RUSSIA: Lyubov Rodionova never feels far from her son, writes Daniel McLaughlin in Kurilovo, near Moscow.
Yevgeny the blond boy peers out from a black-and-white photo, alongside Yevgeny the young soldier, solemn in uniform on his way to Chechnya.
Another snapshot shows the brick cell where Yevgeny was held captive for 100 days. Another shows the sunny glade where rebels severed his head on his 19th birthday, and where Mrs Rodionova used her bare hands to help unearth his bones.
"I sometimes hate those people," she says of the Chechens. "But if you asked me who I hate more - the bandits who killed Zhenya or the officials that sold him out - that would be a tough question." Ten months spent with Chechnya's most notorious guerrilla leaders; more than $10,000 spent buying information about her son; the death of Yevgeny's father five days after her son's burial back home: these things have left their mark, Mrs Rodionova says.
But they are nothing compared to the betrayal she says her son suffered at the hands of Russia's leaders.
"They just send boys away to our undeclared war, and then they forget about them. It is Russia's disgrace." Russians go to the polls to elect a new parliament tomorrow and United Russia, the party backing and backed by President Vladimir Putin, is set to win comfortably.
A bomb on a train near Chechnya shattered the almost eerie pre-election silence on the region's war yesterday.
"It's as if there's been an order to keep quiet about Chechnya, an order from the very top, and while that's in place there will be silence on what happens there." Mrs Rodionova (51) lives on her own in a flat about 50 kilometres from Moscow, a flat she almost lost trying to raise cash to find her son.
She says she went to Chechnya alone and finally met Ruslan Khaikharoyev, the rebel leader who captured Yevgeny and three comrades at their guard post in winter 1996. He took her money, told her where her son was buried, and said that he had beheaded him on May 23 of that year, Yevgeny's 19th birthday.
"I'll never understand what they did to Yevgeny," she says of Khaikharoyev and his men.
"But Russia just abandoned him too. I gave my only son to the motherland, and was left to dig him up with my own hands." She says four political parties, which she declined to name, asked for permission to use Yevgeny's story in their election campaign.
"'Have you no shame?' was all I said."
She plans to write to Mr Putin to shame him into giving proper funding to Russia's underfed and poorly housed troops and decent compensation to the families of war dead, as well as helping find the thousands of soldiers listed as "missing" in Chechnya.
Mrs Rodionova says Ruslan Khaikharoyev told her Yevgeny could have saved his life by rejecting Russian Orthodoxy and converting to Islam. But he refused.
Now many here hail him as a saint, a martyr for the Orthodox Church, and icons of the young soldier are appearing across Russia. Some are said to perform miracles, others to weep myrrh.
Mrs Rodionova says her son's bloodstained silver crucifix was found among his bones. Now she turns it in her fingers and prays that Yevgeny can help protect his old comrades in Chechnya.
She holds out less hope for Russia's politicians.