For several years now, Internet users have been spreading a sensational confession allegedly made by a high-ranking Russian intelligence officer. We checked whether German Ugryumov said this.
As reported in publications, in the spring of 2000, after the first presidential elections in Russia with the participation of Vladimir Putin, a certain FSB general German Ugryumov said: “We had to blow up houses to put him in the Kremlin, how much blood will have to be shed to get him out of there?” After this statement, Ugryumov allegedly did not live even a few months. Often, along with the quote, a long list of other high-ranking law enforcement officers who died suddenly during the first years of Putin's rule is given.
The quote was distributed over the years by news portals (“Glaucus", N.V.) and social network users (X, Facebook, "VKontakte", "Livejournal"). The story of the FSB general’s confession gained wide popularity on Telegram—in particular, the channels “Kremlin Circus"(462,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Nightingale droppings" (146,000) and "Sanctions in the Russian Federation"(113,000). In the background terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall in March 2024, Internet users again remembered about this quote, related posts have received tens of thousands of views.
The houses referred to in the quote obviously mean residential high-rise buildings in Buinaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk, blown up in September 1999. As a result of the terrorist attacks, 307 people were killed, and the conclusions of the investigation, which linked the explosions to Islamist militants, later became serious arguments for the launch of a military operation in Chechnya. The results of the official investigation have drawn serious criticism as in Russia, so abroad.
At the same time, a version was born about the possible involvement of Russian security forces in the explosions, which allegedly acted in the interests of the former head of the FSB and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, whom President Yeltsin a month before announced successor. Gave reason for doubt in the first place incident with the so-called "Ryazan sugar" On September 22, six days after the last of the explosions, a resident of an apartment building in Ryazan noticed three strangers unloading some bags from a car and carrying them into the basement. The police officers who arrived at his call found three bags of a substance that looked like granulated sugar. One of the packages had a timer attached to it, marked 5:30 local time. A chemical analysis carried out by specialists from the Ryazan Internal Affairs Directorate showed the presence of explosives in the bags. Two days later, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev said that an exercise was taking place in Ryazan to test the vigilance of local security forces, the attackers were his subordinates, and there were no explosives in the sugar.
However, since in the real September terrorist attacks the explosive was disguised as sugar, former intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko and historian Yuri Felshtinsky suggested that the explosions were carried out by Russian security forces in order to sow panic in society and contribute to the election of Putin as president. They outlined their arguments in a book published in 2002, “FSB blows up Russia" However, the authors failed to provide indisputable evidence of their theory. Their conclusions were criticized by many independent experts, including the head of the public commission to investigate the circumstances of the terrorist attacks, the first Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation Sergei Kovalev and American journalist, editor-in-chief of the Russian version of Forbes magazine Paula Khlebnikova (later, like Litvinenko, killed under mysterious circumstances). To this day, the theory about the involvement of the FSB in the bombings of houses in the fall of 1999 is considered, if not conspiracy theories, then at least very controversial.
A career officer named German Ugryumov actually worked in Russian law enforcement agencies - however, the rank of admiral (not general) was assigned him on May 30, 2001, the day before his death from cardiac arrest. In 1999, Ugryumov became deputy director of the FSB, the special forces groups Alpha and Vympel were subordinate to him, and he was directly involved in the development of a number of counter-terrorism operations in the North Caucasus. Also Litvinenko and Felshtinsky in their book indicatedthat Ugryumov allegedly directly supervised the organization of the 1999 terrorist attacks. Authors of the investigation referred on information received, according to them, from Yusuf Krymshamkhalov and Timur Batchaev (both were wanted on charges of organizing a terrorist attack). Litvinenko and Felshtinsky also put forward a version that the death of the FSB deputy director was not accidental.
Neither theory has been confirmed. Judging by the open data, until his last days, Ugryumov remained Putin’s close ally on security issues (the Russian president even was present at his funeral), so the sensational statement attributed to the officer, and even made publicly, looks unlikely. “Verified” did not find a single authoritative source (from the media to scanned publications in the Google Books project collection) that contained a viral quote, either with or without attribution to Ugryumov. At the turn of the 1990s and 2000s, the story of the security officer’s confession was not published in open sources at all.
Apparently, the spread of the quote began in 2009, when it was mentioned in the comments to a post on the Farvest blog on LiveJournal. mentioned user @alex_kimstach with a link to the words of a certain Ruslan Saidov in a deleted post from the same blog. Various Internet resources name the UAE-registered company Farwest, LLC, of which, according to them, Saidov was the vice president, news agency, consulting and even intelligence by the company. Saidov’s comment as presented by @alex_kimstach read: “The late German Ugryumov, apparently anticipating his imminent death, in a fit of frankness told me about Putin something like this: “To give him power, we had to blow up houses. It’s even scary to imagine what we’ll have to blow up to take power away from him.” In 2012, the quote, in a slightly modified form, went viral after being mentioned in the comments to one of Felshtinsky’s posts in the same LiveJournal.
Whether Saidov himself cited this quote in any sources, whether he communicated with Ugryumov, whether he heard words from a security official about the connection between the 1999 explosions and the election of Putin - it is now impossible to answer these questions with any degree of certainty. Therefore, an unambiguous conclusion about the authorship of the statement cannot be made today. However, many indirect arguments (Ugryumov’s high official position, his good relations with the Russian president, Saidov’s dubious reputation) indicate that these words, which surfaced in a de facto anonymous source several years after the attacks, were, in all likelihood, never uttered.
Cover photo: social networks
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