Explosive Allegations

Friday, Apr. 19, 2002
Most Russians are unlikely to see The Attempt on Russia, a French documentary shot with the help of tycoon Boris Berezovsky, now self-exiled to London. The film alleges involvement of Russian secret services in the Moscow and the Volgodonsk apartment bombings in the fall of 1999. The terrorist attacks claimed 247 lives and paved the way for a new Chechen war that helped install Vladimir Putin as Russian President. While denying the claim, the Kremlin made sure that Russian TV would not show the footage, screened by human rights groups to limited audiences.

Still, such allegations have been the talk of the country ever since the tragedy. This week, VTSIOM (the Public Opinion Studies Center) released its polls on public reaction to them. The results show that 38% of those polled firmly deny that Russian secret services could be involved; 6% as firmly believe they were; 37% believe that, though not proven, such an involvement should not be ruled out; and 19% are undecided. The polls hardly bode well for Putin.

Four centuries ago, Czar Boris Godunov was alleged to have had Dimitri, a son of Ivan The Terrible, murdered to pave his way to the throne. First, the majority seemed undecided as to his guilt. Then, as things were going from bad to worse, the opinion shifted to regard Godunov as guilty. The alleged murder of an innocent child ushered in what is known in Russian history as The Time of Troubles. By and large, Godunov was one of the best Russian rulers, even if he came up in the ranks of the oprichnina, Ivan The Terrible's dreadful punitive corps, a kind of medieval Russian Shutzstaffel (SS).

Godunov secured his position first by marrying a daughter of Malyuta Skuratov, Ivan's feared chief of secret police, and then by marrying off his sister to Ivan's son and heir Fyodor. For the 14 years of feeble Fyodor's rule, Godunov acted as the premier, to put it in modern terms. Once Fyodor died, Godunov accepted the Russian crown in the wake of insistent and emotional mass appeals, adroitly launched and orchestrated by himself. For the next seven years, Godunov kept reforming Russia as a legitimate Czar.

Reform it he did. Godunov restored domestic peace in the country, torn by Ivan's brutality, and stopped decades of bloody foreign wars. He chartered the course of bringing Russia into the fold of Europe, and sent the first ever group of young Russian nobles to study abroad (all of whom had the good presence of mind never to come back). Under the 19 years of his stewardship, Russia blossomed. But there was just one snag to the success story: allegations of having an innocent child murdered.

These claims, mostly dismissed by modern historians, stigmatized Godunov's enlightened and pragmatic rule. Nor did he ever overcome his oprichnina background, his sophistication notwithstanding: Godunov forced Russians to chant a daily prayer to him, while secret police kept hunting for signs of any sedition, and enticed people to squeal. Nobody felt safe.

As famine hit the country in 1601, Godunov opened up his coffers to make sure that his people would not starve. However, his well-intended but poorly executed venture only inflated bread prices. As things were going from bad to worse, the murmur of Dimitri's murder grew into a roar. Once an imposter who claimed the name of "miraculously saved" Dimitri, marched on Moscow, Godunov's boyars defected, the people fled, and a robust Godunov suddenly died at the age of 53. The untimely demise enhanced the popular view that it was Godunov's guilty conscience that killed him. Russia crumbled, and the long period of the Times of Trouble followed. All due to one child's alleged murder.

Unlike Godunov, Putin has not been a smashing success in the Kremlin. He has spent his first two-and-a-half years in power mostly bringing the unruly media, regional governors, and the Federal parliament under his heel. While secret service officers are busy vying for money and power with left-over stalwarts of the corrupt Yeltsin regime, the people are getting poorer, all the triumphant reports of economic growth notwithstanding. Last week, over 25,000 took to the streets in the regional center of Voronezh to protest utilities and rent hikes that they simply cannot afford. In many cases the tariffs grew higher than their incomes. "Swap my two-bedroom apartment for a single grave," read one poster in Voronezh. This week village teachers, unpaid for almost a year, are continuing their desperate hunger strike in the Krasnoyarsk region in Siberia, while long-unpaid coal miners are launching a hunger strike deep down in their mines in the Yekaterinburg region in the Urals. The Chechen war that brought Putin to the Kremlin, is going nowhere, except new graves. The real culprits of the Moscow and Volgodonsk bombings have never been apprehended and put on trial.

Unlike allegations of complicity in one innocent child's murder back in the 17th century, claims of involvement in 247 innocent deaths will hardly bring the regime down now, not after all the millions of such deaths in modern Russian history. Still, the worse things become, the more people will talk. One day, the talk might grow into a roar once again.