NEWS ANALYSIS : In the Russian Heartland, Echoes of Oklahoma City

One irony of President Boris N. Yeltsin’s six-month offensive to prevent the secession of Chechnya is that the tiny, unruly republic, to many Russians, has become ever more foreign, more un-Russian.

Shocking as it is to them, the bombing and the burning and the wailing of mothers is a remote tragedy--unfolding on television beyond the southern edge of ancient Russia in a land of the Caucasus Mountains conquered by Moscow barely a century ago.

A terrorist strike by Chechen separatists across 70 miles of wind-swept plain into the Russian city of Budennovsk this week shattered any illusion here that the fighting is confined to that other world.

For Russia and for Yeltsin, the consequences are dangerous and unpredictable:

* The Chechens have, in effect, declared war on a Russian heartland as vulnerable and unprepared as Oklahoma City was for the bombing there two months ago. Russia’s security forces are pathetically underfunded and, after seven decades of Soviet rule, inexperienced against urban terrorists, let alone the Chechens, who have a tradition of blood revenge and several thousand determined, well-armed fighters inspired by Islamic faith.

* The ease with which 200 warriors slipped from Chechnya past Russian checkpoints and rampaged around a city of 100,000 people has, through televised images that look disturbingly like Chechnya, further undermined Russians’ faith in their government and its ability to safeguard them. Sensing the mood, Parliament set a vote next week on confidence in the Cabinet.

* Russians will elect a new Parliament in six months, and a new president a year from now. The fearful atmosphere favors candidates such as the neo-fascist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, the militarist Gen. Alexander M. Lebed and others inclined to lead the country toward something more like dictatorship.

Many Russians fear that their 64-year-old president, ailing and isolated after four years in office, has lost the capacity to resolve crises without force. The brutal campaign in Chechnya, where most of the estimated 20,000 dead were civilians hit by Russian bombs, has dragged his popularity rating into the single digits at home and subjected him to condemnation in the West.

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But the attack on Budennovsk has enabled Yeltsin to seize the moral high ground. His Foreign Ministry said the assault “should open the eyes of foreign politicians who chose to lecture Russia instead of supporting it.”

Before meeting Friday with leaders of the Group of Seven industrialized nations in Halifax, Canada, Yeltsin said he would raise the incident there as “a very sorrowful example” of the need “to unite in a struggle against terrorism.”

At Friday night’s dinner meeting, the G-7 leaders expressed concern over the deadly confrontation in Budennovsk but warned Yelstin that he must end the military crackdown against Chechnya if he wants to restore peace in the region, summit officials said.

Privately, Russian officials say they knew from the start of the offensive that Yeltsin would be viewed as the aggressor, and they expected the Chechens to strike back into Russia proper, terrifying the population and losing the edge in the propaganda war. That time, they say, has come.

People interviewed at random in Moscow agreed that sympathy for the underdog had vanished. “Suddenly, the Chechens lost their halo of martyrdom,” said Anatoly F. Gruzdev, a Moscow businessman.

But the overwhelming reaction here is one of disgust with the war, the Yeltsin administration and its incompetent security officials.

“We are being constantly assured by our leaders that Chechnya has been sealed off, that the conflict has been localized, that the situation is completely under control, that the end of the war is at hand,” said Sergei B. Shebagov, 57, a retired railway worker. “These are all fairy tales.”

Politicians across the spectrum joined in condemning Yeltsin’s handling of the war and his absence from the hostage drama. Former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev said it was “impermissible that peaceful, innocent people pay with their lives for schemes and mistakes of politicians.”

The Duma, Russia’s lower house of Parliament, voted 258-0 Friday, hours after Yeltsin had left for Nova Scotia, to demand his immediate return. “I insist that the president of Russia be in Budennovsk today . . . to save thousands of people from death,” said liberal presidential hopeful Grigory A. Yavlinsky.

Zhirinovsky got up during the debate and called for doubling the size of the armed forces.

The most serious potential challenge to Yeltsin, if he seeks reelection, arose when Lebed quit the army to enter politics. A popular and outspoken critic of Yeltsin’s handling of the Chechen war, Lebed resigned two weeks ago to protest orders to disband his 14th Army in Moldova and take another post.

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Having signed a pact with Moldova to withdraw Russian troops, Yeltsin had no choice but to accept the resignation, and he did so Wednesday, even though it exposed him to Lebed’s assertion that “another Chechnya” may erupt between Moldovan troops and guerrillas in a breakaway Russian-dominated enclave.

It is too early to tell whether the raid on Budennovsk heralds a new phase of the Chechen war or the Chechens’ last stand. Its leader, Shamil Basayev, is the most fanatic separatist commander, and if he were killed, it “may well mean the end of the resistance,” said Pavel Felgenhauer, defense correspondent of the Moscow newspaper Sevodnya. “The Russians know this and will do all they can to prevent his escape.”

Most Russians are not so confident. “In the chaos that is reigning today, we should prepare ourselves for the worst,” said Shebagov, the railway pensioner, after watching the siege of Budennovsk on TV. “Russia has proved to the world one more time how unpredictable it is.”