MOSCOW -- Most of the Chechens living in the Russian capital were disdainful of the separatists who had taken control of their homeland -- until the police in Moscow began a campaign of harassment and intimidation.
Every day, police stop Chechens and other darker-skinned people at markets, and subway and bus stops, for document checks. Police wave cars to a stop if the driver appears to be from the Caucasus. They raid hotels and barge into apartments.
Some people get hauled into police stations for several hours while their identity documents are given still closer scrutiny. A few Chechens allege that they have been asked for bribes in exchange for being released; others allege that they were beaten before police let them go.
There are as many as 40,000 Chechens living in Moscow, most of them longtime residents of the city with successful careers. Most of them were contemptuous of the would-be president of a would-be independent Chechnya, Dzhokhar Dudayev, who struck them as nothing more than a criminal chieftain.
But now they find themselves regarded as enemies. And Russian authorities are converting them all into fervent Chechen patriots.
"At every step you have to explain to people that you are not a bandit," said Umar Elikhanov, 33, who has owned a construction firm here for the past three years.
Mr. Elikhanov started out as a critic of President Dudayev, and in fact he still is.
"This war started out as a 'razborka,' " he said, using the Russian slang for showdowns between rival gangs. But the Russians have forced the Chechen people to defend their honor and their homes, and the struggle has become quite different.
"Now that the Chechen people have started fighting," said Mr. Elikhanov's partner, Rakhman Gichkayev, also 33, "they will go to the end."
Every night last week, the two men attended prayer services at Moscow's largest mosque, to mark the start of the holy month of Ramadan. They said they prayed for peace in Chechnya. During the days, they were buying supplies -- medicines, as well as goods they chose to not describe -- and searching for ways to ship them to Chechnya.
Then there is Visradi Anasov. He has run a trading company and a bank, has lived in Moscow 18 years, and tells of his friends in the police and the intelligence services who warned him last year that he would be watched.
"Every time I get to my door, I look back wondering if someone's going to hit me on the head with a brick," he said. "It's terrible."
Mr. Anasov's parents were deported from Chechnya to Central Asia in 1944 on suspicion that Chechens had been too friendly with Nazi occupiers. Mr. Anasov was born in 1956 in what is now Kyrgyzstan, before the family's exile ended.
"I was born a political prisoner," he said. "And now after 18 years here I'm turned into a political enemy."
"I'm constantly being humiliated," said Ruslan Davletmursayev, 40, a graduate student at the Agricultural Institute here. "It's your country -- why should you be treated this way? Why, when you go out, should any drunken cop be allowed to stop you, just because of your face?"
Khizir Kurazov, a 28-year-old wrestler, said he was beaten by police so badly late last year that he was spitting blood. A friend, Apti Bersanov, 27, said police had tried to provoke him. "You, Chechen," he said they shout at him. "You're so hot-blooded -- we'll throw you in a cell and that'll cool you down."
A Moscow police spokesman, Vladimir Vershkov, said that patrols had been stepped up but that no orders have been issued to single out Chechens.
"Of course it can happen that some policeman was in a bad mood and didn't want to leave a Chechen in peace," said Mr. Vershkov. "The law is an ideal, and life is something quite different."
The police sweeps, said Abdullah Khamzayev, a prominent lawyer, "have nothing to do with combating real crime. It's always the law-abiding people they bring in this way.
"Many of us have lived and worked here a long time; I, personally, for 30 years. For the past three months, the special police have been entering apartments on no basis, without warrants, and you can thank God if you are not beaten."
But Chechens are careful to distinguish between the Russian authorities and the Russian people.
"My neighbors come to our apartment and cry and apologize," said Mr. Anasov. " 'Forgive us for what we are doing,' they say."
"I've known Russians since I was young. I have no problems with Russians," said Vakha Umarov, 26. "And yet maybe something has changed. It's not that I hate them. It's as though I'm always more aware, always on guard."
As a group, the Chechens have a reputation among Russians for being clannish, fierce, in some way outside the law. It's a reputation they themselves savor.
"If there's three of us, we're a mafia," said Mr. Elikhanov, the owner of the construction firm. "If you want to call it a mafia, let it be a mafia."
The Chechens of Moscow have so far chosen to stay where they are. They have sent money back home, made arrangements to help relatives escape danger, and felt an unmistakable pride in
the resistance of the vastly outgunned Chechen fighters.
But the tug of ethnic unity is at work. The men all say they will be willing to go to Chechnya to fight if the call should come.
"It's in a Chechen's blood," said Mr. Elikhanov, "to be at war."