PUTIN AND BEREZOVSKY COMMENT ON 1999 PROVOCATION.

Over the past week, President Putin and one of his severest political critics chose to comment on the subject of the events of 1999 that served to spark a second Russian invasion of Chechnya. During a meeting with participants in the “Teacher of the Year” competition, Putin reminded those present that, when an attack on Dagestan had occurred in August of 1999, there had been a real possibility that the Caucasus region would break away from Russia. “All that time,” Putin recalled, “we were one step away from announcing a mobilization and conducting a large-scale civil war” (Strana.ru, October 5). However, in an interview with the chief editor of the weekly Zavtra (October 4 issue), oligarch-in-exile Boris Berezovsky observed: “In 1999, the people of [separatist extremist leader Movladi] Udugov telephoned me. [Sergei] Stepashin had just become prime minister…. They sufficiently unambiguously explained that an incursion by Basaev [into] Dagestan was planned…. Immediately after this secret conversation, I reported its contents to Stepashin… He said: ‘Don’t get upset. We know everything, and everything is under control.’ And this despite the fact that over the course of two years in Buinaksk and Chabanmakhi [Dagestan] the Wahhabis had been digging trenches and creating firing points. How could the FSB not know about that? Later I came to the conclusion that all of that was one big provocation. Both the intervention by Basaev, and the war in Dagestan, and the explosions [in Moscow].” Russia, Berezovsky went on to explain, “had decided to take revenge. And so a provocation was set up. But, even after the beginning of the war, there still remained a chance to localize its tragic consequences. I had a most serious discussion with Putin about that. We had reached the Terek [River] by the end of 1999…. I said: ‘Putin, listen to me-a victory is not raising a flag over Grozny. A victory is the overcoming by [ethnic] Russians of the “complex of the defeated” and the feeling by Chechens that they have lost. Now let’s conclude a peace. Without a storming of Grozny.’ But evidently something very limited and spiteful sits inside Putin: namely, all that pettiness and vanity, as well as a lack of understanding that, for that vanity, one would have to pay a price of thousands and thousands of concrete human lives.”