Explosives or Sugar? The Deadly Art of Distraction in Putin’s Russia - with Helena Merriman

Summary

Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford

Episode: "Explosives or Sugar? The Deadly Art of Distraction in Putin’s Russia" (March 6, 2026)

Guest: Helena Merriman (BBC, Host of "Putin and the Apartment Bombs")
Summary by Section with Timestamps, Key Moments, and Quotes

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Overview:

In this gripping episode, Tim Harford and guest Helena Merriman dissect the mysterious and deadly apartment bombings in Russia in September 1999. These attacks, their investigation, and their aftermath set the stage for Vladimir Putin’s ascent to power and transformed Russian politics and media. Merriman, host of the new BBC podcast "Putin and the Apartment Bombs," delves into the chaos, conspiracy, and propaganda that shrouded these events, examining not just the facts, but the lessons about distraction, journalistic scrutiny, and the wielding of narrative by those in power.

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The 1999 Russian Apartment Bombings: Setting the Scene

[01:50–06:24]

• Backdrop of Tension: In September 1999, Russia was terrorized by a series of nighttime bombings targeting residential apartment blocks. Around 300 people were killed, putting the nation on edge.
• The Ryazan Incident:
  • Alexei, a vigilant resident in the city of Ryazan, spots a suspicious car and alerts police. They discover sacks of white powder and a ticking timer—initially believed to be the same explosive used in earlier attacks.
  • Police evacuate the building, detonate the device, and public figures praise Alexei as a hero.
  • The next day, the government claims it was only a security service "training exercise," and that the sacks contained sugar, not explosives—leaving residents skeptical.
• Putin’s Rise:
  • Vladimir Putin, then little-known, seizes on the panic. His immediate military response and strongman persona catapult his popularity:

    "But 48 hours on, officials declared that the Rezan bomb wasn’t a terror attack, but an anti terror training exercise carried out by Russia’s security service, the FSB. And that white powder in the sacks? Not hexagon after all, but sugar." (Tim Harford, 05:06)

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Russia in the Late 90s: Economic Hardship, Corruption, and Unrest

[06:24–08:21]

• Economic Ruin Following Soviet Collapse:
  • Yeltsin’s “shock therapy” dramatically worsened living conditions.

    "Inflation soared to over 2000% ... Effectively, people’s savings were wiped ... The ruble collapsed. Dollars were the only thing that was worth anything." (Helena Merriman, 07:06–7:25)

• Corruption and Oligarch Power:
  • The rapid privatization led to emergence of oligarchs, creating unprecedented wealth disparities and widespread corruption.
• Unrest in Chechnya:
  • Chechnya’s failed bid for independence in the 1990s fueled continuing violence and unfinished national business.

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The Bombings Unfold: Terror and Propaganda

[09:28–10:54]

• Timeline and Impact:
  • Four deadly bombings struck four cities in 16 days. The brutality was amplified by the timing (late nights) and high casualty rates.

    "You can see how lives would have been lived in the apartment before this bomb exploded. Ninety-four people are killed. And because it's Moscow, the story really breaks out." (Helena Merriman, 09:47–10:09)

  • Widespread fear:

    "The one question on everyone’s lips is, who will be next?" (Helena Merriman, 10:54)

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The Ryazan "Bomb": Confusion, Suspicion, and Cover-up

[11:05–15:00]

• Suspicious Discovery and Police Action:
  • Residents evacuate, a manhunt begins, and a tapped phone call links the suspects not to Chechnya, but to the FSB—Russia’s internal security service.
  • The suspects are arrested, reveal FSB IDs, and claim the operation was a drill.
• Official Response and Public Skepticism:
  • The government issues conflicting explanations; "tests" on the white powder are reversed (from explosives to sugar).
  • Official: “training exercise”; public: outright disbelief.

    "Well, unsurprisingly, they [the residents] don’t believe a word of it. Even the local FSB are completely confused ..." (Helena Merriman, 14:37)

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Putin's Meteoric Rise to Power

[18:40–20:50]

• From Unknown Bureaucrat to War Hero:

  "Back in August, his approval ratings for the presidency were just 2%. He was short. He had quite a forgettable face. There was this phrase in Russian, syrup, miska, which means gray mouse..." (Helena Merriman, 19:04–19:33)

  • Capitalizing on crisis, Putin becomes the face of decisive action, his ratings jump from 2% to 40% in months.
• Embracing a Tough Persona:

  "He calls the bombers rabid animals... It's the language of the gutter and people love it." (Tim Harford & Helena Merriman, 20:27–20:39)

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Press Freedom and the NTV Showdown

[21:00–25:14]

• Media Pushback:
  • NTV, Russia’s independent channel, doggedly investigates the bombings and questions the official narrative.
  • A live TV debate pits FSB agents against Ryazan residents—publicly, dramatically, and, for the FSB, humiliatingly:

    "It really took me back to ... watching those kind of tabloid daytime TV Jerry Springer shows … But here the question is, did you try and bomb my apartment?" (Helena Merriman, 23:35)

  • Resident skepticism is apparent when an apparent plant in the audience claims to support the FSB ("We don't recognize this guy").
• Government Clampdown:
  • Within weeks, NTV is forcibly taken over; its owner imprisoned; Putin is elected president.

    "A few weeks later, FSB commandos break into NTV headquarters. They throw the owner of NTV in prison and it's then taken over by a state owned company." (Helena Merriman, 25:39)

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Western Responses: Wishful Thinking and Missed Warnings

[26:02–27:01]

• Global Leaders Welcome Putin:
  • Western politicians, including Tony Blair and George W. Bush, embrace Putin, misreading his intentions.

  "I looked the man in the eye. I found it to be very straightforward and trustworthy." (George W. Bush, quoted by Helena Merriman, 26:44)

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The Berezovsky–Litvinenko Connection: Investigation and Tragedy

[27:01–38:51]

• Oligarch Berezovsky’s Exile and Campaign:
  • Once a Putin kingmaker, now exiled in London, Berezovsky accuses Putin and the FSB publicly but isn’t taken seriously—discrediting the “inside job” theory from the start.
• Alexander Litvinenko’s Investigation and Death:
  • Former FSB agent Litvinenko investigates the bombings, publishing "FSB Blows Up Russia."
  • He uncovers a disturbing episode: the Russian Duma speaker prematurely announces a bombing in Volgodonsk—three days before the actual event:

    "Either that or it’s just a wild coincidence..." (Helena Merriman, 35:38)

  • Litvinenko is poisoned in London in 2006; a later public inquiry concludes the Russian state likely ordered the murder. Berezovsky, too, is later found dead under suspicious circumstances.
  • Others investigating the bombings suffer similar fates—murders and mysterious poisonings:

    "There's quite a pile up of bodies ..." (Helena Merriman, 38:15)

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Absence of Hard Evidence and Competing Theories

[39:01–40:29]

• Deliberate Erasure:
  • Bombed buildings quickly demolished, removing forensic evidence.
• Main Theories:
  • Putin: Chechen militants are responsible, fitting a pattern of terrorist attacks.
  • Detractors: FSB involvement, perhaps in collusion with Chechens or rogue actors.
  • FSB and Putin always deny, with Putin’s 2000 biography stating:

    "No one in the Russian special services would be capable of such a crime against his own people." (Helena Merriman, 40:17)

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Lessons: Distraction, Journalism, and Power

[40:41–45:14]

• Key Lesson—Investigate the Impossible:

  "... one lesson from this story is that in the chaos of events, we have to keep a healthy curiosity in the unbelievable explanations." (Helena Merriman, 41:18)

• Journalism and Distraction:
  • Journalists naturally focus on what’s visible and new (the Chechnya war). The less “shiny” story of the apartment bombs gets neglected—sometimes by distraction, not just censorship.
  • Veteran BBC correspondents express regret for not investigating further:

    "I think we were distracted by the war, which started very quickly. I think it’s quite painful to confront that we should have covered it more and we didn’t... the kind of groupthink, some missed opportunities." (Andrew Harding, 42:38)

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The Power of Narrative, Wishful Thinking, and Propaganda

[43:20–46:56]

• Putin’s Image Abroad:
  • Western journalists and leaders initially hoped for a benign, modernizing Russian leader following decades of Cold War tension.

    "Forgive us, my generation, for thinking we're on a flight path into Russia becoming normal." (Jeremy Vine, 44:40)

• Firehose of Falsehood:
  • Modern Russian propaganda moves from consistent storylines to a "blizzard" of contradictory claims, actively preventing focus and scrutiny.

    "The pattern was the same. Now, they moved very fast to control these narratives. They would flood the media with different versions of events ... " (Helena Merriman, 46:56–47:43)

• Contemporary Parallels:
  • This distraction technique is now seen globally, not just in Russia.

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Final Reflections

[48:19–49:04]

• Journalists, Citizens, and Everyone Must Decide:

  "What's the real story? What's the distraction? Where should we spend our time? And I think that question is going to be increasingly important, but increasingly hard to answer." (Helena Merriman, 48:19–48:37)

• "Putin and the Apartment Bombs" podcast is highlighted as a deeper dive into the full story.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the Ryazan Incident:

  "You have the police who rush in, find what appears to be a bomb, three sacks full of white powder, and they evacuate the apartment building incredibly quickly... And what happens the next day is you then have a manhunt for the people who did it... The operator... listens in and she hears... 'we can't get out. The city's been shut down. Help us. What should we do?' ... it goes to the number belonging to... the FSB." (Helena Merriman, 11:12–12:52)

• On the FSB’s Official Line:

  "This was just a training exercise. A training exercise that the people in Rizan passed with flying colors." (FSB, reported by Helena Merriman, 13:31)

• On Propaganda:

  "We don’t need a consistent story and we don’t need anything to be particularly believable. We just want lots and lots and lots of different things, different contradictory views, so that people are just lost in the blizzard of claim and counterclaim..." (Tim Harford, 45:24–45:46)

• On Journalistic Regret:

  "There will always be things that we’ve missed." (Helena Merriman, 43:11)

• On Wishful Thinking:

  "Wishful thinking is a very powerful thing. I think people really wanted to believe that the Soviet Union wasn’t coming back." (Tim Harford, 44:26)

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Key Segment Timestamps

• [01:50] – Introduction to Ryazan incident and setup
• [06:24] – Merriman on Russia in the late 1990s
• [11:05] – The Ryazan incident investigated
• [18:40] – Putin’s rise, power, and public persona shift
• [21:00] – Russian media and NTV’s challenge to the official narrative
• [27:01] – The Berezovsky and Litvinenko investigations
• [35:29] – Volgodonsk bomb prediction and parliamentary transcript
• [36:52] – Litvinenko’s poisoning and subsequent deaths
• [39:01] – The absence of hard forensic evidence and alternate theories
• [40:41] – Lessons for journalists and the problem of distraction
• [43:20] – Western perceptions of Putin
• [45:24] – Firehose of falsehood, propaganda, and distraction
• [48:19] – Final reflections on the blurring line between truth and distraction

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Conclusion

Through expert storytelling and incisive analysis, this episode offers not only a riveting true crime narrative but a meditation on propaganda, the dangers of distraction, and the responsibilities of journalism in times of chaos. The lessons are painfully relevant today, both for those who remember 1999 and for anyone navigating a world awash with contradictory information and fleeting attention.

Transcript

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[Tim Harford]

Pushkin. It's half past nine at night on 22nd September 1999, and middle aged dad Alexei is heading home after a long day at work. He lives in the city of Razan, not too far from Moscow, and like all Russians, he's on high alert. Bombs have been detonated at night in four residential apartment blocks and across the country this month, killing some 300 people. Everyone is terrified. Volunteers take on night watch shifts, and some people choose to sleep on the streets rather than risk being killed in their beds. No one has taken responsibility for the attacks, but Chechen militants are blamed. Chechnya is a republic down in the south of Russia, much closer to Iran and Turkey than to Moscow. There's a violent struggle for independence there, and acts of terrorism. Six days on from the last explosion, Alexei spots a white larder car parked outside his apartment block in Ruzan. Why are the last two digits of the number plate obscured, he wonders. As Alexei watches, a man bursts out of the apartment block basement and into the car, which speeds Away. Alexei calls the police. In the basement, they find three sacks of white powder and a ticking timer set for dawn. The white powder appears to be hexagonal, a military grade explosive used in at least one of the previous bombings. Terrified people stream onto the street as the building is evacuated. The device is safely detonated and the residents, shocked and frightened but glad to be alive, return to their homes. The city has been saved and Alexei is a hero. The new Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, is quick to praise the vigilance of the Ruzan residents. And the following day, September 23rd, he orders an airstrike on the Chechen capital, Grozny. The second Chechen war has begun and Putin sees his popularity soar. But 48 hours on, officials declared that the Rezan bomb wasn't a terror attack, but an anti terror training exercise carried out by Russia's security service, the fsb. And that white powder in the sacks? Not Hexagon after all, but sugar. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. Today, Vladimir Putin is regarded as one of the most powerful and ruthless leaders in the world. But back in 1999, he was largely unknown. The fifth prime minister in 18 months, he wasn't expected to last long, but his response to the attacks on residential homes changed all that and soothed a nation paralysed by panic. To this day, no one can agree on who planted the explosives or why. Was something missed back in September 1999? And what happens when we reassess events 25 years on, Putin and the apartment bombs is the subject of a new BBC podcast, the History Bureau from BBC Studios. And I am delighted to say the presenter of the History Bureau, Helena Merriman, is here to tell us all about it. Helena?

[Helena Merriman]

Hi, Tim.

[Tim Harford]

Welcome to Cautionary Tales. Good to have you here. Vladimir Putin, he has essentially been the Russian leader for a quarter of a century. More than that, it is hard to remember him not being in charge. But at the beginning of your story, he wasn't. So take us back to the situation in Russia in the late 1990s.

[Helena Merriman]

So this is eight years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. You had this new leader, Boris Yeltsin, who at first had been incredibly popular. He was charismatic, he was flamboyant, and he'd promised to drag Russia into the 21st century, to embrace capitalism and to free prices overnight. And that's what he did. But he went too far, too fast. He called it shock therapy, and that's exactly what it was. Inflation soared to over 2000%, which meant that Effectively, people's savings were wiped. And when you look at footage and pictures from back then, you have these incredible images of old people sitting in the streets, selling everything they had, even the fur coats that they were wearing. The ruble collapsed. Dollars were the only thing that was worth anything. And so at the same time as you had this huge disappointment in Yeltsin, you also had this extraordinary rise in corruption. And that came along really with this new breed of business tycoons, the oligarchs, who were incredibly wealthy. They'd bought up former state owned companies at knocked down prices, and as they got richer, they'd moved into politics and they were funneling money to Yeltsin to keep him in power. But. But by the late 90s, there was this realization that Yeltsin was now old, drunk. When he was seen in public, he was slurring his words. Everyone knew he had to go.

[Tim Harford]

And the other thing that is going on at the time is the war in Chechnya.

[Helena Merriman]

Again, it goes back to 1991. The seeds were planted in the collapse of the Soviet Union. You have different states breaking free. And Chechnya, which is a republic in the south of Russia, they wanted that too. It was partly about identity, had a very different culture to the rest of Russia, but it was also about decades of very brutal treatment by successive Russian leaders. So they declare their independence, but Russia has no intention of letting Chechnya go. So it sends in the tanks and you have this very brutal war which takes place between 1994 and 1996. Thousands are killed. Horrific accounts of human rights abuses on both sides. And it ends with a peace deal. But Chechens don't win their independence. So there's this sense of unfinished business on both sides.

[Tim Harford]

And with this as the Backdrop, we have September 1999 and these bombs. And this is a terrifying time to be an ordinary Russian.

[Helena Merriman]

And that's really down to the quite horrifying details of exactly how these bombs play out. So the very first One is on September 4, in a very remote town called Buynaksk, which is thousands of miles from Moscow. It's nine in the evening. People have been watching a football match on TV. A truck bomb explodes, 64 people are killed. And it makes the news. But it's not a huge story because this city is quite near the border with Chechnya. There's been fighting in the past, so there's a few headlines. The country then moves on. It's really the second bomb that gets people so scared because this bomb goes off in Moscow and this is the early hours of the morning. The footage is horrifying. It's the front of the apartment has been pulled off. It's almost like looking at a picture of a doll's house. You can see how lives would have been lived in the apartment before this bomb exploded. 94 people are killed. And because it's Moscow, the story really breaks out.

[Tim Harford]

And that's not the last one.

[Helena Merriman]

Exactly. So there's the third bomb. This is the 13th of September, five in the morning. Over 100 people killed in that third bomb. And this is when the panic really sets in. These bombs are going off in the middle of the night, when people are asleep and when the apartments are at their fullest. And then it's only a few days later after that, that on the 16th of September, this is in a town called Volgodonsk. The fourth bomb explodes.

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[Helena Merriman]

So, just to summarise, over a period of just 16 days, four apartment buildings are blown up, killing around 300 people. The one question on everyone's lips is, who will be next?

[Tim Harford]

Yeah. And. Well, it seems that Rouzan will be next. So tell us what happened to the residents of this apartment block on 22nd

[Helena Merriman]

September, as you set out in your introduction. You have this guy, Alexei, who sees this white car very suspiciously parked, with this piece of paper covering part of the license plate. You have the police who rush in, find what appears to be a bomb, three sacks full of white powder, and they evacuate the apartment building incredibly quickly. I mean, babies are pulled out of bathtubs with just towels around them. People race out of this apartment in their dressing gown and pajamas. They spend the whole night in this local cinema. They're terrified. And what happens the next day is you then have a manhunt for the people who did it. They block off the roads, they stop trains. The airport is shut down. And there's this extraordinary moment where a phone call comes into the Rouzan phone exchange. So there's a man at a payphone in Rouzan who wants to be connected to a number outside the city. So the operator, a female operator, is sitting there, and she connects the call. And then she does something she's not meant to do. She listens in and she hears this man in the middle of a city, in the middle of a manhunt, saying, we can't get out. The city's been shut down. Help us. What should we do? And she hears a voice on the other end saying, you've got to split up. You have to get out. So Unsurprisingly, she thinks this is pretty suspicious. She writes the number down, she passes the number along to local police. Given that everyone is assuming that the bombs are the work of Chechen militants, you'd assume that this phone number would go to a number in Chechnya. Yeah, but it doesn't. It goes to the number belonging to. To the fsb, Russia's internal security service.

[Tim Harford]

This is incredible. So the police now have this lead, which is a very weird lead. Maybe it's the fsb. That's a very strange tip off to get. Then they find the car abandoned. Yeah. So then what?

[Helena Merriman]

They manage to track down two men who look just like the drawings of the would be bombers. They arrest them and. And then here's where things get even weirder. The men say, we're not bombers, we're fsb. And they take out their ID cards to prove it.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah. So this is very odd. Quite suspicious. What is the official reaction?

[Helena Merriman]

The official reaction is nothing. For two days. For two days, there's silence. Then, on the 24th of September, Russia's Interior Minister is giving a speech to police officers, civil servants about this wave of bomb attacks. And? And he's listing all the recent successes in the fight against terrorism. And then he gets to Ruzan and he says he's very proud of what people in Rizan did. And he doesn't mention the phone call or the men with the FSB ID cards. And then 30 minutes after he makes that announcement, talking about how people in Rizan stopped this terrorist attack. The head of the fsb, a man called Nikolai Patrushev, he appears in the lobby of the same building, and a journalist sees him, asks him a question about Razan. So Patrichev says there was no bomb. The white powder in the sacks wasn't hexagon, but it was sugar. This was just a training exercise. A training exercise that the people in Rizan passed with flying colors. And a few days later, the telephone operator is even given a color television as a prize.

[Tim Harford]

Well, that's all very wonderful. What do the people of Rizan think about that?

[Helena Merriman]

Well, unsurprisingly, they believe a word of it. Even the local FSB are completely confused, because they tested the powder and they found that it was hexagon. But a few days later, something happens and they change their story. And they say, oh, we got it wrong. The powder in the sacks wasn't hexagon, it was sugar. Our testing equipment must have been contaminated in Chechnya.

[Tim Harford]

Well, I'm not totally surprised that they didn't buy this, but Prime Minister Vladimir Putin seems to he or orders military strikes against Chechnya. Is that going to be enough to stop people asking questions about the strange goings on in Razan? We will find out after the break.

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[Tim Harford]

We're back and I'm talking to Helena Merriman. She is the host of Putin and the Apartment Bombs. So, Helena, despite Chechnya denying responsibility for the apartment block attacks, and despite the Ryazan suspects turning out to be the FSB Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin seeks revenge against Chechnya. So what happened and how did it work out for his popularity?

[Helena Merriman]

So the day after this thwarted bomb in Razan, Putin sends jet planes to bomb Grozny, the capital. And, and at the time, Putin was not well known by the Russian public. So back in August, his popularity ratings, his approval ratings for the presidency were just 2%. He was short. He had quite a forgettable face. There was this phrase in Russian, Syria, miska, which means gray mouse, that people use to describe him because he was just thought to be so uncharismatic. The only thing people knew about him was that he'd once been head of the fsb, Russia's internal security service, and that was it.

[Tim Harford]

So it's not so much that he's hated more that nobody even really knows who he is. He's just underestimated and overlooked exactly that.

[Helena Merriman]

And as the fifth prime minister in 18 months, people think, well, we barely need to get to know him because he probably won't last. But instead, around this time, Putin undergoes this extraordinary transformation from this former FSB guy in a suit to a man who's suddenly wearing military uniform, jumping on planes, giving these heart thumping speeches to soldiers on the front line. And his popularity soars. So it goes from 2% back in the summer to just a few months later after the bombs in this new war in Chechnya, his rating is already over 40%.

[Tim Harford]

And he's got this really punchy style. Suddenly he calls the bombers rabid animals and he says, even if they hide in the toilets, we'll catch them there. It's a very different style from this grey mouse in a gray suit.

[Helena Merriman]

It's the language of the gutter and people love it. And he sees the reaction and he sees that people love it. And he takes his cues from that and really leans into this image of the Vengeful military guy.

[Tim Harford]

And there is now a war on in Chechnya, of course, that is going to absorb a lot of attention. Is anybody still asking questions about the apartment bombs?

[Helena Merriman]

Western journalists are focused on two stories now, which is the rise of Putin and this new wall. But journalists in Russia are asking these rather uncomfortable questions. And one of the first networks to really get at this story is a TV network called ntv. So this is a network that had been founded a few years earlier. It was broadly modeled on the BBC and cnn, and it was one of the first to make western style documentaries and discussion programs. For example, one of their shows was a satirical puppet show called Cookly, which was a bit like Britain's Spitting Image or a sort of puppet version of Saturday Night Live in America. And the ratings were huge. I mean, almost half the country, half of Russia would tune in to watch it. So in ratings terms, I mean, this was the equivalent of the American Super Bowl. And actually it'd been around for a few years. In Yeltsin, he didn't really mind it, but Putin hated it. And that's probably because every week the star puppet of the show was a puppet based on Vladimir Putin, which depicted him as a baby, often a very ugly baby. And Putin put a huge amount of pressure on that TV show to get rid of the Putin puppet, but they didn't, and they kept going with it.

[Tim Harford]

And the theme was that this baby had all of its needs taken care of by the oligarchs.

[Helena Merriman]

Exactly. That the oligarchs were essentially manipulating him and orchestrating everything around him. Journalists on NTV start digging into the apartment bombing story, asking these awkward questions. They don't let it go. And they decide. In March, just a few weeks before the presidential election of which Vladimir Putin is now a candidate, they decide to invite the FSB into their studios to take part in a live chat show where they would invite residents from Ruzan to face off the fsb.

[Tim Harford]

So just to be clear, Putin was Prime minister and now he's running for president, which is a more powerful position.

[Helena Merriman]

Exactly. Because on 31-12-99, Boris Yeltsin makes this shock announcement where he resigns early.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah.

[Helena Merriman]

And Vladimir Putin is made acting president. He's already become incredibly powerful.

[Tim Harford]

He's standing in the election and. Yeah, you get this crazy sounding show.

[Helena Merriman]

Exactly. And this crazy sounding show is just three days before the presidential election.

[Tim Harford]

This is incredible. I mean, it sounds like Jerry Springer, only with the CIA involved. I mean, it's extraordinary. You've got the FSB and you've got the residents. And so how does that go down

[Helena Merriman]

when you watch it? It really took me back to being a teenager and watching those kind of tabloid daytime TV Jerry Springer shows where you'd have someone saying, you know, did you sleep with my boyfriend? But here the question is, did you try and bomb my apartment? So on one side of the studio you have these ordinary men and women, these people that were in that apartment building in Rozan. And then the other side you have these FSB men in suits. And it's extraordinary hour of TV where resident after resident stands up and they're shouting at the fsb. They're saying, how on earth can you expect us to believe that this was just a training exercise when you were dragging us out of our buildings in the middle of the night? No one believes it. And the FSB sit there and they, they say, well, this was a training exercise. And there's this extraordinary moment where one of them holds up this brown cardboard bag that's been sort of sellotaped together. He holds it up to the camera and he says, all the evidence is in here, but we're never going to tell you what it is.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah, I'm sure that went down very well. And there was another moment where someone stands up and says, I'm a resident. I think the FSB are, are absolutely right.

[Helena Merriman]

And you see everyone else looking at him saying, we don't recognize this guy. We've never seen him before, so he's probably been put there by someone else. Yeah, the ratings were huge. And you have to wonder what the FSB were thinking by going on this show. And you see the expression on their faces afterwards. I mean, they look completely shell shocked.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah. It is unimaginable that this could happen in Russia now. So how did we get from that degree of press freedom to the current repression? What did Putin do? How quickly did he respond to clamp down on this kind of thing?

[Helena Merriman]

I mean, it's a great question because I think in so many ways this particular moment is where we first see just how much Putin is going to make the clampdown of the press a feature of the country he will create.

[Tim Harford]

Does not want this to happen again.

[Helena Merriman]

No. So just a few days after that show, there's a call from a government minister who says to ntv, the show will never be forgotten. A few weeks later, FSB commandos break into NTV headquarters. They throw the owner of NTV in prison and it's then taken over by a state owned company. And then just three days after the show Putin's elected president.

[Tim Harford]

The rest of the world welcome him into the diplomatic fold.

[Helena Merriman]

Absolutely. Because the rest of the world. It seems like a very neat story here, which is that first you had Boris Yeltsin, who seemed to be moving Russia into the Western orbit, and here you had Vladimir Putin. And I think many Western leaders thought. Thought it would be a continuation of the same. So Tony Blair phones him to congratulate him. The following year, Putin goes to meet George W. Bush at the White House, and there's this very famous exchange where an American journalist asks George W. Bush if Putin can be trusted. And Bush comes up with that very famous reply. I looked the man in the eye. I found it to be very straightforward and trustworthy.

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We had a very good dialogue.

[Tim Harford]

I was able to

[Helena Merriman]

get a sense of his soul.

[Tim Harford]

So it seems the conversation in the west, at least, has long since moved on from the apartment bombs. But people are still asking questions in Russia.

[Helena Merriman]

Absolutely, in Russia. And also Russians who come to Britain are still asking questions. And one of those is a man called Boris Berezovsky.

[Tim Harford]

So tell me about him.

[Helena Merriman]

So he was one of the very first Russian oligarchs. He was incredibly charismatic. He was confident, he was astonishingly wealthy. But he had something that really gave him the edge. So he didn't just have money, but he had influence because he was a main shareholder in channel one, which was Russia's most watched TV channel, and he uses that back in 99 to help Putin become president. So he, Berezovsky, thinks of himself as a Russian kingmaker, but as so often happens with the kingmakers, the kings eventually turn against them. And that's what happens with Putin, who, when he arrives in power, feels very threatened by the oligarchs who helped get him there. He turns against Berezovsky. He maneuvers Channel One out of his hands. They're locked into this bitter feud, and Berezovsky escapes to London, and he starts his life there in exile. And one of the very first things he does is to fund an investigation into the. He gives this press conference, and he also gives an interview to Newsnight, to the BBC, where he accuses not only the FSB of being involved in the apartment bombs, but says that Vladimir Putin knew about them, too.

[Tim Harford]

How seriously do people take this former billionaire oligarch?

[Helena Merriman]

Not seriously at all, because here's a man who has every reason to make these claims against Putin. He's Putin's archenemy. And so, because Berezovsky is so closely tied to these allegations that perhaps the FSB were involved in the bombs. It almost discredits the theory from day one because he's seen as tainted. No one believes him.

[Tim Harford]

Well, he may be tainted, but he is not going to give this up. Boris Berezovsky asks people to investigate on his behalf and one of those people is shortly to meet a very unpleasant end. We will find out more after the break.

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[Tim Harford]

We are back and I am talking to Helena Merriman, the presenter of Putin and the Apartment Bombs, which is the first series of a new BBC podcast, the History Bureau. So, Helena, tell me about Alexander Litvinenko.

[Helena Merriman]

This is a name that people, particularly listeners in Britain, know because he was poisoned on the streets of London and he died very slowly in the glare of the media spotlight. But what I think most people won't know is that he'd spent the last few years of his life investigating the apartment bomb story. So he'd been in the FSB since the 90s. He was part of this special unit which investigated crime in Russia. And one of his first jobs had been to monitor Boris Berezovsky, this incredibly important oligarch. He'd been asked to kill him. He refused. Litvinenko told Boris Berezovsky, and the two men became friends. And Litvinenko, he's a real believer at this point in the ideals of the fsb.

[Claude AI Advertiser]

And.

[Helena Merriman]

And when he discovers that it's riddled with corruption, he goes to see Vladimir Putin to tell him about it.

[Tim Harford]

And Putin is the head of the FSB at the time.

[Helena Merriman]

Exactly. And he has this 10 minute meeting during which Litvinenko realizes he's made a huge mistake. He realizes Putin isn't interested in hearing about the corruption of the fsb. He leaves the meeting, this huge target on his back. But he doesn't go quietly. He then stages this press conference in November 98 with four other FSB officers. They are wearing masks to protect their identity. Alexander Litvinenko isn't. He's made a choice to be seen. He's then arrested after that press conference, put in prison for eight months. He comes out, he's put in prison again, and he realizes at this point that he can no longer live in Russia. So he escapes to Britain in November 2000. And at that point, Boris Berezovsky pays him to investigate the apartment bombing story. So Litvinenko starts interviewing victims whose relatives died he's tracking down government suspects. He's combing through parliamentary reports and really digging into this story.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah, I mean, what would he learn from a parliamentary report?

[Helena Merriman]

So this goes back to September 13, 1999, the time of the bombs. He finds a transcript from the Duma, the Russian Parliament, and it describes this moment where the speaker of the Parliament has taken to the floor and he's announcing a minute's silence for the victims of the bombings. He's then handed a note and he reads it aloud to the Parliament. He says, it's reported that an apartment has just been bombed in a town called Volgodonsk. This is the day of the third bomb. But the Speaker's got the name of the city wrong because actually the city that's just been bombed is Moscow. And at that point people think, okay, perhaps this is just an innocent mistake. So no one says anything. But then three days later, an apartment building is bombed in Volgodonsk.

[Tim Harford]

Right. I mean, that's a heck of a coincidence.

[Helena Merriman]

It's a heck of a coincidence.

[Tim Harford]

The presumption is somebody knew that Volgodonsk was going to be targeted.

[Helena Merriman]

Either that or it's just a wild coincidence to mistake the name of a city where a bomb explodes for the name of a city in a country as vast as Russia where the bomb would explode three days later.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah, I mean, I can think of a number of explanations, but most of them are sinister.

[Helena Merriman]

Yeah. And someone does spot this. So a few days later, a member of Parliament takes to the floor to ask a question about it. But what Litvinenko discovers in this transcript is that just as this person starts asking a question, his microphone was cut off. And that's it. No one brings it up again.

[Tim Harford]

So Litvinenko is making progress. What does he do with it?

[Helena Merriman]

So he writes up the results of his investigation into a book which he calls the FSB Blows Up Russia. So you can imagine what his conclusion is.

[Tim Harford]

Fairly straightforward title.

[Helena Merriman]

Yep. And the book comes out. This is in 2001. There's a few chapters published in Russian newspapers, but in the west, barely anything.

[Tim Harford]

And then a few years later, this horrific episode, which, I mean, Litvine Henkel was on the front page of every newspaper in the uk. This unforgettable image of this man. He looks like he's been going through chemotherapy. He has no hair. So what happened?

[Helena Merriman]

It's 2006, five years after his book comes out and he falls ill. At first it's suspected that perhaps it's a tummy bug. He goes to hospital and There, he rapidly disintegrates, his hair falls out, his organs fail. Takes two weeks before police say that he was probably poisoned. And in the end, it takes them sending off tests to nuclear testing site to reveal that it was polonium, which is a highly radioactive material. And you're right, there's the famous photo of him sitting in that hospital bed with his hair out, his tangle of wires covering his chest. And a few days later, he dies. And it's only once the British government carries out an inquiry into his death, which is not until 2016, that they conclude that he was poisoned by agents acting on behalf of the Russian state, and that the kill order probably came from Vladimir Putin himself, which we should say the Kremlin denies.

[Tim Harford]

By then, by 2016, Berezovsky's dead as well.

[Helena Merriman]

He's found dead in his home in Berkshire with a scarf around his neck. And at first, his death is described as suicide by hanging, which a year later, the coroner says it's impossible to say whether it was suicide or murder.

[Tim Harford]

Does anybody else mysteriously perish? After looking into the apartment bombings, there's

[Helena Merriman]

quite a pile up of bodies, Litvinenko and Berezovsky in Britain. But you also have these very strange, mysterious deaths in Russia, too. So there's an independent commission, so there's a group of parliamentarians and journalists, a few lawyers, and just a few years after they begin their work, one of them is shot outside his apartment. The other one falls ill. This story is going to sound familiar. He ends up in hospital. His hair falls out, his organs fail. Doctors say, oh, it was probably an allergic reaction. But a lot of journalists at the time say it was probably poisoning.

[Tim Harford]

We have heard a lot that sounds odd. Do we have any hard evidence, do we have any proof that the FSB bombed these apartments?

[Helena Merriman]

There's a real lack of forensic evidence in this story. And one of the reasons for that is that a few days after each of those buildings was blown up, the remains were demolished. So what you're left with is a lot of circumstantial evidence, which we've been looking through. Where that takes you, it depends on who you are. For the Russian government, they've always said, look, it's obvious the answer is the Chechen militants, they had the motive to do it. And they also say, look, it's part of their pattern of behavior. In the years following the bombs, there were numerous other attacks by Chechen militants, from the Moscow theater siege to Besland.

[Tim Harford]

And that is true.

[Helena Merriman]

That is true. And then others say, well, come on how do you explain the very strange events of Razan? How do you explain Volga Donsk? Look at how professional those bombs were. How could Chechen militants have got hands on as much hexagon that they would have needed to have bombed those apartments? Others say perhaps it was a strange combination of the two. Perhaps it was not a grand plot orchestrated from the upper levels of the fsb, but perhaps corrupt officers further down the chain working with Chechen militants. Others even say perhaps Boris Berezovsky was involved. The fsb, they've always denied any involvement in the apartment bombs. Vladimir Putin himself, he has responded to allegations about the bombs directly in his authorised biography that came out in 2000, and he said there, quote, no one in the Russian special services would be capable of such a crime against his own people.

[Tim Harford]

We uncautioning tales always try to learn lessons from the mistakes of the past. So what are the lessons you draw from this whole rather grim story?

[Helena Merriman]

First, it's important to say we still don't know who bombed those apartment buildings. And so the official explanation could well be correct. But what we do know is that a lot of journalists at the time didn't investigate the inconsistencies in the government story. I think there's two reasons for that. Firstly, it was because the alternative explanation at the time that the FSB was involved in bombing their own people, it just felt too impossible to believe. So I think one lesson from this story is that in the chaos of events, we have to keep a healthy curiosity in the unbelievable explanations. But I think it's also about the pressure of journalism. As news journalists, we're trained to chase what's new, what's dramatic and what's visible, what you can actually see. And so, you know, in this context of this story, it's understandable that journalists focused on this new war in Chechnya. It's harder to justify spending hours examining counterfactuals or unresolved questions. And so I think it's that uncomfortable thought that perhaps as journalists, we don't always miss things because of censorship or fear, but because the story isn't shiny enough.

[Tim Harford]

You spoke to many of your colleagues at the BBC about their experiences reporting on Russia. Looking back at what we, the evidence that we've now assembled, how are they feeling about the whole thing?

[Helena Merriman]

These were people who were making minute by minute decisions in an incredibly chaotic, confusing moment. And it's so easy to sit here with hindsight and point out mistakes that were made or threads that weren't pulled or questions that weren't asked, and I think they were very humble in saying they wish they had asked more questions about Rouzan. And one of the journalists I spoke to was BBC veteran correspondent Andrew Harding.

[Claude AI Advertiser]

I think we were distracted by the war, which started very quickly. I think it's quite painful to confront that we should have covered it more and we didn't. You know, it makes you think, and it's. It's a good reminder of how easy it is to fall into patterns in reporting, even when one thinks one's being correct and cautious, that there's the sort of consensus, thinking, the. The kind of group think some missed opportunities.

[Helena Merriman]

Yeah, probably in every story, if you were to take a journalist back, and I would include myself in this, too, in the reporting that I've done, there will always be things that we've missed.

[Tim Harford]

And one of the things that has changed about this story is that Vladimir Putin's reputation has changed. I think it's safe to say that Putin is now in the Western world, held in rather low regard by many people. That was not actually true. In 1999, 2000, he was viewed with quite a lot of hope. And so the idea that he knew about these bombings just seemed very hard to believe.

[Helena Merriman]

Exactly. That it was this almost comforting narrative that here was this new leader of Russia, one of the most important positions globally, who seemed to be moving the country in line with what so many Western leaders wanted. And I think the apartment bombing story fit the narrative that here was this leader cracking down on militants at a time when other leaders in the world were also cracking down on militants who were blowing things up. And so I think. Exactly your point, that we often want the smaller stories to make sense with what the bigger narratives at the time might be.

[Tim Harford]

And wishful thinking is a very powerful thing. I think people really wanted to believe that the Soviet Union wasn't coming back.

[Helena Merriman]

Exactly right. I mean, one of the people I interviewed for the series was BBC journalist Jeremy Vine.

[Tim Harford]

Look at where I'd come from as a someone born in 1965. For the whole of my childhood and my teenage years, I was lying in bed in Cheam in Surrey, thinking I had Russian nuclear missiles pointed at my head and they could go off at any time. And then along comes Gorbachev, and he seems wonderful, and then he's sort of deposed, and in comes Yeltsin, who, while constantly drunk, is also benign. And so forgive us, my generation, for thinking we're on a flight path into Russia becoming normal.

[Helena Merriman]

The way that he looked at this story and so many other journalists looked at this story was that, well, Putin must be telling the truth because of that desire to see him as someone who was changing Russia for the better.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah. I wanted to ask you about distraction and attention. You kind of alluded to it a moment ago in our episode of Cautionary Tales about the master forger, Eric Hebben. We talked about the Russian propaganda strategy. So Hebben was this kind of bizarre character who forged a lot of artwork, but also would make up stories about having forged artwork that he hadn't forged and that was actually perfectly genuine. And so there was like, got no idea what's true and what's not. But he was doing it at tremendous volume and it was always attention grabbing. And we made the parallel between Hebun and the Russian propaganda strategy. So back in the day, propaganda was you would try to come up with a convincing story that was backed up by the evidence, even if it wasn't actually true, and you would kind of stick to the story and maybe you could get people to believe your story. The Russians turned that on its head. They said, we don't need a consistent story and we don't need anything to be particularly believable. We just want lots and lots and lots of different things, different contradictory views, so that people are just lost in the blizzard of claim and counterclaim and can't focus on anything for long enough to really examine it. And when somebody like Berezovki pops up with some crazy sounding story, it's like, well, we hear crazy sounding stories every day, so whatever, we're not interested. So to what extent is this whole a story about not being able to focus on something important for long enough to really ask the right questions and being distracted by the next shiny thing?

[Helena Merriman]

I think not only is this story about that, but I think the last two decades of Putin's rule in Russia is about that. I mean, I think one of the reasons that this story was such an interesting one to tell now is that when you look at how the Kremlin handled the apartment bombs, it became a template, really, for how they managed so many other situations in Russia, too. Whether that was plane crashes or bombings or submarine disasters, the pattern was the same. Now, they moved very fast to control these narratives. They would flood the media with different versions of events that they can send journalists spinning to cover them, and then they close the investigations before any awkward questions can really take hold. And so I think that so much about this story is also about how power works in Russia.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah, even now, and maybe not just in Russia anymore. I feel that we have managed to independently reinvent the firehose of falsehood in the Western world, not necessarily coming from the top, but just the inability in a fragmented media world to concentrate on anything for any particular period of time. And so you've got, you know, with the latest Epstein releases, a distraction from Greenland was Greenland the distraction from Venezuela was Venezuela a distraction from Epstein was all of it a distraction from the collapse in the gold price or from Hamelania's documentary's doing? Or everything's a distraction from everything else.

[Helena Merriman]

Exactly. And I think that's a problem that not only journalists but everyone is trying to deal with now. What's the real story? What's the distraction? Where should we spend our time? And I think that question is going to be increasingly important, but increasingly hard to answer.

[Tim Harford]

Helena Merriman, thank you so much for joining us.

[Helena Merriman]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Tim Harford]

Helena is the presenter of Putin and the Apartment Bombs, which is the first series in the History Bureau, which is a BBC Studios podcast available to listen on BBC Sounds in the UK and on BBC.com globally and obviously wherever you get your podcasts.

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Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise, additional sound design by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio and Dan Jackson.

[Tim Harford]

Ben Nadaff Haffrey edited the scripts.

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without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brodie, Christina Sullivan, Keira Posey and Owen Miller.

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Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember

[Tim Harford]

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[Tim Harford]

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[Tim Harford]

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[Helena Merriman]

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