He was born on November 12th, 1972. He would have been 30 two weeks after ‘Nord-Ost’…

Shura (Alex) was my friend. And this is not just a word. Because all that is the kindest, brightest, most trustworthy, most beautiful, all that there is in the word FRIEND – all this is what I mean when I write about Shura.

Shura had a great handshake, and nowadays this is rare. People greet each other in different ways: some will plop a flabby flipper into your hand, while others do the opposite and contrive to splinter all your bones. But a real handshake, a strong and amicable one: this is a rarity. For some reason this seems important to me.

Shura was an unusual person. Since one can write this about any person, you will just have to take me at my word, but I am nonetheless speaking the purest truth. There were a lot of ordinary young guys and gals in the company that we kept, but Shura was different from everyone else. He never drank at all. He was rather secretive. He had a tendency towards contemplation. He had not lived at home for a long time – he hid out from the draft… And there was something in him, some kind of a friendly grandeur and self-sufficiency. I felt a little out of my league next to him. I had to look up to him from down below, which is not surprising, considering his height of two meters. 

In the later half of the 1990s he got tired of hiding from the draft board and living with friends and counting kopecks. Shura occupied himself with the mountaineering industry, later starting his own business and gradually started to earn some decent money. In the spring of this ill-fated year he bought a car, an old Passat. We used to drive out to my village in it.

He lived, especially in his later years, how should I put this: hungrily, readily, openly, he was always trying something new, particularly when he got his financial freedom.

Shura was no angel. He had his, as they like to say nowadays, cockroaches. In general I do not believe that one has to “either speak well of the dead, or not at all”, because the most valuable is the living memory of living people with all of their peculiarities. Sometimes Shura irritated me terribly. And it was not just a matter of my irritability – he irritated on purpose, and later, with the interest of a young naturalist, he would observe how I boiled over like a teapot. I remember even now the moments of my irritation, of my anger towards Shura, with such warmth and love, as any other, perhaps happier, moments of our life. I would like to be honest, especially relative to one who can no longer object.

Shura was also in love with my daughter, and this is also the truth. My oldest daughter (she just turned 3 that year) was a normal child – sometimes happy, sometimes capricious. Shura spent hours with her. My wife and I were amazed: how many hours can one spend with someone else’s kid? A half-hour, an hour? But Shura could sit all day with Mashka, never leaving the room. After all, they had such a genuine interest in each other! We could easily leave Mashka with him like a nanny, and sometimes we even did this. They like being together.

We did not tell her what had happened right away, but after a few days she suddenly understood that Shura was no more. She figured it out from conversations at home, or from the television and radio. We only searched for him by phone. Only God knows the pain she felt.

That summer before he died, we had signed Mashka up for kindergarten and I was obligated to do some labor for the school, to dig out the supports for a huge, welded swing set. For half a day Shura and I clawed at the ground, set up the swings, straightened them out, and poured cement. The swings stood as a monument to Shura for almost four years, and kids played on them, but last summer they took them down and put something else up.

PS: I do not know if it is worth telling how Shura took a long time in getting around to going to ‘Nord-Ost’, how we planned to go together but it turned out that my wife and I went earlier. How he decided to order tickets for a Tuesday or a Wednesday. He ordered on a Tuesday but for some reason they turned out to be for Wednesday. Was the hand of fate here? I do not think so. It just turned out that way: someone went on Tuesday, and someone got Wednesday.

But it is impossible to forget, impossible not to tell you the feeling of that awful revelation, which turns out to be so simple! There once was a person – and then he is no more. Three days ago you two had been chatting, greeting each other and saying good-bye, gossiping about someone, making plans for the weekend, and then you are standing there and looking dully at his legs sticking out from under a sheet on a gurney. God, how defenseless they are!

Whose fault is it? Who brought the Chechen pot to a boil and overdid it so bad that THESE events started? Who turned the theater into a gas chamber? Who repeated the whole thing a couple years later to even greater effect in Beslan?

In my opinion, the answer is so obvious that it is not worth talking about. THEY do not know how to do anything else. THEY do not know that ANY life is priceless: not only the lives of THEIR children, but OURS as well.