No Way Out?

At first light, Russian troops in combat gear move slowly along one of Grozny's ruined main streets, past makeshift crosses erected to their fallen comrades. Hugging the edge of the road to avoid snipers, they peer into the bushes, looking for radio-controlled mines and booby traps laid overnight by Chechen separatists. The soldiers--young conscripts fresh from the provinces and professionals here for the money--are tense, but they barely glance at most Chechens passing by. And the Chechens ignore them. The Russians don't find any mines this morning, and at a concrete-and-barbed-wire checkpoint, their comrades inspecting cars and buses don't catch any rebels. They occasionally rough up the drivers and often demand bribes, but the guerrillas know very well how this game is played. "Stick some money out the window, and they don't check anything," says a self-described mujahid. Ordinary residents like Zinaida, a clerical worker with a teenage son, are happy just to see another dawn. "Night is our hell," she says--a time when soldiers descend on homes, beat down doors and take away young men suspected of rebel activities. Most are never seen again.

This is gradual normalization, the phrase that Russian President Vladimir Putin's propaganda machine has come up with to describe what passes for life in Chechnya. When a mine blew up recently near the campus of Grozny University, a student looked at his watch and quipped, "Normalization is early today." Normalization is scheduled to enter a new phase this week, with the expected announcement of election results for the Chechen presidency. Chechens had little choice but to vote for Putin's hand-picked nominee, Akhmad Kadyrov, 52, head of the Moscow-appointed administration in Chechnya. The former mufti, or chief Islamic legal authority, of Chechnya was once an anti-Russian guerrilla fighter. He rallied to the Russian cause in late 1999 because, as he tells it, he disapproved of the growing influence of radical Islamists among the rebels. It was a dangerous move--Kadyrov has since survived many attempts on his life--but a politically advantageous one. By election day, he was virtually the only candidate left in the race; most of his serious rivals had been disqualified on technicalities, dropped out for "personal reasons" or been suddenly awarded plum jobs in Moscow.

Once in office, the new Chechen President is to be given broad powers to run the republic, Putin recently told a group of journalists from the U.S. media, including TIME. A local legislature will also be elected. Then the Kremlin plans to announce that the war is over, reduce its troop numbers to a small permanent garrison and hand over pacification duties to the 13,000 men in the Chechen police force, which is widely viewed as Kadyrov's private army, and an undisclosed number of Kadyrov's personal security guards.