Who committed the 1999 terrorist attacks?

Tuesday, 19. Le Monde. Sophie Shihab.

In August 1999, a thousand Chechen and Dagestani militants led by field commander Shamil Basayev and his Saudi assistant Khattab invaded Dagestan – a small North Caucasian republic bordering Chechnya and also a subject of the Russian Federation. Basayev claimed he wanted to help local Islamists ready for an uprising. The Russian army expelled the invaders, wiping several villages off the face of the earth in the process. But, most importantly, Russia declared that it had become the target of an "attack by international terrorism" – a threat the Kremlin had been talking about for years, although it could not convince the West of it.

In Moscow, Boris Yeltsin took advantage of the situation to change the prime minister for the second time in two months. Viktor Chernomyrdin was replaced by the unknown Vladimir Putin, officially introduced on August 9, 1999, as the president's heir. "This man will lead to the final solution of the Chechen problem," Boris Yeltsin declared while introducing him on television. An unfortunate phrasing that no one, except the Chechens, paid attention to at the time.

Meanwhile, this moment was a turning point in modern Russian history, and the situation would clearly take a more dramatic turn. When on September 24, Vladimir Putin promised to "waste (terrorists) even in the outhouse" and sent bombers to Chechnya, Russia was shaken by a series of terrorist attacks. In less than three weeks (from August 31 to September 17), powerful explosions rocked a shopping center near the Kremlin, a small town in Dagestan, and most importantly – two densely populated apartment buildings in residential areas of Moscow and another building in the southern city of Volgodonsk. More than 300 killed, thousands wounded. The country was gripped by horror, traumatized. Russian authorities immediately pointed the finger at the culprits: the Chechens.

What happened in the summer of 1999?

This episode, fundamental to the new Russian regime and the starting point for the second Chechen war, is surrounded by so many mysteries and contradictions that the question remains open to this day: was this series of terrorist attacks a pre-arranged machination?

Rumors at the time immediately pointed to suspect "number one": Boris Abramovich Berezovsky, BAB, the Kremlin's gray eminence, one of the pioneers of post-Soviet "capitalism," who at that time increasingly looked like one of the main organizers of Russian chaos. His ties to the most radical Chechens, especially Shamil Basayev, were well known. He was suspected of organizing most of the kidnappings of foreigners in the North Caucasus, after which he appeared on television screens as a liberator. In September 1999, one of the members of his circle, a young French entrepreneur, contacted the newspaper Le Monde in Russia. In a telephone conversation, he betrayed his friend: "Boris is announcing new terrorist attacks. He has gone mad. Enough, I don't want to have anything more to do with him. Apparently, he thinks that by creating chaos, he can put his strongman in power. And at the same time grab new pieces of the Russian pie, including the Caspian. That's why he organized the Chechen invasion of Dagestan. Basayev received 30 million dollars and weapons for this."

Articles in the Russian press developed this thesis. About the invasion plans of Shamil Basayev, who already saw himself as the "emir" of an Islamic state in the form of Chechnya and Dagestan, liberated from the Russian yoke. Nevertheless, Russian military units were withdrawn from the Dagestani border just before the militant invasion, and then let them out of Dagestan. The opposition newspaper "Moskovsky Komsomolets," close to Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, published a series of recordings of telephone conversations between Boris Berezovsky and his Chechen friends from Basayev's circle after the attacks. The latter complained that they had not received all the promised money and said that the bombing of militants in Dagestan "was not provided for in the contracts." Denying everything, Berezovsky called these recordings a "dishonest compilation of conversations overheard at different times."

However, as the editor-in-chief of the newspaper claims, the FSB agent who handed over these materials was later killed.

Even more surprising is that on October 12, BAB's own publication, "Nezavisimaya Gazeta," through the mouth of