37 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
I'll build a little on u/anapprehension's answer with some background. The answer has to do with Chechnya, so it might help to provide some background there.
For a *very* brief rundown of Chechen history in the 20th century - Chechens had been combined with the neighboring Ingush people in a Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic as a part of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic in the early Soviet period. During the Second World War, in 1944, the Chechens were deported en masse from this area by the NKVD for alleged collaboration with invading Axis forces (about six other ethnic groups in the Caucasus region were deported in related operations), causing mass deaths, and the autonomous republic was abolished.
In 1956, with general de-stalinization, the Chechens were allowed to return to their homeland from internal exile, and the autonomous republic was re-established. When the USSR began to dissolve in 1990, the Chechen Autonomous Republic behaved more like a full-fledged Soviet Socialist Republic (like, say, Georgia or Armenia) than as a part of Russia, declaring sovereignty in 1990, electing former Soviet Air Force Major General Dzhokar Dudayev president in 1991, and declaring unilateral independence in November 2, 1991.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin refused to recognize this independence - while he gave an extremely wide latitude to the leaders of Russia's federal regions, famously declaring to them in 1990 that they should "grab as much sovereignty as they can swallow", outright independence was a step too far. A standoff between Russia and Chechnya ensued over the next few years, as Dudayev slowly lost control of Chechnya itself and the republic increasingly saw internal factional fighting and a flourishing of organized crime. Yeltsin launched a full-scale invasion of Chechnya in December 1994 - the First Chechen War, which saw a bloody battle to take control of the capital, Grozny, but that also saw continued guerrilla resistance to the Russian military, as well as tens of thousands of civilian casualties. Ultimately peace accords were signed in 1996-1997 that granted a more-or-less de facto independence to Chechnya.
However, war-torn Chechnya was even less able to provide coherent peace and stability within its borders, and many armed groups proliferated, fighting with one another and with the republican leaders. On August 7, 1999, Shamil Basayev, a local Islamist warlord, along with Saudi-born Ibn al-Khattab led forces into neighboring Dagestan (an autonomous North Caucasian republic in the Russian Federation) to spark a separatist revolt there, and were counterattacked by Russian security forces. This conflict had by September 1999 caused hundreds of casualties. In the meantime, Director of the FSB Vladimir Putin had been appointed as Acting Prime Minister on August 9, and had been confirmed in that office by the Russian Duma a week later.
Now, the connection to the apartment bombings is that starting on August 31 and continuing into September there were a spate of bombings and defused bombs in Moscow and in the North Caucasus region, especially Dagestan, with the deadliest bombing occuring in an eight-story Moscow apartment building on September 13, killing 119 people. Specifically, the incidents were bombs at a Moscow shopping mall on August 31 (1 killed, 40 injured), a car bomb in Bukyansk, Dagestan (64 killed, 133 injured), a bomb at a Moscow apartment building on September 9 (106 killed, 249 injured), the September 13 bombing, a truck bomb in Volgodonsk (17 killed, 69 injured), and then the Ryazan foiled bombing on September 22.
About 300 people were killed altogether - the Ryazan bomb is the most notorious and controversial, but didn't actually kill anyone. Anonymous callers called Russian news agencies and claimed responsibility for these bombings as retaliation for the Russian military offensive in Dagestan, and in one case claiming membership in an otherwise unknown "Liberation Army of Dagestan". Who these individuals were remains murky, and Basayev denied any connection to them, claiming it was Dagestanis, not Chechens. One can decide whether or not to believe Basayev, but it's worth pointing out that by 1999 he had already been responsible for such terrorist attacks as the Budyonnovsk Hospital Hostage Crisis in 1995, that ultimately had led to the death of 140 civilians.
The "FSB is behind the bombings" theory is that these were false flag operations: namely, that the FSB orchestrated the bombings as a casus belli to turn Russian public opinion against Northern Caucasian insurgents and in favor of a full-scale second invasion of Chechnya - as it turned out, a land invasion was launched on October 1, beginning the Second Chechen War (which officially ended in 2009).
The Second Chechen War and his perceived strong leadership of it saw Putin go from a relative unknown in Russian public opinion (a 31% Approval, 33% Disapproval, 36% No Opinion) in August 1999 to an extremely popular Prime Minister, with a 65% approval rating in October of that year (his approval rating has never gone below this since). The military operation was definitely cast as an anti-terrorist one, with Putin (in)famously promising in a September 1999 televised press conference:
""We are going to pursue terrorists everywhere. If they are in the airport, we will pursue them in the airport. And if we capture them in the toilet, then we will waste them in the outhouse. … The issue has been resolved once and for all”."
With Yeltsin's December 31, 1999 resignation of the Presidency in favor of Putin, and his convincing win in the Presidential election's first round of voting the following March, the idea is that Putin orchestrated the bombings in order to rally Russian public opinion for a new invasion of Chechnya to cement his hold on power.
I will try to not soapbox here, so let me just be clear that: all claims of "Putin/the FSB is behind the bombings" have come from public opponents of Putin, as mentioned in the answer above, but as far as I am aware of, no concrete evidence besides that already mentioned has been given for FSB involvement in the bombings. For what it's worth, Russian journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, who have reported on Russian intelligence services and are critical of the Russian government, consider the Ryazan incident to be an actual FSB training operation that was badly bungled to the point of confusing the public to the point of paranoia (as they describe in *Russia's New Nobility* ).
Not that there *couldn't* be nefarious FSB involvement, but that it's not something conclusive (and FSB removal of evidence and obfuscation in open investigations has made it difficult to arrive at any public conclusion). It also needs to be pointed out that the bombings occurred in a period of already open military conflict between Chechen forces and the Russian military in Dagestan, and occurred in a number of cities and locations across Moscow and the North Caucasus over a three week period.
Carrying out *that* many attacks - some of which were reported to the FSB and foiled - over that many locations over that many weeks and covering up that much official involvement boggles the mind. Which is not to say that false flag incidents do not happen, but that even Nazi Germany limited themselves to one radio station in order to justify their invasion of Poland in 1939. In the case of Putin's rise to power, this also assumes a preset plan (get appointed PM, conduct a false flag operation to start a war, get popular for leading that war, get appointed President), as opposed to him capitalizing on or benefiting from contingencies of history. So while FSB involvement in the bombings is a theory that prominent journalists and Putin critics have discussed, it's probably one that should be taken with a grain of salt.
Comment by Kochevnik81 at 10/01/2019 at 18:43 UTC*
22 upvotes, 0 direct replies
A postscript: while Putin is the only Director of the FSB to be appointed Russian Prime Minister directly from that office, it's worth pointing out that an intelligence background was hardly unique for Prime Ministers in the late 1990s, as his two immediate predecessors also had such backgrounds: Sergei Stepashin, had been head of the FSB's earlier incarnation, the Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK) from 1994 to 1995, while Yevgeny Primakov was Deputy Head of the KGB in 1991 and Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) from 1991 to 1996.
ETA: Post-postscript - it's also worth mentioning that while the FSB gets talked about as if it were just the KGB rebranded, the KGB was actually broken up into smaller often competing agencies, including the FSK/FSB, the SVR, FAPSI (which monitored electronic communications), the Federal Border Service, and Federal Protective Service. These agencies likewise had to compete with newer organizations like the Federal Tax Police.
Comment by AeneasFelix at 10/01/2019 at 19:57 UTC
12 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Thank you for your very informative post. There is one thing I can't quite wrap my head around though:
Russian journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, who have reported on Russian intelligence services and are critical of the Russian government, consider the Ryazan incident to be an actual FSB training operation that was badly bungled to the point of confusing the public to the point of paranoia
How would these journalists/proponents of this theory explain the presence of actual explosives (Hexogen) if the incident was an "FSB training operation"? Why on earth would anyone ever use actual explosive compounds in a training operation in a civilian building?