In September 1999 a series of bombs tore apart four apartment buildings in three Russian cities, and the recently appointed (a month earlier) Prime Minister, a

In September 1999 a series of bombs tore apart four apartment buildings in three Russian cities, and the recently appointed (a month earlier) Prime Minister, a bright young former deputy mayor of St Petersburg named Vladimir Putin, whom no one had ever heard of and had many similarly positioned rivals, won a great deal of popularity for his handling of these "terrorist attacks" that killed 307 people, including re-invading Chechnya and starting the Second Chechen War. He then used that popularity to become essentially dictator for life. These bombings were blamed on Chechens- who hotly denied it. It has long been suspected- but not really proven- that the FSB was behind it, as a true False Flag operation to gin up support for invading Chechnya, done under the orders of former KGB/FSB agent Vladimir Putin who just happened to be the one to benefit most from the attacks. You can see the wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Russian_apartment_bombings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Russian_apartment_bombing... to see more details on exactly what the evidence for this is, and the people who argue that there is just not enough evidence one way or another to assign responsibility. So, no, Russia was not "overtly copy the US model" if anything they were innovating it first and the US was copying.