ON FRIDAY, a special presidential flag, with a gold, two headed eagle against a background of white, blue and red stripes, flew from the Kremlin to celebrate Boris Yeltsin's inauguration. On Saturday, it had been replaced by the ordinary Russian tricolour, hanging at half mast in mourning for the hundreds of people who were killed and wounded in Chechnya last week in the worst upsurge of fighting since Moscow sent troops to the region in 1994.
It was a terrible week for the country and its newly re elected leader, who looked like sick old man as he pronounced his presidential oath. Yesterday the fighting was still raging as Russian troops fought to regain control of Grozny from the Muslim rebels. And yet there were small signs of hope. Depending on how Moscow behaved now, the last week may go down in history as the turning point in the Chechnya war, the start of the long road to peace.
The Russian leadership had only itself to blame for the latest debacle in Chechnya. Mr Yeltsin knew he could not win the presidential election earlier this summer unless he stopped the bloodshed in the Caucasus region. On May 27th, just weeks before the first round of voting, he invited the leader of the separatists to the Kremlin and agreed a truce with him.
This was followed by peace talks in the town of Nazran in Ingushetia, a Muslim region bordering on Chechnya, where Russian and Chechen officials worked out a peace process. The first stage of this was to involve an exchange of prisoners and the dismantling of Russian military checkpoints in Grozny and the surrounding countryside.
Mr Yeltsin told voters the fighting in Chechnya was the worst disappointment of his first presidency, that he was determined to end it if they gave him a second chance. The fact that he seemed willing to admit his mistakes and try to change his policy persuaded many Russians to vote for him, that and the fact that they did not wish to see a return to communism. He won the election with a bigger margin than he could have dreamed of at the beginning of this year, when his popularity rating was at rock bottom because of the Chechen war.
And yet, within days of his reelection on July 3rd, Russian aircraft were carrying out air strikes on Chechen villages, indiscriminately killing civilians, with the pretext of wiping out rebel bases in the region's southern mountains. Mr Yeltsin, recovering in a sanatorium outside Moscow from exhaustion, did nothing to restrain the hardline elements in the Russian military who were responsible for this.
The Chechens were furious and made no secret of the fact that their offensive last week was deliberately designed to ruin Mr Yeltsin's inauguration in revenge for the air raids.
A field commander, with the nom de guerre of Rezvan, told the liberal Russian newspaper Izvestia: "We went in Yeltsin's direction during the elections, believing that he would really stop the war in Chechnya and not only halted military actions but even allowed presidential elections to be carried out on our territory.
"But it turned out that Yeltsin tricked everyone. As soon as he won the election, he immediately forgot about our war, and does not notice the daily bombings. Now we want to ruin his celebrations and remind all his guests that the war is continuing, that Chechnya, will never be conquered by force.
The rebels, numbering about 3,000 men, humiliated the far larger Russian army, blocking soldiers in their bases, attacking the columns of clumsy tanks and even assaulting the compound of the pro Moscow government in the very centre of Grozny. The Russians were obliged to admit the rebels were still a formidable force, a full 20 months after the former defence minister, Gen Pavel Grachev, first sent troops to Chechnya, boasting they would have the separatist rebellion licked within a matter of days.
Commentators in the Moscow press compared the mayhem the rebels were causing to the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, when the North Vietnamese over ran the US embassy and made the Americans realise that, although their equipment was superior, they could never win the war against guerrillas who were familiar with every inch of their own jungle.
A number of Russian ministers are now starting to speak in a different way about Chechnya. For example, Mr Viktor Chernomyrdin, addressing parliament before deputies voted to reconfirm him as prime minister on Saturday, said: "A completely, military solution is a dead end. Yesterday he did say, however, that federal forces would have to be strengthened in the short term to recover Grozny.
Most significantly, over the weekend Mr Yeltsin sacked his personal representative in Chechnya, Mr Oleg Lobov, and in his place appointed his new chief of national security, Gen Alexander Lebed. Gen Lebed, with a reputation in the military as Mr Clean, opposed the war from the start and, when he was running for the presidency, spoke of the possibility of Chechen independence, although he has back tracked on that since joining the Kremlin team.
All eyes are now on him. If he is not sufficiently bold, Chechnya could become the graveyard of his political career. But he has a chance to win a place in history if he can end the war which Russians bitterly call their "internal Afghanistan".