BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
Vastly outgunned and outnumbered, 200 Chechen independence fighters held off thousands of Russian troops in the village of Pervomayskoye for three days in mid- January. Moscow's forces, reinforced by tanks and helicopter gunships, pounded the town with aerial and artillery bombardment.
Failing to force the Chechen guerrillas' surrender, the Russian generals ordered the village and its inhabitants annihilated January 17. Pervomayskoye, located in the republic of Dagestan near the border with Chechnya, was reduced to ashes by a barrage of missiles.
In response, Chechen fighters widened their resistance. One group earlier commandeered a Turkish ship carrying Russian passengers on the Black Sea. Another guerrilla unit reportedly captured a group of Russians in Grozny, Chechnya's capital. A few Chechen fighters broke out of the siege of Pervomayskoye and launched a counterattack against the Russian troops. Another 200 to 300 guerrillas crossed the border from Chechnya and took over a schoolhouse in the neighboring village of Sovetskoye.
"I know almost every person who lives there," Patimata Getinova angrily told a reporter as she watched the fires consume Pervomayskoye. "What point are they making by destroying a peaceful city? Does Boris Yeltsin think this will stop Chechnya from wanting to be free?"
The Russian army destroyed Pervomayskoye despite the presence there of 100 hostages who had been seized by the Chechens in a raid on a hospital in nearby Kizlyar January 9. The independence fighters took over the hospital after being beaten back trying to attack a Russian helicopter base in Kizlyar.
The Chechen group, named the Lone Wolves, had released most of the 2,000 hostages they captured in the raid and demanded to be allowed to return home. They staged the attack to demand that Russian forces withdraw from Chechnya, where 40,000 troops invaded 13 months ago to smash the movement for independence there. Some 30,000 people have been slaughtered in Yeltsin's war, mainly civilians, and more than 600,000 have been forced from their homes.
"Wolves have come, and they will stay in Kizlyar until Russia withdraws all its troops from the Northern Caucasus," declared rebel leader Salman Raduyev on January 9.
The Chechen independence fighters were allowed to leave Kizlyar January 10 and headed home with 130 hostages, but were halted near the border with Chechnya when Russian helicopter gunships fired on their caravan of 11 buses and two trucks. The Chechens then fled toward Pervomayskoye, capturing 37 members of a local militia force and setting up their defenses in the village.
"Let us go home and we will free the hostages," a Chechen guerrilla told reporters and some Russian military leaders at a meeting on January 11.
According to the New York Times, the generals shook their heads. "We know they are committed," Gen. Aleksandr Mikhailov, spokesperson for the Russian Federal Security Service, said. "But if we have to, we will annihilate them."
Gen. Mikhail Barsukov, director of Moscow's security service, promised on January 13 that the rebels could return unharmed to their homes if they released the hostages and gave up their weapons. When Gen. Mikhailov, was asked the next day if the guerrillas would be guaranteed safe passage to Chechnya, he replied ominously, "That's their problem."
The latest flare-up in the Chechen struggle delivered yet another blow to Yeltsin, who is trying to reassert his authority since returning from two months of recovery following a heart attack in October. A similar raid occurred in the southern Russian town of Budyonnvsk last summer, with the Chechen fighters returning home as heroes.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Yeltsin was shown on Russian television January 9 pounding a conference table and lambasting the interior minister, Gen. Andre Nikolayev, among others.
"I told you, Gen. Nikolayev, on numerous occasions that the region should be sealed," Yeltsin exclaimed. "And all this happened when information about movement [of rebels] was received, but no actions taken."
The Chechen resistance to Moscow's occupation has increased tensions between Yeltsin and some of his allies. "Popular sentiment against the war will grow, and it will all be to the detriment of Mr. Yeltsin in the forthcoming elections," asserted Yevganny Volk, director of the Heritage Foundation in Moscow.
"We should have withdrawn our troops to prevent all these deaths and horror," a 20-year-old construction worker told a Times reporter in Moscow.
"The Russian president has now destroyed one of our towns," said Markha Valentinovna from the Dagestani town of Sovetskoye, as she watched the assault on Pervomayskoye. "He is trying to pit the people here against each other." Moscow's onslaught, however, seems to have provoked increased hatred toward Russian domination among many people in Dagestan, a Caucasian republic that, like Chechnya, is subject to Great Russian oppression.
The most vociferous supporter of Moscow's bloody offensive against Chechnya has been ultrarightist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who complained that the Russian president was not ruthless enough in crushing the independence struggle. Zhirinovsky, one of Yeltsin's main rivals, formally announced his campaign for president January 10.
"If you don't stop the war in Chechnya in one month, burning all rebel bases with napalm, you will lose the elections and I will win them," he warned. "The Russian people have become the most humiliated nation on the planet."
The fascist politician theatrically dropped to his knees and intoned, "We bend our knees to honor the memory of Russian soldiers who saved the world and civilization."
The Chechnya nightmare plaguing the Russian rulers began in 1991, after Dzhokhar Dudayev was elected president and declared independence for this republic of 1.2 million people.
Chechnya became part of the autonomous mountain republics of the Soviet Union following the victory of the Russian revolution in 1917. Under the leadership of V.I. Lenin , the revolutionary soviet government took measures to restore to the people of the northern Caucasus land that was stolen from them under czarist rule.
During the 1920s, Joseph Stalin and the bureaucratic caste around him organized a political counterrevolution, destroying the communist leadership and blocking the oppressed peoples from fully exercising their sovereign rights.
Stalinist repression of the Chechens reached its apex in 1943-44, when more than 1 million were deported to Siberia and many killed for alleged collaboration with the Nazi invasion of the Caucasus region. The war in Chechnya is a product of this long-standing oppression.
The Chechen rebels have vowed to fight "to the last bullet," displaying fierce resistance in gun battles that continues to astound Moscow as well as capitalist commentators.
"This war is far from over," a Russian soldier told a reporter. "And it is widening every day."