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to ever more audacious Chechen terrorist attacks.
    In the space of two weeks in September four bomb explosions destroyed apartment blocks in the cities of Buynaksk, Moscow (twice) and Volgodonsk. Almost 300 people were killed. The attacks were blamed on Chechens and, together with the invasion of Dagestan, provided Putin with the excuse, if he needed one, to launch the second Chechen war. At a meeting with Bill Clinton on 12 September an agitated Putin drew a map of Chechnya and described his plan to annihilate the separatists. ‘These people are not human,’ he snarled to the press afterwards. ‘You can’t even call them animals – or if they’re animals, they’re rabid animals ...’
    The apartment bombings were so convenient in providing Putin with the pretext to go to war, and thereby to improve his ratings, that some Russians believe they were carried out by the FSB. Conspiracy theories are so rife – and so outlandish – in Russia that you would have to rewrite history if you believed them all. But real suspicions were raised by a fifth incident, in the city of Ryazan, where police acting on a tip-off foiled an apparent plot after discovering three sacks of white powder, which they identified as explosive, together with detonators, in the basement of a block of flats. Thousands of local residents were evacuated while the sacks were removed and made safe. Putin himself praised the vigilance of the people who had spotted the sacks being carried into the building. When men suspected of planting the bombs were arrested, however, they turned out to be FSB agents. The FSB chief then claimed it had all been an ‘exercise’ to test responses after the earlier explosions and that the bags only contained sugar. The local FSB in Ryazan knew nothing about such an exercise, however, and issued a statement expressing surprise.
    Several other mysterious circumstances surround the apartment bombings. For example, the speaker of the State Duma announced to parliament that he had just received a report of the apartment bombing in Volgodonsk on 13 September – the day of one of the Moscow bombings, but three days before the Volgodonsk explosion. Had someone who knew in advance about all the planned attacks got the dates mixed up? But attempts to have the incidents properly investigated in Russia have been thwarted, and the Kremlin reacts with fury to questions on the subject. Moreover, two members of an independent commission that tried to establish the facts were murdered and a third was killed in a car accident, while the commission’s investigating lawyer was arrested and jailed for alleged illegal arms possession. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, both of whom investigated the bombings, were murdered in 2006.
    The second Chechen war was intended to avenge the humiliation suffered by Russia in the first, and to put a halt to what Putin apparently regarded as an Islamist threat to the entire country. One of his closest advisers told me on condition of anonymity that Putin feared his tenure as prime minister might last only a few months (like that of his predecessors) and he wanted to use the time to prevent Russia from falling apart. ‘The Chechen invasion into Dagestan was a signal from the bandits that they could go further, along the Volga river into some of our Muslim republics – Bashkortostan and Tatarstan.’
    I have never heard Putin (or any other Russian leader) speak about the real grievances of the Chechen people – their mass deportation from their homeland to Central Asia under Stalin, the swamping of their culture and language by the Russians during the Soviet period. Nor is there much awareness of the fact that it was the brutal Russian invasion in 1994 that radicalised the Chechen fighters and encouraged Islamic fundamentalism – of which there was not a whiff when I visited the republic before the first war. It was the war, and the atrocities committed by