you can probably keep a watch out for it whenever HBO reairs it, or it
goes to DVD.
HBO's 'Terror in Moscow': A Look Back in Anguish
By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 23, 2003; Page C01
When a masked gunman walked onstage during a musical number that was being performed by a chorus in military uniforms, a member of the audience in a Moscow theater remembers thinking to herself, "Great acting." But it was acting only in a very different sense, and that Moscow theater was about to become a world stage for yet another monstrous terrorist drama.
Forty-one Chechen rebels -- 22 armed men and 19 women, some of whom had explosives secured around their waists -- took 850 hostages in the theater that rainy night to advance what they considered a noble cause, getting the Russian army out of Chechnya. What was to be a nearly three-day ordeal may seem a small outrage compared with the 9/11 attack on the United States by Islamic extremists, but it is a moment that ought to be remembered.
"Terror in Moscow," a documentary premiering at 7 tonight on HBO, exactly a year after the siege began, remembers it movingly, grippingly and sometimes heartbreakingly. From the instant the terrorists took over the theater, bringing in a large bomb and all those suicidal human bombs, an unhappy ending was all but assured. There was no way Russian authorities were going to capitulate to terrorism, and, having committed themselves, the fanatics could hardly say "never mind" and withdraw.
Remarkable footage was available to producer-director Dan Reed, who made this quite possibly unforgettable film for England's ambitious Channel 4 and America's ambitious HBO. The interruption of the performance by the terrorists who walked onstage was captured on videotape by a theater camera that recorded all the performances there. The rebels soon turned that camera off, but one of the gunmen had brought his own video camera and turned it on the victims as well as the victimizers, one of the latter the charismatic 25-year-old leader of the Chechens.
We don't have to merely imagine the hardships and horrors of being a hostage, because we can see and almost feel it for ourselves. A grim fatalism overcomes many of those in the audience because, says narrator Ian McShane, "everyone expected a bloodbath" to be the conclusion of the crisis. The terrorists refused to let the hostages use theater bathrooms, so the orchestra pit became a huge cesspool of human waste. A few pregnant women were allowed to leave, and two people mysteriously broke into the theater from the outside world (both of them were shot to death), but nearly everyone else was miserably and hopelessly trapped.
It would be nice if we knew more of the background of the Chechen rebels and their specific grievances against the Russians. But American television news is so myopic and provincial that it fails to keep us filled in on the world's less fashionable trouble spots. No matter how legitimate the Chechen grievances, however, the method of redress was unforgivable. In the end, the Russians bungled their plan for overcoming the terrorists, and when the crisis ended, more than 100 people lay dead.
One member of the group is identified as a "Gulf Arab" who shaved off his bushy beard to fit in with the Chechens. There is much talk of Allah and how pleased He will allegedly be with this latest act of lunatic barbarism. The Gulf Arab says of the enemy, "We desire death in the path of Allah more than they desire life." Well, death is what he and his comrades got, and a brutally pointless one besides.
More pointless and tragic by far, of course, were the deaths of the innocent people who had come to the theater that night merely to enjoy a play. Through the documentary we get to know some of them and share their agony. With a tragic outcome assumed to be inevitable, a little boy asked his mother, she recalls, "How will I recognize you in Heaven?" Her reply, she says, was that she would hold tight to her son's hand so they would never be separated -- no matter what.
Later, a woman injured in freak gunfire inside the theater remembers in horror that when she was allowed to leave for medical care, she forgot to say goodbye to her daughter, whom she would never see again. There is something very, very Russian in her recollection of trying to end her own life later by throwing herself off a bridge into an icy river and complaining that she was rescued before she could die: "I didn't even catch a cold."
To bring the nightmare to a halt, Russian troops released an anesthetic gas into the theater, waiting until they were certain it had taken effect on everyone inside before venturing in. One survivor recalls hearing people in the theater snoring as sleep overcame them; a musician describes the gassing as "a nice feeling, like being stoned. . . . I no longer cared what happened next." A few people proved immune to the gas, but many, many hostages, cruelly enough, died because they did not receive proper medical care.
They do indeed deserve to be remembered, those helpless victims of the madness of our times, and not only for their own sake. The world forgets at its own peril. "Terror in Moscow," a great documentary, makes a brilliant contribution to seeing that at least that will not happen.
