GRUESOME pictures filled the screens of Russian television nearly every evening last week. First we were shown film of Chechen women in the town of Sernovodsk, which had been subjected to a nine day onslaught by rampaging Russian soldiers. In the burnt out mosque, mothers were piecing together the charred remains of their sons, whom they were only able to identify from scraps of clothing, while mourners wailed in the Muslim tradition.
Then we saw a whole series of burials in different Russian cities. Federal soldiers who had been killed in Chechnya were carried in open coffins to the sound of Chopin's funeral march and the weeping of relatives.
When the Soviet Union was fighting its war in Afghanistan, such coverage would have been unthinkable. The bodies of Soviet soldiers were brought home in sealed containers to be buried in secret while the agony of the Afghans never reached Russian living rooms.
But as the newscaster commented, nothing can he hushed up in Russia anymore. The images from Chechnya were the last thing Boris Yeltsin needed as he started to campaign in earnest for June's presidential election.
The communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, is the favourite, according to the opinion polls. Last Friday his faction in Parliament pushed through a resolution denouncing the 1991 Agreement which dissolved the Soviet Union and set up the Commonwealth of Independent States. The resolution had no legal force but showed that Russia's resurgent communists are full of nostalgia for the past.
Analysts believe Mr Yeltsin (65) still has a chance of stopping them, however, if younger democrats end their squabbles and fall in behind him. In recent days, the Kremlin leader has tried to correct some of the mistakes of his presidency. For example, he has issued a decree allowing the sale of land, a vital reform which was long delayed, and he has arranged relief for millions of workers who have been kept waiting for their wages.
But the boost that his election campaign really needs is a settlement in Chechnya. Mr Yeltsin knows this and has been searching desperately for a way out of the crisis he created when he sent troops to the separatist Caucasian region in December 1994.
This February, in his home city of Yekaterinburg, he said he would come up with a plan to end the war before the election.
Now we are told, the plan is ready. The powerful Security Council discussed it last Friday and approved it unanimously. But we are still waiting for details. Mr Yeltsin said after the meeting that he would reveal all in an address to the nation in March". The formula will have to be a magic one to end such a complicated conflict in so short a time.
The liberal presidential candidate, Mr Grigory Yavlinsky, believes the only way out is to allow the Chechens a referendum on their future. Other democrats say nothing can be achieved unless Moscow, which has installed a puppet government in Chechnya, opens talks with separatist leader, Gen Dzhokhar Dudayev, whom it has declared a wanted criminal. All last week, rumours swirled in. Moscow that Mr Yeltsin was about to sack the Defence Minister, Mr Pavel Grachev, the hardliner who helped to drag Russia into the war in the first place and has hampered peace efforts since.
Mr Yeltsin's plan may contain some of those initiatives. But the signs are the Kremlin leader will continue to use the stick as well as offering carrots to tame the stubborn Chechen beast.
At the international summit of peacemakers in Egypt last week, Mr Yeltsin tried to present the war in which 50,000 civilians have died, many as a result of Russian bombardment as a terrorist problem. And before the Russian security council meeting, the Interior Minister, Mr Anatoly Kulikov, said that Moscow was not ready to withdraw its troops from Chechyna.
If the plans fails to offer some truly original thinking, it will be worse than if Mr Yeltsin had said nothing on the subject of Chechnya, for his impotence will only be highlighted. Gen Dudayev's small band of fighters, who infiltrated the city of Grozny and harried Russian troops for several days earlier this month, have shown they are a still deadly.
They cannot defeat the giant Russian military machine but they have the power to keep up the flow of politically damaging television pictures until polling day and beyond.