Free Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev Page A

crowd. A hundred yards between jolliness and terror, between hot dog stalls and hostages. At first I couldn’t understand: Why is everyone acting like they’re in a comedy, when this is a tragedy? Weren’t we all meant to sit in silence? Bite our nails? Pray?
    Back in the theater the orchestra pit was being used as a toilet; the people in the front row were sweating from the stench. Rows of seats were rattling as the hostages shook with fear. “When we die, how will I recognize you in paradise?” a seven-year-old girl asked her mother.
    The hostages were losing hope. The terrorists demanded the President pull all federal forces out of the North Caucasus. The Kremlin had said there was no way it would negotiate: the President’s credibility was based on quelling the rebellion in Chechnya. In the late 1990s, when he was still prime minister, he had been transformed from gray nobody to warrior by the Second Chechen War, suddenly appearing in camouflage sharing toasts with soldiers on the front. The war had been launched after a series of apartment buildings had been bombed in mainland Russia, killing 293 people in their homes. Nowhere, nowhere at all, had seemed safe. The perpetrators were announced on TV to be Chechen terrorists—though many still suspect they were working with the Kremlin’s connivance to give the gray nobody who was meant to become president a reason to start a war. Many in the Russian public, cynical after living among Soviet lies so long, often assume the Kremlin’s reality is scripted. There were indeed some grounds for skepticism: the Russian security services had been caught planting a bomb in an apartment block (they claimed it was a training accident); the speaker of the Duma had publicly announced one of the explosions before it had taken place.
    While they held the Nord Ost theater the Chechen terrorists welcomed TV crews inside to give interviews live for Russian TV. The men spoke in heavily accented Russian, the southern accents usually used in Russian comedies.
    “We’ve come to die here for Allah. We’ll take hundreds of unbelievers with us,” they announced.
    One of the Black Widows spoke on camera. Through her head scarf you could see the most elegant, almond eyes. She said she was from a secular family and had joined a sect when her father, husband, and cousin were killed during the war with Russia.
    “If we die it’s not the end,” she told the television audience, quite calmly. “There are many more of us.”
    It was my job to stay outside and wait to see if anything happened while my bosses went back to their hotel. It drizzled. The cold rain tasted salty. I drank warm beer, listening for an explosion or gunfire. There wouldn’t be any. At 5:00 a.m. on the fourth night of the siege, special forces slipped a fizzing, mystery anesthetic blended with an aerosol spray gas into the ventilation system of the theater. A gray mist rose through the auditorium. The Black Widows were knocked out instantly, slouching over and sliding onto the floor. The hostages and hostage-takers all snored. Barely a shot was fired as special forces, safe from the fumes in gas masks, entered. All the Chechens were quickly killed. The soldiers celebrated the perfect operation. The darkness around me was lit up with the spotlights of news crews reporting a miracle of military brilliance.
    The medics moved in to resuscitate the audience. They hadn’t been warned about the gas. There weren’t enough stretchers or medics. No one knew what the gas was, so they couldn’t give the right antidotes. The sleeping hostages, fighting for breath, were carried out, placed face up on the steps of the theater, choking on their tongues, on their own vomit. I, and a thousand TV cameras, saw the still-sleeping hostages dragged through cold puddles to city buses standing nearby, thrown inside any which way and on top of each other. The buses pulled past me, the hostages slumped and sagging across the seats and on the