Putin in Moscow: The Rise to Power and the 1999 Apartment Bombings
This article covers Vladimir Putin’s remarkable rise to the Russian presidency after he moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow and discusses the controversial 1999 Moscow apartment bombings. It is the seventh installment in the series “Vladimir Putin, Russia, and the Road to the 2016 American Election.” While it is not necessary to read the previous entries, it is recommended.
The first article provides a brief history of Russia’s intelligence services and a definition of “Disinformation” and “Active Measures.”
The second article describes Vladimir Putin’s early life and his experiences as a KGB Officer in Russia and East Germany.
The third article describes how elements of the KGB laundered billions of dollars of Communist Party money into the West as the USSR collapsed.
The fourth article describes the rise of the post-Soviet oligarchic system and the role Eurasian organized crime played in facilitating it.
The fifth article covers Putin’s tenure as Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg and his enduring relationship with organized crime.
The sixth article covers the organized crime and intelligence service links to the Bank of New York money laundering scandal.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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In 1996, Anatoly Sobchak, Vladimir Putin’s boss and the mayor of St. Petersburg, faced a difficult reelection campaign. After years of crime, corruption, and recession, there was widespread disillusionment among voters with both his leadership and democracy itself. To make matters worse, both Sobchak and Putin were under investigation.
Yuri Skuratov, the Prosecutor General in Moscow, was looking into corruption in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office. In particular, investigators examined the murky privatization of apartments in the city that went to members of Sobchak’s family and other officials in the mayor’s office, including Putin.
Putin and Sobchak were convinced that the prosecution was politically motivated. Matters went from bad to worse when Sobchak lost the election to one of his deputies and, as a result, lost immunity from criminal prosecution. In addition to Skuratov’s investigation of Sobchak, there were several ongoing investigations into Putin by local authorities in St. Petersburg. Under pressure, Putin needed to find a way back into the corridors of power.
After Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection, a shuffling of positions in the cabinet led to a power struggle. Putin was invited to Moscow and secured a position in the Presidential Property Management Department. The department, led by Pavel Borodin, a Siberian drinking buddy of Yeltsin’s, managed over $600 billion worth of the Kremlin’s assets.
The position gave Putin access to the inner circle around Yelstin, known as “The Family.” It did not appear to keep Putin particularly busy, and during his time there he wrote a dissertation on the economics of natural resources, portions of which were plagiarized from an American text book on the subject.
While in Moscow, Putin maintained his relationships in St. Petersburg. In particular, he displayed loyalty to the much troubled Anatoly Sobchak that didn’t go unnoticed by Yeltsin. Sobchak was faced with being criminally indicted. Several of his subordinates in the mayor’s office had already been arrested on bribery charges.
Prosecutors attempted to serve him with a summons for an interrogation. When he was finally arrested and interrogated, things became so heated that Sobchak claimed to fall ill and was taken from the interrogation room straight to the hospital. Sobchak’s wife claimed that he suffered a heart attack, though few believed her.
Sobchak stayed in the hospital for a month. Prosecutor General Skuratov’s patience wore thin and he arranged for Moscow based doctors to examine Sobchak to determine if he was fit for interrogation. However, before any of this could happen, Putin returned to St. Petersburg and had Sobchak transferred to a different hospital under the care of a physician who had once treated Lyudmila Putina. Several days later, Putin chartered a flight that whisked Sobchak and his wife to Finland and eventually onto Paris, safely away from the clutches of investigators.
Putin’s role in helping Sobchak flee the country was most likely illegal. However, to Boris Yeltsin, it was a display of loyalty at great personal risk and worthy of admiration.
It is quite possible that this one act did more for Putin’s political career than anything else for the simple reason that Yelstin and those around him would soon grow terribly afraid that they themselves would be prosecuted upon leaving office. Putin’s loyalty, whether legal or not, was seen by Yeltsin as perhaps his defining quality.
Yeltsin’s second and final term in office was even more turbulent and corrupt than his first. The alliance of convenience between the Seven Bankers who banded together in 1996 during the reelection campaign failed to last even a year.
By 1997, the seven most powerful oligarch’s in the country were back at eachothers throats, competing to scoop up the few industries left to be privatized. To make matters worse, in 1998 Russia was struck by a terrible financial crisis that led to the devaluation of the ruble and to the country defaulting on its debt.
Under pressure from the Clinton administration, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had poured billions of dollars of loans into the Russian economy in the lead up to the 1996 election in order to improve the chances of Yeltsin’s reelection.
During this period, the Russian Central Bank established through a Paris-based intermediary an obscure offshore shell company known as Financial Management Company Ltd (FIMACO) based in Jersey, a Channel Island tax haven located off the United Kingdom. Between 1993 and 1998, tens of billions of dollars passed through the account.
The Central Bank’s chairman later admitted this was done to hide money from Russia’s creditors, though others thought it was another scheme to enrich insiders and provide them a way to launder money overseas. Of an $800 million dollar IMF loan provided to Russia in 1993, $500 million was transferred to FIMACO. The United States Government and the IMF were aware of these off-shore scams as they were happening.
While Putin was at the Presidential Property Management Department (PPMD), a bribery scandal involving Yelstin and his daughters erupted into an international incident. Pavel Borodin, head of the PPMD, awarded a series of lucrative contracts to repair a palace and several other Kremlin owned buildings to a Lugano-based, Swiss construction company called Mabatex.
In order to win the contracts, Mabatex appeared to bribe officials at the highest levels of the Russian government. In late 1995, it was discovered that Mabatex’s founder had transferred $1 million to a Budapest bank account linked to Yeltsin. Mabatex further purchased Yeltsin two yachts which were flown by Russian military aircraft from Marseilles to St. Petersburg.
Yeltsin, his two daughters and numerous other Russian officials, including Pavel Borodin, were provided credit cards by Mabatex. It is estimated that the company poured between $10 and $15 million into various credit cards and bank accounts.
The Mabatex scandal was blown open by a whistleblower from the Swiss bank Banco del Gottardo. Or so it seemed, until Catherine Belton uncovered that the so-called whistleblower Felipe Turover was in fact a former KGB foreign intelligence officer who had worked with Putin on the Oil-for-Food scandal.
The supposed Mabatex scandal was a scheme by the Russian intelligence services to frame and eventually oust Yeltstin, replacing the President of Russia with one of their own. Turover, worked as Banco del Gottardo’s debt collector in Russia and provided Swiss Prosecutor General Carla del Ponte with documents and testimony that implicated a largely clueless Yeltsin and his family in the bribery scheme.
The Kremlin’s Game of Thrones: Putin Ascends the Ladder of Power and Confronts a Prosecutor
As these scandals became public and chaos engulfed the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin moved up the ladder of power. After spending less than a year at the Presidential Property Management Department, Putin was made the head of the Main Control Directorate, the body meant to ensure that federal laws, executive orders and presidential instructions were being properly implemented.
While there, Putin was in charge of the documents related to the Salye Commission which investigated his corrupt activites in St. Petersburg. No further investigations were conducted into the scandal from that time forward. This was also the time in which Putin arranged for Anatoly Sobchak to escape to Paris.
Turmoil and a revolving door in the Yelstin cabinet provided Putin with opportunities impossible at any other time.
Fearing for his political future, Yeltsin relieved one of his Prime Ministers and a potential contender in the fast approaching election, Viktor Chernomyrdin. His replacement, a 35-year old banker named Sergei Kiriyenko, learned of his appointment the morning it was announced. In the shakeup, Putin was promoted, this time to first deputy director of the presidential administration. He occupied the position for two months.
Yeltsin had grown concerned over the power and independence of the FSB, as it had the power to investigate him and his family. In order to gain further control over the agency, Yeltsin appointed Putin as its head on July 25th, 1998.
Though Putin claimed not to be aware of the appointment until the day it was offered to him, he wasted no time in putting his new position to good use. He immediately offered high-level positions to personal friends from his days in the KGB and St. Petersburg. He then eliminated two internal agencies charged with investigating economic crimes, thus offering significant relief to many of the figures in the Yeltsin administration under scrutiny and his allies in organized crime.
In the wake of the financial crisis that had engulfed the nation, Yeltsin was forced to change Prime Minister’s again, this time replacing Kiriyenko with Yevgeny Primakov, the former head of the Foreign Intelligence Service. Though Yeltsin had wanted to return one of his previous Prime Minister’s to the job, his relationship with the Russian legislative body the Duma had deteriorated so far that he had to settle for Primakov as they refused to ratify anyone else. At the time, Yelstin was facing potential impeachment inquiries.
Primakov established his independence and determination to strike back against corruption and the oligarchs by authorizing investigations into “The Family” and arguably the most powerful oligarch at the time, Boris Berezovsky.
Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov opened investigations into FIMACO, Berezovsky’s defrauding of the airline Aeroflot and the Mabatex affair. Skuratov was in communication with the Swiss Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte and in early 1999 Swiss law enforcement raided Mabatex headquarters in Lugano while Russian officers raided Aeroflot’s offices in Moscow. The noose around “The Family’’ was tightening.
Yeltsin and his lieutenants believed that Primakov was positioning himself to take over the Presidency in 2000, when the Constitution mandated that Yeltsin leave office. Primakov was busily solidifying his support base in parliament and had entered into a political alliance with the popular but corrupt mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov.
After the corruption and economic disasters of recent years, Yeltsin’s approval ratings had plunged to single digits. It was widely feared within “The Family” that they would be prosecuted and imprisoned upon Yeltsin leaving office. To make matters worse, Skuratov’s investigations were rapidly proceeding.
In early February, a tape emerged that purportedly showed Skuratov at a sauna linked to the Solntsevskaya having sex with two prostitutes. The circumstance gave every appearance of being a honey-trap orchestrated Russian intelligence.
Yeltsin officials, who received a copy before it went public, confronted Skuratov with the tape in early February of 1999, less than a month after his investigations into Yeltsin’s inner circle had picked up steam. Skuratov wrote a letter of resignation and promptly checked himself into the hospital. Yeltsin accepted Skuratov’s resignation for the ostensible reason of poor health, but no one believed that explanation.
Skuratov may have submitted his resignation, but he wasn’t quite ready to quit yet. According to the Russian constitution, the only authority that could accept the resignation of a Prosecutor General was the Federation Council. The council would have to convene and vote on the matter and he would be given the opportunity to make a case before them.
Putin, in his capacity as head of the FSB, met with Skuratov on several occasions. The first was in Skuratov’s hospital room. Putin explained that the “Family” was pleased with his resignation and would be offering him an ambassadorship as a reward. Skuratov refused the offer and explained that he wanted to continue the work he was doing as Prosecutor General.
Putin spoke with Skuratov again shortly after he had left the hospital. During the call Putin attempted to sympathize with the prosecutor, bizarrely suggesting that he had heard rumors that a similar tape of himself existed and that it would be best for all concerned if he stepped down from his position.
When this failed to shake Skuratov’s resolve, Putin indicated that he possessed documents that were of an incriminating nature regarding Skuratov’s apartment in Moscow. Putin also suggested that it was his investigation into Pavel Borodin and Mabatex that was concerning “The Family” the most.
Skuratov remained unbowed.
When the Federation Council gathered to vote on the question of his resignation, Skuratov stood before the body in evident good health and claimed that he had been made to resign under duress, though not mentioning anyone in the Yeltsin camp by name.
Before the vote, Kremlin sources circulated copies of the tape to members of the Council. Disgusted by the clumsy attempt at blackmail, the Council voted to reject Skuratov’s resignation. A few hours later, the tape aired on Russian state television.
The next day Skuratov met Yeltsin face to face in the hospital room where Yeltsin was recovering from one of his many ailments. Putin and Primakov were present. Yeltsin again demanded he resign, suggesting that if he did so the sex tape would stop airing on television.
Putin watched the interaction in silence. Cornered, Skuratov again signed the resignation papers. However, he wasn’t about to go out without a fight. As he left the hospital, he called the press and made the Mabatex investigation public. Putin again emerged as a key ally. Shortly after the confrontation at the hospital, Putin publicly announced that the FSB had verified the authenticity of the sex tape.
From mid-to-late 1999, events of seismic significance in Russian politics occurred at a blistering and often confusing pace.
Regarding the fate of Skuratov, Yeltsin and the Federal Council went back and forth, with Yeltsin forcing his resignation and the Council repeatedly rejecting it.
In addition to battling with his own Prosecutor General, Yeltsin dismissed his Prime Minister and perceived rival Yevgeny Primakov and replaced him with his third Prime Minister in less than a year, Sergei Stepashin. Stepashin lasted less than two months. Days later, Yeltsin barely survived an impeachment vote in the Duma led by the Communist party.
On August 9th, 1999, Sergei Stepashin was replaced as Prime Minister by Putin. Yeltsin went a step further and publicly named him as his designated successor to the Presidency.
Putin’s ascent to the loftiest heights of the Russian power structure was aided by a set of strong alliances he had established with members of “The Family” and by the fact that they were in a desperate situation. There was both a parliamentary and presidential election just a few months away. Yeltsin and the oligarchic circle around him were profoundly unpopular.
To make matters worse, former Prime Minister Primakov and the mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov were now actively campaigning against Yeltsin and were increasingly favored to win the election.
“I don’t like election campaigns,” Putin admitted to Yeltsin upon being told he was now the heir apparent. “I really don’t. I don’t know how to run them, and I don’t like them.”
Yeltsin assured Putin there was already a structure in place to support his candidacy. In addition to positive coverage on state TV, Boris Berezovsky placed the full weight of his independent channel behind supporting Putin and attacking Primakov and Luzhkov.
Berezovsky also conceived of a new political party, Unity, which made Putin its standard bearer. However, none of these efforts could guarantee Putin victory. It was during this time that some of the most mysterious, terrifying and still currently unexplained events in Russian political history unfolded.
The September 1999 Moscow Apartment Bombings
In 1999, at a critical moment at which Putin sat at the threshold of power, a series of mysterious bombings tore across Russians. At the time, these were some of the worst terrorist attacks in history. Ever since, journalists, dissidents, and others have speculated as to who was behind the atrocities. Due to a number of unexplained and suspicious events surrounding the bombings, and the remarkable rise in political fortunes Vladimir Putin experienced in their aftermath, there has been persistent allegations that the attacks were false flag events orchestrated by elements of the Russian state, most likely involving the FSB itself.
In his recently published biography of Vladimir Putin, the British journalist and author opens his book by dismissing this explanation, writing that “factual evidence of Russian state involvement is absent” and described the idea that the FBS was behind the attacks as “almost certainly false.”
To support his viewpoint, Short offers quotes from two Western intelligence officials who worked on Russia issues at the time, Mark Kelton and Richard Dearlove of the CIA and M16, respectively.
There are reasons to be cautious regarding Kelton and Dearlove’s assertions. According to former CIA officer Robert Baer’s book The Fourth Man, the CIA’s intelligence capacities in the 1990s regarding Russia was in tatters due to Russian intelligence penetration of the CIA.
What isn’t under dispute is the fact that the issue remains hotly contested. Other esteemed journalists, dissidents, and scholars who, in some cases, were in Moscow at the time and addressed the issue at far greater length than Short, have arrived at the opposite conclusion.
Let us examine just some of the evidence available.
On June 6th, 1999, the Moscow correspondent for the Swedish publication Svenska Daglabet reported that a group within the Russian power structure that was considering, “terror bombings in Moscow which could be blamed on the Chechens.”
David Satter, the Moscow correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, was told by “a Russian political operative who was well connected to the higher levels of Russian power,” that there were serious fears within the Kremlin that Yelstin was going to lose the election and that rumors abounded that Moscow would shortly be the scene of a serious provocation.
Satter’s source went on to say that if the matter wasn’t resolved, “they will blow up half of Moscow.”
In June 1999, for reasons never publicized, Russian military forces began to amass on the border of Chechnya, an Islamic, breakaway Russian province that had been the scene of a bloody and inconclusive war in 2004. This was a curious development, as earlier that spring Russian forces were withdrawn from the neighboring province of Dagestan.
On August 7th, two days before Putin was made Prime Minister, a Chechen force of Islamic militants under the leadership of Shamil Basaev and an Arab jihadist under the nom de guerre Khattab invaded Dagestan. The incursion was fought by local police units and withdrew after two weeks.
The day after the incursion, the Russian investigative weekly Versiya published an article claiming French intelligence had tipped them off to a meeting that took place at a villa between Nice and Monaco between Aleksandr Voloshin, head of the Presidential administration, and the Chechen commander Basaev.
Further inquiries by the investigative journalist Boris Kagarlitsii confirmed that such a meeting took place.
John B. Dunlop, former acting director of Stanford University’s Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and author of the most extensive investigation into the 1999 bombings, wrote, “a representative of one of the French intelligence organizations, whose identity is known to me, subsequently confirmed to an experienced Western academic that French intelligence does indeed possess intelligence that roughly coincides with what Boris Kagarlitskii wrote.”
According to a senior official in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, had the troops not been withdrawn earlier the Chechens could have easily been repelled.
A special-ops commander fighting in Dagestan at the time told Time Magazine that Russian forces had Basaev in their sights during his retreat and were poised to engage him but were ordered by Moscow to stand down.
“We just watched Basaev’s long column of trucks and jeeps withdraw from Dagestan back to Chechnya under cover provided by our own helicopters,” The commander told Time. “We could have wiped him out then and there, but the bosses in Moscow wanted him alive.”
On August 31st, a small bomb exploded at Manezh Square in Moscow, killing one bystander and injuring thirty others. An anonymous individual claiming to represent the Dagestan Liberation Army took credit for the bombing. As car bombs had been a normal means of mob-related assissination in Moscow, most Muscovites shrugged it off.
Nikolai Patrushev, a close friend of Putin’s who had replaced him as head of the FSB, told a Russian paper, “there is no basis for a more intense regime because of the bomb at Manezh Square.”
Following the Chechen withdrawal, the Russian military responded with an indiscriminate bombing campaign of an entirely separate part of Dagestan from where the earlier fighting had been that killed up to 1000 civilians.
The bombing raids spurred the Chechens to reinvade Dagestan.
At 9:40pm on September 4th, 1999, the day of the Chechen invasion and less than a month after Putin had been appointed as Yeltsin’s successor, an explosion from a truck bomb tore through a five-story apartment building housing Russian soldiers in the Dagestani city of Buinaksk. 64 men were killed instantly and dozens others were buried in the rubble.
A few hours later, another bomb-laden truck was discovered and diffused within the city that contained over 6,000 pounds of explosives.
The Buinaksk bombing took place in Dagestan, which was a warzone at the time, and the victims were soldiers. As a result, initial public reaction in Russia was muted.
On September 9th, a bomb detonated in the basement of an apartment building at 19 Guryanova Street, located in a working class neighborhood in Moscow. 100 Russian civilians were either immolated or crushed by debris from the collapsing building, 690 were injured.
That same day, a liberal member of the State Duma, Konstantin Borovoi was provided with a document by rogue members of Russian military intelligence warning of future attacks. Borovoi attempted to provide the information to the Russian security establishment but was rebuffed by the FSB. No additional preventative measures were taken.
At 5am on September 13th, five days after the Guryanova St. bombing, a 9-story building located at 6 Kashirskoye Highway was detonated, killing 124 of its sleeping residents.
Later that morning, with much of Russia in an uproar, the speaker of the State Duma Gennady Seleznev stood and made an announcement that an apartment building had been bombed the night before in the Russian city of Volgodonsk.
Three days later, a truck bomb killed eighteen more Russian civilians when it destroyed the facade of a 9-story apartment building. This time the bombing did take place in Volgodonsk.
According to Philip Short, Seleznev was referring to a smaller explosion that took place on the 12th in Volgodansk that killed one person.
Less than a week later, on September 22nd, Aleksei Kartofelnikov was returning to his apartment in the city of Ryazan, 120 miles south of Moscow. Kartofelnikov, a bus driver for the local soccer club, had spent the day at his dacha tending to his vegetable garden.
At 8:30 pm he parked his car and walked back to his 12-story brick apartment building at 14/16 Novoselov St. As he approached, he noticed a white Russian vehicle pull up and park next to the entrance of the building’s basement.
Curiously, its license plates were covered by a pieces of paper, on which someone had written a local Ryazan registration code. As he approached the entrance, Kartofelnikov noticed a young woman glancing back and forth suspiciously.
Kartofelnikov, disturbed as most Russians were at the time by the campaign of terror unfolding in the streets, was unsettled. Upon returning to the apartment he shared with his 24-year-old daughter Yulia, he decided to call the police.
As Kartofelnikov repeatedly tried to get through to the local police station, Yulia stepped out onto the balcony and watched as a man exited the basement and glanced around before rejoining two others in the car which promptly left the scene. Their suspicions deepened and they weren’t alone.
Another resident of 14/16 Novoselov St., 53-year old radio engineer Vladimir Vasiliev, was also watching the three strangers. He got a good look at them as they returned to their car.
Vasiliev described them as two men and one woman between the ages of 20 and 25 who didn’t appear to be Chechen but rather possessed distinctively Russian physical characteristics.
A piece of paper covering one their license plates had fallen off and as they pulled away Vasiliev noted that the plate was actually from Moscow. Vasiliev promptly called the local police station.
Philip Short sees this clumsy attempt at covering the license plate as evidence suggesting that the operation couldn’t have been conducted by elements of the FSB.
When the police arrived 45-minutes later, they were hesitant to enter into the basement as it was used as a toilet by local derelicts. However, two officers eventually walked down to inspect. They emerged moments later in a state of alarm shouting that there was a bomb.
A call was put in to the local bomb squad and the officers immediately evacuated every man, woman and child from the building with the exception of a few invalids who were unable to be moved.
Panic spread quickly throughout the entire city and soon residents of other buildings were pouring out into the streets as well.
Yuri Tkachenko, head of the local bomb squad, arrived within minutes. The residents of the building watched nervously as he made his way down into the basement.
Tkachenko approached three fifty pound sacks filled with a white substance, all connected by a timed detonator set to go off at 5:30 am. Tkechenko disarmed the device and used a portable gas analyzer to test the substance within the sacks. They tested positive for hexogen, a Russian produced military grade explosive.
The sacks were taken from the scene by the FSB at around 1:30 am, but in an oversight they had left the detonator with the local bomb squad.
On the morning of the 23rd, Russians woke up to the nationwide media reporting that an attempted apartment bombing in the city of Ryazan had been averted by vigilant residents and local authorities.
Alexander Sergeev, the head of the Ryazan branch of the FSB, went on television and congratulated the local residents for preventing a terrorist attack.
Putin issued a brief statement in which he said, “If the sacks which proved to contain explosives were noticed, then there is a positive side to it.”
His statement was followed by that of the Chief of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Vladimir Rushailov, who heaped praise upon the local Ryazan authorities for thwarting an attempted terrorist attack.
Using the eye-witness accounts of the Kartofelnikov’s and Vasiliev, local police developed composite sketches of the three suspects. A manhunt ensued, the local airport and railways were cordoned off and roadblocks were erected on all the streets leaving Ryazan. The suspect’s car was discovered abandoned in a local parking lot.
Shortly thereafter, a Ryazan operator connected a call from a local public phone to Moscow. The voice on the Ryazan end of the line explained that there was no way to get out of town without being detected. The voice from the Moscow end of the line instructed them to, “[s]plit up and each of you make your own way.”
The operator reported the call to the police, who proceeded to trace the call back to FSB headquarters in Moscow.
On the evening of the 23rd, the three suspects were apprehended. Upon being captured, they produced FSB identification cards.
Shocked, local Ryazan authorities were then contacted by FSB headquarters in Moscow and instructed to release the detained bombing suspects. They were released from custody and vanished without ever facing charges or public scrutiny.
On the 24th, the head of the FSB and close Putin ally from St. Petersburg, Nikolai Patrushev, made a surprise announcement in which he explained that the incident at Ryazan was in fact an FSB training exercise. The sacks, he further explained, had been filled with sugar. Local residents, police officers and the Ryazan FSB reacted with incredulity and outrage.
The overall impact of the September terrorist campaign had a frightened and vengeful Russian public baying for blood.
On September 23rd, the day after the Ryazan incident, Yeltsin issued an illegal decree authorizing the army to resume operations in Chechnya. The Russian constitution forbids the use of the Russian military against its own territory. Within hours, Russian warplanes began bombing the airport and oil refineries in and around Grozny, the capital of Chechnya.
The second Chechen war had begun.
As the planes began their bombing runs, Putin took center stage. From this point on he would be on all the major television stations on a nightly basis. After praising the vigilance of the citizens of Ryazan, mere hours before Patrushev would claim the event was a training exercise, Putin directed his ire toward the alleged Chechen terrorists. Putin’s barbed rhetoric, dripping with vulgarity and identifiable gangster slang, proved wildly popular.
“We will hunt them down,” Putin snarled. “Wherever we find them, we will destroy them. Even if we find them on the toilet. We will rub them out in the outhouse.”
By the end of the month, 24 regional governors sent Yeltsin a letter requesting that he step down so that Putin could take his place. Yeltsin then ceded full control over the war effort to his heir apparent.
On the first day of October, Putin ordered a full ground invasion of Chechnya. 93,000 troops, twice as many as had been used in the 1994 war, poured over the border.
The bombing campaign against the civilian center Grozny was total and unrelenting. Putin even secretly traveled to Russian military bases in the region to hand out medals. His conduct proved wildly popular among ordinary Russians.
The September bombings, the renewed Chechen war and Putin’s rapidly rising popularity dramatically changed the political calculus both inside and outside of Russia.
US policy makers suddenly found their attention turning to the dramatic and violent events unfolding in Russia itself.
In the parliamentary elections held on December 19th, 1999, Putin’s Unity Party exceeded expectations, vanquishing the party supporting Primakov and Luzhkov.
On December 31st, Yeltsin used his annual New Year’s Eve address to the nation to make a surprise announcement. Effective immediately, he was stepping down as President of the Russian Federation. Vladimir Putin was now the most powerful man in Russia.
In his first act as President, Putin granted Yeltsin and his family full immunity. With a stroke of a pen, Putin made good on his promise to “The Family.” The Skuratov investigations were scrapped, the man himself unceremoniously removed from office shortly thereafter. Parliamentary opposition, active during the Yeltsin years, went silent.
Though he still had an election to win in a few months’ time, as he was only the “Acting President” until being properly elected, the result appeared to be as predictable as it was inevitable.
Putin didn’t bother to run a traditional campaign, declining to engage in debates or extensive independent interviews, but rather allowed the full resources of the Kremlin and the positive coverage of state and friendly-oligarch owned television stations campaign for him.
Though the war in Chechnya was turning into a bloodbath, Putin restricted access to journalists. News of mass civilian casualties and repeated war crimes dribbled out through the dogged reporting of independent news outlets, but reached only a small, un-influential intelligentsia.
Attempting to curry favor with the new leader of Russia, money poured in from sources both foreign (particularly from Ukraine) and domestic. The organs of state acted aggressively on Putin’s behalf.
In the lead up to the election, the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Investigation Committee seized documents that potentially implicated the popular Mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov and his wife in crimes. Luzhkov declared he wouldn’t be running, fell in line behind Putin and would never show any signs of political independence again.
Two days before the election, NTV, an opposition television station owned by the oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky aired a town hall debate that allowed the residents of Ryazan to question a representative from the FSB about the mysterious events that had occurred in September.
In the intervening months independent media, led by the paper Novaya Gazeta among others, had systematically uncovered evidence that riddled official explanations with holes.
After suggesting the the bombings may have been terrorist acts by the state as oppossed to terrorist acts against the state, Novaya Gazeta had its website shut down by a cyber attack.
The NTV town hall revealed that not a single resident of 14/16 Novoselov St. believed the events of the 23rd of September had been a training exercise.
When a person who claimed to be a resident of the building suggested that they did believe the official explanation, they were immediately shouted down by the other residents, who claimed to have never seen them before.
It was widely believed the FSB had placed a plant among the residents. The FSB representative on the program was unable to explain why the “sugar” tested positive for the explosive hexogen, or why the local Ryazan FSB was in the dark about the exercise.
The election took place on March 26th, 2000. Despite Putin’s newfound popularity, there were still numerous reports of widespread irregularities, particularly in the outer regions of the Federation. Balloting results showed that Putin won in Chechnya by nearly 200,000 votes, an odd outcome considering it was being bombed to rubble under his orders.
Despite significant evidence that election fraud did occur in the Russian 2000 election, nearly every scholar concedes that Putin would have won the election with or without it.
The next article in this series will cover the role of assassinations and political terror in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.