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PRETORIA, Oct 28 (Reuters) - Former South African President Nelson Mandela sent condolences on Monday to his old ally Russia and relatives of over 100 Russians who died in a dramatic rescue from a Moscow theatre, condemning their captors as "terrorists".

Mandela, himself once branded a "terrorist" during his decades-long struggle to end his country's racist apartheid rule, was picking up a Soviet-era peace prize 12 years after he was first named a Lenin Peace Prize laureate by his Soviet allies.

He condemned the Chechen separatists who seized the theatre and took hundreds of people hostage, prompting a dramatic rescue by Russian special forces in which at least 117 hostages died, mostly from inhaling gas used to overpower their captors.

The Chechens were demanding Moscow pull troops out of their homeland.

"No government must be pressurised by terrorists to do something that it is not prepared to do," Mandela said at a ceremony at Russia's embassy in Pretoria where he received the International Lenin Peace Prize.

"I want it to be clear what I mean by terrorists, because this is a term that has been abused," Mandela said shortly after a moment of silence was observed for the Moscow dead.

"By a terrorist I mean a person or group of persons, or a state, which targets innocent individuals in order to accomplish its ends. That is a terrorist."

Mandela was named Lenin peace laureate in 1990 by the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), but had never actually received the award due to the subsequent break-up of the USSR, a long-standing ally of Mandela's cause.

"The governments and peoples of the Socialist bloc gave material, moral and political support to our struggle in a manner and on a scale that we will never be able to repay," he said.

Mandela, who led the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), spent 27 years in jail on charges of sabotage and conspiracy. He was released in 1990 and elected South African president in the country's first democratic elections in 1994. He was succeeded in 1999 by Thabo Mbeki.

Current U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney voted against sanctions on South Africa's apartheid government in the 1980s, arguing that Mandela's ANC was a terrorist organisation. 

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