MOSCOW - The Kremlin dismisses him as a terrorist and a bandit.
But Shamil Basayev, who plotted the seizure of more than 800 hostages in a Moscow theater last month, represents more than just another gunman with a grudge. The guerrilla leader is the product of a fierce mountain culture hardened by two centuries of struggle against Russian rule. And he has proven himself one of Moscow's most skillful and determined foes.
The 37-year-old warlord, thought to be hiding in Chechnya's snow-capped mountains, says the hostage seizure - which led to at least 169 deaths - was justified by the Russian military's record of attacks on Chechen civilians. And he threatens more bloodshed, unless the Kremlin grants his homeland its dream of independence.
"People without any demands, who will not be taking anyone hostage, will come next time," he said, apparently warning of further attacks against Russians, in a statement published on a pro-Chechen Web site last week. "God willing, sooner or later, like it or not, the Russian people and leadership will have to end this bloody slaughter. They will have to stop this war, agree to peace and get off our land."
Those who know the veteran fighter say he means what he says. The theater seizure, they fear, may only be the start of a cold-blooded terror campaign against Russians outside the borders of Chechnya.
"Basayev is not a person to throw words into the wind," says Valery Yakov, deputy editor of the newspaper Novye Izvestia, who has been both Basayev's chronicler and his hostage.
A rebel's roots
A calm, bearish man with a shaggy beard, Basayev was born in the Chechen village of Vedeno, set in a steep gorge cut by a river about 35 miles southeast of the capital, Grozny.
It was there that the man Basayev was named after, Imam Shamil, a legendary warrior-priest, led the Chechen resistance in the mid-19th century. In Vedeno, Shamil's forces made their last, futile stand against the czar's armies in the spring of 1859. He was later captured in neighboring Dagestan.
Basayev's ancestors fought the Russians, too, and suffered for it. His great-great-grandfather, one of Shamil's lieutenants, was killed in battle. His grandfather fought against the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution, and died of hunger and cold in exile in Kazakstan during World War II.
Basayev's father may have suffered radiation sickness from Soviet nuclear tests in Central Asia in the 1950s, according to the 1998 book Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus, by Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal.
Basayev graduated from high school in 1982 and spent two years in the Soviet military as a firefighter. He wanted to study law at Moscow State University, but says he was denied admission because of prejudice against Chechens. Instead he entered Moscow's Institute of Land Exploitation Engineering in 1987, earning money on the side dealing in black market computers.
During the coup attempt by Communist hard-liners in August 1991, Basayev joined about 100 other Chechens who rallied at parliament's headquarters, the White House, to defend the acting chairman, Ruslan Khasbulatov, a Chechen, and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin. Basayev went to the barricades armed with hand grenades. Later, Yeltsin wrote him a letter of commendation.
As Chechnya threatened to break free of Russia, the Kremlin declared a state of emergency in November 1991. In response, Basayev led a band of gunmen who hijacked a passenger plane in southern Russia and flew it to Ankara, Turkey, where they threatened to blow it up. The hijacking ended peacefully, after Moscow decided it had more urgent business than Chechnya.
Over the next two years, Basayev fought on the side of Islamic forces in wars throughout the Caucasus, including in Abkhazia, part of the former Soviet state of Georgia. He received training there from Russian secret services, which covertly supported Abkhazian separatists fighting to undermine the anti-Moscow administration of Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze.
Later, Basayev reportedly took some of his fighters to Afghanistan and Iraq for training.
After years of threats, Russia finally attacked Chechnya at the end of 1994. On New Year's Eve, an armored column entered the Chechen capital. Basayev, then 29, emerged as a leader of the rebels.
A deadly raid
In June 1995, with the battle going badly for the Chechens, Basayev tried an audacious gambit. Saying later that he had been heading for the Kremlin, Basayev and 150 of his fighters drove out of Chechnya, running into police 100 miles to the north in Budyonnovsk. In the ensuing firefight, the Chechens grabbed 1,200 hostages from offices and homes and herded them to the town's hospital. Yakov, then a reporter for Novye Izvestia, was one of several journalists who volunteered to be swapped for hostages.
When Russian authorities refused to let Basayev stage a news conference, the guerrilla leader coolly ordered the executions to start, Yakov says. Five Russians were marched into the rose garden and shot. Seven more were executed later.
"There was no hysteria, he was completely calm," recalls Yakov, who produced a television documentary about the siege. "And he thought of every step he was going to take."
After two botched, blood-soaked assaults by Russian troops, Basayev and his fighters negotiated their way out. They returned safely to Chechnya with some hostages in a fleet of buses. More than 129 people died during the siege, including 18 policemen.
After the raid, Chechen separatists rallied. In August 1996, Basayev led an attack on Grozny that drove out the Russians. A short time later, Moscow signed a cease-fire and granted Chechnya greater autonomy.
Basayev ran for president of Chechnya in 1997 but lost to the more moderate Aslan Maskhadov. Basayev became prime minister.
The new government in Grozny, though, failed to control heavily armed criminal gangs. Yeltsin had promised aid as part of the peace settlement. It never arrived.
"And at that point," Yakov said, "Moscow missed a chance to draw Maskhadov and the whole government of Chechnya on its side."
Basayev resigned from his post, increasingly radicalized and convinced that a new war with Russia was inevitable. He opened a guerrilla training camp. One of his pupils, Yakov says, was Movsar Barayev, who led the storming of the Moscow theater.
Basayev took up the cause of Islam, launching a raid from Chechnya into the neighboring Russian region of Dagestan in August 1999, declaring a war to free all of southern Russia's Muslim regions from Russian rule. The Dagestanis, however, were not interested in rising up to form an Islamic union, and the Chechens were forced to withdraw.
Modern Russia's second Chechen war has smoldered ever since, turning into a wearying guerrilla war with a few casualties on both sides almost every day.
One skirmish apparently injured Basayev, who reportedly had his foot amputated as a result. His comrade-in-arms, an Arab named Khattab, was later killed, perhaps by a poisoned letter from the Russians.
Stronger than hatred
And still, Basayev and his men fight on, perhaps for the past as much as the present, history seared into their souls.
In February 1944, Stalin had the unpredictable Chechens rounded up, crowded into boxcars and shipped off to exile in Kazakstan. He didn't trust them, and in his paranoia accused them of collaborating with the approaching Germans. Up to 200,000 of the 600,000 Chechens died.
Every family suffered, and no one has forgotten.
The great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who served with czarist troops in Chechnya from 1851 to 1853, once described the reaction of villagers after Russian troops burned their homes and crops, defiled their mosque and bayoneted a child. For many Chechens, it still applies.
"No one spoke of hatred for the Russians," he wrote. "The feeling which all Chechens felt, both young and old, was stronger than hatred. It was ... such a revulsion, disgust and bewilderment at the senseless cruelty of these beings, that the desire to destroy them, like a desire to destroy rats, poisonous spiders and wolves, was as natural as the instinct for self-preservation."