"Freedom of speech"
Short synopsis
When Tatyana Morozova, a pre-school teacher in Milwaukee, learned that
her mother had been killed and her old apartment block destroyed by
an explosion back in Moscow, she believed the official version: that
the attack was the work of Chechen terrorists. Then an American scholar
published a book arguing that the bombing was engineered by the FSB,
the Russian secret service, to help Vladimir Putin win the elections.
Torn by grief and disbelief, Tatyana and her sister Alyona embark on
a journey in space and time to seek the truth - followed by the camera
of Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov. Filmed in Milwaukee, Moscow, Denver,
Washington, London and the Ural Mountains, Disbelief chronicles the
agony of a devastated family swept up in the high-stake politics of
the age of global terrorism.
Moving pictures
1. The
Checkist (2,49 MB)
2.
The Chechen lesson (3,62 MB)
3.
Security or Xenophobia (1,73 MB)
4.
Our money (800 KB)
Milwaukee, 1998
Milwaukee, May 2003
Milwaukee, May 2003
Denver, June 2003
Moscow, June 2003
Southern Urals, June 2003
Southern Urals, June 2003
When Tatyana Morozova, a pre-school teacher happily married in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, learned that her mother had been killed and her sister Alyona had barely survived a middle-of-the-night blast that destroyed her old apartment building back in Moscow, she believed what she was told by the Russian government--that the attack was the work of Chechen terrorists.
But in the immediate aftermath of the attack she was more concerned about getting her shell-shocked sister over to America than about looking into the mystery of the serial apartment house bombings, that shook up Russia in September 1999.
Within a year, Alyona moved to the US and enrolled in a college, a stranger in a strange land trying to cope with nightmarish visions of her whole world collapsing around her on that fateful night.
In the meantime, the blasts triggered the war in Chechnya, propelled the hawkish ex-KGB spy Vladimir Putin to power and turned Chechens throughout Russia into despised and feared second-class citizens.
Immersed in their new lives in America, Tanya and Alyona initially discounted the rumor filtering out of Russia that it was not the Chechens, but the Russian secret service FSB that staged the bombings to help Putin win the elections.
The FSB theory originated from an investigative TV report about FSB agents being caught red-handed while planting a bomb in the apartment block in the city of Ryazan. The Ryazan report--reproduced in Disbelief - brought the FSB theory home to many Russians and won authoritative followers abroad, including David Satter, the scholar at the Hudson Institute in Washington and former Moscow correspondent of the Wall Street Journal.
In summer 2003, Alyona traveled to Washington to attend the presentation of Satter’s new book Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State published by Yale University Press, which squarely puts the blame for the 1999 bombings at the door of the FSB. Satter’s speech, with Alyona in attendance, makes the central scene in Disbelief’s narrative, puting the sisters’ personal story in the context of political history. By then, Tanya and Alyona were already considering an offer from Andrey Nekrasov to participate in a documentary about the 1999 bombings.
The film project would entail a trip to Russia, where the sisters would reunite with members of their family, see other survivors, and meet the official investigators of the attacks. They would get a chance to judge by themselves on the merits of the FSB theory, about which they were still unconvinced.
In the end they decided that only Tanya would go, accompanied by her three-year old American-born son, Sasha. Alyona felt that she was not yet emotionally capable of confronting the memories of walking out from ground zero.
In her Moscow encounters, and in the Ural village with her grandparents and her uncle’s family, Tatyana asked the same question: do you think our own government could do it? And she got the full spectrum of answers: from a solid yes by her attorney, an ex-KGB agent turned dissident, to a firm no by her mother’s old friend, a Russian nationalist who lectured her on the devious character of the Chechens.
She heard the horrific account of a man, Timur, who had been falsely accused of the bombing and confessed to it under torture. She listened to the protestations of a Chechen official who pointed out how absurd would it be for the Chechens to stage the bombings that were retaliated by massive Russian bombardment of their towns and villages. She visited the investigator who denied her access to the case files for reasons of state security.
But perhaps the most dramatic response came from her childhood friend who lost her parents in the blast: she did not want to know the truth “because the truth might be even worse” than the loss itself.
In the film, Tanya does not reveal her conclusions. And the viewer is left to judge on his own: who was the perpetrator of the greatest unsolved crime of the 20th century?