Of all the mistakes they made during the disastrous 1994-96 war to crush Chechnya's independence drive, the Russians have concluded, one of the worst was permitting the media to freely cover it.
When Russian troops invaded Chechnya in October, only a handful of selected reporters were allowed anywhere near the action.
Since then, aside from a few stage-managed tours supervised by the military, Chechnya has been pretty much a journalist-free zone.
'Controlling the press is one aspect of the campaign that has been an unqualified success,' says Oleg Panfilov, a spokesman for the independent media watchdog group Glasnost Foundation.
'The overwhelming bulk of information getting on to Russian TV is straight from military sources,' he says.
'There have been a few weak attempts at criticism of the war in some newspapers, but they cannot compete with the Kremlin's megaphone.' For example, when three Russian missiles slammed into a Grozny market on October 24, killing 140 people, TV audiences were told the blast was caused by 'bandits fighting among themselves in an arms bazaar'.
Last week, when Russian forces imposed a draconian security regime in occupied Chechen territory that treated all men between 10 and 60 as 'terrorist suspects', home audiences were not informed.