Rebellion in Russia

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

The obscure land called Chechnya is about the size of Connecticut, a mere pinprick even on a large world map. Its 1.3 million people make up less than 1% of the population of the Russian Federation from which it is trying to secede. But the war in this mountain enclave in the northern Caucasus involves stakes that are hardly Ruritanian. Obviously, there are the lives of many thousands of Chechens and Russian soldiers that could be snuffed out in the promised guerrilla struggle; at week's end, at least 16 and possibly 70 Russians -- counts differed wildly -- and hundreds of Chechens had already fallen in heavy fighting. Even more ominous, a drawn-out campaign could deal a devastating blow to Boris Yeltsin's presidency and Russia's endangered democracy.

The survival of Russia as a single country could also be imperiled. A successful bid for independence by Chechnya could encourage secessionist movements in scores of other unhappy ethnic and economic enclaves. On a broader canvas still, the worldwide trend of small ethnic groups to break away from larger sovereignties and form their own mini-nations could get either a stiff setback or a strong boost from Chechnya's fate.

Though Russia sent in a heavy force on Dec. 11 to stop the rebellion, and the Chechens vowed to fight, both sides appeared to be drawing back from a blood-soaked showdown. As many as 40,000 Russian troops converged on the Chechen capital of Grozny but were holding off on a final assault. Yeltsin extended for 48 hours, until Saturday midnight, an ultimatum for Chechens to surrender their weapons. His first ultimatum was a flat failure; as it was about to expire Thursday, the Moscow news agency TASS reported that "not a single gun has been turned in." On Saturday, Moscow issued a harsher threat: missile strikes against strategic targets in Grozny if the Chechens did not disarm. The rebels refused to blink. Said a spokesman: "When the bombing starts, we will first go to our shelters. When it is finished, the command will go out to our forces to defend the city against the Russian attack."

On Wednesday, Dec. 14, Chechen president Jokhar Dudayev had broken off negotiations with a Russian team and summoned his people to "a war for life or death." But on Friday he proclaimed a cease-fire and announced that he would reopen talks. The stated positions of the two sides would seem to leave nothing to talk about. Dudayev was demanding that Russia immediately pull out its forces and recognize the full independence he had proclaimed for Chechnya three years ago, while Yeltsin insisted as a precondition for any withdrawal that the Chechens disarm and end their secession. The view in Moscow was that by extending his ultimatum and appealing for new talks, Yeltsin had made significant concessions and was looking for a way to avoid continuing the war.

Certainly Yeltsin appeared unlikely to win any cheap or easy victory. His forces could probably storm and occupy Grozny, a city of 400,000, within hours. But that would begin rather than end the war. Dudayev has called on his ! people to "strike and withdraw, strike and withdraw" until the invaders flee in "fear and terror." That was the strategy Chechen forebears followed in fighting czarist armies. They lost, but it took the Russians 47 years between 1817 and 1864 to subdue them.

The 1994 Russian army is also meeting tenacious resistance. To reach Grozny, it had to fight its way through Ingushetiya, an ethnic republic whose people are Muslim and, like the Chechens, are anti-Russian. Two days after the advance began, the burned-out hulks of at least seven Russian trucks could be seen on the main highway through Ingushetiya into Chechnya; many more, with their tires cut, were being towed away.

The following day, near the village of Sleptsovskaya on the Chechnya- Ingushetiya border, a fiery-red morning sun was melting the light frost on fertile fields and groves lining the highway to Grozny 18 miles away. But Russian soldiers in a column of 50 light tanks, armored personnel carriers and trucks could not enjoy the idyllic scene; they had to stop and take shelter behind their vehicles from unseen Chechen snipers. In a lovely grove left of the highway, a Grad missile launcher fired its projectiles toward the Chechen village of Achkoi-Martan four miles ahead; heavy artillery boomed and fires blazed atop hills. Journalists could not follow the battle any further because a light Russian tank suddenly opened fire on them with a machine gun, chasing the reporters into their parked cars and away from the scene. First, though, the journalists heard the views of Victor, a Russian major who declined to give his full name: "This whole thing is stupid, useless and futile. I grew up here in the North Caucasus. I know these people. Once challenged, they'll fight to the last."

The same sentiments rang through Moscow. Dread of a prolonged guerrilla war that might not be confined to Chechnya -- the rebels have threatened terrorist attacks on Russian nuclear-power stations -- united communists, leaders of the once pro-Yeltsin Russia's Choice party and many other politicians in condemnation of the invasion. Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultranationalists were the only major faction to voice even tepid support.

The great fear of democratic politicians is that Russia's fledgling institutions of free government are too fragile to withstand a draining, divisive war. Yeltsin and his onetime democratic allies are already increasingly isolated and on the defensive against the tacit "red-brown" alliance of communists and ultranationalists. If democratic forces now become wholly estranged from the President, the odds increase that military factions disgruntled with Yeltsin's handling of the Chechen crisis might stage a long- predicted military coup, neatly disguised as a necessary crackdown to prosecute the war. But the army itself is also divided; some officers far higher in rank than Major Victor consider the invasion a piece of bloody foolishness.

An alternative scenario has Yeltsin himself staging a dictatorial coup. By this theory, his impetuous order to invade Chechnya, after three years of largely ignoring the problem, proves he is succumbing to the influence of what Russians call the "power ministries": the more hawkish army generals, the Ministry of Defense and the intelligence services. They apparently talked him into the covert anti-independence operation in Chechnya that backfired embarrassingly at the end of November, when the Chechens caught and jailed Russian soldiers supporting an aborted coup against Dudayev. Yeltsin then ordered an open, armed assault in hopes of a quick victory that would distract Russians both from that humiliation and from the country's continuing economic woes. If that does not work, he could take advantage of provisions in the year-old constitution to provoke a fight with parliament, then dissolve it and rule by decree.

But Yeltsin has some compelling motives for ordering the attack. Chechnya is important to the distressed Russian economy: a vital railroad line and oil pipeline run through it. Russians also regard Chechens as the core of the Russian mafia, and their region as a center of arms and drug smuggling that has to be suppressed.

More important, there is something to the insistence by Yeltsin that he had to bring Chechnya back under Moscow's authority to preserve Russia's "integrity." The Russian Federation teems with groups that have some kind of ethnic, territorial or economic gripe against Moscow. Even now, Moscow's writ hardly runs in some areas. But a drawn-out war in Chechnya could incite rather than discourage more outright secessions.

All this presents a dilemma for Washington, which likes to pose as a champion both of self-determination and of global stability. For now, stability has won: everyone in the Clinton Administration -- from Vice President Al Gore, who visited Moscow last week, on down -- resolutely dismisses the crisis as a Russian "internal affair" about which the U.S. has nothing to say. If the war continues, though, it will reopen a painful question: how to strike a balance between condoning brutal repression of peoples unwilling to remain in a larger community, and countenancing an endless and chaotic proliferation of tiny and often economically unviable nations. The hope in both Washington and Moscow is that Yeltsin and Dudayev can patch something together that will avert all-out war and put off that question a bit longer. But the hope seems slim.

With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly and John Kohan/Moscow, J.F.O. McAllister/Washington and Yuri Zarakhovich/Sleptsovskaya