GROZNY, Chechnya -- Appearances can be deceptive at the parliament building in the Chechen capital Grozny.


Although the plaque outside says "parliament," the building is full of men with white beards and Astrakhan hats, leather pistol holders slung over their shoulders. They are some of the 7,000 village elders of Chechnya who have made the parliament building their headquarters. Outside in the square they dance a religious rite known as the zikr. Men rush round in a circle, stamping their feet and clapping. They chant mournfully for Allah to forgive their sins.


The meetings inside and the dance outside are not orchestrated by rebel President Dzhokhar Dudayev. They are proof of how a nominal republic with a president at its head is more accurately a network of clans, villages and religious brotherhoods which all but regulates itself.


The Chechen Council of Elders is trying to reconstitute itself as an arbiter in disputes between people of different teips, the more than 100 clans to which every Chechen belongs.


"The council of elders was like that before the October Revolution, the court of the country decided all questions," said Said Ahmad Adizov, chairman of the council. "If there was a dispute between teips the council decided all questions."


But Adizov acknowledges that the Soviet regime virtually eviscerated their Islamic and Chechen traditions and the vacuum has not yet been filled.


"We are making the transition back slowly," Adizov said. "For 73 years, thanks to the communist system we have been divorced from Moslem ways"


Instead Chechnya is a land of leaders, from the national level to the local.


"Chechens have respect for the authoritative," said Salamu Dauyev, a leading member of the Chechen opposition and aide to the former speaker of the Russian parliament, Ruslan Khasbulatov.


Dauyev said that the pull of strong personalities, like Khasbulatov and Dudayev, was extremely important, and that many Chechens felt loyalty to more than one at once. The commander of the Shali tank regiment has for example at different times promised his support to different sides in the conflict.


On a lower level, every community in Chechnya has its own leader with his own authority. The village of Shalazhi south of Grozny has even gone so far as to declare autonomy from the rest of the republic under its leader, Ruslan Zakreyev.


The respected elder of one village, Mechekhi, is a German, Wilhelm Weisserth, who converted to Islam when he married a Chechen in Kazakhstan. He returned with the Chechens from exile and is now a respected Islamic judge.


The downside of the Chechens' local diversity is a freebooting tradition. Once famous horse thieves, the Chechens are now famous for fraud, blackmarket trading and gangsterism.The chief elder, Adizov, complained that the younger generation is often disrespectful of Islam and dabbles in crime.


"There are those who are greedy for what belongs to others, who don't respect the will of Allah and all the saints, people who like madmen and wild bears want to get their hands on everything," he lamented.


Other young Chechens are pursuing violence under the cloak of tradition. The most famous is Chechen gangster Ruslan Labazanov, whose men, when they are not watching violent American videos, wear black headbands and talk of a traditional blood feud they have declared on Dudayev.


Adizov said he had vainly tried to persuade Labazanov to abandon his feud.


"I personally appealed to Labazanov," Adizov said. "I said be careful, you're young, don't do these things."


But Labazanov has ignored the appeal and said last week: "I am fighting against Dudayev and I won't be calm until he is destroyed."


The only thing that has united the Chechens in the past is a common resistance to the Russians.


In the last century they fought for 40 years against the tsar's armies and were only subdued in the 1860s. One piece of Chechen folklore has it that if the leader of the Caucasian tribes' resistance, Shamil, had been a Chechen, rather than an Avar, they would not have given in.


In 1944 Stalin had the entire Chechen and Ingush population deported to Central Asia for allegedly collaborating with the Nazis. Their republic was abolished and they were only allowed to return in 1957.


In his book "The Gulag Archipelago," Alexander Solzhenitsyn pays tribute to the solidarity and tenacity of the Chechens, whom, he says, were the only people in Stalin's camps who refused to submit to the "psychology of submission."


Should the Russians invade, the Chechens will probably bury their differences again. Labazanov said he would fight alongside his sworn enemy Dudayev to repel them. Many Chechens say they would retreat to the mountains to fight a partisan war as their ancestors did.


"Three times before when the enemy came we escaped to the mountains," Adizov said. "We are prepared to do the same a fourth time."