By FRED WEIR
MOSCOW - A wave of emotionally wrenching mass funerals has marched across Russia in the past month, leaving whole communities dazed and anguished over the sudden loss of dozens of local boys in a conflict the Kremlin keeps declaring finished.
This week Perm, an industrial city in the Urals, welcomed home the bodies of more than 20 members of an elite crime-busting police unit that was ambushed by Chechen rebels in the mountainous area of Vedeno.
The exact number of men killed in the action has still not been established, but could be as many as 40.
"Everyone in this city is in shock," says Nikolai Kuznetsov, a journalist with the Perm Zvezda (Star), an independent daily.
"Our switchboard has been jammed with calls from people who just want to express their sorrow, or their outrage. Nothing like this has happened here in a long time."
Like many Russian casualties from the Chechen war, the dead were not soldiers but police from hinterland towns dispatched to perform security functions behind the front lines in Chechnya.
It is a bit like sending the New York Police Department or the Miami Vice Squad to fight in Vietnam. The policy of sending Omon - elite local police units - to the war zone results from a vagueness in Russian constitutional law and military doctrine that stipulates the Army is for external threats only.
"The Interior Ministry is supposed to play the leading role in dealing with internal disturbances," says Viktor Boronyets, a former spokesman for Russia's Defence Ministry and now a public military expert.
"Our Government wants to preserve the fiction that Chechnya is not a real war. That's why the police are doing military work down there."
The Russian Army has been in the forefront of taking territory and battering the rebels' "organised armed formations." But now that most of the breakaway republic is under Russian control, the military seems anxious to transfer the tasks of "keeping order" to the Interior Ministry.
"It may not make the best military sense, but we are likely to see more Omon being sent down to Chechnya if the guerrilla war becomes more intense," says Boronyets.
Unlike the usual daily flow of coffins from the battlefront back to towns and villages across Russia, the sudden massacre of large numbers of men from a single place makes news headlines and becomes a tragedy for the whole community.
Most Army divisions are made up of conscripts drawn from all over, whereas police units are home town boys, with deep local roots, sent in a group for temporary Chechnya service.
A month ago the small town of Sergeyev Posad, just north of Moscow, buried 18 officers of a local Omon detachment that was wiped out while driving through a suburb of Grozny, the Chechen capital that is supposedly under Russian control.
In a mid-March incident involving a regionally based Army unit, an entire regiment of paratroopers - 84 men - from the western Russian city of Pskov was massacred in a three-day mountain battle near the Argun Gorge, in southern Chechnya.
They were buried in a mass funeral in Pskov attended by Defence Minister Igor Sergeyev and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexei II and drenched in nationwide media coverage.
"These funerals hit local communities like a natural disaster, like an earthquake," says Yury Levada, director of VTsIOM, Russia's leading public opinion service.
Polls show a solid majority of Russians still support the six-month-old Chechnya war, though Levada says the numbers are gradually sliding.
The 53 per cent first-round win for the conflict's chief architect, President Vladimir Putin, may be read as a public referendum on his policies.
However, a survey conducted by Arpi, a leading polling agency, found that 52 per cent of Russians were braced for a drawn-out guerrilla war as opposed to just 12 per cent who believed Kremlin claims that Chechen rebels were on the verge of final defeat.
"The casualty rate in this war is already much higher than in previous conflicts, like the 1994-96 Chechnya war or the long Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s," says Alexander Goltz, military expert with the weekly news magazine Itogi.
"Russia is a big country and we haven't seen much impact on public opinion yet. But these mass funerals draw people's attention in a very dramatic way."
Russian war deaths hit home
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