Over the mountains
Battles rolled...
Dazed companies,
Dividing this world
Into strangers and our own,
Marched openly
Against machine guns.

Now, perhaps, it's time to explain a paradox.

The people with whom I spent a week in this war are not only not professional soldiers (except, of course, for officers of the internal troops, and even their main heavy weapons are fragile APCs), but also in the least degree responsible for the politicians' mistakes in the Chechen conflict: they were given an order, told "It's necessary," without clearly explaining what awaited them—professional fighters against professional crime. They know how to analyze, search for evidence, conduct raids, and, of course, shoot; some of them—the same SOBR officers—are proficient in various combat techniques. Their enemy is the mafia, which, for all its power, has not yet reached the level of front-line operations.

And here they are. With me, the SOBR officers were overjoyed: for the first time in twenty days, they got beds; before that, they slept wherever they could. Other conditions? No conditions. They will receive money upon return—two salaries. "How much is that?" I ask. One replies: eight hundred thousand, another, older in rank—a million. Another said that everything might be deducted: they were given money for a hotel, but what kind of hotel is there here? How to account for it, if they left their travel money with their families when they left for Chechnya...

Yes, one could say it that way. They were fed up with Chechnya as a criminal zone: counterfeit banknotes (so many found here that one could wallpaper Dudayev's palace with them), terrorists, just plain bandits sought by all of Russia. Not to mention that they, as professionals, were barred from entering Chechnya: it was easier to extract our gangster from France than from here. But, on the other hand, it would never occur to them to raze Moscow's Solntsevo district just because the famous Solntsevo mafia was born there!

Although they are servicemen and accustomed to risk, in principle, they are people of peacetime. And here they became people of war.

They are proud that their wounded hide their injuries so as not to be sent to the rear. They are pleased that professional soldiers recognize their authority. And even that the internal troops (though a different service, still their own MVD) suffered immeasurably fewer losses than the regular army—it's clear that all this gives them the right to feel much more confident than their army neighbors.

No, they don't talk about "Mother" Russia, about "preserving territory," about "national interests" (in general, I noticed that all such words sound louder the quieter the sounds of battle). These men are concerned with more earthly problems: they found a mine right in front of the train, the APC broke down, the snipers are making too much noise...

I repeat, I came to people with whom I have professional interests, and with some, I've been acquainted for a long time.

But weeks, and for some, already a month of war (the amount of days spent here could be judged by how long their beards had grown), transformed them into completely different people, unfamiliar to me.

What peace! What peace negotiations! With whom? With this bandit? After so many of our guys have fallen? — I heard a general murmur against my timid words that it couldn't go on like this indefinitely: a dead end, and beyond it — an abyss...

More than that! They shouted at me, as if I were the only journalist in all of Russia: "Stop spitting on us! Are we the most to blame?... Chechens are people, but who are we? Where were you before with your human rights, when there was a complete genocide of the Russian population in Chechnya? Why weren't you outraged when Russians were forced to sell their homes for a pittance?!"...

I spoke to them about the devastated city, and they told me: "Why don't you write about how they hung eleven soldiers upside down on the building of the Council of Ministers?" I spoke about how an army captain shot four civilians with his rifle, absolutely unrelated to the fact that only six soldiers from his battalion were left alive, and they told me about how much loot they found in Chechen houses from robbed trains.