Not only these two foreign correspondents, but also Russian journalists predicted
with unmatched foresight the coming events, hinting at involvement of the highest
political authorities. On July 22, 1999, Aleksandr Zhilin published an article in
the Moskovskaya Pravda with the title Burya v Moskve (Storm in Moscow).[17] In this article Zhilin wrote that “the city is awaiting great shocks. The performance
of loud terrorist acts (or attempts at terrorist acts) is being planned involving
a number of government establishments: the buildings of the FSB, MVD [Ministry of
the Interior], the Federation Council, the Moscow City Court, the Moscow Arbitration
Court, and a number of editorial boards of anti-Luzhkov publications.”[18] In a second article, published after the bombings, Zhilin wrote that he possessed
a leaked document on which his first article was based. He said he had showed the
document to the deputy premier of Moscow and to colleagues from the TV: “Everyone
said that this could not be true,” he wrote. “Today I understand that those journalists
who rejected even the theoretical possibility of the existence of a plan of destabilization
in Moscow, one that included terrorist acts, were reasoning like normal, decent people.
They could not understand in their minds how, for the sake of some political goals,
someone could commit such barbaric acts.”[19]
Another Russian journalist, Yelena Tregubova, who had close contacts with the Kremlin
at the time, wrote that, as early as September 1998—this is one year before the apartment explosions took place—the head of the presidential administration,
Valentin Yumashev, warned her “that we have received secret information from the special
services that the country finds itself on the eve of mass rebellions, in essence on
the verge of revolution.”[20] Tregubova considered this an indication that a “Storm” scenario had already been
envisaged. It is clear that the real truth could not emerge in this climate of rumors,
predictions, alleged leaked documents, and so-called exercises in which FSB agents
were caught while putting sacks of sugar in the basement of an apartment building.
There was only an “official” truth, and this truth was that Chechen terrorists were
responsible for these acts. Sophie Shihab, at that time the Moscow correspondent for
the French paper Le Monde, returned later to these dramatic and fateful weeks. She wrote about a young French
businessman with close contacts with Berezovsky, who had called the bureau of Le Monde in Moscow in September 1999. “On the telephone,” wrote Shihab, “he has lost his considerable
self-assurance and renounces his friend: ‘Boris is announcing more attacks. He has
gone mad. It is finished, I’m having nothing more to do with him. He must think that
by creating chaos he can put his strong man into power.’”[21] Strange? But there were other strange things that happened in this period, although
it would take two and a half years before these emerged in the press.
One of these strange things was the fact that Gennady Seleznev, the speaker of the
Duma, was informed of the explosion in Volgodonsk three days before the explosion actually took place.[22] It happened on September 13, 1999, during a session of the Duma and LDPR leader
Vladimir Zhirinovsky told how it happened: “Somebody from the secretariat brought
a note. Clearly they had called to warn the speaker about such a turn of events. Seleznev
read us the news on the explosion. Thereafter we waited for announcements about the
event in Volgodonsk on the TV news. But when this only happened three days later,
I was the only one who asked the speaker about it at the plenary session of September
17, 1999.”[23] Seleznev did not answer: he simply turned Zhirinovsky’s microphone off. When, in
October 1999—after the war had started—a Russian GRU officer, Aleksey Galtin, was
captured by the Chechens, the man declared on a video, received by The Independent: “I know who is responsible for the bombings in Moscow (and Dagestan). It is the
FSB, in cooperation with the GRU, that is responsible for the explosions in Volgodonsk
and Moscow.”[24] The Russian authorities immediately claimed that this confession had been made
under torture and contained no truth. But after his return to Russia, Galtin repeated
his version of the facts in an interview with the opposition paper Novaya Gazeta, and this time he could not be accused of making his statement under pressure.
