SLAUGHTER began as new year was ushered in Russia had sent troops into Chechnya at Christmas 1994, but the main force of raw conscripts was sent in on January 1st 1995. The results were horrendous. Teenaged soldiers, many of whom had never fired a shot in their lives, were mown down by experienced Chechen fighters.
The Chechen adventure, in which it has been estimated that 40,000 civilians lost their lives, dominated Russian affairs in 1995 despite other major events such as the rapid deterioration in both the popularity and the health of President Yeltsin, the rise of the Communist Party, the continuing crime wave and, on the credit side, the strengthening of the economy.
At first it was the Russians who suffered most. The plight of the young soldiers, some of whom I saw, seriously wounded, in a military hospital in the Volga city of Samara, captured the imagination of the Russian public. There were protests; soldiers mothers marched into the battlefront to find their sons. Deserters made their way back to Moscow and other cities despite a technical death penalty.
Poor equipment and the lack of will to fight on the part of the conscripts changed the nature of the war. The air force took over and bombed the city of Grozny to pieces. Many, if not most, of those killed in the air raids were Russian inhabitants of the Chechen capital.
Then the better trained soldiers - units of special forces, marines from the Pacific fleet, interior ministry troops - were brought in. Finally the presidential palace, headquarters of the Chechen independence groupings under General Dzhokhar Dudayev, was taken by Russian forces. Victory was declared, but it soon became apparent that the war was continuing.
In April there were reports of a massacre of civilians in the Chechen village of Samashki. In June a group of Chechens under the control of a moustachioed terrorist stormed a hospital in the southern Russian city of Budyonnovsk and took hundreds of hostages. An initial attempt by Russian forces to storm the hospital proved to be disastrous. The rebels were allowed to leave, peace talks began, and, for a while at least, the war was over.
A year later, however, hostilities have resumed, with car bombs being set off in Grozny and sporadic fighting in rural areas. By November the Military Prosecutor's office in Moscow announced it was investigating 600 allegations of misbehaviour by Russian troops.
A military operation which Russia's defence minister, Gen Pavel Grachev, said it would take two battalions of paratroops a couple of hours to complete successfully shows no sign of coming to an end. Gen Dudayev and Shamil Basayev are still at large.
Despite massive criticism at home and abroad, Gen Grachev has kept his job while the country's human rights commissioner, former Gulag prisoner Sergei Kovalyov, who did most to expose the evils of the war, was fired by Mr Yeltsin and replaced with a communist.
Mr Yeltsin's behaviour in the course of the war was eccentric and contradictory. He announced an end to air raids but the air raids continued. In the course of the Budyonnovsk incident he announced first of all that the order to storm the hospital had been given by himself and later that it had not. In the end, the peace negotiations were conducted, with partial success, by the Prime Minister, Mr Viktor Chernomyrdin.
Murders of leading businessmen in Russia proper continued apace with bankers as the main targets, though at least two candidates in the election for the State Duma (lower house of Russia's parliament) were shot dead in the course of the campaign. The most prominent killing of this nature in 1995 was that of the chairman of the Round Table of Russian Business, Mr Ivan Kivelidi. His murder, in August, marked a change of tactics by Russia's burgeoning band of hired assassins. Instead of being shot on the street, Mr Kivelidi was poisoned at a business reception.
One event, the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, served to bring pride and unity to a struggling nation. A new war memorial was opened on the Poklonnaya Gora, the hill from which Napoleon viewed Moscow in 1812. World leaders, including President Clinton, the Taoiseach and other European prime ministers came to Moscow to pay tribute to the former Soviet Union, which lost 26 million of its citizens in the conflict.
It was also the single happy occasion of 1995 for Mr Yeltsin. Later he was 19 be hospitalised twice with a heart condition, his popularity reached an all-time low and his favoured candidates for the parliamentary elections, Mr Chernomyrdin and the parliamentary speaker, Mr Ivan Rybkin, failed to do as well as had been initially hoped.
Economically, Russia improved considerably in the course of the year. The rouble, which had been trading at more than 5,000 to the US dollar and rising, stabilised, increased in value and stabilised again to trade at 4,600. Big former state companies such as Gazprom, formerly run by Mr Chernomyrdin, became successful joint-stock operations and the edge was taken off the hardships endured by a large proportion of the population.
This was not enough, however, to compensate for the damage done to people's confidence by the war and the continuing criminality. The market will undoubtedly survive in Russia in 1996. Democracy is another matter.
