On September 8, 1999, several hundred pounds of explosive detonated on the ground floor of a nine-story apartment building in the southwestern Moscow neighborhood of Pechatniki. 94 people were killed and 150 wounded. Five days later, a second building was leveled, this time on Kashirskoye Highway, again in the southern region of the city. In the collapse of the eight-story structure, 118 people were killed and 200 wounded. Almost immediately, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that Russia would undertake a second massive military assault on the breakaway province of Chechnya, even though the Chechen rebels did not take responsibility for the lethal blasts.

The Moscow bombings were immediately suspicious, not only because the Chechens did not brag about the assaults (as is their wont) but also because the government razed the two sites with almost no time being spent on forensic investigation. Things got even more suspicious nine days a later: On September 22, someone reported suspicious activity near at apartment building in the city of Ryazan. When local police responded, sacks of powerful explosive were discovered. According to Wikipedia: ???????A telephone service employee tapped into long-distance phone conversations managed to detect a conversation in which an out-of-town person suggested to take care and to watch for patrols. That person’s number was found to belong to an FSB ÄKGBÅ office in Moscow.??????? When confronted, the FSB admitted that its agents were involved, and claimed that it was a ???????training exercise.???????

Most suspicious of all, though, was that Putin had not called for an invasion of Chechnya several months earlier when an actual army of Chechen rebels, led by the fearsome warlord Shamil Basayev, actually invaded Russia and sought to take control of the Republic of Dagestan. It was impossible to escape the conclusion that Putin did not believe this attack on a remote area with few Slavic Russians would be sufficient to garner public acceptance of a second adventure in Chechnya after the first, under Boris Yeltsin, had been so bloody and costly ???????? as well as a disastrous military failure.

Duma deputy and Soviet dissident Sergei Kovalev (twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize) established an independent public committee to investigate the bombings after the official investigations proved a sham (the Russian Duma refused twice in the winter of 2000 to open a parliamentary investigation). The Russian government refused to cooperate with the Kovalev Committee????????s investigation and progress ground to a halt.

In the spring of 2002, Boris Berezovsky got into the act. National Review reported:

On March 5, however Berezovsky, a self-exiled oligarch and former key Kremlin adviser, held a press conference in London in which he accused the FSB of carrying out the bombings with Putin’s complicity in order to justify a second Chechen war. He presented as evidence the testimony of Nikita Chekulin, a former acting director of the Russian Explosives Conversion Center, a scientific research institute under the Ministry of Education, who was recruited by the FSB as a secret agent. Chekulin stated, and confirmed with documents, that in 1999-2000, a large quantity of hexogen, the explosive that is believed to have been used in the apartment bombings, was purchased by the institute from various military units and then, under the guise of gunpowder or dynamite, shipped all over the country to unknown destinations. Berezovsky also presented a documentary film that was largely based on a previous television program about the Ryazan incident that was shown on NTV and the reporting in Novaya Gazeta.

In addition to the film, Berezovsky financed the publication of a book called Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within, which was published in 2002 by KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko; the book alleged that agents from the FSB co-ordinated the apartment block bombings. (To read the whole book online, click here.)

In 2003, just as the renewed impetus provided by Berezovsky might have got the investigation moving again, two of the Kovalev Committee????????s ranking members, Sergei Yushekov and Yuri Shchekochikhin were murdered in obvious assassinations eerily similar to the fate of Anna Politkovskaya. A third member of the Kovalev Committee, Otto Lacis, was brutally beaten in the same year (he died in a car crash in September of last year), and the Committee????????s lawyer, Mikhail Trepashkin, was arrested (that????????s him pictured above), convicted in closed proceedings and sentenced to four years in prison in sham proceedings protested by numerous human rights organizations. In December 2003 Russian authorities confiscated over 4000 copies of Litvinenko????????s book en route to Moscow from the publisher in Latvia and, Publius Pundit readers well know, Litvinenko was murdered in London in November 2006 by the use of radioactive toxins that have since been traced to Russia.

How much longer do Berezovsky, Trepashkin and Kovalev have to live? That????????s anybody????????s guess. Trepashkin is the likely next target; Kovalev is 76 years old, well above the Russian average lifespan for a man, and his public face and reputation are some protection during his short time remaining on the earth. Berezovsky has the money and experience to make a hit very problematical for the Kremlin. Trepashkin is in no such position: In July, the Telegraph reported:

Tatyana Trepashkin, 34, also knows how ruthless the president can be towards those who oppose his policies. Her asthmatic husband, Mikhail, 48, a lawyer, been languishing in jail in the Urals since September 2005. Mr Trepashkin had been representing an American woman whose mother was among 300 people who died in four apartment block explosions across Russia in 1999. When he revealed that he had evidence that implicated the FSB, in the attack, he was arrested. No one had claimed responsibility for the blasts, but Mr Putin, playing to the general suspicion that the Chechens were to blame, used it as a means of justifying his military re-occupation of the country. He was furious with Mr Trepashkin. Mrs Trepashkin, fearful for her safety and that of her two young daughters, will talk only if we meet at a park bench 10 miles outside Moscow. She speaks in whispers. “Our apartment is likely bugged. The KGB burst in, the children were terrified. They just dragged Mikhail away, and I haven’t been allowed to see him since. I know he is crammed in lice-infected cells with many others. I know Putin wants him out of the way, to silence him.” Though Mr Trepashkin’s appeal was set for last month, it has been postponed until the end of this month. “That is because Putin doesn’t want the publicity to tarnish his reputation before G8,” says Yevgeny Ikhlova, of Za Prava Cheloveka, a human rights group. “Once the summit is over and the world leaders have gone, Trepashkin will be simply kept in prison.”

Russian authorities have refused to allow the team of British investigators now in Russia looking into the Litvinenko killing any access to Trepashkin in prison (nor will they be able to interview another key witness, former Russian agent Andrei Lugovoi, who met Litvinenko in London on the day he fell ill; Lugovoi suddenly checked himself into a Moscow hospital when the British arrived in town, supposedly for further radiation screening).

The Guardian has reported that in connection with the investigation of the Litvinenko killing

Scotland Yard has been passed copies of two letters apparently penned in jail by former Russian intelligence officer Mikhail Trepashkin, in one of which Mr Litvinenko is warned that both he and his family are at risk. Mr Litvinenko’s London friend Alex Goldfarb said scans of the letters came into his possession on Thursday and he passed them to Scotland Yard. Mr Trepashkin, who worked for the KGB’s successor the FSB until 1997, was tried in 2004, accused of being a British spy and passing secret information to Mr Litvinenko and his close friend the tycoon Boris Berezovsky, both exiled in London.

Such valiant activity, of course, only makes Trepashkin that much more of a target. Here is what Congressman Chris Smith said about Trepashkin on the floor of the U.S. House in November 2004:

Mr. Speaker, there is reason to fear for the fate of rule of law in Russia. I want to present one relevant example. Mikhail Trepashkin, an attorney and former Federal Security Service, FSB, officer was arrested on October 24, 2003, a week before he was scheduled to represent in legal proceedings the relatives of one of the victims of a terrorist attack in Moscow. Mr. Trepashkin’s American client is Tatyana Morozova of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In September 1999, Ms. Morozova’s mother was killed and her sister barely survived the bombing of an apartment house in Moscow. Officially, the crime was blamed on Chechen separatists, but Mr. Trepashkin was expected to present the findings of his investigation which suggested involvement of elements of the FSB in the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow as well as an aborted attempted bombing in the city of Ryazan. Mr. Trepashkin had been a consultant to the public commission set up by prominent human rights activist and former Duma Deputy Sergei Kovalev to investigate the 1999 bombings. The Kovalev commission asked many unpleasant questions but got precious few answers from the authorities. Meanwhile, in the course of his investigation Trepashkin discovered evidence that didn’t track with the official version of the bombing incidents. This included events in Ryazan, where a bomb in an apartment basement was discovered by local police and safely detonated hours before it was due to explode. The two suspects in that case were released after presenting FSB identification documents. The whole incident was later declared a “readiness exercise” by Russian authorities. Several months later, the co-chairman of the Kovalev Commission, Duma Deputy Sergei Yushenkov, was assassinated in front of his home. Four persons were convicted of the murder. Another member of the Commission died of food poisoning in a hospital, another was severely beaten by thugs, and two members lost their seats in the Duma. The activities of the decimated commission came to an abrupt halt. A week before the October 24, 2003 trial opened, the police just happened to pull Trepashkin over on the highway, and just happened to find a revolver in his car. Trepashkin claims the gun was planted. Three weeks later, he was put on trial and sentenced to 4 years labor camp by a closed court for allegedly divulging state secrets to a foreign journalist. Mr. Speaker, I don’t know all the details of this case, but it looks very much like Mr. Trepashkin was prosecuted in order to prevent him from releasing potentially damaging information regarding the activities of the FSB. The U.S. State Department has commented diplomatically: “The arrest and trial of Mikhail Trepashkin raised concerns about the undue influence of the FSB and arbitrary use of the judicial system.” Today Mr. Trepashkin is held in a Volokolamsk city jail in a 130-square foot, lice-infested cell, which he shares with six other prisoners. He suffers from asthma but reportedly has been denied health care or even medicine. These arduous conditions may be retaliation for Mr. Trepashkin’s filing a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. It is difficult to believe that President Putin, given his KGB and FSB background, is unaware of the controversy surrounding the bombing investigations and the possibility that elements of the security services were involved. He must realize that corruption and personal vendettas within the FSB are dangerous commodities not only for the people of Russia, but for an entire civilized world that relies on the combined efforts of the intelligence community in the war against terrorism. I urge President Putin to order a thorough and honest investigation of Mikhail Trepashkin’s jailing and full cooperation with the Kovalev Commission. While the jury is still out on the 1999 bombings, persecution of those who want to find out the truth does not add to Mr. Putin’s credibility among those in the West who so far have been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Shamefully, many have sat idly by watching those who tried to seek justice in the Moscow bombings fall like dominos one after another, until almost none are left. Even more shamefully, others we might call ???????Russophiles??????? have aggressively rationalized and enabled the Putin dictatorship. How much evidence does the West need before it will realize the scourge it is facing in Russia and move to action? On Sunday, incoming Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Democrat Joseph Biden and influential Republican Lindsey Graham sounded the warning call on FOX News regarding the need for a major new policy initiative to confront Russia, and this is welcome news. It should be an area of perfect bipartisan unity, a chance for Americans to show the world what they are capable of and what they stand for and stand against. People????????s lives, most especially those of our children, hang in the balance.

Kim Zigfeld publishes the Russia blog La Russophobe.