Russia's 1999 apartment bombings: Buynaksk - Moscow - Volgodonsk - Ryazan
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The film was originally produced for NTV, the independent Russian television station that has since been taken over by the state.
Documentary film accuses FSB of 1999 bombings
13 March 2002
The Associated Press
MOSCOW - Hoping to shame the government into ordering an investigation, a small liberal party on Tuesday showed the Russian premiere of a film alleging the secret service organized four 1999 bombings that helped spark Moscow's second Chechen war and catapult Vladimir Putin to the presidency. The documentary, with the English title Assassination of Russia, focused on a murky episode in September 1999 following apartment house bombings in Moscow and two other cities that killed 300 people and provoked fears of a wave of Chechen terrorism in Russia.
The bombings, at intervals of three to four days, were blamed on Chechen rebels and inspired people across Russia to form volunteer patrols in their neighborhoods to prevent their homes from becoming the next targets.
On Sept. 22, 1999, residents of an apartment house in Ryazan, about 150 kilometers (90 miles) south of Moscow, noticed a car with falsified license plates parked outside. They alerted local police, who searched the basement and found large sacks that allegedly contained explosives and were connected to a timer. The previous bombings had involved similar-looking explosives disguised as sacks of sugar.
Residents of the building were evacuated, and officials expressed relief that another explosion had been averted.
However, Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Federal Security Service or FSB, later said that the sacks held only sugar, no explosives, and that they had been planted as part of an anti-terrorism training drill by his agency.
Many Russians, including the targeted building's residents, were convinced Patrushev was lying. They pointed to evidence that contradicted his account: The police sapper who inspected the sacks said they did not hold sugar, and the Ryazan branch of the Federal Security Service said before Patrushev's revelation that agents had found an apartment used by the plotters of the failed Ryazan explosion.
"There are still very many questions to which society has not received answers," Sergei Yushenkov, a legislator from the Liberal Russia movement, said at Tuesday's premiere. "To this day, we don't know who committed these crimes."
The 40-minute film contains at most circumstantial evidence of FSB culpability, but it raises the question of how much Putin knew. It intersperses footage of grieving survivors of the apartment blasts with shots of Putin's triumphal inauguration ceremony in March 2000.
In just seven months, Putin had risen from the head of the FSB to President Boris Yeltsin's fifth prime minister to president. Putin's soaring popularity was largely attributed to his tough handling of the Chechen war.
Yushenkov said that by showing the film, Liberal Russia was pushing for creation of a public commission to investigate the FSB's alleged involvement in the September 1999 bombings, and demonstrating the necessity of establishing controls over the security service, the main successor to the KGB.
The government has vehemently denied any connection to the bombings.
"I hope that the majority of parliamentary deputies will come to realize the necessity of creating a system of parliamentary control over the special services," Yushenkov said.
He also said Liberal Russia was trying to organize an appeal to the Constitutional Court to rule on the legality of then-President Yeltsin's secret decree of Sept. 23, 1999, declaring a start to the Chechen war.
The film was originally produced by French journalists for NTV, the independent Russian television station that was taken over by the state-controlled natural gas company last spring.
Much of the footage had previously been broadcast on an NTV investigative program, and it demonstrated how far the television station had gone in challenging the government. With all of Russia's television channels now under state control, such a film could hardly be made today.