Late October 2002

Late October 2002 is the date of the Dubrovka Theater hostage crisis in Moscow, a 57-hour siege whose violent ending killed 129 hostages as well as nearly all the militants who had seized the theater. In Henry Pelham’s recollection, the episode is both a human catastrophe and a political turning point: the response to the deaths gave way quickly to accommodation with Russia, even as the war in Chechnya intensified.

The Siege

During a performance of Nord-Ost, a Russian version of Les Misérables, more than fifty Chechen Islamic militants took control of the Dubrovka Theater. They held 850 people hostage and demanded that Russian troops withdraw from Chechnya, where war had been underway for three years. The demands set the crisis against an ongoing military conflict; the theater’s audience became the immediate human stake in that conflict.

After 57 hours, Russian forces pumped gas into the theater and entered. Nearly all the militants were killed. So were 129 hostages, most as a result of the gas and the decision not to tell treating doctors precisely what the victims had inhaled. The rescue operation therefore ended the siege but also produced a mass casualty event whose medical consequences were compounded by the withholding of information from those treating the survivors.

Public and Political Aftermath

One of the dead hostages was a 49-year-old American from Oklahoma City who had come to meet his Russian fiancée. At the U.S. embassy and in Washington, officials repeatedly invoked his name while joining international condemnation of the Russian Special Forces operation and its many avoidable deaths. The individual victim became part of the public case against the conduct of the rescue.

That condemnation soon weakened. Vladimir Putin and his spokesmen emphasized the threat of international terrorism, invoking the attacks that had brought down two towers in Manhattan the previous year. Washington came to regard Russia’s argument as persuasive and relaxed its stance. The change in tone mattered beyond the theater: a decision to reduce Russian troop levels in Chechnya was quickly reversed, and large-scale operations in Grozny and elsewhere began again a couple of weeks later.

Henry Pelham’s Recollection

The siege reaches the reader through Henry Pelham’s memory of leaving Moscow with its grinding recollections still lodged in his mind. In 2003, after transferring to Vienna, he met Celia Favreau; his account places that meeting against the unresolved memory of the crisis. The date thus carries two linked scales of consequence: the deaths inside the theater and the subsequent political retreat from criticism, followed by renewed military action in Chechnya.