PRISONERS OF THE CAUCASUS.(The Talk of the Town)

In Russia, the tragic sense is not limited to Chekhovian intellectuals or tyranny's victims. Even the privileged few, insulated by high office and a pride of bodyguards, know the truth when they care to look out a Kremlin window. In the post-Soviet period, Russian fatalism was captured best by a former prime minister and natural-gas magnate, Viktor Chernomyrdin, when he remarked, after yet another disaster of state, "We wanted it to go better, but it turned out as always."

The hope that the collapse of Communism would lead to the evolution of a liberal, democratic order in the East remains a working proposition in Poland, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere in the region. But in Russia it has, in many respects, turned out as always. Some of the crises were predictable from the outset of the post-Communist era. It will take many years for the national economy to recover from seven decades of Communism, not to mention centuries of feudal autocracy; it may take another generation for the national psyche to heal. But only those with the most well-honed tragic sense could have imagined that in 2004 Russia would be ruled by a President whose language and instincts were shaped by his career as an officer of the K.G.B., and that the country's most urgent threat would come from ruthless Chechen terrorists who increasingly modelled their tactics and ideology on the jihadists of the Middle East and South Asia.

The slaughter in the town of Beslan earlier this month of hundreds of schoolchildren and their parents was a crime for which there is no defense. The act of shooting children in the back as they try to flee is no more comprehensible than the act of steering commercial airliners into office buildings. As many Russians acknowledge, however, there is a past, an original sin, behind the new crisis.

Among the results of the fall of Communism was the dissolution of the "internal empire," the fifteen republics of the old Soviet Union. And because Russia itself was made up of eighty-nine regions, some with a complicated history, Russia's borders, too, came into question. In the euphoria of the period, President Boris Yeltsin encouraged the various regions to assume as much sovereignty "as you can swallow." After decades of Soviet centralism, he was thinking of a reform of degrees. But Chechnya, which had bridled under Moscow's rule since the nineteenth century and suffered mass deportations and killings under Stalin, declared outright independence.

In 1994, Yeltsin invaded, encouraged by a circle of advisers who promised a "small and victorious war." It was neither. The Russians shelled Grozny. They rampaged through villages with tanks intended to make war on nato. More than eighty thousand Chechens, almost all of them civilians, died. Tens of thousands were left homeless or fled to other parts of Russia. Grozny was reduced to rubble, and the republic to a state of lawless ruin much like Afghanistan after its war with the Soviet Union.

And out of a terrible war came terror. Shamil Basayev, the Chechen commander who likely ordered all the massacres of the past month--the murders in Beslan, the bombing of two airliners in flight, the bombing outside a Moscow subway station--came to Moscow as a young man, studied land management, and tried to sell computers for a living. In August, 1991, he was among the thousands of volunteers who helped defend the Russian White House, and Yeltsin, against the coup plotters. Then he returned to Chechnya, where he joined the military wing of the independence movement. In 1995, with Grozny destroyed, Basayev and around a hundred of his men took more than a thousand hostages, including women and children, in the town of Budyonnovsk--an event that augured the rise of a new kind of insurgency.

Chechnya today ...