Chechens Form Human Chain to Defy Russia : Caucasus: Tens of thousands line highway for 40 miles. Bombs fall near streetcar station in center of capital.

In a striking show of mass defiance, at least 100,000 Chechens lined their last unoccupied highway Tuesday to call for peace as Russian troops stepped up land and air attacks on their tiny breakaway republic.

Top Chechen officials moved from the nine-story presidential palace here to an underground shelter after two bombs exploded nearby Monday night in the first major air assault on the city center. Frigid wind whistled through President Dzhokar M. Dudayev’s empty office, and snow dusted the windowsills.

Tearful homeowners picked through the rubble of their possessions in a residential neighborhood near Grozny’s central streetcar station where the two bombs hit.

“That used to be my house,” said clockmaker Ruslan Ismailov, pointing at the partial husk of a structure. “We’ll deal with those Russian pigs!”

Two people were confirmed dead Tuesday morning in three overnight air raids on this oil-refining center. But the bombs and the constant thumping of prolonged battle in the northern suburb of Petropavlovskaya heightened tension among the estimated 200,000 people still in Grozny.

As the Kremlin promised “decisive offensive actions” to press Dudayev into renouncing his oil-rich republic’s claim to independence, fully a tenth of Chechnya’s mostly Muslim population took to its main highway in protest.

Men and women, infants and old people walled the 40-mile stretch of the Moscow-Baku highway from the eastern outskirts of Grozny to the Dagestan border. Many carried hand-lettered signs demanding “Freedom for Chechnya” and “Yeltsin! Stop the War!”

At prayer time, many in the crowd laid lambskin coats on the fresh snow and knelt on the curly wool, facing Mecca.

“We want freedom and independence,” said Makhmadselakh Bechiev, a driver who had been standing in the wet snow for two hours. “If we have to, we’ll stand forever, until there’s peace.”

Andi Natsulkhanov, a 62-year-old farmer, said villagers had turned out in such numbers because “all of the Chechen population wants to live its own life.”

“No Chechen,” he said, “wants all our issues here to be solved by bombing and killing and the destruction of all that was built.”

The great line of people had many gaps along the road but swelled into huddled crowds near towns and spilled into Dagestan, a Russian republic, where thousands joined the protesters in solidarity.

Organizers had billed the lineup as a march of peace meant to involve the entire North Caucasus.

Politicians have warned that Russia’s military moves in Chechnya could explode into a new Caucasus war, a modern twist on the conflict that dragged on for decades in the mid-19th Century, when czarist Russia tried to force the mountain region into its empire.

Twenty-seven Russian soldiers have been reported killed since President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government sent 10,000 or more troops into Chechnya on Dec. 11.

Chechen fighters shot down a Russian helicopter Tuesday in the battle for Petropavlovskaya, killing two military doctors and a crewman.

Nobody had bothered to count Chechen casualties until Sergei Kovalyov, Yeltsin’s human rights commissioner, reported Tuesday having personally seen the bodies of 42 civilians killed in fighting outside Grozny and bombing raids inside.

“The scale of human rights violations by the Russian troops in Chechnya is such that the conflict has ceased to be just an internal affair of Russia,” said Kovalyov, who opposed the offensive from the start. His comments echoed protests and calls for peace talks by Turkey, Iran, Jordan and other governments.

In the wind-swept presidential palace, Dudayev adviser Abdullah Dadayev said the Chechen conflict is more likely to become a rerun of the Afghanistan war that bogged down and humiliated the Soviet army in the 1980s.

“This will be a drawn-out war,” he said. “We’ve prepared a long time for it, and it will be another Afghanistan, whether we want it to be or not.”

Tuesday’s Kremlin statement made it clear that the attacks are aimed in part at destroying the Chechens’ store of war materiel.

Fifteen pieces of “combat hardware” and 10 artillery guns were destroyed in the last 24 hours, the statement said.

The main combat Tuesday was focused in Petropavlovskaya, which was reported Monday to have been overrun by the advancing Russians.

But Musa Mirzhuyev, Dudayev’s liaison with his fighters, said Tuesday that Chechen forces in the suburb were holding back Russian tanks and artillery guns with grenades and machine guns.

“We’ll beat them back,” Mirzhuyev vowed. He said he still expected the Russian troops to try to storm Grozny.

Despite the accelerated bombing and shelling of Grozny and its outskirts, Moscow appeared to be holding back, possibly hoping to persuade Dudayev to agree to disarm his fighters--the one concession demanded by Russia for a resumption of peace talks.

Neighbors of the destroyed houses near Grozny’s streetcar station said a bomb crater left in an intersection indicated that the Russian planes were dropping one-ton bombs.

The crater measured about 20 feet across and 10 feet deep--a devastating hit but far short of what the former Soviet air force could do if it attacked full force.

Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux contributed to this report from Moscow.