by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Vesselin Nedkov, like the millions of others living in Russia a year ago, knew about the horrors of the war in Chechnya. The 29-year-old Bulgarian ex-pat just didn't expect that they would find him, especially in the comfortable surroundings of a Moscow theatre.

On Wednesday, October 23, 2002, Nedkov and a friend were attending the Broadway-style musical Nord-Ost, a showcase for the new Russia. Unlike other shows, Nord-Ost was all-Russian: it was written, produced and performed entirely in Russian, and told an epic, uniquely Russian love story set before and during the Second World War. A technical triumph and widely praised as a thrilling, spectacular family show, it became attached that night and forever after with Russia's savage war with separatist Chechens.

Nedkov, wrapping up his affairs in Moscow before emigrating to Canada, was watching the opening minutes of the second act when a group of 50 Chechens - including 18 women, ranging in age from their late teens to mid-40s, with explosives strapped around their waists - stormed the stage and announced that they were bringing the war to Moscow. For two-and-a-half tense, terrifying days, he and 800 other hostages were at the centre of an international crisis that ended with Russian special forces gassing and then storming the building. In the ensuing operation, almost all the Chechens were killed - as were 129 hostages. Most of the civilians died from exposure to the as-yet-unidentified gas.

Pawn in a grim game

Nedkov, now pursuing his MBA at McGill, survived but was traumatized. To escape his memories, he decided to confront them, and with the help of Paul Wilson, deputy editor of Canadian magazine The Walrus, he wrote 57 Hours: A Survivor's Account of the Moscow Hostage Drama.

The book is a harrowing read, alternating between a first-person account of the crisis, background information on Chechen history - particularly grim, even by Russian standards - and the buzz of activity outside the theatre by authorities, the hostages' relatives and the media.

Like most people, he didn't know much about Chechnya before the crisis. "Nothing more than what I saw on TV. Of course, it was all from the Russian perspective, but what I remember vividly was watching a live hostage-taking and execution" by the Chechens, he says over a cup of coffee. He knew they were ruthless, but also knew that they were often more interested in ransom money than martyrdom. "They are engaged in a slave-trade."

That thought didn't help much, he says, when the hostage-takers told their captives, the authorities and the media that, "We want to die more than you want to live." Nedkov says the phrase was like a buzzword, a slogan he calls horrifying. Especially when the women uttered it.

"I could understand the men," he says. "They were soldiers. But the women... You could tell, underneath their veils, how young some of them were, and how beautiful. But it was personal tragedy that drove them - they'd lost their husbands, their brothers, their sons, their homes. They had nothing else to lose. They were prepared to die."

No sympathy, no mercy

Nedkov had few illusions about the gravity of the situation. He says there were times when he was certain he was going to die, but the worst was his inability to control the situation. "I felt so helpless," he says. "There was nothing I could say, nothing I could do. They didn't seem to care about anything."

What he says he did not feel was any sort of onset of the Stockholm Syndrome, where hostages begin to identify with their captors. But there was some interaction between the Chechens and their hostages, mostly among women.

"There were these Chechen women who were sitting next to a couple of Russian sisters and their children, and they talked," he says. "The Chechen women started to sympathize and later on said, ‘We'll sit next to you, so when we blow ourselves up you'll die instantly. That way you won't suffer.'"

He says at least one Russian male tried flirting with one of the women, without much success. On the whole, however, the atmosphere was sharply divided between captor and captive, made more stark when a woman - not a hostage, but a young woman who had somehow entered the theatre from outside and urged the hostages to rise up - was executed.

"At first I couldn't believe they killed her," Nedkov says. "I was certain that it was staged [by the Chechens] just to show us how merciless they are. But then, 10 or 12 hours later, we saw the body lying in the lobby."

Three other people were killed by the Chechens. Two were killed when an audience member snapped and charged one of the Chechen women with a broken juice bottle and, along with a bystander, was gunned down. The third was an older man who had entered the theatre, claiming to be looking for his son. Nedkov believes, as the hostage-takers did, that the man acted as a diversion for the authorities, who needed to sneak in the gas.

Ongoing horror

Nedkov doesn't remember much of how the rescue operation went off, but says that the aftermath was terrible. The Russians came under severe criticism, particularly in the West, for not having sufficient doctors and ambulances on the scene before storming the theatre, and for not telling hospital staff what kind of gas was used.

"I have a huge amount of gratitude to the soldiers and policemen who risked their lives to save mine," he says. "The military part of the operation was brilliant, but the second part was ridiculous. Those 129 people died from neglect."

Nedkov has travelled back to Russia since the crisis, and has even seen the second half of Nord-Ost, which reopened the following spring. "I really enjoyed it," he says. "When the play started, I was very nervous. But when the moment passed in the second act [when the Chechens took over the theatre], I was very relieved." It closed after a few months, however, due to poor attendance, and theatre attendance across Moscow is down.

He has since done a lot of thinking and research on Chechnya, and doesn't blame them as a nation for his experience. "I understand that there are two separate entities," he says. "The terrorists and bandits, and the Chechen people, who suffer very much. It's difficult to say who is right and who is wrong. The Russians are... well, they're not the nicest enemy to have."

57 Hours: A Survivor's Account of the Moscow Hostage Drama by Vesselin Nedkov and Paul Wilson, Penguin, HC, 250PP, $35