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2 Decades On, Questions Linger About Putin's Rise to Power

Mike Eckel - RFE/RL

   One month after then-President Boris Yeltsin plucked a security agency
   official named Vladimir Putin from obscurity and made him prime
   minister, an explosion leveled a nine-story apartment building on
   Moscow's outskirts.

   The predawn blast on Sept. 9, 1999, reduced the building to a smoking
   pile of rubble, killing more than 100 people. A second building, less
   than 6 kilometers away, was rocked by an explosion on Sept. 13, killing
   119.

   Days earlier, a car bomb exploded in a small town bordering the
   war-ravaged region of Chechnya, where reignited fighting was already
   spilling into neighboring regions. That blast, outside the apartment
   building in the town of Buynaksk, killed dozens.

   It was followed seven days later by a truck bomb that destroyed a
   nine-story building in another southern city, Volgodonsk, killing 17.

   On Sept. 23, Putin asserted terrorists in Chechnya were to blame and
   ordered a massive air campaign within the North Caucasus region. When
   asked a day later about the campaign targeting what he called
   terrorists, Putin responded with the phrase that inaugurated his rise
   to preeminence.

   "We will pursue them everywhere," he said, using a crude slang
   expression. "Excuse me for saying so: We'll catch them in the toilet.
   We'll wipe them out in the outhouse."

   The statement became a Putin catchphrase, and set the tone for the 20
   years of rule that followed.

   "Yes, it's one of Putin's original sins," said Sergei Kovalyov, a
   former lawmaker and rights activist who headed a commission that
   investigated the bombings in the early 2000s.

   The bombings, and the fear they provoked, "were advantageous," he told
   RFE/RL. "At the time, it was advantageous for him to take control of
   the country, and to introduce force into the Caucasus, in Chechnya in
   particular."

   Yeltsin and his officials had already endorsed Putin, who was tapped a
   year earlier to head the country's main security and intelligence
   agency, the FSB, and also served as secretary of the Security Council.

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