Boris Abramovich Berezovsky, also known as Platon Elenin, was a Russian business oligarch, government official, engineer and mathematician and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The Russian apartment bombings were a series of explosions that hit four apartment blocks in the Russian cities of Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk in September 1999, killing more than 300, injuring more than 1000, and spreading a wave of fear across the country. The bombings, together with the Invasion of Dagestan, triggered the Second Chechen War. Then-prime minister Vladimir Putin's handling of the crisis boosted his popularity greatly and helped him attain the presidency within a few months. Russian courts ruled that the attacks were orchestrated by Chechen-linked militants, while some scholars, journalists, and politicians have argued that Russian security services likely organized the bombings.
Ivan Petrovich Rybkin is a Russian politician. He was Chairman of Russia's State Duma in 1994–96 and Secretary of the Security Council in 1996–98. He ran for the Russian presidency in 2004, before dropping out after allegedly being kidnapped and drugged by Russian state Federal Security Service (FSB) officers.
Mikhail Ivanovich Trepashkin is a Russian attorney and former Federal Security Service (FSB) colonel who was invited by MP Sergei Kovalev to assist in an independent inquiry of the Russian apartment bombings in September 1999 that followed the Dagestan war and were one of the causes of the Second Chechen War. During his investigation, he was arrested by the FSB and convicted to four years of imprisonment for "revealing state secrets". His arrest has been criticized by a number of human rights organizations and he has been called a political prisoner.
The Dagestan War, also known as the Invasion of Militants in Dagestan began when the Chechnya-based Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade (IIPB), an Islamist group, led by Shamil Basayev, Ibn al-Khattab, Ramzan Akhmadov and Arbi Barayev invaded the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan, on 7 August 1999, in support of the Shura of Dagestan separatist rebels. The war ended with a major victory for the Russian Federation and Dagestan Republic, and the retreat of the IIPB. The invasion of Dagestan served as the main casus belli alongside the series of apartment bombings in September 1999 for the Second Chechen War.
On 7 October 2006, Russian journalist, writer and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment block in central Moscow. She was known for her opposition to the Chechen conflict and for criticism of Vladimir Putin. She authored several books about the Chechen wars, as well as Putin's Russia, and received numerous international awards for her work. Her murder, believed to be a contract killing, sparked a strong international reaction. Three Chechens were arrested for the murder, but were acquitted. The verdict was overturned by the Supreme Court of Russia and new trials were held. In total, six people were convicted of charges related to her death.
Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko was a British-naturalised Russian defector and former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) who specialised in tackling organized crime. A prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, he advised British intelligence and coined the term "mafia state" to describe the Russian regime before he was murdered by radiation poisoning in 2006. Although Russia has refused to cooperate with investigations, it is considered extremely likely Putin personally ordered his assassination, as heard by a 2015 British inquiry into his death.
Yuri Petrovich Shchekochikhin was a Soviet and later Russian investigative journalist, writer, and liberal lawmaker in the Russian parliament. Shchekochikhin made his name writing about and campaigning against the influence of organized crime and corruption. His last non-fiction book, Slaves of the KGB, was about people who worked as KGB informers.
Sergei Nikolayevich Yushenkov was a liberal Russian politician. He was assassinated on 17 April 2003, just hours after registering his political party to participate in the December 2003 parliamentary elections.
Anatoly Vasilyevich Trofimov was a head of the Soviet KGB investigation department. He personally supervised all Soviet dissident cases including Sergei Kovalyov, Gleb Yakunin, Alexey Smirnov, and Yuri Orlov. He was later a deputy director of the Russian Federal Security Service and became a mentor and supervisor of Alexander Litvinenko. He was assassinated in April 2005 by unidentified gunmen in Moscow.
The International Foundation for Civil Liberties is a non-profit organization established by the Russian-British oligarch Boris Berezovsky in November 2000. The foundation is headquartered in New York City and headed by Alexander Goldfarb. The stated mission of the foundation is "to provide financial, legal, informational and logistical resources to secure human rights and civil liberties in Russia."
Andrey Konstantinovich Lugovoy, also spelled Lugovoi, is a Russian politician and businessman and deputy of the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, for the LDPR. He worked as a KGB bodyguard and as head of "Ninth Wave", a security firm. He is wanted by British police on suspicion of the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB and later FSB officer. Russia has rejected the request for his extradition, as the country forbids the extradition of its own citizens.
Alexander Litvinenko was a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and the KGB. After speaking critically about what he saw as corruption within the Russian government, he fled to the UK, where he remained a vocal critic of the Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. Six years after fleeing, he was assassinated by Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun by poisoning.
Alexander Davidovich Goldfarb is a Russian-American microbiologist, activist, and author. He emigrated from the USSR in 1975 and studied in Israel and Germany before settling permanently in New York in 1982. Goldfarb is a naturalized American citizen. He has combined a scientific career as a microbiologist with political and public activities focused on civil liberties and human rights in Russia, in the course of which he has been associated with Andrei Sakharov, George Soros, Boris Berezovsky, and Alexander Litvinenko. He has not visited Russia since 2000.
Yuri Georgievich Felshtinsky is a Russian American historian. Felshtinsky has authored a number of books on Russian history, including The Bolsheviks and the Left SRs, Towards a History of Our Isolation, The Failure of the World Revolution, Blowing up Russia, and The Age of Assassins.
Lubyanka Criminal Group is a book by Alexander Litvinenko about the alleged transformation of the Russian Security Services into a criminal and terrorist organization.
Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within is a book written by Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky. The authors describe the Russian apartment bombings as a false flag operation that was guided by the Russian Federal Security Service to justify the Second Chechen War and bring Vladimir Putin to power. The story was initially printed by Yuri Shchekochikhin in a special issue of Novaya Gazeta in August 2001 and published as a book in 2002. In Russia the book was prohibited because it divulged state secrets, and it was included in the Federal List of Extremist Materials. However, it was published in more than twenty other countries and translated into twenty languages.
The poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services, alternatively known as Laboratory 1, Laboratory 12, and Kamera, was a covert research-and-development facility of the Soviet secret police agencies. The laboratory manufactured and tested poisons and was reportedly reactivated in the late 1990s.
Achemez Gochiyayev is a Russian citizen who was accused of organizing the Russian apartment bombings, a series of terrorist acts in 1999 that killed 293 people and led the country into the Second Chechen War. The five bombings took place during two weeks between September 4 and September 16, 1999, in Moscow, and the southern towns of Buynaksk and Volgodonsk. Gochiyayev has not been arrested or convicted and ostensibly remains a fugitive; he has not been seen since early March 2002.
