Women's camp (gulag photo). Gulag for the little ones “Be careful with Lyusya, her father is an enemy of the people”

An infant in a pre-trial detention center, locked in a cell with its mother, or sent along a stage to a colony was a common practice in the 1920s and early 1930s. “When women are admitted to correctional labor institutions, at their request, their infant children are also admitted,” a quote from the Correctional Labor Code of 1924, Article 109. “The shurka is neutralized.<...>For this purpose, he is allowed out for a walk only for one hour a day, and no longer in the large prison yard, where a dozen trees grow and where the sun shines, but in a narrow, dark courtyard intended for singles.<...>Apparently, in order to physically weaken the enemy, assistant commandant Ermilov refused to accept Shurka even the milk brought from outside. For others, he accepted transmissions. But these were speculators and bandits, people much less dangerous than SR Shura,” wrote arrested Evgenia Ratner, whose three-year-old son Shura was in Butyrka prison, in an angry and ironic letter to People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Felix Dzerzhinsky.

They gave birth right there: in prisons, during prison, in zones. From a letter to the Chairman of the USSR Central Executive Committee, Mikhail Kalinin, about the expulsion of families of special settlers from Ukraine and Kursk: “They sent them into terrible frosts - infants and pregnant women who rode in calf cars on top of each other, and then the women gave birth to their children (isn’t this a mockery ); then they were thrown out of the carriages like dogs, and then placed in churches and dirty, cold barns, where there was no room to move.”

As of April 1941, there were 2,500 women with young children in NKVD prisons, and 9,400 children under four years old were in camps and colonies. In the same camps, colonies and prisons there were 8,500 pregnant women, about 3,000 of them in the ninth month of pregnancy.

A woman could also become pregnant while in prison: by being raped by another prisoner, a free zone worker, or a guard, or, in some cases, of her own free will. “I just wanted to the point of madness, to the point of beating my head against the wall, to the point of dying for love, tenderness, affection. And I wanted a child - a creature dear and dear, for whom I would not be sorry to give my life,” recalled former Gulag prisoner Khava Volovich, sentenced to 15 years at the age of 21. And here are the memories of another prisoner, born in the Gulag: “My mother, Anna Ivanovna Zavyalova, at the age of 16–17 was sent with a convoy of prisoners from the field to Kolyma for collecting several ears of corn in her pocket... Having been raped, my mother gave birth on February 20, 1950 me, there were no amnesties for the birth of a child in those camps.” There were also those who gave birth, hoping for an amnesty or a relaxation of the regime.

But women were given exemption from work in the camp only immediately before giving birth. After the birth of a child, the prisoner was given several meters of footcloth, and for the period of feeding the baby - 400 grams of bread and black cabbage or bran soup three times a day, sometimes even with fish heads. In the early 40s, nurseries or orphanages began to be created in the zones: “I ask for your order to allocate 1.5 million rubles for the organization of children’s institutions for 5,000 places in camps and colonies and for their maintenance in 1941 13.5 million rubles, and in total 15 million rubles,” writes the head of the Gulag of the NKVD of the USSR, Viktor Nasedkin, in April 1941.

The children were in the nursery while the mothers worked. The “mothers” were taken under escort to be fed; the babies spent most of the time under the supervision of nannies - women convicted of domestic crimes, who, as a rule, had children of their own. From the memoirs of prisoner G.M. Ivanova: “At seven o’clock in the morning the nannies woke up the kids. They were pushed and kicked out of their unheated beds (to keep the children “clean”, they did not cover them with blankets, but threw them over the cribs). Pushing the children in the back with their fists and showering them with harsh abuse, they changed their undershirts and washed them with ice water. And the kids didn’t even dare cry. They just groaned like old men and hooted. This terrible hooting sound came from children’s cribs all day long.”

“From the kitchen the nanny brought porridge blazing with heat. Having laid it out in bowls, she snatched the first child she came across from the crib, bent his arms back, tied them to his body with a towel and began stuffing him with hot porridge, spoon by spoon, like a turkey, leaving him no time to swallow,” recalls Khava Volovich. Her daughter Eleanor, born in the camp, spent the first months of her life with her mother, and then ended up in an orphanage: “During visits, I found bruises on her body. I will never forget how, clinging to my neck, she pointed to the door with her emaciated little hand and moaned: “Mommy, go home!” She did not forget the bedbugs in which she saw the light and was with her mother all the time.” On March 3, 1944, at one year and three months, the daughter of prisoner Volovich died.

The mortality rate of children in the Gulag was high. According to archival data collected by the Norilsk Memorial Society, in 1951 there were 534 children in infant homes on the territory of Norilsk, of which 59 children died. In 1952, 328 children were supposed to be born, and the total number of babies would have been 803. However, documents from 1952 indicate the number of 650 - that is, 147 children died.

The surviving children developed poorly both physically and mentally. The writer Evgenia Ginzburg, who worked for some time in an orphanage, recalls in her autobiographical novel “Steep Route” that only a few four-year-old children could speak: “Inarticulate screams, facial expressions, and fights predominated. “Where can they tell them? Who taught them? Who did they hear? - Anya explained to me with a dispassionate intonation. - In the infant group, they just lie on their beds all the time. Nobody takes them in their arms, even if they burst from screaming. It is forbidden to pick it up. Just change wet diapers. If there are enough of them, of course.”

Visits between nursing mothers and their children were short - from 15 minutes to half an hour every four hours. “One inspector from the prosecutor’s office mentions a woman who, due to her work duties, was several minutes late for feeding and was not allowed to see the child. One former worker of the camp sanitary service said in an interview that half an hour or 40 minutes were allotted for breastfeeding a child, and if he did not finish eating, then the nanny fed him from a bottle,” writes Anne Applebaum in the book “GULAG. The Web of Great Terror." When the child grew out of infancy, visits became even more rare, and soon the children were sent from the camp to an orphanage.

In 1934, the period of stay of a child with his mother was 4 years, later - 2 years. In 1936-1937, the stay of children in the camps was recognized as a factor reducing the discipline and productivity of prisoners, and this period was reduced to 12 months by secret instructions of the NKVD of the USSR. “Forcibly sending camp children is planned and carried out like real military operations - so that the enemy is taken by surprise. Most often this happens late at night. But it is rarely possible to avoid heartbreaking scenes when frantic mothers rush at the guards and the barbed wire fence. The zone has been shaking with screams for a long time,” French political scientist Jacques Rossi, a former prisoner and author of “The Gulag Handbook,” describes the transfer to orphanages.

A note was made in the mother’s personal file about sending the child to the orphanage, but the destination address was not indicated there. In the report of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR Lavrentiy Beria to the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR Vyacheslav Molotov dated March 21, 1939, it was reported that children seized from convicted mothers began to be assigned new names and surnames.

"Be careful with Lyusya, her father is an enemy of the people"

If the child’s parents were arrested when he was no longer an infant, his own stage awaited him: wandering around relatives (if they remained), a children’s reception center, an orphanage. In 1936-1938, the practice became common when, even if there were relatives ready to become guardians, the child of “enemies of the people” - convicted under political charges - was sent to an orphanage. From the memoirs of G.M. Rykova: “After my parents’ arrest, my sister, grandmother and I continued to live in our own apartment<...>Only we no longer occupied the entire apartment, but only one room, since one room (father’s office) was sealed, and an NKVD major and his family moved into the second. On February 5, 1938, a lady came to us with a request to go with her to the head of the children's department of the NKVD, supposedly he was interested in how our grandmother treated us and how my sister and I generally lived. Grandmother told her that it was time for us to go to school (we studied in the second shift), to which this person replied that she would give us a ride in her car to the second lesson, so that we would take only textbooks and notebooks with us. She brought us to the Danilovsky children's home for juvenile delinquents. At the reception center we were photographed from the front and in profile, with some numbers attached to our chests, and our fingerprints were taken. We never returned home."

“The day after my father was arrested, I went to school. In front of the whole class, the teacher announced: “Children, be careful with Lyusya Petrova, her father is an enemy of the people.” I took my bag, left school, came home and told my mother that I wouldn’t go to school anymore,” recalls Lyudmila Petrova from the city of Narva. After the mother was also arrested, the 12-year-old girl, along with her 8-year-old brother, ended up in a children's reception center. There they had their heads shaved, fingerprinted and separated, sent separately to orphanages.

The daughter of army commander Ieronim Uborevich Vladimir, who was repressed in the “Tukhachevsky case,” and who was 13 years old at the time of her parents’ arrest, recalls that in foster homes, children of “enemies of the people” were isolated from the outside world and from other children. “They didn’t let other children near us, they didn’t even let us near the windows. No one close to us was allowed in... Me and Vetka were 13 years old at the time, Petka was 15, Sveta T. and her friend Giza Steinbrück were 15. The rest were all younger. There were two little Ivanovs, 5 and 3 years old. And the little one called her mother all the time. It was pretty hard. We were irritated and embittered. We felt like criminals, everyone started smoking and could no longer imagine ordinary life, school.”

In overcrowded orphanages, a child stayed from several days to months, and then a stage similar to an adult: “black raven”, boxcar. From the memoirs of Aldona Volynskaya: “Uncle Misha, a representative of the NKVD, announced that we would go to an orphanage on the Black Sea in Odessa. They took us to the station on a “black crow”, the back door was open, and the guard was holding a revolver in his hand. On the train we were told to say that we were excellent students and therefore we were going to Artek before the end of the school year.” And here is the testimony of Anna Ramenskaya: “The children were divided into groups. The little brother and sister, having found themselves in different places, cried desperately, clutching each other. And all the children asked them not to separate them. But neither requests nor bitter crying helped. We were put into freight cars and driven away. That’s how I ended up in an orphanage near Krasnoyarsk. It’s a long and sad story to tell how we lived under a drunken boss, with drunkenness and stabbings.”

Children of “enemies of the people” were taken from Moscow to Dnepropetrovsk and Kirovograd, from St. Petersburg to Minsk and Kharkov, from Khabarovsk to Krasnoyarsk.

GULAG for junior schoolchildren

Like orphanages, orphanages were overcrowded: as of August 4, 1938, 17,355 children were seized from repressed parents and another 5 thousand were planned for seizure. And this does not count those who were transferred to orphanages from camp children's centers, as well as numerous street children and children of special settlers - dispossessed peasants.

“The room is 12 square meters. meters there are 30 boys; for 38 children there are 7 beds where recidivist children sleep. Two eighteen-year-old residents raped a technician, robbed a store, were drinking with the caretaker, and the watchman was buying stolen goods.” “Children sit on dirty beds, play cards cut from portraits of leaders, fight, smoke, break bars on windows and hammer walls in order to escape.” “There are no dishes, they eat from ladles. There is one cup for 140 people, there are no spoons, you have to take turns eating with your hands. There is no lighting, there is one lamp for the entire orphanage, but it does not have kerosene.” These are quotes from reports from the management of orphanages in the Urals, written in the early 1930s.

“Children’s homes” or “children’s playgrounds,” as children’s homes were called in the 1930s, were located in almost unheated, overcrowded barracks, often without beds. From the memoirs of the Dutchwoman Nina Wissing about the orphanage in Boguchary: “There were two large wicker barns with gates instead of doors. The roof was leaking and there were no ceilings. This barn could accommodate a lot of children's beds. They fed us outside under a canopy.”

Serious problems with the nutrition of children were reported in a secret note dated October 15, 1933 by the then head of the Gulag, Matvey Berman: “The nutrition of children is unsatisfactory, there is no fat and sugar, bread standards are insufficient<...>In connection with this, in some orphanages there are mass diseases of children with tuberculosis and malaria. Thus, in the Poludenovsky orphanage of the Kolpashevo district, out of 108 children, only 1 is healthy, in the Shirokovsky-Kargasoksky district, out of 134 children are sick: 69 with tuberculosis and 46 with malaria.”

“Basically soup from dry smelt fish and potatoes, sticky black bread, sometimes cabbage soup,” recalls the orphanage menu Natalya Savelyeva, in the thirties, a pupil of the preschool group of one of the “orphanages” in the village of Mago on the Amur. The children ate pasture and looked for food in garbage dumps.

Bullying and physical punishment were common. “Before my eyes, the director beat boys older than me, with their heads against the wall and with fists in the face, because during a search she found bread crumbs in their pockets, suspecting them of preparing crackers for their escape. The teachers told us: “Nobody needs you.” When we were taken out for a walk, the children of the nannies and teachers pointed their fingers at us and shouted: “Enemies, they are leading enemies!” And we, probably, actually were like them. Our heads were shaved bald, we were dressed haphazardly. The linen and clothes came from the confiscated property of the parents,” Savelyeva recalls. “One day during a quiet hour, I couldn’t fall asleep. Aunt Dina, the teacher, sat on my head, and if I had not turned around, perhaps I would not be alive,” testifies another former pupil of the orphanage, Nelya Simonova.

Counter-revolution and the Quartet in literature

Anne Applebaum in the book “GULAG. The Web of Great Terror" provides the following statistics, based on data from the NKVD archives: in 1943–1945, 842,144 homeless children passed through orphanages. Most of them ended up in orphanages and vocational schools, some went back to their relatives. And 52,830 people ended up in labor educational colonies - they turned from children into juvenile prisoners.

Back in 1935, the well-known resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR “On measures to combat juvenile delinquency” was published, which amended the Criminal Code of the RSFSR: according to this document, children from the age of 12 could be convicted for theft, violence and murder “with the use of all measures of punishment." At the same time, in April 1935, an “Explanation to prosecutors and chairmen of courts” was published under the heading “top secret”, signed by the USSR prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky and the chairman of the USSR Supreme Court Alexander Vinokurov: “Among the criminal penalties provided for in Art. 1 of the said resolution also applies to capital punishment (execution).”

According to data for 1940, there were 50 labor colonies for minors in the USSR. From the memoirs of Jacques Rossi: “Children's correctional labor colonies, where minor thieves, prostitutes and murderers of both sexes are kept, are turning into hell. Children under 12 years old also end up there, since it often happens that a caught eight- or ten-year-old thief hides the name and address of his parents, but the police do not insist and write down in the protocol - “age about 12 years old,” which allows the court to “legally” convict the child and sent to the camps. The local authorities are glad that there will be one less potential criminal in the area entrusted to them. The author met many children in the camps who looked to be 7-9 years old. Some still couldn’t pronounce individual consonants correctly.”

At least until February 1940 (and according to the recollections of former prisoners, even later), convicted children were also kept in adult colonies. Thus, according to “Order for Norilsk construction and correctional labor camps of the NKVD” No. 168 of July 21, 1936, “child prisoners” from 14 to 16 years old were allowed to be used for general work for four hours a day, and another four hours were to be allocated for study and “cultural and educational work.” For prisoners from 16 to 17 years old, a 6-hour working day was already established.

Former prisoner Efrosinia Kersnovskaya recalls the girls who ended up with her at the detention center: “On average, they are 13-14 years old. The eldest, about 15 years old, already gives the impression of a really spoiled girl. Not surprisingly, she has already been to a children's correctional colony and has already been “corrected” for the rest of her life.<...>The smallest is Manya Petrova. She is 11 years old. The father was killed, the mother died, the brother was taken into the army. It’s hard for everyone, who needs an orphan? She picked onions. Not the bow itself, but the feather. They “had mercy” on her: for the theft they gave her not ten, but one year.” The same Kersnovskaya writes about the 16-year-old blockade survivors she met in prison, who were digging anti-tank ditches with adults, and during the bombing they rushed into the forest and stumbled upon the Germans. They treated them to chocolate, which the girls told about when they went out to the Soviet soldiers and were sent to the camp.

Prisoners of the Norilsk camp remember the Spanish children who found themselves in the adult Gulag. Solzhenitsyn writes about them in “The Gulag Archipelago”: “Spanish children are the same ones who were taken out during the Civil War, but became adults after World War II. Brought up in our boarding schools, they equally melded very poorly with our lives. Many were rushing home. They were declared socially dangerous and sent to prison, and those who were especially persistent - 58, part 6 - espionage for... America.”

There was a special attitude towards the children of the repressed: according to the circular of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR No. 106 to the heads of the NKVD of territories and regions “On the procedure for placing children of repressed parents over the age of 15 years”, issued in May 1938, “socially dangerous children exhibiting anti-Soviet and terrorist sentiments and actions must be tried on a general basis and sent to camps according to the personal orders of the Gulag NKVD.”

Such “socially dangerous” people were interrogated on a general basis, using torture. Thus, the 14-year-old son of army commander Jonah Yakir, who was executed in 1937, Peter, was subjected to a night interrogation in an Astrakhan prison and accused of “organizing a horse gang.” He was sentenced to 5 years. Sixteen-year-old Pole Jerzy Kmecik, caught in 1939 while trying to escape to Hungary (after the Red Army entered Poland), was forced to sit and stand on a stool for many hours during interrogation, and was fed salty soup and not given water.

In 1938, for the fact that “being hostile to the Soviet system, he systematically carried out counter-revolutionary activities among the pupils of the orphanage,” 16-year-old Vladimir Moroz, the son of an “enemy of the people” who lived in the Annensky orphanage, was arrested and placed in the adult Kuznetsk prison. To authorize the arrest, Moroz's date of birth was corrected - he was assigned one year. The reason for the accusation was the letters that the pioneer leader found in the pocket of the teenager’s trousers - Vladimir wrote to his arrested older brother. After a search, the teenager’s diaries were found and confiscated, in which, interspersed with entries about the “four” in literature and “uncultured” teachers, he talks about repression and the cruelty of the Soviet leadership. The same pioneer leader and four children from the orphanage acted as witnesses at the trial. Moroz received three years of labor camp, but did not end up in a camp - in April 1939 he died in Kuznetsk prison “from tuberculosis of the lungs and intestines.”

The second quarter of the 20th century became 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 were in forced labor camps dispersed throughout all the republics.

After Stalin's death, the camps began to be abolished, people tried to leave these places as quickly as possible, many projects on which thousands of lives were thrown fell into disrepair. However, evidence of that dark era is still alive.

"Perm-36"

A maximum security labor colony in the village of Kuchino, Perm Region, existed until 1988. During 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 BC-389/36.

Six years after its closure, the Perm-36 Memorial Museum of the History of Political Repression was opened on the site of the former colony. The collapsing barracks were restored and museum exhibits were placed in them. Lost fences, towers, signal and warning structures, and utility lines 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 closure - due to insufficient funding and protests from communist forces.

Dneprovsky mine

On the Kolyma River, 300 kilometers from Magadan, quite a lot of wooden buildings have been preserved. This is the former convict camp "Dneprovsky". In the 1920s, a large tin deposit was discovered here, and especially dangerous criminals began to be 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 under which they had to work: in the summer it gets up to 40 degrees Celsius, and in the winter - down 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. It is, of course, easier to work during the day. From the night shift, you get to the zone by the time you have breakfast, and as soon as you fall asleep, it’s already lunch, when you go to bed, there’s a check, and then there’s dinner, and then it’s off to work.”

Road of Bones

The infamous abandoned highway, 1,600 kilometers long, leading from Magadan to Yakutsk. Construction of the road began in 1932. Tens of thousands of people who participated in laying the route and died there were buried right under the road surface. At least 25 people died every day during construction. For this reason, the tract was nicknamed the road with 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 allowed onto the lands uncultivated by the state farm only in the early 50s. According to reports, they actively assisted in the search and arrest of fugitives.

On the territory of the camp there were seven separate villages, in which a total of over 20 thousand prisoners lived. The camp administration was based in the village of Dolinka. A museum in memory of the victims of political repression was opened in that building several years ago, and a monument was erected in front of it.

Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp

The monastery prison on the territory of the Solovetsky Islands appeared at the beginning of the 18th century. Here priests, heretics and sectarians who disobeyed the will of the sovereign were kept in isolation. In 1923, when the State Political Administration 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 significantly every year. From 2.5 thousand in 1923 to more than 71 thousand by 1930. All property of the Solovetsky Monastery was transferred for the use of the camp. But already in 1933 it was disbanded. Today there is only a restored monastery here.

"Valley of Death" is 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.
While denouncing Nazi Germany for genocide, the Soviet government, in deep secrecy, at the state level, implemented an equally monstrous program. It was in such camps, under an agreement with the All-Union Communist Party of Belarus, that Hitler’s special brigades underwent training and gained experience in the mid-30s.
The results of this investigation were widely covered by many world media. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn also participated in a special television program broadcast live by NHK Japan, along with the author (by telephone).

According to information from the article, in the said camp they were engaged in three things: they mined uranium ore, enriched it and carried out some experiments.

Uranium ore was mined by hand, and again enriched by hand on pallets in primitive-looking furnaces. To confirm this, a photograph of the insides of some abandoned building is shown. In the foreground is a series of partitions made of an unknown material. Apparently it is implied that coal was burning below or whatever it was, and that same pan was being held on top. It is not clear why it was impossible to build an ordinary stove, and what these, judging by the photograph, rather thin partitions are made of. In general, there are only guesses about the course of the technical process, and the direction of these guesses is extremely one-sided. It is alleged that the workers employed in this work 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 prisoners is also not such a shocking event, because it is quite logical under the conditions of that time to send prisoners to this work. The only thing that raises questions is the technical process of enrichment, which in the form described is dangerous not so much for the prisoners, but for the administration, civilians and security. Judging by the photograph, the building is quite low in height. This means that there is no talk about the guards walking with machine guns along the perimeter of the hall above the heads of the prisoners (and no remains of these structures are visible, while the fastenings for the 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 easily become a victim - a desperate prisoner could easily throw a pan in her direction. This arrangement is very strange, given the fact that since time immemorial, as far as I know, a rule has been formed - the security of a prisoner 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 addressed.

Finally, let's get to the fun part. The author provides a number of information indicating the presence in this camp of a certain mega-secret laboratory in which scientists, among whom “there were even professors,” carried out 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 effects of radiation on the human body and experiments on the brain. Judging by the materials presented, he prefers the second version - which, it must be noted, looks much more terrible than the first. Experiments on the influence of radiation in the conditions of its extraction 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 look at the atomic mushroom (I read somewhere that some VIP seats were almost sold for money). And it was clearly not white collar workers who mined uranium ore for the United States. As a result, the topic of experiments on radiation exposure was silenced by mention of the unfortunate fate of the guinea pigs, whose bones were discovered in one of the barracks.

But with brains everything is more complicated. As evidence, photographs of several individual skulls with trepanation are provided and only assurances that there are many such corpses there. 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 - which means there were opportunities.

A small touch. Histological studies are carried out on brains removed no more than a few minutes after death. Ideally, on a living organism. Any method of killing gives a “not clean” picture, since a whole complex of enzymes and other substances released during pain and psychological shock appears in the brain tissue.
Moreover, the purity of the experiment is violated by euthanizing the experimental animal or administering psychotropic drugs to it. The only method used in biological laboratory practice for such experiments is decapitation - almost instantaneous cutting off the animal's head from the body.

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 craniotomy is performed. The body of a man is clearly lying on the table, not secured in any way, which suggests that the procedure is being carried out on a corpse. Some damage is clearly visible in the area of ​​the skull cleared from the scalp. Upon 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. There are no visible stains of blood or fluid from the skull. Moreover, the scalp was tucked under the head, and also did not leave a single stain on the sheet. There are several possible explanations here - either the blood and fluid were previously pumped out of the skull, or the removal of the scalp and trephination of the occipital part was carried out in a different 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 gurney can be found in some hospitals - was it really the same even in 1947 or 1952?
Another thing that is puzzling is this. If we are talking about experiments, it is extremely doubtful that they were carried out in the same room as the storage of corpses. It is also clear that the corpses are lying rather carelessly - most likely, they were recently delivered.

Now the second photo in the “18+” category, or rather a collage. There are also no significant wet spots visible on any of the fragments. But best of all they show the room itself where the trepanation is performed:

We see tiles on the walls. It’s strange, isn’t it, to import scarce building material to a very remote area? Moreover, it is not painful and is needed in this case - painting the walls with light paint is enough. However, the room is apparently lined with it to the ceiling - isn’t it, a very strange luxury, in the conditions of a recently ended war, albeit for a mega-secret laboratory, but located not in Moscow, or even in Arkhangelsk.
Also quite surprising is the central heating battery. It seems completely normal to have a boiler room for heating the laboratory and administration buildings, and there probably was one. However, this battery has a very 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 the wider section shape with edging. The battery sections that were installed previously were narrower, and when photographed from this distance, the tops would appear sharper, rather than blunt as they are here (see photo below). Unfortunately, I don’t yet have a photo of such an old battery (they can’t be found anywhere anymore), I’ll take it as soon as possible.

The image, apparently a tattoo, on the chest of the body also raises questions. It is very strange that it depicts a profile reminiscent of Lenin. It’s like - a prisoner, in a fit of fanatical Leninism, ordered such a tattoo in the zone? Or was it the bloody KGB that pricked everyone as an edification (why, exactly?).

I forwarded questions regarding damage to the skull and tattoo to a competent person. If he can clarify anything, I will update it.

So, what kind of photo were they shown to us? In my opinion, this looks more like a photo from the anatomy department of some medical university, where students are shown the process of trepanation on an ownerless corpse. The bodies in the background are material for further work. Citizens who are frightened by such cynicism should understand that it 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 a person who was wounded in the head with a sharp object, in order to determine 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 claim that these photos were taken in that particular camp during the “experience.” Thus, the version of selling outright bullshit to a naive human rights activist for a bunch of green presidents takes on a very real form... Moreover, one can hardly doubt that such a “civilian in civilian clothes” has great opportunities to supply such “secret photographs” wholesale and retail to everyone for those who wish.

I would still like to note that if trepanned skulls were actually found in those burials, such operations could well have been performed there. Whether they were done, and for what purpose, and what actually happened in that camp should be shown by normal research aimed at establishing the truth, and not adjusting the evidence to fit an existing and generously funded thesis.

Quite recently, a website for photo and film documents “GULAG - with a camera around the camps” appeared. This is the first online resource that contains photographic materials from the archives of the repressive bodies of the Soviet government. 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 can become the largest information resource-archive of camp photographs and documents in the world.
http://www.gulag.ipvnews.org/

The author of the project is a former board member of the Soviet Cultural Foundation, and now a famous American photographer, Sergei Melnikoff. He himself served a long sentence in the political camps of the USSR - for free-thinking, dissident sentiments and calls for trial of the CPSU.

The love of climbing behind fences with a “Forbidden Zone” sign led to the fact that the Soviet dissident, along with his “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 modern times - "Accusing the USSR of experiments on people." Japan, South Korea, and the United States immediately recognized the uniqueness of the material presented and organized a world tour for the exhibition. The Soviet press spoke about the exhibition through clenched teeth, mostly throwing mud at its author.

A year later, Sergei and his family were forced to flee from the USSR through Mongolia to China, illegally, crossing the state border at night with a one-year-old daughter in his arms.

The American CBS News hid them in China for a long time. This same powerful television corporation achieved the status of political refugees for the fugitives, directly from the UN (the third case in the entire history of Soviet dissidence). The family, which the KGB was already looking for with all its might, was transported by the US government and the UN to Thailand, and then was able to immigrate to the United States, where Sergei founded his own non-profit television company, IPV News USA. Over the past decade and a half, he has continued to go on endless expeditions to all six continents of the Earth. I even signed up for a space flight...

And so, “GULAG - with a camera in the camps” appeared on the Internet. The new resource is a collection of unique photographs taken from negatives that fell into the hands of Sergei both as a result of a dozen trips to the Stalinist camps that remained in the wilderness, and as a result of the sudden awakening of commercial interest among people who had previously served faithfully in the “land of October”. These people with “hot hearts, cool heads and clean hands” helped Sergei become the owner of priceless photographic documents. Well, who else besides them could have evidence of crimes against their own people?!..

Special officers from numerous camps that strewn the map of Russia, like black dots on an old lampshade covered with flies, not only began to sell everything they could, but also, sensing 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 depicted 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 over and over again the evidence of their atrocities.

Because of this hobby, unnatural for normal people, today we have the opportunity to look into this terrible world. Their world. A world in which such concepts as philanthropy, spirituality, compassion, decency, friendliness, intelligence, selflessness, generosity of soul do not exist.

The photographs are accompanied by texts of such terrible force that they leave no stone unturned from the myth that today’s successors to the work of “Iron Felix” - the true moral monster and the real executioner of Russia - Dzerzhinsky continue to drive into the heads of Russians. The myth of supposedly wise, fair and selfless “knights without fear or reproach.” Moreover, the current chief security officer, irreplaceable despite continuous failures, has agreed that his subordinates are “...modern-minded, educated people..., modern “neo-nobles”...

Well, the “nobles”!.. “Nobles” who once a year - in December - celebrate the founding of their office not since the beginning of the 90s, but precisely since 1918! That is, they consider themselves to be continuers of the work of the people’s executioners Dzerzhinsky, Peters, Menzhinsky, Egoda, Yezhov, Beria...

In addition to the photo galleries "Butugychag" and "Prickly Truth", the site contains articles that are deadly in their power, for example - "Valley of Death", "Marble Gorge", "Stage of Georgy Zhzhenov", "Capital Punishment", "Letter of a Scoundrel", " Children's Gulag", "Kill Stalin" and "Dedicated to the bitches from the KGB." And this is just the beginning. So the “bitches” will still learn a lot about their affairs, which they are trying to make us all forget about.

This is what the aforementioned monsters in human form and their henchmen did, and this is what is being told on the pages of Sergei Melnikoff’s project. The narrative becomes even more terrible because it is accompanied by “visual aids” - evidence of the deepest fall of the knights of fear and reproach. Reproaches that they have not yet truly heard from a society tired of reforms. But this does not mean that they will never hear them. Sergei Melnikoff's project brings these days closer.

We will 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 - Sergei Melnikoff!

In conclusion, I would like to quote the words of Sergei himself: “...Human memory does not accommodate such power of grief, such scales of tragedy that the people of the Russian Empire inherited from the Bolsheviks. And therefore the executioners easily escape retribution, and the next generation is doomed to repeat it. We are obliged bring criminals, old and new, to justice, so that every next ruler knows what the imposed despotism threatens him with..."

Explosions for the reign!

Translation into Russian of the original scandalous article from GQ magazine, banned for distribution in Russia, about how the FSB blew up houses in Moscow and other Russian cities 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, it is extremely useful to read.

Perhaps our officials will shun the “weather-eyed” for fear of getting dirty!

Maitre's favorite Asian dish is “Russian” lamb baked in a tandoor...

Vladimir Putin's sinister rise to power

The first explosion occurred in the barracks of the Buinaksk garrison, where Russian military personnel 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 by a truck filled with explosives. The explosion caused the interfloor ceilings to collapse on top of each other, so that the building turned into a pile of burning ruins. Under these rubble were the bodies of sixty-four people - men, women and children.

On September 13th last year, at dawn, I left my Moscow hotel and headed to a 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 dotted 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 Kashirskoe Highway 6/3. At 5:03 on September 19, 1999, exactly nine years before my arrival, the house at Kashirskoye Shosse 6/3 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 occurred nine days after the Buinaksk explosion, was the third of four apartment bombings that occurred over a twelve-day period that September. The explosions killed about 300 people and plunged the country into a state of panic; this series of terrorist attacks was among the deadliest worldwide to occur before the fall of the Twin Towers in the United States.

Newly elected Prime Minister Putin blamed the bombings on Chechen terrorists and ordered scorched-earth tactics in a new offensive against the rebel region. Thanks to the success of this offensive, the previously unknown Putin became a national hero and soon gained complete control over the power structures of Russia. Putin continues to exercise this control to this day.

At the site of the house on Kashirskoe Highway there are now neat flower beds. Flowerbeds surround a stone monument with the names of the victims, topped with an Orthodox cross. On the ninth anniversary of the attack, three or four local journalists came to the monument, watched by two policemen in a patrol car; however, there were no special occupations for either one or the other. Shortly after five in the morning, a group of two dozen people, most of them young, presumably relatives of the victims, approached the monument. They lit candles at the monument and laid red carnations - and left as quickly as they came. Besides them, only two elderly men appeared at the monument that day, eyewitnesses of the explosion, who obediently told television cameras how terrible it was, such a shock. I noticed that one of these men looked very upset while standing at the monument - he was crying and continuously wiping tears from his cheeks. Several times he began to decisively walk away, as if forcing himself to leave this place, but each time he hesitated on the outskirts of the park, turned around and slowly returned back. I decided to approach him.

“I lived nearby,” he said. “I woke up from the roar and ran here.” A large man, a former sailor, he waved his hands helplessly around the flower beds. “And nothing. Nothing. They pulled out only one boy and his dog. That’s all. Everyone else was already dead.”

As I later found out, the old man suffered a personal tragedy that day. His daughter, son-in-law and grandson lived in a house on Kashirskoe Highway - and they also died that morning. He led me to the monument, pointed to their names carved in stone, and again began desperately rubbing his eyes. And then he whispered furiously: “They say that the Chechens did it, but it’s all a lie. These were Putin’s people. Everyone knows this. Nobody wants to talk about it, but everyone knows about it.”

The mystery of these explosions has not yet been solved; This riddle is embedded in the very foundation of the modern Russian state. What happened in those terrible September days of 1999? Perhaps Russia has found in Putin its avenging angel, the notorious man of action, who crushed the enemies who attacked the country and led 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 the explosions of 1999 and the events that followed had not happened, it would be difficult to imagine an alternative scenario for Putin’s rise to the place he currently occupies - a player on the world stage, the head of one of the most powerful countries in the world.

It is strange that so few people outside Russia want to get 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 American lawmakers have shown interest in the matter. In 2003, John McCain told Congress that “there is credible information that the Russian FSB was involved in 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 the official version of what happened. One by one these voices fell silent. In recent years, a number of journalists investigating the incident were either killed or died under suspicious circumstances - as were two Duma members who participated in the commission investigating the terrorist attacks. At this point, almost everyone who has expressed a different position on this issue in the past either refuses to comment, has publicly retracted their words, or is dead.

During my last year's visit to Russia, I addressed a number of people who were in 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 well-known inconsistencies in this case, but refused to express their point of view, limiting themselves to the remark that the issue remains “controversial.” Even the old man from Kashirskoe Highway ultimately turned out to be a living illustration of the atmosphere of uncertainty that hangs over this topic. He readily agreed to a repeat 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 telephone conversation a few days after we met. "I talked to my wife and my boss, and they both said that if I meet you, I'm done for." I wanted to find out what he meant by this, but I didn’t have time - 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 an intelligence conspiracy in the house bombing case. From his London exile, Litvinenko, the 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 bombings of residential buildings. In November 2006, the world community was shocked by the news of Litvinenko's poisoning - it is assumed that he received a lethal dose of poison during a meeting with two former KGB agents in a London bar. Before his death (which occurred 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 case. Several years before his death, he invited another ex-KGB agent, Mikhail Trepashkin, to participate in the investigation. In the past, relations between the partners were quite complicated; it is said 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 in the case of the explosions.

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 of my visit to 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 into account this, 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 will talk,” the intermediary assured me. "The only thing they can do to silence Trepashkin is kill him."

On September 9, five days after the explosion in Buinaksk, terrorists struck 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 the general alarm sounded on Guryanov. During the first hours after the terrorist attack, several officials immediately announced that Chechen militants were involved in the explosion, and a special situation was introduced in the country. Thousands of law enforcement officers were sent to the streets to question, and in hundreds of cases arrest, people with Chechen appearance; residents of cities and villages organized people's squads and patrolled courtyards. 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 with someone like a bodyguard - a young man with short hair and a blank look.

Trepashkin, although small in stature, was powerfully built - evidence of years of martial arts training - and, at 51, still handsome. His most attractive feature was the half-surprised smile that never left his face. This gave him a certain aura of friendliness and general pleasantness, although the person sitting opposite him in the role of the interrogated person would probably get on his nerves with such a smile.

We talked for some time about general 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 assessing me, deciding how much he could tell me.

He then began to talk about his career in the KGB. He spent most of his time investigating cases of antiques smuggling. In those days, Mikhail was absolutely devoted to the Soviet government and especially the KGB. His devotion was so great that he even took part in an attempt to prevent Boris Yeltsin from coming to power in order to preserve the existing system.

“I understood that this would be the end of the Soviet Union,” Trepashkin explained. “Moreover, what will happen to the Committee, to all those who made work in the KGB their lives? I only saw an 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 transition of KGB agents to work in the private sector. Some started their own businesses or joined the mafia they once fought. Others became “advisers” to the new oligarchs or old apparatchiks, who were desperately trying to grab everything more or less valuable for themselves, while verbally expressing support for Boris Yeltsin’s “democratic reforms.”

Trepashkin was familiar with all this firsthand. Continuing to work for the successor to the FSB, Trepashkin found that the line between criminals and state power was increasingly blurred.

“In case after case there was a kind of confusion,” he said. "First you find the mafia working with terrorist groups. Then the trail goes to a business group or a ministry. And then what - is this still a criminal case or an already officially sanctioned covert operation? And what exactly does 'officially sanctioned' mean - who makes the decisions anyway ?"

Ultimately, in the summer of 1995, Trepashkin became involved in a case that would change 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 murder. Like many similar cases investigating corruption in post-Soviet Russia, this one was tied to the breakaway region of Chechnya. By December 1995, the militants, who had been fighting for the independence of Chechnya for a whole 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, the Chechens controlled most of the criminal groups in the Union, so the criminalization of Russian society only benefited the Chechen militants. The uninterrupted supply of modern Russian weapons was ensured by corrupt Russian army officers who had access to such weapons, and the Chechen crime bosses, who spread their network throughout the country, paid for them.

How high did this close collaboration go? Mikhail Trepashkin received the answer to this question on the night of December 1, when a group of armed FSB officers burst into the Moscow branch of Soldi Bank.

The raid was the culmination of a complex operation that Trepashkin had helped plan. The operation was aimed at neutralizing a notorious group of bank extortionists associated with Salman Raduev, one of the leaders of Chechen terrorists. The raid was an unprecedented success - two dozen criminals ended up in 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 precaution turned out to be 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 that emerged from this discovery was stunning. Since few people had access to such equipment, it became clear that high-ranking intelligence officers and the army could be involved in the case - in a case that was not just criminal, 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, before Trepashkin could begin the investigation, 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 other 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 participation in the case, and also accused most of the FSB leadership of a number of crimes, including collaboration with the mafia and even hiring members of criminal groups to work in the FSB.

“I thought that if the president found out about what was happening,” Trepashkin said, “he would take some action. 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 began to be put on him. However, this did not mean that Trepashkin was going to quietly disappear into the fog. That same summer, he filed a lawsuit against 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 upon himself the responsibility for rebuilding the agency. Instead, his persistence appears to have convinced someone in the FSB leadership that the Trepashkin problem must be solved once and for all. One of the people they turned to for a solution was Alexander Litvinenko.

In theory, Litvinenko seemed 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 Directorate for the Development and Suppression of Activities of Criminal Associations (URPO). Alexander did not know at the time that the department was created for the purpose of carrying out secret liquidations. As Alex Goldfarb and Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, write in their book “Death of a Dissident,” Alexander found out about this when the head of the department summoned him in October 1997. “There is this Trepashkin,” the boss allegedly told him, “This is your new object. Take his file and get acquainted.”

During the familiarization process, Litvinenko learned about Mikhail’s participation 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, this is a sensitive matter,” according to Litvinenko, his boss told him. “He summons the director of the FSB to court and gives out interviews. We must shut him up - this is the director’s personal order.”

Soon after, Litvinenko said the list of potential victims included Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch with connections to the Kremlin, whose death someone in power appeared to want. Litvinenko was playing for time, coming up with numerous excuses as to why the liquidation orders had not yet been carried out.

According to Trepashkin, at that time there were two attempts on his life - one from an ambush on a deserted stretch of Moscow highway, the other from a sniper on a roof who failed to make a aimed shot. In other cases, Trepashkin claims, he received warnings from friends who were still working in the Office.

In November 1998, Litvinenko and four of his colleagues from URPO spoke at a press conference in Moscow about the existence of a conspiracy to kill Trepashkin and Berezovsky and their role in it. Mikhail himself was present at the press conference.

At this point, without much fanfare, everything died down. Litvinenko, as the leader of a group of dissident officers, was dismissed from the FSB, but the punishment then was limited to that. As for Trepashkin, oddly enough, he won a lawsuit against the FSB, married again and got a job in the tax service, where he intended to quietly serve until retirement.

But then, in September 1999, apartment bombings shook the foundations of the Russian state. These explosions again threw Litvinenko and Trepashkin into the shadow world of conspiracies, this time united by a common goal. In the midst of the panic that gripped Moscow after the Guryanov bombing, in the early morning of 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, which revealed nothing, and left house 6/3 on Kashirskoe Highway at two o’clock in the morning. At 5:03 a.m. the building was destroyed by a powerful explosion, killing 121 people. Three days later, the target was a house in Volgodonsk, a southern city, where seventeen people were killed by a truck bomb.

We are sitting in a Moscow cafe, Trepashkin frowns, which doesn’t look like him at all, and looks into the distance for a long time.

“It was impossible to believe,” he finally says. “That was my first thought. There is panic in the country, volunteer squads are stopping people on the street, there are police checkpoints everywhere. How did it happen that the terrorists moved freely and had enough time to plan and carry out such complex terrorist attacks? It seemed incredible.”

Another aspect that raised questions for Trepashkin was the motives for the explosions.

“Usually the motive for a crime is obvious,” he explains. "It's either money, or hatred, or envy. But in this case, what were the motives of the Chechens? Very few people thought about it."

From one country, this is easy to understand. Dislike for the Chechens is firmly rooted in Russian society, especially after their war for independence. During the war, both sides committed unspeakable cruelties against each other. The Chechens did not hesitate to transfer hostilities to Russian territory; their targets often became civilians. But the war ended in 1997, with Yeltsin signing a peace treaty that gave Chechnya broad autonomy.

“Then why?” asks Trapeshkin. "Why should the Chechens provoke the Russian government if they have already received 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 his third prime minister in three months. He was a thin, dry man, virtually unknown to the Russian public, named Vladimir Putin.

The main reason for his obscurity was that just a few years before his appointment to high office, Putin was only one of many mid-level officers in the KGB/FSB. In 1996, Putin received a position in the economic department of the presidential administration, an important post in the Yeltsin hierarchy, which allowed him to gain leverage over internal Kremlin politics. Apparently, he made good use of his time in this post - over the next three years, Putin was promoted to deputy head of the presidential administration, then appointed director of the FSB, and then prime minister.

But despite the fact that Putin was a relative stranger to the Russian public in September 1999, Trepashkin had a good idea of ​​the man. Putin was director of the FSB when the URPO scandal broke and it was he who fired Litvinenko. "The reason I fired Litvinenko," he told a reporter, "is that FSB officers should not call press conferences... and they should not make internal scandals public."

No less troubling for 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 ardent supporters of the version of the “Chechen trace” in the case of explosions of residential buildings.

“That is, we observed such a turn of events,” says Trepashkin. “They told us: ‘The Chechens are to blame for the explosions, so we need to deal with them.’”

But then something very strange happened. This happened in sleepy provincial Ryazan, 200 kilometers southeast of Moscow.

In an atmosphere of super-vigilance that gripped the country's population, several residents of house 14/16 on Novosyolov Street in Ryazan noticed a suspicious white Zhiguli parked next to their house on the evening of September 22nd. Their suspicions turned to panic when they noticed the car's occupants carrying several large bags into the basement of the building and then driving away. Residents called the police.

Three 50-kilogram bags were found in the basement, connected using a timer to the detonator. The building was evacuated, and an explosives technician from the local FSB was invited to the basement, who determined that the bags contained hexogen, an explosive that would be enough to completely destroy the building. At the same time, all roads from Ryazan were blocked by checkpoints, and a real hunt was launched for the white Zhiguli cars and their passengers.

The next morning, news of the Ryazan incident spread throughout the country. Prime Minister Putin praised the residents of Ryazan for their vigilance, and the Minister of Internal Affairs boasted of successes in the work of law enforcement agencies, “such as preventing an explosion in a residential building in Ryazan.”

This could have been the end of it if two suspects suspected of planning a terrorist attack had not been detained that same night. To the amazement of the police, both detainees presented their FSB identification cards. Soon a call came from the Moscow headquarters of the FSB demanding the release of the detainees.

The next morning, the FSB director appeared on television with a completely new version of the events in Ryazan. According to him, the incident in house 14/16 on Novosyolov Street was not a prevented terrorist attack, but an FSB exercise aimed at testing public vigilance; the bags in the basement did not contain hexogen, but ordinary sugar.

There are a lot of inconsistencies in this statement. How can we compare the FSB version about bags of sugar with the conclusion of a local FSB expert that there was hexogen in the bags? If this really was an exercise, why did the local FSB branch know nothing about it and why did Patrushev himself remain silent for a day and a half since the incident was reported? Why did the explosions of residential buildings stop after the incident in Ryazan? If the terrorist attacks were the work of Chechen militants, why didn’t they continue their dirty deed with even greater zeal after the failure in Ryazan for the FSB from a PR point of view? But the time for all these questions has already been lost. While Prime Minister Putin was delivering his speech on September 23, praising the vigilance of Ryazan residents, military planes had already begun massive bombing of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. Over the next few days, Russian troops, which had previously been massed on the border, entered the breakaway republic, marking the beginning of the Second Chechen War.

After this, 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 elections were held. Instead of the planned summer, the election date was set just ten weeks after Yeltsin's resignation, leaving little time for the remaining candidates to prepare.

During a public opinion poll conducted in August 1999, less than two percent of respondents were in favor of electing Putin as president. However, in March 2000, Putin, riding a wave of popularity caused by the policy of total war in Chechnya, was elected with 53 percent of voters. The Putin era has begun, changing Russia irrevocably.

Trepashkin scheduled 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 manner. Trepashkin showed me his home and I noted that the only place where there was some disorder was a small room filled with papers - a built-in closet converted into an office. One of his daughters was at home during my visit, and she brought us tea as we sat in the living room.

Smiling embarrassedly, Trepashkin said that there is another reason why he rarely invites work-related guests - his wife. “She wants me not to be involved in politics anymore, but since she is not at home right now...” His smile faded. “This is because of the searches, of course. One day they broke into the apartment,” he waves his hand towards the front door, “with weapons, shouting orders; the children were very scared. This 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 invaded the apartment and turned everything upside down. Trepashkin claims that they found nothing, but were able to plant enough evidence - secret documents and live ammunition - so that the prosecutor's office could open a criminal case against him on three counts.

“This was a signal that they had taken me for a pencil,” says Trepashkin, “that if I don’t come to my senses, they will take me seriously.”

Trepashkin guessed what caused such attention from the FSB - a few days before the search, he began receiving calls from a 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 at which he accused the URPO of plotting murders, he spent nine months in prison on charges of “abuse of authority” before being forced to leave the country while prosecutors prepared new charges against him. Litvinenko and his family, with the support of the exiled oligarch Berezovsky, settled in England, where Alexander began a joint campaign with Boris 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, since 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 review of all aspects of the weakest FSB case - the case of the “exercises” in Ryazan. By 2002, the head of the Ryazan FSB, who led the hunt for “terrorists,” officially supported the version of the exercises. A local explosives specialist, who had claimed in front of television cameras that there were explosives in the Ryazan bags, suddenly fell silent and disappeared from view. Even some residents of building 14/16 on Novosyolov Street, who appeared in a documentary 6 months after the events and desperately protested against the official version, now refuse to talk to anyone, limiting themselves to statements that perhaps they were mistaken.

“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. “If I start to look into it on my own, the authorities will immediately turn against me.”

Trepashkin's official role was arranged during a meeting organized 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. Tatiana Morozova, a 35-year-old Russian emigrant living in Milwaukee, attended the meeting. Tatyana's mother was among those killed in the explosion on Guryanov Street - under Russian law, this gave her the right to access official records of the investigation. Since Trepashkin had recently received a lawyer's license, 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 with both proposals,” Trepashkin told me, “but the question remained where to start. Many of the 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 authorities' reaction to the explosions was remarkable for the excessive haste with which the site of the terrorist attack was cleared. Americans dug into the ruins of the World Trade Center for six months after its fall, treating the site as a crime scene. Russian authorities cleared away the rubble at the site of the explosion on Guryanov Street within a few days, and all the debris was sent to the city landfill. Whatever evidence remained - and it was unclear whether it existed in nature - was all presumably in FSB warehouses.