#7
The Russia Journal
May 11-17, 2001
Soldiers worry about road to civilian life
Pending reform means many will soon have to look for work
By VLADIMIR MUKHIN
For many in Russia, the cutback in troop strength is just a matter of
numbers. Debate centers on how many should be cut and how efficient the armed
forces will be after reductions.
But for others -- the 600,000 servicemen destined to lose their jobs -- it is
a much more personal question.
A survey of servicemen shows that two-thirds are worried by the prospect of
having to find new work after leaving the military. Many of those affected by
the cutbacks will also face problems finding new places for their wives to
live and work.
Out of a total 3.5 billion rubles allocated this year for military reform, 50
million rubles are earmarked for the retraining of military specialists. This
may not seem like much, but as economics correspondent for the Defense
Ministry newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda Col. Ivan Ivanyuk said, even this
represents progress.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was only last year that the state
set aside money for retraining military specialists when it allocated 24
million rubles.
"The state isn't able to find decent work for all the dismissed officers,"
Ivanyuk said. "I'm not certain the government will actually hand out all the
money allocated for retraining. This money could end up being sequestered due
to budget problems that came up at the beginning of the year and the
redistribution of extra budget revenue."
At the last meeting of a government committee on social issues affecting
servicemen, the chief inspector at General Headquarters, Gen. Mikhail
Moiseyev, released figures showing that since 1992, more than 900,000
officers, warrant officers and midshipmen had been dismissed. Of this number,
only 60,000, or 7 percent, had undergone retraining for civilian professions
in Defense Ministry training centers.
On paper, at least, the state is doing something for servicemen who've lost
their jobs in the military through no fault of their own. Servicemen are
covered, for example, by a 1998 federal employment program for 1998-2001.
Another plan is for the state to compensate dismissed servicemen for the cost
of training for a new profession. The government passed a decree on this last
year.
There is also the government committee on social issues affecting servicemen,
headed by Deputy Prime Minister Valentina Matviyenko. The committee is
working on a draft federal program that aims to facilitate the integration
into civilian society of servicemen dismissed between 2002-05. The committee
is also drawing up welfare programs for servicemen and their families.
Former Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev recently signed a resolution to set up
a coordinating council on the welfare of dismissed servicemen and their
families, which will unite the efforts of the various Defense Ministry
departments.
"We are seeing a proliferation of servicemen's welfare committees, but this
isn't solving anything," said military sociologist Sergei Solovyev. "The
country doesn't have the money and this means no matter what our intentions,
only a small share of the officers will be able to retrain at the state's
expense and find decent work."
Solovyev said that according to his figures, less than half the officers who
come under the cutbacks end up finding any kind of other work for themselves.
"It's particularly hard for servicemen over 50 and living in small towns or
in garrisons where there are many retired servicemen," Solovyev said. "It may
not make us look good, but as before, most of the aid for retraining officers
will come from abroad. When we withdrew our troops from Germany, the Germans
gave us money to build 10 retraining centers for our servicemen. Then, other
Western countries also began giving us money. Last year, foreign investment
accounted for 11 million rubles of money spent on retraining. It may not seem
like a lot, but it's better than nothing."
Some military experts say that more thought has to go into how to carry out
retraining. Security Council expert Maj. Gen. Yevgeny Nikitenko, for example,
said that retraining shouldn't become an end into itself.
"It would be simpler and more effective to create jobs in general and expand
production," he said. "This way, it would be easier for our retired
servicemen to see where in the economy they can be useful – and only then
choose a specific profession to learn.
"As it is at the moment, we train them and they get, say, a diploma in
accounting or management and then spend years looking for a place to use
their skills. Only once the economy picks up will we be able to solve the
unemployment problem for former servicemen."
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#8
space.com
May 14, 2001
Despite Expertise, Russia Can't Afford Trip to Red Planet
By Simon Saradzhyan
MOSCOW -- Sending humans to Mars with return tickets is technically and
medically possible, but Russia cannot muster up the funds and resources
necessary for such a costly program on its own, officials and experts said.
"There are no obstacles that cannot be overcome from the medical point of
view. Problems exist, but there are approaches toward solving them," Anatoly
Grigoryev, director of the Moscow-based Institute for Biomedical Problems,
told SPACE.com.
In a statement issued to SPACE.com on Thursday through his press service,
Grigoryev noted that Russia has already acquired expertise in keeping human
beings in space long enough for a voyage to Mars and back.
He cited the example of the deputy director of his institute, Valery
Polyakov, who spent 438 days on the Mir space station in 1994-95 to prove
that human beings can endure over yearlong voyages in space. Calls to
Polyakov were unanswered Thursday.
Mars 2016?
Grigoryev said the year 2016 offers the best launch window to take advantage
of a favorable planetary alignment between Earth and Mars, but would not
venture a guess as to whether Russia's space industry could muster the safe
technology needed to send a crew of cosmonauts to Mars and back by that date.
NASA chief Dan Goldin told a symposium on the 40-year history of U.S. human
spaceflight on Tuesday that human beings could reach the Red Planet 20 years
from now.
According to an official at the Russian Aviation and Space Agency
(Rosaviakosmos), America, the world's wealthiest country, has the resources
and ability to launch a manned craft to Mars in two decades, unlike Russia,
whose annual national budget roughly equals that of California.
"We don't even try to estimate how much it would cost" Russia to launch a
manned mission to Mars, an official who oversees Rosaviakosmos' Mars probe
program, told SPACE.com in a phone interview Thursday.
Presently, the cash-strapped agency isn't even sure whether it will be able
to launch a spacecraft to Mars and Phobos in 2005 on a sample-return mission
that will also transmit images of their surfaces, as had been earlier
planned, according to the official, who asked not to be named.
The agency's Mars exploration program already saw one Mars-bound probe
plummet back into the ocean when its launch vehicle failed in 1996.
While unable to solely finance the launch of a crew to Mars, with return
tickets, Russia could shoulder some costs of U.S.-led program along with
Europe, the Rosaviakosmos official said.
"We could have lowered the overall costs as cheaper, but skilled labor would
remain our advantage, hopefully, even 20 years from now," said the official.
As for Russia's edge on keeping human beings safe and sound in space for
years, it will have evaporated by 2020, he said.
"Twenty years is more than enough for Americans to muster these technologies
thanks to ISS (the International Space Station)," said the official.
Another Rosaviakosmos official, when reached by phone Thursday, questioned
the very need to launch humans to Mars.
"The question is what such a mission can exactly achieve. I don't see
anything that would justify the costs that would total tens of billions of
dollars," said the official, who asked not to be named.
He said the federal government would have to boost Rosaviakosmos' 2001 budget
of 4.59 billion rubles by 50 times if Russia were to try to send its
cosmonauts to Mars in 2016.
Such an interplanetary hike is "unreal" and, thus, Rosaviakosmos should limit
its Mars exploration program to trying to send a robotic probe there in the
next several years, he said.
Technically feasible, financially impossible
A Russian space industry veteran said the launch of a manned craft to Mars is
technically and medically feasible, but would prove to be too costly.
Konstantin Feoktistov, who helped to prepare the flight of Yuri Gagarin at
the legendary OKB-1 design bureau and later flew into space himself, said he
has calculated a manned mission to Mars would cost $1 trillion. "Even if the
surface of Mars were covered with gems and gold, a manned mission would still
be too expensive because of such a great cost," Feoktistov, who lectures on
space exploration at the Moscow Bauman Technical University, told SPACE.com
in a phone interview Thursday.
Moreover, such a mission would have no "realistic objectives to accomplish,"
according to Feoktistov, who looked into the possibility of launching a crew
to Mars while working at OKB-1, now called Rocket Space Corporation (RSC)
Energia.
He said OKB-1 designers started to study the possibility of such a mission
back in the 1960's, but dropped these studies in the mid 1970s.
Back then, the Soviet government commissioned Energia and the Chelomey Design
Bureau to look into this possibility, but refused to finance further research
after both organizations concluded that the costs "would have been too great
even for the Soviet Union to bear," Feoktistov said.
Feoktistov said he lost interest in manned exploration of Mars after
concluding that an interplanetary ship would have had to weigh 400 tons to
effectively protect six cosmonauts from deadly radiation during their
two-to-three-year mission.
He said three of them would have actually landed on the Red Planet while the
rest would have remained in orbit to stage a rescue operation if needed.
Feoktistov said Energia's calculations showed that such a mission would have
lasted two to three years, and the spacecraft's weight could not have been
significantly reduced, even if powered with electric jet engines.
Feoktistov argued that retrieval of samples from Mars and search for signs or
traces of organic life on this planet could be done more easily by robotic
craft. Meanwhile, setting up a colony there would be too costly because it
would require building a gigantic power station to provide the energy needed
to produce oxygen from carbon dioxide, which accounts for more 95 percent of
the Martian atmosphere.
According to the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), a
manned mission to Mars would last up to two years and would cost $40 billion
or more.
Russia would not be able to implement such a project on its own, but could
play an important role in designing and manufacturing both the ship and
landing capsule if the United States and other Western countries decided to
use Russian expertise, as they did in the case of ISS, according to a CAST
statement made to SPACE.com Thursday.
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#9
Kennan Institute meeting report
The Prospects for a Sino-Russian Strategic Partnership
By Joseph Dresen
"The Prospects for a Sino-Russian Strategic Partnership" (April 11, 2001)
Lecture at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center
for Scholars, Washington, D.C.
"The idea of a Russian-Chinese strategic partnership that Russian President
Boris Yeltsin and Chinese President Jiang Zemin first proclaimed five years
ago, in April 1996, evokes memories of the Sino-Soviet alliance of half a
century ago, but it is actually nothing of the sort," stated Steven Levine,
Mansfield Professor of Asia Pacific Studies, University of Montana at a 11
April 2001 panel discussion at the Kennan Institute cosponsored by the Wilson
Center's Asia Program. The panel also included Aleksei Voskressenski,
Professor and Head, Department of Asian Studies, MGIMO-University, Moscow,
and former Regional Exchange Scholar, Kennan Institute; Jeanne Wilson,
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Wheaton College; and
discussant Alexander Lukin, Visiting Fellow, Center for Northeast Asian
Policy Studies (CNAPS), Foreign Policy Studies, Brookings Institution. Rather
than a relic of the cold war, the panel agreed, the strengthening
relationship between China and Russia is driven by a complex set of shared
interests and different priorities.
China and Russia share a mutual interest in a stable border. By the late
1990s, Moscow and Beijing had resolved a long-standing border conflict that
had once threatened to engulf the Soviet Union and China in outright war.
Both Russia and China are also interested in limiting U.S. influence in
Central Asia, as well as maintaining political stability in these new states.
The economic forces unleashed by globalization also work to reinforce this
cooperative relationship, according to Voskressenski. While benefiting from
international trade, Russia and China are also concerned about lagging behind
Western nations more fully integrated into the global economy. Both nations
seek to mitigate the negative consequences for globalization by promoting
increased cross-border trade. China benefits from increased access to Russian
energy supplies and Russia benefits through greater integration of the
Russian Far East into the Pacific economy. Another aspect of the economic
relationship between Russia and China is one that strongly concerns the
United States--Russian arms sales to China. Wilson noted that 70 percent of
Russia's arms sales went to China in 2000. For Russia, these sales represent
a very important source of export earnings that also keep several enterprises
in Russia's defense industry afloat. China, in turn, relies on Russia for
sophisticated arms and military technology, as it is cut off from arms sales
from the West.
It is international politics, however, that throws Russia and China together
with the greatest urgency and public fanfare. Both Moscow and Beijing view
with alarm the economic, political, and military dominance of the United
States in global affairs. In their eyes, Lukin stated, they are defending an
international order rooted in the United Nations, where each holds veto power
in the Security Council, from a United States bent on changing that order to
its own advantage. NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia over Kosovo was particularly
important in convincing Moscow and Beijing of the need to strengthen security
ties. Both China and Russia are multinational countries, Lukin noted, and
they wonder why the U.S. felt it could bomb Yugoslavia and not China and
Russia, or even Turkey, for the same crime.
If the United States provides China and Russia with the strongest reason to
unite, it is also the greatest source of contradiction in the relationship.
Both China and Russia view their own bilateral relations with the United
States as more important than their developing strategic partnership, the
panelists agreed. Each also suspects the other of being willing to cut
separate deals over vital security matters. Russia values China's cooperation
in voicing opposition to U.S. hegemony, but it knows that China would not
endanger its economic ties with the West over another round of NATO
expansion. Bilateral trade between Russia and China may have reached a record
$8 billion in 2000, but this figure is only 1.7 percent of China's trade
volume and is dwarfed by China's $75 billion trade with the United States.
China, on the other hand, is very concerned over any form of missile defense,
given its limited nuclear deterrent and its desire to intimidate Taiwan with
missiles based across the strait. China suspects that Russia may be willing
to cut a deal with the West on missile defense that would negate China's
deterrent without damaging Russia's.
Another challenge in the relationship is the reversal in relative power since
the cold war. This change is evident in the demographic situation developing
in the Russian Far East. Sparsely populated to begin with, the Russian
population of the region is in decline. Over the border lies China, with the
world's largest population and memories of territories annexed by the Russian
Empire through a series of unequal treaties. If the security relationship
between Russia and China is to endure as more than a reaction to the United
States, they will need to come to terms with the shift in power and manage
such vexing issues as the Russian Far East.
In short, the panelists agreed, the Sino-Russian relationship will fall far
short of a military alliance and will be based upon independently derived
assessments of their convergent mutual interests. A strong relationship
between these states is a positive trend, as it promotes stability in the
region and economic develop-ment. An element of that relationship will be to
challenge the United States, but that challenge will be mitigated by each
nation's interest in maintaining positive relations with the United States.
Joseph Dresen is program associate at the Kennan Institute.
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#10
Moskovsky Komsomolets
May 16, 2001
[translation from RIA Novosti for personal use only]
AIDS IS A GREATER FINANCIAL THREAT TO RUSSIA
THAN AN ARMY OF BUREAUCRATS
Treatment of One HIV-Infected Person Costs the Budget
$10,000 a Year
By Anastasiya KUZINA
No one believed in the possibility of an AID epidemic five
years ago. A thousand HIV-infected people seemed like a drop in
an ocean for a large country like Russia. Numerous long-term
forecasts were made at that time. However, reality has
overthrown all theoretical predictions. In the past five years
the number of virus-carriers has increased by several dozen
times to exceed 113,000 this year. But the real number is from
five to ten times more, according to the estimates of the UN
and Russian practising doctors.
The epidemic has not stopped. About 100 people become
infected every day at present with 70 of them being residents
of Moscow and the Moscow region. In January-April of this year
27,500 new cases were registered, increasing the total number
of HIV-carriers to 113,323. The forecast for the next five
years looks like a verdict. According to specialists from the
Russian Federal AIDS Center, we will have up to five million
HIV-infected patients by 2005. A look back and an analysis of
statistics clearly show that such a number will become a
reality in December 2005, regardless of our attitude.
This stands to reason that given the continuation of the
present situation, one in thirty Russian citizens will be
infected in five years. Taking into consideration that most of
the HIV-infected are young people (90% are aged 15 to 30
years), one in ten people under 30 years of age will be a
virus-carrier.
The virus as such does not require any treatment but, as
time goes, HIV inevitably turns into AIDS. AIDS patients no
longer die thanks to state-of-the-art methods of treatment, but
treatment costs a lot of money. It takes at least $10,000
dollars a year per HIV-infected patient. The health care system
no longer copes with the treatment of 400 cases. What will
happen when there will be five million of them? Simple
arithmetical estimates show that not only the country's health
care system but the entire Russian economy will be unable to
shoulder such a burden.
It was generally believed until very recently that only
narcotic drug users are vulnerable to HIV. Statistics have come
up with a surprise, which, by the way, could have been expected.
Whereas only 6% of people got the HIV virus from their sex
partners last year, their number was almost twice as large, or
10.3%, in the first three months of this year. The moment it
reaches the level of 30% to 40% - which is just a piece of cake
in our country - the virus previously confined within the
community of drug addicts will quickly get loose in the streets
all over the country.
Russians are very careless, indeed. Even the spread of
syphilis has not been stopped yet: syphilis rate has grown 60
times since 1987. This vividly shows that the majority of our
population are ignorant as far as safe sex is concerned.
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