Documentary : Getting to Rebel Chechnya Is a Battle in Itself : A correspondent runs into roadblocks trying to cover conflict in the Caucasus--and also a cunning taxi driver.

The captain at the roadside militia post studied our press credentials and phoned his superior. As we waited, truckers and farmers breezed through the checkpoint.

Half an hour later, he lied to us: “There’s a crowd of armed people ahead. For your own safety, I cannot let you through.”

The captain, a cheerful, stocky little man with a Kalashnikov rifle and bulletproof vest, was just one of a string of obstacles on the way from Moscow to Grozny, the capital of tiny, secessionist Chechnya.

It is a 1,000-mile journey that should take two hours by air.

But here in the Caucasus Mountains, distance and time have a way of expanding to frustrate the finest of Moscow’s calculations, the grandest of imperial designs. Even for an unarmed Moscow correspondent, getting to Grozny is an unpredictable ordeal.

Czarist armies needed three centuries to bring this turbulent region to heel. Now, after seven decades of Russian monarchy and seven decades of “scientific socialism,” the Caucasus is again a caldron of ethnic unrest.

So it was a historic event when thousands of Russian troops moved into heavily armed Chechnya to try to crush the oil-rich Muslim republic’s self-declared independence. Awakened by the news early on Dec. 11, I fretted over the odds of reaching Grozny ahead of the Russians.

The Itar-Tass news bulletin said three tank columns began converging on the city at 7 a.m., from 40 to 60 miles away, at speeds up to 12 m.p.h. At that rate. . . .

I rushed to the airport with Sergei Loiko, a Russian reporter for The Times. A Russian blockade had halted flights to Grozny since August. The nearest we could land was Mineralniye Vody, a Russian city 190 miles to the northwest.

By 5 p.m., an intrepid taxi driver named Ruslan had agreed to take us in his big black Volga. Grozny was four hours away, but he warned: “I cannot guarantee we’ll get there.”

We arrived at 5 the next morning.

Along the way was a maze of roadblocks in three tiny republics, each guarded by police, vigilantes and assorted gunmen, each with its own foreign policy.

The militia captain who turned us back in the Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria was taking orders from someone in Moscow who didn’t want reporters to witness the conflict.

But Ruslan found a way around--a two-hour trek on muddy back roads across moonlit collective farms--and on to the next ministate, Ingushetia, where the first police roadblock was pro-Chechen.

There, Lt. Bekhan Korigov offered help arranging VIP clearance through every checkpoint to the Chechen border.

“If the Russians enter Grozny, the Ingush, the Kabards, the Balkars, the Cherkessians--all the Caucasus peoples--will rise up, and that will be the end of Russia,” the lieutenant declared. “You’ll see.”

But where were the Russians? Hadn’t they already entered Grozny?

Not yet. Moscow’s biggest tank offensive since the Afghan War was meeting far more resistance than Ruslan’s Volga. The story of the week was not the storming of Grozny but the bogging down of a huge military machine.

Before we could begin to find out why this was happening, it was first necessary to check out of that death trap of a hotel in Grozny where we had stupidly crashed after 5 a.m.

The other guests turned out to be out-of-town guerrillas--Muslims lured from places like Afghanistan and Syria to wage holy war against Slavs, and Slavs from Ukraine with their own national grievances against the Russians.

It was a multinational snipers’ nest with no food, heat or water. An Islamic Rambo juggled a hand grenade in the hallway.

“We came here to defend Ukrainian and Chechen freedom,” boasted Sasha, a beefy blond with a Kalashnikov rifle, a Los Angeles Raiders jacket and a Miami Dolphins cap turned backward on his head.

The first resistance to Col. Ivan Gromov’s tank column came not from mercenaries like Sasha but from 150 Chechen farmers. Leaving their guns home, they milled around in the road where his tanks had stopped 20 miles northeast of Grozny.

Gromov, a veteran of other ethnic conflicts around Russia’s edge, is a man who knows his limits. He took us aside, away from the crowd, which, perhaps because of our presence, had started shouting at the Russians to go home.

“My mission is to disarm the Chechens, but I’m not going to risk my men’s lives doing it,” he said.

“You have to be careful even how you talk with these people,” he added. “They are Muslims. A drunken Chechen harassed me, but I couldn’t tell him he was drunk because drinking is against his religion and he would have felt grossly insulted.”

The tanks were full of other Russian officers and soldiers who didn’t want to offend the Chechens’ sensibilities. Or spill their blood. Or die in their holy war.

So after a week of fog, peaceful and armed Chechen resistance, and wavering Russian will, the columns stopped short of Grozny. Finally, the Russian high command resorted to bomb and artillery strikes on the city’s edges.

In the eye of the storm, on the ninth floor of his presidential palace, sat Gen. Dzhokar M. Dudayev, the leader of Chechnya’s independence movement. Could I interview him?

“That depends on whether you voted for Bill Clinton,” said Dudayev’s press secretary.

Huh?

It seems that the American president had irritated the renegade Chechen by dismissing his independence war as an “internal Russian problem.”

I had been intrigued, even before coming to work in Moscow, by Dudayev’s folk hero status in the little nations under Russia’s neo-imperial thumb, his railing against Kremlin “cynicism, vandalism, barbarism and satanism,” his threats to blow up Russian nuclear power plants.

In the eventual interview, the rebel general sounded almost smug about the Russian siege of Grozny, a decrepit and lawless city that’s a haven for arms traffickers, drug dealers, counterfeiters and car thieves. He had drawn the Russian bear into a quagmire, he said, from which it cannot easily advance nor retreat. “We have achieved a brilliant victory. Now Russia’s problems will grow in geometric proportions.”

When time came to leave Chechnya, I was amazed at the ease of the journey. No roadblocks, no checkpoints, no tanks. Our taxi averaged 50 m.p.h. to Makhachkala, the nearest airport east of Dudayev’s republic.

I wondered how long it would take the Russians.