Orphanage in Chechen Capital Bombed : Caucasus: Attack heralds beginning of Russian assault on city. Children escape injury.

Hours after President Boris N. Yeltsin vowed to halt bombing that could cause civilian casualties, Russian warplanes early Wednesday morning devastated Chechnya’s biggest orphanage, where about 60 children and 100 adults cowered in the basement, witnesses said.

No one was hurt in the bombing that heralded the long-expected, full-scale Russian attack on the rebel capital of Grozny. But old women and children who hid in the basement recalled the whine of the plane they heard at dawn and the sense of betrayal they felt over Yeltsin breaking his promise.

“Ask Yeltsin this question,” demanded Antonina Tikhonova, a 70-year-old ethnic Russian. “How can the Russian pilots we’ve always loved kill us, Russian children and old people?”

Nonstop bombing and shelling pounded the northeast and west of Grozny on Wednesday as Russian forces braved ferocious resistance and advanced into the besieged capital in a relentless final push to subdue the breakaway republic.

By midafternoon, the approaching rat-tat-tat of small arms fire in the city center indicated that Russian troops had broken through Chechen defenses and could carry out Kremlin plans to take the city before New Year’s Eve.

Russia denied it had bombed the orphanage or any other area of Grozny.

“We did not work in Grozny today,” insisted Valentin M. Sergeyev of the Russian government press center in Moscow. “We obeyed the president’s order, which is the law for us.” He called any report of the bombing “propaganda and provocation.”

Other Russian officials claimed that Chechen rebels had fired a missile on the outlying village of Urus-Martan, killing nine civilians, then tried to blame the attack on the Russian air force. Russian air commanders claimed that not even reconnaissance flights had been made in the area.

Up to 40,000 Russian troops moved into Chechnya on Dec. 11 in a last-ditch Kremlin attempt to bring the rebellious republic to heel. The largely Muslim enclave of about 1.2 million people has put up fierce resistance to the Russian incursion, and President Dzhokar M. Dudayev of Chechnya declared in a televised address Tuesday that his troops would go “not one step back.”

After 17 days of halting Russian advances, however, the Chechnya offensive appeared to be entering a decisive new phase. In a televised speech Tuesday, Yeltsin instructed Russian troops not to delay in disarming the “criminal gangs” he blamed for hijacking, terrorism, train robbery and drug- and weapons-trafficking, and they responded by waging battles in and around Grozny with renewed vigor.

Oleg I. Lobov, secretary of Yeltsin’s Security Council, said Wednesday that troops were intent on bringing the city under control gradually with a minimum of bloodshed. Grozny “will not be taken by storm, but liberated,” he declared.

Nevertheless, the city shook under heavy bombing and shelling--a deadly symphony of the deep booms of aviation bombs, the lighter thump of shelling and the staccato stutter of machine guns, sometimes all sounding at once.

“They don’t care where they bomb,” said Magomed Khachkeyev, a soldier who came to help evacuate the remaining 60 or so orphanage children to an outlying village. “They want to erase the face of the city.”

A heavy battle raged in the town of Argun, 10 miles east of Grozny, where Chechen troops were trying to hold off the Russian advance toward the capital. Truck-launched missiles and small arms fire dominated the ground exchanges as Russian bombardiers in helicopters flew overhead.

Despite Russia’s vastly superior might, Chechen fighters claimed they had surrounded and captured a group of Russian soldiers in Argun. They said they had offered to let the Russians go if they would lay down their arms but that the captives responded that they lacked permission to surrender.

Lobov said Russian forces had taken the town of Pervomayskoye after days of intensive fighting and that they now control the airport in Khankala, a suburb of Grozny, as well.

On the psychological front, the Chechens hold a clear advantage. A fierce mountain people who fought czarist rule for decades in the 19th Century and were brutally deported by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, they have no lack of motivation. Many Chechen commandos wear green bandannas, denoting their status as suicide fighters planning to sacrifice their lives to defend their homeland.

But on a purely strategic plane, the Chechens are doomed to defeat by the military machine of the former superpower.

The wrecked buildings lining many of the streets of central Grozny testify to more than a week of Russian bombers attacking the city with impunity.

The Children’s World store just two blocks from Dudayev’s presidential palace is a blown-out shell. The trees across the street are blackened skeletons.

The pretty pink Kavkaz Hotel across from the palace has lost one wing and most of its windows. Dzerzhinsky Street, a small area where Chechnya’s poshest shop used to stand, has nothing left of its storefronts but rubble.

Near the entrance to the city’s Microdistrict No. 1 on Wednesday, a large crater and the mangled, burned-out frames of six cars attested to the bomb that hit the intersection there. Sheets that had been used to cover charred corpses still lay on the ground.

Along Grozny’s snowy boulevards, building after building showed the marks of destruction. Several streets were flooded, and most of the city was without electricity. A music school was in ruins.

Chechen sources said that Russian planes also bombed a radio transmitter in southwestern Grozny six times Wednesday morning, but missed.

In Chechnya’s central Republican Clinical Hospital, head nurse Tatyana Kitayeva said missiles had destroyed two of the hospital’s operating rooms and that most of the wounded were being treated in a bomb shelter turned into a makeshift emergency ward.

“We have no antibiotics, not enough anesthetics, not enough fluids and we’re short on bandages,” Kitayeva said. “We don’t have enough of anything.”

The playground in the back yard of Orphanage No. 2 in the Leninsky district was cratered from the bombing attack. Whole families resigned to living in the bomb shelter until the fighting stops had reverted to a primitive existence, baking their own bread and snuggling together for warmth.

“Yeltsin is a fascist,” said Nina Tsekhoyeva, a school administrator who moved into the orphanage basement after her home was bombed a week ago.

“Dudayev may be bad, we may be bad,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean we deserve this.”