NOVEL FOCUSES ON 1999 BOMBINGS.

In an article appearing in the 18-24 issue of The Russia Journal, the well-known political commentator Andrei Piontkovsky discussed a “pamphlet-novel” issued last year by a leading conservative Russian writer, Aleksandr Prokhanov, chief editor of the weekly Zavtra. In the novel, entitled “Mr. Hexogen [Gospodin Geksogen-hexogen was the explosive employed in the Moscow bombings],” Piontkovsky noted, Prokhanov “describes the plot in the upper echelons of power in the summer and autumn of 1999, designed to unleash the second Chechen war and turn it into an effective electoral campaign instrument. The plot aimed to bring to power the ‘Successor,’ who would guarantee the security of the thoroughly corrupt Yeltsin clan…. Both Prokhanov’s novel and [Boris] Berezovsky’s [recent] promise to reveal the ‘truth’ to the world in February leave the public no choice but to come back to the subject of the September 1999 explosions.” Two days before the appearance of Piontkovsky’s article, the web-site Apn.ru had carried an article on the same topic, entitled “Prokhanov Has Prepared the Hexogen.” The report noted that Prokhanov’s new novel had been completed on June 30, 2001 and had been published in the mass-edition “Roman-Gazeta,” a literary supplement to the newspapers Zavtra and Sovetskaya Rossiya (Apn.ru, January 16).