GROZNY -- A two-day cease-fire that began in the Chechen capital Grozny on Tuesday morning collapsed amid renewed fighting by the afternoon, with Chechens fighters using the brief pause in hostilities to bring reinforcements into the city.


Reuters said the Chechens had begun "to pour men and arms into front-line positions" during the lull in the violence.


Reporters who crossed the Sunzha river bridge on foot saw Russian mortar bombs, artillery shells and rocket-propelled grenades landing in Freedom Square in front of separatist president Dzhokhar Dudayev's shell-blackened palace, the agency said.


"Either this is propaganda or the (Russian) military is not taking orders. We think it is both," Chechnya's information minister, Movladi Udugov, told reporters in the south of Grozny as shelling and small arms fire resounded from the direction of the city center.


But in Moscow, there were some signs that President Boris Yeltsin may have begun to turn toward more moderate members of his entourage, perhaps dissatisfied by the performance of the so-called "party of war" that has until now driven the conflict.


Defense Minister Pavel Grachev has agreed to cooperate with an independent inquiry into whether Russian troops ignored orders to stop bombing Grozny, a top official said Tuesday. He added that Grachev denied any bombing raids had been ordered since Dec. 23, Reuters reported.


The bombings have caused international outrage and embarrassed Yeltsin who twice has called for an end to the air raids.


Itar-Tass reported a meeting between the president and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, the cease-fire's sponsor, in which Yeltsin hinted that he was unhappy with the quality of information he has been getting.


"The president especially stressed the need for wider use of professionals and analysts on the level of finding solutions and also the need for provisional calculation of the financial costs of the decisions which have been taken," said an official statement released by the Kremlin press service.


Chernomyrdin also met members of the Chechen diaspora Tuesday and later said that a special group had been set up within the cabinet and a plan of action worked out to "resolve the Chechen conflict without the use of force," Itar-Tass reported.


Chernomyrdin and Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, who has softened an initially tough stance, have taken a more flexible line on the crisis than their colleagues on the Security Council, which has taken most key decisions on the crisis, exposing a deep divide among Yeltsin's aides.


In another significant move, the speakers of the two houses of parliament, Ivan Rybkin and Vladimir Shumeiko -- both, like the prime minister, considered pragmatists -- were promoted Tuesday to be permanent members of the Security Council. They will now have the right, alongside Yeltsin, Chernomyrdin and the council chairman Oleg Lobov, to cast a "deciding vote" on resolutions and to chair council meetings.


"They are not hawks," the political commentator for Izvestia Otto Latsis observed of Shumeiko and Rybkin. "They are unprincipled people, they will do what they see necessary."


Rybkin told Interfax on Tuesday that there was a need for "strong coordination of all the power ministries," in an apparent criticism of the badly planned operation.


The most outspoken opponent of the war is Yeltsin's human rights ombudsman, Sergei Kovalyov. Now back in Chechnya after a short high-profile visit to Moscow, Kovalyov said an opportunity had been missed Tuesday.


Kovalyov, who helped negotiate Chernomyrdin's cease-fire proposal, said the content of the final declaration released by the government early Tuesday was "fundamentally different" from what he had discussed with the prime minister, Interfax reported.


He said the statement amounted to an ultimatum, not a truce leading to negotiations as he had hoped, and attacked it for failing to make any mention of removing dead and wounded from the streets of Grozny.


The limited cease-fire offer could be explained as a temporary concession to Chernomyrdin. Or it may have been designed to take some sting out of the anti-war campaign at home and the denunciations of the war abroad.


"Maybe they are just trying to lie low for a couple of days," commented one Western diplomat.


The government's declaration said the Chechens had 48 hours, beginning at 8 A.M. Tuesday, to lay down their arms. A later statement by the government press service said the truce was a "last chance" for separatist president Dzhokhar Dudayev to reach terms with Moscow.


Dudayev's information minister, Udugov, said Tuesday that a commander in chief of the Chechen armed forces, Colonel Aslan Maskhadov, was holding talks with Russian General Ivan Babichev, whose division is based in the House of Culture in Grozny. Earlier in the campaign Babichev, who then commanded a column of tanks, had created a political storm when he refused to march on the city.


"There is no clear front line, they are fighting building by building," Udugov said of the Russians. The central bazaar is held by Chechens but Russian snipers are in two or three buildings nearby, he said.


Larissa Timurbulatova, 24, a nurse from Hospital No. 9 in the northeast of the capital, fled under sniper fire Tuesday toward the south and relative safety.


Timurbulatova said that she, together with a surgeon and one other nurse, had treated some 50 patients in the basement since Dec. 31. The hospital had received some 200 dead Chechens but only one wounded Russian. She said she could not work any more without heat, light and proper supplies.