Chronicling Chechnya, Lawmaker Emerges as Russia’s Conscience : Caucasus: Sergei A. Kovalev’s gruesome reports from Grozny counter Moscow propaganda and rally nation against conflict.

His tired, bespectacled face and shy, reasoning voice seem out of place in the brutal battle for Chechnya.

But three weeks ago, 64-year-old lawmaker Sergei A. Kovalev traveled there to show his opposition to the Russian assault on the tiny, secessionist republic and stayed to chronicle the daily suffering inflicted by Russian bombs, artillery and tank fire.

In doing so, this dissident banished to the gulag for exposing the falsehoods of the Soviet dictatorship has emerged today as the chief whistle-blower on what he calls “the gigantic lie” of a supposedly democratic Kremlin.

Kovalev’s gruesome testimony--laid out daily in recorded phone messages, on Russian TV newscasts and, on Friday, in a Kremlin meeting with President Boris N. Yeltsin--has helped shatter Moscow’s propaganda gloss on the conflict and rallied much of the nation against it.

What makes his lonely, life-risking venture more dramatic is the fact that Kovalev serves the government he condemns. As the president’s human rights commissioner, he says he is trying to save not only Chechnya but also Russia itself--and Yeltsin, if he will listen--from a new dictatorship.

“A nation that suppresses another nation cannot be free,” Kovalev said as he returned to Moscow this week. “The destiny of Russia is being determined in Chechnya.”

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Kovalev called his 50-minute audience with the president “the last opportunity to contain this bloody insanity,” but he won no commitment from Yeltsin to change course. He said he will return to Grozny, the rebel capital, no later than Sunday to witness the war’s outcome.

Whatever the fate of his mission, it has established Kovalev as the new voice of Russia’s conscience--the heir to Andrei D. Sakharov, the nuclear physicist who won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize for his anti-Soviet dissent. A fellow lawmaker has nominated Kovalev for the same prize.

The Kovalev mission also dramatizes the divorce between Yeltsin and the liberals he joined in the vanguard of Russia’s new democracy after making his own break with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

In May, 1989, Kovalev and Yeltsin stood in the honor guard at Sakharov’s funeral. Running as reformers the following year, both men were elected to the Parliament, and in 1991 Yeltsin was voted president of the increasingly independent Russian Federation.

After Kovalev’s reelection to Parliament in 1993, Yeltsin named him Russia’s first human rights commissioner. But by that time liberals were losing support among voters disillusioned with reform, and Yeltsin was moving to the center. Last summer, when Kovalev issued his first report on Russia’s troubled human rights record, the government tried to suppress it.

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Kovalev was thrust into his role half a life ago after wrecking his Soviet career as a biologist to help Sakharov, a fellow scientist, found the human rights movement in the early 1960s.

A specialist in the physiology of the human heart, Kovalev lost his scientific job for opposing the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1974, he was arrested for the crime of editing and distributing the Chronicle of Current Events, an underground journal that kept track of human rights violations across the Soviet Union.

After 12 years in exile, prison and labor camps, he returned to Moscow in 1987, to his wife and three children, under Gorbachev’s liberalizations. From his deathbed two years later, Sakharov launched Kovalev into politics, telling his reluctant disciple that he owed it to the democratic cause to run for Parliament.

Kovalev is still more comfortable as a witness, a chronicler, than as a political leader--a role that Russia’s liberal media is now trying to define for him.

The Moscow newspaper Izvestia named him “man of the year” for “standing in the way of tanks, under bombs” to “bring hope to hearts filled with pain and alarm.” The weekly Moscow News ran a photograph of him beside one of Yeltsin under the headline: “1995: Russia Has a Choice.”

Asked at a news conference Thursday whether he was ready to lead a democratic opposition or at least a street rally against the war, he said no, “I simply am not suitable.”

His extensive, firsthand testimony on the conflict has been damning enough.

Day after day, he describes new civilian casualties from bombings that Moscow claims are not taking place. After much investigation, he has found little evidence to support other official Russian lines--that Chechens mistreat their Russian POWs or use Islamic radicals as mercenaries. Chechen fighters are not “criminal gangs,” as Moscow portrays them, he says, but armed people defending their homes.

“There is not a single word of truth in the official statements,” he told reporters Thursday. “Their every word is a lie. I say this responsibly: Their every word is a lie.”

He also offered a grim forecast of the war’s consequences: The Russians will suffer more defeats. Chechnya will never rejoin the Russian Federation. Eastern Europe will clamor more loudly to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Yeltsin will never be reelected.

Kovalev has proven unstoppable as well as courageous. Russian officials tried to bar him from flying to the airport nearest Chechnya, until he threatened to make the 1,000-mile journey on foot.

Finding himself in Chechnya’s skyscraper presidential palace during the Russians’ New Year tank assault on Grozny, Kovalev refused to leave that center of armed resistance, sleeping in a basement chair for two nights and hoping his presence would protect the place.

“He was the one who understood best of all that if the palace was stormed that all inside would die,” said Anatoly Shabad, one of four Russian lawmakers who joined Kovalev’s mission.

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Yeltsin has dismissed Kovalev’s “whimpering” about the rights of Chechens as insensitive to the Kremlin’s effort to wipe out organized crime there. He has also created a parallel human rights commission, made up of people in tune with the government line on Chechnya.

After their meeting Friday, Kovalev reported that he spoke harshly to Yeltsin, who said little and listened attentively but uncomfortably. “I said, ‘You are surrounded mostly by people who have a single super-task--to please you every 10 minutes. They pushed you into this adventure.’ ”

Noting that today is Russian Orthodox Christmas, Kovalev called for a truce but said Yeltsin rejected the idea as premature.

He said Yeltsin was “absolutely convinced that there had been no bombings of Grozny” since he had ordered them halted Dec. 27. Kovalev then noted that he had seen bombing almost daily and asked, “So, you do not believe me?”

“No, I believe you,” he said Yeltsin replied. “Your point of view is clear to me. . . . Your point of view will be taken into account.”

“I think Yeltsin is experiencing a personal tragedy,” Kovalev said later, recalling the president’s long career as a Communist Party boss. “He has evolved. I appreciate his ability to learn, his courage. This man has made a lot of mistakes, but he has always corrected them. I hope he will have enough courage to do it again.”

But the voice of Russia’s conscience added: “I will never vote for Yeltsin again. The mistakes that have been paid for with other people’s blood cannot be forgiven.”

Andrei Ostroukh of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.