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Bek Baskhanov, the public prosecutor general of Chechnya. It was provisionally agreed that the main problems to be discussed at the negotiations between Moscow and Grozny were halting the bloodshed and establishing normal relations. Negotiations with the supporters of the Chechen opposition were only supposed to deal with questions of disarmament.

All this increased the chances of peace being preserved, and left the party of war with very little time until December 12. In effect, the announcement by the Working Commission for the Settlement of the Chechen Conflict determined the date on which

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military land operations began. If the peace negotiations were due to start on December 12, the war had to be launched on December 11. The Russian leadership acted accordingly: on December 11, land forces crossed the demarcation line into the Chechen Republic, and for the first few days, Russian military reports spoke of the absence of any real resistance or any losses.

By December 13, Soskovets had already determined his main lines of action, and he informed journalists that the total cost of implementing measures to normalize the situation in Chechnya could amount to about a trillion rubles. (This was the sum that would first have to be allocated from the budget, so that it could be systematically embezzled.) He said that the government s first priority was to get the aid delivered to the population of Chechnya, and special attention would be paid to ensuring that it was not wasted or stolen (we now know for certain that no aid ever reached Chechnya, and all of it was wasted and stolen).

Soskovets emphasized that members of the Chechen diaspora, living in Moscow and other Russian cities, should not be considered potential terrorists. Note this phrase. So far, nobody had even dreamed of regarding the members of the Chechen diaspora as potential terrorists, and there had not actually been any terrorist attacks. The war with Chechnya was still not even regarded as a war, but something more in the nature of a police operation, and there had not yet been any serious casualties. Yet, for some reason the First Deputy Prime Minister seemed to think it possible that the Chechens might organize acts of terrorism on Russian soil. Soskovets remark that no discriminatory measures would be applied to the general mass of Chechen citizens, and that the federal authorities were not even considering the enforced deportation of Chechens, was clearly a suggestion from the party of war that war should be waged against the entire Chechen people throughout the whole of Russia, including by both discriminatory measures and enforced deportation.

Lieutenant-General Alexander Lebed, commander of the 14th Russian Army in Pridniestrovie (the region along the Dniestr River in Moldova), fiercely opposed the party of war, because he understood perfectly well what Soskovets was hinting at and the price Russia would have to pay. In a telephone interview from his headquarters in Tiraspol, he declared that the Chechen conflict can only be resolved by diplomatic negotiations. Chechnya is repeating the Afghanistan scenario point for point. We are risking unleashing war with the entire Islamic world. Solitary fighters can go on forever burning our tanks and picking off our soldiers with individual shots. In Chechnya, we have shot ourselves in the foot exactly as we did in Afghanistan, and that is very sad. A well-reinforced and well-stocked Grozny is capable of offering long and stubborn resistance. Lebed reminded everyone that in Soviet times Dudaev had commanded an airborne division of strategic bombers capable of waging war on a continental scale, and that fools were not appointed to such posts.

Beginning on December 14, Moscow was transferred to a state of semi-military alert, and Muscovites were deliberately frightened with the prospect of inevitable Chechen terrorism. The agencies of the Ministry of the Interior stepped up their protection of