Not mighty, not red, and barely an army.

In 1942, the Soviet army saved the world from Nazism by holding Stalingrad while the Germans pounded it to rubble. Today, that army's delinquent stepchild, the Russian army, is fighting a city battle of its own. The Russians are pounding their own city, Grozny, to rubble and are murdering Russian civilians in the process. Their conquest of Grozny, which should conclude by the end of January, will complete a methodical campaign of brutality. Since October, more than 100,000 Russian troops have inched through Chechnya, leveling villages with low-precision artillery and dumb bombs. This "pacification" has killed many Chechen guerrillas and civilians and has turned most of the survivors into refugees. "In its indiscriminate use of firepower against civilian targets, it is as bad as anything since World War II," says Lani Kass, a professor of military strategy at the National War College.

No matter. The war against the Chechens, who are despised as Muslim terrorists in slavic Russia, is wildly popular, proof that Russian military power is returning. Chechnya is payback for Afghanistan, for the first humiliating Chechen war of 1994-96, and for NATO's bombing of Serbia. The army's triumph will ensure Vladimir Putin's election as president in March. It has already restored the military's prestige and budget.

But the notion that Chechnya's rape represents a return of Russian military glory is preposterous. Russia is turtling through Chechnya partly because it doesn't have enough competent troops to fight more quickly. Russia can rely on only about 20,000 skilled soldiers in an army of 700,000. Analysts believe that Russia could muster "one or two" decent army divisions out of a paper strength of 70 divisions.

Russia's military is a lumpen-army, the dregs of dregs. Conscription remains mandatory, but more than 80 percent of young Russians avoid it. The enlisted ranks fill with the stupid, the sick, and the criminal. These soldiers are little better than cannon fodder. Russia makes no serious effort to train them, because it doesn't have qualified noncommissioned officers, and its officers can't control the conscripts. Hazing is unbelievably brutal: More than 1,000 soldiers are murdered every year by their brothers-in-arms, and more than 500 kill themselves because of the horrific conditions.

Pay is laughably small and usually in arrears. Russia has shelved its longstanding plan to switch to a volunteer army because it can't pay enough to recruit soldiers. According to the CIA, Russia spends only one-sixth as much on the military as the Soviet Union did during the '80s. Clothing and rations are scarce: Navy servicemen have starved to death. Alcoholism is rampant, as soldiers drink everything they can get their hands on. (In the '80s, the Mig-25 was nicknamed the "Flying Restaurant" because crews would drain and drink its alcohol-based hydraulic fluid.) Hepatitis flourishes because troops don't know how to dig latrines. The army is "a kingdom of darkness," says U.S. Army War College professor Stephen Blank.

Russia can't afford to equip its so-called soldiers. Only a tiny fraction of Russian materiel is equal to modern Western equipment. Russia lacks up-to-date communications, computers, and precision munitions. Much hardware remains from the Soviet buildup, but most of it doesn't work. Soldiers cannibalize spare parts to keep a few vehicles working. Pilots lack the fuel and equipment to fly training missions. Russian arms plants still produce excellent weapons for export (anti-ship missiles, for example), but the Russian military can't afford to buy any of them.

Russian conventional forces have grown so flaccid that Russia has altered its nuclear policy. It used to abjure first-use of nukes. Now first-use is an essential part of military doctrine, because Russia knows it can't defend itself conventionally. (The only good news about the military is that it has regained secure control over its active nuclear weapons--though not over discarded nuclear material.) Even the Pentagon, which has long featherbedded its budget by inflating the Moscow threat, has largely stopped pretending that Russia can endanger U.S. military interests. The Russian army is no longer the great Russian bear but a "rather vicious ferret," says Mark Galeotti, a Russian military analyst at Britain's Keele University.

This military has decayed immeasurably since the glory days of the Mighty Red Army. The Russian army broke Napoleon. Soviet troops, in Winston Churchill's words, "tore the guts" out of the Nazis. U.S. officials certainly exaggerated the competence of the Soviet military during the Cold War, but it was still a great force: 6 million men under arms, a 3-to-1 tank advantage, a 2-to-1 aircraft advantage. The Red Army was the only institution that matched the Communist Party in prestige. The best and brightest joined the officer corps. There were 15 applicants for every slot at some military schools. The state pampered officers with special stores, chauffeured cars, and dachas.

The Czarist and Soviet armies were not artful, but they were often effective: weak on offense, strong on defense. They performed poorly in far-flung adventures (the Russo-Japanese War, for example) but savaged invaders when the Motherland was under attack. They mastered brute-force warfare, throwing huge numbers of troops, tanks, and shells at the enemy. The U.S.S.R. won World War II by losing 8 million soldiers.

The Afghanistan invasion vanquished the myth of Soviet military invincibility and aroused the popular mistrust of the army that persists today. The breakup of the U.S.S.R. shattered the army into 15 pieces, as Russia lost nukes, ships, bases, and many of its best officers to newly independent republics. In the post-Soviet chaos, youngsters found more ways to duck conscription, and the quality of the average soldier plummeted. Boris Yeltsin, who didn't trust the army, further damaged it by elevating the interior ministry--with its hundreds of thousands of soldiers--as a separate, independent foundation of military power. The first Chechen war dealt the final disgrace. The hardened rebels slaughtered Russia's ill-prepared men, ambushing them by the hundreds in Grozny. Russian mothers traveled to Chechnya, pulled their sons off the front lines, and brought them home.