Russia has unexpectedly accepted an alphabet soup of nuclear treaties as it seeks to upstage Washington at next week's UN forum on keeping the world safe from the spread of atomic weapons.

START II, START III, CTBT, NPT, ABM -- name a nuclear treaty and Moscow is either putting its name on the dotted line or making sure that everyone else does.

A far cry from the days when Moscow swarmed with Kremlin conservatives who treasured the fast-fading Soviet glory days, President-elect Vladimir Putin suddenly has Russia blazing the nuclear safety trail.

"Putin has authority and he was only just elected -- I think this is in large part due to him," Mikhail Prusak, governor of the Novgorod region, enthused moments after parliament's upper chamber approved that START II treaty. Yet at heart of the matter, according to defense observers, is not Russia's goodwill but rather its deep dread that it cannot afford to do what the United States can -- build a nationwide nuclear defense shield.

The easiest way for Russia to interfere with those US plans is to restrict Washington to the existing 1972 anti-ballistic missiles (ABM) treaty prohibiting such defense systems.

To do that, Moscow is moving at breakneck pace to adopt all other existing pacts -- and then threatening to pull out of them should the US defense shield ever go up.

"If the United States abandons the 1972 agreement, we will have the right to pull out not only of START II but also from the entire arms reductions and control system," Putin warned last week.

Both houses of Russia's parliament this month dropped their tedious seven-year game of brinkmanship and ratified the START II arms reduction treaty.

Putin for his part added that he favors even broader arms cuts than those pencilled into a new START III treaty already under negotiation.

Going one better, the State Duma lower house scheduled for Friday a debate on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) that forbids all atomic testing -- and which the US Congress has vetoed.

"If the CTBT is ratified after START II, then (Russian Foreign Minister Igor) Ivanov will be on the diplomatic offensive in New York," Duma foreign relations committee chairman Dmitry Rogozin said this week.

The UN Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) conference is held once every five years. This year's forum, which helps define nuclear cooperation between its 187 members, will stretch through May 19.

Moscow has not been shy to concede that it will be pushy in New York. "Russia will present its point of view... and tell about the different results which Russia and the United States have achieved in the field of nuclear disarmament," the foreign ministry's security and disarmament advisor Vladimir Rybachenkov told ITAR-TASS.

In Rybachenkov's view, the United States has done far less than Russia over the years -- especially over recent weeks -- and has no right to speak of breaking the ABM.

An official foreign ministry statement added: "Further mutual nuclear reduction of strategic weapons may be achieved through strict compliance with the 1972 ABM treaty."

The United States has so far conducted two tests to determine how a nuclear defense shield might actually work, and both ended on a mixed note. Another is scheduled for June.

Perhaps Washington's strongest argument will a focus on Russia's highly criticized decision to help Iran build a nuclear power plant.

Speaking at the 11th session of the OANA General Assembly currently under way in Moscow, Ivanov said that "now it is important that the United States ratified the same package of documents, which confirms the commitment of both sides to the ABM Treaty".

Ivanov said this issue is directly linked with the current forum. "The international public opinion should know that if the concept of creating national anti-missile system wins in the United States, strategic stability will be destroyed and the whole process of disarmament will stop," the Russian minister said.

"We should not forget that the U.S. is trying to justify its plans of creating its own national anti-missile system by the existing threat to its security. Moreover, the plans of creating a tactical ABM system in Southeast Asia may be real and this can destabilise the situation in the whole world," Ivanov noted.

This charm offensive has surely been effective. START II ratification was welcomed worldwide. President-elect Vladimir Putin was cordially received in London this week by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth II - not bad for a man heading a government accused of perpetrating war crimes and the mass murder of civilians.

Putin got much-needed international respectability, promises of investment from abroad and assurances that the West will only mildly scold Russia for Chechnya and express "concerns," but will not seriously punish Moscow. Exports of oil, natural gas, metals and fertilizers to the West keep the present state going and feed the ruling class, the so-called oligarchs. Economic sanctions or even a credible threat of such sanctions in the first weeks of the Chechen war could have stopped the conflict or at least limited it by preventing an invasion by Russian troops across the Terek River deep into the Chechen heartland.

Last September and October, a deep invasion of Chechnya was seriously opposed by moderates in the military and political elite. A clear public signal from the West could have swayed the decision-making process in Moscow, but such a signal never came. Instead, the West pretended it believed in Moscow's good intentions. Russian authorities announced they would not cross the Terek and then did just the opposite.

Generals said they would not "storm" the Chechen capital and then flattened it with aerosol bombs and heavy guns, killing an unknown number of civilians that were trapped in the city.

Today, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov (a man who does not decide anything about how the war in Chechnya is run) says that Moscow is in constant negotiation with Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov and that these negotiations will soon bear fruit. But Sergei Yastrzhembsky, Moscow's main Chechnya spokesman, and Security Council Secretary Sergei Ivanov have repeatedly said that the war will continue until all armed resistance is wiped out, and that Moscow can negotiate with Maskhadov only the terms of unconditional surrender. Of course, Yastrzhembsky and Secretary Ivanov are telling the truth, and Minister Ivanov is floating a red herring. A meaningful cease-fire in Chechnya can only come as a result of military disengagement. If the troops stay, the Chechens will inevitably continue to fight the brutal occupation, and neither Maskhadov nor any other Chechen warlord will be able to stop revenge attacks even if they wanted to.

Moscow is not yet ready to disengage its troops. The possibility of the war's ending today with some political solution is zero. But the West wants to believe some civilized solution to the Chechen problem is around the corner and thus continues to accept Russian casuistry without doubt.

In a recent visit to Moscow, former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry said, "U.S.-Russian relations will not be held hostage to any other problem, including Chechnya." Russia is still a nuclear superpower; arms control is the only real issue, not dead Chechen civilians. But this realpolitik attitude has run into trouble lately: The ratification of START II also turned out to be a ruse.

Secretary Ivanov has announced that ratification documents will not be exchanged and START II will not go into force before the U.S. Senate ratifies supplementary protocols signed in September 1997, including a document distinguishing tactical and strategic anti-ballistic missile systems.

The ABM protocol reaffirms U.S. and Russian commitment to uphold the 1972 treaty and at the same time declares not only Russia, but also Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus to be legal successor nations to the treaty. If in the future the United States tries to change ABM rules, it will be forced to negotiate not only with Russia, but also with others, including Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko. U.S. Senate leaders have already stated publicly that they will never ratify the ABM protocol.

Obviously, such an impasse was preplanned by the Kremlin. The new government still actively seeks propaganda munitions to use against the United States, as if the Cold War never ended.

"Your son threw a stone at our little boy? Why, that thug of yours is nothing more than a young criminal. We'll sue you."

-- How many Russian journalists feel about Western coverage of the war in Chechnya.

MOSCOW -- Those journalists in Russia today who still actually believe in and try to follow the principles associated with an "independent media" have become increasingly disappointed by what they view of the hypocritical coverage in the West of the war in Chechnya.

In a nation where the majority of media outlets are already more or less obviously controlled by the state, this loss of faith by credible Russian reporters in those who advocate a free press is truly bad news.

Yet who can blame them? They've watched their Western colleagues write about "excessive use of force by the Russian Army as it fights against the small but proud Chechen nation, striving for the right to build the life and society of its own."

They view these reports as one-sided, failing to tell the Western public what life was like in Chechnya for the previous eight years.

Few if any Western reports detailed how the Chechnyan economy had been virtually destroyed by those who usurped power in the republic after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was then, after all, when none other than Boris Yeltsin called upon the leaders of the various autonomous republics within Russia to grab as much sovereignty as they could hold. Some, like Chechnya's Djohar Dudayev, chose to take it all.

After that, industrial and agricultural output fell to zero. The education, health care and welfare systems were in ruins. Genocide against the non-Chechen population became rampant and the formerly multinational republic was practically mono-ethnic. The rulers of Chechnya gained fortunes by slave-trading, drug-smuggling, illegal and environmentally damaging oil-refining practices.

Criminals sought by the federal and international law-enforcement agencies felt quite at home in Chechnya. No less than $4 billion of counterfeited money was printed in Grozny, only to emerge later throughout Russia and other nearby states. Cars stolen in Russia and in other countries regularly turned up there -- at least 2,900 of them were found during the recent anti-terrorist operation. Chechnya became the site for numerous training bases for international terrorists.

Who could tolerate all that? And for how long?

The Kremlin's patience finally ran out after a series of barbaric terrorist acts in Moscow and other Russian towns, such as the bombings of apartment buildings, popularly, although not legally, attributed to Chechen fighters. Then came the Chechen attack against its neighbor Dagestan last August. This attack was seen in Moscow as a clear-cut challenge. The republic of Dagestan was invaded by well-organized and well-trained paramilitary organizations, equipped not only with small arms but also with artillery and missile launchers. The amount of force used by the Russian Army was publicly viewed as appropriate given the nature of the threat.

Those Chechen refugees who had to abandon their homes in the combat zone fled towards the advancing federal troops, not away from them. No matter how desperate their situation, these civilians knew they would be safer in areas under the federal government's control rather than those ruled by the Chechen fighters. For thousands, it was their first chance since the collapse of the Soviet Union to visit a doctor and to send their children to school. Most of these facts are ignored by those journalists who prefer to dwell on the federal troops' atrocities only.

Unfortunately, some of these journalists are equally selective in their reporting about their own colleagues. While the fate of Radio Liberty reporter Andrei Babitsky, reported missing in Chechnya until he was eventually freed by Russian forces, was widely reported, there was practically no mention of Vladimir Yatsina, a reporter for the ITAR-TASS Russian news agency who was kidnapped last July in Chechnya and reportedly was shot several weeks ago. Altogether, 24 journalists were killed in Chechnya during the previous and the current military campaigns. "The one-sided approach of Western media to this drama is amazing," says Vassily Aksyonov, a well-known Russian writer now living in the United States. "You feel, especially if you have some Soviet-life experience, as if somewhere behind the scenes there is a covert propaganda center which coordinates this campaign and sends directives to independent newspapers. According to these 'directives', one shouldn't believe any information from Russian Army sources but, on the contrary, should unconditionally believe any information from 'independent Chechen sources,' " he says.

Comment: Of course, Russia does wish to restore its superpower status, but it is questionable yet whether it needs the Black Sea Fleet. For the last six years when Russia and Ukraine have divided the Fleet it has finally dilapidated. since 1988, not a single new warship was put into service. About 60 percent of warships were built over 18 years ago, and they are outdated in both technical equipment and combat capability. Its overall combat capability is minimal without missile and air support. Up to now, Ukraine actively prevented Russia from modernizing the Russian portion of the fleet. Kiev, despite it sanctioned a transfer to Crimea of a squadron of the Su-24M bombers to substitute the older models, is still blocking further modernization. Russia has not yet demonstrated any special concern for the Russian seamen's fate. Salary debt amounts to $3 million. Sebastopol's municipal authorities cut off the Russian ships from local electricity lines, for the accumulated unpaid electricity, gas and water bills worth $10 million. Whether Russia can afford now a very expensive full-scale overhaul of its Navy is questionable. Yet, The Times says "the Russian Black Sea Fleet is a symbol of the dilapidated military machine that Putin swore to rebuild". They will definitely find the money for it.

Former president Boris Yeltsin repeatedly tried and failed to get rid of prosecutor-general Yuri Skuratov, who annoyed the Kremlin for more than a year by investigating allegations of high-level corruption. Even a secretly recorded video of Mr. Skuratov frolicking in bed with two prostitutes didn't persuade the upper house of parliament to approve his sacking.

But yesterday, Mr. Putin persuaded the Federation Council to show its loyalty to the Kremlin by firing the prosecutor.

"Now is the time to support our president and consolidate society," council member Valentin Svetkov said.

The council voted 133-10 to get rid of Mr. Skuratov, who had uncovered evidence that the Kremlin had funnelled millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks to several of Mr. Yeltsin's closest aides and family members. The corruption probe is now likely to be shut down.

Mr. Skuratov acknowledged yesterday that he had lost the bitter feud with the Kremlin. He warned that the corruption investigation could soon fall away: "If the President does nothing, then all these cases will disappear into the sand." If the investigation does die, Mr. Putin will have done a favour for two of his former bosses: Mr. Yeltsin, who stepped down Dec. 31 to make room for Mr. Putin, and former Kremlin property chief Pavel Borodin. The investigation found evidence that Mr. Borodin had set up a Swiss bank account to accept bribes from Mabetex, a construction company that won hundreds of millions of dollars in lucrative contracts for Kremlin renovations.

Mr. Borodin -- who employed Mr. Putin as a deputy in 1996, when the former KGB agent first moved to Moscow -- allegedly arranged credit-card accounts for Mr. Yeltsin's two daughters in European banks.

Swiss authorities have issued a warrant for Mr. Borodin's arrest on money-laundering charges in connection with the Mabetex scandal, but Mr. Putin responded by appointing him to a prestigious post at the head of the Russia-Belarus political union.

Analysts say the investigation was a source of anxiety for the Yeltsin family. When the former president resigned on New Year's Eve, Mr. Putin immediately signed a decree to guarantee Mr. Yeltsin's immunity from any criminal prosecution, investigation, search or questioning.

Mr. Putin played a crucial role in the Kremlin's ruthless campaign against Mr. Skuratov last year. He was head of the Federal Security Service, the former KGB, when it helped arrange the videotape of the prosecutor having sex with prostitutes. The videotape was broadcast on Russian state television, but Mr. Skuratov refused to resign.

The Kremlin also pushed for a criminal investigation of Mr. Skuratov himself. But with the prosecutor now sacked, this probe is likely to be dropped, a Kremlin official said yesterday.

Meanwhile, there are mounting signs that the Russian investigation of the Mabetex corruption scandal will be quietly halted soon. The current chief investigator, Ruslan Tamayev, has reportedly asked to be removed from the case. Several other investigators have also quit the case in the past two years.

Mr. Tamayev was coerced into abandoning the corruption case because of "unprecedented pressure" from the Kremlin and its allies, the Russian weekly newspaper Vlast reported this week.

It cited several examples of the harassment and intimidation that the investigator has suffered. Two weeks after he was put in charge of the case, a group of interior-ministry officers tried to enter his home "on the pretext of checking his passport," Vlast said.

"He didn't let them in, and they threatened to make his life difficult. Three months later, his two stepbrothers were detained on charges of drug possession. They insisted that the evidence was planted on them, and the police tried to get some compromising stuff on Tamayev from them." "Mr. Skuratov understands that his corruption investigation was "tilting at windmills," the newspaper said.

But Russia is not yet able to meet the commitments it made in signing the 1997 agreement, which bans the development, production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons.

So Moscow has officially informed the international community of its difficulties and requested that the April deadline be postponed.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) executive council supported the Russian request at a recent meeting in its Hague headquarters, but a final decision will be taken at a conference bringing together all the member states in May.

"We’re not withdrawing from the convention, but we can’t physically fulfill our commitments for this year, we don’t have the money," said Zinovy Pak, director of the Russian Munition Agency.

Pak said that later, by April 2002, Russia would be able to destroy 8,000 tons of chemical substances used in weapons. This would require 2-3 billion rubles from the Russian budget and foreign aid, he said. Currently, Russia spends about 500 million rubles a year on destruction of chemical weapons. Russia had a program to destroy chemical weapons before it signed the Hague Convention and joined the OPCW, but it has always been underfunded, said Col. Gen. Stanislav Petrov, head of Russia’s radiation-, chemical- and biological-protection troops.

"It’s in a catastrophic state. The program has never received all the money it was supposed to get," Petrov said. "In 1995, it got 17.5 percent of planned funding, and in 1996-99, only 2-3 percent of planned funding. That’s brought work virtually to a standstill."

Petrov said Russia has around 40,000 tons of toxic chemical substances ­ almost half of world stocks. Russia stores its chemical weapons in seven Defense Ministry arsenals in small towns in the Udmurt republic, the Saratov, Bryansk, Kirov, Penza and Kurgan oblasts.

The main priority, Petrov said, was to first destroy stocks of chemical substances that attack the skin, such as mustard gas, that are stored in large tanks. Such stores, in the towns of Gorny in Saratov Oblast and Kambarka in Udmurtia, were produced in the 1940s and ’50s and are a threat to the environment. Stocks amount to 7,500 tons.

Next on the destruction list would be more than 32,000 tons of substances designed to attack the nervous system ­ used in ammunition by missile forces, artillery and aviation. A timetable for destroying these weapons has been drawn up running through to 2009, but Russian and foreign experts estimate that the program would require at least $5 billion.

Russia sees the only way out of its chemical weapons problems as getting foreign help. The West is willing to help. At an international conference in the Hague on assistance to Russia for its chemical weapons destruction program March 31, many countries supported OPCW Director Jose Bustani’s proposal to set up a permanent committee on coordinating assistance to Russia. "We must be realistic; without substantial international help, Russia won’t be able to destroy its chemical weapons within the deadlines set by the convention," Bustani said.

Putin told a government session gross domestic product (GDP) would grow by four to 4.5 percent in 2001. He said GDP had grown by nearly eight percent in the first quarter of this year, describing this as "huge growth."

Providing the first government economic forecasts since Putin was elected president last month, Economics Minister Andrei Shapovaliants told journalists after the session on economic development during 2000-03: "By 2003 the real income of the population will have pogressed to close to 25 percent."

The government's forecast for this year pins growth at about three percent and inflation below 18 percent. Last year, GDP grew 3.2 percent, surpassing analysts' expectations.

According to a provisional scenario, inflation will be down to 10 percent by next year and to eight percent by 2003, Shapovaliants said. Last year inflation was 36.5 percent.

Industrial production would grow by five percent next year, and to seven or eight percent by 2003, the minister predicted.

Shapovaliants said the forecast figures were based on the current situation and a range of measures envisaged by Putin's government team to regulate relations between central government in Moscow and the regions, the power of monopolies and the tax regime.

"The scenario involves a range of essential legislation," he said. The government also intended stimulating the economy and investments. The precipitate introduction of market reforms after 1991, notably the lifting of price controls and the unregulated privatisation of large sectors of the economy, severely dislocated the Russian economy and society in the 1990s.

About 2.7 million Russians now make up the local Internet audience, using the net for e-mail, World Wide Web access and other services, according to the poll of 7,800 urban residents.

The poll is part of Comcon's ongoing Web Vector project, which monitors Internet use and growth in Russia.

The number of e-mail users increased from 1.3 million last year to 1.7 million this year, and web users increased from 1.46 million to 1.8 million. Frequency and volume - or amount of time spent online - also have grown. At first glance, the new figures - the first to be released this year by any of the handful of organizations that measure net use - appeared likely to buoy investors' hopes that a quick Internet boom was on the way. But a respected market watcher, Anatoly Karachinsky of the IBS Group of computer businesses, warned against excess optimism and said the rise of Internet use is ultimately tied to the number of new computers bought and hooked up to the Internet, which this year would be no more than 30 percent to 40 percent of new computers, he predicted.

"We aren't saying it [Internet use] won't grow," Karachinsky said. "We're just telling people they shouldn't wait for a big explosion."

Web Vector project director Pyotr Zalessky said the new figures showed stable growth from last year, and added the next batch of figures - to be released in three months - would show whether the pace was picking up in 2000. Zalessky said the rise in the number of users was due in large part to end-of-the-year computer purchases. During the first quarter of 2000, the share of users who had computers at home rose by 1.5 percent, he said. "Many of the sellers [were] offering additional perks to buyers - like free Internet usage for several hours," Zalessky said.

The new, more-flexible pricing policies now being offered by Internet service providers, as well as the successful offline ad campaigns advertising ISPs or web resources also helped push more users into the arms of the net. Zalessky, for his part, argued the number of PCs in the country was not a deciding factor in Internet growth.

"We have a unique situation in Russia: The common-use PC. For example, a PC in an accounting department can have several users, a PC in reception can be used for e-mailing, etcetera," he said.

Today I have been asked to address a few words from the basis of my long experience in Russia on the subjects of culture, religion, and women. Now, these are subjects that do not ordinarily occupy the center of the political stage, not like the more muscular subjects of arms and economics and world trade and missiles. In fact, they are generally ignored. Yet, in the case of Russia, I'd like to suggest that they might be the biggest topics, precisely the key elements that we are going to need to consider our relationship far more seriously as we enter a new millenium. In fact, I'll go further and say that systematically treating these three areas in the past as small and unimportant may well be a reason why we have so consistently misjudged and, indeed, been downright wrong about events in Russia from the revolution until today with, perhaps, the exception of a small window during the Gorbachev-Reagan years.

Most recently, our biggest surprise was the fall of the Communist regime and I will suggest that, had we been watching religion, culture, and women a bit more closely, this might not have been such a big surprise. Because perhaps if we'd better understood the power of these old ladies and what they represented, we might have understood better what they understood so well, that religion is the core of something much larger: identity. We might even consider whether, had we been paying more attention to them and what they were doing and representing, what our policy during the last years of the Soviet Union might have been, because in the end, the religion that they so tenaciously and faithfully preserved and defended played an important role in bringing down the communist regime. Considering this, one might even muse a little bit about what the long-range effect today may be ultimately on the wider society of, say, 20 million babushkas, those ladies who consider themselves the backbone of Russian society, who defied the Nazis and held the fort against the godless communists, if they now view us as ugly Americans and anti-Russian.

Today, the search for culture and identity are more important than ever. Russians are searching through the rubble, looking for their lost soul. Young Russians are looking for spiritual underpinnings for their new society, which spring from their own, not our, traditions. One of the most important avenues continues to be Orthodoxy and the Church. In fact the march of the Russians back to the faith of their ancestors over the past twenty-five years has been one of the most fascinating aspects of contemporary Russian history. You see, for 850 years it was said that the Church was Russia, and Russia was the Church, and there have only been twice in history that it was seriously attacked: once by Peter the Great who, in the end, had control only over the upper classes, and then the far more ruthless genocide against the church by the communists. In fact, as you well know, this was no mere harassment. Hundreds of thousands of priests, monks, and nuns were simply murdered. Churches were destroyed, bells melted down, everything about the church was to vanish. The first Five Year Plan confidently predicted that at the end of that first Plan, no more vestiges of religion would be left. Well, it wasn't true then and it certainly isn't true now.

Both of these efforts failed, so tenaciously was Orthodoxy in the hearts of the Russian people. Today, the Church remains the only unbroken link to a thousand years of the Russian past. Russians are passionately attached to their history and culture as few other nations. The impact of Orthodox thought is deeply imprinted in the national soul, even those who do not attend church. History and culture today are all the more important because of the relentless effort of the Communist regime to wipe out all historical memory. Now, we in the United States consider ourselves very patriotic and, more than ever, are seeking out our national values and valuing our own ethnic roots. We should think how we might feel and what we might be doing if, for the past seventy years, everybody had told us that none of this was valuable, that all of it was destroyed, that we could not speak about it or celebrate or even think in any way of our own previous history. What would we be doing? Now, that's why I think, myself, that it is wrong to brand the search of the Russians for their lost heritage and history as narrow political nationalism, because nations, no less than human beings, need to have a strong sense of self to be able to relate constructively to others. I've always wondered why it's all right for the Poles and Ukrainians and others to be nationalistic, but always bad for the Russians.

Religion, as a major category, goes far beyond its influence in Russia. Russia is today one of the three largest Christian countries on earth and the largest Orthodox country in the world, claiming some 100 million adherents. Without going into the right or wrong of our policies and actions in Kosovo, in our insensitivity in bombing on Easter, the holiest day in the Orthodox calendar, as well as the destruction of Serbian monasteries and historic churches, we succeeded in alienating not only millions of believers in Russia, but in Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece. The impact of this, I believe, will remain very strong on the national consciousness in Russia.

Yes, it is true that the Orthodox Church in Russia has a lot of problems. It is far from perfect. Its affairs are complicated and Byzantine, with a good number of fundamentalists and right wing nationalists lurking about. But I am willing to bet that in the new millenium, the Church is not going to become less, but more important in the affairs of that Russian nation. It is perfectly obvious that the Church is assuming an ever-more prominent and visible role in the life of the country. Church holidays, most especially Easter, are becoming increasingly important celebrations for the country as a whole for believers and non-believers. The gigantic reconstructed Church of the Savior now dominates the Moscow horizon, relegating the Stalin wedding cakes to rather quaint relics of the past illuminated, Oz-like, at night in orange and green. So I think we have to look much more carefully at this Church and its leaders and think about what implications there might be for us. Certainly, ignoring it is not the answer.

As for women, they have always been considered the backbone and strength of Russia. Both Russian history and Russian culture and literature are full of stories of the sustaining strength and role of Russian women in the society. In the past they have held positions of great importance--at present, one can say that Russia is a matriarchy ruled by men. However, in addition to their traditional role of producing and educating the next generation, Russian women are increasingly assuming roles as the heads of businesses, and I believe will soon appear far more prominently in political roles.

What signals are we giving this very important part of the Russian population? At the moment, by all our actions, I will say external as well as internal, we are projecting a rather uncaring, aggressively masculine image. It seems odd and, I've always felt, a little short-sighted, that in a country known as "Mother Russia," in which a growing majority of the population are women, not only have we never sent a woman ambassador to Russia, but, increasingly in our most recent years, several of our representatives have gone to Russia without their wives. Now they, of course, have the right to live any way they wish, but the State Department, I feel, also has the right to take that element into consideration, because, in Russia, the role of a diplomat's wife is enormously important. I would like to pay tribute to Donna Evans, who was extremely active and visible in St. Petersburg. She and her equally talented husband, John, who was Consul General, left a strong and positive image of our country in that city. So the importance of the role that diplomatic wives can play in diplomatic life and in representing the values of the United States, I think, deserves far more recognition and support from our government.

In the past, when we dismissed old ladies as unimportant, we managed to denigrate both the importance of religion and women. Today, in addition to this, we seem to be increasingly singling out young Russian women and making it almost impossible for them to get visas to come to the United States for any reason on the grounds -- particularly if they are pretty -- that they "might stay." Often they are treated with unpardonable rudeness. In fact, I will digress a bit by saying that our visa sections have such a bad reputation now in Russia that we are classified with the worst of the old Soviet system. Far from excluding young women, we should be encouraging them and helping them to come to the United States to learn political life, law, economics, health care, and the management of volunteer organizations. I also think that it is time for us to reexamine carefully the stereotypical thinking about Russian culture and Russian history that still dominates much of the political discourse in the United States. I keep lists of them. Among these are that are the Russians are "apathetic," that they've never had any experience with democracy, that they don't know how to do business, that tsars and commissars were always the same, and none of these old saws really bear careful analysis. One of the worst mistakes that we've made in the past is merging the word "Russian" and "Soviet" as if they were one and the same and using them as synonyms, forgetting that, ultimately, the legitimacy of any government rests on how much it represents the feelings and the aspirations of its people. The communists failed not only because of a failing economy and lagging in the arms race, but most importantly because they had lost any legitimacy. They had some that they established by force, but they never really had legitimacy among the majority of the Russian population.

Our policy of concentrating only on the government, treating the government as the same as the people, has brought us some grief in the past. Of course we have to deal with governments, but we should never forget the people, for the Russians have a very long memory. They never forgot our help in World War II, and the memory of this friendship endured through seventy-five years of virulent anti-American propaganda. What the communists could not destroy in seventy years, we, with our usual efficiency, were able to accomplish in three years. We have begun to be seen only as interested in money, in fact, they called it the money disease, bucksy. One has to remember that Russians have a very strong need and interest in spiritual life. They admired us before, not because of our money, but because of our values and because of our idealism.

Russian governments are going to continue to come and go, as ours do. Ultimately, they will rest on the feelings and the emotions of the people. The Russians have ferociously and heroically defended their culture against all would-be conquerors, internal or external, whether they be the Mongols, or Peter the Great, or Napoleon, or Hitler, or Stalin. They have always emerged and survived. Their history teaches us a little how they deal with these would-be conquerors, which we have to count ourselves as one just now. They are patient. They are skilled and strong survivors. They know how to take a long view, something that we have almost forgotten in our search and rush for quick results. They outwait, they outlast, and they finally swallow them, emerging always more Russian than ever before. I think this process is at work today. We might do a lot better by helping them bring out the best in themselves rather than judging them always by how much they look like us. They are different, they will always be different. We might learn something from these differences. After all, psychologists say that only narcissists want mirror images.

I have often said that Russia is like an iceberg, you have to look for the tips of what might come. During a thousand years, Russia has had many models, not just one, and seventy years is just a drop in the historical bucket for a nation that has known a thousand years. They have known everything from an early form of democracy in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries to the oriental despotism and theocracy of the Muscovite years in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, an imperial autocracy based on the European model in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, and the first modern revolution and totalitarianism that followed it in the Twentieth Century. Now, what model are they going to choose in the next millenium?

They point out that their armed forces are underfunded and poorly equipped, and their contribution to the common defense is too small to make any significant difference. The conclusion which they are actively promoting is that because this first attempt at NATO enlargement has not been a success, any thought of further enlargement should be promptly abandoned. Everything depends, of course, on how you define success. Supporters of NATO enlargement point out that without the cooperation of Hungary, any peace mission in the Balkans would have been far more difficult and costly. If Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary had not rejected Russia's request to permit a massive airlift of Russian troops over their territories into Pristina, the Kosovar capital, Russia and NATO would have been brought to the brink of a major military confrontation. All three countries were guided by their commitment to NATO, which Bulgaria and Romania are hoping to join in the next round of enlargement. Today, two Polish battalions serving in Bosnia and Kosovo are considered model peacekeepers.

As the new secretary general of NATO, Lord George Robertson, told a National Press Club audience in Washington, within 10 days of being admitted to NATO, the new countries were caught up in NATO's biggest conflict in its 50-year history. It was a "real test by fire — and they stood up robustly to it." He paid warm tribute to the effort, energy and loyalty of NATO's newest members.

It is clear that the prospect of NATO membership has already become an important tool of constructive American influence in this crucial region. It would not serve the interests of the United States to undermine the hopes, or destroy the strongly pro-American orientation of the countries which find themselves between NATO and the present Russian border.

Those who think in purely military terms and argue, for example, that the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania could hardly contribute to NATO's defensive potential, tend to overlook the more vital question: what should be done to turn Russia from an adversary into a fully cooperative partner of the European-Atlantic community?

Opponents of NATO enlargement argue that nothing should be done that might create a sense of isolation, or even humiliation, in Moscow. To reject those countries seeking future NATO membership would pave the way, they argue, for a mutually beneficial accommodation and perhaps some "super-agreement" with Russia.

Unfortunately, things are not that simple. Russia's superpower ambitions are not limited to exercising, sometime in the future, greater control over its next-door neighbors. Its avowed primary objective is still to reduce America's global influence as much as possible. As long as Russia's leadership indulges every opportunity to damage U.S. interests abroad, any effort to treat today's Russia as a genuine partner would have to be based on a significant degree of self-deception.

There is an expansionist mentality among Russia's ruling elite, deeply rooted in the country's past, which makes it difficult for them to consider forming a partnership with the West. This almost permanent urge for territorial expansion has at the same time become a scourge for the Russian people, who continue to live in appalling poverty in a country rich in resources.

A refusal or indefinite postponement of admission to NATO of those countries located in the gray unprotected zone between NATO and Russia would be seen by Moscow as tacit recognition by the West that these countries are within Russia's exclusive sphere of influence. It would be perceived as a triumph and would further encourage the imperialistic elements within the Russian leadership, posing further challenges to the West.