By any standards, last weekend's televised performance by Defense Minister Pavel Grachev was grotesque. The chairman of the State Duma Defense Committee, Sergei Yushenkov, was dismissed as a "vile little toad;" the internationally recognized human-rights campaigner, Sergei Kovalyov, was smeared as an "enemy of Russia." Both accusations so crass that they can reflect only on Grachev.


Grachev chose to spit in the face of public and international opinion, and in reward his German opposite, Volker R--he, has rightly made it clear that he is no longer welcome at a European Security Forum in Munich in February.


But there was worse to come. What could Grachev possibly have been thinking when he said Russian soldiers were dying in Chechnya "with smiles on their faces"? Quite apart from the absurdity of such a statement, what does it say about Grachev's attitude to the families of the dead or to their comrades-in-arms, who saw them die and who know the truth?


Even those close to the defense minister were patently discomfited by this display. The faces of Interior Minister Viktor Yerin and counterintelligence chief Sergei Stepashin, who flanked Grachev throughout his diatribe, made it plain to anyone watching that both men wished very strongly to be somewhere else.


It was not the first time that Grachev had displayed such insensitivity. Responding to the death of Dmitry Kholodov, the investigative reporter killed by a booby-trap bomb last October, Grachev showed no regrets. Instead he insinuated that the journalist had blown himself up.


It would have been hard to find a more offensive response, although Grachev made a good effort with his bar-room language last weekend. Nor is the issue limited to diplomacy. For Grachev, who pledged there would be no assault on Grozny and who boasted that with one division of paratroopers he could take the city in two hours, has presided over a bloody fiasco.


In most people's view, the military campaign in Chechnya has been disastrous, appallingly planned and executed. Grachev's speech was chilling because it showed one possible road the Kremlin could now take: namely to go on calling white black and crush anybody who objects.


There is, however, an alternative. President Boris Yeltsin could admit the obvious -- that the Chechnya campaign was ill-conceived, ill-executed and span out of control almost before it had begun. He could cut his losses by trying to wind down the fighting as quickly as possible and find an negotiated settlement. And he could sack Grachev as a thoroughly deserving scapegoat.