The New Tsar (45 page)

The Kremlin’s strategy in Chechnya had suffered one setback after another. On May 9, 2004, two days after Putin’s subdued second inauguration, a bomb secretly cemented into a pillar at Grozny’s newly rebuilt soccer stadium exploded as the republic’s political elite assembled for a Victory Day parade, commemorating the fifty-ninth anniversary of the Nazi defeat. The blast killed thirteen people, including the newly installed president, Akhmad Kadyrov.
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Kadyrov, fifty-two, had fought against the Russians in the first war in Chechnya, but he broke with the republic’s president, Aslan Maskhadov, during its brief period of
quasi-independence, opposed to the radicalized form of Islam that was taking root. As a mufti himself and a respected commander, Kadyrov had commanded enough respect to carry out Putin’s plan to reunite Chechnya with the motherland. Now he was dead. In Chechnya’s clannish society, the only obvious successor was his son, Ramzan, a thuggish fighter who had once served as his father’s driver and then security chief, in charge of a group of fighters who became notorious for their brutal tactics against suspected militants. When Putin summoned Ramzan to the Kremlin on the day of his father’s assassination, he arrived looking disheveled and wearing sweatpants. He was only twenty-seven, too young according to Chechnya’s new constitution to become president, but Putin elevated him to the post of deputy prime minister and laid the foundation for him to succeed his father when he turned thirty. The rebels vowed to kill him too. “You don’t have to be Nostradamus to guess the fate of Ramzan Kadyrov,” they vowed on their website. Two days after the attack in May, Putin secretly flew to Chechnya to attend Kadyrov’s funeral, and his own delusion about the progress that had been made became clear. He flew by helicopter over the ruins of Grozny, seeing with his own eyes the physical evidence of devastation that had been airbrushed out of official accounts of the war. When he returned to Moscow, he appeared before his ministers and declared that not enough was being done to rebuild the shattered republic. He stated what had been obvious to anyone who had to live in Grozny. “Despite all that is being done there,” he said, “it looks horrible from a helicopter.”
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He sounded surprised.

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I
n Beslan, the local authorities were overwhelmed. Police commanders initially reported having trouble reaching the terrorists inside the school, even though one of them answered the school’s telephone and told Nikolay Khalip of
The New York Times
that the fighters were a unit under the command of Shamil Basayev, Russia’s most wanted terrorist. “Wipe your sniffles,” he told Khalip.
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After a while a terrified woman emerged from the school with a note demanding negotiations with the leaders of North Ossetia and neighboring Ingushetia and the doctor who had mediated during the
Nord-Ost
siege, Leonid Roshal. The note also warned that the captors would shoot fifty hostages if any of their fighters were killed. By evening they escorted the men to a classroom on the second floor and began to execute them one by one anyway, heaving their bodies out the window.

On the morning the siege began, Putin woke and managed an early swim in the sea, but the unfolding crisis made staying in Sochi impossible. He flew back to Moscow, where a senior aide who met him described him as “terribly upset,” complaining about the utter breakdown in security that could allow a group of heavily armed fighters to seize an entire school.
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Putin remained in the Kremlin during the following days, retreating periodically to the office’s chapel to pray, it was made known, but also complaining that he did not have time for his daily exercise routine.
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He appeared in public only briefly, on September 2, during an appearance with King Abdullah of Jordan, in which he vowed to protect the lives of the hostages above all. He spoke even as he ordered the FSB to dispatch ten “special purpose” groups to Beslan, each comprising elite officers trained for extraordinary crises.
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Putin sought to convey a sense of calm authority, but the reflex of Russian officials to lie in the face of tragedy compounded the sense of panic and choas. The authorities in Beslan and in Moscow reported that there were only 354 hostages, even though everyone in the town knew there were more. Some of those outside the school angrily resorted to holding up signs in view of television cameras saying there were as many as 800 hostages and imploring Putin to intervene peacefully, knowing that would not be his reflexive instinct.
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The terrorists inside were furious when they watched state television parroting the lie about the number of hostages; they threatened to shoot hostages until only 354 were left. Even some officials agonized over the lies they had to repeat.
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The authorities—the police, the Interior Ministry, and the FSB, all bolstered by Putin during his first term—seemed paralyzed. They worried as much about protecting the regime that Putin had created as about protecting the children and parents besieged inside the school. Anna Politkovskaya, who had negotiated with the terrorists at
Nord-Ost
, reached out to Chechnya’s opposition leaders in exile to mediate again, but when she flew to an airport near enough to drive to Beslan, she fell ill during the flight; she was convinced that the tea she had been given was poisoned. Andrei Babitsky, the reporter whose capture during the early years of the war had led to a scandal, was detained at a Moscow airport, as well.
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The authorities who had failed spectacularly to protect Beslan’s school were determined to protect the city from unwanted reporters.

The officials in Beslan appeared uncertain and hesitant as the siege
entered a second day. The tension was heightened by intermittent explosions and gunfire, the cause of which remained unclear to those outside. Putin had made himself the ultimate authority in Russia, but his “vertical of power” created paralysis in times of crisis: No one would risk taking an initiative that might provoke disapproval.
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Putin had vowed never to negotiate with terrorists, but for the first time he allowed his aides to explore the possibility of a negotiated end to the siege, even as the Kremlin distanced him from the effort.
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He instructed the region’s governor, Aleksandr Dzasokhov, to make contact with Alsan Maskhadov’s chief representative in exile, Akhmed Zakayev. He did so through Ruslan Aushev, the former president of neighboring Ingushetia. Aushev, a hero of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, had been sympathetic to Chechnya’s struggle for independence, but he also made sure to keep his region out of the fighting. Aushev arrived in Beslan on the second day of the siege and took over contact with the terrorists. Within fifteen minutes, he was told he could enter the school, the first official allowed in.

What he saw inside was desperate. The terrorists had given the hostages no food or water. The commander of the group, who called himself Colonel, gave Aushev a handwritten list of demands: Russian troops should withdraw from Chechnya and grant it independence. The new Chechnya would join Russia in the Commonwealth of Independent States, keep the ruble as its currency, and work with Russian forces to restore order in the region. The note, scrawled on notebook paper, was addressed to “His Excellency, President of the Russian Federation” and written in the name of “the servant of Allah, Shamil Basayev.” None of the demands would be acceptable to Putin, but Aushev promised to convey them if the terrorists would release the women with nursing babies. One of the terrorists told him there were 1,020 hostages inside the sweltering school. Aushev managed to persuade them to allow twenty-six hostages to leave with him—eleven women and fifteen babies.

When Aushev returned to the command center, he called Zakayev, then in London. Zakayev told him that he and Maskhadov were prepared to assist, but that if Maskhadov were to travel to Beslan to speak to the terrorists, Russia would have to guarantee safe passage.
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Aushev knew that a plan had been drawn up to raid the school; in fact, two of the special units that Putin had ordered to Beslan were already training for an assault at a similar schoolhouse not far away.
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He hoped he could win the release of more hostages in the meantime, however. On the morning of the third day, September 3, he reached an agreement
with the terrorists to remove the bodies of the men who had been executed and tossed from the classroom window; by then, their corpses had begun decomposing. A four-man crew from the Ministry of Emergency Situations pulled up in an ambulance at one o’clock and had just begun picking up the bodies when a thunderous explosion rocked the school’s gymnasium. Twenty-two seconds later a second explosion erupted. The blasts lifted the roof and rafters off the school, blew out the windows, and ripped a hole in the gymnasium’s wall.

Scores were killed immediately, but dazed survivors began to escape, tumbling out of the shattered school. The soldiers outside and the terrorists inside—both unsure of what had happened—began a ferocious firefight that lasted for ten hours. The roof caught fire and the burning rafters collapsed on those still inside. A conspiracy theory later emerged that the Russians had started the battle by firing into the school, but none of those outside had appeared prepared to launch an assault on the building when the assault began. Many did not have bullet-proof vests. Nor had they established a security perimeter around the building. There were no ambulances or fire trucks on hand. Local men with hunting rifles joined the fight, firing haphazardly and running into the crossfire to carry children to safety.
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The horrific pandemonium unfolded live on international television—though not on the Russian networks, which interrupted their regular programming only for brief updates that continued to play down the carnage as it worsened. Neither Putin nor any other senior officials emerged to address the crisis. Prime Minister Fradkov carried on with a government meeting convened to discuss the nation’s privatization plans, even as the bursts of gunfire and explosions shredded the school. The climax of the battle came that night at 11:15, when a Russian tank fired a shell into the school, killing three insurgents holding out in the basement. Russia’s state television networks had declared the situation under control hours before.

When it was over, 334 hostages had died, 186 of them children. Ten Russian commandos were killed trying to free those inside. Thirty terrorists died, including the two women, Maryam Taburova and Rosa Nagayeva, whose roommates had launched the wave of terror by destroying the two airliners. One terrorist was captured and later tried in court, but others were believed to have escaped in the chaos. Since the death toll nearly equaled the number of hostages that had been repeated for more than two days on state television, the lie could no longer be hidden.
The public distrust of official statements was such that many believed the government continued to lie about the number of dead, the fate of the terrorists, and the cause of the two explosions that had brought the siege to its horrible end.

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P
utin left the Kremlin early on the morning of September 4 and flew to Beslan. He arrived before dawn and visited the wounded in a hospital before making a brief statement with the region’s president, Aleksandr Dzasokhov. “Today all of Russia suffers for you,” he told him.
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He offered no other words of comfort beyond his vow to hunt down those responsible for the siege. He was not there to comfort, but to create the image of having comforted. He did not hold a meeting—even one scripted for the cameras—with the people of Beslan. The anguished, frenzied, and traumatized crowds that had kept vigil outside the school demanded afterward that the government act, that the government stop lying. Instead Putin returned to Moscow and delivered a televised address to the nation.

When Putin appeared in the nation’s living rooms that night, he looked uncharacteristically shaken. He stood alone in front of a wood-paneled wall and a Russian flag. “It is a difficult and bitter task for me to speak,” he began. “A horrible tragedy happened in our land.”
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He asked all of Russia to remember those “who lost the dearest in their life,” bowing his head slightly, but he offered no apology and accepted no responsibility. He did not use the occasion to defend, justify, or explain his policies in Chechnya. Nor did he offer any new approach. He did not even mention Chechnya by name. Putin instead offered a soliloquy on the country’s history, one with a deep nostalgia for the unifying purpose and security of the Soviet Union, then already thirteen years gone. He had only suggested as much before, careful to honor the history of the Soviet past without embracing its failures and crimes, but now he seemed to blame the siege in Beslan on Russia’s inability to preserve the strength that made the Soviet Union he remembered as a boy so strong and respected. “There have been many tragic pages and difficult trials in the history of Russia,” he went on, lecturing patiently as a professor might. “Today we are living in conditions formed after the disintegration of a huge, great country, the country which unfortunately turned out to be nonviable in the conditions of a rapidly changing world. Today, however, despite all difficulties, we managed to preserve the nucleus of that giant, the Soviet Union. We called the new country the Russian Federation. We all
expected changes, changes for the better, but found ourselves absolutely unprepared for much that changed in our lives. The question is why. We live in conditions of a transitional economy and a political system that do not correspond to the development of society. We live in conditions of aggravated internal conflicts and ethnic conflicts that before were harshly suppressed by the governing ideology. We stopped paying due attention to issues of defense and security. We allowed corruption to affect the judiciary and law enforcement systems. In addition to that, our country, which once had one of the mightiest systems of protecting its borders, suddenly found itself unprotected either from West or East.”