ILYA LYSAK, A BOYISHLY CHARMING TWENTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD bass player with a confident manner, seated himself in the orchestra pit and began tuning up. It was October 23, 2002, and he and thirty-one other musicians were about to perform in the hit musical Nord-Ost, or “Northeast,” a World War II love story. He knew the score by heart, having already played it some three hundred times for theater audiences. But he was ever mindful of the need to stay sharp—it was a coup that he had landed this job in Moscow, one of the world’s most musically talented cities, and he knew it.
Irina Fadeeva, a thirty-seven-year-old blond woman with striking blue eyes, took her seat in row 11 of the theater. She was accompanied by her equally lovely older sister, Victoria; her fifteen-year-old son, Yaroslav; and her eighteen-year-old niece, Anastasia. The foursome ended up here entirely by chance. Irina had bought tickets for another show at a different theater, only to discover at the last minute that the tickets were for the previous night’s performance. But she was determined that the evening would not be wasted. She hurried everyone to another theater just down the street. Nord-Ost was playing, and she managed to buy four of the few remaining tickets.
Elena Baranovskaya, a well-spoken, elegantly turned-out woman, sat seven rows away with her husband, Sergei, a retired military officer, and her nineteen-year-old son, Andrei. They were marking a new life together—she and Sergei had been married just over a year, and only the day before had moved into a large new apartment. Elena had bought the Nord-Ost tickets to celebrate their good fortune; a bottle of wine and late dinner awaited them at home after the play was over.
Five years later, in separate conversations, the young bass player and the two women would guide me through the nightmare that soon unfolded inside the theater. Here are the stories of Ilya, Irina, and Elena, three who somehow survived while more than one hundred were dying.
It was during the second act that events on stage began to seem out of the ordinary. Ilya looked up from the orchestra pit to see armed strangers, dressed in masks and fatigues, suddenly appear. His initial reaction was bemusement: Two years into the musical’s run, its eccentric director must be still fiddling with the cast, introducing new characters without warning. Ilya watched as one of the masked men ordered a principal actor to leave the stage, then a second and a third.
Some in the audience, including Irina and Elena, laughed at the seemingly impromptu staging. But not Elena’s husband, a war-hardened former colonel in military intelligence. His intuition told him that these new “actors” were about to take hostages. “Everyone relax. We will be here awhile,” Sergei cautioned those around him. Images flashed through his mind of the 118-man crew that had perished in the submarine Kursk two years earlier, absent any Russian rescue attempt. Putin “will not save us,” he said.
Now something was going wrong in the orchestra pit. The conductor continued to wave his baton, but the music began to trail off. One by one, the confused members of the orchestra were putting down their instruments, in such perfect order that it appeared the surreal scene had been choreographed. Finally, there was only silence in the pit.
Videos captured some of the drama. A sequence from the theater’s in-house recording system opens with four men walking on stage in camouflage jackets. One barks orders to a comrade. Another is identifying himself and the other invaders as Chechens from the republic in southern Russia where President Vladimir Putin is conducting a savage war of conquest. Their leader, twenty-two-year-old Movsar Barayev, appears in a separate video shot during the siege with British newsman Mark Franchetti. The only one not wearing a mask, he is a nephew of a famously fierce Chechen commander. “We want an end to the war,” he tells the intrepid reporter.
From his vantage point in the pit, Ilya estimated that there were four dozen Chechens scattered about the theater. He wasn’t far off. There were forty-one. Many of them were women; they were known as “black widows” because they were the wives or sisters of slain Chechen men and had volunteered to be suicide bombers in this assault. Each one kept a hand at all times on a belt around her waist; each belt was said to be loaded with explosives and shrapnel. Ilya could see what appeared to be detonators—small buttons atop some belts; two wires extending from others, as if waiting to be touched together.
As the hours ticked by, tensions heightened. Some of the intruders wired bombs to pillars that supported the theater’s structure. Others fired weapons over the heads of audience members. “Just look straight ahead,” said one masked man. “Anyone who ducks will be dealt with.” It was ultimate terror, Ilya thought—was he more likely to die from a bullet as he sat in his seat, or if he ducked down next to his bass? He looked directly ahead, as did everyone else.
Later, when the attention of the Chechens seemed to be directed away from the orchestra, Ilya sensed that the time might be right for escape. His seat was close to a door leading to the musicians’ dressing rooms. He reached over and opened the door, and the players quietly filed out of the pit, locking the door behind them. But the Chechens quickly noticed their absence. A few militants climbed into the pit and demanded that the musicians come out. If they did not comply, the door would be forced open and a grenade tossed in. What could Ilya do? He opened the door, and the musicians returned to the pit, with their hands behind their heads. Now they were made to sit with the audience, directly in front of Movsar Barayev so that the Chechen leader could keep an eye on them.
Only a few rows away, Irina expressed confidence that the standoff would soon end. Even if these were genuine Chechen terrorists, they would be satisfied to have made their point; the show would then go on and she and her son would be home by eleven o’clock. “No, this will be two or three days,” came the voice of one of the black widows, known to audience members only as Asya. She had been standing nearby and overheard the conversation. Her prediction would prove to be eerily accurate.
Russians were not unused to mass hostage-taking by Chechen insurgents. In 1995, after an assault on the town of Budyonnovsk, invaders from Chechnya retreated to a hospital and held some 1,500 patients hostage. About 30 died in fighting with Russian forces before a truce was finally negotiated. The following year, two villages were raided in Dagestan, a territory adjoining Chechnya; more than 2,000 were taken hostage and about 340 died before the standoffs ended. In all three of these episodes, many Chechen fighters were able to escape.
I was more accustomed to the criminality that erupted after the First Chechen War ended in 1996. It sorely tested the sympathy that many Western reporters felt for the quarrelsome republic that had been nearly obliterated by the Russian military. The main crime was kidnapping-for-ransom. It wasn’t only the abductions themselves that disillusioned me, but the way victims were treated. They were typically held for months without word, sometimes in pits dug under homes, even if family members were ready to pay up. Most victims were Chechens, many never to be seen again. Some were foreigners, including a Russian journalist named Yelena Masyuk, who was held for 101 days before being ransomed for $2 million.
In August 1997, I visited the northern Caucasus city of Nalchik, a two-hour drive west of Chechnya, where sixteen residents had already been kidnapped that year. Thirteen had been released for an average ransom of $300,000. Among the lucky ones was Alim Tlupov, a muscular twenty-three-year-old with a butch haircut. He and two friends had driven into Chechnya to barter belongings for diesel fuel. But two Chechen acquaintances led them into a trap. Alim and his friends ended up with pillowcases over their heads and their hands tied, while the captors telephoned Alim’s father, Zauddin, with a demand for the equivalent of $300,000. The sum was absurd, since Zauddin was only a factory driver.
So began an ordeal in which the three young men were moved from one basement to another, beaten, and prevented from bathing. Alim described it as a family enterprise. The kidnappers’ wives and sisters wandered about, sometimes delivering bread and unsweetened tea to the captors—their main diet. Neighbors strolled by, clearly aware that kidnapping victims were being held a few steps away, Alim said.
After two months, the captives managed to escape. Before they could reach home, the infuriated Chechens telephoned Alim’s father. “Your son has been killed in a skirmish,” one of the captors said. “Come right away.” Now the father would become the victim. When Zauddin arrived at the rendezvous point, the Chechens abducted him. Another two months passed. Finally, the kidnappers accepted a reduced ransom of about $22,000, which the Tlupovs managed to raise from relatives. What seemed to most anger the family was the tepid response they received from authorities in Russia and Chechnya when they asked for help. Everyone pleaded impotence against the kidnappers.
Some victims who managed to escape—especially Europeans—tried to explain away the kidnappings as a natural outgrowth of the abuse the people of Chechnya had experienced. But that was absurd. The truth was that kidnapping became a way of life for many Chechens. Obviously nowhere near the whole population was involved, but sometimes it seemed so.
At the same time, Chechen militants fighting for a cause became interwoven with unholy characters such as Arbi Barayev, a sadistic Chechen insurgent who, among other outrages, had decapitated four Western telecom workers—three Britons and a New Zealander—in 1998 and left their heads in a sack by a road.
Now Barayev’s nephew was standing on a theater stage in Moscow, glaring down at hundreds of terrified hostages whose lives were in his hands.
Anna Politkovskaya was in Santa Monica, California, to receive an award for courage from UCLA. Swooping into the sun-drenched lobby of her hotel, the celebrated Russian journalist was handed a message: Call Moscow.
“The terrorists want to see you,” a colleague told her.
What terrorists?
Anna turned on the television and saw news of the siege for the first time. She rang her hosts to express regrets and booked the next available flight from Los Angeles to Moscow, via New York, a grueling trip. On the way, she telephoned her twenty-two-year-old daughter, Vera, in Russia.
Here is where coincidence proved difficult to believe.
Ilya, the young bassist now sitting quietly under the watchful eyes of his Chechen captors, had been a favorite of Anna’s family since childhood. She had been like a mother, someone he could turn to for advice. More than once he had slept over on their couch after a study session with Anna’s son, who was Ilya’s best friend. For a time, Anna’s daughter had been Ilya’s girlfriend.
Mother, Ilya just telephoned me from Nord-Ost, the daughter told Anna.
Ilya is in Nord-Ost? Quite apart from concern over his fate, Anna had an idea. If he calls back, she instructed her daughter, please make two requests. Could he ask the Chechens if it was all right for her—Anna—to enter the theater when she reached Moscow? And would he also relay her request that they not do anything rash before she arrived?
Ilya did call back. That was one of the oddities of the hostage-taking—the Chechens’ leader, Movsar Barayev, allowed his captives to make as many cell phone calls as they wished. He saw it as a way to increase public pressure on the Kremlin to negotiate. The only limit was how much power remained in one’s cell battery.
But Barayev was not one to trifle with. He was the proud heir of his uncle Arbi, whose reputation for brutality was well known. The nephew apparently had not carried out any major operations before Nord-Ost—and, unlike his uncle, had not decapitated anyone. He commanded respect nonetheless, specifically because of his family link.
From where he was sitting, Ilya had almost line-of-sight eye contact with Barayev. “Can I talk to you?” he called out. The Chechen looked over and then motioned for Ilya to approach.
“I have a message from Anna Politkovskaya,” Ilya said when he reached the stage.
“How do you know her?” the suspicious Barayev inquired.
Ilya recounted his long-standing friendship with the journalist’s family.
Barayev asked for the phone number of Anna’s daughter, then sent Ilya back to his seat.
At three a.m. in Moscow, the daughter was awakened by the ringing phone.
“This is Barayev. From Nord-Ost.”
Anna had his permission to enter the theater.
For Ilya, conditions improved at once. He was allowed to roam the theater aisles, no longer forced like the rest to stay seated. He took it to mean that Anna enjoyed “undisputed authority” among the Chechens.
Ilya noticed a curious thing during his wanderings. At night, when the hostages were mostly asleep, the black widows were much less menacing. They appeared rather relaxed, unlike during daytime, when they were ultra-serious and seemingly ready to set off their belt bombs at any moment.
And there was something puzzling about the belts themselves. Ilya saw one woman reflexively pushing her thumb detonator without causing her belt to explode. Screws dropped regularly to the floor from other belts. Such observations made Ilya and some fellow musicians wonder if the belts were fake.
Anna Politkovskaya arrived in Moscow the second day of the hostage-taking. She went directly to the theater, on Melnikov Street, in the Dubrovka district. She was used to danger, having reported stories in the most remote and treacherous parts of Chechnya. But walking into a hostage situation with terrorists ready to explode bombs was quite another matter. She was admittedly frightened.
The theater was not what one might call cavernous; it was more like a large cinema house, with two decks of red-covered seats set on a slight incline down to a moderate-size stage. Anna entered the lobby area, accompanied by an elderly doctor who had volunteered to check on the condition of the hostages. There was no one in sight. “Hello, is anyone here?” she called out. “This is Politkovskaya.” There was no reply. Again she called out.
At last they heard a voice. “Are you the one who was at Khotuny?” A masked man made himself visible. He was referring to a Chechen mountain village that Anna had visited some twenty months earlier to investigate the reported presence of a brutal Russian prison camp. Yes, I was there, Anna told him.
That made her welcome, but not the elderly doctor, who was ushered out after being accused of various misdeeds. Anna went on alone until she came face-to-face with a man calling himself Abu Bakar. He was nominally Barayev’s deputy. But it was clear from his authoritative manner that the relatively inexperienced Barayev relied on him heavily for most of the crucial decisions.
Here was an opportunity to try for a negotiated settlement. Anna spoke first. She assured him she wanted to hear everything the Chechens had to say, but first the children in the audience must be released. She was instantly rebuffed. Russian soldiers made a practice of arresting Chechen males as young as twelve, Abu Bakar replied, so why should we show mercy?
At least allow the hostages to have something to drink and eat. Abu Bakar gave a little ground. He would permit juice and water to be brought into the theater, but no food. The hostages could eat the same as the beleaguered Chechen people, meaning little or nothing.
Anna could understand Abu Bakar’s bitterness. She felt that Putin had victimized not only the Chechens, but also Russian civilians, by inuring them to a vicious war, and his own military, too, by turning professional soldiers into callous killers.
What were the Chechen demands? Anna wanted to know.
There were two, Abu Bakar replied. Putin had to declare the war over. And, as a confidence-building measure, he had to actually withdraw troops from one part of Chechnya. Once those demands were fulfilled, the hostages could go home.
And what about Abu Bakar’s masked comrades and the black widows?
“We will stay here, take the fight, and die,” he said.
Anna knew there was no chance that Putin would agree. Perhaps there was some other way out. But for now, the hostages needed attention.
She returned to the street and went looking for drinks. But the Russian commandos surrounding the theater had come ill prepared to satisfy such a request—there were no food supplies of any kind for the hostages. So Anna solicited cash donations from fellow journalists and some firemen—enough to buy water, juice, and candy at a nearby kiosk. The candy was not explicitly permitted, but Anna figured that it was worth the risk. In several relays, the drinks and the sweets were carried inside.
Anna felt better after having brought some relief to the hostages. But she was newly distressed by a message whispered to her furtively by one of Ilya’s orchestra mates. Word was circulating that the Chechens intended to begin shooting captives soon.
Anna telephoned a trusted friend, Dima Muratov, her editor at Novaya Gazeta. He told her to stand by while he called someone. Novaya Gazeta—“The New Newspaper”—was the only national opposition paper that had survived Putin’s purge of rival voices in the media. It did not have a lot of friends in the Kremlin, but Muratov did possess the phone number of one important person—a suave survivor from the Yeltsin era named Alexander Voloshin, who was Putin’s chief of staff. Perhaps Voloshin could make a difference. The editor put in the call.
“Can Anna leave the theater area? Is she free to leave?” the Putin aide asked. Muratov didn’t know. He had to call his reporter back.
“Yes, I can go,” Anna told him.
“Tell her to leave,” Putin’s man said when the editor called back. The meaning of his words was ominously clear. The Russian security forces had their own timetable—they were about to storm the theater. If Anna were there, she risked being swept up in the violence. The trouble was, if her editor told her the truth, she was sure to refuse to leave. She was just that way.
Muratov called Anna. “I need you to come back to the newsroom—now,” he said. “I need you to write your story.”
Apparently not suspecting her editor’s subterfuge, Anna returned to the office and wrote up the events of the previous hours.
The clock ticked past midnight, and Irina’s fifteen-year-old son began saying his good-byes to those sitting around him. “I will not survive,” he said.
A few rows away, Elena’s son, a third-year chemistry student at Moscow State University, wondered aloud why authorities didn’t pump in a gas that would simply put everyone to sleep. “Such gases exist,” he said. But his stepfather, the retired colonel in military intelligence, said it wouldn’t work.
“If they spray gas, it is not physically possible for everyone to be put to sleep,” the older man said. So “they will just start shooting.”
Elena thought that if anyone was about to die, it would be her. She turned to her new husband. He had to promise that if anything happened to her, he would not abandon her son. “You’ll help him,” she said. She was thinking of her former husband, who had walked out two years earlier to live with another woman. The colonel looked at her with tense eyes but spoke in a calm voice. “Don’t doubt about this,” he said. “I would never abandon him.” A reassured Elena relaxed. She was certain he would not.
Suddenly, there was hope. “You can rest. Someone is coming from the government,” the Chechens’ leader, Barayev, called out. General Viktor Kazantsev, Putin’s special envoy for Chechnya, had called to say he was flying in to Moscow and would come to the theater for face-to-face talks. The standoff, now in its third day, might actually be near an end.
Everyone—the hostages, the Chechens—was buoyed. The masked men tossed candies and juice into the audience.
About five a.m., Elena’s son told his mother that he smelled something sweet. Irina saw one of the Chechens on stage pull his mask up over his face and look about the theater in seeming puzzlement. Was there a fire? she wondered. Ilya glanced up and saw a faint, cloud-like mist floating down from ventilators in the ceiling.
Barayev shouted a sudden warning. “Now they are storming us!” he cried out. “Lay down!”
Ilya didn’t know what to think—did the Chechens intend to be their killers, or their rescuers?
“I’m afraid,” said Irina’s son. “Don’t be afraid,” she replied. “Whatever happens, we’ll be together. I’ll hold your hand.” She was startled to see the black widows begin to slump against walls where they had been standing at attention, then slide to the floor unconscious.
Something perilous was in the air. Irina wrapped her scarf around her son’s face and told her sister to cover her daughter’s face, too. Elena dampened three handkerchiefs with water she had saved. She handed one to her son, one to her husband, and placed the third over her face.
Ilya heard shouting, glass breaking, and shooting. The Chechen gunmen scattered in panic. But the gas had made him woozy and indifferent—who cared about the Chechens? He and a fellow musician lay side by side on the floor and covered their faces with a jacket they shared. Then Ilya blacked out.
Russian commandos waited at a command post about two hundred yards away as the gas was released into the theater’s air-conditioning system. It was a derivative of fentanyl, an opiate anesthetic many times more powerful than morphine. The Kremlin’s expectations were that everyone inside would fall safely asleep. Then security forces could storm the building and kill the Chechen invaders before any bombs were detonated.
The assault had been organized with the care of a watchmaker, according to Mark Franchetti, the British journalist. Commandos placed ultrasensitive sound devices beneath the floor of the auditorium, enabling them to track the movement of the Chechens inside. They also drilled a peephole and ran a tiny camera through it, allowing some limited viewing of the theater’s interior. After hours of such monitoring, the security forces were able to establish the approximate position of each terrorist. Commandos were then assigned specific Chechens to shoot when the assault began. They conducted practice raids in another theater a few miles away.
Still, after the fentanyl was released, signs of movement continued inside the auditorium. The gas apparently had not circulated as well as expected. Fentanyl was usually dispensed via an injection or pill; the aerosol had been tested and judged safe by scientists, but never in a space this large. Some parts of the theater seemed to be getting quite a bit of gas, other parts very little.
More fentanyl was pumped in, and then yet more. At last, all seemed quiet inside the theater and troops from the elite Alpha Unit poured into the building. Fifty-seven hours after the hostage crisis had begun, it was all over. The Russian commandos shot the black widows point blank where the women had collapsed. They pursued the Chechen men through the theater and executed them on the spot, including Barayev. (There were rumors later that one or more of the terrorists had escaped, but they were unsubstantiated.)
Ilya felt someone shaking him. A masked commando was shouting in his face, “Get up! Get up!” Although he could barely move his arms and legs, he managed to stumble out of the building to an ambulance, which whisked him to a hospital. When he was released four days later, four thousand rubles, the equivalent of $160, was missing from his trousers. Other hostages admitted to the hospital had the same story—all their cash, jewelry, and furs were stolen. Later, Ilya learned that ten of his fellow musicians were dead.
Elena awoke in a hospital bed about four hours after the gassing. “Where is my husband?” she pleaded. A few hours later, her mother and sister arrived with the answer. Her husband, Sergei, and her son, Andrei, had both perished.
Irina awoke in the crowded emergency room of another hospital. Her clothes, blood soaked, had been removed, and she was naked except for a blanket that someone had wrapped around her. She realized that her son was not with her and began to scream.
“Why are you shouting?” a doctor demanded. “Everyone is fine. No hostages died.” That, at least, was the official word—all the hostages were safe.
A friend retrieved clothes from Irina’s apartment while she used a borrowed cell phone to call other hospitals in search of her son. There was no trace of him, and she decided to go look for him herself. The first obstacle was getting out of the emergency room and off the hospital grounds, which were surrounded by soldiers with orders not to allow anyone to leave. Irina was stopped on her first attempt. But when in desperation she began to climb over a fence, she felt a hand under her—a kindly soldier provided the final boost.
Irina’s first stop was her apartment, to retrieve a photograph of her son in case it would be needed for identification purposes. The building’s lobby was already crowded with friends ready to join in the search. A television was turned to the news.
Suddenly, a friend brandishing a cell phone burst into tears. They killed him, she cried. On television, the bad news was confirmed. Some hostages in fact had died, and their names began scrolling across the screen. The first on the list was Yaroslav Fadeev—Irina’s son.
A stillness came over Irina. She felt nothing and showed no emotion.
“Where is he?” she asked simply. She found his body at a morgue, where she sat alone, gazing at his face and caressing his head. She felt a wound and realized he must have been hit in the fusillade directed at the Chechens. That explained why her clothes had been so bloodied—it was her son’s blood.
All she could think of were her final words to him—whatever happens, we’ll be together. She felt she had deceived her son. And she couldn’t live with that.
Irina ran out a back door, flagged a taxi, and directed the driver to a bridge over the Moscow River. She had no money so she paid the fare with her gold wedding band, and stepped out. She stood on the bridge where she and Yaroslav had often strolled, and gazed down at the icy water. The words kept going through her mind—whatever happens, we’ll be together.
Then she jumped.
Irina opened her eyes. She had briefly gone underwater, but then floated right back to the surface. There was too much ice in the river. It was impossible to drown.
“Are you crazy? Why are you swimming there?” a man shouted from the riverbank. He and a friend pulled Irina out. “Where are you from?” the man’s friend asked.
“I’m from the morgue,” she replied. The men looked at her as if she was crazy.
“Listen,” she said. “I’m from Nord-Ost.”
The two men instantly understood. Anyone in Moscow would have. “Where do you want to go?”
Home, she said.
Irina did not even catch a cold.
The official death toll was 129. In a statement, Vladimir Putin congratulated the commandos for rescuing more than seven hundred hostages. “We could not save everyone,” he said. “Forgive us.”
A chorus of criticism arose among survivors and their relatives. Why had the Kremlin not given negotiations more of a chance? What happened to Viktor Kazantsev, the Russian general who supposedly was on his way to attempt a negotiated settlement? Had that been a ploy to gain time for the commandos to prepare their assault? And what about the reckless use of the aerosol?
Those killed by the gas had gone into hypoventilation, slow and shallow breathing that leads to a dangerous buildup of carbon dioxide in the blood. It is the way that heroin addicts often die. The appropriate treatment is an injection of naloxone, a medication that counters the effects of opiate overdose, especially from heroin or morphine. But it must be administered immediately.
In fact, some rescuers carried syringes of naloxone. Judging by the welt on his upper arm, Ilya reckoned that he received a shot from the commando who shook him awake. But there were not enough doses, or not enough people delivering them, to make much of a difference. Ilya said that no other musician appeared to have gotten a shot; he had simply been lucky.
Outside the theater, medical personnel were either absent or disorganized. The commandos themselves, rather than a waiting crew of paramedics, carried the liberated hostages from the building. Witnesses said there were no waiting stretchers and virtually no medical supervision; the commandos simply laid the hostages on the sidewalk, sometimes in the snow. Proper medical procedure called for the victims to be laid on the side, arms down at their sides, and heads back and aligned with their bodies, so as to keep their air passages open and tongues safely away from their throats. But that care was not taken.
Even those who made it to hospitals alive could not expect to receive appropriate treatment. Government secretiveness left doctors and nurses uncertain for hours as to how to proceed. In the emergency room where Irina was treated, it was apparent that few medical workers had been told anything about the nature of the gas that had been used, not even what it was.
And so the doctors tried improvising. Irina recalled that one prescribed milk for all the survivors. Another doctor ordered the milk exchanged for mineral water. Then a third ordered the mineral water withdrawn. “It’s no good in this case,” he said.
Some doctors did receive word to inject naloxone, which they reasonably interpreted to mean that the gas was an opiate. But no one could be sure what sort of opiate, a crucial bit of information. Under pressure, the Kremlin finally began to characterize the gas as a fentanyl derivative, but even that was too inexact. Was it an analogue of fentanyl called carfentanil, ten thousand times more powerful than morphine and used to sedate large animals? Was it sufentanil, an anesthetic for heart surgery that is a mere ten times more powerful than fentanyl? Or simple fentanyl? Doctors were left wondering how much naloxone to administer.
Five years later, authorities whom I interviewed responded to their critics in pretty much the same way. The government had certainly not intended that the hostages should die. Therefore it was blameless.
A former Kremlin official who had been involved in the planning, and who asked for anonymity, said no one was sure how much gas to pump in. Nor, he added, did anyone anticipate that a large supply of antidote would be needed. It was assumed that everyone would simply wake up. “In my opinion, the operation was successful,” he said.
As for the bitter complaints of survivors, he turned philosophical. “When there are victims, they will always seek answers,” he said. “They say we could have continued negotiations. They will do so until the end of their lives. People live in a certain myth in which some things were done well, and some things bad. But I’m absolutely certain that there was no evil plot to kill people.”
The Kremlin political adviser Vyacheslav Nikonov replied similarly. “The gas was rather harmless. The only thing they needed was a breath of fresh air—oxygen. A mask on their mouths,” he said. “Most of them died because of their tongues going down their throats. When they started bringing people out, there was a long line of medical cars. They concentrated on bringing people to the cars rather than on giving them oxygen.”
The government’s review of what precisely happened was lack-adaisical at best. Yuri Sinelshchikov, a former deputy prosecutor of the city of Moscow who supervised part of the investigation, believed it was not a serious effort. Written findings by his own investigator were altered to be in agreement with the conclusions of the FSB and the federal prosecutor, he said.
Sinelshchikov did not elaborate, but in other remarks he indicated there could be no conclusive investigation because the crime scene was politicized and corrupted. “I would leave the scene sick because of the mistakes, criminal mistakes,” he said. “Important witnesses were not immediately interviewed, not until two or three weeks later. There was missing evidence. In the beginning someone didn’t think something was important, and when he went back it was gone. People were not detained for interrogation. If someone was under suspicion and needed to be followed secretly, they were not doing it well at all, and it was obvious. For the first ten days there was chaos, and there were too many people from the top involved.”
Anna Politkovskaya had her suspicions about the events—she believed there had to be complicity of some kind within Russia’s intelligence agencies. How else did so many fully armed terrorists reach the center of Moscow? she asked. Six months afterward, she backed up her case by publishing an interview with a man who identified himself as a surviving member of the Nord-Ost terrorist band. The man, named Khanpasha Terkibayev, was working for Russian intelligence, Politkovskaya alleged. After the interview, Terkibayev denied telling Politkovskaya that he was at Nord-Ost. He was killed in a car crash a few months later.
Like the allegations regarding the 1999 apartment blasts, the suggestion of FSB involvement at Nord-Ost seemed fantastic. Even though I trusted Anna’s work, I had trouble taking such notions seriously. What I could say was that something worse than simple incompetence had led to the outcome at Nord-Ost. From the moment the hostage crisis began, the Kremlin and its security forces were focused only on killing the Chechens, on demonstrating the resolve of the state not to be pushed around. It never occurred to any of them to make the survival of the captives a priority.
An outsider could only wonder: If terrorists seized a theater in a major Western city, would the New York police or the FBI or the London, Paris, or Tokyo police use gas to subdue the hostage takers? Possibly. But would they neglect the need to have massive and well-organized medical care waiting outside the theater? The Hurricane Katrina debacle in 2005 notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine that fully equipped rescue trucks and ambulances would not have been lined up on Broadway by the dozens. I think it would be the same in the United Kingdom, in France, in Germany, and so on.
The most dangerous place in the industrialized world to be a rescued hostage is Russia.
The Nord-Ost survivors tried to get on with their lives, some more successfully than others. Two months after the hostage episode, Anna Politkovskaya’s phone rang. It was the police.
“We’ve got Ilya Lysak down here. He is asking for you,” a voice said. Ilya had been disorderly again; since his brush with terrorism, the young musician had gotten into a bar fight, inexplicably erupted at passersby on the street, and thrown a chair at someone.
“What’s wrong with me?” he asked Anna, after she signed him out of jail. That night, he dozed off on the Politkovskaya couch next to the family’s pet Doberman.
A few months later, a car jumped a curb near Ilya’s apartment and ran him down. He suffered multiple broken bones and spent eleven months in the hospital. Anna arranged for his treatment, cashing in a favor owed her by a wealthy acquaintance, who paid the bills.
When I met him five years later, he spoke as though the hours he spent as a hostage weren’t entirely frightening for him. Indeed, I had the sense that he was feeling fairly full of himself some of the time. At one point, he said, he decided that the Chechen leader, Barayev, was not that imposing, and that he, Ilya, could “take him one-on-one” if the two had ever been alone together. But there also was something affecting about Ilya. He described himself as a big, muscular man prior to the auto accident; now, at age twenty-nine, he was skinny, almost wiry, and, while a captivating speaker, he was more boy than man. When I saw him, Ilya was working two jobs—sound director at the country’s main television station and, on the side, composing music for a film.
Elena noticed that people acted strangely once they learned of her connection to Nord-Ost, and so she stopped mentioning it. For the previous eighteen years, she had taught chemistry. But she could not see herself returning to the classroom. Instead, she began attending classes on the tourism industry, and there she met an elderly woman named Diana who was already a success in the business. As their relationship warmed, Elena revealed that she had been a hostage.
Diana responded instantly. “I’m going to give you my firm,” she said. Elena was floored by her classmate’s extreme kindness. “She was seventy-five and decided to do something else. She could see my circumstances,” said Elena. “She asked an absolutely symbolic amount” of money in exchange.
When Elena spoke to me over tea in spring 2007, she was about to fly to Paris to personally select a hotel for clients. This courageous woman was on her way.
Irina, anxious that her son not be forgotten, presented herself at Anna Politkovskaya’s newspaper office with a sheaf of photographs. Until then, the two had never met. But the sympathetic journalist made Irina and her dead son part of a feature article entitled “Nord-Ost. 11th Row,” and churned out other pieces on the survivors and the government’s plodding investigation. Irina read them all; Anna, she said, had “taken me by a finger and pulled me out from drowning….”
But the Novaya Gazeta story offended the city prosecutor’s office. An investigator summoned Irina for an interview and demanded that she retract the claim that her son had been shot by commandos. The official version was that firearms had been used only against the Chechens. Irina refused to back down; the prosecutor’s office kept phoning, then began calling her parents.
Finally, Anna called the prosecutor’s office: “Leave this family alone,” she said, according to Irina. The calls stopped.
In America, the HBO network commissioned a documentary entitled Terror in Moscow, based on the work of Mark Franchetti, the British reporter who had interviewed the terrorist leader Barayev. Ilya, Elena, and Irina were brought together for the HBO program, and it in turn gave rise to the formation of Nord-Ostsi, or the “People of Nord-Ost”—survivors and families of the dead, bound together by the shared tragedy. They met at Elena’s new apartment, and their common vow was to keep the memory of the theater massacre alive. Some joined in a suit against the Russian government, filed in international court in Strasbourg, France.
On the first anniversary of the gassing, a bronze plaque bearing the names of all 129 victims was installed outside the theater during a memorial service. Irina placed a photograph of her son amid the bouquets of flowers. Elena slipped in a photo of her husband and son at the seashore. No one from the Kremlin attended. President Putin sent a statement from abroad, calling the deaths “a severe wound in our heart that will take a long time to heal. But you and I know well that once you let terrorists raise their heads in one place they will immediately appear in another place using territories they are comfortable in as bases of rear support.”
I last saw Irina at a Nord-Ostsi dinner in September 2007, where she sat before the camera of Russian documentary filmmaker Marina Goldovskaya. She was in despair that her life had become, like the setting for the theater massacre, a sort of play. “Just turn on the camera, and we can perform,” she said of herself and the other survivors.
Her story fascinated the media—how she had found her son’s body in a morgue, how she had jumped from the bridge. She was entirely genuine each time her tears welled up, which is why journalists and filmmakers kept returning. She had dedicated herself to crusading on behalf of the victims of Nord-Ost, which guaranteed that she would be a constant object of attention.
And yet she was troubled by the freeze-frame in which she found herself. It seemed frightening at times. In the years after the massacre, she had married and given birth to two children. She was a mother again, and she did not want her children to pay a price for the life she had chosen to lead. But how could they not be affected?
Would it have helped if Irina had sensed that there was some understanding of her pain amid the highest levels of government? An understanding among the Kremlin leadership that defense of the state had to be tempered with compassion for the Russian people?
Probably.