Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall. Andrew Meier

by his own admission, Khattab had consorted with Osama bin Laden. But the rebel commander’s ties to bin Laden were obscure at best.²⁶

      Basayev and Khattab led a convoy of fighters across the mountains of southeastern Chechnya, east into neighboring Dagestan, the mostly Muslim republic, firmly within the Russian Federation, on the Caspian Sea.²⁷ A caviar-rich republic the size of the Austria, Dagestan is a complex mélange of obscure ethnic groups – more than thirty in all – long ruled by Soviet-bred officials loyal to Moscow. The rebels, several hundred by the best estimates, marched in broad daylight, two by two, well armed with grenade launchers, wearing new camouflage uniforms. When they seized a handful of Dagestani villages across the border, in Moscow the move was seen as an attempt to fulfill an old vow to unite Chechnya with Dagestan in an Islamic state that would reach the Caspian.

      The remote stretch of Dagestan had long been a center for the Wahhabi movement. Sergei Stepashin, the Russian prime minister at the time of the incursion, had even once visited the villages under Wahhabi “occupation.” In August 1998 Stepashin, then Yeltsin’s interior minister, had gone to Dagestan to hear grievances from the village elders. He left convinced that “the Wahhabis are peaceful people, we can work with them.” The day after Basayev and Khattab entered Dagestan, Stepashin again flew to Dagestan. This time as prime minister he spoke in stern tones. He said he’d come to take charge, but his face was ash gray. The next day, August 9, 1999, Yeltsin sacked him.

      Stepashin had personified loyalty, long considered the president’s favorite attribute. However, this was not just another of Yeltsin’s seasonal cabinet cleanings. Stepashin’s shortcoming, said Oleg Sysuev, a Kremlin aide at the time, was that “he had a heart.” Yeltsin needed more than fidelity; he needed strength. He turned to Putin, who had been his FSB director for only a year, and named him prime minister. In eighteen months Yeltsin had sacked five prime ministers. This time, however, he added a shocker. He spoke on television of Putin as his successor. At the time the former KGB officer was unknown. Polls put his popularity ratings at less than 2 percent. The dynamics, however, of the political vacuum had been proved. “Yeltsin could put anyone in the prime minister’s job,” said Aleksandr Oslon, Russia’s best pollster, “and his numbers would rise.”

      Putin’s numbers were aided by more than his new seat of power. The August march into Dagestan, fixed on Russian television screens as a slap in the Kremlin’s face, gave him a perfect opportunity to avenge the mistakes of the past. But Putin wanted more: to permit Russia, insulted and injured after the crash of 1998 and burdened by Yeltsin’s calcified rule, to imagine itself again a velikaya derzhava, a great power. Moscow dispatched helicopter gunships to pound the mud villages the rebels had seized. Basayev and Khattab, however, and nearly all their men, it seemed, had already fled. The new prime minister promised a short operation – he would mercilessly cleanse Dagestan, but under no condition reignite the embers in Chechnya.

      During his brief tenure as FSB chief Putin had hung a portrait of Peter the Great in his Lubyanka office. In his first months as prime minister, his aides liked to assure foreign reporters that Peter, the tsar who opened Russia to the West, was Putin’s model. Yet Peter had also begun his career with an onslaught against the heathens in the south, conquering the port of Azov in 1696 from the Ottoman Turks, gaining access, after a failed attempt the previous year, to the Black Sea.

      For years, in Russian politics the month of August seemed to carry a curse. Both the coup of 1991 and the crash of 1998 came in August. But August 1999 hit Yeltsin particularly hard. His physical and mental health had moved from a topic of concern to ridicule among the Moscow elite. Worse still, scandals brewed on several fronts, conspiring to ruin his fishing vacation. There was the Mabetex mess, a tangled affair that reeked of money laundering on a massive scale and of egregious – even by Russian standards – bribery. The Mabetex story, gaining ground since the spring, had already ensnared Pavel Borodin, the president’s drinking partner and chief of one of the state’s largest internal empires, the Kremlin Property Department. In August the scandal threatened to drag in Yeltsin’s two daughters, their spouses, and a host of family consiglieri. Borodin was alleged to have accepted bribes from a Kosovar Albanian, Behgjet Pacolli, for multibillion-dollar contracts to refurbish the Kremlin.²⁸

      August also brought a second scandal, the Bank of New York affair. The story, which first appeared in the New York Times on August 19, 1999, alleged that Russian crime bosses, in cahoots with Moscow officials, had washed “as much as ten billion dollars” through the U.S. banking system.²⁹ The BoNY scandal unfolded as Russian forces bombed and shelled the Wahhabi villages in Dagestan. Then, on August 25, the Corriere della Sera ran a detailed exposé of the Mabetex case that linked, for the first time, the Yeltsin family to the misdeeds.

      Six days later the bombing season began. Days after the rebels had retreated from Dagestan, a series of bombings rocked Russia. On August 31, as Mia and I sat in an Indian café two blocks away, a bomb exploded in one of Luzhkov’s proudest creations, the Manezh, a subterranean shopping mall next to the Kremlin. Placed beside a video arcade, the device wounded forty-one. Two later died from their burns. On September 4, 1999, an apartment building housing Russian officers and their families in the Dagestani town of Buinaksk exploded in the middle of the night. Sixty-two died. Back in Moscow, one after another on September 9 and 13, massive chemical bombs leveled two whole apartment blocks. Three days later a fourth building blew, this time in the south, in the town of Volgodonsk. By then nearly 300 people had been killed in their sleep. Yeltsin denounced the “barbaric acts of terror.”

      No one came forward to claim responsibility. But the prime suspects naturally were the Chechens. Few facts surfaced, but, as always, theories in Moscow swirled. Rossiiskaya gazeta, the daily newspaper of the Russian state, saw a host of possible culprits: Chechen rebels, who “want[ed] to create a great state in the Caucasus,” global oil barons, “who want[ed] to redraw the map of a rich region in their favor,” and Russophobes, who wanted Moscow to “sink into local conflicts and retire from the world stage.” Viktor Ilyukhin, the chairman of the Duma Security Committee and an unreconstructed Communist prone to fulminating without facts, saw the bombings as a Kremlin campaign to bring down Mayor Luzhkov. Moskovskii komsomolets, Russia’s best-read tabloid and the newspaper closest to Luzhkov, accused his archfoe Berezovsky of masterminding the invasion into Dagestan. The paper even aired an accusation that many – members of the military included – feared true: that the FSB had set the bombs. No evidence, however, surfaced that the blasts were the work of Chechen extremists.³⁰

      Questions lingered. There was the choice of targets – working-class districts – and the timing – just when things seemed quiet – and the fact that the Chechens had never set off a bomb in Moscow during the first war. Most disconcerting of all was a strange episode in Ryazan, a city 130 miles southeast of Moscow. On the night of September 22, 1999, just six days after the Volgodonsk bombing, residents of a twelve-story apartment house at 14/16 Novosyelov Street called the police. A bus driver had seen two men carrying something into the basement and feared it was a bomb. The police discovered three sacks bound by wires and a detonator set to go off before dawn. They evacuated the building and called the bomb squad. The next day Putin declared that “vigilance” had thwarted a “terrorist threat.” On September 24, 1999, however, in the glare of the television lights, the new head of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, a man Putin had brought from Petersburg, apologized. The security service, he said, had put the sacks there itself. It was only “a training exercise,” Patrushev said awkwardly. The sacks, he insisted, were filled with sugar.³¹

      The bombings, coupled with the invasion of Dagestan, united the nation – against the Chechens. By September’s close Putin’s War had begun. Russian troops, this time a force of nearly a hundred thousand, were back in Chechnya. This war, the new prime minister vowed, would be different. Moscow would restore order in the lawless region that had enjoyed de facto, if not de jure, independence since driving the Russian