MOSCOW — In one of Mikhail Lermontov's tales of the bloody 19th-century battles between the czar's armies and Chechen mountain warriors, a Russian soldier complains to his commander: "They don't seem to know when they ought to die, sir."
After two months of savage fighting in the latest war for Chechnya, the Chechens are still refusing to die. Dispirited Russian soldiers, mired in mud and ice, fear they will have to fight to the last Chechen to crush the republic's independence drive.
A two-week visit to Chechnya leaves an enduring impression that this is a war of ever-shifting fronts. As soon as the Russians declare victory on one front, a new one opens. Russia has might; Chechens have mobility.
In December, Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev boasted that he would
put down the revolt in two hours. But this is not a war measured in hours, or even days or weeks. It takes months and years to annihilate a people, and many Russians and Chechens fear this is what the war has come to.
"The more Chechens they kill, the more Chechens they will have to kill until there is no one left," said Ruslan Labazanov, a Chechen who once fought for Chechen President Dzhokhar Dudayev but who now supports the Russians. ''There won't be any quick end to this thing."
Last month, the Russians took the presidential palace in Grozny, the capital, after suffering staggering losses. Last week, they were poised to drive the bulk of Chechen forces out of the capital; on Wednesday, the Chechens moved their headquarters out of Grozny.
But most fighters have simply retreated to new strongholds south and east of the capital. If the Russians drive them from Argun, 12 miles east, they will have to take Shali just to the south. Then there is the big Chechen redoubt in Gudermes, 25 miles east of Grozny.
And beyond Gudermes are the mountains that exhausted the czar's armies. The
hills are home to hundreds of Chechen villages, each one a potential new front. Chechen fighters say they have stored ample ammunition and provisions at secret mountain bases.
"The Russian generals might have thought the war would end with the fall of the presidential palace," Aslan Mashkhadov, the Chechen military commander, told reporters last week after retreating to the relative safety of Argun. "But the war is only beginning."
