Chechnya War Didn't Have To Be, Yeltsin Aide Says -- Russian President Seemed Unwilling To Try For Peace

MOSCOW - The Security Council is supposedly the Kremlin's ultimate advisory body. But as these 14 men considered a plan to make war on Chechnya, Yuri Kalmykov sensed an oddly brusque formality about the proceedings, as if President Boris Yeltsin hadn't really come for advice.

"I want to discuss another way, a peaceful way," said Kalmykov, the man in the room that November day who best knew the breakaway republic. Yeltsin cut him off sharply. "We'll talk about it later," he recalls the president insisting. "Let's vote on what we have."

Without argument, the council approved a four-stage military assault. Yeltsin then let Kalmykov's idea - to delay the war and negotiate Chechnya's status - dissolve in inconclusive debate. Russian troops began moving, and Kalmykov, who was justice minister, went home to draft his resignation, puzzled why the suddenly hawkish president had bothered to call the meeting.

Nearly four months into a war that has devastated Chechnya, traumatized Russia, humbled its army, bled its treasury, damaged its relations with the West and stained his presidency, Yeltsin has explained little of why and nothing of how he decided to start it.

But interviews with politicians, warriors and analysts on both sides indicate that the decision was all but sealed in August, when Yeltsin stopped listening to his specialists on Chechnya - who were counseling against force - and approved a covert operation to topple Chechen President Dzhokar Dudayev.

STEP BY MISSTEP

By all accounts, Yeltsin was drawn into the conflict step by bungling step. Dudayev had declared Chechnya independent from Moscow in late 1991, won a rigged election and armed a militia with heavy weapons of the disintegrating Soviet army.

Encouraged by Yeltsin's reluctance to talk to Dudayev, lightly armed Chechen rebels had risen against Dudayev's repressive rule and asked Moscow for help. But the tanks, helicopters and training they had received in response were not doing the job.

A critical moment came Nov. 26, when Chechens who had been offered $1,000 apiece to storm the rebel capital of Grozny refused to board tanks, prompting their Russian trainers to take over the job at the last hour. At least 15 Russians were captured in the badly improvised attack, exposing the covert operation and obliging Yeltsin to choose between a humiliating retreat and a full-scale assault for which his army was ill-prepared.

At that point, Yeltsin turned to a secretive, informal circle of advisers who told him a quick military victory was possible and would boost his approval ratings. They were wrong; the Russian invasion, rubber-stamped by the Security Council on Nov. 29, helped the unpopular Dudayev rally his people to unexpectedly fierce and prolonged resistance in which thousands have died.

While Russian military failures were quickly evident in the field, the path that led Yeltsin to war is only now becoming clear, as some advisers look back with critical eyes and as Parliament opens hearings on the conflict.

Although Russian forces finally control Grozny and the intensity of combat is diminished, Parliament's investigation will make it hard for Yeltsin to put Chechnya behind him.

Seeking the roots of the crisis, a parliamentary commission is asking why Moscow didn't protect its arsenals in Chechnya from Dudayev-ordered raids in 1991, and why Defense Minister Pavel Grachev agreed to leave Dudayev half the tanks, aircraft, artillery and automatic weapons still in the arsenals when the Russian army left the following year.

Lawmakers are also asking how the rebel republic secured oil export licenses from Moscow, and who in the Kremlin may have profited from arms trafficking, bank fraud and other criminal activity that flourished under Dudayev.

Rather than any complicity, Yeltsin says it was his all-absorbing power struggle with Russia's Soviet-era Parliament, finally dissolved by force in the fall of 1993, that kept him from confronting the Chechen rebellion until early 1994.

MILITARISTIC MENTALITY

Until the last day, senior advisers were urging Yeltsin to stop short of war.

In late November, Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov told Yeltsin that Dudayev was ready to rejoin the Russian Federation. After the Nov. 29 Security Council vote, Kalmykov, a native of the Caucasus region that includes Chechnya, rushed there to see Dudayev and reported him willing to talk to Moscow "without preconditions." But Yeltsin wasn't listening.

A Kremlin adviser, Emil Pain, meanwhile, was pushing his own plan. It called for "peaceful competition between two systems" - Dudayev's impoverished regime and three pro-Russian districts of northern Chechnya that would get massive economic aid from Moscow. The aim was to win Chechens' support for renewed ties with Russia and weaken Dudayev's already dim hopes for re-election in 1995.

The plan made sense to many Chechens. "We could have gotten rid of Dudayev without blood and without war, just by waiting seven months until elections," said Lom-Ali Shamayev, a rich Chechen businessman. "What's seven months?"

Pain, the top expert on ethnic conflict in Yeltsin's Analytical Center, warned that his plan would not work if the Kremlin aided the armed wing of the anti-Dudayev opposition; otherwise, it would drive Chechensto fight on Dudayev's side.

But that is exactly what happened.

"It was simply ingrained in the mentality of our leaders that when they decided to help the opposition take control, the first thing that occurred to them was, of course, military control," Arkady Popov, another Kremlin adviser, said in an interview.

"If Dudayev had tried to invent something to boost his standing, he couldn't have done it better," he concluded.