Johnson's Russia List #6153 23 March 2002 davidjohnson@erols.com A CDI Project www.cdi.org [Note from David Johnson: 1. UPI: Martin Sieff: Comment: Acting as if Russia doesn't count. 2. The Times (UK) editorial: A cowed press. Old Soviet habits are stifling the news about Chechnya. 3. BBC Monitoring: Exiled tycoon's controversial film is brought to Russian town featuring in it. 4. Interfax: Former Russian premier criticises US foreign policy.(Primakov) 5. RFE/RL: Alexandra Poolos, East: Taking The Pulse Of Post-Soviet Health Care. 6. RFE/RL: Kathleen Knox, Unhealthy Mothers In Russia Get Babies Off To A Poor Start. 7. AP: Experts warn Russia's fight against TB is far from over. 8. Fianancial Times (UK) book review: Andrew Jack on THE OLIGARCHS: Wealth and Power in the New Russia by David Hoffman. 9. BBC Monitoring: Russian environmentalist against MP's proposal to resume nuclear tests. 10. The Russia Journal: Aleander Golts, The battle of Pskov.(re military reform) 11. The Scotsman (UK): Chris Stephen, Russian war film hits raw nerve.("War") 12. Los Angeles Times: Maura Reynolds, Russia Acquits 2 in 'Friendly Fire' Case. 13. Washington Times: Christopher Pala, Kazakh capital based on Washington. 14. New book: Vadim Birstein, THE PERVERSION OF KNOWLEDGE, THE TRUE STORY OF SOVIET SCIENCE.] ******** #1 Comment: Acting as if Russia doesn't count By Martin Sieff (sieff.yavelak@erols.com) Senior News Analyst WASHINGTON, March 18 (UPI) -- A dangerous attitude toward Russia has taken hold across the senior foreign and defense policy officials of the Bush administration: "You don't matter any more. And even when you do, you have to do as we tell you anyway." These very sentiments have been repeatedly expressed privately -- and not so privately -- in recent weeks by not one but several policymakers holding key positions in both the State Department and the Department of Defense. And they do indeed appear to be an accurate description of the general Bush administration policies towards what is still the one nation on earth capable of annihilating the United States with a comparable strategic nuclear arsenal. From Sept. 11 to mid-December, it was all very different. Then, Russia was by far the most important ally the United States had in the world, far eclipsing Britain, Japan, Germany, France or any other major nation of Western Europe or East Asia. Russian support was crucial for establishing U.S. military forces in Central Asia as operating bases from which to hammer the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that protected the al Qaeda terrorist group responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Towers and the mauling of the Pentagon. The Northern Alliance forces that proved so effective at ousting the Taliban with U.S. military aid had been longtime allies of Russia. Russian aid and connections proved crucial in establishing rapid and effective cooperation with them. But once the Taliban was toppled, the attitudes of senior Bush officials reverted to the complacent arrogance that had characterized their attitude to Russia before the terrible terrorist attacks of Black Tuesday. U.S officials have been giving the Russians dictats on anti-ballistic missile policy and regarding only full compliance with their demands as reasonable "negotiations." Now U.S. officials are taking the line that the U.S. military presence in Central Asia must continue for the foreseeable future. The specific line being formulated by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, according to Pentagon insiders, is that the Russians are not being told the U.S. presence in their historic back yard for the last half a millennium will be permanent. The official line being expressed is that it will only be for an indefinite time. According to the level of strategic thinking currently prevalent in the Pentagon, the Russians are supposed to be assured by this formulation that it will not be permanent, even though that is what is intended. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has always walked and talked softly in public, has been careful not to confront the United States head on. Indeed, he is currently being severely criticized in Moscow for cooperating with the new U.S. military presence in the Caucasus republic of Georgia to root out al Qaeda groups entrenched there. Therefore so far, Putin has not responded to any of these U.S. moves with anger. But the rage in Moscow both in the press and among key policymakers has been palpable. Fierce-anti-American sentiments are far more commonly held and expressed among both groups than they ever where in the last years of the Soviet Union under President Mikhail Gorbachev. There is no sense of alarm or concern either at Foggy Bottom or across the Potomac in the Pentagon that President Putrin may be willing or capable of taking hostile and harmful action to U.S. interests in retaliation for policies and insults. There is certainly no thought at all given to the possibility that even if he maintains cautious cooperation with Washington, he may be in danger of being eventually toppled and replaced with others who would prefer confrontation. Yet Putin himself last June 15 signed a far reaching agreement to set up the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or Shanghai Pact, a Eurasian military defense organization teaming Russia and China that was modeled on the old Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. It openly proclaimed its ambition of expelling U.S. influence from the heartland of Asia. Since then U.S. influence in the short term has grown exponentially there. But it remains to be seen if that influence is sustainable in the long term. The U.S. influence in Central Asia that now so angers Russians is being defended by administration officials as being strategically crucial to maintain open access to the new oil and gas reserves being developed in the Caspian Basin. But the Caspian Basin is hundreds of miles to the west of nations like Uzbekistan and Afghanistan where the new U.S. presence is being established. And even if it were far closer, the odds are overwhelming against the United States being able to establish itself as a permanent presence in a region it has never known and does not understand. And it will have to maintain that presence in the face of opposition from the Russians, Chinese and Iranians who surround it on every side. Besides, the more the United States pours resources into maintaining a military presence, the less it will have to maintain its simultaneous presence in the Persian Gulf and to defend Taiwan. And in both regions, current U.S. policies require maintaining overwhelming military superiority for the indefinite future against powerful regional powers fiercely opposed to them. Of course, if Russia really doesn't matter any more, these traditional arguments of geopolitical common sense would no longer apply. And the opinion is now virtually universally held across the Bush administration that Russia indeed remains prostrate and will not matter for a very long time to come, if ever again. Perhaps they are correct. But a lot of powerful and important people -- including Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler -- have destroyed themselves and their countries in that same belief. ******* #2 The Times (UK) 22 March 2002 Editorial A cowed press Old Soviet habits are stifling the news about Chechnya Anna Politkovskaya is not a name known outside Russia. If President Putin had his way, she would not be known inside the country either. Her searing accounts of the corruption, intimidation and brutalities perpetrated by Russian soldiers in Chechnya are now almost the only source of information about what is really happening there. Her reporting has been at huge personal risk: in 40 visits to Chechnya she has been harassed, arrested, threatened with rape and torture and forced to flee Russia after vile hints of a car “accident”. But like the dissidents who refused to be silenced by an oppressive Soviet state a generation ago, she has continued to speak out. Yesterday Index on Censorship, the press freedom lobby, saluted her with an award for the most courageous defence of freedom of expression. Like Andrei Sakharov, Ms Politkovskaya has been drawn into a lone confrontation with the State by its refusal to admit abuse. She has no political agenda and has reported also on the extremism and criminal connections of the rebel leaders. But she has also exposed what the military command is desperate to hide: the conscripts’ lack of training, equipment and discipline, the collusion of Russian officials in the kidnappings and protection rackets, the extortion of bribes from civilians, targeting of their houses and property and the indiscriminate killings, including, most recently, the burning of a bus to hide the evidence that its civilian passengers were shot by mistake. President Putin has achieved much in the past year. He has brought his country stability, increased its wealth, pushed through vital tax, judicial and land reforms and confronted old prejudices to reorientate Russia towards the West and join the fight against international terrorism. This has come, however, at some cost in press and individual freedom. There is little tolerance of dissent, and old Soviet habits are beginning to reassert themselves: self-censorship by journalists, official pressure on those who will not toe the line and a gradual retreat from the democratic hubbub of the Yeltsin years. One by one independent newspapers and television stations have been suppressed. Only Novaya Gazeta, the small liberal bi-weekly carrying Ms Politkovskaya’s reports, still speaks out on Chechnya; now the courts have imposed record libel damages in a clear attempt to bankrupt and silence it. Most Russians care little about press freedom. For them it is more important that pensions are paid, corruption curbed and crime reduced. Most do not think much about what is happening in Chechnya. But this war is a wound that Mr Putin has been unable to stanch; and the dirtier it becomes, the greater the danger that it will infect the body politic. Keeping it out of the news is one thing; persecuting those who report the truth is reprehensible. Russia is fighting a legitimate war against terror; but this does not excuse any barbarity in Chechnya. Only a free press can insist on the distinction. ******* #3 BBC Monitoring Exiled tycoon's controversial film is brought to Russian town featuring in it Source: Ekho Moskvy news agency, Moscow, in Russian 0945 gmt 23 Mar 02 [No dateline as received] The film "Attack on Russia" dealing with the explosions that hit several apartment blocks in Moscow and Volgodonsk in autumn 1999 was today shown in the Oka cinema theatre in Ryazan. The leader of the Ryazan regional branch of the Liberal Russia political movement, Viktor Shlyakhin, has told the Ekho Moskvy radio that about 60 people came to see the film. "We had difficulties finding a venue for the screening. This issue was resolved only yesterday [22 March]. That is why the screening received no wide publicity. Invitations were sent primarily to local journalists, the residents of the apartment block in which an explosion was prevented and members of some political parties," Shlyakhin said. He added that the audience's reaction to the film was "largely constructive". "They saw that the film raises important questions. Many of them asked for a copy of the film," Shlyakhin said. [Omitted known background information on the film.] ******** #4 Former Russian premier criticises US foreign policy Interfax Moscow, 23 March: A military operation against Iraq would become "a historic mistake for the United States", President of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry Yevgeniy Primakov has said. Speaking at the 10th assembly of the Russian Foreign and Defence Policy Council on Saturday [23 March], Primakov noted that in this case "the scale of support for the USA (by other members of the international antiterrorist coalition) would significantly shrink, and the world would be divided by another principle". The former Russian prime minister accused a team in the Bush administration that is directing the US foreign policy today of lack of professionalism. After the 11 September terror attacks, one could have expected the Americans "to try to get rid of the main basis for terrorism - the conflict in the Middle East - for instance, through expanding the number of mediators, especially bearing in mind that many European countries were prepared for this", Primakov said. "However, the United States did not follow this path," Primakov noted, adding that "they neither followed another path, failing to revise methods providing their national security and exclude those disapproved of by other states". As a result, "even the French foreign minister spoke against the US unilateral approach to foreign policy", he said. Primakov recommended that Russia in these circumstances should "follow the policy of converging with Western states despite all disagreements remaining, taking into account our own interests". Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his greetings to the participants in the forum, calling the council "an independent research floor" and wishing its members new creative success. ******** #5 East: Taking The Pulse Of Post-Soviet Health Care (Part 1) By Alexandra Poolos In the decade following the fall of the Soviet Union, many postcommunist countries have faced sharp declines in the quality of their health care systems. No longer protected by a centralized health sector that serviced urban centers and provincial regions alike, large segments of the post-Soviet population today find themselves denied even the most basic medical services. The picture, while generally grim, differs dramatically across the region -- from Central Europe, where nations are striving to catch up to their Western neighbors, to countries like Russia, which are seeing the resurgence of communicable diseases like tuberculosis. In the first of a five-part series on the state of health care in the former Soviet bloc, RFE/RL correspondent Alexandra Poolos speaks with an expert from the World Health Organization (WHO) about larger trends across the region. Prague, 22 March 2002 (RFE/RL) -- The economic and social upheaval that has characterized the years following Communism's collapse in the former Soviet bloc is evident in nearly every aspect of life. Perhaps most notably, it is reflected in declining health care across the post-Soviet spectrum. From Bulgaria to Turkmenistan, mortality rates are rising and birth rates are falling. Hospitals are understocked; doctors are underpaid. In Russia, life expectancy for men has dropped 10 years in a single decade, from 68 to 58 years. Health professionals in Moldova earn the equivalent of $12 a month. A recent survey in Ukraine showed that more than 80 percent of the population finds it difficult or impossible to obtain health care. It's a trend, says Martin McKee of the WHO, that is closely tied to government spending cuts and the breakdown of centralized care that have accompanied the collapse of the Soviet system. McKee says that in periods of transition when countries are engaged in building new states -- as in the case of the Soviet Union, from which 15 new nations emerged -- health is often low on the list of priorities. He adds that many of these countries also are undergoing major economic crises, which have a negative impact on health care: "The health care system that existed in the past had many weaknesses. It's easy to look back and think everything was fine. It certainly wasn't. But it often provided a high degree of health care to people in remote areas. I think we see this especially in places like Siberia, where some degree of care was provided in a way that is much more difficult now that the system is tending to come apart," McKee says. McKee, who has been studying the effects of post-Soviet transition on health care across the region, says that while medical care overall has declined, individual regions in the former communist bloc are suffering from their own particular problems. In Central Asia, for example, infant and maternal mortality rates, always poor by Soviet standards, have shot up even further. In Turkmenistan, mortality rates among women living in rural areas has also seen a dramatic increase. McKee says the breakdown in health care in postcommunist countries can be seen in the rising death rate from diseases that were once easily managed during Soviet times: "We do see a breakdown of the health-care system. [The] most striking example of this is the increase in death rate of people with diabetes. We looked at the death rate among people under 50 who had diabetes and found that it had increased about eight times in Russia and Ukraine. We looked at this in more detail in Ukraine, in Lviv, and we found that although people with diabetes were able to get insulin, they were not able to get the same strength or the same type of insulin from one week to another." Furthermore, McKee says, the collapse of medical care has been compounded by new health concerns across the region -- especially increases in alcoholism and smoking. McKee says alcoholism is contributing to a rising rate of death by injury, as well as long-term illnesses like cardiovascular disease. Smoking, he says, has increased in almost every part of the postcommunist population, including among young women. But even more troubling, McKee says, is the rise in communicable illnesses such as tuberculosis and HIV: "There has been a significant increase in a number of communicable diseases. This is almost what one might expect in any case of major social and economic transition. It was what we saw in the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe in the 19th century. And there are lots of reasons for this. We can look at different diseases, because they each have particular risk factors. But underlying them all is the case of transition. In the case of tuberculosis, we know that we have very high rates of transmission of the disease in the prison population. And the prison population has been increasing markedly in many former Soviet countries. In the case of HIV, clearly the risk factor is the increase in commercial sex workers. But linked with that is the marked increase in injecting-drug use. The two, of course, are coming together in many cases." Russia is dealing with a tuberculosis (TB) epidemic. Since 1991, the number of Russians with the disease has nearly tripled, with the country averaging 150,000 new cases annually. McKee says a growing proportion of TB cases in countries like Russia are proving resistant to the standard drug treatment used in the West. Although the former Soviet Union does have access to some TB drugs, poor supervision of the long-term treatment often means that new, drug-resistant strains of the disease are generated. Central Europe, however, is the one bright spot. Health care in this region has actually progressed. McKee attributes the advances in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary to these countries' proximity to the West, which has given them access to better training and working models of professional health care systems: "When we look at Central and Eastern Europe, the picture is quite different, and particularly as we go further toward the West. Largely, [health care there is much better] because of the accessibility to international literature due to the much wider use of English, which is actually very important to find out what's going on. But it's also because there were always much stronger links with the West [in this region]. So, for example, in a country like Hungary, you will find that many of the senior people in the health industry would have been able to have spent some time in the West even during the 1970s and the 1980s. That clearly was not the case for the Central Asian republics." The loosening of borders in the former Soviet bloc, McKee says, does leave room for hope. The ability to travel freely and improved access to information is allowing many citizens in the postcommunist region to be better informed about their health options. For now, however, it is mainly the wealthy elite who can afford to explore medical options in the West or pay for private health care at home, McKee says. The general public has yet to reap the benefits of access to Western medical care and information. And the general decline in health standards, he adds, is only likely to get worse when the cumulative effects of higher alcoholism and smoking rates begin to add up. "It's only been a decade," McKee says. "I don't think we've even seen the worst of it yet." ******** #6 Russia: Unhealthy Mothers In Russia Get Babies Off To A Poor Start (Part 4) By Kathleen Knox As few as one in four Russian babies are born totally healthy, and their mothers aren't feeling much better. In Part 4 of our look at the state of health care in the former Soviet bloc, RFE/RL correspondent Kathleen Knox finds that the reasons behind the poor health of Russia's infants are the same as those killing off its population -- a mix of poverty, unhealthy lifestyles, and ecological factors. Prague, 22 March 2002 (RFE/RL) -- Russia's demographic decline is well known. People are dying faster than they're being born. The country is shrinking by about 750,000 people a year. If current trends persist, some demographers think the population could shrink by up to one-third -- from today's 144 million -- within the next 50 years. As if that picture isn't gloomy enough, as few as one in four babies is born healthy, and around three-quarters of women suffer some sort of illness during their pregnancies. Hans Troedsson is head of child and adolescent health and development at the World Health Organization (WHO), which this week held a conference on child health in Stockholm. On the phone from the conference, he told RFE/RL the simple reason why it is so important to give children a healthy start in life. "It's an investment. If we don't invest in our children, which starts with the newborn, we will not make progress. And it's not just for the children to survive. It's also to develop to their full potential. We want healthy children. We want children who have good ability and capacity to learn because they are the future. They are the ones who are going to take over. They are our future leaders, engineers, doctors, workers, who are going to move ahead. So it also has a more practical reason, why we have to start with the newborns," Troedsson said. Russia's problem is not high infant mortality -- at around 17 deaths per 1,000 live births, it's about double that in developed countries but better than most of the other republics that comprised the former Soviet Union. The problem in Russia is the poor start in life that many of these babies receive, and the poor health of their mothers. The reasons are the same as those driving the country's demographic decline -- poverty, unhealthy lifestyles, overwhelmed health-care systems, and environmental pollution. Official statistics show that these children are also growing into unhealthy adolescents, which only exacerbates the country's health problems. The figures vary depending on your definition of healthy. Neo-natologist Irina Ryumina says more than 50 percent of newborns are unhealthy, though she acknowledges this figure encompasses various minor problems. Asphyxia, pulmonary diseases, sepsis and hemolytic diseases and congenital anomalies -- especially of the heart -- are common. "The morbidity of mothers in Russia has also grown. That's the ill health of women who gave birth to these babies. So there's a biological factor [involved]," Ryumina said. Murray Feshbach is a prominent U.S. demographer specializing in Russia. He paints a gloomier picture than Ryumina and says that only 28 to 30 percent of newborn babies in Russia fit the definition of healthy, that is, suffering from no complications in the birth process. He says that 10 years ago, that figure was 35 to 40 percent. In large part, Feshbach says, the situation has gotten worse because of problems experienced during pregnancy by a growing number of women. A common problem is anemia, which can slightly increase the chances for premature birth. Another is pre-eclampsia, or toxemia, which can appear suddenly in late pregnancy and is potentially fatal for both mother and child. Kidney diseases and sexually transmitted diseases are also on the rise. "The percentage of women who have anemia during pregnancy has increased as a rate per 1,000 by six to eight times, and that's mostly I believe due to malnutrition, not due to frequency of birth like it would have been in Tajikistan or Turkmenistan, with the birth interval [there] being relatively short. However, here you have a different story. You have an issue of the quality of the food package, shall we say. Then again, you have issues of growing drug addiction, growing STDs [sexually transmitted diseases], as I said. The rate of 10- to 14-year-old girls -- it's a terrible statement I'm going to say -- who have contracted syphilis has officially gone up by 60 to 70 times in the past decade," Ryumina said. It stands to reason that poor mothers are less likely to remain healthy during pregnancy, says Inga Grebesheva, the director of the Russian Family Planning Association. But she says there are no figures to prove it. "There is no research on this here [in Russia]. But [there] has been research into the ill health of the population in general, according to income group. Of course, those who earn more, their health is better. I can say with confidence that a woman who doesn't eat properly, of course it has an impact on the health of her children. And apart from that, these women don't have the opportunities to get treatment and don't even know about their illnesses, including STDs. So of course logic says it's like this, but to give you data from research, I can't do that because there isn't any yet," Grebesheva said. Environmental pollution is also taking its toll, with congenital anomalies and miscarriages more common in polluted areas. The high number of abortions in Russia also affects the ability of women to have healthy, wanted pregnancies. Thanks to federal family planning programs and an increase in contraceptive use, the number of abortions in Russia dropped from 3.5 million in 1992 to 2.1 million in 2000. But Russia still has one of the highest abortion rates in the world. Nearly two out of three pregnancies end in abortion, and the average Russia woman will have two to three abortions in her lifetime. Grebesheva of the Russian Family Planning Association: "Here, there's a very high percentage of complications after an abortion, probably higher than in Western European countries. Therefore, you have these infections, disruptions of the menstrual cycle and disruptions of the ability to conceive." Demographer Feshbach says reducing the number of abortions even further is key if the health of Russia's women -- and that of the babies they do bring to term -- is to improve. "Obviously, education is one issue. But that takes a long time to implement, when I want to turn things around in terms of teaching people to have safe sex in Russia, when the men don't give a damn and tell women just go have an abortion, and the only rule in the past used to be no more than one abortion every six months in a hospital. But there were a lot of illegal abortions or self-induced [abortions] and that affected the women's health condition, lives, potential for more children, etc., especially when you had lots and lots of abortions," Feshbach said. Grebesheva offered a wish list of measures she says would help: "Bearing in mind that the birth rate is shrinking, I think the situation as regards the health of newborns and pregnant women is dire. The value to the country of each child is considerable, not in terms of money but in terms of the future generation. Now what's needed is to improve clinics for pregnant women, to provide them with food -- we have so few pregnant women that every region, every city can do this from their internal budget -- and provide for the treatment of all diseases that are discovered before or during pregnancy and that can be treated." But Russia is poor, and Grebesheva acknowledges these are radical opinions. Public spending on Russia's overwhelmed, out-of-date and decaying health-care system shrank by perhaps one-third between 1991 and 1998 -- hyper-inflation of the early 1990s and the 1998 economic collapse make the actual figure hard to calculate -- and the regional system of mandatory medical insurance funds hasn't quite filled the gap. The World Health Organization estimates that Russia now spends $251 per person per year on health care, compared with almost $1,700 per person per year in the European Union. Russia ranks 130th in the world for overall health system performance. Last autumn, State Duma deputies asked the government to fund a "Healthy Child" program to improve, among other things, the health of newborns and pregnant women. Last week, the government instructed the Labor Ministry to draw up a federal program for the next four years entitled "Children of Russia," which will encompass the "Healthy Child" project. Russian Health Minister Yurii Shevchenko says a health survey of all children under the age of 18 will begin on 1 April. In the meantime, Grebesheva said even education on reproductive health is lacking for young people, adding: "We're waiting for things to get worse." ******** #7 Experts warn Russia's fight against TB is far from over March 22, 2002 By ERIC ENGLEMAN, Associated Press Writer MOSCOW - Despite signs of progress in the fight against tuberculosis in Russia, much more needs to be done to control the epidemic, a group of health officials and experts said Friday, two days ahead of World TB Day. The Russian government announced last month that the number of new people infected with tuberculosis had dropped slightly — from 134,000 in 2000 to 133,000 in 2001 — the first positive sign in more than a decade of fighting the disease. But health officials said it's too early to start celebrating and that Russia's battle with TB is far from over. "Mortality from tuberculosis still remains at an unacceptable level, so the fight has to continue," said Mikhail Perelman, head of the TB department at Russia's Health Ministry. Tuberculosis re-emerged with a vengeance after the breakup of the Soviet Union, including new strains resistant to traditional drug treatments. The problem is most acute in Russian prisons, full of overcrowded, poorly ventilated cells. Among the nearly 1 million prison population, 100,000 inmates have TB, and almost 30 percent are infected with drug-resistant strains. Every year, roughly 50,000 prisoners with active TB are released back into the community, many without adequate health care. Experts said ex-prisoners infected with tuberculosis need counseling to ensure that they continue treatment after their release and that they understand how to keep from passing the disease on to others. "To fight only the medical aspects of tuberculosis is to fight only half the battle," said Samantha Perkins of Merlin, a British health charity that runs one of Russia's most successful TB programs in the Siberian city of Tomsk. The Soviet health care system kept tuberculosis, a major killer in the 19th and early 20th centuries, at bay by relying on mandatory inoculations and X-ray diagnosis and by isolating patients in sanatoriums for years. That ended with the Soviet Union's 1991 collapse, when government funding collapsed and public health programs all but disappeared. More recently, the Russian government has increased spending on anti-tuberculosis programs, but many regional hospitals and clinics don't have equipment to conduct even the most basic TB tests. "Today our health institutions are not supplied adequately to screen the population, in particular the high-risk groups," Perelman said. International health organizations are also funding anti-TB efforts. But some Russian officials are reluctant to accept outside help. Russia last year rejected a dlrs 150 million loan from the World Bank for tuberculosis treatment. The loan stipulated that Russia use a heavily drug-dependent treatment — including mandatory home visits by health care workers, which many Russians considered intrusive. ******* #8 Fianancial Times (UK) 23 March 2002 BOOKS: Roubles from the rubble. Andrew Jack looks at how the new super-rich have emerged from Russia's chaos By ANDREW JACK THE OLIGARCHS: Wealth and Power in the New Russia by David Hoffman Perseus Press Pounds 19.99 / Public Affairs Dollars 30, 567 pages As the Soviet Union crumbled in the late 1980s, cracks emerged in the surreal communist economic system which presented unparalleled opportunities for personal enrichment for those with brains and contacts. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an activist in the Komsomol youth organisation, exploited a legal loophole allowing him to take the worthless "non-cash" accounting roubles used by planners and managers and convert them into very real cash which he switched into dollars for deposit abroad. Vladimir Potanin, a son of the Soviet elite, pulled strings to gain effective control of a state bank, and then - at a time when there was no central treasury - persuade leading government departments to deposit their money with him, providing considerable opportunities to boost his income. Alexander Smolensky, an earthy builder who constructed country homes for the party elite, benefited from the "mistaken" borrowing of millions of dollars in funds provided to his fledgling financial institution by the central bank on the back of faked money transfer orders. Vladimir Gusinksy, a mercurial theatre director, was able to play on his contacts with Moscow's powerful mayor Yuri Luzhkov to receive buildings without charge for redevelopment, on the condition that ownership of the majority of the apartments was handed back to the city once the work was completed. In the chaos of the 1990s, these men and a handful of others emerged as "oligarchs". They became politically influential on the back of their rapidly acquired wealth, but they then vastly increased their riches by exploiting their power in the corridors of government and the Kremlin itself. In his well-written book, David Hoffman, who was the head of the Washington Post's Moscow bureau for six years of that turbulent period, offers one of the most wide-ranging and sober of several recent descriptions of the oligarchs during the painful past decade of change in Russia. He is particularly strong in tracing the wild early histories of this group of men, many of whom still wield enormous influence in Russia, and are doing their best to convert themselves into respectable western-style executives, complete with corporate governance rhetoric and fast-expanding philanthropic programmes. He focuses on the tight connections between some of them, and highlights a short-lived, exclusive club on Sparrow Hills overlooking Moscow which brought them together for fortnightly dinners. He shows the networking role of Pyotr Aven, one-time minister and a partner in the powerful Alfa conglomerate today, who first introduced the economists Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar to each other, forming the basis of a liberal reformist group that still dominates much Russian policy-making. Aven was also in at the start of the creation of the business empire of the future tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who worked at the same academic institute as Aven's father. He went on to introduce Berezovsky to Valentin Yumashev, a friend of Yeltsin, paving the way for Berezovsky to become the "grey cardinal" of the Kremlin. Hoffman is careful to stress - if only in passing - the constraints that helped explain the widely discussed scandals of the era: the legal and institutional vacuum that meant that anything went; and the political compromises that were arguably necessary at the time of a weak state and fears of a return to communism. But his account - for all its 500 pages - is still far from definitive, and he has arguably sacrificed the greater original depth that he could have provided into the oligarchs' activities, in favour of the broader sweep of contemporary Russian history of the 1990s already frequently written about elsewhere. As a result, the book feels less like an insider's account than that, for example, of my colleague Chrystia Freeland, who described revealing phone calls between the oligarchs even as they spoke with her. Hoffman faced understandable prac-tical difficulties in his investigations. When two people meet in Russia, there are usually three contradictory accounts of what went on, which change radically as time goes on, before it turns out that those who made critical decisions were other people entirely. Nonetheless, most of the characters he describes get off rather lightly. The "body trail" that accompanied the struggle for control of business assets is glossed over, and the reader is left with many questions about the bribes, influence-peddling and threats behind the restructuring of the 1990s. Hoffman seems over-generous to Smolensky, who appears to have systematically removed depositors' money from his SBS-Agro bank long before the August 1998 default served as a con-venient excuse; and he glosses over those who have felt the negative side of Luzhkov's Moscow machine. In the absence of greater verifiable information, it would have been good to hear more from the oligarchs themselves on their opinions of their ascension, their changing relations with power and their future mission. One could quibble over whether the influence of the oligarchs in the past decade has been over-played, or which of them are the most worthy of attention. More importantly - as so often is the case in the moving target of Russia - events had shifted radically by the time of this book's publication. While some remain influential, others - notably Gusinsky and Berezovsky - have fled into exile. The relations of those who remain with Vladimir Putin are starkly different. Hoffman has captured a past period well, but it is one that is already being consigned to history. ******* #9 BBC Monitoring Russian environmentalist against MP's proposal to resume nuclear tests Source: Ekho Moskvy news agency, Moscow, in Russian 1050 gmt 23 Mar 02 [No dateline as received] President of the Russian centre for environmental policy [academician] Aleksey Yablokov sees no logic in a suggestion that Russia should resume nuclear tests, recently made by [former deputy defence minister, now leading member of pro-government Fatherland-All Russia faction in the State Duma] Andrey Kokoshin. "We would again join the arms race. I see neither geopolitical, nor economic, nor strategic logic in it. What I see is a boyish desire to score off someone," Yablokov said in a live interview with Ekho Moskvy radio. Kokoshin, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee for Industry, Construction and High Technology, said that Russia might resume nuclear tests speaking at the ongoing 10th assembly of the Russian Council on External and Defence Policy. He said that new nuclear tests on the Novaya Zemlya testing range would be quite possible if the United States continues to work on its nuclear programme. "Of course, America's decision to prepare for more nuclear tests prompts our military to do the same. It would be silly, because we and Americans have different problems," Yablokov said. He said that Russia has enough weapons to provide for strategic deterrence. ******* #10 The Russia Journal March 22-28, 2002 The battle of Pskov By ALEXANDER GOLTS Military officials may have been dragging their heels, but it looks as if President Vladimir Putin has finally managed to get them to prepare for genuine military reform. Maj.-Gen. Valery Astanin, a high-placed officer at General Staff, said the Defense Ministry has sent a draft program for gradual change to a contract Army to the government, which will soon examine the proposal. The program should be reported to Putin by June 1. Optimists would say that things are finally going in the right direction. Last year, military officials said it would take them up until 2005 just to study the issue and make their calculations. Now that Putin has approved proposals drawn up by the Union of Right Forces as a basis for military reform, a state program for the changeover to a contract Army is to be ready by the end of 2003. It’s easy to understand Putin’s impatience to get the process under way. He can’t help but notice what the military brass tries to ignore – namely, that the Armed Forces have entered a new stage of degradation. Armed soldiers are deserting virtually every day, all around the country, both from ordinary garrisons and elite units. What’s more, in three years Russia will enter a "demographic trough"that will see the number of conscript-age young men drop dramatically. But it would be naive to think Russian generals will give up the conscript Army so easily. Military officials now propose beginning the changeover with an "experiment."While visiting the 76th airborne paratroops division in Pskov, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said this unit would be the first to go over to an exclusively contract basis (contract soldiers currently make up 15 percent of the paratroopers). "By mid-2003, we will be able to give precise figures on paper for how much a contract Army will cost to maintain, rather than just guessing,"Ivanov said. But military bureaucrats want nothing more than for the experiment in the 76th division to fail (or at least be declared a failure). For a start, doing the changeover unit by unit looks like a dubious approach. It would seem more logical to spend the available funds on quickly setting up educational facilities to train the body of professional sergeants who will be essential if the changeover is to go ahead at minimal cost. But instead, the military officials plan to use the 76th division to prove to Putin that the state can’t afford to abandon conscription. In December last year, Vladislav Putilin, head of the General Staff’s Chief Organization and Mobilization Department, said that it would cost at least 500 million rubles to put just one division on a contract basis. Then it suddenly occurred to the generals that maybe 500 million wasn’t frightening enough for Putin, and before Ivanov’s meeting in the Pskov division, Putilin gave journalists a new figure – 1 billion rubles. After the meeting, it turned out the figure had grown to several billion rubles. In the generals’ opinion, the main costs won’t even be wages for the contract soldiers (at least 4,000 rubles a month), but new infrastructure. In particular, defense officials propose providing every soldier with a one-room service apartment. Up until now, no Russian state agency, not even the FSB or the prosecutors’ office, has made such a requirement a condition of its work. It’s obvious that no state agency can fulfill this condition. Nor should it be forgotten that around 100,000 officers are already without apartments at the moment. The generals also point out with a certain spiteful glee that the billions of rubles needed for their Pskov experiment haven’t been provided for in the 2002 budget and that extra billions will have to be found somewhere if the experiment is to begin as planned in autumn. That the 76th division should have been chosen a guinea pig is an intrigue all of its own. Paratroops commander Georgy Shpak thinks the division was chosen because it’s one of the best in the entire Armed Forces, and because the paratroopers already have experience with contract soldiers through having served in peacekeeping forces in Abkhazia, Bosnia and Kosovo. But skeptics say the General Staff has already planned to make sure the experiment fails and wants to then put the blame on Shpak, who head of the General Staff Anatoly Kvashnin sees as a new rival. So long as military-reform proposals are drawn up in isolation within the walls of as specific an organization as the Defense Ministry, it will inevitably fall victim to clan interests and internal intrigues. The only way to verify the military’s cost estimates is to make them subject to open, public discussion. This is all the more so as the military-reform program was proposed not by General Staff, but by specialists from the Academy of Military Sciences and the Institute for the Economy in Transition (Gaidar Institute). But neither Putin nor Ivanov seem to have realized yet that openness is one of the main instruments for reforming the Armed Forces. While discussing the recent power cuts to military garrisons, Putin gave Ivanov a dressing down; not for letting these power cuts happen, but for the fact that the conflict between the Defense Ministry and Unified Energy Systems became public knowledge. Now Putin has no time left to try persuading military officials. He already lost 18 months before realizing that what the General Staff called military reform – merging military districts and separating the Space Forces from the Strategic Missile Forces – wasn’t reform at all. This wait has only worsened the crisis in the Armed Forces. Now military reform has to go ahead before the Army disintegrates entirely. ******** #11 The Scotsman (UK) 23 March 2002 Russian war film hits raw nerve BY CHRIS STEPHEN IN MOSCOW ALEXEI Chadov is Russia's answer to Ewan McGregor: Same looks. Same attitude. Only Chadov shoots back at the world not with a heroin needle but with a rocket launcher. The unknown actor has been made a star by the biggest film to hit Russia for years - War, a battle film set in Chechnya. Chadov plays the hero who is lean and mean but has a good heart, as he blows away "terrorists" by the fistful. Predictably, the movie follows a standard plot - lone hero out to save girl kept prisoner in Chechen dungeon. But War comes with added twists. First, the girl is British: early in the movie she is captured, together with her boyfriend - played by a British actor, Ian Kelly - while the characters are playing Shakespeare on a tour of neighbouring Georgia. The British pair are a throwback to the real life British Chechen hostages, aid workers Camilla Carr and Jon James. When Kelly's character is released, with orders to bring a oe40 million ransom for his colleague, he finds the mean Brits will not come up with the money. Instead, he turns to his only friend, Chadov, a young soldier he met while a prisoner. And the theme of art imitating life follows a familiar thread: The horrors on screen, as Chechens hack off heads, ears and fingers are all too real for most Russians: videos by Chechen warlords as they carry out these deeds have been captured and are regularly screened on Russian television. Predictably, our hero's first task is to show his friend that liberal values and knowledge of Shakespeare are no substitute for being handy with a Kalashnikov. The violence comes thick and fast, ending with a battle in which helicopter gunships roar in, killing Chechens by the dozen, over a heavy metal soundtrack. The film is the brainchild of the nationalist director Alexei Balabanov, whose previous film, Brother, featured a disgruntled Russian with a grudge against the West going on a mammoth killing spree in Chicago. War, sweeping the country just three weeks after its release, echoes the sentiments of the president, Vladimir Putin, about wiping out the Chechen "terrorists". But War is no mouthpiece for the Kremlin. Instead, the authorities are shown as just another obstacle to our hero - with the army commanders unhelpful and the secret service in league with the terrorists. In fact, the Chechens even get a good line, with one captor telling the hero that Russia will never win the war because "you are not fighting for your homeland". And while the camera dwells lovingly on the combat scenes, they are at least more realistic than the Technicolor action scenes usually dished out by Hollywood. The success of War is in fact a barometer of the national mood: One in which disenchantment with the fruits of democracy has seen even nationalism crumble before the altar of despair. In the end the hero is betrayed - he rescues the girl but is jailed for killing Chechens while no longer a soldier. His empty home life in a rundown Siberian town - rescued only by the attentions of his girlfriend - also touches a raw nerve. Where Russian films were once uplifting, Balabanov's War is simply bleak. This bleakness and emptiness is the film's most powerful feature, and its most depressing. Its success says more about today's Russia than opinion polls ever can. ******* #12 Los Angeles Times March 23, 2002 Russia Acquits 2 in 'Friendly Fire' Case Courts: Slain commander of elite police unit is blamed for the deadly incident in Chechnya. Some still believe convoy was ambushed by rebels. By MAURA REYNOLDS, TIMES STAFF WRITER MOSCOW -- The first attempt by Russian authorities to address the problem of "friendly fire" in the separatist republic of Chechnya fizzled Friday when a court acquitted two senior police officers and instead laid blame posthumously on the commander of the targeted unit. Twenty-two men from the OMON elite police force died in the firefight two years ago in the Chechen capital, Grozny, when officers from one unit fired on another unit arriving in a column of reinforcements, investigators say. The incident is considered the worst friendly fire incident in Russia's two wars in the republic. The trial has been closely watched in Russia as a measure of the government's ability to hold police and military officers accountable for mistakes under their command. Soldiers and police troops complain that poor battlefield organization and friendly fire incidents lead to unnecessary deaths and low morale in the Russian armed forces. "The case was way too scandalous to be hushed up," military analyst Alexander Golts said. "President [Vladimir V.] Putin, or someone from his closest entourage, must have issued an unwritten order to find and punish those who were responsible for such a disgraceful incident." At the time of the March 2000 incident, Russian officials blamed Chechen separatists. They said rebel fighters ambushed the arriving column of military trucks carrying OMON forces as it neared a federal checkpoint in the northwestern section of Grozny. Russian officials also accused officers from the newly formed Chechen police force of assisting the rebels. The firefight lasted two hours and left 22 Russians dead and 31 others injured. Two senior police officers--Maj. Gen. Boris Fadeyev and Col. Mikhail Levchenko--were accused of negligence for failing to provide adequate security for the convoy. The Grozny district court, which convened in a Moscow courtroom because of high public interest, acquitted both officers. In an unusual addition, however, the judges said that the commander of the arriving OMON unit, Dmitry Markelov, was at fault for improperly ordering the convoy to depart without receiving the proper paperwork. Markelov died in the firefight. "Blaming someone who is gone is incomparably easier than finding the real perpetrators of the crime," said Maj. Andrei Koryavin, acting commander of the same OMON unit, who said he had never heard of the paperwork involved. "In fact, today's court hearing did not have anything to do with finding out who actually killed our guys." The verdict appeared to satisfy few, including the acquitted defendants. "The reasons for the deaths . . . have not been established," said Liliya Ababkova, Fadeyev's lawyer. "Fifteen months of investigation went in fact down the drain." Many police officials, including the second defendant, Levchenko, continue to insist that the incident was an elaborate rebel ambush. "It was an action painstakingly planned by the rebels," Levchenko said as he left the court. "I intend to issue a statement on this." The question of who fired first remains unclear, complicated by the presence at the scene not only of the two OMON units but also of groups of ordinary police officers from Chechnya and other regions of Russia. In addition, according to documents from the prosecutor general's office made available to The Times, OMON and the Grozny-based police had received apparently incorrect intelligence that a group of rebels posing as police would be arriving in the capital that day. Critics such as Golts accuse the Interior Ministry of being slow to come to terms with the incident and contend that only pressure from the Kremlin forced the trial. Golts described Fadeyev and Levchenko as "scapegoats." "No one in the ministry, knowing what horrible mess and chaos accompany every single ministry operation in Chechnya, would ever risk exposing the ministry's dirty linen to the public gaze," Golts said. "It was much more convenient and less embarrassing for the top-ranking people at the Interior Ministry to say that the OMON unit was decimated by the Chechens rather than by their fellow policemen. Dying in real combat is less ignominious than being killed by mistake by your own guys." Koryavin, the acting commander of the OMON unit, lamented that although the investigation officially remains open, the case is likely to languish. "One thing is clear--if the real perpetrators have not been found over the past two years, it is very unlikely that they ever will," he said. Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times' Moscow Bureau contributed to this report. ******** #13 Washington Times March 23, 2002 Kazakh capital based on Washington By Christopher Pala ASTANA, Kazakhstan — Call it the first post-Soviet city. With new buildings sprouting like mushrooms and many old buildings newly clad in sidings of glass and steel, Astana, the new capital of this huge nation stretching from Europe to China, is beginning to look more like San Antonio than the decaying provincial town it was only a few years ago. Riding high on last year's 13 percent growth, 7 percent inflation, ever-increasing revenue from oil, metals and wheat as well as a new financial and banking system that Russia and Turkey can only envy, Kazakhstan is treating itself to a party of sorts: the building of a new capital. The Turkic-speaking Kazakhs are descendants of cattle-raising nomads who famously constituted the bulk of the Mongol-led armies assembled by Genghis Khan in the 13th century. Using superior horsemanship, appalling cruelty and brilliant strategy, they conquered what was at one point the biggest empire the world had — without ever building a capital. When the pendulum swung back and their former vassals, the Russians, overran their lands, Moscow was careful to rule the territory the size of Western Europe from three different centers. When the communists took over in 1920, they picked a southern city called Kyzyl Orda but moved the capital in 1929 to what was then called Alma Ata and was renamed Almaty at independence in 1991. Today, Kazakhstan is building itself the first capital it can call its own, a city with the same grandiose master plan as Washington, with a new government enclave shaped not unlike the Mall and ending with a three-story, presidential office strikingly resembling — you guessed it — the White House. Moving the capital was entirely the idea of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, the country's leader since 1988. Mr. Nazarbayev fits the ancient description of the enlightened despot. With a knack for co-opting opposition and, after some early mistakes, implementing shrewd economic policies, he rules with near-absolute power over all three branches of government. Yet human rights monitors such as the U.S. State Department have found no case of politically motivated killing and nothing more serious than harassment of the tiny opposition. Mr. Nazarbayev and his family are believed to have amassed considerable wealth and his fight against the widespread corruption lacks credibility, but most Kazakhs don't seem to mind. They generally shrug, say corruption is everywhere anyway and support him for building the foundations of a modern state, keeping harmonious relations between the Muslim Kazakh and Orthodox Russian halves of the population and attracting billion-dollar investments from U.S. oil companies that in a decade will make the country rich. Mr. Nazarbayev's motivations for moving the capital are a matter of endless speculation. Why abandon pleasant Almaty, a leafy city of 1 million people snuggled against the ever-white peaks of the Tian-Shan range that provide serviceable ski slopes? Issyk Kul, one of the world's most beautiful lakes, lies over the mountains to the south and a smaller, closer lake provides relief from the summer heat. Was it fear of losing Almaty to populous China, 170 miles away, or to an earthquake or a mudslide, as has happened before? Was it a new belief that a capital must be located in the middle of a country, a notion that a glance at any atlas reveals is more the exception than the rule? And if the capital must be moved, why choose an ugly town with a dismal history located in the windswept steppe in the middle of nowhere, where temperatures range from minus-40 degrees to 105 degrees, a much bigger range than in Almaty? An official who knows Mr. Nazarbayev well offered the most convincing explanation. "When we became independent, we went through some very bad times," he said. "Nazarbayev wanted to do something that would be big and beautiful and that he could control completely from start to finish. That's the irrational reason. "The rational reason is that he wanted to eliminate any possibility of the Russians ever claiming northern Kazakhstan," where ethnic Slavs, mostly Russians and Ukrainians, formed a majority. Astana, the northernmost big town and a railway and road hub to boot, beckoned. Built on one side of a river, it offered the other side as a place to build a whole new city. The choice showed Mr. Nazarbayev is not supersitious. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader who succeeded Josef Stalin in 1953 and also wielded huge power, decided to make the town, then called Akmolinsk, the center of a misguided attempt to turn the steppe into wheatfields, the Virgin Lands program. Khrushchev renamed the town Tselinograd (City of Virgin Lands) and supervised the importation of thousands of more-or-less enthusiastic workers called Tseliniki to build a farming infrastructure in Tselinograd. Just as today, when welding lamps flicker at night in the skeletons of new skyscrapers, Tselinograd became a huge construction site. It received a 1,200-seat theater and was getting ready to welcome the entire headquarters of the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture when Khrushchev was ousted and his grandiose plans with him. By then, the Russians had discovered what the Kazakhs had always known: the steppe is only good for grazing cattle. At independence, Tselinograd got back its old name and not much more until Mr. Nazarbayev rescued it from obscurity. A plan to turn it into the capital was approved by parliament in 1994. In December 1998, when the government officially moved and the new capital was proclaimed, it had 250,000 residents. Now it has twice that many, and most of the newcomers are Kazakhs, who dominate in the south. "We are planning to have 1 million people by 2010, but I think there will be more," said Vladimir Laptev, the city's chief architect and planner. "And they, too, will be mostly Kazakhs." Astana means "capital" in Kazakh. But the concept has a different meaning in the nomadic-rooted language: It lacks a connotation of immobility and actually means "place where decisions are made." And that's exactly what it became within four years of the initial decision. A design building served as a skeleton for parliament, the main local administration building became the presidential administration and a hotel was turned into the Foreign Ministry. All three now look brand new. Yet they are only temporary. "In 1994, we faced the decision of how to turn a small provincial town into a capital," recalled Mr. Laptev. "So we decided to give an immediate face-lift to the center, accommodate all the ministries for ten years and plan a new city on the south side of the river." While his own architectural firm designed the new S-shaped Finance Ministry and the futuristic sports complex, the city's two most striking modern buildings, hundreds of Soviet-era apartment houses with crumbling facades and unevenly windowed-in balconies received fresh paint and siding. Balconies were evenly closed. The entire city's electrical and water mains were overhauled. Though 90 percent of the city is in private hands, the face-lift was funded entirely by the government, which in 2001 ran a surplus of slightly more than 1 percent of the gross domestic product. The siding is plastic, imported from China and is designed to last 10 years. It gives the buildings an oddly American look, as do some new street signs. Both are apparently unknown anywhere else in the former Soviet Union. New buildings that incorporate penthouses and terraces — unknown in Soviet times — are starting to appear. Mr. Nazarbayev intends the city to be a center for Central Asia and founded the Lev Gumilyov Eurasian University, which is already poised to overtake Almaty's. It is named after the son of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, an academic who spent 15 years in gulags for advancing the notion that Russians and Central Asian nomads constitute a "super-ethnos" stretching from Poland to China and that Russians have more in common with them than with Europeans. Meanwhile, a prominent Japanese architect named Kisho Kurokawa, who had written a book on Central Asian nomads, won a competition to create the city's master plan. He is also designing the new airport. "We chose his plan because it best took into consideration the ecology of the place," Mr. Laptev said. It involves purifying the city's drainage and sewage water for irrigation and setting up a large-scale wind-power generation system. The plan to create what Mr. Kurokawa calls a "metabolic, symbolic ecocity of the 21st century" includes planting an irrigated forest in the southeast. The forest would lie on the undeveloped side of the Nishim River, where the ambitious new center, called New City, is being prepared. In addition to the presidential mansion and office, the center will contain all the main government institutions. "We wanted to avoid the mistake they made in Brasilia [the capital of Brazil], where the offices are on one side and the residences are on the other side," Mr. Laptev said. So the new city will also contain 8,000 apartments in two gently curving wings, schools of law and diplomacy, a diplomatic zone and a shopping mall. "Astana is the face of our people and of our government," Mr. Nazarbayev proclaimed. ******* #14 From: Michael Parrish [parrish1@indiana.edu] Sent: Friday, March 22, 2002 Subject: New book Birstein, Vadim J. THE PERVERSION OF KNOWLEDGE, THE TRUE STORY OF SOVIET SCIENCE. Boulder, Co: Westview Press. 200l.490p. $ 32.50. ISBN 0 8133-3907-3 A powerful account of the tragic and brutal consequences of the Communist Party/KGB control over Soviet scientists and intelligentsia. Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Russian-American geneticist and historian Birstein's first trade book is the story of "the state control of science in the Soviet Union." A comprehensive history of how Russian scientists were ruled by their government from the Bolshevik revolution through its post-perestroika present, the volume focuses especially on doctors who conducted state-authorized experiments on political prisoners while developing poisons and chemical weaponry that were eventually used in a rash of political assassinations during the 1950s and '60s by way of covert weapons such as umbrella tips and poisoned bullets. But very little of this material reads like an Ian Fleming novel; it's more like a college textbook. With over 100 pages of notes, biographical sketches and translated materials, the text is so finely detailed that it runs the risk of confusing readers with its sheer volume of information. Moreover, most of the original documents Birstein relies upon are still classified and "these documents are... frequently written in a special metaphoric language used by NKVD/KGB offices. Only since 1997 have three fundamental reference books been published in Russian that have allowed me to put the events in Soviet science into historical context." These shortcomings are unfortunate, as the subject of state secrecy and chemical weapons development is both important and timely. In uncovering the Soviet labyrinth of plot and secrecy, Birstein builds labyrinths of his own and casual readers might not be willing to wind their way through to the end. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Speaking from personal experience and aided greatly by archival materials and reference books made accessible in the 1990s, geneticist Birstein offers a comprehensive account of 80 years of governmental control and censorship of science in the Soviet Union. He describes how academic and research scientists in the nation's scientific institutions were replaced with political functionaries who often had no knowledge of the sciences they represented. He emphasizes Stalin's favorite, the fraudulent geneticist Lysenko, and also the biochemist Mairanovsky, who in his poison lab experimented on prisoners, often fatally. Birstein graphically describes some of those experiments, as well as secret-service tortures, referring briefly to experiments on supposed volunteers in the U.S., Canada, and England. Early on he says he wants readers to ask what they would have done in the same circumstances, and later he tells the stories of several scientists who took firm ethical stands and survived. Demonstrating how science, research, and education were frighteningly perverted, he provokes concern about Russia's current lack of support for science and how dangerous it may be. William Beatty Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved *******