I'm talking about what I saw last week, that is, ten days after Boris Yeltsin publicly declared that "the first phase of the operation is complete" and internal troops had replaced the army...

Here, in Grozny, is a real front line. Here are ours, and nearby, where the next nine-story building stands, are "they"—ours, who by the will of incompetent politicians have become not ours, but strangers, opponents, enemies.

It's already forgotten, as if it never was, that once we ate porridge from the same soldier's mess tin—after all, we all went through the same soldier's school! That we underwent military training together in universities, and even fought crime together—there was a time!—not to mention living together in the same country...

Now—it's over, now it's war, with its own laws, with examples of great courage and boundless vileness, with its scoundrels and heroes, with suddenly awakening mercy and, much more often, with manifestations of inhuman, bestial cruelty.

From both sides. That's why they look at you here, doubting your sanity, if you start telling some about the humanism of the Chechen side towards Russian prisoners, and others about how Russian soldiers share their last can of stew with Chechen children.

Although there is both. But for those fighting today, it no longer matters.

Fog... The helicopter won't fly... They say a column is forming for Grozny. With the same meticulousness and precautions as in Pushkin's time. Only instead of Cossacks with cannons, there are APCs with aimed machine guns... The first sign of war is roads broken by tank tracks and mud, mud, mud... We crawl along. It will turn out that the road from Mozdok to Grozny, which is barely a hundred and thirty kilometers, will take seven hours. As if on horseback. Nothing appears to the "dreaming imagination." What you see is enough... A dead cow on the roadside. A calf killed about five meters away. Another fifteen kilometers to Grozny. Later, on the streets of Grozny itself, I will see uncollected corpses: a woman covered with a sack, two young men in civilian clothes... I will hear: "Oh, come on! You can't compare it to what was here ten days ago..." Then I will stop being surprised.

The center of Grozny is controlled by criminal police, OMON detachments gathered from all over the country, officers and soldiers of the internal troops, and the guard of the Main Directorate for Combating Organized Crime of the MVD—SOBR units—special rapid response detachments.

The grass fell under the tracks,
Engines sang.
Armor burned like firewood,
We didn't burn.

Created three years ago, they were intended primarily — and solely! — to combat armed criminal groups that had occupied our cities. "We didn't know what we were going there for, but it turned out to be straight into battle, into positions," one of the SOBR officers tells me. Today, they command legitimate authority, unlike Alpha Group, which, according to numerous eyewitnesses, if it appears in the city at all, it's only to escort another high-ranking official and, as a rule, impressing — and angering — the same SOBR officers with their freshly pressed uniforms. Every army battalion commander dreams of having at least one SOBR officer with him: they are indispensable, if only because half-trained soldiers feel more confident next to them. And young officers too.

What does the control of federal troops over the city actually mean today? What are "quarters cleared of militants"?

The MVD group headquarters is located on the territory of a dairy factory. From here, APCs go on raids, here—practically daily—the wounded are brought, here every morning a crowd of civilians, mostly Russians, gathers at the gates... An operational-investigative group also works at the headquarters, its task not yet very clear even to its own participants... What crimes need to be solved when everything around is one continuous crime?..

"They bring us those suspected of belonging to militants, but proving whether this person is a militant or not is practically impossible," a young man from Moscow's RUOP admitted to me.