Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [117]
“Let’s have some dinner and watch TV at my place,” Sergei said. She agreed. Shortly after midnight Sergei said that he was going to the kitchen to have a cigarette. Those were his last words.
Initially Aliona thought an earthquake had struck. In her shock she heard no noise, as if the sound had been turned off in a movie theater. The wall with Sergei’s bookshelf and TV suddenly detached from the rest of the room and slid down, leaving her on the couch at the edge of an abyss. She did not lose consciousness, and her hearing returned within seconds. As the sounds of the street reached her from the outside, she realized that she was looking across the gap that had formed in the middle of the building. Somewhere in that gap lay her boyfriend, his kitchen, her mother, and their entire apartment, which went down with the nine floors that collapsed around the two central entrances.
She was rescued by firefighters. As she wandered distraught through the pandemonium filled with smoke, police, fire trucks, and paramedics, a CNN crew spotted her.
“Were you in the building? Do you need to make a call? You can use my phone,” yelled a man with a camera over the noise of the sirens.
“I have no one to call, my sister is in America,” she said. “I don’t remember the number.”
Eventually, courtesy of CNN, she contacted her sister. The next morning Tanya flew to Moscow.
They never found their mother’s body. They became frustrated by the nearly inhumane insensitivity of the countless officials whom they had to see because without their mother’s body there could be no death record, and all their documents were destroyed. One day, they stood in front of their apartment block with the gaping hole in the middle—four entrances out of six were still intact—amid the crowd of survivors and journalists, separated from their old courtyard by a police line. The powers that be had decided to raze what remained of the block. When the demolition charges boomed, they quivered and burst into tears and clutched each other. Somewhere under that rubble of dust and concrete that bulldozers were about to level lay their mother.
A year later, in the aftermath of 9/11, the contrast to how the Americans handled the consequences struck them.
“The Americans went with a fine-toothed comb over the World Trade Center wreckage, looking for the tiniest clue,” Tanya told me. “Why didn’t the FSB look for evidence? Why did they bulldoze the place? Did they have something to hide, perhaps?”
It took Aliona three months to restore her papers. As soon as she could, she got on a plane to Chicago. She stayed at Tanya’s house for a while. The following fall she enrolled at the University of Denver, majoring in computer design. She had no intention of ever returning home again.
“As for who did it, somehow it did not matter to me initially,” recalled Aliona. “They told us it was the Chechens, but I didn’t really know much about them. Politics never interested me. They might as well have said ‘the Martians.’ Eventually I learned all the politics behind it, that someone was playing with us as if we were tin soldiers. But that was much later.”
Before going home after the London film premiere, Tanya attended a brainstorming session in Boris’s office to decide what to do next. The group included the two Duma members, Yushenkov and Rybakov, Boris, Sasha, Felshtinsky, and myself.
One idea was that Yushenkov set up a commission in Russia to investigate the bombings. He would try to get official Duma support for that. We agreed that Boris should not be a part of it, since he was too controversial. Tanya and Aliona would represent the victims. Felshtinsky and Sasha would continue their investigation, and I would be in charge of the publicity campaign outside Russia.
There was someone in Moscow, Sasha said, who could be very useful to Yushenkov. His name was Mikhail Trepashkin, a former FSB investigator, currently a lawyer. Sasha vouched for him. He offered to call Trepashkin to ask him to see Yushenkov as soon as possible. Also, Sasha noted, Aliona and