North Ossetia

My time in North Ossetia was a tale of two halves. Its capital, Vladikavkaz, was a welcome reprieve from some of the more challenging places I’ve visited on this trip. The name literally means “ruler of the Caucasus”, which speaks to the city’s historical significance as the great Russian outpost on the road to Georgia. Unlike other cities in southern Russia I’ve visited, which have either been rebuilt or were never developed to begin with, Vladikavkaz felt like a return to civilisation: safe and clean, with large green spaces and beautiful neoclassical buildings along the main promenade, all topped off with the most magnificent backdrop of mountains. I didn’t do much sightseeing here. I just enjoyed a taste of quotidian Russian life.

North Ossetia gave me some of the best monuments I’ve seen in Russia, including heroic Soviet-era war memorials in the socialist realist mould and older tributes to the warrior traditions of the Caucasus, with one leaping out of the cliffside in particularly awesome fashion.

It was certainly nice to see the good before delving into the bad and ugly – and where I went next was one of the darkest sites I’ve ever visited. About a thirty minutes’ drive from Vladikavkaz sits the town of Beslan, which, to paraphrase an old post, has the misfortune of counting itself among that exclusive club of places whose names are synonymous with tragedy. In September 2004, a school here was seized by Chechen-led terrorists demanding Russia’s withdrawal from Chechnya and recognition of its independence. For three days, more than 1,100 hostages were held in the gymnasium, starved of food and water. When Russian special forces stormed the building on the third day, the result was catastrophic: 334 people were killed, 186 of them children. It remains the deadliest school shooting in history.

I was too young to have watched events unfold in real time, but my sense is that Beslan was Russia’s 9/11 moment – so seismic, so odious, that it has since become the subject of endless debate and conspiracy. The perpetrators were sent by the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, who had orchestrated similar atrocities before, including the 2002 Moscow theatre siege. The group itself, however, was ethnically mixed. Basayev later stated it included Ingush, Russians, Arabs and Ossetians alongside Chechens, but Putin characteristically chose to frame it as “international terrorism” rather than engage with its separatist roots. We will probably never know the full truth; Russia has shown no appetite for a fair and robust inquiry.

What seems clear enough is this: you don’t take a school hostage unless you are willing to kill children. The possibility of enormous tragedy was created the moment that choice was made, whatever the political objective. Perhaps I am guilty of projecting my experience of living through October 7th, but I think we in the West need to recognise that what is beyond the pale for us morally may not hold true for others. And whatever tactical logic Basayev may have imagined, the attack destroyed the Chechen independence movement’s moral standing at a stroke. Putin was handed a carte blanche to prosecute the war by any means necessary, international pressure evaporated, and he used the crisis to consolidate power in ways that extended well beyond Chechnya.

And what of Russian culpability? At the time special forces stormed the school, there were negotiations underway and Aslan Maskhadov, Chechnya’s effective president in exile, was reportedly en route to mediate when the assault began. Whether Russia should have let him through is a genuinely difficult question. If you are fighting a war against separatists, legitimising their leadership through negotiation carries real costs. And yet the storming, conducted with tanks, thermobaric rockets and armoured personnel carriers, almost certainly killed many of those it was supposed to save. While many have impugned Russia’s heavy-handedness as deliberate, I would point out that in the fog of war, high-pressure situations spiral catastrophically – one thinks of Carter’s disastrous attempt to rescue the Tehran hostages in 1980.

None of this made visiting the gymnasium any less heart-wrenching. Teddy bears had been left out alongside bottles of water, a reminder that the children trapped inside went three days without drinking while this was going on. At the nearby cemetery, I was struck by how many Muslim victims there were among the graves and by the families buried together; in one case, seven children from the same family lay side by side. Whatever else Beslan represents historically or politically, at its core lies an immensity of loss that I will carry with me as I continue through this region.