to Beslan and negotiate with the terrorists—an agreement that Politkovskaya had in effect already brokered but that Dzasokhov had had to initiate anew.
There was every indication that the terrorists were willing to negotiate; in most countries, this would have meant the standoff would drag on and on as long as there remained the chance of saving any of the hostages. But as during the theater siege, Moscow did not wait until negotiations were exhausted; in fact, the beginning of military action seems to have been timed specifically to prevent a meeting between the terrorists and Maskhadov, who stood a good chance of brokering a peaceful resolution.
At one in the afternoon on September 3, just minutes after workers from the emergency ministry had come to the building to pick up the bodies of several men killed by the terrorists at the beginning of the siege—this had been negotiated by Aushev—two explosions shook the building. By this time, most of the hostages had been crowded into the school gymnasium for more than two days. They were dehydrated—many of them had begun to drink their own urine—and terrified. They knew the gymnasium was mined—the explosives had been mounted in plain sight—and two of the terrorists were standing guard with their feet on pedals that could set off the explosives.
But the two explosions, coming just seconds apart, originated outside the building. Litvinovich was able to determine that both were the result of Russian troops firing grenade launchers directly at the overcrowded gymnasium. “It was as if something had flown in, a giant ball of fire,” one of the former hostages testified. Like most of the adults in the gymnasium, she was a mother who was there with her child. “I looked over,” another former hostage said, “and saw that where the door to the schoolyard had been, there was a giant hole in the ceiling, and this hole was burning very, very fast.”
“When I came to, there were bodies on top of me,” one of the former hostages testified. “Everything was burning,” said another. “I was lying on top of dead bodies. There were also dead bodies sitting on the benches.” A third testified, “I looked over and saw that my girl was missing her head and her arm and her foot had been crushed completely.”
The hostages had spent two days in hell, and now this hell was turning upside down. The terrorists seemed panicked—now they were trying to save the hostages’ lives. They herded those who could move on their own into the school cafeteria, which was shielded from immediate fire. They urged those who remained in the gymnasium to stand in the windows and show Russian troops that the room was filled with hostages, that they were firing at women and children. Russian troops continued to use tanks, grenade launchers, and fire launchers, aiming first at the gymnasium and then also at the cafeteria at point-blank range. The terrorists repeatedly attempted to move women and children into rooms that were shielded from the fire. Outside, local police tried unsuccessfully to convince the Russian troops to stop firing. In all, 312 people died, including ten non-FSB officers who died in the fire while attempting to save the hostages.
For the second anniversary of the Beslan tragedy in September 2006, Litvinovich put together a brochure with her findings. Politkovskaya, having been incapacitated, wrote little about Beslan, but her contribution was striking: she secured a police document showing that a man detained four hours before the siege had warned the police of the plan. The warning had been ignored: there was not even heightened security at the school that Day of Knowledge.
HOW WAS ONE TO UNDERSTAND THIS? Some were certain that Beslan had been planned and executed by the secret police start to finish, just as the apartment-block explosions had been. The fact that Putin came out with the initiative of canceling gubernatorial elections just ten days after the tragedy, and that he framed it as a response to terrorism, lends credence to this theory. Zakaev, for one, was certain that the FSB had arranged for a rogue group of Chechens to seize the local governor’s office—to provide Putin with an excuse for instituting direct federal control over regional administrations—but something had gone awry and the terrorists ended up at the school.
I believe reality is messier. That the apartment-block explosions were the work of the secret police seems almost beyond doubt— in the absence of an opportunity to examine all of the evidence available and not. The theater siege and Beslan strike me less as well-planned operations than as the results of a series of wrong moves, unholy alliances, and wrecked plans. It appears proven that a number of FSB officers maintained long-running relationships with terrorists or potential terrorists from Chechnya. At least some of these relationships involved the exchange of services for money. It is clear that someone—probably police but likely also secret police—had to aid the terrorists in moving around Russia. Finally, there is every indication that Putin’s government worked neither to prevent terrorist attacks nor to resolve crises peacefully when they occurred; moreover, the president consistently and increasingly staked his reputation not only on his own determination to “rub them out” whatever the circumstances but also on the terrorists’ perceived ruthlessness.
Did this add up to a series of carefully laid plans to strengthen Putin’s position in a country that responded best to the politics of fear? Not necessarily, or not quite. Originally, I think, the organizers of the theater siege and the school siege and their enablers had different motivations: at least some of the Chechen rebels wanted to scare Russians into understanding the nightmare of their war; some of those who helped them execute the attacks on the Russian side were, most likely, motivated purely by profit; others, on both sides, were settling personal scores; still others were indeed engaged in grand political scheming that may or may not have reached to the very top. One thing is certain: Once the hostage-takings occurred, the government task forces acting under Putin’s direct supervision did everything to ensure that the crises ended as horrifyingly as possible—to justify continued warfare in Chechnya and further crackdowns on the media and the opposition in Russia and, finally, to quell any possible criticism from the West, which, after 9/11, was obligated to recognize in Putin a fellow fighter against Islamic terrorism. There is a reason that Russian troops in both Moscow and Beslan acted in ways that maximized bloodshed; they actually aimed to multiply the fear and the horror. This is the classic modus operandi of terrorists, and in this sense it can certainly be said that Putin and the terrorists were acting in concert.
ON MARCH 20, 2006, Marina Litvinovich left work just after nine in the evening. She was now working for Garry Kasparov, the chess champion turned politician. They kept their presence in the center of Moscow quiet, working behind an unmarked door, behind which stood two of Kasparov’s eight permanent bodyguards. In the evenings, Kasparov and his bodyguards would drive off in his SUV and the rest of his small crew dispersed, driving, walking, or taking the subway by themselves. Litvinovich, who lived nearby, usually walked.
About an hour after she left the office, Litvinovich opened her eyes to discover that she was lying on top of a cellar awning and someone was trying to ascertain if she was all right. She was not: she had apparently been knocked unconscious by a blow or several blows to the head. She had been badly beaten, was bruised all over, and was missing two of her front teeth. Her bag was lying next to her; her notebook computer, her cell phone, and her money were still in it.
She spent three or four hours in the emergency room that night, and she spent another three or four at the police station the following day. The police were unusually solicitous in their manner, but kept insisting she had not been beaten. Had the thirty-one-year-old woman perhaps just passed out in the street and fallen in such an unusual way as to be bruised all over? She objected that she had a large bruise on one of her legs that, the doctors had told her, had probably been caused by a blow with a rubber baton. Had she maybe been hit by a car, then? Litvinovich pointed out that her clothes were so clean that she was wearing the same trousers and coat the following day, so she clearly had not been hit by a car. Moreover, this was one of several signs that she had been attacked by professionals: she must have been held while she was beaten, then laid carefully on the awning on which she found herself.
The attack was a message. The pristine execution and the fact that Litvinovich’s valuables were not touched served to underscore this. Another young political consultant, a former colleague of Litvinovich who had made a brilliant career working for the Putin government, spelled out the message in his blog: “Women should not be in this line of work… Marina has joined the war, and no one ever said this war would be conducted according to rules.” In other words, this is what would happen to those who fought the Kremlin.
ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya came home to her apartment building in central Moscow and was shot dead in the elevator.
Who could have done it? Anyone. Politkovskaya could be extremely unpleasant: alongside her extraordinarily empathic personality there seemed to exist another, given to lashing out at the slightest provocation. This was a
