Former Soviet Colonel New Chechnya Leader Revolution Against Russia Is First Order Of Business For Maskhadov

Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechen commander who already made one smooth transition, from the battlefield to the negotiating table, will move up to the presidency of the breakaway Russian republic, according to election results announced Tuesday.

The low-key 45-year-old former Soviet Army colonel, who won an estimated 63 percent of the vote in a field of 16, ran on a pledge to make the world acknowledge Chechnya as a sovereign Muslim state despite Russia’s strenuous objections.

It was a promise that every candidate in Monday’s election was all but obliged to make. The Chechen public, after all, although impoverished and decimated by 21 months of Russian bombardment, is convinced that it has already paid the highest price for its independence.

At a victory news conference in Grozny, a ghostly capital of empty buildings targeted by Russian forces during their futile attempt to annihilate the separatists, Maskhadov said he and other Chechens consider their republic already independent.

It declared itself so in 1991, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and confirmed it by driving the Russians out of Grozny last summer, he said.

“All that remains,” added Maskhadov, “is for other countries, including Russia, to recognize it.”

The first reaction out of the Kremlin to Maskhadov’s apparent victory was reserved.

President Boris N. Yeltsin’s spokesman Sergei Yestrzhembsky said the president sees the election results as “a serious chance for productive negotiations to continue.”

Like every other Chechen of his generation, Maskhadov has some reason to expect the worst. He was born in exile in the ex-Soviet republic of Kazahkhstan. The entire Chechen population was deported to Central Asia in 1944 by dictator Josef Stalin - with an estimated one-third dying en route in cattle cars - and was only allowed back home in 1956.