"To celebrate the last night of a business trip to Moscow, Vesselin Nedkov and a friend picked up two tickets to the hottest show in town: the groundbreaking Broadway-style musical Nord-Ost. Halfway through the show, his life was changed forever as forty Chechen terrorists, including eighteen female suicide bombers, took over the building and held eight hundred people hostage for two and a half days." "57 Hours is Nedkov's harrowing account of being trapped between two dangerously unpredictable forces: inside the theatre, the Chechens, loaded with explosives, demanded the withdrawal of all Russian troops from the bloody conflict that was raging in Chechnya; outside, while government officials refused to negotiate with the rebels, Russian Special Forces prepared to storm the theatre." "During those fifty-seven terrifying hours, Nedkov discovered courage and ingenuity he never knew he had. While the female terrorists described the unbearable loss of their menfolk at the hands of Russian soldiers and expressed their desire to die for Allah, Nedkov tried to plan various avenues of escape. In the end, 129 innocent people - men, women, and children - lost their lives, most succumbing to gas used by the Russian forces to facilitate their dramatic rescue." "Nedkov's ordeal had a profound effect on him. He learned about the horrendous cruelty and destruction on both sides that has marked the Chechen-Russian civil war, a conflict that remains unresolved to this day. He felt compelled to discover how his fellow survivors had fared in the aftermath of the gruesome event and returned to Moscow to seek out their stories."--BOOK JACKET.