A 25-year-old conspiracy theory about the FSB lives on

The phrase “apartment bombings” in Russia evokes a series of terrorist attacks that happened in September 1999. In two weeks, terrorists blew up four residential buildings in various Russian regions, killing 300 people. There were also at least two reportedly thwarted terrorist attacks, one in Moscow and another in the city of Ryazan. The “Ryazan sugar” affair became the source of a conspiracy theory that the apartment bombings were an FSB operation — and to this day, a person’s view on “what really happened” in Ryazan in September 1999 is a good proxy for their views on the current government. Meduza explains why this particular issue has such staying power 25 years later. 

This story first appeared in Signal, Meduza’s Russian-language newsletter on the rhetoric of Putinism. You can subscribe here (it’s in Russian). If you enjoyed this article, stay tuned for more Signal in English — we’ve got plans.

The context

The political situation in Russia’s North Caucasus was escalating throughout the summer of 1999. Then, on August 7, real war broke out when a group of Chechen fighters, led by Shamil Basayev and Ibn al-Khattab, invaded Dagestan. 

On August 9, Russian President Boris Yeltsin fired then-Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin and appointed FSB director and Security Council Secretary Vladimir Putin in his stead. Yeltsin also named Putin his successor. The new leader’s obvious first and main task was to lower the general temperature in the Caucasus. 

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On August 20, Russian air forces began bombing Chechnya. Fierce fighting broke out in Dagestan’s Kodori Valley. Soon, everyone in Russia knew the names of local villages Karamakhi and Chabanmakhi.

On the evening of September 4, a residential building was blown up in the town of Buynaksk, in Dagestan, around 30 kilometers (~18 miles) from the closest military action. On the night of September 8, or perhaps the early hours of September 9, a building in Moscow was blown up. Another Moscow building was blown up early on the morning of September 13. And on the morning of September 16, the same thing happened to a building in Volgodonsk, in the Rostov region.

This series of terrorist attacks killed more than 300 people and injured more than 1,500. At first, when it came to responsibility for the attacks, neither the official investigation nor the public seriously considered any theory other than the “Chechen connection.” 

If the main goal of terrorism is to frighten people, then this was one of the most successful terrorist campaigns in history. Russian cities were gripped by fear. People were afraid to go home to their own apartments; no one could sleep. Many sought out basements, organized overnight patrols, and interrogated neighbors they deemed suspicious. Attacks on emigrants from the Caucasus became more frequent.

Vigilant civilians did manage to prevent at least one explosion during this period. A Moscow realtor recognized one of his clients from a composite sketch of a suspect in a previous Moscow bombing — the client had just rented a storage facility in a residential building. The realtor called the FSB, whose operatives found explosives and timers set for September 21 on the rented premises.

In Russia, these events are remembered collectively as the 1999 apartment bombings. But then, on September 22, in Ryazan, something happened that upended what was becoming a straightforward, if frightening, narrative. This event became known as “Ryazan sugar.” 

Ryazan sugar

On the evening of September 22, Alexey Kartofelnikov, a resident of 14/16 Novoselov Street in Ryazan, noticed an unfamiliar Zhiguli car parked in his building’s courtyard. Three people — two men and a woman — were carrying sacks from the car to the basement of the building. Kartofelnikov found it particularly suspicious that the regional identifier on the car’s license plate was obscured by a piece of paper with the number 62 written on it — the code for the Ryazansk region. 

Kartofelnikov called the police. But while the police were on the way, the car disappeared. When police did arrive, they found three sacks in the basement. They opened one and found an unidentified sand-like substance. The building’s residents were evacuated immediately. Forensic experts ran a preliminary analysis of the sacks’ contents and found evidence of potent explosives.

The bags also allegedly contained a detonator and a timer set for 5:30 a.m. All of the evidence was taken to the FSB, first in the Ryazansk region and then in Moscow. Apart from special services employees, no one saw the sacks, or the detonator, or the timer.

The next day, on September 23, a Ryazan telephone operator named Nadezhda Yukhanova reported to the local FSB office that she had recorded a suspicious telephone conversation between Moscow and Ryazan. Yukhanova said the conversation went like this:

The Moscow number belonged to the FSB’s central office.

The terrorists’ car was found that evening in Kolomna, halfway between Ryazan and Moscow. Its license plates turned out to be from Moscow.

Officials spent all of September 23 explaining that the events in Ryazan were reassuring, a sign that citizens were “reacting correctly to events” — not panicking, but pulling together and being vigilant, ultimately preventing a terrorist attack. The next day, Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo said the same thing in a presentation to his colleagues.

Everything seemed simple and clear, and then it all went to hell. FSB director Nikolay Patrushev came out of Rushailo’s presentation to the Interior Affairs Ministry and said to waiting journalists, “That was an exercise. It was sugar.” 

Explanations soon followed from the FSB’s PR center, from organizations for KGB veterans, and from journalists close to Russia’s security services. Eventually, these explanations converged on the story that Moscow had sent FSB operatives to stage preparations for terrorist attacks in several cities, in order to test citizens’ and law enforcement agencies’ vigilance. Ryazan rose to the occasion. There were no explosives, the sacks contained sugar, and the tests that detected explosive material were either faulty or the equipment was contaminated.   

Barely anyone believed this theory. In March 2000, television network NTV aired a program called Independent Investigation, in which FSB spokespeople spent an hour trying to convince journalists and residents of the building where Kartofelnikov had spotted the suspicious sacks that the FSB had been conducting training exercises in Ryazan on September 22–23. They not only failed to be convincing, but in fact unintentionally demonstrated the many holes and inconsistencies in their version of the events. 

To this day, Russian officials maintain that the events in Ryazan on September 22–23 were a training exercise. 

How a conspiracy theory was made

The conspiracy theory about Ryazan sugar took shape in 2001–2002, largely thanks to the efforts of three people: Yury Felshtinsky, Alexander Litvinenko, and Boris Berezovsky. 

Felshtinsky was born and raised in Moscow, and emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s. A professional historian, he conducted research about the Bolsheviks and Soviet security services. In the 1990s, he began to travel back to Russia regularly. He started to associate with oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who at that time was successfully crafting the image of a behind-the-scenes power broker and arbiter of the country’s fate.

Litvinenko was a former FSB officer. He became famous in 1998 when he announced publicly that his superiors had ordered him to kill Berezovsky. He was subsequently fired and charged with several crimes. Berezovsky hired him to work his own private security service.

In 2000, when Putin became president, the idea that Berezovsky had somehow arranged for him to succeed Yeltsin was very popular. The oligarch himself and the media outlets under his control had done a fair amount to create that impression. But after Putin came to power, the prosecutor’s office re-opened an old criminal case against Berezovsky, who left Russia. Litvinenko soon followed him.

Felshtinsky later recalled that around this time, he went to Berezovsky and laid out his theory that the wave of terrorist attacks in September 1999 had been the work of the FSB. As Felshtinsky saw it, Russian security services used the “attacks” to justify the Second Chechen War (which was ongoing at the time), unite society, and ensure the electoral victory of their protege, Vladimir Putin. In Ryazan, they failed, thwarted by local law enforcement who didn’t know about the conspiracy and who were honestly investigating an attempted terrorist attack. They were one step away from accidentally exposing the whole plot — so Patrushev took the hit and told journalists that it was a training exercise.

Berezovsky took an interest in Felshtinsky’s interpretation of events, and enlisted Litvinenko to help him. The two Berezovsky associates then set out to prove their theory. The result was a book called Blowing Up Russia, which was published outside of Russia in 2002. Berezovsky invested heavily in the book’s promotion.

The book was popular among Russia’s intellectual class, but it was also considered a conspiracy theory. Today, though, many think differently, including respected journalists like Sergei Smirnov, the editor-in-chief of independent publication Mediazona. They reason that we’ve learned so much more about how the FSB operates, that something that seemed unthinkable 25 years ago — that the FSB blew up Russian apartment buildings — now seems entirely plausible. 

Be that as it may, Felshtinsky and Litvinenko’s book bears all the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory, full of counterfactuals and rhetorical tricks. For example, a rumor circulated after the Ryazan sugar affair that the technician who supposedly found explosives in the sacks had been a suspect in a criminal case. However, there was no such case. Felshtinsky and Litvinenko write that if a technician really had conducted an investigation incorrectly, then a criminal case would have been opened against him, and the fact that there was no case means there really were explosives. Almost all of Felshtinsky and Litvinenko’s work with open sources boils down to some variation on “Coincidence? We think not!”

They did also draw on other sources, however. They claimed to have received a letter from Timur Batchayev and Yusuf Krymshamkhalov, two of the suspects in the string of terrorist attacks in September 1999. The letter, which Novaya Gazeta published in full in 2002, claimed that the FSB organized all of the explosions, and named FSB counter-terrorism boss German Ugryumov as the operation’s chief architect. Felshtinsky and Litvinenko also said they’d been in touch with Achimez Gochiyaev, whom Russian security services had called the organizer of the September 1999 attacks, and even had video of him discussing the events. They quoted Gochiyaev as saying he’d rented a Moscow storage space at the behest of an old friend who turned out to be an FSB officer, and that he had called the police himself.

It’s impossible to verify any of these claims. There is no independent confirmation of the authenticity of Batchayev and Krymshamkhalov’s letter. No one has seen the video of Gochiyaev. Felshtinsky’s account of how he obtained all of this evidence features high drama: chases along mountain roads; murdered couriers; someone apparently threatening to cut off his ears.

In response to Felshtinsky and Litvinenko’s claims, the FSB leaked details about the “training exercises” to the newspaper Sovershenno sekretno (Top Secret). Among other things, the FSB said they had essentially planted clues, like obviously obscuring license plates and discussing the operation on an open line, to see whether citizens and local law enforcement would act appropriately.

That seemed to be the end of the whole affair. But 25 years on, when Russians recall the 1999 apartment bombings, they still think about Ryazan sugar and the theory that the FSB orchestrated the whole thing. Almost no one remembers the official version of events, or the names of the people who were actually convicted.

A potent symbol

The official investigation into the September 1999 bombings named Ibn al-Khattab and Abu Omar al-Saif as the organizers of the attacks. Eleven people received prison terms ranging from three years to life sentences. Another five suspects did not live long enough to go to trial. The only one of the main organizers who is still alive and at large is Achimez Gochiyaev, who is believed to have fled to Turkey.

There was not one Chechen among the convicted terrorists. Ibn al-Khattab and Abu Omar al-Saif were from Saudi Arabia and were connected to al-Qaeda. The people who were convicted of actually carrying out the attacks were from the North Caucasus regions of Karachay-Cherkessia and Dagestan. 

Human rights activists and opposition politicians spent years lobbying, unsuccessfully, for a parliamentary commission to verify Felshtinsky and Litvinenko’s theory. Eventually, they formed a commission of their own, headed by former Human Rights Commissioner Sergei Kovalev. Felshtinsky promised repeatedly to supply the commission with his evidence, including the video of Gochiyaev, but he never did it.

The FSB, it should go without saying, didn’t cooperate. In 2015, a Russian court banned Felshtinsky and Litvinenko’s book extremist material. 

At this point, the general consensus is that it doesn’t matter what actually happened in Ryazan in September 1999 — there’s no argument that will end the debates about it. The more important aspect to observe is that there was general distrust of the official narrative, and a surprisingly persistent conspiracy theory in its place. The tenacity of the idea that an ill-intentioned security service would do anything to help its boss during an election cycle is itself telling.

Similar conspiracy theories arose in the U.S. after the 9/11 attacks, but they were widely discussed and subsequently widely debunked. When Russia banned Felshtinsky and Litvinenko’s book, many had an almost automatic reaction: they wouldn’t ban it if there weren’t something to it. In the absence of open society-level discussion, all theories tend to become either “official lies” or “the banned truth.” 

In Russian today, commitment to one or another “banned truth” is a marker of political identity. If you’re pro-Putin, you have to believe that what happened in Ryazan was a training exercise and the sacks contained sugar; if you’re in the opposition camp, you can’t believe that’s true. The reverse is also true: if you believe, you’re automatically pro-Putin. Today, the whole complicated history is a powerful cultural symbol. If you know someone’s position on Ryazan sugar, you can correctly guess a number of other things about their ideological positions.