Putin and the Apartment Bombs: 1. The Four Bombs

They say that when a bomb goes off, you feel it before you hear it. The explosives create a shockwave that pushes walls inwards, disintegrates glass, compresses air, and for a brief moment, Silent. You hear it. A blast so loud it can rupture eardrums. After the explosion, the aftermath of a bomb follows a familiar pattern, sifting through the rubble, counting the dead, the hunt for survivors. And finally The Search for a Story.

What we've got to do.

Yeah.

It's a second draw.

We're digging into a story that the world may have been. It's about In fact, four.

Four bombs.

Just utterly trauma.

Walk.

And these bombs and everything that followed have sparked some chilling theories about who was behind them. Because they set the stage. For perhaps the most consequential rise to power in modern history.

It's part of the origin story of Vladimir Putin.

It's something which explains Putin and the rise of Putin, or might do, and I think in that sense it's a mystery which matters.

I'd been talking to journalists who were there in Russia just.

We are watching some kind of government conspiracy.

A lot of what we should know has been classified or buried or covered up.

if it really happened. It's a story for the ages.

The journalists we brought together for this series don't all agree about what happened.

It was quite clear that something very dirty is going on.

No.

I would say that's a conspiracy theory. I've read the evidence, believe me.

I'm very, very wary of conspiracies. But when it comes to the Kremlin They've often proved to be true.

But there's one thing they do agree on. Asking questions about this story, even now, can be dangerous.

He has been transferred to intensive care and he is on monitors. his immune system is gone

It's a mystery some have died trying to solve.

We note their names, the people who've been killed, they all investigated the bombings, and that message has reached the Russian public as well.

And that message is

That's dangerous. Don't go there.

Amen.

You know you might end up dead.

I'm Helena Merriman, and we are going there. In the History Bureau. Putin and the Apartment Bureau. Episode one

Uh one two three um let me get to my Russian seizala surshku. That's a nursery rhyme. Is it? Designed to make babies say sh.

What does it mean?

Sasha went along the road, licking at a lolly, I think, or something.

Yeah, yeah.

So I'm Andrew Harding. Let me let me think about this. I arrived in Moscow in nineteen ninety one, age twenty four, thinking let's go somewhere exciting to try and do this thing, be a foreign correspondent.

Why Russia?

I had a friend in Moscow and they allowed me to sleep on their floor. It was incredibly dramatic. You know, the Soviet Union was coming to an end. It was always in the news and I was very interested in what was happening.

And it's quite a place to land. This is nineteen ninety one, Soviet Union is collapsing, you're in the middle of one of the biggest stories in the world. What was it like to experience that collapse happening in a day to day way?

It was it was so surreal because You walk through the centre of Moscow and there are still these huge grey buildings with things like shoes and fruit written above them. You know, no advertising, very Soviet, very communist. There was s there was so much optimism and a desire to become part of the West. and all these foreign fast food outlets were coming, Pizza Hut, McDonalds, Snickers bars everywhere. Somebody coined the phrase snickerizatia, the snickerization of our country.

Andrew's been a BBC Foreign Correspondent for over 30 years. But through the years, his time in Russia in the 90s, it's always stuck with him. Even now, he's still trying to make sense of it. This wild, unpredictable decade that ended with the four bombs. And those bombs were about to get into them. But first you have to understand the years that led up to them. This time in Russia when history was playing at double speed.

So when Andrew arrives in Moscow in ninety one, the Berlin walls just The Soviet Empire collapsed, and he's living in a new country.

Russia.

A country that's just elected its first ever president.

Many votes are still to be counted, but there is no doubt that Boris Yeltsin has become the first president of the United States.

Boris Yeltsin. He's flamboyant, charismatic. He says he's going to shake things. The old Soviet economy, embrace capitalism.

Fast track rushing.

21st century. The problem was Yeltsin went to the

Shock therapy

He freed prices overnight.

Inflation soared.

over two thousand percent. And the result? People's savings are. were wiped.

The old people, the pensioners.

Apartments.

And they would be sitting there all day. fur coats or if they'd sold their fur coats in thinner coats and hats, and people would walk past in the slush, it was really wretched and made a huge impression on me.

The Russian ruble collapsed, and suddenly the only thing that mattered was dollars. And that changed everything. The jobs you could get.

Yeah.

So you'd want to have to sort of queue up outside?

Literally do a five dollar handshake with the dormant.

To bribe your way in.

Which was, you know, a source of great pride, you know. I bribed my way in somewhere, it felt very dramatic. And once you're inside, for another five dollars. eat and drink all night. For five dollars you could fly nine time zones to the far edge near Alaska. The dollar was extraordinary and of course most people didn't have access to that.

Most people except for the people.

a businessman

The oligarchs. They got very rich very fast, buying up former state owned companies at knockdown prices. And as they got richer, they moved into politics, funneling money to Yeltsin, helping to keep him in power. But as Yeltsin and the oligarchs scavenged on Russia, the rest of the country was getting poorer. And by the late nineties, people had had enough. Where Russians had once lined the streets to support Yeltsin, Now they wanted him going to be In Yeltsin, he was falling apart.

Last week, President Yeltsin arrived a little unsteadily at a press conference. He's long had a reputation for boozing.

By the last few years of the nineties, Yelp.

Yeltsin's hope for another term in office won't survive his latest illness.

He was so sort of shabby, pathetic figure. Often when he wasn't drunk, he looked like he Clearly struggling with his mind. He spoke painfully slowly. they would say we need somebody new. And every time he went in for an operation, it was this huge drama because would he survive the operation, who does he hand the nuclear briefcase to? Who can he trust to be there when he comes round from anaesthetic?

The problem was Yeltsin had no obvious successor, and he was terrified that the next president might turn on him, take up one of the corruption scandals surrounding him and his family, and throw him in prison. The oligarchs were nervous too. They needed a new protector, someone who'd keep the money flowing.

The stakes were incredibly high before.

And what were they after, power or money or both?

Uh uh well th the two were sort of came hand in hand in a way. Um it was a real cowboy capitalism and it was very, very dangerous.

And so by the autumn of ninety nine you have a country with a failing president, no clear successor, and powerful men operating in the shadows, searching for a new leader they can trust.

Windows shattered.

And one by one the fire flee. Soon the Then the ambulances. And then From Russia, Andrew Harding reports. The journalists like Andrew Harding.

Southern Russia is in turmoil tonight. 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 carbon. This 10-year-old girl was dragged from the ruins, both legs crushed.

The final count? 64 Women and children.

It's not clear yet what caused the blast, but the finger of suspicion is likely to be.

This first bomb makes the news, but only briefly. The explosion happened in a remote city near Chechnya, where militants and the Russian military have fought for years. So it's a tragic story, but it seems like more of the same, and the country moves on.

I was at home in my apartment in southern Moscow and I remember getting the call.

There'd been a second bomb, another apartment blown up.

This second bomb explodes in the early hours of the morning, when most people are asleep. But this time, it's not in a remote, war-torn part of the country. It's in the heart of Russia. In Moscow.

I remember rushing off with a cameraman Bob from the bureau and heading off to I think Southeast Suburbs and um we arrived

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What?

Everybody from the

Could you see the insides of apartments?

There were some places I do remember where the front peeled off. It was almost like a And you could see the layers that have been compressed as well.

In Russian news footage you see firefighters in black uniforms. They're kneeling in the rubble, prizing apart slabs of concrete as they search for bodies. Suddenly you see an arm. Then a face, then an eye that twitches. This man is still alive. The firefighters scoop out the rubble around him, heave him into their arms, and they carry him away. He's naked, except for a pair of green underpants.

I remember the dust. And I remember the smell. There was just a mood of hysteria. You know, Russians were used to a certain degree of chaos, they were used to mafia hits, they were used to all sorts of things, but this was Not something that anybody in in the city had seen.

Again the counting. 94 dead. And this time with Moscow hit, the story breaks out. Address tragedy naitské, dom chest corpus space. front page, every TV bulletin, every radio show. And the question everyone's asking, who did this?

Our correspondent Andrew Harding is in Moscow.

Within days, people think they know who's to blame.

Andrew, have the authorities there actually nailed the cause of this explosion? Is it now beyond doubt?

Well there is

Obvious possibilities have sprung to everyone's mind and the leading candidate is the Islamic militants, the Chechens who are now fighting against Russian troops in the south of the country.

All over Russia, people are blaming them. Chechen militants. And this was a terrifying thought for Russians, because if the Chechen militants had bombed two buildings already, then maybe they'd do it again.

They have promised to wage the campaign against the Russians in every major city, including Moscow, and this is

It was almost instinctive for people because they were the ones who Russia had been at war with.

And that war between Chechnya and the Russian state had been so brutal that people thought it could be reason enough for Chechen militants to blow up apartments full of Russian civilians.

The Russians moved in at first light this morning.

And they sent in the tanks.

Hundreds of tanks and armored personnel carriers crossed the border, backed up by helicopters.

Yeah.

The Chechen's responded with sort of classic, provocative swagger and said, Come and get us. We are Chechen, we are not afraid of this superpower army.

It was the first conflict Andrew ever covered.

I think my first visit would have been in the summer of nineteen ninety four. And I would have driven over the mountains in my little Lada Neva Jeep that was just in love with it.

How did it deal with the with a rocky

Amazingly. It was very light. The Soviet joke was that this was the thing that the Soviet industry invented instead of fixing the roads. They came up with this amazing That could drive over everything.

He drove all over the country, meeting Chechen fighters.

Chechnya was overrun by warlords and Armed to the teeth, just bristling with weapons, and we really had no idea what we were doing. I mean we'd never covered a anything like this.

ご視聴ありがとうございました

He was there when the tanks rolled in, when Chechen women walked into the streets to try and stop them. And he was there in the capital, Grozny, when Russia tried to destroy the city.

The war for Grozny was just hell on earth. It was the most intense bombardments on a big city. And I to this day have never been more scared of anything.

And you've covered a a lot of wars in your time.

It was in insane. This was Russia's superpower. ex-Soviet military with every imaginable missile, mortar, bombs, jets, helicopters, all targeting this city and pulverizing it. I mean the word it is a appropriate.

The war dragged on for two years. Thousands of Chechen civilians were killed, and there were reports of horrific abuses on both sides. It ended with a peace deal, but the Chechens didn't win their independence. So there was a sense of unfinished business, that a day of reckoning would come.

They... kept that resentment, that anger against Moscow, It burned and it still burns.

And that anger in Chechnya, it became a fertile place for a new kind of extremism.

After all the bloodshed and all the chaos and misery of the First War, you could start to see a more militant. Islamism starting to come in, starting to fund people, more shadowy figures emerging with their own power centers.

Chechen militants started taking hostages, aid workers, journalists, anyone they thought could bring in money or attention. And in one particularly brutal case, they kidnapped four foreign engineers. A few months on, their bodies were found dumped by a roadside. All four had been decapitated.

So when those first two bombs explode in 1999, this is why most Russians blame Chechen militants. And in the news reports, you can hear a deeper fear that this might just be the beginning.

So are you saying that Russia is b is bracing itself now for some kind of wave of terrorist attacks from this source?

I think that it's quite likely that that's going to happen.

As long as neighboring Chechnya remains in a state of near anarchy, more turmoil in the region seems almost inevitable.

And sure enough.

The blast happened before dawn as the building's 150 residents lay sleeping.

Only a few nights later, at five in the morning on the thirteenth of September

An entire apartment block collapsed, leaving a scene of utter devastation. The death toll is rising by the minute.

The third bomb explodes again in Moscow. It's the third one to tear down an apartment in just nine days. And now The panic sets in.

Russian police patrol the streets of Moscow. Yesterday's deadly explosion has triggered a massive security clamp down here. Every nook and cranny is being searched.

In Russia, almost everyone lives in these tall, precarious, prefab concrete apartments. And with the bombs exploding in the middle of the night, people are now too scared to sleep.

there was a sense that this is going to carry on, that we're all at risk now. People began to patrol every apartment block where they could, to make sure it didn't happen to them the next night.

Это преступление, причем преступление гнусное.

That night, Russia's latest prime minister, the fifth in 18 months, talks to the press.

Их даже зверями назвать нельзя.

For most Russians, this is the first time they've ever seen their new Prime Minister speak. He's only been in the job a few weeks. He's short, a forgettable face, and the only thing most people know about him is that he was, until very recently, the head of the FSB, Russia's internal security service, formerly the KGB. His name Vladimir Putin

With President Boris Yeltsin nowhere to be seen. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had been a very good thing.

Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin blamed Islamic militants for the attack and said that Russian forces would wipe out their

It's Putin offers comfort. But he also offers revenge. Says he'll go after the rabid animals who did this. Three days later, at five in the morning, I was

Volgodonsk in southern Russia hasn't experienced anything like it since the Second World War.

The fourth bomb explodes, demolishing an apartment building in Volgodonsk, a city hundreds of kilometers away from Moscow. It rips the facade off a nine-story.

Somewhere in Russia.

Children.

Flooding the streets. In the battle to beat the bombers, no stone is being left untouched. The building destroyed this morning had only been checked. of yesterday. Nowhere now is safe, nothing beyond suspicion.

At this point, all four of the bombs have gone off. Over a period of just 16 days, four apartments have been blown up, killing some 300 people.

I remember this extraordinary news coming through that Another bomb would be found in another apartment. And then I remember it seemed almost instantaneous. That there was a twist, just the worst possible twist.

And this fifth bomb, it doesn't explode. People find it. They call the police. And the police, they follow the A trail which ends up not with Chechen militants, but with the FSB, the Russian government security service, formerly known as the KGB.

If it's true it changes what's the right

It changes everything.

If Because the story of this fifth bomb is contested. Twenty-five years later, people are still arguing about it. But at the time, like so many Western journalists, Andrew didn't report on this twist. It didn't feel like a priority.

I think it's very difficult. to it. It's it's quite painful to to confront That failure. I all I can say is I think we should have done. We should have covered it more.

But a few journalists did.

The bombings were extremely suspicious. My premonition was that there was something very, very sinister going on.

It's so evil. So horrible.

So outside the north. Comprehension.

But how many people, how many journalists, how many diplomats, how many political leaders are equipped to

Is a BBC Studios production. Written and presented by me, Helena Merriman. The series producer is Sarah Shabier. Sound by Eloise Waller. And the executive editor is Annie Brown.