Insurgents led by Chechen rebel commander Shamil Basayev have been repelled for the second time in Dagestan. Their aim this time was apparently to take the town of Khasavyurt and declare it the capital of the Islamic republic of Dagestan.

It was in Khasavyurt that then secretary of the Security Council Gen. Alexander Lebed and Chechen leaders met in 1996 to sign a peace deal.

And what is clear today could have been predicted back then. What came out of Khasavyurt was not peace but an imitation of peace. Even so, an agreement was vital. Without an immediate end to the unpopular Chechen war, Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov would have become president instead of Boris Yeltsin. That would have been a disaster for Russia.

Thus democrats welcomed the agreement and gave Yeltsin their support, even though no real solutions had been found.

The Caucasus have been smoldering away, with the odd flare-up every so often, for 400 years now. The most radical solution came from Stalin. In 1944, with the war against Nazi Germany still underway, he exiled several peoples, including the Chechens, resettling them in the inhospitable steppes of Central Asia. By the time the Chechens returned home after Stalin's death, they had lost a quarter of their population.

That attempt at a "final solution" is an argument in the hands of Islamic extremists, who proclaim that there can be no peace with Russia. Democratic Russia has given them yet another argument: the senseless and devastating 1994 to 1996 war that killed 100,000 people in Chechnya - Chechens and non-Chechens.

Basayev and his ilk have picked up that argument as they launch an offensive that could be fatal for the people of Chechnya. Following the bombs in Moscow that have killed more than 200 innocent people, voices are calling for a new final solution.

That is not just the voice of the crowd. "Let's postpone the era of mercy for another 50 years," wrote a commentator at Moskovsky Komsomolets, Moscow's most popular daily. The wri-ter failed to see that people are dying today precisely because yesterday and the day before politicians postponed the era of mercy.

Speaking on TV, chairman of the Duma defense committee Roman Popkovich called the Khasavyurt agreements a betrayal. Popkovich, by the way, is a deputy from Our Home is Russia, the leader of which, Viktor Chernomyrdin, was head of the government at the time the agreements were signed.

If the government were to launch an attack against Chechnya today, adversaries of a new bloodbath would not find much public support.

So far, the government has resisted the tide of hysteria. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin says there is no need to declare a state of emergency, and President Yeltsin, in a TV address, promised that all measures taken to fight the terrorist threat will be strictly in line with the constitution.

But in the same address, Yeltsin also said that immediate measures must be taken to restore order in Moscow. Here he specifically called on Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, known for his fondness for measures that one would be hard-pressed to call constitutional. TV viewers have already had a chance to see how zealously Moscow police can clear markets of Caucasians - not of Chechens, but of Azeris.

The police make use of turbulent times to bring in their haul, and politicians will do likewise. Hundreds of candidates in the upcoming Duma elections will most likely promise all kinds of miracles for fighting terrorism. This will only exacerbate the disease, namely an absence of any strategy, that has afflicted Russian politics for the last 10 years and that has become so painfully evident over these last days.

From the moment the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia has been reproached with having no strategy for market reform. But this was pardonable and practically unavoidable. Power fell unexpectedly into the hands of reformers after the failed putsch of August 1991, and the economy was in such a state that there was no time to waste.

But the next eight years saw different camps pitted against each other in a struggle that prevented any one vision for reform from gaining the upper hand. Now, in the election run-up, reform has ground to a halt altogether. It is also evident today that there is no clear vision for reform of the armed forces, no foreign policy strategy, no blueprint for social, education or other reform.

Russia has no lack of intellectual resources to draw up proposals. There are, in fact, too many ideas; the problem is in getting sufficient public consensus to choose one of them.

This is an unavoidable consequence of the breakup of the old Soviet empire. A new military doctrine is sorely needed, but is impeded by the constant swing between nostalgia for the old times and awareness of a new reality. Events in Dagestan are only making this more evident.

Russia's generals continue to dream of nuclear missiles, while soldiers in the Dagestani mountains lack weapons to fight a close-range war.

That is just the most visible sign of the conflict between reality and delusion in Russian society. But if Russia does not understand even at this tragic moment that such a conflict can't go on forever, then our future is grim indeed.