VICTORY IN EUROPE : Life ‘Harder’ Now, Says Chechen Vet : Recollections: Grozny resident calls Russian invasion a worse ordeal than he suffered in 1940s.

Fifty years ago, Said-Selim Usayev was tending cattle when a woman on a horse cart raced by announcing the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.

Usayev, a Soviet Red Army veteran of that war, allowed himself a smile. It was a brief moment of triumph in a life bracketed by his people’s two great tragedies in this century.

In 1944, the year after he came home disabled and decorated for bravery, Usayev and the rest of the Chechen population were packed into cattle cars and deported, accused by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin of collaborating with the Nazis.

The collective farm Usayev was working on half a century ago was in distant Kazakhstan, where he lived in forced exile until 1957.

But nothing he went through in Stalingrad, where he crawled off the battlefield with shrapnel in his left leg, or in exile, where he was confined to a single village and closely watched, prepared him for the ordeal of war that erupted five months ago and put his separatist-minded land under brutal occupation by the army he once fought for.

“Maybe it’s because I am no longer young,” the 70-year-old Chechen told a lunch guest at his bomb-damaged home here in the capital, “but if you put everything on a scale, I would say that my life now is harder than ever.

“I am a veteran of two wars,” he explained. “Against the Germans, we had a front line. We knew who the enemy was. Now it’s hard to know who might kill you. . . . In Kazakhstan, we were persecuted and laws were strict. But we were protected. What is happening now in Chechnya couldn’t have happened there.”

In late December, Russian bombs forced Usayev to flee to his native village. Returning home six weeks later, he learned from neighbors that Russian soldiers had shot open his front door and looted the place. His prized war medals--the Order of the Patriotic War, the Order of the Red Star and the Order of the Defenders of Stalingrad--were gone.

He lives now in uneasy coexistence with jumpy Russian Interior Ministry troops supposedly sent to protect him. Provoked by small bands of Chechen separatists who sneak into the city, the troops shoot up his neighborhood and search his home for weapons. They stop him at gunpoint and demand to know why he is limping--as if he was some aging guerrilla fleeing from battle--until he produces a certificate of his disabling wound at Stalingrad.

But he survives. According to the Grozny Veterans Council, about 2,500 of the estimated 8,000 Chechen World War II veterans alive at the time of the Russian invasion in December have since died or disappeared. Many survivors lost homes and loved ones. The council’s headquarters was blown up; the group now meets in an unlit, shrapnel-scarred chess club.

A large, vigorous man with gold molars and vivid recollections of his epic life, Usayev without his white hair would look something like Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Soviet leader who repatriated the Chechens from Kazakhstan and has a square in Grozny named for him.

Revelations about the Stalin era have helped Usayev understand what happened that snowy Feb. 23, 1944, when people in his village were summoned to a school to celebrate Red Army Day, then surrounded by security police.

Usayev survived the two-week rail trip on crutches, but six of the 50 people in his freezing cattle car died.

Chechens could not have collaborated with the Nazis, whose army never reached Chechnya. Usayev believes that Stalin was swayed by Lavrenti Beria, his secret police chief, who bore personal grudges against Chechens and viewed them as unruly people more easily controlled outside their land.

Usayev, who made a career in forestry administration after coming home, harbors no bitterness for his exile. “Stalin and Beria were responsible, and they are dead,” he explained.

He also rejects the popular suspicion of Moscow that fed Chechen President Dzhokar M. Dudayev’s independence drive. Like most Chechens who fought in World War II, Usayev was recruited from the northern plains, where separatist sentiment was never strong.

Appalled by Dudayev’s misrule, he first welcomed the Russian army, hoping it would restore order. Then he signed a telegram with other veterans begging Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin not to use force against civilians. Now he holds Yeltsin largely responsible for the war’s estimated 20,000 deaths.

Usayev and other veterans gathered Tuesday at Grozny’s airport to watch a Russian military parade and lay wreaths at a monument to the Chechens who died in World War II. He said he went to remember “the pain of every Chechen.”

“The day the war ended, I was in exile, but I still felt a holiday in my heart,” he recalled. “Everyone embraced each other and smiled. But this will not be a holiday like that one, not here. Now it is rare to see a smiling veteran.”