Russia: after decades of animosity, America and Russia may be recast as partners and allies.

• Author: Wines, Michael
• Position: International - War against terrorism

ON THAT SWEET AND BALMY SEPTEMBER NIGHT TWO YEARS ago when everything changed, Alyona Morozova, then 23, was watching a soccer game on TV with her new boyfriend, Sergei. They lived in separate apartments in a huge south Moscow housing complex--a hulking concrete box 18 stories tall. It was exactly two seconds before midnight when Sergei walked out of the room to have a smoke.

The bomb exploded at that moment. Alyona remembers only the groan of twisting steel and the crash of collapsing floors, the chaos of flying glass and furniture.

Above the screams of the injured and dying, sirens finally blared. A searchlight spiked through the dust and spotted her. "The fireman said, `Don't look back,'" she recalls. "I knew something was wrong. So I turned my head, and I saw in the building a huge hole. And I knew that in the middle was where my apartment and my mother were supposed to be."

Ninety-four people--including Sergei and Alyona's mother--died in the bombing of 17 Guryanova Street in the final seconds of September 8, 1999. Five days later, 120 more perished in a second apartment blast. In all, terrorist bombings claimed more than 300 Russian lives that autumn.

Americans barely noticed.

Russia, after all, was no longer the Soviet Union, the military colossus and America's nemesis during 45 years of Cold War. An empire that once sprawled from the Pacific Ocean to the Italian border had disintegrated with Communism's collapse in 1991, liberating one third of Europe and 14 Soviet republics from dictatorship--and easing the threat of nuclear war. Physically, Russia remained the world's largest nation. But in other respects, Russia in 1999 had shriveled into a corrupt, destitute ghost of a superpower--its economy no larger than North Carolina's, its once-mighty army reduced to foraging for mushrooms, its people desperately poor.

The Moscow apartment bombings seemed irrelevant until another September day, almost exactly two years later, when a series of carefully coordinated terrorist attacks changed everything for Americans. Suddenly, it seems Russia has more in common with the United States--and is far more important globally. In the new war on international terror, the United States has canvassed the world for allies--and found a willing and potent one in Moscow.

Like the U.S., Russia views terrorism as an issue of national survival. Authorities there are convinced that the 1999 apartment bombings were the work of Islamic extremists who have played a growing role in a long festering nationalist...