ILYA LYSAK, A BOYISHLY CHARMING TWENTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD bass player with a confident manner, seated himself in the orchestra pit and began tuning up. It was October 23, 2002, and he and thirty-one other musicians were about to perform in the hit musical
Irina Fadeeva, a thirty-seven-year-old blond woman with striking blue eyes, took her seat in row 11 of the theater. She was accompanied by her equally lovely older sister, Victoria; her fifteen-year-old son, Yaroslav; and her eighteen-year-old niece, Anastasia. The foursome ended up here entirely by chance. Irina had bought tickets for another show at a different theater, only to discover at the last minute that the tickets were for the previous night’s performance. But she was determined that the evening would not be wasted. She hurried everyone to another theater just down the street.
Elena Baranovskaya, a well-spoken, elegantly turned-out woman, sat seven rows away with her husband, Sergei, a retired military officer, and her nineteen-year-old son, Andrei. They were marking a new life together—she and Sergei had been married just over a year, and only the day before had moved into a large new apartment. Elena had bought the
Five years later, in separate conversations, the young bass player and the two women would guide me through the nightmare that soon unfolded inside the theater. Here are the stories of Ilya, Irina, and Elena, three who somehow survived while more than one hundred were dying.
It was during the second act that events on stage began to seem out of the ordinary. Ilya looked up from the orchestra pit to see armed strangers, dressed in masks and fatigues, suddenly appear. His initial reaction was bemusement: Two years into the musical’s run, its eccentric director must be still fiddling with the cast, introducing new characters without warning. Ilya watched as one of the masked men ordered a principal actor to leave the stage, then a second and a third.
Some in the audience, including Irina and Elena, laughed at the seemingly impromptu staging. But not Elena’s husband, a war-hardened former colonel in military intelligence. His intuition told him that these new “actors” were about to take hostages. “Everyone relax. We will be here awhile,” Sergei cautioned those around him. Images flashed through his mind of the 118-man crew that had perished in the submarine
Now something was going wrong in the orchestra pit. The conductor continued to wave his baton, but the music began to trail off. One by one, the confused members of the orchestra were putting down their instruments, in such perfect order that it appeared the surreal scene had been choreographed. Finally, there was only silence in the pit.
Videos captured some of the drama. A sequence from the theater’s in-house recording system opens with four men walking on stage in camouflage jackets. One barks orders to a comrade. Another is identifying himself and the other invaders as Chechens from the republic in southern Russia where President Vladimir Putin is conducting a savage war of conquest. Their leader, twenty-two-year-old Movsar Barayev, appears in a separate video shot during the siege with British newsman Mark Franchetti. The only one not wearing a mask, he is a nephew of a famously fierce Chechen commander. “We want an end to the war,” he tells the intrepid reporter.
From his vantage point in the pit, Ilya estimated that there were four dozen Chechens scattered about the theater. He wasn’t far off. There were forty-one. Many of them were women; they were known as “black widows” because they were the wives or sisters of slain Chechen men and had volunteered to be suicide bombers in this assault. Each one kept a hand at all times on a belt around her waist; each belt was said to be loaded with explosives and shrapnel. Ilya could see what appeared to be detonators—small buttons atop some belts; two wires extending from others, as if waiting to be touched together.
As the hours ticked by, tensions heightened. Some of the intruders wired bombs to pillars that supported the theater’s structure. Others fired weapons over the heads of audience members. “Just look straight ahead,” said one masked man. “Anyone who ducks will be dealt with.” It was ultimate terror, Ilya thought—was he more likely to die from a bullet as he sat in his seat, or if he ducked down next to his bass? He looked directly ahead, as did everyone else.
Later, when the attention of the Chechens seemed to be directed away from the orchestra, Ilya sensed that the time might be right for escape. His seat was close to a door leading to the musicians’ dressing rooms. He reached over and opened the door, and the players quietly filed out of the pit, locking the door behind them. But the Chechens quickly noticed their absence. A few militants climbed into the pit and demanded that the musicians come out. If they did not comply, the door would be forced open and a grenade tossed in. What could Ilya do? He opened the door, and the musicians returned to the pit, with their hands behind their heads. Now they were made to sit with the audience, directly in front of Movsar Barayev so that the Chechen leader could keep an eye on them.
Only a few rows away, Irina expressed confidence that the standoff would soon end. Even if these were genuine Chechen terrorists, they would be satisfied to have made their point; the show would then go on and she and her son would be home by eleven o’clock. “No, this will be two or three days,” came the voice of one of the black widows, known to audience members only as Asya. She had been standing nearby and overheard the conversation. Her prediction would prove to be eerily accurate.
Russians were not unused to mass hostage-taking by Chechen insurgents. In 1995, after an assault on the town of Budyonnovsk, invaders from Chechnya retreated to a hospital and held some 1,500 patients hostage. About 30 died in fighting with Russian forces before a truce was finally negotiated. The following year, two villages were raided in Dagestan, a territory adjoining Chechnya; more than 2,000 were taken hostage and about 340 died before the standoffs ended. In all three of these episodes, many Chechen fighters were able to escape.
I was more accustomed to the criminality that erupted after the First Chechen War ended in 1996. It sorely tested the sympathy that many Western reporters felt for the quarrelsome republic that had been nearly obliterated by the Russian military. The main crime was kidnapping-for-ransom. It wasn’t only the abductions themselves that disillusioned me, but the way victims were treated. They were typically held for months without word, sometimes in pits dug under homes, even if family members were ready to pay up. Most victims were Chechens, many never to be seen again. Some were foreigners, including a Russian journalist named Yelena Masyuk, who was held for 101 days before being ransomed for $2 million.
In August 1997, I visited the northern Caucasus city of Nalchik, a two-hour drive west of Chechnya, where sixteen residents had already been kidnapped that year. Thirteen had been released for an average ransom of $300,000. Among the lucky ones was Alim Tlupov, a muscular twenty-three-year-old with a butch haircut. He and two friends had driven into Chechnya to barter belongings for diesel fuel. But two Chechen acquaintances led them into a trap. Alim and his friends ended up with pillowcases over their heads and their hands tied, while the captors telephoned Alim’s father, Zauddin, with a demand for the equivalent of $300,000. The sum was absurd, since Zauddin was only a factory driver.
So began an ordeal in which the three young men were moved from one basement to another, beaten, and prevented from bathing. Alim described it as a family enterprise. The kidnappers’ wives and sisters wandered about, sometimes delivering bread and unsweetened tea to the captors—their main diet. Neighbors strolled by, clearly aware that kidnapping victims were being held a few steps away, Alim said.
After two months, the captives managed to escape. Before they could reach home, the infuriated Chechens telephoned Alim’s father. “Your son has been killed in a skirmish,” one of the captors said. “Come right away.” Now the father would become the victim. When Zauddin arrived at the rendezvous point, the Chechens abducted him. Another two months passed. Finally, the kidnappers accepted a reduced ransom of about $22,000, which the Tlupovs managed to raise from relatives. What seemed to most anger the family was the tepid response they received from authorities in Russia and Chechnya when they asked for help. Everyone pleaded impotence against the kidnappers.
