In an interview with ORT state television, Aleksandr Veshnyakov, chair of the Russian Central Election Commission, deemed it likely that a referendum on the issue of a new pro-Moscow Chechen constitution would be held in March of 2003 (RIA Novosti, December 5). The following day,... MORE

Malika Umazheva has been murdered," the human rights organization Memorial reported on December 4, "a person well known in Chechnya and beyond its borders, the [former] head of administration of Alkhan-Kala, who boldly opposed the arbitrariness of the [Russian] soldiers in her village." Observing that... MORE

In this final 2002 issue of the Chechnya Weekly, I would like to focus on a major recent event: the Moscow hostagetaking crisis of October 23-26. Like other key crises of the past decade--the August putsch of 1991, the "October events" of 1993 and the... MORE

? On November 28, the website Grani.ru, which has been keeping careful tabs on all information relating to fate of the hostages, reported that the terrorists had taken 979 people captive. It provided a list of those 979 names after scouring other websites and the... MORE

? On October 26--the final day of the crisis--the Moscow Times reported that, as of the previous day, "the number of those who have gotten out of the theater since [October 23]" stood at fifty-eight. Those, all of whom the terrorists released, included children younger... MORE

? None. The one young woman who did perish--Olga Romanova, a Moscow perfume saleswoman--had somehow made her way through the police cordon around the building and then managed to enter the theater. She was definitely not one of the hostages, was reportedly in a state... MORE

? Approximately 204. On October 28, two days after the "storming," the website Utro.ru predicted: "The number of those deceased at the House of Culture at Dubrovka will reach 200 persons. At the present time, according to our sources, the toll has already reached 160."... MORE

? If one accepts the figure of 204 for the number of deceased hostages, it would appear that 203 of them died from the effects of the gas that the Russian special services pumped into the building and only one--Denis Gribkov, born 1972--from gunshot wounds... MORE

? This appears already to be happening. On December 6, Judith Ingram of the Associated Press reported: "Interviews with former hostages and their relatives reveal a wide range of ailments they believe were caused by their captivity and the gas used to knock them out....... MORE