A Step At A Time

Lauri Otonkoski (b. 1959): poet, musician, essayist and music critic. He has published seven books of poetry, a book for children and essays. Awards received by Otonkoski include the Nuori Suomi (Young Finland) Prize for 1995, the Tanssiva Karhu (Dancing Bear) Prize 1996 and 2003 (for the book Olo), and the Engel Ecclesiastical Prize, 2001.

(my tr.)

19.12


Sitting in a car on a frosty morning only a Finn, as the cold
slams from the padding of the seat into his kidneys,
is able to ask the gods of pistons, liquids
and spark plugs to have mercy on him.
The trunks of the pines were the colour of asphalt
as I drove. The sea screams here on the island like an endless bullet train,
the voice of the south-westerly wind looks blue behind the strait.
If there were snow,
in the yard one would see the tracks of elk, hare and the neighbour’s dog.
But now on the move are only the ghosts risen from the boghole,
which leave no trace. Someone fades the dusk to darkness
by afternoon.
If among the trees now priests were running,
their robes would not be visible,
but the bands would flutter like white bats.
In the electric warmth of the cottage I fry an egg and am not afraid
of the darkness that is outside. If the TV were working,
I would get pleasure even from that.
I would watch a random show which would of course be the Business News.
Knowledge expands, love builds, but only the capitalist
is able to be anxious while idle, Paul forgot that.
Stocks were falling, but in the Northern Atlantic
an area of high pressure should give us hope as it filled.
Putin is almost a whore in French. O. bin Laden
looks like a moss-covered mushroom
as he talks on a grainy video about God
and mass murder in turns.
Now the feelings come. A screaming present
without the armour of alcohol, how I really hate them.
The spheres behind the frontal lobe, in which a substance heavier
than the soul is pumped until the head splits
and the heart splashes from its moist ark
to gargle a birch-branch stripped of bark.
The water has risen to the shed, the rowing boat seems to be moving there.
A thump carries through the dark air as it beats its nose against the wall.
Freedom in a carefully measured space. I tried to think
about alcoholism, but only that kind of thought came.
Without memory one could live happy as a green pea on a plate.
Then in spring the patches open in the melted snow and in them flower the intentions.
I had come here now and looked everywhere to see
that the doors were closed against the winter, the walls vertical
and the floor horizontal, like a sleepy sharp-shooter I had
thought I saw something moving. The night went in such a way
that the children’s inheritance was not much increased,
only one thing remained on my mind, whether a thought or a dream:
love and alcohol, that two-headed sorcerer’s serpent,
around my neck like a tightly knotted scarf. And quite hard to take off.
As soon as there was a bit of light in the morning,
for one cannot really talk of sunrise at this time of year,
the cloud cover on the horizon opens just a crack
and there it was all aurora as morning broke
I drove to the southern tip to take off that too-tightly-knotted scarf.
The young birches suddenly stripped raised their hands to their ears
in pure shame. They are sad and pathetic
as if on the way to a concentration camp. The juniper on the other hand
grows straight from the rock and boasts
that Hier gibt’s kein warum. In the inlets already ice-anglers
like black sticks on a grey background,
like a giant bird of prey would suddenly have flown over
and lightened its being swollen with a blueberry-containing meal
precisely at that place.
But I go further out,
throw the narrow spoon straight towards Tallinn.
Before Easter I will sail across the Atlantic. I have heard
that between Bermuda and the Azores there are no reefs,
love or alcohol, and surely that is reason enough
to prepare oneself for the journey. Are there also those
who simply open the doors of the floodgates,
let life slip into a book,
if they are writers, and if they are something else,
then into something else.
I just always have the feeling that I I have to go and look.
That much I am in debt to things. It may chill or warm,
but the sea smokes, it eats its furthest islets
one after the other in its white maw,
with increasing speed it drinks itself metre by metre
in some terrible thirst the size of the Gulf of Finland.
I understand you, sea. I do not fear you, too much.
How much fairer it would be if love were more like smoke.
So that its gushing could be touched.
So one could see it.
How it disperses.

April 1948

Early morning on the coast of Scotland. Edinburgh: swans on the canals. The city around a false acropolis, mysterious and fogbound. The Athens of the North has no north. Chinese and Malays in Princess [sic] Street. It's a port town.

(tr. Justin O' Brien)

After the secret police, the poetry police? At the St Andrews Poetry Festival recently publisher Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Books gave a lecture entitled “Bile, Guile and Dangerous to Poetry” attacking the current poetry scene in the UK, which he believes is dominated by a narrow coterie of male, Anglocentric academics and critics:

The reason why I feel I must 'speak my mind' on this subject - as the StAnza programme puts it - is that as a poetry editor with 30 years' experience in the field, and as a publisher with a close understanding of poetry publishing, distribution and readership, I see at first hand the damage being inflicted by the poetry police as well as by others in the poetry establishment. I travel the country talking to all kinds of readers at festivals and regular poetry venues. I have access to publishing and bookselling statistics. I know what bookshops are selling, what readers and buying and what kinds of poetry people want to read.

And I don't blame bookshops for not stocking those books which very few people actually want to read. When Robert Potts laments in the Guardian (6 December 2003) that 'sadly, major bookshops are not stocking poetry in adequate quantities', he seems to me to be blaming booksellers for a situation which he and his fellow elitists have helped bring about. What does 'adequate quantities' mean for the bookseller? Presumably filling the shelves with books recommended by Potts, many of which, in my opinion, most poetry readers won't want to buy (or won't be able to afford). The poets and their publishers have been outraged by the recent reductions made by the bookshops to their poetry stocks: their high art was being spurned by the philistines. But in effect the people doing the spurning were not the bookshops - they were just the middle men - it was the readers who had lost interest. The only way to reverse that process is to promote many different kinds of poetry to as wide a readership as possible.

What I try to do as an editor and publisher is to be responsive both to writers and to readers, and then work with my colleagues to try to help bookshops serve the poetry readership. Unlike the poetry police, I don't shoot my mouth off with a partial or non-existent knowledge of the facts; I don't distort the facts to fit my opinions; and I don't make statements which are outright lies.

You can read the whole lecture here

"The unacknowledged legislators of the world" describes the secret police, not the poets.

- W.H. Auden

In the JC (subscription required), ex-Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky tells Jenni Frazer in an interview given at his home in Cambridge, England, that "dark days are back in Russia". As Frazer writes, Bukovsky "is arguably the most famous non-Jewish Soviet dissident after Sakharov." From the interview:

[Bukovsky] was specifically asked to go to Downing Street in order to brief Prime Minister Tony Blair's private secretary on the case of the fallen oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the now-imprisoned former boss of the Yukos oil empire.

Khodorkovsky, like many of the oligarchs, is Jewish, a fact which Bukovsky sees as yet one more reason for the nomenklatura to attack them and whip up popular domestic opinion against them.

"The case is political. There's no doubt about it. And it's outrageous. At the beginning of the '90s, the Russian government identified certain offshore zones as tax-deductible areas, and gave them benefit status. They were economically deprived areas, and Yukos was one of the companies which took advantage of the tax benefits. But when Putin came to power, the government announced that these tax benefits were cancelled and that those who had benefitted in the past would be obliged to pay the money back. It was done solely to punish successful businessmen for their independence. It was vengeance, pure and simple, and political opportunism."

But besides briefing Downing Street about Khodorkovsky, Bukovsky drew attention to more general issues in the former Soviet Union. He paints a bleak picture: "deterioration of human rights, a deliberate whipping-up of spy-mania, xenophobia, the persecution of foreigners -- and anti-Semitism. A regime which is oppressive internally usually becomes aggressive externally. It's clear that the objective is to try to restore the old Soviet Union as far as is physically possible."

....

He is both weary and cynical about the lack of protest from the international community: "There is a need for an alternative source of oil and gas and, because of the instability in the Middle East, the West turned to Russia. And, second, Bush announced his global war on terror and the Russians were smart enough to jump on the bandwagon and made themselves indispensable. I doubt that Russia is important to the so-called anti-terrorist coalition. They have their own agenda."

BEYOND THE MYTH: A REVIEW OF THE WOLVES OF ISLAM

By Andrew McGregor

Few conflicts in modern times have been so poorly known or understood as the Russo-Chechen war. And as the struggle over Chechnya is propelled to the forefront of the War on Terrorism, further obscuring the war's causes and effects, new works of scholarship are desperately needed to move the debate over the fate of this tiny republic beyond the realm of myth. Unfortunately, The Wolves of Islam, a new book by Paul Murphy ("a former U.S. senior counter-terrorism official" and "U.S. congressional advisor on Russia in 2002"), does little to increase our understanding of the complexities of this conflict.

The book's dust-jacket gives some hint of the approach of the rest of the work; just above the subtitle "Faces of Chechen Terrorism" is a large image of the late Amir al-Khattab, a Saudi-born Arab who led foreign volunteers in Chechnya. In his opening, the author remarks that in telling the story of the "Chechen Wolves", "…misinformation and disinformation have to be carefully filtered out." What follows, however, is a casual mix of facts, factoids and fantasies seemingly designed to discredit the Chechen struggle as another front in the war against al-Qaeda.

The sensational tone of the book is set in the opening pages, which warn that "graphic descriptions of terror, acts of torture, and human cruelty in this book will disturb the reader." Indeed, much of the first half of the book is devoted to detailed descriptions of various atrocities allegedly committed by Chechens. The author devotes some space to a gruesome account of the crucifixion and mutilation of a Russian soldier during the 1994 battle for Grozny. The "crucifixion of the innocent soldier" is a recurring propaganda motif that dates back to the Belgian front in the First World War (where the victim is usually described as a Canadian soldier victimized by Germans). But the author insists on the authenticity of his account, citing a scene from a novel (though Murphy does not describe it as such) by Vyacheslav Mironov and a similar scene from the 1997 movie Purgatory (Chistilishche), made by Russian nationalist and Duma deputy Aleksandr Nevzorov. By this point the reader may begin to suspect that the author's "misinformation and disinformation" filters are seriously defective.

Murphy's failure to cite references or to include any form of bibliography leaves the reader beholden to the author's accuracy in quoting various individuals. The reviewer was therefore not encouraged to see a lengthy quote from the late Khunkarpasha Israpilov attributed to Aslan Maskhadov on page 75. [1] In another incident involving Israpilov, the author offers an account of the 1996 Salman Raduev raidon Kizlyar. Raduev is described as deciding to seize a hospital in emulation of Basaev's earlier hospital seizure in Budennovsk and later killing a police hostage. In fact, the inexperienced Raduev was compelled to turn over command of the operation temporarily to Israpilov when things began to go wrong. It was Israpilov who decided to seize the hospital (he was a veteran of Budennovsk) and who later shot the policeman. [2]

Wolves or Humans?

In Murphy's description of the Chechens, soldiers, terrorists, criminals, politicians, foreign volunteers, women and children, all Chechens are gathered under the single appellative of "Wolves" – a dangerous and evidently sub-human species that poses a dire threat to the rest of mankind. The substitution of the term "Wolves" for Chechens throughout the text is a simplistic means of dehumanization, usually found in crude propaganda. Chechens, we are told, travel in "packs", Shamil Basaev leads a "pack of Wolves", and in the conclusion we are told "Wolves have taken to the skies". This affectation makes it difficult to tell whom the author is even talking about most of the time, as "Wolves" seems to include Chechens, Arabs, Ingush and possibly others. When Murphy says that "Wolves" paid two individuals to place a bomb, one wonders where they got the money.

There is almost no discussion of Chechnya's complex social structure (essential in any work attempting to describe the command structure of the Chechen resistance) or the region's history of devastation at the hands of Russian forces. The omission of a context for the author's account aids in the depiction of Chechens as inexplicably
single-minded in their hatred of Russia, the West, Christianity, Judaism, the United States, etc. The 1944 deportation of the entire Chechen nation to Central Asia (an event that defines modern Chechen attitudes towards Russia) is described in a mere two sentences – one of which manages to repeat Stalin's false accusation of Chechen collaboration with the German army (which never set foot in Chechnya). The author fails to mention that most of Chechnya's men of fighting age were busy at the time offering stiff resistance to the Nazi invasion of Russia.

In his treatment of the late Aslan Maskhadov, the author adopts the paradox displayed in the Kremlin accounts he is so fond of citing; Chechnya's late president is a powerless figurehead who "controls no-one", while at the same time bearing personal responsibility for the planning and management of every major act of terrorism. Maskhadov and most other Chechen leaders are eagerly linked to al-Qaeda whenever possible. Murphy uncritically repeats every allegation in what might now be termed the mythology of the "Chechen International" – Chechen expeditionary forces campaigning for al-Qaeda against U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. Though more serious analysts have exposed the falseness of all these claims in detail, Murphy's own research does not appear to have penetrated deeper than the tabloid headlines.

The Khattab/Bin Laden connection Murphy creates is unconvincing. On page 91, we are told "Khattab likely attended Osama bin Laden's worldwide Islamic League emergency session in Kandahar, Afghanistan, at which he must have laid out the idea of reuniting Chechnya and Dagestan by force…Osama bin Laden surely liked the idea…" (Italics inserted by the reviewer). On page 153 we find a Chechen delegation to bin Laden was "almost certainly led by Khattab." Later we find that bin Laden "almost certainly discussed and approved" financing for Khattab (page 215). In general the book follows the ever-popular, but not very useful, "Bin Laden controls everything" model. For those who question the extent of the alleged Chechen/Bin Laden links, the author offers that "President Putin confirmed in February 2003 that Osama bin Laden is still funding Wolves in Chechnya." Case closed.

Nuclear Threat or Atomic Scam?

The author appears especially eager to promote the Chechens as a source of "nuclear terrorism". He cites Yoseff Bodansky's old and unsubstantiated claim that Chechens supplied Bin Laden with suitcase nukes in the mid-90s. We are warned repeatedly of the threat posed by Chechen access to Osmium 187, a platinum-group substance. Osmium 187 is a non-fissile, non-radioactive substance of no use in constructing a "dirty-bomb" or any other weapon. Despite this, the author assures us that "Osmium isotopes are one of the required components for making mini-nukes because osmium increases the destructive power of the explosion" (page 177). This is precisely the sales-pitch con-artists have used to make a killing by peddling this expensive material to Russia's many consumers of bomb-making technology. Osmium 187 is not regulated by any U.S. or international agency and is easily available from legitimate dealers over the internet. The scam is well-aided by media sources and politicians who insist on repeating the bogus claims of its danger.

Meanwhile, the infamous bombings of Russian apartment buildings in 1999 (blamed on Chechens by the Kremlin) might be expected to fill at least a chapter in a work like this, but Murphy deals with this complex event in just two pages. Despite the absence of an inquiry, the demolition of the crime scenes without investigation, and the apprehension of several FSB agents caught in the act of placing explosives in the basement of a Ryazan apartment building, Murphy declares that "the evidence that Khattab was responsible for the apartment building bombings in Moscow is clear" (page 106). Anyone familiar with Russia knows that this is far from the case, but dissenting opinions and evidence are dismissed as part of "the now well-known story told by (Russian billionaire Boris) Berezovsky" (page 106). The description of fugitive Achimez Gochiyaev, the self-described "patsy" in the bombings, as a terrorist "mastermind" is simply excessive.

There are numerous small annoyances in the book, such as dubious mathematics (the Chechen population was "decimated by half") and inconsistencies in the spelling of names. The description of the regional drug trade might have more credibility if there were fewer references to "heroine" production. At times, the author betrays his weak grasp of technical issues by making ludicrously simplistic statements such as "it is easy to make different kinds of primitive biological weapons in the field." And, while discussing the "Black Widow" phenomenon, the author dismisses claims that Chechen women have been mistreated by Russian soldiers ("these accusations are difficult to prove" – page 210), preferring to ascribe their motivation to "forbidden love".

Conclusion

Murphy's book wastes little time on describing the torture of Chechen civilians by Russian forces, the looting, the disappearances, the trade in bodies, the mass graves. The concept of "state terrorism", however, is never approached – though some of Basaev's quotes would make a good launching point for such a discussion. The author mentions "war terrorism" several times without explanation, though the term
seems to refer to what is commonly known as "guerrilla warfare". The book's treatment of Islam in Chechnya is extremely weak. There is no explanation of what a "Wahhabi" is exactly, though the term is liberally applied to the "Wolves". Of the Naqshbandi and Qadiri Sufi orders we are told only that they are "mystical". On the Russian side, there is no discussion of the deep involvement of rival Russian intelligence agencies in the conflict. In Murphy's view the FSB (former KGB) and the GRU (military intelligence) are as blameless as a London Bobby.

What is the author's solution to this conflict, now in its third century? Maskhadov and Basaev must be killed and their financial networks destroyed in order to avoid chemical, biological and nuclear terrorist attacks. That's it. By the author's reckoning we should now be 50% closer to peace in the Caucasus. But anyone hoping for an accurate and thoughtful examination of the Russo-Chechen conflict will find The Wolves of Islam a most unsatisfactory work.

Dr. McGregor is the director of Aberfoyle International Security
Analysis in Toronto, Canada.

Notes:
1. Charles W Blandy, "Chechnya: A Beleaguered President". no. OB 61, Conflict Studies Research Center, Aug. 1998, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1998/ob61.htm.
2. Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamity in the
Caucasus, New York University
from Jamestown Foundation's Chechnya Weekly

Posting will again be light this weekend. Back to normal by Tuesday, I hope, if not before.

Former FSB colonel Aleksandr Litvinenko, writing at Chechenpress:

Today security officers have once again been caught sheltering war criminals from Serbia on their territory. Earlier security officers hid those who were guilty of mass execution of Polish officers in Katyn, whose murder was recognized as genocide at the Nuremberg trials. World-known terrorists such as Karlos Ilyich Ramiros, nicknamed "The Jackal", who has committed so many acts of terrorism that it would take more than one page just to list them, Vaid Haddad, the head of the terrorist groups of the PLO, the brother of the former prime minister of Pakistan Bhutto, who, following Andropov's personal instructions,hijacked airliners of the international airlines; those who blew up the Baku underground – they have all found a reliable shelter for themselves and their accomplices within the walls of the Lubyanka.

For this reason I would like to remind Mr Ignachenko, as the foam at his mouth washes the FSB clean of terrorist activity, of something that happened to me while I still was a member of that organization.

Since 1996 I held the post of the chief of the division engaged in the search for persons identified in the international search for terrorist activity. At that time documents from the Republic of Georgia obliging all member countries of Interpol were dispatched worldwide to assist the Georgian law enforcement bodies in the search for and detention of Igor Georgadze, who had organized an attempt on the life of the President of Georgia, Shevardnadze. Through operative sources I found out the exact location of this international terrorist, and immediately reported it to the chief of the operative-investigative directorate of the FSB, Lieutenant-General I.K. Mironov, offering to detain Georgadze for his subsequent extradition.

Having listened to my report, the general authoritatively declared that terrorist Georgadze was “ours" and that there was no need “to touch him". This was how I learned that there were “our” terrorists in the FSB and "another's". After all this we need to ask Putin and Co: Messrs security officers, please explain to the dull taxpayers: the leader of Al-Qaeda Bin Laden, who is he for you: “your” terrorist or "another's"? And are you sheltering him in the Lubyanka among other international terrorists and gangsters who are wanted worldwide.

I'm pleased because the composer Justin Connolly has given me a work for solo viola on my 60th birthday: it's his Celebratio, op. 29/IV. Justin writes: "It isn't easy, but you can use it as a study, bar by bar." I haven't played it through yet, but already I can see that it's a fine work, and I'm greatly honoured to have it dedicated to me.

Last October Justin's Piano Concerto had its first performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under David Porcelijn, with Nicolas Hodges as soloist.

I'm still picking up the threads after the long weekend of poetry readings in Scotland. Visiting Scotland always stirs up memories for me, taking me back to what sometimes feels like an alternative, "Scottish" past - a reality I might have stayed in if in my late 20s I hadn't begun to travel and then ended up being based outside the country I belong to. One thing that struck me this time was how different Scotland is from England - genuinely another country which, even though it no longer really has a language of its own, possesses an identity and ways of seeing and interpreting the world that are mostly foreign to the English. Perhaps some of the sharpness of the contrast came from the fact that I arrived in Edinburgh by plane from London - something I hadn't done since the 1960s - and was duly surprised by the sprawling extent of Edinburgh Airport, which now bears a much closer resemblance to Kastrup or Oslo than it does to the windswept Turnhouse Aerodrome of my youth. Strange, somehow, also when the taxi-driver taking you to the reading knows the street where you lived fifty years ago, has relatives in the same village, and describes the local smithy so vividly that you remember it in all its details, from childhood. And the reinforcement of all this caused by listening to poetry in Scots dialect - which, though it may not be widely spoken nowadays, is still very much alive as a literary language. Practitioners like Liz Niven extend the range of literary Scots so that it reaches out across the world again, much as it did until the 1920s and 30s.

I'm back in London now, after taking part with Lauri Otonkoski and Anni Sumari in the St Andrews Poetry Festival. Our Finnish reading went reasonably well, I thought, after we simplified the format from the reading at SPL in Edinburgh on the Thursday night. I hadn't been in St Andrews since childhood, but remembered many features of the place. The weather was foggy for much of the time, but the sea and sand were just as I remembered them, and so was the town itself.

While I'm in Scotland there may be a bit of a hiatus in posting here - things should be back to normal on Monday evening.

In Jamestown Foundation's Chechnya Weekly, Laurence Uzzell comments on the mystery that surrounds the killing of Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov, and sees it as one more shadowy act of violence associated with the Kremlin:

Press reports and official statements concerning the circumstances of Aslan Maskhadov's death, far from clearing things up, made them even murkier. In his May 8, Ilya Shabalkin, spokesman for the federal forces in the North Caucasus, said the rebel leader had been killed when security forces used explosives to penetrate the bunker beneath a house in the village of Tolstoi-Yurt in which Maskhadov was hiding with three associates. Chechen First Deputy Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, meanwhile, claimed that Maskhadov was killed when a bodyguard who was next to him in the cramped bunker "carelessly handled his gun." Kadyrov also claimed that those who took part in the operation against Maskhadov had planned to take him prisoner, not to kill him. The following day, however, Kommersant quoted Chechen Interior Minister Ruslan Alkhanov as saying that Maskahdov was killed when commandos tossed grenades into the bunker after Maskhadov refused to surrender. On March 10, Izvestia quoted Kadyrov as saying that he had been "joking" when he said that Maskhadov was accidentally shot and killed by his own bodyguard. Kadyrov, however, refused to discuss exactly how Maskhadov was killed. Meanwhile, the Rossia state television on March 13 broadcast an interview with a Federal Security Service (FSB) commando who participated in the operation against Maskhadov, who said that commandos did not negotiate with the rebel leader before blowing up his bunker because he was wearing a suicide bomber's belt and they assumed he would not surrender.

In an article published in Moskovsky komsomlets on March 15, Vadim Rechkalov and Irina Kuksenkova speculated that Maskhadov may have been killed by Ramzan Kadyrov's people after cutting a deal with Kadyrov, under the terms of which Maskhadov would publicly renounce his post as president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, and he and his family would be allowed to leave Chechnya unmolested and move abroad. The journalists speculated that Maskhadov was captured and shot to death just before leaving the country, after which his body was taken to Tolstoi-Yurt and "a special operation was staged." Rechkalov and Kuksenkova, who visited the house in Tolstoi-Yurt where Maskhadov's body was found, noted that the bunker in which Maskhadov and three associates had ostensibly lived since October had no ventilation. They quoted Yakha Yusupova, the wife of the house's owner, who denied that Maskhadov had been there, as saying that "you start to suffocate very quickly" in the bunker. In addition, the two reporters noted that the Yusopovs' house was "absolutely not adapted" for use as a safe house because it had no escape exits in the event of a zachistka, or mopping up raid by security forces. "This contradicts the tactics that the militants have developed," they wrote.

It should be noted that Ingushetiya.ru reported on March 8, the day the Russian military announced Maskhadov had been killed, that the rebel leader and several of his bodyguards had in fact been killed two days earlier – on March 6 – by gunmen loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov after a Nozhai-Yurt district resident gave away the rebel leader's hiding place for a "tidy sum of money." According to the independent website, Kadyrov asked the federal authorities to attribute Maskhadov's death to other agencies (see Chechnya Weekly, March 9).

The likelihood that more clues concerning how Maskhadov died might be found was reduced greatly on March 14, when Russian authorities announced that they had blown up the house in Tolstoi-Yurt where Maskhadov allegedly hid because they feared booby traps. The Associated Press quoted Col. General Arkady Yedelev, chief of the federal headquarters for the military campaign in Chechnya, as saying that demolition experts inspecting the bunker had discovered and detonated a box that contained documents and was ridden with explosives. "The team of investigators decided to blow up the entire house to avoid such surprises in the future," Yedelev said in a statement. Novaya gazeta correspondent Anna Politkovskaya told the AP that the destruction of the house apparently was intended to destroy any evidence that could cast doubt on official accounts of the killing. "There is nothing left now to question the official version of events," she said. Aleksandr Petrov of Human Rights Watch's Moscow office told the news agency that federal authorities in the past had blown up houses in Chechnya that belonged to militants who participated in terror attacks and that the practice has drawn strong criticism from international rights groups. "If the authorities blew up the house to punish the house owners, it's a bad move," Petrov said.

Meanwhile, the FSB said in a statement released on March 15 that it had paid a promised $10 million for information that led to the discovery and killing of Maskhadov to citizens who had "helped to pinpoint Maskhadov's exact whereabouts and to carry out the special operation," RIA Novosti reported. "These citizens were paid the financial recompense in full," the FSB said. "If need be these citizens will be provided with help in moving to a different region of Russia or to a Muslim country." The head of the FSB's public relations department, Colonel Sergei Ignatchenko, told the news agency that the FSB would pay $10 million to those providing information on the whereabouts of Chechen rebel warlord Shamil Basaev. The FSB offered bounties of $10 million each for Maskhadov and Basaev following the September 2004 Beslan school massacre. Maskhadov denied involvement in that attack, while Basaev claimed responsibility for it.

Umar Khanbiev, the Chechen rebel government's general representative abroad, called the idea that Chechens had revealed Maskhadov's whereabouts for the reward money "complete nonsense," Kommersant reported on March 16. "Yes, the president [Maskhadov] had enemies, including [some] among [the] local inhabitants," he told the newspaper. "They could shoot him, but sell him out – never." According to Kommersant, Khanbiev said that Chechens would not involve themselves in such a deal with the special services because they did not want the eternal shame that such "treachery" would bring on themselves, their families and clans. He said the theory that Maskhadov was killed elsewhere and then taken to Tolstoi-Yurt originated with Tolstoi-Yurt residents who "wanted to deflect the disgrace of the president of Ichkeria having been killed in their village."

This is a continuation of an overview of Robert Conquest’s book The Dragons of Expectation, Norton, 2005.

The list of works whose authors misrepresented and misperceived the realities of the Soviet state and the Cold War is quite a long one. In Chapter XIV (“A Gaggle of Misleaders”), Conquest examines some of those misleading works, and gives attention to the question of why they were often well received in the West: “We have avoided,” he states at the outset, “the products of a total ignorance, however pretentiously presented – as with the Webbs. And we have stuck to examples with, in each case, heavy intellectual claims to acceptance. It is a vivid haul of misunderstanding and misdirection, at various levels of IQ and influence.”

The examples considered by Conquest include the English writer C.P. Snow. Snow, the essay suggests, “is a stunning example of a deep emotional attachment to bureaucracy, to state supremacy, to quasi-Marxist – and to pro-Soviet – delusions.” Snow’s work shows evidence of a thirst for power. A quotation from one of Snow’s own novels sums up his character: “He longed for all the trappings, titles, ornaments, and show of power… He wanted the grandeur of the Lodge, he wanted to be styled among the Heads of Houses.”

Snow is perhaps best known now for the “two cultures” controversy with the literary critic F.R. Leavis, in the course of which Snow cited the British physicist J.D. Bernal, who in his book The World Without War stated that “scientists have the future in their bones”, against the vision of the future presented in Orwell’s 1984. As Conquest notes, Bernal had urged “an ever-closer understanding between Britain and the USSR”, and his politics were almost totally Stalinist. While Snow, on the other hand, was a “democratic sort of socialist”, he had no qualms at all about visiting, and being put up by, Yuri Zhdanov, the former notorious head of the Soviet Communist Party’s Culture Department, who was now head of a Russian university. Snow also visited and frequented those Soviet writers who toed the Party line, and in 1966 published an anthology of Soviet short stories, in the preface of which :

he argued that we should not look at Soviet literature with any political considerations in mind, accepting as fact such things as that “frontline soldiers in dugouts sang the war poems of Surkov [Stalinist hack]).”

The phrase “cold war” occurred frequently in this preface. It meant drawing attention to any facts or expressing any opinions unpalatable to the Soviet leadership. Snow assured us that it was wicked to look at Soviet literature with any political considerations in mind, since we would not do so with the literature of other cultures. This really is fantastic! Soviet literature, as we were told day in and day out by Soviet politicians, cultural bureaucrats, and orthodox writers themselves, was (or should be) “a weapon for Communism.”

Snow, Conquest suggests, quite consciously aligned himself “not only with the British establishment, which is bad enough, but also with the worst foreign one he could turn up.” Snow’s habit of mind is typical of a certain stratum of British intellectual society, and it is one that still persists today.

The essay continues with a look at some more “misleaders”: there is Simone de Beauvoir, with her abject acceptance of Maoist propaganda: in her book The Long March, she continually justified Communist atrocities “on the grounds that there were abuses in the West, too (on the principles Orwell defined, in The Lion and the Unicorn, as ‘two blacks make a white, half a loaf is the same as no bread’), and pointing to the undoubted faults of the old regime.” There is John Kenneth Galbraith – another, like Snow, from high establishment circles,

accepted, or listened to, because he presents his themes in a way persuasive to such a public, which is not so common among (let alone respected among) the professional economists. To take a pundit seriously on these grounds is (as in a different way in Hobsbawm’s and Snow’s cases) like saying, “This is a beautifully printed and finely bound railway timetable.” Yes, but its train times are wrong.

Conquest also devotes considerable and justified space to an investigation of the CNN documentary Cold War: An Illustrated History, 1945-1991 by Jeremy Isaacs and Taylor Downing, attacking in particular its “assessment of a benign Lenin”, and “its simplification of motive beyond the complexities and contradictions inherent in human character.” Conquest also attacks the documentary’s view of the Soviet spies Burgess, Maclean, and Philby: the documentary tells us that “they acted from political conviction. They believed what they were doing was right.” As Conquest notes, the same could be said of agents of Nazism like John Amery, but goes beyond this rather simplistic argument to quote the poet Stephen Spender, who knew the three spies and so some extent sympathized with them. Spender wrote in his diary:

.. what they all had was the arrogance of manipulators… Perhaps this was in part because they had voluntarily put themselves at the service of their Russian manipulators.. their faith in a creed whose mixture of sanctity, bloodiness and snobbery gave them a sense of great personal superiority.”

A consideration of the documentary’s view of Ronald Reagan (it sees him at hostile caricature level, as a simpleton) is followed by an examination of its treatment of the Rosenberg case (we are told by the CNN work that they were part of “a network of spies who felt uncomfortable that the United States was the sole owner of they key to atomic warfare”), and this, Conquest asserts, “gives an arguably acceptable motive for their espionage activity, though since they never confessed and thus never advanced such a motive, its is one constructed for them by sympathizers.” There is an extensive discussion of the documentary’s handling of the subject of McCarthyism and the workings of the CPUSA. Conquest suggests that there is a glaring and vital omission in the reasons for the Cold War that are given by the documentary and the book: it is

the conception that the Marxist-Leninist creed saw the world as a scene of essential antagonisms and insisted that the conflict must be pursued until the overthrow of the non-Communist order the world over. As we have said, this motivation has been confirmed by former Politburo members, post-Soviet foreign ministers, and others, and was only abandoned by the last Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, in 1990.

See also: Dragons and Democracy
Dragons and Democracy - II
Dragons and Democracy - III
Dragons and Democracy - IV
Dragons and Democracy - V
Dragons and Democracy - VI
Dragons and Democracy - VII
Dragons and Democracy - VIII
Dragons and Democracy - IX

Window on Eurasia: The Anti-Semitic Roots of Anti-Chechen Propaganda

Paul Goble

Tartu, March 15 - Russian writers are using images and motifs found in Nazi anti-Semitic writings to demonize and dehumanize the Chechens today, according to an American professor who has examined their production.

In an article published in the current issue of Moscow's "Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye," Anna Brodsky, who teaches at Washington and Lee University in the United States, argues that anti-Semitic imagery is an important source for Russians who are engaged in anti-Chechen propaganda (http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2005/70/br22-pr.html).

According to Brodsky, "the characteristics which the Nazis ascribed to the Jews" are now finding their way into the writings of an increasing number of Russians about the Chechens who are presented as being the incarnation of absolute evil --just as the Nazis treated the Jews more than a half century ago.

"Possibly the chief anti-Semitic stereotype used by the authors of such books [about the Chechens] is the myth of the economic domination of an immeasurably rich national minority," she writes. This paranoid vision of the Jews, which was outlined in the notorious forgery, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," is now being used to denounce the Chechens.

In a 1997 novel, for example, Lev Puchkov wrote that the Chechens are now attacking Russians because before the war they were used to stealing from them as the North Caucasians built up their illegal wealth. And in a 2001 novel, Dmitriy Cherkasov made a similar point, saying that the Chechens have always had economic power over the Russians.

Brodsky notes that Russian writers - novelists, memoirists and journalists - do not limit themselves to the application of this anti-Semitic slander from the past to the Chechens of today. They also portray the Chechens as cruel, pitiless, and obsessively interested in non-Chechen women, charges that anti-Semites historically have employed as well.

Russian writers like Puchkov, Viktor Dotsenko and Andrei Voronin, Brodsky notes, fill their books and articles with stories about the extreme sexuality of the Chechens and their dissolute behaviour not only among themselves but with others - again themes that often animated Nazi anti-Semitic writings as well.

And Russian writers also portray the Chechens as traitorous to the core, as people who are superficially hospitable but who inevitably betray anyone who is foolish enough to accept it. Indeed, at least one Russian writer on this theme explicitly calls the Chechens who do so Judases, yet another frequent anti-Semitic theme.

But perhaps the most disturbing parallel between anti-Semitic writings of the past and anti-Chechen writings of the present is the reappearance of the idea of the "blood libel," the notion that Jews and now Chechens practice ritual murder of outsiders as part of their national traditions.

This absurd medieval myth tragically had a more recent manifestation, Brodsky points out. Just before World War I, the Russian government infamously indicted Mendel Beilis on charges of ritual murder. Beilis was acquited, but anti-Semites continue to question his innocence - among them the Russian writer Igor Shafarevich as recently as 2002.

Now, at least one Russian writer has suggested that the Chechens are guilty of the same thing. In a pair of novels, "Walking into the Night" and "The Chechen Blues" (both published in 2002), Aleksandr Prokhanov suggested that the Chechens ritually murder captured Russian soldiers who refuse to convert to Islam in order to get their blood.

Like other scholars (see http://www.polit.ru/country/2002/12/07/479426.html) Brodsky acknowledges that Russian anti-Chechen propaganda has other sources as well - including not unimportantly Stalinist actions like the "dekulakization" of the peasantry and the forced exile of entire peoples including of course the Chechens themselves.

In memoirs about the Chechen war, some Russian soldiers, Brodsky points out, talk about "dekulakizing" the rich Chechens, and others who come in contact with the Chechens openly express regret that Stalin did not kill enough of them when he sent them into Central Asian exile at the end of World War II.

But as Brodsky makes clear, it is the anti-Semitic sources of the anti-Chechen writings that are the most disturbing for two important reasons.

On the one hand, this sourcing calls attention to just how far some Russians and others have already gone to demonize and dehumanize the Chechens, two steps typically taken by those who want to justify the destruction of an entire community or to excuse those who want to take that step.

And on the other, this sourcing highlights the ease with which hatred for one group can be displaced onto another and perhaps back again. The imagery that promoted attacks on Jews yesterday is now being used to justify attacks on Chechens. In the future, as Brodsky suggests, it could all too easily be exploited to power attacks on Jews and other groups as well.

(via MAK)

At the Moscow Times, two contrasting views of Maskhadov's killing. Pavel Felgenhauer writes about the reasons for the murder:

Maskhadov was not a terrorist. As a career army officer, he did not believe in terrorism as an effective weapon. Artillery Colonel Maskhadov left the Russian Army in 1992 to become the rebels' chief of staff because he was a nationalist, not because he was an Islamist. Maskhadov was ready to surrender to Moscow a large portion of future Chechen sovereignty in exchange for a formal declaration of independence and an international guarantee that the Russian military would never again invade Chechnya.

Why did the Kremlin assassinate him then? Why was Maskhadov denied dignity in death and his relatives denied timely access to his body? Chechen separatist sympathizers among the local population will surely hate Russia all the more for this affront. By disgracing Maskhadov, the Kremlin also dishonors its own military, which the deceased leader often defeated in battle. Most Russian generals that fought Maskhadov or negotiated with him held the late Chechen president in high esteem.

In being denied a proper burial, Maskhadov resembles many of his fellow Chechens, the men, women and children who were kidnapped, tortured and massacred by the Russians and their local Chechen henchmen. Under the rule of President Vladimir Putin, occupied Chechnya has many unmarked mass graves.

This, apparently, is the main reason the Kremlin wanted Maskhadov dead and refused to negotiate an end to the war. Even a partial troop withdrawal from Chechnya and the arrival of international missions could document the true level of atrocities, perhaps comparable to those of the Slobodan Milosevic regime in Kosovo. While Putin rules, there will be no peace. The Kremlin rulers do not want to go the way of Milosevic.

In the same issue, writing from a much more Kremlin-friendly perspective, U.S. academic Robert Bruce Ware expresses the belief that

whatever Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov may have been in 1995 or 1997, he was a terrorist on the day he died. As compared to a monster like Chechen commander Shamil Basayev, Maskhadov might have been described as a "moderate" up to 1998. In January 1997, he became the first and last legitimately elected president of Chechnya. However, his incapacity to cope with pressures endemic to Chechen society led to his drift toward radicalism beginning in the latter part of that year.

Ware considers that

because of his iconic status, Maskhadov's death was necessary for the stabilization of the North Caucasus, but it is far from sufficient. In all but his iconic status, Maskhadov will be quickly replaced, as Basayev would be. In order to begin stabilizing the North Caucasus, the Kremlin first must support human rights and genuine democratic procedures throughout the region, beginning with the upcoming Chechen parliamentary elections. Instead of consolidating corruption, the Kremlin, secondly, must strive to reduce it. Finally, Russian officials must stimulate dramatic and widespread economic development. Otherwise, poverty, unemployment, corruption and despair will continue to nourish radicalism, alienation and instability in the region. Westerners who claim to care about the peoples of the North Caucasus should put their money where their mouths are by offering tangible assistance to stimulate economic development in this region.

Meanwhile, it's reported that the house in which Maskhadov was killed has been demolished by Russian special forces, and speculation about the details of the assassination continues, with a suggestion, based on eyewitness accounts and off-the-cuff statements by Ramzan Kadyrov, that Maskhadov was actually shot in an execution-style murder, with a subsequent attempt by special forces to make his death seem the result of a "battle" which never actually took place.

(via BH, ML)

From Sarajevo, Guardian correspondent Ed Vulliamy reports that Bosnian Serbs who allegedly took part in the Srebrenica massacre are being protected by Russia's secret services:

Russia's secret services are shielding Bosnian Serbs wanted by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague for atrocities committed during the Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica, where more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered.

Gojko Jankovic, a Bosnian Serb who gave himself up to the tribunal yesterday to face accusations of torture and multiple rape, was one of a group of fugitive alleged war criminals living in Russia under official protection.

According to sources at The Hague and other intelligence sources, those still on the run and enjoying protection from the Russian secret services are Vinko Pandurevic and Vujadin Popovic, two senior Bosnian Serb military figures accused of genocide over the massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995.

Mr Jankovic was flown to The Hague yesterday having given himself up in the Bosnian Serb capital of Banja Luka, after four years in Moscow.

There was no conclusive explanation last night as to why Mr Jankovic had turned himself in. A senior diplomat said: "Jankovic suddenly phoned from Moscow saying he wanted to come in."

His wife, Milica, suggested personal reasons: a phone call to their son, Boban, in Belgrade, and the belief that he may be able to serve a prison term in Bosnia. Mrs Jankovic wanted to convince her husband to "surrender ... for the family".

Sources at The Hague pointed to pressure from the Bosnian Serb republic, Republika Srpska, "who are beginning to realise that this is not going to go away".

The FSB, Russia's secret service, told the Guardian last night: "We know nothing about this, and we have no comment on it."

There is acute frustration in diplomatic circles with Russia's attitude, not least because it is a signatory to the Dayton accord, which ended the Bosnian war in December 1995.

"Why they are doing it is not clear. What is clear is that the Russians are helping these people, which is holding the process to ransom," one senior diplomat said.

At chechnya-sl, Marius has translated part of a new lenta.ru article about a report in Russian Newsweek on the killing of Aslan Maskhadov:

http://www.lenta.ru/news/2005/03/14/maskhadov/

(my quick tr) Russian Newsweek: Liquidation of Maskhadov was a stage act.

Elimination of Aslan Maskhadov by the FSB Spetsnaz in the settlement of Tolstoy-Yurt was possibly a stage act (enactment) [instsenirovka]. Russian Newsweek correspondents were at the place of the alleged[http://www.runewsweek.ru/rubrics/?rubric=country&rid=103] killing of the leader of Chechen separatists and talked to the eyewitnesses of this special operation.

Thus, according to Yakha Yusupova, the wife of the owner of the house where Maskadov was allegedly killed, only his bodyguard Ilyas Iliskhanov stayed with them, an he is actually their distant relative.She notes that in no way four adult men could stay in the basement. Officially it was reported that three more people were located together with Maskhadov.

The majority of the inhabitants of the settlement of Tolstoy-Yurt are also convinced that Maskadov's body was "tossed up -brought in"-the periodical writes. According to them, they always have been inopposition to the authority in Grozny - during Dudayev andMaskadov's lifetime. Half of the inhabitants of this village - arerelatives of Ruslan Khasbulatov. Umar Avturkhanov, the initiator of march on Grozny in November 1994, from which began the first Chechencampaign, was born there.

Meanwhile one of the employees of the republic's MVD described to the correspondents of the periodical, that the whole thing that occurred in the village was staged. According to him, Maskhadov died on 5March, as his kidneys failed, damaged because of his staying in mountains in winte. According to this theory, the people from Maskhadov's entourage were moving his body into his native settlement of Zebir-Yurt, which is located on other shore of the Terek from Tolstoy-Yurt.

Then on Sunday, a group headed by Kadyrov went to capture Maskhadov. In the course of a brief battle they killed the leader of the separatists and several of his guards. However, after conducting the operation, Kadyrov decided not to take the killing of Maskhadov on himself and reported its results to the federals.Since Maskhadov's murder can bring on a Chechen an "eternal disgrace", the vice- premier of the government of Chechnya asked federal special services to take the responsibility for the operation and its results.

One of the agents of the Chechen special services confirmed this version to the correspondents of Russian Newsweek. In his opinion, the federal forces specially took the operation on themselves in order to take blood vengeance away from Ramzan Kadyrov.

The thing that lights up the world and makes it bearable is the customary feeling we have of our connections with it -- and more particularly of what links us to human beings. Relations with other people always help us to carry on because they always suppose developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only purpose were to have relations with human beings. But the days when we become aware that this is not our only purpose, when we realize that our will alone keeps those human beings attached to us (stop writing or speaking, isolate yourself, and you will see them melt around you), that in reality most of them have their backs turned (not through malice, but through indifference) and that the remainder always have the possibility of becoming interested in something else, when we imagine in this way the element of contingency, of play of circumstances, that enters into what is called a love or a friendship, then the world returns to its night and we to that great cold whence human affection drew us for a moment.

- Albert Camus

At IAJEStrings, Gayle Dixon wrote this great - and moving - essay/email:

Hi, all --

Not only is Regina Carter a phenomenal musician, she is an incredible person who is dearly loved by a number of musicians in this forum. As one of the many who hold Regina in high regard, I was deeply offended by Matvei Sigalov's comments. I realize they were not meant for public view, however, I feel compelled to answer what's been said. I agree that we should move on in a positive manner.

Regina and Kenny Barron have performed together on many, many, many, many occasions. Darol Anger hit the mark when he mentioned the nature of the music business. It's a business that doesn't deal kindly with musicians, even jazz greats. I prefer to believe that Kenny Barron recognized a rising star when he saw one, and was smart enough to include Regina on his front line! By the way, the association hasn't hurt his reputation or marketability.

There are at least two lessons here. When I first started working, someone told me to "always hire musicians who are at least as good as you." Years later, a prominent jazz bassist told me that people didn't call him because they thought he was too busy, or maybe the money wasn't good enough. He was sitting at home when he'd rather have been out playing! It goes without saying that Regina is a smart business woman. When she got some work, she offered it to Kenny Barron -- and he took the gig! But going back to my first point, it's very clear that they respect each other's musicianship.

I want to point to some of the factors that distinguish Regina Carter from most of the violinists in this forum. First, she made her name by stepping out in front of the real heavy-hitters of jazz. Regina paid her dues in a way few string players can match. John Blake did it before her -- Grover Washington, Jr. and McCoy Tyner put John out in front of their bands. Unfortunately, the industry was not smart enough to give John's work the support it deserved. Regina came along at the right time, and had all of the ingredients for success.

Regina is a proven artist who has delivered, time and time again, on stages around the world. She has broad appeal -- her style, musicianship, and approach to the violin are already influencing a generation of violinists. I played her "Paganini: After A Dream" concert at Lincoln Center. She is a musical powerhouse. There wasn't an empty seat in the hall. Less than a handful of violinists get that kind of receiption.

I also had the pleasure of serving as an objective ear for Regina last year when she was preparing to play a newly composed classical violin concerto with a major symphony orchestra. WE did about three sessions. She is one of the most disciplined musicians I know, and has a formidable technique. She is also relentless. Didn't stop for refreshments, small talk, anything -- I was exhilarated by the quality of her work.

Further, Regina is an innovator. Yes, she "internalized the jazz vocabulary," using it as a launch pad for her personal voice, but Regina doesn't just use the vocabulary. She speaks the mother tongue, the language of the blues, and rhythmically she is deep in the pocket. Regina "walks the walk, and talks the talk."

I recognize that the jazz vocabulary yields itself rather elegantly to some who don't speak the mother tongue. Clearly, it is possible to develop a unique and powerful voice in jazz without it. I was on a rehearsal break at NYC's old Carroll Studios many years ago, when I heard a distinctive violin voice emanating from one of the rooms. I peeked in, and sure enough, it was Stephane Grappelli. (He stopped to chat, even invited me to his performance that night.) It could not have been anyone else. You heard him and you said, "yes, that's Grappelli." His was not New Orleans, Kansas City, Chicago, Philly, NYC or any other American blues, but he was a force of nature, and his "gypsy blues" style resonated.

I sincerely believe that the mother tongue and the rhythm are what make the music "jazz." If it doesn't at least resonate like the blues, and the rhythm is not in the pocket, you definitely need to call it "Alternative" or something else. Regina is a jazz musician.

By the way, some years later I was "on the same stage" with Grappelli when I played some shows in Monte Carlo, Monaco. I've also been on the same stage with Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Woody Shaw, Max Roach, and a host of others. Did I "deserve" to be on the stage with them? Eat your heart out, people -- I was the one who got the call.

The Internet is a great equalizer. Anyone can put together some recordings and self-promote. Lest we forget, some people are big fish in small ponds, some are in their pool in the backyard, and others, like Regina, are taking long strokes across the ocean.

Gayle Dixon

I've been at the London Book Fair for most of the day. Therefore posting has been light, and is likely to remain so this week, as various pre-Easter literary events loom.

The results of the normblog composers poll have been posted. Beethoven leads the way, with Mozart and Bach as runners-up, while Schubert takes fourth place. Not exactly my own order of preference (Bach, Haydn, Mozart...). If I remember rightly, we had to choose the five top classical composers of all time - and at least one of my choices, Arnold Schoenberg, didn't even make to the list of finalists at all - oh well, I expect it all goes to show that music is a very personal thing. Certainly, the composer friends I approached on the subject said they'd be unwilling even to make a list of choices at all (now I wonder why that is).

Chechnya continues to be the single largest human rights crisis in Europe and the only place on the continent where civilians are killed and "disappeared" on a daily basis as a result of an armed conflict.

- from a recent Human Rights Watch report.

Kavkaz Center has published the following biographical information about Chechnya's new President:

Sheikh Abdul-Halim: Abdul-Halim Abu-Salamovich Sadulayev, a Chechen, b.1967. Born and raised in the city of Argun (12 km away from Chechen capital Jokhar). Belongs to Chechen clan of Ustradoi (Ustargardoi is considered as an independent branch of the Belgatoi Clan). Ancestors of Ustradoi Clan are considered to be founders of the city of Argun (Ustradoila, Ustargardoi-Evla).

He was taught by prominent Chechen theologians. Active participant of Islamic revival in Chechnya. He became a teacher by teaching Islam to the youth. Abdul-Halim was studying at the Chechen University, Department of Philology, but he had no time to graduate because the war started. He speaks Chechen, Arabic and Russian fluently.

President Abdul-Halim is a veteran of the first Russian-Chechen war. During the period between the first war and the second war he was delivering Islamic sermons on Chechen TV. He was also heading Islamic Jamaat (Military Council) of the city of Argun. Sheikh Abdul-Halim was also delivering Islamic lectures in various regions of Chechnya. For some time he used to be an imam of the Argun Mosque.

In 1999 on the order of President Maskhadov he was appointed as a member of State Commission of Constitutional Shariah Reform.

When the second Russian-Chechen war started he headed armed units of Argun People’s Militia, which joined CRI Armed Forces.

In 2002 during the broad session of State Defence Council of CRI (the supreme governing body of CRI during the period of war) Abdul-Halim was appointed as Chairman of the Shariah Committee of SDC and the Head of the Shariah Court of CRI.

Since the moment of death of President of CRI Aslan Maskhadov, Abdul-Halim became the legitimate leader of the Chechen State – President of Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, Commander of CRI State Defence Council and Commander-In-Chief of CRI Armed Forces -- in accordance with his position that he held.

And here are some more clarifications. During the broad session of SDC of CRI in July-August 2002 (which lasted 24 days), with the participation of members of SDC, the Parliament, the Government, heads of Administrations and Military Command of CRI Armed Forces, a number of important and crucial decisions were adopted.

-Several amendments and additions were made to the acting Constitution of CRI, while considering the proposals prepared as far back as 1999 by the State Commission of Shariah Reform. (By the way, Ahmad Kadyrov was one of the heads of that commission back then);

-Decision was adopted about the mechanism of legitimate succession of power in accordance with the CRI Constitution in case of death of the head of the Chechen State or in case the head of the state gets captured by the enemy.

-“Bayat” had been taken: the Islamic Oath of loyalty of military and political leaders of all levels (Commanding Officers, Commanders, Ministers, etc.) to the head of the state for as long as the head of the state complies with the Shariah Law and upholds it.

On the order of President Maskhadov, Sheikh Abdul-Halim was decorated with two medals of the Chechen State: the supreme decoration founded by First Chechen President Jokhar Dudayev, Koman Sii (“Honour of the Nation”) and Medal of Valour “Koman Turpal” (“Hero of the Nation”).

In 2003 the invader’s Spetznaz (Russian special forces) took the wife of Sheikh Abdul-Halim hostage. She was brutally murdered by Russian FSB agents after sadistic tortures when they were trying to find out where her husband was.

According to the information that Kavkaz Center has, Sheikh Abdul-Halim has never left the Chechen soil except for one trip to Mecca on Hajj.

In Chechen Society Newspaper, Timur Aliyev has edited and published an interview by Novye Izvestiya journalist Masha Dubova with Chechen film director Inal Sheripov about his plan to make a new screen version of Shakespeare's drama King Lear. The film will contain a faithful rendering of Shakespeare's text, with English names and placenames. The setting of the film will, however, be Chechnya - though the filming will be done in Krasnodar and at the studios of Mosfilm.

Woe to those who suddenly discover historical time unprepared, as an illiterate would discover chemistry. But woe also to those who deceive themselves by their obedience to an unchanging moral claim, because for them historical time, which demands of us constant renewal, is but fog and delusion. Even their art will be inert, for it has not been toughened in the purgatorial fires – and man’s unavoidable contradictions are his purgatory.

- Czeslaw Milosz

At EDM, Igor Torbakov considers the refusal by the presidents of Lithuania and Estonia to attend the Moscow victory anniversary celebrations on May 9, and asks: Is It All About History?

Russia is unlikely to sign the treaties with Estonia and Latvia in the near future, and this situation will strain relations between Moscow and Brussels, since the European Union insists on the speedy conclusion of the treaties between Russia and the two Baltic countries. As the attached political declarations are purely a Russian initiative, European policymakers will likely blame Moscow for stalling the process of final accommodation with the Balts (Politcom.ru, March 9).

Moscow's stiff position has two explanations. First, by pushing documents totally unacceptable to the Baltic governments, the Kremlin seeks to portray them as a bunch of intransigent crypto-fascists and thus discredit them in the eyes of their European Union partners. Symptomatically, in comments devoted to the release of the book History of Latvia: The 20th Century, the Russian Foreign Ministry accused the Latvians of harboring "sentiments of the historic revanche" that are being supported "at the highest state level" (mid.ru, February 2). Kremlin spin doctors believe Estonia and Lithuania's decision to stay home provides a powerful propaganda trump card. Some Russian commentators have already pointed out that the Baltic leaders' "demonstrative no-show" at the commemoration festivities will be a larger scandal than their "banal Russophobia" (Rossiiskaya gazeta, January 27).

Moscow seeks to discredit the Baltic leaders as a way to express its utter unhappiness about the role these new EU entrants play within the powerful bloc. The overwhelming majority of Russian political pundits view the Baltic countries as the "anti-Russian force within the EU" that poisons relations between Moscow and Brussels. Moscow is wary of the perceived ambitions of the Baltic states to act as Europe's chief experts on Russia and the post-Soviet space. Especially worrisome, in the eyes of the Kremlin strategists, is the Baltic political elites' active participation in the overall EU policy aimed at tearing certain CIS countries away from the Russia-led integration bloc and reorienting them toward the EU and NATO. According to one analyst at Russia's Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, there is even a peculiar "division of labor" between the new EU members, whereby Poland and Lithuania are "responsible" for Ukraine and Estonia and Latvia for Georgia (Russky kuryer, December 30, 2004).

The second reason behind Russia's behavior directly pertains to its current political identity, which is dubious at best and potentially dangerous at its worst. Almost 15 years after the collapse of communism, Russian society still has not unambiguously distanced itself from Stalinism; nor has the Russian elite fully repudiated the pernicious Stalinist legacy in its geostrategic thinking. On the contrary, voices are increasingly being heard in Moscow claiming that the Stalin era constitutes one of the most glorious pages of Russia's modern history. More alarmingly, one recent poll showed that 42% of respondents would like to see a "new Stalin" in the Kremlin (Novye izvestiya, March 5).

But there is a serious danger in the unwillingness to see one's history critically. The disastrous social practices that were not properly analyzed and condemned may well reproduce themselves. Such an alarming prospect cannot fail to disturb both the Baltic nations -- the undisputable victims of Stalinist foreign policy -- and their partners in the European Union.

Meanwhile,Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is the latest defector from the Moscow guest-list:

Russo-Japanese relations appear to have digressed back to the zero-sum, tit-for-tat, tenor that defined the relationship throughout the Cold War. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi announced on Thursday, March 10, that he would not attend the VE- Day celebrations to be held in Moscow this May. The announcement emerged as it became clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not be visiting Japan this spring for a summit meeting with Koizumi. The all-too-well known point of contention in the bilateral relationship is the "Northern Territories," the four southernmost Kuril Islands.

- Two enemies can hardly live under one roof.

- A worthy man cannot be without friends.

- A friend who lives far away is like a frontier outpost.

- A new coat and an old friend are the best.

- A united family of cats has defeated disunited wolves.

- When grief-stricken, hold your head high. Bow your head before other people's grief.

- An understanding friend is considered a brother.

- Sow seeds in the sunshine, and you'll sit in the shadow when the plants have grown big.

- The potter attaches a handle to a pot wherever he wants it to be.

- He who lives by the river knows where the ford is.

- Matchmakers are told even a dog's bowl is made of copper.

- Even if you have just had a good meal, make sure you have something to eat before starting on a journey , and don't leave your sheepskin cape at home even if the sun is shining brightly.

- Asked what was good, the hare said: "It is good to see a dog before it sees you."

- He who is too lazy to harvest his own wheat, shall have to cut rock for other people.

- The cat who has failed to get pork fat says it is Lent time.

- One summer day provides food for a month of winter.

- He who has been lying idle in summer, shall be running around in winter.

- Work as if you were to live forever, and be kind to people as if you were to die tomorrow.


More Chechen proverbs can be found here.

In the short essay “Cold War: Heated Imaginations”, Conquest turns his attention to the concepts, actions and motivations of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet Union. To present them, he remarks,

is not to say that America, or the West, or its allies were angels facing demons. They were more like human beings facing monsters, with the human capacity for error and sin. It seems best to get that out of the way. And to note that to describe Hitler’s war on Poland in 1939 by selecting a few successful Polish counterattacks, ignoring all other data, and thus proving Polish aggression, is more or less what is done vis-à-vis the West and Moscow on the Cold War.

Where Soviet motivations are concerned, the essential point to grasp, Conquest argues, is that right up to the eve of its collapse, the Soviet Union was committed to “the concept of an unappeasable conflict with the Western world”, and to the notion that this conflict could only be resolved by world revolution. It has been rather usual for Western academic observers and historians to play down this crucial aspect of Soviet policy, under the pretence that such Soviet phantasmagoria as “socialism in one country”, and later “peaceful co-existence” somehow negated it. Yet it was clearly formulated and stated as late as 1975 by Andrei Gromyko in his book The Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union, which spoke in unambiguous terms of “further developing and deepening the world revolutionary process.” Basing his arguments on recently discovered letters written by Stalin to Molotov in 1945-46, Conquest shows how even the hard-line stance of Molotov (or “Stone-Bottom” as he was known in diplomatic circles) was not hard enough for Stalin: when Molotov allowed Pravda to publish a speech of Churchill’s praising the Soviet war effort and Stalin personally, the leader accused him of “servility towards foreigners” – for which he received a formal reprimand from a commission of the Politburo. In fact, Conquest notes, so much power was concentrated in the leader’s hands, that Stalin had the personal ability to make the post-war world uninhabitable if he so wished - and he very nearly did.

Conquest shows that the rhetoric and heated language of postwar Soviet propaganda was much more than mere linguistic posturing: its extreme and fanatical dogmatism – as George Orwell noted, “even mild Western expressions of distaste for Communist actions were almost always called ‘rabid’ – in fact, a useful marker word” – was designed to create an alternative international reality, in which “frenzied” “Anglo-American imperialists” were constantly on the point of launching a new world war. The democracies of the West were “Fascist gangs”, and their leaders “warmongers” and “lackeys of imperialism”. The violence of the language used, and the repetition by dint of which it was to permeate human consciousness, carried the authentic hall-marks of totalitarian conceptual "mind-bending".

In Western left-wing political circles, those who questioned Soviet motivations were accused of harbouring a “Cold War mentality”. In fact, however, the left-wing view of the post-war world looked something like this:

In the late 1940s… we see a Russia with a free press, the open advancing of pro-American views, a multiparty system; in America, a rigid dictatorship. The governments of Western Europe are run by members of the American Fascist-Capitalist Party, though after a few years many of its British, French, and Italian leaders are accused of being agents of Russia and executed after torture. In 1952, America’s leading Jews are tortured, then executed without publicity. In 1953, demonstrations in favour of Russia are put down by American troops in Paris. In 1956, a socialist rebellion in Belgium is similarly suppressed. In 1968, the Capitalist Party in Italy, hitherto loyal to Washington, moves to a more humane capitalism; troops from the United States and its European satellites intervene. In Germany, the American foothold in Berlin is surrounded by a wall, to prevent people escaping to the liberal East German Republic… and so on and so on.

Remnants of such inverted vision and historical perspective still linger on in Western left and liberal circles even today. The charge of “Cold War thinking” levelled at those who attempt to deconstruct the Soviet Union and show it for what it was, constitutes only one of those remnants – there are also the charges of “demonization”, of “subjectivity” and “judgmentalism”. One of the most recent accusations is that of “triumphalism”:

This strange term is used to deplore any sign of being glad that the Soviet Union failed and that the Western world “triumphed”… It seems to imply, above all, that such an attitude is in bad taste. The poor, unfortunate totalitarian anti-Western regimes collapsed, but one shouldn’t crow.

While one may agree that it us more important to reform the methods of those who were wrong than to rebuke them, Conquest asks: “how can it be done without some public analysis of their errors, which, after all, had a very deleterious effect on part of the Western mind? Let’s not be smug; but let’s be rigorous."

See also: Dragons and Democracy
Dragons and Democracy - II
Dragons and Democracy - III
Dragons and Democracy - IV
Dragons and Democracy - V
Dragons and Democracy - VI
Dragons and Democracy - VII
Dragons and Democracy - VIII


Robert Conquest's The Dragons of Expectation - Reality and Delusion in the Course of History is published by Norton, and can be purchased from amazon.com.

From: Valeri Kalabugin [mailto:valeri@ngonet.ee]
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 4:41 PM
To: valeri@ngonet.ee
Subject: Press release


PRESS RELEASE Tallinn, 9 March 2005
For immediate release


ESTONIAN INSTITUTE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
phone +372 630 7477
fax +372 631 1239
e-mail ininst@nlib.ee


JEWISH COMMUNITY SUPPORTING
THE OPPRESSED MARI MINORITY IN RUSSIA
======================================

The Jewish Community of Estonia (JCE) issued the following statement in support of the oppressed Mari minority in Russia:

The Jewish Community of Estonia expresses its support to the Maris’ effort to preserve their language, culture and ethnic identity.

We find the forced assimilation and violation of the principles of democracy by Russia against the Maris impermissible.

Cilja Laud
Chair, Jewish Community of Estonia


The Maris are a 600 thousand strong people living in Russia, just some 500 miles to the east from Moscow. They have their autonomous republic named Mari El. Due to constant russification, the share of Maris in their republic is only 43,5% today. Opposition in Mari El is brutally suppressed. During the last years, many brilliant journalists, opposition leaders and public figures of Mari origin were murdered or brutally beaten with the silent approval of local authorities who are supposedly behind these attacks.

This February, the Mari El Association in Moscow appealed to the world community for help, pointing at the “climax of political terror” in the republic. The responce came from a group of American, British, Swedish, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian scientists and public figures, including prominent politicians, European MPs and ex-presidents of Nordic and Baltic countries. They addressed the Russian government with a joint appeal calling Moscow to put an end to attacks on members of the democratic opposition in the Republic of Mari El. This appeal is open on the website
http://www.ugri.info/mari for everyone to sign.

Please find additional information about endangered Uralic peoples on the
website http://www.suri.ee/eup.


Merle Haruoja
General Secretary

Valeri Kalabugin
Member of the Board


See also in this blog: Mari Demonstration

At Prague Watchdog, my translation of Ruslan Isayev's report on reactions of Chechens to the killing of their President, and its likely repercussions. From the article:

With Maskhadov’s death a new phase of the conflict in Chechnya is beginning, one that will be characterized by great cruelty on both sides. In a pseudo-victorious push, the Russian special forces are trying to finish off the resistance. The guerrillas, on the other hand, will most probably halt their operations for a while.

Everything depends on who will be chosen as leader of the State Committee of Defence of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, which was headed by Maskhadov. This structure was created especially for war, and it controls the coordination of military operations.

The situation may now alter for the worse. Writing in one of the Russian journals about a month ago, the Russian philosopher Grigory Pomerants wrote literally as follows:

“As long as the Chechens are fighting, they may collaborate with anyone they like, including Al-Qaeda. But they don’t need Al-Qaeda as a guiding force, because they can guide themselves… The best defence against Al-Qaeda in Chechnya is provided by Maskhadov and Basayev. If they are removed, the Chechens will be left without leaders of their own. And it’s then that Al-Qaeda will have a hance of taking Chechnya into its hands. We ought to be praying for the health of Maskhadov and Basayev, not putting prices on their heads.”

This is also word-for-word the opinion of most of Chechnya’s peaceful inhabitants. People are really crushed and depressed by the news of their President’s death.

“I’m proud that he left in a way that was fitting for a real warrior and a man of honour. It would have been worse if he’d been caught and humiliated like Saddam Hussein. I didn’t have that courage and I had to surrender and take amnesty,” was how Salavdi, one of the amnestied guerrillas, who is at present living in Ingushetia, commented on the President’s death.

66-year-old pensioner Maret Nikayeva is also very upset by Maskhadov’s killing: “What did he ever do to the Russians, for them to kill him? Why don’t they kill Basayev, who has done far more harm to Russia? He’s working with them, that’s why they don’t kill him. But Maskhadov wanted negotiations, and that’s why they killed him. They (the Russians) always kill the innocent ones, who don’t want war.”

A young woman named Zina, who lives in Chechnya, thinks that Maskhadov’s death is a great tragedy for the Chechen people. When asked why, she replies:

“Well, I voted for him. He was Chechnya’s legitimate President. And that’s also how many of my friends, relatives and neighbours feel. It’s a great loss for me and my people. Many people in Chechnya will stay at home as a sign of mourning, to express their solidarity with those who are fighting the Russian troops.”

The reaction of ordinary people to Maskhadov’s death is unambiguous. Almost everyone I spoke to expressed regret. The expression on the faces of many was one of grief. At the moment when one of the Russian TV channels showed the body of the slain Maskhadov, the women wept, and tears came to the eyes of several of the men.

Indeed, Maskhadov’s fate is very similar to the fate of his people. Unlike Basayev and Dudayev, Maskhadov had no wish to fight to the end, until victory. Although he was a regular soldier, he always considered that it was impossible to solve the problem by war. Even with the passage of so many years and all his wanderings, Maskhadov never lost his human face, and always talked about the need for negotiations.

“I doubt if Putin will feel much rejoicing in Maskhadov’s liquidation. At least, I didn’t see it in his face. I think he understands the whole danger of the situation, which may get out of control,” said a resident of Chechnya named Beslan.

“Even if they capture and kill Basayev and the other commanders, there are others, young and uncompromising, who will take their place: I know what I’m talking about, and I know how others of my age feel,” the 24-year-old Beslan notes.

By holding these celebrations in the Red Square, and thus highlighting the Soviet victory, today's Russia is also celebrating its gains in that war. One of those gains was my country, Lithuania, whose incorporation into Josef Stalin's empire was accompanied by countless tragedies. Unlike Germany, Russia has never recognized its responsibility for the war and the mass graves of the innocent.

Thus, a former captive nation is now being invited to celebrate its captivity. This is why almost all Lithuanians -- indeed, most residents of the Baltic countries -- feel queasy at the prospect of their leaders marking this anniversary in Moscow. But Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanian.s are not the only Europeans who should feel this way.

When Stalin offered Hitler his friendship in the spring of 1939 -- formally concluded that summer in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact -- Nazi aggression was assured of not being knifed in the back from the East and so was left with free hands to do as Hitler pleased in the West.

The pact came after the pogroms of "Kristallnacht" in Germany, so its Soviet initiators knew pretty well to what destiny they were consigning the Jews of Poland and Lithuania, which, in accord with the first secret protocol signed by Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop on Aug. 23, 1939, were to go to Hitler. A month later, in equal secrecy, Hitler sold Lithuania to Stalin.

The other countries situated between Germany and the USSR were similarly sentenced to disappear as nations -- sooner or later. Their peoples were treated practically as though they did not exist; the aggressors' only concern was territory. The death sentences and torturing that were then imposed on almost entire nations and millions of people are, it now appears, to be silently accepted and noisily celebrated on May 9 in Moscow. Some Russian officials want to unveil a monument of Stalin to crown the festivities.

When Hitler's Wehrmacht struck westward, the USSR duly supported Germany in its war against Poland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway and the UK. As a result, cities in those countries were flattened and people killed not only by the Nazis, but also by their Soviet ally, which invaded Poland and supplied the Wehrmacht with the material it needed for its war against the West. In return, Stalin's USSR was given a free hand to attack Finland and to occupy Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as a part of Romania.

Vytautas Landsbergis, writing in the Taipei Times

From Tallinn, Estonia:

Demonstration at noon today, March 9,
in front of the Russian Embassy in Tallinn, Pikk street!

NB: Mostly the media fails to report that MASKHADOV WAS THE ELECTED PRESIDENT OF CHECHNYA - IN ELECTIONS MONITORED BY THE OSCE. This is a major part of the Chechen tragedy - most of the media do not bother to get the story right, they just pick up and repeat Russian allegations and accusations. PLEASE see the two articles at the end of the News, also. The report from the DELEGATION OF THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION TO RUSSIA and Mr. Zakayev's article from the IHT. (I wonder if the EU members even read what their own offices/delegations produce.) It is really tragic, that the cease-fire Maskhadov called for (see IHT article below) was in effect when he was killed - maybe that was why Russia rushed to eliminate him. To understand the reality AND horrific potential of Putin's Russia, just look at the barbarity being carried out for years behind closed doors in Chechnya. MAK

EUROPEAN UNION
Moscow, 25 February 2005
DELEGATION OF THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION TO RUSSIA


Democracy & Human Rights in Russia
Newsletter No. 56: 18 - 25 February 2005

European Court of Human Rights finds Russia responsible for killings in Chechnya

The European Court of Human Rights delivered yesterday three judgments in the first cases brought against Russia arising out of the situation in Chechnya. In each case, the Court has found Russia responsible for killing the applicants' relatives, in violation of Article 2 (right to life) of the European Convention on Human Rights, and that the authorities failed to carry out an adequate investigation into the deaths. The Court found that Article 13 had been violated because of the failure to provide any effective remedy before the Russian courts. The cases of Khashiyev and Akayeva concern the deaths of five of the applicants' relatives in Grozny at the end of January 2000. The mutilated bodies of the applicants' relatives were found with numerous stab and gunshot wounds in the Staropromyslovskii district of Grozny. The European Court found that their relatives were killed by Russian soldiers. The cases of Isayeva, Yusupova and Bazayeva arose from the Russian military's aerial bombing of a convoy of civilian cars. As a result of the bombing, the first of the applicant was wounded and her two children and daughter-in-law were killed. The panel of judges, among them one Russian, were unanimous in condemning Russia for breaching the European Convention of Human Rights article on the right to life. The Court awarded financial compensation to the applicants in all six cases. The applicants are represented by lawyers from the London-based European Human Rights Advocacy Centre (EHRAC), together with the Russian human rights organisation, Memorial. The EHRAC has been established at London Metropolitan University to assist individuals, lawyers and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) within the Russian Federation to take human rights cases to the European Court of Human Rights. The centre is core-funded by the European Commission, with a grant under the EIDHR programme. For details on the judgments see the Court's website. For further information please contact the EHRAC (CoE, Reuters, EHRAC).

Reactions to European Court of Human Rights ruling

Russia's special envoy to the European Human Rights Court Pavel Laptev said Russia does not exclude the possibility of an appeal. Russia can request the case be referred to the court's grand chamber for a final judgement within the next three months. Philip Leach, Director of EHRAC and one of the applicants' legal representatives, said that "these landmark judgments highlight the use of grossly disproportionate force by the Russian military in Chechnya, with utter disregard for the risk to civilian life. In view of the lack of international oversight in the region, it is extremely important that the European Court has called Russia to account, and that it will continue to do so". On a press release following the Court's announcement, Amnesty International said that the ruling "shows Russia's consistent failure not only to protect human rights in the course of the armed conflict, but also to ensure justice for victims of human rights through effective investigations and prosecutions of those responsible". According to AI, many people who have submitted cases to the European Court of Human Rights have been subjected to reprisals, and some have been even killed or "disappeared". Among other things, Amnesty International calls on the government of the Russian Federation to implement the judgements of the European Court of Human Rights without delay; to investigate all allegations of human rights violations and bring those responsible to justice in a court of law; to take effective measures to prevent any further reprisals against
any person who seeks a remedy before the European Court of Human Rights; and to ensure that all allegations of such reprisals are investigated promptly.

(AI, EHRAC, Mosnews).

*****************************************************
Feb 16, 2005 International Herald Tribune
Stop APPEASING Putin in Chechnya
Akhmed Zakayev

When George W. Bush sits down with Vladimir Putin this month in Bratislava, the
war in Chechnya will be one of the issues to discuss. As they prepare to meet, time is running out in the Caucasus.

Three years ago, the U.S. president gave Putin the green light for his plan of Chechen pacification, which consisted of draconian measures against the civilian population, the installation of a puppet government and a propaganda campaign in the West that portrayed the Chechen independence movement as Islamic terrorists. It is clear now that the strategy did not work: The armed resistance was not subdued, the population did not embrace the Quisling government and courts in Britain and the United States cleared Chechen political figures, such as myself, of Russian accusations of terrorism. The only outcome of "pacification" was the emboldening of radicals at the expense of the moderate Chechen leadership, leading to the outrage of Beslan and the spread of militant ideology throughout the Caucasus. Meanwhile, opposition to the war has been growing in Russian society. Last November, the Union of Committees of Soldiers' Mothers, the largest and most respected Russian NGO, called for peace talks in defiance of Putin's rejectionist stand. The appeal won the support of a majority of Russians and caught the Kremlin by surprise. But Russia managed to block a meeting between Soldiers' Mothers and representatives of the Chechen resistance at the European Parliament. That the Belgian government chose to side with the Kremlin and deny entry visas to the Russian peace activists was widely reported in the region and contributed to the sense among Chechens that they have been abandoned to Putin's troops.

Militant radicals appeared to be their only defenders.

Terrorist groups that no one is able to control are springing up in Dagestan, ngushetia, Karachaevo-Cherkesia and in Russia proper. The notoriously corrupt
Russian security services, as well as puppet-government officials, are eager to sell them arms and free passage. The stockpiles of Russian weapons of mass destruction are not properly guarded. It is only a matter of time before the situation explodes in the faces of the architects of the policy of appeasing Putin.

The only way to prevent catastrophic deterioration in the Caucasus is to press Russia for a political settlement with the responsible and moderate leadership of the Chechen Republic. In a last ditch effort to persuade the world of that, Aslan Maskhadov, Chechnya's ousted elected president, recently issued a unilateral cease-fire, which will last for one month. This gesture is a response to the call of the Soldiers' Mothers, who we know are speaking for the Russian people: Yes we heard you, we are ready for peace, we want to stop fighting and talk, with all options open. It is significant that the radical wing of the fighters, which is controlled by Shamil Basayev, accepted the cease-fire. Basayev had taken responsibility for many terrorist attacks, including the horrific raids on the school in Beslan and the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow. We do not control Basayev; we condemned his methods,
but we were powerlesss to stop him. Yet we know why he decided to silence his guns and hold his suicide squads - because he knows that the Chechen people want to give peace a chance. This may be the last chance. But as long as the cease-fire holds,
it demonstrates that Maskhadov can deliver peace, even though he does not control the militants in war.

This is a unique opportunity, perhaps the last, to break the vicious circle of hatred, death and destruction. If it is lost, the responsibility for the escalation of the conflict, further radicalization of the Caucasus and the inevitable increase of terrorism will go to those who persist in the failed policy of appeasing Putin. Bush should realize that his hands-off policy on Chechnya does not increase security but only breeds terror.

(Akhmed Zakayev is special envoy to Aslan Maskhadov, the separatist leader and former [sic] president of Chechnya.)
*******************************************************

From a mosnews report (8.03.2005):

There were about 1000 people in the Square of Liberty in Vladikavkaz. First several mothers from the Committee took the stand, then there were representatives of other local organizations that support the Committee of Mothers. Although the Committee repeated that the demonstration is NOT political, many of the speakers were speaking out openly against Dzasokhov, the Republic's President. Official name ofthe demonstration is "Mothers against Terror".

Taking part in the action were representatives of Women of Beslan, an organization set up in the wake of the militants' attack on a school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan where over 1,000 people, mostly children, were held hostage on September 1-3 of 2004. Over 330 people were killed during the siege. Protesters carried placards, addressed to North Ossetia's President: "Dzasokhov, where is your conscience?" and "Terrorism in power is worse than al-Qaeda".

(via chechnya-sl)

Reports are appearing on Ekho Moskvy and other Russian media that the elected Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov has been killed by Russian FSB forces. Leading human rights activist Valeria Novodvorskaya is quoted as saying that if it is true that Maskhadov has been killed, then it will have been done for one reason only: to make negotiations impossible.

Zakayev has now confirmed the death.

Siberian Light has a running update on developments.

From an interview with Ukrainian political expert Taras Kuzmov:

What's going to happen with Kuchma?
Kuchma can feel completely safe, that's why he came back so willingly to Kyiv, after the death of Kravchenko. He can put on a show now, that he doesn't have anything to hide, that he feels innocent. I wouldn't be surprised if he gives statements in the Prosecutor's office. By the way, our politicians of the new government as well as of the opposition have begun to create new parties before the parliamentary elections that will take place in a year' time. Threfore, the case of Gongadze and Kuchma can be put on the back burner and I'm afraid that once again we won't know the truth. I hope I am not proved right. If my words are confirmed this will mean that the new government doesn't control the situation, and our revolution was a fiction.

From Gazeta Wyborcza, Warsaw:

Major Melnychenko: Yushchenko is being manipulated

Marcin Wojciechowski 08-03-2005, last update 07-03-2005 19:00

A Gazeta journalist met with Melnychenko yesterday at Warsaw's Okecie Airport. Melnychenko was waiting for a flight to London, after a series of secret meetings in the Polish capital with Ukrainian vice-premier, Mykola Tomenko. They probably talked about how Melnychenko could help the prosecutorship in its investigation of the Gongadze case.

[passage omitted, story of Melnychenko]

Kuchma's former bodyguard thinks that the new president of Ukraine is being manipulated by his predecessor’s entourage. In his view, Kravchenko could have been encouraged to commit suicide by Kuchma's people. “It should seriously be considered whether Yushchenko gave some guarantees to Kuchma, about which we don't know anything. I don't say that Yushchenko had anything to do with the death of Kravchenko, but the suicide of former minister was convenient for Kuchma's people,”
says Melnychenko.

Melnychenko handed over to Tomenko - a close associate of Yushchenko – some materials on Kuchma. “Tomenko took those materials, agreeing with me, but I don't know what will happen next,” says Melnychenko. “In my opinion the Prosecutor General’s office is bamboozling Yushchenko on the Gongadze case.”

Last week the investigators announced that the Gongadze case was solved and that those who ordered his death will soon be arrested. Everyone suspected that they were referring to former minister Kravchenko. Well, he suddenly committed suicide on Friday, although already on Wednesday, the security services proposed, just in case, to arrest Kravchenko. But the Prosecutor General rejected this advice.

”Yuschenko trusted the Prosecutor General’s office and, relying on its reports, he announced that the case has been solved,” says Melnychenko. “That was a big mistake, Yushchenko shouldn't be a spokesman for the Prosecutor on this case.

Kuchma’s former bodyguard asserts that even after Kravchenko's death, it's possible to get to the truth in Gongadze's murder, on condition, that the influence of people from Kuchma's past entourage, who still are in power, will be curbed. These people include, first and foremost, the speaker of the parliament, Wolodymyr Lytvyn. A few years ago he was the head of Kuchma's administration, and was actually the second highest person in the country. Lytvyn also participated in the meeting of Kuchma with his Minister of Interior, during which the president blamed Gongadze. This meeting was recorded by Melnychenko.

Lytwyn gave his statements on that case in the prosecutorship, but its contents are secret. In the view of Melnychenko, the speaker of parliament, like Kuchma, has been taken under some safety umbrella of the new authority. Especially because during the Orange Revolution he played a constructive role in the dialogue between the authorities and the opposition. However, Melnychenko thinks that this unofficial amnesty for Kuchma's people won't allow the mystery of the most known political murder in the history of to-day's Ukraine to be solved. “People like Lytvyn have to go, otherwise the new cabinet will be always under influence of the old one,” says Melnychenko.

The former bodyguard of Ukraine's president refused to tell us if London was the last leg of his trip. Melnychenko, who travels with his own bodyguard, got political asylum in the USA. He showed us a document issued by the FBI, in which the border guards of countries visted by Melnychenko put their stamps on this document, so the stages of his trip are not in his passport. Melnychenko asserts that in the last few years Kuchma's people tried to kill him four times.

Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky pays for Melnychenko's bodyguard. Berezovsky who lives in London also has the status of political refugee. ”I don't see anything wrong in this, that Berezovsky provides a bodyguard for me. Thanks to it, he can say that he supports democracy. I have the protection of the US government, but only in America,” says Melnychenko.

TALLINN, March 7 (Reuters) - The presidents of Estonia and Lithuania on Monday spurned a Russian invitation to World War Two victory celebrations, risking a diplomatic spat with Moscow and a rift with Baltic neighbour Latvia.

RFE/RL has published an exclusive interview with Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov, in the context of the ending of the recent ceasefire. In particular, the latter part of Liz Fuller's article makes interesting reading:

Invited by RFE/RL to speculate about Putin's motives for beginning the war, Maskhadov replied that it is not clear whether Moscow's priority is to defend Russia's territorial integrity or to defend Russia's regional and defense interests. He pointed out that Chechnya is a relatively small republic encompassing only 17,000 square kilometers, and that "while Russia has been at war with Chechnya, the Chinese have occupied the whole of Primorskii Krai and Trans-Baikal."

Maskhadov denied that his January cease-fire offer was prompted by the abduction of his relatives. Asked how the situation will develop if peace talks do not take place in the near future, Maskhadov said, "the war will continue.... Chechen mujahedin will resist to the end in this struggle, and the flame of this conflagration will spread to the entire North Caucasus." And in seeming contrast to his earlier prohibition on terrorist acts outside Chechnya and directed against the Russian civilian population (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 18 June 2003), Maskhadov continued: " The people of Russia will experience constant fear of possible retribution by suicide bombers in revenge for the evil deeds of the [Federal Security Service] and the federal forces in Chechnya."

Maskhadov did, however, admit the possibility that "when the interests of Western states and those of Russia collide in the Caucasus, when the leaders of those Western states comprehend the level of danger to the entire civilized world that emanates from Russia, then they will line up and beg us Chechens to agree to end the war."

Asked about the West's role, Maskhadov said the West is sitting it out, playing with Putin and trying to achieve its own global strategic objectives, and that the Russian leadership for its part is taking advantage of Western forbearance to "continue to commit monstrous crimes on Chechen territory."

Maskhadov dismissed as "risible" the proposed roundtable on Chechnya to be convened by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe's (PACE) rapporteur for Chechnya, Swiss parliamentarian Andreas Gross. That event is scheduled for later this month, but the venue remains unclear. The Council of Europe originally proposed Strasbourg, but over the past week several members of the pro-Moscow Chechen government have insisted that it should be held in Grozny. The interlocutors are Russian and pro-Moscow Chechen officials; Gross tried to include Maskhadov's representatives, but his envoy Umar Khanbiev declined to attend. Khanbiev told the information agency Daymohk on 2 March that Maskhadov has ordered the Chechen Foreign Ministry to consider "freezing" all contacts with PACE.

Maskhadov contemptuously dismissed the various pro-Moscow Chechen "bandit formations" running loose in Chechnya as "traitors" to the Chechen cause, adding that this phenomenon dates back to the 1994-96 Chechen war when mavericks such as Ruslan Labazanov, Umar Avturkhanov and Bislan Gantamirov headed such bands. The difference, according to Maskhadov, is that those commanders "had brains," the inference being that Ramzan Kadyrov does not.

Maskhadov admitted that occasional clashes occurred in 1994-96 between such bands and the resistance forces (of which he at that time was commander in chief), and that he personally participated in such clashes, but that they were never protracted. He said that "history should teach us" that Chechens should never fight among themselves, and he went on to claim that "there is a clear understanding -- and I mean today -- how a Chechen from one side or the other should behave during a forced clash. Not a single self-respecting Chechen policeman...would ever refuse help to the mujahedin," because those Chechen police know how the war will end, and that "tomorrow we shall have to live together."

Maskhadov implied that Federal Security Service Director Nikolai Patrushev was the "godfather" of the pro-Moscow Chechen police force and that Patrushev created that force in the hope of triggering a civil war in Chechnya -- but to no avail.

The complete text of the interview is here

A reader writes:

Dear David,

re: Dragons and Democracy VIII

I would like add to those 6 points you cited, one more: - the attack on Finland at the end of Nov. 1939 and the so called Russo-Finnish Winter War that ensued after this attack by the Soviets.

Allow me to clarify the issue of the number of killed POWs in the Katyn massacre - it's true that in the Katyn Forest that number is around 4,400, because we are dealing here with POWs who were moved to the execution site in the Forest from this one particular camp in Kozyelsk. There were other camps and according to the materials and documents we may conclude that the number of murdered in "other Katyns" is 21,857 or even higher (25,700) if one reads the 144 of the Politburo signed on the 5th of March - exactly 65 years ago.

Let me also add, that the Red Army took at least 200,000 Polish POWs in Sep. 1939. Some 40,000 of them were handed to the German side, 25,000 were forced to work in the coal mines in the Donbas region, the rest were let go, but then in 1940, when en-masse deportations from the territory of Eastern Poland and the Baltics begun, it could be assumed that a majority of them were send to GULAG camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan. It's been estimated that between 0,5 to 1 million Poles were deported in that year.

In the 1990s the documentation on the Katyn crime could be collected and the three main crime sites were established. Some 4,400 inmates of the Kozyelsk POW camp were murdered and buried in Katyn; the 4,000 prisoners of the Starobyelsk camp were murdered at the NKVD headquarters in Kharkov and then buried in the nearby forest of Piatikhatki.

An estimated 7,000 prisoners of the Ostashkov camp were murdered at the NKVD premises in Tver and buried in collective graves in Mednoye. The fate of another several thousand victims of this crime is still unknown.

Those murdered at Katyn and other places included an admiral, 11 generals, 300 colonels and lieutenant colonels, 500 majors, 2500 infantry and cavalry captains, 17 naval captains, 5,000 lieutenants and second-lieutenants, 6,000 NCOs, seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials. Also among the dead were 20 university professors; 300 physicians; several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers; and more than 100 writers and journalists as well as about 200 pilots. It was their social status that landed them in front of NKVD execution squads. Most of the victims were reservists who had been mobilized when Germany invaded. In all, the NKVD eliminated almost half the Polish officer corps--part of Stalin's long-range effort to prevent the resurgence of an independent Poland.

The first time from the Russian side, that the NKVD on Stalin's order committed the crime, we heard it in the TASS communique on 13th of April of 1990. At a Kremlin ceremony on 13 October 1990, Gorbachev handed to general Jaruzelski a folder of documents that left no doubt about Soviet guilt. He did not, however, make a full and complete disclosure. Missing from the folder was the March 1940 NKVD execution order. Gorbachev laid all blame on Stalin's secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria, and his deputy. (This was a safe move, because Beria and his deputy had been branded criminals and summarily shot by Stalin's successors.) Gorbachev also failed to mention that the actual number of victims was 21,857--more than the usually cited figure of 15,000. By shaving the truth, Gorbachev had shielded the Soviet Government and the Communist Party, making Katyn look like a rogue secret police action rather than an official act of mass murder.

The new evidence put additional pressure on the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation to reveal the full truth. In 1992, Moscow suddenly "discovered" the original 1940 execution order signed by Stalin and five other Politburo members (Kaganovich, Kalinin, Mikoyan, Molotov, Voroshilov) -- in Gorbachev's private archive. Gorbachev almost certainly had read it in 1989, if not earlier. In October 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin presented a copy of the order along with 41 other documents to the new Polish president, former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa. In doing so, he made a point of chiding his arch enemy Gorbachev, with whom he was locked in a bitter domestic political battle.

Also Rudolf Pikhoya, the director of the Russian State Archives - delivered to president Walesa the materials regarding the Katyn crime,specifically the decision about the killing the Polish POW's, signed by the members of the Politburo of Central Committee of the Soviet Union and information about the destruction of 21,857 files of Polish POW's in 1959.

During Yeltsin's 1993 visit to Warsaw, in a joint statement with Walesa, Russia's president pledged to punish those still alive who had taken part in the massacre and make reparations--a promise that has not been kept.

At the Polish Military Cemetary in Katyn now, there is the Memorial Wall with 4,412 (I presume, these are only those who were exhumed and identified by the Germans and the Red Cross) iron plates with engraved names of those murdered.

All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). CENTRAL COMMITTEE

No. P13/144
Com. Beria
March 5, 1940

Excerpt from the minutes No. 13 of the Politburo of the Central Committee meeting

Resolution 144 - March 5, 1940 regarding the matter submitted by the NKVD USSR

I. To instruct the NKVD USSR that:

1) the cases of 14 700 people remaining in the prisoner-of-war camps - former Polish Army officers, government officials, landowners, policemen, intelligence agents, military policemen, settlers and prison guards
2) and also the cases of arrested and remaining in prisons in the western districts of Ukraine and Byelorussia people in the number of 11 000 - members of various counter-revolutionary spy and sabotage organizations, former landowners, factory owners, former Polish Army officers, government officials and fugitives - be considered in a special manner with the obligatory sentence of capital punishment - execution by firing squad.

II. The consideration of the cases to be carried out without the convicts being summoned and without revealing the charges; with no statements concerning the conclusion of the investigation and the bills of indictment given to them. To be carried out in the following manner:

a) people remaining in the prisoner-of-war camps - on the basis of information provided by the Directorate of Prisoner-of-War Affairs NKVD USSR,
b) people arrested - on the basis of case information provided by the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR and NKVD of the Byelorussian SSR.

III. The responsibility for consideration of the cases and passing of the resolution to be laid on three comrades: Merkulov, Kobulov and Bashtakov (Head, 1st Special Division of the NKVD USSR).

The Secretary of the Central Committee

From Gazeta Wyborcza, Warsaw

Marcin Wojciechowski 06-03-2005, last update 06-03-2005 23:09

The Gongadze case: difficult to file charges against Kuchma

[passage omitted]

At the weekend Yuri Lutsenko, Minister of the Interior, disclosed the content of the letter that Kravchenko wrote before his death. "My dear ones. I'm innocent. Forgive me. I've become a victim of the political intrigues of president Kuchma and his entourage. I'm leaving you with clear conciensce. Good-bye," writes Kravchenko. Even if the letter is genuine, it faults Kuchma, but only morally.

The same story is with those *tapes of Kuchma's former bodyguard, mayor Mykola Melnichenko, in which the former president asks Kravchenko "to take care of Gongadze". - "In the eyes of our law, evidence has to be acquired legally. Unfortunately, the Melnichenko tapes were wiretapping, and that's not legal. Sorry, but that's not enough of a basis on which to charge Kuchma," - Volodimir Stretovych, lawyer and the chief of parliament's committee for the fight with corruption and organized crime, told Gazeta.

[passage omitted]

After Kravchenko's death the first wave of critique went through the Ukrainian media toward the cabinet of new president Yushchenko. "The death of minister came very handy and for some persons - please excuse me for this pun, it could prove simply to be vital to stay alive - writes in his commentary Vakhtang Kipiani from the Internet's Ukrainskaya Pravda, which was founded by Georgy Gongadze. And the weekly Dzerkalo Tyznia sums up: "The new stage of investigation in the Gongadze case begun from a farce - that's how those last week's boasts could be called, that the case has been already solved - but it ended in tragedy."

--------------------------------------------------------
*Republished with permission by Transitions Online (TOL). This article originally appeared on the TOL web site on January 5, 2001.

The words "blya" and "blyad" are not translated, since they are here used not in their original meaning (vulgar term for "whore") but primarily for adding an emotional tincture to the speech.

Excerpt 1

Kuchma: ...Ukrainska Pravda, well, this is completely already, blyad, insolence. Bastard, blya. The Georgian, Georgian, blin.

Unidentified Individual: Gongadze?

Kuchma: Gongadze. Well, who could be financing him?...

Unidentified Individual: Well, he actively works with this, with Moroz, with Grani [web site].

Kuchma: To court, maybe. Here, people's deputies. Let the lawyers take him to court. This goes to the prosecutor, right? It's just, blya, ... there is some kind of limit, son-of-a-bitch, blya. ... Deport him, blyat, to Georgia and throw him the fuck out there.

Unidentified Individual: Drive him out to Georgia and throw him there.

Kuchma: The Chechens need to kidnap him and throw him away.


Excerpt 2

Kravchenko: Gongadze. We already came across [this individual in the past] ...

Kuchma: Wha-?

Kravchenko: We came across him somewhere. We're looking.

Kuchma: The things he constantly writes in some kind of Ukrainska Pravda he throws it onto the Internet, understand. Well who? Someone finances him.

Kravchenko: (undecipherable phrase) I have people ... (undecipherable) ...

Kuchma: But the main thing, I'm telling you, as an example, that's what Volodya says, the Chechens need to kidnap him and drive him the fuck out to Chechnya and ask for a ransom.

Kravchenko: Eh, we'll just ... him somewhere ... I'm telling you ... These are the type of people (laughing) just unbelievable ...

Kuchma: Well, drive him out to Georgia, and that's it.


Excerpt 3

Kuchma: ... there is, besides [the information] that [Gongadze] works with Moroz, that he writes for Moroz in his Grani, ... starting from the summer, and that ... finances him.

Kravchenko: Well ... I wouldn't be surprised is they have connections with the socialists here. .. Well, we'll take care of things with them. ...

Excerpt 4

Kuchma: I'm telling you, drive him out, throw him out. Give him to the Chechens. ...

Kravchenko: We'll think it through. We'll do it, so that's [that].

Kuchma: [I] mean, drive him out, undress him. Blya, leave him without
his pants, let him sit here. I'd do it simply, blya.

Kravchenko: ... I have right now a fighting team, such eagles, who do
everything that you want. That's the situation at present.

Kuchma: ... They're throwing [a lot of] dirt into Russia through the
Internet. You know, into the Internet through Russia. Clear?

Kravchenko: ... for me now there is a question ... I have my team
there ... there are contacts ... I put armed surveillance there. I
want to learn his contacts. ...

Kuchma: And does Gongadze have a team? They named some surnames there
[who are] scribbling this dirt. There are three of them.

Kravchenko: We have them. We have them all. But I want to start with
him, because I want to see how the General [Prosecutor Mykhaylo
Potebenko] will react. ...

Excerpt 5

Kravchenko: Well, Leonid Danylovych [Kuchma], what's new?

Kuchma: Gongadze, or what?

Kravchenko: Exactly ... (undecipherable). Today, there, we ...
observed [something].

Kuchma: Are they looking for [parliamentarian Sergei] Holovaty?

Kravchenko: Ya, they're looking. They've already found two ties. We're following him.. I want to khlopnut him [slang for kill] I want to pop him straight and simple. I'll throw him a prostitute, the very best there is. ... Everything that has been assigned, everything is working. So, I think with time, Gongadze in a few days. We have to wait and see how things turn out with one director ... I looked there
at selected materials of his. There's this on Yeliseyev ... this is Svoboda [newspaper], Lyashko.

Kuchma: I have Lyashko ... we will (two hand claps) him.

Excerpts from Episode 6

Kuchma: How should I say this ... Kravchenko promised to take care of it.

Lytvyn: ... The Georgian embassy made an official announcement and made an anonymous call [from] the embassy that the Moscow rayon needs to be searched and Volkov is dealing with this matter, [as well as] Kravchenko and Kisil. One can't ... undermine it [politics] ...

Kuchma: The ambassador has to be summoned.

Lytvyn: Me too .. And make some kind of notation or warning, or have a conversation.

Kuchma: A phone call needs to be made ... and get him the hell out, this sort of ambassador, blin. Koval (unidentified), you need to be removed. Have you been taking care of things with the Georgian embassy?

Koval: We will now start to take care of things.

Kuchma: And summon him. Blya, let him answer, otherwise I'll call [Georgian President Eduard] Shevardnadze to remove him the hell out of here.

Koval: Okay.

Kuchma: And say that I will call Shevardnadze, to remove him the hell
out of here.

Koval: Okay, Okay, I'm summoning him right now.

Excerpt 7

(Kuchma making a telephone call to Leonid Derkach, head of the State
Security Service)

Kuchma: Listen, they just showed me [these] newspapers, blyat, all these, blyat, being published. Well, Hrysha Omelchenko is continuing to publish a paper in Kremenchug. Well, what are you bullshitting [about]? No, no, right now, for the 15th of September, he put out a paper. And I'm telling you, September 15 [he] published a newspaper. Svoboda, blya, is being published and you're still [going on] about
that ... Well there, well there, there are such [insulting] caricatures there. So then you invite Yulia. Fuck your mother, you invite Yulia and ask: "Dear one, what are you bitch, blya, doing? Do you want us to [destroy] you completely, or what?" And say: "Why are you financing Omelchenko, why are you doing this and that?" Don't you know [how to do] your job, or what?! ... So, if they aren't one fucking bit afraid of you. Fuck your mother, what's with you? Why should you be feared? It is our service that they are afraid of. ... I am the one who appointed you. So that's why. Let's go.

Excerpt 8

(Another conversation with Derkach)

Kuchma: Listening. And where are you looking? In Poltava oblast, in Kremenchug, this bastard Omelchenko is publishing such a newspaper there, blya, simply incredible. With caricatures, blya, [of] the president, and dirty publications. So therefore, he can't ... the security service together with the prosecutor [can] start a criminal
case together. These lawyers looked at [this] there and say that there are grounds to start such a case. Where's the Service [SBU]? Well, yah. Then why aren't they reporting now? They bring me this newspaper ... Newspapers, blya, they deliver to me here, while the service doesn't report one fucking thing at all. And that's what's most interesting. So, I'll look [into] who takes part in [these things], in
this same [newspaper]. All of these anti-presidential correspondents ... Yah, and that includes Korobova, Hrani. Fuck your mother, imagine, this bitch, blya, this whore of newspapers that he brought her into.... That Gongadze, blya, good-bye, good riddance.

Lytvyn: They all need to be ...


(via Marius)

Poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski

Translated from the Polish by Adam Zdrodowski

Wróblewski was born in 1962 in Gdansk and grew up in Warsaw, Poland. Since 1985 has lived in Copenhagen. He has published 6 volumes of poetry in Poland, 3 (translations) in Denmark, and selected poems in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Mostar 2002). He is also the author of several plays. English translations of his poems have appeared in London Magazine, Poetry London, Chicago Review, 3rd bed (USA) and in anthologies: Altered State: The New Polish Poetry (Arc Publications, Todmorden, UK 2003), Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird (Zephyr Press, Brookline, USA 2004).

Adam Zdrodowski, born in 1979, poet and translator, is preparing his PhD on Elizabeth Bishop. His translations include Lifting Belly by Gertrude Stein and poems by Mark Ford. His poems have appeared in: Odra, Dwukropek and Dziennik portowy. His first collection of poems is entitled Przygody, etc. [Adventures, etc.] and has been published in Wrocław (2005). He lives in Warsaw.

1. THE TIME OF WOKEN UP POETS/CZAS PRZEBUDZONYCH POETÓW
2. HIGH TIDE/PRZYPŁYW
3. KITES ON PRIMROSE HILL/LATAWCE NA PRIMROSE HILL
4. THE PORTER AND LAVENDER/PORTIER I LAWENDA
5. ORIENTATIONS BETWEEN FRIENDS/TOWARZYSKIE ORIENTACJE
6. ON THE MILKY WAY/NA MLECZNEJ DRODZE
7. RED POLKA-DOT DRESS/SUKIENKA W CZERWONE GROSZKI
8. REPETITION/POWTÓRZENIE
9. MR VESTER/PAN VESTER
10. THE WIND’S TRIUMPH. JECKELS HOTEL, SKAGEN./TRIUMF WIATRU. JECKELS HOTEL, SKAGEN.
11. PASSENGER/PASAŻER
12. THE HOUSE/DOM
13. SONG ABOUT GUNNAR/PIOSENKA O GUNNARZE

from the collection Pomieszczenia i ogrody, by Grzegorz Wróblewski, with illustrations by Teodor Bok, published by Biblioteka Narodowa, Duński Instytut Kultury, Warsaw 2005.

1.

THE TIME OF WOKEN UP POETS

Why don’t we love each other any more?
What do we have left after all these years?
Such sad songs I hear
Tonight.

It’s poets, poets waking up and knocking
On the windows as winter comes.
When I fall asleep,
They begin to sob loudly.


CZAS PRZEBUDZONYCH POETÓW

Dlaczego już się nie kochamy,
Cóż nam pozostało z tamtych lat?
Takie oto smutne piosnki słyszę
Dzisiaj w nocy.

To poeci, to poeci budzą się i pukają
W okna wraz z nadejściem zimy.
Kiedy ja odchodzę w sen,
Oni zaczynają głośno szlochać.


2.

HIGH TIDE

Our birds are already circling above someone else.
You’re right, we pay too much tax,
and the sky has unexpectedly lost depth.
The birds quickly figured it out...

(Your cold hand is touching my dry
skin.) Did I make love to you only thanks to
full dentition and five-fingered
limbs?



PRZYPŁYW

Nasze ptaki krążą już nad kimś innym.
Masz rację, płacimy zbyt wysokie podatki,
a niebo niespodziewanie straciło głębię.
Ptaki się szybko zorientowały...

(Twoja zimna dłoń dotyka mojej wysuszonej
skóry.) Kochałem się z tobą tylko dzięki
pełnemu uzębieniu i pięciopalczastym
kończynom?



3.

KITES ON PRIMROSE HILL

My wife is falling asleep nicely (and surely she’s wriggling about because of the full moon
as usual it’s me who is to blame together with
the mentally unbalanced moon)
she’s falling asleep nicely and she’s thinking only about me
just like me
me too I’m thinking only...
she’s falling asleep close to the kites on Primrose Hill, somewhere near the ghosts of
Stevenson
and Keats (people stopped reading
there’s been a transformation of homo novus
it’s even worse than it was
it’s the same as always)
I know well she’s falling asleep, I can feel it under my skin (Constable, too, was wriggling
about there
but is there anyone in my Copenhagen hole who knows who it was –
Constable?)
we’re an exemplary couple
(Primrose Hill has a definite advantage over Christianshavn
because kites, kites are a very interesting form of spending...)
we spent many holidays together and we played cards (my wife
hates to play cards, she considers it, rightly so, a vulgar way
of spending, even though poker differs fundamentally...)
and we read aloud the classics to each other, though the classics
bored us stiff and
we never had time for the lyre, the classics
and the cards, because there were, it seems, other necessities
wreaths, does anybody at all read the classics
probably not
everybody pretends, just like the moon
the moon doesn’t spend with them either
I admit never in my life have I come across a unicorn
(they didn’t recognise Keats, fools), I’m falling asleep and I’m thinking only about her
I am to blame for evevything...


LATAWCE NA PRIMROSE HILL

Moja żona grzecznie teraz usypia (i wierci się pewnie z powodu pełni
jak zwykle odpowiedzialność za wszystko ponoszę ja oraz
niezrównoważony psychicznie księżyc)
grzecznie usypia i myśli tylko o mnie
podobnie jak ja
ja też myślę w tej chwili wyłącznie...
usypia blisko latawców na Primrose Hill, gdzieś w pobliżu duchów Stevensona
i Keatsa (ludzie przestali czytać
nastąpiła transformacja homo novusa
jest jeszcze gorzej niż było
jest tak samo jak zawsze)
dobrze wiem, że usypia, czuję to pod skórą (Constable też się tam wiercił
ale czy ktoś w mojej kopenhaskiej dziupli wie, kto to taki –
Constable?)
jesteśmy przykładnym małżeństwem
(Primrose Hill ma zdecydowaną przewagę nad Christianshavn
ponieważ latawce, latawce to bardzo ciekawa forma spędzania...)
spędzaliśmy razem niejedne wakacje i graliśmy w karty (moja żona
nienawidzi gry w karty, uważa to, słusznie, za wulgarny sposób
spędzania, mimo iż poker różni się zasadniczo...)
i czytaliśmy sobie na głos klasyków, choć klasycy nas
potwornie nudzili i
nie mieliśmy nigdy czasu na lirę, klasyków
i na grę w karty, gdyż były, zdaje się, inne zapotrzebowania
wianki, czy ktoś czyta w ogóle klasyków
raczej nie
wszyscy udają, podobnie jak księżyc
księżyc też z nimi nie spędza
przyznaję, że nigdy w życiu nie natknąłem się na jednorożca
(Keatsa nie rozpoznali, głupcy), usypiam i myślę tylko o niej
ponoszę za wszystko odpowiedzialność



4.

THE PORTER AND LAVENDER

He glances as I enter the empty hotel.
“What’s up?”, he asks.
“The moon is a swindler”, I say.
“Did you lose two hundred at cards again?”. He hands me the keys.
His little finger travels again to his hairy ear.

He leans over a yesterday newspaper.
He yawns.
He doesn’t want anything from me.
Neither do I from him.
(Will I ever get the chance to meet Georges Charpentier?)

Those lonely porters, gamblers, lost conquerors of rich widows
and oceans – how they resemble one another!
They always smell of lavender.
They can’t afford anything else.

They know one another inside out and secretly hate.
They can’t afford anything else.



PORTIER I LAWENDA

Spogląda jak wchodzę do pustego hotelu.
Co słychać? - pyta.
Księżyc to oszust - mówię.
Przegrałeś znowu dwie stówki w karty? - podaje mi klucze.
Jego mały palec wędruje ponownie do zarośniętego ucha.

Pochyla się nad wczorajszą gazetą.
Ziewa.
Nic ode mnie nie chce.
Ja od niego też.
(Czy kiedykolwiek dane mi będzie poznać Georgesa Charpientera?)

Ci samotni portierzy, gracze, niedoszli zdobywcy bogatych wdów
i oceanów - jakże oni wszyscy do siebie podobni!
Zalatują zawsze lawendą.
Na nic innego ich nie stać.

Znają się na wylot i po cichu się nienawidzą.
Na nic innego ich nie stać.



5.

ORIENTATIONS BETWEEN FRIENDS

Renoir again, though there have already been
many poems about him and because of this ladies
cried bitter tears and an art connoisseur
was running about distracted, with a stomachache etc.

So it’s this hapless Renoir again,
it’s clear, his old age wasn’t
pleasant, he suffered just like any other
ailing grandpa, but why does it always

lead to conflicts between friends
when you, God forbid, say that his father
was a tailor and had the eyes of a common sadist?

(The Portrait of Renoir’s Father, 1869; Saint Louis, City Art Museum)



TOWARZYSKIE ORIENTACJE

Znowu Renoir, choć był przecież o nim
niejeden już wiersz i panie z tego powodu
płakały rzewnymi łzami i pewien znawca sztuki
biegał rozkojarzony z bólem brzucha etc.

Więc znowu ten nieszczęsny Renoir,
wiadomo, jego starość nie należała
do przyjemnych, męczył się jak każdy inny
schorowany dziadziuś, ale dlaczego zawsze

dochodzi do towarzyskich konfliktów,
gdy się, nie daj boże, powie, że jego ojciec
był krawcem i miał wzrok pospolitego sadysty?

(Portret ojca Renoira, 1869; Saint Louis, City Art Museum)



6.

ON THE MILKY WAY

What joy not to do anything!
To avoid those who deliver letters or earn money by counting
constellations.

Caressing a stray Alsatian, I’m looking into his
cunning eyes.
He understands me perfectly.

He doesn’t have to hunt ducks and nobody teases him with a rubber
bone.
Just like me he’s taking a rest among the mindless
dandelions.

He thinks he has understood his short mission.



NA MLECZNEJ DRODZE

Cóż za szczęście nic nie robić!
Omijać tych, co roznoszą listy albo za pieniądze przeliczają
gwiazdozbiory.

Głaszcząc bezpańskiego wilczura, patrzę w jego
chytre oczy.
On mnie doskonale rozumie.

Nie musi polować na kaczki i nikt nie drażni go gumową
kością.
Podobnie jak ja wypoczywa wśród bezmyślnych
dmuchawców.

Zdaje mu się, że pojął swoją krótką misję.




7.

RED POLKA-DOT DRESS

Why have they spilled the milk again? I’m so tired...
Something must have surely happened to my mother, she complains.

What do you need then, maybe you’d like to take a ride
to the forest with me?

My heart is failing me and I can constantly hear my mother’s cry
- she ignores my proposal.

All right! Then you have to get on by yourself,
see you, take care etc.

Then, already in the hall, pricks of conscience seize me.
I go back and ask if she doesn’t want to go with me somewhere after all.

She starts anew: Something must have surely happened to my mother, constantly
I can hear her cry, where is my mother now?

When I run away again, she, offended, pounds her fists on the walls.
(I promise myself we’ll never meet again.)

A few days later I sit again on the edge of her metal bed.
She’s breathing heavily.

She claims that they have spilled her milk again and that soon she’ll go
to meet her Maker.

As usual I propose a ride to the forest,
and she suddenly says:

All right, wait a minute, I’ll just put on the red
polka-dot dress.




SUKIENKA W CZERWONE GROSZKI

Dlaczego znowu rozlali mleko? Jestem taka zmęczona...
Coś na pewno stało się matce - żali się.

Czego ci w takim razie potrzeba, może chcesz przejechać się
ze mną do lasu?

Serce odmawia mi posłuszeństwa i słyszę ciągle płacz matki
- ignoruje propozycję.

W porządku! W takim razie musisz radzić sobie sama,
do zobaczenia, trzymaj się itd.

Potem, już na korytarzu, łapią mnie wyrzuty sumienia.
Wracam i pytam, czy nie chce się jednak ze mną gdzieś wybrać.

Zaczyna od nowa: Coś na pewno stało się matce, ciągle
słyszę jej płacz, gdzie podziewa się teraz moja matka?

Gdy ponownie stamtąd uciekam, obrażona wali pięściami w ścianę.
(Przyrzekam sobie, że nigdy więcej się nie spotkamy.)

Po kilku dniach siedzę znów na krawędzi jej metalowego łóżka.
Ciężko oddycha.

Twierdzi, że rozlali jej mleko i że już wkrótce wybierze się
na tamten świat.

Proponuję jej jak zwykle przejażdżkę do lasu,
a ona niespodziewanie mówi:

Dobrze, poczekaj chwilę, tylko włożę na siebie sukienkę
w czerwone groszki.




8.

REPETITION

I have already been in this room once.
I have talked to the same woman, watched her shiny necklace
and drunk tea from the same cup.

I know exactly at which moment we’ll say to each other:
Good night! How many minutes I’ll be falling asleep and what we’ll later
dream about...

I have already been in this room once!
For unexplained reasons they have forgotten to limit my memory.
Is it possible that somebody hoped that this time I’d act differently?

Change the course of events, mend the world’s history? But I joyfully...
repeat myself. It’s a wonderful, earthly evening.
Intimate and common.

I’d like to live it through endlessly.
Without any changes.


POWTÓRZENIE

Byłem już kiedyś w tym samym pomieszczeniu.
Rozmawiałem z tą samą kobietą, obserwowałem jej błyszczący naszyjnik
i piłem herbatę z tej samej filiżanki.

Wiem dokładnie, w którym momencie powiemy sobie:
Dobranoc! Ile minut będę usypiał i co się potem nam
przyśni...

Byłem już kiedyś w tym samym pomieszczeniu!
Z niewyjaśnionych przyczyn zapomniano ograniczyć mi pamięć.
Czyżby ktoś liczył na to, iż postąpię tym razem inaczej?

Zmienię bieg wydarzeń, naprawię historię świata? Ale ja z radością...
powtarzam się. To jest wspaniały, ziemski wieczór.
Intymny i pospolity.

Chciałbym przeżywać go w nieskończoność.
Bez jakichkolwiek zmian.




9.

MR VESTER

The owner is not the owner any more.
He used to own a white house with a fireplace but now
they have brought a hat for him into the garden
Hung it on a collapsing hedge and are silently waiting

Mr Vester has rammed his stick in the ground and is wiping his horn-rimmed glasses
He’s looking at the people walking down the road in the direction of the city
where he has never set foot.


PAN VESTER

Właściciel nie jest już właścicielem
Posiadał kiedyś biały dom z kominkiem a teraz
wynieśli mu do ogrodu kapelusz
Zawiesili na walącym się płocie i w milczeniu czekają

Pan Vester wbił w ziemię laskę i przeciera rogowe okulary
Patrzy na ludzi wędrujących szosą w stronę miasta
w którym jeszcze nigdy nie postawił nogi.



10.

THE WIND’S TRIUMPH. JECKELS HOTEL, SKAGEN.

Your eyes change and you stop reacting to sounds.
The glasses standing nearby start shaking.

You fall asleep fast. You scream in an unknown language and you dig in your nails
into the pillows. (The hotel cats knock on our door.)

You return only in the morning, with the first vigilant seagulls.
(Outside there is silence. The long-awaited silence and the sun...)

Smiling, you comb out your hair and ask for a cup of tea.
You can’t remember anything.

You soften...
Until the next storm.



TRIUMF WIATRU. HOTEL JECKELS, SKAGEN.

Zmieniają ci się oczy i przestajesz reagować na dźwięki.
Stojące w pobliżu szklanki zaczynają drgać.

Szybko usypiasz. Krzyczysz w nieznanym języku i wbijasz się paznokciami
w poduszki. (Hotelowe koty pukają do naszych drzwi.)

Powracasz dopiero nad ranem, wraz z pierwszymi czujnymi mewami.
(Na zewnątrz cisza. Długo oczekiwana cisza i słońce...)

Uśmiechnięta rozczesujesz włosy i prosisz o filiżankę herbaty.
Niczego sobie nie przypominasz.

Łagodniejesz...
Aż do następnego sztormu.



11.

PASSENGER

Should the court be taxed? Breathless steeds
are pulling a black coach through the streets of snowy Copenhagen

(Should we tear off the batmen’s shiny buttons?)
Poor, corrupt hacks

So much humiliation in exchange for a bucket of royal
oats.



PASAŻER

Czy należy opodatkować dwór? Zdyszane rumaki
ciagną czarną karocę ulicami zaśnieżonej Kopenhagi

(Zerwać ordynansom ich błyszczące guziki?)
Biedne, skorumpowane szkapy

Tyle poniżenia w zamian za kubeł królewskiego
owsa.



12.

THE HOUSE

Late each morning in front of it
men in black coats gather.
They silently stand on the steps and smoke long cigarettes.

Then they ring the doorbell.
They wait a few minutes and disperse.
They appear again the next day.

Dressed in black, they silently stand on the steps,
drag on, ring.
Everything always happens at the same pace.

Nobody ever lets them in.


DOM

Każdego przedpołudnia zbierają się przed nim
mężczyźni w czarnych płaszczach.
Stoją w milczeniu na schodach i palą długie papierosy.

Potem dzwonią do drzwi.
Czekają kilka minut i rozchodzą się.
Pojawiają się ponownie następnego dnia.

Ubrani na czarno, stoją w milczeniu na schodach,
zaciągają się, dzwonią.
Wszystko odbywa się zawsze w tym samym tempie.

Nikt im nigdy nie otwiera drzwi.




13.

SONG ABOUT GUNNAR

Gunnar has only
a wooden spoon
and a cabbage patch left.

His wife died
of pneumonia
three years ago.

His son went
to Sappisaasi
to breed reindeers.


PIOSENKA O GUNNARZE

Gunnarowi została
drewniana łyżka
i poletko kapusty.

Jego żona zmarła
trzy lata temu na
zapalenie płuc.

Syn wyjechał
do Sappisaasi
i hoduje tam renifery.


See also: The Other Side

Conquest begins an examination of misevaluated events of the Second World War by reminding his readers that his book “is not a work of history. It merely records events that affect our understanding of the totalitarian, and our own, development.” The essay is headed “With and Against Hitler”. Before proceeding to an analysis of issues relating to the war itself, which for the Soviet Union began in June 1941, it lists some of the actions and realities of the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact:

1) The joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939.
2) The Katyn massacre of 1940, when on Stalin's orders the NKVD shot and buried over 4000 Polish service personnel who had been taken prisoner when the Soviet Union invaded Poland in September 1939 in support of the Nazis.
3) The Soviet-German military and naval cooperation, which had been developing ever since 1918.
4) The handing over to the Gestapo of German Communist refugees in Soviet exile.
5) The publication of Communist papers in Western Europe for some time after the Nazi invasions.
6) The peace movements – including the movements that advocated peace with Hitler – that compromised many on the far left in the United States as well as in Britain.

In assessing the clash that ensued between the “quondam allies”, Conquest refers to the fact that Russian losses in the war were enormous – “far greater than those of the Western powers, or of Germany”:

These are even now, sometimes, put to the credit of the regime. The soldiers fought bravely and tenaciously. The civilians died in huge numbers. But far from this giving justification to the regime, the opposite is largely true.

Conquest shows how the notion – still current in some quarters – that the industrialization implemented by Stalin saved Russia in World War II is fallacious, a) because the crash industrialization was “irrationally pursued and falsely celebrated”, with huge effort being put into grandiose projects that were either wholly or partially worthless; b) because of the irrational subjectivity that prevailed within the field of military-industrial planning, with Stalin insisting on the building of heavy cruisers, over the opposition of naval commanders who were among the first to be shot in the purges of the late 1930s; c) because of the massive loss of military equipment during the early battles of the war; and d) because of the large-scale loss to the Nazis of the industrial equipment as well as most of the important food-producing areas.

Nonetheless, historians such as Eric Hobsbawm have persisted in maintaining that the USSR defeated Nazi Germany, and that therefore the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s were somehow justified. Conquest quotes Hobsbawm, who in his book The Age of Extremes wrote:

"It turned the USSR into a major industrial economy in a few years and one capable, as Tsarist Russia had not been, of surviving and winning the war against Germany. One must add that in few other regimes could or would the people have borne the unparalleled sacrifices of this war effort.”

As the author points out, this is thoroughly misleading, because it ignores the fact that in 1914-17 the collapse of the Russian army occurred from the top down, while the disasters of 1941 and 1942 involved deep penetrations that affected the entire military apparatus. Stalin grossly mishandled the situation – having decapitated his army by executing most of its generals and leaders, he was left with a half-trained military leadership. Stalin also ignored warnings that a Nazi attack was imminent – and one result of this was that almost the entire Soviet airforce was destroyed on the ground. The Soviet military forces were defectively deployed, with the abandonment of the fortified line along the old Soviet frontier (this, to consolidate the gains of 1939) when new forts had not yet been completed – this resulted in huge losses of men and equipment, often of the highest calibre. And when Stalin ordered that Kiev be held and defended, again ignoring the advice of his military advisors, the result was the biggest defeat of the war. Relying on survivors of the purges, such as Voroshilov, Budenny, Kulik and Mekhlis, Stalin put the Soviet army into the hands of incompetents. At the same time, generals commanding at the front were shot. In October 1941 three successive heads of the Soviet airforce were executed, with further groups of officers and generals being shot throughout 1941 and 1942. Large numbers of Soviet troops, including five generals and numerous colonels, defected to the enemy. Nothing similar had happened in tsarist times.

The ruthlessness with which the desertions and defections were punished may, Conquest speculates, have been “one of the conditions for the narrow margin of victory over Hitler”. For by October 10, 1941, 661,364 soldiers had “escaped from the front” and been rounded up. Anthony Beevor notes over 10,000 military executions during the Stalingrad period.

All of this leads to the inevitable question of how far such ruthlessness was justified by the struggle against Nazism. Conquest quotes a Russian-Jewish acquaintance who told him that “the best outcome of the war would have been a German victory over the Soviet regime, followed by a Western nuclear destruction of Nazism."

”But you would have been dead.”
“Yes, there is that.”

The essay reaches the conclusion that the Soviet regime barely survived the Second World War. Its survival was largely dependent on the sacrifice made by the people of the Soviet Union and on the help it received from its allies. It was the survival of a disaster “for which it itself was largely responsible.” Nor was the disaster over. The advent of peace in 1945 merely led to a reinforcement of Stalin’s hostility towards the non-Soviet world:

The peoples of Russia and Sovietized Eastern Europe, exhausted by the war, faced ever-worsening oppression. And, even in the freer world, with lesser stresses, those concerned to face the perspectives of reality did so under constant anxiety and apprehension.

See also: Dragons and Democracy
Dragons and Democracy - II
Dragons and Democracy - III
Dragons and Democracy - IV
Dragons and Democracy - V
Dragons and Democracy - VI
Dragons and Democracy - VII

Robert Conquest's The Dragons of Expectation - Reality and Delusion in the Course of History is published by Norton, and can be purchased from amazon.com.

Veronica Khokhlova has a link to a remarkable photo-essay by the photographer Ron Haviv. It chronicles the Balkan War, from 1991 onwards:

The fall of the Berlin wall and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union had led people to believe that the world had taken a turn towards peace. All that wound up happening in places such as Yugoslavia was the lifting of a lid on fervent nationalistic feelings.

I decided to go. My decision was reaffirmed by the quick announcement of the independence of Slovenia, one of the republics.I left that night. By the next day it was evident that independence wasn't going to be easy. The Yugoslav Federal Army, with bases in Slovenia, was going to fight the decision to break up Yugoslavia.

It is also possible to purchase the book from amazon.com.

From the new issue of Chechen Society Newspaper:

Grozny Megalopolis

The Capital of Chechnya: From Skyscrapers to Traffic Jams

Grozny, the third largest town in the North Caucasus in the 1990s, is trying to recapture its former “glory”. At the moment, however, this aspiration is only evident in the traffic jams in the centre of town.

By Timur Aliev

Car horns, the irritated cries of the drivers, whose path is being blocked by minibus- taxis, dropping passengers off right in the middle of the road… Pedestrians in the same spot stepping from brick to brick, trying to cross the “lake” of mud…. This is a typical scene at the central crossroads in Grozny near the House of Fashion, which is currently being renovated.

Observing this scene, you somehow have more faith in the results of the census in Chechnya that counted more than a million inhabitants in the republic. Grozny really is acquiring more traits of a capital city. It is true that it has been decided to scrap the positive side of this phenomenon – the skyscrapers promised a year ago in the centre of the Chechen capital – in favour of 3-4 storey houses. On the other hand the negative side of giant towns – the traffic jams – “overtook” us long ago.

By day Grozny resembles other Russian regional centres in this regard. Travelling a few kilometres from the “Avtobaza” bus stop, past the government building, past the old House of Print and past the House of Fashion to what used to be Lenin Square, can sometimes take no less than half an hour. What happens if you need to do this a few times?

The first traffic jam appeared more than a year ago near the central market. At that time they tried a radical solution to the problem – they moved the market. This did not help, however. The traffic jam did not disappear and the market returned to its former site.

Recently in addition to the congestion near the House of Fashion, traffic jams have cropped up in four or five other places. Generally, they are at the intersection of Grozny’s central streets: Krasnye Frontoviki Street and Ordzhonikidze Prospekt, Krasnye Frontoviki Street and Prospekt Mira, Mayakovskii Street and Krasnoznamennaya Street.

Traffic lights installed a year ago have not resolved the situation. According to some Russian state TV channels, these quasi-mythical appliances, which Chechen children have supposedly never seen before, should have pleased everyone. Unfortunately, the traffic lights have remained “mythical” in the sense that they do not work.

The traffic lights have been replaced with traffic controllers, who do not need electricity. “It was difficult at first – people didn’t understand the traffic controller’s hand signals. It’s easier now as people have got used to it”, says Hasan, a police man on point-duty.

“Old residents” near the market of workers at the House of Fashion say that at one time [the authorities] tried to solve the problem of traffic jams in the area by “installing” a traffic controller. This idea had to be abandoned as the residents claim the police officer was nearly run over.

Of course, the traffic jams could be seen as a good thing if we take them as a consequence of the financial prosperity of the town’s inhabitants, who are acquiring cars with their extra money.

The traffic jams in Grozny, however, are more likely to be another sign of the general ambivalence of the situation in the Republic – neither war nor peace, neither prosperity nor ruin. There is no active military action, but people are dying. Houses in Grozny are being renovated, but a year later the plaster is starting to crumble and the paint is beginning to peel.

There are actually a lot of cars, but everyone knows that they are all “C-50” models (“Compensation-50s”, which means they have been bought on the compensation money received for destroyed housing and the figure “50” denotes the fact that applicants had to give over 50% of the money in order to get it).

As a rule the traffic jams are an effect of ruin – and the lack of renovated roads and car parks in the centre of Grozny. The narrow width of the central streets does not allow cars to park by the market without obstructing the traffic.

The situation may be partly resolved this spring. According to the Ministry of Housing and Communal Management (HCM) of Chechnya 12 roads around the centre of Grozny are currently being completely renovated. This will partially solve the problem of the traffic jams as “redirecting the flow of lorries around the centre will lead to a reduction in the burden of goods traffic on the central roads”.

The main bridge across the River Sunzha is also being renovated. According to the Grozny town council, in order to speed up this process they have decided to raise finance from credit and by economising money on other renovation projects in the town.

However, there is another condition that will have to be met in order for the traffic jams to disappear from Grozny. Traffic regulations will have to be adhered to. While pedestrians insist on crossing the street wherever they feel like it, buses let passengers off on public roads and cars drive on the pavements, there will not be order on the roads.

So, change is needed not just around us, but inside us and neither the HCM nor the town council can help us with that.

(translated by Claire C. Rimmer)

In the International Herald Tribune, two German members of parliament* suggest that the 60th anniversary of the ending of the Second World War should also be marked in Brussels. From the article:

We cannot ignore the fact that, even after the victory over National Socialism, both the people of the Soviet Union and half of Europe had to suffer oppression and lack of freedom under Stalinist and Communist dictatorship. Bronislaw Geremek, former Polish foreign minister, stated: "If the whole historical truth is not told on May 9, commemoration cannot lead to anything good."

This question is of current political significance. For weeks, a public debate has been raging in all three Baltic states about whether their presidents should accept Putin's invitation. There is great concern that the whole truth will not be acknowledged: For these countries, occupation and repression ended only with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the attainment of independence.

Estonia and Latvia have been waiting years for Russia to sign a border treaty on which negotiations were completed. Russia has now offered to sign, but its offer is linked to a declaration that has sparked a new disagreement. It would be good if the border treaties were signed without delay and unconditionally, and Putin then presented the instrument of ratification to the two presidents on May 9.

Those who look back today at the end of the war must not forget postwar history. This applies not only to Eastern Europe, which lived without freedom for more than 40 years, but also for the story of freedom and integration in the West. May 8, 1945, represents a watershed in European history. Europe lay in ruins, divided; the age of the superpowers, the cold war, was beginning. Yet in spite of these adverse conditions, the seed of European integration was growing.

The Europe of integration, the European Union, embodies the lessons drawn from the wars and dictatorships of the 20th century. The EU is the means by which the peoples of Europe seek a future of security and welfare. The death and suffering of millions of people in Western and Eastern Europe during World War II should therefore also be commemorated in the city that best symbolizes Europeans' wish for a common future in peace and liberty, namely Brussels.

Josep Borrell, president of the European Parliament, and Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the Council of the European Union, should seize the initiative and organize a ceremony at the seat of the European institutions in May to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the war. This would send out an important signal for Europe's common future.

The European Union can only create a future of peace and solidarity, freedom and justice, if it gives consideration to the past with all its different perspectives. Europe's unification on the basis of democracy and human rights signifies the true end of World War II, so the EU must mark this anniversary fittingly.

__________________________________________________
* Markus Meckel was the last Foreign Minister of East Germany
and is from the SPD; Matthias Wissman was a member of Kohl's Cabinet and is from the CDU. (via scb)

(via Marius)

From news.ru, a report that Russia has refused to hand over to Poland classified documents relating to the massacre at Katyn. The director of Poland's Institute of National Remembrance announced that the Institute will still press the Russian authorities to hand over all the materials.

(via Marius)

Mysterious Death of a Minister

by Piotr Kościński from Kyiv, Tatiana Serwetnyk

[passage omitted]

The Gongadze case resembles a dramatic political fight - Olekh Tsariov, deputy of the Regions Party, told Rzeczpospolita. “We could be dealing here with the purging of some traces of Gongadze's murder, “ said Mykola Zhulynsky, deputy of the center-rightist bloc Our Ukraine. “Kravchenko had many possibilities to flee abroad, “ asserted Taras Chernovil, son of the well-known dissident Vyacheslav Chernovil.

The death of Kravchenko, who was to be the main witness (and the suspect) in the Gongadze case has agitated the political elites of Ukraine. Hrigoriy Omelchenko, chairman of the parliamentariy investigative committee, who already a few days ago demanded that Kravchenko be taken into custody and put under special guard, accused the Prosecutor General, Svyatoslav Pyskun, and even, indirectly, president Viktor Yushchenko, of causing Kravchenko’s death.

”I suspect that Yushchenko has made some agreement with former president Leonid Kuchma, giving him some guarantees of security. I demand Pyskun’s dismissal. If the prosecutor keeps his job, I will acknowledge that I was right," Omelchenko told journalists.

(via Marius)

The Arabs can at least claim kinship, not in a nation, but in a sort of Moslem empire, either spiritual or temporal. Spiritually that empire exists, its adhesive force and doctrine being Islam. But there also exists a Christian empire, at least as important, which there is no question of bringing back as such into temporal history. For the moment, the Arab empire does not exist except in the writings of Colonel Nasser, and it could not come about without world-wide upheavals that would mean the Third World War in a short time. The claims for Algerian national independence must be seen in part as one of the manifestations of this new Arab imperialism in which Egypt, overestimating its strength, aims to take the lead and which, for the moment, Russia is using for its anti-Western strategy. The Russian strategy, which can be read on every map of the globe, consists in calling for the status quo in Europe (in other words, the recognition of its own colonial system) and in fomenting trouble in the Middle East and Africa to encircle Europe on the south. The happiness and freedom of the Arab populations are of little account in the whole affair. One has only to think of the slaughter of the Chechens or of the Tartars in the Crimea or of the destruction of the Arab culture in the once Moslem provinces of Daghestan. Russia merely takes advantage of such dreams of empire to serve her own designs. Those nationalistic or, in the strictest sense of the word, imperialistic claims, must in any case be responsible for the unacceptable aspects of the Arab rebellion – chiefly, the systematic murder of French civilians and Arab civilians killed without discrimination and solely because they were French or friends of the French.

Albert Camus, writing in 1958.

http://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/wiadomosci/1,53600,2586074.html

Suicide of Kravchenko: Mouth shut for the truth
Marcin Wojciechowski 05-03-2005, last update 05-03-2005 00:17
[passage omitted]

He [Kuchma]can now return [from abroad] with ease. To prove, that it was he who ordered the murder of Gongadze will be very difficult,because the main witness is dead - says Volodymyr Stretovych, the chairman of the parliamentary committee for combating corruption.

How am I supposed to be happy about Kravchenko's suicide? - adds the lawyer of Gongadze's mother, Andriy Fedur. One statement of the former ministercould have solved the case, and now we will never know the whole truth.

The new president Viktor Yushchenko commented: - Everyone has a choice, - to defend his own honour in court or to dispense justice for himself.

One of the theories assumes that Kravchenko made a deal with the investigators and got a few days to think it over, to decide: confessing statement or suicide. A lot of people in Kyiv ask: who has agreed on this kind of solution? And why? To save Kuchma from responsibility. Did Yushchenko or someone from the new Ukraine's authorities know about this scheme?

See also: http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/03/940be100-11f3-4fc3-ae4f-ac4a3adbd0bb.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4317773.stm

http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/03/9f32ac57-9d6d-45f7-bcbf-b93c8e7fb263.html

(via Marius)

As I reported earlier, March 1 marked the 10th anniversary of the murder of ORT General Director Vladislav Listev, one of the highest-profile unsolved killings in Russia in the 1990s.

Now Moscow News has published an interview with Aleksandr Litvinenko, the ex-KGB and FSB officer who worked for the Organized Crime Control Directorate (URPO), and who came to prominence when he held a news conference where he said that URPO directors had ordered them to kill Boris Berezovsky. "Furthermore," the newspaper writes, "the officers said that URPO had in fact been created to carry out special operations to physically eliminate certain individuals." In retaliation for the news conference, the FSB opened a criminal case against Litvinenko, on charges of kidnapping, but the case "collapsed in court like a house of cards." Litvinenko and his family fled for London where he was granted political asylum.

Litvinenko subsequently published a book entitled Vyzyvayu Sebya na Dopros (Called In for Self-Interrogation). It contains passages that have a direct bearing on the Listev murder.

Aleksandr Litvinenko, in particular, writes about a report that came from his agent in the Kurgan organized crime group. The agent stated that he could be ordered to "terminate" the man who had killed Vladislav Listyev. Should he indeed get the hit order he would turn in the killer to law enforcement officials, the agent said.

Litvinenko reported the situation to Aleksandr Korzhakov, head of the Presidential Security Service (SBP). Having found out who the agent was, Korzhakov said that he was a con man. Nonetheless, Korzhakov asked Litvinenko to leave the room and called Acting Prosecutor General Aleksei Ilyushenko. They spoke for several minutes. Later, after hearing Litvinenko's report in the Kremlin, Ilyushenko said that the Prosecutor General's Office did not need his information.

This looks very strange. Investigators were questioning hundreds of people; possible witnesses were being delivered all the way from Siberian labor camps, in the hope that some information would surface and shed some light on the crime. But when there was a real chance of tracking down the killer, the head of the Presidential Security Service and the acting prosecutor general ignored it. Why? And why did Litvinenko have to brief Korzhakov, rather than his superiors, on the agent's story?

Moscow News conducted a telephone interview with Litvinenko in London, in which the following exchanges took place:

Korzhakov and his deputy, Ragozin," Litvinenko explained, "showed great interest in the Listyev case although they had nothing to do with investigating the crime."

Even so, you kept him up to date.

I was ordered to by my superiors.

Who exactly?

Korzhakov knew that I had some information and he found me through First FSB Deputy Director Safonov.

You describe yet another episode connected with the Kurgan crime group. Apparently, one of its two members who were held at the Matrosskaya Tishina jail was going to tell investigators about some contract hits, including the Listyev murder. Soon afterward both men were killed. How could that happen?

The detainee told his lawyer about his intention. The room where they were talking was bugged. Police operatives from Petrovka (headquarters of the Moscow City Criminal Investigations Department, or MUR. - ed.) decided to move both Kurgan men to the Lefortovo jail and work on them there. One of the operatives knew me and asked for help. I informed my superiors. Two weeks later both Kurgan men were killed in their cells. On the same night.

Why both? After all, only one of them was going to talk.

I did not know the name of the man who was going to cooperate with the police and so in my report I wrote about two Kurgan gangsters. Nor did the official who read my report. So they decided to play it safe.

In your book you talk about a private security firm called Stealth. You, in effect, assert that there is an FSB unit that organizes killings of people. Do you have any proof?

I assert nothing. I only cited information that had come from my source. A person working for Stealth told him that his bosses had ordered him to case a number of targets. He would study the entrance, the apartment, its location in the building, and the approaches to the building. Then he would draw a map and make a verbal report. Thus he cased the entrance to Listyev's apartment building. When the journalist was killed, television showed footage from the scene of the crime, and my source recognized the place. The firm's employee told my informer that after Listyev was murdered, he examined all the places that he had cased and found that murders had been committed there.

I visited Stealth many times, taking some documents there on my superiors' orders. Apart from this firm, as far as I know, there was another one operating under FSB auspices: Kosmicheskaya Alternativa (Space Alternative).

It engaged in unlawful monitoring of cellular phones and pagers.

Could it have monitored a victim's conversations at the time when an operation was carried out?

It probably could.

(via Marius)

Marius writes, on Kravchenko/Gongadze:

It looks as if Kuchma may walk free, the main witness won't talk.

http://www.newsru.com/world/04mar2005/gong.html

This news is a week old, but is none the less worthy of attention. It comes from the Finnish daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat:

Foreign - Friday 25.2.2005
Members of Russia's Mari minority hold demonstration to defend language and cultural rights

Hard-line president demands cancellation of protest

Members of the Finno-Ugric Mari people have held their first demonstration to defend their culture and history. Friday's peaceful protest attracted a few hundred local people in Joshkar Ola, the capital of the Mari Republic, which lies east of Moscow.

Georgi Pirogov, the chairman of the Mari journalists' association, said by telephone that the slogans used by the demonstrators were somewhat subdued. Signs carried by the marchers bore slogans such as "Russia is our home", "The people are nevertheless stronger", and "Uncivilised officials are a loss for the whole people".

The purpose of the demonstration was to support a list of grievances sent to Leonid Markelov, the hard-line President of the Mari Republic, demanding improvements to the present situation of the ethnic Mari.

The demonstrators want Markelov to cancel the decision made in December to shut down the Mari National Theatre. They also demand that those responsible for making the decision should be punished.

Other demands include the re-establishment of the Mari language section of the Republic's Ministry of Education, the passage of a new language law, the creation of a Mari Cultural Programme in rural areas, and continued economic support for Mari artists.

The demonstrations also called for equal freedom for all newspapers, and the rehiring of the head of the Mari national printing press, who was recently removed from his post.

All of the moves to weaken the position of the Mari people have taken place during the Markelov Presidency. Pirogov says that the President had called the organisers of the march to meet with them just a short time before the event began. "At the meeting Markelov threatened to hurt our operations in any way possible if we would not immediately cancel the demonstration", Pirogov says.

Previously in HS International Edition:

Mari Republic President irate at HS articles; threatens legal action (31.1.2002)

Finno-Ugric Mari people of Central Russia complain of ethnic persecution (27.12.2001)

Links:

Information Centre of Finno-Ugric peoples: the Mari or Cheremisses

http://www.finugor.komiinform.ru/info/countries/mari.html

UNPO (Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation) web site: Mari

http://www.unpo.org/

http://www.suri.ee/hs250205.html

(via justice4northcaucasus - which collects news not only from the North Caucasus, but also from other regions of the Russian Federation. The list is well worth subscribing to, and is free.)

See also in this blog: Mari People Appeal
More On Mari Situation

Abdymok says Interfax-Ukraine is reporting that former Ukrainian minister of internal affairs Yuri Kravchenko was found dead at his dacha today (March 4). Kravchenko was due to give evidence today to the Ukrainian prosecutor general's office about his alleged role in the abduction and murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze.

(via Neeka's Backlog)

See also: More on Gongadze


Update:
Dan McMinn at Orange Ukraine has more.

The flood of almost unbelievably Stalinesque propaganda about World War II and its aftermath continues to pour from the Kremlin in the long run-up to May 9 and the 60th anniversary event in Moscow that is to be attended by world leaders. The latest outburst is directed against Finland. In a RIAN item headed "Hitler's Ally Finland Should Not Correct Textbooks", the Russian Foreign Ministry gives its "response" to a speech by Finnish President Tarja Halonen at the French Institute of International Relations. The article makes the Russian view plain:

She gave the audience a sidelight on the Finnish vision of WWII, the main point of which is that for Finland WWII meant a separate war against the Soviet Union, in the course of which the Finns upheld their independence and the democratic political system.

The commentary of the Press and Information Board of the Russian Foreign Ministry, which has come to hand at RIA Novosti on Thursday, notes that this vision of history has become wide-spread in Finland especially in the last ten years.

"The desire to respect its past is natural of any country. The period of mutual mistrust between the Soviet Union and Finland, which led to two wars brought uncountable sufferings to the peoples of both the countries," the ministerial commentary reads.

Moscow believes that "today, 60 years later, remembrances of this common pain should not divide but bring us closer together, aim at the development of constructive goodneighbourly relations".

Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Ministry believes that "there are hardly grounds to make corrections in history textbooks world-wide erasing mention that during the years of the 2nd World War Finland was among the allies of Hitler's Germany, waged war on its side and, correspondingly, bears its own share of responsibility for that war".

"In order to become convinced what the historical truth is, it is enough to open the preamble of the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947, concluded between Finland and the 'Allied and United Powers'. Incidentally, the 1947 Peace Treaty contained serious political clauses guaranteeing the rehabilitation in post-war Finland of the human rights and freedoms, which make up the basis of democratic society", the ministerial commentary notes.

This view of the "historical truth" excludes completely, of course, an awareness or admission that in 1939 Soviet Russia concluded a military agreement with Nazi Germany, and that the invasion, occupation, and partition of Poland and much of the rest of Eastern Europe in that year was conducted according to a secret joint Nazi-Soviet protocol. It misses out the fact that in the Winter War of 1939-40, launched by Stalin against Finland, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were on the same side. It also omits any mention of the massive and crippling reparations that Finland was forced to pay to the Soviet Union after the end of the war.

It's clear that the Kremlin authorities are now reverting to a view of World War II deriving from the hardline, Stalinist approach to its history that characterized the early years of the Cold War.

Elena Bonner, widow of the Soviet dissident and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, writes at PRIMA about the Beware, religion! trial currently in progress in Moscow, and points to some precedents:

Two examples:

1. Stalin: when Raul Wallenberg died in prison, the prison doctor asked in his report what should be done with the corpse. Kabulov (a minister at the time) did not arrange for a post mortem, but decided on cremation. Thus to this day we do not know whether Wallenberg died of a heart attack or received a bullet in the nape of his neck.

2. Gorbachev: when the party secretary had Andrei Sakharov returned from Gorky, Sakharov requested his manuscripts and diaries, taken from him in various searches or just stolen, be returned to him. He was told they no longer existed. And here in my hands is an order from the then minister Kryuchkov for the 570 volumes of the Sakharov-Bonner case to be incinerated. And this dirty deed was indeed carried out in the months when the people’s deputy Sakharov made his request.

Now the time of colonel Putin. The demand of the prosecutor to destroy the pictures of the artists who took part in the exhibition Beware, religion! – the “evidence of crime” – only shows there was no crime. Times may come and go, but the handwriting of the organs of state remains the same. Criminals, whether murderers, robbers, or bent courts with investigation and prosecutor; they always destroy evidence .

Continuing an overview of Robert Conquest’s The Dragons of Expectation.

Starting in Chapter X (“Into the Planned Economy”), Conquest begins to examine the relation of the Western world to the Communist world from two basic standpoints: the almost incredible extent of the deception that was practiced by Stalinism, both internally and externally, and, in retrospect, the equally incredible extent of the West’s willingness to be fooled by that deception. The “planned economy” was a concept that appealed “not only to revolutionaries, but also to foreign scholars and others seeking a rational society,” who were only too ready to accept the “facts and figures” supplied by Stalin’s apparat. Chief among them were “those deans of Western social science”, the Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, “who are now, in this field at least, rightly forgotten.”

The true dimensions of the falsifications and distortions that were built into the official statistics released by the Soviet state have only recently become clear, with the publication of previously restricted material. “The striking thing is,” Conquest notes, “is that, in almost every respect, the history, including the history of Stalin’s postwar foreign policy, turns out to be even worse than we had envisaged.” The history makes some grim reading: in his earlier book, The Harvest of Sorrow, the author had a whole page of individual reports of Ukrainians going north into Russia in 1930-33, during the “terror-famine”, in search of bread, and being arrested or sent back: “Now we have the secret telegram, dated January 21, 1933, from Stalin and Molotov to the party and police chiefs of the provinces affected. It orders the blocking of peasants trying to enter Russia from the Ukraine or Kuban; they are to be sent back and the ringleaders arrested.” Even more serious is the evidence that the Soviet leaders were perfectly well aware that famine would result if their plans were put into implementation – though for decades this was denied by Western academics and historians. Conquest quotes a recently-discovered document relating to a Politburo decision of 1932, in which Molotov, who had just returned from the Ukraine, wrote: “We definitely face the spectre of famine, especially in the rich bread areas.” The decision insisted, however, that “Whatever the cost, the confirmed plan for grain requisition must be fulfilled.”

There is further evidence of the falsification of statistics during the period of the terror-famine:

I was able, from the odd report, to note that the registration of death has been largely suspended in the Ukraine after October 1932. From the newly available documents, we now have direct analyses. In the Kiev Medical Inspectorate, 9,742 corpses were noted, only 3,997 of which were registered, and similar things were reported from other districts.

At the same time, the propaganda offensive continued:

On another point, a report to the Central Committee from the deputy head of the North Caucasus Political Section of the Machine Tractor Stations alleged that kulak bodies were being left near the railways to “simulate famine” (see E.N. Oskolkov, Golod 1932-1933).

The Western delusions about the Soviet Union – delusions held above all by a large section of the educated liberal left, who wanted to believe that the new state was the incarnation of all the ideals of etatist socialism they had nurtured for so long – were reinforced further by the writings of contemporary political observers. Eminent among these was the British historian E.H. Carr, to whom Conquest devotes considerable attention. Carr’s first political book, which was published on the eve of World War II, was a study in the application of “political realism” to European politics: it advocated appeasement of Hitler. During the war, Carr served as a leader-writer on the London Times, which at that period was regarded as the voice of establishment orthodoxy, and even of official government policy. “The tone,” Conquest writes, “might be called magisterial or condescending, depending on one’s taste.” However, in 1944, Carr abandoned his “realism” in order to attack British government policy on the fighting in Greece: when British troops prevented a Communist takeover of the country, Carr hotly opposed the action on the grounds that the Communist partisans “appeared to exercise almost unchallengeable authority” over most of Greece…After the war, Carr began work on his massive History of Soviet Russia. It consists of 14 volumes, the last six of which take as their focus and rationale the “planned economy” which its author believed was emerging in the USSR – and which, it is important to note, he considered to point out the direction of the world’s future.

Conquest analyses Carr’s acceptance of Soviet official “facts”, showing how it played along with the Soviet promotion of such phantasmagoria as the “five-year plans” so beloved of Soviet orthodoxy: these “plans” were in fact no more than a set of targets for various industries – targets which were repeatedly increased, with pressure to “overfulfill” them. Carr’s readiness to accept official Communist accounts was, Conquest suggests, merely one more expression of an intellectual prejudice that characterized large sections of the political left in Europe. Although towards the end of his life Carr criticized the inhumanities of Stalin’s regime, he did so belatedly and inadequately: right to the end, he insisted that it was wrong to “moralize” about the crimes of Stalin – and even of Hitler. This approach, the essay points out, lives on today in the so-called “non-judgmental” neutrality promoted in many academic quarters. But, as Conquest notes:

… neutrality on such issues is itself a moral stance, and this human failing goes with a smug affectation of being above the battle. Carr’s view that history is not, or not much, interested in the losers has long been criticized as both insensitive and uncomprehensive. But the past decade has relegated his favorites, the proletarian revolution and the planned economy, to the status of… losers.

See also: Dragons and Democracy
Dragons and Democracy - II
Dragons and Democracy - III
Dragons and Democracy - IV
Dragons and Democracy - V
Dragons and Democracy - VI

I recently discovered this site. It exists to commemorate the massacre of approximately 8,000 Muslim men and boys, and the torture, rape, and killing of many women and children, which occurred from July 12 through July 18 1995, in and near the UN declared "safe area" of Srebrenica. The massacre was carried out after the commander of the UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force), General Bertrand Janvier, refused to carry out UNPROFOR's mandate to defend the Safe Area and handed it over to Serbian army General Ratko Mladic.

Taras Kuzio at EDM has more on the Gongadze murder:

Yushchenko explained how resolving the murder of Gongadze -- and of other journalists and politicians from the Leonid Kuchma era -- is important evidence that the rule of law exists in Ukraine. Resolving the Gongadze case is also, "My, and my team's political, moral, human responsibility before Lesia Gongadze, before my country, and before the international community" (Ukrayinska pravda, March 1).

Investigators found the car used to kidnap Gongadze, but the SBU has refuted reports that Gongadze's head has been located. Military and Ministry of Emergency troops searching for Gongadze's head, which likely would have a bullet wound that could help identify the murderers. Investigators believe Gongadze was shot in the head and then decapitated so that the bullet could not be traced.

Yushchenko believes that the next -- and most important -- aspect of the Gongadze affair is, "Who organized and ordered this murder. At the moment, the investigation is moving to this stage" (Ukrayinska pravda, March 1). This is the most delicate phase, because the identity of those who ordered Gongadze to "be dealt with" has long been known.

And, the article concludes:

Piskun [Sviatyslav Piskun, Ukraine's current prosecutor] admitted that resolving the Gongadze affair "is going to be a litmus test of democracy in this society" (New York Times, February 3). Until there is closure on the Gongadze affair Ukraine cannot move forward. The release of the first tape in November 2000 sparked the Ukraine Without Kuchma movement that, exactly four years later, led to the Orange Revolution. When Yushchenko was elected on December 26, Lutsenko said the "Ukraine Without Kuchma movement is over" (1+1 TV, December 26). The final break with the past will come when the Gongadze investigation is finally closed.

The eyes of the world will be watching Moscow on 9 May. We will be carefully listening to the message that comes from there. This is a great responsibility for the hosts. We should expect this message to take account of the historical truth, in all of its complexity. In order to reflect this truth, it will suffice to say a few words; they will not by any means dampen either the greatness of the anniversary or the lofty celebratory atmosphere. The Polish presence should be an expression of the expectation for these words as well.

In the Warsaw daily Gazeta Wyborcza, the words of Poland's Prime Minister, Marek Belka, who believes that the Polish President, Aleksander Kwasniewski, should attend the ceremonies Moscow marking the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. Some further passages from Belka's article, in translation (from BBC Monitoring):

We are all asking ourselves the question of whether the president of the Polish Republic, Aleksander Kwasniewski, should or should not participate in the ceremonies in Moscow marking the 60th anniversary of victory over the Nazi Third Reich. I respond: three times yes! Yes -- out of consideration for the past, the present, and the future!

Why out of consideration for the past? Because elementary respect for historical truth demands that the highest-ranking representatives of independent Poland should not be missing from among the leaders of the democratic community of states. It was a historical injustice that 60 years ago representatives of the Polish state were not invited to take part in the victory parades organized in 1945 in London and
Moscow. This was a time when Poland's fate was determined by others. Today, finally, we are the masters of our country and we should ourselves right the wrongs done to us 60 years ago. From the first to the last day of WWII, we were participants in armed struggles. Today we have a moral obligation and we want, before all of Europe, to honor the memory of all those Poles who perished in the fight against Nazism on all the fronts of that war. They lost their own lives in order to spare the those of others.

Secondly, we should be present there out of consideration for the challenge of the present time. By being present in Moscow, we can demonstrate the new place and role we play in the region and on a global scale -- within NATO and in the realization of a common EU foreign and security policy.

Thirdly and lastly, we can and want to bear testimony, through the Polish head of state's presence in Moscow, that the division of Europe into spheres of influence that was symbolized by Yalta has ended once and for all. We are today building a new Europe based on common values. This is how we see the future.

(via Marius)

See also in this blog: Lithuanian-American Statement
Threats and Warnings
Russia Must Explain

Reuters is reporting Ukraine's president Viktor Yushchenko as saying that the killers of Georgiy Gongadze have been caught.

Meanwhile, a grisly uncertainty surrounds the question of whether or not Gongadze's head has been found.

(via Marius, and Neeka's Backlog)

From today's RFE/RL Newsline:

TEN YEARS LATER, LISTEV MURDER STILL A MYSTERY.

Russian news agencies reported that 1 March is the 10th anniversary of the murder of ORT General Director Vladislav Listev, one of the highest-profile unsolved killings in Russia in the 1990s. The Prosecutor-General's Office issued a statement saying that "the investigation of this crime has not stopped for one minute and the most experienced law enforcement officials continue to work on it." The statement added that 100 volumes of material have been collected in the case, RIA-Novosti reported. Investigators have looked into all aspects of Listev's life, but they believe that the murder was almost certainly connected with his efforts to reorganize the business practices of ORT, Russia's premier television channel. Listev was named ORT general director in January 1995. RC

From Paul Goble, a report from Belarus about weeping icons there:

Tartu, March 1 - Visitors to a Russian Orthodox Church in a small town near the Belarusian capital report that icons there are now weeping blood, a development that the local clergy say reflects God's sadness at the rising tide of evil in the world and may point to impending disaster in that country.

According to an article published in "KP v Belorussii" and posted online last week, approximately a dozen icons in an Orthodox church in Dzerzhinsk began to weep myrrh about a month ago, something that attracted the attention of the local community.

But in the last two weeks, more than 80 of the holy images in that church have begun to shed what appear to be tears of blood, as a picture featured in this article shows. That in turn has attracted more people to the church and prompted the media attention that resulted in the "KP v Belorussii" report.

The priest and his wife were not shy about showing the icons to that paper's skeptical reporter, Natalya Artemchik. And they were not restrained in explaining to her what they believe this phenomenon points to: an effort by God to "remind us about Him," in the words of Father Aleksandr.

The priest's wife Svetlana told Artemchik that the tears on one icon reflected the fact that "people and especially men drink too much." She said that those on another represented divine concern about the sad reality that so many people have ceased to believe and have fallen away from the church.

And noting that "blood in a church is a bad sign," Mother Svetlana pointed out that icons had bled in Moscow churches just before the Kursk submarine disaster. And crossing herself three times; she expressed her own fear that something equally tragic might take place in Belarus in the near future:

When Father Aleksandr showed Artemchik the myrrh he had collected from the icons earlier, she suggested that it strongly resembled Vaseline, an idea that he priest quickly dismissed with a laugh. "You lay people are used to not believing in anything; you're always trying to find a simple explanation for everything."

And he pointedly told the "KP v Belorussii" reporter that "it is already time to think about one's soul especially since the Lenten fast is beginning."

Whether the tears on the icons of the Dzerzhinsk church are a miracle as the priest and his wife believe or whether they are something else entirely, this unusual development may very well have a serious impact on those in Belarus who learn about it.

Many Belarusians, like people in neighboring countries, continue to be much affected by such signs and draw on them to interpret events. For many in that region, the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 was made all the more horrible because the name itself is used in the Apocalypse of St. John to designate the bitter wormwood connected with the end of the world.

The story of the weeping icons in the Dzerzhinsk church is unlikely to have an equally dramatic impact on the way people in Belarus think about their lives and their future in one of the most authoritarian and repressive countries at the edge of Europe.

But the very possibility that they might do just that perhaps explains why the government of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka allowed this article to appear at all -- and also why the journalist was quite careful to restrain her skepticism.

(Paul Goble - Window on Eurasia)

In “some notes on a neglected theme”, Conquest turns his attention to an examination of the origins and spread of Marxism-Leninism from an unusual perspective – that of economics. As he notes sardonically, this approach is, however, perfectly in keeping with the Materialist Conception of History.

The essay’s study of “revolutionary high finance” begins, of course, with Lenin, who was the first political activist in history to contemplate and realize the establishment of a cadre of “professional revolutionaries” – in other words, revolutionaries who had to be paid. Lenin was not averse to accepting financial assistance from sources that other socialists would have found objectionable – his association with Alexandra Kalmykova (known to the Bolsheviks as "The Bucket"), a well-to-do woman publisher and owner of a popular bookshop that in later years financed Lenin’s first émigré newspaper Iskra, and his marrying off of two Bolsheviks to the Schmidt heiresses, are proof of that. There were also other methods of obtaining funding for the Bolshevik party: bank robberies were a simple expedient, and were mostly organized by the young Stalin, under the name of Dzhugashvili. There were also money diversion scams, one of which involved the siphoning off of funds intended for the Social Democrats as a whole.

Conquest notes that when Lenin took power over Russia, “large sums became available”:

Whoever controls a state, however poor it may be, can wring money out of it – as various ex-dictators of Third or Fourth World countries have more recently demonstrated. At any rate, Soviet foreign policy and influence required massive funding. The Soviet regime now began to employ a vast and increasingly experienced apparatus of propaganda and persuasion. Ideas do not merely step into the “intellectual” consciousness; this sort of general penetration must be materially assisted and was.

From 1921, with the formation of the Comintern, funding became a very important consideration. What has been neglected, or denied, until recently, is the huge advantage over left-wing rivals that the continuous financial support from Moscow (up until the late 1980s) gave the world’s Communist parties. A party or organization that can afford a network of paid officials, newspapers, book publishing companies, and so on has a very big edge over one that cannot.

The essay shows how the huge international and global business concern that was Soviet Communism developed from its early roots in pre-revolutionary crime and capitalism to the situation that characterized the 1920s, when Soviet workers complained that their hard-earned money was being used, via “party contributions”, to finance revolutionary activity abroad. The 1920s were also the period when Lenin ordered the seizure of church valuables – Conquest speculates, ironically, that “the organization and propaganda of the seizure cost more than the value of the loot.” During the devastating famine that took hold of the country in the early years of the decade, the Soviet Union was still exporting most of its grain overseas. As a result, Herbert Hoover negotiated the bringing of American humanitarian aid to Russia, and Congress voted millions of dollars to this cause – what happened to the money is to this day not clear. There are pointers, however: in 1921 the Communist Party of Great Britain was receiving £55,000 per annum, at a time when its own income was around £100 per annum…

Above all, Conquest emphasizes once again, the obvious result of all this was that

the Communist parties could afford large permanent staffs both centrally and locally, and above all could publish propaganda and versions of Soviet falsifications in a new way. The general wave of Western intellectual leftism was given a disciplined, single-minded center (and a vast output of Moscow’s media products).

“It took time,” he notes, before all those who thought of themselves as Communists were reduced to proper obedience. But eventually, as we know, they proved able to switch from anti-Fascism to anti-anti-Fascism overnight.”

Drawing on documents which have only recently become available – through documents such as Valerio Riva’s Ora da Mosca, and Fond 89 at the Hoover Institution Archives, Conquest presents overwhelming evidence of the extent of the Soviet funding of the world’s Communist parties. Some of the figures are astonishing: in 1959, 43 listed Communist parties received a total of $8,759,700; “by 1963, it was c. $15,750,000 covering eighty-three Communist parties and a few others.” During the same period, the CPUSA received $42,1202,000, the French Communist Party $50,004,000 and the Italian $47,233,000.

Conquest also looks at “another of Stalin’s material investments in the struggle for foreign support":

Moscow did not depend only on the direct financing of foreign Communist parties. A quite important example of other financing was the diversion into the hands of the American ambassador to Russia, Joseph Davies, and his collector wife, of important artistic treasures free, or at nominal prices, from the Tretyakov Gallery and various nationalized monasteries and other collections. Davies became a keen adulator of and misinformer on the USSR.

See also: Dragons and Democracy
Dragons and Democracy - II
Dragons and Democracy - III
Dragons and Democracy - IV
Dragons and Democracy - V