The Global Story: The mystery of Putin and the apartment bombs

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The history bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Divya Arya, and I've been speaking to young women from villages and small towns in India about how sport is helping them break free from the practice of child marriages. And to fight against discrimination. Listen now by searching for the documentary, wherever you get to your BBC podcasts. Hey there, I'm Asma Khalid. And I'm Tristan Redman, and we're here with a bonus episode for you from the Global Story Podcast. The world order is shifting. Old alliances are fraying and new ones are emerging. Some of this turbulence can be traced to decisions made in the United States, but the US isn't just a cause of the upheaval. Its politics are also a symptom of it. Every day we focus on one story, looking at how America and the world shape each other. So we hope you enjoy this episode and to find more of our show, just search for the Global Story, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. When you're trying to make sense of the world in this moment, one person central to it all is Vladimir Putin. And although here on this show, we have looked at Putin's backstory and how it informs Russia today. There remains a pivotal series of events during his rise to power that is still shrouded in confusion and controversy. In September, 1999, just weeks after Putin became prime minister, four bombs blew up four apartment buildings across Russia. The bombs exploded in the middle of the night, killing hundreds of people while they slept. In the aftermath of the bombings, many strange things happened and that led to several different theories about who could have been behind those attacks. The Russian government blamed militants from Chechnya, a rebellious region in the south of Russia. But some said the bombings were the work of the FSB, Russia's security services. There's a theory that Vladimir Putin himself had a hand in them, although the FSB and President Putin have always denied this. Putin has called the suggestion utter nonsense and totally insane. What isn't indisputed is that the atmosphere of terror that followed the bombings was part of Putin's case for launching a war in Chechnya that set the stage for his rise to the presidency. A new BBC podcast tells the story of the apartment bombings in detail and tries to get close to the truth behind this 26-year-old mystery. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington DC and today on the global story, how the 1999 apartment bombings helped propel Putin's rise to power. So I'm Helena Merriman. I'm a journalist. I reported for the BBC for many years from frontline war reporting to elections. And I'd say, for me, one of the interesting things through my career has been looking at that meeting point between journalism and history, which is partly what this podcast does. Helena is the host of the new BBC podcast I mentioned. It's called The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. I started out by asking Helena why she wanted to tell this particular story. Well, as a journalist, as much as I love looking at what's going on right now in the present, I think I've always been drawn to stories in the past where the dust hasn't quite settled. And I think the story of the apartment bombs is probably one of the most intriguing examples of that. In fact, I'd say it's probably one of the most important unresolved stories of our recent history. So it's about four bombs that blew up four apartments in September 1999, killing hundreds of people while they slept. What's interesting about the story is that even now, there are these huge disagreements about who bombed those four apartments. So the government blamed Chechen militants, but others blamed the FSB, which is Russia's internal security service, partly because of very strange murky things that went on at the time, which I'm sure we'll get into. But it's also a story that tells us so much about one of the most powerful men in the world today, Vladimir Putin, because he becomes president right at the time of the bombs. So if you want to understand Putin's origin story, this is a really important place to start. Well, I will say many listeners might not know this story at all. So can you take us back to the beginning? Where does it all begin? So it all begins in September 1999. And maybe it's helpful to give a bit of political context at the time. So this is eight years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. You have this new country, Russia with a new president, Boris Yeltsin. And at first, everyone loved him. He was flamboyant. He was charismatic. But by 1999, he's old. He's an alcoholic. Inflation has gone through the roof. All savings are wiped. There's vast amounts of corruption. And Yeltsin and the oligarchs around him know that he needs a successor. But the problem is there is no one obvious. So that sets the scene for what then happens on September the 4th. In a city called Buenask. This is remote town, which is thousands of miles from Moscow. People are bedding down for the night when a truck, which is parked outside the apartment, explodes. Southern Russia is in turmoil tonight. Prambles to the ground. 64 people killed. 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. And it makes the news. But it's not seen as a big deal because this city is near the border where there's been fighting in the past, so at that point the country moves on. But then, just a few days later, on September the 9th, you have a second bomb. Russian investigators say a bomb caused the explosion which destroyed a block of flats in Moscow. And it goes off in Moscow, in the early hours of the morning. At least 46 people were killed in the blast, with more missing and fear dead. And the footage from the time it's really harrowing, you see the front of the apartment is peeled off. One journalist at the time describes it as looking like a doll's house. You can see all the people's clothes and bathtubs inside. And 94 people are killed in that second bomb, and this time because it's Moscow, the story breaks out. And who are the leading suspects? After the first two bombs go off, the question everyone's asking is who did this? And the answer comes pretty quickly, people seem pretty sure that it's Chechen militants. And that's partly because very recently there's been a horrific war between Russia and Chechnya. It goes back to 1991 when the Soviet Union was falling apart, you had different states breaking free. And Chechnya, which is a republic in the south of Russia, wanted it to. So they declare independence, but Russia has no intention of letting Chechnya go. So they sent in the tanks, there's a very brutal war between 94 and 96, thousands killed, horrific accounts of human rights abuses on both sides. And it ends with a peace deal, but the Chechens don't win their independence. So there's this real sense of unfinished business on both sides. That's why when the first two bombs explode, a lot of people in Russia immediately blame Chechen militants. Is that just because of the war that it was considered to be so brutal and somewhat unfinished that people thought it might be related to this or was there actual evidence on the ground at that point pointing to the Chechens? At that time there was no evidence pointing to Chechnya militants, but then just a few days later you have a third bomb. Yesterday's deadly explosion has triggered a massive security clamp down here. Every nook and cranny is being searched. This is on the 13th of September. Over a hundred people killed. As for the survivors, only two people were pulled from the rubble alive. And it's at that point that the panic really sets in. People here are bracing themselves for further attacks. This is if the whole city was on a war footing. It's partly because almost everyone in Russia lives in these very tall, precarious, prefab apartment blocks. And I think what makes these attacks so horrific is that most of them happen in the middle of the night. So when people are in their beds asleep and so you have people now sleeping on the streets at night to protect themselves. And it's that night of the third bomb when Russia's new prime minister is their fifth in just 18 months because none of them last speaks to the press. And his name is Vladimir Putin. The name of course we all know well, but what's interesting about this moment then is that this is the first time most Russians have seen him talk. He's only been in the job a few weeks. He's short, he's got a forgettable face. The only thing people really know about him is that he was recently head of the FSB, which is Russia's internal security service, formerly the KGB. And he gives a speech, a very powerful speech where he says he's going to go after the rabid animals that did this and wiped them out. And how does that speech go over with the public? What did you hear from reporters who were there at the time? So reporters at the time saying this went down really well. People wanted to hear this strong talk, vengeful talk. They wanted a sense that here was someone taking this seriously, especially when just a few days later on the 16th of September, there's a fourth bomb and this is in a town called Volgodontz. The facade of another apartment block was ripped off by a bomb in the southern town of Volgodontz on Thursday causing a further 17 deaths. Security has been stepped up at government buildings and citizens have been encouraged to be more vigilant by organizing watch committees in their blocks of flats. So by this point you now have four apartment buildings blown up, around 300 people killed and people are terrified at this point. And then this is where the story takes a very strange turn. And in fact, I think of all the things that happen in this story, the apartment bombs, this is probably the most contested part of it. So it all happens in a city called Rizan, which is about 100 kilometers south of Moscow. And this is now about a week after the fourth bomb. And at this point everywhere in Russia you have people patrolling apartment buildings looking out on the streets because everyone's terrified that maybe their apartment will be next. And at around 9.30 in the evening, a man called Alexei spots this white ladder car, it's parked outside his apartment. But he notices something strange about it, which is that part of the license plate has been covered up with a piece of paper. So he calls the police, they come, they go into the basement and they rush out and they say there's a bomb in the building. The whole building is then evacuated, you know, babies taken from bathtubs, people racing outside in their pajamas and their dressing gowns. And the police then send an explosive expert into the basement. And they find three white sacks of powder connected to a detonator and a timer. And they then test the powder and they find it positive for hexagon, which is a military explosive that was used in at least one of the other apartment bombs. So the residents are racing outside and they end up staying in a local cinema for the night. Someone takes them in, gives them cups of tea to keep them warm. And the next day you have this man hunt, which begins because everyone's desperate to try and catch these bombers. So the city is under siege, you have the local FSB local police residents all looking for the bombers, you have the roads and trains and airports all blocked. And then one of the most extraordinary parts of this story is a call comes into the Rizan phone exchange. And there's a man at a pay phone in Rizan who wants to be connected to a number outside the city. So the operator puts the call through and then she listens in and she hears a man saying the city is locked, we can't get out. And the person at the other end says to the man, you know, you've got to split up and leave the city immediately. So she's understandably suspicious. So she writes down the number that they call the phone number send it to local police and they trace it. And you'd expect at this point that it might go to church and militants given the narrative at the time. But instead it goes to a number belonging to the FSB brushes internal security service. This is a bizarre detail. So at this point, what does the FSB say when that number is traced back to them? This is where the story gets even stranger. So the police then find the car abandoned. They then find two men who look just like people who eyewitnesses saw. But the men then say where FSB and they get out their ID calls to prove it. So none of this is making sense until two days later there's an announcement given by the government, Russia's Interior Minister speaking to the police. And he mentions what happens in Rizan is a successful example of people finding and stopping what could have been a bomb. So he says, you know, well done, you were vigilant, your vigilance paid off. But then, again, this is another very strange one of the stories. There's a 30 minute gap. And half an hour after that speech, the head of the FSB, man called Nikolay Patrychev. He says something that completely contradicts what the Interior Minister said. He says, oh no, it wasn't a bomb. It wasn't a thwarted terrorist attack. It was a training exercise. It was all just a drill. Those sacks of hexagon, it wasn't explosives, it was just sacks of sugar. And we were doing this just to test you and well done, you passed the test and he gives the phone operator a color TV for passing this test. And it's so extraordinary that even the local FSB in Rizan at that point don't appear to believe it. The residents don't believe it, journalists at the time don't believe it. I'm Helena Merriman and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. I'm Divya Arya and I've been speaking to young women from villages and small towns in India about how sport is helping them break free from the practice of child marriages and to fight against discrimination. Listen now by searching for the documentary, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. We live in a world where the news is on our fingertips. But how often do we stop scrolling and just listen? I'm Malika Bilal and this is The Take. I'll just hear us daily news podcast, where we bring you the context and the people behind the global stories that matter. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Krasi Ivanovich Tweek from the Global Jigsaw Podcast from the BBC, where we explore the peace talks aiming to end nearly four years of war in Ukraine. We compare the Russian and the Ukrainian wish lists and we ask what are the peace negotiations achieving? The Global Jigsaw looks at the world through the lens of its media. Find us wherever you get your BBC podcasts. One small detail you mentioned in the series that caught my attention is that there was an attempt to publicize this story beyond Russia. You spoke to a journalist who actually tries to get this story out into a newspaper at the time, no here, as the Washington Times. And it was tripped by the fact that it doesn't seem to resonate. Exactly. What happened and why was that? Yeah, it's a really good question because when you look back at it now, you think why wasn't everyone asking these questions all over the world? And this journalist, I interviewed David Satter, who is one of the first Western journalists to ask these questions. He writes in our school for the Washington Times. He speaks to some of his sources who are former members of the intelligence services who raise a lot of questions, particularly about Rizan, but also about the bombs and whether Chechen militants really could have been capable of doing it. And he writes this article, but it disappears into the wind. And I think it's partly because the idea back then that the FSB could have been involved in something like this just seemed so unimaginable. So beyond the realms of what anyone thought was possible at that time, the people just couldn't believe it. It sounded like a conspiracy theory, you're saying? Exactly. And so you almost have this divide between what happens in the Western press, which moves on, partly because you then have President Yeltsin resigns, December 31st, Putin becomes acting president, so events are moving very quickly. And so in the Western press, it's full of coverage of Vladimir Putin, the new acting president of Russia. And it was warmly welcomed, by the West, it seems at that time, right? He was exactly thought to be leading Russia in a new direction. Exactly. And you have Western leaders lining up to meet him and court him, and Tony Blair comes to Russia and watches opera with him, and people want to make friends with this new leader, who they think is someone they can do business with. Meanwhile in Russia, a lot of Russian journalists are asking very uncomfortable questions still. But in a way, those questions get sideline, because there's this new distraction, which is Putin sending fighter jets to bomb the Chechen capital Grozny. Misery returns to Chechnya. Just three years after its war with Russia, the fighter bombers are back. It's the start of the second Chechen war. Moscow says it's targeting what it calls bandits. The Islamic rebels, it holds responsible for the recent spate of bomb blasts in Russia's cities. But it's ordinary Chechens who are dying. Those pictures are now flooding into the newsrooms of TV stations around the world. And journalists at the time draw a direct line between the apartment bombs in this new war. What's so interesting about the effect of that war is that at the same time, Vladimir Putin is undergoing this huge transformation from being this rather forgettable former KGB guy in a suit. People in Russia called him the Syrian Miska, which is the grey mouse. And he's now, it's what those suits for military uniform. He's jumping on planes. He's giving heart-thumping speeches to soldiers on the front line. And his popularity rating saw. I mean, when you look at his ratings back in August before the bombs, only 2% of Russians thought that Putin would make a good president. Just a few months later, after the bombs, after this new war in Chechnya and Putin being all over the news, his ratings have soared over 40%. It's that quick. And as a result of that war, did Russian authorities arrest any suspects related to the bombings? So here's where it gets interesting. So you have these apartments are blown up in September over a matter of just a few weeks. You then have this new war in Chechnya. But at the same time, Putin is now campaigning to become president. So really, by that point, he is president in all but name. And so it's just a few months before the election. He barely campaigns. Again, he carries on his rides and fighter jets flying over Chechnya. And he wins outright in the first ballot. So the 26th March 2000 Vladimir Putin is now president of Russia. So you say he has seen, it sounds like in Russia is a popular sort of war hero. And yet this question of who was involved or who was responsible for these apartment bombings, is that ever resolved? Yeah, so what you then have is a number of very brave Russian journalists, parliamentarians who are desperate to get to the truth. And in February 2002, there's a group of Russian parliamentarians who say, look, we need an official public inquiry into the bombs. And there's a vote. And hundreds of parliamentarians in the Russian Duma actually vote for it, only a few vote against. But because it has to be unanimous, it fails. So there's no independent commission. Well, there's no parliamentary commission. I see. But there's an independent one. So a few parliamentarians say, okay, well, if they can't be a parliamentary inquiry, we'll just do one ourselves. And a bunch of them get together. It's a bunch of politicians, journalists, lawyers, some grieving family members. But right from the start, things are very hard for them. So one of the people on this commission, a lawyer called Mikhail Trapashkin, within just a few days of him agreeing to be on this commission, his house is raided. There's another member of the commission, Sergey Yushenko, he's the vice chair. This is a year after they've begun their work. He's coming home one day. And he's shot to death in front of his apartment in Moscow. His wife finds his body lying in the street. And just a few months later, another member of the commission starts feeling unwell. He goes to hospital. His internal organ shut down. His skin peels off. Takes about 16 days for him to die. Doctors at the time say he just had an allergic reaction to something, but journalists at the time said they're sure that he was poisoned. So you have these very mysterious deaths that eventually result in that commission falling apart. And was anyone ever arrested for the bombings? Yeah. So then at the same time, you have the government's inquiry. And very little is known about that. And we've done a lot of digging to try and find out snippets of what went on. But even journalists at the time said it was really hard to get a grip on it because so much happened behind closed doors. I mean, just to give you an example of how the government's response to the bomb's differed from the way other governments have looked at terror attacks. In Russia, just a few days after those apartment buildings were bombed, the government removes what was left of those apartment buildings. So a lot of the forensic evidence that might have existed is never found. You know, compare that to 9/11 when that site was a crime scene for months and months and months after. So when various lawyers do get access to some of the government files on the reports, there's very little found, but there is eventually a trial and that takes place in October 2003. And by that point, there's only two people that the government has managed to find who they say are responsible for the bombs. And where they're judging? Well, good question. You would expect them to be given that this is who the government blamed for the bombs, but they're not. They arrested a number of people, quite a few of them from Dagestan, which is a Republic next to Chechnya. And in the end, you have this trial. It goes on for two months. These two men, non-Chetians, have found guilty for a string of charges, handling explosives, but also for being connected to two of those four bombs and their sentence to life in prison. So to sum up the story that you have given us, we have several people who strongly believe the FSP, Russian Intelligence Security Services, somehow were involved in those apartment bombings. And they seem to believe that Russia's leader Vladimir Putin had a lot to gain from them because they accelerated his rise to power. Some of those people are now dead under mysterious circumstances. How do you characterize what the evidence tells you after doing the series? Yeah, it's the question we've wrestled with for weeks and months as we've been looking at this story. When you look at it by the end, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence. There are a lot of theories. There are a lot of theories that point in both directions. You could make an argument that the Chechen militants had the motive to do it. In 1999, the Kremlin script from Chechnya was slipping. The Yeltsin government was unraveling. This was a moment of weakness for the Russian state, so perhaps a good chance for them to try and take back control. Others say, you know, just look at the attacks that Chechen militants carried out in the years after. This was the kind of thing that they would do. You had this siege in the Moscow theater in 2002, where they took more than 900 people hostage in 2004 militants attacked two planes and those militants were linked to the Chechen cause. There were suicide bombings in the Moscow metro. So for a lot of people, they felt, well, look, it fits the bill. You know, it fits their pattern of behavior. And then others who point to the FSB say, well, look, how would Chechen militants have got these explosives all the way to Moscow? Why didn't the FSB in Moscow tell the local FSB in Rizan about the drill? So there are so many strange twists and turns to this story. This theory of possible FSB involvement, it sounds like it's highly disputed. What does Putin, what does the Russian government say? What has it said over the years? So the FSB, they've always denied any involvement in the apartment bombs. Vladimir Putin himself, he wrote an authorized biography, and that was published in April 2000, so just six months after the bombs. And he responds to these allegations. He says, what's blowing up our own apartment buildings? You know, that is really utter nonsense. It's totally insane. No one in the Russian special services would be capable of such a crime against his own people. And I think the feeling for the FSB for Putin was that this would put to rest these questions. You know, they'd sent a couple of people to prison. They then sealed the files away for the next 75 years. But of course, that's not what's happened. And I think one of the most interesting things to discover is just how live questions around this story still are in Russia today. Why are the questions so live? And you know, one thing that was on my mind as I was listening to your series as I listen to you speak now about this story is what this mystery tells us about Putin's Russia 25 years on. I think what this story tells us is just how much the Russia we see today was forged in that moment back in 1999. So when you look at Russia now, I think you see a country that's closing in on itself. You know, you have independent newsrooms have been shut down reporters in exile Western news sites have been blocked Facebook, Instagram and X these platforms that once connected Russia to the outside world, they've all been banned. And when you look at how the Kremlin handled the apartment bombs, I think you can see a template there for how they would continue to act and how they would manage future scandals. So whenever you've seen crises since then, whether that's playing crashes, bombings, you know, the pattern's the same. They move very fast to control the narrative. They flood the media with the official version of events and they close investigations very quickly before any of these awkward questions can be asked. So I think I think for us looking at this story now, it's really not just about what happened in 1999. It's about how power works in Russia now. And how narratives are controlled and amidst that control, what I find fascinating is how very brave people in Russia are still asking these questions even now. Thank you so much, Helena, for bringing your reporting to us. Thank you. That was Helena Meriman and her series is called The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. You can find it wherever you get podcasts. And I should add that there is a lot more to this story than we had the time to get into here. So if you're interested, check it out. Our show today was produced by Viv Jones. It was edited by Brigitte Hardy and mixed by Travis Evans. Our senior news editor is China Collins. And that is it for the global story today. We'll talk to you again tomorrow. I'm Helena Meriman and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.