The Moscow Bombings of September 1999 by Dunlop John B

Author:Dunlop, John B. [Dunlop, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Regional Studies, Political Science, Terrorism, History, Europe, Russia & the Former Soviet Union
ISBN: 9783838266084
Google: iuA3BAAAQBAJ
Publisher: ibidem-Verlag Jessica Haunschild / Christian Schon GbR
Published: 2015-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

III The “Ryazan Incident”

“No exercises in our country (except for the first nuclear tests) were ever surrounded by such a curtain of secrecy. And all of the information about the exercises that were conducted has been classified.”

(Journalist Pavel Voloshin)[372]

“I heard that it was an exercise… But maybe it wasn’t.”

(Apartment resident Evgeniya Kachatina)[373]

Information concerning the Ryazan incident, which occurred on 22 September 1999—following two terror bombings in Moscow and one in Volgodonsk—arrived in three separate waves. First, there was the Russian and Western media’s initial reporting on the incident, which commenced on 23 September and then continued through the remainder of the month. Then there took place a much stronger wave—generated initially by American and British journalists—which began in January of 2000 and lasted up to the eve of the Russian presidential elections which were held on 26 March. Referring to the influx of Western journalists into Ryazan in February of 2000, one Russian journalist quipped: “Today provincial Ryazan will soon be comparable to Moscow in number of foreign journalists per inhabitant…”[374]

A third wave arrived much later, in late 2001 and in 2002. After Vladimir Putin had been elected president in late March of 2000, the Ryazan incident had generally ceased to attract significant attention, except on the part of the members of the so-called BAB Group—historian Yuri Felshtinsky, natural scientist Alexander Goldfarb, and former FSB lieutenant colonel Aleksandr Litvinenko—three publicists loyal to exiled oligarch Boris Berezovskii. This group, during 2001-2002, focused much of its attention upon the Ryazan incident. On 5 March 2002, a film entitled “Assassination of Russia” [Pokushenie na Rossiyu] premiered in London and later that month was also shown in Moscow. The film, which focused upon the Ryazan incident, was somewhat misleadingly reported to have been based on a book by Litvinenko and Felshtinsky, The FSB Blows Up Russia.[375] In point of fact, most of the film was based on original footage which had been prepared by NTV in late 1999 and early 2000.

It should be noted that, in contrast to their work on the Moscow bombings, which tended to be rather slipshod, the members of the “BAB Group” generally had sensible things to say about the Ryazan episode. Litvinenko’s training as a professional FSB investigator and his first-hand knowledge of the laws regulating the activity of the secret police in Russia was put to good use.

In contrast to the murky and semi-opaque circumstances surrounding the Moscow terror bombings, the basic facts concerning the Ryazan incident are not in dispute. Both the FSB and the Russian General Procuracy, as well as their harshest critics, have expressed agreement on many of the facts concerning the incident. As one high state official, V.A. Titov of the Russian General Procuracy, wrote to State Duma deputy Aleksandr Kulikov in May of 2002, in response to an official inquiry [zapros] submitted by the latter:

“On 22 September 1999, at 9:15 p.m., there came a telephone call to the Dashkovo-Pesochinskii Department of the Oktyabrskii ROVD [i.e., the regular police] of the city of Ryazan from A.

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