And so the doctors tried improvising. Irina recalled that one prescribed milk for all the survivors. Another doctor ordered the milk exchanged for mineral water. Then a third ordered the mineral water withdrawn. “It’s no good in this case,” he said.
Some doctors did receive word to inject naloxone, which they reasonably interpreted to mean that the gas was an opiate. But no one could be sure what sort of opiate, a crucial bit of information. Under pressure, the Kremlin finally began to characterize the gas as a fentanyl derivative, but even that was too inexact. Was it an analogue of fentanyl called carfentanil, ten thousand times more powerful than morphine and used to sedate large animals? Was it sufentanil, an anesthetic for heart surgery that is a mere ten times more powerful than fentanyl? Or simple fentanyl? Doctors were left wondering how much naloxone to administer.
Five years later, authorities whom I interviewed responded to their critics in pretty much the same way. The government had certainly not intended that the hostages should die. Therefore it was blameless.
A former Kremlin official who had been involved in the planning, and who asked for anonymity, said no one was sure how much gas to pump in. Nor, he added, did anyone anticipate that a large supply of antidote would be needed. It was assumed that everyone would simply wake up. “In my opinion, the operation was successful,” he said.
As for the bitter complaints of survivors, he turned philosophical. “When there are victims, they will always seek answers,” he said. “They say we could have continued negotiations. They will do so until the end of their lives. People live in a certain myth in which some things were done well, and some things bad. But I’m absolutely certain that there was no evil plot to kill people.”
The Kremlin political adviser Vyacheslav Nikonov replied similarly. “The gas was rather harmless. The only thing they needed was a breath of fresh air—oxygen. A mask on their mouths,” he said. “Most of them died because of their tongues going down their throats. When they started bringing people out, there was a long line of medical cars. They concentrated on bringing people to the cars rather than on giving them oxygen.”
The government’s review of what precisely happened was lack-adaisical at best. Yuri Sinelshchikov, a former deputy prosecutor of the city of Moscow who supervised part of the investigation, believed it was not a serious effort. Written findings by his own investigator were altered to be in agreement with the conclusions of the FSB and the federal prosecutor, he said.
Sinelshchikov did not elaborate, but in other remarks he indicated there could be no conclusive investigation because the crime scene was politicized and corrupted. “I would leave the scene sick because of the mistakes, criminal mistakes,” he said. “Important witnesses were not immediately interviewed, not until two or three weeks later. There was missing evidence. In the beginning someone didn’t think something was important, and when he went back it was gone. People were not detained for interrogation. If someone was under suspicion and needed to be followed secretly, they were not doing it well at all, and it was obvious. For the first ten days there was chaos, and there were too many people from the top involved.”
Anna Politkovskaya had her suspicions about the events—she believed there had to be complicity of some kind within Russia’s intelligence agencies. How else did so many fully armed terrorists reach the center of Moscow? she asked. Six months afterward, she backed up her case by publishing an interview with a man who identified himself as a surviving member of the Nord-Ost terrorist band. The man, named Khanpasha Terkibayev, was working for Russian intelligence, Politkovskaya alleged. After the interview, Terkibayev denied telling Politkovskaya that he was at Nord-Ost. He was killed in a car crash a few months later.
Like the allegations regarding the 1999 apartment blasts, the suggestion of FSB involvement at Nord-Ost seemed fantastic. Even though I trusted Anna’s work, I had trouble taking such notions seriously. What I could say was that something worse than simple incompetence had led to the outcome at Nord-Ost. From the moment the hostage crisis began, the Kremlin and its security forces were focused only on killing the Chechens, on demonstrating the resolve of the state not to be pushed around. It never occurred to any of them to make the survival of the captives a priority.
An outsider could only wonder: If terrorists seized a theater in a major Western city, would the New York police or the FBI or the London, Paris, or Tokyo police use gas to subdue the hostage takers? Possibly. But would they neglect the need to have massive and well-organized medical care waiting outside the theater? The Hurricane Katrina debacle in 2005 notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine that fully equipped rescue trucks and ambulances would not have been lined up on Broadway by the dozens. I think it would be the same in the United Kingdom, in France, in Germany, and so on.
The most dangerous place in the industrialized world to be a rescued hostage is Russia.
The Nord-Ost survivors tried to get on with their lives, some more successfully than others. Two months after the hostage episode, Anna Politkovskaya’s phone rang. It was the police.
“We’ve got Ilya Lysak down here. He is asking for you,” a voice said. Ilya had been disorderly again; since his brush with terrorism, the young musician had gotten into a bar fight, inexplicably erupted at passersby on the street, and thrown a chair at someone.
“What’s wrong with me?” he asked Anna, after she signed him out of jail. That night, he dozed off on the Politkovskaya couch next to the family’s pet Doberman.
A few months later, a car jumped a curb near Ilya’s apartment and ran him down. He suffered multiple broken bones and spent eleven months in the hospital. Anna arranged for his treatment, cashing in a favor owed her by a wealthy acquaintance, who paid the bills.
When I met him five years later, he spoke as though the hours he spent as a hostage weren’t entirely frightening for him. Indeed, I had the sense that he was feeling fairly full of himself some of the time. At one point, he said, he decided that the Chechen leader, Barayev, was not that imposing, and that he, Ilya, could “take him one-on-one” if the two had ever been alone together. But there also was something affecting about Ilya. He described himself as a big, muscular man prior to the auto accident; now, at age twenty-nine, he was skinny, almost wiry, and, while a captivating speaker, he was more boy than man. When I saw him, Ilya was working two jobs—sound director at the country’s main television station and, on the side, composing music for a film.
Elena noticed that people acted strangely once they learned of her connection to Nord-Ost, and so she stopped mentioning it. For the previous eighteen years, she had taught chemistry. But she could not see herself returning to the classroom. Instead, she began attending classes on the tourism industry, and there she met an elderly woman named Diana who was already a success in the business. As their relationship warmed, Elena revealed that she had been a hostage.
Diana responded instantly. “I’m going to give you my firm,” she said. Elena was floored by her classmate’s extreme kindness. “She was seventy-five and decided to do something else. She could see my circumstances,” said Elena. “She asked an absolutely symbolic amount” of money in exchange.
When Elena spoke to me over tea in spring 2007, she was about to fly to Paris to personally select a hotel for clients. This courageous woman was on her way.
Irina, anxious that her son not be forgotten, presented herself at Anna Politkovskaya’s newspaper office with a sheaf of photographs. Until then, the two had never met. But the sympathetic journalist made Irina and her dead son part of a feature article entitled “Nord-Ost. 11th Row,” and churned out other pieces on the survivors and the government’s plodding investigation. Irina read them all; Anna, she said, had “taken me by a finger and pulled me out from drowning….”