After Russian commandos blitzed a Moscow theater early Saturday and freed hundreds of people held hostage by Chechen rebels, Russian television showed government footage of the aftermath: the corpse of the rebel leader sprawled on the floor and dead female rebels, clad in black robes, slumped over theater chairs with explosives strapped to their waists.
Blood, including that of some of the hostages, was nearly everywhere. But this was not the bloodbath many had feared, and the Russian government hailed the surprise raid as a success.
“We managed to do almost the impossible,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told the nation Saturday night.
But he also acknowledged the loss of life: “We could not save everyone. Forgive us.”
The resolution of the crisis is unlikely to bury questions about Putin’s hard-line policy in Chechnya, where the war he ordered three years ago remains a stalemate that has claimed the lives of thousands of Russian soldiers and Chechen civilians–and has now bled into the Russian capital.
Russia will have to measure the defeat of a small band of Chechen rebels against the hostage death toll the raid produced. The Interior Ministry reported that 67 hostages died; the Health Ministry said the death toll topped 90. At least 108 people were hospitalized, some in grave condition. About 50 rebels were killed.
Russian officials said they had no choice but to order the special forces operation. Before Saturday, Moscow and the rest of Russia had braced for much worse.
On Wednesday, armed Chechen rebels stormed a theater where one of Moscow’s most popular musicals was being performed and took everyone in the building hostage. The rebels, men in camouflage armed with assault rifles and women in dark robes with explosives strapped to them, lined the building’s aisles, seats and walls with mines and bombs.
Then they issued a demand Putin could not meet: Withdraw Russian troops from Chechnya and end the war against the Islamic separatist movement or the hostage-takers would detonate the explosives and kill everyone inside.
The demand appeared to be designed to box Putin into a lose-lose scenario. The likelihood of Putin acquiescing and ordering a pullout from Chechnya was small, experts said. But a failed rescue attempt that ended in the deaths of hundreds would have been equally devastating. Russians would never forgive such a loss of life at the hands of Chechens less than 3 miles from the Kremlin.
Leaders of the Russian military, Federal Security Service and Interior Ministry said they found a way out, involving the use of an incapacitating gas to neutralize the rebels, especially the 18 women with explosives.
Russian authorities refused to name the gas, but they said disabling the rebels’ ability to detonate the bombs, explosive canisters and mines planted throughout the building–including on the roof–was vital to the raid’s success.
“The structure of the building and the threat of an explosion gave evidence that no one would survive in the building if the explosion was powerful enough,” Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Vasilyev said.
Putin’s hostage crisis command center had decided it would begin a raid on the building, in southeast Moscow in the Dubrovka neighborhood, if rebels began executing captives.
The rebels, angered that the Russian government failed to give them any sign they would meet their demands, announced Friday night they would begin killing hostages early Saturday. After 4 a.m., they killed two captives, according to witnesses and Russian officials.
Witness to execution
Olga Chemyak, a hostage and a reporter for Russia’s Interfax news agency, said she saw one of the executions. A rebel aimed a rifle at a male hostage and shot him in the eye.
Chemyak said the man “said something like, `Mummy, I do not know what to do!'” before he was shot. “They also shot a woman in her belly. We understood that the executions started.”
Swarms of Russian commandos began circling the theater. Large holes were blasted into the walls to allow troops inside. An unconfirmed report in the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets quoted one of the commandos as saying the incapacitating gas was piped into the building through the ventilation system.
Inside the theater, hostages sensed the government’s raid. One hostage, Natalia Skoptseva, frantically called a Russian radio station on her cell phone and chillingly described what was happening as bursts of gunfire and explosions rang out.
“Special forces have started doing something here, and it appears that the government doesn’t want us to get out alive,” Skoptseva said. “We feel this gas, we see it, we don’t know what it is. We are breathing in our handkerchiefs.”
Other hostages said they were relieved when the raid began. Chemyak said she and others believed a government rescue offered the best chance of survival.
“We were waiting for this storm–we were sure it was necessary,” Chemyak said.
As the gas filled the main hall, Chemyak said she and her husband grabbed pieces of clothing and tried to moisten them so they could cover their noses and mouths. Moments later, they passed out. Chemyak awoke in a hospital emergency room.
Commandos took about 95 minutes to get control of the theater. Many hostages were carried out on the shoulders of soldiers. Within minutes, the pavement in front of the building was covered with bodies, some already in body bags.
A convoy of ambulances and buses rushed the wounded to nearby hospitals. Galina Kushnir, a patient at one of the hospitals where the hostages were brought, looked out her room window and saw “the street filled with ambulances.”
Several girls were brought into her ward, disoriented and in shock.
`Am I alive?’
“One girl said, `Gas! Gas! It tastes bitter!’ She vomited and then asked, `Am I alive?'”
At the entrance to Hospital No. 13, where most of the injured were taken, relatives and friends gathered and pleaded for news of their loved ones.
The information trickled out.
“The doctors just give us generalities,” said Marina Kravchenko, whose daughter, 21, was a hostage. “They don’t give us specific information.”
None of the 20 children inside the building Saturday was killed, Vasilyev said. The 75 foreigners, including three Americans, also survived, he said.
Doctors said many hospitalized hostages suffered from gas poisoning when Russian commandos pumped an incapacitating chemical into the theater. Some hostages may have died from the gas, physicians said.
Moscow prosecutor Mikhail Avdyukov warned that the hostage death toll could go up.
“We cannot rule out that this figure might increase as information from emergency rooms of hospitals keeps coming.”
Many of those hospitalized were being treated for malnutrition. During the rebels’ 58-hour siege of the theater, the hostages were given chocolate and water. Conditions were harsh. The rebels would not allow the hostages to use the toilets, instead forcing them to use the theater’s orchestra pit as a bathroom.
At times the rebels refused to let the hostages sleep, ordering them to stand up and down repeatedly to keep them awake, Marat Abdurakhimov said.
“We were shown a mine and told, `We will blow you all up,'” Abdurakhimov said. “We were . . . threatened endlessly.”
In his brief address to the nation Saturday night, Putin told Russians they had just endured “a terrible test. We proved that it is impossible to put Russia on its knees.”
Calling the rebels “armed bastards,” he described the Chechen separatist movement as “strong and dangerous, inhuman and savage.”
How Putin weathers the crisis and its aftermath remains to be seen. He was lauded at home and abroad for his work in freeing the hostages. But Russians are likely to remember that the war in Chechnya that Putin launched in 1999 has boomeranged to Moscow.
A opinion poll in July indicated that only 29 percent of Russians supported the war in Chechnya. In 2000, 70 percent of Russians backed the war. And when they discuss a possible peace in the war-torn republic, they speak of decades, not years.
“There is no final solution to this war in sight,” said Alexei Malashenko, an expert in Chechen affairs and an analyst for the Carnegie Moscow Center. “The war continues, and the capture of this theater is one of the best examples of that.”
