by Mia Bloom
With the dissolution of the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev and the balkanization of the Russian empire, Chechnya followed Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in its quest for autonomy. Under the leadership of Dzhokhar Dudayev, the all-national congress of the Chechen people stormed a session of the Chechen-Ingush parliament with the aim of asserting independence. The Chechen nationalists pulled down the statue of Lenin in the main square in the capital city of Grozny, drove the KGB out, and threw the first secretary of the Communist Party, Vitaly Kutsenko, out of a third-story window. Dudayev declared Chechnya’s independence in 1991. Unable to control the situation and end the violence in the region, Gorbachev’s successor, Boris Yeltsin, declared a state of emergency on November 8, 1991.
Dudayev’s support surged among Chechens while Yeltsin was criticized by all sides: Russian reformers accused him of going too far, conservatives of not going far enough. The average Russian was angered by stories of Chechen abuse of local Russians and saw Chechnya as a dangerous center of mafia activities. As ethnic Russians fled the region, the economy and industry suffered. In February 1994, Russia signed a treaty with Tatarstan affirming Russian sovereignty in exchange for domestic autonomy. Tatarstan had been the only republic other than Chechnya that had refused to sign the March 1992 federal treaty. Dudayev refused to enter into negotiations until Russia recognized Chechnya as an independent state.
Dudayev’s erratic and authoritarian behavior, the severe economic slump, and increasing crime, corruption, and clan rivalry led to political infighting, attempted coups, countercoups, and mounting opposition to his leadership. He finally dissolved the Chechen parliament and introduced direct presidential rule. On November 29, 1992, Yeltsin issued an ultimatum to all the warring factions in Chechnya ordering them to immediately disarm and surrender. When the government in Grozny refused, the Russian president ordered his army to restore constitutional order by force.
In December 1994, Russia began aerial bombardment of Chechnya, including the capital city of Grozny. Russian forces assumed that every Chechen was the enemy and no one was spared. Thousands of civilians died as a result of carpet bombings and rocket artillery barrages. As civilian losses mounted, the Chechen population—even those opposed to Dudayev—became increasingly hostile to the Russian forces. Highly mobile units of Chechen fighters caused severe losses to Russia’s demoralized troops. By summer 1996, the Chechen rebels had managed to split the Russian forces into a dozen isolated pockets. Over a period of one week, the rebels were able to fend off the Russian forces and send them fleeing.
The First Chechen War culminated in the Battle of Grozny, also known as Operation Jihad, in August 1996, a bloody siege in which more than 27,000 Chechen civilians died in the first five weeks (some estimates suggest the number exceeded 35,000, including 5,000 children). The bloodbath shocked Russians and the outside world, resulting in severe criticism of the war and waning domestic support among Russians. The total number of civilian deaths in the war is estimated to have been between 30,000 and 100,000, with as many as 200,000 more injured and more than 500,000 people displaced by the fighting. Yeltsin finally called for a ceasefire in 1996 and signed a peace treaty, the Khasav–Yurt Accord, the following year.
The peace agreement was short-lived. In August 1999, Yeltsin nominated Vladimir Putin, a relatively unknown former security service agent, to head the government. Shortly thereafter a series of bomb attacks destroyed several apartment blocks in Moscow and other Russian cities, claiming hundreds of victims. Although the perpetrators were never properly identified and there were many indications that the FSB was responsible, Putin used the bombings as an excuse to once again undertake a full-scale military mobilization against Chechnya. Appealing to Russian chauvinism, Putin’s Unity Party swept into office on a wave of nationalist rhetoric and hyperbole.
In the period between the peace treaty and the resumption of hostilities, Chechnya had become the new focal point of the global jihad. As the Taliban consolidated their control of Kabul, many mujahideen fighters migrated to Chechnya, bringing with them the same techniques that had succeeded against the Russians in Afghanistan. Arms and money flowed to Chechnya as Arab mercenaries were integrated into the separatist units. Secular nationalists embraced Islam as a means of exploiting the new allies and resources. Warlords like Salman Raduyev and Arbi Barayev emerged in a region increasingly characterized by its lawlessness. Those Chechen groups not taking money from the jihadis engaged in campaigns of kidnapping and hostage-taking; more than 1,300 people were kidnapped and held for ransom. In August and September 1999, Chechen leader Shamil Basayev (in association with an Arab jihadi, Ibn Al Khattab) led two armies of two thousand Chechen, Dagestani, Arab, and international mujahideen and Wahhabi militants from Chechnya into the neighboring Republic of Dagestan and so precipitated the Second Chechen War.
Putin responded with massive aerial bombardments intended to wipe out the militants and flatten Grozny. The air campaign was followed by a new ground war. In the notorious zachistka (mopping-up) operations, Russian units would cordon off a village and prevent anyone from entering or leaving. In Chechnya, it was normal for people to disappear. The disappearances would take place either during the mopping-up operations or at the police checkpoints, which were set up on the roads leading in and out of every city. Over the course of several days, the Russians would violently interrogate Chechen civilians. Often the men and boys were killed and dumped in open pits that were subsequently blown up to obliterate all trace of the bodies.12 The women who found themselves in police custody were vulnerable to sexual predation.13 Tens of thousands were arrested, tortured, or disappeared. According to the 2001 annual report by Amnesty International:
There were frequent reports that Russian forces indiscriminately bombed and shelled civilian areas. Chechen civilians, including medical personnel, continued to be the target of military attacks by Russian forces. Hundreds of Chechen civilians and prisoners of war were extra judicially executed. Journalists and independent monitors continued to be refused access to Chechnya. According to reports, Chechen fighters frequently threatened, and in some cases killed, members of the Russian-appointed civilian administration and executed Russian captured soldiers.14
The Chechens began to use suicide terrorism against government targets in 2000. Russian troops had been instructed to focus their attention on men between the ages of seventeen and forty, so Basayev opted to use female bombers. Two women, one aged twenty-two and the other sixteen, perpetrated the first attack, against Russian checkpoints. The twenty-two-year-old was Khava Barayeva, sister of the warlord Arbi Barayev, and soon to be a model for Chechen women and girls throughout the region. Basayev used women in several more operations, to great effect. At the outset his attacks were directed against Russian military and police but, as the conflict raged on, Basayev began to target civilians. In 1995 he took over a hospital in the Russian city of Budyonnovsk; in 2000 he attacked the Russian military base at Vedeno; and finally, he and his lieutenant, Arbi Barayev, began to hatch their most shocking plan to date: to target civilians in Moscow. The two men narrowed down possible targets: the Bolshoi Ballet, the Stage Theater, the Central House of Youth, and another theater, the Dubrovka House of Culture. They agreed that the Dubrovka was likely to have the most Russians (and fewest foreigners) in the audience, and so chose it as their target. Barayev did not get to put the plan into action, however; he was killed by Russian special forces in June 2001.
Notorious for his viciousness, Arbi Barayev was an inspiration to his twenty-five-year-old nephew, the rebel leader Movsar. Arbi boasted that he had personally killed more than 170 people while leading the Chechen Islamic Special Units and the Special Purpose Islamic Regiment (SPIR). He was infamous for shooting six members of the International Red Cross (ICRC) in 1996, and for beheading four foreign telecommunications workers—three British citizens and one New Zealander—in 1998. (Osama bin Laden allegedly paid Arbi thirty million dollars for the feat, outbidding by ten million the Russia
n police’s offer for their safe return.)15 To honor Arbi’s memory, Movsar adopted his name and joined with Shamil Basayev to commemorate the first anniversary of his uncle’s assassination in fitting fashion.
DUBROVKA: THE HOUSE OF CULTURE
The lights in Moscow’s House of Culture flickered on and off to signal the end of intermission and the beginning of the second act. Ladies decked out in jewels and furs and men in designer suits hurried back to their seats as the orchestra readied the audience for Georgy Vasilyev’s sold-out performance of the hit musical The Two Captains. The Nord Ost players took their places on the darkened stage. More than 850 people16 eagerly awaited the play’s conclusion. The musical was about love and intrigue during World War II. The elaborate set design and complicated staging had amazed critics: firecrackers and rockets boomed and a real aircraft landed onstage during every performance. It was a stereotypically Russian plot with singing bombers, dancing pilots, and folk music. There were few non-Russians and only a handful of foreigners in the audience.
Five minutes into the second act, an armed man appeared on the stage. This was the reborn Arbi Barayev, a.k.a. Movsar Suleimenov, and the AK–47 in his hands was no stage prop. He announced that he was taking the audience and the actors hostage. At first, many members of the audience assumed the armed man was part of the show. Their smiles faded as Barayev fired several shots into the air. A half-dozen terrorists had been seated in the orchestra; now they pulled black hoods and masks over their heads, drew machine guns from under the seats, and stood to join the other armed Chechen men and women—more than forty in total—who filtered into the crowd. The men wore fatigues and clutched automatic rifles in their hands. F–1 hand grenades dangled from their belts. The women switched out of their sweaters and jeans and covered themselves from head to toe in black Islamic veils and robes. All you could see were their kohl-lined eyes, the Makarov pistols in their hands, and the improvised explosive devices strapped to their bodies.
Onstage, Barayev said: “Take out your cell phones, call your friends and family, call the media and tell them that you have been taken hostage.”17 Then he told the captives to place their hands on top of their heads. Some people remained calm while others panicked. Several women began to cry and some even fainted. It was 9:05 P.M. Moscow time on October 23, 2002, and what would turn into a three-day siege had just begun.
The hostage-taking was originally scheduled for October 29. It was meant to be the culmination of a series of attacks, including car-bomb strikes on a McDonald’s and the Russian Duma (parliament).18 However, the explosives packed into the car (a Lada Tavria) parked outside the McDonald’s on October 25 failed to cause sufficient damage to satisfy the rebels,19 and the attack on the Duma fizzled out when the bomb failed to explode at all. Two more attacks, including one against the Moscow subway (which finally occurred in February 2004), were deferred. The arrest on October 22 of Aslan Murdalov, one of Barayev’s co-conspirators, forced the team to speed up their schedule by a week. Barayev was not sure they were ready, but some of their number had begun filtering into Moscow on October 2, and the women had arrived by October 19. On the night of October 23 he left three vehicles—a Chevrolet SUV, a Ford SUV, and a VW Gazelle microbus20—with their engines running outside the theater, in case the initial takeover was unsuccessful and the team had to make a hasty retreat. No one noticed the driverless vehicles idling outside the theater until it was too late.21
Onstage, Barayev informed the audience that the rebel group was a suicide squad (smertniki) from the 29th Division of the Chechen rebel forces. While the women guarded the hostages, the men assembled bombs from parts hidden around the theater and from the bags they had with them. The entire theater was rigged with two tons of RDX hexogen explosives along with two 152-millimeter fragmentation shells, one in each of two massive metal cylinders. They placed one cylinder in the center of the auditorium in row fifteen, where everyone could see it, and the second in the balcony.22 If either of these two devices had gone off, the theater’s ceiling would have collapsed on the hostages. Twenty smaller bombs were placed throughout the building, in the balconies, under the seats where the audience sat, and in the hall. The female terrorists wore suicide vests packed with three to five kilograms of homemade explosive encased with metal nuts, bolts, and ball bearings. The shrapnel would cause as much devastation as the explosions themselves.
The terrorists called select radio and television stations using the hostages’ cell phones. Several members of the international media—including the Italian newspaper La Repubblica—as well as reporters from Russian television channels NTV, TVS, and Ren-TV were invited into the theater to talk to the rebels and see for themselves that the hostages were being cared for. The stations broadcast the calls from the siege in real time over the next three days. The hostages pleaded with the authorities not to storm the building as truckloads of police and soldiers accompanied by armored personnel carriers encircled the theater. The terrorists said they were prepared to kill ten hostages for any terrorist casualty or in the event that security forces launched an attack.
In a filmed interview with NTV’s Sergey Dedukh, Movsar Barayev said that the rebels had nothing to lose. They had traveled two thousand kilometers to get to Moscow and there was no way back. “We have come to die. Our motto is ‘freedom and paradise.’ We already have freedom in Moscow. Now we want paradise.” Movsar explained that the group had not come to Moscow to kill the hostages or to fight Russian troops. They had had enough fighting in Chechnya. They wanted President Vladimir Putin to publicly declare the end of the war in Chechnya. They wanted Russian forces to immediately withdraw from Chechen territory. They also demanded that an antiwar demonstration be held in Red Square and that artillery and aerial bombardments in Chechnya be terminated. They especially wanted a halt to the notorious zachistka operations.
The military had seven days to pull out and if they refused, the rebels would start killing the hostages one by one. “We will kill them all!” a hostage-taker named Abusaid told Tatyana Deltsova, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, in a phone interview. “We came here to die. We are suicide fighters.”23 The terrorists expected Russian special forces to attack on the third day of the siege. One of the Chechen leaders, Abu Said, told Azeri TV: “Yes, the Russians will definitely attack. We are waiting for it.”24
At 3:30 A.M. on October 24, six hours into the siege, a woman walked into the auditorium. Olga Romanova had sneaked past the police cordons and tried to incite the crowd to overtake the terrorists. She screamed at the hostages, telling them there were only forty hostage-takers and hundreds of them. The terrorists pointed their guns at her. A voice from one of the balconies yelled out, “Shoot her!” Romanova dared them to do it: “Yes, go ahead and shoot me!” They took her from the hall into an adjacent room and fired four bullets into her with a 5.45-mm assault rifle. The bullets penetrated the right half of her rib cage, abdomen, lungs, and left hip bone as she crumpled to the ground, and she was soon dead. It was rumored among the hostages that she had been drunk or on drugs. Others claimed that she might have been an FSB agent. Romanova was the first casualty of the siege.
Back in the main auditorium, the terrorists used the hostages’ passports and other forms of identification to separate the foreign hostages from the Russians. They also separated the men from the women. The hostages were split between the main stalls and the balcony. Virtually no contact between the groups was allowed. The terrorists also checked IDs to determine how many police officers or federal agents might be among the crowd. Accounts differ as to what happened next. According to one story, police officers and agents were shot; according to another, after the siege it was found that no agents had been killed. All Muslims, Azeris, and Georgians in the audience were told that they were free to leave, as were those holding foreign passports. Seventy-five people from fourteen different countries were told to go, but then the Russian police negotiators refused to let the crowd be divided along ethnic lines. The Russian authorit
ies did permit the terrorists to release 150 women and children and some of the foreigners, especially those who required medical treatment after the first few hours of the siege. One pregnant Russian suffering from dehydration and anxiety was taken to a local hospital.
The siege became a tense standoff and the hours turned into days as the Russians pretended to negotiate with the hostage-takers. Shortly after midnight on day three, a group of Russian doctors, including Dr. Leonid Roshal, head of the Moscow Institute of Emergency Children’s Surgery, entered the theater with several NTV reporters to treat the sick and wounded. Most hostages just needed cough medicine or eyedrops. Roshal reported that the rebels were not beating or threatening any of the captives. Most of the hostages were calm; only two or three needed tranquilizers. The Red Cross also brought in hot food, warm clothes, and medicine.
According to Movsar’s father, as part of the negotiations, Vladimir Putin promised to come to the theater. The Kremlin also promised to send General Viktor Kazantsev, a former commander of the Chechen war who wasn’t even in Moscow, to negotiate terms.25 Hoping that a peaceful agreement could be negotiated, Barayev ordered the men to disable the bombs in the auditorium and to take the batteries out of the handheld detonators, so that there would be no accidental explosions. In fact, there were no negotiations in the works. The terrorists had been duped. In the final hours before the security forces took over, the rebels were informed that the Russians would concede to their demands, a lie that appears to have persuaded the Chechens to relax their defences. Russian special forces then leaked information to the media that they planned to storm the theater at three in the morning. Barayev and his men waited for two hours for the assault but nothing happened. They let their guard down again, assuming the tip to have been a hoax.