In the fall of 1999, airborne assault forces (military unit 59236) Private Alexei Pinyaev and his fellow soldiers from Moscow were assigned to this very regiment. While they were guarding a storehouse with weapons and ammunition, Pinyaev and a friend went inside, most probably out of simple curiosity, and saw sacks with the word Sugar on them.
The two paratroopers cut a hole in one of the sacks with a bayonet and tipped some of the state s sugar into a plastic bag. Unfortunately, the tea made with the stolen sugar had a strange taste and wasn t sweet at all. The frightened soldiers took their bag to their platoon commander. He suspected something wasn t right, since everyone was talking about the story of the explosions, and he decided to have the sugar checked out by an explosives specialist. The substance proved to be hexogene. The officer reported to his superiors. Members of the FSB from Moscow and Tula (where an airborne assault
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division was stationed, just like in Ryazan) descended on the unit. The regimental secret services were excluded from the investigation. The paratroopers who had discovered the hexogene were interrogated for revealing a state secret. You guys can t even imagine what serious business you ve got tangled up in, one officer told them. The press was informed that there was no soldier in the unit with the name of Pinyaev and that information about sacks containing hexogene being found in the military depot had simply been invented by Pavel Voloshin, a journalist from Novaya Gazeta. The matter of the explosives was successfully hushed up, and Pinyaev s commander and fellow soldiers were sent off to serve in Chechnya.
For Pinyaev himself, they devised a more painful punishment. First, he was forced to retract what he had said (it s not too hard to imagine the kind of pressure the FSB could bring to bear on him). Then the head of the Investigative Department of the FSB announced that the soldier will be questioned in the course of the criminal proceedings initiated against him. A female employee of TsOS FSB summed it all up: The kid s had it& In March 2000, criminal proceedings were initiated against Pinyaev for the theft of army property from a military warehouse containing ammunition& the theft of a bagful of sugar! One must at least grant the FSB a sense of humor. But even so, it s hard to understand why the Investigative Department of the FSB of Russia should have been concerned with the petty theft of food products.
According to the engineers in Ryazan, explosives are not packed, stored, or transported in fifty-kilogram sacks, it s just too dangerous. Five hundred grams of mixture is sufficient to blow up a small building. Fifty-kilogram sacks, disguised as sugar, could only be required for acts of terrorism. Evidently this was the warehouse which provided the three sacks, which were later planted under the loadbearing support of the building in Ryazan.
The instruments of the Ryazan experts had not lied.
There was a sequel to the story of the 137th regiment of the VDV. In March 2000, just before the election, the paratroop regiment sued Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper had published the interview with Pinyaev. The writ, which dealt with the protection of honor, dignity and business reputation was submitted to the Basmansky Intermunicipal Court by the regimental command. The commander himself, Oleg Churilov, declared that the article in question had insulted the honor not only of the regiment, but of the entire Russian army, since in September 1999, there had not been any such private in the regiment. And it is not true that a soldier can gain entry to a warehouse where weapons and explosives are stored, because he has no right to enter it, while he is on guard duty.
So Pinyaev did not exist, but he was still handed over for trial. The sacks contained sugar, but a state secret had been breached. And the 137th regiment had not taken Novaya Gazeta to court over the article about hexogene, but because a private on guard duty has no right to enter the warehouse he is guarding, and any claims to the contrary were an insult to the Russian army.
The question of the detonating devices wasn t handled so smoothly, either. Despite all of Zdanovich s efforts to persuade people to the contrary, the device was genuine and live,
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as the chairman of the Ryazan regional Duma, Vladimir Fedotkin, firmly asserted in an interview with the Interfax news agency on September 24: It was an absolutely genuine explosive device, nothing to do with any exercises.
The detonating device is a very important formal point. Instructions forbid the use of a live detonating device for exercises involving civilian structures and the civilian population. The device might obviously be stolen (and somebody would have to be held responsible), or it might be triggered by children or tramps, if they found it in the sack of sugar. If the detonating device was not live, then no criminal case could have been brought under article 205 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (terrorism), the case would have been based on the discovery of the explosive and turned over to the MVD, not the FSB. In the final analysis, if we are talking about an exercise, then the vigilance of the people of Ryazan was checked to see how promptly they would discover sacks containing explosives, not what they would do with a detonating device. The FSB could not have carried out such a check using a live device.
In order to find out whether this was really true, Novaya Gazeta turned for assistance to one of its military specialists, a colonel, and asked him the questions: Are exercises conducted using real explosive substances, and Are there any instructions and regulations which govern this kind of activity? Here is the colonel s answer: Powerful explosive devices are not used even in exercises involving live shelling. Only blanks are used. If it is required to check the ability to locate and disarm an explosive device, a mine for instance, models are used which contain no detonator and no TNT.
Exercises on the use of explosives, of course, involve the real detonation of quite powerful explosive devices (the specialists have to know how to disarm them). But& such exercises are conducted in restricted areas without any outsiders. Only trained personnel are present. There is no question of involving civilians. The whole business is strictly regulated. There are instructions covering the equipment required, instructions for clearing mines, appropriate instructions and orders. Undoubtedly, these are similar for the army and the secret services.
It is difficult for the uninitiated to appreciate the significance of the innocent phrase: the initiation of criminal proceedings under article 205. Most importantly of all, it means that the investigation will not be conducted by the MVD, but by the FSB, since terrorist activity falls into the FSB s area of investigative competence. The FSB has more than enough cases to deal with, and it won t take on any unnecessary ones. In order to take on a case, it has to have very cogent reasons, indeed (in this case the cogent reasons were provided by the results of the analysis). The FSB investigation is supervised by the Public Prosecutor s Office, and the search for the perpetrators is conducted by the FSB jointly with the MVD. A crime for which criminal proceedings have been initiated is reported within twenty-four hours to the FSB of Russia duty officer at phone numbers (095) 224-3858 or 224-1869; or at the emergency line numbers 890-726 and 890-818; or by high-frequency phone at 52816. Every morning, the duty officer submits a report on all messages received to the director of the FSB himself. If something serious is going on, such as the foiling of a terrorist attack in Ryazan, the duty officer is entitled to phone the
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director of the FSB at home, even at night. Reports in the media about the FSB and its members are also presented every day in a separate report.
Within a few days of the instigation of criminal proceedings requiring investigation by the FSB, an analytical note is compiled on possible lines of action. For instance, the head of the section for combating terrorism at the Ryazan UFSB draws up a note for the head of the Department for Combating Terrorism of the FSB of Russia. This note is then submitted via the secretariat of the deputy director of the FSB with responsibility for monitoring the corresponding department, and from there the note goes to the director of the FSB. All of which means that Patrushev knew about the discovery in the basement of a building in Ryazan of sacks containing explosives and a live detonating device no later than seven o clock on the morning of September 23. When there are explosions happening everywhere, for a subordinate not to report to the top that a terrorist attack has been thwarted would be tantamount to suicide. The foiling of a terrorist attack is an occasion for rejoicing. It means medals and promotion and bonuses. And also, of course, public recognition.
This time, the apparent cause for celebration created a tricky situation. In connection with the incident in Ryazan, Zdanovich announced on September 24 that the FSB offered its apologies to the people of the city for the inconvenience and psychological stress they had suffered as a result of anti-terrorist exercises. Note that a day earlier, in his interview with NTV, Zdanovich had not apologized, which means that on September 24, Patrushev must have sent Zdanovich the directive to write everything off to sheer stupidity in order to avoid being accused of terrorism.
General Alexander Zdanovich today apologized to the inhabitants of Ryazan on behalf of the Federal Security Service of Russia for the inconvenience they had suffered in the course of antiterrorist exercises and also for the psychological stress caused to them. He emphasized that the secret services thank the people of Ryazan for the vigilance, restraint, and patience they have shown. At the same time, Zdanovich called on Russians to take a tolerant view of the need to hold hard-line checks on the preparedness, in the first instance, of the agencies of law enforcement to ensure public safety, and also on the vigilance of the public in conditions of heightened terrorist activity. The general told us that this week, as part of the Whirlwind Anti-Terror operation, the FSB had implemented measures in several Russian cities designed to check the response of the agencies of law enforcement, including the territorial divisions of the FSB itself, and of the population to modeled terrorist activity, involving the planting of explosive devices. The representative of the secret services observed that serious shortcomings had been uncovered. Unfortunately, in some of the cities tested, there was no response at all from the agencies of law enforcement to the potential planting of bombs. According to Zdanovich, the FSB conducted its operation in conditions as close as possible to a real terrorist threat, otherwise there would have been no point to these checks. Naturally neither the local authorities nor the local law enforcement agencies were informed.
Precisely for this reason, the results of the check provide an accurate picture of the degree to which the security of the Russian public is guaranteed in various cities in the country.
The general emphasized that the last of these cities to be checked, Ryazan, proved to be
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by no means the last in terms of the vigilance of the public, but was, unfortunately, less successful in terms of the actions of the agencies of law enforcement. The FSB RF is currently analyzing the results of the checks carried out in order urgently to introduce the necessary correctives to the work of the agencies of law enforcement in ensuring the safety of the Russian public. Alexander Zdanovich assured us that once the results had been summed up and the reasons for the failures in the operation itself explained, appropriate measures would be taken immediately.
In this way, the FSB issued an unambiguous statement that Ryazan was the last city in which exercises had been conducted. In actual fact, September 23 marked the beginning of the urgent organization by the FSB (despite Zdanovich s assurances) of an absolutely idiotically conceived exercise to check the vigilance of the public and the agencies of coercion. The press was full of reports of practice bombings, which were quite impossible to distinguish from the hooligan escapades of telephone terrorists: mock-ups of bombs were planted in one crowded place after another, in post offices, in public institutions, in shops, and the following day, the media reported in graphic detail how the exhausted public had failed to pay any attention to them. This was Patrushev providing himself with an alibi, attempting to prove that the Ryazan exercises had been only one episode in a series of checks organized across the whole of Russia by the idiotic FSB.
The journalists had a field day, showering colorful epithets on the dimwitted FSB operatives who hadn t caught a single real terrorist, but kept thinking up stupid war games in a country where real terrorism was rampant. Headlines such as FSB baseness and stupidity, The Federal Sabotage Service, Land of frightened idiots, Man is Pavlov s dog to man. Let them hold these exercises in the Kremlin, or The secret services have screwed the people of Ryazan, hardly even stood out against the general background. But the base and stupid leadership of the FSB demonstrated remarkable stubbornness, carrying out more and more practice bombings and for some reason failed to take serious offense at the journalists new-found boldness-with only one exception, which was when they wrote about Ryazan.
Here are a few typical training exercises from late September and October 1999.
In Moscow, FSB operatives checking on police readiness arrived at a police station with a box on which the word bomb was written. They were allowed inside, where they left their package in one of the offices and then left. The box was only discovered two days later A mock-up of an explosive device was planted in a pizzeria on Volkhonka Street in Moscow (it was not discovered).
In Balashikha outside Moscow, an abandoned building was selected, and exercises were conducted in and around it on rescuing the victims of an explosion that had supposedly already taken place in the building, with the involvement of the police, the FSB, and the MChS.
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In Tula and Chelyabinsk, there were repeated instances of mock bombs being planted, perhaps as an exercise, perhaps out of simple hooliganism.
In late October in Omsk employees of the Omsk Region department of the FSB for counterfeit documents drove a vehicle on to the grounds of the Omskvodokanal Company without encountering any obstacles, broke through the company s triple-level defenses, and exploded containers of liquid chlorine.