The second quarter of the 20th century was one of the most difficult periods in the history of our country. This time was marked not only by the Great Patriotic War, but also by mass repressions. During the existence of the Gulag (1930-1956), according to various sources, from 6 to 30 million people visited the labor camps dispersed throughout the republics.
After Stalin's death, the camps began to be abolished, people tried to leave these places as soon as possible, many projects that had been given thousands of lives fell into decay. However, evidence of that dark era is still alive.
"Perm-36"
A strict regime labor colony in the village of Kuchino, Perm Region, existed until 1988. In the days of the Gulag, convicted law enforcement officers were sent here, and after that - the so-called political ones. The unofficial name "Perm-36" appeared in the 70s, when the institution was given the designation VS-389/36.
Six years after the closure, the Memorial Museum of History was opened on the site of the former colony political repression"Perm-36". The crumbling barracks were restored and museum exhibits were placed in them. Lost fences, towers, signal and warning structures, engineering communications were recreated. In 2004, the World Monuments Fund included "Perm-36" in the list of 100 specially protected monuments of world culture. However, now the museum is on the verge of closing - due to insufficient funding and the protests of the communist forces.
Mine "Dneprovsky"
Quite a few wooden buildings have been preserved on the Kolyma River, 300 kilometers from Magadan. This is the former Dneprovsky hard labor camp. In the 1920s, a large tin deposit was discovered here, and especially dangerous criminals were sent to work. In addition to Soviet citizens, Finns, Japanese, Greeks, Hungarians and Serbs atoned for their guilt at the mine. You can imagine the conditions in which they had to work: in summer it can be up to 40 degrees of heat, and in winter - up to minus 60.
From the memoirs of prisoner Pepelyaev: “We worked in two shifts, 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Lunch was brought to work. Lunch is 0.5 liters of soup (water with black cabbage), 200 grams of oatmeal and 300 grams of bread. Working during the day is certainly easier. From the night shift, until you get to the zone, until you have breakfast, and as soon as you fall asleep - it’s already lunch, you lie down - check, and then dinner, and - to work.
Road on the bones
The infamous 1,600-kilometer abandoned highway leading from Magadan to Yakutsk. The road began to be built in 1932. Tens of thousands of people who participated in the laying of the route and died there were buried right under the roadway. At least 25 people died every day during construction. For this reason, the tract was called the road on the bones.
The camps along the route were named after kilometer marks. In total, about 800 thousand people passed through the "road of bones". With the construction of the Kolyma federal highway, the old Kolyma highway fell into disrepair. To this day, human remains are found along it.
Karlag
The Karaganda forced labor camp in Kazakhstan, which operated from 1930 to 1959, occupied a huge area: about 300 kilometers from north to south and 200 from east to west. All local residents were deported in advance and admitted to the lands uncultivated by the state farm only in the early 50s. According to reports, they actively assisted in the search for and detention of the fugitives.
There were seven separate settlements on the territory of the camp, in which more than 20 thousand prisoners lived in total. The camp administration was based in the village of Dolinka. Several years ago, a museum in memory of the victims of political repressions was opened in that building, and a monument was erected in front of it.
Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp
The monastery prison on the territory of the Solovetsky Islands appeared in early XVIII century. Priests, heretics and sectarians who were disobedient to the sovereign's will were kept in isolation here. In 1923, when the State Political Directorate under the NKVD decided to expand the network of northern special purpose camps (SLON), one of the largest correctional institutions in the USSR appeared on Solovki.
The number of prisoners (mostly those convicted of serious crimes) increased many times every year. From 2.5 thousand in 1923 to more than 71 thousand by 1930. All the property of the Solovetsky Monastery was transferred to the use of the camp. But already in 1933 it was disbanded. Today, there is only a restored monastery here.
"Valley of Death" - a documentary story about special uranium camps in the Magadan region. Doctors in this top-secret zone conducted criminal experiments on the brains of prisoners.
Revealing Nazi Germany of genocide, the Soviet government, in deep secrecy, at the state level, put into practice an equally monstrous program. It was in such camps, under an agreement with the VKPB, that Hitler's special brigades were trained and gained experience in the mid-30s.
The results of this investigation were widely covered by many world media. In a special TV show hosted by live NHK of Japan, Alexander Solzhenitsyn also participated with the author (by phone).
In the process of reading the material, the following is striking: firstly, all the photographs presented are either macro photography or shooting of individual objects or buildings; there are no photographs that would allow us to assess the scope of the camp as a whole (except for two, in which nothing is visible). Moreover, all photos are extremely small, which makes it difficult to adequately evaluate them. Secondly, the text is replete with eyewitness statements, mentions of some archives and names, some statistics, but there is not a single specific scan or photograph of any document.
According to the information from the article, in the aforementioned camp they were engaged in three things: they mined uranium ore, enriched it and set up some experiments.
The extraction of uranium ore was carried out by hand, and again enriched by hand on pallets in primitive-looking furnaces. In support of this, a photograph of the insides of some abandoned building is shown. In the foreground is a row of partitions made of incomprehensible material. Apparently it is understood that coal was burning below or something else, and the same pallet was kept on top. It is not clear why it was impossible to build an ordinary oven, and what these, judging by the photograph, rather thin partitions are made of. In general, there are only guesses about the flow of the technical process, and the direction of these guesses is exclusively one-sided. It is alleged that the convicts employed in this job had a catastrophically short life expectancy.
In general, the picture is not surprising. At that time, little was known about radioactive materials. The extraction of uranium ore by the hands of a convict is also not such a shocking event, because it is quite logical in the conditions of that time to send prisoners to this work. Raises questions only about the technological process of enrichment, which in the described form is dangerous not so much for the s / c, but for the administration, civilians and guards. Judging by the photo, the building is quite low in height. This means that there is no question of security guards walking around the perimeter of the hall with machine guns above the heads of the convicts (and no remains of these structures are visible, while the mounts for pipes under the ceiling have been preserved). Apparently, the guards were present directly in the hall, and received the same dose of radiation as the workers. Moreover, the same guard could well become a victim - a desperate s / c could easily splash in her direction from the pallet. Such a routine is very strange, given the fact that since time immemorial, as far as I know, a rule has been formed - the protection of the s / c should be carried out in such a way that the guard has a clear and undeniable advantage. Thus, the topic of uranium enrichment has not been disclosed.
Finally, let's move on to the most interesting. The author cites a number of information that indicates the presence in this camp of a certain mega-secret laboratory, in which scientists, among whom "there were even professors", conducted no less secret experiments. Looking ahead, I note that the topic of these experiments was also not disclosed.
The author traces two versions - experiments on the effect of radiation on the human body and experiments on the brain of a s / c. Judging by the materials presented, he likes the second version more - which, it should be noted, looks much worse than the first. Experiments on the effect of radiation in the conditions of its production by hand are a banal and quite logical matter. Similar experiments were also carried out in the stronghold of democracy - with the exception that the subjects were ordinary citizens who came to gawk at atomic mushroom(I read somewhere that some VIP places were sold almost for money). Yes, and they mined uranium ore for the United States, clearly not white-collar workers. As a result, the topic of experiments on radiation exposure was silenced by the mention of the unfortunate fate of experimental horses, whose bones were found in one of the barracks.
But with the brain, everything is more complicated. Photographs of several individual skulls with trepanation are given as evidence, and only assurances that there are many such corpses. However, the author could well be shocked by what he saw, and forget about his camera for a while; although, judging by his words, he had been there more than once - so there were opportunities.
Little touch. Histological studies are carried out on the brain, extracted no more than a few minutes after death. Ideally, in vivo. Any method of killing gives a "not clean" picture, since a whole complex of enzymes and other substances appear in the brain tissues, released during pain and psychological shock.
Moreover, the purity of the experiment is violated by the euthanasia of the experimental animal or the introduction of psychotropic drugs into it. The only method used in biological laboratory practice for such experiments is decapitation - almost instantaneous cutting off of the animal's head from the body.
In confirmation of the words about the presence of experiments on people, a fragment of an interview with a certain lady, allegedly a former convict of that camp, is given. The lady indirectly confirms the fact of the experiments, but to the leading question about trepanation to a living experimental subject, she honestly admits that she is not in the know.
Finally, the author saved up a few photos that a certain “ another boss with big stars on shoulder straps", and it is specified that " for a solid dollar bribe, he agreed to rummage through the archives of Butugychag". This case is very curious. Isn't it true, a familiar picture from various films, and indeed similar stories - a certain citizen in civilian clothes, whose conscience has stuck, transmits mega-secret data to bring his superiors to clean water. Something similar even somewhere in ... hmm ... funny Edvard Radzinsky had - "a railway worker told me ..." Nonsense? With regard to the clerk from the office of "Horns and Hooves" - not necessarily. With regard to "citizens in civilian clothes" - more than likely. Actually, the author did not even consider it necessary to critically consider the current situation, naively believing that “ for a hefty dollar bribe”, popularly known as a bribe, anyone will give him anything. In this situation, systems thinking draws at least three options: the first - everything was as it was, they passed what was needed; the second - it was part of a special operation, they handed me over; third - " another boss” corny decided to earn extra money on a naive whistleblower, pretended to be an ally and sucked in frank bullshit.
The first option is unrealistic because it assumes that the boss has some ideological principles for which he is ready not only to sacrifice his career, a comfortable chair, a stable income for the sake of some lover of revelations, but to commit an act of treason in the eyes of his colleagues and superiors. A simple “struggle for the truth” is not enough here, a powerful and strong ideology is needed, which, in fact, neither the author nor his sponsors offer.
The second option is unrealistic because there is not much point in carrying out such special operations - all these diggers are already in plain sight, and you can put the necessary photos in another way.
The third option, I think, looks the most reliable. Why? To clarify, let's try to carefully consider the transferred "secret materials".
So, the first photo in the 18+ category contains a number of interesting fragments, some of which I highlighted with a frame and adjusted the brightness / contrast in order to try to make the image more informative:
We are shown a table on which a craniotomy is performed. The body of an obviously male lies on the table, not fixed in any way, which indicates that the procedure is performed on the corpse. Some damage is clearly visible on the scalped area of the skull. On closer examination, we can assume that we are dealing with a wound inflicted by a sharp object:
The body lies on white sheets, which for some reason ... are dry. No stains of blood or fluid from the cranium are visible. Moreover, the scalp is tucked under the head, and also did not leave a single stain on the sheet. There are several explanations here - either the blood and fluid from the skull were previously pumped out, or the scalping and trepanation of the occipital part was carried out in another place (with a different set of sheets), or we are dealing with installation.
In the background we see several corpses or their parts, as well as a fragment of a gurney. It is surprising that such a model of a gurney can be found in some hospitals - was it really the same even in 47 or 52?
What is still puzzling is this. If we are talking about experiments, then it is extremely doubtful that they were carried out in the same room as the storage of corpses. It can also be seen that the corpses lie rather carelessly - most likely, they were recently delivered.
Now the second photo in the "from 18+" category, or rather, a collage. None of the fragments also shows any significant wet spots. But best of all, the room itself is visible on them, where trepanation is performed:
We see tiles on the walls. It is strange, isn't it, to import scarce building material into a very remote area? Moreover, it does not hurt and is needed in this case- It is enough to paint the walls with light paint. However, the room was apparently lined up to the ceiling by him - isn't it a very strange luxury, in the conditions of the recently ended war, albeit for a mega-secret laboratory, but located not in Moscow, and not even in Arkhangelsk.
Also of considerable surprise is the central heating battery. It seems perfectly normal to have a boiler house for heating the laboratory and administration buildings, and for sure there was one. However, this battery has a painfully strange shape ... As far as I know, batteries with sections of this shape began to be installed in the late 60s - early 70s of the last century, when this camp, as we know from the article, no longer existed. A characteristic feature is a wider section shape with a fringing. The battery sections that were installed earlier were narrower, and when shooting from this distance, their upper parts would look sharper, and not blunt, as they are here (see photo below). Unfortunately, I do not yet have a photo of such an old battery (they are now few where you can find it), I will do it as soon as possible.
Raises questions and the image, apparently a tattoo, on the chest of the body. It is very strange that it depicts a profile reminiscent of Lenin. It's like - s / c in a fit of fanatical Leninism ordered such a tattoo in the zone? Or was it a bloody gebnya that pricked everyone for edification (why, actually?).
Questions about damage to the skull and tattoo sent to a competent person. If he can clarify something, I'll make an update.
So, what kind of photo did they show us? In my opinion, it looks more like a photo from the anatomy of some medical school, where students are shown the process of trepanation on an ownerless corpse. The bodies in the background are material for further work. Citizens frightened by such cynicism should understand that this is a necessary component of the profession of a doctor, pathologist or pharmacist, simply because it helps to maintain a more or less healthy psyche.
It is also possible that we are talking about an autopsy of the body of a person who was wounded in the head with a sharp object, in order to clarify in more detail the nature of the injury and the level of damage to the brain.
In any case, in my opinion there is no reason to believe that these photos were taken in that camp during the “experiment”. Thus, the version about the sale of frank bullshit to a naive human rights fighter for a bunch of green presidents takes on a very real shape ... Moreover, one can hardly doubt that such a “citizen in civilian clothes” has great opportunities to supply such “secret pictures” wholesale and retail to everyone wishing.
However, I want to note that if the trepanned skulls were indeed found in those burials, such operations could well have been done there. Whether they were done, and for what purpose, and what actually happened in that camp - should be shown by normal studies aimed at establishing the truth, and not fitting evidence to an existing and generously funded thesis.
Explosions to reign!
Translation into Russian of the original scandalous article from the GQ magazine, banned for distribution in Russia, about how the FSB blew up houses in Moscow and other cities of Russia to ensure the rating of the rat ruler.
The Russians don't care. But for readers who have a head on their shoulders, and not a pumpkin, reading is extremely useful.
Perhaps our officials will shun the "black-eyed" for fear of getting dirty!
Matra's favorite Asian dish is a "Russian" ram baked in a tandoor...
Vladimir Putin - sinister rise to power
The first explosion took place in the barracks of the Buynaksky garrison, where Russian servicemen and their families lived. An unremarkable five-story building, located on the outskirts of the city, was blown up at the end of September 1999 with a truck loaded with explosives. From the explosion, the interfloor ceilings collapsed on each other, so that the building turned into a pile of burning ruins. Under these debris were the bodies of sixty-four people - men, women and children.
On the thirteenth of September last year, at dawn, I left my Moscow hotel and headed for the working-class district located on the southern outskirts of the city. I haven't been to Moscow for twelve years. During this time, the city was overgrown with skyscrapers made of glass and steel, the Moscow skyline was generously studded with construction cranes, and even at four in the morning life in the bright casinos on Pushkin Square was in full swing, and Tverskaya was filled with jeeps and BMWs of the latest models. This trip through Moscow at night gave me a glimpse of the petrodollar-fueled colossal changes that have taken place in Russia during Vladimir Putin's nine years in power.
However, my path that morning lay in the "former" Moscow, in a small park where a nondescript nine-story building once stood at 6/3 Kashirskoye Shosse. At 5:03 am on September 19, 1999, exactly nine years before my arrival, the house at 6/3 Kashirskoe Shosse was blown to pieces by a bomb hidden in the basement; one hundred and twenty-one residents of this house died in their sleep. This explosion, which sounded nine days after the Buynaksky one, was the third of four explosions of residential buildings that occurred during the twelve days of that September. The explosions claimed the lives of about 300 people and plunged the country into a state of panic; this series of attacks was among the deadliest in the world before the fall of the twin towers in the United States.
Newly elected Prime Minister Putin blamed the bombings on Chechen terrorists and ordered the use of scorched earth tactics in a new offensive against the breakaway region. Thanks to the success of this offensive, the hitherto unknown Putin became a national hero and soon gained complete control over Russia's power structures. This control Putin continues to exercise to this day.
Neat flowerbeds are now laid out on the site of the house on Kashirskoye Highway. Flowerbeds surround a stone monument with the names of the dead, crowned with an Orthodox cross. On the ninth anniversary of the attack, three or four local journalists came to the monument, followed by two policemen in a patrol car; however, there were no special occupations for either of them. Shortly after five in the morning, a group of two dozen people approached the monument, most of them young, presumably relatives of the dead. They lit candles at the monument and laid red carnations - and left as quickly as they came. In addition to them, only two elderly men appeared at the monument that day, eyewitnesses of the explosion, who obediently on television cameras, told how terrible it was, such a shock. I noticed that one of these men looked very upset, standing at the monument - he was crying and constantly wiping tears from his cheeks. Several times he began to resolutely walk away, as if forcing himself to leave this place, but each time he lingered on the outskirts of the park, turned around and slowly returned back. I decided to approach him.
"I lived near here," he said. "I woke up from the roar and ran here." A large man, a former sailor, he helplessly gestured around the flower beds. "And nothing. Nothing. They pulled out only one boy and his dog. And that's it. Everyone else was already dead."
As I found out later, the old man also had a personal tragedy that day. His daughter, son-in-law and grandson lived in a house on the Kashirskoye highway - and they also died that morning. He led me to the monument, pointed to their names carved in stone, and again began to desperately rub his eyes. And then he whispered furiously: "They say that it was the Chechens who did it, but it's all lies. They were Putin's people. Everyone knows it. Nobody wants to talk about it, but everyone knows about it."
The mystery of these explosions has not yet been solved; This riddle lies at the very foundation of modern Russian state. What happened in those terrible September days of 1999? Maybe Russia found in Putin its avenging angel, the notorious man of action, who crushed the enemies who attacked the country and brought his people out of the crisis? Or maybe the crisis was fabricated by the Russian secret services in order to bring their man to power? The answers to these questions are important because if there were no explosions in 1999 and the events that followed them, it would be difficult to imagine an alternative scenario for Putin to come to the place that he currently occupies - a player on the world stage, head one of the most powerful countries in the world.
It is strange that so few people outside of Russia want an answer to this question. Several intelligence agencies are believed to have conducted their own investigations, but the results of the investigations have not been made public. Very few US lawmakers have shown interest in the case. In 2003, John McCain told Congress that "there is credible information that the Russian FSB was involved in organizing the bombings." However, neither the United States government nor the American media showed any interest in investigating the bombings.
This lack of interest is now observed in Russia. Immediately after the explosions, various representatives of Russian society expressed doubts about official version happened. One by one the voices fell silent. In recent years, a number of journalists investigating the incident have either been killed or died under suspicious circumstances - as have two members of the Duma who participated in the commission investigating the terrorist attacks. At the moment, almost everyone who has expressed a different position on this issue in the past has either refused to comment, has publicly retracted his words, or is dead.
During my last year's visit to Russia, I addressed a number of people, one way or another connected with the investigation of the events of those days - journalists, lawyers, human rights activists. Many refused to talk to me. Some limited themselves to listing the well-known inconsistencies in this case, but declined to express their point of view, confining themselves to the remark that the issue remains "controversial". Even the old man from Kashirskoye Shosse eventually turned out to be a living illustration of the atmosphere of uncertainty that hangs over this topic. He readily agreed to a second meeting, at which he promised to introduce me to the relatives of the victims, who, like him, doubt the official version of events. However, he later changed his mind.
"I can't," he told me during a phone conversation a few days after we met. "I talked to my wife and boss and they both said that if I meet with you, then I'm done." I wanted to know what he meant by that, but before I could, the old sailor hung up.
There is no doubt that part of this reticence is due to memories of the fate of Alexander Litvinenko, a man who devoted his entire life to proving that there was a conspiracy of secret services in the house bombings. From his exile in London, Litvinenko, a fugitive KGB officer, launched an active campaign to discredit the Putin regime, accusing the latter of a wide variety of crimes, but especially of organizing apartment bombings. In November 2006, the world community was shocked by the news of the poisoning of Litvinenko - it is assumed that he received a lethal dose of poison during a meeting with two former agents KGB in one of the London bars. Before his death (which came only after twenty-three painful days), Litvinenko signed a statement in which he directly blamed Putin for his death.
However, Litvinenko was not the only one working on the bombings. A few years before his death, he invited another ex-KGB agent, Mikhail Trepashkin, to participate in the investigation. In the past, relations between partners were rather confusing, they say that in the 90s one of them received an order to liquidate the other. However, it was Trepashkin, while in Russia, who was able to obtain most of the disturbing facts about the bombings.
Trepashkin, among other things, came into conflict with the authorities. In 2003 he was sent to a prison camp in the Ural Mountains for four years. However, by the time I visited Moscow last year, he was already free.
Through my intermediary, I learned that Trepashkin has two small daughters and a wife who passionately wants her husband to stay out of politics. Taking this into account, as well as the fact of his recent imprisonment and the murder of a colleague, I had no doubt that our communication with him would not work out in the same way as my attempts to communicate with other former dissenters.
"Oh, he'll talk," the go-between assured me. "The only thing they can do to silence Trepashkin is to kill him."
On September 9, five days after the explosion in Buynaksk, terrorists hit Moscow. This time, their target was an eight-story building on Guryanov Street, in a working-class area in the southeast of the city. Instead of a truck with explosives, the terrorists planted a bomb in the basement, but the result was almost the same - all eight floors of the building collapsed, burying ninety-four residents of the house under the rubble.
It was after the explosion that a general alarm sounded on Guryanov. During the first hours after the attack, several officials immediately announced that Chechen fighters were involved in the explosion, and a special situation was introduced in the country. Thousands of law enforcement officials were sent to the streets to interrogate, and in hundreds of cases to arrest, people with a Chechen appearance, residents of cities and villages, organized people's squads and patrolled the yards. Representatives of various political movements began to call for revenge.
At Trepashkin's request, our first meeting took place in a crowded cafe in the center of Moscow. First one of his assistants came, and twenty minutes later Mikhail himself came along with what appeared to be a bodyguard, a young man with short hair and a blank look.
Trepashkin, although small in stature, was strongly built - evidence of many years of martial arts, and, at 51, is still handsome. His most attractive feature was the half-surprised smile that never left his face. It gave him a certain aura of friendliness and general amiability, although for a person sitting opposite him as an interrogator, such a smile would probably get on his nerves.
For a while we talked common topics- about the unusually cold weather in Moscow, about the changes that have taken place in the city since my last visit - and I felt that Trepashkin was internally evaluating me, deciding how much he could tell me.
Then he began to talk about his career in the KGB. Most of the time he was involved in investigating cases of smuggling of antiques. In those days, Michael was absolutely devoted Soviet power and especially the KGB. His loyalty was so great that he even took part in an attempt to keep Boris Yeltsin out of power in order to preserve the existing order.
"I knew that this would be the end Soviet Union", Trepashkin explained. "Moreover, what will happen to the Committee, to all those who have made work in the KGB their life? I saw only the approaching catastrophe."
And the disaster happened. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia plunged into economic and social chaos. One of the most devastating aspects of this chaos was the transfer of KGB agents to work in private sector. Some have started their own businesses or joined the mafia they once fought. Others became "advisers" to the new oligarchs or the old apparatchiks, who were desperately trying to get everything of little value for themselves, while at the same time verbally expressing support for Boris Yeltsin's "democratic reforms".
Trepashkin was familiar with all this firsthand. While continuing to work in the successor to the FSB, Trepashkin found that the line between criminals and state power was becoming increasingly blurred.
"There was a kind of confusion in case after case," he said. “First you find a mafia working with terrorist groups. Then the trail goes to a business group or a ministry. And then what - is it still a criminal case or an already officially sanctioned covert operation? And what exactly does “officially sanctioned” mean - who makes decisions anyway ?"
Eventually, in the summer of 1995, Trepashkin became involved in a case that changed his life forever. This case led to a conflict between him and the top leadership of the FSB, one of whose members, according to Mikhail, even planned his assassination. Like many similar cases investigating corruption in post-Soviet Russia, this was tied to the rebellious Chechen region. By December 1995, militants who had been fighting for the independence of Chechnya for a year had put the Russian army in a bloody and shameful stalemate. However, the success of the Chechens was not due to superior training alone. Already in Soviet times Chechens controlled most of the criminal gangs in the Union, so the criminalization of Russian society was only in the hands of Chechen fighters. The uninterrupted supply of modern Russian weapons was provided by corrupt officers of the Russian army, who had access to such weapons, and the Chechen criminal authorities who spread their network throughout the country paid for them.
How far did this close cooperation go? Mikhail Trepashkin received an answer to this question on the night of December 1, when a group of armed FSB officers broke into the Moscow branch of Soldi Bank.
This raid was the culmination of a complex operation that Trepashkin helped plan. The operation was aimed at neutralizing a notorious group of bank extortionists associated with Salman Raduev, one of the leaders of the Chechen terrorists. The raid was crowned with unprecedented success - two dozen intruders fell into the hands of the FSB, including two FSB officers and an army general.
Inside the bank, FSB officers found something else. To protect themselves from a possible trap, the extortionists placed electronic bugs throughout the building, which were controlled from a minibus parked near the bank. And although this precautionary measure proved ineffective, the question arose about the origin of the listening equipment.
"All such devices have serial numbers," Trepashkin explained to me, sitting in a Moscow cafe. "We traced these numbers and found that they belonged to either the FSB or the Ministry of Defense."
The conclusion to be drawn from this discovery was staggering. Since few people had access to such equipment, it became clear that high-ranking officers of the special services and the army could be involved in the case - in a case not just a criminal one, but one whose goal was to raise funds for the war with Russia. By the standards of any country, this was not just a fact of corruption, but treason.
However, no sooner had Trepashkin begun his investigation than he was removed from the Soldi Bank case by Nikolai Patrushev, head of the FSB's own security department. Moreover, Trepashkin says, no charges were brought against the FSB officers detained during the raid, and almost all the rest of the detainees were soon quietly released. By the end of the investigation, which lasted almost two years, a turning point came in Trepashkin's life. In May 1997, he wrote an open letter to Boris Yeltsin, in which he described his involvement in the case, and also accused most of the FSB leadership of a number of crimes, including cooperation with the mafia and even hiring members of criminal gangs to work in the FSB.
"I thought that if the president found out about what was happening," Trepashkin said, "he would take some measures. I was wrong."
Exactly. As it turned out later, Boris Yeltsin was also corrupt, and Trepashkin's letter warned the leadership of the FSB that a dissenter had crept into their ranks. A month later, Trepashkin resigned from the FSB, unable to withstand, in his words, the pressure that they began to exert on him. However, this did not mean that Trepashkin was going to quietly disappear into the fog. That same summer, he sued the leadership of the FSB, including the director of the Service. He seemed to hope that the honor of the Office could still be saved, that some hitherto unknown reformer could take on the responsibility of reorganizing the agency. Instead, his tenacity seems to have convinced someone in the FSB leadership that Trepashkin's problem must be solved once and for all. One of the people they turned to for a solution was Alexander Litvinenko.
In theory, Litvinenko looked like a suitable candidate for such a task. After returning from a difficult business trip to Chechnya, where he served in counterintelligence, Litvinenko was sent to a new, secret division of the FSB - the Office for the Development and Suppression of the Activities of Criminal Associations (URPO). Alesander did not know at the time that the department was created for the purpose of carrying out covert liquidations. As Alex Goldfarb and Litvinenko's widow, Marina, write in their book "The Death of a Dissident", Alexander found out about this when in October 1997 he was summoned by the head of the department. "There is such a Trepashkin," the boss allegedly told him, "This is your new object. Take his file and get acquainted."
During the familiarization process, Litvinenko found out about Mikhail's involvement in the Soldi Bank case, as well as about his legal battle with the leadership of the FSB. Alexander did not understand what he should do about Trepashkin.
"Well, it's a delicate matter," Litvinenko said his boss told him. "He's calling the director of the FSB to court, giving out interviews. You have to shut him up - this is the director's personal order."
Shortly thereafter, Litvinenko claimed, Boris Berezovsky, a Kremlin-connected oligarch whose death appeared to be wanted by someone in power, was included in the list of potential victims. Litvinenko played for time, coming up with numerous excuses as to why the liquidation orders had not yet been carried out.
According to Trepashkin, there were two attempts on his life at that time - one by an ambush on a deserted section of the Moscow highway, the other by a sniper on the roof, who failed to make an aimed shot. On other occasions, Trepashkin claims, he received warnings from friends still working at the Office.
In November 1998, Litvinenko and four of his colleagues from the URPO spoke at a press conference in Moscow about the existence of a conspiracy to assassinate Trepashkin and Berezovsky and about their role in it. Mikhail himself was also present at the press conference.
On this, without much fanfare, everything died out. Litvinenko, as the leader of a group of dissident officers, was fired from the FSB, but that was the end of the punishment. As for Trepashkin, oddly enough, he won a lawsuit against the FSB, remarried and got a job in the tax service, where he intended to quietly serve up to retirement.
But then, in September 1999, apartment bombings shook the foundations of the Russian state. These explosions again threw Litvinenko and Trepashkin into the shady world of conspiracies, this time united by a common goal. In the midst of the panic that seized Moscow after the explosion on Guryanov, early morning On September 13, 1999, the police received a call about suspicious activity in an apartment building on the southeastern outskirts of the city. The police checked the signal, found nothing, and left the house 6/3 on the Kashirskoye Highway at two in the morning. At 5:03 a.m., the building was destroyed by a powerful explosion that claimed the lives of 121 people. Three days later, the target was a house in Volgodonsk, a southern city where seventeen people were killed in a truck bomb.
We are sitting in a Moscow cafe, Trepashkin frowns, which is not at all like him, and looks into the distance for a long time.
"It was unbelievable," he finally says. "That was my first thought. There is panic in the country, volunteer squads stop people on the street, police checkpoints are everywhere. How is it that the terrorists roam freely and have enough time to plan and carry out such complex attacks? It seemed unbelievable."
Another aspect that raised questions from Trepashkin was the motives for the explosions.
"Usually the motives for the crime are on the surface," he explains. "It's either money, or hatred, or envy. But in this case, what were the Chechens' motives? Very few people thought about it."
From one country, it's easy to understand. Dislike for Chechens is firmly rooted in Russian society especially after their war of independence. During the war, both sides committed indescribable cruelties towards each other. The Chechens did not hesitate to endure fighting into the territory of Russia, their target was often the civilian population. But the war ended in 1997, with the signing of a peace treaty by Yeltsin, which gave Chechnya broad autonomy.
"Then why?" asks Trapeshkin. "Why should the Chechens provoke Russian government if they already got everything they fought for?"
And one more thing made the former investigator think - the composition of the new Russian government.
In early August 1999, President Yeltsin appointed the third prime minister in three months. It was a thin, dry man, practically unknown to the Russian public, named Vladimir Putin.
The main reason for his obscurity was that only a few years prior to his appointment to a high post, Putin was just one of many mid-level officers in the KGB/FSB. In 1996, Putin was given a position in the economic department of the presidential administration, an important post in the Yeltsin hierarchy that gave him leverage over internal Kremlin politics. By all appearances, he used his time in office well - over the next three years, Putin was promoted to deputy head of the presidential administration, then director of the FSB, and then prime minister.
But while Putin was relatively unfamiliar to the Russian public in September 1999, Trepashkin had a good idea of the man. Putin was the director of the FSB when the URPO scandal broke and it was he who fired Litvinenko. "I fired Litvinenko because," he told a reporter, "the FSB officers shouldn't call press conferences ... and they shouldn't make internal scandals public."
Equally disturbing to Trepashkin was the appointment of Putin's successor as director of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev. It was Patrushev, being the head of the FSB's own security department, who removed Trepashkin from the Soldi Bank case, and it was he who was among the most zealous supporters of the version of the "Chechen trace" in the case of apartment bombings.
“That is, we observed such a turn of events,” says Trepashkin. “We were told: “The Chechens are to blame for the explosions, so we need to deal with them.”
But then something very strange happened. It happened in sleepy provincial Ryazan, 200 kilometers southeast of Moscow.
In an atmosphere of super vigilance that gripped the population of the country, several residents of the house 14/16 on Novoselov Street in Ryazan noticed suspicious white Zhiguli parked next to their house on the evening of September 22nd. Their suspicions turned to panic when they noticed how the passengers of the car carried several large bags into the basement of the building and then drove away. The residents called the police.
Three 50-kilogram bags were found in the basement, connected with a timer to a detonator. The building was evacuated, and an explosives expert from the local FSB was invited to the basement, who determined that the bags contained hexogen, an explosive that would have been enough to completely destroy this building. At the same time, all roads from Ryazan were blocked by checkpoints, and a real hunt was launched for the white Zhiguli and their passengers.
The next morning, news of the Ryazan incident spread throughout the country. Prime Minister Putin praised the people of Ryazan for their vigilance, while the Interior Minister praised successes in law enforcement, "such as preventing an explosion in a residential building in Ryazan."
This could have ended if the two suspects in planning the attack had not been detained that same night. To the astonishment of the police, both detainees produced FSB identification cards. Soon, a call was received from the Moscow headquarters of the FSB demanding the release of the detainees.
The next morning, the director of the FSB went on television with a completely new version events in Ryazan. According to him, the incident at 14/16 Novoselov Street was not a thwarted terrorist attack, but an FSB exercise aimed at testing public vigilance; the sacks in the cellar did not contain hexogen, but ordinary sugar.
This statement contains a lot of inconsistencies. How to correlate the FSB version of the bags of sugar with the conclusion of the local FSB expert that the bags contained hexogen? If these were really exercises, why did the local FSB department not know anything about this and why did Patrushev himself remain silent for a day and a half that had passed since the incident was reported? Why did the explosions of residential buildings stop after the incident in Ryazan? If the attacks were the work of Chechen fighters, why didn't they continue their dirty work with even greater zeal after the failed case in Ryazan for the FSB in terms of PR? But the time for all these questions was already lost. While Prime Minister Putin was delivering his September 23 speech extolling the vigilance of Ryazan residents, warplanes had already begun massive bombing raids on Grozny, Chechnya's capital. Over the next few days, Russian troops that had previously been concentrating on the border entered the breakaway republic, starting the second Chechen war.
After that, events developed rapidly. In his 1999 New Year's address, Boris Yeltsin stunned the Russian people with the announcement of his immediate resignation. The move made Putin acting president until the next election. Instead of the planned summer, the election date was set just ten weeks after Yeltsin's resignation, leaving little time for other candidates to prepare.
In a public opinion poll conducted in August 1999, less than two percent of those polled were in favor of electing Putin as president. However, in March 2000, Putin, on a wave of popularity caused by the policy of total war in Chechnya, was elected by 53 percent of those who voted. The era of Putin has begun, irrevocably changing Russia.
Trepashkin appointed our next meeting in his apartment. I was surprised - I was told that, for security reasons, Mikhail rarely invited guests to his home, although I understood that he was aware that his enemies knew where he lived.
His apartment, located on the first floor of a high-rise building in the south of Moscow, made a good impression, although it was furnished in a Spartan way. Trepashkin showed me his apartment and I noted that the only place where there was some disorder was a small room full of papers - a built-in closet converted into an office. One of his daughters was at home during my visit, bringing us tea as we sat in the living room.
Smiling embarrassedly, Trepashkin said that there was another reason why he rarely invited guests related to work - his wife. "She wants me to stop doing politics, but since she's not at home right now...". His smile faded. “This is because of the searches, of course. Once they broke into the apartment,” he waves his hand towards the front door, “with weapons, shouting orders; the children were very scared. It had a strong effect on my wife then, she is always afraid that it will happen again."
The first of these searches took place in January 2002. One late evening, a group of FSB agents broke into the apartment and turned everything upside down. Trepashkin claims that they did not find anything, but were able to plant enough evidence - secret documents and live ammunition - that the prosecutor's office could initiate a criminal case against him on three counts.
“It was a signal that they took me on a pencil,” says Trepashkin, “that if I don’t change my mind, they will take me seriously.”
Trepashkin guessed what caused such attention from the FSB - a few days before the search, he began to receive calls from the man whom the Putin regime considered one of the main traitors - Alexander Litvinenko. Lieutenant Colonel Litvinenko quickly fell into disgrace. After a press conference in 1998 in which he accused the URPO of planning the murders, he spent nine months in prison on charges of "abuse of authority", after which he was forced to leave the country while the prosecutor's office prepared new charges against him. Litvinenko and his family, backed by exiled oligarch Berezovsky, settled in England, where Alexander and Boris began a campaign to expose what they called the crimes of the Putin regime. The main focus of the campaign was to investigate the facts about a series of explosions in residential buildings.
That's why Litvinenko called him, Trepashkin explained. Litvinenko, for obvious reasons, could not come to his homeland, and they needed someone who could conduct an investigation in Russia.
It was easy only in words, because by 2002 Russia had changed a lot. During Putin's two years in power, independent media have virtually ceased to exist, and the political opposition has been marginalized to the point of playing no role.
One of the indicators of these changes was the revision of all aspects of the FSB's weakest case, the "exercises" case in Ryazan. By 2002, the head of the Ryazan FSB, who led the hunt for "terrorists," officially supported the version of the exercises. The local explosives specialist, who had claimed in front of the TV cameras that there were explosives in the Ryazan bags, suddenly fell silent and disappeared from view. Even some residents of the house 14/16 on Novoselov Street, who starred in the documentary 6 months after the events and desperately protested against the official version, now refuse to talk to anyone, limiting themselves to statements that they may have been wrong.
"I told Litvinenko that I could only help in the investigation if I was officially involved in the case," Trepashkin explained to me, sitting in his living room.
An official role for Trepashkin was arranged during a meeting hosted by Berezovsky in his London office in early March 2002. One of those present at the meeting, State Duma member Sergei Yushenkov, agreed to organize a special commission to investigate the circumstances of the explosions, Trepashkin was invited to this commission as one of the investigators. The meeting was attended by Tatyana Morozova, a 35-year-old Russian immigrant living in Milwaukee. Tatyana's mother was among those killed in the bombing on Guryanov Street, which, according to Russian law, gave her the right to access official records of the investigation. Since Trepashkin had received a lawyer's license shortly before, Morozova had to appoint him as her attorney and send a request to the court asking for access to the materials of the explosion case.
“I agreed to both proposals,” Trepashkin told me, “but the question remained where to start. Many reports could not be trusted, many people changed the original testimony, so I decided to turn to physical evidence.”
Easy to say, hard to do. The reaction of the authorities to the explosions was distinguished by the excessive haste with which the site of the attack was cleared. Americans dug into the ruins of the World shopping center within six months of his fall, treating the site as a crime scene. Russian authorities cleared the rubble at the site of the explosion on Guryanov Street a few days later, and all the debris was sent to the city dump. Whatever evidence remained - and it was not clear whether they existed in nature - they were all supposedly in the warehouses of the FSB.
Quite recently, a site of photo and film documents "GULAG - with a camera in the camps" has appeared. This is the first online resource that contains photographic materials from the archives of the repressive bodies of Soviet power. The basis of the site will be archival materials of the NKVD and KGB: 12 tons of folders in two containers. So over time it may become the largest informative resource-archive of camp photographs and documents in the world.
http://www.gulag.ipvnews.org/
The author of the project is former member board of the Soviet Cultural Foundation, and now the famous American photographer Sergei Melnikoff. He himself served a long term in the political camps of the USSR - for free-thinking, dissident sentiments and calls for a trial of the CPSU.
The love of climbing behind fences with a sign "Forbidden Zone" led to the fact that the Soviet dissident, along with "native" special agencies, was also wanted by the North Korean regime for unauthorized filming inside the concentration camps of this country.
Immediately with the beginning of Gorbachev's glasnost, Melnikoff organized a photo-documentary exhibition, unprecedented even in today's times, "Accusing the USSR of experiments on people." Japan, South Korea The United States immediately recognized the uniqueness of the material presented and arranged a world tour for the exhibition. The Soviet press spoke of the exhibition through clenched teeth, mostly slinging mud at its author.
A year later, Sergei and his family were forced to flee from the USSR through Mongolia to China, illegally, at night crossing state border with a one year old daughter in her arms.
In China, they were hidden for a long time by the American CBS News. The same powerful television corporation achieved for the fugitives, directly from the UN, the status of political refugees (the third case in the entire history of Soviet dissidence). The family, which the KGB was already looking for, was transported by the US government and the UN to Thailand, and then was able to immigrate to the US, where Sergei founded his own non-profit television company, IPV News USA. In the last decade and a half, he continues to go on endless expeditions to all six continents of the Earth. Even signed up for a flight into space ...
And so, "GULAG - with a camera through the camps" appeared on the network. The new resource is a collection of unique photographs made from negatives that fell into the hands of Sergei as a result of a dozen trips to the Stalinist camps preserved in the wilderness, and as a result of a suddenly awakened commercial interest among people who previously served faithfully and faithfully "the country of October". These people with "warm hearts, cold heads and clean hands" helped Sergei become the owners of priceless photographic documents. Well, who else besides them could have evidence of crimes against their own people?! ..
Specialists from numerous camps, strewn with a map of Russia, like black dots of an old lampshade covered with flies, not only began to sell everything they could, but, smelling the smell of money, like many of their Lubyanka "colleagues", began to run across to where the smell was coming from. Many of them settled in the newly created tax inspectorates. Then, as we know, their appetites increased immeasurably.
What is shown in the photographs amazes even seasoned connoisseurs of the "charms" of the Soviet regime. And they were filmed by one of those who did all this. Like a criminal returning to the scene of his crime, they looked again and again at the evidence of their atrocities.
Because of this unnatural hobby for normal people, today we have the opportunity to look into this terrible world. Their world. A world in which there are no such concepts as philanthropy, spirituality, compassion, decency, friendliness, intelligence, selflessness, generosity of the soul.
The photographs are accompanied by such terrible force of texts that they leave no stone unturned from the myth that today's successors of the "Iron Felix" case - the real moral monster and the real executioner of Russia - Dzerzhinsky, continue to hammer into the heads of Russians. The myth of supposedly wise, just and disinterested "knights without fear or reproach". Moreover, the current, irremovable despite continuous failures, the chief Chekist agreed to the point that his subordinates are "... modern-minded, educated people ..., modern" non-gentry "...
Well, "nobles"!.. "Nobles" who once a year - in December - celebrate the founding of their office not since the beginning of the 90s, but since 1918! That is, they consider themselves the successors of the cause of the people's executioners Dzerzhinsky, Peters, Menzhinsky, Yegoda, Yezhov, Beria ...
In addition to the photo galleries "Butugychag" and "Prickly Truth", the site contains articles that are deadly in their power, for example - "Death Valley", "Marble Gorge", "Georgy Zhzhenov's stage", " The highest measure Punishment", "Letter from a Scoundrel", "Children's Gulag", "Kill Stalin" and "Dedicated to Bitches from the KGB". us.
That's what the mentioned monsters in human form and their henchmen were doing and the story is being told on the pages of Sergey Melnikoff's project. The narrative becomes even more terrible from the fact that it is accompanied by "visual aids" - evidence of the deepest fall of the knights of fear and reproach. Reproaches, which they have not yet really heard from a society tired of reforms. But this does not mean that they will never hear them. Sergey Melnikoff's project brings these days closer.
We look forward to new articles, as well as photo galleries of this enthusiastic, wonderful person and a true citizen of our Fatherland and only part-time Citizen of the World - Sergey Melnikoff!
In conclusion, I would like to quote the words of Sergei himself: "... Human memory does not contain such a force of grief, such a scale of tragedy that the people got Russian Empire from the Bolsheviks. That is why the executioners easily avoid retribution, and the next generation is already doomed to repeats. We are obliged to bring to justice the criminals, old and new, so that every next ruler knows what threatens him with the implanted despotism ... "
To the Women's Camp (GULAG photo)
“Have you thought about, for example, how the women in the camp took care of their hair or coped with their periods? For many, menstruation simply stopped, the body switched from reproduction mode to survival mode. Many people talk about this independently of each other, including Efrosinya Kersnovskaya.
Hair for a woman is not just hair, it is an element of self-perception (especially good, beautiful hair). A woman with unkempt hair ceases to feel like a woman. But metal combs were banned in the camp, bone combs quickly broke, and how to comb hair? With long hair in the camp there were torments (neither washed nor combed). Some, like the already mentioned Rau, simply cut their hair "to zero", all the rest had their hair cut quite short, and were combed with homemade combs made from split thin boards. These are very important details, they give much more than documents for understanding that time .... "
Alexey Babiy, " Life"
“There were three mothers. We were given a small room in the barracks. Bedbugs here fell from the ceiling and walls like sand. All night long we robbed them from the children. food for the children. Nevertheless, Volovich writes, for a whole year I stood by the child’s bed at night, picked out bedbugs and prayed. I prayed that God would prolong my torment for at least a hundred years, but not separate me from my daughter. released from prison with her. So that I could, crawling at the feet of people and begging, raise and educate her. But God did not answer my prayers. As soon as the child began to walk, as soon as I heard from him the first, caressing the ear, such wonderful words - “mother”, “mother”, like us in the winter cold, dressed in rags, they put us in a wagon and took us to the “mom” camp, where my angel-like plump woman with golden curls.
Khava Volovich " mommy camp"
