"Not our people"
Following the June 23 terrorist attacks in Dagestan, local residents continue to speculate about who is behind the attacks.
On June 23, 2024, armed militants attacked synagogues, churches, and a traffic police post in Makhachkala and Derbent. Twenty-seven people were killed in the attacks. Five of the attackers were subsequently killed by security forces. Two synagogues were burned and two Orthodox churches were damaged. Local residents are still trying to come to terms with what happened and understand who was behind the attacks. A NeMoskva journalist visited the scene and spoke with witnesses to the attacks.
Blood on the pole
At first glance, Makhachkala offers no sign of the recent tragic events. Tourists wander the streets, shops and restaurants are packed, and street vendors occupy the sidewalks with their wares. Security forces are almost invisible, with only police cars frequently driving along the roads, their lights flashing but sirens silent. The scene changes as one approaches Gromova Street, home to the Holy Dormition Cathedral, which was attacked by militants on the evening of June 23.
A group of passersby, a gray-bearded man and several women, wearing headscarves and crosses over their long dresses, stop at a lamppost. The man points to a brown spot a meter above the ground.
“This is blood, they shot at the police here,” the grey-bearded man explains, the women gasp and cross themselves, “and there’s a bullet stuck in this pole.”
I walk into the Bagration hypermarket next to the church. The saleswoman, a middle-aged woman named Zemfira, tells me she was working there with the owner at the time of the attack.
"I don't have much to tell. As soon as the shooting started, we locked the door and turned off the lights. We sat quietly, didn't call anyone. Three or four hours later, we were escorted out by security forces who came into the store themselves."
Across the street from the store is a post office. An employee was injured there.
"When the shooting started, our Zainap went out onto the porch to close the door, and at that moment two bullets hit the porch. One went through the metal wall and hit her in the thigh, and the second broke the window above her head," says postal worker Lyudmila. "We managed to quickly drag Zainap back inside and lock ourselves in. We stayed inside until about midnight, when we were able to get help. Zainap lay on the floor the whole time, and we only managed to bandage the wound. I visited her in the hospital yesterday; she was just starting to get up. They removed the bullet from the wound, the tip of which was open like a flower. The doctors say it was explosive."
After the post office, I head to the Holy Dormition Cathedral. A police squad of several officers armed with machine guns and wearing body armor is on duty at the gate. There's a booth and a car parked nearby. As I approach the gate, the officers ask me to come up to them for a search. They check my backpack with a hand-held metal detector and ask me to show them its contents. Then they allow me into the church, where a service is taking place.
"The bullets fell like seeds."
The Holy Dormition Cathedral, built in 1906, consists of the church itself, along with annexes known as the "Alexander Nevsky Chapel," and several administrative buildings. Restoration work is currently underway. While waiting for the service to end, I explore the cathedral grounds.
Electricians are running cables across the church courtyard, and near the gate, a worker is sanding down bullet holes on the doors, which have been covered with mortar. The gunfire remains clearly visible on the church walls. The windows are broken. Behind the church are two burned-out cars, with a pool of molten metal frozen on the ground near one of them. Beneath the fence, on the lawn, lies the grave of the only victim of the attack—a cathedral security guard. On a wooden cross is a photograph of the murdered Mikhail Vavilin and his dates of birth: 1972-2024. The grave is completely covered with flowers.
Mikhail's colleague, a strong, grey-haired man in a green T-shirt and camouflage pants, stands nearby.
"I didn't know Mikhail very well; he was my replacement, and he took over from me on the morning of the 23rd," says a security guard who declined to be identified. "We've been working alone for a year and a half now; there used to be two of us, but they cut us due to lack of funding. We don't work for a private security company; we're directly employed by the church and are essentially considered volunteers, though we do receive a small salary. Our special equipment includes traumatic pistols, purchased with our own money. Mikhail had one too. Of course, what happened was a complete surprise; you can't be prepared for that. But I'll keep working; I worked in the Makhachkala police for twenty-two years before this; it's not easy to scare me."
The service ends and the parishioners exit the church into the courtyard. Several women go to sit in a gazebo located near the church, in the shade of the trees. I approach them to ask about the events of June 23rd. One of the parishioners, sixty-year-old Tatyana, is a direct witness to the attack.
"That day was the feast of the Holy Trinity, and after the service, I went out onto the porch to chat with our people. When I heard the first shots, I said to my friends, 'There's a wedding going on somewhere nearby.' The locals love to shoot into the air on any special occasion. Then smoke started billowing. I said, 'Look, they're starting to grill shashlik.' Then I thought, 'What shashlik? The smoke is too thick.' Then Father Sergiy suddenly shouted, 'Get back to the church quickly! We're under attack!' Everyone ran back, but I can barely walk. Two girls grabbed me by the arms and pulled me back, and Father Sergiy locked the door," Tatyana recalls.
For greater safety, those hiding in the church decided to climb the bell tower into a windowless room. About twenty people in total took refuge in the church, including Priest Sergiy Abasov, Deacon Lazar Tarasov, and Sergiy's three children, the youngest of whom was ten months old.
"Father Sergius told us all to lie down on the floor and pray. His son Seraphim kept offering me to lie on top of him, and I replied, 'Son, I'll crush you.' I sat against the wall, although for some reason I was afraid a bullet would pierce the wall and definitely hit my spine," Tatyana recalls. "Everyone held up well, even the children, although some of the parishioners cried. It was especially scary when the bullets rained down like sunflower seeds on the walls of the bell tower, with such a sharp sound. Then Father Sergius called on everyone to pray and venerate the cross. This means preparing for death."
The attacker fired at the church several times, set fire to cars and outbuildings parked on the grounds, but was unable to break into the locked church.
"Father Lazarus was constantly monitoring the movements of these donkeys through the upper part of the window located one floor below, and he was constantly texting someone on his phone," Tatyana explains. "The deacon was over fifty years old, his blood pressure had dropped, and he was generally feeling unwell, but all this time he continued to maintain contact with the security services and reported everything to them."
In total, those who took refuge in the church spent about four and a half hours under siege before help arrived.
"During that time, I said goodbye to all my family and friends, asked everyone for forgiveness. And then my nephew writes to me: 'Where are you now?' I reply: 'In church, I wrote to you!' And my nephew says: 'They said on TV that you were all freed.' And after that, we sat in the bell tower for another hour," Tatyana says indignantly. "I remember how we were truly freed. Father Lazar exhaled so loudly: 'Well, that's it!' My heart sank, I thought he meant it was the end, the militants had broken into the church, but he adds: 'A military vehicle entered the yard.' Someone with the call sign 'Skull' contacted the deacon and ordered us to descend and leave one by one." We left the church and ran towards the spotlights, past the armored vehicle, past Mikhail's body to the gates, where the security services and the church's key keeper, Priest Pavel, were waiting for us. He congratulated us all on our birthday!
All those released were taken to a nearby police station, where they were questioned for two hours, then to the Investigative Committee, where they were interrogated for another two hours. The parishioners received psychological support.
"The psychologist told us that when you get home, you should definitely take a bath, talk to your loved ones, and if they're not there, just talk to your reflection in the mirror," Tatyana explains, adding with a smile. "When I got home at four in the morning, the water had been turned off. So I didn't take a bath until Monday evening."
According to Tatyana, none of the parishioners stopped going to church after the incident:
"I don't know who these handsome terrorists were or what they wanted. I've lived in Makhachkala my whole life and I don't remember anything like that. Were they trying to scare us? Why scare us? We all go to church under God and will continue to do so."
"The second terrorist attack in my life"
The next day, a memorial service for the murdered servant of God, Mikhail, was held at the grave of the deceased guard. After the service, I approached Father Sergiy, who was conducting the service, and asked to speak with me about the attack of June 23rd.
"This is the second terrorist attack in my life. The first happened in Grozny on May 19, 2018, when they attacked the Church of the Archangel Michael, where I served as the only priest. After the evening service, four men armed with sawed-off shotguns, knives, axes, and smoke bombs burst into the church," recalls Father Sergiy.
"The church has been guarded by police since the 2000s, and that day, they were guys from Saratov. The attackers immediately killed Vladimir Gorsky, then employee Kairat Rakhmetov was killed in the shootout, along with one of the parishioners, Artemy, who had simply left the church for some fresh air. Hearing the gunshots, I rushed to close the doors with the parishioners, but my mother, Galina, ran out of the church and rushed to the refectory, where our children were. She came face to face with one of the attackers, but he was reloading his rifle at the time, and she managed to reach the refectory and hide in the basement with the children. Fyodor Napolnikov, a surgeon at the Gudermes Children's Hospital, and I barricaded the doors; the gunmen fired through the doors and wounded Fyodor Konstantinovich several times. According to him, he should have died from blood loss in fifteen minutes, but thank God, help arrived quickly, and all the attackers were eliminated. Of course, I never imagined I'd have to face something like this again.
Father Sergiy Abasov was born in 1989 in Azerbaijan. After serving in the army, he began singing in a male church choir in Baku. Until 2011, Dagestan was part of the Baku-Caspian Diocese, and thus Father Sergiy met Father Nikolay Kotelnikov from Derbent, whose daughter he soon married. After his ordination, Sergiy was sent to Makhachkala to serve as a priest, where he remained with a break from 2016 to 2018, when he was sent to a church in Grozny.
"On August 1, 2018, I began serving at the Makhachkala church. All these years have passed peacefully and quietly, but this year, on June 23, the feast of Trinity, I almost died. But by the grace of God, through the prayers of our Orthodox Christians, the Lord granted me life," Father Sergiy recounts. "That day, I felt a certain uneasiness in my soul from the very morning. There seemed to be no specific reason, and I didn't see any suspicious people. Our church is open, and not only parishioners, but also tourists and local Muslims freely enter."
After finishing the evening service, Father Sergius undressed, and at that moment his wife Galina, who was at home that day, called and reported that Father Nikolai had been killed in Derbent half an hour earlier.
"I went out onto the porch and told the parishioners about Father Nikolai's death. This news delayed many of those who were about to go home, and it saved their lives. We entered the church and began to pray," Father Sergiy recalls. "Soon I heard gunshots and explosions outside. They had attacked the guard post that had been stationed outside our church since the attacks on churches in Kizlyar and Grozny in 2018. I was familiar with the sounds of gunfire both from my military service and from the events in Grozny. I immediately ran out of the church again and began calling out to the remaining parishioners outside. I also called for our security guard, Mikhail, but he was visually impaired and somewhat deaf; he most likely simply didn't hear me and remained at the entrance gate."
Father Sergius and Deacon Lazar managed to close all the numerous doors of the church that were open due to the heat.
"In the church, we sang the prayer 'My Queen, Most Gracious,' which inspired the people, and we began climbing the bell tower—not to the very top, which was in the line of fire, but to a small enclosed room. As we climbed through a small window, I saw Mikhail's body. Apparently, he had wanted to run to the church, but the bullets had caught him first," the priest recounts. "The small room we entered was hot and stuffy; there was no furniture, not even a small chair. I laid down a rug so the women could sit. First one, then the second, and then the rest of the parishioners asked to receive communion and confess; everyone thought they would die there. We spent four and a half hours like that. Most of all, we were thirsty. The parishioners had about 100 grams of water and a bottle of juice with them, which they gave to my children, who were all with me that day. They drank it all in the first ten minutes." Since that moment in the bell tower, I've been constantly tormented by thirst, even though I can drink at any moment. Sometimes, just holding a glass of water in my hand is enough to stop it.
At that time, the attacker set fire to a car, a bakery, a prosphora bakery, and an educational center with a house church dedicated to St. Ignatius. The terrorist also attempted to enter the church. Father Sergiy, from a window on the stairs leading to the bell tower, saw him attempt to break down the front doors with a crowbar he had procured.
“If a terrorist had entered the doors, he would have set fire to the temple from the inside and shot everyone, but the Lord did not allow it; help arrived first,” the priest says.
Closer to midnight, special forces began their assault, and an armored personnel carrier entered the church grounds, knocking down the gates. Security forces spent another hour clearing the area before allowing the people inside to leave.
"At six o'clock in the morning, after questioning at the police station and the Investigative Committee, I returned to the church. Outside the gates, I was met by a black-and-white cat. She lives on our property, but I don't know her name," Father Sergiy recalls with a smile. "The cat looked at me and meowed, as if asking for help. In the following days, I saw her carrying her only kitten around the church, looking for a quiet corner, but she couldn't find it."
The psychological effects of the terrorist attack varied among those who survived it. Deacon Lazar was hospitalized with a severe nervous breakdown. Father Sergiy's children are seeing a psychologist, but the priest himself, despite breathing and heart problems, has so far refused treatment.
"Yes, I sleep uneasily at night, thinking about the terrorists' chat room, and the photo of Father Nikolai that the security forces found on the phone they confiscated. Sometimes I worry about whether there's a photo of me on some stranger's phone. A couple of days ago, a jeep stopped at the church, and several bearded men got out, laughing and filming the church grounds with their phones. Police officers from the checkpoint in front of the church approached them, checked their documents and the car, found nothing suspicious, and let them go," Father Sergiy says, adding with a sigh. "The children don't sleep well, especially eleven-month-old Elizaveta. She cries often, I lean over her, she feels my beard, and it calms her down. Of course, I need to get some treatment; I've already applied for a two-week vacation. But for now, I'm staying with the parishioners; we've survived this ordeal together, and I can't leave them now."
"Muslims come to our temple to pray."
Derbent. In 2003, the old part of the city was recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. In 2006, at the UNESCO Prize ceremony, Derbent received an honorary diploma as the most tolerant city in the world. In 2019, the Monument to the Friendship of Three Religions was erected in Kazem-Bek Alley. Tea drinking. A mullah, a rabbi, and an Orthodox priest converse peacefully over cups of tea. The priest's prototype is Father Nikolai Kotelnikov. He was killed on June 23. After the terrorist attack, Derbent residents brought flowers to the monument.
From conversations, it becomes clear that the gunshots in the "most tolerant city" are not a one-time outburst of aggression by Islamic radicals. They are a sign of existing tensions that could yet erupt and lead to violence.
A grim, long-bearded, middle-aged taxi driver named Timur drives me around Derbent. He asks the usual questions: how did you like the city? Then I ask about the events of June 23rd. Timur is initially reluctant to answer, but then offers one of the most common theories:
"Everyone in the city knows it's a provocation. We know whose doing it was. They killed the priest at the church, and only the security guard at the synagogue, and they simply set it on fire. There was no one inside, everyone was warned in advance," the taxi driver explains. And he adds, "The Jews are trying to set Muslims and Christians against each other. Those ram attackers were trained in Turkey. Everyone here knows the Israeli secret services used them blindly."
The Church of the Holy Intercession in Derbent is located on Lenin Street, one of the city's central streets. Near the church wall is a grave, covered with bouquets of flowers, wreaths, a wooden cross, and a portrait of the deceased priest. The entrance to the church is guarded by two police officers with machine guns and bulletproof vests. They ask me to leave my backpack on a bench by the gate, saying, "Drop it here, and when you go out, you can pick it up; no one needs it here." I comply and walk into the church courtyard.
"I've been serving in Derbent since 2004, but I couldn't have imagined what happened on June 23rd. After the attack on the Grozny church, a police post was set up here, but it was quickly removed. The officers merely promised to drive past the church every day, as our city is peaceful, and tourists don't need to be bothered by armed patrols," says Mikhail Lobov, priest at the Church of the Holy Intercession.
"I'm convinced the attackers weren't genuine Muslims, and none of them were from Derbent. All of these terrorists were brainwashed in Turkey by European intelligence services," he says, giving the version of events that the authorities have been voicing since the very beginning.
Father Mikhail, like Sergei Abasov, was born in Azerbaijan and served in the army after finishing school. In 2002, he was ordained to the priesthood in Baku, and in 2004, he was transferred to Derbent under the supervision of Father Nikolai Kotelnikov, whose daughter, Olga, Mikhail soon married.
"Derbent is an ancient city, where followers of all religions have always lived in peace. Not only members of the clergy, but also ordinary Muslims, came to our church to pray. They respect Christianity and, although they often pray in their own languages, they still believe that if they can't find help in a difficult situation at the mosque, they should go to a Christian church. On Christmas Eve, many Muslims come to us and say, 'We also want to participate in the service, Jesus Christ, our prophet!'" says Father Mikhail. He is dressed in a T-shirt and jeans; the priest has been working on restoring the church for the past week since the terrorist attack.
The attacks on June 23 came as a complete surprise to Father Mikhail.
"After the service, I went into the house, undressed, and lay down on the couch in my room to respond to Trinity greetings sent via messenger. My wife and my youngest daughter, Anna, went to the store, and my two sons, Dmitry, nineteen, and Alexey, thirteen, were also with me. I was engrossed in answering the greetings—it's a time-consuming process—when suddenly gunfire started. I recognized the sound immediately; I'd served in the army," Father Mikhail recalls. "The children ran to me; they'd never heard gunshots before, and I calmed them down. Alexey immediately began praying. At that moment, a man with a twelve-year-old girl ran into our house. I saw him among the parishioners, but I don't know his name, so of course, I let them take cover. We started calling the police. I got through to the dispatcher, spoke very emotionally, shouting that we were being attacked. The dispatcher calmly replied, 'What are you shouting?' "It's not my fault, calm down, they're already on their way!" At that moment, the shooting stopped, it became very quiet, and then a single shot rang out.
Father Nikolai was shot. Mikhail decided to leave the house to assess the situation.
"I approached the church, cautiously peeked out from behind the notice board, and saw a man with a machine gun coming down the porch of Father Nikolai's house. The attacker noticed me, raised his weapon, but didn't shoot, otherwise he would have shot me right through," the priest says. "I turned and ran into the house. The door was open, even though I told the children to lock it. I ran inside and slammed the door behind me. The whole time, the terrorist was following me. I don't know if he was trying to break through to us; we all hid in the back room, but I think I heard someone tugging at the handle of the front door."
After this, Father Mikhail was only able to leave the house when security forces arrived on the church grounds. The priest helped extinguish the fire in the church and then ran to Father Nikolai's burning house with a fire extinguisher.
"They pushed me away, didn't let me enter the apartment. The security forces were afraid of any surprises the terrorists might have left. But I broke free, ran into the house, grabbed Father Nikolai by the leg, and pulled him onto the threshold," Mikhail's voice breaks, but he fights back the tears and continues. "The paramedics pronounced Father Nikolai dead. I covered him with a chair cover I brought from my home. They carried him out and laid him near the walls of the church, in the place where he is now buried."
After this, Father Mikhail, his children, and Mother Valentina were given shelter by neighbors. In the morning, they all returned to the church.
"I'm still being called in for questioning by the Investigative Committee; everyone's trying to find out the details, to understand what happened. Everything is clear to me. It wasn't our people who did this; they were just plain inhuman," says Father Mikhail. "They wanted to divide us, to drive us apart, but they failed. We've become more united than before. Christians, Muslims, and Jews—everyone loved Father Nikolai, everyone came to his funeral, and now everyone is working together to help restore the church."
"Can you find even one peaceful place in Russia now?"
At the church I meet Mother Valentina, the widow of the deceased priest.
"My father, Nikolai, and I got married in 1977 in Stavropol, and in 1978 he was transferred to serve in Derbent, and we've lived here ever since," Valentina says. "Everything was different here back then. There was only one mosque, a synagogue, and no rabbi, just an officiating rabbi, and our church. Everyone socialized with everyone else, visiting each other for holidays. Armenians, who didn't have their own church, came to us for baptisms, weddings, and funerals. It was always a peaceful city of three religions. There was no religious division; no one asked children their nationality at school."
With the opening of the borders in the early 90s, the situation began to change, says Valentina.
"Then young people started traveling to Muslim countries, like Turkey, for in-depth study of Islam. They brought Wahhabism to the Caucasus," my interlocutor is convinced. "Many mosques appeared based on ethnicity: Tabasaran, Azerbaijani, Lezgin, and so on. And then people started talking: Russia is a big country, but poor. Estonia is small, but life is good. Dagestan is also small, so they could try living separately. All this is aimed at division, and it comes from there, from abroad."
However, according to the priest's widow, neither the outbreak of the Chechen wars nor the subsequent tragic events in the Caucasus brought about any changes in the life of the Derbent church. The only significant event over all these years was the police post that appeared at the church gates after the terrorist attack at the Crocus shopping center.
"We asked the police: 'How long are you assigned to us?' They replied that it was probably a long time. Maybe they knew something we didn't," Valentina says.
On Sunday, June 23, Trinity was celebrated in the Church of the Intercession, as well as in the Holy Dormition Cathedral.
"After the service, Father Nikolai and I left the church and sat on a bench. He could only get around with the help of a walker and barely spoke, having suffered two strokes. Sometimes I couldn't understand him, but he always came to services," Valentina recalls. "We sat like that for a while, and then I said, 'Let's go inside and rest.' Inside, Father Nikolai lay down in his room, and I sat in mine; I had some paperwork to finish for the diocese. Suddenly, gunfire started—I'd only heard that kind of thing on TV before. I looked out the window but saw nothing, so I went out into the hallway. Father Nikolai also got up and stood in the doorway of his room. That's when the attacker entered. He raised his machine gun and fired once at my husband. I screamed, and the killer turned to me, raised his gun, but didn't shoot. The terrorists were probably conserving their ammunition. I managed to slam the door and never saw the killer again.
The bullet struck Father Nikolai in the chin and exited through his jaw. The priest may have shown some signs of life, as the attacker slit his throat. After the murder, the terrorist set fire to the house and attempted to set fire to the church, but was unsuccessful; only the lectern burned. The attackers, two of them (one remained at the entrance gate the entire time), were in such a hurry that they even left a bag containing a grenade and a knife, the murder weapon, inside the church. As security services approached, the terrorists fled the church grounds through the roof of the summer kitchen.
"In the room, I kept trying to call security, the police, then I smelled smoke and looked out into the hallway. Then everything became clouded with black clouds, and I saw Father Nikolai lying on the floor in a pool of blood. I realized he was dead. I ran out of the house, and the yard was already full of police," Valentina recounts in a level voice. "I kept screaming for them to pull my husband's body out of the fire, and the police yelled back, 'Go away, woman! Do you want to lie down here too?' They were afraid to enter the house for fear of tripwires. They pushed me first off the church grounds, and then across the street. My brother-in-law, Father Mikhail, and his family found shelter with neighbors from the house across the street. We arrived there before one in the morning, after which the police allowed us to return to the church, on the condition that we lock ourselves in Father Mikhail's house and not go out." We did just that, and in the morning we woke up and had to clean it all up. And now I'm sitting here giving interviews.
The priest's widow is convinced that her deceased husband was one of the main targets of the terrorists in Derbent because of his authority in the city.
"Father Nikolai was never an orator, but he always preached peace. He was friends with people of all faiths; everyone in town knew him, everyone revered him. Why would they have killed a sixty-nine-year-old priest, who could barely walk and barely speak, if he hadn't been a symbol of understanding among people of different religions?" Valentina muses. "He was killed to sow discord between religious communities. Only the killers showed weakness. By shooting an old, feeble man, they thought they would frighten us. But such a death is considered a martyrdom in Christianity. The entire country prays for Father Nikolai; God has called him to Himself; there is no better death for a Christian. People often tell me that I should leave the Caucasus after the attack, but I'm not going anywhere. One terrorist here, another there. Can you find a safe place in Russia right now?"
Last fall, after the pogrom at the Makhachkala airport and the arson of the Jewish Cultural Center, one of NeMoskva's journalists visited Dagestan. We also spoke with locals then. For more context, read our report from that time. material "Find a Jew" and / or watch the movie.