Caucasus region has rich history of hostage-taking

For centuries, at least as far back as Leo Tolstoy's youth, hostage-takings and kidnappings have been a feared part of life in Chechnya and other parts of Russia's disorderly North Caucasus region.

But over the past decade, the actions have grown in size and severity and psychological shock -- with the seizure of a school full of children crossing a disturbing new threshold.

Although the identity of the heavily armed and explosives-laden raiders who took hundreds of hostages Wednesday in North Ossetia hasn't been established, suspicion fell on rebels from neighboring Chechnya or other insurgents taking a cue from that republic's chaos and violence.

Chechens' for hostage-taking is described vividly in Tolstoy's story ``A Caucasus Hostage,'' based on his army service in Chechnya, about two Russian soldiers seized in the 1850s and held for ransom in a warlord's deep pit. Placing captives in holes in the ground is a practice that continues in the 21st century -- Russian soldiers in Chechnya use it also.

Abducting for slave labor also persists, as Vladimir Yepishin found out in 1989 when he met two North Caucasus men in the western Russian city of Yaroslavl while intoxicated and agreed to go with them to Chechnya. He was beaten, sold from family to family four times, forced to work as a shepherd and released only 13 years after a journalist ventured into his remote mountain village and learned of his plight.

Since the first of two post-Soviet wars broke out in Chechnya in 1994, however, regional raiders have shown an increasing willingness to move from small seizures with monetary roots to large, brazen actions with political or tactical demands and to target some of society's most vulnerable sectors.

In 1995, Chechen rebels took some 2,000 hostages at a hospital near Chechnya, demanding that Russia end the war. About 100 people were killed in the raid and dozens more died when Russian troops unsuccessfully stormed the hospital. The next year, a Chechen rebel band seized up to 3,000 hostages in a raid on another hospital in the neighboring region of Dagestan. At least 40 people were killed in the raid.

After Russian forces pulled out of Chechnya in late 1996, large seizures halted, but de-facto independent Chechnya plunged into lawlessness and became notorious for brutal ransom kidnappings that sometimes ended with videotaped beheadings or mutilations.

The hostage takers in the school crisis of Beslan raised the shock value even further by seizing a group that is about half children. The raiders have made no public statement on why they chose the young and small as targets.

But mindful of the use of gas in the theater crisis, the school captors may have calculated that Russian forces would hold off this time because gas strong enough to disable an adult could kill a child.