Vladimir Kara-Murza Sr.: Valentin Mikhailovich, what made you think that these were not exercises?

Valentin Gefter: I have no doubt that... only I don't want to call it 'exercises,' I would call it an FSB special operation, at least by the central apparatus. Moreover, as we just heard from Sergei Adamovich's story, the operation was carried out with a large number of failures and inconsistencies. And most importantly, it clearly carried, even with a probability of some tenths of a percent, the threat of a real explosion. In my opinion, even if they didn't intend, let's say, to actually blow up building number 16, there should have been not only an internal but also a state, parliamentary, and other investigations that would have revealed the full danger of this kind of training, exercises, and special operations. And not only from the point of view of technical implementation and the threat to the lives of the people living in that building, but most importantly—the political danger.

After all, if you look at the dates, these exercises preceded the entry of our troops into the territory of the Chechen Republic. I remind you that throughout August and early September, battles were fought against those who broke into the territory of Dagestan under the leadership of Basayev. And only by the end, maybe by mid-September, did an operational situation arise when our troops went on the offensive, crossed the Terek or the border of Chechnya, and combat operations began on the territory of the Chechen Republic, which started the long and bloody Second Chechen War. Here, in my opinion, not only the technological assessment of the special service's actions—how 'skillfully' they covered the tracks of their special operation or exercises—was very important, but also the political task: why it happened at that exact moment.

And then we build a bridge, although the things seem unrelated, to what happened earlier in Moscow and Volgodonsk. There was an opportunity to familiarize ourselves with the materials of the criminal case on these explosions; there is quite a lot of information there. There were lawyers. They took a non-disclosure agreement. Of course, they later conveyed some information from this closed trial and from the preliminary investigation to the public commission. But the main thing was that there were victims from Volgodonsk—women from the building that blew up (or from the neighboring one), but who clearly suffered, who were participants in the trial, and to whom, as victims, these materials had to be provided. And they were provided with part of the materials related to the two individuals I named, the Karachays, and everything that happened in Volgodonsk and Kislovodsk, where a truck was being prepared to transport explosives, according to the version of the investigation and the verdict, to Moscow. That is, the picture there was much clearer. Moreover, it was clearer not from the point of view of direct evidence of one 'trace' or another, but of everything that happened by days, hours, and by several participants.

And there was an attempt at an international investigation. Alexander Litvinenko from London and Yuri Felshtinsky from Boston also investigated what was connected with the figure of Gochiyaev, who already a few years later, if I'm not mistaken, went on virtual contact with them, promising them a story about all these events, about his role and participation. He had already moved to Georgia. And most importantly, there was later an attempt to meet with Gochiyaev in Georgia, and at that time Krymsamkhalov and Dekkushev were still at large, which ended in a rather major failure of this meeting of investigators due to events on the territory of Georgia, in the Pankisi Gorge and at its exit. There was a shootout. In general, there was a detective story of almost international proportions, worthy of the pen of great writers who write about intelligence.

We cannot assert anything now, and we couldn't then, about Moscow and Volgodonsk—that there is a trace of the presence of special services in the preparation or provocation of these explosions. We know the names of the real perpetrators; they are serving life sentences. And I have no doubt that these are not fictional figures; these people are of flesh and blood. They were in the trial and so on. But this whole case was accompanied by a mass of side traces on the eve of the explosions. People appeared who allegedly had something to do with this (I wrote about this briefly in Novaya Gazeta then), who either led investigators and overly curious people away from the real events of Moscow and Volgodonsk, or vice versa. In every serious, big case, some hangers-on appear, some fantasy people who either were there or weren't, or they notified the special services on the eve of the explosions.

I'm not talking about Seleznyov and Zhirinovsky now. It seems to me that this is a kind of, as the English say, misunderstanding, not literal by dates or hours. No one investigated literally why. In my opinion, no one has proof that Seleznyov spoke about this from the Duma rostrum before the real explosion in Volgodonsk. Another thing is that official reports of the explosion in Volgodonsk might not have existed yet, but he had already received information through special channels, so it looked like this: the event is not yet in the information field externally, but he is already talking about it. But I'm talking now about the mass of false or absolutely unverifiable side traces that created a picture of, to put it mildly, confusion. And my main conclusion over all these years, which I tried to convey to my colleagues, is that the main thing is that the state did not fulfill its duties, its obligations for a thorough, detailed, and public investigation of these events. I'm talking now not only about the Ryazan special operation, although this is a very important point, but also about the real explosions in Moscow and Volgodonsk. They were obliged to lay it out with the precision of the last comma.