Death Trap

The pictures of bomb-gutted buildings and bloody-faced civilians could have come from Sarajevo. Footage of burned corpses protruding from tank hatches might have been taken along the Highway of Death leading out of Kuwait. But there was something unnervingly different about the war in Chechnya, as a government turned its military might upon its own people and attempted, at terrible cost to its own soldiers, to level their capital city. For all the destruction and death, there was no victory to be had. David was defying Goliath, a Goliath that had held the world in fear for a half-century. It bred a creepy sense of things coming unhinged, of supposed verities turned upside down, of heroes and villains switching roles, of future dangers that looked all the scarier because it was hard to tell which scenario to fear the most.

Take, to begin with, the debacle the Russian army suffered when it tried last week to storm the Chechen capital of Grozny, only to be driven back from the city center by greatly outnumbered and outgunned Chechen fighters. Yes, everyone knew the Russian military was no longer the tightly disciplined, overpowering army that a few years ago haunted the dreams of potential victims from Beijing to Bonn. It still came as a shock that the machine had deteriorated so badly -- and a greater shock that so much of it was riven by dissension and insubordination from teenage draftees who deserted, sometimes jumping off troop trains rather than going into battle, to senior generals who openly denounced the Kremlin's orders and local commanders who ignored them. Should the outside world be less worried about Russia's military prowess because the army seemed for the moment incapable of acting as an instrument of aggression? Or more worried that generals who still control nuclear weaponry scorn the commands of their civilian superiors?

Then, what was to be made of Boris Yeltsin? Clearly he could no longer be regarded as the democratic hero of Western myth. But had he become an old- style communist boss, turning his back on the democratic reformers he once championed and throwing in his lot with militarists and ultranationalists? Or was he a befuddled, out-of-touch chief being manipulated, knowingly or unwittingly, by -- well, by whom exactly? If there was to be a dictatorial coup, would Yeltsin be its victim or its leader?

Most disturbing of all was the sense that in this war there was no clearly defined right and wrong. Most outsiders felt instinctive sympathy for the Chechens as the victims of assault, of indiscriminate bombing of civilians -- but sympathy too for the hapless Russian recruits dying because of the ineptitude of their leaders and generals. But could anyone really cheer for Chechen secession? A few voices call for letting regions historically forced into the Russian Federation go free, like the other pieces of the Soviet Empire. But the U.S. and West European governments acknowledged without question Russia's right to hold the country together. Analogies are never exact, but the rough equivalent of siding with the Chechens would be defending the right of heavily Mexican areas of South Texas or the Basque region of northern Spain to declare themselves independent nations.