On a hot night last August in a small Russian town on the banks of the Volga River, Yelena Arefieva heard a knocking and someone crying: Mama. Mama. Mama. ''I jumped like a cat to the door,'' she said, but there were only mosquitoes buzzing in the stairwell, for the cries were in her dreams. A few days later, Yelena received a letter from a young police investigator just back from serving three months in Chechnya. It was about her son, Denis, a 19-year-old junior sergeant with an artillery unit who had been sent to Chechnya in June. ''I've been thinking for a long time how to write you and decided to write everything that I know, although this letter will not bring you joy. Your son and another boy from his unit, Aleksandr Chernikov, are in captivity. The Chechens want to exchange them for two relatives of their field commander D. . . .''
Before dawn the next morning, Yelena and her husband, Misha, who live in the province of Nizhni Novgorod in a tiny Stalin-era settlement, were driving toward the Ural Mountains. By afternoon, they reached the young investigator's home. He told Yelena that the Russian authorities would do nothing to save her son and that he had taken on the case himself when he heard it involved a boy from his province. He had made contact with a Chechen middlewoman, notorious in the kidnapping trade, who had given him a videotape of Denis and Aleksandr (who is called Sasha). On the tape, it looked as if they were being held in a basement or an underground bunker. And they had such eyes, the young investigator said, that he still could not sleep. He was sure if he had had another month in Chechnya, he would have found the boys, but his tour of duty was ending, and the F.S.B. -- the post-Soviet incarnation of the K.G.B. -- told him to leave Chechnya, go home, forget the case, lest he be killed. He gave Yelena the name and address of the middlewoman, with the caveat that Yelena never tell the authorities where she got it.
Two days later, Yelena received a telegram from the headquarters of her son's unit in Volgograd. It said that Denis and Sasha had deserted their posts in early July. Yelena was furious, though it is standard practice for the Russian military to list missing soldiers as deserters. That same afternoon, in a village hundreds of miles away, Masha Chernikova, Sasha's mother, also received the telegram. She tracked down Yelena through an operator in her small town and asked her what she knew. The telegram wasn't true, Yelena told her. Their sons were in captivity.
Though Yelena had rarely been away from home since her first husband died in 1995, she couldn't stop thinking that if she did nothing, Denis would perish. And she kept hearing the voice of the young police investigator, who had warned her: ''You mothers must go there. Only you can save your sons.''
In September 1999, around 100,000 Russian troops invaded the semi-independent republic of Chechnya. It was the second time in the last decade that Moscow waged war against Chechnya, and the Kremlin was determined to avenge the army's humiliation in the first Chechen war, which began in 1994 and left an estimated 30,000 civilians and soldiers on both sides dead. That bloody conflict ended in 1996, after Chechen fighters stunned the world by recapturing the capital, Grozny, in a matter of days. The two sides negotiated an autonomy for the small Caucasian republic, and the Russian Army withdrew in shame. Boris Yeltsin even offered a rare apology for his mistake -- the war.
Over the next three years, Chechnya devolved into a postwar banditry so vicious and bizarre that the nation forfeited the world's sympathy. Criminal gangs kidnapped, ransomed and killed Russians, Chechens and foreigners alike, and the president, Col. Aslan Maskhadov, seemed to have little sway over them. Most reporters stopped going into Chechnya. Intrepid aid organizations packed up and left. It is estimated that 1,100 people were held hostage during those years -- but those are just the known cases.
The chaos spread beyond Chechnya's borders. Chechen rebels staged an attack on the neighboring republic of Dagestan with the aim of creating a united Islamic state. And according to the Kremlin, the rebels also set off a series of bombs in Moscow and other Russian cities. Though, as a lieutenant in Moscow told me: ''We have this dark habit -- if something goes wrong in Russia, we blame it on the Chechens. They never found out who did all the bombings. And when the F.B.I. tried to help investigate, our authorities said, 'No, no, we don't need your help.''' Many Russian journalists and Kremlin experts in Moscow have concluded that some of the bombs were planted by Russian agents to incite the public and gear them up for war, which would ensure Putin's victory in the March presidential elections.
Throughout the centuries, the fierceness of the Chechen resistance to Russian domination has inspired Russians to heights of venomous oratory. ''There is no people under the sun more vile and deceitful,'' Gen. Alexei Yermolov, the most ruthless of the 19th-century Imperial commanders, said. His strategy for colonizing Chechnya was simple -- raze the villages, slaughter civilians and chop down the forests in order to flush out the rebels. Rather than crushing the mountaineers, though, the raids gave birth to a Muslim holy war that lasted some 40 years. A century later, in 1944, Stalin decided to solve the ''Chechen problem'' by shipping them all in trains to the wastelands of Kazakhstan. Thousands died of suffocation, hunger and cold. Recently, the Russian commander of the Northern Caucasus, Gen. Gennady Troshev, went on television and called for the public executions of captured rebels, saying, ''Hang them up and let them dangle for everyone to see.'' And every Chechen can recite by heart the infamous promise Putin made in September 1999: ''We will rub them out, even in the toilet.''
At the end of that year, after months of aerial bombardment, the Russians moved in on the ruins of Grozny. Once again, hundreds of Russian troops were slaughtered in the ground assault. In January 2000, Gen. Viktor Kazantsev, then the commander of Russian forces in Chechnya, blamed the ''tenderheartedness'' of his troops and their ''groundless trust'' of Chechen civilians. He ordered the detention of every Chechen man between the ages of 10 and 60. By May 2000, the Interior Ministry boasted that Russian forces had swept more than 10,000 Chechens for interrogation. Today, that number has reached at least 20,000.
If Yeltsin's war, as befit his character, was waged with a sledgehammer, full of bombast and blunder, Putin's bears all the marks of a man trained for life in the K.G.B. Wary of the media coverage that damned the first war, Putin has tried to seal off Chechnya from outsiders so that no one can see what many call ''Russia's bleeding wound.'' In May, the Kremlin reported that 3,069 Russian soldiers had died in combat. The Soldiers' Mothers Committee of Russia, which collects data from mothers in provinces all across the country, says the number is around 10,000 dead and 12,000 wounded. In the first war, public protest was galvanized by televised images of wooden boxes bearing zinc coffins and mothers weeping over the bodies of their sons. In Putin's war, the ''boys in zinc'' are lowered into the ground more discreetly. The only place where accounting of all the Russian dead takes place is Dr. Vladimir Cherbakov's laboratory in Rostov-on-Don. Using one computer and forensic technology, the lab experts wade through mounds of bones and body parts to help mothers -- many of whom brought the pieces back from Chechnya themselves -- identify their missing sons.
Currently, there are at least 80,000 Russian troops garrisoned across Chechnya, culled from a confusing array of security ministries -- the federal army, military intelligence, F.S.B. units, anti-crime units, anti-drug units, police patrollers and border guards. Each controls its own fief, and each protects its own Chechen agents -- many of whom are kidnappers, useful middlemen or oil smugglers. The Russian troops have not only failed to restore order to Chechnya; they have also created their own brand of kidnapping in which suspected Chechen rebels are rounded up and then ransomed back to their families. A whole spectrum of desperate characters -- from unemployed Chechens to underpaid Russian soldiers -- feed their families off the trafficking of simple traces of information.
And it is the mothers, Chechen and Russian, who are left on their own to collect the traces and search, quietly, for their missing sons.
Yelena is a small, blond, bun-haired woman who has worked all her life on riverboats and at shipyards. I met her one night as the winds howled off the Volga. She opened the door as soon as I knocked, as if she had been expecting someone. Her daughter, Zhana, a tall, freckly, impish 13-year-old with stringy red hair, was sitting on a stool with her knees pulled up, her bright blue eyes unblinking and haunted. (She reads and rereads Kipling's ''Jungle Book,'' she said later, so she can be like her brother and live as he does. In class, she likes beating up boys.) As Yelena showed me Denis's things -- an old guitar and bicycle, his favorite novel about medieval knights, his old record player and photos of him smoking in his army uniform, Soviet war books and Dostoyevsky's ''Poor Folk'' -- she said that she still wasn't used to his absence. Denis was not a natural soldier, but he had risen to the rank of sergeant shortly after his recruitment and was a hope for the family. Yelena used to be a conductor on the ferries until she moved ashore to be with her children. She is a cleaner at the ship repair plant, where she earns $20 a month. Her husband earns $50 a month as a tugboat helmsman.
On Oct. 6, Yelena gathered Denis's photographs and letters, took a small icon of St. George and the Dragon from the prerevolutionary church in her village, said goodbye to her husband and two daughters and left for Moscow. There, she met Masha, Sasha's mother, who had come north from her family's land in the black-soil region of southern Russia. She had just buried her own mother, and now here she was, with Yelena, boarding a train bound for the Caucasus.
The mothers traveled by van over the Chechen border, through the Russian checkpoints and into Grozny. On their first day, they came under Russian artillery attack. When they showed up in the town of Gudermes, where the pro-Russian Chechen administration has set up its government, they went to a Russian police station and were met by a half-drunk major who tried to shoo them away, hollering at them that there were no hotels. Other officers simply looked at them and asked, ''How did you manage to get here?''
Yelena and Masha spent the next few nights in an army truck. They spent their days writing to Lt. Gen. Valery Baranov, then the commander of Russia's armed forces in Chechnya, appealing to him to help rescue their sons.
After a few days, the local military packed them off to Khankala, the Russian military headquarters in a village outside Grozny. They had no idea why they were being sent there, but when they entered the base, they were seen by a huge colonel who hollered, ''Get those women out of here.'' No one knew what to do with them. Eventually a medical officer called their sons' commander, who refused to see them. The medic told them what the police investigator had already said: ''Work with the Chechen middlemen to find your sons. No one here will help you.''
They traveled to the town of Argun in search of the Chechen middlewoman named by the young investigator. They went to the address they had been given, but she never showed up, and they wandered around the market until an old man approached them and whispered, ''Are you the mothers looking for your kids?''
They followed him to a house nearby, where they were brought before a man sitting behind a screen. ''We can make an exchange for your sons,'' the man told them, ''but if anything happens to us or the middleman, your children will die.''
Masha offered to pay him, but he said no, he had bought the boys for exchange, not sale. The mothers had no idea how the system worked. ''Bought them?'' Yelena asked. ''From whom?'' The man behind the screen said that he had paid $4,000 for each boy to commanders of the boys' artillery regiment. Their kidnapping was a setup, he said; the senior conscript soldiers had sent Denis and Sasha off the base to buy vodka in the village, where the Chechens were waiting to ambush them.
Yelena and Masha were stunned. But retired soldiers I spoke to were not. Everyone knows how abuse in the army works, they told me. It is called dedovshina and has been part of Russian military culture for centuries. The senior soldiers -- not the officers -- are the lords of the unit, and the fresh conscripts are their vassals. They beat them mercilessly and humiliate them, and if the initiate resists or snitches, he may be killed. It is estimated that some 500 soldiers a year are killed by fellow soldiers. In Chechnya, the retired soldiers I spoke with said, it is entirely possible that commanders would sell their own conscripts to Chechens who needed bodies for an exchange. ''You send a normal officer to Chechnya who says, 'No, you can't do that,''' one retired major told me, ''and he'll either be sent back or killed, because in Chechnya everything is illegal. It's all lies. What else do you expect from a dirty war like this.''
The mothers had their instructions. The Chechens wanted two brothers of a field commander back, and the women needed to persuade General Baranov, who held the brothers, to make the exchange. The mothers returned to Gudermes, to find out whether Baranov would agree to the trade. Finally, he sent word to them through a messenger: there will be no exchange, he said, but we will try to find your children.
For the next several weeks, the women lived among Chechen refugees just over the border in Ingushetia, suffering one ordeal after another as they tried to find other avenues to buy back their sons. In Grozny, they were nearly killed by a Russian tank that was firing into panicked students fleeing the university; they witnessed blocks of homes getting ''cleansed'' by Russian troops; and they were apprehended by the Russian police and, absurdly, accused of being snipers.
Great copper-colored fires blaze across the northern lowlands of Chechnya, along the Terek River, as you head toward Grozny. It is said that the Russians have blown up some 46 oil wells to prevent the Chechens from stealing Russian oil and to break the back of the Chechen mafia. Clouds of charcoal smoke drift across the horizon, and with all the oil fumes settling upon the land, the sheep have turned gray.
It was a strange time just before spring. It felt as if someone had been conducting an experiment on how long human beings can survive under unremitting psychological torture. This spring was the anniversary of Putin's election, and radio broadcasts were reporting almost every day that the war was over, that Russian order was being restored, that reconstruction was under way and that troops were being withdrawn -- as if the people were deaf and blind. Yes, the rockets had stopped raining down on Grozny, but a more sinister war was taking place. Paranoia and fear hung in the air, an archaic, Soviet-style paranoia that slowly conquers the mind until everyone suspects everyone else of being an informant. There was so little gainful employment, and so much to inform about, and who knew how many of the 20,000 men corralled for interrogation had caved -- after electrocutions, after beatings -- and signed the informants' lists?
''By the time they finish with the spinning telephone, you're ready to sign anything,'' a young Chechen in an Adidas track suit said about his experience in a prison run by a notorious Russian police unit. There was no electricity, no candles even, in the house where we met not far from the prison. His hands were gashed. He had a long, thick scar under his cheekbone. Six weeks before I met him, he was scooped up in a zachistka -- one of the frequent house-by-house raids that the Russians use to seize suspected rebels and intimidate the population. He had been sleeping when a bomb exploded in the central market and killed a Russian soldier, and he awoke to a flashlight shining in his eyes and a Russian in fatigues shouting: ''Up! Up! Up!''
''You're led into a room with the green military phones,'' the young man said, ''and those Russian comedians say, 'You want to speak to your mother?' They clip wires from the phone to your nose, ears, fingers -- it's not polite to say where else -- and then one shouts to his buddy, 'Papa Carlo, let the music begin!' The other cranks the phone to get the juices flowing. 'It's you who exploded the market, isn't it?' Fifteen minutes' electrocution, 15 minutes' rest, 15 minutes' beating. For four hours. 'Yes, yes,' I screamed. 'I exploded everything.' 'And who is paying for it?' they shouted. 'Osama bin Laden,' I shouted back. But they wanted the truth. They give you the shocks, little by little, and then whoosh, up, 200 volts. So much your teeth crack, and you feel like you're the screen of a broken television, and oh, I can feel it right now. I dreamed to die, just not to feel it. I would have signed anything, even that I was an assassin, even that a tortoise has fleas on his back.'' After his brother mustered up 2,000 rubles and an automatic weapon to buy him back, he was released on the condition that he report back to the Russians every four days and tell them where the Chechen fighters were hiding. ''This is how they crack you,'' he said. ''Now I'm on the stukach (informant) list.''
Just as often, the informants are lonely and poor old women. Every habitable apartment block has one.
One afternoon, I stopped to talk to a man who was crouched in a wasteland of rubble and garbage. He was peeling the plastic coating off some scrap wire to forage the copper and sell it. Nearby, a father and his daughter were wrenching metal hinges off a fallen window frame. ''Money,'' the daughter said, embarrassed. Another man suddenly appeared and said, ''I know you're here to turn us in, to inform that we're stealing materials.'' I was taken aback not by his menace but by the conviction in his vigilant glare.
And the Russians were as paranoid as the Chechens. The father of one Chechen family I stayed with told of a girl downstairs in his apartment building who, that morning, was looking out her window when a Russian sniper shot her in the head. He thought that she, too, was a sniper, scoping out the Russian soldiers at the kiosk below.
How could anyone remain sane in Grozny? Putin's war has razed all hope. Grozny today is ruins, charred tree stumps and a maze of Russian block posts -- the small fortresses built of cinder blocks and sandbags where Interior Ministry troops check documents, take bribes and arbitrarily pummel those they don't like. Unexploded Hail rockets stick out of crossroads and courtyards like giant daggers left behind from Gulliver's world -- though Grozny feels more like Pompeii, a relic with no scent of renewal.
Take a stroll down Victory Street. Stand not far from the cinder-block wall at the end of the central market, which has absorbed so much blood over these years. Three young laughing women in high-heeled boots and floral scarves lift up their long slit skirts -- as risqué as they get here -- to squeeze past the wall and climb up the mountain of crushed brick, egg shells, tin cans, sodden clothing and offal that disgorges you into the market. One of the girls stumbles. She is on crutches and missing a leg. A man with a black hooked arm drifts past her, seeing no one and nothing, not even the man with the Crusoe beard and wild eyes weaving in front of him, waving a fishing pole.
A mobile Russian unit careers around to stop a Red Cross jeep and haul away the Chechen driver. Traffic lights are bent over and twisted like old olive trees. Stop signs don't exist, and driving proceeds under the laws of anarchy. A few women are clustered outside a cafe on Victory Street. Their hands cover their faces. They have just arrived for work and have discovered the couple who own the cafe dead on the floor. One was shot in the head; the other, torched with a gas pipe. And who are those men in black, idling on the corners like sentries under the towering ruins? They stand there morning and afternoon in the rose-tinted glasses and felt hats so fashionable before the war. With their arms crossed over their chests, they move nothing but their eyes, tracking the feral puppies scrounging in what remains of the Internet Café. In an apartment nearby lives a poor family with a troubled son prone to violence. Not knowing how to contain him, they keep him locked in a cage.
And here come the Chechen mothers from the villages and the town, marching down Victory and Peace Streets, holding photographs of their sons, waving placards, chanting, ''Russia is killing our children,'' and ''Russia, give us back our sons.''
What does the normal Russian soldier like Sergei think? He is a special police officer from Siberia, blue-eyed with a delicate face and a keen mind. ''A Chechen mother came to me in tears,'' he tells me, ''saying, 'They took my son to a filtration point, but there they say they know nothing about him.' So we went to the filtration point ourselves, but they wouldn't let us past the concertina wire. An officer checked the lists and said they didn't have the boy. What could I tell her? I hate the curs, our big bosses, their cruelty and venality, covering themselves with high words about patriotism, democracy, human rights and doing with our Mother Russia what they want.''
All over Chechnya, boys and men are being ''disappeared'' in zachistkas. As ethnic cleansing was in the Balkan wars, so the zachistka is the distinguishing feature of an unwinnable war. Translated literally, it means ''cleansing'' or ''mopping up.'' Sometimes they are targeted police actions to capture a rebel or weapons cache. Often they are looting sprees by Russian units on their way home. One Chechen woman told me of a cleansing that went on for 48 hours. She said that the soldiers raided every house. They carried off 18 men, including her son. By the second day, they went berserk. Some were barking from the road, ''Bring us TV's, radios, gold.'' And when the assistant commander of Russian forces in Grozny tried to drive through the cordon of armored personnel carriers to stop the looting, she said the Russian cleansers, his own men, opened fire, killing him and wounding two of his bodyguards.
The most brutal zachistkas are the acts of revenge by soldiers who have lost their friends, often in remote-controlled mine explosions rigged by Chechen rebels. (That is how the two Chechen men whom Denis and Sasha's captors wanted back had been picked up.)
If you are a young Chechen man swept up in a zachistka, the chances are good that you will land in an isolation center, where your family can then buy you back. But there is also a chance that you will end up in a deep fetid pit dug into the ground, the kind of pit where countless suspected Chechen fighters are tortured and imprisoned under planks of wood or tree branches, listening to the groans of their fellow prisoners rising from the dank soil. The pits have not changed since the 19th century, when a Russian officer was shackled by his Tatar captors and dropped into a 12-foot-deep hole behind a mosque in Tolstoy's story ''Prisoner of the Caucasus.''
I met a 22-year-old Chechen journalist in Moscow who was working for Japanese television when he was arrested and thrown in a pit at Khankala. He had come too close, he said, to a story about a Chechen field commander and kidnapper suspected of being in the pay of the F.S.B. ''I heard voices from the other holes, and it was like a huge graveyard,'' he said. ''I was only released because I was with those two military intelligence officers the Japanese hired for our protection.'' Because things were so out of control, the Russian military intelligence officers were thrown in the pits as well. ''One general even told me: Do you understand from where you came back from? No one comes back from that place.''
The zachistka has not only infiltrated the nightmares of Chechens, it is poisoning the souls of Russian soldiers as well. Sergei tells me it is a source of spiritual despair, ''blowing the roof off his head.'' He says he hates the word. ''I've seen it bring some guys a feeling of power, like they are kings over others. But most guys aren't made of stone. It's a rough thing to rummage through houses and look into the people's eyes. Sometimes you get some zealous bosses who arrange six or seven zachistkas in a month -- so they can mark in their papers how active they were. But they're sitting in the office and throwing guys in this zachistka. Often guys don't even know what to clean, where to clean, who to clean, and so everybody is cleansed. The outcome is only anger, bitterness and hatred from the locals.''
Is it any wonder that the Russian bureaucrats and military officers have no patience with Yelena and Masha? Every day, the prosecutors are bombarded by parents writing complaints and asking where their children are. As in some Gogolian satire, the complaints get passed back and forth from one ministry to the next until they wind up where they started.
One of them is Raia Murdalava's. I seem to see her everywhere in Grozny in her brown fur coat and fur hat, waiting outside ministries to hound another official to give her back her son. ''Come to our home,'' she says to me.
A few days later, I accept her invitation. I wake at 3 a.m. to a noise outside. The full moon lights up Raia in her nightdress. She has the dark, Old World beauty of Ava Gardner. And I have an image of an archipelago of insomniac mothers stretching from the Caucasus up to Murmansk in the north and across Russia's 11 time zones to Sakhalin, which also sees off its boys to defend Russia here, where the archipelago is at its thickest.
''I'm afraid to sleep,'' Raia says, ''and not to sleep. My son's hungry and cold in a hole, and I'm here.''
Her husband emerges in the gaslight outside, gaunt, bearded like Abraham Lincoln. He carries the dagger he keeps under his pillow. Raia keeps a baton under her bed. He is standing guard. The night before, bandits robbed the neighbors and nearly slit their throats. Raia has packed their belongings in plastic bags and buried them along with their important documents, like her husband's engineering degrees.
Explosions rattle the fragile walls of the house, where only a few rooms remain. Russian soldiers are drunk and firing. ''At night,'' Raia's husband says, ''we hear them singing a variation on a war song I sang in my service: 'We'll kill all the Chechens and bring glory to Mother Russia.'''
The day after New Year's, Raia's son went for a walk in his long, green wool coat. He was alone when six soldiers pounced on him, stripped off his coat and shirt, beat him and dragged him away. When he did not come home, Raia went from one command post to another looking for her son. ''This commander was saying we don't have your son on our list, and at that moment, this babushka comes in, limping, dragging her arm, her dentures all broken.'' Raia can't help laughing. ''Yes, you do, I saw everything,' she said. She'd tried to pull my son away from the soldiers, and they beat her.''
I imagine Raia as she describes herself, demanding to get into a police station. A Russian guard tells her to go to hell, and she slaps him in the face with her wallet. ''I told him, 'You go to hell, you jackal.''' Her face breaks into laughter again. ''And he said: 'We're going to kill all of you, anyway. We have orders to kill even 2-year-olds.'''
Later, she hears from a prisoner who was released that while they were arguing, her son was in the basement beneath her. His fingernails were pulled out, the prisoner says, and her son was electrocuted and bloodied and unconscious and hauled off by Russian guards. Raia says she knows the names and addresses of her son's torturers, and Lt. Gen. Ivan Babichev has promised her that he will bring the men back to Chechnya. Like a girl, Raia says, ''General Babichev keeps a photo of our son in his wallet.''
Every day in Grozny I meet young Chechen boys who have lost a brother, a sister, a parent. They say they won't stop avenging the deaths until every last Russian soldier is off Chechen land. It sounds like bravado, but the Chechen patience in blood feuds is legendary. So how will this end?
''It won't,'' says a soft-spoken, clean-shaven, 40-year-old commander of a cell of 15 Chechen fighters. We drive in a small white Zhigoli, sloshing through a river of mud along the sea of destroyed oil refineries and chemical silos, passing the most notorious and heavily fortified filtration camp in Grozny. Russians troops are everywhere. So, it seems, are fighters.
His group has killed some 200 Russian soldiers over the last six months, but only in the valley. He is a link between the fighters and the pro-Russians in the Chechen administration. He says they, the fighters, have little national support even though people are realizing there is no other way to stop the Russian's bespredel, a word uttered almost as often as zachistka. It means ''without limits'' or ''without order.'' It was used in the 1990's to describe the economic and criminal chaos unleashed by perestroika, when the only codes that reigned emanated from the prisons and the mafia. Chechens use it to describe the Russian military's lawlessness. Russian soldiers sometimes use it to describe their own excesses.
The commander is an educated, deeply disillusioned man, a philologist and historian whose brother, a celebrated poet, was killed trying to rescue him in the first war. Young people come to him every day asking where to go to fight and to get arms. ''On the bus, I heard one boy ask another whether it'd be better to blow up the block post with a Zhigoli'' -- the Russian equivalent of the people's car -- or a truck. I said, 'Are you serious?' And he said: 'I lost someone in my family. And if I could blow up myself and this bus at the Russian block post, I would.' He was sincere and no one on the bus even flinched. It was normal. We didn't have kamikazis in the first war, but this war has bred fanaticism.''
He is religious, but he also has contempt for the Wahabbis -- named after the 18th-century puritanical sect of Islam that flourished in Saudi Arabia, it is applied here loosely: it can mean the foreign mujahadeen, Chechen Islamic extremists or just bandits. He blames them for shredding apart the Chechen traditions that have united the country for so long. Without them, he says, it is not clear what makes a Chechen. ''I could never imagine killing a Russian P.O.W. in my home,'' he said. ''But they will.'' They lure young people in with money, he says. They will pay them for their ''work'' -- as much as $1,500 to $2,000 for blowing up Russians in an armored personnel carrier. They will create an Islamic state after the war, and he will leave. He could see no other way out.
''If this goes much longer, this new generation of monsters will create another Afghanistan. They won't be educated. They'll know only Islam, weapons, knives. They won't value their own or anyone else's lives.''
In January, Yelena and Masha moved into the home of a man named Sulieman Vatsaev, a Chechen committed to liberating Russian P.O.W.'s as a way of retaliating against the Wahabbis, who had kidnapped his son and killed his brother. Now he was waging his vendetta not by spilling blood but by saving Russian prisoners.
Despite his hatred of the Wahabbis, Suleiman took the mothers to their latest middleman, a shady character named Said, a self-proclaimed Wahabbi who nevertheless lived and operated in a town firmly under Russian control. He is an example of the confusing contradictions that make Chechnya such an unnerving, sinister place. I often heard stories of pro-Russian Chechen police apprehending Chechen bandits, only to watch Russian F.S.B. agents release them.
Just before New Year's, the story about Sasha and Denis had changed. The boys had been sold from one middleman to another, and now they were being bartered for a Chechen soldier referred to as ''the invalid,'' whose relatives agreed to negotiate with the women.
Suleiman and Said drove Yelena and Masha to an empty village not far from where their sons' unit was based and pulled up to an abandoned house by a river.
The invalid's relatives refused to meet the women face to face. Said ferried back and forth between the two sides, becoming increasingly irritated as the negotiations wore on. Finally, he brought back word: Sasha will be exchanged for the invalid; Denis's life will depend upon the success of the deal. If, after two weeks, the invalid remained safe, then Yelena could purchase Denis from them for $15,000. If the mothers could not persuade the Russian authorities to agree, then they would find the heads of their boys on the government steps in Gudermes.
''It was almost evening when we moved to the car, and I turned back,'' Yelena recalled. ''There was a small house and a big gray brick wealthy house. The windows were covered with metal sheets, as if nobody lived there. I had such a feeling my son was there, and at the same moment, Masha said, 'Don't you feel our children are there?'''
The women spent weeks in Gudermes, trying to get an audience with the Russian prosecutor who could grant approval for the exchange. Though the invalid had 36 bullet wounds, no left leg and only one eye, the Russians and some powerful Chechen allies were adamantly against his exchange. He was on the mend, the Russian authorities said, and they were hoping to interrogate him. ''We were at the limit of our force then,'' Yelena said. ''We went to the prosecutor's office and said, 'We're not moving until he sees us.''' The prosecutor finally met with the women and told them that there would be no exchange. ''Your son is worth nothing to us,''' Yelena remembered him saying. ''Can you imagine what it was like for a mother to hear her son has no value? I wanted to beat him.''
In March, Yelena went home, leaving Masha behind in Gudermes. She looked not just depleted but also battered. When I asked her why she had come back, she began to explain, but then stopped. Her husband quietly urged her to speak. Yelena said that someone had come one day to Suleiman's house and told her that if she wanted to see her son, she should follow him. ''For six months, we were trying to find the children, and suddenly I was told I could see him so easily,'' Yelena said.
She went to the house on her own. ''They thought I had money,'' Yelena went on. ''They were pure business types. Not fighters. Not Wahabbis. They put me in a basement and said they'd release me for money. 'You can kill me,' I said, 'but I don't have a kopek.' What could I say? My salary is 500 rubles a month.'' Misha leaned over and put his hand on hers. ''And you understand Russian women,'' he said. ''When she's ordered to the basement, will she go there? Of course not, so they beat her.'' Yelena told me that she doesn't remember much else about what happened to her or who her captors were. She knows only that after three days Suleiman appeared and saved her.
When Yelena left Chechnya, Suleiman promised to send her a telegram as soon as there was news.
At the end of March, Masha got word that Sasha was alive but was being detained for desertion back at the boys' artillery base in Volgograd. It seemed appropriate that he should end up there, where children are still being killed by exploding World War II mortar shells and where the shallowest digging still unearths bones and whole bodies of the million Russians killed in the battle for Stalingrad. And it seemed appropriate, too, that I should find Masha one afternoon staying in a seedy motel across from an enormous statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the K.G.B., lording it over the Red Oktober Tractor and Tank Factory, just down the road from the 200-foot statue of Mother Russia.
When I spotted Masha walking toward her motel, she greeted me with a crooked smile. She was paranoid, naturally, convinced that the F.S.B. was following her. She said that she was always looking over her shoulder and scanning the windows for snipers. The motel was populated by soldiers and drifting traders, but at least it was cheap. She was committed to staying there as long as it took, she said, until the army released her son. She had been gone from home for six months and had very little in her room -- a plastic bag with a few clothes, a Bible from Pennsylvania, a can of gin and tonic and a can of sprats.
Every morning she trekked to the unit with dried meat and cream for Sasha. She told me that back in February Said had been trying to cheat her and Yelena out of their money. By their last visit with him, Sasha had already been freed. One day, Masha called her sister back home, and her sister had shouted into the phone, ''But the boy is free!''
Masha ran to Suleiman and drove as fast as possible out of Chechnya, to the army prosecutor's office in Mosdok, where she was allowed to see her son. ''I still didn't believe it, but when they called 'Chernikov' to come, I turned, and he was at the door. I just cried. 'Sasha,' I said, 'I'll never let you from me again.' And he said, 'Mama, I don't believe I've come out of this hell.'''
A few days later, Masha's husband arrived in Volgograd. Back in October, he had slaughtered all but one of their pigs and borrowed money on his truck to finance her journey to Chechnya. He is her second husband, and Masha said he had become a laughingstock in their village for sticking by her the entire time she was gone. ''The first was such a boozer,'' Masha said. ''I isolated Sasha from him. And maybe because Sasha saw how diffi-cult it was for me alone, he stopped his studies to join the army and earn money.''
Masha was hoping her husband might have some sway with the stubborn bosses at her son's unit. After all that had happened, Sasha was now being held because the papers clearing his name on desertion charges didn't have the proper stamp on them and therefore had to be sent back to Chechnya. Even more absurdly, the F.S.B. wanted Sasha to account for the weapon he had been issued in Chechnya. The senior officers who sent them for vodka claim that they left with guns. But, as Sasha said, ''If we left with weapons, would we have just raised our hands?''
Near the end of May, Sasha was released. When I go to visit him in his village in southern Russia, I find Masha pumping water from the well in front of her wooden cottage, painted turquoise and blue in the old Russian manner, with flowers on the window frames. She is transformed. She and her husband have just bought three piglets. A Russian pop love song blares from the door as Sasha ducks out with a flirtatious grin. He is not the shy, downtrodden boy one might have expected. With his army earnings, he just bought a CD player and an old red motorbike and sidecar. He has been fishing all day.
We sit by the pond behind Sasha's grandfather's house, and despite his initial reluctance, he recounts for me the story -- as much as he knows -- of his and Denis's captivity. He tells me that his first six months of training in the army were interesting. ''I liked learning to drive the A.P.C., and the life was unusual after home.'' Then one day in Volgograd, 10 of them were lined up and told: You are going to Chechnya. Are there any reasons you cannot go there? ''What reasons could I give?'' Sasha says. ''Two days later, 50 of us were en route, for four days in the trains. The only thing I remember are the small Chechen boys we passed, who shouted at the windows: 'Where are you going? Soon ''ours'' will kill you all.' It was not a nice feeling, of course. But I've studied history, and I know they are not people to simply stay quiet.''
As Sasha recalls his days on the artillery base in Chechnya, he begins folding into himself. He pulls his head down with his clasped hands. His words fall into his army shirt. Of course he had heard about abuse in the army, he told me, but he was stunned by the severity of the humiliations, the broken noses, the daily bashing with rifle butts, boots, fists by his ''seniors.''
Nineteen days after being deployed to Chechnya, Sasha and Denis were sent to the village by the seniors to buy two bottles of vodka. On the way back, two Chechen men appeared with pistols, and in an instant, Denis and Sasha were reduced to barter -- roped up, blindfolded, stored for the summer, then fall, then winter in pits, attics, basements and car trunks.
After the first week, they tried to escape by pulling the planks out of a cellar trapdoor. But the ladder was rotten and collapsed under Denis. Their captors heard the crash. They threatened to slice the boys' throats until another of them intervened. After that, their rations were reduced to half a loaf of bread and a glass of water a day. Soon they could not walk. They began to lose their sight. ''We were so skinny, they just hauled us with one hand when they wanted to move us,'' Sasha says. He felt that they were just waiting to die. Denis told him about his fiancée back in Gorky. And Sasha told him about his girlfriend. ''That one has met a guy while I was gone,'' he adds. ''But it's understandable. She had no idea whether I was alive.''
Then, sometime in October, he and Denis were chained together and thrown into a pit ''the size of a usual grave.'' It was closed in by branches and covered with earth, and it was shortly after that that Denis suffered an epileptic attack. ''The Chechen guarding us in a 'phantom mask' was as startled as I was,'' Sasha says. ''Denis fell on the floor and was convulsing and moaning and foam was coming out of his mouth. Later, Denis said he saw red circles in his eyes, but he couldn't remember anything else.'' The next epileptic attack happened when the Chechens carried Denis to the outhouse. ''They thought it was a ruse and beat us again.''
Sasha tells me of a conversation he had with one of his captors. ''He said we'd come on their land to kill them, that we were bad, that he had killed 'ours' and that we were lucky we were recruits, not contract soldiers, or we would have had our heads cut off immediately. And then he asked what would we do if he came to our Russia and started slaughtering our women. So I told him I'd buy a rifle and shoot them for defense. And so he beat us again.''
The mosquitoes are swarming now, and we head back through the overgrown backyard. ''My grandmother died the day before my mother came to Chechnya,'' he says, and then he talks about how shocked he was when the Chechens told them their mothers had come. ''They said the only reason our commanders were starting to speak of exchange or ransom was on account of our mothers.'' Before that, the Chechens told them that their commander had simply said: ''Just shoot them. What do I need them for?''
At the end of November, Sasha's captors told him that he had been sold. The rope that had bound him to Denis for the past two weeks was untied, and he was transported to his new owner -- he doesn't know who -- where he says he was treated less miserably. Then, after three months, he was stashed in a car with two Chechens and a Russian woman called Aunt Zina. They told him that they were with a mission that frees P.O.W.'s and, he says, ''They told me there are more like me in captivity, and I should be quiet.''
And that was it. He is still not entirely sure what happened, but he was turned over to the F.S.B., who for the next six weeks interrogated him, asking about every detail of his captivity. They never bothered to tell his family he was free. Finally, he managed to find someone who got a message to his aunt in their village.
When I ask him about Denis, Sasha says quietly: ''One of the commanders in Volgograd told me that he received information that Denis was probably dead. Either from untreated illness or slaughtered.''
That night, the river is cold. The wind rushes through the birch leaves. Sasha is free and alive, and he takes off his clothes and splashes, shouting through the icy water. He shimmies up a dead pine tree to crack off the branches for a fire. He is nervous, he says, about how much he has told me. Suspicion reigns, even out here. Earlier in the day, when we stopped by the village club hall, a circle of crinkle-faced men looked up. ''They heard you speaking English -- tomorrow I'll be interrogated,'' Sasha says, only half joking.
On our way back to his cottage, a small car pulls up with a few of Sasha's friends. It is 2:30 in the morning. They stand around talking of girls.
When I ask Masha if she is surprised by Sasha's ordeal with the army, she says: ''And how does the Russian man usually behave? Seven beat up one, and 10 will be standing and watching, and everyone will be thinking, 'It's not me they're beating, so all is O.K.' Take an Armenian, an Azerbaijani, a Chechen, someone beats one of them, and they'll attack him like cats and stand up for each other. Us? We just wave the sight away and walk on.''
Sasha was one of the lucky ones. He had scraped through. His family had rich, black-soil land. He was hungry and ambitious. He had his girlfriends lined up for the summer. He would get a job and go back to his institute.
On my last visit with Yelena, we walk with her daughter Zhana around the rusting ship hulls and propellers on the banks of the Volga. Yelena is waiting for another telegram from Suleiman and preparing for her next trip to Chechnya. She wishes she could know for sure whether Denis is alive or dead. He has just appeared in her daughter's dream, she tells me, to say he is coming home soon. And Yelena says she has also just received a sign of hope from the candles at her church. I wonder what to do with the information I have from Sasha. But then she tells me a story that she heard from Suleiman. It is about a mother who received her son's coffin at the end of the first war. ''And at the beginning of this war,'' Yelena says, ''her son walked through the door.''
As we walk back to the house, it is hard not to think about what must be going on in Chechnya behind Putin's closed doors. A few days earlier, I got a call about a missing boy whose family I had stayed with. ''They found the boy,'' the girl I was speaking with said over the scratchy line. I was so stunned, having assumed they never would. ''Alive?'' I asked her. There was a muffling on the phone. ''Oh, just a minute,'' said the girl, who was translating for the family. Then she said, ''No, dead.'' I remembered talking to the boy's younger brother. If his brother didn't turn up alive, he told me, all Russians would be the target of his vengeance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/08/magazine/only-you-can-save-your-sons.html