The Official Story.(Grozny Chechnya Russia)

Our small group of journalists sat on benches in a huge, empty hangar draped with Russian military banners, listening as two high-ranking officers in green camouflage gave us a situation report on the rebellious republic of Chechnya. We had come to the Chechen capital of Grozny on a special three-day tour staged by the Russian government, and now our hosts were delivering the messages they wanted us to take back home. The situation in Chechnya, they assured us, was characterized by "normalization and stabilization." Most Chechens, they said, approved of Moscow's attempts to restore "law and order" and postwar reconstruction was moving ahead. Most important, the Chechen "bandits and terrorists" who opposed the Russian forces had all but ceased their fight--one or two mine explosions a day, no more. We weren't sure we understood correctly, so we asked straight out. The war in Chechnya is over? Yes, came the official response. "No question about it."

It's one thing to be in Moscow, listening to President Vladimir Putin claim that the "counter terrorist operation" in Chechnya ended in the spring of 2000. But when Russian field officers tell you the same thing as you're walking through the vast ruins of Grozny, surrounded by a squad of heavily armed guards, you've reached an Orwellian scale of denial. We spent two nights in Chechnya and heard shooting on both of them. At the Grozny airport, special trucks filled the sky with warm smoke to confuse the sensors of the heat-seeking missiles that the rebels have used to shoot down dozens of Russian helicopters since this war began in 1999.

Call them lies, or just heavy spin. By any name, it began on the first day of our trip when a cheerful Russian officer described his work overseeing the conscription of young Chechen men into the Russian Army. "It's purely voluntary," he assured us. Then we were ushered into a gymnasium for a photo session with the latest levee of young conscripts. Stepping away from our ever-present guards, I introduced myself to one young Chechen and asked whether he was here voluntarily. "They force us," he said, explaining that he lives in an area where Russian forces routinely conduct zachistki, literally "cleansing operations." Typically they surround a village or town with armored personnel carriers and heavily armed troops, then go house-to-house searching for suspected rebels. "People are disappearing without a trace," he told me. "They tell you, 'Either join the Army or the same thing will happen to you'."

Nothing the Russians planned for us seemed to go quite as intended. When they wanted to demonstrate how they were restoring much-needed ...