how a bubble was saved, all living happily thereafter

The first building to be hit was the barracks in Buynaksk housing Russian soldiers and their families. It was a nondescript five-story building perched on the outskirts of town, and when the enormous truck bomb went off late on the night of September 4, 1999, the floors pancaked onto each other until the building was reduced to a pile of burning rubble.  In that rubble were the bodies of sixty-four people—men, women, and children….

  By December 1995 rebels fighting for the independence of Chechnya had fought the Russian army to a bloody and humiliating stalemate after a full year of war….

  But equally alarming to Trepashkin was who had been chosen to be Putin's successor as FSB director,

Nikolai Patrushev, 1999-2000.  As head of the FSB internal-security department it was Patrushev who had removed Trepashkin from the Bank Soldi case and who was now among those government officials most vehemently claiming a Chechen connection to the apartment-building bombings.  "So what you saw was this dynamic building," Trepashkin said, "and it was the government promoting it.  'The Chechens are behind this, so now we must take care of the Chechens.'"

  But then something very strange happened.  It happened in the sleepy provincial city of Ryazan, some 120 miles southeast of Moscow.  Amid the state of hyper-vigilance that had seized the nation, several residents of 14/16 Novosyolov Street in Ryazan took notice when a white Zhiguli sedan pulled up to park beside their apartment building on the evening of September 22.  They became downright panicked when they observed two men removing several large sacks from the car's trunk and carrying them into the basement before speeding away.  Residents called the police….As police quickly evacuated the building, the local FSB explosives expert was called in to defuse the detonator; he determined that the sacks contained RDX, a explosive powerful enough to have brought the entire apartment building down.

Prime Minister Putin congratulated the residents on their vigilance, while the interior minister lauded recent improvements by the security forces, "such as the foiling of the attempt to blowup the apartment building in Ryazan."  There the matter may well have ended, except that same night two of the suspects in Ryazan were apprehended.  To the local authorities' astonishment, both produced FSB identification cards.  A short time later a call came down from FSB headquarters in Moscow that the two were to be released....    https://www.gq.com/story/moscow-bombings-mikhail-trepashkin-and-putin 

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-        -Romanov family plate of gold/electrum