It is not a pretty picture. For the first time, images like this one from the fighting in Chechnya -- and other footage at least as disturbing -- have become a part of the daily television news diet of millions of Russians.
The sight of dead, maimed and captured Russian soldiers is coming as a shock here. Much more than the impassioned denunciations of political figures, the images of Russia's first major televised conflict appear to be stirring bitter opposition to what was already an extremely unpopular war. Moreover, the pictures seem to have canceled out the government's Soviet-style propaganda campaign, which has produced a blizzard of lies, disinformation and distortion about the war in Chechnya.
"I watched it on television -- so many people were killed, there must be hundreds," said Nina Kizyakova, 80, a retired doctor. President Boris Yeltsin "should be shot for this."
Images from Grozny "are impossible to watch without anguish," Viktor Ilyushin, a top Yeltsin aide, acknowledged Tuesday.
Until now Russia has had no comparable experience to America's televised war in Vietnam.
During the Soviet Union's venture in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when, according to official counts, 15,000 Russian troops were killed, strict state censorship sanitized the images that reached Moscow and the provinces. Corpses of servicemen were returned home in sealed zinc coffins, and whatever horrors had befallen them were left to the imaginations of their bereaved countrymen.
The state's grip on the media has loosened considerably since the Afghan war, leaving nearly all newspapers and some television outlets more or less free to cover the news as they wish. The result is that as the war in Chechnya reached a climax this week with a ferocious battle in the heart of Grozny, the military debacle for Russian troops is being magnified for the entire nation by gruesome and wrenching pictures.
The most damning footage has been aired by NTV. In one broadcast in the opening days of the war, an injured Russian soldier whose legs had been amputated was shown naked and close up. Another severely wounded serviceman was seen twitching, with tubes running from his nose.
In the last few days, as the Russian attempt to storm central Grozny was repulsed by fierce Chechen resistance, NTV aired footage of young Russian POWs, obviously deeply frightened, being led into the bomb shelter beneath Grozny's presidential palace. There have been pictures of old women wounded in their Grozny homes by errant Russian bombs, interviewed with their faces and clothing still stained with fresh blood.
The government has threatened to revoke NTV's license, but the station's coverage has been unrelenting, and apparently has taken it's toll in public opinion: Polls show that Russians oppose the war by more than 2 to 1.
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