Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [87]
It was pointless. Whoever bombed the apartment buildings had achieved one result: all across the political spectrum, there were calls for revenge. Even the super-dove Yavlinsky called for “a large-scale action … without haste.”
The day of the press conference, in the early morning hours, another apartment house exploded, this time in Volgodonsk, in southern Russia, killing seventeen people. Three days after that, on September 19, Putin spoke. The peace accords of 1996-1997 were “a mistake,” he declared. “These people must be destroyed. There simply is no other response.”
On September 23, 1999, police foil an apparent bombing attempt in an apartment block in Ryazan, 130 miles southeast of Moscow. Putin orders aerial bombardments of Grozny. Two days later, the government suddenly changes its story on the Ryazan incident, saying that it was a training exercise by the FSB, and that the bomb wasn’t real.
In retrospect, Boris should have realized that Putin was not playing the limited war gambit developed by Udugov, but chose all-out war as the defining theme of his bid for the presidency. As the Russian army crossed into Chechen territory, Boris still believed that their aim was to go as far as the Terek River. He disagreed with Putin, but he had promised to steer clear of Chechnya. So he decided to leave this aside for a while. They were still part of the same team. They had an election to win, and Boris completely immersed himself in party politics. He was out to promote his new creation, the party of Russian regions called Unity, symbolized by a huge Russian bear, that he had dreamed of while in a fever in the hospital.
A key battle looming in advance of the presidential contest was the elections to the State Duma, the lower chamber of Parliament, scheduled for mid-December. Boris’s main concern was how to defeat a powerful coalition led by Primakov: the alliance of Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov with many regional governors from across the country.
Ever since the 1993 Constitution granted the provinces the right to elect local governments, provincial leaders had viewed the Kremlin with suspicion: they feared that the center would infringe on their self-rule. All eighty-six governors served on the Federation Council, the upper house of Parliament, and they often opposed the policies of the Kremlin.
However, the governors could not agree on a leader. From their perspective, all provinces of the Federation should be equal. Alliance with the powerful mayor of Moscow strengthened their group, but they were wary of naming Luzhkov to be a first among equals. So it seemed a natural solution to invite Evgeny Primakov, the deposed prime minister, to be the leader of their Fatherland All-Russia Coalition. He did not have his own regional base, yet he was the nation’s most popular politician. Primakov brought with him the backing of old-time Soviet apparatchiks and much of the national security and intelligence community. Luzhkov had the support of NTV, Gusinsky’s network. The governors controlled the local media and political machines. Altogether it was a formidable political force.
The Duma elections became Boris’s obsession. He was running for a Duma seat himself, from the impoverished North Caucasus ethnic republic of Karachayevo-Cherkessia. He and his messengers flew from region to region, talking to apprehensive regional bosses and to their home clans, the provincial mini-oligarchs.
In every provincial capital they repeated the same spiel: “You have been plotting against Yeltsin because he stepped on your toes. But wasn’t he the one who gave you your rights in 1993 in the first place? Just wait until Primus gets into the Kremlin! He will bring back his Soviet cohorts, the old-time apparatchiks, the veterans of central planning, the bureaucrats. He will take away your local elections, your rights and privileges.