The New Tsar (38 page)

—

I
n his speech, Putin devoted barely a minute to the war that he had ridden to power, in part because it was no longer the triumph he had promised. In 2001, Putin announced that the withdrawal of the Russian military from Chechnya would soon begin, but the war was far from over. Federal forces controlled the republic’s borders and most of its cities and villages, but only during the day. Attacks from the rebels continued to kill Russian troops, who retaliated with sweeps of villages that resulted in arrests, torture, and death.
³⁰
Although the Kremlin had installed a former rebel commander and imam, Akhmad Kadyrov, as the republic’s loyalist leader, the military and the FSB could not crush the insurgency. Its leaders remained at large, hiding in the mountains along the border or in villages that remained committed to Chechen independence.

The initial popularity of the war had faded; polls showed that most Russians no longer believed it was winnable. Chechnya threatened to become a quagmire that most felt should be resolved through peace talks. The mounting casualties threatened not only Putin’s strategy but his presidency. The war remained a personal crusade for Putin, and the official propaganda was so successful that he “began to believe the sterilized
versions of events, falling victim to his own spin.”
³¹
It was only when disaster struck on an enormous scale that the Kremlin’s propaganda could not conceal the devastation and Putin glimpsed the shortcomings of the strategy he had launched and the security bureaucracies he had enlisted to carry them out.

On August 19, an Mi-26 helicopter approached the main Russian military base in Chechnya, the sprawling airfield at Khankala, just outside Grozny. The helicopter, the world’s largest, was designed to carry tons of equipment and as many as eighty passengers and crew, but by 1997, the Ministry of Defense had banned its use to ferry passengers, restricting it to cargo. On this day, there were 147 people onboard, soldiers and civilians, including the wives of several officers and at least one young boy, the son of an army nurse, who had hitched a ride. As the helicopter descended, a missile struck its starboard engine. The helicopter landed a thousand feet short of its landing pad—right in the middle of a minefield intended to protect the base’s perimeter. Loaded with fuel for its return trip, it burst into flames. Most of the passengers who survived the crash landing were trapped inside the burning cabin; those who made it out tripped mines as they fled. The military, reflexively, lied about the cause and the casualties, which ultimately reached 127, including the boy and his mother. It was the worst helicopter disaster in history, and the single biggest loss of life in the war, a military catastrophe more deadly than the
Kursk
.

Putin, having learned the hard political lesson of the
Kursk
, immediately acknowledged the crash and promised an investigation with Sergei Ivanov in charge of it. Ivanov flew the next day to Khankala and relieved the commander of the army’s aviation wing, Colonel General Vitaly Pavlov, who protested that he was being scapegoated. Pavlov complained about the maintenance of the helicopter fleet and said the order banning passenger transit applied to peace time, while the country remained at war. “If there is no fighting, why are our troops dying at the hands of militants?”
³²

Putin’s frustration with his commanders flared. Two days after the crash, he met in front of television cameras with Sergei Ivanov in the VIP hall of an airport outside Moscow. Aside from his major addresses and press conferences, the televised tête-à-tête became Putin’s signature means of communicating, a scripted setting in which he was the unquestioned leader praising, encouraging, or hectoring his subordinates, even
a friend as close as Ivanov. “How could it happen that despite a defense minister’s order banning the use of helicopters of this type from carrying people, people were still being carried?”
³³
Putin demanded to know.

“There is no justification, Vladimir Vladimirovich,” Ivanov replied, playing his part in the public censure. Two weeks later, he forced General Pavlov to submit his resignation and reprimanded nineteen other commanders, including twelve generals. The one thing Putin never considered in the wake of the disaster was any change in the war’s strategy.

Although intermediaries had floated proposals for peace talks earlier in the year, Putin continued to rule them out. The only thing Putin would accept from Chechnya’s rebels was unconditional surrender. The rebels’ response came shortly thereafter in a videotape that showed a shoulder-fired missile downing the helicopter. Despite rumors of his death, the narrator was Aslan Maskhadov, surrounded by bearded men he referred to as “our mujahedin.” He sat in front of Chechnya’s green flag, which no longer bore a wolf, the symbol of the independence struggle for more than a decade. It had been replaced by a sword and a Koranic verse.
³⁴

—

“W
e came to the capital of Russia to stop the war,” a young man said, speaking thickly and slowly into a camera as he sat cross-legged in front of an open laptop, “or to die here for Allah.”
³⁵
The man speaking was Movsar Barayev, a rebel fighter and nephew of one of Chechnya’s most ferocious commanders, Arbi Barayev. Russia’s military command in the Northern Caucasus had triumphantly announced two weeks earlier that Movsar Barayev had been killed on October 10, 2002, ignoring the fact that his death had already been announced a year before that.
³⁶
Now Barayev was in Moscow, barely three and a half miles from the Kremlin, where Putin, as was his custom, was working late in his office. Putin would not leave for the next three days.
³⁷

Barayev, three days shy of his twenty-third birthday, was the public face of a “special detachment” of fighters, twenty-two men and nineteen women, who had arrived in Moscow a month earlier, traveling individually or in pairs on trains and buses from Dagestan to avoid the scrutiny of police wary of travelers from the Caucasus. They came on the orders, he said, of Chechnya’s “supreme military emir,” Shamil Basayev, though they professed grudging loyalty to its putative president, Aslan Maskhadov. They spent weeks in Moscow preparing for an assault that would bring the bloody, brutal war to the capital. They wanted a public
place that would ensure a mass hostage taking of ordinary Russians. They considered the parliament, but settled on a theater.

The one they chose was on Dubrovka Street in southwest Moscow, a hall still known by its Soviet name, the Palace of Culture for the State Ball-Bearing Factory No. 1. A part of the building housed a gay club—“frequented by members of parliament, prominent businessmen, and politicians,” it was said—that was undergoing renovation. The fighters of Barayev’s group disguised themselves as construction workers and made plans to storm the theater.
³⁸
The theater was showing Russia’s first Broadway-style musical:
Nord Ost
, based on a popular Soviet novel,
The Two Captains
, by Veniamin Kaverin. The story was a romantic melodrama, spanning the first half of the twentieth century, the exploration of the Arctic, and the siege of Leningrad in the Great Patriotic War. The musical’s creator, Georgy Vasiliyev, spent $4 million to produce it and promote it on billboards ubiquitously plastered across the city. He calculated that Russia’s new middle class—the beneficiaries of the economic boom that Putin was riding to popularity—had grown prosperous enough to afford the $15 ticket price. On the night of its 323rd performance, October 23, 2002, the Chechens moved in just as the second act began. The actors, dressed as pilots in vintage uniforms of the Red Army air force, were tap-dancing across the stage when a masked man in camouflage entered from stage left. The closest actor jolted in shock, but most of the audience thought it was a part of the performance—until the gunman fired his AK-47 into the roof and more camouflaged men joined him on the stage.
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Barayev’s fighters sealed off the main hall and wired explosives to columns supporting the theater’s balcony. The women, dressed in black hijabs with Arabic inscriptions, took up positions among the audience. They carried pistols and wore belts of what appeared to be explosives, which they threatened to detonate if anyone resisted or the authorities dared to storm the building. The women, as young as nineteen, became known as “black widows,” the wives, daughters, and sisters of Chechen fighters who had died in the war. In all the years of fighting in Chechnya, suicide bombings had been rare, and the women proved to be a terrifying portent of the turn the war in Chechnya was taking. “We are on Allah’s path,” one of them declared. “If we die here, that won’t be the end of it. There are many of us, and it will go on.”
⁴⁰
There were 912 people inside, including the cast and crew and foreigners from Europe and the United States. The siege unfolded over the next two days in a surreal, televised spectacle. Barayev told the captives
they could use their phones to call their loved ones and tell them that they would die if the authorities did not end the war in Chechnya.

Now Putin was besieged, too. He had vowed to wipe out Chechnya’s bandits, but the war had ground on for three years, devouring Russian soldiers and thousands of Chechens. He had lost the popular support for the war he cultivated at the outset. The military had failed to subdue the insurgency. And now the FSB had failed spectacularly to stop a terrorist raid in the heart of Moscow. Putin canceled plans to travel to Germany, Portugal, and then to Mexico, where he was to meet George Bush again. Meeting the director of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, he ordered preparations for an assault on the theater, authorizing negotiations only if it would buy time. The FSB dispatched three teams of commandos to the scene. Only his prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, protested that a rescue could result in hundreds of deaths. Putin sent him in his place to the international gathering in Mexico, apparently to get him out of the way.
⁴¹

Several prominent politicians, journalists, and officials, including the Chechen representative in the Duma, Aslambek Aslakhanov, telephoned the captors inside and eventually were allowed in to negotiate with them. Thirty-nine of the hostages were soon released, most of them young children. Grigory Yavlinsky, whose party, Yabloko, was sharply critical of the war, entered the theater that night after seeking approval from the Kremlin, which seemed unable to control the intermediaries going in and out, or the phone calls and later the video of the terrorists’ demands. He was struck by how “very, very young” the fighters were; they would have been merely children when the Soviet Union collapsed and Chechnya declared independence in 1991.
⁴²
He doubted they had ever gone to school. All they knew they had learned on the battlefields of the Caucasus. They could barely articulate their demands, let alone negotiate. When they demanded an end to the war, Yavlinsky asked, “What does this mean?” He left frustrated, but hopeful that incremental steps, including the release of more hostages, could at least minimize the casualties. Yavlinsky returned to Putin’s office in the Kremlin and took part in a series of meetings with him on the progress of the negotiations. And yet it became clear to him that Putin also presided over a separate set of meetings, with Patrushev and other security officials, and people like him were not invited to attend.

On the second day of the siege, conditions in the hall became dire with the hostages succumbing to hunger, dehydration, exhaustion, and
fear. The terrorists shot several people, including a woman who inexplicably ran into the building and an FSB commando who had approached from a patio outside. Even so, intermediaries continued to enter the theater, including Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist whose scathing reports from Chechnya had defied and infuriated the military and the Kremlin. She and a prominent physician, Leonid Roshal, managed to persuade a fighter who called himself Abu Bakar to allow her to return with boxes of juice for the hostages. Politkovskaya, born in New York to Soviet diplomats posted at the United Nations, was one of the most courageous Russian journalists who covered the war, and by then she had become an eloquent, impassioned critic of it. Her reports sympathized with all who suffered—Russia’s conscripts, the rebels, and the civilians caught in between—but she loathed the military’s inept and inhumane commanders and most of all the commander in chief who in her mind had orchestrated the entire catastrophe in the Caucasus. Her encounter with Abu Bakar made her legs “turn to jelly,” but she persuaded him to let her meet two of the hostages. One, a journalist named Anna Adrianova, spoke of despair. “We are a second
Kursk
,” she said.
⁴³

More releases seemed imminent. An American hostage, Sandy Booker, was allowed to telephone the American embassy. He told a diplomat there that Barayev had agreed to release the foreigners the next morning.
⁴⁴
The Kremlin announced that it had summoned Putin’s special envoy in the southern region, Viktor Kazantsev. The rebels believed that he would arrive at ten the next day, but he never boarded a plane to Moscow.

The storming of the theater began, on Putin’s orders, shortly after five o’clock in the morning. The terrorists appeared to have relaxed, anticipating more negotiations the next day. Russian commandos had already infiltrated the building through the gay club, and inserted listening devices to learn the position of the terrorists. Fearing explosions that could destroy the building, they were to kill the terrorists, not capture them.
⁴⁵
An odorless gas began to seep into the main hall, released through the building’s ventilation system. It was an aerosolized derivative of a powerful anesthetic, fentanyl, developed by an FSB laboratory. The release of the gas caused confusion among the captors and hostages. Anna Adrianova, the hostage Politkovskaya had met, telephoned the radio station Ekho Moskvy and said that the terrorists seemed uncertain but not ready to execute them. “Can you hear us?” she said after shots rang out. “We’re all going to be blown to hell.”
⁴⁶
Mysteriously, they were
not. The gas put most of the hostages to sleep, while the commandos fought gun battles with terrorists who were not in the main hall or were otherwise unaffected by the gas. The fighting lasted more than an hour before Barayev was cornered on a second-floor landing behind the balcony. All forty-one captors died, most from bullets to the head.