" ("An assault on Russia"?), financing 25% of the costs. The film accused Russian special services of organising the explosions in Volgodonsk and Moscow. According to research carried out by two French journalists, Jean-Charles Deniau and Charles Gazelle, the explosions were carried out by FSB to provide justification for the continuance of the Chechen War, which in turn helped Putin beat the communists in the presidential election of 2000. There is some doubt concerning Berezovsky's impartiality in this case, as he allegedly had extensive business dealings with Chechen rebels. However, nearly 40% of the Russians gave credence to Berezovsky's accusations at the time.

In April 2002 on a visit to Washington, Duma member Sergei Yushenkov pointed to a mysterious remark by the Duma speaker Gennady Seleznev, from which it appeared that Seleznev had known about one of the explosions three days before the fact. In fact, Seleznyov was referring to an unrelated explosion which indeed happened in Volgodonsk three days earlier.

On May 20, 2004, an article in the Los Angeles Times described the conviction on an unrelated state secret charge of Mikhail Trepashkin, appointed by a public committee, set up by four members of the Russian parliament, to investigate the bombings. Trepashkin was arrested shortly before he was to make his findings public. The article states that FSB agent Vladimir Romanovich was identified by several witnesses as the man who rented the basement of one of the bombed buildings; Romanovich subsequently died in a car crash in Cyprus. Trepashkin's wife declared that his conviction was punishment for publicizing uncomfortable truths about the bombing.

Among Western scholars, the theory of FSB involvement in the bombings has been championed by David Satter, the former Financial Times correspondent in Moscow, in his book Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State ISBN 0-300-09892-8, published by Yale University Press.

3. Work in pairs. Make up 6 true or false statements based on the content of the article. Use them to check whether your partner understands of the facts correctly.

4. Speaking. Talk about another recent apartment bombing:

• When and where did the bomb explode?

• Where was the explosive device planted?

• How many people were killed or wounded?

• Who was blamed on for the apartment bomding?

• Did any person/ group or organization take responsibility for the attack?

5. Writing. Write a brief summary of the article (or a part of it) using the active vocabulary from exercises 1, 2.

Additional Reading 1.2.