A month ago President Dzhokhar Dudayev, the flamboyant president of Chechnya, looked in trouble. His economy had collapsed, his capital Grozny was facing its third winter without heating, popular support was wearing thin and rebel forces were closing in.


But Dudayev, who rose to power on a wave of nationalist feeling in 1991, had one last card up his sleeve: The Russian threat. And obligingly, the Russians have come to his aid.


Ten days ago, the invasion Dudayev has been darkly predicting for nearly three years, began. At least 20 Russian soldiers were among those captured in a failed assault on Grozny. On television they said they were regular army troops. Then jets, now acknowledged to have been Russian, blitzed the city, causing civilian casualties ( See Page 3).


That has been enough to rally Chechens behind Dudayev, a former airforce general, who can revel once more in his favorite role as the defender of Chechen independence against the Russian empire.


A typical gesture was his telegram last week to Pyotr Deneikin, the commander of the Russian airforce, "congratulating" him for the air-raids on Grozny and saying "we will meet on the ground."


Most ordinary Chechens say they feel remote from politics. But a huge number said that if the Russians invade they will rally behind Dudayev and fight them, as their ancestors did in the Caucasian wars of the last century.


One such Chechen is Said, who runs a restaurant in Grozny.


"I am against Dudayev, I am against the opposition, but if the Russians come in I will go and fight," he said.


What has saved Dudayev has all but destroyed his opponents. Asked about the Chechen opposition's role in events last week, Dudayev could say simply "our only opposition is Russia." For once his statement was self-evidently true. The opposition's attempted big push against Grozny 10 days ago was repulsed. The operation was not only a military failure, it demonstrated what for months Dudayev had vainly been trying to prove, namely that the opposition were nothing more than stooges for Moscow. That has discredited them in the eyes of most Chechens.


A symptom of the decline of the opposition, which was always a disorganized movement, is the way the former speaker of the Russian parliament, Ruslan Khasbulatov, left the North Caucasian republic Sunday, saying that his self-proclaimed "peacekeeping mission" was now redundant "Russia is bringing in troops. As you know I was always against this development in events," Khasbulatov said in a statement. "My role has been made superfluous, the role of an observer of events which I can no longer influence."


Dudayev and his ministers have consistently refused to talk to the opposition. But they say they are happy to talk to anyone from Moscow, provided the issue of Chechen independence is not negotiable. Inter-government talks now look set to take place as soon as a location is agreed upon.


The Chechens can afford to be gleeful as Moscow no longer speaks with a single voice and looks increasingly hesitant about invading.


A small liberal bandwagon has been set in motion against military intervention. A delegation from the State Duma, led by the head of the defense committee Sergei Yushenko, has strongly urged the Kremlin against intervention. They and other liberals are angry that the Defense Ministry lied in denying that regular Russian troops were used in the conflict and about the air raids in which civilians died.


Yegor Gaidar's reformist Russia's Choice party called the military threats against Chechnya an "action directed at destabilizing the situation in Russia, a rejection of the democratic achievements of recent years."


A gradualist approach is also attracting supporters. The speaker of the upper house of parliament, the Federation Council, Vladimir Shumeiko, who earlier this year urged for a meeting between Yeltsin and Dudayev, said Monday that there should be negotiations with official Chechnya before a state of emergency is imposed there. The Federation Council, has to approve the imposition of a state of emergency.


Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin suggested in an interview Saturday that he held the same view.


"Imposing a state of emergency is really a last resort which I hope is not under discussion either now or in the future," he told Rossiskaya Gazeta.


Finally, where military intervention could only favor Dudayev politically, it involves huge risks for Yeltsin, who cannot be sure that public opinion is behind him. Russian television, especially the non-government NTV channel, has shown its viewers the bombing raids on Grozny and pictures of Russian prisoners who say they have been abandoned by the Defense Ministry. The parallel with Afghanistan must be too uncomfortable for Yeltsin to ignore.