#16 - JRL 6524
Moscow News
October 30-November 5, 2002
A Son of Perestroika
By Viktor Loshak

Movsar Barayev was 23. As recently as last Friday, he was shown alive on television. Now he is a corpse, with a bottle of Hennessy someone has planted near his stiffened hand for some reason. Among the terrorists, he was the only one not wearing a mask, probably because he was the only one who could be regarded as a conscious suicide. Those who were wearing a mask (no matter what they called themselves - suicides, shahids, or whatever) must have believed they would survive the hostage taking. Otherwise, what was the point of covering their faces?

During the last two days of his life, Movsar became infamous throughout Russia and the rest of the world. Could a poorly educated lad from the heartland of Chechnya ever hope for such fame, albeit posthumous? In a way, he is now one of the best known "children of perestroika." When perestroika started, he was a schoolboy in his native town of Argun. His generation was lucky in that they became the country's first adults unfettered by Soviet mentality.

His peers in the large Russian cities were busy learning a foreign language, running their own small businesses, learning a trade, getting driver's licenses, falling in love, saving money for an overseas trip in summer...

But Barayev grew up amid warfare, wielding a submachine gun and hating Russians. A greenhorn in the first Chechen war, he was cruel, wicked, resentful. Did the valiant military leader Grachev and Commander-in-Chief Yeltsin realize that side by side with our armored personnel carriers, Chechen teenagers brainwashed with ideas of "independence" were growing up?

Barayev's peers in Russia had just graduated from college; some had got married and had had their first children. As for Movsar, he left his native mountains and came to Moscow in order to - kill those children if need be. He could have seized a nursery school, or a maternity home, but he chose to take a musical auditorium and the whole of its audience. Those who went to negotiate with him say they were talking in different languages, as it were. "He is a different species." Half of Chechnya is "a different species." Children of the first Chechen war, Movsar Barayev and his fellow gunmen came to Moscow wearing masks to sow death and destruction. And die in the process.

After the crushing of the hostage-taking operation, the nation feels devastated. People are discussing the events, mourning their dead. Call in the architects of the first Chechen war - Grachev, Khazbulatov, Rutskoi, Yerin... Let them take a good look at Movsar's corpse. And let them say: "Blood-thirsty boy, it is we who have nurtured you! Thanks to us and Dudayev, you grew up to be so ignorant, stupid, spiteful."

Can anyone anywhere foresee what horrible fruit the seeds of war are going to bear?