MOSCOW: The first snow of Russia's winter fell on the red and yellow flowers, and candles flickered beneath photographs of the dead.
"It changed my whole life, that event, and it ended my daughter's," said Raisa Bogdanova, remembering last October's attack by Chechen rebels on a Moscow theatre.
Clutching her own small bunch of carnations, she was one of perhaps 150 people who gathered in the bitter cold outside the Dubrovka theatre yesterday, to witness the opening of a memorial to the hundreds killed and injured a year ago.
Mrs Bogdanova carried a framed picture of her daughter, Irina, one of at least 129 people killed when a secret gas was pumped into the building to immobilise heavily armed guerrillas, who had threatened to blow up the theatre.
"At the inquest they said she had blood in her brain and lungs," Mrs Bogdanova said of Irina, who was 30 years old when she died.
"I'm not an expert, I don't know, but it seems to me they didn't do enough to save the people in there," she said, in the shadow of the theatre where her daughter died.
It was a lament frequently heard on the wind that whistled around this Moscow square, made infamous by more than two days of constant television pictures that ended with bodies being dragged from the building and left lifeless on the wet tarmac.
Where were the ambulances? Where were the specialist doctors? Why did the security services refuse to reveal the nature of the deadly gas? Why do hospital records and official figures disagree over how many people died?
Questions unanswered since October 26th, 2002, when special forces stormed the gas-filled theatre and killed all 41 rebels, including a dozen or so women with bombs strapped to their waists.
Aleksei (18) was rehearsing with his dance troupe away from the main auditorium when the rebels rushed in, wielding Kalashnikov rifles and grenades. One of them heard noise from the rehearsal and brought Alexei and his friends down to join the rest of the hostages. There were almost 900 of them.
"We barely left the hospital for six months," said Alexei's mother, Olga Shostak. "He's deaf now, from the gas, and doesn't really talk about what happened. One day he saw something by chance on the television about the siege and he couldn't sleep all night."
Mrs Shostak said she had received some compensation for Aleksei's injuries, but nothing to make up for her lost wages now that she cares for him full-time.
"It was awful how they told us nothing, and we just couldn't believe what was going on," she said.
"Everything is just such a mess here - officials looking after themselves, so much corruption. How did those people get here with bombs and guns? And it's our kids that suffer."
Moscow's Mayor, Mr Yuri Luzhkov, and the US ambassador to Russia, Mr Alexander Vershbow, were among those attending yesterday's ceremony, to unveil a monument of three bronze cranes taking flight from a tall stone plinth. Russian folklore holds that the birds with their mournful cry are human souls flying to heaven.
"We are gathered here, where the terrorists did their fiendish work," said Mr Luzhkov from a small stage, "And we bow our heads before their victims."
The crowd, some wondering aloud what Mr Luzhkov had done to save their relatives, observed a minute's silence.Then they drifted across the square towards the theatre, to lay photographs, candles and flowers beneath a plaque bearing the names of the people who died there.