Theater of War

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As the siege came to an end, a wave of relief and even euphoria surged across the state-controlled media — and President Vladimir Putin was suddenly the star. The man who had laid low for much of the week, making only a brief statement of defiance against "these provocations," now donned a white doctor's coat to visit freed hostages at a Moscow hospital. Opposition politicians fell over themselves to declare their admiration for him. The message: this Putin — famous for his use of crude slang — can kick ass.

But the celebrations might be premature — and not just because of the shocking security lapses that had allowed the Chechen rebels to seize a theater just five km from the Kremlin (and that will likely lead to a major shake-up among Putin's security chiefs). The real issue was that the rebels had caught Putin in a big lie. He won the presidency in 2000 on a law-and-order platform and a promise to restore Moscow's grip on the rebellious republic of Chechnya, and for the past two years he has regularly claimed that the war there was all but over. But where he claimed victory, others saw quagmire, so more recently he has enforced a media blackout on Chechnya, concealing the dimensions of the stalemate. But the theater siege brought the cause of the Chechen rebels — desperate and more than willing to die for their separatist cause — right back to the Russian capital. "Putin behaves as if he has had a major victory," says the Kremlin source. "But some of his top aides believe that the theater seizure marked the total collapse of his three-year-old policy of claiming to have pacified Chechnya. It is totally clear now that the war has not been won, that it has spread to Russia, and that further hostilities on Russian soil — and in Moscow in particular — are inevitable."

As the siege at the Theater Center on Dubrovka in a grimy, Soviet-era neighborhood unfolded, the armed gunfighters, laden with explosives and showing every sign of determination, made only one demand. Russia must stop the war in Chechnya and withdraw its troops from the mostly Muslim Caucasus republic. Putin refused to yield. 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. "I don't want my daughter to die at 14."

The crisis at the theater began just after 9 p.m. on Wednesday. After an intermission, theatergoers headed back to their places in the 1,100-seat auditorium for Act 2 of Nord-Ost ("North-East"), a popular musical romance following a passionate love story in Soviet days. Outside, two or three vehicles drew up and unloaded masked attackers in camouflage battledress who 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 few actors and theaterworkers escaped through backstage windows as the guerrillas ordered the audience into silent submission. Olga Treiman, a barmaid at the theater who was later released because she was pregnant, heard a young woman arguing with the assailants in the orchestra pit. "One of the men shouted: 'Just shoot her!'" says Treiman. "I heard five rapid shots and a scream." The woman's body was brought out by a day later by two Jordanian medical doctors who were allowed into the building by the rebels.

In the first two days, the Chechen rebels freed 54 hostages, mostly children under 13. But more than 800 captives, including some 30 teens and some 75 foreigners, remained in the gang's hands. A third of the estimated 50 attackers were women, and, according to a spokesman for the fsb, Russia's internal security agency, widows of fighters killed in the long-running war; they were eager to sacrifice themselves for the cause. Shrouded in black except for their eyes, each held a pistol in one hand and in the other, cables running into explosives-filled packets on their belts. Black-masked men carrying Kalashnikovs quickly wired plastic bombs to pillars, walls and seats; enough, they warned, to bring down the entire building if Russian troops stormed it. Only the terrorist leader Barayev defiantly bared his face.

Well before the Spetsnaz stormed the theater, spokesmen for the fsb were dismissing the rebels as drug-addled lunatics with no coherent plan. After the end of the siege, some reports claimed that the female rebels had alcohol on their breath and that a bottle of cognac was found inches from Barayev's hand. None of this tallied with the descriptions provided by independent negotiators and TV journalists who had actually come into contact with the rebels earlier in the week: they found Barayev to be cool and focused.