By Caroline Wyatt
BBC Moscow correspondent

Fifty-eight years ago, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin rounded up and exiled the troublesome Chechen people to Central Asia, for allegedly collaborating with the Nazis. It was more than a decade before they could return. Today, those old enmities are still burning in the Caucasus, with the Chechens continuing to fight for independence - two years after the Russian army retook the city of Grozny.

Russia is now keen to show the world that law and order is slowly returning to this shattered place, where 200,000 people live in a city virtually razed to the ground by Russian bombs.

The Russians say they are in control. But there is little left to control. Looking at the city of Grozny is like seeing newsreel footage of the ruins of Dresden or Berlin after World War II.

But this is today, in colour.

Living on the brink

We fly into Grozny in a military helicopter. A helicopter gunship flies beside us, dropping heat-flares to throw off any rebel attack.

Road upon road of shattered houses, charred fragments piercing the sky. This looks like a place that Russia tried to wipe from the face of the earth. It nearly succeeded.

Yet, incredibly, there are still people living here, eking out an existence. As we land I can make out washing blowing on clothes-lines outside impossibly blackened homes.

Our Russian minders are determined to paint a positive picture, so we're taken to flats that are being rebuilt.

An elderly Chechen man carries a pile of bricks towards the door; he stoops under their weight. I ask what living here is like and he answers by taking off his hat and showing me a shock of white hair. "I'm only 40-years-old," he says. "This is what the war has done to me."

Life is slowly getting better, he says. But as we talk, a machine gun rattles in the distance. He doesn't even flinch.

'No nothing'

In another grey street, the noise of sewing machines has replaced the gunfire. It's a new workshop that the Russian-backed local administration is very proud of.

The women here bend over their machines, reluctant to talk to foreign visitors in front of our hosts. But then one looks up and talks quickly and quietly.

"This is not a life, simply not a life. We have no life. There's gas, though sometimes it's cut off. But there's no electricity, no water, no work," she says. "No nothing."

Blind fear

There doesn't seem to be much of a life here for anyone at all.

We are allowed to visit a small local market. Here old women at shabby stalls sell chocolates and camouflage jackets.

Next door is another shattered building, its roof tiles hanging off at crazy angles. Inside, Gassan Karimov shows us around Grozny's library for the blind - and the basement where he hid during the bombing.

He himself is blind so he's never seen the destruction of his home city. But he can feel the despair around him - and the fear and mistrust.

"You get used to anything, even fear," he said. "Your legs shake but your mind says you have to be brave. I could have left, but who needs us? I can't imagine life in a tent would be better than living in my destroyed home here."

Just as the sun begins to set, we're driven out of Grozny - away from this man-made hell. It's a drive down silent streets through a landscape that belongs to Stalin's era, not to the 21st century.