Russians have mixed attitudes towards the war in Chechnya: they like strong leadership but don't want their sons to fight. Chris Stephen examines some of the feelings behind the protests.
The big question for anyone looking at TV images of Chechnya - shattered towns, flat muddy fields and bleak mountains - is why Russia is so determined to hang on to it.
Economically, what little assets the province ever had have been blown away by war: Grozny, the capital and industrial heart, is all but destroyed. So are the Soviet-model agricultural combines.
Chechnya cannot grow enough food to survive and needs subsidies both in the form of good aid and Russian government grants. There is a strategic oil pipeline running through it - but now a new pipe, avoiding this war zone, has been built from Central Asia to Turkey.
Politics supplies part of the answer: in a federation with so many national groups, Moscow does not want to set an example by granting independence to a rebel group which is prepared to fight for it.
But the issue is more convoluted. For ordinary Russians, Chechnya is a symbol of their struggle to, as they see it, battle evils, not just in the form of enemy soldiers, which seem bent on destroying the country and its culture.
There is a paradox in all this. On the one hand, Russians want to fight. On the other, they hope someone else will do the dying.
"We must fight, we must fight the Chechens," says a Russian flower-seller, well wrapped up against the early winter cold outside Kievskaya Vagzal railway station in western Moscow.
But she is equally firm about the second question: should her son, in his last year of high school, do army service that could see him sucked into the battle that has cost 3,000 Russian troops their lives? "Neit," she answers firmly.
Hypocrisy, perhaps, but also an indication of the anxiety of ordinary people, worried about the erosion of their nation.
Russians see Chechnya as a metaphor for their national condition - a condition in which this country, far from embracing democracy, has begun to fall apart a decade after being freed from the shackles of Communism. The threat from this desolate province is real - guerrillas seeking to carve off one small piece of the Narodnya, or "motherland".
But Chechnya is only one threat among many. What also of the Orthodox Church? In the provinces, the better financed and more proactive missionaries from Protestant and Catholic churches are taking away worshippers from Orthodox parishes.
Last month's decision to cancel visas for European Catholic priests was met with a sigh of relief - at least it will help to keep the souls of Russia where they belong.
The fear that the great nation is being chipped away extends into all areas: in the parliament, there is consternation at the use of English for the Internet and worry that there is no Russian equivalent for www.
"Snickerisation" is a word coined for the way Western companies, led by chocolate companies, have gobbled up the sweets market using slick marketing techniques. This paranoia throws up some bizarre occurrences.
When Russia's answer to McDonalds, Ruskie Bistro, was threatened with bankruptcy - Muscovites prefer Ronald McDonald to home-grown burgers - Moscow city council stepped in to override the firm's debts.
Such attitudes are easy to mock but should be understood for what they are: democracy has not brought prosperity for Russia. Instead, it has seen a small elite grow rich and the majority grow poor. And every change brings with it more pain and more anxiety.
For all these reasons, many ordinary Russians look above all for strength and unity. The war in Chechnya may not be pretty, but there is some comfort, albeit small, in seeing that the nation's leaders, however inept and corrupt many have become, at least willing to fight the threat of national disintegration.