Chechnya

In the high, rocky passes of the Caucasus Mountains, in a place where the czars' armies struggled for decades to subdue the fierce local tribesmen, and where the winters can be grim as any in Russia, President Boris N. Yeltsin has decided to take a long-shot gamble on his political future. The question, of course, is, why. It has been more than three years since Chechnya, the small patch of Russian soil that Yeltsin is trying to reclaim with military force, declared its independence from the Russian Federation, amid the confusion of the Soviet Union's collapse.

I went to see the war in Chechnya on a Russian military transport plane bringing emergency supplies to the battle zone. The passengers huddled in pull-down seats along the plane's walls facing a mountainous pile of packaged Costa Rican noodle soup, military gear, camcorders, a huge karaoke video-TV, and parcels from mothers in Siberia to their soldier sons, atop which sat a couple of dozen armed guards in black knit caps and camouflage whose...

Mike Tyson is beloved in Chechnya, judging from the spectators who mobbed him on the streets Thursday and jammed the stands to watch him open a boxing tournament in the city of Gudermes. The former heavyweight champion was the first international celebrity to visit the strife-torn Russian republic, besieged for a decade by guerrilla conflict between separatist Muslim rebels and Russian troops. Tyson converted to Islam while in prison on a 1992 rape conviction. He told the crowd that when he boxed, it wasn't for himself but for all Muslims in the world, including Chechens, whom he considers to be his brothers.

Anna Lopotkhova can still remember a time when this tidy city on the Volga looked exactly the way Grozny looks now. It was 1942, and Hitler's army was pushing east through Russia. For six long months, the Germans relentlessly battered the city then known as Stalingrad. By the time they surrendered in exhaustion on Feb. 2, 1943, "the city was just rocks and stones," Lopotkhova said. In the intervening years, the Soviets thoroughly rebuilt Stalingrad and changed its name, so that now virtually the only traces of the past are in the collective memories of its citizens, people like Lopotkhova.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin marched to the brink of war with a breakaway region of the Caucasus Mountains recently, then backed off at the last minute when friends and enemies alike raised a clamor of protest. Then late last week, he authorized the use of force against unspecified militias in the region. This back-and-forth approach reveals much about the operating style of Russian intelligence organizations since the dissolution of the old KGB in 1991. As always with intelligence operations, the story is complicated.

Dear Boris Nikolayevich: We Americans who lived through the Vietnam War would like to send you a message: Don't make the mistake of getting bogged down in another guerrilla conflict. We thought Russian leaders might have learned that lesson in Afghanistan, where they went in for an easy kill and came out years later, bloodied. That war laid the seeds for the end of the Soviet empire. Today, you have the bare beginnings of a democracy. You say it is necessary to keep pieces of the Russian federation, like Chechnya, from seceding, or the ultranationalists will take over.

To anyone who observed Russia's brutal war in Chechnya earlier this decade, her headlong rush into another tangle with Muslim mountain warriors appears mad. It is a true "wag the dog" scenario: Russian politicians, with an eye to coming parliamentary and presidential elections, are trying to distract voters from corruption scandals and economic woes. Russia has massed tens of thousands of troops on the Chechen border, and is bombing an already pulverized republic back beyond the Stone Age, supposedly to crush Islamic militants.

As Russian troops kill hundreds of Chechen civilians and force hundreds of thousands more into wintry exile, pressure is mounting on the Clinton administration to sharpen its opposition to the onslaught. The reasons are not just humanitarian. Moscow's indiscriminate attacks on the separatist region, Russia experts warn, could undermine Russia's efforts to democratize. They could also destabilize oil-rich Central Asia and erode cooperation between Moscow and the West. The administration has been reluctant to do anything to deter the carnage in Chechnya, or even to protest it vigorously.

In another step toward reconciliation after a bloody two-year war, the presidents of Russia and Chechnya signed a formal peace treaty here yesterday. But a wave of kidnappings, bombings and other violence blamed on former rebels has kept the southern Russian province far from peaceful. Proclaiming an end to four centuries of intermittent conflict with Chechnya, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin initialed the accord after a cordial meeting with Chechnya's wartime military commander and newly elected president, Aslan Maskhadov.

On my office wall I keep a photo of Russian President Boris Yeltsin standing by the Liberty Bell during a 1989 visit to Philadelphia. At Independence Hall, in the room where the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution, Yeltsin spent 10 minutes quizzing the National Park Service guide. His questions all focused on one subject: How did these Americans decide how much power the states should cede to the central government, and how much they should keep for themselves? Hearing that conversation helped shape my early favorable impression of Yeltsin, at a time when he was unpopular with the Bush administration and was being portrayed (unfairly)

SO, WHAT DO you get when the biggest army since Napoleon showed up in 1812 - 55,000 Brits this time - has pitched camp in Moscow for today's UEFA Champions League final? What you get is a potential perfect storm of soccer violence with Europe's equivalent of the NFL's Super Bowl as the eye of the hurricane. You get ????????????? ??????? ????????????. Really big trouble. It could have been a champion side from the Italian league vs. a German titleholder. It could have been any conceivable Euro combination from the "football"-playing powers of the continent and the United Kingdom.

'Roo back in zoo BERLIN - Skippi, a wily kangaroo on the run since early August, was returned yesterday to his home at a petting zoo in southern Germany, but not until a chase through the Alps that left the animal with a strained leg. The injured marsupial was captured in a cornfield almost 10 miles from where his journey began, police in the nearby town of Ravensburg said. Residents in the area had reported multiple sightings of the kangaroo over the past few weeks. Greek tragedy: Among the horrors, some stand out ATHENS, Greece - Firefighters rushed helicopters and buses yesterday to evacuate more than two dozen villages threatened by towering walls of flames that had killed 63 people while ravaging swaths of forest and farmland in Greece's worst wildfire disaster in memory.

At Saturday's G-8 summit in St. Petersburg, President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin are certain to celebrate their recent successes in the global war on terrorism: the June 7 killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, and the July 10 liquidation of Chechen separatist Shamil Basayev. At first blush, the similarities between Zarqawi and Basayev appear significant. Both used Islam to inspire followers and legitimize violent force. Both led dynamic insurgencies embracing comparable military tactics.

Mike Tyson is beloved in Chechnya, judging from the spectators who mobbed him on the streets Thursday and jammed the stands to watch him open a boxing tournament in the city of Gudermes. The former heavyweight champion was the first international celebrity to visit the strife-torn Russian republic, besieged for a decade by guerrilla conflict between separatist Muslim rebels and Russian troops. Tyson converted to Islam while in prison on a 1992 rape conviction. He told the crowd that when he boxed, it wasn't for himself but for all Muslims in the world, including Chechens, whom he considers to be his brothers.

With one foot planted in Russia's autocratic past and the other in its democratic present, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin launched his reelection campaign yesterday during a live, three-hour TV call-in show that resembled a public audience with one of his czarist predecessors. Once a year, the common folk of Russia get a shot at telling their usually remote president what's on their minds. From Murmansk to Vladivostok, they phone, fax and e-mail questions to their leader, who this year seized the opportunity to confirm, to no one's surprise, that he will run in the March 14 election.

The odd career path of Akhmad Kadyrov - college headmaster, anti-Russian guerrilla fighter, Islamic cleric, pro-Russian political appointee - has taken another sharp turn, as he has used the Kremlin's support to sweep 85 percent of the vote, becoming the new president of the war-torn Russian republic of Chechnya. Just days before the election, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin had endorsed Kadyrov, 53, as "an open, decent and honest person. " The world's major human-rights organizations boycotted the voting, refusing to send observers because of safety concerns, and they criticized the election as a piece of political theater stage-managed by Moscow.

House of Fools, Andrei Konchalovsky's film set near Chechnya during the 1996 civil war, purveys the exhausted allegory of the mental institution as metaphor for society. Konchalovsky would seem to say that what happens when patients take over the asylum is the same as when Russians struggled to create new order after the fall of the Soviet Union. Though it purports to be based on a real incident, the movie is remarkably close in plot to King of Hearts, the one about the World War I soldier who finds those in the so-called madhouse much saner than the officers outside.

Fighting in Israel as New year begins Israel ushered in the Jewish New Year yesterday with armed guards stationed at synagogues and the holiday serving as a reminder of peace hopes lost in a year of fighting with the Palestinians. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat sent New Year's greetings to Israel, along with reassurances that he has ordered his forces to cease fire. But fighting persisted, with one Palestinian killed and 15 wounded in gun battles in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Russian forces in the breakaway region of Chechnya said yesterday that 30 separatist rebels had been killed in separate operations, Russian news agencies reported. The reports came as liberal Russian legislators said they had signed a protocol with members of Chechnya's parliament that eventually could lead to a negotiated solution to the 15-month war. There was no response to the initiative from the Russian government, which has insisted that the only settlement it will accept is the surrender of rebel commanders.

The Russian crewmen of the submarine Kursk lie entombed on the bottom of the Barents Sea, but their story is far from over. Their grisly deaths hold a warning for us all. The Kursk tragedy has exposed a continuing culture of Cold War-style secrecy among top Russian military and government officials, whose first instinct was to hush up the catastrophe rather than save their own men. It has also exposed Russia's inability to finance its nuclear...