No Way Out?

VLADIMIR VELENGURIN/KP FOR TIME
Chechen policemen loyal to Moscow raid a home in Alkhan-Kala

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.

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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.

This Chechenization strategy intended to remove the war as an issue in Putin's re-election campaign next spring is reminiscent of the U.S.'s attempts to declare victory and get out of Vietnam three decades ago. It also has echoes in the U.S.'s current predicament in Iraq, as Bush seemed to acknowledge at a news conference with Putin at Camp David two weeks ago when he said, "Terrorists must be opposed wherever they spread chaos and destruction, including Chechnya." In Chechnya guerrillas have fended off a superior military force and used terrorist tactics to take the battle from Grozny to the streets of Moscow.

There's a neat symmetry to Putin's Chechenization scheme. The Chechen war, waged in 1994 by Putin's predecessor Boris Yeltsin, was supposed to be a brief punitive action against a small, unruly republic. But it ended in August 1996 with at least 80,000 Chechens dead, Russia humiliated and Chechnya independent in all but name. The experience was as scarring for Russia as Vietnam was for the U.S. In late 1999, after a series of apartment-block bombings in Moscow that the Kremlin blamed on Chechen terrorists, Putin, then Prime Minister, ordered the reinvasion of Chechnya, making the conflict a key theme of his presidential election campaign. By February 2000, Russian jets had crushed the resistance in Grozny by reducing the city to rubble. Putin's promise to bring the rebellious republic back into line got him elected President. He has no intention of letting the place unmake him now.

But with a Russian victory no closer today than it was three years ago, Putin desperately needs a credible Plan B. As many as seven Russian soldiers are being killed every day in Chechnya, according to close observers of the war. Moscow rarely publishes its losses, but last February the Kremlin admitted to almost 4,600 soldiers dead since late 1999--more than it lost in the first Chechen war but still considered a gross understatement. Musa Doshukayev, the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian-appointed administration in Chechnya, told TIME that the official Kremlin count "causes only mirth among security specialists." No one has counted the Chechen civilian dead this go-around, though a conservative estimate is 10,000. While officials in Moscow talk of wiping out the last 3,000 guerrillas something they were promising to do to the last 2,000 fighters three years ago the rebels have retained control of large swaths of territory. And all the while, Chechen civilians continue to live in fear and squalor, many of them without running water, sanitation, electricity or jobs.