Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

A few hours later, one of our reporters called to say that a hospital right near the theater had been evacuated. The military were beginning to storm the building, I concluded, and were readying space for possible casualties.

At 5:30 on Saturday morning, the third day of the siege, two of the hostages called Echo Moskvy, the city’s main news and talk station. “I don’t know what’s going on,” one of them sobbed into the phone. “There is gas. Everyone is sitting in the hall. We ask you, please, we just hope we are not another Kursk .” Unable to speak further, she passed the phone to her friend, who said, “It seems they are beginning to use force. Please don’t abandon us if there is a chance, we beg you.” It is heartbreakingly clear that neither the hostages nor their loved ones outside trusted the Russian armed forces to save them. The reference to the Kursk made it plain: they did not trust the government to have regard for human life.

In fact, the rescue plan was brilliant: special forces used underground passages to fill the theater with gas that would make everyone inside fall asleep, preventing the terrorists from detonating the explosives planted around the hall—women dressed in black and apparently wearing vests packed with explosives were posted throughout. The sleeping terrorists could then be detained and the hostages freed by troops who would emerge from those same underground passages as well as enter the building through the front doors.

None of it worked out as planned. It took several minutes for the terrorists to fall asleep. Why they did not set off the explosives was unclear, and led to speculation that there were no explosives at all. The hostages, sleep-deprived and severely dehydrated—at least in part because the two different special forces units stationed around the theater could not agree on letting pass a shipment of water and juice the terrorists had consented to accept—fell asleep quickly and required medical help to wake up. Instead of being given immediate medical attention, they were carried out of the building and laid on the steps of the theater, many of them on their backs rather than their sides, as they should have been. Many people choked to death on their own vomit, without ever gaining consciousness, right on the steps of the building. Then the dead and the merely unconscious alike were loaded onto buses, where, again, they were placed sitting up; on the buses, many more people choked to death when their heads flipped backward. Instead of being taken to the hospital next door, the hostages were transported, mostly by bus, to hospitals in central Moscow, where the doctors were helpless to aid them because the military and police authorities refused to tell them what kind of chemical had been used in the theater. Several of the hostages fell into a coma and died in the hospital, some as late as a week after the siege was over. In all, 129 people died.

The government declared victory. Pictures of the terrorists, all of whom were summarily executed in their sleep by Russian troops, were repeatedly shown on television: men and women slumped in theater chairs or over tables, with visible gunshot wounds to their heads. When I wrote a piece on the disregard for human life the government had exhibited by declaring victory in the face of 129 unnecessary deaths, I received a series of death threats myself: the triumph over terrorism was not to be questioned. It was months before some human-rights activists dared point out that Russia had violated a series of international conventions and its own laws by using the gas and applying force when the terrorists were still willing to negotiate. Few Russians ever learned that the terrorists, led by a twenty-five-year-old who had never before been outside Chechnya, had advanced demands that would have been almost laughably easy to fulfill, possibly securing the release of all the hostages. They wanted President Putin publicly to declare that he wanted to end the war in Chechnya and to demonstrate his goodwill by ordering troop withdrawal from any one district of the breakaway republic.

But for all the seeming simplicity of their demands, the terrorists were demanding that Putin act in a way that ran counter to his nature. The boy who could never end a fight—the one who would seem to calm down only to flare up and attack again—now the president who had promised to “rub them out in the outhouse,” would certainly rather sacrifice 129 of his own citizens than publicly say that he wanted peace. He did not.

Just two weeks after the theater siege, Putin was in Brussels for a European Union–Russia summit devoted principally to the discussion of the international Islamic terrorist threat. At a press conference after the meetings, a reporter for the French newspaper Le Monde asked a question about the use of heavy artillery against civilians in Chechnya. Putin, looking calm and even smiling slightly with the corners of his mouth, said, “If you are ready to become a radical adherent of Islam and you are ready to be circumcised, I invite you to come to Moscow. We are a country of many faiths. We have specialists in this. I will recommend that the operation be performed in such a way that nothing will ever grow there again.” The interpreter did not dare translate Putin’s response in full, and it did not even make it into the following day’s edition of The New York Times : the paper demurely translated his last sentence as: “You are welcome and everything and everyone is tolerated in Moscow.” But the video of him lashing out at the reporter was still viral on RuTube nine years after Putin made his threat—and demonstrated his utter inability even to pretend to consider a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Chechnya.

ALEXANDER LITVINENKO was now living in a row house in North London, across a narrow street from Ahmed Zakaev, a former actor from the Chechen capital of Grozny, who had, in the late 1990s, become the intelligent, charming face of an independent Chechnya. He had been a key member of the post–cease-fire Chechen government and Chechnya’s representative in the West. In 2000 he was wounded and left Chechnya for medical treatment, and eventually he sought political asylum in Great Britain. Now he was living in North London on a stipend he received from his old negotiating partner, Boris Berezovsky—just like Litvinenko, who had spent much of the second half of the 1990s in Chechnya, on the side of the Russian troops. Zakaev’s surviving comrades considered him to be the prime minister of Chechnya in exile.

Together, Litvinenko and Zakaev pored over documents and video footage of the theater siege and made a startling discovery: one of the terrorists had not been killed; in fact, he seemed to have left the building shortly before Russian troops stormed it. They identified the man as Khanpash Terkibaev, a former journalist who, they believed, had long been working for Russian secret police. On March 31, 2003, Zakaev saw Terkibaev in Strasbourg, where both had traveled for a meeting of the European Parliamentary Assembly as representatives of the Chechen people, Terkibaev sanctioned by Moscow and Zakaev not. In early April, Litvinenko sought out Sergei Yushenkov, the liberal colonel with whom Marina Salye had been co-organizing before she fled Moscow, who was now engaged in a parliamentary investigation of the theater siege, and gave him all the information he had collected on Terkibaev. It was two weeks later that Yushenkov was shot dead in Moscow in broad daylight. Litvinenko was certain this was a direct result of his theater siege investigation.

But Yushenkov had already given the documents he received from Litvinenko to someone else. Anna Politkovskaya was a journalist in her mid-forties who had spent most of her professional life in relative obscurity, writing excessively researched and confusing pieces on all manner of social ills. During the second war in Chechnya she emerged as a recklessly brave reporter who would spend weeks on end in Chechnya, apparently oblivious of the Russian military’s restrictions, documenting allegations of abuse and war crimes. In a couple of years she had become easily the most trusted Russian among Chechens. Gray-haired, bespectacled, the mother of two grown children, she seemed a most unlikely muckraker or war reporter, which probably kept her safe on a number of occasions. During the theater siege, she was allowed to enter the building to attempt to negotiate with the terrorists, and she appears to have been instrumental in getting them to agree to allow water and juice to be delivered.