The anniversary this month of the apartment-block bombings that killed nearly 300 people in 1999 has gone by quietly. A memorial service to mark the bomb on Kashirskoye Shosse in Moscow on September 13 won a few column inches and a couple of moments of a TV anchors’ time in the state-run media. But it was low key. The bombings that were some of the worst terrorist atrocities ever committed do not command the kind of lasting grief one might expect.

There are reasons for that. In the years since, the bombings have been overshadowed by other atrocities. First the siege of the Dubrovka theatre in 2002, in which 129 hostages were killed, and then the Beslan school siege in 2004, where over 300 hostages – 186 of them children – were killed. Beslan, especially, looms large in the national memory, and the fifth anniversary of that tragedy on the first of this month was marked with long, introspective new reports, memorial ceremonies, and self-vindicating speeches. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin opened a cabinet meeting with a minute’s silence for the victims.

And at the fringes – in the ‘liberal’ media – commentators recalled the intelligence failings that led to the attack, the survivors’ anger that no official has been held to account for incompetence, and the still unanswered questions and suspicious holes in the official account of events. Novaya Gazeta, a  particularly bold liberal paper, devoted two pages to a troubling story about the role a Russian double agent may have played in the Beslan tragedy.

The anniversary of the 1999 bombings might have gained even less attention if it were not for a furor over the censorship of a similar article outlining the darker side of that story. But the publication concerned was not bastion of Russian opposition media like Novaya Gazeta or the liberal Echo of Moscow radio station, but the American edition of GQ magazine. And the censoring body was not the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) that the article implicates, but the Conde Nast publishing house.

How not to bury a story

The article, by the American war reporter Scott Anderson, carries a title and expounds a theory that is not designed to endear its author to the Russian authorities. Briefly, “Vladimir Putin’s Dark Rise to Power,” details how the Russian special services may have organized the 1999 attacks to install one of their own – then and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin – as president. The article centers around a series of interviews with the former KGB and FSB officer Mikhail Trepashkin, who has carried out independent investigations of the bombings and continues to question the official account.

The idea is not new, even in Russia. But it is not the kind of story (or the kind of title) that a prudent investor would publish in Russia without thinking about it very carefully first. Conde Nast’s decision that the story “should not be distributed in Russia” was, in Anderson’s own words, “not surprising.” It was the effort to to make sure that it was not read by anyone outside the United States, let alone in Russia, that Anderson – and the world - found bizarre.

According to an NPR report last Friday, the publishing house went as far as to forbid the article’s publication or promotion in any Conde Nast magazines in other countries or online. Copies of the U.S. edition were not to be taken to Russia, shown to Russian officials or journalists or advertisers.

The move could not have gone more wrong. The same day NPR revealed the self-censorship, Gawker posted a scanned copy of the print edition. Over the weekend it was translated into Russian by volunteers, and by Monday it was available in translation all over the Russian internet. By Tuesday both Western and Russian media had picked up the story, and Conde Nast was steadfastly refusing to comment.

Who benefits?

It is a characteristically Russian approach to crime detection to ask “who benefits?”, and in the case of the 1999 apartment bombings, the obvious beneficiary was Putin. At the time he was a near-unknown plucked from obscurity to serve as prime minister in the last days of an increasingly shaky Yeltsin administration, a poisoned chalice if ever there was one (he was Yeltsin’s fifth prime minister in 18 months). But the bombs provided the demand for a “strongman” leader and a casus belli for the second Chechen War. Most analysts put Putin’s overwhelming victory at the presidential elections the following year to the successful prosecution of that war. Without the bombs, the reasoning goes, Putin would never have become president.

But who benefits is a matter of perspective. The authorities’ standard response to accusations of this kind is that that any crime that implicates the Russian government could only be of benefit to the regime’s critics, and therefore must have been planned by Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch and  Kremlin critic now exiled in London. That implication has been used to suggest that he killed  anyone from Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya to former FSB man Alexander Litvinenko, one of his close associates, just because it would embarrass the Kremlin. The same reasoning, incidentally, suggests that Conde Nast’s apparently bungled attempt at censorship was actually a cunning publicity stunt.

Cowardice or editorial integrity?

Nikolai Uskov is an interesting, if not downright mercurial character. A former history lecturer, he turned in his academic career for a life in glossy magazines back in the late 1990s, and rose to become the chief editor of Russian GQ in 2003. He is an eloquent defender of the concept of glamor and the elitism it implies, but he is also a regular guest on Echo of Moscow, a radio station with a reputation for serious debate. And under under his editorship GQ has not completely shied away from sensitive topics – this month’s edition features an interview with Mikhail Khordokovsky, the disgraced former oligarch and Putin nemesis, on life in prison. Not in the same league as accusing Putin of mass murder, perhaps, but not the behavior of a regime sycophant either.

Uskov is also the only Conde Nast employee to comment on the furor around Anderson’s article. In an interview with Echo on September 6 – Sunday, two days after the NPR article appeared – he denied that he had that he had been forced into censorship from the American office. “I haven’t received any orders from my superiors forbidding the publication of Scott Anderson’s article,” he said. “I can still publish it if I want to. But this article contains nothing that the Russian mass media has not already been writing about for several years in a row.”

When the Faster Times called Russian GQ the next day a spokeswoman said that Conde Nast had issued an order against commenting on the topic, but Uskov had already repeated his comments on Echo to the Kommersant business daily: the American office has no control over his editorial policy, and the article didn’t say anything new anyway. Why, GQ even published an interview with Litvinenko in 2005, in which “he said the same thing.”

“Forgive me for saying so,” said Anderson when I put it to him that most of the information was already on the public domain, “but this seems to be the party line that is being adopted by those defending the Russia government or who would like to dismiss the article as ‘nothing new.’” From Anderson’s point of view, at least one thing is very new indeed - a major international news magazine has taken an in-depth look at one of the most controversial topics in recent Russian history.

From one conspiracy to another

Juxtaposing the 1999 apartment bombings with the September 11 attacks may seem a little too neat, but it is illuminating. Faced with why one is willing to believe that Putin or his henchmen may have been behind the Russian apartment bombings, when the suggestion that the Bush administration organized 9/11 is so repellent, one could point to any number of things. One might argue that Putin and the FSB are clearly more mendacious than Bush; one might argue that the evidence in the one case is much stronger than in the other. But the real comparison is between the level of public debate that has occurred around either crime.

“There has been a vast array of newspaper and magazine articles, as well as entire books, that have examined the 9/11 bombing from every possible angle, including the notion that the Bush Administration may have known of it beforehand and/or actually carried it out,” said Anderson. “Most people who have seriously examined the topic have dismissed these accusations as absurd, but the larger point to our discussion is where is the corresponding body of investigative articles and books looking at the ‘99 bombings in Russia?  It doesn’t exist.”

Well, according to some people it does. “I think after ten years, when so many journalists and writers and political technologists have looked at this, we have to admit there is no proof the FSB was involved in this crime,” said Andrey Soldatov, an independent security analyst.

Soldatov is not the kind of character you would describe as a defender of the government. He used to work for Novaya Gazeta, and was at one point himself “a captive” of the idea that the FSB was behind the bombings. But for all the suspicious activity around the bombings, there is simply too much evidence pointing the other way. Berezovsky’s involvement in pushing the theory – he backed both Litvinenko, who co-authored a book about it, and Trepashkin’s efforts – is one good reason to take it with a pinch of salt. The oligarch has a very personal vendetta against Putin, and is even credited with masterminding the transition of power from Yeltsin to Putin. That suggests he would have been involved in the bombings if they were part of that plan. And there were other pretexts for the invasion of Chechnya – in August Chechen militants had invaded neighboring Dagestan. So who’s to say Putin benefited?

Soldatov subscribes to the official explanation – that the bombings were organized by a hitherto virtually unknown Islamist terrorist group from the Caucasus republic of Karachay Cherkessia. But he does not dismiss the idea of FSB involvement as absurd. “We know the guys who carried out the operation, we know the guy in Cherkessia who was behind it, but we don’t know the next step,” he said. “And that is the point where the official investigation failed; we cannot understand who, in the end, was behind this operation. Were they acting alone, did [Chechen rebel leader Shamil] Basayev ask them to do it, or were they organized by somebody else – even the Kremlin? I cannot exclude this version.”

That is why the conspiracy theories around the 1999 bombings attract skepticism rather than derision. There has been some kind of independent investigation, but it has been so completely stymied by official evasions and suppression, that it is impossible to be able to rule out one theory or the other. Does that evasiveness signal guilt, as Trepashkin suggests? Or were the FSB just “so incompetent they couldn’t even present the real facts,” as Soldatov argues? It is impossible to tell, and the result is that if most people who have seriously examined the topic of 9/11 have dismissed the “inside job” theory as absurd, those who have examined the 1999 apartment bombings have given up in frustration.  Except for Trepashkin, which depending on your point of view either makes him heroic, or deluded.

An opinion poll conducted over the same weekend that Russian bloggers were busily translating Gawker’s copy of Anderson’s article showed that some 22 percent of Russians think the special services were either certainly or possibly involved in the attacks. But that level of suspicions comes with a heavy dose of resignation.

“Do I care? Of course I care,” reflected one Muscovite. “But we’re never going to know. We didn’t have a public dialogue about Beslan, or Dubrovka, or the accident at the Sayano Sushenskaya hydro-electric plant the other week. So why expect to have one about this?”

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