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 Russian 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
