The New Nobility by Irina Borogan

Author:Irina Borogan
Language: eng
Format: epub

THE BESLAN SIEGE cast a harsh light on the ability of the Russian security services to cope with large-scale hostage-taking and terrorism. All the various ministries and elite forces had been called, but they seemed to be parts of a broken watch: They were all in one place, all involved in the same movement, but the whole mechanism was out of order.

From the beginning, the hostage crisis in Beslan was clearly of national scale. But fearing responsibility for possible failure, FSB generals in Moscow deliberately framed the event as a local crisis. The reorganized system, approved only one month earlier, was supposed to put one of the twelve commanders in charge of such an event. But during the Beslan siege, the commander was made subordinate to the FSB chief in North Ossetia. On the first day of the crisis, Putin sent FSB director Nikolai Patrushev and Minister of Internal Affairs Rashid Nurgaliev to Beslan, but they left the republic as soon as possible.10 The two officials did not even make it to the town of Beslan. They landed at the airport just long enough to get another flight back to Moscow.11 The school was captured at 8:00 A.M., and by noon the heads of the FSB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs managed to fly to Beslan and get all the way back to Moscow, 932 miles north, to meet Putin.12 “I did not meet Patrushev and Nurgaliev in Beslan,” testified Valery Andreev, the FSB chief in North Ossetia who was put in charge of the operation. He spoke at the trial of the only surviving terrorist, Nurpashi Kulaev, in the Supreme Court of North Ossetia on December 15, 2005.13

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