Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [122]
The material came from Yuli Rybakov, the Duma deputy from St. Petersburg who was one of the members of the Public Commission. He had retrieved something from the official Duma record: a remark by the speaker, Gennady Seleznyov of the Communist Party, on the morning of September 13, 1999, just hours after the second explosion in Moscow. According to the transcript, Seleznyov interrupted the proceedings with a surprising announcement.
“I have just received a report. According to information from Rostov-on-Don, an apartment building in the city of Volgodonsk was blown up last night,” he said.
In response, the nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky chimed in, “And there is a nuclear power station in Volgodonsk.”
Yet there had been no explosion in Volgodonsk on that day. A bomb did indeed destroy an apartment house in that southern town, but three days later. Nineteen people were killed.
When the news of the actual Volgodonsk blast reached the Duma chamber on September 16, Zhirinovsky spoke again: “Mr. Speaker, please explain, how come you told us Monday about the blast that occurred on Thursday?”
“Thank you, I have noted your remark,” responded Seleznyov, and promptly turned off Zhirinovsky’s microphone. On the video of the Duma session, Zhirinovsky can be seen gesticulating wildly.
Yuli Rybakov sent an official request to the prosecutor general’s office asking that Seleznyov be interviewed about the incident. He received no response.
“What do you make of this?” I asked Sasha, as he prepared for a run on the Spanish beach.
“Well, to me it appears that someone had mixed up the order of the blasts, the usual Kontora mess-up. Moscow-2 was on the 13th, and Volgodonsk on the 16th, but they got it to the speaker the other way around. I need to talk to Trepashkin, perhaps he can dig up something on that.”
He donned his baseball cap and went out for a run, looking somewhat like Forrest Gump.
Two weeks later, when I met Sasha at the Milan Airport for our final get-together on The Gang from Lubyanka, he brought Trepashkin’s report.
“The man who gave Seleznyov the note about Volgodonsk was FSB,” he announced. “Just as I thought.”
It was not the first time that Mikhail Trepashkin had proven himself to be highly capable. For months I had been hearing his name; Sasha had been promoting him relentlessly as “his man” in Moscow. By then Trepashkin was both a consultant to Yushenkov and the attorney for Tanya and Aliona. Sasha argued that there was no one better than Trepashkin to organize the distribution of The Gang from Lubyanka, which I planned to print in Riga and then try to bring into Russia across the Latvian border.
Kontora was hardly indifferent to Trepashkin. In January 2002, shortly after Sasha started calling him from London, the FSB showed up at his door with a search warrant. Later on, when his case file became available to his lawyers, a remarkable document was revealed, which had apparently initiated the investigation. In a letter to the Russian prosecutor’s office, the FSB claimed that Trepashkin entered into a conspiracy with Litvinenko and Berezovsky, on behalf of the British secret service MI5. The purpose of their conspiracy was “to discredit the FSB through alleging that it had organized the 1999 Moscow bombings.” Of course, it was perfectly true that the three men were working together to investigate the FSB’s role in the attacks, but it was a typical Agency maneuver to suggest that Trepashkin might be guilty of treason by claiming that he was doing it at the behest of British Intelligence.
The January 2002 search at Trepashkin’s home produced nothing, except for one ten-year-old KGB file marked “Classified,” unrelated to the bombings, that had apparently been forgotten in his desk, and a few gun cartridges, which he said were planted during the search. He was promptly charged with divulging state secrets, exceeding official powers, and possessing illegal arms. He was not arrested, however, nor even called in for questioning. He was simply ordered