It was all so disturbingly familiar. The sight of Islamists waving automatic weapons on a stage in the Russian capital as hundreds of Muscovites looked on, first in surprise, then shock, then abject horror.
Even the words of the survivors were an eery echo of the past. “I thought it was all part of the show,” one concert-goer said.
Twenty-two years ago those were the very same words spoken by survivors of the attack on a Moscow theatre showing the popular musical Nord Ost.
Back then around 50 Chechens stormed in during the interval and took the audience of nearly 900 hostage. The terrorists’ demands for releasing the hostages was that Moscow withdraw it’s military from their war-ravaged homeland in the north Caucasus.
Three days later Russian special forces pumped a knock-out gas into the theatre and then stormed the entrances.
Recently dispatched to Moscow for The Daily Telegraph, I bluffed my way through a security cordon and watched as dozens of the dead and dying were lain out on the stone steps of the theatre as a cold October dawn broke over the city.
Some were so close I could have reached out and touched them.
Last Friday night an audience of nearly 6,000 had gathered at a top Moscow venue, this time on the outskirts of the city. They had come to watch a veteran rock band called Picnic.
Just as the show was about to start four gunmen, apparently radicalised Muslims from Central Asia, pulled up outside in a white Renault. They walked into the building and began to spray bullets into the crowd.
The AK47 assault rifles they carried were designed as a battlefield weapon for use on the plains of eastern Europe. At close quarters they cut the concert-goers down in droves.
When the attackers’ supply of ammunition began to dry up they set fire to the concert hall using a flammable liquid and then fled. They were arrested in Bryansk in western Russia.
By the time the fire at the concert hall was finally put out the death toll had risen to around 140, almost exactly the same number of casualties from the Nord Ost theatre.
Of course, there were differences in the methods – and the aims. The Chechens in 2002 included several ‘shakhidkas’ – the Russian term for female suicide bombers who strapped explosives to their bodies to avenge their dead husbands and brothers.
Although they knew they were unlikely to emerge alive, they did nevertheless have a cogent demand – that the Russians pull out of Chechnya and stop murdering and terrorising their kinsfolk.
The methods may have been outrageous, but the demand for national emancipation from a brutal occupying force was hardly radical in itself.
ISIS, who claimed the attack at the weekend, is an entirely different beast. While one of their goals is a Muslim caliphate to call their own, they have an openly internationalist terrorist agenda.
Their members are steeped in a deep hatred of the west, Russia and Shia Islam. The fire in the bellies was born out of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Chechen wars, and the doomed American-led occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
There was no sets of demands from the ISIS gunmen or attempts to trade hostages. Killing Russians was, for them, reward enough.
So why the attack? And how will Putin react?
From ISIS’s point of view any attack that brings international headlines and reinforces its place as the leading global exporter of violent jihad is a boon. It helps to fill its coffers from radical Islamist donors, and attract new recruits to its cause.
The gunmen themselves seem to have been paid - around $5,000 each according to one of them. Though the bruises on his face and fear in his voice suggest he had been softened up by the Russians and, at that point, any testimony is questionable.
As for Vladimir Putin, his reaction was depressingly familiar.
Just as he blamed the media for the attack on the Moscow Theatre, and the west in general for the seizure of a school in Beslan in southern Russia by Islamic militants in 2004, which led to 350 deaths, so now he has attempted to blame Ukraine.
Nevertheless – however you cut it – the attack in Moscow this past weekend will leave Putin weakened. His offer to the Russian people has always been a relatively simple one: vote for me and I will give you security and order.
In 2004 during the Moscow theatre siege insiders said that Putin felt so embattled that at one point he told his inner circle he was ready to step down.
After last week’s election – a performative exercise rather than a proper test of ordinary Russians’ political inclinations – Putin, if he serves out his new term, will be the longest Russian ruler since Catherine the Great, pushing Stalin into third place.
But that is, of course, if he serves out his term.
It has been a bruising couple of years for the spy from Saint Petersburg: his final dramatic bust-up with the west, his poorly-executed invasion of Ukraine, the coup attempt by Yevgeny Prigozhin of the Wagner mercenary group, and now the biggest terrorist attack on Russian soil in 20 years.
Putin doubled down on Ukraine, had Prigozhin blown out of the sky, and will now undoubtedly set his security forces on the millions of hapless gastarbeiter from central Asia that are one of the mainstays of the Russian economy.
Only a fool would write off one of the most cunning political survivors of the 21st Century. Even so, despite the Potemkin election last week that gave him 87 percent of the vote, the Russian strongman is suddenly not looking quite so strong.
Correction: In earlier versions I suggested Nord Ost was in 2004. Beslan was in 2004. Nord Ost was in 2002.
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NEWS & LINKS
+ In a few days Kim and I will be setting off for Kyiv. From there we have booked a car, and secured a couple of flak jackets and helmets, and our plan is to take a slow drive through eastern Ukraine.
I will probably write a four or five part diary on the trip and try and post updates whenever we come to resting spots with both power and internet. Kim will take photographs.
The bare bones will be available to all, but we plan to offer our private thoughts and impressions to paid subscribers, whose subscriptions have made this trip possible. (I am not intending to file for other publications.)
If you would like to support our efforts to offer a fresh perspective more than two years into the war, please consider signing up for a paid subscription.
Those of you who opt to be founding members will also know that you are helping pay some of our expenses for the trip, most of which still come from our own pockets, and that we are extremely grateful.
+ If you would like to know more about the Moscow theatre siege in 2004, click here to watch a documentary about it. Paid subscribers can also message or email me and I will send them the original story I wrote from outside the theatre.
+I recently returned from a week-long trip to Georgia, which is once again living under Russia’s shadow. Among others we met Russian opposition activists. I’ll write a post on that trip and what I learned soon.
+ On the subject of the Russian opposition, here is a good new VICE documentary about opposition inside the country. Click here to watch. It shows the price paid for opposing Putin at home and just how difficult it is to stand up against the regime.
+ Meanwhile the documentary I have been making with my daughter, Emma, and others, to tell the remarkable story of an ethnic Albanian boy from Kosovo that survived an awful massacre of his family in 1998, is nearing completion. We aim to have a private screening in the Kosovo capital Prishtina on April 24th. An endeavour that was supposed to cost around $6,000 and take a few months to complete, is now standing at $25,000 and has taken two years. I hope he likes it! I will also update on that soon.
Hi!! Am in UA. Weekends in Kyiv. Next week in Donetsk. Tag me on whatsapp!!
Julius,
Flak jackets and helmets aside, please stay safe. What you do in the wilds of Canada is just as important as what you do for the citizens of Kyiv.
God speed