YELTSIN VISITS CHECHNYA SECRETLY ON HEELS OF SIGNING PEACE TREATY.

Byline: Michael Specter The New York Times

President Boris Yeltsin embarked on his most audacious campaign trip Tuesday, traveling to the shattered capital of Chechnya only hours after concluding a peace treaty intended to stop the raging war in the secessionist southern region.

Yeltsin had never before set foot in the region where as many as 40,000 people have died since he sent federal troops there in December 1994. But he has said many times in the last month that he would visit Chechnya during his presidential campaign, and this was one promise he clearly felt he needed to keep.

``You have won the war,'' Yeltsin told slightly astonished members of the 205th Motor Rifle Brigade, based at the heavily fortified Grozny airport. ``We have defeated the mutinous regime of Dudayev.'' He was referring to the separatist leader Dzhokhar Dudayev, who was killed last month in a Russian rocket attack.

Yeltsin's furtive six-hour trip, undertaken without a word even to many of his closest aides, was clearly planned to capitalize on his success in convincing the rebel leaders to sign a peace treaty Monday. The trip also underscored the extent to which his peace gambit, and perhaps more, depend on an embittered and uncertain military.

As recently as last week Defense Minister Pavel Grachev was quoted widely as saying that peace talks would fail. And he may be right, because it is not yet clear whether the military will follow Yeltsin's orders - nor is it clear that the Chechen rebel commanders will lay down their arms Saturday, when the treaty goes into effect.

``In carrying out our task, we could not avoid some grave mistakes,'' Yeltsin told the soldiers who suffered most for those errors. ``I am not trying to fend off blame for myself.''

The trip was clothed in such secrecy that Russians learned about it only after he had arrived in Mozdok, the city in neighboring Ossetia that has become the headquarters for Russian forces in Chechnya.

Even Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the Chechen rebel leader who met with Yeltsin at the Kremlin on Monday, said he had no idea the trip was under way. He said that like almost everyone else, he heard about it on the radio Tuesday morning before he returned to Chechnya.

At times the secrecy proved comical. So many helicopters were sent as decoys from Mozdok to Grozny that even Yeltsin's special contingent of security troops lost track of which vehicle was carrying the president.

Like most of Yeltsin's campaign trips, this one was scripted to avoid anything spontaneous or scary. He left the Kremlin a little after dawn and was back by dinner time. While in Chechnya, he never traveled to the center of Grozny - a city reduced to rubble and ash by the Russian air force - but made it only as far as the airport on the northern border of the city.

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Photo: Russian President Boris Yeltsin honored a campaign v ow and made a surprise trip to Chechnya.

Associated Press