VLADIKAVKAZ, Russia -- Suspicious Chechens and wary Russians spent seven hours here yesterday, smoking Marlboros, drinking Coca-Cola and trying unsuccessfully to end a dangerous confrontation.
Despite the odd mixture of Western-style smoke-filled rooms and Soviet chic (the negotiations were held in the House of Art, where the delegates glared at each other over three large vases of long-stemmed red roses), age-old antagonisms were very much at hand.
"We don't want war," said Ali Aliyev from neighboring Dagestan, chairman of the Confederation of Peoples of the Caucasus who was an imposing figure with his lavish mustache, gold teeth and towering Astrakhan hat of gray lamb's wool.
"But if Russia doesn't want to withdraw its forces, we will defend Chechnya. I think the negotiations are a game. Russia is the party of war. Do you understand? They want war. Nobody needs war. Russia doesn't need this war. Nobody does. But this will be the beginning of a new Russian Caucasus war."
The last one -- still so much on his mind -- was fought in the 19th-century against the Russian Empire.
"Sooner or later," he said, "Chechnya will be recognized as an independent country."
This most recent conflict has been set off by Chechnya once again insisting on independence. For the past three years, Russia has tried to ignore it -- until Sunday, when Moscow launched an invasion.
The Russians have not forgotten the past, either, and hold a collective image of the Caucasus as a wild land subdued by a civilizing hand.
Many still regard the people of the Caucasus as near-savages. They are blamed for most of the crime in Moscow. The overwhelming majority of Muscovites heartily supported their mayor a year ago when he ordered a round-up and expulsion of residents without proper papers -- who happened to be from the Caucasus.
Russia's President Boris N. Yeltsin and his allies said they do not want to spill blood, but want to restore order by encircling hTC Chechnya and its capital Grozny (which means "terrible" in Russian).
The Chechens accuse them of agreeing to the negotiations only to buy time to fortify their positions before moving in.
They say the Russians have not sent an appropriate delegation, including as it does a deputy minister of education and a deputy minister of social welfare.
"They're a serious delegation," said Taimaz Abubakarov, Chechen minister of economics, putting it politely, "but the subject of the negotiations and the content of their delegation don't completely correspond."
The Russians denied they were stalling. "It's completely sufficient," said Valentin Nikitin, chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee for Nationalities Affairs. "We've been given the authority to resolve the problems. We just need time. We have to consult."
As they consult, Russian soldiers seem to be everywhere.
Their headquarters is in the dusty, two-lane town of Mozdok, to the northwest of Grozny. The town, with its snug boxy houses and lazily scratching dogs, now has helicopters flying in and out, along with the occasional jet.
Defense Minister Pavel Grachev is ensconced there, as well as Russia's top security officials. Residents of Mozdok, normally lost in the middle of large, flat, steppe, were slightly overwhelmed.
One man said enough Russian troops had poured through to pacify not only Chechnya but Turkey as well if the Russians saw fit.
An uneasy mixture of ethnic hostilities in the Caucasus can be soothed by one sentiment: That is distrust of Russians, the conquerors from another time and place.
The Russia of Moscow seems strange and distant from here. The journey these days is disjointed.
Yesterday's flight from Moscow to Vladikavkaz in North Ossetia actually landed in Mineralnie Vody, 210 miles to the northwest. "Technical" reasons were cited.
The driver of a beat-up taxi -- a small, tinny, Zhiguli -- agreed to make the journey to Vladikavkaz. Just outside Mineralnie Vody, the taxi passed an armored personnel carrier with a "student driver" sign.
Fifteen miles into the trip, traffic police stopped the car, looked at the reporters inside and said they had orders not to let them through.
The police said to go to Mozdok, well north of Vladikavkaz. The Armenian taxi driver refused to go past Mozdok. Armenians, he said, are killed for their cars on the stretch of road through Ingushetia -- for ethnic and financial reasons.
His passengers switched to a bus. An Armenian on the bus shared rumors he believed completely -- Afghans and Baltic citizens, once repressed by the Russians, had come to the defense of Chechnya. The blood would flow forever, he said.
The bus goes 75 miles out of its way so it can circle around a part of Ingushetia deemed dangerous for everyone because of bandits.
The alliances are no more transparent in Moscow. There, the democrats joined the Communists in bitter opposition to the invasion.
The ultra-nationalist party of Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky blandly supported it.
Most of the rest of the world has declared this conflict an internal Russian matter. But Russian troops on the move still create a deep unease.