Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [113]
Such stories—there were many in the book—along with a fresh recap of the Ryazan incident, made Blowing Up Russia a minor sensation in Moscow that summer. The book did not prove anything, but it made an outlandish theory seem plausible. Was it possible that the secret service was prepared to blow up houses with sleeping innocent citizens?
I was not yet convinced, but Sasha and Boris were excited beyond belief. I sensed the thrill in their voices whenever I spoke with them by phone. I could not quite understand it, based on the evidence uncovered so far.
I began to understand their excitement only when they separately made one nearly identical comment.
“Imagine their faces when they read this in Kontora,” said Sasha.
“I’d give a lot to see Volodya’s face when he reads it,” said Boris.
For them the book was not aimed at the general public; it was not supposed to prove anything. It was a personal message to their nemeses, a declaration of war: We think you did it, and we are out to get you. Indeed, I thought, never mind that the book was hardly a best seller; if the FSB had, in fact, blown up those houses, the book would create havoc in the Kremlin and perhaps provoke a reaction that would become a proof in itself.
It has become a cliché to say that September 11, 2001, changed everything, yet for many things in Russia, which had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden, the cliché held true. In exchange for support of the American war on terror, Putin got what may have ultimately saved his presidency: U.S. acquiescence to his war in Chechnya and the dismantling of Russian democracy. After the attacks, Boris and I went to Washington as soon as we could. The news that Putin had become an American ally was told to us by Tom Graham, the senior Russia hand in the Bush administration, who was then on the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department. It was clear to me that from now on, we would be viewed in Washington as the enemy of a friend.
“Volodya is so fucking lucky,” said Boris when we were leaving the State Department building. “If there was no bin Laden, he should have invented him. I wonder whether the Americans understand that he is not their friend at all. He will play them and the Muslims against each other, exploring every weakness to his advantage.”
After nearly a year of pleading to the Brits for forgiveness for smuggling Sasha into the UK I was allowed to return. I got to London just in time for the event that I had been planning from my New York exile: the launch of a campaign to remind the Western world about the 1999 apartment block bombings. On December 14, 2001, the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers, the largest NGO in Russia, held a conference in Moscow on the war in Chechnya sponsored by the IFCL. Soldiers’ Mothers came from all over Russia. The hall was packed with international journalists, and it was expected that Boris would address the gathering via teleconference from London. It was his first, albeit virtual, appearance in Moscow since he went into exile more than a year earlier.
Boris used the occasion to state that after reading Sasha’s book, he had become convinced that the Moscow apartment houses were blown up by the FSB. As a result, the foreign press jumped on the story for the first time. Perhaps it was the audience of soldiers’ mothers that did it. Their children were dying in Chechnya, and they seemed to accept the claim as perfectly plausible; no one in the hall raised any objection. Or it could have been the fact that the bombings were retroactively cast as Russia’s 9÷11. Or maybe it was the drama of a