Putin's Russia

Moscow, February 8, 2003. No. 1 Dubrovskaya Street, now known to the whole world as Dubrovka. In a packed theater whose image—just three months ago—was flashed to all the world’s newspapers, magazines, and television stations, there is an exuberant atmosphere. Black tie, evening dress, the whole of the political beau monde has assembled here. Sighs and gasps, kisses and hugs, members of the government, members of the Duma, leaders of the parliamentary factions and parties, a sumptuous buffet…

They are celebrating a victory over international terrorism in our capital city. The pro-Putin politicians assure us that the revival of the musical Nord-Ost on the ruins of terrorism is nothing less than that. Today will see the first performance since October 23, 2002, when the unguarded theater, its actors, and its audience were seized during the evening performance and held hostage for fifty-seven hours by several dozen terrorists from Chechnya, who hoped to force President Putin to end the second Chechen war and withdraw his troops from their republic.

They didn’t succeed. Nobody withdrew from anywhere. The war continues as before, with no time for doubts about the legitimacy of its methods. The only thing that changed was that in the early morning of October 26, a gas attack was mounted against all those in the building, some eight hundred people, both terrorists and hostages. The secret military gas was chosen by the president personally. The gas attack was followed by a storming of the building by special antiterrorist units in the course of which all the hostage takers was killed, along with almost two hundred hostages. Many people died for lack of medical attention, and the identity of the gas was not even revealed to the doctors charged with saving lives. Already on that evening, the president was announcing, without a qualm, that this was a triumph for Russia over “the forces of international terror.”

The victims of this murderous rescue operation were barely remembered at the gala performance on February 8. It was a typical fashionable Moscow get-together at which many seemed to forget what it was they were raising their glasses to. They sang, they danced, they ate, a lot of people got drunk, and everyone talked a lot of nonsense, which seemed all the more cynical because the event was taking place at the scene of a massacre, even if the theater had been refurbished in record time. The family members of those who had died in the Nord-Ost tragedy refused categorically to come to the celebration, considering it a sacrilege. The president was also unable to attend but sent a message of congratulation.

Why did he send congratulations? Because nobody could break us. His message was couched in typically Soviet rhetoric and proceeded from typically Stalinist values: it was a shame about the people who died, of course, but the interests of society must come first. The producers warmly thanked the president for his understanding of their commercial problems and said that audiences would be in for a treat if they came back. The musical had received a “new creative impetus.”

But now: the reverse side of the medal, the individuals at the cost of whose lives the president consolidated his membership in the international antiterrorist coalition. Let us look at those whose lives were crushed by the events at the Nord-Ost. Let us look at the victims about whom today’s state machine is trying to forget as quickly as possible, and to induce the rest of us to do the same by every means at its disposal. Let us look at the ethnic purging that followed the act of terrorism, and at the new state ideology Putin has enunciated: “We shall not count the cost. Let nobody doubt that. Even if the cost is very high.”

THE FIFTH ONE

Yaroslav Fadeev, a boy from Moscow, is now the first named in the official master list of those killed during the Nord-Ost assault. According to the official version of events, the four hostages who died from bullet wounds were shot by terrorists; the special unit of the FSB, Putin’s own service, does not make mistakes and hence did not shoot any of the hostages.

There is, however, no escaping the fact that a bullet passed through Yaroslav’s head, although his name is not on the list of the “four shot by the terrorists.” Yaroslav was the fifth to die from a bullet wound. In the “Cause of Death” column on the official form that was issued to his mother, Irina, for the funeral, there is a dash.

On November 18, 2002, Yaroslav, who was in the tenth grade of a Moscow school, would have been sixteen. There was to have been a big family celebration, but standing over the coffin of the now eternally fifteen-year-old boy, his grandfather, a Moscow doctor, remarked, “There now, we didn’t get to shave together even once.”

Four of them had gone to the musical: two sisters, Irina Fadeeva and Victoria Kruglikova, and their children, Yaroslav and Nastya. Vicetoria was the mother of nineteen-year-old Nastya. Irina, Victoria, and Nastya survived, but Yaroslav died in circumstances that have never been officially investigated.

After the assault and the gas attack, Irina, Victoria, and Nastya were carried out of the theater unconscious and taken to the hospital. Yaroslav completely disappeared. He was not on any of the interim lists. There was a total absence of precise official information. The telephone hotline announced by the authorities on radio and television was not functioning. Relatives of the hostages were rushing all over Moscow, and among them were friends of this family. They combed the city, dividing its mortuaries and hospitals into sectors to be checked.

Finally, in the Kholzunov Lane Mortuary they found Body No. 5714, which fitted Yaroslav’s description, but they could not confirm it was him. In his pocket they found a passport in the name of his mother, Irina Vladimirovna Fadeeva, but the page for “Children” contained this entry: “Male. Yaroslav Olegovich Fadeev, 18.11.1988.” The real Yaroslav, however, had been born in 1986.

As Irina explained later, “I put my passport into my son’s trouser pocket. He did not have any identification documents on him. Since he was very tall, looking to be about eighteen, I was so afraid that if the Chechens suddenly started releasing children and adolescents, Yaroslav might not be included because of his height. So, right there in the hall, I crouched under the seats and wrote Yaroslav’s data into my own passport, changing the year of his birth to make him seem younger.”

Sergey, Irina’s friend, came to see her in the hospital on October 27 and told her that Body No. 5714 had been found. He told her about the passport in the trousers and about the resemblance to Yaroslav. In spite of the frost, Irina ran out of the hospital, straight through a gap in the fence, just in what she was wearing.

The hostages who had survived and been taken to hospitals were still being held hostage there. By order of the intelligence services, they were forbidden to return home. They were not allowed to telephone or be visited by their families. Sergey had gotten into the hospital by bribing everyone he encountered: the nurses, the guards, the orderlies, the police. The total corruption of our system prizes open even the most firmly battened-down hatches.

Irina ran from the hospital straight to the mortuary. There she was shown a photograph on a computer monitor and identified Yaroslav. She asked to see his body, felt carefully all over it and discovered two bullet wounds in the head, an entry and an exit hole. Both had been filled up with wax. Sergey, who was with her, was surprised at how calm she seemed. She didn’t sob or become hysterical. She was logical and unemotional.

“I really was very glad that I had found him at last,” Irina tells me. “Lying in the hospital, I had already thought everything through and considered my options. I had decided how I would behave if my son was dead. In the mortuary when I saw that this really was Yaroslav and that my life was therefore at an end, I simply did what I had decided on earlier. I calmly asked everyone to leave the hall to which his body had been brought from the refrigerator. I said I wanted to be alone with my son. I had decided I would say that. You see, before he died, I had made him a promise. When we were stuck there, he said to me at the end of the last day, during the night, a few hours before the gas, ‘Mom, I probably won’t make it. I can’t take much more. Mom, if something happens, what will it be like?’ I told him, ‘Don’t be afraid of anything. We have always been together here, and we will always be together there.’ He said, ‘Mom, how will I know you there?’ I told him, ‘Your hand is always in mine, so we’ll find ourselves there together, holding hands. We won’t lose each other. Just don’t let go of my hand, hold on tight.’ But see how it turned out. I felt I had deceived him. We were never far from each other while he was alive. Never. That is why I was so calm: we were together in life, and over there, in death, we would still be together. Anyway, when I was alone with him in the mortuary, I told him, ‘There now, don’t worry. I have found you and I’m coming to be with you.’… I had never deceived him…. That is why I was so calm. I went through the side door in order not to see the friends who were waiting for me and asked the assistants to let me out through the service entrance. When I got outside, I flagged down a passing car, went to the nearest bridge over the Moscow River, and jumped off it. I did not drown, though. There were ice floes in the river, and I fell among them. I can’t swim, but I didn’t sink. I could see I wasn’t sinking and thought, ‘Well, I may at least get a cramp in my leg,’ but that didn’t happen either. As ill luck would have it, some people pulled me out. They asked, ‘Where are you from? What are you doing swimming?’ I told them, ‘I’ve just come from the mortuary, but please don’t report me.’ I gave them a telephone number to call, and Sergey came to collect me. Of course, I’m doing my best to cope, but I am dead. I don’t know how he is getting on there without me.”

When she had regained consciousness in the hospital on October 26, Irina found she was naked under the blanket. The other women hostages around her all had their clothes, but she had only a small icon clutched in her hand. When she could talk, she asked the nurses to give her back at least some of her clothing, but they explained that everything she had been wearing when she was brought in from the theater had been destroyed on orders from officers of the intelligence services, because it was soaked in blood.

But why? And whose blood was it? Irina had passed out in the theater clasping her son in her arms. The person whose blood it was must have been shot in a way that caused it to gush over her. It could only have been Yaroslav’s.

“That last night got off to a very tense start,” Irina recalls. “The terrorists were nervous, but then ‘Mozart,’ as we called him, Movsar Baraev, the ringleader, announced that we could take it easy until 11 A.M. A ray of hope had appeared. The Chechens began throwing juice out to us. They did not allow us to get out of our seats. If you needed anything, you had to put up your hand and then they would throw you some juice or water. When the government assault began and we saw the terrorists running up on to the stage, I said to my sister, ‘Cover Nastya with your jacket,’ and I put my arms tightly around Yaroslav. I didn’t realize they had released gas, I just saw the terrorists becoming agitated. Yaroslav was taller than I, so that really he was shielding me when I held him. Then I passed out. In the mortuary I saw that the entry wound was on the side away from me. I had been shielded by him…. He saved me, although my one wish in those fifty-seven hours as a hostage had been to keep him safe.”

But whose bullet was it? Was a ballistics test conducted? Was a blood sample taken from the clothing to establish whose it was?

Nobody in the family knows the answers to these questions. All information relating to the case is strictly classified, kept secret even from a mother. In the mortuary register, the cause of death was given as “bullet wound,” but the entry had been made in pencil. This document, too, was later classified: “They’ll have rubbed it out, of course,” the family says with certainty.

“At first I thought it had been done by one of the Chechen women,” Irina relates. “While we were stuck in there, she was nearby all the time. She saw that whenever there was any danger, any noise or shouting, I would grab my son and hold him tight. It was my own fault that I attracted her attention…. It seemed to me she was watching us all the time. At one point she said, staring at Yaroslav, ‘My son is back there’—in Chechnya, that is. Nothing bad happened to us after that, but I felt she was watching us all the time wherever she was. So perhaps she had shot Yaroslav. I still can’t sleep. I see her eyes in front of me, the narrow strip of her face.”

Irina’s friends later explained to her that the size of the entry wound on Yaroslav’s body indicated the bullet was not from a pistol, and the Chechen women had only pistols.

So the question remains: Whose bullet was it?

“It must have been our people,” Irina says. “Of course, we were sitting in a very unfortunate position, right by the doors. Anyone who came in was right there at row 11. When the terrorists burst into the auditorium, we were the first people they saw, so of course when our soldiers came in, we would have been directly in front of them, too.”

Irina can analyze what happened, and how, as much as she likes. What she thinks or imagines is of no concern to the authorities. The state’s line is that four people were shot, and no one else. Yaroslav, the fifth person, falls outside the official version of events. Indeed, Yaroslav is not even officially included among the victims in Criminal Case No. 229133, being investigated by a team from the Moscow city prosecutor’s office.

“It really hurts me that… the authorities are pretending there never was any such person,” Irina muses.

Worse, however, is that as soon as Irina shared her questions and conclusions with journalists, she was summoned to the prosecutor’s office. The investigator was angry. “What are you kicking up all this fuss about? Do you not understand it is impossible that he had a bullet wound?” He went on to do his best to scare the wits out of the unhappy mother, who was already in a perilous state: “Either you immediately write a statement to the effect that you told those journalists nothing and that they thought everything up themselves, whereupon we shall bring criminal charges against them for slandering the intelligence services, or we dig up your son’s grave without your consent and carry out a postmortem examination!”[10]

Irina did not give in to this wretched attempt at blackmail. Instead, she took her leave after a four-hour grilling in the prosecutor’s office and went straight to the cemetery to guard her son’s grave. It was late November, which in Moscow is the depths of winter. Again she was saved from death by friends who looked all over the city when she did not return home that night.

Yaroslav was considered a quiet, studious boy. He graduated from music school while others of his age were running wild in the streets swilling beer and exercising their swearing muscles. He suffered a great deal because of this. He wanted to be “tough,” to be assertive, bold, and unflinching.

He kept a diary, as many of us do at his age. Irina read it after the Nord-Ost events. He wondered which aspects of his personality he could say he liked and which he disliked. He wrote: “I hate it that I am such a coward, scared of everything and indecisive.” “And what would you like to bring out in yourself?” the diary asked. “I would like to be tough.” He had school friends, but they were not boys who were considered tough or whom girls fancied. At home he had a sense of humor, could show what he was made of, and be bold and assertive. It was outside that the problems began.

Irina is saddened by the things she never said to Yaroslav and by the fact she never properly told him how much she admired him.

“People consider me, for example, a strong person,” Victoria, Yaroslav’s aunt, tells me. “But in there I was completely distraught. There we three women were sitting next to him, the youngest of us, and it was he who encouraged us, like a grown man. My daughter’s nerves went completely. She was shaking and sobbing, ‘Mama, I want to live. Mama, I don’t want to die.’ But he was calm and courageous. He reassured Nastya, he supported us, he tried to take everything on himself, as a man is supposed to. For instance, one of the Chechen women saw we had put the children between us, trying to protect them…. Irina and I thought that if there was an attack, we would cover them with our bodies. Then the woman came up to us with a grenade in her hand. She touched Nastya’s leg. I said, ‘Would you mind going away?’ but she looked at Nastya and said, ‘Don’t be afraid. If I am standing right next to you, it won’t hurt. You will die instantly, while those sitting further away will suffer more.’ Then the Chechen woman went away, and Nastya said to me, ‘Mom, ask her to stay with us, ask her. She said it wouldn’t hurt us.’ Nastya was broken. I knew perfectly well that if we had that Chechen woman standing next to us, we really would be out of luck, but if she wasn’t, there was at least some hope….

“Another time the terrorists were frightening us by saying that if nobody came to negotiate, they would start shooting us, and that the first to be shot would be anyone in the police or the army. Naturally, many people quickly threw away their military ID, but the terrorists picked them up and called out the names from the stage. Suddenly we heard, ‘Victoria Vladimirovna, born 1960.’ That was me. Only the surname was wrong…. The situation was very bad. Nobody answered. The terrorists started going through people row by row. They came to me. Irina said, ‘We’ll go together.’ The terrorists demanded that members of the law-enforcement agencies go off somewhere with them, and we all thought they were going to be shot. I told Irina that one of us needed to survive or our parents would be left completely alone…. The terrorists found the Victoria they were looking for, but while everything was still unclear, Yaroslav came and sat beside me. He took my hand and said, ‘Auntie Vicky, don’t be frightened. If anything happens, I’ll come with you. Forgive me for everything. Forgive me.’ I said to him, ‘That’s all right, everything is going to be fine.’… I don’t know where he found so much courage. We thought he was just a child….

“It really was very scary. They let us listen to what was being said about us on the radio. That’s how we knew the president was saying nothing, and that [the radical right-wing politician] Zhirinovsky in typical hard-line fashion had said there was no point in the Duma wasting time on this terrorist act. It wasn’t worth discussing because it was all just a hoax….

“After we had gotten through the first day, we felt we could sit it out there for a week just so long as we could stay alive and the authorities could come up with a solution other than an assault on the theater. We found it hard. It was difficult to maintain your composure. But Yaroslav took it.”

Irina’s life has changed completely. She isn’t working now. She couldn’t bear to go every day to the job she was doing before, when Yaroslav was alive. Her colleagues were a cheery bunch. They knew one another well and would celebrate every exam Yaroslav passed, every top grade he earned. She can’t bear even to walk around Moscow, because she walked all the streets with her son and wherever she turns, the memories flood back.

“Look, these are tickets for the overnight train to Saint Petersburg, for October 25—26, just when he died. We were going there to a tennis tournament, just the two of us. I had been wanting to go somewhere with him by train for a long time, because I always had the feeling that we didn’t talk enough and in the train there would be just the two of us, and we would be able to have a heart-to-heart. It wasn’t to be.”

“Why do you say you felt you didn’t talk enough?”

“I don’t know…. We did talk a lot, but all the same, that is how it seemed. I wanted to talk and talk to him….”

Everybody around her is trying to help and support Irina. She is fortunate in having the love of those closest to her, but still it is hard. It was too much even for the priest she sought out in order to unburden her soul. When he had heard her story, he broke down. “Forgive me,” he said, “it’s just too painful.”

“I went to ask the priest what I could do. It was I who had dragged Yaroslav to Nord-Ost. It was all my idea. He wasn’t all that keen to go,” Irina says. In photographs taken before the terrorist ordeal, she is a beautiful, self-confident young woman, glowing with happiness, perhaps a little plump. Now she is shrunken and haggard, with a look of despair in her lackluster eyes. She seems far from young in her perpetual black coat, black beret, black shoes and stockings, always shivering, keeping her coat on even inside.

“Yaroslav and I went to the theater a great deal. That evening we had tickets for a different production in a different theater,” Irina continues. “We had already changed to go out. Victoria and Nastya had come to collect us, and there, standing in the hallway, we realized the tickets were for the day before. Yaroslav was glad. He wanted to stay at home, but I insisted: ‘Let’s go to Nord-Ost. It’s on nearby.’… I dragged him along, and then I failed to protect him…. The last thing he said to me was, ‘Mom, I so much want to remember you, if anything happens….’”

“Did you talk a lot like that in there?”

“No. For some reason it happened that this was the last time we talked together. You know, while I still had Yaroslav, I would get up in the mornings feeling I was the happiest woman in the world…. Now I think you probably aren’t allowed to be so happy…. I brought Yaroslav to such a terrible end. The present I gave him for his sixteenth birthday was a fence for his grave.”

“It is not you who did that to him.”

“It’s the war. There is a war being waged,” Victoria says again and again. “And now we have become its victims.”

No. 2251: UNIDENTIFIED

Before I can tell you this story, there is something I need to explain. It is about the way we are living in Russia in the aftermath of the Nord-Ost events, and about the state of the Russian judicial system under Putin.

The fact of the matter is that our courts were never as independent as you might have thought from our constitution. At the present time, however, the judicial system is cheerfully mutating into a condition of total subservience to the executive. It is reaching unprecedented levels of supine pozvonochnost’.

This word refers to the phenomenon of a judge delivering a verdict in accordance with what has been dictated in the course of a phone call (zvonok) by representatives of the executive branch of the government. Pozvozzochnost’ is an everyday phenomenon in Russia.[11]

“The victims of Nord-Ost” is how people now refer to the families who lost relatives during the assault, and also to hostages who were crippled as a result of the gas attack. These victims have begun to serve writs on the authorities demanding compensation for the “moral” (i.e., emotional and psychological) harm inflicted on them and naming as defendant the municipal government of Moscow. The victims have claimed that the officials of the municipal government, not wishing to argue with Putin and the FSB, failed to organize timely medical assistance for the victims. The plaintiffs consider that the city of Moscow’s culpability is the greater, since Yury Luzhkov, Moscow’s mayor and director of the city’s executive authority, was one of the people who agreed that the president should use chemical weapons against Russian citizens.

The initial writs were served at the Tverskoy Intermunicipal Court of Moscow (a district court) in November 2002. By January 17, 2003, when the first three were being examined by Federal Judge Marina Gorbacheva to see whether there was a case to answer, the number had risen to sixty-one. The compensation demanded totaled the ruble equivalent of $60 million, with the plaintiffs stating that this was the price of a state lie. What they primarily wanted to know was the truth about why their relatives had died. It had proved to be impossible to obtain, because the FSB had classified anything connected with the October terrorist attack as secret. Since Putin’s FSB was involved, the build-up to the court hearings took place amid a barrage of propaganda directed against the plaintiffs by the state media, who accused them of brazenly attempting to raid the country’s coffers and of trying to profit from the death of relatives. The better-known lawyers of Moscow had chickened out of representing the Nord-Osters because they feared the wrath of the Kremlin. Igor Trunov, who agreed to act for them, was besmirched in the press.

The authorities did their best to bulldoze their way out of the Nord-Ost claims, using the considerable PR machinery at their disposal, as if they were not the guilty ones themselves but rather the aggrieved party.

On January 23, 2003, Judge Gorbacheva, true to form as a “telephone judge” and basing herself on a technicality, rejected the claims of the first three plaintiffs. The federal law known as the Struggle Against Terrorism could be read in several ways, and there were contradictions between different provisions. One of them could be interpreted as meaning that the state was under no obligation to compensate victims of terrorist acts for any loss they suffered. In fact, the judge did a good deal more than merely reject the claims. She accompanied her rejection with a barrage of abuse as shameless as that of the authorities themselves, who had no doubt asked her to do so. The hearings developed into a succession of unforgivable insults and humiliations directed at the plaintiffs.

Here are some examples from the January 23 session.

“Karpov, sit down. I said, sit down!”

“But there’s something I need to say—”

Judge Gorbacheva interrupts Sergey Karpov, plaintiff, in midsen-tence. He is the father of Alexander Karpov, a popular Moscow singer, poet, and translator who was asphyxiated during the gas attack.

“Sit down, Karpov, or I shall have you removed. You missed your opportunity to make a written submission before the hearing.”

“I didn’t miss the opportunity. I was never notified.”

“Well, I say you did. Sit down, or I shall have you removed.”

“I wish to submit—”

“I am accepting nothing from you!”

The judge has a hysterical look. Her eyes are vacant, and she sounds like a street trader. While berating the plaintiffs, she is cleaning the dirt from under her fingernails. It is a disgusting sight. She continues her haranguing of Sergey Karpov: “Karpov, do not put your hand up again.”

“I request that my rights be explained to me.”

“You are going to have nothing explained to you.”

The crammed courtroom has not been swept for a long time. All the journalists have been forbidden to use dictaphones. Why, exactly? What state secrets are likely to be divulged? You are reluctant to talk to the victims—whose souls are in torment—because they immediately start crying. Relatives and friends have come to support them in case they are taken ill. The representative of the Russian bench continues, however, to drown everything in her vulgarity.

“Khramtsova, V.I; Khramtsova, I.E; Khramtsov, T I.Are you present? No?” The judge reels off the names with a total lack of courtesy.

“I am present,” a tall, thin young man replies.

“Khramtsov! You may speak!” From the tone of her voice you would think she was saying, “Here is a ruble, my good fellow, and now be off with you!”

Alexander Khramtsov has lost his father, who played the trumpet in the Nord-Ost orchestra. He begins to speak but finds it difficult to hold back the tears.

“My father traveled the world with orchestras and to make personal appearances. He represented our country and this city everywhere. His death is an irretrievable loss. Are you completely unaware of that? It is you who let the terrorists in, you, the city administrators of Moscow. They strolled around unhindered. Of course the assault was not your responsibility, but why were four hundred people taken to No. 13 Hospital when there were only fifty staff on duty there and they couldn’t treat people promptly? People died before they received any attention. That is how my father died.”

The woman in the judge’s robes, presiding up there on the bench, appears to be miles away. To kill time, she lazily shifts her papers from one place to another. She is weary and occasionally looks out of the window, adjusts her collar, checks her appearance in the dark glass. One of her earrings seems to be irritating her. She scratches her ear.

The son continues. He turns naturally to address the three defendants at a side table. They are the “representatives of Moscow,” officers of the law departments of Moscow’s government. Now the judge is checking her manicure.

“Why did you not at least allow medical students into the building if there was a shortage of doctors? Or on to the buses taking the hostages to the hospital? They could have looked after our casualties on the way there. People were choking and dying because they were lying on their backs.”

“Khramtsov!” Gorbacheva interrupts tetchily, noticing who the plaintiff is addressing. “Who are you looking at? You must address your remarks to me.”

“Fine.” Alexander turns his eyes back to the judge’s bench. “They were choking on the buses. Choking!”

He is crying. Who could remain unmoved?

Sitting immediately behind the witness stand, Valentina Khramtsova, his widowed mother, is also weeping. She is dressed completely in black. Gorbacheva cannot fail to see her. Next to her is Olga Milovidova, her face hidden in a handkerchief, her shoulders like two sharp humps, but nevertheless holding back her tears in order not to disturb the court. All the plaintiffs know they must not anger the judge, since she could simply have the court cleared and they would have to stand outside for several trying hours. Olga is in the seventh month of pregnancy. Her fourteen-year-old daughter, Nina, died in the audience at Nord-Ost. Olga had bought the ticket for her. “Why do you keep trying to humiliate us?” shouts Tatyana Karpova, the late Alexander Karpov’s mother, wife of Sergey. “How have we deserved that?” Danila Chernetsov, a Moscow student asphyxiated by the gas, was twenty-one years old and earning a little money in the evenings at Nord-Ost as an usher. His mother, Zoya Chernetsova, gets up and walks out of the courtroom. Outside the door she can be heard wailing. “I was looking forward to grandchildren,” she cries. Her son’s pregnant young widow had a miscarriage nine days after his funeral. “And now I have a court case where I’m insulted to my face.”

There is such a lack of decent legal tradition in this land of ours. We all know Judge Gorbacheva’s situation. Those who employ her consider that they, rather than we taxpayers, are paying her salary. They could remove her and the privileges of her office, which do make life easier for her than for an ordinary citizen on a low income. Let us suppose there is nothing she can do other than reject every one of the unfortunate victims’ demands.

But why does she have to be so rude? What need is there for all this derision, all these insults? Does she just enjoy kicking those who are already down? Who is Judge Gorbacheva, anyway, standing so zealously in defense of the interests of Moscow’s municipal exchequer?

Do you think anyone wrote in these terms in the state-controlled press or spoke in this way about the Nord-Ost hearings on state-controlled television? Some hope! Day after day the media informed citizens that the government supported Judge Gorbacheva in her defense of the interests of the state, which take priority over personal needs.

Such is our new Russian ideology, Putin’s ideology. And there is no getting away from the truth that it was first tried out in Chechnya. It was precisely at the time of Putin’s ascent to the Kremlin throne, amid the din of the bombing at the beginning of the second Chechen war, that Russian society made a tragic, immoral error because of its traditional unwillingness to think clearly. Our society ignored what was really going on in Chechnya, the fact that the bombing was not of terrorists’ camps but of cities and villages, and that hundreds of innocent people were being killed. It was then that most people living in Chechnya felt, as they still feel, the diabolical hopelessness of their situation—when, taking away their children, fathers, and brothers to who knows where and for who knows why, the military and civilian authorities said baldly (and still say), “Stop whining. Just accept that this is what the higher interests of the war on terrorism require.”

For three years Russian society kept quiet. The vast majority of citizens tacitly condoned the behavior in Chechnya and ignored those who predicted that it would come back to haunt them: a government that has acted like this in one part of the country would not stop there.

The Nord-Ost victims and the families of those who died are being abused in exactly the same way. “Stop whining,” they are told. “This had to be done. Society’s interests come before personal interests.”

Well, perhaps the government is behaving a little better, some 50,000 to 100,000 rubles better, toward them, since this time it has managed, at least, to pay for the funerals.

What about the reaction of the Russian people?Not much sympathy has been forthcoming—sympathy as a politically significant impulse that the government could not afford to ignore. Quite the opposite, in fact. A depraved society wants comfort and peace and quiet, and doesn’t mind if the cost is other people’s lives. Citizens run away from the Nord-Ost tragedy and would rather believe the state’s brainwashing machine than face the reality.

One hour after Alexander Khramtsov’s damning speech, Judge Gorbacheva rattled off her verdict, finding in favor of the government of Moscow. The courtroom emptied, leaving behind only the victors: Yuri Bulgakov, a lawyer in the city’s Revenue Department, and Andrey Rastorguev and Marat Gafurov, advisers in the legal department of the metropolitan authority.

“Well, are you celebrating?” I couldn’t help asking.

“No,” all three replied sadly. “We are human, after all. We can see what is going on. It is a disgrace that our state is treating these people in this way.”

“Well, why don’t you stop doing this disgraceful work?”

They were silent. We went out into the dark Moscow evening, some to warm homes filled with the laughter of their families, others to echoing flats left empty forever on October 23. The last to leave was a stooping, gray-haired man with expressive eyes. Throughout the hearing he had sat with quiet dignity in the corner.

“What is your name?” I called after him.

“Tukai Khaziev.”

“Were you a hostage yourself?”

“No. My son died there.”

“Can we meet?”

Tukai Khaziev reluctantly gave me his telephone number.

“I don’t know what my wife will make of this. You must understand, it is not something she has any wish to talk about. But you may call in a week’s time. I will talk to her.”

The Khazievs, a Moscow family, have been through a specifically Russian hell. They have not only lost their twenty-seven-year-old son, Timur, a musician in the orchestra of Nord-Ost. They have been on the receiving end of the very ideology that is now so widespread and that, without exaggeration, was Timur’s real killer.

“Would it have been so difficult for Putin to find at least some sort of a compromise with the Chechens, the terrorists?” Tukai Khaziev keeps repeating. “Who needed that ‘indomitability’ of his? Not us, that’s for sure….”

Tukai is the one person in this house on Volgograd Prospekt in Moscow who can talk about the subject without crying. His wife, Roza; Tanya, Timur’s young widow; and the eighty-seven-year-old grandmother cannot control their grief. Timur’s three-year-old daughter, fair-haired Sonechka, ricochets around the grown-ups. Her daddy was not there to celebrate her third birthday because it came after Nord-Ost.

They set the table, and Sonechka climbs up on a chair. She takes the biggest cup. “This is for Daddy. It’s Daddy’s cup. You mustn’t use it!” she warns in tones that brook no contradiction. Grandmother Roza has explained to her that Daddy is in heaven now, just like Roza’s own daddy, and that he can’t come back anymore. But the small girl cannot see why he can’t come back when she, his beloved Sonechka, so much wants him to.

“I believed in the state,” Tukai Khaziev says. “Almost to the very end of the siege I believed in it. I thought the intelligence services would think of something, would come to an agreement, make some promises, fudge some issues and everything would work out. What I really did not expect was that they would do as Zhirinovsky suggested a day before the assault. I remember him saying that what we should do was gas everybody. Everybody would sleep for a couple of hours; then they would wake up and just walk away. Only they didn’t wake up, and they didn’t just walk away.”

All of Timur Khaziev’s life revolved around music and the House of Culture at No. 1 Dubrovskaya Street. From childhood he had attended the Lyre Music Studio there, and there he had signed up for the orchestra of Nord-Ost, which rented the premises of the House of Culture. And there he had died.

His parents, Tukai and Roza, used to have a room in a communal apartment near the House of Culture, and both their sons, Eldar, the eldest, and Timur, learned to play the accordion there. The teachers recommended that Timur continue. He was a talented boy, and when, after tenth grade, it was time for him to choose a career, he completed the examination course for percussion instruments in a single year with help only from his accordion teacher. He entered a wind-instrument college, which he finished in three years instead of four, and then the prestigious Gnesins Academy of Music, as he had long dreamed of doing.

His teacher called him Rafinad, “Sugar Lump,” after the refined way he held the drumsticks. He was a subtle, intelligent, even suave percussionist.

Timur combined his studies at the Gnesins Academy with playing in wind and symphony orchestras of the Ministry of Defense. He toured Norway with a military orchestra, and a tour of Spain had beckoned after October 23.

“There, I had his uniform all ready, and his morning dress for concerts,” Roza says firmly, in order not to be overcome by emotion as she opens the cupboard. “They just won’t come and take it back, the Ministry of Defense.”

Sonechka, whizzing past us, promptly grabs the cap with its shiny rosette, plonks it on her head and gallops around the room: “Daddy’s hat! Daddy’s hat!” Tanya breaks down and leaves the room.

When he graduated from the Gnesins Academy, Timur was invited to play in the Nord-Ost orchestra. This was a third job, but he took it on. He was married, and had a growing daughter. Tanya, who had graduated from the Academy of Eurhythmic Art and was an actress and producer, was working as a kindergarten teacher at a low salary.

It is unfashionable to believe in mysticism or presentiments, but a month before the siege at the theater, Timur had trouble sleeping. “I would wake up toward morning,” Tanya tells me, “and he would be sitting up. I would ask him what he was doing, ask him to come back to bed, but he would say, ‘Something is making me feel anxious.”’

His family supposed that Timur was just very tired. His day began early, when he drove Sonechka and Tanya to the kindergarten. From there he immediately went to his parents’ apartment, where he kept his instruments, to practice. Recently he had been working on improving his left hand and was pleased when he got his technique sorted out. In another couple of years, he told Tanya, he would be a really good percussionist. When he had finished practicing, he would jump into the car and drive off to rehearsals with the military orchestra. From there he would give his wife and daughter a lift home from the kindergarten and go on to the Nord-Ost performance. He would get home close to midnight, and the cycle started again early the next morning. He seemed to be in a great hurry to live his life. Why? He was only twenty-seven, after all. Nobody has an answer to that question, or knows why, on October 23, Timur was even at the performance of Nord-Ost.

“It was a Wednesday,” Tanya tells me. “We had a rule that Wednesday was our free evening for being together as a family. A different percussionist played on Wednesdays, but on this particular day he asked Timur to swap because his girlfriend was insisting that he spend the evening with her. That girl saved her boyfriend’s life, but at the cost of the life of my husband. He was never any good at saying no, and because of that he died.”

“You don’t want the belongings of someone close to you just left lying around, do you?” Roza asks rhetorically. “So we went there [to the theater]. Of course there was no sign of his mobile phone. Timur had just started having a bit of money and had bought one. No sign of any of his new clothes, either.”

In the theater Roza had broken down when she saw his belongings. The only items returned to Timur’s parents were his old jacket, with an army bootprint on the back, and his shirt. That was it.

We seem to have become very primitive in the last few years, even rather ignoble. The change in moral values is increasingly noticeable as the war in the Caucasus continues and broken taboos increasingly become familiar facts of life. Killing? Happens every day. Robbery? What of it? Looting? Perfectly legal in a war. It is not only the courts that fail to condemn crimes, but society as well. What was regarded in the past with repugnance is now simply accepted.

In those terrible October days when the hostages were seized, the whole country seemed to have united in a surge of concern, wondering how to help, praying, hoping, and waiting. But there was nothing we could do. The intelligence services let no one near, assuring us that they had everything under control. How can we reconcile ourselves to the fact that among the few allowed special access were people who took the opportunity to do a bit of looting? Whatever was nice and new. Whatever fit. There is no other explanation for the disappearance of the hostages’ clothing and possessions. The families of those who died can never be free of what they felt in those days. Even if the government suddenly decided to give them all a million dollars in compensation, those memories would still remain.

Judging by the shirt that was returned, Timur had been lying outside in the open. Roza couldn’t wash our famous Moscow street muck out of it, a mixture of gasoline and oil.

When Timur went to work for the last time, he had in his pockets some ten different forms of ID with his photographs, testifying to the fact that he was a musician in the Nord-Ost orchestra and in the orchestra of the Ministry of Defense. There were his passport, his driver’s license, and an address book with the telephone numbers of his friends and relatives.

Nevertheless, on October 28 his body was returned to his family with a tag attached to the wrist by a rubber band that read: “No. 2551 Khamiev Unknown.”

“How could that happen?” Roza Abdulovna asks.

“Why ‘Khamiev’ instead of ‘Khaziev’?” In Russian the word has an insulting ring to it: to call someone a kham is to call him a rat. “And even if they were going to give his name as ‘Khamiev,’ what was the meaning of ‘Unknown’? And why did we have to go to such lengths to find him? They had only to open his address book, call any number in it, and ask the person who answered if they knew Timur Khaziev. They would immediately have been given our telephone number.”

Timur’s mother is talking about the day after the assault, the long day of October 26, which the Khaziev family will never forget.

“From the morning until four in the afternoon there was no mention of his name anywhere, not in any of the lists of hostages given out by the authorities,” Tukai Khaziev relates. “When we had already done the rounds of all the mortuaries and hospitals, it suddenly appeared. There was a short list, just some twenty people, and Timur was on it. It said there that he was alive and in No. Hospital. I phoned my wife and told her that everything was fine. We wept with joy. Our friends congratulated us. Tanya and I went around to the hospital as fast as we could.”

At the gate, however, a posted sentry would not let anyone in. He said the prosecutors office had forbidden it. Tanya began to cry, and the guard, taking pity, whispered to Tukai that it was bad news that “your one” was in there. It meant there was no hope. Tanya heard and started begging to be let inside. The guard opened the gate.

The hospital corridors appeared to be deserted until a police officer came at them with an assault rifle cradled against his fat belly.

“You know, he was just someone without a heart. No word of warning. No ‘Brace yourself for bad news.’ He just said, straight in my face, ‘He’s dead. Go away.’ Of course I was in hysterics for twenty minutes, and that brought some doctors running. ‘Who let you in here?’ they demanded.”

When Tanya recovered her composure a bit and asked to be allowed to see Timur’s body before the autopsy, she was refused. She begged and begged, but the policeman just said, “Go and ask Putin for permission.” Three officials from the prosecutor’s office turned up. “Why are you in such a rush?” they asked. “You’ll have time to nail down his coffin lid.” Then they said, “Surname? Khaziev? A Chechen?”

That turned out to have been Timur Khaziev’s undoing. Once the forces of law and order had taken his Tatar surname to be Chechen, everything had automatically followed in accordance with the prevailing ideology.

The family is now convinced that Timur died because, having been taken for a Chechen, he was deliberately denied medical treatment. When the men of the Khaziev family collected his body from the mortuary, written on his chest, in large letters, was “9:30,” the time of his death in No. 7 Hospital. There were no marks on his body from a IV drip feed, an injection, or the use of a ventilator. Instructions had been issued from above to wipe out all the Chechens, and Timur, mistaken for one, was not entitled to resuscitation. For four hours and more after the assault, he just lay there dying. Timur was killed by ideology.

“We have no rights in our own country. We are just human trash. That is why all this happened to my Timurka” are Tanya’s parting words to me.

While Tanya and Tukai were standing outside the hospital gate on October 26, about twenty people tried to enter the flat where the young Khazievs lived, some in uniform and some in plainclothes. Their neighbor quickly intervened and just managed to head them off. Tanya was told they had been acting on a tip-off from the hospital that a Chechen lived there.

What should the Khaziev family do now? Accept the humiliations and keep their heads down?

“When we spoke as plaintiffs about all this in the Tverskoy court,” Tukai recalls, “Gorbacheva pretended not to understand what we were talking about. She was certain that everybody, without exception, had received medical attention.”

Naturally, the Khazievs have a death certificate, but it contains no mention of the cause of death. The space has been left blank. No hint that there had ever been a terrorist act. In addition to the state ideology that killed him, Timur and his family have, working against them, a system that avoids providing documentary evidence.

“I imagine you asked the officials at the prosecutor’s office why the cause of death had been left blank.”

“Of course, on October 28. They assured us this was simply a formality so that we could get on with preparations for the funeral. After the results of the postmortem were known, they said, they would be sure to make the appropriate entry.”

“Did they?”

“No, of course not.”

This is an illuminating answer. Nobody expects fair dealings from the government. The authorities are, at best, a source of trouble, despite all their popularity ratings, which are officially so high. Recently the president’s office set up a special department to engineer a “correct” perception of the country and the president abroad. The idea is to reduce the spread of negative information, to make Russia look better in the eyes of foreigners. It would be even better, of course, if the government set up another special department to improve the image of the country and the president in the eyes of its own citizens.

“Could Putin really not have backed down? Could he not just have said, ‘I am bringing this war to an end’? Our loved ones would still be alive today,” Tukai keeps repeating. “All I want to know is, who is responsible for our tragedy? No more than that.”

TANYA RECENTLY BOUGHT Kiryusha and Frosya, a tortoise and a cat, so as to have some company to come home to. Sonechka is still too little to understand what happened to her daddy, but she doesn’t like coming back after kindergarten to a home without him. Recently the family was phoned by the producers of the revived Nord-Ost musical and offered free tickets. The family declined but were told that anytime… We really seem to have lost all sense of propriety.

SIRAZHDI, YAKHA, AND THEIR FRIENDS

Only a madman could envy the Chechens who live in Russia now. In years gone by, their situation was unenviable, but since the Nord-Ost siege, the machinery of racially based state retribution has been in overdrive. Racial attacks and purges supervised by the police have become commonplace. In a single moment people’s lives are ruined, they lose their home, their jobs, any sort of social support, and for just one reason: they are Chechens. Their lives in Moscow and many other cities are intolerable: drugs are slipped into their pockets, cartridges are pressed into their hands, and they are promptly sentenced to several years in prison. They have been quite openly made into pariahs and find themselves at a dead end, with no chance of escape. It is a way of life that leaves nobody unscathed, regardless of age.

“When they started speaking in Chechen and interrupted the second act, I realized that things were serious, and that they were going to get worse. I somehow saw that very clearly straight away.” Yakha Neserhaeva is a forty-three-year-old Muscovite, an economist by profession. She is a Chechen born in Grozny, but she moved to the capital long ago. On October 23 she went to see Nord-Ost. Her friend Galya, whom she has known for many years, is from the northern Russian town of Ukhta. She bought tickets for the thirteenth row of the stalls, and, although Yakha was not that keen on musicals, Galya begged her to come along.

“Did you tell them you were a Chechen?”

“No. I was frightened. I did not know whether it was better to tell them or not. They might have shot me for being a Chechen at a musical.”

Yakha did not see the gas, although many of the hostages noticed white clouds of something in the air. From where she was sitting, she just heard people shouting, “They’ve released gas!” and a few seconds later, she blacked out.

She came to in No. 13 Hospital, to which many victims were taken, including Irina Fadeeva, mother of Yaroslav, the boy who was shot. Feeling sick, Yakha didn’t have much idea of what was going on. Soon an investigator appeared.

“He asked my name, surname, where I live, where I was born, and what I was doing at Nord-Ost. Then two women came, took my fingerprints and took my clothing away for forensic examination. The investigator came back in the evening and said, ‘I have bad news for you.’ The first thing I thought was that the friend I had gone to the musical with had died, but he said, ‘You are being arrested as an accomplice of the terrorists.’ It was a shock, but I got up and walked after the investigator in hospital slippers and a dressing gown. I was first taken for two days to No. 20 Hospital [a special-purpose, secure hospital], where nobody asked me anything or gave me any treatment. In fact, I received no treatment at any time. At the end of the second day, the investigator came again. I was photographed, and they recorded a sample of my voice. A few minutes later, they brought me a coat and a pair of men’s half-boots, put me in handcuffs, and said, ‘You need treatment in a different hospital.’ They put me in a police car, took me to the prosecutor’s office for ten minutes or so, and then to the Mariino Prison [a women’s isolation holding facility in Moscow]. So there I was, with boots three sizes too big for me on my bare feet, in a dirty man’s overcoat, unwashed and unkempt for a week. They took me to a cell, and all the woman supervisor said was, ‘Well now, you plague virus…”’

“Did they question you frequently while you were in solitary confinement?”

“I wasn’t questioned at all. I just sat there and asked the wardress for a meeting with the investigator.”

Yakha speaks quietly, slowly, without emotion. She seems barely to be present. Her face is that of a dead person, her eyes dilated, her gaze fixed, her muscles immobile. The photograph in her passport seems to show someone else; the face is that of a proud and beautiful woman.

Yakha does sometimes attempt a smile, but it is as if in the two weeks she spent in prison her muscles forgot how to respond. She thought she was done for and that nothing could save her. The situation was as bad as it could be. The police officers who transferred her from No. 20 Hospital, the only people who had had anything to tell her about her future, had informed her that she would “answer for all of them,” since all the other terrorists had been exterminated and she was the only one left.

As normally happens in musicals, however, Yakha’s story had a happy ending.

Her friends rallied around and swiftly engaged a lawyer who managed by a miracle to break through the seemingly impenetrable wall surrounding Yakha Neserhaeva. After ten days she was released from prison. Surprisingly, in these racist times, the investigators of the prosecutor’s office who were working on the team investigating the Nord-Ost incident, finding nothing that remotely incriminated Yakha, simply did the decent thing. They did not set about trying to frame her, or tailor the charge to the individual, plant evidence, abuse or mock her. They made no attempt to take revenge on a Chechen woman purely because she was Chechen. Nowadays that is quite something.

They went even further. When they advised Yakha that she was free to go, they apologized and had her driven home. For that, she has senior investigator and lawyer first class V. Prikhozhikh to thank. She also has the officials of the Bogorodskoe Department of Internal Affairs to thank. They issued Yakha’s elder sister Malika, who had rushed from Grozny to Moscow to help Yakha get back on her feet, a special permit to remain in the capital because a relative was in need of constant care. They issued the permit in the knowledge that without it, any Chechen in Moscow today cannot go out of the front door without being arrested immediately.

AELITA SHIDAEVA, THIRTY-ONE, is a Chechen, too. Since the beginning of the present war, she has been living with her parents and daughter, Hadizhat, in Moscow. Aelita was arrested where she worked, in a café by the Mariino underground station. She tells me her story in a calm and restrained manner, without tears or hysteria, smiling politely. You might suppose she had experienced nothing out of the ordinary, if you didn’t know that when she was finally released from the Mariino Park police station after seven hours of relentless interrogation, she promptly collapsed.

“It was all pretty weird. First there was this one policeman having his dinner in our café. Nothing unusual, they often eat with us. The police station is one hundred meters from our front door. I’ve never hidden from them that I am a Chechen who fled Grozny to get away from the war. Anyway, this policeman finished his meal and went out, and suddenly the rest of them came rushing in. About fifteen of them, headed by our local policeman, Vasiliev. He knows me very well, too. They stood us all up against the wall, searched us, and took me in.”

“And what questions did they ask you?”

“‘What were my relations with the terrorists?’ I said to them, ‘You all saw me yourselves. I’ve been right in front of you for twelve hours every day, from eleven in the morning until eleven at night.”’

“What did they reply?”

“‘Which of the terrorists did you go to a restaurant with?’ I have never even been to a restaurant in Moscow. It isn’t something I do. They said if I did not confess to links with the terrorists, they would plant drugs or weapons on me. They took turns interrogating me. Some suspicious-looking men in uniform were passing by and staring at me. The investigator said that if I did not confess to links with the terrorists, he would give me to these guys and they would ‘eat me alive.’ He said they were just waiting to get at me because they could make anyone talk.”

At the police station Aelita was informed that she had been dismissed from her job. The prosecutor said that the café owner had been ordered to fire her if he didn’t want his business to be closed down. The authorities released Aelita only because her mother, Makka, a Russian-language teacher, was a born defender of civil rights. According to the police officers at the Mariino Park station, she “trumpeted the case all over Moscow.” Makka called the Echo of Moscow radio station, mobilized the lawyer Abdullah Hamzaev and many others, and, despite police insistence that Aelita was not at the station, eventually pressured the officers into releasing her.

Aelita is no longer in shock. She fully understands the situation and says she just wants to get out of Moscow.

“Back to Chechnya?”

“No, abroad.”

Makka opposes the idea. She is not against her daughter taking her granddaughter elsewhere: Hadizhat needs to go to school, in spite of what Movsar Baraev and his supporters did at the Dubrovka theater and in spite of the special interest the Moscow police take in young Chechen girls. Makka herself is reluctant to leave. She cannot imagine living anywhere else than Russia, but neither can she imagine what it is that Russia wants from Aelita, from herself, and from Hadizhat. One is an adult who spent the greater part of her life in the Soviet Union. Another is a young woman who has never lived a full life, who has known only the urgency of fleeing from one place to another, from one war to the next. The third is a young girl who is attentively watching and listening to the world around her and saying nothing, for the time being.

Hadizhat’s teacher has just phoned Aelita, painfully embarrassed, to say she must bring in a form confirming her status as a single mother. Who issues such forms? Her other documents are perfectly in order, but if she doesn’t produce this form, then she, the teacher, “just does not know what to do.” They want to expel Hadizhat. After October 26, 2002, there is no place in the fifth grade of No. 931 School, Moscow, for a Chechen girl brought here by her family to study.

“I can’t even work out,” Aelita says, “whether my being a single mother is counted in favor of Hadizhat or against her. Who can you trust?”[12]

ABUBAKAR BAKRIEV ONCE held a modest technical position in one of the big Moscow banks. Now, however, he is free of any such ties. It all happened very simply and undramatically. Abubakar was called in by the company’s deputy chairman for security, who said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but we are going to have problems because of you. Write a voluntary letter of resignation.”

At first, Abubakar could not believe his ears, but then the deputy chairman added that “they” wanted him to backdate the letter—for example, to October 16—so that the resignation would look quite proper and nobody could accuse the bank of sacking him as part of an anti-Chechen cull after the Nord-Ost incident.

So there we have it: the executioners put you to death (and for any Chechen to be sacked today is the end: there is no way he or she is going to find another job), but they do hope you’ll understand their predicament. It is a peculiarity of our times that a murderer approaches the victim and says straight out, “I am going to kill you, not because I am a bad person but because I am being compelled to do so. But I would ask you to make it look as if you haven’t been murdered.”

On that day, a Dagestani employee was “voluntarily fired” from the same bank, his “personal decision,” too, being backdated. He occupied a modest position but was also ethnically cleansed, to avoid any further unwelcome questions regarding people of Caucasian origin working at the bank.

“The bank has been cleansed,” Abubakar says. “The security services can sleep at night. I am fifty-four. I don’t know where to go. The police have to come to my home three times to see how I live with my three children. You are turning us into enemies. You need to understand that we have no alternative now but to demand independence, because we do need a land, somewhere we can live in peace. Give us any place on earth you choose, and we will go and live there.”

ISITA CHIRGIZOVA AND Natasha Umatgarieva are Chechen women who live in a temporary center for refugees in the village of Serebryaniki, in Tver Province. We met in No. 14 Police Station in Moscow. Isita was wiping off the ink after being fingerprinted. Natasha was crying inconsolably. They had just been released, a miracle in today’s climate. The police had taken pity on them.

On the morning of November 13, 2002, the women were subjected to typical treatment. They had come to Moscow on an early train to collect aid from one of the civil-rights organizations. They were arrested at the station, a couple of meters from the organization’s entrance, because Natasha was limping. Because she has an open sore on her leg from diabetes, she was suspected of being a wounded fighter. Isita is in the seventh month of pregnancy; she has an evident bulge under her jacket, just where suicide bombers wear their grenade belts. This, at least, is how Major Lyubeznov, who was on duty at No. 14 Police Station, explained the reason for their arrest. Lynbeznyi means “amiable” in Russian, but the major proved far from amiable. Indeed, to safeguard Russia from the terrorist threat, he felt obliged to personally grope Isita’s Chechen bulge, to ensure that it was caused by pregnancy.

The story of Isita and Natasha ended well. The police officers just gave the women some bluster to the effect of, “If you kill us, we’ll kill you.” Major Lyubeznov didn’t have time to disgrace himself any further, and, in addition, I was able to be of some assistance. First, I managed to intercept the women in the police station before they were carted off to the isolation and interrogation unit. Second, I persuaded Vladimir Mashkin, the superintendent of No. 14 Police Station (and he was perfectly open to persuasion) that people sometimes come to collect humanitarian aid just because they are poor, having no opportunity to get a job and no home of their own.

ZARA WORKED As a vegetable seller by the underground station. The owner of the little market came to her and said, “Don’t come to work here tomorrow, because you are Chechen.” Zara provides the only support for a family consisting of three children and her husband, who has tuberculosis. What need is there for the police to involve themselves in a situation like this one?

ASLAN KURBANOV SPENT the first Chechen war in a tented refugee camp in Ingushetia. In the summer he left to enter a college in Saratov, then moved to Moscow to live with his aunt, Zura Movsarova, a postgraduate student at the Moscow Aviation Technical Institute. He found a job and was officially registered as having the right to live in the capital.

On October 28, 2002, CID officers from No. 172 Police District (Brateevo) came to his home. The day before, Zura had been fingerprinted at the request of the local police, so when the CID authorities said they wanted Aslan to come with them only to have his fingerprints taken, nobody suspected anything. Aslan put on his coat and went off in the police car.

Three hours later, Zura became anxious. Her nephew still had not returned, so she went to the police station herself. There she was informed that Aslan had been arrested for possession of drugs. What sort of story was that? He had gotten up, put his coat on, put some drugs in his pocket, and gone to give himself up to the police? Aslan managed to shout to Zura that he had been taken to a room, some cannabis had been produced from under the table, and he had been told, “This must be yours. We are not going to give Chechens an inch. We’re going to shake all of you up like this.”

Aslan does not even smoke cigarettes. On October 30 he spent his twenty-second birthday in the Matrosskaya Tishina Prison.

ON THE MORNING of October 25, 2002, police officers burst into the Moscow apartment of the Chechen Gelagoev family. Alihan, the owner of the flat, was handcuffed and taken away. His wife, Marek, rushed for help to the Rostokino police station but was told that no officers had gone out from there. She called Radio Liberty, which reported Alihan Gelagoev’s abduction, and by evening he was released. She had pressed the right buttons.

Alihan told me that in the car the police had put a sack over his head and beaten him for a long time as they were going to Petrovka, the street where the Moscow Central Police Department is located. They shouted, “You hate us and we hate you. You kill us and we will kill you.”

When they arrived at Petrovka, however, they stopped beating him and tried for many hours to persuade him to sign a confession saying that he was the ideological mastermind behind the terrorist attack on Nord-Ost. This is the sort of thing that used to happen in the Stalin years. The confession had even been written in advance, as was the practice in the earlier period. All Alihan had to do was sign at the bottom.

He refused, but to obtain his freedom he had no option but to sign a statement to the effect that he had come voluntarily to the Central Police Department and had no complaints to make against its officers.

Racism? Yes. Appalling behavior? Of course. It is also a travesty of a war against terrorism. I do not believe a single statistic produced by the police authorities on the progress of the antiterrorist “Operation Whirlwind,” telling the world how many “terrorists’ accomplices” they have caught. The figures are bogus. The police are bogus officers churning out bogus reports based on bogus investigations.

In the meantime, where are the terrorists? What are they up to? Who knows? The police have no time to think about that. Putin is presiding over a return to the Soviet methods of bogus activity in place of real work.

THE POLICE INTERROGATORS were very reassuring, thirty-six-year-old Zelimhan Nasaev tells me. “Don’t worry,” they said, “you’ll get three or four years and then you’ll be out. They may give you a suspended sentence. Just sign here. Make it easy on yourself.”

Zelimhan has been living in Moscow for many years. His family, following his elder sister Inna, moved here to escape the second Chechen war.

“Were you beaten at the police station?”

“Of course. They woke me up at three in the morning and said, ‘Time for the pressure.’ They beat me through a hard surface [evidently a technique to leave no external sign of injury] on the kidneys and liver, to make me sign a confession, but I wouldn’t. I said, ‘Pressure me, then. Even if you shoot me, I’m not going to let you pin anything on me.’ They kept saying, ‘What’s a Chechen like you doing here? Your country is Chechnya. Go back there and get on with your war.’ I told them, ‘My country is Russia, and I am in my own capital city.’ They got very angry about that. To make me lose control of myself, one of the policemen said, ‘Well, I’ve just come from fucking your mother.”’

If only that agent in the Nizhegorodsky police station had known whose mother he was claiming to have raped, whom he was beating up and trying to coerce into admitting to a crime he never committed, in order to boost the policeman’s rating in the post-Nord-Ost campaign to “crack down on Chechen criminals in Moscow”! But perhaps it’s just as well he didn’t know.

Roza Nasaeva is the granddaughter, and Zelimhan the great-grandson, of the legendary Russian beauty Maria-Mariam of the Romanov family, a relative of Emperor Nicholas II who fell passionately in love with Vakhu, a Chechen officer of the czarist army. She eloped with him to the Caucasus, converted to Islam, took the name Mariam, bore Vakhu five children, was deported with him to Kazakhstan and, after his death there, returned to Chechnya. She died there in the 1960s, regarded almost as a Chechen saint. This lovely story of Russo-Chechen friendship and love, known throughout the Caucasus, is of little help at the moment, however, because nothing could save Zelimhan from the Moscow police. Even if he had the blood of ten emperors flowing in his veins, they would treat Zelimhan exactly as they treat any other Chechen.

There are parts of Moscow you really do not want to go to, grim places behind factories, within industrial zones, or beneath high-voltage electricity lines, and they are where you will find the Chechens who are still trying to survive in the capital city. Frezer Road is one such location, a dour strip of asphalt leading from Ryazan Prospekt out past barely habitable five-story brick buildings to industrial slums very remote from the life of the metropolis.

Actually, they weren’t ever intended for human habitation. Officially, they are still the workshops of a milling factory that ceased to exist long ago, a victim of perestroika. Its workers departed, and today the factory bosses make a living by renting out the derelict workshops and other premises. In one such dirty, looted, former factory building, the first Chechen refugees appeared, in 1997. They had fled the criminal anarchy that reigned between the first and the second Chechen wars and were mainly members of families opposed to the Chechens Maskhadov and Basaev. The directors of the milling factory allowed the refugees to refurbish the workshops, convert them into living accommodations, and then pay tribute to the bosses.

The Chechens live there to this day, the Nasaevs among them, one of twenty-six families. The local police know them all perfectly well. Nobody is on the run or in hiding because nobody has any wish to do so, or indeed anywhere to run to.

When the Nord-Ost hostage taking occurred, the police from the Nizhegorodsky station headed straight here, explaining that they had orders to arrest a quota of fifteen Chechens “in every precinct.” All the men of the twenty-six families were arrested and taken away in buses for fingerprinting.

It was Zelimhan Nasaev-Romanov’s bad luck that he wasn’t at home at the time. He had gone to deliver a batch of the pens the family assembles at home and to collect the components for the next assignment.

The police soon came back to the industrial shack where the imperial family’s descendant lives. They needed his fingerprints, they said, and Roza let him go without a fuss. The parents began to worry only several hours later, when their son had not returned. Finally his mother and father set off to the police station, where they were told, in typically inane fashion, “Your son had a grenade and a fuse in his pocket. We have arrested him.”

“I shouted, ‘You have no right to do this! You took him away yourselves. He left the house with you and there was nothing in his pockets. There were plenty of witnesses,’” Roza tells me. “The policeman just said, ‘Here Chechens don’t count as witnesses.’ I was so offended. Are we no longer citizens, then?”

When Zelimhan’s mother returned to the police station the next morning, they told her, “Your son is also dealing in marijuana. You can’t help him.”

“We got there and they took me to an office,” Zelimhan tells me. “They said, ‘You are dealing in heroin.’ The more senior officer was holding a small packet in his hand and announced, ‘This is yours now.’ I was handcuffed. They put the packet into my pocket. I began to protest. Then they said, ‘All right, then, we’ll add a fuse from a”lemon.“’ I saw the senior policeman was already wiping a fuse with a rag to remove other people’s fingerprints. He shoved it in my hand and made a note. I again shouted, ‘You have no right to do this!’ And they told me, ‘We have our orders. We have every right, and if you aren’t a good boy and don’t agree to help us by admitting to the crime, your relatives will follow you. We are going back to your house now to search, and we’re going to find another part of the same grenade. Sign the confession.”’

Zelimhan refused to sign anything. The officers beat him and said they would continue to beat him until he couldn’t be seen by any lawyer. They released him only because journalists and Aslambek Aslahanov, a deputy of the Duma, interceded. Now Zelimhan sits at home in his shack in a deep depression. He is afraid of every knock at the door. Depression is the characteristic mood of all the Chechens living among us. Not a single optimist is to be found among the young or the old. At least, I haven’t found any. Everybody dreams of emigrating so as to have a chance to merge into the cosmopolitan background somewhere and never have to reveal one’s nationality.

“There is an orgy of systematic police harassment of Chechens in Russia,” claims Svetlana Gannushkina, director of the Citizens’ Aid Committee for Assistance to Refugees and Displaced Persons. This is the organization to which people turn in their distress: Chechens whose relatives have been arrested, fingerprinted, and had drugs or cartridges planted on them; Chechens who have been fired from their jobs or threatened with deportation. (For heaven’s sake, where do you deport Russian citizens to from the capital of Russia?) They come to Svetlana Gannushkina because there is nowhere else for them to go.

“The signal for this new wave of frenzied state racism, officially called Antiterrorist Operation Whirlwind,” Svetlana continues, “was given immediately after the storming of the Dubrovka theater complex. Chechens are being expelled everywhere. The main problem is when they are fired from their jobs or driven out of their flats. This is a settling of scores with an entire group in retaliation for the acts of particular individuals. The main method used to discredit them as a nation is the false creation of criminal cases by planting drugs or cartridges. The policemen think they look cool when they mockingly ask their victims, ‘Which would you like: drugs or a cartridge?’ The only ones who get rescued are those with mothers like Makka Shidaeva. But what about all the others?”

And what sort of a nation are we, the Russian people?

One Chechen family has three daughters. One has passed the entrance exam and gotten into music school while the other two haven’t. The parents have asked their successful daughter’s teacher to give private piano lessons to her sisters. The teacher has refused. The head of the music school—where, of course, everyone knows everybody else’s business—will not allow the teacher to continue, saying she has received orders to that effect from the Department of Culture. If the teacher continues to teach the Chechens, the security services will start taking an interest in her.

Playing fast and loose with people’s livelihoods—and sometimes even their lives—is something that we, the Russian people, must own up to. The majority of us go along with the state’s xenophobia and feel no need to protest. Why not? Official propaganda is highly effective, and the majority share Putin’s belief that an entire people must shoulder collective responsibility for the crimes committed by a few.

The upshot, nevertheless, is that nobody yet knows, despite a war that has been going on for years, despite acts of terrorism, catastrophes, and torrents of refugees, what the authorities actually want from the Chechens. Do they want them to live within the Russian Federation or not?

IN CONCLUSION, HERE’S a straightforward story of ordinary people living in Russia and suffering from state-induced hysteria.

“Do you often get told off at school?”

“Yes.” Sirazhdi sighs.

“And is there a good reason?”

“Yes.” He sighs again.

“What do you do that is naughty?”

“I’m running down the corridor and somebody bashes into me and I always give them something back so they don’t think they can hurt me, and then the teachers ask me, ‘Did you hit them?’ and I always tell the truth and say, ‘Yes,’ but the others don’t and I get told off.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t tell the truth either? You might not get into trouble.”

“I can’t.” He sighs heavily. “I’m not a girl. If I did it, I say, ‘I did it.”’

“You know, he tries to trip our children up so the little ones will hit their heads and die….”

Great heavens above! This is not Sirazhdi talking about himself now; grown-ups are talking about him. Not about a special operations agent trained to destroy terrorists but about a seven-year-old Chechen boy named Sirazhdi Digaev. The words represent the publicly expressed view of a certain woman member of the parents’ committee of Class 2b of No. 155 School, Moscow, which Sirazhdi attends.

“Well, do you know, my child complains, ‘Sirazhdi never has anything, and I have and I have to lend it to him.”’ This from another mother on the committee.

Why is this child complaining? Surely if the person next to you hasn’t got something and you do, you should bloody well lend it to him.

“He’s a nuisance to everyone. You have to understand that. My son told me he didn’t write down his homework in the class because Sirazhdi was making so much noise that he couldn’t hear the teacher. Sirazhdi is uncontrollable. Like all Chechens. You have to understand that,” opines another mother.

The conversation continues as we sit in an empty classroom. The second-grade children have gone home, and now the parents’ committee is discussing how to purge the school of a small Chechen so that “our children don’t learn bad things from a possible future terrorist.”

You think I must be making this up. Unfortunately I’m not.

“Don’t get us wrong. Even though he is a Chechen, we don’t discriminate between nationalities. No. We just want to protect our children….”

From what? In November the parents’ committee of Class 2b convened a meeting to warn Sirazhdi’s mother and father that, if they did not take him in hand by the New Year, and unless, “in spite of being a Chechen,” he started acting in accordance with the parents’ committee’s understanding of good behavior, they would demand that the head of No. 155 School expel him.

“Well, just tell me, why are they all piling into Moscow?” The real reason emerges when, one or two weeks later, a member of the parents’ committee tries to explain why they adopted the resolution.

Well, why should “they” not come to Moscow? Are the inhabitants of the capital so special that being brought into proximity with other citizens of Russia might have a negative effect on their sensibilities?

“Why is it you say they are having a hard time?” another parent almost shrieks. “Who asks if we are having a hard time? What makes you think our children are having it any easier than he is?”

Why? Well, Sirazhdi was born in Chechnya in 1995. When his mother, Zulai, was pregnant, there was shelling and bombing all around her. She fled because when the first Chechen war started, she had no option. Today Zulai has complicated feelings when she sees that, even though they moved to Moscow in 1996 and her youngest son has been a Muscovite for most of his life, he is still terrified by fireworks and thunderstorms. He hides and cries but doesn’t know why.

“Oh, so it’s because they don’t feel at home here yet,” floats up the ratty voice of another member of the parents’ committee. “They think they can impose their ways on us? No, thank you very much!”

The irritation has arisen because Alvi, Sirazhdi’s father, came to the meeting, listening to everything the parents had to say to him, and then took the floor himself and dared to explain his problems—that in front of his children he had been cursed at by a policeman who marched into their room in his jackboots, and that he, a father, had been unable to do anything about it. The children had seen it all.

Alvi also told them that the main reason his family was in Moscow and not in Chechnya, in spite of how uncomfortable things were for them here, was to enable their children to go to school without a war taking place around them. Zulai was a math teacher, but she had to work at a market stall in Moscow, not something she was good at. They spent their evenings rolling chicken cutlets to sell in the morning. Everything he and Zulai did was for the sake of their children.

“Well, how about that! They’re worming their way right into the center of Moscow! And they expect to be given a $500 apartment!” This was the reaction of the parents’ committee to Alvi’s appeal.

“I do not want my son or my daughter to be taught in the same class as someone like that.” Such was the verdict Alvi and Zulai were given at that meeting.

“Who says we’re wrong?” the members of the parents’ committee demand.

Well, nobody, of course.

It is worth remembering an incident that began in a similar way in the twentieth century but had a different ending. When the Fascists entered Denmark, the Jews were ordered to sew yellow stars on their clothing so they could be easily recognized. The Danes promptly sewed on yellow stars, both to save the Jews and to save themselves from turning into Fascists. Their king joined with them.

In Moscow today, the situation is quite the opposite. When the authorities struck at the Chechens who are our neighbors, we did not sew on yellow stars in solidarity with them. Instead, we are making sure that Sirazhdi never loses the sense of being a pariah.

At my request, he shows me his exercise book for the Russian language. His marks range from poor 2’s to average 3’s. Sirazhdi’s handwriting is untidy, as Yelena Dmitrievna reminds him on almost every page. She is his class mistress and writes out her words of admonition in a trained calligraphic hand. She has been a teacher for thirty-five years, all of them in a primary school.

Yelena Dmitrievna did not support the parents’ committee in its campaign to get rid of the Chechen boy, but neither did she take a stand. She did not categorically refuse to be part of the group’s efforts to oust the youngster, although she could have done so, thereby halting in its tracks the Digaev family’s persecution by the notorious Russian public opinion assault being waged by the committee.

Sirazhdi is spinning like a top. He really has no wish to show me his Russian exercise book. He does his best to divert my attention to his math book, where the situation is much happier. Sirazhdi is an ordinary boy who can’t sit still. The main thing is that he very much wants to look good. Why should he be any different, a modest little boy keeping his head down as the parents’ committee would like him to, to make him less of a Chechen?

Even his math book soon bores him. Promising to draw a “sword and a man,” he goes off in a great rush. He does everything in a great rush. Soon he returns, bearing a pad with the outline of a strongman with powerful muscles from The Lord of the Rings, and a light saber represented by a smudge of yellow crayon.

“You know, we only wanted what was best for him,” the parents of Class 2b now say, realizing that the story of their campaign against a small Chechen boy in the wake of the Nord-Ost hysteria has been taken up by journalists. “Only what was best…”

Is Sirazhdi going to believe in what they think is best for him? He does fight at playtime. In art lessons he throws paint at the wall. He trips up his classmates, too, and the more often he misbehaves, the more it is made clear to him that he is the odd one out in Class 2b.

THIS IS LIFE in Russia after Nord-Ost. The months have passed, and many Russians have gradually begun to understand that this appalling tragedy has its uses. In fact, it has come in handy for lots of people, for a lot of reasons.

First in line has been the president, with his folksy cynicism. He has taken to reaping international dividends from this horror and its deadly outcome. Nor has he balked at allowing other people’s blood to be spilled for his PR purposes inside Russia.

At the bottom of the heap are the petty squabbles in a small school and the rank-and-file police officers who were only too glad to beef up their antiterrorist scores before the New Year in order to qualify for bonuses. The frantic anti-Chechen chauvinism of the days immediately following Nord-Ost have mellowed to a pragmatic, steady racism.

“Do we take up arms, then?” some of the Chechen men ask. You can hear them grinding their teeth in impotence. “I can’t take this anymore,” groan others. Their impatience and anger are a sign of weakness, of course, which does not suit them at all, especially since their children are watching. What should they do?[13]