Search for 'One Chechen'

The tsarist conqueror of the Caucasus Alexei Yermolov once said famously that all he needed was "one Chechen" in order to subdue the mountain peoples.


There seems little doubt that Chechnya will soon formally be part of the Russian federation again, even if Grozny is in ruins and there are hundreds or thousands of casualties. The military arithmetic is unstoppable.


But the more long-term political problem now looks virtually insoluble. Moscow will certainly need "one Chechen" to help bring the republic around, but the prospects of finding him do not look good.


The Moscow leadership's fundamental mistake is that it has called the Chechens' bluff.


Chechen independence consisted -- still consists, at the time of writing -- of two things: a huge sense of pride and a free economic zone. The Chechens swelled with pride at their national flag and the name-plates outside their ministries, and they dodged Russian import duties when they traded consumer goods.


But the reality went little further. Most Chechens had a kind of double-talk. If you asked, "Do you support Dudayev and Chechen independence?" they would say, "Yes, of course."


Ask again, "But you can't live without Russia, can you?" and the answer would also be "Yes, of course, you're right." Most Chechens speak Russian as well as they do Chechen, they have relatives in Moscow and they earn their money doing business with Russia. They are effectively still part of Russia.


As long as the phony war between Boris Yeltsin and Dzhokhar Dudayev went on, ordinary people could live both roles, part of both "free" Chechnya and the Russian Federation. Leaving the self-declared republic with its green, white and red flag at lunchtime, they could be in Moscow that afternoon on an air ticket bought in rubles.


Paradoxically, this is one reason why Chechnya has never suffered from the rabid nationalism that can be encountered in some of the ex-Soviet states. Russians living in Grozny say there is no personal hostility between them and the Chechens, although they do complain that they lost out enormously from the collapse of the official economy. Two weeks ago in Grozny, some Russians I met were asking angrily why on earth Moscow was bombing their city.


But the military intervention in Chechnya has now turned pragmatism into militancy. It is a matter of shame for most Chechens now not to go and fight.


This quagmire means Moscow now has some unpleasant political choices to make.


The Kremlin's stated policy is to hold "free elections" in Chechnya, but it is now hard to imagine Chechens walking freely into polling stations guarded by Russian soldiers and putting their crosses on Russian ballot forms. A mass boycott would seem to be in the cards.


In the short term, the Russians might put a gubernator, a Russian administrator, in Chechnya. That would effectively be a policy of containment, a much more vicious analogue of British rule in Ireland in the 19th century.


And so to the search for the "one Chechen." But who could it be?


A few months ago the favorite choice would have been Umar Avturkhanov, the leader of the opposition Provisional Council. But Avturkhanov has now been completely discredited in the eyes of most of the Chechen population. The sight of his men escorting Russian tanks into Chechnya on Sunday will only have put the nail in his political coffin.


The same can be said for Doku Zavgayev, who was the first ethnically Chechen party secretary in Chechen-Ingushetia, but was removed by Dudayev in 1991. Zavgayev still has a lot of authority in Chechnya and belongs to one of the two most powerful teips, or clans, in the region. But today he works in the Kremlin, and that will now make him automatically unacceptable to the mass of the population.


In short, Yeltsin has achieved what six months ago would have seemed impossible. By sending in the troops, he has united the disparate, dispersed, argumentative Chechen population. They are now all against him. No one who is implicated with the Russians stands a chance of becoming a popular leader.


Theoretically I can see only one man who sooner or later could exploit the situation: Ruslan Khasbulatov. He is a figure who commands enormous respect among the Chechens, and he has impeccable credentials, thanks to his hostility to Boris Yeltsin. But maybe we should now take him at his word when he said he was sick of the whole crisis.