MOST evenings throughout April and May, Russian television started its main news programme with the reminder that four journalists from Radio Russia and Tass newsagency were still held hostage in Chechnya.
The television commentators gave more attention to the plight of their colleagues than to dozens of civilians from other professions who have been or still are in the same situation in the Caucasus. But viewers did not object. Instead, they sympathised and joined national prayers for the release of the reporters.
Then two weeks ago, the journalists came home, pale and exhausted after being held in damp cellars and moved from place to place in car boots like sacks of vegetables. But otherwise they appeared none the worse for their experience. The television news was devoted to them that night and one appeared on a chat show called Hero Of The Day. They were free. That would be the end of it. Or so we thought.
Within hours it was announced that a Russian television crew had been kidnapped in Grozny. The campaign had started again.
In fact, hostage taking is common in Chechnya even though the bitter war with Russia has ended. It is the work of armed criminal gangsters who still operate beyond the control of Aslan Maskhadov, the conciliatory president whom Chechnya elected in January.
The gangsters seized construction workers who have come to Grozny to help rebuild the shattered capital. Foreigners have fallen victim, too. An Italian photographer, an Austrian businessman. But journalists have been particularly vulnerable.
Many news organisation consider it too dangerous to send correspondents to a region where they cheerfully worked when the bombs were falling. Without a handful of Russian reporters, there would be a news blackout from Chechnya. To that extent the kidnapped reporters, who worked on the front line, merited the special campaign initiated on their behalf.
Although few hostages have been murdered, they generally come home alive. Exactly how they are released is never revealed. But it is obvious that they are ransomed.
This was spelled out last week in an extraordinary television programme, The Man In The Mask, which features a guest who wears a mask because he is either too ashamed or afraid to show his face.
Last week it was the turn of a man calling himself Ivan Ivanovich who claimed to be a go between who released hostages.
The former KGB officer got involved when a friend begged him to go to Grozny to try to release his son. He succeeded and went on to ransom six other victims.
"It is a market, like the real estate market," he said. "People have different values, depending on who they are, what they do for a living, to whom they are related. Sex and age are factors, too." The most he had paid for the release of a hostage was $30,000, he said. The lowest price was $7,000.
"The kidnappers wanted $10,000 but I drove a hard bargain."
The studio audience sat in appalled silence. Gradually questions were articulated. Did he make any profit himself? No.
Where did he get the money for the ransoms? He approached Russian mafia godfathers, he said. They made donations to salve their consciences. Did he note think there was a risk? That by paying ransoms he was encouraging kidnappers to repeat their crime?
Here Ivan Ivanovich became eloquent behind the Grecian mask.
"In theory, yes," he said. "But I imagine your own daughter has been kidnapped. You will give," anything for her release. Then afterwards, you will say to the next man, you should not pay ransoms, it is morally wrong.
The medieval practice of kidnapping had become a reality again, he said. It was a business, like prostitution or drug dealing which was not going to go away but which should be regulated by people like him.
I felt a terrible chill. This masked man was giving ideas to ruthless criminals all over Russia. And the next morning when I opened the Moscow Times, I read of another kidnapping, this trim significantly and worryingly in a region beyond the borders of Chechnya.