Moscow Theater Hostage Crisis

The Moscow Theater Hostage Crisis began on the evening of October 23, 2002, when Chechen terrorists took the audience of the musical Nord-Ost hostage. Fifty-seven hours later, Russian special forces used gas against the hostage-takers and their captives. The official death toll remained disputed, while the families’ yearly candlelit commemorations became closely watched gatherings. The crisis also exposed a contrast that would preoccupy Eduard Limonov: ordinary offenders punished for their crimes, and state agents whose lethal decisions could be defended as firmness.

Seizure and assault

The hostage-taking unfolded before a worldwide television audience. For three days, the crisis dominated broadcasts as the terrorists held the theater’s entire audience. Negotiation was foreclosed; the authorities chose to resolve the standoff by releasing gas inside the building. At dawn on October 26, after fifty-seven hours, the attack killed hostages as well as hostage-takers. The account describes about eight hundred people in the theater when the gas was used, and stresses that the special forces’ action did not distinguish between those who had taken hostages and those trapped there.

The number of civilian casualties remained in question. Official estimates put the total at around 150, but the uncertainty itself became part of the aftermath: the families could not simply accept a public account and mourn in private. When relatives asked whether events might have been handled differently, they were treated as though their questions made them accomplices. Their grief was therefore entangled with a demand for answers and for respect, a demand the authorities did not welcome.

Limonov watches from prison

On the night of October 23, Limonov was in prison, where his cellmates were watching crime films that cast police as heroes and criminals as monsters. He objected to the films’ portrayal, but the others preferred them to the news. When a broadcast interrupted the program to report that the theater audience and actors had been taken hostage, he insisted on following the coverage. For the next fifty-seven hours, he watched report after report, through to the gas attack at dawn on October 26.

The crisis held his attention partly because he himself faced a terrorism charge and an approaching trial. A wave of public paranoia, he understood, could further damage his case. But his response was also a judgment about the scale and character of violence. The crimes committed by his cellmates, he thought, paled beside the mass of people killed by the state’s operation. He returned thereafter to the contrast between crimes committed in a moment of passion or drunkenness, for which perpetrators might pay for the rest of their lives, and crimes of the state, whose perpetrators could be decorated.

Limonov’s day-by-day notes, made from what he saw on television, led him to conclusions that the book compares with those of Anna Politkovskaya, who followed events at much closer hand. Like her, he feared a bloodbath from the outset. After it happened, he suspected that officials were lying about the number of victims and that nothing had been done to save them. When Vladimir Putin declared that Russia would not be intimidated regardless of the losses, Limonov recalled persistent rumors that the 1999 attacks had been committed by the FSB with the president’s endorsement. He began referring to Putin as a fascist; the book identifies this as the first time he used the word negatively.

A vigil under surveillance

Each year after the hostage-taking, the bereaved gathered for a commemoration. The police did not ban the ceremony outright, but monitored it as though it were a seditious assembly—a description that, in the account, had become increasingly apt. At one gathering, two or three hundred people stood in the square in front of the theater, with roughly as many OMON riot police surrounding them in helmets, carrying shields and heavy clubs.

Rain began to fall. Umbrellas opened above the candles, whose paper collars protected the mourners’ fingers from hot wax. The scene recalled Orthodox Easter services, but the signs bore photographs and names of the dead in place of icons. Those present included orphans, widows and widowers, and parents who had lost a child. No state representative attended. The families’ representative said so in a few words marked by cold anger; they were the ceremony’s only speeches. There were no slogans or chants. People stood silently with candles and photographs or spoke quietly in small groups among the police who had sealed off the perimeter.

The vigil’s form made mourning itself a public statement without turning it into a rally. The candles and photographs registered lives lost; the police cordon, official absence, and surveillance marked the limits imposed on the families’ ability to question the state. The ceremony was restrained, but its silence did not signify acquiescence. Each year’s gathering kept the unresolved questions visible.

Limonov among the mourners

At the top of the theater steps, in front of its closed doors, Limonov stood in a black coat with a candle. Several people gathered around him as he spoke quietly. He stood apart from the larger crowd while nevertheless drawing attention, his raised collar and small beard catching the candlelight. The narrator initially recognized only a familiar silhouette. A woman nearby identified him to another observer, saying that Eduard was there and that this was good. He turned his head as if he had heard, and the narrator then recognized him.

Limonov’s presence surprised the narrator, who had not known he was out of prison. He looked less like a rocker than before, but retained an imperious, energetic bearing. People approached to greet him respectfully; the narrator considered joining them, caught Limonov’s glance, and held back when he did not seem to recognize him. The encounter placed the former prisoner, himself charged with terrorism, among families commemorating victims of state violence, without making the differences between their experiences disappear.

Political memory and aftermath

The vigil also brought together bereaved families and opposition figures. The narrator recognized people from the small opposition milieu encountered during the preceding week, and exchanged subdued nods with them. This political presence had a wider context: Anna Politkovskaya had defended forty National Bolshevik Party militants sentenced after occupying and vandalizing the presidential administration’s offices while shouting against Putin. She described them as courageous young people of integrity. Yelena Bonner likewise expressed support for the party’s members, despite the unpleasant associations its name carried for some.

Several months after the vigil, Eduard Limonov joined Garry Kasparov and former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov in the coalition The Other Russia. The narrator took this conjunction as evidence that Limonov’s position in the country had changed, even if Limonov himself had not. The hostage crisis did not resolve the conflict over how the state’s actions should be judged. Instead, the disputed casualty count, the annual monitored vigil, and Limonov’s parallel with Politkovskaya kept that conflict in view: the question of who could name the victims, challenge the official account, and mourn without being treated as an adversary.