It may seem dubious to compare the Beslan hostage crisis with September 11. Most obviously, the death toll that day in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania was far higher than at Beslan. Such a primitive quantitative perspective, however, underestimates the psychological impact, not only on the families of the dead and injured, but on Russia as a nation, people and society. When President Vladimir Putin declared the outrage to be ‘unprecedented in its inhumanity and cruelty’, he spoke for the vast majority of his compatriots.
