Remember the attack on Grigory Yavlinsky, when—after the events in Dagestan—he proposed stopping our troops at the Terek Ridge and not going further? Thousands would die... What accusations weren't hurled at him then!

And it turns out, most generals held the same opinion. Yes, stop. Yes, block the Chechen regions disloyal to Russia. No need to take Grozny, sacrificing the lives of soldiers and officers...

Then Kvashnin, the "sweet-voiced nightingale," as he's called in the army, who whispered to the presidential candidate that "flushing terrorists down the toilet" was necessary for political victory, prevailed...

And on the other side—Maskhadov.

It turned out (and believe the reliability of this information) that Basayev and Khattab were against defending Grozny. But for Maskhadov, it was important to preserve the capital to feel like a president.

And so they played themselves into a corner. Who will answer for just one night attack, in which 26 guys from the famous Sofrino Brigade fell?

...That, that I could not imagine... In the Staropromyslovsky district of Grozny, amidst the ruins of a once great city—a parade of the Sofrino brigade.

Arkady Baskaev was so proud of his brainchild that we visited the Sofrino brigade twice—outside the official program. The last time—already on the way to Mozdok: the brigade was celebrating its anniversary.

They lit the eternal flame in memory of the fallen. Stood at attention when the entire brigade lined up for its small parade. And when they raised the third toast—to remember their friends, the brigade's chief of staff, who was acting as commander, said, nervously: "We baked a loaf of bread."

And a soldier brought in the loaf...

And if only you knew how they live there, in the ruins of the petrochemical station (if I didn't get the name of these ruins wrong)...

In Urus-Martan, in the battalion where we arrived, Chechen road workers were laying asphalt.

We approached them:

"How did you live before? How do you live today?"

It turned out that before, these people felt like... federal employees—as long as they were paid by the Rostov road construction department.

Under Maskhadov, they received five hundred rubles. Now—they were promised three thousand.

"Basayev boasted that he received two million dollars from Berezovsky... They built themselves houses... But who are we to them?" a Chechen man told me.

And added:

"Like in a movie. The Reds come—they loot. The Whites come—they loot..."

We nodded knowingly. In Gudermes, I met with the commander of the Volga District Internal Troops:

"In Argun, our guys are forced to guard some oil wells. Who ordered it? Some head of administration. I'll look into it..."

And I immediately remembered Anna Politkovskaya's article in "Novaya Gazeta" about the Chechen black oil business and who is forced to guard it.

Our State Duma colleague, Nikolai Ovchinnikov, former head of the Yekaterinburg police, had his own separate program that day: a visit to local police officers. He recounted: former operatives and investigators emerged from underground to perform their police work, which they had learned back in Soviet times. And what? They perform it, even solve crimes. But trust in the Chechen police—both from the local population and from the federal authorities—is being restored with great difficulty. A fact from Grozny's criminal chronicle, recounted by Ovchinnikov, stuck in my mind. Here is an entry from the operational log:

"An unknown APC comes to the furniture factory every evening. For tribute..."

Like in Moscow... Only there, it hasn't come to APCs yet.

In Gudermes itself, I was told that the cleanest gasoline belonged to Kadyrov, our Moscow's new protégé.

Once, they tried to destroy illegal oil refineries in Gudermes. It cost a Russian colonel his life.

We're all playing games, you government guys...

And finally.

The Russian army, in its complete poverty, armed a battalion of 600 men in Vedeno, consisting solely of Chechen boys.

Perhaps this is our new concept?

And although General Baranov, commander of the joint group, explained to us that this was, in principle, great and that the Ministry of Defense had only given them light weapons, I still couldn't understand why he was lying?