Johnson's Russia List
#6255
19 May 2002
davidjohnson@erols.com
A CDI Project
www.cdi.org

[Contents:
  DJ: Are you ready for the deluge? The Bush-Putin event is sure
to generate more words than even JRL recipients are accustomed to.
  1. Newsweek: Christian Caryl and Michael Meyer, The New Great Game: 
How to Make Nice. Central Asia is still a major crisis zone and a potential 
threat to global stability. But former cold warriors in Moscow and 
Washington are on the same side now.
  2. Reuters: Russia out of Pope's grasp as he tours its old allies.
  3. AP: St. Petersburg offers clues about native son Putin.
  4. Reuters: U.S. pushes big new Russia anti-proliferation plan.
  5. Boston Globe: Anne Kornblut and David Filipov, Russia may be boosting 
Iran's nuclear arms.
  6. Boston Globe: David Powell, Spinning arms control. Despite a pact, 
Putin saves face but gains little.
  7. Toronto Star: Paul Webster, Russia hones its nuclear skills. Moscow 
is still committed to modernizing its current arsenal and developing new 
weaponry.
  8. New York Times: Celestine Bohlen, Becoming a Normal Nation.
  9. Los Angeles Times: Clifford Kupchan and Charles Kupchan, A Budding 
Partnership. At their summit, Bush and Putin should build on the two 
countries' cooperation on Eurasian security.
  10. New book: Russian Media Law & Policy in the Yeltsin Decade: Essays 
and Documents.]

********
 
#1
Newsweek
May 27, 2002
The New Great Game: How to Make Nice 
Central Asia is still a major crisis zone and a potential threat to global
stability. But former cold warriors in Moscow and Washington are on the
same side now.
By Christian Caryl and Michael Meyer 
 
For 57 years, Russians and Americans have marked the May anniversary of the
Allied victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. This year the day took on
a special resonance. When the U.S. Defense attach- at the American Embassy
in Moscow was promoted to brigadier general, who was invited to help pin on
his stars and epaulettes? A senior general in the Russian Army.
 
It's pure coincidence that the ceremony took place just as George W. Bush
and Vladimir Putin were preparing to meet this week in St. Petersburg and
Moscow. But both events -- the medal presentation and the summit -- are
emblematic of a deeper trend. For at the summit, the two presidents hope to
sign away the last vestiges of the cold war. It's not just that they'll be
putting their names to a new treaty cutting strategic nuclear arsenals by
two thirds. The real news lies elsewhere -- that Moscow and Washington aim
to carve out a whole new relationship, particularly in Central Asia.
 
Pause, for a moment, and savor the irony. Two decades ago Soviet troops
were fighting a war in Afghanistan against U.S.-armed guerrillas; now
thousands of American forces are scattered across the region, in supposedly
"temporary" bases that could well become permanent, all with Putin's
blessing. Where U.S. oil companies not long ago seemed pitted in a
winner-take-all race against Russia to develop the volatile region's
petroleum reserves, next week's summit could bring an "energy security"
deal, administration insiders told Newsweek. The possible deal would
include a Russian offer to make up any shortfalls in oil supplies to the
West resulting from crises in other parts of the world. In return, Moscow
would get an American commitment to help develop not only Russia's own
energy resources, but to work together to integrate Central Asia into the
world's markets.
 
A senior U.S. diplomat describes the new, post-cold-war world this way:
look at the map, he says, and you see that the threats and opportunities
for both Washington and Moscow are heavily in Russia's neighborhood,
whether it's the specter of Islamic radicalism and narcotics trafficking or
the prospect of gaining new oil sources. "Working with Russia now is in our
larger strategic interest," he concludes. "We can collaborate and promote
stability in Central Asia, preventing more radical ideologies from taking
root there. It's a win-win for both of us."
 
All of this is possible because Putin has been encouraging Russia to get
over its inferiority complex. Humbled by its decline, Russia struggled for
several years to maintain its role as a global player, insisting (in what
one former State Department official calls "the Rodney Dangerfield
Syndrome") on gestures of respect not always warranted by its true
capabilities. But Putin doesn't want respect, he wants results, and he
knows that U.S. money and power can help produce them. When old-guard brass
in the Russian military recently objected to the deployment of American
forces in Moscow's backyard, Putin asked, in effect, "What's the problem?"
-- promptly quelling dissent. (These days, in fact, it's Bush who could use
a little more global respect: when the U.S. president sets out for Europe
next week, alighting first in Berlin, he's likely to be greeted with
protests and catcalls -- sentiments widely shared by many allied nations of
Europe, not just in the increasingly hostile Muslim world.)  
 
Promising as it is, the new Russian-American entente could yet go wrong.
That's chiefly because so much of it depends on Putin himself. He remains
hugely popular, with opinion polls showing support around 70 percent. Those
same surveys, however, show that Russians are extremely skeptical about
American intentions. As they see it, Putin has made plenty of concessions
to the United States and received little in return. Meanwhile Russia's
military and diplomatic establishment is still locked into a Soviet-era
mentality of superpower competition. They oppose Putin's efforts at
governmental reform, seeing it as a threat to their power and prerogatives,
and they are deeply suspicious of his foreign policy. When Gen. Tommy
Franks came to Moscow in March to thank the Russians for their help, he sat
down at a table facing the smiling and receptive Russian Defense minister,
a civilian close to Putin -- and a phalanx of grim-faced generals who
scarcely said a word. The Rodney Dangerfield Syndrome is still very much
alive, it seems, even if the cold war is not.
 
With John Barry in Washington 

********

#2
Russia out of Pope's grasp as he tours its old allies
May 19, 2002
By Richard Balmforth 

MOSCOW (Reuters) - "The Pope? How many divisions has he got?," Soviet
dictator Josef Stalin is said to have scoffed. 

The Vatican still has no guns to threaten Russia, but the established
Orthodox Church says it is alarmed by Roman Catholic missionary foot
soldiers on the march for converts. 

Catholic leaders in Russia deny charges by the Orthodox patriarchate that
their clergy are actively poaching souls from the vast flock of Orthodox
believers that has swelled since the end of the atheistic Soviet state 10
years ago. 

The row, being waged from pulpits and in parishes across the country, has
triggered remarkably barbed attacks by Patriarch Alexiy II and other
leaders of the majority Orthodox Church who accuse the Vatican of invading
its canonical territory. 

A Catholic bishop has been barred from returning to his Siberian diocese
and a priest has had his working papers summarily confiscated. 

As Russian extreme nationalists try to press the Kremlin into action to
defend the traditional church, anti-Catholic demonstrations have been
reported across the country. 

And for the much-travelled Pope who calls on another of Russia's neighbours
later this week -- this time Azerbaijan -- his dream of ever reaching
Russia itself is more distant than ever. 

John Paul's May 22-23 trip to Muslim Azerbaijan, which has a tiny Catholic
community, follows tours of other ex-Soviet states including Ukraine,
Georgia, Armenia and Kazakhstan. 

But the ailing Pontiff, who turned 82 on May 18, always had his sights on
Russia, where a visit by him could help heal the 1,000-year rift between
the two churches. 

Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, head of the Catholic Church in European Russia,
conceded this was a dim prospect while it was opposed by the Orthodox
leadership. 

"It is difficult to speak of this," he said. 

"On the one hand the Holy Father has an invitation from the President. But
knowing his approach to ecumenical development he would like to have some
green light from the Orthodox Church," he told Reuters. 

FEW CATHOLICS IN RUSSIA 

Catholics are only a tiny minority of Russia's 147 million people,
numbering about 600,000 believers. Many are descendants of Poles, Germans
and Lithuanians deported to Siberia in Soviet times. Estimates of the
number of practising Orthodox worshippers are put at between 4.5 million
and 7.4 million. 

Orthodox anger towards Catholics, which follows a slow slide in relations,
erupted in February when the Vatican announced plans to strengthen its
presence in Russia by creating four fully-fledged dioceses. 

Only last Monday Patriarch Alexiy II renewed charges that Catholic priests
were engaged in missionary activity on Russian soil in the search for souls. 

"There is quite a lot of evidence of conversion to Catholicism of Orthodox
believers. It includes people who do not have enough knowledge of the
differences of faith between Catholic and Orthodox," he said in an
interview with Izvestia newspaper. 

For the Orthodox leadership the canonical territory it seeks to protect
against the Catholics stretches into other ex-Soviet states such as Ukraine. 

"The Vatican must drop the practice of proselytising among the traditional
Orthodox population of Russia and countries of the Commonwealth of
Independent States," Alexiy said. 

CONTROVERSIAL LAW ON RELIGION 

Kondrusiewicz, a stocky 55-year-old cleric from Belarus and archbishop in
Moscow for 10 years, says Orthodox antagonism stems from a 1998 law on
religion which gives it a pre-eminent place among traditional Christian
faiths in Russia. 

Protestant churches and their priests are also being harassed, he said. 

He acknowledges that there are isolated cases of Orthodox believers who
turn up saying they would like to convert to Catholicism. But he says these
instances are few. 

"If a Russian man comes to me and says he wants to be a Catholic, what can
I do? I cannot say 'Go away' and I cannot change his nationality. This does
not happen a lot, but it does happen all the same," he said. 

Life was particularly hard for Catholic believers in far-flung parts of
Russia, he said. "I have just spoken to a priest from Petrozavodsk. People
are scared," he said. 

The main obstacle Kondrusiewicz faces is that from Tsarist times through
communism the Orthodox Church has been closely identified with Russian
statehood -- and state structures. 

That means, say religious rights watchdogs in Russia, that it is relatively
simple for Orthodox officials to pull strings at the official level. 

Bishop Jerzy Mazur, a Pole who heads one of the four new dioceses in
eastern Siberia, was summarily declared persona non grata in April after
being stopped by border authorities when he flew into Moscow from Warsaw.
He has been unable to return to his vast parish since. 

Kondrusiewicz says that in Pskov, near Russia's border with Estonia, work
on rebuilding the Catholic church there stopped after local Orthodox clergy
complained to municipal authorities. 

PUTIN, MAN IN THE MIDDLE 

President Vladimir Putin has become, uncomfortably, the man in the middle,
with both sides seeking his ear and support. 

Though an Orthodox believer himself and prominent at pomp-filled Easter
celebrations two weeks ago, he has avoided being dragged into the dispute.
He says the two churches must work out their differences. 

Much to his relief, no doubt, Russia's lower house of parliament, the State
Duma, last Wednesday turned down a nationalist-initiated draft appeal that
would have called on him to restrict the activities of the Catholic Church. 

Charges of religious discrimination in Russia, however, do not go down well
with the pro-Western democratic image he seeks to project nor with his
political goal of securing Russian integration into western structures. 

The Pope is still well remembered in Russian political circles as the
Pontiff who played a key role in the collapse of communism in the Soviet
bloc in the 1980s. 

Religious freedom monitors say the Orthodox hierarchy fears a visit by the
Pope would create a unwelcome surge of interest in Catholicism that could
weaken its new-found authority in Russia, 10 years after the break-up of
the Soviet Union. 

Commentators also say a papal visit would require tangible gestures of
goodwill from Putin such as the return of church buildings, confiscated
after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. 

Many of these are now in Orthodox hands. 

********

#3
St. Petersburg offers clues about native son Putin 
May 18, 2002
By SARAH KARUSH

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia - With its orderly planning, understated grandeur
and rich contribution to European culture, President Vladimir Putin's
hometown is not a typical Russian city. But then, Putin, with his reserved
manner and Western tastes, is no typical Russian politician.
  
St. Petersburg, the former imperial capital, stands apart from the rest of
Russia in its appearance, traditions and heritage; locals pride themselves
on their cultural distance from both Moscow and the Russian hinterland. As
U.S. President George W. Bush will likely discover when he travels here
this week, the city offers many clues to Putin's personality and priorities.

When Putin was born here in 1952, it was still called Leningrad, after the
founder of the Soviet Union. Its return to its old name symbolizes the
spirit of change that swept through the country when the Soviet Union
collapsed.

Putin spent his boyhood in a communal apartment in the city's beautiful but
dilapidated center. He married and began his KGB career in the city,
returning after a stint in East Germany for his first foray into politics.

"Putin is a Leningrader," said St. Petersburg historian Lev Lurye. "Putin
wants to seem civilized in a European, German fashion."

Known as Russia's window to Europe, St. Petersburg was founded in 1703 by
Czar Peter the Great, who so admired the West that he gave his future
capital a European-sounding name. The city was built with right-angled
precision, borrowing the idea of canals from Amsterdam and cathedral styles
from Rome.

It was in this new port, built on marshland at roughly the same latitude as
Anchorage, Alaska, that Peter began an often ruthless campaign of
Westernization, training a new class of government servants and even
forcing men to cut shave off their beards.

In 1918, a year after the Bolshevik Revolution, Leningrad lost its status
as the country's capital. During World War II, more than 1 million people
died during the Nazi's 900-day siege of the city.

All this has left its mark on the people of St. Petersburg.

"It's the architecture of the city, the history — what you would call a
mentality," said St. Petersburg sociologist Leonid Kesselman. "It's a
manmade beauty in which you can feel the human spirit."

St. Petersburg and Moscow have not produced any national leaders in modern
times. Josef Stalin was born in Georgia, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid
Brezhnev in Ukraine, Mikhail Gorbachev in southwestern Russia, Boris
Yeltsin, in the Ural Mountains.

Many Russians believe that's part of what makes Putin different. His
Leningrad upbringing is reflected in both his foreign policy and personal
tastes, Lurye said. Putin has forged friendships with Western leaders such
as German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Italian Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi, while his preferences lean toward downhill skiing and away from
vodka, the national drink.

More broadly, said Lurye, Putin values "the idea of decorum" — a trait St.
Petersburg residents believe other, less Westernized Russians lack. This,
and not only Putin's KGB past, may explain his reticence.

Putin's tight-lipped and careful style contrasts starkly with the often
impulsive behavior and emotional tone of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin,
which embarrassed many Russians.

The ghosts of World War II no doubt also left their mark on the young
Putin. In "The First Person," a book of interviews published in 2000, Putin
recounts how his parents lost a son to diphtheria and his mother nearly
starved to death during the siege, while his father had several brushes
with death on the front lines.

Baskov Lane, where Putin spent his childhood, is a collection of graceful
19th-century buildings — some with elegant iron grating. Though some have
been restored in recent years, others are crumbling — as they likely were
in Putin's time.

In the book, Putin recalled his childhood universe — the small paved
courtyard of No. 12 — and his mother calling to him from the fifth-floor
window to make sure he hadn't run off.

Today, the front of the building is a bank, but the sound of clattering
pots and pans still drifts through open windows into the closed courtyard.

The now renovated inside was once a typical picture of Soviet urban
poverty. Putin recalled chasing rats in the stairwell — until one of the
rodents came charging back at him. He and his working-class parents lived
in one room of a communal apartment, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with
other families.

Communal apartments, a Soviet social experiment, were particularly common
in Leningrad, where the spacious homes left by the pre-revolutionary rich
were divvied up to solve a housing crunch. Even today, more than one-tenth
of St. Petersburg's 4.6 million people live in communal apartments.

Such awkward living arrangements may help explain the polite distance St.
Petersburg residents maintain in all but their closest relationships, Lurye
argued.

Living in a communal apartment "disciplines a person. ... You learn to
value your time alone," he said. "I think Putin is a loner. He doesn't need
anybody else."

******

#4
U.S. pushes big new Russia anti-proliferation plan
By David Ljunggren

OTTAWA, May 19 (Reuters) - The United States is pressing its key partners
to sign up to a new $20 billion plan to speed up nuclear nonproliferation
projects in Russia in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks and thereby prevent
hostile groups from obtaining weapons-grade material, diplomats said.
 
But they said some members of the Group of Seven leading industrialized
nations feared Washington might be moving too quickly with its "10 plus 10
over 10" plan, under which the United States would commit $10  billion
while the rest of the G7 would also come up with $10 billion over 10 years.
 
Washington, which has already committed around $1 billion next year under
existing programs to help Russia decommission the vast former Soviet
nuclear arsenal, is determined to prevent al Qaeda and other organizations
from taking advantage of leaky security at Russian atomic sites, the
diplomats said.
 
"This is a very ambitious nonproliferation plan. I think Sept. 11 focused
people's attention as to how great the dangers of nuclear proliferation
are," one G7 diplomat told Reuters.
 
Details of the plan have yet to be worked out but it is designed to boost
efforts to help Moscow deal with the 30,000 nuclear weapons and the highly
enriched uranium and plutonium stocks it inherited when the Soviet Union
broke apart in 1991.
 
Last year a bipartisan U.S. task force said the need to secure Russian
nuclear weapons, materials and scientific knowledge was "the most urgent
unmet national security threat to the United States."
 
U.S. officials first put forward Washington's new plan in mid-April and are
determined that it should be formally announced at a summit of leaders from
the Group of Eight nations -- the G7 plus Russia -- in the Canadian Rocky
Mountain resort of Kananaskis in late June.
 
The focus on nonproliferation was boosted with the announcement by U.S.
President George W. Bush that he planned to sign a treaty with Russia this
week under which the two nations would cut their nuclear warheads by the
year 2012 to around 2,000 from current levels of 5,000 to 6,000.
 
Diplomats said G7 nations were in three minds about the new U.S. plan --
Germany and Canada supported it fully, Britain and France liked the concept
but wanted more details while Italy and Japan were less enthusiastic, in
part at least because of the cost as well as the widespread corruption in
Russia.
 
"People feel there is enough money going to the Russians to fund
nonproliferation efforts as it is and they aren't spending all of it. If we
give them even more, it won't be that effective," said another G7 diplomat.
 
U.S. officials are now suggesting that instead of handing over billions of
dollars more to Russia, G7 countries could forgive some of their Soviet-era
debt on the understanding that Moscow spent an equivalent sum on
nonproliferation efforts.
 
One North American security source familiar with the 10 plus 10 over 10
plan said Washington was unhappy with how little other G7 nations had
contributed to programs designed to neutralize the dangers posed by Russian
nuclear material.
 
"Everybody recognizes that given the threat we have now of terrorists
getting their hands on some of these weapons of mass destruction that we
really need to accelerate the programs. The Bush administration believes
this cannot be done unless we get more money into them," the source told
Reuters.
 
"The U.S. perception is not only can the Russians absorb the funding that
is coming their way now but there are particular projects that could be
developed rather quickly to absorb a great deal more funding."
 
Experts say the new plan might focus on decommissioning some of the older
Soviet-era nuclear power stations as well as constructing a mixed-oxide
plant which would turn weapons-grade plutonium into fuel suitable for use
in civilian reactors.
 
Under the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, named for its
two principal sponsors in the Senate, Washington has provided hundreds of
millions of dollars to former Soviet states since 1991 to protect and
dispose of nuclear materials.
 
The money is designed to help scrap those Russian missiles, bombers, and
submarines designated for destruction under arms reduction treaties as well
as accounting for and safely storing dangerous byproducts such as nuclear
warheads.
 
But while G7 nations do not doubt the sincerity of Washington's efforts to
step up nonproliferation efforts, they worry that it could blunt the new
initiative by moving too quickly to produce a plan for the leaders' summit
in Canada.
 
"There are lots of questions still hanging over this one but the Americans
are absolutely determined that an announcement be made in Kananaskis," said
one diplomat.
 
******

#5
Boston Globe
May 19, 2002
Russia may be boosting Iran's nuclear arms
By Anne E. Kornblut and David Filipov, Globe Staff

MOSCOW - It began as a promising business venture. The Russian government
would use its reservoir of unemployed nuclear scientists to help Iran build
a nuclear power plant, a sophisticated but harmless civilian complex
nestled on the eastern banks of the Persian Gulf. 
 
But as work on the Bushehr power plant has progressed, so have Iran's
efforts to obtain nuclear weapons technology, according to a well-connected
Russian scientist and several former Russian officials. Contradicting the
Kremlin's assertions, these sources say Russia's Atomic Energy Ministry,
known as Minatom - a rogue force with almost no independent oversight - is
providing a direct boost to Iran's nuclear weapons program, under the guise
of the power plant. And US officials say Iran is on the cusp of reaching
this dangerous goal because of the Russian help.

''So what?'' said the Russian scientist, who has traveled to Bushehr
several times, and who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. ''The
Iranians will acquire these weapons. Pakistan has them. Israel has them.
Other countries have them. So what if Iran has them?''

That attitude, and the problem it reflects, is of escalating concern for US
officials who have labeled the state of Iran a charter member of the ''axis
of evil.'' It is also driving a wedge in US-Russian relations, which both
sides might prefer to portray as rosy as Bush prepares to visit Moscow this
week.

Above all, the Iranian nuclear weapons program is an example of
inconsistencies that President Bush, perhaps, should resolve as he enters a
phase of his war on terrorism in a complex post-Cold War world, a place
made murkier by autonomous relics like Minatom.

The gray textures of the post-Cold War world, with its global corporations,
international terrorist organizations, and autonomous relics like Minatom,
can frustrate a search for clarity.

Russian officials argue that the Bushehr power plant is an innocuous, and
lucrative, effort to bring power to Iran, similar to the light-water
reactor the United States is building for North Korea.

In fact, under the rules of the International Atomic Energy Agency,
countries with nuclear knowledge are required to help nonnuclear states to
build power plants, and to safeguard the spent fuel to prevent it from
being turned into weapons-grade material. Russia and Iran have both pledged
to adhere to the agency's rules, to keep Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

But evidence abounds of far more extensive exchanges of nuclear
information, according to CIA documents and interviews with dozens of
senior Bush administration and Russian officials over the last two months.

Beyond the $840 million that Iran is paying, officially, for the Bushehr
power plant, Russian officials and scientists are engaged in clandestine
technology transfers, money-laundering schemes and other transactions that
have made a fortune for Russian officials, according to several officials
interviewed by the Globe.

And that, the scientist said, made it too dangerous to discuss in great
detail.

''This is a super-Mafia,'' the scientist said. ''Anything else I might tell
you could result in conditions not conducive for life, for me, you and
anyone else involved, if you know what I mean.''

And yet for all his threats to isolate nations that support terror in any
form, Bush is unlikely to downgrade US ties to Russia over Moscow's ties
with Iran, which in turn has ties to Hezbollah, which Bush considers a
terrorist group.

Administration officials are weighing sanctions against Russia, and Bush
may raise the issue at his summit meeting with the Russian president,
Vladimir V. Putin, US officials said.

Such concerns have been raised in Congress. ''Russia continues to supply
significant assistance to many of Tehran's nuclear programs,'' said Senator
Richard C. Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence.

Of Russia, Shelby said: ''I've been there, I've talked with them about
these programs, and the president will be talking about this on the highest
level. They have told us before that they would cooperate with us against
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.''

''But,'' Shelby added, ''what they say and what they do are two different
things.''

Iran, which has signed nonproliferation treaties, denies that it is seeking
nuclear weapons technology.

''There is nothing about production of nuclear weapons in the agreement
signed between Russia and Iran on use of the atom for peaceful purposes,
for generating electrical power,'' Gholam Reza Shafei, Iran's ambassador to
Moscow, said at a news conference in February.

Publicly, officials in Moscow insist that Russia has no interest in seeing
Iran, a country they see as a regional rival but not an evil supporter of
terrorism that is armed with nuclear weapons.

But Minatom, the Russian atomic energy agency that is cash-hungry, has
little regard for official Kremlin policy, and it seems to have no
compunctions about any role it might have, or have had, in helping Iran to
become a nuclear military power.

A legacy of the Cold War, cloaked in secrecy, Minatom has ignored numerous
agreements between Russian and US officials about Iran, and it is
continuing to do so, many argue - funneling sensitive technologies to Iran
on the side, under the cover of the Bushehr plant. 

''It is a serious issue,'' a senior US official said. ''We take it very
seriously. Russia should think again about what it's doing.''

The matter has been a source of disagreement between the United States and
Russia for almost a decade, and it had been a focus of almost every summit
meeting that President Clinton held with his Russian counterparts.

But over the past year and a half, a new dynamic has emerged: Despite his
close relationship with Bush, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin is loath
to be seen as bowing to US demands, especially by cracking down on an
alliance with Iran that provides jobs for Russian scientists.

Conceived under Stalin as the complex of laboratories and secret ''closed
cities'' where nuclear weapons were designed, built and mass-produced,
Minatom is the epitome of Cold War-style secrecy. 

Nominally under control of the Russian government, Minatom does not, in
fact, report to anyone on how it spends hundreds of millions of dollars,
given the tight veil of confidentiality drawn over its operations. There
are no independent regulatory agencies to monitor Minatom's activity, other
than non-governmental organizations whose effect on Kremlin policy is limited.

The current head of Minatom, Alexander Rumyantsev, insisted during a trip
to Washington earlier this month that the light water nuclear reactor under
construction in Iran cannot be used to develop material for weapons and
does not pose a proliferation threat. Instead, he said, the project
provides jobs in Iran for over 1,000 Russian specialists, as well as
machine building firms in Russia, providing a much-needed boost to a sector
that has suffered drastically since the end of the Cold War. Minatom is
unable to sell its goods to western markets that remain closed to it, and
nuclear scientists, no longer employed by the Soviet government, live in
remote, impoverished communities, sometimes not receiving a paycheck for
months, their desolation a source of constant worry for non-proliferation
specialists.

Bushehr, Rumyantsev told reporters in Washington, ''is not a source of
proliferation of nuclear material.'' A Minatom spokesman in Moscow said the
ministry needed 45 days to answer any further questions. The Bushehr plant
is still under construction, and scheduled to be completed by early 2005.

Iran, which has signed non-proliferation treaties, denies it is seeking
nuclear weapons technology.

''There is nothing about production of nuclear weapons in the agreement
signed between Russia and Iran on use of the atom for peaceful purposes,
for generating electrical power,'' Gholam Reza Shafei, Iran's ambassador to
Moscow, said at a news conference in February.

But ''Bushehr is just the tip of the iceberg,'' a senior US official in
Moscow said, speaking on condition of anonymity. ''We are quite convinced
that dangerous tech transfers are still taking place. There may be some
willful criminality in the Atomic Energy Ministry, and some agencies that
are getting away with exports on their own.''

''I have no doubt that the building of an Atomic reactor in Bushehr is a
cover-up for Iran's plans to build an atomic bomb,'' said Alexei Yablokov,
a former senior adviser to President Boris Yeltsin on environmental issues,
now the head of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy, a non-profit
group. ''It is madness to build them reactors.''

He said that the spent nuclear fuel generated by any type of nuclear
reactor contains enough uranium and plutonium for the creation of nuclear
explosive devices at low cost. 

''In three months, 30 people with a college education could do it,''
Yablokov said. ''There is no distinction between civilian and military
nuclear programs; that is why handing nuclear technology to such unstable
countries as Iran is a suicidal step.''

According to Yablokov, in 1995 Minatom contracted to build two facilities
that would allow the production of enriched uranium and plutonium needed to
produce a nuclear weapon. Yeltsin halted this deal, but Yablokov said
Iran's efforts to lean how to build a bomb have since been augmented by
student exchanges and the transfer of knowledge from Russian specialists
working in Iran.

A CIA report last year said Iran is aggressively pursuing nuclear
fuel-cycle capabilities, which ''can also support fissile material
production for a weapons program.'' US officials also charge that Russia is
helping Iran build long-range missiles that could reach Europe and beyond.

And Maxim Shingarkin, a former officer in the Russian military's secretive
12th Department, which is in charge of strategic weapons, said that with
the right knowledge, the reactor in Bushehr could produce weapons-grade
plutonium. By replacing the control rods in the nuclear fuel assembly with
rods filled with uranium 238 and bombarding the rods with neutrons, he
said, the Iranians could produce enough plutonium, over time, to make
several bombs. As a longtime purchaser of Russian conventional weaponry,
Iran could obtain the uranium 238 from the depleted uranium shells of
artillery ordnance.

The Russian government does listen to US concerns about proliferation.
After the US slapped sanctions on seven Russian firms it accused of
peddling sensitive technologies or materials to Iran in 1998, Russia passed
tough legislation putting in place strict controls on the export of
sensitive technologies. 

But in Iran's closed system, it is difficult for outside intelligence to
distinguish civilian technologies from equipment that could be used to
develop nuclear weapons. For example, the US wanted to introduce sanctions
against TsAGI, a major Russian aeronautics firm, for a wind tunnel supplied
to Iran. But it was impossible for the US to tell whether the tunnel was of
the type needed to test nuclear bombs.

''From the early 1990s, our concern was that this large project would serve
as a cover for more sensitive technical interactions between Russians and
Iranians,'' said Robert Einhorn, the Assistant Secretary of the Bureau for
Non-proliferation at the State Department in the Clinton administration.
Now, he said, ''the concerns we had have materialized.''

That presents a major set-back for weapons control programs, and a major
problem for the Bush administration, partly of its own making: Bush
distanced himself from Russia at the start of his term, and then, after
first meeting Putin in Slovenia last summer, chose to focus on missile
defense and the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. According to one former
Defense Department official, Bush raised the matter of Iran with Putin
during one of their four meetings since last year, but it has never been a
focus of US discussions in public.

Since January, however, when Bush first cited Iran as part of the ''axis of
evil'' in his State of the Union address, the administration has renewed
its focus on the Islamic state and its efforts to obtain nuclear weapons.
Under pressure to prove its innocence, Minatom head Rumyantsev traveled to
Washington earlier this month to meet with US Energy Secretary Spencer
Abraham and assure his US counterpart that Russians are not slipping
sensitive material to Iran. After one meeting with Abraham, Rumyantsev
admitted it was still a ''sensitive topic.'' 

According to several former and current US and Russian officials, Minatom
is still a central part of the problem - aware of technology transfers and
making a large profit from its illegitimate work, sometimes at the expense
of the larger Russian budget.

In January, Russia's Accounting Chamber issued a report detailing how $270
million in US aid intended to help clean up and build safe storage for the
country's radioactive waste had disappeared. Tens of millions of dollars
had also been diverted to ''research projects'' that, because of their
secret nature, remained a mystery.

The Accounting Chamber could not explain where this money goes, but
Shingarkin said it disappears in various book-cooking and money laundering
schemes. Some of the lost funds actually go to research institutes, which
hastily rewrite old research reports and present them as work recently done.

He said that the Iran project is no different. Minatom, Shingarkin claimed,
had paid four times the going rate when it purchased ventilation systems
from a Czech company for the Bushehr reactor. Shingarkin and the Russian
scientist said officials had pocketed the difference. They did not know the
actual amounts involved, only that it involved ''many millions'' of
dollars, as Shingarkin put it. A Minatom spokesman said the ministry needed
45 days to answer any questions.

''Sixty percent of the money is returned to Minatom officials in cash,
which they pocket,'' said Shingarkin, who now works for the Moscow office
of Greenpeace. ''I know, because in the past I have carried it.''

*******

#6
Boston Globe
May 19, 2002
Spinning arms control
Despite a pact, Putin saves face but gains little
By David E. Powell
David E. Powell is the Shelby Cullom Davis professor of Russian studies at
Wheaton College in Norton. 

Last week, the United States and Russia reached an agreement to
''substantially reduce'' their nuclear arsenals. Both sides will cut the
number of strategic warheads from the 6,000 or so currently permitted by
the START I treaty to a mere 1,700-2,200 - a reduction of roughly two-thirds. 
 
President Bush said he and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, would
sign the agreement at the Moscow summit to be held Thursday through
Saturday. ''It will make the world more peaceful and put behind us the Cold
War once and for all'' and ''will liquidate the legacy of the Cold War,''
Bush said of the pact. Indeed, he added, it will begin a ''new era of
US-Russian relations.'' The future promises to be ''a period of enhanced
mutual security, economic security, and improved relations.''

Is the president telling it like it is? That the story may be less dramatic
than he has suggested is implied in Putin's considerably less enthusiastic
embrace of the deal. Speaking in Moscow, the Russian president said, ''We
are satisfied with our joint work.'' His foreign minister, Igor Ivanov,
called the agreement important, but not ''overly ambitious.''

In fact, Bush and Putin had agreed in principle last year to make these
very reductions in their arsenals as soon as it was practicable. The
Russians cannot afford to maintain their inventory at current levels, and
the United States is willing to cut its arsenal if (as seems clear) it
decides to go ahead with a program of National Missile Defense.

There were three sticking points: (1) the American wish not to codify any
agreement in a formal treaty vs. the Russian insistence on precisely such a
written arrangement: (2) the US insistence on developing missile defense,
and (3) the US desire to place some of its ''decommissioned'' warheads in
storage (for a rainy day, as it were), in contrast with the Russians'
determination to have those weapons discarded.

As matters have worked out, the Bush administration has yielded to Putin's
demand for a treaty - a fact that the Russian president can cite as
evidence of his, and his country's, ability to influence important
international events. After all, Putin has made a signal contribution to
the US war on terrorism by allowing use of Russian airspace to support
military action in Afghanistan, and more generally, he has sought to
develop a strategic partnership with the United States since Sept. 11. To
date, however, he has received few concrete expressions of appreciation
from his US ''partners,'' a circumstance that his national security
advisers, as well as his more conservative adversaries, point to with dismay.

For example, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov and officials of the
Federal Security Service (one of the KGB's successors) argued against use
of Russian airspace and the military bases of the former Soviet republics
of Central Asia.

More recently, Gennadi Seleznyov, speaker of the Duma (the lower and more
powerful house of Russia's parliament), as well as General Konstantin
Totsky, director of the Federal Border Service, have demanded that the
United States ''get out of our zone of influence'' in Central Asia. Other
government officials and academic specialists on security issues -
including some with pro-American track records - continue to warn against
''unwarranted concessions'' to the United States and have spoken of the
''naivete'' with which Putin seeks to normalize relations with the West.

Thus, the fact that Putin got his way and a formal treaty will be signed at
the summit will be to his benefit. As Aleksandr Konovalov, the highly
regarded director of Moscow's Institute of Strategic Assessments, put it,
''This is a big victory for Putin, and could be a key turning point in the
US-Russian relationship.''

With respect to the second point, the two sides said nothing last week
about strategic defense. That does not ensure that the issue will not
reemerge this week; indeed, both sides have spoken in the past of the
wisdom of linking US deployment of a missile defense system with a
reduction in offensive forces. It would not be surprising to see the issue
revisited in the near future and even Russia's S-300 antiballistic missile
system somehow tied to US research, development, or deployment of a missile
defense program. For the moment, though, the United States has had its way
on strategic defense, and the Russians have gained nothing.

This is not necessarily the end of the story, however. Georgii Mamedov,
Russia's deputy foreign minister, spoke vaguely last week about certain
questions ''that are not directly the matter of strategic offensive
armaments, but without which strategic stability is impossible.'' He even
acknowledged that he was referring, ''in the first place, [to] the question
of missile defense.'' Mamedov went so far as to add that he hoped ''to
achieve mutually acceptable results'' on this issue in his ongoing
negotiations with John Bolton, US undersecretary of state.

Finally, with respect to the third problem, whether the Bush administration
will destroy or ''mothball'' some of its offensive missile warheads, the
''compromise'' looks suspiciously like another US victory. Some American
weapons will be destroyed, but precisely how many has not been disclosed.
As Celeste Wallender of the Center for Strategic and International Studies,
a Washington think tank, said, ''the agreement or treaty will not constrain
either side - but effectively speaking, the US side - from being able to
hold in reserve additional warheads that might be redeployed to deal with
future unspecified contingencies.''

Wishing to put the best spin on the fact that some of these warheads will
be retained, Philipp Bleek, a researcher at the Arms Control Association in
Washington, said that the two sides, ''appear to be agreeing to disagree on
some of the core issues.'' That is a colossal understatement.

Moscow had insisted that Washington not confine itself to a ''virtual
dismantling'' of its offensive systems, but that is precisely what has
happened. As Aleksandr Pikayev, a military specialist with the Carnegie
Endowment in Moscow, said, ''This agreement leaves the US with full freedom
of action.''

Similarly, Russia's best-known national-security analyst, Pavel
Felgenhauer, asserted that Russia has gained nothing, while the United
States has had its way. ''This agreement decides nothing. It's pure
propaganda,'' Felgenhauer noted. ''Putin needs to justify his pro-Western
stance, and now he can claim that he convinced a reluctant George Bush to
sign this document.''

Pravda.Ru, the rather pathetic vestige of what was once the Soviet
Communist Party's most feared newspaper, was equally pointed. After the
agreement was approved by the two sides, it observed ruefully that
''Although reluctantly, the Kremlin consented to partial stockpiling of
warheads. Earlier Russia had insisted warheads were to be destroyed
completely ... Russia decided to reconcile itself to the fact that U.S.'s
nuclear strategy cannot be changed, and the treaty will permit Vladimir
Putin to save face.'' The paper's headline said it all: ''America Got the
Treaty, and Russia Got Nothing.''

In reality, with a defense budget roughly one-40th that of America's,
Russia is in no position to dictate policy. For better or worse, the United
States is the world's sole superpower, and the agreement reached last week
by the two countries serves merely as a reminder that America can have its
way in virtually any international negotiation.

*******

#7
Toronto Star
May 19, 2002
Russia hones its nuclear skills 
Moscow is still committed to modernizing its current arsenal and developing
new weaponry 
Paul Webster
SPECIAL TO THE STAR 
 
MOSCOW--IT WAS the sort of encounter that packed the pages of Cold War
thrillers back when the arms race was hot.

Flying east late last month, two giant Russian bombers designed to carry up
to 16 nuclear-tipped cruise missiles were only 60 kilometres off the Alaska
coast before American F-15 jets intercepted them. 

The Bear H bombers stayed on course into U.S. airspace just long enough to
make the American pilots sweat a little, then circled back to base. 

The exercise was enough to remind Washington that although the Kremlin's
superpower pretensions crumbled with the collapse of the Soviet empire in
1991, Russia remains a nuclear colossus. 

Over the last few months, Russia has sent a series of such signals,
designed to deliver the message that, despite the treaty presidents George
W. Bush and Vladimir Putin plan to sign here this week pledging deep cuts
in U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, Russia is firmly committed to
maintaining its status as a nuclear front-runner.

According to many observers, Putin has made refurbishing and strengthening
Russian nuclear forces a top priority. 

Shortly after he was elected in 2000, he issued a national security
blueprint emphasizing Russia's need for "nuclear forces that are capable of
guaranteeing the infliction of the desired extent of damage against any
aggressor state or coalition of states in any conditions and circumstances." 

According to Gen. Vasily Lata, who works at Russia's nuclear missile
academy, Putin has worked hard to honour that commitment.

"We'll win not with numbers but with skills," Lata says about plans to cut
the number of warheads.

"Russia is not involved in disarmament. We're just reducing the numbers of
warheads to a reasonable level. In the meantime, we're developing new
nuclear weapons and modernizing the ones we have.

"Over the last few years, improving our land-based nuclear weapons has been
emphasized. In many ways, our systems are superior to the American ones and
can easily beat American missile-defence plans."

In the late 1990s, Russia launched a program to build up to 50 more of its
most advanced nuclear-capable missiles a year. On Feb. 6, the deputy chief
of Russia's general staff, Gen. Yuriy Baluyevskiy, announced that his
country's intercontinental ballistic missile force had been successfully
modernized during the 1990s and will remain "entirely satisfactory" for the
rest of this decade.

Baluyevskiy said the modernization of naval nuclear forces is now the
country's top military priority. 

This announcement had been expected since March, 2001, when the Russian
government put in an order for 40 sea-launched ballistic missiles, the
first major order since 1992.

Russia is currently building two new ballistic missile submarines, having
just refurbished a third. 

Only weeks after the announcement about the naval nuclear build-up, Russian
aircraft-industry officials announced plans to modernize all 15 of their
Tupolev-160 bombers, the backbone of the air force's nuclear-attack wing.

Along with the modernization of Russia's land, sea and airborne
nuclear-delivery forces, research continues at 10 ultra-secret nuclear
cities, where an estimated 75,000 specialists work on new nuclear weaponry.

According to a 2001 study of the secret nuclear and missile complex by
Russian demographer Valentin Tikhonov, key weapons-research programs have
survived Russia's economic collapse and competition for research jobs in
these centres is now growing. 

Ivan Safranchuk, of the Centre for Defence Information in Moscow, says
Russian nuclear researchers intend to match U.S. plans for nuclear weapons
that can be used in battlefield situations.

"They want to develop a less destructive nuclear weapon with limited
radiation effects," Safranchuk says about Russia's research aims. 

Although Russian nuclear-weapons testing is forbidden by international
treaty, money has been invested in a sophisticated program to allow weapons
designers to match U.S. programs that test weaponry innovations in virtual
settings using computer simulations. 

Says Lata: "Russia has similar test methods and models to the U.S. We
support the idea of testing nuclear weapons virtually, maybe even more than
the U.S. We're creating new weapons that way." 

Last week, the New York Times reported that the U.S. Joint Atomic Energy
Intelligence Committee says it has evidence Russia is preparing to resume
live nuclear tests.

Although the Russian government vigorously denied this claim, it has
admitted conducting a series of so-called "subcritical" nuclear experiments
in 1999, which it says are not banned.

And while Bush has praised Putin's commitment to cut its nuclear arsenal,
numerous senior U.S. experts and officials have been expressing concern
about Russia's nuclear-weapons program.

According to Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National
Lab, where U.S. nuclear weapons are designed, Russia has a major nuclear
edge over the U.S. because the Russians "are able to produce and assemble
nuclear-weapon materials and components at capacities many times that of
the United States."

The U.S. currently is not assembling any new nuclear weapons.

Testifying before the U.S. Senate on March 19, Thomas Wilson, director of
the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, said Russia will continue to rely on
nuclear weapons and is building new missiles while upgrading others "to
compensate for its diminished conventional military capability." 

That same day, CIA director George Tenet warned the Senate that "Moscow is
likely to pursue a variety of countermeasures and new weapons systems to
defeat a deployed U.S. missile defence."

The worries in Washington about Russia's nuclear ambitions appear to have
triggered a response all too familiar to readers of Cold War fact and fiction.

A few a few days before Wilson and Tenet gave their warnings, U.S. Energy
Secretary Spencer Abraham appeared before the Senate's Armed Services
Committee to answer questions about Russia's program to build new weapons.

He told the senators that the U.S. has decided to begin building warheads
again by 2007. 

Paul Webster is a Canadian reporter based in Moscow.
 
*******

#8
New York Times
May 19, 2002
Becoming a Normal Nation
By CELESTINE BOHLEN

PRESIDENT BUSH told Russia's foreign minister he is preparing for his first
trip to Russia by reading the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the 19th-century
author whose works explored the dark recesses of the Russian soul.

But Mr. Bush has picked the wrong author, Russians say, because the Russia
he will be visiting this week is not the Russia of Dostoyevsky, with
mystical saints and guilt-stricken madmen, but a more rational and
forward-looking nation that is being pushed, prodded and promoted by his
host, President Vladimir V. Putin.

"Bush is reading Dostoyevsky, but he should be reading Nabokov, because
that is where the future is, not the past," said Nina L. Khrushcheva, a
professor in international affairs at the New School University.

Like Dostoyevsky, Mr. Putin is a nationalist. But like Vladimir Nabokov,
the émigré writer, Mr. Putin also seems to have a clear understanding of
what Russia lacks, and of what the West has to offer. 

In his two years in office, most particularly since Sept. 11, this former
K.G.B. agent has set Russia's course westward — economically, culturally,
politically and now strategically, through a bilateral arms control
agreement with the United States and a new alliance with NATO that gives
Russia a seat at Europe's head table.

Still, the gap separating Russia and the West, while narrowing, remains
wide — and can be measured in many ways, not just by economic statistics
that show Russia lagging significantly behind even Poland, let alone
Germany, France or the United States.

So is this the historical moment that has beckoned for decades, even
centuries, the moment when Russia becomes a member of the club of civilized
countries? Can it be that Russia — so vast it sprawls across 10 time zones
and two continents — is ready to check its baggage at the door, its history
of exotic, often brutal despotism, its messianic ambitions and its belief
in its own special destiny?

WESTERN leaders last week were quick to pronounce the end of one era, and
the opening of a new one. Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, said
that the new Russian-NATO council amounted to a "funeral of the cold war,"
and others spoke effusively about Russia's long awaited integration into
Europe.

But to many Russians, these pronouncements seemed both short-sighted and
outdated. On one hand, they say, the cold war ended more than a decade ago,
with the political reforms begun by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev,
which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and then of the Soviet Union itself.

"I am sick and tired of attending funerals for the cold war," said
Vyacheslav Nikonov, head of the Politika Foundation, a research group.
"Gorbachev ended the cold war in 1989. It died then, and I think it is
still dead."

On the other hand, Russia has proved resistant to change in the past at
least as far back as Peter the Great, who in the 17th and 18th centuries
tried to modernize and Westernize his country. Even the communist
revolution of 1917, many argue, only perpetuated a traditional despotism
with an imperialist foreign policy, even if clothed in the language of Marx
and Lenin. 

"The process has begun," was a phrase used by Mr. Gorbachev in those years
(in Russian, the phrase is more vivid, suggesting a train that has left the
station). But from the Russian perspective, that process is far from over. 

RUSSIA is getting closer, and the West is letting it get closer," said Ms.
Khrushcheva, a granddaughter of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. "But
the process is not always linear, and that is not only Russia's doing. We
have centuries of mistrust between us, and they cannot be overcome in 10,
or 20 years. This is one chapter in a series of chapters, and all that we
can say is that the chapters are getting shorter."

Otto Latsis, a political commentator at the newspaper Noviye Izvestia, also
believes that Russia's rapprochement with the West still has a way to go.
"I agree with the word historical," he said, referring to last week's
headlines about Russia's new relationship with NATO, "but not with the word
moment. This is the subject of an eternal debate that has been going on for
hundreds of years. The adoption of the Western model for Russia is the key
question behind our economic reforms, and it is the key to our political
change. It can only be a process, a long and difficult one, with twists and
turns."

Even if they couldn't quite comprehend it a decade ago, most Russians have
now come to understand that the loss of their superpower status was the
price they had to pay to become a "normal" country — if by normal they
meant free, democratic and market-oriented. And as painful as that can be
sometimes, most Russians have made peace with their choice. 

Even before Sept. 11, Mr. Putin seemed ready to accept that reality and
make the best of it, by choosing to cooperate with the West, rather than
confront it. 

But he has done so in the face of resistance from much of Russia's
institutional elite, from the military and the remnants of the old Soviet
foreign policy establishment, many of whom still bridle at the concessions
made by Mr. Gorbachev as the cold war was winding down.

"For Russia, it is difficult to become a minor partner," said Anatoli I.
Utkin, director of international studies at the Institute for U.S. and
Canadian Studies in Moscow. "Since 1480, with the defeat of the Mongols,
Russia has never been in second place to anyone. It is difficult to imagine
that Russia would ever be happy to be behind the leader, just one member of
a pack."

And yet, as many argue, Russia really has no choice. The Soviet Union
bankrupted itself by keeping its economy on a war footing for 60 years, Mr.
Latsis said. "Now our economy is even worse off," he said. "So how could we
conduct ourselves like a superpower? On the basis of what? I can believe
that there are some people in the Pentagon who would like to destroy
Russia, as they did the Soviet Union, but we should not take up their
challenge."

MANY Russians still harbor deep misgivings about the West — or rather about
the West's intentions toward Russia. Those feelings are particularly strong
among the elite, but then, as Mr. Nikonov said, here Mr. Putin benefits
from the Russian tradition of a strong, even all-powerful leader.

"Russia is still a czarist country where the elite can be ignored," said
Mr. Nikonov. 

In any case, he added, the general population has more positive feelings
towards the West in general, and the United States in particular. Only
twice in the last decade have those feelings soured significantly: once
during the American-led bombing campaign in Yugoslavia in 1998, and again
during the Salt Lake City Olympics, when Russians felt that their top
figure-skaters were the victims of an anti-Russian hysteria generated in
the North American press.

The vehemence of the Russian reaction to these events reflects, in part, a
sensitivity over their country's weakened position. For many Russians, the
bombs that fell on Serbia, a Russian client state, were an ominous hint
that bombs could fall again on Russian targets, should Washington will it.
At Salt Lake City, too, Russians felt powerless, voiceless and victimized.

So far, the larger strategic issues raised by Russia's new role at NATO, or
the terms of the latest arms control agreement, seem barely to have
registered on Russian public opinion. But that could change, some experts
predict, as NATO takes on the Baltic states as members, or if the American
military presence in Central Asia and in Georgia looks set to become
long-term.

These issues — and others, like a possible American invasion of Iraq —
could upset the delicate balance built into Russia's relations with the
West, and could, some argue, even lead to Mr. Putin's eventual eclipse —
just as Mr. Gorbachev is thought to have dug his own political grave by
being overly eager in his accommodation of the West.

"There is a feeling of déjà vu," Mr. Utkin said. "For the second time,
Russia is going bearing gifts." The question is whether this time, it will
get enough in return to warrant staying the course.

Russia's democracy has advanced since Communist hard-liners mounted a coup
against Mr. Gorbachev in 1991: Mr. Putin, unlike Mr. Gorbachev, was
popularly elected, and today enjoys a popularity rating of 70 percent or
more, about equal to Mr. Bush's. 

THESE things can change, however, and there is no guarantee — either
institutional or cultural — that Russians next time won't swing away from
Mr. Putin's pro-Western policies, leaving the next leader with the same
broad powers to move in an entirely different direction.

"Essentially we are talking about two approaches," Mr. Utkin said. "One,
taken from American folklore, is if you can't beat them, join them. The
other path, which was taken by Winston Churchill or Charles de Gaulle, is
to show defiance even in defeat." 

How would the second approach be put into effect? "This is a big country, a
very patriotic country, and people could be made ready for mobilization,"
Mr. Utkin said.

In other words, the debate over Russia's role in the world and history is
not over. Even as the Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov was clasping
hands with Western leaders at a NATO meeting in Reykjavik, Mr. Putin was
playing host to five presidents of ex-Soviet Republics who came to Moscow
to turn a 1992 military alliance into a formal organization.

"This is a kind of insurance policy," Mr. Utkin said, "a guarantee against
being melted into the crowd, being put somewhere between Portugal and Spain."

*******

#9
Los Angeles Times
May 19, 2002
CENTRAL ASIA
A Budding Partnership
At their summit, Bush and Putin should build on the two countries'
cooperation on Eurasian security.
By CLIFFORD A. KUPCHAN and CHARLES A. KUPCHAN, Clifford A. Kupchan is vice
president of the Eurasia Foundation. Charles A. Kupchan is a professor of
international affairs at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations.

MOSCOW -- At their meeting here this week, President Bush and Russian
President Vladimir V. Putin can take a dramatic step toward a new
U.S.-Russian partnership by building upon a revolution in the geopolitics of
Eurasia that has been rapidly unfolding since Sept. 11. Coming on the heels
of last week's agreements to cut nuclear arsenals and create a NATO-Russia
council, burgeoning cooperation on Eurasian security could transform
U.S.-Russian relations.

For centuries, Russia has dominated Central Asia and the Caucasus, all the
while warning Western powers to steer clear. But Moscow is backing off. The
U.S. military now has footholds in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and
Georgia, all a direct result of America's war on terrorism. Bases in
Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have facilitated U.S. operations in
Afghanistan; U.S. troops in Georgia will help prepare forces there to attack
terrorists in the country's lawless Pankisi Gorge. Remarkably, U.S. forces
have arrived under Russia's approving eye.

The motivations behind Moscow's cooperation go well beyond the fight against
terrorism. Putin's welcome of U.S. forces into Russia's backyard is part of
a profound shift in his country's policy toward its neighbors. Before Putin,
Moscow worked hard to limit Western influence in the former Soviet
republics, saw Russia as the sole arbiter of regional disputes and showed
interest in reconstituting an imperial zone. In contrast, Putin's policy is
based on economic pragmatism and recognition that Russia would pay too high
a price for seeking to retain tight control over its periphery.

Economic reconstruction of Russia is Putin's key goal, and foreign policy is
to serve this end. His increased respect for the sovereignty of Russia's
smaller neighbors and his willingness to offer the West more economic and
strategic access to Central Asia and the Caucasus follow logically.

The Russian president has gradually implemented his policy since 2000.
Russia has dropped its opposition to the U.S.-backed Baku-Ceyhan pipeline,
which would bring Caspian oil to the international market without crossing
Russian territory. Russian companies are vying to participate in the
project. In peace talks over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh in
Azerbaijan, Moscow has allowed Western countries to become influential
partners in mediation. Russia also is withdrawing from many of its military
bases across the region, fully aware that its presence is expensive and
strains relations with the United States.

In orchestrating this about-face, Putin continues to encounter opposition
from the military and others in the Russian elite, but his commanding
political power has enabled him to prevail. Russia's interest in countering
the terrorist threat from Central Asia and the Caucasus has strengthened
Putin's pragmatic hand. As Alexei G. Arbatov, a leading defense expert in
the Duma, or lower house of parliament, recently remarked, "Either Islamic
terrorists operate there freely, or an American political and military
presence begins building up. Since Russia today is unable, unfortunately, to
liquidate hotbeds of terrorism on its own, there is no other choice."

This evolution in Russian policy represents a remarkably rapid decline in
Russia's residual imperial mind-set. The Soviet Union existed only 11 years
ago, and Russia is Eurasia's dominant state, tempting it to encroach upon
its weaker neighbors. Nonetheless, Moscow is retreating from decades of
reliance on coercion and intimidation to sustain a sphere of influence, a
momentous shift that opens up opportunities for the U.S. to develop a
regional partnership with Russia.

The new U.S.-Russia partnership should focus on shared strategic, political
and economic objectives. Fulfilling its strategic goals would entail a
long-term U.S. military presence in Central Asia, a prospect most Russian
elites privately support. The U.S. would use these bases to continue the
fight against terrorism, of particular importance in light of the
questionable future of U.S. access to bases in Saudi Arabia. The bases would
also help combat Islamic radicals in the region who are reportedly funneling
arms and money to Palestinian extremists. In addition, the U.S. would use
its foothold in Central Asia to work with Moscow to limit China's growing
influence--Beijing's intentions are of deep concern to Russian elites--and
to manage conflict between India and Pakistan.

The political goal of a U.S.-Russian partnership would be to promote
stability among the fragile states of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Many of
these countries have weak domestic institutions and tenuous national
identities; a corrupting drug trade further compromises the functioning of
the state. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan are governed
by elderly, autocratic leaders and face potential crises over leadership
succession. Georgia's government has teetered on the edge of collapse and
does not control major portions of the country. The United States and Russia
should focus joint diplomacy on preserving the territorial integrity of
these countries, ensuring smooth leadership transitions and enhancing
efforts to fight drug trafficking.

The fragility of these states also increases the possibility that they could
serve as terrorist havens. Extremists are already operating in Georgia. The
United States should continue anti-terrorism training, increase efforts to
improve the quality of domestic governance and press the government to take
stronger steps against terrorists. The Russians should play a more
constructive role in resolving the country's separatist conflicts and should
stop strong-arming Georgia through tactics such as threatening to cut off
gas supplies.

On the economic front, the U.S. and Russia can work together to encourage
development and reform throughout the region, the best insurance against
both political instability and the spread of fundamentalism among Central
Asia's substantial Muslim population. Washington should seek to attract
private investment to the area, a goal made easier by a U.S. military
presence. The U.S. also should direct more foreign assistance to Central
Asia, but without falling into the Cold War trap of providing aid directly
to autocrats uninterested in economic reform or political liberalization.
Instead, Washington should channel aid to the grass-roots level, supporting
and nurturing new ideas among the next generation of leaders through
educational exchanges, training programs and in-country projects that bypass
the central government.

Although the Russian government does not have the resources to contribute
financial assistance, it can take important steps to stimulate growth in the
region. Moscow should ease new visa restrictions on Georgians, enabling them
to again find work in Russia and send back home their earnings. The Russians
should drop barriers on imports of Central Asian agricultural products.
Moscow can use the growing economic clout stemming from its oil production
to champion the development of Central Asia in international lending
institutions and among Arab and Asian donors. And the U.S. and Russia must
work together to tap the Caspian Basin's major oil reserves, enhancing the
region's prosperity, bringing income to Russia's energy industry and
diversifying the West's oil supplies.

Many issues will continue to divide the United States and Russia. But in
Central Asia and the Caucasus, American and Russian objectives now closely
coincide. Neither Washington nor Moscow can afford to overlook this
opportunity to bring welcome stability to Eurasia's southern rim while
opening the door to a new level of cooperation.

*******

#10
From: "Peter Yu" 
Subject: Book Announcement
Date: Sun, 19 May 2002 

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT

Russian Media Law & Policy in the Yeltsin Decade: Essays and Documents
Edited by Monroe E. Price, Andrei Richter, Peter K. Yu
Published by Kluwer Law International
572 pp. + xiv

The Howard M. Squadron Program in Law, Media & Society at the Benjamin N.
Cardozo School of Law is pleased to announce the publication of Russian
Media Law & Policy in the Yeltsin Decade: Essays and Documents. 
  
One of the great transitions as the Soviet Union dissolved involved the
transformation of state broadcasting in Russia and the Newly Independent
States. This book deals with the turmoil associated with struggles in
Post-Soviet Russia: struggles for journalistic editorial autonomy, the
bloody media wars between the Yeltsin government and the Russian
legislature, the role of the media in the Coup, and the role of the United
States, other governments and non-government organizations in shaping the
new media.
  
The book is available at book stores worldwide and at Amazon.com (click
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/9041188770/).

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part I: Essays
I. An Introduction
- The Russian Press After Perestroika - Andrei Richter
- After the Bloodshed:  Survey of the Russian Press from 1993 to 1995 -
Jamey Gambrell
II. Freedom of Speech and Democracy
- Law, Force, and the Russian Media - Monroe E. Price
- Comparing Broadcast Structures: Transnational Perspectives and
Post-Communist Examples - Monroe E. Price
- Izvestiia as a Mirror of Russian Legal Reform:  Press, Law, and Crisis in
the Post-Soviet Era - Frances H. Foster
- Freedom and Responsibility in the Russian Media - Yassen N. Zassoursky
- Information and the Problem of Democracy: The Russian Experience -
Frances H. Foster
III. Evolving Regulation
A. Elections
- Free Speech and the Mass Media in Russia: Lessons from the December 1993
Election and Constitutional Referendum -
Melissa Dawson
- Information Tribunal Made Permanent Under President’s Supervision - Peter
Krug
B. Content Control  
- Of Founders and Emergencies: Euphemizing Censorship - Peter Krug
- Pornography, Pluralism, and the Russian Press - Brian McNair
- Parental Law, Harmful Speech, and the Development of Legal Culture:
Russian Judicial Chamber Discourse and Narrative - Frances H. Foster
- Controlling Content on Television in Russia - Svetlana Kolesnik
C. Advertising
- The MMM Case:  Implications for the Russian Media - Frances H. Foster
- Legal Regulation of Advertising in Russia - William G. Frenkel
D. Defamation
- Civil Defamation Law and the Press in Russia:  Private and Public
Interests, the 1995 Civil Code, and the Constitution - Peter Krug
E. Changing Institutions
- Corporate Transformation of the Russian Media - Elena Vartanova
- Pass the Advil:  Financial Woes of Russia’s State Broadcasters - Peter Krug
- In Russia, Private Doesn’t Mean Independent:  Bankers and Oil Tycoons Use
the Media as a Business Weapon - Andrei Fadin
- Television and Politics:  The ORT Crisis - Svetlana Kolesnik
- Local Media Legislation in Russian Provinces:  An Old and Winding Road -
Andrei Richter
IV. Into the Putin Era
- The Kremlin Strikes Back:  The Reassertion of State Power over the
Russian Media - Laura Belin
- A Brief Chronology of Russian Media Law and Policy During the Yeltsin
Years - Bethany Davis Noll
Part II: Documents...
III. Reports and Other Publications
- Russian Newspaper Crisis Recovery Program - Robert Manoff, Robert
Coalson, Conrad Hohenlohe &
Vladimir Svetozarov
- Regional Newspapers and the Russian Crisis - Robert Coalson & Vladimir
Svetozarov
- 1998 Country Report on Human Rights Practices in Russia - U.S. Department
of State
- Commentary on 1998 U.S. State Department Country Report on Human Rights
Practices in Russia - Manana Aslamazyan, Internews Russia
- 1998 World Press Freedom Review on Russia - International Press Institute

******

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