Chechen Hell

CHRISTOPHER MORRIS--BLACK STAR FOR TIME Winning at Any Cost: Russia's special-reaction force in Chechnya

General Alexander Mikhailov clearly wishes he were somewhere else. "I had my fill of fighting these monkeys three years ago," he complains to us, as we wait in Mozdok, a military base three hours by plane from Moscow that is the nerve center of operations against Chechnya. There is no point in trying to make "whites" out of the Chechens, he says. What the republic needs is a "good old governor-general."

The choice of General Mikhailov to lead a group of journalists on a tour of Russian-controlled parts of Chechnya is an intriguing one. In 1996 he was chief spokesman for the Federal Security Service at Pervomayskoye, site of one of Russia's worst humiliations in the 1994-96 Chechen war. A Chechen leader named Salman Raduyev had seized the village, taken hostages and for days beaten back attacks by elite Russian units. Mikhailov was responsible for explaining this mortifying defeat to Russians and to the world. His performance was roundly denounced as inflammatory and wildly inaccurate, and he was fired. He is back as one of the chiefs of the Rosinformcenter, the official voice of the Russian government in its latest and so far more successful effort to regain control of the breakaway republic.

Mikhailov apparently regards journalists in much the same way he views Chechens. If anyone has visited the other side in this war, he says unsmilingly as we prepare to take off from Moscow, don't mention it to Russian soldiers. You could have "serious problems."

Our destination is Gudermes, Chechnya's second-largest city, which recently surrendered to Russian troops without a shot. Now, as Russian guns, warplanes and missiles reduce to rubble what was left of Gudermes after the 1994-96 war, Russian officials talk increasingly of turning this grim railway town with a peacetime population of 38,000 into Chechnya's new capital. No problem, says a Russian airborne general, as we stand in a forward base just outside Gudermes listening to the steady rumble of heavy artillery and long salvos of Grad missiles. "We could establish the capital on this hill if we were told to." We are informed confidentially that a high-level delegation from Moscow will be flying in. But a brief, chaotic visit to the town underscores the difficulties that the Russian armed forces are having administering even an ostensibly friendly town.