“That last night got off to a very tense start,” Irina recalls. “The terrorists were nervous, but then ‘Mozart,’ as we called him, Movsar Baraev, the ringleader, announced that we could take it easy until 11 A.M. A ray of hope had appeared. The Chechens began throwing juice out to us. They did not allow us to get out of our seats. If you needed anything, you had to put up your hand and then they would throw you some juice or water. When the government assault began and we saw the terrorists running up on to the stage, I said to my sister, ‘Cover Nastya with your jacket,’ and I put my arms tightly around Yaroslav. I didn’t realize they had released gas, I just saw the terrorists becoming agitated. Yaroslav was taller than I, so that really he was shielding me when I held him. Then I passed out. In the mortuary I saw that the entry wound was on the side away from me. I had been shielded by him…. He saved me, although my one wish in those fifty-seven hours as a hostage had been to keep him safe.”
But whose bullet was it? Was a ballistics test conducted? Was a blood sample taken from the clothing to establish whose it was?
Nobody in the family knows the answers to these questions. All information relating to the case is strictly classified, kept secret even from a mother. In the mortuary register, the cause of death was given as “bullet wound,” but the entry had been made in pencil. This document, too, was later classified: “They’ll have rubbed it out, of course,” the family says with certainty.
“At first I thought it had been done by one of the Chechen women,” Irina relates. “While we were stuck in there, she was nearby all the time. She saw that whenever there was any danger, any noise or shouting, I would grab my son and hold him tight. It was my own fault that I attracted her attention…. It seemed to me she was watching us all the time. At one point she said, staring at Yaroslav, ‘My son is back there’—in Chechnya, that is. Nothing bad happened to us after that, but I felt she was watching us all the time wherever she was. So perhaps she had shot Yaroslav. I still can’t sleep. I see her eyes in front of me, the narrow strip of her face.”
Irina’s friends later explained to her that the size of the entry wound on Yaroslav’s body indicated the bullet was not from a pistol, and the Chechen women had only pistols.
So the question remains: Whose bullet was it?
“It must have been our people,” Irina says. “Of course, we were sitting in a very unfortunate position, right by the doors. Anyone who came in was right there at row 11. When the terrorists burst into the auditorium, we were the first people they saw, so of course when our soldiers came in, we would have been directly in front of them, too.”
Irina can analyze what happened, and how, as much as she likes. What she thinks or imagines is of no concern to the authorities. The state’s line is that four people were shot, and no one else. Yaroslav, the fifth person, falls outside the official version of events. Indeed, Yaroslav is not even officially included among the victims in Criminal Case No. 229133, being investigated by a team from the Moscow city prosecutor’s office.
“It really hurts me that… the authorities are pretending there never was any such person,” Irina muses.
Worse, however, is that as soon as Irina shared her questions and conclusions with journalists, she was summoned to the prosecutor’s office. The investigator was angry. “What are you kicking up all this fuss about? Do you not understand it is impossible that he had a bullet wound?” He went on to do his best to scare the wits out of the unhappy mother, who was already in a perilous state: “Either you immediately write a statement to the effect that you told those journalists nothing and that they thought everything up themselves, whereupon we shall bring criminal charges against them for slandering the intelligence services, or we dig up your son’s grave without your consent and carry out a postmortem examination!”[10]
Irina did not give in to this wretched attempt at blackmail. Instead, she took her leave after a four-hour grilling in the prosecutor’s office and went straight to the cemetery to guard her son’s grave. It was late November, which in Moscow is the depths of winter. Again she was saved from death by friends who looked all over the city when she did not return home that night.
Yaroslav was considered a quiet, studious boy. He graduated from music school while others of his age were running wild in the streets swilling beer and exercising their swearing muscles. He suffered a great deal because of this. He wanted to be “tough,” to be assertive, bold, and unflinching.
He kept a diary, as many of us do at his age. Irina read it after the Nord-Ost events. He wondered which aspects of his personality he could say he liked and which he disliked. He wrote: “I hate it that I am such a coward, scared of everything and indecisive.” “And what would you like to bring out in yourself?” the diary asked. “I would like to be tough.” He had school friends, but they were not boys who were considered tough or whom girls fancied. At home he had a sense of humor, could show what he was made of, and be bold and assertive. It was outside that the problems began.
Irina is saddened by the things she never said to Yaroslav and by the fact she never properly told him how much she admired him.
“People consider me, for example, a strong person,” Victoria, Yaroslav’s aunt, tells me. “But in there I was completely distraught. There we three women were sitting next to him, the youngest of us, and it was he who encouraged us, like a grown man. My daughter’s nerves went completely. She was shaking and sobbing, ‘Mama, I want to live. Mama, I don’t want to die.’ But he was calm and courageous. He reassured Nastya, he supported us, he tried to take everything on himself, as a man is supposed to. For instance, one of the Chechen women saw we had put the children between us, trying to protect them…. Irina and I thought that if there was an attack, we would cover them with our bodies. Then the woman came up to us with a grenade in her hand. She touched Nastya’s leg. I said, ‘Would you mind going away?’ but she looked at Nastya and said, ‘Don’t be afraid. If I am standing right next to you, it won’t hurt. You will die instantly, while those sitting further away will suffer more.’ Then the Chechen woman went away, and Nastya said to me, ‘Mom, ask her to stay with us, ask her. She said it wouldn’t hurt us.’ Nastya was broken. I knew perfectly well that if we had that Chechen woman standing next to us, we really would be out of luck, but if she wasn’t, there was at least some hope….
“Another time the terrorists were frightening us by saying that if nobody came to negotiate, they would start shooting us, and that the first to be shot would be anyone in the police or the army. Naturally, many people quickly threw away their military ID, but the terrorists picked them up and called out the names from the stage. Suddenly we heard, ‘Victoria Vladimirovna, born 1960.’ That was me. Only the surname was wrong…. The situation was very bad. Nobody answered. The terrorists started going through people row by row. They came to me. Irina said, ‘We’ll go together.’ The terrorists demanded that members of the law-enforcement agencies go off somewhere with them, and we all thought they were going to be shot. I told Irina that one of us needed to survive or our parents would be left completely alone…. The terrorists found the Victoria they were looking for, but while everything was still unclear, Yaroslav came and sat beside me. He took my hand and said, ‘Auntie Vicky, don’t be frightened. If anything happens, I’ll come with you. Forgive me for everything. Forgive me.’ I said to him, ‘That’s all right, everything is going to be fine.’… I don’t know where he found so much courage. We thought he was just a child….
10
This was moral blackmail calculated to crush a woman in a state of extreme stress. Under Russian legislation, as the investigator must have known, exhumation can be authorized only after a court hearing. Where exhumation is authorized, it may take place only in the presence of the mother, father, or other close relatives whom the court recognizes as having suffered as a result of the death of the individual concerned. As a result of his misconduct, the investigator who attempted to blackmail Irina was moved to other work. Later he was quietly sacked.