Chechen Republic’s Independent Nature Bodes Ill for Russia, Yeltsin : Conflict: Proud people take lone wolf as their symbol. Muslim enclave is the first, but probably not the last, to try to leave the federation.

A throaty chant emerged from the depths of the old Communist Party headquarters in this frozen town on the northern flank of the Caucasus Mountains. Then came the thud of boots and a shuffling parade of 20 elders in long sheepskin coats and gray lamb’s-wool Astrakhan hats.

The “wolf republic” is dancing with independence, to music written and conducted by a onetime nuclear bomber pilot.

It is an exciting, if anxious time in the Chechen-Ingushetia region of Russia--now the self-proclaimed sovereign Chechen Republic, a proud but provocative speck on Russia’s southernmost frontier. It is also perhaps a harbinger of trouble for Moscow.

“There is no god but God, and Mohammed is his prophet,” the bearded elders intoned as they danced through the high-ceilinged, marbled corridors.

The rites of the Muslim Nakshibendi sect on a recent winter’s eve hailed the takeover of the old Communist palace on Grozny’s main square by the region’s new, would-be independent government.

The former Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic is the first--but probably not the last--Muslim enclave to attempt to secede from Boris N. Yeltsin’s new Christian Russian state.

The region’s 700,000 Chechens are one of a number of non-Russian or Muslim groups within the Russian motherland whose aspirations for independence replay in miniature the process that destroyed the Soviet Union itself. Yeltsin may not face ethnic problems on the scale of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who bade peaceful farewell to Eastern Europe and the Soviet republics. But the Russian president has shown no willingness to let the small territories go.

Late last year, Yeltsin sent 650 internal security troops to quell Chechen separatism, but without success. The soldiers were blocked on the airport road by farm machinery, demonstrators and men for whom honor demands possession of a gun. Within days, Yeltsin withdrew.

What Chechen-Ingushetia lacks in numbers, it makes up for with a virile culture that is not for the fainthearted.

Handshakes are thrown like karate chops. Conversations rarely go softer than a quiet shout. A Chechen mother may strike her son only once during his upbringing--to ensure that his spirit remains unbowed. To be a man is to be proud, independent and brave.

The central symbol on the new Chechen flag is the wolf, sitting enigmatically under a silver moon under a mountaintop symbolizing the 14,000-foot peaks to the south of the capital where wild wolves still roam.

“The wolf is different from any other animal, just like the Chechens,” said President Dzhokar Dudayev, who like most of his people is as fluent in Russian as in Chechen, their rare, indigenous Caucasian tongue. “The Soviet Empire saw the Chechens as criminals. Now the Chechens need to live like wolves, proud and alone.”

Dudayev’s story crowns centuries of Chechen history in the wilds of the Caucasus, a history troubled by conflict with the Russians. The president already plans a 60,000-man army and an air force and boasts of the conversion of a heavy engineering plant to produce an automatic weapon that he claims is better than the Israeli-made Uzi submachine gun.

In a way, he is following in the steps of the legendary hero of the Chechens, Hajji Shamil, a religious leader from neighboring Dagestan who defied czarist expansionism for decades in the mid-19th Century. Shamil unified Caucasian forces under the banner of Islamic holy war. It took a Russian expeditionary force of 200,000 men to end his revolt in 1859.

A later Chechen attempt to escape Moscow’s rule by proclaiming an independent state after World War I was crushed by the Red Army, but enmity between the Russians and Chechens did not end.

Dudayev’s men say he was born on the very night in February, 1944, that Stalin’s troops started herding Chechens aboard railroad cars for exile to Central Asia, accused like the Tatars of collaboration with Nazi Germany.

Thousands died, and a whole generation was wrecked before the Chechens returned to their homeland in 1957. Their natural energy later earned them influence in the Soviet Union. A Chechen, Ruslan Khasbulatov, still heads the Russian Parliament. In Moscow, however, many equate their canny, clannish defiance of rules with the old Soviet version of the Mafia.

“The Russians are really afraid of their fiery, independent spirit,” said one Moscow-based Western military attache of the tall, straight-backed mountain people. “They run rings around the slouching Slavic type.”

Dudayev symbolized the Chechens who came to terms with the Soviet Union. He flew as a Soviet nuclear bomber pilot for 28 years and still hands out photographs of himself in a peak-capped general’s uniform with his mustache lovingly trimmed into the shape of a pair of swept-back aircraft wings.

Politics was thrust upon him when he returned for a summer holiday to Grozny last year. His anti-Moscow speeches stirred passions during the run-up to the October, 1991, presidential elections. Soon he was the candidate. Then he won.

“Dudayev is a romantic revolutionary. He’s very clever, a fanatic with a national idea for the Chechens,” said Leicha Yakhbayev, editor of the independent daily newspaper Svoboda here in the capital, a gray Russian garrison city of 350,000 people where mosques were banned and the only religious buildings are onion-domed churches built for the colonists from Moscow, 1,000 miles to the north.

Initially, Dudayev’s independence “revolution” was somewhat narrowly based. Intellectuals thought it wouldn’t work, native Ingush and other minorities were suspicious. The Russian minority of 350,000 feared that independence would cut them off from their motherland.

Dudayev insists that there is no turning back, and he plays his cards close to the vest. His presidential office is surrounded by well-armed bodyguards from his extended family, right down to an 11-year-old boy. Caution is the watchword.

Border skirmishes with the Ingush and a post-independence doubling of the crime rate have already caused many ordinary families to flee their Grozny apartments.

“It’s just an instinct that maybe what happened in Georgia could happen here,” said economics institute teacher Aiza Abbasova, now living with her parents on the outskirts of the capital. The Georgian civil war is closely felt by its Chechen neighbors since the ousted Georgian president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, is a friend of Dudayev and ally in the crusade for independence from Moscow.

But Yeltsin’s attempt to crush the Chechen independence movement last year united behind Dudayev many of the diverse forces in the old autonomous republic, whose population is nearly two-thirds native Chechen.

Chechen embodies the ethnic complexities and suspicions of many other parts of Yeltsin’s new federation. Opposition to independence, for example, is especially strong among the 150,000 people of the Ingush minority in the industrialized towns to the west of Grozny.

It is hard for outsiders to tell a Chechen from an Ingush, but they know one another. The Ingush share the Chechens’ history of Stalinist oppression but speak a slightly different language and oppose independence because of an unresolved claim to their historic homeland, given by Stalin to neighboring North Ossetia.

Dudayev has accused Russia of stirring up the Ingush. And Chechens view with suspicion Yeltsin’s sudden public interest in the Ingush case.

About 20,000 Russians have left the region, but more than 300,000 still stay because they enjoy a higher standard of living than in the bleak Russian heartlands, because of intermarriage or because they were born there and have nowhere else to go. Recently, teachers held a salary protest in Grozny’s windy central square--one month’s pay buys just two free-market chickens--but there are more fundamental grievances.

“They are making us get Chechen stamps in our passports,” said one Russian teacher wearing a soft fur hat. “We are frightened that this will mean that we will not be able to go elsewhere in Russia, or that other republics will make us pay for things in foreign currency if we do.”