— By the way, how do you feel about Putin's personality? He has, perhaps, proven that the special services raise real men and strong politicians.

— I treat him with great respect. True, I haven't had to communicate with him often. But those rare meetings and conversations are enough to note his strong will and determination. There is that combat core in him, without which there is no man, no leader, no person.

— And how do you feel about the idea of declaring a hunt for the leaders of terror, the Chechen ones, for example? To direct all efforts toward eliminating them physically?

— I don't quite share this point of view. Firstly, even in relation to them, it is illegal. Secondly, as a rule, such elimination usually yields little. But it is impossible to forgive what Basayev did, for example, in Budyonnovsk, and the fight against him must be conducted to the death. He is an international terrorist with whom there is only one conversation. He must get what he deserves; there are means for that, and they have already been launched...

— Do you feel, with a specialist's instinct, how dangerous the development of terrorism in Russia has become?

— Political extremism and its most dangerous form—terrorism, in my view, carry a clear threat to the very existence of the Russian Federation.

— One might get the impression that it appeared suddenly, out of nowhere. I understand that this doesn't happen. This phenomenon matured for a long time. And it's impossible that the competent services didn't notice it. What prevented them from entering an active struggle earlier, from nipping it in the bud?

— Attention was paid to this before, and the struggle was waged. All this was kept quiet because there was, frankly, nothing to boast about. I will now cite some of my own observations about terrorism that are several years old, and you will notice that they fully correspond to today's realities. This means we knew and studied this evil. I will list the internal reasons for the activation of manifestations of extremism: the aggravation of the struggle for political power and the redistribution of property, the desire for separatism and the intensity of inter-ethnic, inter-ethnic contradictions, social tension and the unprecedented material stratification of society, the criminalization of all spheres of public life. External reasons: support by a number of foreign countries for Chechen and other separatists, the penetration of Islamic fundamentalists, primarily Wahhabis, into the North Caucasus region and the Volga region, their active support by criminal capital, the creation of conditions for the secession of a number of subjects of the Federation from Russia, the destabilization of the internal political situation in the country as a whole. All this began a long time ago and has only now manifested itself in full. There are also accompanying dangerous factors contributing to the development of terrorism. First of all, it is easy access to weapons and the most dangerous means of destruction. Everyone knows that many tons of explosives were found in Moscow alone. The weakening of the administrative-legal regime. The decrease in efficiency in the work of special services and law enforcement agencies. Such are the reasons of an objective nature.