Death Trap

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The economic and political price would also be crippling. An expensive, protracted war would doom any hope of holding the nation's budget deficit to 1% of gross domestic product, as the International Monetary Fund demands Russia do in order to receive pending loans. Potential trade partners and investors would shy away: the 15-nation European Union last week announced that it would hold up completion of an interim trade accord to express displeasure at the Chechnya war. In the U.S., Republicans in Congress are already muttering about withholding aid. Moscow would lose billions of dollars in oil revenues if war keeps disrupting the flow of petroleum via pipelines running through Chechnya to foreign markets. All told, the war could severely set back or possibly reverse Russia's economic recovery.

Even before the first batch of "death letters" goes out to the families of Russian soldiers killed in Chechnya -- the dead have yet to be accurately counted, let alone identified -- political opposition in Moscow to the war is ferocious. It is fed in part by a widespread belief that the government is systematically lying about the fighting. Russia is experiencing its first televised war, with the same results that Vietnam coverage produced in the U.S. While the official TV channels dutifully read out government press bulletins that Russian troops last week were successfully occupying central Grozny and bringing in food to nourish liberated Chechens, even they followed the lead of independent NTV in presenting viewers with graphic footage showing that the truth was the exact and horrifying opposite.

Criticism mounted from public figures as wide-ranging as Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexei II, who stated that "no one can remain indifferent to the death of peaceful civilians," and former President Mikhail Gorbachev, who called the war a "disgraceful, bloody adventure." Some of the most furious assaults came from Yeltsin's democratic reformist allies. Economist Grigori Yavlinsky, once a prominent member of Yeltsin's planning team, advised his old boss, "Boris Nikolayevich, resign! Don't wash Russia with blood."

To what extent Yeltsin is in charge is uncertain. Power in Moscow has gravitated to such secretive and nonstatutory bodies as the Security Council, which makes more of the real decisions than parliament or the Cabinet; such shadowy figures as Ilyushin, Oleg Lobov, Yeltsin's friend for 20 years and secretary of the Security Council, and Alexander Korzhakov, head of the Kremlin security service, also reputedly wield great influence. Moscow gossips claim they can learn more by cultivating the chauffeurs and bodyguards of top officials than by attending press conferences or even sessions of the parliament.

As many Russian and foreign analysts see it, Yeltsin seems to have got lost in this Byzantine atmosphere: secluding himself in the Kremlin and listening to a narrowing circle of mostly militarist and nationalist advisers -- the "war party" of Defense, Interior and counterintelligence chiefs -- who tell him what he wants to hear. One popular theory about how the Chechnya invasion was launched is that Defense Minister Pavel Grachev convinced Yeltsin that a victorious little war would do wonders for his sagging popularity and that the secession could be crushed quickly and cheaply.