Bloody Drama

By Johanna McGeary

They are gassing us! We really beg not to be gassed. We hope it will not be like the Kursk!" As a thick, visible mist enveloped hostages and their takers in Moscow's House of Culture theater, Anya cried for help through her cell phone. The hostage thought she was about to suffocate slowly just like the sailors trapped aboard the crippled Russian submarine Kursk in 2000. "We see it, we feel it, we are breathing through our clothes. We are all going to be blown up!"

But the fast-acting sleeping agent being pumped into the theater was the key ingredient in a daring rescue raid. As early as Day One of the hostage standoff, diggers had been tunneling underneath the theater in preparation for an assault. Now in the early hours of Saturday, gunshots from inside had forced into action the waiting Spetsnaz commando troops in the elite Alfa and Vympel antiterror units of the Federal Security Service. The Chechen hostage takers, it seemed, were about to fulfill their death vow. They had sworn that if Russian President Vladimir Putin had not declared an end to the war in Chechnya by Saturday at dawn, they would start killing hostages. If they were assaulted, they made clear they were ready to blow up explosives plastered around the auditorium and strapped to their bodies.

But the rescue was precipitated by a small, unexpected act of impatience. After three days locked in the stuffy, smelly auditorium, an agitated young male hostage had had enough. According to one account, he threw a bottle at some of his Chechen captors and ran toward them. A gunman opened fire, missed the youth and hit another man in the eye. "There was blood--foamy. A girl was hit in the side," said Olga Chernyak, an Interfax news reporter among the captives. "It happened right where I was. I thought they would kill us all." As hostages screamed, recalled Chernyak, "The Chechen women were very happy the end was coming and that they would blow us all up. They told us, we have come here to die, and you will be going with us."

The 200-man team from Alfa and Vympel were ordered to set the hostages free in two hours. They donned white armbands to distinguish themselves from the Chechens wearing similar camouflage suits. Then they injected the sleeping gas through the building's ventilating system and holes bored underneath the auditorium, hoping to immobilize the gunmen and especially the explosive-laden women. A source close to the Alfa unit says that five times the required amount of gas was funneled in. "They used a lot, to be on the safe side," he says. "They were well aware of the repercussions for them should the gas attack fail." There was a shattering blast and the rattle of gunfire; then the troops smashed through doors, shooting down hostage takers still capable of firing back. Spetsnaz shot sleeping suicide bombers in the temple at point-blank range. "When a person wears two kilos of plastic explosive, we didn't see any other way of neutralizing them," said a member of the assault team. Ringleader Movsar Barayev sprawled dead on his back on stage with a Cognac bottle--strangely--by his side.

Forty minutes later, all 53 Chechen rebels were dead or captive. Anya and more than 750 other hostages had escaped alive, including some 30 children and 75 foreigners. But at least 90 Russian citizens died in the operation: killed in cross fire, perhaps, or suffocated by the mysterious gas, or even felled by heart attacks. Russian officials stressed that the deaths resulted from the siege's privations and stress. Nevertheless, Moscow hospitals appealed for blood, and eyewitnesses saw unconscious bodies carried from the theater. Many of the freed were delivered straight to toxicological wards to be treated for gas poisoning. The televised pictures of those female guerrillas, explosive packs still tied to their waists and slumped lifelessly in their seats, offered mute testimony to the fast-acting power of the agent.

By Russian standards, the rescue operation was an unexpected success. Putin made the most of it, donning a white doctor's coat to visit freed hostages at a Moscow hospital. Yet for all the claims of victory Saturday, top Kremlin leaders must face up to the security failures that let the Chechen takeover happen in the first place. While it would be "untimely" to fire the country's security chiefs right now, a top Putin aide reportedly said, the President needs to take steps to ensure that such a terrifying event does not happen again in the middle of Moscow.

Many Russians will cheer the success of the rescue. But the Chechen raid may also kindle fierce debate about Putin's war. He rose to the presidency of Russia in 2000 on a promise to restore Moscow's grip on the rebellious republic of Chechnya. For the past two years, he regularly claimed victory was all but won. As the champion of order and stability, Putin enjoyed strong public standing, while the government's harsh censorship of news from the war zone nearly a thousand miles from the capital has kept the grim realities of the stalemated conflict off the front pages and out of the minds of ordinary Russians. Now the brazen takeover of a theater just three miles from the Kremlin has brought the vicious struggle right to their doorstep.

The Chechen attackers, showing every sign of determination, had made only one demand. Russia must stop the war and withdraw its troops from the mostly Muslim Caucasus republic. No, said Putin. "We will not yield to these provocations." But once complacent Muscovites were beginning to ask whether this war, like the one in Afghanistan, was worth the bloodshed. "This is the logical extension of what they have always been doing, sending our children to die senselessly," said playwright Mark Rozovsky, 65, as he waited for news of his teenage daughter Sasha, a captive inside the theater. "I don't want my daughter to die at 14!"

The crisis began just after 9 on Wednesday night. After an intermission, theatergoers headed back to their seats in the 1,163-seat auditorium for Act II of Nord-Ost (North-East), a popular musical romance. Suddenly, masked attackers in battle dress burst into the building. Some fired into the air, while others raced onto the stage shouting, "We are Chechens!" and "We are at war here!"

A third of the attackers were said by intelligence officials to be widows of fighters killed in the decade-old war, which made them eager to sacrifice themselves for the cause. Black-masked men carrying Kalashnikovs wired plastic explosives to pillars, walls and seats--enough, they warned, to bring down the entire building if Russian troops stormed it. Only their leader, the 25-year-old Barayev, defiantly bared his face.

The raid marks a new chapter in the separatists' struggle. As far as they are concerned, "Any Russian who pays taxes and is silent over the war is a legitimate target," said a Chechen friend of Barayev's. Their intent was simple: "If the Russian people don't understand there's a war going on in Chechnya," explained a young Chechen in Moscow, "we'll bring it to them." The theater siege was the work of a generation of Chechens who feel they have nothing left to lose. And more such attacks are possible, Chechen sources told Time, waged by young, desperate, angry guerrillas bolstered by their Islamic faith. Barayev's crew made their single-minded objective plain in a videotape they sent Thursday morning to al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based channel frequently used by Islamic terrorists to broadcast messages. "I swear by God we are more keen on dying than you are keen on living," said a man who claimed to be one of the hostage takers. "Each one of us is willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of God and the independence of Chechnya."

Putin was not one to be moved by such rebel demands. He has long resisted opposition calls for peace talks with the Chechens. And his hard-line rivals would pounce on any sign of retreat from his promise to defeat Chechnya militarily. While a long line of self-styled or improvised negotiators paraded in and out of the theater, all Putin offered was a willingness to talk on his own tough terms.

Early on, the Russian President sought to shift the blame for the crisis to international terrorism. The takeover, he announced, was planned in "foreign terrorist centers" by the "same people" responsible for attacks like the recent bombing in Bali. That reverberated well in Washington, where Putin has long argued he is fighting exactly the kind of Islamic terrorism that led toSept. 11. President Bush quickly called to offer solidarity and general assistance.

But Chechens were doing this kind of thing long before al-Qaeda loomed large. This is homegrown terrorism, born in the ruins of Chechnya's cities and towns, where a barbarous occupation has been unable to crush an equally savage campaign of secession. After a disastrous two-year war whose military humiliations and soaring body count nearly unseated then President Boris Yeltsin, Russia withdrew in 1996, leaving Chechnya virtually independent. Russia stepped back in when Putin blamed Chechens for a series of 1999 Moscow apartment bombings that killed nearly 300. Though some doubted that Chechens were responsible, Russians rallied to Putin's promise that this time the army would destroy the rebellion for good.

Putin has floated on that wave of patriotic support ever since. The war was safely remote. Many Russians despise Chechens as "blacks" who lie, cheat and steal. "We must round up all these black scum in Moscow and tell the terrorists we'll be killing 100 of them for each dead Russian," declared a burly, bearded Muscovite, in the crowd outside the theater, whose son is fighting in Chechnya. "Yeah," agreed a young man nearby. "And if we withdraw our army from Chechnya, they'll butcher all the Russians there." For citizens like these, Putin's standing will suffer if he does not hang tough.

Yet for many others, starting with the terrified relatives of the hostages, the siege in the heart of Moscow has shattered the illusion that Russia is winning in Chechnya. Says Ruslan Khasbulatov, former chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation, an ethnic Chechen: "This war has served only to beget this homespun terrorism that will kill more people. You want to stop this terrorism, stop the bloodshed in Chechnya." Criticism like this hasn't been heard much during Putin's reign until now.

Seizing a theaterful of innocents may only convince many that Putin is right when he dismisses the rebels' cause as plain terrorism. But Putin's leadership will be judged on how he manages the fallout. He might now feel compelled to try decisive action in Chechnya. But the public might push instead for re-examination of a war that refuses to slink away. --Reported by Paul Quinn-Judge andYuri Zarakhovich/Moscow

With reporting by Paul Quinn-Judge and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow