Censoring Beslan. What has been cut from the Russian translation of “The School” by C.J. Chivers, a classic report about the 2004 terrorist attack

C. J. Chivers’ “The School” was published in the June 2006 issue of Esquire magazine. By that time, Chivers, a retired Marine, had been the The New York Times’ Moscow correspondent for two years. He was in Beslan on September 1, 2004, when terrorists took hostages in School No. 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia. The school was seized by members of the terrorist group Riyad-us Saliheen, sent by the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, who demanded Russia withdraw from and recognize the independence of Chechnya. More than 1,100 people were taken hostage, including 777 children. The siege ended on September 3, when the school was stormed by Russian forces, with the deaths of over 300 people, nearly 200 of them children, as well as 31 of the attackers.Chivers spent all three days of the terrorist attack in Beslan and returned there many times afterwards. The resulting report, which traces the fates of dozens of hostages, has become a classic of American journalism. Mediazona discovered that its Russian translation was censored on the 20th anniversary of the tragedy.

“In The School, C. J. Chivers recounts, in astonishing and chilling detail, the progress of the three-day siege by Chechen terrorists at School No. 1 in the Russian town of Beslan. Told with economy yet packed with detail, The School presents scenes and images that compel the readers attention, and may haunt them for decades to come.” That was the American Society of Magazine Editors’ statement when it awarded Chivers the 2007 National Magazine Award for best reporting. He also received the Michael Kelly Award, and Esquire named “The School” one of “seven greatest stories in the history” of the magazine.

The translation of the article was published in the Russian version of Esquire in October 2006. It omitted one short chapter describing the historical context of the hostage-taking, but it ran with photographs of the story’s protagonists shot by the Russian editorial staff. Since 2010, the translation has also been available on the magazine’s website.

Immediately after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Hearst Magazines revoked the Russian Esquire licence. The publication nevertheless continued under a new brand name—Pravila Zhizni (Rules of Life)—and adopted a Russian version of the American “What I’ve Learned” interview format. The vast majority of material from the Russian Esquire archive was preserved on the renamed website pravilamag.ru.

And just over a year ago, on the 20th anniversary of the Beslan terrorist attack, the Russian translation of “The School” on this website was heavily censored.

Mediazona learned of the edits in the fall of 2025. Copies of the page preserved in the Wayback Machine suggest the changes were made on September 1, 2024. Earlier that morning, the text still appeared in its original form. The censored version was published at 6:44 p.m.—this timestamp still remains on the website, meaning that no further edits were made after that. Up until this text has been published.

A total of 1,650 words were cut from the 18,000-word piece, about 11% of the entire original translation.

The edits affect the final sections, which describe the last assault on the school by Russian troops, during which most of the people were killed, and the events of the following day. The cuts made in the text cannot be explained by a technical glitch. The overall structure of the article and the subheadings have been preserved, but significant fragments have been removed from each one; in four cases, only the first paragraph of each segment remains.

What was cut from the article

Fragments that remained intact are highlighted in italics.

Mid-Afternoon. The Cafeteria. <...> Larisa Kudziyeva watched one of the grenades, a smooth metal oval about the size of a lime, as it passed over her, fell to the floor, and bounced off the kitchen tile toward the soldiers. Her son was beneath her and her daughter beside her. She squeezed the boy, threw her leg and arm over him, and swung her other hand over her daughter’s face.

A hand grenade is a small explosive charge surrounded by a metal shell, whose detonation is controlled by a fuse with a few-second delay. When the charge explodes, it shatters the metal exterior, turning it into bits of shrapnel that rush away at thousands of feet per second, accompanied by a shock wave and heat. It can kill a man fifteen yards away. The nook was less than six yards across.

The grenade exploded.

After the wave of metal hit her, Larisa was encased in something like silence, a state in which the absence of sound was overlaid by the ringing in her ears, leaving her to feel an effect like a struck crystal glass. How easy it is to die, she thought. But she did not die, not immediately, and as if in a dream she ran an arm over her son, who was beneath her. He was alive. “Mama,” he said. “Mamochka.”

The shrapnel had blasted the right side of her face, tearing part of it off, and ruined her right arm. Larisa did not want the boy to see what had become of her and turned away and raised her left hand to her face. Her fingertips felt wet flesh and exposed bone. The bone fragments were sharp enough to prick. She passed out.

Her daughter crawled to her. A teacher beside Larisa was missing a leg. One of the commandos was dead. The children Madina had escorted in were dead. One of Larisa’s neighbors was dead. Another teacher was dead. The grisly mess extended through the room.

Larisa looked dead, but Madina checked her pulse, finding life. More commandos climbed in. They told the survivors to follow them out. “My mother is still alive,” Madina said.

We will take care of her, a soldier said.

Madina picked up her little brother, handed him out the window to a man outside. The man helped her down, too, and the brother and sister ran out into the neighborhood. They were saved.

Inside the dish-washing room, Irina Naldikoyeva had felt the wall shake, but she remained on top of her children, holding them down, unsure what had happened. There were two doors into the tiny room, and after a few minutes a man's head appeared along the floor at one of them. It was a commando, crawling. He wore a helmet. His face was sweaty. Irina understood: Russians were inside. The children hiding with the pots understood, too. The cupboard doors flew open and they scuttled out and bounded past him, looking for a way out.

Irina followed with Kazbek and Alana, out the door, past the mangled corpses, to the window. She handed out the children and then shinnied down. She was out, in autumnal air, standing on grass. She walked unsteadily and turned the corner at the first house on Kominterna Street. She did not know where her children had gone. She sat on the ground. Someone came and led her away.

Late Afternoon. A Classroom. Kira Guldayeva hid with Georgy in the classroom as the sound of gunfire rose and fell. Six Kalashnikovs were stacked against the wall. Camouflage clothing was strewn on the floor. The walls were streaked with blood, as if during the battle injured terrorists had congregated here. Kira pulled Georgy close. He was a small boy, wearing only underpants. She checked him for injuries and found tiny holes where shrapnel had entered his back, buttocks, and one of his feet. Blood beaded from each wound. Her injuries were worse, a catalog of the afternoon's hazards: She had been shot twice, and one bullet had passed through her arm. Shrapnel had struck her shoulder. She had been burned.

She sat for a long time, afraid the terrorists might return and wondering when the rescuers might reach them.

“Stay here,” she told the boy, and crept to the door.

A Russian soldier stood across the hall. They appraised each other, two faces in the chaos. He dashed toward her. As he crossed the open, gunfire boomed. A bullet slammed into his head. He staggered into the room, dropped his rifle, grasped for his helmet, and collapsed. He did not move. His dropped rifle pointed at Kira and Georgy; she pushed it away with a board. Another soldier followed him in and leaned against the wall. He was injured, too.

“Lie down,” he said to them, and began applying a bandage to his leg.

A microphone hung at his throat, into which he spoke in clipped tones. More soldiers entered. The school was falling under Russian control.

They put Kira and Georgy on stretchers, and she was handed through a window. Litter bearers ran with her, tripped, and dropped her to the ground.

“Where is the boy?” she screamed. “Where is the boy?”

Late Afternoon. The Cafeteria. Larisa Kudziyeva awoke, unsure how much time she had spent on the floor. The hostages near her were all dead. She tried to move, but her right arm felt as if someone were atop it. Much of her face was gone; soldiers stepped past her as if she were a corpse. They seemed calmer, having for the moment taken control of the room. One stood above her, a blurry form. She raised her left hand to wipe blood from her eyes. He glanced down, surprised.

“Girl, be patient,” he said. “They will bring stretchers.”

His voice sounded kind. If he can call me girl when I look like this, she thought, then I can wait. She drifted to sleep.

Late Night. A Hospital Room in Vladikavkaz. Nikolai Albegov arrived at the door and surveyed his son's wife. He was sixty-six, a retired truck driver, fidgeting where he stood. The thin frame of Irina Naldikoyeva, his daughter-in-law, was extended on the bed. Her head and her neck were wrapped in gauze. She was foggy from painkillers. An IV snaked into her arm.

Throughout Beslan and Vladikavkaz a fresh horror was descending. The morgue in Beslan was overflowing, and bodies were laid on the grass. Vladikavkaz’s morgue also had a growing display of corpses waiting to be claimed. The dashes out of the school, and the rescues, had been so spontaneous and disorganized that many families were not sure whether their spouses and children had survived. The families also heard of blackened remains encased on the basketball court under the collapsed roof. The living roamed among the dead, peering at the unclaimed, looking for their own.

Nikolai’s family had been spared this. For nine years Irina had lived in his home. She had borne the family a son and a daughter and performed much of the daily labor. Nikolai kept one of the most traditional households in Beslan, and under the mountain customs he observed, he was the khozyain, the elder of his domain. Irina was not allowed to address him. She had never spoken to him unless he had asked her a question. They had never embraced.

He stood at the door in a suit, a leathery, strong-handed old man in his very best clothes, assessing the woman who had come into his home. He did not yet know what had happened in the school. But she had brought his family out. Tears ran down his dark face. He walked to her bed, found a spot on her face where there was no bandage, and gave her a kiss.

September 4. Evening. A Hospital Room in Vladikavkaz. The doctor assessed Larisa Kudziyeva. Twice they had operated on her, but she had remained in a coma. Shrapnel had cut too many holes through her; blood transfusions leaked out. Her blood pressure had sunk. She was near death. The hospital was overwhelmed with patients, and at last Larisa was triaged. Nurses washed her and put a tag on her toe.

But Larisa Kudziyeva would not die, and hours later another doctor found her alive where she had been left for dead. Early on September 4 she was put back on an operating table. Much of her eye socket was gone. The right side of her face was mashed. Her right arm was shredded and broken in three places. Her middle finger was snapped. Her side had absorbed a shock wave and shrapnel blast. But the metal had missed her main arteries and her right lung. She stabilized before sunrise. Now she was awake, barely. The surgeon questioned her, running through a simple neurological exam.

“What is your birthday?” he asked.

“The fourteenth,” she said.

“What month?”

“May,” she said. It was true. But it was not.

“No, forget that day,” the doctor said. “Your birthday is September fourth.”

C. J. Chivers’ text also includes a lengthy epilogue in which he summarizes what was known about the terrorist attack by mid-2006 and recounts the fate of the hostages. This chapter was also censored.

What was cut from the epilogue

The fragment that remained intact is highlighted in italics.

The Beslan siege claimed a greater toll of human life than all but one act of modern terrorism, the destruction of the World Trade Center. The terrorists' actions and the bungled rescue efforts ended with the deaths of 331 people, not counting the 31 terrorists the Russian government says were killed. Among the dead were 186 children and 10 members of Russia's Special Forces, whose individual acts of courage were undermined by the incompetence of their government's counterterrorism response. More than seven hundred other people were injured, most of them children.

The siege ended with no victor. Faith in Russia's government, and the ability of its security agencies to protect its citizens, has been shaken. Sympathy for Chechen independence has shrunk. Even some of Chechnya's separatist fighters, men claiming loyalty to Shamil Basayev, have questioned the utility and rationale of such tactics, although the underground rebel government, unwisely, has not distanced itself from Basayev, who was appointed its first deputy prime minister in 2005. His retention of such a post, no matter his earlier guerrilla prowess, discredits the separatists and is grounds for shame.

The Russian and North Ossetian parliaments have opened investigations into the terrorist act, which thus far have led to inconclusive findings and drawn accusations of cover-ups from survivors and the bereaved. Official lies have eroded public confidence, including the insistence during the siege that only 354 hostages were seized, and an enduring insistence that the T-72 tanks did not fire until all the survivors were out, which is false. It remains unclear, and a source of acrimonious debate, what caused the first two explosions and the fire in the gym, although the available evidence, on balance, suggests that the blast damage and the majority of the human injury were caused by the terrorists' bombs. There is similar uncertainty about the reason behind the explosion of the shahidka.

Other points of contention include what help, if any, the terrorists received from inside Beslan, whether the terrorists hid weapons in the school before the attack, how many terrorists were present, and whether several of them escaped. A third of the dead terrorists have not been publicly identified, and their names are officially unknown. Ibragim was killed; this is clear. But many hostages, including Larisa Kudziyeva and Kazbek Misikov, have studied the known pictures of the dead terrorists and insist that Ali, previously known as Baisangur, and others were not among the dead and were not seen on the last day of the siege.

Almost all of the surviving hostages remain in North Ossetia, and many continue to receive treatment, including Larisa, who had endured fourteen surgeries through early April 2006 and is expecting two more. Aida Archegova, who became a human shield after searching for her son Soslan, was rescued and later learned that Soslan escaped. Her face has been rebuilt, with bone from her hip grafted to fashion a replacement jaw. She has never again seen the boy who was a human shield with her and does not know whether he is alive. Sarmat Bolloyev survived. Lora Karkuzashvili, the human shield shot in the chest by rescuers, did not. Alina Kudzayeva, the wife of Aslan Kudzayev, who jumped from the window of the literature classroom, was freed with their nineteen-month-old daughter and other breast-feeding mothers; the remains of her mother, Tina Dudiyeva, who shielded Dzera, the bell ringer, were found in the gym. Albert Sidakov, who opted not to jump with Aslan, was killed, as were both sons of Ruslan Betrozov, the man who stood to translate the terrorists' instructions. Fatima Tskayeva, who sent out her infant but stayed behind with her two other children, died with her daughter Kristina. Makhar, Fatima's three-year-old son, was saved. Karen Mdinaradze, who survived execution, was questioned by a detective at the hospital, who thought that he might be a terrorist masquerading as a fleeing hostage; he was eventually treated properly. His ruined left eye has been replaced with an artificial one. Even up close it looks real. Kazbek Misikov and his family recovered from most of their injuries, although Kazbek's arms remain damaged and he is classified an invalid. On January 22, 2006, his wife, Irina Dzutseva, gave birth to a third son, Elbrus, who is named, like his father, for a mountain that soars above the others on the Caucasus ridge.

The Russian translation of “The School” was also accompanied by C.J. Chivers’ interview, in which he explained how he reported and wrote the piece and why he believed it mattered. This has also been heavily censored: about 750 words were cut from the roughly 900-word text. Because there is no original English version, however, we are not including it in this overview.

At the time of the edits, Pravila Zhizni was headed by pro-government writer and blogger Sergei Minaev (editorial director) and Trifon Bebutov (editor-in-chief), both of whom have since left the publication. We contacted the magazine’s current editorial staff; they said the cuts came as a complete surprise. The abridged version of the text nevertheless remains on the website.

By agreement with the author, the Russian translation of “The School” will now be available on Mediazona. Moreover, we have restored not only the fragments that were deleted on September 1, 2024, but also those that were shortened in the original translated version. The context of the Beslan tragedy, which C. J. Chivers described in detail for English-speaking readers, was well known to the Russian audience 20 years ago, so it was not included in the first Russian translation. But it is clearly not superfluous today.

The Russian version of “The School” is available here.

Update, 23 December 2025: Several hours after we published this text, the current Pravila Zhizni team restored “The School” in its original form.

Editor: Maria Klimova