MOSCOW - On Oct. 23, as always, the second act of the Broadway-style musical Nord-Ost opened with a line of pilots in Soviet-era uniforms tap-dancing across the stage.
As always, Yekaterina Moreva was in the orchestra pit. She touched her bow to the strings of her violin, ready to play a military march for the hero, who was about to stride from the metal hangar doors that served as a curtain.
But instead of music, a tragedy began.
Moreva heard gunfire before she could play a note.
Instead of the play's hero, a man appeared on stage wearing camouflage and a black ski mask and carrying a Kalashnikov. Instead of the sounds of the orchestra, what the 700 or so people in the audience in the main theater of the Palace of Culture heard was the sound of bullets being fired into the ceiling.
The audience, musicians and cast members would be the heroes and the victims of a hostage crisis that would last 57 hours. It would bring the ruthless fighting of the Chechen war to within three miles of the Kremlin, and its effects would be felt throughout Russia.
No previous show performed on that stage could match the tragedy that was about to unfold. Politicians would plead with the 40 or so guerrillas in the theater for the hostages' release. Parents of hostages would plead for the Kremlin to capitulate to the guerrillas' demands by withdrawing troops from Chechnya. Authorities would try to end the hostage-taking without killing everyone in the theater.
President Vladimir V. Putin would be praised for his decisive action and criticized for his ruthlessness in ending the crisis. Chechens throughout Russia would brace for a brutal crackdown. Some Russians would wonder whether the event would expand the power of security agencies.
None of that immediately concerned Yekaterina Moreva - Katya to her friends. The 40-year-old musician responded as any rational person might to the gunman on stage.
Clutching her violin, she ran.
She hesitated only when she reached a door leading to the basement. She wondered whether her husband, Igor Morev, had run, too. She didn't see him there jostling with the other musicians. So she froze.
Igor, a 39-year-old violinist with sad blue eyes, still sat in the orchestra pit, staring up at the gunman on stage. When Igor refused to climb out of the pit, the gunman said, "I am going to kill you now."
"I am going to leave," Igor said and slowly walked toward the exit to join Katya. All the musicians who could fit locked themselves in the women's dressing room, the place where they spent intermissions drinking tea.
For each performance, they earned a mere 470 rubles, about $15 - half the price of the best tickets for the show. Now, in the dressing room, they followed events in the theater on the screen of a closed-circuit TV.
"Those are Chechens up there," someone said in the dressing room. "Do you hear their accents?"
It was about 9:15 p.m., and Katya, now with plenty of time to think, realized she had ignored an early sign of trouble. During intermission, she had used a pay phone by the stage entrance and seen a guard in camouflage. He wasn't a guard, she understood now, but a guerrilla preparing for the raid.
Other than wait, all the musicians could do was use their cell phones to call relatives and police. Family members said they were watching the events on TV, and authorities said help was on the way.
After 10 p.m., two guerrillas rattled the knob of the dressing room's locked door. "If you don't unlock the door," a voice said, "we'll shoot the door apart."
The musicians opened the door.
Tracking the guerrillas
Also about 10 p.m., police, military forces and the Federal Security Service set up a headquarters in War Veterans' Hospital No. 1 across the street from the theater. In the Kremlin, Putin was briefed about events. All over the city, cell phone users saw an exclamation point appear on the screens of their phones - a sign, according to the Moscow Times, that encryption systems had been turned off to allow the security service, known as the FSB, to intercept calls.
The eavesdropping apparently helped authorities identify and track the guerrillas in the theater. There were at least 44 hostage-takers, 18 of them women, all of whom evaded the city's frequent, random police checks and arrived at the theater in minibuses and jeeps.
All the men wore camouflage; all the women dressed head-to-toe in black dresses and veils. Each woman wore a belt holding plastic explosives studded with ball bearings and was armed with a pistol and grenade.
Movsar Barayev, a 25-year Chechen warlord, was their leader. His clan had a reputation for violence. More than once, the Russian military had reported his death, most recently 10 days before the theater raid.
Barayev made only one demand: that Russia withdraw its troops from Chechnya. On a Web site sympathetic to the Chechens, the guerrillas called themselves smertniki, a Russian word for someone ready to die for a cause.
