Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [116]
The trouble with the official claim that Wahhabi terrorists were behind the attack was “that it is not based on a model of rational behavior of clever villains, but the behavior of idiots, whose motives are impossible to comprehend…. There is a striking disparity between the carefully executed plan and the fact that its aim is absolutely incomprehensible.” The analogy to 9/11 did not work, argued Furman, because bin Laden had a rational plan: to damage America and provoke anti-Islamic backlash. But why would Wahhabi terrorists want to blow up the working-class apartment houses? Was it to stop the war, or to provoke it? To damage Russia? It didn’t make sense. “The second idiocy, implied by the official version, is the idiocy of the FSB. The Ryazan operation (if it was an operation, and not an averted terrorist act) is so ridiculous, that all attempts to explain it fail.
“That the first version implies rational behavior, and the second, idiocy, does not mean that the first is correct, and the second is not. But when people face something very frightening, it’s easier for them to believe in a devil’s plan, than in the actions of idiots or some absurdity. It’s easier to believe that the [young Prince] Dmitry was killed by Boris Godunov, and not the official version, that he stabbed himself to death with a small knife.”
Thus, Furman concluded, Russians had a choice: deem their vlast criminal or idiotic. Berezovsky had already won, regardless of the truth.
But it was not good enough for me. I needed the truth. Granted, Putin was the quintessential KGB man, a murderous type. But being murderous does not automatically mean being guilty of every murder. And there were other murderous types out there, as I learned while watching the towers go down on 9/11. At heart I was a research scientist trained to treat evidence skeptically. Here I differed with Boris, a mathematician, for whom logic, not evidence, was supreme. For him, Ryazan was sufficiently convincing. For me, Ryazan was impressive but circumstantial. I had no scruples trumpeting the FSB theory in the media because of the obvious official cover-up. But I still wanted to get to the bottom of it.
I was not alone in this. Almost unnoticed among the guests at the London film premiere was Tanya Morozova, a quiet thirty-one-year-old woman with large brown eyes and high Slavic cheekbones. Her mother was killed at the bombing at Guryanova Street on September 9. When introduced to her, those present at the London event tended to become reflective, if only for a moment, reminded of the human stakes that somehow got lost amid the high drama of the Kremlin power intrigue.
Yuri Felshtinsky had discovered Tanya in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she lived with her American husband and a four-year-old son. He explained that we were continuing to investigate the bombings. There are two views as to who could have killed her mother. Of all people, she was one who must want to know the truth. We would like her to come to London, hear us out, and decide for herself.
Tanya agreed. In London, she did not say much; she came to listen. But after seeing the film she called her younger sister, Aliona, in Denver to say that the rumor that they had brushed off as sheer madness might actually be true. There were serious grounds for believing that their own government could have planted the bomb that killed their mother and ninety-three of their neighbors. Would Aliona agree to be part of a committee to investigate the allegations?
Aliona was a survivor of the Guryanova Street blast. After Tanya had married and moved to Milwaukee, Aliona, who was twenty-three at the time, stayed with their mother in the one-bedroom apartment in which she had grown up, in a working-class neighborhood of Pechatniki. On the evening of September 8 she was out with her boyfriend, Sergei, who lived in the section next to theirs in the huge apartment block. On the way home they stopped to chat with some friends on the leafy patio with benches and a playground