Putin and the Apartment Bombs: 1. The Four Bombs

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The explosives create a shockwave that pushes walls inwards. Disintegrates glass compresses air and for a brief moment there's just silence. Then you hear it. The blast so loud it can rupture eardrums. After the explosion the aftermath of a bomb follows a familiar pattern sifting through the rubble, counting the dead, the hunt for survivors. And finally the search for a story. Something to make sense of the horror. Sometimes the story gives closure. Perpetrate is enamed. Motivations identified. But then there are the stories that don't make sense. That lead to more questions than answers. From the BBC this is the history bureau. Where we take journalists back to a story to ask, what did we miss the first time round? It's a second draft of history. And for this our first season we're digging into a story that the world may have been getting wrong for years. It's about a bomb. In fact four bombs. Four bombs that blew up four apartments across Russia in 1999, killing some 300 people. The entire country felt under siege. There were people screaming just utterly traumatized. Children were terrified. Adults were patrolling around the clock. And these bombs are never thing that followed have sparked some chilling theories about who was behind them. Because they set the stage. Perhaps the most consequential rise to power in modern history. It's part of the origin story of Vladimir Putin. It's something which explains Putin and the rise of Putin will might do. And I think in that sense it's a mystery which matters. I've been talking to journalists who were there in Russia during those brutal attacks. Journalists who've spent big chunks of their careers trying to figure out who killed all of those innocent people. We are watching some kind of government conspiracy. A lot of what we should know has been classified or buried or covered up. If it really happened, it's a story for the ages. The journalists we brought together for this series don't all agree about what happened. It was quite clear that something very dirty is going on. I would say that's a conspiracy theory. I've read the evidence, believe me. I'm very, very wary of conspiracies. But when it comes to the Kremlin, they've often proved to be true. But there's one thing they do agree on. Asking questions about this story, even now, can be dangerous. He has been transferred to intensive care and he is on monitors. His immune system is gone. It's a mystery some have died trying to solve. We know their names. The people who've been killed, they all investigated the bombings. And that message has reached the Russian public as well. And that message is. That's dangerous. Don't go there. You know, you might end up dead. I'm Helena Maryman and we are going there in the history bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Episode one. The Four Bombs. 1-2-3. Let me get to my Russian slush, I should brush her teeth. A cellar. Sushka, that's a nursery rhyme. Is it? Designed to make babies say sure. Okay, what does it mean? Sasha went along the road, licking a lolly, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Assalam-Ajrug, Harding. Let me think about this. I arrived in Moscow in 1991, aged 24, thinking, "Let's go somewhere exciting to try and do this thing, be a foreign correspondent." Why Russia? I had a friend in Moscow and they allowed me to sleep on their floor. It was incredibly dramatic. You know, the Soviet Union was coming to an end. It was always in the news. And I was very interested in what was happening. And it's quite a place to land. This is 1991. Soviet Union is collapsing. You're in the middle of one of the biggest stories in the world. What was it like to experience that collapse happening in a day-to-day way? It was so surreal because you walk through the center of Moscow and there are still these huge gray buildings with things like shoes and fruit written above them. You know, no advertising, very Soviet, very communist. There was so much optimism and the desire to become part of the West. And all these foreign fast food outlets were coming. Pizza Hut McDonalds, Snickers bars everywhere. Somebody coined the phrase "snickers-assia", the "snickers-ization" of our country. Andrew's been a BBC foreign correspondent for over 30 years. But through the years, his time in Russia in the 90s, it's always stuck with him. Even now, he's still trying to make sense of it. This wild, unpredictable decade that ended with the four bombs. And those bombs were about to get into them. But first, you have to understand the years that led up to them. This time in Russia when history was playing at double speed. So when Andrew arrives in Moscow in 1991, the Berlin Walls just fallen. The Soviet Empire collapsed. And he's living in a new country. Russia. A country that's just elected its first ever president. Many votes are still to be counted, but there is no doubt that Boris Yeltsin has become the first president of the Russia. Boris Yeltsin. And at first, people love him. He's flamboyant, charismatic. He says he's going to shake things up. Ditch the old Soviet economy, embrace capitalism and fast track Russia into the 21st century. The problem was Yeltsin went too far, too fast. Shock therapy, he called it. He freed prices overnight. Inflation sawed to over 2,000%. And the result? People's savings were wiped. The old people, the pensioners, started to come out of their apartments and sell everything they had on the icy snowy streets of Moscow. And they would be sitting there all day in these big fur coats, or if they'd sold their fur coats in thinner coats and hats. And people would walk past in the slush. It was really wretched and made a huge impression on me. The Russian rubble collapsed. And suddenly the only thing that mattered was dollars. And that changed everything. The jobs you could get, the places you could eat. Restaurants didn't want to let you in, unless you had dollars. So you'd want to have sort of a queue up outside? You'd literally do a five dollar handshake with the dormant. To bribe your way in. Which was, you know, a source of great pride. You know, I bribed my way in somewhere. It felt very dramatic. And once you're inside for another five dollars, you could eat and drink all night. For five dollars, you could fly nine time zones to the far edge near Alaska. The dollar was extraordinary. And of course, most people didn't have access to that. Most people, except for a new breed of businessmen, the oligarchs, they got very rich, very fast, buying up former state-owned companies at knockdown prices. And as they got richer, they moved into politics, funneling money to Yeltsin, helping to keep him in power. But as Yeltsin and the oligarchs scavenged on Russia, the rest of the country was getting poorer. By the late 90s, people. had had enough. Where Russians had once lined the streets to support Yeltsin, now they wanted him gone. And Yeltsin, he was falling apart. Last week President Yeltsin arrived a little unsteady at a press conference. He's long had a reputation for boozing. By the last few years of the '90s, Yeltsin was a shadow of himself. Yeltsin's hope for another term in office won't survive his latest illness. He was so sort of shabby, pathetic figure really. Drunk, often when he wasn't drunk, he looked like he might be clearly struggling with his health. He spoke painfully slowly. What would Russians say to you when you interviewed them about this, about him? They would say we need somebody new. And every time he went in for an operation it was this huge drama because would he survive the operation? Who does he hand the nuclear briefcase to? Who can he trust to be there when he comes around from anesthetic? The problem was, Yeltsin had no obvious successor. And he was terrified that the next president might turn on him. Take up one of the corruption scandals surrounding him and his family and throw him in prison. The oligarchs were nervous too. They needed a new protector, someone who'd keep the money flowing. These were gangs, essentially, competing for power. The stakes were incredibly high. And what were they after power or money or both? The two sort of came hand in hand in a way. It was a real cowboy capitalism and it was very, very dangerous. And so by the autumn of '99, you have a country with a failing president, no clear successor and powerful men operating in the shadows, searching for a new leader they can trust. And it's at this point on September 4th that our story begins. It all starts in a town in southwest Russia, Buenaxk. It's remote thousands of miles from Moscow, surrounded by mountains. And lining its streets, as in so many Russian cities, is a smattering of grey identical buildings. Russia's apartment blocks. There's one apartment right next to a Russian military base. Five floors, small flats, kitchens just big enough for a table and two chairs. And TV sets, which tonight are showing a football match, a qualifier for Euro 2000, Russia versus Armenia. And the game, it's a good one for Russia. They win 2-0. After the game, some of the families stay up to watch the news. Others bed down for the night. This is when the apartment is at its fullest. And this is when it happens. A truck parked outside the apartment explodes. The building catches fire. And one by one, the five floors collapse. Soon the firefighters come. Then the ambulances. And then, from Russia, Andrew Harding reports. The journalists, like Andrew Harding. Southern Russia is in turmoil tonight. Rescue workers have spent the day searching for survivors in this mound of rubble. It's all that remains of a block of flats torn apart by a massive car bomb. This 10-year-old girl was dragged from the ruins both legs crushed. It takes a few days to find all the bodies in the rubble. The final count, 64, men, women and children. It's not clear yet what caused the blast, but the finger of suspicion is likely to point towards a group of militants who've been trying to drive Russian forces out of the region. This first bomb makes the news, but only briefly. The explosion happened in a remote city near Chechnya, where militants in the Russian military have fought for years. So it's a tragic story, but it seems like more of the same. And the country moves on. A few days pass. It's now the 9th of September. I was at home in my apartment in southern Moscow, and I remember getting the call. There'd been a second bomb. Another apartment blown up. This second bomb explodes in the early hours of the morning, when most people are asleep. But this time, it's not in a remote, war-torn part of the country. It's in the heart of Russia, in Moscow. I remember rushing off with a camera man bob from the bureau and heading off to the southeast suburbs. And we arrived at this giant pile of rubble. We're already police, and we're these crowds around. People scrabbling in the dirt. People screaming, people just utterly traumatized. Everybody from the neighborhood was there. A lot of them were there dressing gowns. Could you see the insides of apartments? So in some places, I do remember where the front peeled off. It was almost like a doll's house. So you could see inside, and you could see the layers that have been compressed as well. Rescue workers are continuing to hunt for survivors beneath the smoldering rubble, but hopes of finding anyone else alive are now fading. In Russian news footage, you see firefighters in black uniforms. They're kneeling in the rubble, praising a part's slabs of concrete as they search for bodies. Suddenly you see an arm, then a face, then an eye that twitches. This man is still alive. The firefighters scoop out the rubble around him, heave him into their arms, and they carry him away. He's naked, except for a pair of green underpants. I remember the dust, and I remember the smell. There was just a mood of hysteria. In Russians, we used to have a certain degree of chaos. They were used to mafia hits. They were used to all sorts of things, but this was not something that anybody in the city had seen. When the counting begins, 94 dead, and this time, with Moscow hit, the story breaks out. It's on every front page, every TV bulletin, every radio show, and the question everyone's asking, who did this? Our correspondent Andrew Harding is in Moscow. Within days, people think they know who's to blame. Have the authorities there actually nailed the cause of this explosion? Is it now beyond doubt? Well, various obvious possibilities have sprung to everyone's mind, and the leading candidate is the Islamic militants, the Chechen, who are now fighting against Russian troops in the south of the country. All over Russia, people are blaming them. Chechen militants. And this was a terrifying thought for Russians, because if the Chechen militants had bombed two buildings already, then maybe they'd do it again. They have promised to wage the campaign against the Russians in every major city, including Moscow. It was almost instinctive for people because they were the ones who Russia had been at war with. In that war between Chechnya and the Russian state had been so brutal that people thought it could be reason enough for Chechen militants to blow up apartments full of Russian civilians. It all goes back to 1991. The Soviet Union was falling apart, different states breaking free and declaring independence. In Chechnya, a republic in the south of Russia wanted that too. It was partly about identity, most Chechens are Muslim, but it was also about decades of brutal treatment by Russian leaders. So Chechne had declared independence, but Russia had no intention of letting Chechne go. The Russians moved in at first light this morning, and they sent in the tanks. Hundreds of tanks and armored personnel carriers crossed the border, backed up by helicopters. The Chechens responded with a classic, provocative swagger and said, "Come and get us. We are Chechen, we are not afraid of this super power army." It was the first conflict and you ever covered? I think my first visit would have been in the summer of 1994, and I would have driven over the mountains in my little lad, a niva, jeep, that was just in love with this. How did it deal with the Rocky Mountain? Amazingly, because it sort of bounced over everything. It was very light. The Soviet joke was that this was the thing that the Soviet industry invented instead of fixing the roads. They came up with this amazing. Small but mighty car. That could drive over everything. He drove all over the country, meeting Chechen fighters. Chechne was overrun by warlords. arms to the teeth, just bristling with weapons, and we really had no idea what we were doing. I mean, we'd never covered anything like this. He was there when the tanks rolled in, when Chechen women walked into the streets to try and stop them. And he was there in the capital, Grozny, when Russia tried to destroy the city. The War for Grozny was just hell on earth. It was the most intense bombardment song, "Big City". And I, to this day, have never been more scared of anything. And you've covered a lot of wars in your time. It was insane. This was Russia's super power ex-soviet military, with every imaginable missile, mortar, bombs, jets, helicopters, all targeting this city and pulverising. I mean, the word "is appropriate". The War dragged on for two years. Thousands of Chechens' civilians were killed. And there were reports of horrific abuses on both sides. It ended with a peace deal, but the Chechens didn't win their independence. So there was a sense of unfinished business, that a day of reckoning would come. They kept that resentment, that anger against Moscow. They burned and instilled burns. And that anger in Chechnya, it became a fertile place for a new kind of extremism. After all the bloodshed and all the chaos and misery of the First War, you could start to see a more militant Islamism starting to come in, starting to fund people, more shadowy figures emerging, with their own power centers. Chechen militant started taking hostages, aid workers, journalists, anyone they thought could bring in money or attention. And in one particularly brutal case, they kidnapped four foreign engineers. A few months on, their bodies were found dumped by a roadside. All four had been decapitated. So when those first two bombs explode in 1999, this is why most Russians blame Chechen militants. And in the news reports, you can hear a deeper fear that this might just be the beginning. So are you saying that Russia is bracing itself now for some kind of wave of terrorist attacks from this source? I think that is quite likely that that's going to happen. As long as neighboring Chechnya remains in a state of near-anarchy, more turmoil in the region seems almost inevitable. And sure enough, the blast happened before dawn as the building's 150 residents lay sleeping. Only a few nights later, five in the morning on the 13th of September, an entire apartment block collapsed, leaving a scene of utter devastation. The death toll is rising by the minute, rescuers are dead. The third bomb explodes, again in Moscow. It's the third one to tear down an apartment in just nine days. And now the panic sets in. Russian police patrol the streets of Moscow. Yesterday's deadly explosion has triggered a massive security clamp down here. Every nook and cranny is being searched. In Russia, almost everyone lives in his tool, precarious prefab concrete apartments. And with the bombs exploding in the middle of the night, people are now too scared to sleep. There was a sense that this is going to carry on, that we're all at risk now. People began to patrol every apartment block where they could to make sure it didn't happen to them the next night. "This is a crime, a crime of being innocent." That night, Russia's latest Prime Minister, the fifth in 18 months, talks to the press. "For most Russians, this is the first time they've ever seen their new Prime Minister speak. He's only been in the job a few weeks. He's short, a forgettable face. And the only thing most people know about him is that he was, until very recently, the head of the FSB. Russia's internal security service, formerly the KGB. His name? Vladimir Putin. With President Boris Yeltsin nowhere to be seen, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has stepped into the light. Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin blamed Islamic militants for the attack and said that Russian forces would wipe out their bases in Chechnya. Putin offers comfort, but he also offers revenge. Says he'll go after the rabid animals who did this. Then, three days later, at five in the morning, "Folga Donskin, southern Russia hasn't experienced anything like it since the Second World War." The fourth bomb explodes, demolishing an apartment building in Volga Donsk, a city hundreds of kilometers away from Moscow. It rips the facade off a nine-story building. "Someone somewhere in Russia is doing this, but no one knows who or why." Once again, people are killed as they sleep, two are children. The police are flooding the streets, and the battle to beat the bombers, no stone is being left unturned. The building destroyed this morning had only been checked yesterday. Though we're now as safe, nothing beyond suspicion. At this point, all four of the bombs have gone off. Over a period of just 16 days, four apartments have been blown up, killing some 300 people. But then, this story takes a strange turn, one that people have been puzzling over ever since, because there's a fifth bomb. I remember this extraordinary news coming through that another bomb would be found in another apartment block. And then I remember it seemed almost instantaneous that there was a twist, just the worst possible twist. And this fifth bomb, it doesn't explode. People find it, they call the police, and the police, they follow the trail. The trail which ends up not with Chechen militants, but with the FSB, the Russian government security service, formally known as the KGB. If it's true, it changes what Russia's sense of itself is. It changes everything. If it's true, because the story of this fifth bomb is contested. 25 years later, people are still arguing about it. But at the time, like so many Western journalists, Andrew didn't report on this twist. With so much going on, a bomb that didn't go off, well, it didn't feel like a priority. I think it's very difficult to, it's quite painful to confront that failure. All I can say is I think we should have done. We should have covered it more, and we didn't. But a few journalists did. The bombings were extremely suspicious. My premonition was that there was something very, very sinister going on. Next time, on Putin and the apartment bombs. The problem is a problem with imagination. It's so evil, so horrible, so outside the normal comprehension of people. You have to believe the unbelievable. Once you understand that the impossible is really possible, everything makes perfect sense. But how many people, how many journalists, how many diplomats, how many political leaders are equipped to believe the unbelievable? The history bureau Putin and the apartment bombs is a BBC studio's production. Written and presented by me, Helena Merrimen. The series producer is Sarah Shebier, sound by Eloise Whitmore, and the executive editor is Annie Brown. I'm Ian Glenn, and this is Real Vikings. The Vikings terrified the medieval world, yet they beguilers today. Real Vikings. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.