Monday, March 29, 2010 looked to be an unremarkable start to a normal work week in Moscow. My commute to the office was a 30 minute trip by subway from our station, Park Kultury on the Red Line. The Moscow Metro is extremely crowded at times but amazingly efficient: over 8 million riders per day, with rush hour trains every minute or less. Some Metro stations are deep underground, with steep escalators hundreds of feet long, but my end of Park Kultury station is much closer to the surface, with access to the platform by stairs.
Over the weekend, we would have chatted with our grown sons. One of the tradeoffs of living eight time zones away is not being able to keep up with their daily activities as they go about their lives, but they were always in our thoughts.
That Monday morning I would not have been aware that another father, 1200 miles away from me was preparing for his workday as a Russian Literature teacher in a village in the Republic of Dagestan, in the North Caucasus Region of Russia. Rasu Magomedev had a 27-year-old daughter , Mariam, a teacher with three university degrees, who lived at home with her parents but was away, supposedly visiting friends.
In the same region, another young woman Dzanet Abdullayeva, 17 years old and living with her mother, was not at home either. She was later remembered as a promising student in her village who recited poetry in local competitions.
Both young women were not at home because they had travelled to Moscow, where their lives would soon intersect with mine.
As I gathered my things for work and prepared for the 7-minute walk to the metro, the first female suicide bomber’s vest detonated at Lubyanka Metro Station on the Red Line at 7:56am , killing 26 commuters and injuring scores. The bomb was packed with bolts and screws to ensure maximum lethality.
At 8:30, I walked down the stairs to the platform at Park Kultury and was puzzled to see that it was much more crowded than usual. Trains were stopped at the platform in both directions. A Metro employee was walking hurriedly through the crowd with a portable microphone and speaker, broadcasting a tinny, unintelligible message (in Russian of course). I stepped into a car but quickly realized that everyone was exiting the train. When everyone had disembarked, the doors slammed shut, and both empty trains accelerated down the tracks in opposite directions. I watched as the crowd flowed shoulder to shoulder toward the exit at the far end of the platform
I stood there on the platform in a moment of indecision: Do I wait until the trains start moving again, or do I go above ground and find a café for a coffee until things clear out? I decided on the latter and was about to turn and walk toward the exit stairs as another train pulled into the station.
At 8:38am, as the train doors opened, a second female suicide bomber detonated her bomb, approximately 60 feet (18 meters) from where I was standing. I heard the explosion and saw the flash in my peripheral vision.The sound was not like a movie explosion but rather a loud, echoless bang. People screamed as the platform instantly went dark and quickly filled with smoke. Local news would later report that people stampeded, but my memory was that people around me started moving toward the exit in an orderly way. There was no running or pushing, because that was not possible in this tightly packed space.People were sobbing but otherwise it was silent except for the scuffing of feet and the rustling of winter coats. I didn’t realize how close I was personally to disaster until I shuffled with the packed crowd into the growing daylight as we started up the stairs to the street. On this cold March morning, the black parka of the man ascending ahead of me was splattered solid with someone else’s glistening blood and small chunks of flesh.
Once on the street, I started the short walk back to our apartment. About halfway there I decided to call Cheryl, in case she might happen to see a report on the news. As I leaned against a wall to call, the shock began to set in.
I later learned that this bomber had killed 14 and injured many more. I was “lucky”, I realized: She had two vests, but only one detonated, hence the lower number of fatalities. Also , hers was detonated as the doors opened but while still on the train, so the blast went through the carriage and straight outward. If it had gone off after she had exited the train, things might have been different for me.
What were the complicated motivations of these two young women? There are numerous theories, which is way beyond my ability to comment on. But the Park Kultury bomber was the 17 year old widow of a terrorist she had secretly married and who had been killed earlier by Russian forces. These “black widows” as they are called, were recruited for such missions – whether voluntary or coerced. Like the refrain we often hear in terrorist attacks, the father of the other woman – the school teacher – expressed disbelief that his daughter could have done this.
In a “life goes on” pragmatic reality, the Park Kultury station was back in full operation by 5:00pm that day. I stayed home the rest of that day, but later I decided to walk to the supermarket. But really, on the way to buy a loaf of bread or whatever, I needed to go back down to that platform and walk through it. By that time, there were mounds of flowers and groups of people standing around solemnly, with the only sounds being the arriving and departing trains.
I must say that on that morning, at the moment I was back up in daylight and leaning against that wall, I felt very alone. Here we were, living and working in a country where it was not easy to travel into and out of at that time, and with infrequent contact with my home headquarters office. I didn’t drive in Moscow, for a number of reasons, so for a week, I took a car service to and from work. The trip took twice as long, and Moscow traffic adds its own risks, so after a week, I was back on the Metro. And it continued that way for the remaining four years in Moscow, without incident.
I think that I am a resilient person in general, and this proved to be true in this situation. I bounced back quickly, realizing from experience that Moscow is basically a very safe city, and that we now know sadly that such attacks can happen in Boston, London, New York, Brussels – and the list goes on.
Life abounds with “what ifs”. And this experience was one for me. If I had not stood where I was but had decided to move with the bulk of the crowd toward the other end, the timing would have put me directly in harm’s way. On the other hand, had I left the apartment earlier or later, I would not have been on that platform. at that very moment. Either way, although it was eleven years ago, rest assured that I remember that morning like it was yesterday.
