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Screening Horror

A new film seeks the truth behind the 1999 bombings.

By Greg Walters
Published: September 3, 2004

Alyona Morozova didn't hear the bomb blast that took her mother's life. In the center of an explosion, a physicist explained to her later, there is silence: Sound waves spread out beyond the blast itself. The explosion was so loud her neighbors' ears bled. But Alyona remembers only silence, then pitch-black darkness.

She crawled through the dark to the windowsill, then waited. Some time later -- she doesn't know how long -- a blinding fire-truck searchlight landed on her. It was some time after midnight on Sept. 9, 1999.

Even as she searched for two hours through the rubble for her mother, Alyona realized she had to call her sister in the United States. But she hadn't memorized the phone number. She asked a CNN crew to help her. Hours later, a cameraman located her sister Tatyana in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At first, Tatyana thought the call was a joke.

Tatyana flew to Moscow while Alyona stayed with friends. They still blamed the explosion on a gas leak. Some began accusing Chechen separatists, but the sisters didn't believe it. "It just didn't sound human," Tatyana said.

But then, one by one, buildings exploded across Russia. Four days later, an apartment building on Kashirskoye Shosse was bombed. On Sept. 16, a truck bomb tore the facade off an apartment building in Volgodonsk, Rostov region. About 300 people were killed in total. Terrorism seemed the only possible answer.

Alyona joined Tatyana in the United States, then enrolled in the University of Colorado. It was not until almost a year later that the Morozova sisters began to doubt this second version of events, too. But they had little to go on.

When director Andrei Nekrasov told Alyona and Tatyana that he was planning a documentary questioning the circumstances of the bombings, and that he wanted them to return to Russia with a film crew, only Tatyana accepted. Alyona, still shaken, agreed to be interviewed. But she did not want to leave the United States.

On Wednesday, almost exactly five years after the first apartment bombing shook Russia, "Disbelief" (Nedoveriye), the story of Tatyana's trip to Russia in search of the truth, and a look back at the origins of terror in Vladimir Putin's Russia, will play in a small theater in north Moscow followed by a midnight service for those who died in the bombings. The film will be released on video and DVD in October.

In scenes from the documentary, Tatyana meets others whose lives were torn apart by the blasts -- both bombing victims and those who suffered in other ways. She visits Timur Dakhkilgov, one of the Chechens who were arrested after the explosion, charged with terrorism and quietly released three months later. She attempts to secure the release of official documents. She meets the former Chechen warlord, Akhmed Zakayev. She hires a former lieutenant colonel in the Federal Security Service, or FSB, Mikhail Trepashkin as a lawyer. Trepashkin was later convicted on charges of divulging state secrets, in what human rights organizations called an attempt to squash his investigations.

Nekrasov's movie has played only once in Russia, last February at Moscow's Central House of Writers. But the film is getting considerable international exposure, buoyed in part by the success of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." The movie will play in eight countries this week. When it was shown on television in Switzerland last month, it got the kind of ratings normally reserved for a blockbuster thriller. A Swiss journalist later asked Nekrasov how it felt to be the "Russian Michael Moore."

Nekrasov replied that the comparison was only "partly flattering," since he wants to be known in his own right. But he agreed that there are certain parallels between the two films. Both focus on an ordinary woman caught up in an international crisis (Moore's documentary centers on the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq). Both are careful not to make unproven accusations -- at least not explicitly. Both let viewers decide for themselves.

Ivan Sekretarev / AP Rescue workers at the site of the first blast were hampered by thick smoke from fires inside the rubble, which continued to burn for 14 hours.

Another documentary about the 1999 bombings, financed by self-exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, is less cautious. Comparing titles is telling. "Disbelief" has, as Nekrasov says he intended, layers of meaning. Tatyana doubts the official version, but the alternative -- that the bombings were part of a plot to secure Putin's election by creating support for a second invasion of Chechnya -- is also beyond belief. The Berezovsky-backed film is called "The Assassination of Russia," and is based on a book called "The FSB Blow Up Russia."

Today, Tatyana says she was not emotionally prepared for meeting fellow sufferers. Timur tells her he was beaten, that his arms were handcuffed under his chair for so long he could not feel his limbs. "When we were in the same room we burst into tears," she said by telephone from Milwaukee, where she works in children's day care. "He was in prison for three months, and his pregnant wife was walking around the jail trying to give him socks and some food. I tried to be strong and just think about the film. But I kept forgetting about the film. We're real people."

Tatyana has not seen the entire movie. She tried to watch it a few days ago, she said, but she could not finish it. "To tell the truth," she said, "I threw up." She had intended to watch it at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, where the film had its U.S. debut earlier this year. Alyona saw it there, her sister said, although she had to walk out more than once. At the time Tatyana was nine months pregnant. She gave birth hours before the film's opening credits rolled.

Nekrasov says he has not met any serious resistance to showing the film in Russia. But when Trepashkin was arrested, Nekrasov made another documentary compiled from interviews with Trepashkin. After a Moscow screening, Nekrasov said he noticed a strange car following him all the way across town. "I just felt like I was dreaming," he said. "I felt like getting out of my car and screaming, 'What do you want from me?'"

Later, the master copy of the Trepashkin film was stolen out of the director's briefcase. Nekrasov's documents were stolen from his jacket pocket on the day he was to fly out of Moscow. "It was a nightmare," he says. "My mouth went dry."

But today he doesn't think he has anything to fear in Russia, and planned to attend the Wednesday showing. The Trepashkin tapes, he said, were probably more sensitive than "Disbelief." He doubts the authorities see him, or his film, as a threat requiring decisive action. "I think that if it was going to happen, it would have happened earlier."

Vladimir Filonov / MT Over one thousand residents of two apartment blocks were forced to leave their homes after the first explosion.

Perhaps no one would have suspected the FSB of blowing up apartment buildings in order to secure Putin's electoral victory if not for a curious event in Ryazan. As Russians panicked and organized vigilante squads to watch buildings, three sacks stuffed with white powder and connected to what appeared to be a detonator were discovered in a Ryazan basement on Sept. 22.

The local police declared that preliminary tests showed the powder was hexogen, and evacuated the building. A terrorist attack had been averted, they said. But when circumstantial evidence indicated that the suspects in the case were security agents, the head of the FSB Nikolai Patrushev shocked the country by announcing that his agents had indeed planted the sacks -- but that they weren't filled with hexogen. The powder was sugar. Harmless sugar being used in an exercise.

The Ryazan event didn't sway public opinion. The bombings created tremendous support for the second invasion of Chechnya -- the main platform in Putin's electoral campaign.

Nekrasov's film makes ample use of television footage from the Ryazan incident to cast officials in a sinister light. But he admits there is no proof of a conspiracy. "We don't even have hard evidence on the Ryazan case, because everything was removed," he said. "But we certainly have hard evidence of the preventing process, the covering-up process."

When the Berezovsky-financed film was released, the oligarch said the movie would prove that the FSB was behind the bombings. Viewers widely disagreed. But Nekrasov says that absolute proof is not necessary. The lack of a thorough investigation into the available evidence is shocking enough, he argues. "Any responsible politician has to respond to this circumstantial evidence," he said. "It's every artist or journalist's right to question this and put it into perspective."

"Disbelief" plays Wed. at 7 p.m. at Ekran, located at 19A Novocherkassky Bulvar. Metro Marino. Tel. 795-3795.

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