On a drizzly Wednesday night in October several hundred people were watching a musical at the Ball-Bearing Factory Theater in Moscow. The show was a romantic love story set in Stalin’s Russia. As the audience settled down to the second half of the show, dozens of heavily-armed men and women laden with explosives arrived at the theater in three vans. The attackers raked the foyer with gunfire and swarmed into the building.
Inside the auditorium, the theatergoers were watching the show, and heard nothing. That night’s performance was recorded, as was usual, by the theater’s video camera. As gunmen sealed off the auditorium, the sound and the video were cut. The audience heard the terrorist leader Movsar Barayev announce that if the Russian army did not get out of Chechnya, he would command his followers to blow up the theater and everyone inside it. By now the police had sealed off the surrounding streets. From inside the theater, a hostage used her mobile phone to call a local radio station.