CAUTION and circumspection are the key words in Moscow. The term vremenny (temporary) is the one most frequently heard about the ceasefire negotiated by Mr Alexander Lebed and the Chechen commander, Aslan Maskhadov.
In the Moscow headquarters of the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers this word echoes along the narrow corridors.
Lyubov Kuznetsova dashes from phone to phone. On one telephone she is trying to organise a transfer for a teenage member of a construction battalion, who shows the signs of a horrific beating he received as part of the Russian army's tradition of dyedovshchina in which recruits go through brutal initiation rites.
At the other she is dealing with a call from a woman in the Siberian city of Tyumen who received a telegram on August 15th to inform her that her only child had been killed in Chechnya but is still waiting for the body.
The atmosphere is frenetic.
Copies of the Russian edition of Cosmopolitan lie unread on tables. Phones keep ringing, mothers are seeking the bodies of their sons. The woman in Tyumen is given numbers to ring in the southern city of Rostov on Don. Lyubov says she will ring them.
Those in Rostov who deal with the gruesome task of finding the bodies of the war victims are "good people" overwhelmed with the scale of their job, Lyubov tells the distraught mother.
After the phone conversation she tells me: "A lot of mistakes are made. Her boy could well be still alive. Some clerk may have messed things up. Maybe this woman might be one of the lucky ones. Then she points to a psychological aid the committee workers use frequently.
It is called an "anger sheet", an ordinary piece of typing paper, hooked to a wall with the message: "When you are angry vent it on me. Tear me into shreds and throw me in the wastepaper basket." Yesterday afternoon there was just one "anger sheet" left unshredded.
Valentina Melnikova, the committee's spokeswoman, held out little hope of a prolonged peace. "Lebed means well but he is a product of the Russian army. He fought in Afghanistan. This has a bearing on his outlook.
"We have seen ceasefires before. All of them have been broken. In any event in a country as large as this it's dangerous to place so much hope in one person, to overestimate the influence of a single man.
Our committee has no trust in the authorities. Instead, we are appealing to the people not to let their sons go to Chechnya, not to answer the call of conscription.
There is not the slightest hope that the ceasefire will be observed. "The authorities are too deep into this. Too many people want blood. Too many want revenge... In reality very few of them want peace.
While officially dealing with the problems of mothers of soldiers in the Russian army, the committee has sympathy for the Chechens and particularly the Chechen mothers.
"There is one particular problem that must be resolved before the Chechens will be agreeable to peace. There are 1,400 missing Chechens. We have a list of their names and addresses from the Chechen mothers.
"The [Russian] authorities will give no details of where they are. Even if the authorities admit they have been killed or have died in the `filtration camps' it would help ease the bitterness that exists."
In the Nezavisimaya Gazeta office the atmosphere is no less pessimistic. Allan Kasayev is the paper's expert on nationalities. As an Ossetian from the northern caucasus he has a special understanding of an area in which the ethnic patchwork makes the Bosnian situation look simple.
On the missing Chechens he is blunt. The Russian forces don't even have details of their own people who are missing in action, let alone of the Chechens. The situation is chaotic.
The ceasefire is temporary. "You must understand the power of the military and the military industrial complex in Russia. It impinges on the lives of at least 50 million people, 30 per cent of the population. There are military interests, political interests and industrial interests."
On the military side there is the need for victory, on the industrial side the war keeps factories going and on the political side there are those who feel a permanent situation of crisis can help them to hold the attention of an ailing and indecisive President.
When Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin finds himself in trouble, his instinctive reaction is to blame someone else.
