(Bloomberg) -- The deadly attack in a Moscow concert hall has plunged anxious Russians back to a time they thought they’d left behind, when a wave of violence engulfed the country early in President Vladimir Putin’s rule.

The assault by gunmen as people gathered for a rock concert at Crocus City Hall killed at least 133 people on Friday night, the worst atrocity in the capital in more than two decades. Authorities continue to sift for more victims through the burnt-out husk of the giant building that’s come to symbolize a pivotal moment for many Russians, whomever they blame for the slaughter. 

“Russians have their own 9/11,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Moscow, referring to a series of terror attacks that began in the late 1990s and spread a climate of fear across the country as Putin was rising to power. The concert assault “quickly brought back these memories and state of fear.”

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the carnage at Crocus City Hall, while Putin pointed the finger at Ukraine in a televised address to the nation the next day. Ukraine has denied any involvement and described it as a false-flag operation by the Kremlin, while US officials said Islamic State is solely responsible for the attack. 

For many Russians, the scale of the tragedy recalled a series of still largely-unexplained explosions in apartment buildings in September 1999 that killed more than 300 in Moscow and Volgodonsk and Buynaksk in Russia’s south. Two thirds of the victims were in the capital. 

 “I was a teenager and I still remember my parents’ fear and how my father was always on alert.” said Denis, 42, a manager from Lipetsk, south of Moscow. “It’s scary if those times are back.”

Just as he was newly appointed Russia’s prime minister, the little-known Putin blamed Chechen separatists and vowed to end the wave of terror. He rallied Russians behind him by unleashing a massive air force bombing campaign in Chechnya that became a full-scale invasion to restore Moscow’s control.

After President Boris Yeltsin stood down on New Year’s Eve and anointed Putin his successor, the former KGB officer rode a wave of public approval over the war to win the 2000 presidential election and begin his quarter-century rule.

Despite Putin famously promising to hunt down terrorists and “wipe them out in the outhouse,” the bloodshed didn’t stop.

Chechen militants took about 1,000 people hostage in Moscow’s Nord-Ost theater in 2002. At least 170 died including dozens of the militants when special forces carried out a botched rescue mission. 

Two years later, as Russians nationwide celebrated the Day of Knowledge marking the start of the new academic year on Sept. 1, Islamist militants took more than 1,000 children and adults hostage at School No. 1 in the North Caucasus town of Beslan. More than 330 died, half of them children, in chaotic attempts to end a three-day siege.

Just days earlier, two passenger jets that took off within an hour of each other from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport crashed some 500 miles apart, claiming 90 lives, in suspected suicide bombings by so-called Black Widows, female relatives of men who’d been abducted or killed in Chechnya. 

Black Widows were also blamed for twin suicide bombings that killed at least 40 people on the Moscow metro in 2010, the last major terrorism incident in the capital before Friday’s attack.

Putin’s native St. Petersburg was hit by a suicide bombing on the subway by an Islamist extremist that killed 16 in April 2017 as the president was visiting the city.

After Putin sent his forces into Syria in 2015 to support President Bashar al Assad’s regime in the country’s civil war, Islamic State threatened to strike at Russia. It claimed responsibility for downing a plane in October that year carrying Russian tourists from Egypt to St. Petersburg, killing 224 on board.

Putin subdued Chechnya through force and by allying with the warlord father of the region’s current ruler, Ramzan Kadyrov, who split from the separatists and backed Moscow. Kadyrov, who controls his own private army, is among Putin’s most devoted allies and has sent troops to back the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

While Islamic State says it’s behind Friday’s attack, many Russians blame the war for the return of insecurity to their lives even as they don’t point the finger as Putin did toward Ukraine. 

For them, the attack shattered an illusion of normalcy in the capital during more than two years of war that Putin has carefully sought to preserve. He’d publicly dismissed US warnings of an imminent terrorist threat as a Western attempt to “intimidate and destabilize our society” three days before the attack. 

“The attack on Crocus reminded me of the times when houses in Russia were blown up and people were afraid to even sleep,” said Valeriy, 45, who lives near Moscow and rushed to take his daughter away from the capital on Friday evening. Like others spoken to for this article, he declined to give his full name out of fear for his personal security.

“Those times when we constantly had terrorist attacks in the subway and in pedestrian passages have returned. It’s all because of the war,” he said. “It’s getting worse and worse every day. It’s not safe in Russia now.”  

“We all hear about Belgorod, where people die, but it seems quite far away,” said Elizaveta, a 47-year-old cultural events worker, referring to the Russian border region that’s faced repeated attacks in the war. “Now it feels like the war came to Moscow.”

She fears the Kremlin will use the attack to justify a new mobilization to draft more young men - like her student son - to the front line. She also worries that the harshest crackdown in decades on any kind of criticism of the authorities will intensify. 

Read more: Attacks Across Russia Border Bring Home Costs of Putin’s War 

What happened “shows that the quality of work of the security forces under Putin has radically deteriorated over the past 20 years,” said Vladislav Inozemtsev, head of the Сenter for Post-Industrial Studies, based in Moscow. The security services have focused mostly on preventing protest rallies and arresting people for challenging the state in recent years, rather than on threats to public safety, he said.

Russia marked a nationwide day of mourning Sunday. Malls and theaters closed in Moscow and several other regions following the Crocus disaster, while airports and railway stations tightened security. Management companies of some large apartment blocks urged residents to be wary and pay attention to strangers, RBC newswire said.  

“We can forget all hope that the war will be stopped,” said Anastasia, 45, who’s a manager at a Moscow firm. “Now it will only get worse.” 

The sense of fear contrasts sharply with the euphoria the Kremlin sought to generate over Putin’s unprecedented 87% vote in the presidential election a week ago. It cast the result as evidence Russians were united behind the 71-year-old president over the war in Ukraine and his confrontation with the West. 

Putin is trying to shift the focus to Ukraine because “it was his carelessness that led to the terrorist attack being missed,” said Kolesnikov at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Still, he said, Russian society is so tired of the war that as long as Putin doesn’t announce a mobilization on the back of the Crocus City Hall attack, the public will likely come to terms with the shocking reminder of militant violence.

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