To the Rescue

“It was the longest I’ve had,” grunts Ilya Lyubimsky, 42, as he takes off his blood-soaked coveralls back at his rescue unit base, a dilapidated two-story shack squeezed in behind brand-new buildings on Mosfilmovskaya Street in Moscow’s posh Embassy quarter. On this summer day, he has spent more than one-and-a-half hours extracting a corpulent middle-aged man from the wreck of what had been his car. The rescuers could not use a torch to cut the metal lest they hurt the man, whose legs were wedged in; they had to unbend the jagged pieces by hand. For Lyubimsky, who didn’t even learn the victim’s name, the rescue was routine. Not so routine have been the Chechen terrorist attacks that he regularly responds to, including the 2002 Moscow theater siege and the February 2004 subway bombing, when his team saved lives and collected fragments of people ripped apart by the blast.

It’s not exactly the career he had planned for. With degrees in art, engineering and management, he appeared to have everything going for him. A construction company he launched in 1993 was doing fabulously, employing 12 people. But Lyubimsky, an avid skier of the pristine slopes in the Khibiny Mountains of the northern Kola peninsula, was haunted by the thought that over 200 people annually died or suffered serious injuries in skiing accidents there — and got no help. And so in 1996 he used his hard-earned rubles to set up, equip and train a rescue force of 30 in the area. That led him to collaborate with the Russian Red Cross Rescue Service (rcrs), a nongovernmental public body, and his life totally changed. “I never thought I’d be doing this,” says the heavyset, agile and mild-mannered man. “Don’t ask why, we’re just doing this.”

Since 1996, Lyubimsky has been working as a professional rescuer: first with the rcrs, then on the staff of the Ministry for Emergencies (mchs). The tasks are grim: in September 1999 he worked at an apartment block bombed by terrorists in Moscow’s Guryanova Street where 109 died, and five days later he dug for 38 hours through the wreckage of another block, bombed in Moscow’s Kashirka Street, where 124 more died. It was so rainy and cold that at times he had to lie among the corpses to get whatever body warmth they could still spare. In 2002, as a fentanyl-derivative gas knocked out the terrorists who seized the Moscow theater — and some 800 hostages along with them — Lyubimsky helped carry the unconscious people out, risking his own life.

What does he get in return? For one thing, his wife refuses to live with him, because she disapproves of his long hours and late-night alarm calls. Instead, he lives in the shack. Powerful property developers covet the plot it stands on, and there is a perpetual threat that they will invade at night to kick out the rescuers in an “ownership dispute.”

Such a seizure would mark the end of the road for the embattled nongovernmental rcrs, which represents the only backup the mchs has in major disasters. “We would have been all dead ourselves if it were not for their help,” says Lyubimsky. “Now, it’s they who need help.” It would be a painful irony if even Lyubimsky could not rescue his own rescuers. — By Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow