Johnson's Russia List
#6020
13 January 2002
davidjohnson@erols.com
A CDI Project
www.cdi.org

[Note from David Johnson:
1. Reuters: U.S. senators in Uzbekistan to stress partnership.
2. UPI: Russia's role in Central Asia to grow.
3. Reuters: Free car, TVs lure Siberians to scandal-hit poll.
4. Moscow Times: Robert Bruce Ware, Chechen vs. Afghan Campaign.
5. UPI: Chechen refugees left without bread.
6. The Pioneer (India): Tatiana Shaumian, No smooth drive, this.
7. New York Times: Ian Fisher, With U.S. Blessing, Russia Gives Fragile 
Ukraine a Hand.
8. Washington Post book review: Marie Arana, Chance of a Lifetime. 
'Summer in Baden-Baden' by Leonid Tsypkin. 
9. MSNBC: Alan Boyle, Russia’s hidden treasures of space. One museum keeps 
the ship used by world’s first spaceman; another preserves the dogs that 
preceded him into orbit.
10. South Florida Sun-Sentinel: Chet Currier, From Russia with a caveat.
The top-performing mutual fund of 2001 is a daydreamer's delight.
11. Financial Times (UK): John Kampfner, Media mogul seeks to mix in new c
ircles: LUNCH WITH THE FT: US-born Boris Jordan is desperate to prove his 
bona fides in the controversial battle for Russia's popular NTV television 
station.
12. BBC Monitoring: Russian expert says USA mulling use of small nuclear 
weapons. (Leonid Ivashov)]

*******

#1
U.S. senators in Uzbekistan to stress partnership
By Shamil Baigin
  
TASHKENT, Jan 13 (Reuters) - A U.S. Senate delegation headed by Majority 
Leader Tom Daschle arrived in Uzbekistan on Sunday to emphasise Washington's 
long-term political interests in Central Asia, officials said. 

South Dakota Democrat Daschle, who will stay in the ex-Soviet state until 
Friday, will hold talks with top Uzbek officials including President Islam 
Karimov and top clergymen of the mostly Muslim state of 25 million. 

"The two sides are expected to discuss the issue of fighting terrorism, the 
situation in the Central Asian region and bilateral relations," an Uzbek 
government official told Reuters. 

Uzbekistan has become a key strategic partner of the United States in 
ex-Soviet Central Asia after it embraced with enthusiasm Washington's "war on 
terrorism." 

Karimov allowed U.S. warplanes to use the country's Khanabad airbase for 
search-and-rescue and humanitarian operations in neighbouring Afghanistan, 
after which Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan also opened bases to coalition 
aircraft. 

Diplomatic sources say Daschle's bipartisan group will visit Khanabad, as 
well as the garrison town of Termez that overlooks Afghan territory across 
the Amu Darya river. 

Termez is the site of the imposing Friendship Bridge, used in 1989 to 
withdraw Soviet troops after their Afghan defeat, and now a key part of a 
humanitarian cargo route to Afghanistan. 

Another government source told Reuters that Daschle was expected to fly over 
the Aral Sea in northwestern Uzbekistan on Tuesday. 

Daschle, whose office was contaminated last year by a letter containing 
spores of anthrax, would fly over the sea's Resurrection Island, once used as 
a test site for Moscow's top-secret biological warfare programme. Anthrax was 
one of the weapons tested there. 

U.S. officials have been trotting through a region suddenly thrust into the 
headlines by the war in Afghanistan. 

Daschle's senate delegation arrived in Tashkent as a separate group of six 
U.S. congressmen led by Arizona Republican Jim Kolbe was to depart for 
Tajikistan. 

Another group of senators, led by Democrat Joseph Lieberman and Republican 
John McCain, visited Tashkent last weekend. 

Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and 
General Tommy Franks, who commands U.S.-led forces in the region, have all 
visited Uzbekistan since the war began. 

Some politicians in Moscow, the region's former colonial master, have 
expressed unease at the growing U.S. clout. 

"Let them (the Americans) deal with Afghanistan. The most important thing is 
that they should not deal with Central Asia with the same fervour," Gennady 
Seleznyov, Communist speaker of Russia's State Duma lower house of 
parliament, told Russian soldiers in Tajikistan on Saturday. 

"But appetite comes with eating, and they may want to build bases here 
seriously and for long. This is not in Russia's geopolitical interests," he 
said. 

*******

#2
Russia's role in Central Asia to grow 

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan, Jan. 12 (UPI) -- Moscow should build up its security
force presence in Central Asia, a top Russian lawmaker told reporters
Saturday. 

Gennady Seleznyov, the speaker of the lower house of the Russian
parliament, the State Duma, spoke at a training center of Russia's Border
Guard Service unit, stationed in the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan.

Seleznyov added that the current presence of Italian and French military
contingents in Tajikistan was of a "temporary nature." He emphasized their
future activities in the country should "by all means be controlled by the
United Nations."

The arrival of French and Italian troops in Tajikistan was part of the
U.S.-led effort to maintain security in neighboring Afghanistan in the
aftermath of the war against the Taliban regime and international
terrorists believed to be hiding there. 

In recent months, some of prominent figures in Russia's top-level politics
have voiced their concerns over the apparent reduction of Russia's role in
Central Asia as Washington stepped up its cooperation with former Soviet
republics to fight terrorists harbored by the Taliban.

Russia's border guards have jointly manned the volatile Afghan-Tajik border
with the Tajik policemen since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Over the last decade, border guards have prevented tens of thousands of
narcotics and arms smugglers from entering Tajikistan, often engaging in
armed clashes involving heavy casualties.

On Saturday, Seleznyov toured the training center and was shown the latest
weapons used by the border guards.

The speaker praised the level of the units' combat readiness and degree of
preparation to carry out their military tasks.

Seleznyov headed a delegation of the State Duma lawmakers who were on a
two-day working visit to Tajikistan.

******

#3
Free car, TVs lure Siberians to scandal-hit poll
By Peter Graff
  
MOSCOW, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Siberian voters, offered the chance to win a car
or TV if they went to the polls, turned out en masse on Sunday to bring an
end to a scandal-plagued contest for control of Russia's huge, diamond-rich
Yakutia region. 

The central election commission declared the run-off valid after turn-out
surged to more than 70 percent, well above the 50 percent minimum, thanks
in part to offers of discounts on utility bills and tickets to a lottery
for voters. 

Results will be available on Monday in a contest noted for scandal and
mudslinging even by the shady standards of Russia's high-stakes regional
politics. 

Russia also held first-round elections for regional leadership in the two
southern provinces of Kabardino-Balkaria and Adygeya on Sunday. But eyes
were on the Yakutia poll. 

Newspaper Vremya Novostei called it "the most scandalous vote in the
history of regional elections" after court cases, press smear campaigns and
accusations the Kremlin had pushed out incumbent Mikhail Nikolayev for a
diamond industry kingpin. 

Vyacheslav Shtyrov, head of diamond monopoly Alrosa, won 45 percent of the
vote in a first round last month and was the favourite in Sunday's runoff
against the first-round runner-up, businessman Fedut Tumusov. 

FINAL BLOW 

But that was only after two-term incumbent Nikolayev was hounded out of the
race by criticism from officials in Moscow, including the head of the
Central Election Commission. 

The final blow was delivered by President Vladimir Putin himself, who
summoned both Nikolayev and Shtyrov to the Kremlin to give an award to
Shtyrov. Nikolayev promptly stepped down and told his supporters to back
Shtyrov, his one-time bitter rival. 

To prevent low turnout spoiling the run-off, voters were offered tickets to
a lottery with a million-rouble ($33,000) prize fund including a car,
washing machines, televisions and stereos, despite a criminal case launched
against organisers of a similar lottery for the first round, Vremya
Novostei reported. 

Voters were also offered vouchers for discounts on utility bills and
chances to buy cheap cooking oil, chicken and condensed milk. 

Provincial leaders amassed huge powers in Russia under Putin's predecessor
Boris Yeltsin, often having wide control of the mineral wealth buried under
vast swathes of the world's largest country. 

But the new Russian leader has reined them in by taking on powers to sack
them, appointing federal envoys to oversee them and kicking them out of the
upper house of parliament in Moscow. 

Under Putin, the governor of the Pacific coastal Primorye region, once
considered among the most powerful of all regional bosses, was forced to
step down. 

Last year election officials struck the incumbent governor of the Kursk
region, Alexander Rutskoi, from the ballot on the eve of a poll, citing
campaign irregularities. Rutskoi called himself a victim of Kremlin meddling. 

*******

#4
Moscow Times
January 11, 2002
Chechen vs. Afghan Campaign
By Robert Bruce Ware  
 
For both Russia and the United States, war followed terrorist attacks that 
claimed civilian lives and exacted heavy social costs. The attacks upon New 
York and Washington occurred exactly two years and one week after the first 
of four Russian apartment buildings exploded. The United States began its 
anti-terrorist campaign in Afghanistan exactly two years and one week after 
Russia began its current military campaign in Chechnya.

In their respective campaigns, both Russia and the United States found 
themselves fighting against forces composed of local militants and foreign 
fighters. These forces were joined on behalf of similar forms of Islamist 
extremism and were supported by the same individuals and organizations based 
in the Persian Gulf. The Taliban and Chechen militants have supported one 
another, and Osama bin Laden has supported both.

But that's where the similarities stop. In a little more than two years, 
Russia has sunk steadily deeper into a Chechen quagmire. In a little more 
than two months, the United States has achieved most of its goals in 
Afghanistan. There is much that Moscow might learn from the U.S. campaign.

The differences began immediately after the terrorist attacks occurred in 
each country. Russians quickly blamed Chechens for the apartment blasts, just 
as Americans accused al-Qaida. But Russian officials vilified Chechens as a 
people and the Russian media was quick to follow. This vilification added to 
long-standing anti-Caucasian prejudices in Russia that target people of dark 
complexion from the south, including dozens of other ethnicities as well as 
Chechens, for regular harassment and periodic assault. These prejudices 
undermine Russia's presence in the Caucasus morally and politically. How can 
Russia justify its retention of these people within its federation when it 
chronically treats them as second-class citizens? Every day in Russia new 
rebels rise up against the injustice of these prejudices.

By contrast, U.S. leaders and the U.S. media joined forces to combat the 
vilification of Arabs. They opposed prejudicial treatment of Arab-Americans, 
prosecuted hate crimes, and declared that U.S. actions would not be 
anti-Islamic.

After the attacks, the United States acted with careful deliberation. Initial 
efforts were dedicated to diplomatic finesse that addressed the fears of 
foreign leaders and consolidated international support. The following weeks 
saw similar public relations efforts within Afghanistan. Millions of leaflets 
were dropped assuring Afghans of U.S. protection and offering them a clear 
choice if they abandoned their militant leaders. When the U.S. attack finally 
came, it was targeted to avoid civilian casualties and was accompanied by 
food drops.

Moscow did none of this. The failure of Russian policies in Chechnya began 
before its troops re-entered the republic when it failed to explain the 
reasons for its military campaign to the international community and the 
people of Chechnya.

In fact, Russia had a case. After Russia withdrew from Chechnya in 1996, 
Chechnya disintegrated into lawlessness. Thousands of people from the region 
were held hostage in Chechnya. Criminal raids across the Chechen border were 
daily events that terrorized the surrounding populations, and militant groups 
from Chechnya thrice invaded the neighboring republic of Dagestan. My survey 
research suggests that most of the Muslim people of Dagestan view Chechnya as 
a serious threat, support the Russian campaign in Chechnya and seek closer 
relations with Russia. Yet before Russian troops re-entered Chechnya, little 
effort was made to explain any of this in international forums.

Nor did Russian leaders appeal to the people of Chechnya. Here again, Russia 
had a case. Many Chechens suffered from the chaos in their country and were 
fed up with the warlords and extremists who ran it. Especially in the early 
stages of the war, Russia had the support of some of these people, and it 
might have had the support of more had it made an effort to assure their 
protection.

Instead, Russian attacks have been characteristically brutal and 
indiscriminate. Efforts to identify militants in "pacified" areas of Chechnya 
have resulted in the regular abuse of civilians. These tactics have inspired 
Chechen resistance and undermined any popular support that Moscow might 
otherwise have cultivated. So long as these tactics continue there can be no 
hope for peace in Chechnya.

In Afghanistan, by contrast, the militants were found to be without popular 
support and folded surprisingly quickly. The U.S. presence has supported the 
restoration of human rights, and efforts to seek out militants in pacified 
areas have been relatively unobtrusive.

Of course, comparison invites caveats. First, in southern Russia there are 
ancient animosities that the United States is spared in Afghanistan. Second, 
in Chechnya, Islamist extremists cannot be separated as easily from local 
nationalists as they were in Afghanistan. Third, the Russian military is a 
horribly blunt instrument for such delicate social surgery. Russians lack 
precision weapons and disciplined troops, while Chechen militants hide among 
civilians. Finally, the situation in Afghanistan is likely to deteriorate in 
the future, as power devolves to feuding warlords.

Still, it remains a fact that Russia has rarely deviated from policies that 
are patently counterproductive. For more than two years, the West has bashed 
Russia's policies in Chechnya without producing constructive change. Now we 
have demonstrated a different approach. Perhaps we will do more to help the 
people of Chechnya if we appeal to Russians in terms of their own interests.

Robert Bruce Ware is an associate professor at Southern Illinois University 
who conducts fieldwork in the Caucasus. He contributed this comment to The 
Moscow Times.

*******

#5
Chechen refugees left without bread 

MOSCOW, Jan. 12 (UPI) -- Thousands of Chechen refugees who found shelter in
the neighboring province of Ingushetia have been left without bread,
possibly deepening the crisis there.

A local bakery halted bread supplies to refugee camps because of the bills
that have not been paid for months by Russia's Nationalities and Migration
Policy Ministry, RTR television network reported Saturday.

The network carried a report from a refugee camp located near the town of
Nazran in Ingushetia's Sunzhensky district, stating that the refugees had
not received bread supplies for three days. 

According to a federally-funded program, the refugees are entitled to half
a loaf of bread daily, but even that amount has become too costly for the
local bakery which has been delivering about 5,000 loaves daily, running
into debts in recent months because of unsettled payments.

In February, the report added, the bread factory will cancel the contract
it has with federal authorities. Other businesses in the area that provide
food, gas and electricity supplies could follow suit, RTR said.

"Today, the outstanding payments for bread deliveries make up 80 million
rubles ($2.6 million)," Magomet Gireyev, a provincial head for the Russian
Nationalities and Migration Policy Ministry.

"The overall amount owed by federal authorities to the businesses that
provide food and accommodation to displaced persons makes up over 200
million rubles ($6.5 million)," added Gireyev.

Ingushetia harbors some 150,000 officially registered Chechen refugees and
an additional 20,000 are believed to be residing in the province without
proper registration.

Most of the refugees fled their homes in the fall of 1999, when Russian
troops rolled into Chechnya to quell the rebels who made frequent
incursions into neighboring Dagestan.

Many homes and public bulidings throughout the breakaway province were
devastated by the Russian troops' heavy shelling, urging Moscow to fund the
construction projects restoring the public sector and providing housing for
those who fled Chechnya.

Meanhwile, a team of financial inspectors and auditors arrived Saturday in
the Chechen capital, Grozny, to review the provincial government's spending
of federal funds transferred for supporting construction projects, Interfax
news agency reported. 

The commission is made of Interior Ministry, Federal Security Service, Tax
Ministry and Tax Police employees, the report added.

According to Chechnya's government head Stanislav Ilyasov, a "transparent
program of the building works' financing has allowed us to control the
spending and ensured fulfillment of building contracts."

******

#6
The Pioneer (India)
No smooth drive, this
By Tatiana Shaumian 
(Dr Tatiana Shaumian is Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Moscow)
 
One of our most famous historians, Nikolai Karamzin, once remarked that
"Russia has two misfortunes: its roads and its fools". It was a very sharp
perception in its time, but that brilliant scholar of two centuries ago
could have never imagined how those two malign factors have come together
in post-Soviet Russia to create real mayhem. 

The roads of Moscow were designed in Soviet times to be broad and
impressive. Most of the traffic in those days consisted of official cars
tearing down those vast avenues at full speed, as if no one else existed.
Even in the 1980's, when quite a few ordinary people had acquired cars, the
streets still looked empty. A traffic jam seemed an unimaginable thing.
Since the collapse of the USSR, every fool in Russia has expressed his
sense of liberation by purchasing an automobile - preferably a big,
growling American or German one. Suddenly Moscow's roads are crammed with
cars, millions of them, crawling like legions of ants through every corner
of the city, filling the air with choking smog and creating a constant
background rumble. Yet each Russian man tries to drive according to the
only example he knew in his youth: official cars. He tries to speed down
the street, weaving between cars, potholes and pedestrians, as if he were
on crucial state business. If a road is jammed, he might jump the curb and
go racing down the sidewalk, scattering people to all sides as if they were
peasants of Czarist days. If his car has an accident or breaks down - both
very common occurrences - he will leave it sitting in the middle of the
road, snarling traffic and creating mayhem, while he goes off to find a
repairman.  
    
When you add the Russian weather to this mix, the result can be total
paralysis. During several big blizzards last month, some traffic jams
lasted for 16 hours or more. I know a man who left his downtown Moscow
workplace at 5 o'clock on a Friday afternoon and finally arrived at his
suburban home at 11 o'clock the next morning! I myself have sat in my car
for 9 hours, trying to complete a journey that should normally take half an
hour. Experts say the situation is one of the worst in the world, due to
the combination of bad roads, ill-considered traffic rules and maniacal,
idiotic drivers. I know what my Indian readers are thinking: that Delhi,
Calcutta and Mumbai are just as bad. I used to think there could be nothing
more chaotic than the thick gasoline fumes, careening three-wheeled
vehicles and stampeding traffic of a big Indian city. Now I know there is.
It is the total breakdown that has occurred in Moscow, where the streets
are so choked with cars that normal mobility has become impossible. Thank
goodness Moscow's metro system still functions like clockwork, swiftly and
efficiently transporting about 18-million people per day to most points of
the city. But those underground trains have also become crowded to the
point of being dangerous, and experts say the old Soviet-era system is
exhausted and badly over-extended. 

Don't imagine that Moscow's post-Communist traffic madness is at least
democratic. It is not. Russian officials still travel as they always did,
by forcing the peasants to get out of their way. I happen to live on the
Uspenskoye Highway, a suburban region which is home to President Vladimir
Putin and many other top government leaders. Twice daily the entire
30-kilometre route from Putin's home to the Kremlin is closed down by
police, who order cars to the side of the road and back them up at
intersections, just so the President's 8-car cortege can race from home to
work, and back, without any inconvenience. The delay for ordinary drivers
can be 30 minutes or more each time. If this were a privilege enjoyed only
by President Putin, it might be understandable. But in Russia it seems that
every government minister (there are over 50 of them), innumerable deputy
ministers, rich oligarchs, crime bosses, military chiefs and
god-knows-who-else has the power to charge down the road with sirens
blasting, lights flashing, and police waving everyone else out of his way. 

Moscow's traffic pandemonium is far beyond being just a nasty irritant. It
is a creeping social, economic and environmental catastrophe that threatens
to overwhelm Russia's capital city, and drag it under. It may also be a
looming political problem. President Putin remains the country's most
popular leader in many decades, but I have often heard drivers cursing him
furiously as they wait at roadside for his cortege to sweep past. If I were
him, I'd worry about things like that.

******* 

#7
New York Times
January 13, 2002
With U.S. Blessing, Russia Gives Fragile Ukraine a Hand
By IAN FISHER
 
KHARKIV, Ukraine — In the last decade, the United States pumped more than
$2 billion into Ukraine, the huge and puzzled nation hinged to Russia's
western edge. This was not just to be nice: Ukraine had nuclear weapons,
the still real threat of Chernobyl and 50 million people who could steer
their fragile new nation toward Europe or drift back into Russia's embrace.

Now the nuclear arms are gone. The Chernobyl nuclear plant is shut. But
Ukraine's relations with Russia seem warmer than ever: at a recent summit
meeting in this big industrial city about 25 miles from the Russian border,
the flags of both nations waved together on frozen streets as the two
presidents — Leonid D. Kuchma of Ukraine and Vladimir V. Putin of Russia —
once again pledged friendship and tighter business ties.

Not so long ago this warming might have caused alarm in Washington, a sign
that its influence in Eastern Europe was slipping. But a changing calculus
between West and East, marked by far better relations between Russia and
America themselves, seems to be depriving Ukraine of some of its geo-appeal.

American officials sound unconcerned, casting Ukraine and Russia as
partners in reform leading toward European standards of business and
governance. "We see no contradictions between Ukraine's `European choice'
and stable, normal relations with Russia," said Carlos Pascual, the
American ambassador to Ukraine. "Ukraine can — and should — pursue both. A
stable, confident and reforming Ukraine would be the kind of neighbor that
could encourage a reform-minded Russia on its own transition path. The
obverse is likewise true." 

Jack F. Matlock Jr., a former ambassador to Moscow and a keen observer of
the former Soviet bloc, said that when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991
Ukraine was seen by many in the State Department as a crucial ally for the
Western camp. That sense of urgency, he said, has faded, even as the
commonality between Ukraine and Russia — large Slavic nations with
extremely strong economic and business ties — has become clearer. "As
Russia builds stronger institutions, and they are doing that, I think they
can be of enormous help to Ukraine, and they can probably do it better than
we can," Mr. Matlock said. 

As the Americans seem less purposeful, Ukrainians — particularly
intellectuals and reform-minded politicians — worry. They fear that their
nation is moving backward, or eastward, even as other former Soviet
satellites — and indeed Russia itself — move more solidly toward the
European Union and NATO. 

"Before, Ukraine was like a buffer zone between Russia and the West," said
Volodymyr Polokhalo, a writer and a political scientist. "Today, Ukraine is
transforming itself into a transit country into Russia. Putin is following
a very wise policy that uses the weaknesses in Ukraine to his own strength."

The newspaper Holos Ukrayiny, or The Voice of Ukraine, recently worried,
"Having noticed Russia's will to achieve civilized living standards, the
West is getting increasingly keen on Russia dragging Ukraine along." 

In the last year, economic growth in Ukraine has skyrocketed — to some
degree on the strength of increasing investments from Russia, which
supplies Ukraine with 70 percent of its energy and is Ukraine's largest
export market. 

But the general state of the economy is still in shambles, controlled by an
elite of powerful businessmen. Many of the dealings with Russia — whose
envoy here is Viktor D. Chernomyrdin, the former Russian prime minister and
the former Gazprom chairman — are murky. The rule of law is wanting.

Politically, Ukraine has suffered. President Kuchma allowed the dismissal
of a reformist prime minister, Viktor Yushchenko, as his own popularity
dipped to single digits over allegations that he was involved in the
slaying of a journalist, Georgy Gongadze, in late 2000. 

In October, a general sense of incompetence and loss of control came to a
boil when the Ukrainian military accidentally shot down a Russian jetliner
over the Black Sea, killing 78 people. Mr. Kuchma denied it, then made
matters worse with a string of comments like, "Maybe the missile didn't
understand Ukrainian."

Then at year's end, the government announced that it would issue pellet
guns to journalists so they could protect themselves if the police could
not. In the last 10 years, about a dozen journalists have been killed or
have disappeared. 

Ukraine's reputation hit such a low that a group was formed several months
ago devoted to sprucing up its image abroad. Oddly, Ukraine Cognita,
founded by businessmen with the blessing of Mr. Kuchma himself, seems aimed
as much at warning the nation's leaders that they are doing Ukraine serious
harm as at alerting foreigners to the country's good qualities.

"The image of the country is of a totalitarian regime, no freedom of the
press, no human rights, high corruption," said the group's executive
director, Irina Gagarina, not bothering to dispute a single allegation.
"It's a pity for a generation of Ukrainians, which is actually ready to
make the country better for the future." 

Many eyes are now turned toward the parliamentary elections set for this
March; concerns exist as to whether they will be fair or a repeat of Mr.
Kuchma's re-election campaign in 1999, widely considered tainted with fraud.

In this national slump, as Western leaders heaped criticism on Mr. Kuchma,
particularly over the journalist's death, Mr. Putin remained silent. He
went on meeting publicly with a grateful Mr. Kuchma — who like the Russian
leader was successful in the Soviet system — and made comments about how
Ukraine and Russia "should develop their relations with the rest of the
world in tandem."

For their part, American officials say they are certainly not abandoning
Ukraine. Direct American investment is still higher than that from Russia.
Aid remains among the highest to any nation in the world, with the aim of
ultimately seeing Ukraine in Europe.

In a speech in Poland last summer that still represents his most detailed
public look at Eastern Europe after the cold war, President Bush singled
out Ukraine in his sweeping call to erase the dividing line between East
and West. 

But his call came wrapped in a question mark, which reflects the
frustration of Ukraine's resistance to change. "Some in Kiev speak of their
country's European destiny," he said. "If that is their aspiration, we
should reward it." 

Although there is a long, lingering sense of unfairness in Ukraine over
what most people here perceive as poor treatment by Moscow during the 70
years of the Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine seem ready to develop their
friendship. 

At the summit meeting here, Mr. Putin said Russia and Ukraine should
coordinate their efforts to join the World Trade Organization. They also
discussed having Ukraine use Russian technology and financing to finish two
nuclear reactors to replace Chernobyl, a deal in which Ukraine might walk
away from a long-planned financing arrangement with Western nations. 

One thing is certain: most Ukrainians do not share the ambitions of
Aleksandr Lukashenko, the Stalinist president of Ukraine's northern
neighbor, Belarus, to be formally reattached to Russia.

This sense of nation — at times shaky between staunch Ukrainian
nationalists in the west and those oriented more toward Russia in the east
— seems embodied in a new square under construction in central Kiev
celebrating independence from Russia in 1991. Some complain that the design
— especially a heraldic, gilded, statue of a mother Ukraine — is a bit too
Soviet. But ask almost anyone on the square, and the words come out much
like those of Roman Gadysh, 24. It is, he said, a symbol "of beauty and
independence."

*******

#8
Washington Post
January 13, 2002
book review
Chance of a Lifetime 
'Summer in Baden-Baden' by Leonid Tsypkin 
Reviewed by Marie Arana

SUMMER IN BADEN-BADEN
By Leonid Tsypkin
Translated from the Russian by Roger and Angela Keys
New Directions. 146 pp. $23.95

"Nothing is invented. Everything is invented." With that sphinxlike
pronunciamento, Susan Sontag beckons us into this fiercely imagined,
impeccably researched little novel about a single summer in the life of
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. As Sontag suggests in her introduction, Summer in
Baden-Baden is at once entirely true and untrue -- a conflation of
terrestrial travel and cranial spelunking, of history and hallucination.
Although its publication comes almost 20 years after the death of its
author, and although his name continues to go unrecognized in Russia, this
slender volume stands to change the way we think of 20th-century Russian
fiction. It is, in more ways than one, a chronicle of fevered genius.

It might never have seen the light of day. At the time of his death in
1982, Leonid Tsypkin was a complete unknown in Soviet literary circles: a
doctor and medical researcher whose published works were limited to highly
technical scientific journals. He might have taken his place in the long,
distinguished line of physician writers such as Chekhov and Bulgakov --
except that his communist masters had turned a paranoid eye on the arts.
Tsypkin began Summer in Baden-Baden in 1977 at the age of 51. He completed
it four years later, only months before he succumbed to a heart attack and
just as his countrymen locked into a tragic, unwinnable war in Afghanistan.
Harassed by the KGB for his repeated applications for an exit visa, demoted
from his senior position at a medical institute because his son had
emigrated to the United States, Tsypkin had given up all hope of ever
publishing his fiction. He had not produced much: a handful of short
stories, two novellas. He began Summer in Baden-Baden fully aware that it
would be a labor of love -- a story that, in all likelihood, would only
languish in the gloomy confines of his desk drawer.

What a labor of love it is. Love is at the very core of it: conjugal love,
carnal love, hopeless love, a love of luxury, a love of the roulette wheel,
a love of words, an artist's obsessions, a fan's desires. It recounts
Dostoyevsky's trip in 1867 to Baden-Baden with his new bride, Anna
Grigoryevna Snitkina, the 19-year-old stenographer to whom he had dictated
his novel The Gambler. This was before the novelist's extraordinary run of
literary success. The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov had yet
to be written, and Dostoyevsky was plagued by demons, real and imagined.

Uncertain of his future, the former engineer had taken a punishing contract
for his new novel; he was drinking too much, gambling away what little
fortune he had, losing himself to debilitating epileptic fits, agonizing
over his debts, careering from obsessive concern for his pregnant young
wife to nearly criminal disregard. Tsypkin reveals him in a bettor's fever,
pawning Anna's earrings, brooches and dresses, until she is reduced to
wandering the elegant German resort in threadbare clothes and he is reduced
to a miasma of self-loathing. But, as Dostoyevsky himself had written in
Notes From Underground, "man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in
love with suffering," and so this story is also about that other, very
Russian, kind of love: the romance of misery, the seductions of despair. It
is about Dostoyevsky's anguish, to be sure, but it is about Tsypkin's, too.

Tsypkin's account of Dostoyevsky's journey to Baden-Baden is embedded in a
journey of his own. The novel begins as memoir: The narrator -- clearly
Tsypkin himself -- is making a pilgrimage to Petersburg to visit the
apartment in which Dostoyevsky died. He settles into the train with a
moldering volume he has acquired from his aunt, a literary critic. The book
is Reminiscences, by Anna Grigoryevna Dostoyevsky, an intimate account of
her honeymoon and of her groom's frenzied sprees at the gaming tables of
Baden-Baden. What follows is a double narrative, a polyphonic telling, as
mesmerizing and haunting as any of Dostoyevsky's psychic odysseys. Tsypkin
is traveling into the minds and hearts of the newly married Dostoyevskys
even as he is making his way north to the very room in which the writer
drew his last breath. But, as we come to learn, Tsypkin's love for
Dostoyevsky is a troubled affair, fraught as it is with the clear-eyed
understanding that Dostoyevsky despised Jews, made no secret of it, and
therefore would have despised him. In this strange double helix of a voyage
-- through time, through words, through history, through madness -- Summer
in Baden-Baden manages to tell various stories: of a marriage, of a
literary obsession, of a nation's anti-Semitism, of the pinched spirit of
the communist age, of the swirling nexus of Dostoyevsky's writerly world.

Tsypkin's prose is eerily reminiscent of Jose Saramago's, although he could
not possibly have been familiar with the Portuguese Nobelist's work. The
sentences are sinuous, endless constructions that challenge as mightily as
they reward. A single one can snake across several pages, draw the reader
into a dervish dance -- and then, holding on for dear life, refuse to let
the reader go. Here, for instance, is a passage in which the narrator
introduces the Dostoyevskys' hotel chambermaid, "a very lively and swarthy
girl who looked Italian," before he spins off into a fugue of memory,
recalling an archetypal young woman he once had seen in a hospital, a
figure he was unable to put out of mind:

"I could not yet make out the building I was heading for, but in the
common-room or in the corridor male and female students in white lab-coats
would be clustering around one of the junior doctors, and amongst them
would be the girl with golden hair escaping from under her cap, the
one-and-only girl who exists for all of us at that age, and for some of us
not only then, the one-and-only girl both imaginary and at the same time
real with fine blue veins in her temples beneath the delicate, tender skin
and a heart rhythmically contracting to pump fresh, hot blood (is it really
hot?) around the fragile, tensile arteries, as yet unsullied by a single
nodule or grain of calcium, blood which gives the skin and the whole body
that amazing pink tone termed flesh-coloured and which they all attempt to
imitate with stockings and tights -- wallpaper and lamp-shades are
sometimes that colour, too, but never very successfully: only the skin of a
young woman possesses that exact tone -- and as I sit there in the tram, I
try in mind to place myself next to that golden-haired student in such a
position that the hair tumbling out from under her cap touches my cheek --
and why is it only now in our declining years that we become so sensitive
to the touch of a woman's hair, and sitting on public transport,
surreptitiously try to let our cheek or bald patch brush against a cascade
of female hair flooding down from somewhere? -- and the more casual the
touch, the stronger the feeling of contentment, as we can then, having
purposely placed our skin against this cascade, try to convince ourselves
that it is pure accident, and the more painful is the enforced parting from
this cool golden flood pouring down from on high, heedlessly flowing over
shoulders covered by a suede or denim jacket and transferring a charge of
electrons to our ageing skin -- and to receive this mysterious electron
charge from some unwitting donor, and for that reason particularly desired,
we, as we leave home in the morning, are also hurrying somewhere, filled
with anticipation and certainty that something unusual must be about to
happen to us . . . "

The effect, offputting at first, becomes hypnotic as Tsypkin blends his own
reminiscences with Anna Grigoryevna's. He knits in cameos of Dostoyevsky,
Dostoyevsky's characters, Dostoyevsky's contemporaries and their characters
as well. Turgenev, Belinsky, Pushkin, Prince Myshkin (from The Idiot),
Trusotsky (from "The Eternal Husband"), Fyodor Karamazov, even Stinking
Lizaveta -- all make appearances, so that the novel's pages teem not only
with real figures from Russia's past but with a veritable dramatis personae
of the Russian imagination.

So why is this vertiginous little book such an important addition to the
canon? Because, like the work of so many other writers who toiled beneath
the yoke of Soviet history -- Mayakovsky, Babel, Pasternak, Bulgakov,
Solzhenitsyn, Tsvetaeva, Voinovich, Aksyonov -- Leonid Tsypkin's novel
affirms precisely what we value in literature: that, in such prose as this,
a mind is able to wrest grace from despair, truth from lies and, most
miraculous of all, immortality from a desk drawer. •

Marie Arana is the editor of Book World. She can be reached at
aranam@washpost.com.

*******

#9
MSNBC
Russia’s hidden treasures of space 
One museum keeps the ship used by world’s first spaceman; 
another preserves the dogs that preceded him into orbit 
By Alan Boyle
 
      MOSCOW —  It’s not listed in the tourist guides, and they won’t let
you just walk in the door, but there’s a hidden store of space treasures
and kitsch at the Energia Museum of Rocket Space Engineering in Korolyov,
just north of Moscow.    
     YOU CAN TOUCH the dark brown, spherical Vostok craft that Yuri Gagarin
rode into history 40 years ago as the first human in space.   
     Other items include the capsule from which Alexei Leonov made the
world’s first spacewalk in 1965, the Soyuz descent capsule that was used in
1975’s Apollo-Soyuz linkup and mock-ups of the two linked spacecraft as
well as of a Salyut space station.
       You can even climb inside the museum’s Soyuz T-3 — it’s a tight fit
for just one person, let alone the three people who rode it back to Earth
in 1980.
       “I ask people how long they could stay in there,” says museum guide
Yelena Dubinko, “and they say five minutes, not more.”
       The museum is at the headquarters of the Energia rocket company,
which restricts access to outsiders because of security concerns. For that
reason, Dubinko says would-be visitors have to call about five days in
advance to arrange for a visit.
       
MEMORIAL MUSEUM
       Another space shrine, the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, is far
more accessible. It’s right underneath Moscow’s 328-foot-high cosmonaut
memorial, a short walk from the VDNKh Metro station in the northern part of
the city. The compact museum displays something unique: an actual space
traveler.
       Two cosmo-canines named Belka and Strelka were sent into space
aboard a Vostok in 1960, becoming the first creatures to survive orbital
flight.
       A few months after that flight, Strelka gave birth to six healthy
puppies. One of the pups, named Pushinka, was given to Caroline Kennedy as
a present from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.   
 Belka, one of the first creatures to survive a ride into Earth orbit, sits
eternally within the Memorial Museum of Astronautics, with reflections
playing off the preserved dog's glass case.
          Today, thanks to the marvels of taxidermy, Belka sits within a
glass case like a lapdog Lenin. Strelka was also preserved, but she is
nowhere in sight during this visit.
       “Strelka is our travel dog,” museum administrator Galina Kozyr
explains. “It was in Australia, America, Israel — and now it’s on display
in China.”
       Belka seems to gaze wistfully at a Soviet moonsuit that was never
used. After NASA’s Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969, Soviet space
officials gave up on their own moon effort and decided they didn’t need the
spacesuit.
       “There was no reason to send people,” Kozyr said. “Everything was
prepared, but the program was closed.” 

*******

#10
South Florida Sun-Sentinel 
January 13, 2002
From Russia with a caveat
The top-performing mutual fund of 2001 is a daydreamer's delight.
By Chet Currier
Chet Currier is a Bloomberg News columnist. He can be reached at
ccurrier@bloomberg.net.

You can spin all sorts of trade-your-way-to-riches fantasies from the short
history of the Pilgrim Russia Fund, which ranked No. 1 among the 15,237
funds for U.S. investors tracked by Bloomberg. It sported a gain of about
80 percent for 2001. 

The fund has experienced such extreme ups and downs that a simple strategy
of buying it one year and selling it short the next would have turned
$10,000 into $165,000 over the past five years. If you could somehow keep
piling up an average return of 75 percent for another five years, your
once-modest stake would balloon to $2.72 million.

Hey, this ought to go out on the Internet alongside some of the other
propositions that keep showing up in my America Online mailbox -- "annual
return of 34 percent guaranteed!" or "our last 3 stock picks have gained
328 percent." Too bad it's not much more realistic than those other pipe
dreams.

But let's save the party-pooping until later. For now, imagine that you and
I staked $10,000 on Pilgrim Russia, formerly known as the Lexington Troika
Dialog Russia Fund, at the end of 1996.

Every 12 months from then, we maintained our long position after years in
which the fund declined -- or switched to a short position of equivalent
size after years in which the fund posted a gain. This strategy made a lot
of sense, we figured, since the Russian economy stood to experience plenty
of wild ups and downs. 

A 67.4 percent gain in 1997 increased the value of our investment to
$16,740. At that point, we cashed out and went short an equal amount
(assuming we had a broker willing to handle this bet on a market decline,
which requires us to borrow shares and sell them).

Sure enough, the fund took a brutal 83 percent drop in 1998 as a debt
crisis struck the Russian economy. When 1999 arrived, we were long again in
time to enjoy a 160 percent rally. We went short for an 18 percent decline
in 2000, then long once more to ride the fund up again in 2001.

Looking to 2002, we're due to switch back to a short position. Here we can
start to see the real-world difficulties of playing this game (not to
mention the taxes, transaction costs and other incidentals that might
interfere along the way).

Betting against continued Russian progress right now strikes me as a dicey
thing to do. Under President Vladimir Putin, the Russian economy has been
turning in some unexpectedly good numbers. "One can boldly say that the
past year was successful for Russia," said Putin, recently reported to
enjoy an 80 percent approval rating in a Moscow poll. 

Maybe a continued decline in oil prices would deal the country a setback.
But if the United States and other developed economies recover from
recession in the year ahead, mightn't a rebound in oil prices be as likely
as a further drop?

Besides, since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington Sept. 11,
U.S.-Russia relations have been warming up, in one of the most intriguing
developments to come out of the new war. The U.S. ambassador in Moscow
spoke in late December of "a new framework that is more suitable for the
post-Cold War period." 

As scary as it may feel to take a negative position now, it was tougher
still to be bullish on Russia at the end of 1998, when all the news came
wrapped in gloom.

Wherever you pursue a progressive in-and-out trading strategy like the one
we've concocted here, an inherent psychological problem also arises. The
more success it produces, the harder it gets to stick with as the size of
the kitty increases.

A buy-and-hold approach puts less strain on the nerves. But in a case like
this one, even simply holding for the long pull can be frustrating. As of
late December, the Pilgrim Russia Fund's average annual return for the past
five years worked out to 1.9 percent -- or about what you could get at the
other end of the risk spectrum in an ultra-safe U.S. Treasury bill.

The daydream was more fun.

*******

#11
Financial Times (UK)
12 January 2002
Media mogul seeks to mix in new circles: LUNCH WITH THE FT: US-born Boris
Jordan is desperate to prove his bona fides in the controversial battle for
Russia's popular NTV television station
By JOHN KAMPFNER

Boris Jordan breezes in to Claridges in jeans and jacket. He's late.
Pile-up on the motorway from the airport. London traffic is just as bad as
Moscow's.

It meant Gordon Ramsey's culinary experience would have to wait. We would
have to make do with some sushi in the foyer. Time was short. He had a
series of meetings with potential partners in the afternoon.

There is something neither fish nor fowl about Jordan. He's neither fully
American nor Russian. A New Yorker of White Russian descent, he moved to
Moscow in the early 1990s from where he persuaded western financiers to
invest in the conversion from communism. His Renaissance Capital Group was
Russia's first western-style investment bank. Serious money was made - and
lost. His clients threw billions at him - then accused him of playing fast
and loose.

After the 1998 crash he retrenched, reinventing himself last April as a
media mogul. He engineered the take-over of the popular television station,
NTV, by helping state conglomerate Gazprom acquire a majority holding
through its wholly owned subsidiary, Gazprom-Media.

All the while, NTV's founder and chief, Vladimir Gusinsky, had been under
house arrest in Spain, as the Russian government sought his extradition.
Jordan became chief executive of NTV last April and has been fighting off
accusations of being a Kremlin stooge ever since.

Now he's trying to put together his own consortium and hoping to negotiate
a buy-out from Gazprom over the next month. He is flitting between European
capitals, hoping to have a final bid ready within weeks. But it won't be
easy. Media ownership means power. Other oligarchs are in the race. The
Kremlin is keeping a close watch.

Jordan is desperate to prove his bona fides. He rattles out the figures -
he says he will have reduced a projected loss for this year of Dollars 26m
by three-quarters, with forecasts of a profit for 2002.

"I acquired an asset in total distress." He suggests he has turned round
not just the finances, but also the journalism. "The Russian people are
tired of being lectured to, being told what to think. In our programmes we
try to give both sides."

He has in his sights Yevgeny Kisilyov, NTV's star anchor, who quit in
disgust when Jordan took over and led more than half the journalists to a
new, smaller station, TV6.

Now it, too, is embroiled in intrigues, with fights for control between
Boris Berezovsky, another oligarch, and the country's largest oil group,
Lukoil, and with the government toying with the idea of closing it down.

Jordan scarcely conceals his schadenfreude or his disdain for Kisilyov and
Berezovsky. "Imagine Al Gore buying CBS and announcing he was using it to
form a political party. That's what Berezovsky is doing. Would the American
people accept that?"

Ratings are finally on the increase for NTV's more measured political talk
shows, but Jordan accepts he still has considerable work to win over the
doubters. He says he has met Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, three
times - the first in July to lobby him to persuade Gazprom to divest its
holding in the station, and the other two in public gatherings.

"Our programmes are as critical as they need to be," he says, with
unintended ambiguity. But he proudly declares that one of his television
crews has been arrested after filming in Chechnya.

So many hopes for a vigorous free press in Russia were invested in NTV, in
spite of the questions surrounding the financial dealings of Gusinsky's
Media Most empire. The demise of the station's original cast was bound to
reflect badly on whoever took it over. Jordan accepts that. That is why he
is lobbying so hard. He feels he is making some headway in Europe, but he
still has problems with the American administration. When US government
officials visit Moscow, TV6 is one of the channels invited in to the
embassy, but NTV is made to remain outside.

"I've met with Congressmen, Senators, people at the State Department and
the National Security Council, but they don't want to hear," Jordan complains.

The station now plans to publish its news reports on its English-language
web pages to "prove" its objectivity.

Does he ever speak to Gusinsky, who is holed up in New York. "Yes, we've
talked," he says. "We have nothing personal against each other." What did
he think of the arrest? "I think it was probably wrong." He then corrects
himself. "No it was definitely wrong."

When Jordan seeks to prove a point, he takes a precise stab at one of his
salmon or tuna sushi rolls and then washes it down with mineral water. He
is earnest, surprisingly nervous, and doesn't try to smooth-talk me.

He came on to the business scene shortly before I left Moscow after a
period working there, and the Russia he speaks of is unfamiliar to me. This
is post-post-communism. It is hard-nosed, still living on the edge, but
denuded of much of the passion that went with the momentous events of the
early 1990s.

He is part of the new generation of Russians whose only ideology is
pragmatism, like Putin, who he says is "doing all the right things to rid
Russia of anarchy".

Chastened by the crash, Jordan insists he is more cautious now. "The
mistake was we thought Russia could be reformed in a few years. I want to
be part of that, but we now know it will take much longer. But, for the
first time since Peter the Great, Russia can integrate into the community
of Europe."

What about his own integration? His family certainly lives the privileged
life - a mansion in Moscow's suburbs, children at one of the capital's
smart new private schools, his wife now running a small company that makes
uniforms for some of the city's best academic institutions.

This, he says, is where he wants to stay. Long Island, where he was raised,
is no longer his home. He was never quite accepted. At school he was called
a "red" and a "commie". On graduating from New York University he wanted to
work for the State Department, but was told he would not be posted to
eastern Europe. "They said they thought I'd be too emotional. So I gave up
the idea of government service and went into business."

But there was something about making money that has left him still
unsatisfied. "I was always an intermediary, for people like Soros and BP.
Then I decided I wanted to be the principal. The media is a breath of fresh
air after the stodgy world of finance."

Perhaps, I suggest, as we stand up to leave, he is in it for the glamour
and the power?

Not in the least, he says. But then he cannot resist telling me that the
previous week at a media function he had sat next to Lord Black, proprietor
of the Daily Telegraph, and Greg Dyke, director general of the BBC. That is
the new company he would like to keep.

*******

#12
BBC Monitoring
Russian expert says USA mulling use of small nuclear weapons 
Source: Strana.Ru web site, Moscow, in Russian 10 Jan 02

The USA wants to resume nuclear testing because it plans to deploy nuclear
devices in conjunction with its National Missile Defence programme and,
additionally, is preparing world public opinion for the use of battlefield
nuclear weapons in the developing world, according to Russian defence
expert and former senior Defence Ministry official Leonid Ivashov. The
regional use of tactical nuclear weapons fits in with the USA's strategy
for tackling the global problem of dwindling resources and overpopulation.
According to Ivashov, these plans must be countered by a strong and
regenerated Russia. The following is the text of the interview, conducted
by Viktor Sokolov and published by the Russian Strana.Ru web site on 10
January under the headline "Leonid Ivashov: 'USA planning to shoot down
missiles with nuclear weapons'". The subheadings have been added editorially:

Col Gen Leonid Ivashov, vice-president of the Academy of Geopolitical
Problems and former chief of the Defence Ministry's main administration for
international military cooperation, believes that Washington is being
prompted to resume underground nuclear tests by the National Missile
Defence [NMD] plans and a desire to accustom the world to the use of
tactical battlefield nuclear weapons in its own interests.

[Viktor Sokolov] The US press reports that the USA could resume underground
nuclear tests. What do you think will come of this and how will Russia
respond to it?

Missile defence tests

[Ivashov] America wants to withdraw from the moratorium which the two
presidents declared on nuclear tests. The reason for this is that the USA's
NMD programme has been launched, its initial stages have been funded and it
is under way. Withdrawal from the ABM treaty was, in fact, an element of
the programme. However, the tests conducted by the Americans have been both
successful and unsuccessful. Moreover, the successful tests of antimissiles
using real targets have demonstrated that there is no guarantee that the
antimissiles will hit ballistic missiles. These successful tests were more
political in nature, because the missile was almost directed towards the
antimissile; the target was directed towards the weapon.

[Sokolov] Not the other way around? Do you mean that the tests were not
technically successful?

[Ivashov] That's right; it was just that a result was needed in order to
preserve political prestige in this situation. As for the technology, it is
far from perfection. And it should be borne in mind that, even if they
achieve a hit rate of 0.7-0.8, this will not provide a total guarantee of
protection. Second, it should be borne in mind that, in this situation, NMD
as a whole must be looked at slightly differently. Other sides, including
Russia and China, will definitely work on the problem of overcoming
antimissile defence. Such experience exists in Russia. Pretty successful
experience. So the Americans are evidently coming to the conclusion that,
in order to provide a stronger guarantee that the target - ICBMs - will be
hit, small nuclear weapons must be used. But, in order to launch into this
process now, tests are needed, not just using modelling but also actual
explosions. This is one reason why the USA wants to withdraw from the
moratorium.

Battlefield weapons

The second reason, it seems to me, is along the lines that the Americans
are striving to get the world used to the idea of the necessity or
possibility of their using battlefield nuclear weapons, which will also
have a colossal effect and lead to a rejection of nuclear war against the
USA. It is envisaged that they could be used in such situations as Tora
Bora, in caves and so on. But the possibility of such weapons being used in
other local conflicts cannot be ruled out.

[Sokolov] Are we now entering an era when powerful nuclear weapons will
recede into the background and perhaps disappear altogether, while tactical
nuclear weapons will become the usual form of weapons and will pollute the
earth to such an extent that we will all eventually disappear from it?

Population worries

[Ivashov] That is a bigger question, you know. But if we consider the US
national security strategy in the next century, the Americans regard the
exhaustion of Planet Earth's resources and rapid population growth as two
of the prime problems. They predict that the earth's population will
increase by 1.1bn by 2015. On the one hand, resources are being exhausted;
on the other, the population is growing! Moreover, it is envisaged that the
population will grow in the East and South, but not in the West. So what
the USA is now doing in various regions of the world is evidently intended
to direct countries in these regions along a course of regressive
development. In this way, perhaps, they hope at a stroke to resolve both
the problem of reducing consumption and the problem of population. If my
conclusion is correct, and I am sure that it is, these nuclear weapons will
indeed become battlefield weapons. This is what they are trying to get us
used to.

[Sokolov] Do you think that everyone will get used to it?

Genocidal policy

[Ivashov] The world community is surprisingly easily getting used to
actions that would have seemed barbaric a few decades ago, to the US
genocidal policy. Remember how strikes were conducted in the Balkans, and
how the Near East situation developed. A similar situation is now being
promoted in the Afghanistan region and in the conflict between India and
Pakistan. And the world perceives this as an ordinary phenomenon. Virtually
without the consent of the UN Security Council, which used to be
impossible, military force is used, whole territories are occupied, whole
states are subjected to strikes and whole regions subjected to actions. The
world is getting used to this. The world seems to have bent down under this
military might - US military pressure.

[Sokolov] What response could Russia make in this situation and can it
respond at all?

Regenerated Russia

[Ivashov] Russia has great potential to counteract this policy. First,
Russia should have a policy, above all a foreign policy in the following
areas: West, East, South. Work must be done in all directions, as they say.
This should be an autonomous policy based on the national interests of the
Russian state. These interests are that we should be friends and cooperate
with India, Pakistan, Iran, the Arab world and, of course, the West. Above
all, this should be a strategy or model for Russia's geopolitical behaviour.

Second, Russia should have an economic development strategy. And we must
not change this economic strategy - which Russia does not have yet but will
do - for the sake of loans or any instantaneous tactical success.
Furthermore, Russia should have a spiritual regeneration strategy. This
should be a comprehensive strategic plan for the regeneration of a powerful
great Russian state. This will be our response.

*******