Russian Roulette

...Thus began the Second Chechen War—which vaulted Putin to the presidency—and which rages still...

...Local police arrested two agents attempting to flee Ryazan on September 23, 1999, and their guilt was so clear that Moscow did not even try to deny it...

...Observing Russian society from the standpoint of ordinary citizens, as Satter does, one soon realizes that no one in the ruling class much cares for the people...

...Satter has always been a staunch anti-Communist, but unlike many commentators on the right, he never fell for Yeltsin or Putin, either...

...There is one question, however, that even Satter was afraid to ask...

...As if to confirm that Western investors are right to be scared, the past few months have seen a new wave of high-profile contract killings of leading businessmen, including Farit Gazimov, the general director of a Yukos subsidiary...

...The most explosive revelations in Satter's Darkness at Dawn concern the "Ryazan incident" of September 22, 1999, when local police disarmed a bomb in the basement of a residential building...

...The reason for this divergence is that Satter doesn't rely on the kind of elite movers and shakers most Western journalists approach in Russia...

...Such links between Moscow power brokers and organized crime have been documented in the West by such writers as Stephen Handelman, Chrystia Freeland, and Martin McCauley...

...He prefers the company of lowly dissidents and human rights activists, unpaid teachers and miners, grieving soldiers' mothers, and beleaguered small businessmen...

...His naval admirals delayed access to the submarine's resting site in the Barents sea to a team of experienced Norwegian divers for a crucial week during which the last survivors are now known to have drowned...

...To cover its tracks, the Federal Security Service accused the head of the Ryazan police bomb squad, Vladimir Tkachenko, of not having prepared his gas analyzer properly— insinuating he may have been drunk on the very alcohol needed to clean it—thus making possible an erroneous detection of hexogen...

...Are you going . . . to step three times on the same rakes in the same movie...

...Politicians, journalists, and investors may want to remember the fate of Vladimir Petukhov, the mayor of Nefteyugansk, who was murdered in 1998 just three days after he had concluded a successful hunger strike that forced Yukos to undergo an audit— which exposed its nonpayment of taxes and wages...

...This temperamental bias somewhat skews, to be sure, the portrait of Russia that emerges in Satter's writing, which is always bleaker than seems humanly possible...

...What if a majority of Russians have already come to the same conclusion he did about Ryazan—but don't care...

...Local residents were then congratulated for their "vigilance...

...As the former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky recently asked an American reporter, "Do you guys ever learn...

...Many early cheerleaders in the West were taken aback by Putin's callous approach to the infamous Kursk submarine crash of August 2000...

...Following on the heels of murderous apartment bombings in Buinaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk, each attributed to Chechen terrorists, the Ryazan bomb prompted then-prime minister Putin to launch a bombing raid on Grozny the next night...

...Instead, the Federal Security Service abruptly changed its story, claiming that its agents had indeed placed the bomb as part of a "training exercise...

...It's a sign of the social hell to which Russia has descended that a common cause of urban death is for people to drop into sinkholes filled with boiling water from leaking pipes, because cost-cutting construction companies have city regulators in their pockets...

...The facts are as follows...

...Clear evidence has emerged only about the thwarted Ryazan attack—and this evidence implicates the Russian Federal Security Service...

...This was a gratuitous smear, and absurd on its face: As Tkachenko later explained to a reporter from Novaya Gazeta, alcohol is not even used to clean the type of gas analyzer he used...

...Just look at the Potemkin village that was Putin's Petersburg during the tricentennial celebrations a few months ago, when the government reportedly asked residents of the city to leave, lest their presence spoil the atmosphere for visiting dignitaries...

...Not coincidentally, Lebe-dev's boss, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, had recently announced political ambitions...

...BY SEAN MCMEEKIN There was a curious moment this spring, when much of America's political and media class affected enormous surprise to discover that Russia had been arming Saddam Hussein and training his Mukhabarat thugs as late as last year...

...One hopes such revelations about the true nature of the Putin regime will cause at least a few people to abandon the idea that the Kremlin shares our moral and strategic concerns...

...If policymakers, journalists, and Wall Street's fund managers wish to avoid getting another Russian rake in the face, they should read David Satter's Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State...

...In early July, Yuri Shchekochikhin, another Duma deputy hated by the Kremlin since his days as a muckraking reporter, died from a suspicious-sounding "severe allergic reaction...

...His reporting from the late Soviet period, collected in an earlier volume called Age of Delirium, was sympathetic to the currents of glasnost and yet entirely free of the Gorbyma-nia to which most of his liberal counterparts fell prey...

...The Kremlin has sealed off all evidence relating to the Ryazan incident for seventy-five years, but Satter, for his part, has no doubts about the Federal Security Service's guilt...

...This shouldn't have shocked anyone acquainted with Putin's past...

...The story Satter tells could not be more different from the ebullient spin often heard in the business press, which has been touting Russia's "emerging market" since the early Yeltsin years (save for a brief spell of sobriety following the financial crash of 1998...

...one of the leading opposition parties in the Duma...

...In what may have been a sick in-joke among Putin's KGB friends, two of Yushenkov's own party loyalists were charged with his April murder...

...And what about Mikhail Khodor-kovsky, Russia's richest oligarch and owner of Yukos, whom many now expect to succeed Putin in 2008...

...One does not have to be a Russophobe to conclude that Putin does not share American values when it comes to, say, the rights of ordinary citizens...

...But no one is as good as Satter at explaining how "Russia's criminal state" cruelly injures the lives of little people—in a society where it is ordinary for gangs to kidnap babies for profit from government maternity hospitals, where soldiers' corpses from the Chechen war are routinely sent to the wrong families, and where rampant bribes make it nearly impossible for the poor to obtain justice even for crimes that take place in front of multiple witnesses...

...Perhaps it is this strain of cynicism in the national character Satter had in mind when he dedicated Darkness at Dawn "to the honest people of Russia...

...To this day, none of the 1999 bombings has ever been conclusively linked to Chechen rebel leaders, who have consistently denied responsibility...

...After all, they elected Putin on March 26, 2000, several days after NTV aired its damning report on Ryazan...

...This summer, it was the turn of the business community to gasp in shock as Platon Lebedev, financial architect of the impending Yukos-Sibneft oil merger, was arrested on dubious charges of "theft of state property...

...As far as that goes, it isn't hard to find Russians who still hold Stalin up as a hero, knowing perfectly well that he murdered millions of their countrymen...

...The Russian president failed even to interrupt his vacation until the scandal had grown into a major political embarrassment...

...The bomb in the new version, contained merely sugar and a fake detonator, despite its having tested positive for the explosive hexogen (the same material used in the earlier three apartment bombings...

...Sat-ter's warnings about Russia's dire environmental and demographic situation, too, owe much to the research of Murray Feshbach...

...Why was any of this surprising...

...Though it was never proved in a court of law, local protesters were certain their beloved mayor had been murdered on orders of Khodorkovsky...

...But the advantages of Satter's ground-up perspective manifest themselves again and again...

...Once the Norwegians had exposed the breathtaking negligence of the Russian navy, the Russian media cynically fed their readers another transparent lie— that the submarine had been sunk by a hostile NATO torpedo...

...Let us hope enough of them emerge in the coming years to bring an end to the regime that oppresses them and endangers the world...

...More frightening still are the murders of both chairmen of Sergei Yushenkov's Liberal Russia, Sean McMeekin teaches Russian studies at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey...