MOSCOW The commander of Russian forces in Chechnya said on Wednesday that his soldiers had committed "widespread crimes" when, after mine blasts had killed Russian soldiers nearby, they inflicted beatings and electric shocks on 1,500 civilians and looted homes in two villages.

General Vladimir Moltensky, acting commander of Russian forces in the Northern Caucasus, assembled his subordinate officers at the main military base in Khankala, near the Chechen capital, Grozny, and in front of Russian news reporters engaged in a rare self-criticism of the army's performance.

"Those who conducted the searches did so in a lawless fashion, committing numerous outrages and then pretending that they knew nothing about it," the Itar-Tass news agency quoted him as saying.

The general said he was making the statement because "numerous crimes" had been committed. He instructed his subordinate commanders to respond to every citizen complaint filed with prosecutors as a result of the "mopping up" operation on July 3 and 4.

Hundreds of complaints have already been filed.

The general's public statement followed strong protests from both Chechen and Russian officials.

The operation took place after two mine blasts on roads outside the villages, 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Grozny. The blasts killed as many as 11 Russian soldiers and wounded several others.

According to dozens of witnesses who were interviewed last week during a visit to the two villages, Assinovskaya and Sernovodsk, hundreds of Russian Interior Ministry soldiers arrived in a column of more than 100 armored vehicles, the identifying numbers of which were covered.

The soldiers barricaded and disarmed the village police, detained local officials and religious leaders and then went house to house, arresting every Chechen male they found between the ages of 15 and 55. The soldiers took them to "filtration" points on the edges of the villages.

There they made them lie face-down in the sun all day, or crowded them into open pits, their shirts pulled over their heads in sweltering heat.

Many residents who tried to see what was happening were beaten with rifle butts. Then, one by one, the men were taken for violent interrogation.

One of those interrogated was Ruslan Payzulayev, 38, a deaf mute, who was pulled away from his mother over her protests that he was handicapped.

"They hit him in the mouth to make him talk," said his sister, Sonya Payzulayeva, translating her brother's sign language.

"They put a belt on him and fixed wires to him and applied current." Mr. Payzulayev's face convulsed as he demonstrated his reaction to the current.

A neighbor, who witnessed the interrogation, quoted one of the soldiers as saying, "We're going to see if he is really deaf and dumb or just too tough."

The operation in the two villages left dozens of people injured. Although no deaths were confirmed, three people are still missing.

The operation has been followed by an exodus of refugees, thousands of whom were living in the two villages after they fled Grozny, the devastated capital, to the east. On Tuesday in Moscow, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, an aide to President Vladimir Putin, acknowledged that soldiers might have committed offenses in the villages. He said the matter was under investigation.

A week ago, General Moltensky himself was silent when civilian officials protested to him against the operation.

One participant in the meeting with him said the general sat silent and "admitted nothing" when village officials recounted the looting and torture by his soldiers.

In Chechnya, tensions are high. The major military assault on Chechnya that ended a year ago, which was intended to put down a secessionist uprising, has turned into a guerrilla war in which nightly mine attacks kill and maim Russian soldiers, while civilians live under restrictions amounting to martial law.

The rounding up of civilians here has inflamed a historic grievance. In 1944 the Russian authorities rounded up Chechen civilians for deportation to Central Asia.

As the Russian soldiers came through the villages last week, one scrawled a verse evoking the deportation on the wall of the hospital. It said freedom for the Chechens was a "railway car" bound for the Asian steppe.

The poem was signed "with warmest regards" from the Interior Ministry soldiers of Yakutia, a Siberian region that has contributed forces to the operations in Chechnya.

After last week's events, Vaha Arsamakov, the mayor of Sernovodsk, said: "I would like to stress that there was not a single rebel among all those arrested. They were all peaceful people. Of course there are bandits in every country, but why should they fight against an entire village because several bandits did something nearby?"

A number of young men who said they had been subjected to beatings and electric shocks removed their shirts and trousers to show a reporter their burns and bruises.

Among them was Amirkhan Sultanov, 23, a farmer. He said he had been beaten especially severely because he had tried to hide from the soldiers. His passport was being renewed at the local registration office and he feared that without the document he would fall under suspicion, as had his younger brother, Aslan Sultanov.

On May 1, soldiers seized Aslan Sultanov in the street here, took him into the woods, put a bag over his head and told him to stretch out his arms as if crucified.

"I thought, this is it," he said. Then, he said, the soldiers shot him in the right wrist and released him.

When the older brother was taken by the soldiers, the same terror took hold.

"They put me down in a hole with a bag over my head and my hands tied," Amirkhan Sultanov said, "and then they began to beat me with rifle butts. They yelled, 'Where are the rebels? Where are they hiding here?'"

As Mr. Sultanov spoke last week, he was wearing a prayer cap and sitting among relatives and neighbors in his courtyard. Armored personnel carriers continued to patrol the muddy lanes of the village, which is surrounded by rolling green hills, fields of sunflowers and haystacks from the wheat harvest. He recounted his torture.

"They put two wires down the back of my trousers and applied electric current," he said.

"It sounded like a box with a hand crank, like an old telephone, and they shouted at me" - as they applied the current - " 'Don't you want to make a call to your mother?' "

"The pain was unbearable," he said. "They stopped only after about 20 minutes, when my breathing under the bag showed I was losing consciousness."

Older residents and women who remained at home said they were forced to pay ransom to soldiers to prevent cars and trucks from being hauled away. Soldiers looted cooking utensils, bedding, alcohol and other items of value from homes, residents said.

Soldiers entered the school in Assinovskaya, kicked down doors, threw grenades into empty classrooms and blew open three safes from which they took 60,000 rubles (about $2,000) that was stored there to pay teachers' salaries.

"They even took the carpet from the prayer room," said the principal, Medina Gudiyeva. She added that soldiers had carried off the school's only set of video equipment.

"I followed them when they left the school," she said, a yellow scarf over her head. "I wanted to talk to their commanding officer, and they told me obscenely to buzz off. And when I kept after them, one of them pointed his machine gun at me and said, 'Go back, or I am going to shoot.'"

Next door, at the village hospital, soldiers looted the drug storeroom and scrawled graffiti on the walls calling Chechens pederasts. They dragged Alkazir Abubakarov, 16, out of his bed and took him to the pit where hundreds of detainees were awaiting interrogation.

"This boy was very weak," said a nurse, who asked that her name not be published, out of fear of reprisal. "He was suffering from pneumonia and kidney stones and was crying, 'Mama, Mama!' " She said the soldiers pushed him into a jeep. He is believed to have survived.

After the soldiers left the hospital, a custodian found two booby traps - a grenade wired to a furnace door and another inside a box - engendering further anxieties among villagers that any door they opened in places where the soldiers had been might touch off an explosion.

"They think there are terrorists in Chechnya," said Musa Gudiyev, who tends the heating system at the school. "But terrorists came here from Russia."

It was possible for an outsider to visit the two villages and interview the residents only by circumventing military checkpoints on the roads.