Johnson's Russia List
#6164
31 March 2002
davidjohnson@erols.com
A CDI Project
www.cdi.org

[Note from David Johnson:
  1. Reuters: Ukraine votes in poll crucial for Kuchma's future.
  2. Washington Times: Natalia Feduschak, Donetsk region pursues its own path.
  3. Washington Post editorial: Ukraine's Unfair Choice. 
  4. Reuters: Russia agrees to lift ban on U.S. poultry in April.
  5. The Sunday Times (UK): Mark Franchetti, Russian returns after 13 years
of 
Chechen slavery.
  6. Toronto Star: Oliva Ward, Danger seen in sale of nuclear savvy. 
Moscow is pushing to capitalize on nuclear expertise — with few safeguards. 
  7. New York Times: John Freedman, Total Theater, Starring Puppets.(Shadow
Theater)
  8. Newsweek International: Owen Matthews, The Next Move is Check. If the
oil contest 
around the Caspian Sea isn’t quite over, at least the national and big
corporate
winners are starting to emerge. A look at the new oil-rich.
  9. Washington Times editorial: Russians for peace.
  10. Nezavisimaya Gazeta:  Armen Khanbabyan, Mikhail Khodarenok, AMERICAN
MARINES 
ON THE STEPPES OF KAZAKHSTAN. Growing American influence means less Russian 
influence in Central Asia.
  11. The Sunday Times (UK): Lydia SLater, Why Moscow is now party central.
Serious ravers could soon be swapping Balearic sunshine for subzero
temperatures.
  12. Interfax: Russia faces choice between Nazism and democracy,
tycoon-in-exile 
tells liberals. (Berezovsky)
  13. The Russia Journal: Ira Straus, Whittling down the new Russia-NATO
set-up.]

*******

#1
Ukraine votes in poll crucial for Kuchma's future
By Elizabeth Piper
  
KIEV, March 31 (Reuters) - Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma predicted
victory on Sunday for parties supporting him in a parliamentary election
marked by charges of vote-rigging and growing calls from opposition parties
for his impeachment. 

The fragmented opposition has accused pro-Kuchma parties of Soviet-style
media manipulation and widespread election violations during a brutish
campaign, marred on its eve by the murder of a parliamentary candidate. 

The president, who survived a political crisis last year over his alleged
involvement in the murder of a reporter critical of his rule, has denied
the charges and said he hoped for stability after the election. 

The West sees the election, which is crucial for Kuchma if he wants
constitutional changes to allow him to run for a third presidential term in
two years time, as a key test of Ukraine's young democracy and commitment
to reforms. 

Decked in the yellow and blue national flag, Ukrainians milled around the
capital's main street, where rival politicians predicted victory within
hours of the polls opening. 

Kuchma, whose wavering policies over six years allowed corruption to
flourish and the economy to stagnate, said he had voted for the
conservative head of his administration. 

"The development of Ukraine will remain the same," Kuchma said after voting
at a school in central Kiev, adding that the election would be a prelude
for a 2004 presidential poll. 

"I hope that commonsense will prevail. Ukraine's future hangs on this
election -- a choice between development and stagnation." 

WEST WATCHES BITTER CAMPAIGN 

Some 37 million voters are registered in the state about the size of
France. First results are due early on Monday with exit polls available
soon after voting ends at 8 p.m. (1700 GMT). 

Western officials and investors are closely watching the ballot -- the
third since Ukraine won independence in 1991 -- and are keen to see the
country embrace stalled reforms and become a stable buffer zone to an
expanding European Union. 

Almost 1,000 foreign observers, led by the Organisation for Security and
Cooperation in Europe, are present. 

The three-month election campaign pitted a reformist former prime minister,
Viktor Yushchenko, against Volodymyr Lytvyn, head of Kuchma's
administration. Lytvyn, leader of For United Ukraine, forecast a majority
for his party. 

"The bloc has support, we will get the largest number of votes and become
the largest faction in parliament," he said, dismissing allegations of
vote-fixing. 

The victory of the so-called party of power is vital if Kuchma is to secure
the constitutional change needed to allow him to seek re-election in 2004.
But polls show his bloc trailing the second-placed Communists, who vow to
slow reforms. 

Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko said he would push for Kuchma's
impeachment if his party won. 

"We shall continue to insist that our bill on the impeachment procedure be
considered in parliament," Interfax Ukraine news agency quoted Symonenko as
saying. 

Yulia Tymoshenko, an outspoken critic of Kuchma and one of Ukraine's most
charismatic politicians, said her opposition bloc would also lobby for his
removal. "I have no doubt that the authorities are preparing to falsify the
results," she said. 

Yushchenko, clear opinion poll favourite among opposition parties,
predicted victory for liberals. 

"I think that this year democratic forces will beat the leftists for the
first time...I am convinced of that," he said. 

Yushchenko won a large following when he helped implement reforms that paid
previously withheld wages and pensions. 

He has led a chorus of complaints over Soviet-style ballot-rigging, media
manipulation and intimidation. The election was also marred by the murder
of a little-known pro-Kuchma candidate in western Ukraine on Friday. 

Concerns over media freedoms deepened when the headless corpse of reporter
Georgiy Gongadze was found in November 2000. The release of tapes in which
a voice alleged to be Kuchma's discussed Gongadze's kidnap sparked Kiev's
biggest political scandal in a decade. Kuchma has denied any involvement. 

(Additional reporting by Olena Horodetska) 

*******

#2
Washington Times
March 31, 2002
Donetsk region pursues its own path 
By Natalia A. Feduschak

     DONETSK, Ukraine — The first thing that strikes a returning visitor
here is the number of blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags that line the main
boulevard, Universitetska Street. They are everywhere in this mainly
Russian-speaking city: at every stoplight, lamp post and street corner. 
     Indeed, so many banners have appeared in the past five years that
Donetsk may well display more of the national insignia than the capital, Kiev.
     "What did you expect," asked Victor Janukovich, governor of the
Donetsk region. "This is our symbol."
     Political parties in today's parliamentary race will closely watch the
returns in both the eastern and western parts of Ukraine. A victory in the
west will signal they have won the Europe-oriented, nationalistic region.
Strong showings in the east, however, will prove they have the support of
the nation's backbone; elections are usually won or lost here.
     Whoever wins today will face a nation united in its contempt for the
ruling elite — particularly President Leonid Kuchma — and by a desire to
give anyone else a chance to lead and by the fervent hope the country will
move forward politically and economically.
     With 5 million residents, the Donetsk region is the ultimate political
prize. It is also the trickiest. Parliament will have to contend with local
leaders who have little tolerance for Kiev and the centralization it
represents.
     That won't be an easy task. In the 10 years since Ukraine became
independent from the Soviet Union, the Donetsk region has increasingly
forged its own path. To Kiev's dismay, it created a special economic zone,
formulated its own energy policy, is forging investment ties with
neighboring Russia and is trying to keep more tax revenues at home, rather
than sending them to the national capital.
      Indeed, in the relationship between the region and the center, it is
Donetsk, not Kiev, that calls the shots, according to political analysts.
     That is not entirely surprising. Many of Kiev's current leaders have
ties to the neighboring region of Dnipropetrovsk, which has been at odds
with Donetsk for a very long time. As Donetsk's economic fortunes have
grown, so has its political muscle.
     The result is a region transformed.
     The city of Donetsk, the regional capital, no longer resembles the
drab coal mining town it was several years ago. Instead, the downtown of
this city — population, 1.1 million — is made up of sleek shops displaying
the latest European fashions. Round-the-clock grocery stores are
commonplace, as are the Toyota Land Cruisers and BMWs parked in front of them.
     The regional government is experimenting with wind power, hoping to
eventually lessen its dependence on coal.
     "Our region makes up more than 20 percent of Ukraine's GDP," said Mr.
Janukovich, a towering man who fits well into his smartly cut suits. "Our
relationship with the center is normal. But we also need to have economic
development within this region."
     The pro-presidential political bloc For a United Ukraine is expected
to do well here, along with Ukraine's Communist Party. Yet it is the Party
of the Regions, which advocates greater regional autonomy, that is the
dominant political force.
     Mr. Janukovich remains mum about his allegiance, but is believed to be
a sympathizer. Despite urging, he opted not to run for parliament, saying
he could do more good at home as governor.
     Like others, Mr. Janukovich said he believes these elections will be a
uniting, not divisive, force.
     "Political activism is growing," he said. "If before there was a
division between eastern and western Ukraine, now there's more of a
consolidation. We are united in our questions."
     On the other side of Ukraine, in the provincial town of Buchach,
Mariyka Hnyp stood on the porch of her dilapidated home, looking across a
field planted in potatoes, beets and red poppies.
     "I like Yulia Tymoshenko," said Mrs. Hnyp, a former political prisoner
who spent eight years in a Siberian labor camp. "This country needs people
like that."
     She agreed that unhappiness with the current regime has played a role
in uniting the region. Mrs. Hnyp has also gained admiration for the people
of the east; they have business savvy that her own people should learn.
     Western Ukraine, home to more than 30 percent of the country's 49
million people, doesn't have the kind of wealth Donetsk has. It has always
been an agricultural region; here, plains of wheat greet the visitor as far
as the eye can see. Unlike in the east, where cities seem to endlessly
merge one into another, the centuries-old villages that mark the western
Ukrainian countryside seem more an accompaniment to the landscape, rather
than its dominant feature.
     Unemployment here is high — many families have been separated for
years as mothers and wives have fled to Portugal, Italy or the Czech
Republic to find work as housekeepers or prostitutes. Indeed, in some
villages women are scarce. At a wedding last summer, one burly man told a
foreign reporter he hadn't seen his wife — who is working as a maid in
Italy — for two years.
     "I'm raising our three children on my own," he said sadly. "I doubt
she'll be back. I think she has found someone else."
     Both Mrs. Tymoshenko, whose political party is named after her, and
Our Ukraine's Victor Yushchenko are expected to sweep western Ukraine. Mr.
Yushchenko, with his love for anything Ukrainian, is seen as a true patriot. 
     Mrs. Tymoshenko, although an easterner from Dnipropetrovsk by birth,
has won points because of her gutsy break with the president and ruling
elite. Despite repeatedly accusing her of corruption and money laundering,
Kiev authorities have been unable to make the charges stick.
     "These people can make economic reforms happen," said Mrs. Hnyp. "You
see what's happening. Why should our people go abroad to make a better life?"

*******

#3
Washington Post
March 31, 2002
Editorial
Ukraine's Unfair Choice 

PRESIDENT LEONID Kuchma is not on the ballot for Ukraine's parliamentary
election today, but he does have an enormous amount at stake. Ever since
the appearance of tape recordings last year linking the president to the
kidnapping and beheading of an opposition journalist, the parliamentary
opposition has been trying to impeach Mr. Kuchma. There are a host of other
criminal allegations to investigate -- most recently a charge that new
tapes implicate Mr. Kuchma in illegal arms trafficking by Ukraine to Iraq.
If it does not pursue impeachment, the next parliament is likely to decide
on Mr. Kuchma's attempt to change the constitution so he can run for a
third term. So, not surprisingly, the president is doing everything in his
power to sway the election toward a pro-government alliance, even though it
has registered at single digits in the polls.

What is surprising is that the president of a country that has struggled to
consolidate its independence from Russia has been willing to use
anti-democratic tactics and anti-American rhetoric to advance his personal
cause at the expense of the chance for real reform in Eastern Europe's
largest nation. According to election monitors in Ukraine, the
state-controlled media have heavily favored Mr. Kuchma's For United Ukraine
bloc, while covering the opposition only through attacks. Opposition
rallies have repeatedly suffered mysterious power blackouts, as have local
radio and television stations that have tried to interview opposition
leaders. The monitors have been inundated with reports of state officials
ordering workers to campaign or vote for pro-government parties and of
local voting lists that include thousands of invalid names. One recent poll
showed that only 4 percent of Ukraine's voters expect the elections to be
fair.

Under these circumstances, it seems appropriate that the U.S. House of
Representatives would have passed a resolution urging the government to
ensure that the elections are democratic, fair and transparent. Yet Mr.
Kuchma expressed outrage over the resolution, calling it "unprecedented."
His indignation about outside interference does not extend to Russia, whose
ambassador, Viktor Chernomyrdin, has issued ringing endorsements of Mr.
Kuchma's party as well as the Communist Party, while condemning the
opposition alliance as "anti-Russian." In fact, Mr. Kuchma's anti-American
statement echoed one made the day before by Mr. Chernomyrdin, who suggested
that Ukraine "make a statement to the effect that [voters] in the United
States elected one president but are ruled by another."

In fact, something like that may be the result of Ukraine's elections. The
opposition alliance, led by former prime minister Viktor Yushchenko, is far
ahead in the opinion polls. Thanks to his strong record of economic reform
and pro-Western views, Mr. Yushchenko is easily the country's most popular
politician. Nevertheless, Ukraine's complicated election system, which
assigns many parliamentary seats to local district elections, may well
produce a result that could keep Mr. Kuchma's cronies in power --
especially when the government's manipulations are factored in. That would
be unfortunate, not only because of the manifest corruption and
unpopularity of Mr. Kuchma's regime but because the president is standing
in the way of the political and economic reforms that might allow his
country to achieve the gains realized by many of its post-Communist
neighbors. Ukraine deserves better.

*******

#4
Russia agrees to lift ban on U.S. poultry in April
By Aleksandras Budrys
  
MOSCOW, March 31 (Reuters) - Russia agreed on Sunday to lift a ban on poultry 
imports from the United States next month, removing an irritant in relations 
ahead of a May summit between presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush. 

"We are really pleased to have defused the immediate crisis," U.S. ambassador 
Alexander Vershbow told a news briefing. 

"With the visit of President Bush just two months away, we need to start 
working to expand our areas of cooperation now that this obstacle appears to 
have been removed." 

Russia slapped the ban on imports of chicken and turkey, citing concerns 
including salmonella contamination and the use of antibiotics in feed. 

Vershbow said the two sides earlier on Sunday clinched the agreement under 
which Moscow will lift a ban on imports of U.S. poultry by April 10, subject 
to certain conditions. 

The ban, imposed on March 10, was one of several difficulties bedevilling 
relations ahead of the May 23-26 summit in Moscow and St Petersburg. 

Other differences focus on attempts to clinch an accord on slashing strategic 
nuclear arsenals, with Russia suspicious of U.S. plans to store rather than 
destroy warheads. Russia is also upset at the imposing of new U.S. tariffs on 
steel imports. 

Russia is the largest market for U.S. poultry products. Last year, the United 
States shipped about $640 million worth of poultry to Russia, making it the 
top U.S. customer. 

POULTRY NUMBER ONE PROBLEM 

"Therefore it is not surprising that this dispute has become the number one 
problem in the U.S.-Russia relations in the past month," Vershbow said. 

"It has engaged at least five cabinet ministers on my side, and even 
President George W.Bush, who has spoken to President Putin directly about 
this." 

Under a protocol agreement, a copy of which was made avilable to reporters, 
the United States agreed to exclude temporarily 14 poultry plants from a list 
of exporters, pending inspection of sanitary conditions. 

The U.S. side also agreed to provide assurances against counterfeit 
veterinary certificates. 

"After the U.S. side fully complies with the actions...the Russian veterinary 
service will lift the temporary ban on U.S. poultry meat exports before April 
10, 2002," the protocol said. 

Vershbow said Russian experts would fly to the United States next week to 
visit plants and ports and to learn more about the U.S. food safety 
inspection and certification system. 

Other issues raised in the course of the negotiations will be discussed 
separately, Vershbow said. 

"The issue of antibiotics and other substances used in the poultry processing 
is a subject for discussions in the next phase of our negotiations," he said. 

*******

#5
The Sunday Times (UK)
31 March 2002
Russian returns after 13 years of Chechen slavery
Mark Franchetti, Moscow 
 
THIRTEEN years have passed since the day Vladimir Yepishin vanished. His
relatives lost hope of seeing him again, his house was given away and the
police stopped looking for him. Everyone thought he had died. 

Last week, however, he returned home to tell of an ordeal more reminiscent
of medieval times than modern Russia. 

After being lured into a trap in the summer of 1989, he was abducted and
taken to the breakaway republic of Chechnya by a criminal gang that sold
him as a slave. He was sold on 10 times and twice passed between warlords
as a “present”. Still only 49, and having lost his teeth and the sight in
one eye, Yepishin looks old and broken. 

“I thought that I would die there,” he said. 

Yepishin was first smuggled to Ingushetia, a region neighbouring Chechnya,
from Yaroslav, a town 200 miles northeast of Moscow. Two Ingush men invited
him to dinner and plied him with drink. He was lured onto a train with the
promise of a better job in Moscow. 

“When I sobered up a bit I said I wanted to go home,” recalled Yepishin.
“But they had taken away my passport.” 

His first master kept him for nearly two years. He was then sold on in
Chechnya, where he lived through two wars. 

The worst treatment he endured was at the hands of a vicious warlord, Amin,
who beat him with the butt of a Kalashnikov. “I tried to escape but was
caught,” recalled Yepishin. “Amin forced me to walk with a heavy metal
stove on my back. I was coughing blood.” 

Nearly four years ago Ramil Gamilov, another Russian slave in Chechnya, was
freed after seven years, unaware that the Soviet Union had collapsed. 

According to the Russian Mothers’ Committee, some 800 Russian soldiers are
being held in Chechnya. However, the Kremlin may soon disband a state
commission that has tried to find and free them. 

Two years ago, when the Russian campaign against Chechen rebels was at its
height, Yepishin was forced on foot across mountains under attack by MiG
fighter jets. He was held in Georgia’s Pankisi gorge, where American
soldiers are poised to root out Islamic militants believed to be close to
Al-Qaeda. 

He was freed there earlier this month with the help of a Russian journalist. 

“To them I was nothing,” said Yepishin. “For Chechens, having a Russian
slave is a status symbol. I didn’t exist. I thought it would never end.”
 
*******

#6
Toronto Star
March 31, 202
Danger seen in sale of nuclear savvy 
Moscow is pushing to capitalize on nuclear expertise — with few safeguards 
By Olivia Ward
EUROPEAN BUREAU 
MOSCOW 

AT RUSSIA'S oldest nuclear power station, a rundown establishment near St.
Petersburg, some despondent employees have taken to vodka to get them
through their shifts. 

Others have joined the country's growing legion of hard drug users. Two
have died of heroin overdoses.

Meanwhile, in the once-elite, closed "nuclear cities" that dot the Siberian
landscape, more than 100,000 skilled nuclear scientists and weapons
technicians are figuring out ways to survive on pay that is lower than the
cost of living.

Western officials have long known about the potential dangers that abound
in the former Soviet Union's nuclear complex. 

Now, there is added cause for alarm: the threat of deadly nuclear secrets,
technology and materials finding their way to rogue states and terror
groups eager to join a jihad against the West.

"The danger certainly exists," warns Maxim Shingarkin, a Greenpeace Russia
anti-nuclear campaigner. "The nuclear industry wants to make money, so it
is becoming commercialized. The scientists and technicians are only part of
the problem."

Since Sept. 11, people around the world have looked on in horror as one
science-fiction threat after another surfaced as a real possibility.

U.S. President George W. Bush has warned that three nations in an "axis of
evil" — North Korea, Iraq and Iran — are trying to acquire new weapons of
mass destruction to use against the West.

At the same time, there are persistent reports of plans by Osama bin
Laden's Al Qaeda network to build nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
And bin Laden has publicly stated it is a "religious duty" to do so.

All those interested in developing such deadly weapons know the benefits of
hiring experts who could save them years of trial and error. And they are
also aware that the former Soviet Union is awash with personnel and
materials vital for their devastating schemes.

The nuclear ministry, Minatom, denies that it has had any dealings with
North Korea. But Russia has in the past worked with Iraq on nuclear-power
projects and its co-operation with Iran to develop a nuclear reactor
program goes back to 1992.

Russian scientists and nuclear personnel are a common sight in Tehran and
other Iranian cities, sparking anxiety in Washington. 

Moscow is also training Iranian scientists at Russian nuclear plants and
educating young Iranian physicists and mathematicians at a prestigious
Russian scientific institute.

"This is very alarming," says Alexei Yablokov, a former presidential
adviser and head of the Environmental Policy Institute. 

"The plans that Iran has for developing atomic energy are, of course, aimed
at the goal of creating a nuclear bomb." 

Yablokov is one of the few high-profile Russians to speak out against the
danger of selling nuclear secrets and materials to unstable, if not
belligerent, states. 

Most politicians are silent on the issue or publicly support a policy that
seeks to capitalize on nuclear expertise — a policy that the Russian
nuclear ministry says is necessary to keep the country's sagging nuclear
complex afloat. 

Officials insist their contracts are strictly for peaceful nuclear
development, to aid countries that need help in supplying their people with
heat and electricity. 

They also point out such trade partnerships are geopolitically advantageous
to Russia and symbolize independence from the West.

Minatom and its business arm, Rosenergo, show no signs of slacking in their
pursuit of commercial contracts. Some would argue they have little choice.

In 1998, when a new civilian director, Yevgeny Adamov, took over Minatom,
the ministry faced a deep financial crisis. Its government subsidies were
declining as the Russian markets crashed and only 20 per cent of the
operating expenses for designing, building, overseeing and dismantling
Russia's domestic power plants and nuclear weapons were being met.

Strikes, layoffs and plummeting morale resulted, along with an escalating
number of safety violations at nuclear plants. Some of the power facilities
were threatened with bankruptcy.

Under such dire conditions, Adamov made strenuous efforts to cut costs and
find new sources of money. Not surprisingly, he looked outside Russia for
revenue. As a result of these changes and an upturn in the Russian economy,
the ministry has recently been able to raise salaries and begin the mammoth
task of updating antiquated equipment in nuclear plants. 

But some observers do not share the new confidence in Russia's nuclear
industry.

"The ministry is the controller of all the nuclear resources — and that
includes people," says Shingarkin. "Minatom is exporting people. They can
make a profit that way. And later, when the power stations are built in
countries like Iran, they have long-term agreements to service them."

Although there is no evidence that the ministry is sending its scientists
to build nuclear weapons in rogue states, control over skilled personnel in
post-Communist Russia is no longer iron-clad. 

The possibilities for freelance peddling of nuclear expertise are
considerable in the 21st century, especially when the experts have little
to look forward to at home.

"The contracts in foreign countries are very advantageous for our
specialists," says Ivan Gradobitov of the Union of Atomic Energy Workers.
"They get paid by those countries and make better wages.

"Of course, there's always danger (of selling secrets). But we hope it's
going to be possible to control it."

Iran, Iraq and China are the main countries that hire Russian experts,
Gradobitov says. And among the travelling scientists and technicians are
employees of the cash-strapped St. Petersburg nuclear plant. 

"About 10 experts went to foreign countries from the plant," says Oleg
Bodrov of the Green World environmental group in nearby Sosovny Bor. "I
know that they participated in work on a power station in Iraq, for
instance. They were outstanding specialists and their work was very
successful."

Russia steadfastly denies it is taking part in any military nuclear
programs in the countries where its experts are working. 

But the United States, which is embarking on a massively expensive missile
defence program to counter intercontinental ballistic missiles, has played
up the possibility that hostile countries might be on the road to
developing the catastrophic weapons.

However, Russian scientists familiar with nuclear weapons programs say none
of the "axis of evil" states has the kind of delivery systems needed to
attack the United States. 

In the case of Iran, the program was moving slowly and haphazardly, said
one missile scientist who spent five years observing Tehran's progress
toward developing new weapons systems. 

"It was a huge mess," Vadim Vorobei recently told the New York Times,
explaining that Iran's missiles could travel little more than 1,000
kilometres and were incapable of landing anywhere near the United States,
nearly 10,000 kilometres away.

North Korea, whose missile program is more advanced, has recently cut back.
And Iraq is under heavy scrutiny from the international community and faces
imminent attack from the United States.

More immediately worrying than large-scale national programs to develop
nuclear missiles are reports Al Qaeda has been working toward obtaining
small, portable nuclear weapons or radioactive materials for a "dirty bomb"
that could be set off with conventional explosives but contaminate a large
territory.

Over the past five years, articles in the Arabic press have claimed that
bin Laden hired Russian and Iraqi scientists to develop a reactor that
could produce nuclear materials for a "suitcase bomb."

Notes and blueprints seized from Taliban strongholds during the war in
Afghanistan contained diagrams and instructions on creating nuclear weapons
and radioactive conventional bombs. 

A small nuclear bomb weighing about 60 kilograms is capable of destroying
several city blocks and contaminating the area where it was detonated for
decades.

There have also been allegations that money gained from large-scale Afghan
drug sales was used by Al Qaeda to finance a nuclear program. 

According to the news magazine Al-Watan Al-Arabi, bin Laden created an
underground laboratory to convert stolen, highly radioactive nuclear
warheads from the former Soviet Union into miniature nuclear weapons that
could be used for terror attacks.

The process could take many years to complete, however, and scientists say
creating a portable nuclear bomb is more complex and technically
challenging than making a simple "dirty" weapon that would accomplish the
same effect for a terrorist.

Either way, the very mention of nuclear terrorism strikes fear into the
hearts of politicians and ordinary people. 

The United States feels especially vulnerable. Even before the Sept. 11
attacks, Washington was well aware of the dangers posed by nuclear terrorism.

"The most urgent, unmet national security threat to the U.S. today is the
danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-usable material in
Russia could be stolen and sold to terrorists or hostile nations and used
against American troops abroad or citizens at home," concluded a U.S.
government task force in 2001.

It cited hair-raising examples of attempted nuclear smuggling, including a
plan by four Russian sailors from a nuclear submarine in the Far East to
make off with radioactive material stolen from the vessel's safe.

As well, an employee of a Russian nuclear research centre was caught trying
to sell secret nuclear weapons designs to Iraqi- and Afghan-based agents
for the equivalent of $4.5 million.

Such discoveries led American opponents of the lavishly expensive Strategic
Defence Initiative to suggest that, instead of worrying about a
spaced-based missile defence system, Washington's money would be better
spent helping Russia safeguard its nuclear weapons, material and personnel,
including finding decently paying jobs for impoverished nuclear experts.

Several nuclear aid programs have been launched since the end of the Soviet
Union, but American politicians have not supported them with much
enthusiasm and the Bush administration appears to be on the verge of
cancelling some of them.

The task force called for as much as $30 billion (U.S.) to be set aside to
boost aid, but at present, even a fraction of the sum seems unlikely to be
allocated.

The timing of the cuts seems especially bad, because although Russia's
nuclear safety may have improved somewhat with the strengthened economy,
the increasing loss of control over nuclear materials and personnel through
creeping commercialization is creating more hazards than ever.

Apart from securing its nuclear plants, Russia also has a problem
safeguarding its huge stockpile of poorly monitored radioactive waste.

In the former Soviet republic of Georgia, on the Black Sea, a search is
under way for at least two small nuclear generators believed to be hidden
in a forest after being apparently abandoned when a Soviet military base
was shut down.

In the far-eastern Russian region of Chukotka, investigators found a more
horrifying scenario — the remains of 85 generators left along the Arctic
coast in the 1960s and '70s lying exposed on the shore of the Bering Sea.

Some of the highly radioactive devices had been stripped down for scrap
metal. A local politician called them "easy targets for a terrorist attack."

The combination of loose nuclear materials and hungry nuclear scientists is
a perilous one for Russia and for the West. And in spite of heightened fear
of terrorism, it has not got through to the leaders of either side.

"Even peaceful nuclear plants and materials can be dangerous, and there is
a real failure to understand that," Yablokov says.

"The most effective way to stop nuclear proliferation is to pay attention
to the public and environmentalists. They are the first people who notice
the danger and they're not afraid to speak out. But the authorities are not
listening."  
 
*******

#7
New York Times
March 31, 2002 
Total Theater, Starring Puppets 
By JOHN FREEDMAN 

MOSCOW -- CHILDREN in Moscow call the Shadow Theater their favorite.

Critics, enthusiastic about its productions of "Hamlet" and "Swan Lake,"
call the theater one of Russia's most innovative.

World-class artists, like the Russian theater director Anatoly Vasiliev,
the Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra and the Russian composer Aleksandr
Bakshi, call it home for their latest projects — brief, intense segments in
a program titled "The Lilikan Museum of Theatrical Ideas," which will be
unveiled at a national theater festival here. (It began last Thursday and
runs to April 15.)

Maia Krasnopolskaia, the founder of the Shadow Theater in 1988 with her
husband, Ilia Epelbaum, put it this way 20 minutes before a late-January
matinee — a puppet performance of Tchaikovsky's mystical fairy-tale opera
"Iolanta":

"This is not a puppet theater, an opera theater or a drama theater. It is
theater as a way of life, a way of existence, a way of feeling."

An hour after the performance, Mr. Epelbaum was in his office, jokingly
describing his efforts to raise the status of puppet theater. Speaking in
Russian, like his wife, he said: "Getting Vasiliev to do Molière's
`Misanthrope' as a puppet show was a big victory. It ought to raise the
prestige of the genre, although I must admit I don't even like puppet
theater."

Mr. Epelbaum, a native of Chelyabinsk, a city in south Russia near the Ural
Mountains, has lived in Moscow since his student days at the Stroganov art
institute. He likes to make quips and to speak plainly on complex subjects.

"I think we should quit breaking art into genres," he said. "Why judge
music, painting, dance, theater, puppetry and film by different standards?
That's narrow-minded. What's good is good and what is good is what should
guide us."

The Shadow Theater, on a nondescript side street about three miles
northeast of the Kremlin, is something of a misnomer. Most of its shows,
which include shadows of people and inanimate objects, dip into numerous
art forms, incorporating painting, live acting and music with stick, string
and hand-held puppets. Several recent works have made use of video —
recorded tapes as well as video transmissions of events in progress.

"Ilia was a successful commercial artist when he decided to quit and create
a theater," said Ms. Krasnopolskaia, 39, who is a trained puppeteer. "His
parents were shocked. He was 25 then and earning good money. We made an
agreement that if, by the time he turned 30, the theater wasn't a success,
we would abandon the idea."

Mr. Epelbaum, who is now 40, took up the tale: "A shadow theater seemed
closest to what an artist does on paper. But I have no education in theater
and we couldn't hold to the genre for long. I think what best describes us
is `visual theater.' Mine is the theater of an artist who begins with
visual images and then adds literature, music and other things."

The theater's first productions were straightforward puppet shows, which
attracted the attention of international puppet festivals. Soon, the
husband and wife team, often with their two children in tow, was touring
the world, including appearances in Vancouver, Chicago and Pittsburgh in
1990 and 1991. Eventually, as the theater's reputation grew, it made the
transition from a private organization to one that is municipally financed.

These days, it is often easier to see the Shadow Theater's shows outside of
Moscow than in it. Immediately upon returning from a festival in the
Siberian city of Tomsk in late January, the troupe left for a tour of Spain
in February. One period they always spend in Moscow, however, is March and
April, during Russia's annual Golden Mask national theater festival. Since
1996, when the festival jury named Mr. Epelbaum best director in the
category of puppetry for his show "The Tour of the Lilikan Grand Royal
Theater of Drama, Opera and Ballet in Russia," the Shadow Theater has been
a perennial nominee and frequent award winner.

AT this year's Golden Mask, one segment of "The Lilikan Museum of
Theatrical Ideas" — the Vasiliev-Epelbaum rendition of "The Misanthrope" —
has been nominated in the innovation category rather than the puppetry
division, endorsing Mr. Epelbaum's view that his work has taken him into
new territory.

"The Tour of the Lilikan Grand Royal Theater of Drama, Opera and Ballet in
Russia" was breathtaking in its conception, scope and detail. Its
play-within-a-play — "Two Trees," a raucous mock-Wagnerian opera enacted by
two-inch puppets on sticks — was almost an afterthought in what amounted to
an elaborate theatrical event, beginning with the arrival of the spectators.

The theater's entrance and foyer were remade into a fantasy land that
ostensibly had been transported from the legendary kingdom of Lilikania.
For the foyer, Mr. Epelbaum created a chamber imitating a grand opera house
lobby with four working puppet video screens (images painted on scrolls
were rolled to give the illusion of movement), self-service snack bars,
souvenir stands, paintings and sculptures.

After listening to Ms. Krasnopolskaia recite a comical lecture on the
history of the Lilikan people and their theater, spectators moved from the
lobby into another small room containing a remarkable miniature-scale opera
house. With its faux marble columns, the exterior of this building was as
elaborate as its interior, which held a mechanical working orchestra and
2,000 minuscule, fashionably dressed spectators. Live spectators were given
glimpses of "Two Trees" through latticed windows.

Like everything Mr. Epelbaum and Ms. Krasnopolskaia do, the show undercut
pathos, shattered preconceptions and injected a healthy dose of whimsy and
novelty into ossified theatrical forms.

Each subsequent production at the Shadow Theater has pushed the envelope
further. "Hamlet" mixed scenes from "Don Giovanni," "Eugene Onegin" and
"The Seagull" with audience-participation can-cans and just about
everything else but Shakespeare's "Hamlet." Another show, whose full title
was "P.I. Tchaikovsky. `Swan Lake.' The Opera," was presented as a great
historical discovery: the creators informed audiences that they had
unearthed the lost opera score for a work that Tchaikovsky subsequently
turned into a ballet.

"Swan Lake," like "The Tour of the Lilikan Grand Royal Theater," began in
the foyer, this time with a Gypsy musician, a fire, and the death and
burial of the traditional Russian puppet Petrushka. After that delightfully
chaotic introduction, the audience was treated to a performance in which an
actress, Natalia Barannikova, sometimes worked puppets and sometimes
stepped onto the forestage to take over the action herself. A crazed
pianist, Andrei Semionov, frequently interrupted the goings-on, which
concluded with a film clip of the entire cast — puppets and actors — taking
curtain calls. 

"The creative ideas for shows belong to Ilia," said Ms. Krasnopolskaia. "He
sees the artistic image, and every time the form is new. He creates the
visual properties and organizes them in space."

Mr. Epelbaum's latest idea is his most ambitious yet. When complete, it
will consist of a half-dozen or more 15-minute productions conceived by
various famous artists and realized in practical terms by Mr. Epelbaum. As
a nod to the Shadow Theater's most famous show, the project bears the
overall title of "The Lilikan Museum of Theatrical Ideas."

The museum's first installment is the Vasiliev-Epelbaum interpretation of
Molière's "Misanthrope." Mr. Vasiliev, known for his reclusive ways and
eminently serious productions at his School of Dramatic Art in Moscow, took
the opportunity in this mini-production to laugh not only at audiences and
theatrical conventions but at himself. His show ends with the death of a
heckling spectator and the total destruction of the theater in a fire.

Soon to come are "Rain After the Deluge," a tale about the destruction of
civilization by Mr. Guerra, who wrote some of the best scripts filmed by
Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini, and "On `The Seagull,' " a
musical mystery by Mr. Bakshi, an innovative composer.

In "Rain After the Deluge," Rome, Paris, New York and Moscow will be
depicted "as cities made of matches," Mr. Epelbaum said. "Each, in turn,
will be wiped out by a huge swell of water. Bakshi's show will be based on
the experimental play by the character Treplev within `The Seagull.' It is
an extension of Bakshi's use of sound to describe the unity of the world."

Foremost for Mr. Epelbaum is the notion of breaking down barriers and
avoiding ruts. "I am not trained in theater," he said. "And that helps me.
I never think, `Can I do this or not?' I just do what needs to be done."   
 
*******

#8
Newsweek International
April 8, 2002
The Next Move is Check 
If the oil contest around the Caspian Sea isn’t quite over, at least the
national and big corporate winners are starting to emerge. A look at the
new oil-rich 
By Owen Matthews

    It is apparently beyond the limits of journalistic restraint to tell
the story of Caspian oil as anything but a breathless spy thriller. So
every few months for many years now, another writer has discovered that the
age-old “Great Game” for control of the Caspian is entering a new and more
dangerous phase. The tale always begins with the Russians and British
battling over the region in the 19th century. It then warns that the
diplomatic intrigue continues today, with new powers and new spies
skirmishing over the always “fabulous” oil wealth of the Caspian. The tale
is no less true for being so well worn, but now there is something truly
new to say. It’s too early to declare the game over, with new intimations
of oil war and violence in the region all the time, and no one willing to
openly concede defeat. But after years of inconclusive wrangling, the Great
Game is starting to yield clear national and corporate winners. 
    THE STAKES ARE high. The Caspian Basin, at a conservative estimate,
contains about 70 billion barrels of oil, one of the richest stores of
petroleum outside the Middle East. At its simplest level, the Great Game is
about who owns the oil reserves and who controls the pipelines that carry
the oil to global markets. In recent months it’s become increasingly clear
which of the many dueling pipeline projects will actually be built. At the
same time, new surveys have also clarified which nations and companies are
truly oil-rich. Among companies, British Petroleum, ENI of Italy and (above
all) ChevronTexaco of the United States appear to hold claim to the bulk of
regional reserves, as well as crucial pipeline routes. Among countries, the
clear winner is Kazakhstan, which is now believed to hold up to 75 percent
of all Caspian reserves, much more than once thought. With 10 billion to 17
billion barrels of proven reserves, Kazakhstan is on the verge of becoming
seriously oil-rich.    
      The United States can also celebrate a strategic victory: it is now
close to achieving its goal of ending the old Russian monopoly on Caspian
export pipelines. The strategy goes back to the last days of the Soviet
Empire, when huge new oilfields were found sandwiched between its southern
fringes and Iran. Western oil majors moved in to exploit these fields, no
longer fearful of work in Russia’s backyard. Meanwhile Washington started
angling to make sure at least one new pipeline out of the Caspian would
bypass Russia by going through Turkey. This route would not only help
Caspian republics achieve real oil and economic independence from Russia,
it would also bypass Iran and diminish this U.S. rival as a player in the
region, too. More recently, the September 11 attacks raised the U.S. fear
of dependence on Arab oil, and its interest in the Caspian. So it’s good
news to Washington that the emerging corporate winner, ChevronTexaco, is
based in San Francisco, and that the pipeline battles are going America’s
way, too.
      The centerpiece of U.S. policy has been to promote a pipeline that
goes from the Caspian coast at Baku, Azerbaijan, through Georgia to the
Turkish Mediterranean Port of Ceyhan. Despite lingering doubts about the
safety of the war-torn route, financing and the size of the Azerbaijan
oilfields, construction on the $3 billion project is set to begin in June.
Oil is slated to flow by early 2005. “Everyone’s much more determined to
see this through after September 11th,” says Mike Bilbo, a spokesman at
British Petroleum, which is leading the Baku-Ceyhan project. “I think it
made people realize the importance of diversifying energy sources.”
      Russia appears to have beaten a tactical retreat. Its own oilfields
are booming, but there’s no question its influence over neighbors is
weakening. Under former president Boris Yeltsin, Russia tried hard to
derail Western oil development in the Caspian by sponsoring mini-wars. His
successor, Vladimir Putin, has chosen to give up that fight and accept
Western influence as inevitable. Moscow will still make billions from the
pipelines that cross its territory, and Russian companies hold lucrative
minority stakes in many Caspian fields, often partnered with Americans.
      So this is no longer a clear-cut front in a global cold-war battle.
Washington and Moscow are not always on opposing sides, and Russia cannot
easily control local officials in the region. Though ChevronTexaco now
controls the biggest corporate holdings, or about 50 percent of the total,
its stake in a new pipeline is in trouble, due to bureaucratic meddling.
Built by the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, or CPC, the pipe extends from the
Tengiz field in Kazakhstan to the Russian Black Sea Port of Novorossiysk.
Opened in November, the pipeline has been closed repeatedly by local
officials, disrupting the flow of ChevronTexaco oil. ”[ChevronTexaco] are
getting shaken down,” says a Western analyst. “It’s not political, it’s
just part of the corruption and inefficiency.”   
     At the same time, Putin appears to be plotting a Russian comeback. He
has been traveling around the Caspian, laying the groundwork for a regional
supply cartel, a kind of “mini-OPEC” led from Moscow. So far, he has talked
to the presidents of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan.
The Central Asians seem keener than the Azeris, who are apparently wary of
helping to revive even a shadow of the Russian Empire. Yet the potential is
there: the key to a cartel is production capacity. Under plans now in the
works, the Caspian could be producing and exporting 7 million barrels a day
by 2012, about equal to the current exports of OPEC giant Saudi Arabia.
It’s not inconceivable that Putin will one day convince Russia’s former
satellites that together they can move markets to their own advantage.
      The shifting new alliances are engaged in a clash over what has
recently been revealed as one of the world’s richest oilfields, Kashagan in
Kazakhstan. Operated by Italy’s ENI, Kashagan is due to begin pumping in
2008. Russia wants Kashagan oil to go through its pipeline network to ports
as far afield as the Baltic Sea. The United States would like to see it go
by tanker to Baku and then through the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline. ENI and the
Kazakh government are also exploring a short link to Iran’s pipeline
network and on to the Persian Gulf. “Kazakhstan is keeping its options
open,” says Kairgeldy Kabyldin, vice president of KazTransOil. “We have
another six years to decide.”
      It’s a perilous decision. U.S. law threatens heavy sanctions against
companies doing business in Iran, including foreign companies. In the late
1990s, European oil companies like ENI and BP cut deals in Iran without
reprisal from Washington, but that was then. In August the Bush
administration extended the Iran sanctions for five years, and then came
Bush’s speech featuring Iran in the “Axis of Evil.” “There’s still a lot of
wishful thinking in the industry that the U.S. is not serious about these
sanctions,” says Steve Mann, the U.S. State Department’s senior Caspian
diplomat. “The State of the Union address stated very clearly that we are.”
      Iran is looking like a major loser in the Caspian, angering Tehran in
ways that nearly triggered a shooting war. Last July two Iranian jet
fighters and a gunboat threatened the Geofizik 3, a BP exploration ship on
its way to conduct seismic tests on a field claimed by both Iran and
Azerbaijan. Within hours of the incident, recalls one Western diplomat,
“all hell almost broke loose.” Iranian jets began flying sorties close to
Azerbaijan’s capital and Tehran radio announced that “precautionary” troop
movements were taking place near the Azeri border. A senior Iranian
official ominously remarked that “Azerbaijan was once an Iranian province,”
causing Turkey to reply that it would not allow its political and ethnic
ally Azerbaijan to become “the next Kuwait.”   
     The saber rattling quickly died down. Iran simply does not have the
military muscle to enforce its claims to the Caspian, which have been
unsettled for decades. Tehran insists the Caspian is a lake, which under
marine law would give it a claim to 20 percent of the underlying oilfields.
Azerbaijan counters that the Caspian is a sea, which would enlarge is own
claim while cutting Iran’s to under 12 percent. “But ultimately it doesn’t
matter,” says Guive Mirfendereski, author of “A Diplomatic History of the
Caspian Sea,” “if the Caspian is defined as a lake, a sea or a bathtub—it’s
all down to who’s in the strongest negotiation position.”
      Luckily for the oil majors, none of the really big fields are in
disputed territory. The sea’s only serious naval power, Russia, has a
vested interest in stability to protect its oil and still considerable gas
holdings. Now the United States is stationing forces in the region for the
first time, sending troops to Uzbekistan and military advisers to Georgia
to fight the war on terror. But it’s lost on no one in the Caspian that
Georgia, in particular, is more central to oil routes than to the hunt for
Osama bin Laden. Spy novelists, resharpen your pencils.
 
*******

#9
Washington Times
March 30, 2002
Editorial
Russians for peace

     Some Russians have become tired of watching in horror as their
military forces ravage the Chechen people and, in doing so, damage their
country's image as well. They are taking their own initiative — putting
pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to play catch-up. Europe's
role, meanwhile, in helping to broker unofficial Russian/Chechen peace
talks is making America's failure to speak out against Russian atrocities
glaringly conspicuous.
     Over the past few weeks in Moscow, Russian lawmakers have met with
Chechen leaders in hiding. This round of talks has been mediated by the
Council of Europe. These unofficial talks follow a breakdown of
negotiations between the Putin administration and Chechen leadership last
fall.
     Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov has declined to participate in the
latest talks until they make some headway. "It would be absolutely immoral
for us to maintain contact with Putin and the Russian side against the
background of the escalation of atrocities," Akhmad Zakayev, Chechnya's
European envoy, told the New York Times. 
     Meanwhile, Mr. Putin is unwilling to reign in his thugs in Chechnya.
In fact, he is deploying the widely feared Khanti-Mansiisk special-police
brigade back to Chechnya, which committed widespread abuses there in the
past. "This is worse than the SS going back there," said Glen Howard,
executive director of The American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, of the
brigade's return.
     But as the Chechen crisis grows worse, the Bush administration has
fallen silent. Clearly, the White House has bartered its criticism on the
Chechen issue for the Kremlin's support of U.S. counter-terrorist
initiatives. This is a Faustian bargain.
     In late February, the administration demonstrated how far it was
willing to go to oblige Mr. Putin. In a move that seems rather
Kremlinesque, the administration blocked Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
from launching 15-minute broadcasts in the Chechen language, as requested
by Congress last year. Although Mr. Putin has long demonstrated his
eagerness to crackdown on freedom of the press to expose the ferocity of
Russia's onslaught of Chechens, Washington hardly needed to contribute by
blocking our broadcasts. 
     Russian lawmakers are showing Mr. Putin they won't stand idly by.
Europe is sending Russia its own signals. If the White House is unwilling
to lead, when will it at least follow?

******

#10
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
March 29, 2002 
AMERICAN MARINES ON THE STEPPES OF KAZAKHSTAN
Growing American influence means less Russian influence in Central Asia
Author: Armen Khanbabyan, Mikhail Khodarenok
THE UNITED STATES HAS RECOGNIZED KAZAKHSTAN AS A NATION WITH A 
MARKET ECONOMY. RUSSIA HAS BEEN STRIVING FOR THIS STATUS FOR A LONG 
TIME, WITHOUT MUCH SUCCESS. NOW RUSSIA WILL FACE EXTRA DIFFICULTIES 
CONNECTED WITH THE EXPANDING COOPERATION BETWEEN THE US AND CENTRAL 
ASIAN STATES.

     Yesterday, Kazakhstan became the first CIS country that 
Washington recognized as a nation with a market economy. U.S. Trade 
Secretary Don Evans made a special phone call to President Nursultan 
Nazarbayev to inform him of this "important news" and to offer 
appropriate congratulations on this occasion.
     Russia has been trying to attain this status, without much 
success. US recognition has considerably strengthened the position of 
Kazakhstan at the talks starting in Moscow today with Kazakh foreign 
minister Kasymzhomart Tokayev.
     Thus, the multilateral strategic Kazakh-US cooperation has 
entered a qualitatively new stage, having finally buried Moscow's weak 
hopes for the possibility of reviving the process of political and 
economic integration, which Moscow cherished until recently.
     However, Kazakhstan's foreign policy agenda had been determined 
much earlier. On the quiet of talks about "Eurasian unity", in 
September last year Astana was the first among Central Asian capitals 
to announce officially full support for the American revenge operation 
in Afghanistan and to offer Washington assistance by promising to 
furnish airdromes in Chikment and Lugovaya, as well as a base to 
deploy a contingent of the counter-Taliban coalition. By the way, this 
happened after George Bush called Vladimir Putin who was at the moment 
holding a difficult conference with force agencies chiefs at his 
residence of "Bocharov Ruchei" in Sochi and openly let him understand 
that U.S. military interaction with countries of the region is a fait 
accompli and no more requires approval on the part of Moscow. But 
still earlier, American military delegations regularly visited 
Kazakhstan, studying the possibilities to update the armed forces and 
military infrastructures of the republic.
     It should be noted that there was no trace of the counter-
terrorist campaign when Astana, if only at the semi-official level, 
was considering the possibility of stationing a U.S. motorized brigade 
near Karaganda, numbering up to 5,000 people. This period was marked 
with working out the Defense Cooperation Plan for the defense 
departments of Kazakhstan and the US, as well as the Program for 
Military Contacts between the Kazakhstan Armed Forces and the U.S. 
Central Command. According to these documents, they are consistently 
and purposefully accomplishing numerous exact programs for overseas 
studies of Kazakh military people, financing and holding of joint 
maneuvers, formation of a Kazakh peace-keeping battalion, etc., while 
American task force train instructors from task force personnel and 
mobile forces of Kazakhstan's army, which are to practice at training 
centers overseas. At the end of last year, at a meeting of the two 
countries' defense chiefs in Brussels, they discussed in particular 
the possibility for Kazakhstan to expand utilization of the funds of 
the American program for Foreign Military Financing. At the same time, 
Astana doubled its defense budget and announced considerable expansion 
of the number of mobile (i.e. the most efficient) army units.
     It would be naive to think the matter is just about cooperation 
for the counter-terrorist operation. The latter is more likely a 
plausible pretext for Astana to progressively expand cooperation with 
the US. Otherwise, how could the fact be explained that, according to 
veritable data, another group of American experts visited the country 
in connection with the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which 
chose to focus its attention on the nuclear test ground at 
Semipalatinsk and the radioactive waste depot near Chikment? 
Kazakhstan is striving to minimize the danger of nuclear stuffs 
proliferation and apparently has abandoned the hope to receive 
assistance for this matter on part of Russia. Meanwhile, Americans 
render such assistance readily. Besides, U.S. DOD representatives will 
soon arrive in Almaty to continue current programs for providing 
biological security and working out plans of joint actions with Kazakh 
scientists from the Institute of Quarantine and Zoonal Infections and 
the Agricultural Research Institute in Otar.
     Astana also counts to on getting Washington's consent to receive 
information from U.S. spy satellites about the situation in the 
adjacent geopolitical region. So far, the matter was about regions 
where "international terrorist activity is possible". However, the 
Russian territory is also an "adjoining space". Meanwhile, taking into 
account that the number of ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan is 
progressively reducing (in 10 years, they will be less than 20% here) 
and the number of Kazakhs in regions bordering upon Russia is 
increasing at the same rapid rates, it might be assumed that the 
Southeast of Russia will inevitably turn into a "special interests 
zone" for Astana.
     As we can see, the state and prospects of the military-political 
cooperation between the US and Kazakhstan are no less radiant that in 
those countries of the region where American military objects are 
already dislocated. Appearance of NATO base stations here is only a 
matter of time. The American military presence will inevitably expand 
northwards, since it is Kazakhstan that is the key link in the plans 
for accomplishing grandiose transnational transportation and energy 
projects such as TRACECA and INOGATE. Astana, like, however, other 
Central Asian capitals, understands that socio-economic progress is 
out of the question without reaching international energy markets. 
Friendship with the US is an obligatory condition to accomplish 
similar hopes. The aforementioned market economy status furnished for 
Kazakhstan testifies to this. Besides, leaders of the region have made 
sure that Russia is incapable and unwilling to secure solution of the 
problems they are facing. They have simply no way out other than to 
expand interaction with the West.
(Translated by P. Pikhnovsky)

******

#11
The Sunday Times (UK)
March 31, 2002
Feature: Why Moscow is now party central
Serious ravers could soon be swapping Balearic sunshine for subzero
temperatures
By Lydia Slater
  
It’s a typical night in Club XIII. Dazzlingly beautiful girls wearing Marc
Jacobs and Chloé are scuffing the 18th-century inlaid parquet floor with
their Manolos, while their escorts watch them narrowly through dark glasses
from the bar. A scantily clad dancer gyrates on a podium; blink and she has
been replaced by another — equally gorgeous and scantily clad. 

This latter-day Studio 54 is in Moscow, which is fast becoming the new
clubbers’ playground. The last time I went to a Russian nightclub was on a
school trip in 1985; then, as I recall, someone produced a guitar and we
all clasped hands and sang folk songs before the cabbage beer was passed
around. 

Fortunately, things have changed a lot. And though the inclusion of Moscow
on the party club circuit might strike the uninitiated as bizarre, it does,
in fact, make perfect sense. 

“Russians love to party,” says Club XIII’s promoter, Gary Chaglasyan. “All
the restaurants and clubs are full all the time. People are making up for
years of deprivation.” 

Add to this rediscovered hedonism the Russians’ innate penchant for full-on
glamour, and the serious quantities of oil money sloshing around the
capital, and you have the ingredients for a decadent scene that has seen
the arrival of several new nightclubs. Right now, alongside Club XIII, the
buzz is about A Priori and Serdtse (Heart). And London’s hip nightspot
Chinawhite is already said to be in negotiations with the Russian
authorities. 

Meanwhile, the three-year-old Club XIII is still holding off its rivals.
“It is my favourite place to DJ,” says Lisa Loud, who regularly makes the
trip. “The scene in Britain is so unglamorous. I don’t want to be partying
with 18-year-olds in trainers, all off their faces. This caters to a much
more sophisticated crowd.” So, while trainer-wearers may occasionally be
allowed past the design police at the door of Club XIII, “they must be in
Prada or Gucci trainers”. So says Chaglasyan, who has no qualms about
declaring that his club has two types of patron: “Rich people, and people
who look rich.” 

Moscow’s door policy, or “face control” as it’s known locally, is reputed
to be the toughest in the world — a reaction to decades of enforced
egalitarianism. So don’t even think about clubbing there unless you’re
prepared to slap on the slap, squeeze into Versace and be judged on the car
that drops you off. 

Chaglasyan, who regards it as his mission to enlighten Moscow about global
dance trends, pioneered club culture there by luring international names
over on a weekly basis. DJ Sash, Fatboy Slim and Paul Oakenfold have all
played there, while the resident DJs Kolya and Grad are known throughout
Russia. 

But the best thing about Club XIII isn’t the music or the people, but the
building itself. Originally the home of one of Russia’s richest men, it had
been commandeered by the Ministry of Culture and allowed to decay gently
along with the Soviet Union. Chaglasyan bought it three years ago after it
had been condemned and quickly turned it into Moscow’s hottest nightspot,
popular not only with politicians and home-grown celebrities such as Anna
Kournikova, but also with party-loving westerners. 

You enter up a sweeping dark marble staircase, with inlaid marble walls
adorned with bas-reliefs of cherubs. Pass through the imposing French doors
and you are in the main dance area — once, doubtless, a ballroom — where
stubbed-out cigarettes smoulder on the parquet, outsize balloons bounce
gently off the cornicing and the twinkling lights come not courtesy of a
mirror ball, but an enormous crystal chandelier. The bar that runs the
length of the room serves delicious cocktails and vintage champagne in
elegant coupes. 

A smaller room, panelled with carved wood, is the “trip-hop acid-jazz
room”, lit by sconces and favoured by model-like wallflowers and couples
whispering conspiratorially on leather sofas. 

Entrance fees are high — up to an eye-popping £40 — but you doubt whether
Chaglasyan is making much from his venture. Partly because he regards it as
more important to keep people out than to let them in. But mostly because
of the vast sums spent on presentation. Every week or so, set designers
from Mosfilm are brought in to revamp the interior: a Roman orgy one week
will give way to a Nutcracker scene the next. Recently, a British party
animal hired the whole place for an evening themed on The Master and
Margarita, the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov about the arrival of the devil in
communist Moscow. For that event, the entrance to the club was refashioned
to resemble a grim Soviet-style apartment, through which the 150 guests had
to file before entering the decadent interior. 

The drawback for British clubbers at the moment is the visa requirement for
entry to Russia, but there are rumours that this may change, allowing
people to travel visa-free for visits of three days or less — just enough
for a long party weekend. 

Right now, although clubbers already come from the UK for a night’s
partying, they’re usually homesick Russians. Typical is Anna, a doll-like
pocket Venus in head-to-toe labels, who hails originally from the town of
Samara, but has been sent by her oil-magnate father to take her A levels in
Cambridge. “I fly here every month just to go out,” she says. “Cambridge
nightclubs are really terrible.” It’s a long way to go for an evening out,
you suggest. “Oh, yes,” she says. “But worth it, don’t you think?” 

Club XIII, Building 1, 13 Myasnitskaya Ulitsa; inquiries: 007 095 927 2391
 
******* 
 
#12
Russia faces choice between Nazism and democracy, tycoon-in-exile tells
liberals 
Interfax

Moscow, 30 March: Identity is "problem number one" for Liberal Russia,
Boris Berezovskiy, co-chairman of the party, has said. "To be heard, we
must be identified first," said he via a Moscow-London TV link-up to
delegates of the Liberal Russia congress, under way in the Russian capital
today.

"We are in a unique situation. No-one but us is prepared to take over this
position of truth in Russia, where authoritarian power has intimidated
society again," Berezovskiy stressed.

He named five strategic priorities for the new party: liberalization of the
individual and citizen, power, society, state structure and foreign policy.
But the first point, liberalization of the individual, gets top priority.

"Russia will become either a democracy or a Nazi state, there is no other
choice," Berezovskiy believes. He noted in this connection that Liberal
Russia should "help every citizen become responsible for his actions and
his position".

Berezovskiy described patriots as the most active part of society and at
the same time the most conservative part, calling them statist patriots.
"It is necessary to help the statist patriots become liberal patriots. Such
a transformation is an important historic task for us," he said.

Yet another major task for Russia, according to Berezovskiy, is to
refashion it into a federation structured according to a national
principle, with all its constituent republics enjoying the same status.

He emphasized in this connection that the creation of the Union of Russia
and Belarus, where Belarus enjoys a higher status than the republics
comprising the Russian Federation, was principally wrong.

*******

#13
The Russia Journal
March 29-April 4, 2002
Whittling down the new Russia-NATO set-up
By IRA STRAUS

A NATO-Russia Council of 20 members – the idea that was proposed last fall
as a breakthrough in mutual relations – has been persistently delayed and
whittled down. It is now going through a further round of whittling-down.
Russia is publicly upset, warning last week that the new Council was being
reduced, in the words of Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, to a "purely
cosmetic" renaming of the NATO-Russia Joint Council that already exists.

The reason is simple. NATO never tried to figure out a workable way to
include Russia in its core processes. If it can’t figure it out for the
core processes, it won’t be able to figure it out for the peripheral
processes either.

As long as NATO does not think about how to do it right with Russia, it
will be left only with plans for doing it wrong. It will become afraid of
these plans. It will want to whittle them down to a bare minimum, which
would limits the damage but still leave the net balance negative. And that
fails to offer prospects for major gains.

That is what is going on now.

The crux of the matter is that NATO has never tried to figure it out. This
would not be so hard to do, but it would require some creativity about
reforming the decision processes. It would mean giving up the traditional
NATO rhetoric that portrays the existing processes as the best of all
possible worlds, a near-miraculous achievement in consensus – a process
that no one has been able to explain without mystification, that was better
fitted to the Cold War than to the fast-changing world of today and that no
one thinks Russia could fit into. There would have to be some open
discussion about the existing mix of decision processes in NATO, their
aspects of flexibility and rigidity, and how to develop supplementary
procedures for getting past the rigidities – procedures for evaluating new
situations without dogma or gang spirit, making decisions quickly enough,
presenting them publicly without fearing if a few members mildly dissent,
implementing them under the joint aegis yet through flexible coalitions and
changing them expeditiously as the external world changes and as the
initial joint measures bring some unanticipated consequences.

In the absence of ideas on how to do this, it is not surprising that NATO
is running into all kinds of self-contradictions when it comes to its plans
for including Russia in decision-making on some new anti-terrorism issues.
With every issue, no matter whether old or new, the same need arises for a
more flexible system. No matter which issues are coming up for decision,
the same inadequacies in existing NATO mechanisms come into play. If NATO
cannot solve them for the old core issues, it cannot solve them for any
other ones, either.

While the existing decision processes have some flaws, they are nowhere
near as bad as the public rhetoric about them. People are led to believe
that there is a right of veto for NATO members. This is repeatedly
uncritically in the mass media, day in and day out. It has gained the
status of an accepted myth, a basis for making all kinds of false deductions.

In reality, the North Atlantic Treaty creates no right of veto and leaves
it to the NATO Council to set its own procedures. The main U.S. author of
the Treaty, Ambassador Theodore Achilles, told me a few years before his
death that this was deliberate: They did not want NATO to be hamstrung by a
veto. The myth of a right of veto nevertheless has served some PR purposes,
particularly during the Cold War, when it was important to present a front
of unanimity against the enemy.

The overall NATO veto-right myth is what gives rise to the sub-myth that
Russia was offered a veto last fall. As long as the NATO decision-making
system is described as if it were one in which every country had a legal
right of veto, people will wonder whether Russia is also getting this
right. And as long as the actual NATO decision-making system is only
somewhat flexible, operating by a mix of normal mutual political pressures
and abnormal privileges that diplomats of member states sometimes extend to
one another for dragging out the discussion in the name of consensus, no
one will be able to understand how to extend that system to include Russia
without at least some damage to the ability to reach meaningful results.

A former U.S. Ambassador to NATO told me that the fears of a "Russian veto"
had all arisen by a kind of accident. "Lord Robertson was tricked by the
press. They asked him if Russia was being offered a veto over NATO
decisions, and he was unusually flat-footed in his response. Then the press
spread the story all around that Russia was being given a veto, and we’ve
had to keep explaining ever since that it isn’t so."

That was an accurate recounting of how the flap over a "Russian veto" began
last fall, but it didn’t explain why it began. Why did the press ask trick
questions? Why did it seize upon an ambiguous response to spread a myth?
Why was it so easy to create a panic? Why was there a similar panic about a
"Russian veto" five years ago, when the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council
was being created? Why is everyone afraid of this "veto", when no one has
been able to define it or explain where or when it could ever come into
play? Why are the official denials about the "Russian veto" so
unconvincing, despite being absolutely true?

The explanation lies in the rigidities in the existing procedures of NATO
and the even more rigid language used for describing them. If every member
of NATO is said to have a "veto," Russia naturally wants one, too –
otherwise it cannot expect to get any respect for its views. If Russia
talks of wanting a "veto," everyone gets scared. And so NATO and Russia run
around the circle again and again.

We’ve been through all this before. In 1997, when the Permanent Joint
Council was created, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger raised
up a veritable hysteria about it. Discussion with Russia was equated with a
Russian veto and the destruction of NATO – unless NATO reached a joint
position first and simply presented it to the Russians, take it or leave
it. The Republicans in Congress and the mass media joined in the hysteria;
no one refuted it effectively, probably because the language game of NATO
served to delete all the space for refuting it. The Clinton Administration
caved in and imposed restrictions on the Joint Council: It could not talk
with Russia until the Alliance had already made up its mind. Advertised as
a breakthrough in relations, the Council was reduced to near-insignificance.

Are we running around the same circle all over again? 

Again, Kissinger is whipping up hysteria about a "Russian veto." This time
he is joined in it by Zbigniew Brzezinski and by the three new Central
European members of NATO. The last time, the Central Europeans had been
cautious: They were on their best behavior, and they knew an agreement on a
Russia-NATO Joint Council might be a condition for their joining NATO.
Today, however, they are securely entrenched in NATO, and are available for
the mobilization of hysteria about Russia. The situation will get worse if
more states with anti-Russian feelings are admitted in November.

The crux of the problem, regarding any new NATO-Russia council and NATO’s
handling of new members in its old North Atlantic Council, remains NATO
decision-making. David Abshire, one of the most respected of the former
U.S. ambassadors to NATO, wrote in 1992 of a need to consider procedures
such as "consensus-minus-one" or "weighted voting" so that former enemies
could not "prevent the Alliance’s traditional members from acting." Ten
years have been lost since then, but last month Lord Robertson, in a speech
at Chatham House, said it is time to get on with the "modernisation of
NATO’s decision-making machinery" so that it will continue to be able to
make decisions expeditiously "after NATO’s enlargement in November."

Carried out seriously, such a "modernisation" would make a tremendous
difference, not only in NATO’s internal effectiveness, but also in its
capacity to adapt to the new challenges. Whether it will be carried out
seriously enough and soon enough for NATO to build a working alliance with
Russia is the question on which the future of the relationship rides.
 
*******