Moscow Commuters Post Grim Video and Photos Online After Bombings

March 29, 2010, 9:41 am — Updated: 2:29 pm -->

Moscow Commuters Post Grim Video and Photos Online After Bombings
By ROBERT MACKEY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjjy46fg1e4&feature=player_embeddedhttp://

Chilling and graphic amateur video shot during the evacuation of a subway station in Moscow on Monday after a suicide bombing on a train.

Updated 2:25 p.m. In the immediate aftermath of bombings at two Moscow subway stations on Monday morning, video and photographs were posted online by commuters in the Russian capital showing some of the damage and the evacuations that followed.

Particularly graphic and disturbing images of people killed by one of the bombs were posted on the Russian Web site Lifenews.ru and included in this video report uploaded to YouTube by Russia Today, an English-language satellite channel financed by the Russian government.

The Park Kultury subway station in central Moscow, where the day’s second bombing took place, is close to Russia Today’s studio. One of the station’s anchors, Yulia Shapovalova, said that she had just finished her shift and was trying to board a train in the station when the explosion there took place. She shot some video on her phone outside the station and then returned to the studio to describe what she had seen, while obviously still shaken:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTby8OlYXCU&feature=player_embeddedhttp://

The first image in this slide show on the Web site of Radio Free Europe shows crowds leaving the Park Kultury subway station in central Moscow after the bombing on a train there. The video report embedded below, from the Russian news agency RIA, includes amateur video that appears to have been shot at the same location:

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Note: Thanks to a reader who writes from Moscow to explain that the video above shows people leaving another part of Park Kultury station, away from the area where the bombing happened.)
This video was posted on YouTube on Monday by someone who said it was shot during the evacuation of the huge Komsomolskaya station, which is a stop on the same line as both of the stations hit on Monday, Park Kultury and Lubyanka:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaQSBm9_37k&feature=player_embeddedhttp://

Readers of Russian blogs — including a Russian-language blog maintained by The New York Times Moscow bureau — have been posting their reactions to the bombings. One blogger, who said that he was present at the Park Kultury station wrote:

How horrible it is when you hear a blast behind your back. I was at Park Kultury at the moment of the blast. Thank God, I managed to enter the walkway tunnel between stations and I was not affected. There was lots of smoke and I could not figure out what was going on. Many people were lying in blood. Horror. [...]

It was scary but I did not notice any panic around me. Everybody continued to quietly walk up, at least people around me. The panic was upstairs, the subway workers, policemen, people were running around. I went into the street and by that moment only one ambulance car came. Some of those who were injured walked out on their own, some were carried by other people. Few minutes later the entrance hall was filled by policemen, doctors and firemen.

RIA’s English-language Web site includes a report based on these eyewitness accounts of the scenes in the two stations during and after the bombings:

Alexandra Antonova described her reaction to the blast at Lubyanka metro station, where the first bomb was detonated. “I was in shock. I was deafened by the sound of the blast, but at first I didn’t think it was a terrorist attack. Then I saw all the smoke and realized it had been an explosion.”

“My only thought was to get away as quickly as possible,” she said.

She managed to change to a different train and arrived at Park Kultury metro station, the site of the second attack, just a few minutes before the blast. “I was very lucky,” she said.

Valery Shuverov, a witness at Park Kultury said reports of the power of the explosion had been exaggerated.

“It wasn’t big … But there were so many people packed together. That’s why there was such a high number of casualties.”

“I’ve seen loads of explosions in my time, and this was nothing. I’m fine. It was just a ‘pop’ like the kind if fire crackers we might let off at New Year.”

He added that the reaction to the explosion was very calm.

“There were some women crying and screaming and there were some people bleeding and wounded, but they were walking. I was two or three carriages away, so I didn’t see any bodies or anything.”

Another witness, a student named Ivan Bukhradtse who was at Park Kultury station, told RIA: “I saw several wounded people being carried and some walking by themselves. There was a lot of smoke and one escalator wasn’t working so people had difficulties leaving the metro.” He also pointed out that, somewhat incredibly, the authorities did not shut down the subway system after the first bomb went off: “The metro staff and the police were very helpful. They reacted very well. The main problem was that they didn’t shut down the subway system. If they had stopped it immediately, there there wouldn’t have been such big crowds.”

As Peter Walker of The Guardian pointed out in a post on Monday’s bombings, a documentary on Moscow’s subway system made in 2008 by Russia Today includes this demonstration of how passengers are able to contact security personnel from the platforms — a new security measure which was introduced after a deadly terrorist attack on a train there in 2004.

Russia Today also uploaded this raw video of wounded people getting treatment after the attacks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uekk98wn0xg&feature=player_embeddedhttp://

A reader of The Lede, Catherine Fitzpatrick, writes, in the comment thread below and on her blog, Minding Russia, that she is disappointed by the relative lack of citizen journalism of today’s events in Moscow. In her comment, she writes:

I think you need to look at all this more critically. Very little amateur footage in fact has been posted and in fact most of it is very much state-controlled, even more than Iran, oddly enough.

We were all hoping that the social media revolution, which has occurred in Russia as well, might lead to more independent and critical reporting of a tragedy like this, where not only early pictures and subjective comments can come in on Twitter and Live Journal (ZhZh), which is very popular in Russia, but some attempt at critical investigative reporting, interviews at the scene, finding even of alternative official sources, etc. [...]

The overwhelming majority of tweets, Youtubes, and ZhZh entries are *regurgitations of the official state-controlled media*. In fact, so far NYT coverage is also dependent on those state versions of the story. State media owned this story within the hour, and no one has been able to depart from the official narrative. While it is likely that Chechen suicide bombers committed this terrible act, as they have other cowardly and despicable acts, we can’t be sure because there are no independent Twittering eyewitnesses who saw them.

On her blog, Ms. Fitzpatrick — who describes herself as a “Russian translator, writer, human rights activist, and long-time student of international affairs” — suggests that Russians are failing to use the new tools available to citizen journalists nearly as well as Iranians, who live in a less free country. She concludes:

Social media coverage of the terrorist bombing at two stations of the Moscow metro in the early hours of Monday morning — on Twitter, Live Journal, and Youtube — starkly revealed the fallacy of the social media advantage, and laid bare the dependency of the Russian people on their state-controlled media. That’s my conclusion after looking at a lot of Twitter and other media for the last few hours. Hours after the blast, it did not seem as if a single Muscovite was reporting live from the scene getting the story on his cell phone *as an independent narrative*. [...]

[T]he picture of the crowd jammed into the station without the ability to exit was one of the very few pictures of the scene telling an unofficial story. Other cell phone coverage only showed crowds silently milling around with no attempts to go question authority or ask survivors anything. The passivity induced in people from many years of dependency on officially-controlled media — even when they have the tools of social media — is striking. The entire narrative was wrapped up and owned by the official pro-Kremlin or outright state-owned media within an hour of the explosion, and few could encroach on it without a browbeating from their fellow tweeters.
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Source:http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/moscow-commuters-post-grim-video-and-photos-online-after-bombings/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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