Alleged Fabrication By The KGB
Soon after the bombings, Soviet journalist Victor Louis (Vitaly Yevgenyevich Lui), published an article about the involvement of Soviet dissidents in the violent terrorism acts, although most of the dissidents officially declared a non-violent struggle for the human rights. After learning about the publication by Lui, Andrei Sakharov wrote an "Appeal to world community" where he requested an impartial investigation and suggested that the bombings might have been arranged by the KGB itself to discredit the entire Soviet dissident movement He stated: "I have serious grounds for concern. This is the provocation article in London Evening News by Victor Lui. These are arrests and interrogations of people who are clearly not related to the bombings. These are murders of last months, probably committed by the KGB which were not investigated. It is enough to mention only two of them: murder of poet Konstantin Bogatyrev and murder of lawyer Evgeni Brunov." After this statement, Sakharov was attacked not only in Soviet newspapers but also received threats by phone. Several people wanted to burst into his apartment, pretending to be the relatives of those killed in metro.
On February 1, 1979, the Moscow Helsinki Group made an official statement "On the execution of Stepan Zatikyan and two other unnamed individuals", which concluses: "The lack of transparency and the whole atmosphere of secrecy give reasons to doubt the validity of charges, objectivity and impartiality of the court".
According to Soviet dissident Alexander Tarasov, he was indeed interrogated by a KGB investigator at this time. The KGB investigator tried to "convince" him that it was actually him who brought the bomb. Unless "I had 300% alibi" (he was confined at a hospital at the time of the bombings), "it would be me who was executed instead of Zatikyan", he said.
Russian historian Alexander Nekrich states that the execution of Zatikyan, Stepanyan, and Bagdasaryan was the first political execution in the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin.
Read more about this topic: 1977 Moscow Bombings
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