The Little мальчик Who Cried Wolf

Putin is exploiting the Moscow concert hall terror attack to distract from his abominable war crimes in Ukraine.

Armed with guns and heavy explosives, the operatives descended on the opera house. There was a concert on the bill. Patrons showed out for the event, dressed in their finest fits. A terrorist attack was the last thing on anyone’s mind.

Shots rang out. People fell dead, blood spilling on the burgundy seats in a semi-circle around the stage. The musicians fled the scene. The operatives fired off round after round, indiscriminately. Security forces could do nothing. Chaos reigned. There was an explosion, a fire. The lovely concert hall, one of the best venues in all of the former Soviet Union, was in flames.

If that sounds like something from a movie, that’s because it is. I have just described the opening scene in Tenet, the 2020 film by Christopher Nolan, in which the villain is a sadistic, psychopathic Russian oligarch, played with appropriate menace by Kenneth Branagh.

The events in Moscow last week were an uncanny echo of the Tenet opening—as if the time-traveling war-making depicted in the film were real.

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During the Yeltsin years in the mid-90s, Russia participated in the First Chechen War, a brutal suppression of the popular uprising in Chechnya. Some 100,000 Chechens were slaughtered by Russian forces. The first president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, Dzhokhar Dudayev, was assassinated by the Federal Security Service (FSB) while he was negotiating peace terms.

In drumming up U.S. support for the Russians, President Clinton compared Boris Yeltsin to Abraham Lincoln—which would have been a good comparison if Honest Abe was a lush who’d used the Civil War to extract wealth from the country to make himself rich. Dudayev had more in common with Lincoln, while Yeltsin was more of a piece with his own countrymen, be they Soviet or Romanov. His callous disregard for human life was as quintessentially Russian as his rank corruption and his notorious drinking problem.

From the days of Ivan IV in the late sixteenth century, Russia’s leaders have been extraordinary ruthless about the application of terror to maintain power. The first secret state police, called the oprichnina, was devised by this first tsar, whom history knows as Ivan the Terrible. Black-clad patrolmen on black mounts descended on towns and villages, like a scene from J.R.R. Tolkien or Washington Irving, leaving death and destruction in their wake. The Okhrana, its spiritual successor, was formed to protect the royal family after unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Alexander II in 1868; it did not prevent the assassination of Alexander III in 1894—or, for that matter, the execution of the last tsar, Nicholas II, in 1918—but it did terrorize generations of Russians, and played a leading role in the Bloody Sunday Massacre of 1905, when peaceful protesters outside the Winter Palace were slaughtered by police.

The Soviets, meanwhile, were veritable butchers. Lenin advocated coaxing troops into battle by shooting at them from behind. The Cheka, the state police established in 1917 by Felix Dzerzhinsky, was infinitely more wicked than its antecedents. Stalin was responsible for more loss of life than Hitler, including over five million Ukrainians who perished during the Holodomor of 1932-3. Subsequent leaders were less brutal than Stalin, but not exactly Nobel Peace Prize nominees, while the mobsters who now hold sway over that country make Stalin seem like a genuine statesman. In Russia, life is cheap.

Vladimir Putin was still toiling for the mayor’s office in St. Petersburg when Dudayev was assassinated, but his rise to power—remarkable, swift, out of nowhere—began just three months later, when Yeltsin named him Deputy Chief of the Presidential Property Management Department in June 1996. This gave Putin access to the books, and the power to move around money and other assets. He formally joined the Presidential Staff in 1997, ascended to first deputy in May of 1998, and a month later, was named the head of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, the organization he’d worked at for most of his career. Putin’s influence over Yeltsin was enormous. Clearly his years with the KGB taught him how to roll drunks.

As the millennium approached, tensions with the Chechens continued, and Yeltsin’s health was deteriorating rapidly. For Putin and the fledgling Russian Federation, the pendulum was swinging the wrong way. But then, on September 4, 9, and 13, 1999, a series of apartment bombings befell the Russian cities of Buinaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk, killing 300 and injuring a thousand more. These were reported by Russian media to be the work of Chechen separatist terrorists. But compelling evidence indicates that the terrorist attacks were the work of the FSB, which Putin oversaw until August 9, 1999—just a month before the bombings—when he left to be First Deputy Prime Minister. Galvanized by his capable response to the attacks, and endorsed by the still-popular Yeltsin, Putin became Acting Prime Minister later that month. He’s been in power, under a variety of titles, ever since.

The journalist David Satter, in Darkness at Dawn, makes the case that the FSB was behind the apartment bombings. He succinctly explained the motive for the inside job during his testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in 2007:

The present ruling oligarchy came to power in Russia accidentally. Were it not for the fact that the Yeltsin leadership was totally corrupt and seized by fear of a grand settling of accounts in 1999, it is highly unlikely that someone like Putin, the head of the secret service with no previous political experience, could have become Yeltsin’s successor. With Yeltsin and his family facing possible criminal prosecution, however, a plan was put into motion to put in place a successor who would guarantee that Yeltsin and his family would be safe from prosecution and the criminal division of property in the country would not be subject to reexamination.

For “Operation Successor” to succeed, however, it was necessary to have a massive provocation. In my view, this provocation was the bombing in September, 1999 of the apartment building bombings in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk. In the aftermath of these attacks, which claimed 300 lives, a new war was launched against Chechnya. Putin, the newly appointed prime minister who was put in charge of that war, achieved overnight popularity. Yeltsin resigned early. Putin was elected president and his first act was to guarantee Yeltsin immunity from prosecution. In the meantime, all talk of reexamining the results of privatization was forgotten.

Yuri Shvets, the ex-KGB officer who was the primary source for Craig Unger’s American Kompromat, confirmed that the apartment bombings were carried out by Putin’s intelligence service goons.

The PREVAIL contributor Moscow Never Sleeps was living in an apartment building in Moscow at the time of the attacks. He recalls doing night watch on the night of September 16, 1999:

The night went on, uneventfully for us and the rest of Moscow. Early in the next morning, a truck blew up in front of an apartment block in Volgodonsk, a provincial town about a thousand kilometers due south of the city, not far from the Caucasus. Mysteriously, three days earlier, the day before the second Moscow explosion, the speaker of the Russian Duma had made an impassioned speech mourning the recently dead in Volgodonsk from an explosion that would not take place for another 72 hours. Either the man was a time traveler or he was the Steve Harvey of Russian politics. . . .

Within a few days, Moscow seemed to return to normal. A week later, local police in Ryazan acting on a tip discovered several bags of powder and a detonator. FSB headquarters sent personnel from Moscow who commandeered the sacks, tested them, and declared they contained sugar. The local cops then detained a group of people who were casing another building. The detainees produced FSB badges and were released. Faced with obvious connections to what could have been the deaths of hundreds of more people, Putin’s successor as director of the FSB claimed the entire thing was a training exercise to see if the local cops were on their toes.

The explosions were over, and on New Year’s Eve, Yeltsin handed the country to Vladimir Putin.

As for the bombings themselves, a few liberation organizations from Dagestan appeared from out of nowhere, proudly took credit for all of it, and retreated into obscurity. Russian law enforcement rolled up an impressive array of Caucasians—none of them, curiously, actual Chechens—and meted out vengeance in and out of court over the next several years. Journalists and lawyers who investigated the links between the FSB and the bombings faced similar fates: vehicular deaths, shootings, poisonings, long prison terms on improbable charges. The owner of the NTV television network, which ran an exposé on the bombings in early 2000 that cast doubt on the official story, was hounded out of the country. The Duma and the government not only refused to inquire into the possibility that the nation’s primary law enforcer was in fact a mass murderer, they eventually sealed all records until after 2075 and made it a felony to investigate further. A few years later, a KGB/FSB agent named Alexander Litvinenko defected to London and…named names. Litvinenko was later assassinated, probably on the orders of the same man he accused, with a cup of tea-flavored polonium in a Mayfair chaykhana.

Over two decades later, Putin is still President.

If true—and I have no reason to believe otherwise—Putin and his cronies were totally chill about indiscriminately exterminating 300 of their own people, and wounding a thousand more, to secure power. The subsequent flurry of Russian journalists, suspected double agents, doctors, and dissidents falling out of high windows, or drinking polonium tea, or suddenly dropping dead in Siberian prisons, does little to counter Satter’s argument.

When President Biden was asked by George Stephanopoulos, two months into his term, if he thought Putin was a killer, the president, without pausing to consider the question, replied, “Yes, I do.” That statement of fact sent Putin into an embarrassing public meltdown:

Julia Davis @JuliaDavisNews

Based on these screenshots from Putin's response to Biden calling him a killer, he seems to be taking it well.

Some strongman!

(For frame of reference: In 2016, when challenged by Bill O’Reilly of all people, who correctly noted that Putin is a killer, Donald Trump responded: “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”)

When Biden accused him of being a killer, Putin may have lost his shit—but he didn’t deny it. Instead, doubling down, he put out a new “kill list” that includes oligarch turned adversary Mikhail Khodorkovsky, British-American businessman Bill Browder, and Christopher Steele, the former MI6 station chief. You know, as men of peace do.

Since then, Putin has invaded Ukraine, unleashing his military to commit war crime upon war crime, raping, pillaging, bombing, slaughtering, blowing up dams, threatening nuclear power plants—a state-sanctioned battery of terrorist attacks that is now in its third year of operation. Half a million people have fallen, including 100,000 Russian soldiers. This, to fight a war with no legitimate purpose—a war that is happening only because Vladimir Putin insists that it continue.

This is not a man who values human life. Quite the opposite.

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This brings us to last week’s terrorist attack on the Moscow music hall. Who benefits? Putin. As my friend Zarina Zabrisky, a war correspondent currently on the ground in Kherson, pointed out, the attack:

1. Distracts from the intensified brutal attacks on Ukrainian civilians

2. Reinforces “a besieged fortress”, “a victim” narrative to further justify mobilization

3. Evokes empathy to the aggressor country in the world

Is the media reporting on Russia bombing a hospital for sick children in Ukraine? Or the humanitarian crisis in Kherson, where there has been no power or water for days? Or the fact that Russia has used public sympathy from the attacks as a shield to up its war crimes? On March 23, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine tweeted, “For the third pre-dawn morning this week, all of Ukraine is under an air alert and has been advised to seek shelter. Russia continues to indiscriminately launch drones and missiles with no regard for millions of civilians, violating international law.” Did we see that in the papers? No. Instead, we read about the Moscow terrorist attack.

Meanwhile, Putin, predictably and preposterously, blamed Nazis in Ukraine for the slaughter.

I asked my friend Moscow Never Sleeps (MNS), an American who lived for years in Moscow during the Yeltsin/early Putin years, for his take on the Crocus City attack. He explained that, first of all, the complex—one of the biggest developments in the country, with restaurants, shopping malls, and a hotel attached to the concert hall—lies outside the bounds of Moscow City—and, therefore, outside the jurisdiction of the Moscow City police. Crocus City, he explains, is “politically part of Moscow Oblast and independent from the municipal government of the City of Moscow. Moscow City has a robust law enforcement and investigation force that is more independent from the Russian federal authorities than any other jurisdiction in the country. Moscow Oblast, to put it simply, does not. It is therefore a perfect place to pull off a homegrown atrocity without worrying that you have to cut in the Mayor’s Office to get permission.”

As for the Tajik suspects rounded up by law enforcement, MNS finds that story dubious. “Although the captured terrorists claim that they were offered a million rubles by ISIS (about $10,400 at today’s rates), as recently as August of last year the Russian government was offering about half that as a signing bonus to people from various Russian-speaking Central Asian republics together with a $2K a month salary (in a country where the average salary is under $800),” he says. “In other words, these guys could have made the same amount or more massacring Ukrainians from the safety of a tank for a few months.”

But a dubious cover story doesn’t necessarily implicate Putin.

“I can’t figure out what Putin gets out of this,” MNS tells me. “He’s just been re-elected with a large margin. Popularity, therefore, is not an important currency to him. If this was about solidifying his hold on power, this would have happened two weeks ago before the election. Does he need it to justify further attacks on Ukraine? Maybe, but at what cost to his iron man image? With the possible exception of nuclear weapons, what hasn’t the Russian military already permitted itself to do in Ukraine?”

Furthermore, Putin’s behavior in the immediate aftermath of the attacks suggest that he, like the members of the heritage rock band Piknik, was caught completely off guard. “Usually, when he kills people for theatre, he knows his lines and blocking, and he delivers his set pieces in a practiced monotonous alloy of ruthless vitriol chilled to 40 degrees below zero,” MNS observes. “This time he was silent for almost a day, almost as if he too was trying to figure out what had gone on. Even as ISIS or one of its imitators crowed for credit.”

If not Putin, then who? The Ukrainian commentator Igor Sushko, citing a Russian source, suggests this was an internecine battle. The Putin crony and Donald Trump pal Aras Agalarov, who developed and owns Crocus, now finds himself in the crosshairs of law enforcement. “Federal FSB under Korolev sabotaged the response to (or staged) the terrorist attack to place blame on and thereby eliminate both FSB Moscow regional chief Dorofeev and Aras Agalarov and steal their billions,” Sushko writes. “To understand Russia, think like a bandit.”

MNS reminds us that, “with the possible exception of Stalin, Russia has never been monolithic at least since the end of the Tsars. Under every other ruler there have been intrigues—Khrushchev against Malenkov, Malenkov against Khrushchev, Brezhnev against Khrushchev, Yeltsin against Gorbachev, everyone against Yeltsin—and there’s no reason to assume that there are not people within the power elites who are looking for the first opportunity to kick Putin if he stumbles.”

And there have been stumbles. Despite his mighty electoral victory, and the inexplicable success of his “Ukrainians are Nazis” disinformation campaign in Russia—even smart, educated Russians believe that Ukraine was behind the Crocus attack, I’m told, because Putin said so—the Russian strongman is not sitting pretty at the moment. He’s still under indictment by the ICC for war crimes. The invasion has been a catastrophic failure, and there’s no way to hide it, not when so many Russian soldiers have come home from Ukraine in body bags, if at all.

“As horrible as it is to contemplate that Vladimir Putin yet again found a way to get a bunch of people killed because that showed up on his to-do list for the day,” MNS says, “it is even more horrible to contemplate an emerging center of gravity developing within the siloviki that has decided it’s time for another exciting round of Whose Kremlin Is It, Anyway? Because if in America, ‘let’s kill a couple hundred people going to the theatre’ is where the story ends, in Russia it’s where it just begins...”

It may well be that the horrible attack on the Crocus Music Hall was the work of ISIS-K—the branch of the Islamic State in Khorasan. It may well be that said terrorist group selected that building to attack because it is owned by Agalarov. It may well be that the unfortunate Tajik suspects Russian law enforcement rounded up and tortured really did commit the crime. It may even be that Crocus is the casualty of a turf war raging among the Russian elites, and that Putin really was caught with his pants down.

In the end, it doesn’t matter; the result will be the same. Putin will turn this to his advantage, just as he did with the Moscow apartment bombings 25 years ago, just as he has with the Hamas atrocities of October 7. Even if it winds up being true, nothing that man says can be taken at face value. Putin has cried wolf too many times for his word to be believed.

I’ve seen this movie before.

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Photo credit: Still shot from the opening scene of Tenet.

NOTE: Some sections of this piece are culled from earlier dispatches.