Andrei Soldatov, Irina Borogan / the extract from The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB

TWO YEARS AFTER the disastrous Nord-Ost siege in Moscow, Chechen terrorists launched a series of brutal attacks in the North Caucasus. Once again, the security services’ inability to respond quickly and effectively (despite changes to the structure of the security services themselves) demonstrated a perilous absence of the sort of commanding direction necessary in a crisis situation.

The first attack occurred on June 21, 2004, when more than two hundred insurgents arrived in Nazran and Karabulak, in the republic of Ingushetia, bordering Chechnya. Militants divided into groups of twenty or thirty and stormed fifteen government buildings, including the 503rd Army Regiment headquarters, the Interior Ministry headquarters, the base of an FSB border guard unit, an arms depot, and the local police headquarters.

The insurgents, Chechen and Ingush fighters, were led once again by Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev. Their main target was law enforcement personnel. Dressed in camouflage uniforms and masks, the insurgents stopped people in the streets, demanded identification, and killed anyone carrying law enforcement personnel identification. They even established their own checkpoints during the raid.

According to official data, the insurgents killed sixty-two law enforcement officials, including the Ingush minister of internal affairs, two prosecutors, and nine FSB regional officers.

The attack was well coordinated: While insurgents were combing both towns for law enforcement, thirty-five militants headed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs arms depot in Nazran, where they found more than 1,500 Kalashnikovs and a large quantity of ammunition. Appropriating the ministry’s trucks, the rebels loaded up with weapons and left the area. The loading took three to four hours, during which time the insurgents continued to attack military facilities and prevented any attempts to recapture the guns. The entire raid lasted less than five hours, and federal army troops did not arrive in Nazran until the following day, when the fighting was over.

The attack in Nazran opened a new front in the Russian conflict in the North Caucasus. It was the first such military foray by Chechens outside Chechnya’s border in many years. The action was a direct strike on law enforcement and the FSB and control over a whole region was lost for nearly a day. Just when many had thought the second Chechen war was over, the Nazran attack posed difficult new challenges to Russia’s security services.

The Nazran attack came at a time of change and paralysis in the organization of the security services. In Moscow, the top brass wanted to show that the war had indeed ended and that all that was needed was some kind of police action. This attitude prompted a change in the way the security services handled events in the volatile region. More responsibility was given to the Interior Ministry, which was essentially a police organization. The FSB kept its hand in, as did the military, but by the summer of 2004 it had been determined that police action would be left to the police agency. Under the new structure, jurisdiction was unclear, security services were overlapping, and problems with coordination soon reached a critical level.

By July 2004, in the North Caucasus the situation was extremely complicated: At least three divisions of the national FSB as well as regional offices, military intelligence, and Interior Ministry units were all operating in the same area. There was little or no coordination between them.

In August, the Kremlin made a key organizational change. Twelve “operational management groups” were created for the troubled North Caucasus region, all of them under the purview of the Interior Ministry. The groups were to coordinate security services in the region in the event of a terrorist attack. The change put responsibility for dealing with an attack in the hands of the police rather than the military or the FSB.

Each of the twelve groups was headed by a colonel of the Internal Troops at the Interior Ministry who had the rank of head of the regional antiterrorist forces — making him the second-highest official in the region after the governor in the fight against terrorism. In the event of hostage taking or insurgent attacks, the commanders of the twelve groups were expected to assume control. They could make decisions independently from Moscow.

The creation of the twelve groups was also significant as a shift in power. During the 1990s, responses to all major terrorist attacks had been managed from Moscow by the central authorities. The new system was intended to decentralize control, giving regional commanders an increased role. (Nonetheless, the Kremlin kept the identities of the commanders secret, so the public could not hold them accountable in the event of failure.)

On August 24, 2004, two domestic passenger planes, a Tu-134 and a Tu-154, took off at Moscow’s Domodedovo International Airport at 10:30 P.M. and 9:35 P.M., respectively. At around 11 P.M. they crashed almost simultaneously, hundreds of miles apart: In both incidents eighty-nine people were killed. Within days it became clear that the planes had been blown up in the air by two female suicide bombers.

On Tuesday, August 31, another woman blew herself up near the Rizhskaya metro station in the center of Moscow. Ten people were killed and fifty-one wounded. It was a Tuesday night, and the area surrounding the station was full of high-ranking officials, including the mayor of Moscow. All these attacks appeared to have been organized as a diversion for a far bigger assault that would follow within twenty-four hours.

On September 1, 2004, more than forty terrorists armed with guns stolen during the raid in Ingushetia captured a school in Beslan, in North Ossetia. More than 1,100 people, including some 770 children, were taken hostage. Over the first two days of the crisis, the terrorists hounded the authorities with demands to deal directly with prominent politicians, releasing a few hostages with every visit to show their willingness to negotiate.

They allowed the former president of Ingushetia, Ruslan Aushev, to enter the school. In exchange, twenty-six hostages were released as a sign of good will. But the hostage takers refused to deal with journalists, claiming they might be FSB informers. (The well-known journalist Anna Politkovskaya might have been allowed into the school, but she was mysteriously poisoned on the plane while flying to the region on September 1. The results of her medical tests have disappeared, strengthening the view that she was poisoned by the security services.) Nevertheless, in the first hours of the hostage crisis, they executed more than a dozen men whose bodies they dumped out the windows of the school.

On Friday, September 3, the third day of the hostage crisis, there were no signs of an impending assault by government forces. The security perimeter around the school was porous; no new army deployments were in evidence.

By Friday morning rumors were circulating among journalists that the terrorists might allow medical staff to remove the bodies of the men who had been shot and thrown out of the windows.

As the gunmen allowed four medical workers from the Ministry of Emergency Situations to approach the school in two ambulances, two bombs went off inside the sport hall of the school, where the hostages were gathered.

It was 1:05 P.M. on September 3.

The explosions almost destroyed the roof of the sports hall and part of the wall. In panic, some children saw an opportunity to flee. The terrorists responded by opening fire, which prompted the security forces to storm the building.

When the shooting began, the special purpose center of the FSB, comprised of the elite officers who had been trained for terrorist attacks, was not prepared. Although there were enough troops on the ground, two assault groups out of ten were not at the immediate site but were undergoing training for an assault on a similar building thirty kilometers from Beslan. The officers of the special purpose center who were near the school were not even wearing bulletproof vests. As they watched the children fleeing and the terrorists shooting, they had no choice but to storm the school. Ten officers were killed, the biggest loss ever for the special purpose center.

The Beslan operation quickly turned into a city battle. Some local armed men ran from the school, taking freed children with them. Others ran in the opposite direction with guns. Around 2:00 P.M. one of them shouted to us: “We need hunting cartridges; please, find some!”

By then the battle had expanded far beyond the area around the school. Some people had been shooting, some feared the terrorists were in hiding and began frantically searching for anyone who looked out of place. Two local militiamen caught one woman who was thought to be a terrorist, and only the sudden arrival of her husband saved her.

After almost three hours, local troops appeared to be hunting one another. We were surprised how disorganized and fluid the whole situation became. At about 5:00 P.M. we managed to get closer to the school and were standing close to the school with dozens of Ossetian men. But we weren’t sure if the operation was still under way. Around this time in Moscow, the state TV channels reported the operation was finished.

At 6 P.M. Soldatov was called by radio Echo Moskvy, and at this very moment another explosion took place: “What’s going on?” he was asked. “We were told the operation is long over. Could you explain that sound?” In fact, the last explosion didn’t come until 11:15 P.M. It was a shell from a tank of the 58th Army attached to the operations staff, firing on the last three insurgents holed up in the school’s cellar. In total, 334 hostages were killed, including 186 children. It was a disaster.

THE BESLAN SIEGE cast a harsh light on the ability of the Russian security services to cope with large-scale hostage-taking and terrorism. All the various ministries and elite forces had been called, but they seemed to be parts of a broken watch: They were all in one place, all involved in the same movement, but the whole mechanism was out of order.

From the beginning, the hostage crisis in Beslan was clearly of national scale. But fearing responsibility for possible failure, FSB generals in Moscow deliberately framed the event as a local crisis. The reorganized system, approved only one month earlier, was supposed to put one of the twelve commanders in charge of such an event. But during the Beslan siege, the commander was made subordinate to the FSB chief in North Ossetia. On the first day of the crisis, Putin sent FSB director Nikolai Patrushev and Minister of Internal Affairs Rashid Nurgaliev to Beslan, but they left the republic as soon as possible.10 The two officials did not even make it to the town of Beslan. They landed at the airport just long enough to get another flight back to Moscow.

The school was captured at 8:00 A.M., and by noon the heads of the FSB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs managed to fly to Beslan and get all the way back to Moscow, 932 miles north, to meet Putin. “I did not meet Patrushev and Nurgaliev in Beslan,” testified Valery Andreev, the FSB chief in North Ossetia who was put in charge of the operation. He spoke at the trial of the only surviving terrorist, Nurpashi Kulaev, in the Supreme Court of North Ossetia on December 15, 2005.

A year after the tragedy, on September 2, 2005, Putin met with members of the committee“Mothers of Beslan,”and he was asked, “Why did Patrushev and Nurgaliev not appear in Beslan on September 1? They were at the airport, and they departed. Why did some of them not remain?” Putin responded, “It happens sometimes that there are a lot of generals, and they impede each other. Therefore, they departed.”

To make matters worse, two operations staffs were established, the first and official one headed by Andreev, and the second and semi-official one consisting of FSB generals from Moscow. Two generals, Vladimir Pronichev and Vladimir Anisimov, deputy directors of the FSB, were presented as “consultants” to Andreev, with no clear delegation of responsibility. In his statement at the trial on December 15, 2005, Andreev remarked that it was the FSB director, Patrushev, who had told him that Pronichev was coming to provide “practical help for the operation,”while the purpose of Anisimov’s presence was not stated.

In fear of alienating the local population, authorities failed to erect an effective security perimeter around the captured school.

This led to the shooting-turned-storming, which surprised both special troops and terrorists. That locals were the first to mobilize people and cars to take children away from the burning school was the best illustration of the operations staff’s inability to lead the rescue operation. The scene in Beslan was crawling with top officials, including two deputies from the FSB director and a number of other Moscow FSB generals, among them Alexander Zdanovich, whom the authors met on September 3 near the operations staff. But with all these bigwigs on the area, the commanding authority seemed to have no clear powers, and the supposed special troops operation turned into a sort of anarchic street fighting that ended only with the help of tanks and only hours after the storming had begun. The operation to free the hostages appeared to be led by nobody.

At 2:00 P.M., after almost an hour of shooting, we saw Eduard Kokoity, the president of South Ossetia, the break-away province of Georgia, ordering Russian soldiers to strengthen the cordon.15 He was the president of another country, but he was one of the people making decisions.

Beslan brutally exposed the Russian security services’ utter failure to react quickly and effectively to a crisis. The decentralization of power from Moscow, and the assignment of a dozen officers specifically designated to the troubled region, had failed to avert a dire scenario. In the end, after three chaotic, terrifying days, 334 hostages (186 children among them) lost their lives.

The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB

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