“WE’VE COME TO RUSSIA’S CAPITAL CITY to stop the war or die here for Allah. . . . I swear to Allah, we desire death more than you want life.” These words, spoken by Chechen terrorist Movsar Barayev, open “Terror in Moscow,” a grim and stomach-churning look at the Moscow theater hostage crisis of October 2002. Producer/director Dan Reed was able to obtain (for the right price) videos from the FSB (formerly KGB), footage recorded by the terrorists themselves, and broadcasts from Radio Ekho Moskvy. The result is an HBO documentary on a par with the Academy Award-winning “One Day in September” about the 1972 Munich Olympics. Over the last 10 years, more than 150,000 men, women, and children have been killed in the war in Chechnya. But the Russians have been fighting there much longer than that, instilling in the Chechen people a hostility best described by one author: “The feeling experienced by all the Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings; but it was such repulsion, disgust, and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them–like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves–was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.”

Those were the words of Leo Tolstoy, written a century ago in one of his greatest stories, “Hadji Murad.” A hundred years later, Tolstoy probably wouldn’t be surprised that the fighting goes on, and that some Chechens would take to extreme measures.