HOSTAGES IN RUSSIA’S HEARTLAND : Defiance of Russians Flows in the Veins of Lead Hostage-Taker : Guerrilla: Shamil Basayev’s family has long fought invaders. But the killings of his mother and 2 children preceded his raid on a city outside Chechnya.

Shamil Basayev, the guerrilla commander holding hundreds of hostages in a hospital in southern Russia, inherited a long and proud ancestral tradition of suicidal resistance to invaders of his native Chechnya.

Central to that tradition was the Basayev family’s two-story stone house--built in the year 1010 and now reportedly destroyed by Russian bombs--in the mountain village of Vedeno. In its defense, one Basayev ancestor fought the 14th-Century Central Asian warlord Tamerlane.

A great-great-great-grandfather died in wartime service as a deputy to Imam Shamil, for whom Shamil Basayev was named. The imam fought to create an independent Islamic state, held off the czar’s army for four decades and made a last stand at Vedeno before surrendering in 1859.

A great-grandfather was killed fighting the Bolshevik army, and his son died when Soviet dictator Josef Stalin deported 800,000 Chechens to Kazakhstan and Siberia in cattle cars in 1944.

“If the Russians come in here and take our home, what’s the point of living?” Shamil Basayev’s father, Suleyman, asked a visitor to the stone house last winter after the Russian army had again invaded Chechnya to crush its latest drive for independence.

Tragedy befell the Basayev household in a Russian air raid late in May. And after losing his village, his home, his mother, two children, a brother, a sister and six other kin, Basayev did last week what no ancestor--and no other Chechen warrior--had ever done.

He took vengeance outside his homeland.

He struck in spectacular fashion, storming Budennovsk--a town of 54,000 people--with no more than 75 guerrillas who slipped in undetected, seized government buildings, grabbed as many as 2,000 hostages and herded them into a hospital, demanding nothing less than a Russian surrender in Chechnya.

“We are sick of watching our villages being bombed and our women and children being killed,” the bearded commander explained from the city’s hospital, which was surrounded by Russian troops, armored personnel carriers and sharpshooters. “Let them come and storm the place. It does not matter to us when we die. What matters is how we die. We must die with dignity.”

Basayev is soft-spoken and barely 30 years old. But few who know him--or understand how serious a threat the Russian government believes he is--think he will get out alive.

Like most Chechens, Basayev is a Muslim, as attuned to the Koran as to military manuals. He wears the green headband of an Islamic militant, insists that only Allah can stop him from fighting and believes that dying in a holy war will take him straight to paradise.

“These are not just slogans,” said a Moscow-based specialist on Chechnya. “He is genuine and believes in what he is doing.”

Basayev finished school in Vedeno, left in 1986 to study agricultural engineering in Moscow and returned to work on a Soviet collective farm.

When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 and Chechen President Dzhokar M. Dudayev declared independence, Basayev began preparing for a separatist struggle against Moscow.

Late that year, he hijacked a Russian passenger plane to Turkey, where Chechen guerrillas were getting assistance.

Then he raised a 500-member volunteer force to help Abkhazia, another Caucasian ministate, break away from rule by Georgia in 1992.

Displaying bravery as a warrior and skill as a strategist, he rose from company commander to battalion commander to deputy defense minister of the self-proclaimed Abkhazian Republic. He also earned a reputation for chivalry; Georgian soldiers reportedly preferred to surrender to him because he treated his captives humanely.

Leaving a wife in Abkhazia, he returned home a hero in 1993, married again and went to work for Dudayev. As the Kremlin armed Dudayev’s Chechen foes, Basayev moved to disarm them. He captured the opposition-held town of Argun without losing a single soldier.

“Since then, every victory of the Chechen troops has been associated with Basayev,” said Mayerbek Vachagayev, a former Dudayev aide. When President Boris N. Yeltsin’s army invaded Chechnya last December, it was Basayev who organized the defense of Grozny that stunned, frustrated and bloodied the Russians for weeks.

For younger Chechens, the chance to fight alongside Basayev became a reason in itself to take up arms, “something you could brag about for the rest of your life,” said Georgy Derluguian, a sociology professor studying Russia’s Caucasus region.

Basayev rose from chief of Dudayev’s bodyguards to deputy commander of the Chechen general staff and then field commander of the Chechen forces, the third rank in the Chechen hierarchy.

Russian security services have spread reports of a rift between the brash, independent commander and the 50-year-old president. Sergei V. Stepashin, Russia’s top security official, said Dudayev had lost control of the army and Basayev was “at the helm.”

Interviewed by The Times in April, Basayev denied such a split. He said he was being urged to take power from Dudayev, but “I rejected those proposals because they originated from the [Russian] KGB.”

“I don’t have a sickness for power,” he added. “We are fighting not for Dudayev, not for myself, but for the entire Chechen people.”

Asked about Dudayev’s oft-repeated threat to take the war to Russia, Basayev said: “As far as I am concerned, we shall never attack a Russian city because that would be terrorism, extremism. . . . Why should civilians suffer?”

But he added: “Anything can happen when you are up against a wall and there is nowhere to retreat. We haven’t come to this stage yet. If there is no way out for us, then we will go, like Dudayev says, into Russian cities and towns and engage in terrorism because we don’t intend to surrender.”

In Budennovsk last week, Basayev said he planned the raid independently from Dudayev, who denied any responsibility. But he proclaimed loyalty to Dudayev and demanded that Yeltsin negotiate with the Chechen leader.

By his own definition, Basayev had become a terrorist, although one tempered by chivalrous instincts. More than 100 civilians have died in fighting at the hospital, but Basayev has promised not to shoot women and children held hostage.

His turnabout reflects the separatist fighters’ collapse in the mountains--their last stronghold after losing Grozny and the plains. It is also a measure of a young man’s personal grief and an ancestral tradition of blood revenge.

“Maybe he saw this as the only means to make Russians really think of this war as a tragedy,” Vachagayev said. “Making them suffer a tragedy of their own, on Russian soil.”

Times staff writer Sonni Efron in Budennovsk, Russia, contributed to this report.