Russians Pound Chechen Rebels

Federal troops continued to savage this village in southern Russia early today after a daylong barrage of artillery and helicopter gunfire Monday left the refuge of Chechen gunmen here in smoldering ruins. The assault freed just nine of the Chechens’ captives, said to number between 100 and 200.

There were conflicting reports of casualties--none final or official, as federal troops had yet to capture the village. Several news agencies put the number of Chechen dead at 60. The Itar-Tass news agency reported one Russian soldier killed and three wounded, while the evening news program “Vesti” said four government troops died and 14 were hurt.

The bleak settlement on the edge of a snow-clad collective farm was in flames during the night and still echoed with machine-gun fire this morning at the site of a hostage drama that is now a week old.

Russian authorities reported that nine hostages had escaped Monday through the cascade of bullets. Looking haggard and bewildered, with baggy circles under their eyes and rough stubble on their chins, four of the survivors told their stories before a television camera.

“How did they treat us?” one man asked indignantly Monda. “What do you mean, how did they treat us? Under the muzzle of a submachine gun--how else would they treat us?”

Another man, with gray hair straying from under his snow-dusted hat, said the Chechens had tried to drag their hostages to another building when the artillery barrage began. He hit his head in the rush and fell down, stunned, he said.

“When I came to, no one was around, so I hid under a shed,” he said.

The hostages said the Chechens were still holding some women. One dirt-smudged young man, asked if any children remained captive, cried out that his brother was still trapped somewhere in the smoldering village.

House-to-house searches for the Chechen gunmen and their captives began Monday after four hours of sustained shelling. But Russian officers conceded that they were facing fierce resistance from the heavily armed Chechens, who have vowed to fight to the death rather than surrender.

Tass reported that as many as 10 of the terrorists surrendered late Monday while federal troops were pressing their attack by the light of candle bombs. That information could not be confirmed, however.

The prospect of a protracted battle to neutralize no more than 300 terrorists who have paralyzed Russia since last Tuesday threatened to escalate the political damage from a crisis in which President Boris N. Yeltsin has been forced to choose between violence and humiliation.

As the commander in chief who ordered the December 1994 attack on the breakaway republic of Chechnya, Yeltsin is held accountable by many Russians for the more than 20,000 deaths the war has inflicted and the wave of retaliatory Chechen terrorism that has most recently struck here in the southern Russian republic of Dagestan.

But ethnic leaders across the Caucasus Mountain region have warned the president that any attempt to settle his score with the Chechens on Dagestani territory could set off ethnic conflicts throughout the volatile region.

Hundreds of Chechen gunmen have been holed up in Pervomayskaya since fleeing with hostages they seized in the town of Kizlyar last Tuesday. The rebels loyal to Chechnya’s president-in-hiding, Dzhokar M. Dudayev, originally grabbed nearly 3,000 captives to use as pawns to force the federal government to accept Chechen independence.

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Yeltsin told journalists in Moscow on Monday that he ordered the attack because all peaceful alternatives had been exhausted. Looking tired but speaking forcefully, Yeltsin expressed the hope that the assault would be wrapped up by day’s end and with minimal casualties.

But the unrelenting blasts from tanks, mobile rocket launchers and combat helicopters laid waste to the simple village less than a mile from the Chechen border. The destruction was visible even to journalists and aid workers kept behind an artillery cordon half a mile away.

Interior Ministry officials directing the assault said the hostages had been held in the village schoolhouse and mosque as a human shield around the Chechen gunmen.

In testimony to the unrestrained nature of the assault, rocket-propelled grenades could be seen tearing into the schoolhouse and igniting an inferno.

The smoke, thunder and fury of the government security troops terrified residents of neighboring hamlets for miles around and rekindled disturbing memories of a botched hostage rescue in another Caucasus town, Budennovsk, in June.

As swooping helicopters blasted rockets into the village, Maj. Gen. Alexander Mikhailov insisted that all precautions were being taken to protect the lives of the hostages.

“Our artillery and aircraft work with surgical precision, and we believe the places where the hostages were being held have not been hit,” he told journalists watching the carnage from a frozen field between Pervomayskaya and a neighboring village, Sovetskaya.

In an emotional appeal to Yeltsin on the Echo Moscow radio station, human rights champion Sergei A. Kovalev begged the president to silence the guns: “Boris Nikolayevich, this so-called operation to free hostages has a great potential to turn into an operation that destroys hostages. It doesn’t matter to these miserable people who killed them--the criminal terrorists . . . or those who set out to free them.”

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The attack began after federal Interior Ministry officers warned the Chechens over loudspeakers that they had 10 minutes to come out of the village bearing white flags or face bombardment at 9 a.m.

The ultimatum was issued after the gunmen had shot and killed six Dagestani elders approaching to attempt negotiations, Russian media reported. Mikhailov said the attack was spurred by the slaying of two police officers who had been among the captives.

“They were hanged and their bodies displayed,” Mikhailov said. A Chechen representative dismissed both reports as “false to the bone.”

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Offering yet another explanation for the troops’ early morning pounce on Pervomayskaya, Yeltsin said “our patience was at an end” after Chechens shot at a car carrying Federal Security Service chief Mikhail I. Barsukov toward the village.

“From that moment, the command to launch the operation was issued,” Yeltsin said.

Flashing with rage, the president described Dudayev as a “bandit” who had ordered the hostage-taking raid as a deliberate provocation.

He threatened renewed assaults on Chechen territory, smacking his fist against his palm and saying, “We want terrorists to be punished and rooted out from the Chechen soil.”

In another sign that Yeltsin plans to take a tougher line in the 13-month-old war that has deeply damaged his image as a democratic leader, he appointed hard-liner Nikolai D. Yegorov as his new chief of staff Monday.

Yegorov is the former deputy prime minister who helped draft Russia’s ill-fated storming of the Chechen capital more than a year ago. He also directed the failed rescue operation in Budennovsk, where 150 people died, many of them shot by the federal paratroopers seeking to free them. Yegorov was fired after the Budennovsk debacle.

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Yeltsin’s popularity ratings have plummeted since he launched the Chechen war, and with a presidential election looming in five months, the Pervomayskaya crisis has inflicted fresh humiliation.

By rehabilitating Yegorov and choosing to storm the rebels rather than let them flee in exchange for the hostages’ lives, Yeltsin appears determined to look more decisive in ending the bitter ethnic conflict he began.

But several lawmakers criticized the decision to use force, arguing that it will fuel, rather than quench, tensions in the region.

Communist legislator Pyotr Romanov, sometimes mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, warned grimly: “Russia may lose the Caucasus if it gives preference to coercive methods rather than to political flexibility and wisdom.”

Times staff writer Stephanie Simon in Moscow contributed to this report.