Russian Mothers Comb Chechnya for Sons : Warfare: A lucky few find the soldiers. For others, it’s waiting, heartbreak.

Olga Ryabtseva was at work, keeping the books at a school in a village in Russia’s Krasnodar region, when a strange man from Chechnya called her on the phone about her son.

“He said my son was a POW,” Ryabtseva remembered. “He said: ‘He was wounded, but he’s past the worst. Come to our village and get him. We’ll meet you.’ ”

Ryabtseva had known that her son Nikolai, 19, was fighting in Chechnya, but the call from the Chechens themselves was the first she had heard that he had been wounded, much less taken prisoner.

No sooner had she hung up the phone than her co-workers began taking up a collection for her trip. Her boss gave her time off and a month’s salary in advance. Ryabtseva, 41, gathered her son’s civilian clothes, kissed her husband and left for the war.

Hundreds of Russian mothers, and the occasional father, have come to Chechnya to look for their soldier sons. They roam battlefields, turning over corpses to see the faces. They wheedle their way into basements-turned-POW-camps, to look hopefully for their sons among the prisoners, and to ask for news.

The Russian mothers are able to do this--unlike, say, American mothers during the Vietnam War or Soviet mothers during the Afghan War--because the war in Chechnya is a civil war waged on Russian territory, among Russian-speaking people with common memories and experiences.

Draftees in their teens have borne the brunt of the fighting on the Russian side. Although the Soviet Union has fallen, the Cold War-era peacetime draft continues to feed the Russian army. Every male who turns 18 is expected to serve a year and a half in the army, or two years in the navy.

Russian mothers have long actively opposed the draft because of the Soviet practice of hazing, where older recruits beat new recruits with the tacit approval of the army leadership. Now, with raw draftees serving on the front lines of a major and unpopular war, mothers hate the draft--and the army--more than ever.

“They say this war is worse than Afghanistan and will take five years,” said Nadezhda P. Korobova, 42, a worker in a Moscow food-processing plant trying to explain why she left her job to travel 1,000 miles to a war zone.

Korobova’s 18-year-old son is a marine, probably in Grozny, the Chechen capital and the scene of the war’s worst fighting. She shows off a snapshot of him in his uniform and beret, standing before the red-white-and-blue Russian flag. He looks proud to be a marine--but Korobova decided two weeks ago that she doesn’t care.

“I packed his civilian clothes into a case and came here, to persuade him to run away from the army,” she said. “I don’t know if he’ll agree, but I have to try.”

Korobova’s spontaneous, reckless journey brought her to the gym of an elementary school in Surkhakhi, a village 60 miles from Grozny, in the neighboring Russian region of Ingushetia. Korobova and 60 other mothers live in the school’s gym. They are fed by Surkhakhi’s sympathetic families, sleep on donated cots and wash from barrels of water in a little-used stairwell. With the school’s student body they share the one outhouse behind the building.

Under harsh gym lights, in the shadow of basketball hoops, mothers trade POW and MIA lists copied by hand from newspapers and bulletin boards. They show their sons’ photographs and read to each other from last letters received.

Showing a picture of her 18-year-old son, Igor--a stocky, dark-haired boy with a smirky grin and a peach-fuzz mustache--Lyudmila N. Belova turned aside compliments with tears. “Of course he’s handsome. They’re all handsome--they’re all young,” she said.

Belova, a red-haired 52-year-old saleswoman in a grocery store, quit her job to look for Igor, who is listed as missing in action. She began her search after discovering a letter Igor had written before leaving home and had hidden under a vase.

“He must have known something would happen,” she said, weeping as she slipped the letter from her wallet and tenderly unfolded it. It began with a now-eerily appropriate bit of Russian doggerel: “Only a mother is deserving of love, only she can wait.”

“Write down his name,” Belova pleaded. “Maybe if you publish it someone will find him.”

From a neighboring cot, another mother staring at the gym ceiling chimed in. “Write them all down,” she said. “Dakayev, Bezuska, Khomenko. . . .”

Viktor V. Khomenko, 43, left his factory job in the Krasnodar region five weeks ago to search for his son. He has been told independently by a Chechen fighter, a Russian POW and a nurse that his son is alive. “My father told me not to come home without his grandson,” said the pale yet energetic Khomenko. “But I’m going home soon anyway. I need more money to keep searching. My father has promised to sell his cow, and I’m going to sell our house. Then I can continue.”

For today, however, Ryabtseva the school bookkeeper is unique among the parents who live in the Surkhakhi school gym. A month ago she found her Nikolai: He had been shot through both thighs and lay for 40 days in a Chechen hospital. On this day, Nikolai was released into Ryabtseva’s custody. Ryabtseva’s cot at the gym had lain conspicuously empty all day, but in the evening she and Nikolai--a strapping boy with brown hair and eyes--returned.

“Hello!” the other mothers called out upon Nikolai’s arrival. Some of them cried quietly at the sight of him; others tried to touch him or Ryabtseva. All gathered around to ask questions. Some noted he looked well fed, to which Nikolai answered that the Chechens in the hospital fed him better than the Russian army, “even before the war.”

Quickly the talk turned to other soldiers Nikolai might have known, and the mothers shyly produced photos for his scrutiny.

“Nikolai, have you seen my son Ilya?” asked Lyubov M. Vasilyeva, a 40-year-old philosophy professor from Saratov. “He’s a thin boy, tall, dark-haired. This is a picture of him before he left on a geology field trip.”

Nikolai did not know Ilya, and so Vasilyeva thanked him and quickly moved away.

But Vasilyeva already knows that her son is probably dead: A week ago she found a boy in a Chechen basement prison who said Ilya had been in the same prison and had been taken away to be shot.

“But he (the POW she questioned) was a mere boy, he was frightened, and the basement was dark. I asked him if he had heard the shot, and he said no. I asked him if he had seen the body, and he said no. So I’m still looking,” Vasilyeva said.

Looking at the other mothers gathered around Nikolai, she continued in a whisper, rocking agitatedly back and forth: “Many of them have already found their boys, have visited them in POW camps, and now are just waiting for (official prisoner) exchanges. But what am I waiting for? I don’t belong here.”

But who does belong? Early the next morning, Vasilyeva and Ryabtseva both prepared to leave--the one empty-handed, the other with a son. Ryabtseva sat on a cot next to her sleeping Nikolai and stroked his arm, careful not to wake him.

“I feel sort of uncomfortable now,” she said quietly, “as if I’ve somehow failed all these mothers.”

Although dawn had not yet broken, the other mothers were already donning scarves and fur hats, preparing to spend another day prowling the battlefields, the morgues and the military and relief agency offices.

“Yesterday, in my misery, I was one of them,” Ryabtseva said. “But today I could not be happier. And I can’t stand it here; the sooner I leave the better for everyone.”

But leaving would mean rousing Nikolai, who lay breathing evenly, in the clothes his mother brought for him from home: blue sweat pants, a green pullover, yellow-red wool socks. Ryabtseva decided to wait just a little longer. “I could sit like this for years,” she said quietly.

Vasilyeva waited at the door. She hitched a ride with journalists to Mozdok, a city where many mothers gather at the local movie theater to compare notes. But in Mozdok there was no word of her son. A Russian officer took a copy of his photograph and asked about birthmarks and tattoos, for comparison against the most disfigured corpses in the morgue.

Back in the car, there was nothing left for Vasilyeva to do. In a tired voice, she contemplated adopting an orphan from the Grozny orphanage. Wasn’t the orphanage bombed? But weren’t the orphans taken somewhere first?

“Drop me off here. I’ll walk the rest of the way,” she said suddenly.

Here?

“Drop me off anywhere,” she said.

Times reporter Sergei L. Loiko contributed to this story.