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The whole country continues to tensely follow the drama unfolding in the capital. The first days of the standoff tick by. What has been done? What are they getting ready to do? And most importantly — WHO is going to do it?

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One of Russia's worst days

October 7th, 2006 was a clear, almost warm Saturday afternoon. For a worker from Novaya Gazeta, it was a day of getting the Monday edition ready. So it was that I was conducting this and keeping a column free at Anya's request, material about torture in Chechnya. Anya was always precise and obligatory, and if for some objective reason she was late on an article, she always called. But on that day…

Lunchtime came and went, then it was 4:05 pm and still no text message or call to the office. I then called. It rang a long time. But how they seem alarmingly short when people are just busy! But I had a soothing thought: maybe Anya was still at the hospital with her mother (we knew she was going to go there) and just had just turned the ringer off to avoid being disturbed.

If only our lives were subject to normal, human logic!

And then the terrible news — such news gets broadcast instantaneously. And somehow you just know it, when it is the truth.

At 4:04 pm Anya was no more.

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On the day before the 11th anniversary of the Volgodonsk bombing, we learned that our project, whose goal is social rehabilitation of the victims of the Volgodonsk suicide attack, was — once again — not among the winners of a presidential grant.

The trusteeship of the grants, assigned to the Public Chamber of Russia's «National Welfare Fund», has for the fourth time demonstrated that assisting victims of a terrorist attack is not Russia's priority.

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Today is the 11th anniversary of the apartment bombing on the Kashirsk highway. We are publishing excerpts from a program hosted by Dorenko dedicated to this tragedy and prepared in for ORT television in September of 2000, but never aired when the show was cancelled.

Program host (onscreen): Hello. Well, it's been a year since the apartment building blasts in Moscow. The anniversary of the blast at Kashirsk is a little later, but in our memory this series of bombings runs together. Before Moscow, there was Buynaksk. Afterwards, there was Volgodonsk. But Muscovites have long been accustomed to the fact that somewhere down south something flashes then fades away, there's a war on, and they don't think about it much. The Moscow bombings, however, brought fear. A fear of going to sleep. Thoughts about what would happen to you or your loved ones if your apartment house were the blow up. And hatred. Hatred not only against terrorists, but all Chechens in general.

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Thus begins the century.

On September 11, 2001, at 08:55 in the morning local time, an American Airlines Boeing 767 crashes into North Tower of one of the largest buildings in New York City — the World Trade Center. In another eighty minutes a second kamikaze rams the South Tower.

A terrible fire starts inside the buildings because of the aviation fuel spilled by the crashes, and the Twin Towers collapse in just an hour.

At 09:43 AM an additional aircraft crashes into the military headquarters of the United States — the Pentagon.

At 10:30 AM news agencies report that another aircraft has crashed near Pittsburgh. After a delay it turns out that the terrorists wanted to direct it toward the White House, but passengers prevented this through their heroic actions.

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