Metro Bomb

Charter97.org continues to publish extracts from Andrei Sannikov's book Belarusian Amerikanka or Elections under Dictatorship.

The beginning of extracts is available here.

- Meanwhile, beyond the walls of the Amerikanka, a serious financial crisis broke out. The miracle didn’t happen. The regime’s squandering of millions of dollars on buying voters, on amateurish PR and the reinforcement of the apparatus of oppression led, as we had predicted, to a hard currency fever and devaluation of the ruble and led Belarus to the edge of a default. Panic broke out because of the lack of foreign currency at exchange booths.

At the same time, the cases against us were falling apart. It was obvious that the authorities couldn’t put together either a conspiracy or attempts at a coup d’état or even a pathetic spy case. Western sanctions could become a reality, and the Kremlin wasn’t hurrying to bail out Belarus.

And during this period so catastrophic for Lukashenka, on April 11, 2011, there was an explosion in the Minsk metro, a terrorist attack.

Orlov literally exploded into my cell. He began to shout at me.

“This is all the doing of you and your friends!”

“What happened?” I asked, shocked.

“Turn on the TV, look at the news! There’s a terrorist attack in the metro!”

“You’ve turned off the signal.”

“I’m telling you, turn it on and look there’s blood, victims, wounded, dead people. Is that what you wanted?”

I thought to ask for a list of victims as soon as it appeared. The explosion had occurred at the Oktyabrskaya Metro Station in the center of town, the district where I had grown up. There could be people I knew. But my first thought was about Danik, who very much loved to ride around on city transportation, not alone, of course, but with adults.

The next day, when the presumed terrorists had been detained, I was brought to Orlov’s office and he began to show me video tapes that were supposedly from a surveillance camera. It was hard to make out anything on the screen, but even so, it seemed that there were several people indicated, and not one was the “identified” terrorist. Orlov bustled about, praised the work of the KGB and the police, and once again turned to the videotapes, insisting that I look more closely. I went back to my cell, not knowing what more to expect.

Finally, the list of victims was brought. There were no familiar names, but the list was terrible. People had been killed.

Very quickly, the authorities pronounced the supposed motives for the terrorist attack. Two of them were political: destabilization of the situation and the actions of youth radical groups. The third theory was that the bomber was mentally ill. KGB Chairman Zaitsev then gave away the original KGB plan, saying that the terrorist attack in the metro was revenge for the trials of opposition members.

Suddenly, it was recalled that we who were arrested on December 19 had tried to put together the organization of mass riots precisely for the purpose of destabilizing the situation in the country. Then it got worse: questioning began of those opposition members who still remained free, on Lukashenka’s direct orders. Lukashenka, and after him the ambassadors of Venezuela and Cuba, pronounced claims that Western states were involved in the metro terrorist attack, and Lukashenka grew hysterical in public, demanding expressions of condolences from these countries, although all of them had publicly condemned the terrorist attack and offered help to the victims.

It became clear that the dictatorship had found a means of distracting the attention of the public from the catastrophic situation in the country, and to undermine the wave of solidarity with political prisoners and place the blame for the collapse of the economy on the West.

The names of the suspects were released: Dmitry Konovalov and Vlad Kovalyov. Everything that came next seemed like a bad movie, at the end of which Konovalov and Kovalyov were executed. Neither during the investigation or during the trial were any convincing proofs of the guilt of these two people, age 25, ever found. On the contrary, there were more and more questions and doubts about their involvement in the tragedy in the metro.

The only theory that could logically explain this monstrous crime was the involvement of intelligence in it. This theory began to resound more and more in the free world. Some Western media wrote outright that the terrorist attack was most of all advantageous for Lukashenka.

Signs of this scenario were visible even inside the Amerikanka. When I learned the time the terrorist attack was made, I recalled that Orlov had broken into my cell less than an hour after the explosion. There were no theories yet and couldn’t be, and yet he shouted about a terrorist attack with political aims.

Orlov informed me during the usual “chat” that the suspects had been held for several days in the Amerikanka.

“Either they aren’t terrorists, or you fear politicals more than terrorists,” I said.

“How so?”

“Well, those ‘masks’ appeared here especially for us with a certain assignment, but “dangerous criminals” are guarded under a regular regimen.

The next day I was once again brought to Orlov, and as I realized, only so that at the end of the corridor I could see from behind a little girl and the guard accompanying her, in a mask. Only the guard was taking the girl extremely delicately, and his back looked like one of “our” turnkeys.

Later, Zmitser Bandarenka and I compared our impressions about the KGB agents’ behavior after the terrorist attack. Zmitser was also shown videotapes from the surveillance cameras in the metro and was made to note that several people were leading Konovalov into the metro. We also recalled the extremely nervous behavior of the KGB agents on the eve of the terrorist attack, they clearly felt out of sorts. Shunevich even confessed that «hawks» are not asleep. In one of the “chats” Orlov had with Zmitser, he even admitted that after the terrorist attack and its “brilliant” investigation, Lukashenka’s ratings went up.

After the explosion in the metro, the trials against the main suspects in the December 19 case began to be prepared hastily. At first it seemed that that the investigation and familiarization with the cases would last until mid-May, but all these periods were curtailed and in April, the trials began.

I am certain, according to the concept of the script-writers of our trials and the solving of the terrorist attack in the metro, that these cases should have overlapped. We were supposed to be connected to the terrorists, if not directly, in a plan with a common goal: to destabilize the situation in Belarus.

But our cases fell apart, people didn’t believe that Konovalov and Kovalyov had committed the bombing, solidarity with political prisoners did not weaken and the authorities were forced to drop their original concept. Now it was important to them simply to put us behind bars as quickly as possible and rid themselves of the “terrorists”.

At that moment, the regime resorted to a tried-and-true means of justifying its organization: the opinion of an international expert. This time there were not experts from the OSCE, as there had been in the cases of Nikolai Avtukhovich and Oleg Bebenin, but a whole Interpol general secretary, Ronald Noble. He hastened to Minsk at the invitation of Belarusian intelligence a month after the explosion in the metro and was unsparing in his expression of amazement at the “unprecedentedly high level of investigation of the crime.” Naturally, he knew about the investigation only from the statements of the KGB officers themselves.

In fact, Ronald Noble demonstrated an unprecedented level of cynicism, coming at the height of political reprisals against the opposition, in order to support the KGB henchmen leading these reprisals.

The Interpol chief continued to push his line even further. When Konovalov and Kovalyov were hastily and meanly executed, which provoked the outrage of society and sharp criticism regarding the actions of the regime and Interpol, he accused the media of lack of objectivity and once again supported the dictatorial regime.

After the trial of the “terrorists,” which was an open mockery of logic, all the material evidence was destroyed. Only those who are trying to remove their tracks behave in this way.