But now: the reverse side of the medal, the individuals at the cost of whose lives the president consolidated his membership in the international antiterrorist coalition. Let us look at those whose lives were crushed by the events at the Nord-Ost. Let us look at the victims about whom today’s state machine is trying to forget as quickly as possible, and to induce the rest of us to do the same by every means at its disposal. Let us look at the ethnic purging that followed the act of terrorism, and at the new state ideology Putin has enunciated: “We shall not count the cost. Let nobody doubt that. Even if the cost is very high.”
THE FIFTH ONE
Yaroslav Fadeev, a boy from Moscow, is now the first named in the official master list of those killed during the Nord-Ost assault. According to the official version of events, the four hostages who died from bullet wounds were shot by terrorists; the special unit of the FSB, Putin’s own service, does not make mistakes and hence did not shoot any of the hostages.
There is, however, no escaping the fact that a bullet passed through Yaroslav’s head, although his name is not on the list of the “four shot by the terrorists.” Yaroslav was the fifth to die from a bullet wound. In the “Cause of Death” column on the official form that was issued to his mother, Irina, for the funeral, there is a dash.
On November 18, 2002, Yaroslav, who was in the tenth grade of a Moscow school, would have been sixteen. There was to have been a big family celebration, but standing over the coffin of the now eternally fifteen-year-old boy, his grandfather, a Moscow doctor, remarked, “There now, we didn’t get to shave together even once.”
Four of them had gone to the musicaclass="underline" two sisters, Irina Fadeeva and Victoria Kruglikova, and their children, Yaroslav and Nastya. Vicetoria was the mother of nineteen-year-old Nastya. Irina, Victoria, and Nastya survived, but Yaroslav died in circumstances that have never been officially investigated.
After the assault and the gas attack, Irina, Victoria, and Nastya were carried out of the theater unconscious and taken to the hospital. Yaroslav completely disappeared. He was not on any of the interim lists. There was a total absence of precise official information. The telephone hotline announced by the authorities on radio and television was not functioning. Relatives of the hostages were rushing all over Moscow, and among them were friends of this family. They combed the city, dividing its mortuaries and hospitals into sectors to be checked.
Finally, in the Kholzunov Lane Mortuary they found Body No. 5714, which fitted Yaroslav’s description, but they could not confirm it was him. In his pocket they found a passport in the name of his mother, Irina Vladimirovna Fadeeva, but the page for “Children” contained this entry: “Male. Yaroslav Olegovich Fadeev, 18.11.1988.” The real Yaroslav, however, had been born in 1986.
As Irina explained later, “I put my passport into my son’s trouser pocket. He did not have any identification documents on him. Since he was very tall, looking to be about eighteen, I was so afraid that if the Chechens suddenly started releasing children and adolescents, Yaroslav might not be included because of his height. So, right there in the hall, I crouched under the seats and wrote Yaroslav’s data into my own passport, changing the year of his birth to make him seem younger.”
Sergey, Irina’s friend, came to see her in the hospital on October 27 and told her that Body No. 5714 had been found. He told her about the passport in the trousers and about the resemblance to Yaroslav. In spite of the frost, Irina ran out of the hospital, straight through a gap in the fence, just in what she was wearing.
The hostages who had survived and been taken to hospitals were still being held hostage there. By order of the intelligence services, they were forbidden to return home. They were not allowed to telephone or be visited by their families. Sergey had gotten into the hospital by bribing everyone he encountered: the nurses, the guards, the orderlies, the police. The total corruption of our system prizes open even the most firmly battened-down hatches.
Irina ran from the hospital straight to the mortuary. There she was shown a photograph on a computer monitor and identified Yaroslav. She asked to see his body, felt carefully all over it and discovered two bullet wounds in the head, an entry and an exit hole. Both had been filled up with wax. Sergey, who was with her, was surprised at how calm she seemed. She didn’t sob or become hysterical. She was logical and unemotional.
“I really was very glad that I had found him at last,” Irina tells me. “Lying in the hospital, I had already thought everything through and considered my options. I had decided how I would behave if my son was dead. In the mortuary when I saw that this really was Yaroslav and that my life was therefore at an end, I simply did what I had decided on earlier. I calmly asked everyone to leave the hall to which his body had been brought from the refrigerator. I said I wanted to be alone with my son. I had decided I would say that. You see, before he died, I had made him a promise. When we were stuck there, he said to me at the end of the last day, during the night, a few hours before the gas, ‘Mom, I probably won’t make it. I can’t take much more. Mom, if something happens, what will it be like?’ I told him, ‘Don’t be afraid of anything. We have always been together here, and we will always be together there.’ He said, ‘Mom, how will I know you there?’ I told him, ‘Your hand is always in mine, so we’ll find ourselves there together, holding hands. We won’t lose each other. Just don’t let go of my hand, hold on tight.’ But see how it turned out. I felt I had deceived him. We were never far from each other while he was alive. Never. That is why I was so calm: we were together in life, and over there, in death, we would still be together. Anyway, when I was alone with him in the mortuary, I told him, ‘There now, don’t worry. I have found you and I’m coming to be with you.’… I had never deceived him…. That is why I was so calm. I went through the side door in order not to see the friends who were waiting for me and asked the assistants to let me out through the service entrance. When I got outside, I flagged down a passing car, went to the nearest bridge over the Moscow River, and jumped off it. I did not drown, though. There were ice floes in the river, and I fell among them. I can’t swim, but I didn’t sink. I could see I wasn’t sinking and thought, ‘Well, I may at least get a cramp in my leg,’ but that didn’t happen either. As ill luck would have it, some people pulled me out. They asked, ‘Where are you from? What are you doing swimming?’ I told them, ‘I’ve just come from the mortuary, but please don’t report me.’ I gave them a telephone number to call, and Sergey came to collect me. Of course, I’m doing my best to cope, but I am dead. I don’t know how he is getting on there without me.”
When she had regained consciousness in the hospital on October 26, Irina found she was naked under the blanket. The other women hostages around her all had their clothes, but she had only a small icon clutched in her hand. When she could talk, she asked the nurses to give her back at least some of her clothing, but they explained that everything she had been wearing when she was brought in from the theater had been destroyed on orders from officers of the intelligence services, because it was soaked in blood.
But why? And whose blood was it? Irina had passed out in the theater clasping her son in her arms. The person whose blood it was must have been shot in a way that caused it to gush over her. It could only have been Yaroslav’s.