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Moscow blasts a challenge to Kremlin

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The suicide bombs that roared through Moscow subway cars Monday were almost certainly the latest salvo in a slow-moving war of attrition between the Russian government and militants in the restive, mostly Muslim republics of the Caucasus.

Vladimir Putin has been trading blows with southern rebels ever since he rose to the presidency a decade ago. At times, violence has threatened to erode the social contract he’s struck with the Russian public: Forgo some democratic rights in exchange for, above all, stability.

And yet, many analysts say, the war in Chechnya consolidated Putin’s power, by persuading people to unite with him against the threats. The militants have both menaced and strengthened Putin’s leadership, they say.

On Monday, two female suicide bombers boarded packed subway cars in bustling downtown Moscow in the middle of rush hour and blew themselves up, killing at least 38 people and injuring dozens more. It was the first such attack in Moscow in six years, and it raised the specter of violence creeping back into the heart of Russia.

The killings seemed intended to rattle the very core of Russian identity. Lubyanka Square, site of the first station to be attacked, holds a deep and unsettling place in the Russian consciousness as the headquarters of the Soviet KGB, and now its successor, the FSB.

Next came Park Kultury, another iconic station alongside Gorky Park, where Russian children gather for roller coaster rides, playtime in sprawling gardens and ice skating.

Investigators said they had identified one of the bombers and were hunting for two women seen on surveillance camera video accompanying the attackers to the doors of a subway station in southwest Moscow, law enforcement sources told Interfax news agency.

Officials recovered some of the remains of the attackers, which were sent for forensic identification. The body parts included a head believed to belong to one of the bombers, unnamed investigators told Russian news agencies.

“Probably it was a reply to some injustice or atrocity done to their fathers or brothers, whoever, but it’s only the end of a tentacle,” said Sergei Arutyunov, chair of the Caucasus department at the Russian Academy of Science. “And the tentacles converge in a large, loose body of separatism and pseudo-Islamic fanaticism.”

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, though suspicion fell on Chechen militants, who have used women in a number of attacks.

However, some officials speculated that the blasts could be an act of vengeance from supporters of Said Buryatsky, an Islamist ideologue who was reported killed by security services this month in the republic of Ingushetia. The Russian government has blamed Buryatsky for a spate of recent attacks, including the November bombing of a high-speed train between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

An Islamist website later confirmed Buryatsky’s death. Another rebel leader, Doku Umarov, threatened Russian cities in a February interview with a website linked to the Islamists. “Blood will no longer be limited to our cities and towns,” Umarov said. “The war is coming to their cities.”

The Metro explosions occurred a few days after the 10th anniversary of Putin’s election to the presidency. In 2008, because of term limits, Putin was forced to give up that office, and he now serves as prime minister. But he is widely seen as Russia’s ultimate authority, and many analysts expect him to return to the presidency in the next elections.

Much of Putin’s time in power has been defined by the struggle with Islamic militants in the Caucasus.

Putin was elevated to national power by President Boris N. Yeltsin, who had fought a disastrous campaign in Chechnya. Putin returned Chechnya to Moscow’s control through a second war. After the installation of proxy leadership to crack down on separatists and lingering, heavy-handed efforts to quash violence, the bloodshed has resurged on the southern edge of Russia -- and raised questions about the government’s ability to stabilize the country.

Amid increased fighting and instability in Chechnya, as well as neighboring Ingushetia and Dagestan, Russia has stepped up abductions and assassinations of Islamist leaders. The Islamists, in turn, have vowed to visit bloodshed on cities in the heart of Russia.

Now Russians are watching keenly to see how Moscow will respond. The public had largely ignored the rampant killings, disappearances and torture that beset its southern flank -- until it spilled into Moscow.

In the past, bombings in Moscow sparked war in Chechnya -- and, analysts say, helped Putin cement his grip on power. Many opposition figures contend, at least privately, that the FSB was behind the bombings of apartment buildings in 1999 that became the impetus for the second Chechen war. The government has vigorously denied involvement, but unexplained contradictions still surround the foiled bombing of an apartment house in the Russian city of Ryazan. People who have noisily called for investigation have, at times, been assassinated under mysterious circumstances.

“If you follow Russian events, you note that almost every such attack was exploited and taken as a pretext for restricting democratic freedoms in Russia,” said Andrei Piontkovsky, a political analyst with the Russian Academy of Science. “It’s the usual paradox: It shows the weakness of the government, but at the same time, they may use it to get more power.”

The Monday morning carnage adds to the pressure on a government already struggling to tamp down public discontent over economic woes.

“Obviously we have not done enough,” President Dmitry Medvedev said at an emergency meeting, Russian news agencies reported. State television aired video of Medvedev questioning some of Russia’s top officials. During the meeting, the men spoke quietly and spent a lot of time staring into their laps.

Medvedev later visited the Lubyanka station, where he took the escalator down to the platform and laid flowers at the scene of the explosion. “They are beasts,” he told reporters outside, referring to the perpetrators.

Putin cut short a working trip to Siberia and headed back to Moscow, vowing to unleash vengeance on the groups that organized the attack. This is the man, after all, who famously vowed to hunt terrorists all the way to the toilet.

“I am confident that law enforcement agencies will do everything to find and punish the criminals,” Putin said in a videoconference carried by state media. “The terrorists will be destroyed.”

Putin later ordered that families of the dead be paid 300,000 rubles, about $10,150, plus an additional $609 to cover the cost of funerals.

None of that meant much to Yekaterina Marishina, 32, who was taking the Metro to the hospital to visit her disabled 6-year-old son. When the train pulled into Lubyanka, the train shook, there was a rattling sound like a toy gun and her vision turned to black and white. She thought she was fainting because she is pregnant.

She woke up to hear voices calling for survivors. She managed to scream, and was pulled from the wreckage, her feet mangled and her eye injured by shrapnel. Monday afternoon, she lay in a hospital ward. A doctor whispered that her eye was in very bad shape.

“I don’t know if my husband knows what happened to me. I don’t remember his number. It was in my cellphone but my cellphone is dead,” she said. “Why me?”

megan.stack@latimes.com

Times staff writer Sergei L. Loiko contributed to this report.

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