A Step At A Time

RFE/RL reports that

A court in Finland has sentenced a Russian woman to prison for running a prostitution ring out of apartments owned by the Russian Embassy's trade delegation.

Tatiana Viitanen was found guilty of acting as a pimp by leasing the apartments to prostitutes over a two-year period.

She was sentenced to two years and three months and ordered to pay some $200,000 in damages.

The apartments were allegedly supplied to Viitanen by two Russian officials. But the two did not face trial as they are protected by diplomatic immunity and have since returned to Moscow.

The Russian Embassy website said that some apartments had been "used for criminal activities...which it regrets," but denied any embassy involvement in a prostitution racket.

Amazon.com is offering the Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection at the low-low price of $7,989.99 with free shipping. From the Amazon advert:

From Edwin A. Abbott to Emile Zola, the 1,082 titles in the Penguin Classics Complete Library total nearly half a million pages--laid end to end they would hit the 52-mile mark. Approximately 700 pounds in weight, the titles would tower 828 feet if you stacked them atop each other--almost as tall as the Empire State Building.

(via technorati.com)

A Kyiv court yesterday ordered the Ukrainian Justice Ministry to backdate the registration of the Pora student movement as a political party. In theory at least, the decision allows Pora, which spearheaded last year’s Orange Revolution that brought President Viktor Yushchenko to power, to take part in the upcoming parliamentary elections.

Prague, 30 June 2005 (RFE/RL) – The Pecherskyy district court ruled that Pora should be retroactively registered as a political party as of 24 March 2005.

By doing so, the judiciary is paving the way for Pora’s participation in the upcoming legislative polls due to take place on 31 March 2006. Ukraine’s election law says a political party cannot compete for parliamentary seats unless it is registered at least 365 days before the polls.

Yuriy Polyukhovych is the leader of Pora's Kyiv branch and a member of Ukraine’s Popular Party. In comments made to RFE/RL, he hailed yesterday’s court ruling. “This is a renewal of justice and people are beginning to believe that common sense can prevail," he said. "This ruling shows that the 10,000 signatures that PORA had collected to register as a party were a fair decision.”

Yesterday’s court decision puts an end to a two-month struggle between Pora and the Justice Ministry. Pora had been seeking registration since 24 March, when it held its founding congress as a political party.

Arguing that only one-third of the signatures of support collected by Pora activists could be authenticated, the Justice Ministry first refused to register the student movement. It did so only on 1 June. But the belated decision came too late for Pora, which was effectively barred from taking part in the upcoming election.

Pora leaders have blamed Justice Minister Roman Zvarych for the delay and organized street protests to demand his resignation. Zvarych eventually voiced support for Pora against his own administration. Yet, relations between Ukraine’s newest political party and the Justice minister remain sour.

On 25 June, Zvarych reportedly shunned a planned television debate with Pora leader Vladislav Kaskiv, prompting an angry reaction from the organization. Zvarych was not immediately available for comment today.

Polyukhovych suspects many government officials -- and not only in the Justice Ministry -- are looking at Pora with suspicion. “It seems that in today’s Ukraine, the new government doesn’t want to see young, promising politicians on its side and that’s why we sometimes have to resort to different methods, such as the protests we had to organize when the Justice Ministry absurdly refused to register us, checked our documents four times and finally registered us, but did so on such a date that would have disqualified us from participating in the elections,” he said.

In a speech delivered at RFE/RL’s Prague headquarters earlier this month, Pora leader Kaskiv explained why in his view it is so important that Ukraine’s student movement continues the political fight.

“Today, with [our] new president, Ukraine is a reborn nation," Kaskiv said. "However we understand that this is not a final, [decisive] victory. [It is just] one more chance to become a great European nation with a new outlook and a reenergized people with an outstanding future. This is why we pledge today to not [repeat] the mistakes of the past. Pora will not allow the corrupt political old guard that ruled over Ukraine in the past 14 years to change its course again. We will not allow corrupt officials to seize power in Ukraine by putting on the orange color. Pora will protect the democratic victory of the people.”

Polyukhovych agrees, saying the organization had vowed to keep a watchful eye on the government.

“The situation forces us to participate in [the upcoming parliamentary] elections," he told RFE/RL. "It is especially true for those of us who have shown by their actions -- and not just by words -- that we, the youth, are well organized and capable of toppling any system that is against its own people. This is why Pora, together with other parties, must take part in these elections as they certainly will not be any less important – perhaps they will be even more important – that the last presidential elections in Ukraine.”

Polyukhovych says that provided Pora wins parliamentary seats it will not blindly support Yushchenko’s government, even though Kaskiv currently works as an adviser to the Ukrainian president.

“I believe this may not be necessarily an opposition, but a young, fresh viewpoint that will be heard, if not by the government, then certainly by the people, and if not in parliament, then certainly in local government councils,” Polyukhovych said.

Polyukhovych says Pora has still not decided whether to run for parliament on its own, or in an alliance with other political parties.

Copyright (c) 2005. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. www.rferl.org

Anne Applebaum, discussing attitudes towards the United States in different countries, population strata and age-groups around the world:

Looking at age patterns in other generally anti–American countries can be equally revealing. In Canada, Britain, Italy, and Australia, for example, all countries with generally high or very high anti–American sentiments, people older than 60 have relatively much more positive feelings about the United States than their children and grandchildren. When people older than 60 are surveyed, 63.5 percent of Britons, 59.6 percent of Italians, 50.2 percent of Australians, and 46.8 percent of Canadians feel that the United States is a “mainly positive” influence on the world. For those between the ages of 15 and 29, the numbers are far lower: 31.9 percent (Britain), 37.4 percent (Italy), 27 percent (Australia), and 19.9 percent (Canada). Again, that isn’t surprising: All of these countries had positive experiences of American cooperation during or after the Second World War. The British of that generation have direct memories, or share their parents’ memories, of Winston Churchill’s meetings with Franklin Roosevelt; the Canadians and Australians fought alongside American G.I.s; and many Italians remember that those same G.I.s evicted the Nazis from their country,too.

The whole article is illuminating and well worth reading.

(via Harry's Place)

Vladimir Socor writes in EDM about how the entire European Union is being insulted by Russia's unilateral decision to reject ratification of the border agreement with Estonia:

On June 27, merely six weeks after signing the border treaty with Estonia, Russia announced that it is revoking its signature, withdrawing from any obligations stipulated in that treaty, and demanding renegotiation from scratch. Those points are contained in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs note, made public that day, along with Ministry comments emphasizing, "Under international law, the issue of delimitation of Russian and Estonian territories remains an open one" (Interfax, June 27, 28). The move also signifies a slap to the European Union, since the Estonia-Russia border forms a part of the EU-Russia border.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov signed the border treaty with his Estonian counterpart Urmas Paet in Moscow on May 18, the Estonian parliament ratified it on June 20, and on June 22 Estonian President Arnold Ruutel promulgated it. However, on June 21 Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to forward the treaty to the Duma for ratification. It vehemently criticized the Estonian ratification law's preamble, which makes references to the Estonian state's uninterrupted legal continuity during the Soviet occupation. Moscow demanded that Estonia give up that preamble in order to have the treaty ratified by Russia. But it did not threaten to cancel the treaty.

A week later, however, Moscow took the escalatory step of discarding the treaty altogether. According to Lavrov, it did so in order to prevent the European Union from interceding with Russia to ratify the treaty. There is no treaty to ratify now, Lavrov gloated in mocking the EU: "They in the EU might have succumbed to the temptation of telling us, well, Estonia has ratified it, even if adding references to ‘occupation,' ‘aggression,' ‘unlawful annexation,' but ratified it anyway … so please show a bit of patience and ratify it on your side, also with some interpretations attached, so that the treaty can enter into force. To stop the EU from falling into this temptation, we have withdrawn our signature. There will be no treaty" (Interfax, RIA, June 27, 28).

Chastising Estonia for "equating [Soviet] liberators to occupiers," Lavrov argued, "It was the Soviet people's victory that gave [Estonians today] the opportunity to play these games and, in general, to speak freely" (Russian TV First Channel, June 27).

The Federation Council's International Affairs Committee Chairman, Mikhail Margelov, blamed "Estonia's nationalist and isolationist voters and their representatives in power" for causing the Estonian parliament to attach the preamble to the ratification law. Margelov used those epithets in the knowledge that the ratification law had passed overwhelmingly with 78 in favor, four opposed, 19 not voting in the Estonian parliament, reflecting a political consensus in the country. The Estonian-ratified border treaty actually confirms Russia's possession of territory taken from Estonia during the occupation.

The Duma's International Affairs Committee Chairman, Konstantin Kosachev, had initially suggested that the chamber could ratify the border treaty despite the preamble to Estonia's ratification law. That document -- Kosachev had pointed out -- did not affect the treaty itself, and could in any case be matched by a unilateral Duma statement as part of Russia's ratification (Interfax, June 21). Now, however, Kosachev rushed to fall into line, on the government's cue: "The Committee, and the Duma in its entirety, unconditionally and unreservedly support the government's and MFA's resolute position." Estonia "just did not want to behave in a civilized manner," he declared (Interfax, RIA-Novosti, June 27). The contention that the three Baltic states are "uncivilized" has figured with increasing frequency in Russia's high-level official discourse this year.

Replying to Russia's diplomatic note, Estonia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has expressed the hope that Moscow will once more analyze the Estonian ratification law, and then initiate the procedure of Russian ratification of the border treaty. The Estonian Vice-Chairman of the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, Toomas Ilves, and other EP deputies have asked the EU to take a stand in response Russia's decision to withdraw its signature from the border treaty with Estonia. The request points out that Estonia's border with Russia is at the same time the external border of EU, that Estonia needs the EU's support on the issue, and that the entire EU is negatively affected by Russia's unilateral decision (BNS, June 28, 30; see EDM, May 2, 20, June 24).

See also: Russia Denounces...

The inquiring blog Far Outliers is currently presenting a series of extracts from Michael Lind's Vietnam, the Necessary War, which throws new light on the close relation of the development of the Vietnam conflict to the phases of the Cold War and its dynamics. During the 1960s and 1970s that relation was not generally perceived by the global public at large - for different reasons, it was largely suppressed by both U.S. and Soviet governments. Lind also discovered evidence of another kind of blockage - an unwillingness among the U.S. military leadership when it came to the matter of counter-insurgency tactics, and he notes: "Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. military prepared to fight Field Marshal Rommel and Admiral Yamamato, when it should have been preparing itself in addition to fight opponents like Nicaragua's Sandino and Haiti's Charlemagne."

Unfortunately, the military's response to pressure from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to master the complexities of counterinsurgency was to dismiss it as a fad. General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1960-61, thought that the Kennedy administration was "oversold" on unconventional warfare. General George Decker, army chief of staff in 1960-62, claimed that "any good soldier can handle guerrillas." Even General Maxwell Taylor, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1961-64 championed flexible response, claimed that "Any well-trained organization can shift the tempo to that which might be required in this kind of situation." John A. Nagl, a U.S. Army captain and professor at West Point, suggests that "it was the organizational culture of the British army that allowed it to learn counterinsurgency principles effectively during the Malayan emergency, whereas the organizational culture of the U.S. Army blocked organizational learning during--and after--the Vietnam War." During the conflict in Indochina, one anonymous U.S. army officer was quoted as saying, "I'm not going to destroy the traditions and doctrine of the United States Army just to win this lousy war."...

After a look round at other U.S. military problems in the post-Vietnam era, Lind returns to the matter of the anti-communist response, and concludes:

In the final analysis, however, the American public's support for a sound grand strategy of global military containment of the communist bloc by means of flexible response collapsed for most of the 1970s because the U.S. military in Vietnam was too inflexible in its response to the enemy's tactics.

From Prague Watchdog, news that Moscow-backed Chechen Vice-Premier Ramzan Kadyrov is offering bribes to the residents of the north-eastern Chechen village of Borozdinovskaya, who sought refuge in neighbouring Daghestan after the sweep operation on June 4, which ended in the killing of one resident and the forced abduction of eleven others:

People who had fled from the Borozdinovskaya village agreed to return home only with the help of a promise of money made by Ramzan Kadyrov, the Moscow-backed Vice-Premier of the Chechen Republic, stated Natalya Estemirova of the Chechen branch of the Russian human rights organization Memorial.

"Ramzan Kadyrov promised to pay 10,000 roubles to each person who would return to the village [Borozdinovskaya]," Nestemirova said on Wednesday, referring to Akhmed Akhmedov, who is in charge of the camp "Nadezhda", where the refugees have been staying for three weeks.

According to official information, the refugees agreed to return after lengthy talks with Ramzan Kadyrov and Dagestani MP Saygid Murtazaliyev.

About a thousand people from Borozdinovskaya, a village located in northeastern Chechnya and inhabited mostly by ethnic Dagestanis, fled across the administrative border to the refugee camp "Nadezhda" near the Dagestani town of Kizlyar after masked armed people raided their village on June 4, killing one elderly man on the spot and abducting 11 others.

See also: Borozdinovskaya - II

The Telegraph has a column on Melita Norwood, the British KGB agent whose death four weeks ago at the age of 93 has only now been announced:

Mrs Norwood, whose espionage activities were disclosed by Vasili Mitrokhin - a former KGB archivist - in 1999 after his defection to MI6 with a large number of files, died at a West Midlands nursing home almost four weeks ago.

Her family arranged a private funeral service after which there was a cremation.

Mrs Norwood, a committed CND and Communist party member, worked as a secretary for the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, whose "tube alloys" project was a cover for nuclear weapons development.

For 40 years Mrs Norwood, who was given the codename Hola by her KGB spymasters, photographed documents and passed them to her Soviet controllers. The intelligence was passed on to Soviet intelligence officials.

According to Christopher Andrew's book, The Mitrokhin Archive, her treachery placed her on a par with Burgess, MacLean, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross. Prof Andrew, a Cambridge academic, discovered Hola's role while examining trunkloads of documents brought out of Russia by Mitrokhin. His research revealed that she had been recruited as an agent in the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, in 1937.

Prof Andrew said yesterday that Mrs Norwood had been an "extraordinaily motivated Soviet agent right to the end of her life".

The Russian State Historical Archive on the banks of the Neva in St Petersburg is to be moved. It's a development that is troubling many people who care about Russia's history, and the need to preserve its memory. What's even more disturbing is the way in which fragile and irreplaceable documents and books are being summarily bundled out in order to make space for Putin and his cronies:

The Financial Times reports that

After 170 years of inhabiting the buildings that housed the pre-revolutionary Senate and Synod, Russia's largest and oldest archive, containing 6.5m manuscripts documenting history from Peter the Great to the Bolshevik coup, is being evicted by the Kremlin.

It will be moved to a new location on the outskirts of St Petersburg, while the grand 18th-century buildings designed by an Italian architect to house the archive will be handed over to the presidential administrative department, a powerful organisation that inherited most of the property used by the Central Committee of the Communist party, including sanatoriums, hospitals and hotels.

The authorities claim that the books and manuscripts, which document Russia's real history, and not the pseudo-imperial ambitions of the present government, will be safer in the new building, but these assurances are being met with scepticism by many who are knowledgeable in the field:

Marietta Chudakova, a famous scholar and a former member of Boris Yeltsin's presidential council, does not believe that Kremlin bureaucrats are genuine in their concern for the documents. "It is disgusting that under the mask of 'improving' conditions of the archive, a fine historic building is being emptied for the needs of the Kremlin's power structures. It is one of the most vulgar examples of the action of siloviki[the men of power] and the inaction of the society."

As the article notes, the Historical Archive is not the only Russian heritage site endangered by the redistribution of property in Russia.

Several historic buildings in St Petersburg have already been claimed by members of Mr Putin's entourage. Moscow's Museum of Cinema is in danger of disappearing after its building was sold to an unknown organisation, and the government is claiming ownership of Catherine the Great's estate near Moscow.

The move is likely to harm the archive material:

Nikita Krylov, an archivist at the state historical archive who has organised a voluntary committee for its protection, says there is a double danger in moving the archive. "First, some documents will inevitably perish during the move. Many of them have never been looked at or copied." The second danger is that a change in environment could damage the documents. Mr Krylov says the building possesses a unique microclimate that helps to preserve the documents. "The new building is built from concrete, which is a very aggressive environment for old paper," he says.

Ms Chudakova adds: "The archive of this size should only be moved under the threat of bombing or flooding."

(Hat tip: Marius)

The results of Norm Geras's all-time favourite movie stars poll are up at normblog.

So it happened. Academia accepted its so-called minority students. And after the pool of ‘desirable’ minority students was depleted, more ‘provisional’ students were admitted. But the academy was prepared to do little more for such students. (Getting admitted to college was for many nonwhite students the easiest obstacle to overcome.) The conspiracy of kindness became a conspiracy of uncaring. Cruelly, callously, admissions committees agreed to overlook serious academic deficiency. I knew students in college then barely able to read, students unable to grasp the function of a sentence. I knew nonwhite graduate students who were bewildered by the requirement to compose a term paper and who each day were humiliated when they couldn’t compete with other students in seminars. There were contrived tutoring programs. But many years of inferior schooling could not be corrected with an hour or two of instruction each week. Not surprisingly, among those students with very poor academic preparation, few completed their courses of study. Many dropped out, most blaming themselves for their failure. One fall, six nonwhite students I knew suffered severe mental collapse. None of the professors who had welcomed them to graduate school were around when it came time to take them to the infirmary or to the airport. And the university officials who so diligently took note of those students in their self-serving totals of entering minority students finally took no note of them when they left.

Richard Rodriguez, writing in his book Hunger of Memory (1982) about the introduction of affirmative action in U.S. colleges during the 1960s.

The BBC reports that some 180 inmates have slashed their wrists or necks at a prison in western Russia in protest at their conditions:

Doctors have examined the prisoners' injuries at the jail in Lgov in the Kursk region, Russian media say.

Their cuts were not life-threatening, but the examination also revealed that some prisoners had been beaten and tortured, they reported.

Prosecutors have opened a case of alleged mistreatment by prison guards; inmates' relatives staged a protest.

COMMENTATOR SAYS 'ANTIWESTERN' IRANIAN PRESIDENT GOOD FOR RUSSIA
Political analyst Yegor Kholmogorov said on Radio Mayak on 27 June that the victory in Iran of ultraconservative and "anti-Western" presidential candidate Mahmud Ahmadinejad is beneficial for Russia as it will bring "not only strategic, but commercial advantages." He added that "Ahmadinejad is a convinced supporter of the development of the Iranian nuclear program and, therefore, [of] cooperation with Russia." Kholmogorov added that Ahmadinejad never would have won the election against Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani without the "shadow" support of the Islamic clerics and the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As a result of the election, Iran's old religious elite has managed to transfer power to a new one, embodied by Ahmadinejad, Kholmogorov said. He called the transfer of power the "Iranian variant of [the Russian] operation 'Successor,'" in reference to how President Boris Yeltsin transferred power to Putin in 2000. VY

(RFE/RL Newsline, June 28)

More on the issue of the Russia-Estonia border treaty:

RUSSIA DENOUNCES BORDER TREATY WITH ESTONIA...
The Russian Foreign Ministry sent a letter to its Estonian counterpart on 27 June saying that Russia is recalling its signature from the Russian-Estonian Border Treaty signed on 18 May and will begin the official procedure of revoking it, international media reported. According to the Russian note, the Estonian parliament inserted into the ratification of the treaty some documents that include "unacceptable" legal wording concerning the Soviet occupation of the country and it forcible inclusion into the USSR (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 20, 21, and 23 June 2005). Speaking on 27 June in Helsinki, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that "Estonia has not fulfilled its obligations, so we are withdrawing our signature from these [land and sea border] treaties. Of course we cannot talk about ratification at this time because there will be no treaties to ratify. In order to resolve border issues between Russia and Estonia, the two sides will have to restart negotiations," RTR reported. VY

...AS RUSSIAN FOREIGN MINISTER USES HARSH LANGUAGE
Earlier on 27 June in Moscow, Lavrov also made a statement criticizing Estonia and the other Baltic states for "attempts to rewrite history and to equate the victims and the henchmen, the liberators and the occupiers," RTR reported. "It is worth noting that the victory by the peoples of the Soviet Union gave those making such attempts [to rewrite history] an opportunity to play these games...and even to speak freely," Lavrov said. Observers noted that Lavrov was, in fact, only repeating a statement made on 22 June at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg by Duma Foreign Relations Committee Deputy Chairwoman Nataliya Narochnitskaya (Motherland). VY

ESTONIA IS BEWILDERED BY RUSSIA'S ABOUT-FACE...
Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet said his country is "surprised by the Russian Foreign Ministry statement and finds it regrettable," NTV reported on 27 June. "We hope that the Russian foreign minister will once again read the Estonian parliament document and realize that it contains neither territorial nor financial claims to Russia," NTV quoted Paet as saying. He added that Estonia will not change the text of the treaty, which has already been ratified by its parliament. Eero Raun, the press-secretary of Estonian President Arnold Ruutel, said in an interview with newsinfo.ru on 27 June that Russia does not want to recognize what is already recognized by the rest of the world. "For example, Russia failed to accept that Estonia became a sovereign state in 1918, but the world did," Raun noted. VY

...AND RUSSIAN LAWMAKERS SEEMINGLY WANT TO CAUSE TROUBLE FOR ESTONIA IN EU
The chairman of the Duma Foreign Affairs Committee, Konstantin Kosachev (Unified Russia), said on 27 June that "Estonia needs the treaty more than Russia does." He added that: "Nobody will rush us to sign it, not to mention to ratify it," RTR reported. The logic of Kosachev's words is understandable, RTR commented. Estonia will not be allowed to join the EU's Schengen zone of open borders until it settles all border issues with neighboring countries. Meanwhile, the chairman of the Federation Council's International Affairs Committee, Mikhail Margelov, said on 27 June that "both Russia and the EU need a stable border, but the law ratified by the Estonian parliament makes the border unstable and we cannot accept that," Ekho Moskvy reported. The deputy chairman of the Duma Foreign Affairs Committee, Leonid Slutskii (Unified Russia), told Ekho Moskvy that "denouncing the treaty with Estonia" is a rare occasion when all deputies, regardless of their political affiliation, will unconditionally support the government. VY

(RFE/RL Newsline, June 28)

"Managed democracy" is not the only term of official parlance currently decommissioned in the Russian Federation. Writing in EDM, Vladimir Socor discusses some other official linguistic conundrums, and the realities they conceal:

At the Moscow summit of the CIS Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and in its wake, Russian officials have publicly acknowledged the fragmentation of the "post-Soviet space" and announced some corresponding decisions on two levels: the lexical and the political-military (see EDM, June 24 and separate article in this issue).

On the lexical level, the "post-Soviet space" has now officially been taken out of usage. Russian leaders view that former entity as splintered three ways: the Baltic states in NATO and the European Union, six countries in the CSTO, and another six CIS countries pursuing their own course, four of them pro-Western. Thus, "The term ‘post-Soviet space' fails to reflect the existing realities," Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov concluded. CSTO Secretary-General Nikolai Bordyuzha emphatically agreed: "This [post-Soviet space] term is political jargon that we should get rid of. As from today, the term ‘post-Soviet space' is to be removed from all official CSTO documents" (Interfax, June 22).

Such cleanup is a rare occurrence in the vocabulary of Russian political communications. Back in 1997, then-CIS Affairs Minister Anatoly Adamyshyn recognized that the term "near abroad" was an offensive one and announced that it would be discarded. It took several years for that term to disappear from the official parlance. "Post-Soviet space" may linger also.

At the CSTO summit, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov proposed to separate a functional "core" from the rest of the CIS: "We perfectly realize that CSTO is the military-political core of the post-Soviet space. And we are taking steps and measures to develop this system outside the CIS format" (RTR Russia TV, June 22).

Along with the concept of "core," Moscow has introduced the term "zone of CSTO's responsibility and adjacent areas (prilegayushchie rayony)" (Interfax, June 23, 24). Putin himself used this construct during the CSTO summit, in preparation for his meeting with NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, which was held the following day. This construct is central to Putin's quest for international recognition of the Russian-led CSTO as a regional security organization, part of a global security system in which Russia would enjoy a sphere of influence and bloc-leader status. The "adjacent areas" are a thinly veiled reference to non-CSTO countries such as Georgia. Moldova, and potentially Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, in which Russia variously claims a monopoly on peacekeeping and conflict-resolution, latitude for "anti-terrorist" actions, and special consideration of Russian interests.

The terms "near abroad" and "post-Soviet space" sought to confer to Russian policy an appearance of multilateralism through CIS institutions. The unraveling of the CIS and the doubtful prospects of the CSTO can create temptations in Moscow to use raw power even against member countries, whether for reasons of geopolitics or internal Russian politics. Thus, writing in the governmental Rossiiskaya gazeta, Vitaly Tretyakov prescribes national irredentism and border revision among 10 steps for Putin to take in order to secure a third term as president of Russia. Tretyakov recommends that Putin should endorse the partial restoration of a Union State, make public his concept for such a state, name its possible members [from among post-Soviet countries], and begin by building a Russia-Belarus union state. Moreover, Putin should announce the goal and possible plans for the "reunification of Russians within one state." This latter recommendation implies border revision in northern Kazakhstan and Crimea at the very least (Rossiiskaya gazeta, June 23).

On the military level, Moscow is now well advanced in dismantling the defense structures of the CIS, hoping to create more effective ones in the CSTO. Russian officials at the summit and afterward explained this trend by noting that certain CIS countries are not CSTO members and aspire to join NATO. Thus, the summit decided to separate the unintegrated CIS Joint Air Defense System (nominally of ten countries) from the integrated CSTO United Air Defense System (planned by six member countries).

The long-idle CIS Staff for the Coordination of Military Cooperation is about to be closed. That Staff's First Deputy Chief, Russia's Colonel-General Ivan Babichev, was appointed First Deputy Chief of the CSTO's Joint Staff at the CSTO summit. The summit also decided to appoint Army General Yuri Baluyevsky as head of the CSTO Staff. Baluyevsky is the incumbent chief of the General Staff of Russia's Armed Forces. Such dual-hatted appointments used to be characteristic of the Warsaw Pact, some of the organizational principles of which were carried over later into CIS military structures. Officially activated in 2004, but not yet fully functioning, the CSTO Joint Staff currently consists of 55 officers and is tasked to develop the CSTO Rapid Deployment Forces.

(Interfax, June 22-25; Nezavisimaya gazeta, June 25)

In Yezhednevnyi Zhurnal, Yevgenia Albats writes about the new political trend in Russia [my quick tr.]:

Have you noticed that the principal oxymoron (from Greek oxy-moron – “sharp-stupid”) of Vladimir Putin’s first government – “managed democracy” – has completely disappeared from official language? The president himself still occasionally allows himself the amusement of the word “democracy”, enriching political science with notions of its special path of development for Russia, while everyone else, including Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s principal specialist (if we recall his recent interview for Der Spiegel) studiously avoids it. And for this – I write it without irony – we must say a big thank you.

Firstly, with time it will make it possible to level the confusion in the brains of one's fellow citizens, who hear one thing, but in reality observe the direct opposite. Most of them don't know how democracy functions in the countries where it exists, and they judge it according to the precepts of various political technologists, who don’t know either, and who derive their information exclusively from translated texts and fashionable Western clothes boutiques. Secondly, it will make it possible to cleanse the word of all those many stratified layers it has acquired during the years of Russia’s post-communist transformation. Thirdly – and this is perhaps the most important thing – the approximation of official political language to reality makes the closed politics of the Kremlin more predictable.

During the past year, for example, we have obtained a much clearer idea of what sort of political system the Kremlin is trying to erect and, consequently, how and where we are going to be living. This name of this regime is bureaucratic authoritarianism, and in it all the main decisions are taken and all the country’s main resources are distributed inside a narrow coalition of officials and soldiers – whether from the army, as in quite a few countries of Latin America, or in civilian garb, i.e. representatives of the special services, as was recently the case in Peru, as is the case in Paraguay and, it seems, is going to be the case for us in Russia. Accordingly, the whole of the real political struggle is also taking place within that coalition (hence such a low effectiveness of control), while everyone else is assigned the role of silent observers.

But Albats sees a ray of hope: the situation, she comments, isn't likely to persist for long before public protest begins to make itself heard:

on all the flanks of Russian society - on both the left and the right - young politicians are appearing who, so far at least, are not prepared to play according to the set rules. Consequently there is a source of resistance, and it will grow: as is written on one of the leaflets of the "Oborona" [Defence] youth organization, right underneath a portrait of V.V. Putin: "We've Had Enough Of You!"

Prague Watchdog continues to document the attacks, abductions, shoot-outs and "sweep" operations (zachistki) that take place almost daily in Chechnya. The NGO fulfils an important role in reminding the world that, far from being "normalized", as the Kremlin claims, the situation in the republic is one in which Russian federal troops are meeting determined resistance. The terrorizing of the local population by armed gangs under the control of the Moscow-installed government of Ramzan Kadyrov also shows no sign of lessening.

A recent PW report by Ruslan Isayev (my tr.) gives an idea of the daily tension and violence, which are ongoing:

CHECHNYA (June 27) – A "Ural" lorry carrying Russian servicemen was blown up by persons unknown at around 3pm Moscow time this afternoon two kilometres west of the village of Chechen-Aul, a source from the Interior Ministry of the Chechen Republic told our Prague Watchdog correspondent.

Two conscripts were killed and one wounded in the explosion, the source added.

In the Leninsky district of Grozny today, a group of armed persons abducted two local residents – Abdula Bachayev and Ayub Takayev. According to certain information, officials of the Security Service under the command of Ramzan Kadyrov – so-called “kadyrovites” – were involved in carrying out the abduction. The whereabouts of the abducted men is not known.

On the same day, the body of a member of the “Vostok” battalion, Ruslan Ezerkhanov, was discovered by local residents in the cemetery of the village of Kurdyukovskaya in the Shelkovskoy district; the body bore the marks of bullet wounds. The identity of the soldier’s killers has not been established. An investigation is underway.

A group of Russian sappers came under fire from guerrillas on the Gansol-chu - Alleroy highway in the Nozhay-Yurtovsky district. One officer was wounded as a result.

On Friday June 24 an attack on a military convoy of federal forces took place on the southern outskirts of the village of Shalazhi in the Urus-Martanovsky district. Three soldiers were killed, and four were wounded. The attackers hid in the forest.

This week's Carnival of Revolutions (No. 7) is up at WILLisms.

Siberian exile - a prominent feature of both Tsarist and Stalinist Russia - is to be reintroduced in the Federation:

PUTIN ORDERS MOVE OF IMPRISONED CHECHENS FROM CAUCASUS TO SIBERIA.
According to a new decree by President Putin, people from the North Caucasus who are jailed for terrorism will serve their terms in Siberia, RTR reported on 26 June. RTR did not provide the date of the decree or say whether it is classified or not, but mentions that under jurisdiction of the edict are people who are sentenced for
"terror, diversion, rebellion, assault of state bodies, participation in illegal armed formations, hostage taking, and human trafficking." RTR commented that "prisoners accused [or convicted] of terrorism and their accomplices should be separated by thousands of kilometers." VY

(from today's RFE/RL Newsline)

Some interesting comments in today's London Times by Iraq's Prime Minister, Ibrahim Al-Jaafari:

I am not only the first democratically elected leader of an Arab country. I am also the first prime minister in the Middle East to come from a religious, Islamic opposition movement — at the head of a diverse ethnic and political alliance. Embracing diversity within human society is not just a political necessity, it is rooted in my faith. Islam teaches that there is no compulsion in religion and that freedom of choice is divinely granted; it is dictators who need to cater to fanatics in order to stay in power.

Saddam Hussein is a case in point. He passed laws to limit religious freedom and degraded women’s lives. I will reverse Saddam’s legacy and welcome Iraq’s diversity. I welcome the strong contribution that women can make in its workplace and political life, where they make up one third of our National Assembly — more than most Western democracies.

Marshall said: “Our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.” Today is the time for a new international Marshall plan towards Iraq and the broader Middle East — directed not for or against any policy but against ignorance, tyranny, hatred and anarchy.

Marshall repaired the decaying infrastructure of Germany after six years of war and 12 years of Nazi rule. In Iraq we have had nearly 40 years of fascist rule and have been in practice at war for half that time. I have seen throughout Iraq the marks of economic collapse and depredation this has left. Iraq today has few English speakers, it has hundreds of thousands of ex-soldiers trained for nothing but war, and its universities — which once enjoyed a worldwide reputation — now lag behind those in the rest of the region. It has debts totalling hundreds of billions of dollars and there has been no investment in its infrastructure for more than 20 years.

Three generations of Iraqis have grown up under a dictatorship, learning to take orders but not take initiatives or responsibility, and educated in religious and political hatred and isolationism. My people are a strong people: their will survived. The marks of Saddam’s brutal and divisive rule, however, will take time to heal. Many of my people, as well as soldiers from the multinational force, are still being killed by terrorism.

The way will not always be easy. I am confident, though, that the prosperous democracies of the world will be as far-sighted today as Marshall was in 1947. Much blood had to be shed, and money spent, before peace was achieved in Europe. In Iraq the fight for democracy has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. In the long run, however, it can secure centuries of peace and prosperity. Iraq’s fight against terrorist networks and training camps, and the poverty and ignorance that supply them, has become the world’s fight for the security of humanity.

(via Harry's Place)

June 27, 2005

The Estonian Foreign Ministry is surprised by the statement made today by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and regards the Russian side's decision as unfortunate.

The Russian Foreign Ministry sent a note to the Estonian Foreign Ministry, informing of the Russian intention to initiate domestic procedures to exempt the Russian Federation of obligations ensuing from the signing of the Border Treaties with the Republic of Estonia. The Russian Foreign Ministry also expressed the desire to open up new negotiations.

The Russian side has deemed the use of diplomatic channels in clarifying matters, related to this statement, and to their earlier statement as unnecessary. Estonia, on its part, is confident that it has done everything in its power to quickly render the treaty into force.

The Estonian side has repeatedly assured that it has not linked any new issues to the border treaties, and thus, the Russian side's assertion that Estonia has added new aspects to the treaties is ungrounded.

The Estonian Foreign Ministry still hopes that the Russian side will reanalyse the Estonian ratification act together with the documents referred to, and hopes that they will abandon their intended steps, and continue the ratification process.


PRESS SPOKESPERSON'S OFFICE
MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS OF ESTONIA
Tel: (372) 6317 654
pressitalitus@mfa.ee
www.vm.ee/eng

posted by David McDuff  # 3:33 PM

Pavel K. Baev, on how Russia is deflecting criticism by the pretence of self-isolation:

The traditional "Russia day" at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe is always a lively affair, but last Wednesday, June 22, it came close to full-blown scandal. The 144-page report on Russia's fulfillment of its commitments to this organization contained more than 400 reservations and accusations of violating basic democratic norms (Lenta.ru, June 23). The Russian delegation, led by Konstantin Kosachev and Mikhail Margelov, gave a good fight in order to soften this criticism, at times taking a cue from Nikita Khrushchev's behavior at the UN, but also making an emotional plea not to attack Russia that hard on June 22, a day associated with the German invasion in 1941 (Kommersant, June 23). It was all to no avail; the Assembly approved the report and even voted for several amendments requesting the end of financial support to the Lukashenka regime in Belarus and the speedy withdrawal of Russian troops from Moldova, as well as clarifying that the Baltic states were indeed "occupied" (Nezavisimaya gazeta, June 23). In the best traditions of resurrected Soviet diplomacy, Kosachev qualified these amendments as "absolutely unacceptable" (Vedomosti, June 23).

What was remarkable in these heated debates was the lack of emphasis on the traditional issues of human rights violations in Chechnya and the failure to abolish capital punishment, though both were duly reflected in the report. The big issue was Russia's deep retreat from democracy identified in every direction from the squeeze of independent media to the tight state control over the judiciary to the manipulation of elections and even to hazing in the barracks. European parliamentarians were particularly critical of Putin's plan to cancel regional elections and appoint governors by decree, but here the Russian team scored a very important point by making sure that the president's name was not mentioned in this context (Gazeta.ru, June 23). They may have returned to Moscow feeling they had completed a difficult task, but there are hardly any doubts in any European quarters that Russia's backsliding towards quasi-authoritarianism is not just happening under Putin's watch but constitutes the core substance of his leadership (Polit.ru, June 23).

For the Kremlin, these condemnations are little more than a minor irritant. Defying Western pressure on Moldova, Moscow sent an emissary from the presidential administration to fine-tune a plan for maintaining a Russian military presence in Transnistria (Kommersant, June 23). Its only response to the attack by the Council of Europe was a threat to halve its contribution to the budget of this organization, which now amounts to 25 million euros (Lenta.ru, June 23). Moscow has adopted the same tactics of financial pressure on the OSCE and, observing the bitter quarrels in the EU on its budget, has few doubts of its efficiency.

What really matters for Putin and his entourage is striking the correct tone at the forthcoming G8 summit in Scotland. Consequently, Vladislav Surkov, the deputy head of the presidential administration and the main architect of "managed democracy," was recently dispatched with a special PR mission to confirm that the pro-Western orientation was alive and that Putin's brand of authoritarianism was indeed "soft" and "enlightened" (Gazeta.ru, June 21). Moscow dismisses speculation about its expulsion from this elite club and even finds it appropriate to advance its own criticism of some shortcomings in Western efforts, singling out the "destabilizing" democracy-enforcement efforts in Afghanistan (Kommersant, June 24).

Hydrocarbon power makes Russia so self-confident, and, as the mind-boggling oil prices edge closer to $60 per barrel, it has reasons to believe that its key European partners, which all happen to be importers, would go along with adding a few extra blocs to the Babylonian construct of "a presidential vertical power structure." For that matter, Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik, visiting Moscow last week, was so busy with an oil-and-gas agenda that there was no time for mundane matters like human rights (Vedomosti, June 21). Norwegians are so excited about the prospect of becoming minor partners in the development of the giant Shtockman gas field that the warnings from the World Bank about state interference strangling the fledgling Russian market fall on deaf ears (Kommersant, June 21).

There is, however, one more, rather peculiar nuance in Russia's bold rejection of Western criticism – the hidden threat to abandon all attempts to engage with the West and retreat into self-isolation. This anti-globalist attitude has long roots in Russia's tortured history, and there are quite a few outspoken commentators, like Mikhail Leontiev, who seek to exploit the widespread feelings of being treated unjustly for cultivating the philosophy of "our way" (Gazeta.ru, June 22). These ideas gain in popularity – as a quick opinion poll conducted by the popular radio station Ekho Moskvy has shown. After giving the floor to Rene van der Linden, the chairman of the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly, to elaborate on the Russian debates, its mostly liberal Muscovite audience was asked: Should Russia remain in the European organizations? Of the 3,765 responses, as many as 41% said "No" (Ekho Moskvy, June 23).

Western policymakers realize that Russia's self-isolation would be a recipe for disaster. Therefore, after devastating criticism of the current course of Putin's "reforms" during recent hearings in the U.S. Senate, the conclusion was reached that the only option is to continue efforts aimed at engaging this disagreeable partner (Kommersant, June 23). What makes the course of self-isolation worrisome is that it appears entirely compatible with internal curbs on democracy. However, in real life, Putin's siloviki have no intentions whatsoever of isolating themselves from Western resorts or bank accounts or elite schools for their children. This bluff would be inevitably called, and perhaps even before the oil bubble bursts.

(EDM, June 27)

Duma deputy Ruslan Yamadayev (brother of Sulim) has given an interview to Kommersant (Russian-language; registration required), in which he talks about the results of the official investigation into the recent "sweep" operation at the Chechen village of Borozdinovskaya, near the border with Daghestan, during which one villager was killed and 11 were abducted. Like his brother, though not so openly, Ruslan appears to be trying to throw suspicion on the villagers themselves. An excerpt:

- Has Sulim Yamadayev already given his statements to the investigation?

- Yes, he talked with the investigators. He said that he never was in Borozdinovskaya, even in peacetime he didn't go there. And he didn't give any orders to his subordinates to do something in the village.

- But then, who did enter Borozdinovskaya?

- The provocateurs, who, as I said, are numerous among the soldiers of official structures.

- So you don't exclude that the representatives of some law enforcement agencies of the republic could have entered there?

- This could have been done by some people from various agencies - legal and illegal. They agreed to do this together, and then they presented it: the Vostok battalion did this. I think, soon we will find an answer to all these questions.

- Was it possible for you to find out something about the fate of those 11 abducted inhabitants of the village?

- No.

- Do you assume that they could be connected to the fighters?

- I don't know. That's why they must be found first. But I know that this wish of the residents of Borozdinovskaya, to be moved into Daghestan, appeared not only because of the last events.

- Because of what else?

- These people want to get some land in a good place in Daghestan and compensation - they live very poorly in Chechnya. How many policemen, imams, heads of administration, who were loyal to Russia, have been killed in Chechnya? Was anyone investigated, did anyone scream or hold meetings? But now, why did they raise such a noise? Yes, because they want to destabilize the situation in Chechnya, in Daghestan, in the North Caucasus.

- What is Sulim doing now?

- Sulim is working, everything's OK with him.

- Have any of his subordinates been detained?

- Why detain them? Because of rumors?

- How in your opinion, will these incidents end?

- I think we ourselves will find those who carried out this action in Borozdinovskaya, and they will be punished, for 100%. But those inhabitants, who hold meetings, they want to get their own way, that they would give to them some land in Daghestan. And until they get what they want, they will not calm down.

(via chechnya-sl: tr. by M.L., minor editing)

abdymok reports that

an unnamed israeli official on june 25 confirmed to a daily english-language newspaper in jerusalem that the man who allegedly executed journalist georgy gongadze has been found in israel.

lt. general olexei pukach, former head of surveillance for ukraine’s ministry of internal affairs, could be deported soon, the official told the jerusalem post.

Update: Oleg Varfolomeyev at EDM has more on the background to this story(June 27):

The investigation into the murder of crusading journalist Heorhiy Gongadze apparently suffered a severe setback last week. Secret information about the whereabouts of General Oleksiy Pukach, whom the Prosecutor-General's Office holds responsible for killing Gongadze in 2000, was leaked to the press. It has transpired from a subsequent statement by President Viktor Yushchenko that Pukach may be in serious danger.

After Pukach's brief arrest in October 2003 on orders from Prosecutor-General Sviatyslav Piskun, then-President Leonid Kuchma fired Piskun. Reinstated in the Prosecutor-General's post last December by the courts, Piskun promised Yushchenko that he would solve the Gongadze case. Speaking in May, he said that, in order to find the truth, three things remained to be done: question fugitive security officer Mykola Melnychenko, who claims to have wiretapped a conversation implicating Kuchma in Gongadze's murder; carry out additional tests on Gongadze's body; and find Pukach.

Pukach has been hiding all this time, and it was widely believed he was hiding from justice in Russia, following the example of several of Ukraine's former top officials. But the Ukrainian newspaper Segodnya reported in early April, quoting sources at the Prosecutor-General's Office, that Pukach had become acquainted with a Jewish Diaspora woman and was going to emigrate to Israel with her help. Mainstream media largely ignored the report. But on June 23 Segodnya caused a great sensation by reporting that local special services had spotted Pukach somewhere in Israel on June 17. According to Segodnya, agents of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) and the Interior Ministry hurried to Israel on June 18-19, apparently in order to locate Pukach.

Hardly by coincidence, on June 21 the weekly newspaper Stolichnye novosti ran a long interview with Deputy Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin, who is the main investigator for the Gongadze case. Shokin said that the two police colonels who had been arrested on the case earlier this year testified that their orders to follow Gongadze on September 15-16, 2000, came from Pukach personally. They said that after they kidnapped Gongadze, Pukach directed the car to his father-in-law's house in Kyiv Region and then to a forest, where he strangled Gongadze and ordered the body burned. Afterwards the body was transported to a different place, where it was eventually found decapitated in November 2000. Asked whether Pukach is still alive, Shokin said that he is hiding abroad: "The SBU and the Interior Ministry are searching for him. Much has been done, but alas…"

Segodnya's sensational leak of June 23 showed that something went wrong in the search for Pukach. President Yushchenko indirectly confirmed the leak, when his press service issued a statement on June 24 saying that Yushchenko wanted "General Pukach to be brought to Ukraine alive," and adding that the investigators had the necessary information on Pukach, which "they have been analyzing for four days now." This disclosure was probably a mistake.

If the investigators were really going to capture Pukach in Israel, the leak may have spoiled everything, either prompting him to flee or, quite possibly, alerting people who might be interested in keeping him silent to go after him. The Ukrainian Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor-General's Office have offered no comment, while the Israeli Foreign Ministry hurried to deny Segodnya's report.

However, the influential Zerkalo nedeli weekly has insisted that Pukach was found in Israel. According to the newspaper, the SBU traced Pukach two months ago with the help of the Israeli special services, even though Pukach had changed his surname. But Segodnya's report and Yushchenko's subsequent statement may have ruined matters irreparably. According to Zerkalo nedeli, information was leaked to Segodnya following a secret meeting at the Prosecutor-General's Office on June 22, at which Israel's request for additional data on Pukach, needed to detain him, was discussed: "The Ukrainian and Israeli special services were shocked upon reading the report." Zerkalo nedeli pointed out that Segodnya's informer had committed a serious crime, and said that the source of the leak must be a deputy prosecutor-general.

The Melnychenko tapes, which the Prosecutor-General's Office views as serious evidence, revealed that the order to do away with Gongadze came from the very top of the Kuchma administration. In one of the secretly recorded conversations, somebody with a voice resembling then-Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko told Kuchma that his "eagles" would deal with Gongadze. The Prosecutor-General's Office has failed to question Melnychenko, who for not quite clear reasons refuses to cooperate with Piskun. Kravchenko was found dead with two bullets in his head in March (see EDM, March 7). If the investigators fail to catch Pukach before it is too late, another very important link to those who ordered Gongadze's murder may be lost forever.

(Interfax-Ukraine, May 27; Stolichnye novosti, June 21; Segodnya, April 7; June 23; LIGABiznesInform, June 23; Obkom.net.ua, June 24; Moskovsky komsomolets, Zerkalo nedeli, June 25)

Books from Finland magazine 2/2005 is published this week. The issue includes translations of work by Raine Mäkinen, Juha Seppälä and Pentti Haanpää, as well as some of my own translations of poems by Catharina Gripenberg and a profile of her work by Finland-Swedish critic Bror Rönnholm. There are also essays and book reviews, though the online version of the magazine contains only a selection of these.

Reuters has the latest official Russian statement on the "war on terror":

(June 25) Russia is prepared to use warplanes to destroy terrorist bases abroad, Air Force commander Vladimir Mikhailov was quoted as saying on Saturday. "As for terrorists and our fighter jets, if we have high-precision weapons and know the whereabouts of a terrorist gang, why not smash it, even if it's outside Russia?" Interfax news agency quoted him as saying.

Russia's Baltic annexation
Written by David Ferguson in Brussels
Wednesday, 22 June 2005

"It is especially important for the Baltic nations to feel sure that the tragedies of the past will never happen again. This will be possible if the Russian Federation, as the legal successor to the Soviet Union, would accept assessments given by the European Parliament and other democratic bodies as to the occupation of the three Baltic States," said Estonian MEP Tunne Kelam.

Kelam, together with MEP Vytautas Landsbergis, Lithuania's first president following independence from the Soviet Union, is behind a draft resolution up for consideration at the ongoing Brussels plenary session of the European Parliament. "As the three Baltic States remember the 65th anniversary of their occupation and annexation by the Soviet Union, the solidarity expressed by the European Parliament strengthens consolidation of the European spirit," said Landsbergis.

Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were annexed from 15 till 17 June 1940 The occupation of the three Baltic States was a direct result of the 23 August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact providing for the three countries' division into zones of 'influence'.

The right-of-centre EPP group in the European Parliament sent a communiqué expressing "... their deep regret that the 1940 illegal occupation resulted in the total extinction by brutal force of state structures and civil society of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, wiped these three member states of the League of Nations from the political map of Europe for half a century and caused massive terror, suppression of basic human rights as well as innumerable human tragedies and damage."

The draft resolution comes at the same time as the pan-European institution, the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, debates Russia's record on human rights. The Council of Europe's 630 members, who hail from national parliaments in the 46 member states including Russia, are likely to give the Soviet Union's legal successor short shrift at the Parliamentary Assembly's Summer Session. "We are concerned about the apportionment of powers which, because of the further development of Putin's 'controlled democracy', is threatened by strong power wielded from the top down," said German Socialist Rudolf Bindig.

"The death penalty has still not been formally abolished. The Yukos case with the condemnation of Mikhail Khodorkovskii has again raised doubts about judicial independence. The Kremlin is constantly extending its influence over television and the press," continued Bindig. Together with British Conservative David Atkinson, the German Socialist presented a report on Russia today in Strasbourg.

(via MAK)

EP on Baltic annexation
Written by David Ferguson in Brussels
Wednesday, 22 June 2005

"For half a century, they lost their human rights and suffered terror and deportations," said European Parliament President Josep Borrell. Opening the Brussels plenary, Borrell recalled that it was 65 years ago, in June 1940, that three new Member States of the EU - Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia - lost their independence after occupation by the Soviet Union.

"In these difficult times for the EU, we should recall the accession of the Baltic states to the EU, convinced this would help build their freedom and prosperity," Borrell said. "We should now proceed to work together in building a united Europe based on shared values. This must be based on respect for human rights and it requires constant vigilance. Those who forget history risk repeating it."

Borrell's opening statement comes as the Parliament considers a resolution by Estonian MEP Tunne Kelam, together with MEP Vytautas Landsbergis, Lithuania's first president following independence from the Soviet Union. The draft resolution calls for "...the Russian Federation, as the legal successor to the Soviet Union, to accept assessments given by the European Parliament and other democratic bodies as to the occupation of the three Baltic States."

Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were annexed from 15 till 17 June 1940 The occupation of the three Baltic States was a direct result of the 23 August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact providing for the three countries' division into zones of 'influence'.

(via MAK)

PARLIAMENTARY ASSEMBLY OF THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE
1996 ORDINARY SESSION

OPINION No.193 (1996)
on Russia's request for membership
of the Council of Europe

1. The Russian Federation applied to join the Council of Europe on 7 May 1992. By Resolution (92) 27 of 25 June 1992, the Committee of Ministers asked the Parliamentary Assembly to give an opinion, in accordance with Statutory Resolution (51) 30 A.

2. Special guest status with the Parliamentary Assembly was granted to the
Russian Parliament on 14 January 1992.

3. Procedure for an opinion on Russia's request for membership was interrupted on 2 February 1995 because of the conflict in Chechnya. On 27 September 1995, with the adoption of Resolution 1065. procedure was resumed on the grounds that Russia was henceforth committed to finding a political solution and that alleged and documented human rights violations were being investigated.

4. The Assembly has followed the events of December 1995 in Gudermes and the recent events in Pervomayskoye with deep concern. It firmly condemns the taking of hostages as an act of terrorism and a flagrant violation of human rights, which no cause can justify. At the same time, it considers that the Russian authorities did not show sufficient concern for the safety of the hostages. The apparently indiscriminate use of force cost the lives of many innocent people and violated international humanitarian law. The Chechen conflict cannot be resolved by the use of force. There will be no peace. in the region, nor an end to terrorist attacks, without a political solution based on negotiation and on European democratic values.

5. The Assembly notes that political, legal and economic reforms have been sustained. The legal system continues to show shortcomings, as noted by Council of Europe legal experts (7 October 1994). Nonetheless, there is progress towards a general awareness of - and respect for - the rule of law.

6. Assurances of continued progress were given to the Council of Europe by the President of the Federation, the Prime Minister, the President of the Duma and the President of the Council of the Federation in their letter of 18 January 1995.

7. On the basis of these assurances and of the following considerations and commitments, the Assembly believes that Russia - in the sense of Article 4 of the Statute - is clearly willing and will be able in the near future to fulfil the provisions for membership of the Council of Europe as set forth in Article 3 ("Every member of the Council of Europe must accept the principles of the rule of law and of the enjoyment by all persons within its jurisdiction of human rights and fundamental freedoms. and collaborate sincerely and effectively in the realisation of the aim of the Council..."):

i. Russia has been taking part in various activities of the Council of Europe since 1992 - through its participation in intergovernmental "co-operation and assistance" programmes (notably in the fields of legal reform and human rights), and through the participation of its special guest delegation in the work of the Parliamentary Assembly and its committees;

ii. "political dialogue" between Russia and the Committee of Ministers has been established since 7 May 1992;

iii. Russia has acceded to several Council of Europe conventions, including the European Cultural Convention;

iv. the following legislation is being prepared as a matter of priority, with international consultation, on the basis of Council of Europe principles and standards: a new criminal code and a code of criminal procedure; a new civil code and a code of civil procedure; a law on the functioning and administration of the penitentiary system;

v. new laws in line with Council of Europe standards will be introduced: on the role, functioning and administration of the Procurator's Office and of the Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights; for the protection of national minorities; on freedom of assembly and on freedom of religion;

vi. the status of the legal profession will be protected by law: a professional bar association will be established;

vii. those found responsible for human rights violations will be brought to justice - notably in relation to events in Chechnya;

viii. effective exercise will be guaranteed of the rights enshrined in Article 27 of the constitution and in the law on freedom of movement and choice of place of residence;

ix. conditions of detention will be improved in line with Recommendation A (87) 3 on European prison rules: in particular, the practically inhuman conditions in many pre-trial detention centres will be ameliorated without delay;

x. responsibility for the prison administration and the execution of judgements will be transferred to the Ministry of Justice as soon as possible;

xi. the state and progress of legislative reform will permit the signature and ratification, within the indicated timetable, of the European conventions listed hereunder in paragraph 10;

xii. the Russian Federation will assist persons formerly deported from the occupied Baltic states or the descendants of deportees to return home according to special repatriation and compensation programmes which must be worked out.

8. With a view to the fulfilment of these assurances and respect for these commitments, the Assembly resolves to establish - with the close co-operation of Russia's national parliamentary delegation - its own parliamentary "advisory and control" programme under the authority of the committees responsible for the implementation of Order No. 508 (1995) on the honouring of obligations and commitments by member states of the Council of Europe. This programme will complement, and not prejudice, the monitoring procedure under Order No. 508 (1995).

9. As a contribution to long-term assistance and co-operation, the Assembly welcomes the European Union / Council of Europe joint programme for the strengthening of the federal structure and of human rights protection mechanisms and for legal system reform: particular attention should also be paid to support for, and the strengthening of, non-governmental organisations in the field of human rights and to the establishment of a civil society.

10. The Parliamentary Assembly notes that the Russian Federation shares fully its understanding and interpretation of commitments entered into as spelt out in paragraph 7, and intends:

i. to sign the European Convention on Human Rights at the moment of accession; to ratify the Convention and Protocols Nos. 1, 2. 4, 7 and 11 within a year; to recognise, pending the entry into force of Protocol No. 11, the right of individual application to the European Commission and the compulsory jurisdiction of the European Court (Articles 25 and 46 of the Convention);

ii. to sign within one year and ratify within three years from the time of accession Protocol No. 6 to the European Convention on Human Rights on the abolition of the death penalty in time of peace, and to put into place a moratorium on executions with effect from the day of accession;

iii. to sign and ratify within a year from the time of accession the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment;

iv. to sign and ratify within a year from the time of accession the European Framework Convent ion for the Protection of National Minorities; to conduct its policy towards minorities on the principles set forth in Assembly Recommendation 1201 (1993), and to incorporate these principles into the legal and administrative system and practice of the country;

v. to sign and ratify within a year from the time of accession the European Charter of Local Self-Government and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages; to study, with a view to ratification, the Council of Europe's Social Charter; and meanwhile to conduct its policy in accordance with the principles of these conventions;

vi. to sign and ratify and meanwhile to apply the basic principles of other Council of Europe conventions - notably those on extradition; on mutual assistance in criminal matters; on the transfer of sentenced persons; and on the laundering, search, seizure and confiscation of the proceeds of crime;

vii. to settle international as well as internal disputes by peaceful means (an obligation incumbent upon all member states of the Council of Europe), rejecting resolutely any forms of threats of force against its neighbours.,

viii. to settle outstanding international border disputes according to the principles of international law, abiding by the existing international treaties;

ix. to ratify, within six months from the time of accession, the agreement of 21 October 1994 between the Russian and Moldovan Governments, and to continue the withdrawal of the 14th Army and its equipment from the territory of Moldova within a time-limit of three years from the date of signature of the agreement;

x. to fulfil its obligations under the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE);

xi. to denounce as wrong the concept of. two different categories of foreign countries, whereby some are treated as a zone of special influence called the "near abroad";

xii. to negotiate claims for the return of cultural property to other European countries on an ad hoc basis that differentiates between types of property (archives, works of art. buildings, etc.) and of ownership (public, private or institutional);

xiii. to return without delay the property of religious institutions;

xiv. to settle rapidly all issues related to the return of property claimed by Council of Europe member states, in particular the archives transferred to Moscow in 1945;

xv. to cease to restrict - with immediate effect - international travel of persons aware of state secrets, with the exception of those restrictions which are generally accepted in Council of Europe member states, and to facilitate the consultation of archives kept in the Russian Federation;

xvi. to ensure that the application of the CIS Convention on Human Rights does not in any way interfere with the procedure and guarantees of the European Convention on Human Rights;

xvii. to revise the law on federal security services in order to bring it into line with Council of Europe principles and standards within one year from the time of accession: in particular, the right of the Federal Security Service (FSB) to possess and run pre-trial detention centres should be withdrawn;

xviii. to adopt a law on alternative military service, as foreseen in Article 59 of the constitution;

xix. to reduce, if not eliminate, incidents of ill-treatment and deaths in the armed forces outside military conflicts;

xx. to Pursue legal reform with a view to bringing all legislation in line with Council of Europe principles and standards: in particular, Presidential Decree No. 1226 should be revised without delay;

xxi. to extend its international co-operation to prevent - and eliminate the ecological effects of - natural and technological disasters;

xxii. to sign and ratify within a year from the time of accession the General Agreement on Privileges and Immunities of the Council of Europe and its additional protocols;

xxiii. to co-operate fully in the implementation of Assembly Order No. 508 (1995) on the honouring of obligations and commitments by member states of the Council of Europe, as well as in monitoring processes established by virtue of the Committee of Ministers' Declaration of 10 November 1994 (95th session);

xxiv. to respect strictly the provisions of international humanitarian law, including in cases of armed conflict on its territory;

xxv. to co-operate in good faith with international humanitarian organisations and to enable them to carry on their activities on its territory in conformity with their mandates.

11. The Assembly recommends that the Committee of Ministers - on the basis of the commitments and understandings indicated above:

i. invite the Russian Federation to become a member of the Council of Europe;

ii. allocate eighteen seats to the Russian Federation in the Parliamentary Assembly;

iii. guarantee that the Organisation's means and capabilities, in particular those of the Assembly and of the human rights institutions, are increased to meet the consequences of these decisions, and refrain from using the Russian Federation's accession to reduce the contributions of states which are already members.

(via MAK)

On June 4 a "sweep" operation (zachistka) - of a sudden and savage type that occurs in Chechnya almost daily - was carried out in the village of Borozdinovskaya in the northeastern part of the republic by a group of armed law enforcement agents whose identity has not so far been established. The raid, in which one villager was killed and 11 were abducted, triggered the exodus to neighbouring Daghestan of several hundred local families, many of whom are Avars, an ethnic minority mainly represented in Daghestan.

On June 22 Dmitry Kozak, Putin's special envoy to the Southern Federal District,made a visit to Borozdinovskaya and, in an unusual acknowledgement of the arbitrary suffering inflicted on local civilians during the past six years of war, callled the raid "an act of sabotage directed against Chechnya, Daghestan, and Russia," and vowed that those responsible would be apprehended and punished. He has since laid the blame for the raid on the Vostok unit, which is part of the 42nd Russian army and is comprised mostly of Chechens. But Vostok's commander, Sulim Yamadayev, has claimed that his forces were not responsible for the reprisals.

From an RIA Novosti commentary:

The immediate consequences of this act can be very serious indeed. A new epicenter of inter-ethnic tensions can emerge in the Russian North Caucusus, like the one between Ossetians and Ingushes, when not separate groups of gunmen but a significant part of the population are ready to take part in the hostilities. However, so far the authorities are able to contain the conflict within more or less acceptable limits, preventing it from escalating. To do so they have to return the Avars home quickly, to ensure their relative security, to complete the investigation and name the offenders, as well as to pay compensations to the victims and help them to improve their living conditions. Mr. Kozak is trying to push the authorities in that direction.

Yet even if this task is solved, there will be another large set of problems left, concerning those who carried out the cleansing in Borozdinovskaya, as well as dozens and hundreds of similar operations in other Chechen villages.

Even if Moscow decides to at least reprimand the organizers of these cleansings, it will seriously jeopardize the fragile stability in the republic. Many representatives of the federal center openly call fighters of pro-Russian Chechen units bandits. As a result, the central authorities find themselves in a very unenviable situation: on the one hand, they are trying to stop cleansings, on the other, they put up with them.

After the tragedy in Borozdinovskaya, the Russian Prosecutor General's Office launched criminal proceedings on charges of kidnapping and extortion. Vladimir Kalita, deputy military prosecutor of Chechnya, maintains that investigators "are shooting off weapons and identifying them."

Meanwhile the Avars who left Borozdinovskaya refuse to return home even after their meeting with Mr. Kozak. They refused to talk to a special state Chechen commission set up to look into the incident. They agreed to negotiate their return only after the 11 people who had disappeared during the cleansing are returned.

Mr. Kozak says "the North Caucasus will perish in flames if people start re-settling in line with ethnic principles." He and the Chechen authorities are trying their best to persuade the villagers to return home.

From an interview with Yury Savelyev, a member of the Federal Parliamentary Commission and State Duma deputy from the Rodina party, who told Kommersant/Vlast correspondent Viktor Khamraev that parliamentarians have still not been able to find answers to the key questions about the Beslan tragedy:

“Many deputies believe that the purpose of the investigation is to establish a direct connection between the event and the actions of the authorities.”

”We are actually working on that – we're trying to identify a direct connection. We have the testimony of witnesses about an explosion. But we have other evidence, for example, on the use of a flame thrower against the terrorists. Either the explosion or the flame thrower could have caused the school to collapse, either from the blast wave or from a fire. At the same time, the official investigation has established two facts. First, the majority of people died because they were buried under the collapsed roof. Second, most died from burns, not from the blast.

“So was a flame thrower used?”

“The commission is inclined to believe that one was used. Our task now is to answer the question of the appropriateness of using flame throwers. It seems to me that this will be the only answer to questions that Beslan residents never stop asking us at each meeting.”

From RFE/RL, a report on a new poll by a private American research body, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The poll's findings seem to contradict Vice President Dick Cheney's confident reply, when asked about the impact of the Iraq war and the Guantanamo controversy on world opinion: "Does this hurt us from the standpoint of international opinion? I frankly don't think so."

The survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, finds that America's reputation has suffered as a direct result of the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. conduct of that war, and the overall war on terrorism.

In fact, poll respondents in 11 of the 16 countries surveyed voiced one particularly surprising attitude, according to Andrew Kohut, the director of the Pew Center. "Perhaps one of the most striking findings in the survey is that China now has a better image among the publics -- European publics -- than does the United States," he said.

Kohut told a Washington news conference that his poll found that the image of the United States has not improved in the past two years in Western European countries, where there was significant opposition to the Iraq war. It also found that the opinion of America has remained poor in many Muslim countries included in the survey.

On a positive note, the survey found attitudes toward the United States were more favorable in the former Soviet bloc nations of Poland and Russia, as well as in India and Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation. Indonesia was the recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars in aid after the tsunami of 26 December.

AT EDM, Igor Torbakov considers Russian schadenfreude at the collapse of the European Union's self-confidence:

Irony and satisfaction – these are two emotions with which most Russian policymakers and analysts observe the acute identity crisis that the European Union currently finds itself in. Against the backdrop of the Commonwealth of Independent States' inglorious demise, the steady growth of the EU was seen – until very recently – as a veritable triumphal march. For some observers, the rich bloc was an organization that "had no neighbors but only future members." But the collapse of the negotiations on the EU budget following the sorry failure of the bloc's Constitutional treaty has revealed, many international commentators contend, the EU's deep "systemic crisis" that, in its turn, sparked a heated discussion on the future direction of Europe.

Russian pundits were quick to seize on the opportunity to advance their favorite thesis that the notion of Europe is much broader than what is represented by the 25-member organization. But Russia's political class itself appears divided over which course toward Brussels Moscow should now take. The stronger nationalist-minded school of thought advocates a tough line seeking to "recoup" the perceived geopolitical losses during the previous period of Russia's strategic retreat. The minority liberal faction, on the other hand, suggests the current situation opens up a window of opportunity for true cooperation and rapprochement with Europe.

The EU's present-day troubles, Kremlin-connected strategists argue, stem primarily from the dizziness from success and sheer greed. The political thinkers steeped in the traditions of Russian and Soviet empires know all too well the potential dangers of imperial overstretch. In their opinion, Brussels, whose appetite was whetted by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a geopolitical vacuum in what some Russian analysts call the Great Limitrophe – the band of lands squeezed between the former Soviet domains and Western Europe – embarked upon the path of an extremely ambitious eastward expansion. This large-scale integration program has recently been described by one Kremlin pundit as the "[Brussels] elites' game in the United Europe as a superpower which was about to start the world-wide planning of its policies and engage in big-time geopolitics and global geopolitical games."

The aggressive enlargement strategy, however, has proved to be a recipe for disaster, some Russian experts contend. First, the EU simply overestimated its absorption capacity and – with last year's big-bang accession of 10 new mostly East European members -- swallowed a chunk it could not digest. Second, the elites' grand designs appear to have clashed with the masses' desires as most Europeans, one commentator notes, loath the attempts at building a federal Europe and "want to live in a normal national and sovereign environment."

It would appear that, geo-strategically, Moscow felt uneasy about the EU's eastward expansion mainly for two reasons. On the one hand, Russia was clearly excluded from the political process of fashioning a United Europe. But on the other hand, the issue of where the EU's ultimate eastern limits lie remains moot. For many members of the Russian security community, such a situation was quite uncomfortable. "On Russia's borders there emerges a super-state – the only political entity in the modern world that is so elusive about the question of where its final frontier will run," notes the preface to a recently published book with the telling title: The Project of Europe Without Russia.

Russia's nationalist political thinkers predict the EU will likely follow in the footsteps of the former USSR and ultimately unravel if the bloc continues its policy of "reckless expansion." They argue that Brussels should understand that it cannot bear the burden of responsibility over the "entire sphere of European civilization" and would be well advised to see that there is another influential player with whom the responsibility has to be shared. "Europe's future lies not in the boundless expansion of the EU…but in the creation of two unions – a West European one and an East European (Russian) one – which would balance each other and compete in a friendly way," one commentary asserts.

For their part, Russia's liberal pragmatists within the foreign policy community say that Schadenfreude at EU's current misfortunes is plainly out of place. This faction, particularly the experts from the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, say the Russian political class can draw some useful lessons from bloc's crisis. First, as the weakened Europe is unlikely to successfully play the role of the global geopolitical leader in the near future, it might become even more interested in developing political and economic relations with Russia. Second, of the two models of future EU development – a quasi-federation and an association of states bound together by a set of common rules, values, and single currency – it is the second one that is much more feasible now. But such a configuration of the EU makes it possible for even Russia to join in some distant perspective as, geopolitically, Russia, too, cannot go it alone, given its sharply diminishing population and shrinking share of the global GDP. Third, Moscow should make use of the ongoing search for the EU's new development strategy and revise its overall relationship with the bloc. The starting point would be the preparation of a long-term treaty on cooperation and rapprochement that would replace the fuzzy and "semi-fictitious" four common spaces.

(Rossiiskaya gazeta, June 2, 21; Trud, June 15; Kreml.org, Russ.ru, June 16; Gazeta.ru, June 17)

Harry's Place has an interesting discussion of the pros and cons (mostly the latter) of Oriana Fallaci's view of contemporary Europe:

I've read her two post 9-11 books, Anger and Pride and the Force of Reason, and while she makes a strident criticism of Islamism she goes beyond a political attack on a political movement to make alarmist generalisations about Muslims in Europe. She also argues for a reinforcement of Christian values in Europe as a way of countering what she sees as an impending Islamic takeover.

If you haven't read her books (and I'm not recommending you should) there is a taste of her views in a sycophantic interview with Opinion Journal today:

"Europe is no longer Europe, it is 'Eurabia,' a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty."

....The increased presence of Muslims in Italy, and in Europe, is directly proportional to our loss of freedom."

The phrase Eurabia is one you can find on a number of, usually right-wing American, blogs which promote the idea that our continent has been 'invaded' as part of a Muslim plot to take over Europe, impose Sharia law and force non-Muslim Europeans into a servile state of dhimmitude. It is a conspiracy theory albeit one that is given a certain credence in parts of the media as you can see in the writings of Melanie Phillips and Mark Steyn.

Both the post and the comments are well worth reading.

At Pearsall’s Books, a post that takes exception to Noel Ignatiev’s book How the Irish Became White, and the thesis that‘s implied in its title. I recently came across the following passage in an essay by Richard Rodriguez – “The Third Man” – which I believe is worthy of reflection:

The price of entering white America is an acid bath, a bleaching bath – a transfiguration – that burns away memory. I mean the freedom to become; I mean the freedom to imagine oneself free.

The point of Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White (by distancing themselves from black) may be extended to any number of other European immigrants to America. How the Germans became white. How Sicilian Catholics became white. How Russian Jews became white.

Extended even to non-Europeans: How my mother and father became white. My Mexican parents were described as White on their citizenship papers by an unimaginative federal agent. (An honorary degree.)

Who can blame the Irish steward or the Sicilian hatmaker for wanting to be white? White in America was the freedom to disappear from a crowded tenement and to reappear in a Long Island suburb, in an all-electric kitchen, with a set of matching plates.

I grew up wanting to be white. That is, to the extent of wanting to be colorless and to feel complete freedom of movement. The other night at a neighborhood restaurant the waiter, after mentioning he had read my books, said about himself, “I’m white, I’m nothing.” But that was what I wanted, you see, growing up in America – the freedom of being nothing, the confidence of it, the arrogance. And I achieved it.

Growing up an honorary white – which meant only that I was not black – I never wanted to be black (Elvis Presley wanting to be black), such was their white freedom! White, which began as an idea of no color; which defined itself against black and was therefore always bordered with black; white in America ended up as freedom from color – an idea of no boundary. Call me Ishmael.

There’s a lot more on this controversial topic in the book – Brown - The Last Discovery Of America (2002) – from which the passage is taken, and I think that much of it is relevant to the present debate in the U.S. – and also in Europe – on immigration and culture.

From today's RFE/RL Newsline:

PACE CALLS ON RUSSIA TO 'IMPROVE DEMOCRACY'... The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) in Strasbourg "urged Russia to improve its democracy, calling for more power for the Russian parliament,pluralist and impartial broadcasting and normal conditions for civil society" in a resolution passed on 22 June, according to a statement on the assembly's website (http://assembly.coe.int). The PACE also warned that solutions to Russia's problems "should be in line with Council of Europe principles," the statement said. "In order for democracy to function properly, power must not only be vertically reinforced but also horizontally shared," the PACE stated in reference to Kremlin-backed reforms approved in the fall of 2004, adding that Moscow should "adjust the direction" of recent reforms. The group also urged that "significantly" more Council of Europe assistance be granted to Russia to help it honor its commitments. The PACE resolution specifically called on Russia to abolish the death penalty, withdraw its troops from the breakaway Transdniester republic, and bring to justice those responsible for human rights violations in Chechnya. AH

...AS REPORT CONDEMNS RIGHTS VIOLATIONS, DEMANDS ACTION... PACE rapporteurs on Russia Rudolf Bindig and David Atkinson harshly criticized Moscow for a perceived lack of compliance with the commitment to human rights it made along with membership in 1995, polit.ru reported. Bindig and Atkinson also noted a slowdown in the democratization process in Russia in recent years. "The fact is that Russia is not yet a free democracy," RFE/RL's Russia Service quoted Atkinson as saying. The report also noted that the main threats to democracy in Russia remain the conflict in Chechnya, corruption and "dubious privatization deals." RFE/RL reported. VY

...PROMPTING VEILED THREAT OVER MOSCOW'S PACE CONTRIBUTION. The head of the Russian delegation to the PACE, Duma Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Konstantin Kosachev (Unified Russia), expressed disappointment with the assembly after passage of the PACE resolution on 22 June, RTR reported. He called some wording in the document "absolutely unacceptable to Russia," according to RTR, singling out for mention a reference to the "Soviet occupation of the Baltic states." Kosachev then said Russia's financial contributions to the PACE are excessive and noted that Moscow could decide to halt such payments. "That is neither our sanction toward the Council of Europe nor an expression of disappointment, but a realistic evaluation of the situation," he said, according to RTR. Council of Europe Secretary-General Terry Davis countered by saying the same day that "it is Russia's own business to decide what financial contribution it will make to the organization," RTR reported. Davis also asserted that "neither Russia nor Latvia is responsible for the misdeeds of past regimes," RIA-Novosti reported. Russia contributes some 28 million euros ($33.76 million) annually to the Council of Europe's budget, putting it among the top five contributors. VY

At EDM, Vladimir Socor comments on Moscow's refusal to ratify the border treaty with Estonia:

On June 20, a special session of the Estonian parliament ratified the Russia-Estonia treaty that defines the border between the two countries. Ministers of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov and Urmas Paet had signed the treaty on May 18 in Moscow after nearly a decade of Russian procrastination. The Estonian ratification bill passed with 78 in favor, four opposed, and 19 not voting in the 101-seat parliament. At least 68 votes were required for passage. On June 22, President Arnold Ruutel promulgated the law on ratification of the border treaty, completing a process whereby Estonia accepts the existing border with Russia.

Thus, Russia obtains confirmation of its possession of two areas it took from Estonia and attached to the Russian SFSR during the occupation era: the town and environs of Iaanilinn (now Ivangorod, opposite Narva) and the district of Petseri (Pechory, now in Pskov region). These areas made up 5% of Estonia's territory prior to the occupation.

Nevertheless, Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced on June 21 that it would not forward the treaty to the Duma for ratification and proceeded to assail Estonia for the preamble that the parliament attached to the ratification law. The preamble makes reference to the legal continuity of the Estonian state proclaimed in 1918 and its constitution, the uninterrupted validity of the 1920 Tartu Peace Treaty between Russia and Estonia (a legal cornerstone of Estonia's state continuity), the 1991 restoration of Estonia's state independence, and the parliament's 1992 declaration of the reestablishment of the constitutional order. The preamble further states that, while the border treaty partly modifies the 1920 treaty-fixed boundary, it does not affect the validity of the Tartu treaty, nor does it predetermine the handling of any bilateral issues unrelated to the border treaty.

That preamble has drawn vituperations from Lavrov, his ministry's chief spokesman Alexander Yakovenko, the Duma's and Federation Council's foreign affairs committee chairmen Konstantin Kosachev and Mikhail Margelov, and other Moscow officials. Politically, they object to the Estonian parliament's references to the 1991 and 1992 documents that mention the "Soviet aggression against Estonia in 1940," "illegal annexation," and "decades of occupation." Those formulations are not included or cited in the Estonian parliament's June 20, 2005, document. But its mere reference to the earlier documents that include those formulations seems beyond official Moscow's capacity to come to terms with its history.

On the legal level, Moscow continues to insist that the Tartu Peace Treaty "lost its validity" and that the 1940 "events" meant that Estonia (and Latvia and Lithuania) "joined" the Soviet Union legally. Russia does not recognize the legal continuity of the Baltic states during their de facto incorporation into the Soviet Union. At the moment, the Russian government seems intent to retaliate against Estonia's reassertion of the state's legal continuity as reflected in the Estonian parliament's preamble to the law on ratification of the border treaty. Thus, the Russian government refuses to forward the treaty for ratification by the Duma.

The refusal has no valid legal grounds, however. The Duma would be asked to ratify the treaty as signed, not the preamble to Estonia's ratification law. That preamble is a unilateral Estonian document, of a type that many countries routinely attach to bilateral or multilateral treaties, without prejudice to implementation of treaties. Moreover -- as Estonian government and parliamentary officials are carefully pointing out -- the preamble contains no reservations toward the border treaty's terms, no demands of any kind, and no conditions for the treaty's implementation as signed with the Russian side.

Thus, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and parliamentary officials' accusations that the preamble paves the way toward Estonian territorial claims on Russia can only be seen as part of Moscow's continuing political campaign against Estonia and the Baltic states overall. For their part Latvia, Lithuania, and the United States have welcomed the Estonian parliament's ratification of the border treaty and expressed hopes that Russia would follow suit.

The border treaty had been initialed in 1996 and reconfirmed by initialing in 1999, its content fully approved by the Russian side in all details. The treaty consists of two documents, defining the border on land and in the Narva estuary and Gulf of Finland, respectively. However, Russia stonewalled the signing, as it did on the 1997-initialed Russia-Latvia border treaty. Moscow miscalculated that the absence of border agreements could impede those countries' admission to NATO and the European Union. The situation changed with the Baltic states' accession to NATO and the EU in 2004, when the Estonia-Russia and Latvia-Russia borders became part of the EU-Russia border.

Reuters discusses a leaked CIA report which characterizes the Iraqi insurgency as an international threat "which may produce better-trained Islamic terrorists than the 1980s Afghanistan war that gave rise to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, a U.S. counterterrorism official said on Wednesday."

A classified report from the U.S. spy agency says Iraqi and foreign fighters are developing a broad range of deadly skills, from car bombings and assassinations to tightly coordinated conventional attacks on police and military targets, the official said.

Once the insurgency ends, Islamic militants are likely to disperse as highly organized battle-hardened combatants capable of operating throughout the Arab-speaking world and in other regions including Europe.

Fighters leaving Iraq would primarily pose a challenge for their countries of origin including Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

But the May report, which has been widely circulated in the intelligence community, also cites a potential threat to the United States.

"You have people coming to the action with anti-U.S. sentiment ... And since they're Iraqi or foreign Arabs or to some degree Kurds, they have more communities they can blend into outside Iraq," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the report's classified status.

I’ve been listening to some of the remarkable CDs newly released by Anthony Barnett's AB Fable label, documenting the development of jazz violin from the early days of swing through the be-bop era almost to the present day. There are so many CDs in the series that it’s hard to know where to start one’s listening tour. Before this, I’d already listened to the Fable Stuff Smith recordings, which give an excellent overview of the work of that great violinist, with authentic remasterings of the original tracks, and also the Ray Perry disc, which makes available recordings that have been long out of circulation. Now it’s possible to become acquainted with the work of other violinists of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. The list of names and artists is a formidable one. In addition to Smith and Perry, it includes Eddie South, Ray Nance (with Ben Webster), Joe Kennedy, Ginger Smock, John Frigo, Dick Wetmore, Harry Lookofsky, Stéphane Grappelli, Svend Asmussen, Gene Orloff, Elek Bacsik, André Hodeir, Jean-Luc Ponty and many, many others.

These are tracks to listen to one or two at a time. There is so much music here that it would need weeks, months, and even years to give it all the attention it requires and deserves. Though unfamiliar, the Ben Webster/Ray Nance recordings are obviously classics, and the same can be said of the wonderful Ginger Smock sessions. The most interesting release, though, is the huge 2-CD collection of “Odds and Svends”, with rare or previously unknown recordings by American and European bebop artists like Joe Kennedy, Dick Wetmore, Harry Lookofsky, Odd Wentzel Larsen and Andre Hodeir. The content is uneven, for some of the tracks are so scratchy as to try one’s patience at times, but the performances are always genuine and alive – and it has to be said that most of the recordings have been preserved or resurrected with great skill. On the “Bownus” CD, issued to subscribers to the whole series of CDs, there are also some previously unobtainable but essential tracks, such as the ones by the Dick Wetmore Quartet (on “Blues for Esquire”, in addition to violin, Wetmore plays Bobby Hackett’s cornet, of which he is custodian), the Harry Lookofsky Septet, and Jean-Luc Ponty with the Jack Diéval Sextet. It would have been nice to have some of the Max Roach Double Quartet recordings, but perhaps it was difficult to obtain permission to reproduce them.

The “Odds & Svends” CDs – grouped under the title “I Like Be I Like Bop” – are accompanied by a 96-page booklet, including photographs, which gives a history of jazz violin from swing to bebop, written by Anthony Barnett. The essay is comprehensive and informative, but I have a small gripe about the format of the booklet: the print in which it’s set is just a little too small for comfort. I guess there’s not much that could be done about this, since the aim was apparently to cram in as much historical analysis and musicological information as possible, and for that one is grateful. But it would be good to see the text reissued in standard book format.

Though it’s not often realized nowadays, the violin – and viola – were important instruments during the formative years of jazz. Many of the great musicians who became famous on other – usually blowing – instruments, began on the violin, and violin sections continued to be a feature of the popular music scene until the Swing Era. One of Artie Shaw's bands was known as his "Strings" orchestra. The new Fable CDs go one step further than most conventional jazz musicology in showing that, far from being eclipsed in the swing and bebop era, the violin continued to be an instrument on which exciting and creative music was made. The relative neglect by the major recording companies of the instrument and its players may have had more to do with commercial image-making and consumer policy than with music as such. At all events, it’s to be hoped that the release of these recordings, and others like them, together with the prominence currently being attained by violinists and violists of the stature of Regina Carter, John Blake Jr., Darol Anger, Tanya Kalmanovitch and others, may bring string instruments back into the centre stage of jazz performance where they belong.

A new fact sheet from Estonia's Foreign Ministry gives information about the country's June 23 public holiday:


Võidupüha (Victory Day) - 23 June

22 June 2005

Võidupüha or Victory Day is an Estonian public holiday, which has been celebrated on 23 June every year since 1934. Victory Day recalls the decisive battle during the War of Independence in which the Estonian military forces and their allies defeated the German forces who sought to re-assert Baltic-German control over the region. Today, Võidupüha also marks the contributions of all Estonians in their fight to regain and retain their independence.



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The War of Independence 1918-1920 and 23 June 1919

At the end of World War I, Estonia was engaged in a War of Independence with two former major powers. At the time of the Armistice on 11 November 1918, the Estonian Provisional Government was forced to defend its declaration of independence against attacks by Soviet-Russian troops and a Baltic-German Landeswehr army under General von der Goltz. By the end of December 1918, the Soviet-Russian forces, in an effort to re-establish the borders of the Tsarist Empire, had succeeded in occupying half of Estonia.

However, the tide began to turn in late December 1918 when Finnish volunteers as well as British naval assistance began to arrive in Estonia to support Estonia's defence. By the time the volunteers and equipment reached the front, the Soviet advance had been halted and in less than a month Estonia was virtually cleared of all Soviet forces.

The War of Independence was carried out by a multi-national force of 85,500 Estonians, 3,700 Finns, more than 5,000 Russians of the North West White Army (under the command of the Estonian Defence Forces General Staff), 9,800 Latvians, 3,000 British, 400 Swedes and 250 Danes and up to 700 Baltic Germans (who were Estonian citizens but had a separate Baltic Battalion).

However, intermittent fighting continued on the eastern and southern fronts throughout 1919. In northern Latvia, a mixed Estonian-Latvian force under the Estonian command of General Johan Laidoner defeated the Red Army troops operating in Northern Latvia. However, half of Latvia was still occupied by the troops of General von der Goltz.

On 5 June 1919, General von der Goltz advanced and attempted to isolate the right wing of the Estonian Army. Despite his well-equipped and experienced troops, his army was defeated at Roopa (20 June) and Cēsis-Rauna (21-22 June). The final battle at Cēsis (Võnnu) on 23 June saw the collapse of the von der Goltz army. Following this victory, Estonian and Latvian forces co-operated to ensure the fall of the puppet regime that had been established in Riga. Latvia's freedom was regained and Estonia's borders were secured.

The defeat of the two invading forces in 1919 and the signing of the Tartu Peace Treaty in 1920 between Estonia and Soviet Russia marked the successful achievement of Estonia's independence after centuries of struggle, and thus 23 June became a day to celebrate this victory.


Võidupüha Today - An Important National Day For All Who Have Supported Estonia's Quest For Independence

While the significance of the victory at Võnnu is not forgotten, Võidupüha is now a day on which the efforts of all those who have fought for Estonia’s independence throughout history are remembered.

Võidupüha is also a day of remembrance. It is a day when the thousands who fell fighting for an independent Estonia are commemorated.

During the second Soviet occupation, beginning in 1944, those who fought against the Soviets were sentenced to the infamous 25+5 prison sentences, which consisted of 25 years in the Gulag and five years in exile. Many of those who fought against the Soviet occupation died from the harsh treatment they received.

Võidupüha recalls the Estonian tradition of fighting for democracy and freedom. Since the end of Soviet occupation in 1991, Võidupüha's commemorations and celebrations have been important in the rebuilding of the Estonian identity. For Estonia's defence forces, it is a particularly important event. The need to base its forces on Estonia’s traditional defence of liberty and freedom, as commemorated by Võidupüha, cannot be underestimated.

Since the victory at Cēsis, the ideals of independence and freedom have been linked to the traditional bonfires that have been lit all over Estonia since ancient times to celebrate the shortest night of summer (called Jaaniõhtu in Estonian). On Jaaniõhtu, the sun sets only for a couple of hours. The tradition continues today: Victory Day together with St John’s day (24 June) is the most important summer holiday for Estonians. The Victory flame lit by the President early in the morning on 23 June is carried to every county to light bonfires at night. The state flags remain at full mast for the two days through the dim light of the Nordic white nights.


Events to Commemorate the 86th anniversary
of Võidupüha in 2005 in Paide

22 June

22.40 Lighting of the Victory flame at the ancient Paide Vallimägi settlement.


23 June

8.30 Official ceremony at the War of Independence Monument in Müüsleri, near Paide.

10.00 Service in the Paide Holy Cross Church

11.30 Parade at the Paide Central Square. The President of the Republic will receive the parade. Symbolic sending of the Victory flame to cities and counties. After the parade, about 12.30, the final concert of the international military music festival EST-TATTOO 2005 will begin at the Central Square.


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This week's Chechnya Weekly has a roundup of reports on the Kulayev trial, at which new evidence about what happened at Beslan on September 1 2004 has emerged, some of which contradicts the official Russian government version:

The trial in North Ossetia's Supreme Court of Nur-Pashi Kulaev, the sole participant in the Beslan school seizure to be apprehended by the authorities and put on trial, continues to prove embarrassing to the authorities. According to the Gazeta (gzt.ru) and Kommersant websites, one of the former hostages, Kazbek Dzarasov, began his testimony on June 21 by saying he had not personally seen the hostage-takers take out weapons that had been hidden in the school before the terrorist raid. However, Dzarasov was interrupted by local residents in the courtroom who shouted that he had said in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist raid that weapons and ammunition had been hidden in the school in advance and that the hostage-takers had forced him to tear up the floorboards and take the weapons out. At this point, Dzarasov said that three people dressed in camouflage had come to his home the previous evening – i.e., June 20 – and warned him to keep his mouth shut. After his admission, according to Kommersant, the courtroom's monitor for journalists went dead and the judges announced a recess. When the recess was over, another former hostage, Svetlana Dzebisova, said that a teacher at the school, who was also a hostage and died in the incident's denouement, had told her that he had been forced to take weapons out from under the stage in the assembly hall and that weapons had been hidden elsewhere in the school building.

After the court session was adjourned for the day, members of the Mothers of Beslan committee presented a petition to Deputy Prosecutor General Nikolai Shepel, the lead prosecutor in the case, calling for criminal charges to be brought against former North Ossetian President Aleksandr Dzasokhov, former North Ossetian Federal Security Service (FSB) chief Valery Andreyev, federal Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev, FSB Director Nikokai Patrushev and his deputy, Vladimir Pronichev. Yufo.ru reported on June 21 that the petition said Kulaev's trial had revealed new details about the Beslan incident confirming that "criminal negligence, inertia and mistakes of the power structures during the counter-terrorist operation" resulted in "so many victims."

Kommersant-Vlast magazine noted in its June 20 edition that Kulaev's testimony has contradicted the official version of the Beslan tragedy in a number of ways, including the assertion by prosecutors and the Federal Security Service that a number of Arabs and even a black man were involved in the terrorist raid. Kulaev testified that only four of the raiders were Chechens and that the rest were Ingush. He also testified that a sniper took out the terrorist who was standing with his foot on the trigger of a bomb, thereby detonating it and starting the series of explosions that led to the storming of the school. As Vlast put it: "The general sense of his testimony is that the military started the assault." In addition, one of the former hostages, Ella Kesaeva, told the magazine: "When [Boris] Karnaukhov [chief investigator for the Prosecutor General's Office in the Beslan case] flew in from Moscow, I met with him. I told him: ‘Our children were shot at with flamethrowers, and so they were burned to death.' Those flame-throwers were lying around the school and on the roof…I told him that we have a cassette that shows how the sports room looked immediately after the assault. Everything is visible on it – the children sitting all burned up – sitting the way they died. The Shmels [flame-throwers] burned the children to death. And everyone knows what the assault was. And he, Karnaukhov, started screaming at me: ‘Why are you lying?!' This is how they interrogated all of the witnesses."

Still, another former hostage Ella Dzarosova, testified on June 16 that Nur-Pashi Kulaev, contrary to his own testimony, took active part in seizing the school. "He ran back and forth like a madman and screamed, cursed, shot into the ceiling," Kavkazky Uzel quoted her as saying. "He shouted: ‘Keep your mouths shut, or we'll shoot you.' She said Kulaev and two other hostage-takers had gathered up male hostages, including her son, taken them outside the school and shot several to death. Her son was not murdered.

Meanwhile State Duma Deputy Arkady Baskaev, a member of the State Duma commission investigating the Beslan tragedy, said a preliminary draft of its report indicated that an accidental explosion, not a planned storming of the school by government troops, set off the ensuing bloody firefight, the Moscow Times reported on June 17. "We have the general view that the explosion itself inside the school was an accident," Baskaev told gazeta.ru. "Reports in the media that there was some sniper that opened fire are complete nonsense

(continued)

In writing down these memories of what life was like for us as British Council exchange students at Moscow University thirty-five years ago, I’m conscious of having left out many things. For example, the high level of surveillance extended well beyond the dim and densely populated corridors of Zones V and B. On a visit to the home of someone outside the main building, a home usually – though not invariably – housed in an apartment block, one could reckon on having to pass at least one security booth, in which a uniformed militsioner (policeman) sat or stood, keeping a tally of those who came and went. There were, however, times when the duty policeman was not on duty – and it was important to know what those times were. Gelfand, as he took us to the waiting taxi, would choose one of those times.

In the new year, L.P. at Inotdel made an appointment for me to meet a Soviet postgraduate student who was also writing a dissertation on Annensky. This turned out to be something of an anticlimax, as when I met him, the student, S., told me that he didn’t really have a very high opinion of Annensky’s work, and regarded him as much inferior to Blok, and even Bryusov. When I asked why he had bothered to make a special study of Annensky, he replied that apart from Fyodorov’s work, no Soviet critical study of the poet existed, and so he had been assigned to write one. It was concentrated on a very strictly defined area, namely the relation of Annensky’s poetry to that of Blok and Mayakovsky, and was written from a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint (there was no other viewpoint for a Soviet study). S. turned out to be pleasant enough – he invited me and D. to tea one day, and we went to what turned out to be his parents’ apartment in the centre of Moscow. It appeared that his father was something in the Politburo, and the apartment was very dark and very grand: we counted at least two servants in old-fashioned black-and-white servants’ attire, and the snacks for tea were wheeled in on an old 1930s-style trolley, with shiny metal covers for the food, and a cake-stand. A grand piano stood in one room, and there were gilt-framed portraits on the walls. The place had an atmosphere of almost Chekhovian tragedy: S.’s brother was an invalid, and couldn’t leave the apartment. Pale and ill-looking, he spent all day with books and music. It was all like stepping into the past – perhaps into the 1930s, or even earlier.

By February or so, the darkness, snow and general atmosphere of political and social oppression were beginning to weigh on us. I think that D. was less affected by it than I was, but we both found that life in this reality, which was constructed and intended quite aggressively and openly as a totalitarian alternative to Western ideas of social and political freedom, was slow and difficult. It was true that there were concerts, recitals, plays, bookstores, cinemas – but what was presented in these was all wrapped around by a heavy aura of ideology and political dogma. Even the concerts tended to be of music one would rather not go out on a cold winter’s night to hear – Kabalevsky, Khrennikov, a cycle of Khachaturyan symphonies, or piano recitals that began well enough with a Beethoven sonata or two, but gradually lost their way in series of unremarkable “pieces” and encores. The bookstores, such as Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga, mainly contained vast amounts of political and party literature, though there were interesting sections, such as the Cuban and Latin American literature department, where the books were all printed in Havana. At the cinema one might be able to see the recent extremely long and multi-series screen adaptation of War and Peace, but more usually it was films with a political message – often strangely enough American or in origin, and dubbed into Russian. And outside the streets were full of grey slush and endlessly falling snow, the lights of the foodstores white and ghostly, the shelves in them often empty, with odd exceptions and variations: one of my enduring memories is of a gastronom on Kutuzovsky Prospect which had a tank of zhivaya ryba (live fish), where large and sluggish perch or pike swam around, waiting for someone to buy them. The tank disappeared after a week or two, and I never saw it again. Or shops in which there appeared to be only one thing for sale: sometimes it was canned kil’ki (sprats), or it might be oranges. The latter would sell out quickly, and then the shop would be totally empty. There were cafes that had no coffee, but only watery tea, and snack bars that had no tea at all, but only cold kompot or – nothing. A visit to the Detskii Mir (Children’s World) store was a strange and tantalizing experience, as there one could find all kinds of goods and clothes, but the goods were toys, and the clothes were only for children, in children’s sizes. The equivalent clothes for adults – just the basic essentials, like coats and boots – were simply for the most part unavailable.

It wasn’t the sort of city where one felt one could relax or enjoy oneself much – though there were always the dollar hotels – but as a backdrop for serious academic work it wasn’t bad, I guess. I completed my dissertation in 1971, and got my Ph.D. from Edinburgh University that same year.

In Moscow that winter, my plans for meeting Soviet dissidents didn’t come to anything. In the end I didn’t meet Brodsky until late 1972, in London, after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, and I remember that at that first meeting he found my recitation of my experience of life in Moscow quite amusing, though he commiserated. D. and I left Moscow in March, and I didn’t return there for a long time. My political – and human - education was really just beginning: it took many years, and still continues today.


See also:

Going Back Again
Going Back Again - II
Going Back Again - III
Going Back Again - IV
Going Back Again - V
Going Back Again - VI
Going Back Again - VII

From today's RFE/RL Newsline:

PUTIN, MEXICAN PRESIDENT AGREE RUSSIAN GAS SUPPLIES TO NORTH AMERICA... President Vladimir Putin and visiting Mexican President Vicente Fox agreed on 21 June to a plan to import liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Russian Far East to North America via Mexico,Russian and international media reported. "I am pleased to note that our liquefied gas will be delivered to the Mexican coast from Sakhalin [Island], and part of it will remain in your country," Putinsaid at a joint press conference, according to kremlin.ru. A Sakhalin Energy and Royal Dutch/Shell-led consortium is expected to operate the project, according to "The Moscow Times." The United States is expected to be another major consumer of the Russian LNG. The deal is expected to translate into some 37 million tons of LNG over 20 years,the paper reported. The two men also discussed other ways to boost bilateral trade. Fox told the news conference that Russia "is interested in deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico," according to RIA-Novosti. Putin said Moscow is also interested in hydroelectric- and nuclear-power projects in Mexico, RIA-Novosti reported. VY

June 22, 2005

STATEMENT BY THE ESTONIAN MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

The Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs expresses regret that the Government of the Russian Federation does not plan to present the Estonian-Russian Border Treaties to the Russian Duma for ratification.

Estonian side has demonstrated its good will by ratifying the border agreements quickly. The border treaties were signed on 18 May and were shortly presented to the Riigikogu for ratification. The Estonian Parliament ratified the agreements already on 20 June. The Estonia President promulgated the ratification act today. With this essentially all the activities of the Estonian side concerning the border treaties are completed.

The Estonian Government did not tie the ratification of the border treaties with any additional annexes that would allow presenting new demands and neither did the Riigikogu when they supplemented the bill. This belief was very clearly reiterated by the Estonian Foreign Minister in his speech to the Riigikogu on 20 June.


PRESS SPOKESPERSON'S OFFICE
(+372) 6 317 654
(+372) 50 94 645
pressitalitus@mfa
www.vm.ee

In Poland the so-called "lustration" debate - concerning the secret files that were kept on Polish citizens by the Communist secret police, and which are now being made public - shows no sign of dying down. In the latest development, the career of Poland's Prime Minister, Marek Belka, looks as though it may be terminated by the lustration process.

From one point of view the opening of the secret files is a victory for democracy in Poland. But from another it demonstrates the continuing power of the secret services to influence Poland's political course.

The material that follows consists of two news items from the bulletin published by the Polish Embassy in Helsinki, Finland, and an item from today's Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, together with some comments from Marius Labentowicz.

Prime Minister: my files are used for political game

Warsaw, June 16: Prime Minister Marek Belka told the Sejm on Thursday that his files were used for a political game in which competence did not matter. Belka admitted to talking to intelligence services before he had travelled to the United States on a scholarship and to signing a "departure instruction", but stressed he had never been a collaborator of communist-era secret services. Belka said this was odd and paradoxical that he himself did not have access to his files. In this situation, though I consider this a bad solution, I asked the IPN to lift the secrecy clause from the documents gathered on me, Belka stressed. He warned that a complete disclosure of era-communist files will not result in a true openness of political and public life. This will give the entire problem as well as the history writing into the hands of former communist-era secret service agents and its interpretation into the hands of people involved in ongoing political games, he said.


Belka: I may leave politics

Warsaw, June 20: Prime Minister Marek Belka said he was thinking about leaving politics and added he might even not run in forthcoming parliamentary elections. The PM told Monday Radio TOK FM he wanted to leave politics despite the fact he was one of the founders of the Democratic Party-democrats.pl. Asked whether he was going to run in the forthcoming parliamentary elections the PM said he had not made up his mind yet. The PM admitted he was trying to convince Sejm Speaker Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz to run for president. Next, the prime minister said he still believed Poland should ratify the EU Constitution. He also said he hoped Great Britain, which is taking over the EU presidency on July 1, would feel responsible for starting a debate on the EU future and reaching a compromise on the EU budget. __________________________________________

Marius writes:

I don't have time to translate all the reactions and comments from politicians in Poland on this particular case, and btw not the first one and not the last one (which has been called in Poland these days as "the game with the files") so just for the record, and to let your readers know how it was then.

Leaving aside all that political game in revealing this intruction from Belka's file now, and the calls for dismissal of the PM from some opposition MPs on the Polish political scene (the parlamentarian elections will take place on 25 Sep. and the presidential one on 09 Oct.) this had been always an open secret in the past. During the communist era, people who wanted to study (those who had that opportunity then, were usually from the circles linked with the Polish communist gvt and the party) in the West had to make that choice. As one of the Polish politicians said " Some were going abroad and were signing this document, others were refusing to sign it and didn't get their passports".

The Polish PM himself said that this instruction was given to him with those days practice, but "he never treated this instruction as an obligation to collaborate with the secret services".

Of course, that practice was no different in the Soviet Union and its satellites, as all citizens could get only their passports from their district police offices.



http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/kraj/1,62266,2778739.html


Content of departure instruction


pi, PAP 21-06-2005, last update 21-06-2005 14:19


The so called departure instruction signed by Polish premier Marek
Belka in September 1984 before his trip on his scholarship to Chicago.

Its content has been revealed by the Polish Press Agency (PAP) and the Radio Information Agency

Belka's departure instruction has three parts:

With regard to the trip to the USA, I take for realization the
following assignements for the Secret Services (Sluzba bezpieczenstwa) of the Ministry of Interior Affairs" - that's how the instruction begins. Then there's talk about some concrete assignments:

1.Identification of acquainted persons in viewv of their possible
connections with the enemy secret services.

2. Scouting and analysing persons from the opinion [think tanks]
circles and all kinds of specialists, favourably inclined towards our
country,who have real possibilities to bring us some interesting
information.

In its second part there is some technical information: how to get
in contact with which [diplomatic] missions, there's also talk about keeping everything secret, remembering all the data, but writing down only names.

The third part of this instruction said: I undertake an obligation to keep top secret, also before my closest persons, of keeping contacts with the Secret Services [SB] of the Interior Ministry and all the informations that conclude from those contacts.

The city of Lodz,
this day of 10.09.1984
signature
Marek Belka


In the document's heading there also Lodz and data 10.09.1984, below
the date" Secret, spec. importance". Below: "single copy"


Update (19:00 GMT) - the BBC is covering the story: Polish PM resists calls to resign

On Monday, Mexico's Zapatista guerrillas in the southern state of Chiapas issued an order closing their offices and sending their leaders into hiding. The reason was not given.

From an AP report at the Washington Post:

The order appeared to come in response to some perceived threat, but the statement, signed by rebel leader Subcomandante Marcos, said only that the decision was made to move local rebel officials to "ensure their safety."

"We are evacuating the members of governing councils and autonomous authorities to ensure their safety. For an undetermined amount of time, they will carry out their work clandestinely," the statement said.

The Zapatistas, who champion the cause of Indian rights, have complained of government attempts to co-opt their movement through aid programs, but there was little to suggest that officials were planning to launch a military attack.

The rebels, however, also fear potential attacks by conservative Indian communities and organizations which the rebels have described as paramilitary groups. Attacks are often motivated by disputes over land and other natural resources in the poverty-stricken mountains of Chiapas

Some of the Zapatistas' communiques and an up-to-date commentary on the events can be read [in Spanish] at goleech. México desde fuera also has commentary:

México necesita claridad, disposición a la construcción de acuerdos, inteligencia y, sobre todo, la capacidad para construir acuerdos que nos permitan resolver el más grave problema del presente nacional que no es otro que el de la pobreza y la desigualdad.

Tristemente, nada de eso ha sido aportado por el EZLN. Al contrario, en los últimos 11 años ha hecho del bloqueo de soluciones y la creación artificial o el ahondamiento igualmente artificial de conflictos un deporte en el que el señor Marcos, con toda su cauda de acríticos seguidores puede considerarse como campeón mundial.

From today's RFE/RL Newsline:

MEXICAN PRESIDENT VISITS UKRAINE. Mexican President Vicente Fox met with his Ukrainian counterpart Viktor Yushchenko as well as with Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko and Verkhovna Rada speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn in Kyiv on 20 June, Ukrainian news agencies reported. Yushchenko said after his meeting with Fox that their countries are planning to cooperate in producing fertilizers and building planes. The two sides also agreed to hold a Days of Ukrainian Culture in Mexico and Days of Mexican Culture in Ukraine next year. JM

In Yezhednevnyi Zhurnal, Yevgenia Albats considers a political campaign that hasn’t really attracted much attention yet, either in Russia or in the West – the increasingly heated search for a successor to Vladimir Putin. It’s nearly three years until the presidential election, yet even now the list of potential candidates is growing. Albats doesn’t make any firm predictions, and running down the list of favourites it’s easy to see why: the candidates are not exactly promising. However, she does pause on one unexpected name – that of the oligarchic Anatoly Chubais, most recently in the news in connection with the Moscow blackout. The “Brown threat” much talked about in recent weeks and months will come, Albats believes, not from Dmitry Rogozin, but from the Kremlin itself. And Chubais is giving the impression that he intends to counter it:

Chubais is convinced that the essence of politics is summed up in the formula that justified itself in the stock exchange games, namely that “perception is reality”. It is this "idea of reality” that he is constructing right now: a sort of liberal, but also a sort of statist, "to blame for it all", but also Russia’s most long-lived politician, loyal to the Kremlin but also apparently a supporter of the opposition. Time will show how far the reality will turn out to correspond to the idea of it that is being cultivated by Chubais. Although right now there is something else that is even more interesting: did Chubais himself begin this game, or was it by arrangement with the Kremlin? And if the latter is true, then what is the role allotted to him behind the "wall"?

But one thing is obvious: the parade of Putin’s potential successors is an intrigue that is being deliberately erected by those who realize that the status quo cannot hold until 2008. The springs are going to break at any moment. The question is, what awaits us? A cold summer? A hot autumn? A long winter?

A report in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung observes that

Chancellor Schroeder's trip to the 750th anniversary of Königsberg (Kaliningrad) on July 3 is causing concern in Poland and Lithuania. The countries feel neglected, as Moscow has not invited them at the level of heads of government.

In Moscow, the investigation of the case of the killing of American journalist Paul Khlebnikov appears to be entering its final phase. The Prosecutor General's Office announced on Thursday that it had "wrapped up" the investigation, and that a suspected Chechen "rebel financier", the subject of a scathing book by Klebnikov, had ordered the slaying. Last Friday, the Moscow Times reported that

Investigators have established that Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev, whom Khlebnikov interviewed extensively for his 2003 book "Conversations With a Barbarian," was responsible for ordering the killing, which was carried out by members of a Chechen criminal group, Prosecutor General's Office spokesman Vasily Lushchenko said Thursday.

However, a RIA Novosti commentary released yesterday makes no mention of Nukhayev, and suggests what looks like a much more probable motive for the killing:

The summer Khlebnikov was killed, The National Interest, a U.S. quarterly journal of international affairs and diplomacy, wrote that Vladimir Putin had lost one of his most unswerving supporters.

The investigators said they believed that the journalist had been killed because he planned to write about the embezzlement of funds allocated to the reconstruction of the war-ravaged Chechnya. The Chechen conflict, which entered a difficult phase in December 1994, was another consequence of the distorted policies of the 1990s, which international terrorism is trying to exploit now.

Khlebnikov would have been a major headache for the corrupt Russian and Chechen officials who started embezzling state money ten years ago, claiming that it was consumed in the flames of war. But the journalist did not finish his investigation this time. On June 25, 2004, Yan Sergunin, a former vice-premier of Chechnya who had promised to provide revelatory information to Khlebnikov, was killed. Paul died two and a half weeks later.

At Winds of Change, a post headed Russian Espionage Back On The Radar. Joel Gaines notes that

Now, British business travelers are warned to be alert for Russian espionage scams while they are in Russia. Australia is tending to an influx of spies from Russian (and elsewhere) and it appears US couner-espionage resources are busy as well.

He adds that he recently discovered the work of J.R. Nyquist,

while doing some research on Alexander Kouzminov - a former KGB agent who worked in the directorate responsible for Russian "illegals" - Russian deep cover agents, posing as Westerners in the target nation. Nyquist is brilliant in that he shares the same ideas, and for generally the same reasons, I have about President Putin and the Russia he is creating.

Read the whole thing.

From Tallinn, Mari-Ann Kelam writes:

Today June 20 in a special session, the Estonian Parliament ratified the border agreement with Russia 78-4.

Update:

Russia Against Border Treaty Ratified by Estonia - Top Lawmaker

Created: 20.06.2005

MosNews

Russia opposes the form of the Russian-Estonian border demarcation treaty ratified by Estonia's parliament, a senior Russian lawmaker said on Monday.

"I don't think the border treaty, in the form in which the Estonian parliament ratified it earlier today, would be acceptable to Russia," Mikhail Margelov, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the parliament's upper house, the Federation Council, was quoted by RIA-Novosti news agency as saying.

He accused Estonian parliamentarians of trying "to outwit themselves." He said Estonia avoids direct mention of an "annexation" and "occupation" of their country by the USSR in the document's final version, but at the same time it makes references to legal acts speaking of those events directly, in the document's preamble.

The treaty's architects used the 1944 borders as a basis, Margelov said. "The Estonian side is reducing us to 1918 in the final version, creating prerequisites for the Estonian side to subsequently make territorial and other claims to us." He added that "if Russia assesses the Estonian side's amendments as unacceptable, the draft would go in the same trash can as the border treaty with Latvia did."

Russia refuses to accept Latvia's territorial claims and rejects demands for an apology for the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states.

(update via M.L.)

Window on Eurasia: On Kaliningrad, Another Russian Military 'Mistake'?

Paul Goble

Vienna, June 17 - A Russian military publishing house has made a mistake,
fateful or farcical depending on one's perspective, in a new atlas for
Kaliningrad, the non-contiguous part of the Russian Federation: In its
depiction of the official shield of that region's capital, the atlas shows
not a ship but NATO's "rose of the four winds."

The mistake, reported yesterday by the Regnum news agency, was made by the
439th Central Experimental Military Cartographic Concern, an institution
that styles itself as "the leading enterprise of the Topographic Service of
the Armed Forces of Russia with 85 years of experience."
(http://www.regnum.ru/news/471075.html).

The publishing house refused to respond to the news agency's questions
about how this could have happened, but book dealers told the agency that
the atlas, issued in an edition of 10,000 copies, had quickly sold out and
that the atlas is now what they called "a bibliographic rarity."

The error -- and that is almost certainly what it was -- probably happened
because NATO's "rose of the four winds" is sometimes found in electronic
publishing programs and used as a placeholder until authors or composers can
find the actual art that is to be put in its place.

But this mistake inevitably recalls an earlier "mistake" made by Soviet
generals about the Baltic region 15 years ago. At that time, they told
Philip Peterson, a distinguished American researcher at the Pentagon, that
their defense planning maps for the year 2000 did not include the three
Baltic countries as part of the USSR.

That judgment of Soviet commanders in late 1990 certainly proved prescient:
Less than two years after it was made, all three Baltic countries had
recovered their independence, and now the three are members of both the
Western alliance and the European Union.

The way in which this Soviet judgment surfaced, however, and especially the
consequences it had when it did are the real reasons why some may now be
taking this latest Russian military "mistake" more seriously.

On March 12, 1990, the "Washington Times" reported on its front page the
dramatic celebrations in Vilnius after elections there had allowed a newly
formed parliament to declare the recovery of Lithuanian independence.
The very same day, that paper carried on one of its inside pages an article
about the judgments of the Soviet generals as reported by Philip Peterson in
a paper that the Pentagon had cleared for publication.

That conjunction of events had real consequences. On the one hand, it
prompted denials by some Soviet generals that they had ever said anything of
the kind. And on the other, it lead some in Washington to fear that overt
Western support for Lithuania might be seen in Moscow as a tilt against
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Obviously, it would be an error to insist on any parallels between the two.
But celebrations in Kaliningrad later this month marking the 60th
anniversary of the formation of Kaliningrad oblast within the USSR and the
750th anniversary of the founding of the German city of Konigsberg, as
Kaliningrad was formerly known, do raise the stakes.

And consequently, both those in the region who would like to see Kaliningrad
become independent as the fourth Baltic republic or even revert to German
control may now be asking themselves whether the publishers of this new
Russian military atlas have made a mistake or rather "a mistake" that points
to the future.

(via MAK)

Carl Bildt has a post about the aftermath of the EU crisis. Among other things, he notes:

Now, the torch will pass from Luxembourg to the successive presidencies of the United Kingdom, Austria and Finland. In a formal sense, the political focus will shift from Luxembourg to London, Vienna and Helsinki.

But the real attention shift is likely to be to Berlin. With an election likely on September 18th, it is highly likely that the German Chancellor at the next European Council meeting will be the CDU leader Angela Merkel.

(via MAK)

(continued)

Meanwhile, D. was having a slightly different experience of life at Moscow State University. As a mathematics research student (now in her second postgraduate year at Girton, Cambridge), she spent much of her time in the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics, usually abbreviated as Mekhmat. In the late 1960s, Mekhmat was a very active centre of pure mathematics, and some of the world’s greatest mathematicians worked there. A.N. Kolmogorov was the central and most senior figure, renowned for his work in functional analysis, but also as a giant presence in mathematics as a whole. Since the 1930s he had been surrounded by pupils – in particular Maltsev (who died in 1967), Gnedenko and Gelfand. Gnedenko has left a description of what it was like to study with Kolmogorov:

The time of their graduate studies remains for all of Kolmogorov's students an unforgettable period in their lives, full of high scientific and cultural strivings, outbursts of scientific progress and a dedication of all one's powers to the solutions of the problems of science. It is impossible to forget the wonderful walks on Sundays to which [Kolmogorov] invited all his own students (graduates and undergraduates), as well as the students of other supervisors. These outings in the environs of Bolshevo, Klyazma, and other places about 30-35 kilometres away, were full of discussions about the current problems of mathematics (and its applications), as well as discussions about the questions of the progress of culture, especially painting, architecture and literature.

All postgraduate students at Mekhmat were assigned to a scientific advisor, and D., who was specializing in problems of algebraic topology and functional analysis, was assigned to Gelfand. At this time (1969-70), he was working on a series of important papers on the cohomology of infinite dimensional Lie algebras, and my wife took part in some of the work. Like Kolmogorov, Gelfand was interested in the relation of mathematics to literature, and was very well read not only in the Russian classics, but also in modern literature and literary criticism: he had a detailed knowledge of Russian formalist theory, and had studied the work of Roman Yakobson, Boris Eichenbaum, Yury Tynyanov and other prominent figures of the 1920s. He was personally acquainted with Nadezhda Mandelshtam, and knew many of Osip Mandelshtam’s poems by heart.

Some time in late November, Gelfand invited us both to his Moscow apartment for an evening at which he said that "mathematics will meet with poetry". It transpired that what he had in mind was a kind of mathematical-literary seminar. After we had had dinner with him and his family, he placed me in one room of the large and roomy flat, which was adorned with rare paintings by pre-revolutionary artists and Soviet artists of the 1920s, and my wife in another, in such a way that we could both see each other. In “my” room there were books of poetry by Pasternak, Mandelshtam, and Yesenin (a poet much admired by Kolmogorov), while in D.’s there were the works of mathematics she was currently studying, as well as some of the cohomology papers. Gelfand chose some poems for me to read, and some passages of math for D., and kept coming round to see us in our rooms, now to talk about poetry, now to discuss mathematics – sometimes he would talk to me about mathematics, and to D. about poetry. We both felt that the experiment had an effect on our relationship – both that there were points of contact between the two apparently so very different fields of mathematics and poetry, and also that there might be none, or very few. It was a strange experience, and was repeated three or four times over the months that followed. The end result of it all was that Gelfand advised me to write poems, and D. to write mathematics. In addition, he told us that a woman has a much shorter mathematical "life" than a man - for if a woman mathematician has even one child, he asserted, it will take ten years out of that life. These were our lessons, and would stand us in good stead for the future, he said. It certainly influenced the future progress of our marriage.

Sometimes Gelfand wanted to talk about the political situation in the Soviet Union – and also about the events in Czechoslovakia, the war in Vietnam, and political developments in the West. When these subjects came up, he would order a taxi, whose driver he appeared to know, and all three of us would go driving around the southern part of Moscow while he explained to us his views on the world situation. We sensed a deep anxiety on his part, not so much for himself as for many of his academic colleagues – there was an official policy of anti-Semitism, but so far it had not affected anyone at Mekhmat. Sometimes he quoted Mandelshtam’s poem My s toboy na kukhne posidim, with its personal and intimate evocation of Stalin’s Russia, applying it to the experience of tyranny both in an immediate context and in the most general and universal way. Then he would drive with us back to the apartment and play us recordings of Monteverdi, or of Neuhaus playing Bach and Mozart.

(to be continued)

See also:

Going Back Again
Going Back Again - II
Going Back Again - III
Going Back Again - IV
Going Back Again - V
Going Back Again - VI

The analytical weekly Kommersant-Vlast' has published an interview with Stanislav Kesayev, the speaker of the North Ossetian parliament, in which he expresses his concern and misgivings about the version of the events at Beslan on September 1 2004 presented by the public prosecutor. The interview is too long to translate in its entirety, but one part of it, where Kesayev talks about the failure of certain "big generals" and key security personnel who attended the seizure to appear in public, negotiate with the hostage-takers, or make any statement at all, is of particular interest:

You mean the deputy directors of the FSB, Vladimir Anisimov and Vladimir Pronichev, and the head of the Southern Federal Region Interior Ministry Directorate (GU MVD), Mikhail Pankov?

- Certainly. They were there, but we know nothing of them. And whereas Prime Minister Chernomyrdin talked to Shamil Basayev (in 1995, at Budyonnovsk. - - "Vlast’"), with these [hostage-takers] no one talked – at any rate, none of the key people were there. It may be that this was an intentional tactic, but experience has shown that it is an unsuccessful tactic for combating terrorism and dealing with one’s citizens. It may possibly make sense in Israel. There’s a higher level of professionalism there, and the circumstances are different. There it’s in their subconscious, they know that Palestinian terrorism is Israel’s enemy. But what about with us in Russia? We’re constantly trying to say that all the blame lies with international terrorism, in which there’s some Chechen and Ingush factor. But in reality it’s a consequence of the policy of the recognition or non-recognition of Chechnya, and a form of protest and an attempt to undermine the existing system.

(via M.L.)

This week's Carnival of the Revolutions is up at Siberian Light.

A recent report describes how Russia's spies believe they are getting a raw deal:

Vladimir Zavershinsky, first deputy head of the SVR [Foreign Intelligence Service], hardly comes across as a staunch democrat. In the new book he attacks the fledging Russian parliament's attempts to establish control over the spies' activities after the collapse of Soviet rule.

"We got crushed by pointless parliamentary investigations, run by incomprehensible and, believe me, unprofessional commissions," he said in an interview published in the book.

He went on to savage the lack of support shown by Russia's democratic government for the authoritarian leaders of East Germany -- including Erich Mielke, the so-called "Master of Fear" who headed the Stasi intelligence service.

"They cravenly gave them up, basically threw them out of Russia, forgetting that they had been not only close allies, but also antifascists, heroes of our Soviet Union," he said.

And for some, the tentative steps toward openness have gone too far.

"I do not understand why these people talk about spies so much, it is totally wrong," said Valentin Velichko, head of the murky Veterans of Foreign Intelligence organization, which played a key if unexplained role in freeing Dutch hostage Arjan Erkel from captivity in the North Caucasus last year.

"There should be (legislative) control, because espionage is paid for by tax-payers, but the commission should be former agents, professionals who know how things should be," he said.

At Far Outliers, Joel presents an excerpt from Michael Lind's Vietnam, the Necessary War, and writes:

I'm going to excerpt more from this book. It challenges almost every aspect of my received wisdom about the War in Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s, during which time I spent 996 days in the U.S. Army--all safely Stateside. A degree of survivor guilt impels me to explore another viewpoint about why so many Americans of my generation--and far, far more Vietnamese of all ages--ended up either killed or disabled by that godforsaken conflict.

In old cowboy movies, the sheriff rode hell-for-leather to capture the desperados before they crossed the Rio Grande. It is an old idea, more Protestant than Anglo-Saxon: that Latin America harbors outlaws.

Some Americans prefer to blame the white-powder trail leading from here to there on the drug lords of Latin America. More Americans are beginning to attribute the rise of drug traffic to American addiction. Tentative proposals to legalize drugs, like tentative proposals to open the border, bow to the inevitable, which is, in their case, the knowledge that there is no border.

The other day I read a survey that reported a majority of Americans believe most Hispanics are in the United States illegally. Maybe. Maybe there is something inherently illegal about all of us who are Hispanics in the United States, gathered under an assumed name, posing as one family. Nixon’s categorical confusion brings confusion to all categories.

Once the United States related millions of its citizens into the family Hispanic – which as a legality exists only within U.S. borders – then that relation extends back to our several origins and links them. At which juncture the U.S.A. becomes the place of origin for all Hispanics. The illegal idea now disseminated southward by the U.S. is the idea that all Latin Americans are Hispanic.

The United States has illegally crossed its own border.

- Richard Rodriguez, Brown - The Last Discovery Of America (2002).

On Saturday, the city of Edinburgh in Scotland granted Aung San Suu Kyi the "Freedom of the City," a symbolic honour akin to being named a privileged citizen. A scroll granting her the honour was placed on an empty chair.

On Saturday, Bob Costas talked to Vanessa Redgrave on CNN's Larry King Live. Some excerpts from the transcript of the interview:

COSTAS: Guantanamo.

REDGRAVE: Is the most visible symbol. There are many other Guantanamos and interrogation centers where torture is being used.

COSTAS: No one denies that there have been missteps and many who are not as far left as you certainly believe that much of American policy is mistaken. On the other hand, the detainees at Guantanamo, many would say, are not covered by the Geneva Convention. They don't wear a uniform. They don't represent any sovereign nation, and most importantly, they themselves would never observe the slightest aspect of the Geneva Conventions.

These are evil people who would slit my throat or yours if they had a chance is the way that argument goes.

REDGRAVE: Well, the only way that you can find out if someone has committed an evil act is to charge them and put them on trial. That's the only way that humanity has found and it's found some major progressive steps along the way and America led the way on that. And that is why millions of people look up to America and should be able to continue to look to America for that.

How can there be democracy if the leadership in the United States and Britain don't uphold the values which my father's generation fought the Nazis, millions of people gave their lives against the Soviet Union's regime, didn't they? Because of what?Democracy. And what democracy meant. No torture, no camps, no detention forever or without trial, without charges. In solitary confinement. Those techniques which are not just alleged, they have actually been written about by the FBI. I don't think it's being far left - I hope that I'm wrong to consider that it's far left to uphold the rule of law.

COSTAS: There's ...

REDGRAVE: To uphold the constitution.

COSTAS: There's little doubt that what happened at Abu Ghraib and some of what's happened at Guantanamo has hurt American interests, has hurt America's image and little doubt that we should hold ourselves to a higher standard than our enemies. But without being overly argumentative, I think some people, given what they know about your background, would want me to ask this question.

Even given the mistakes or perceived mistakes of American policy, what is the greater evil in the world, America and its policies or America's enemies?

REDGRAVE: It's an important question. One of our most respected judges and highest up in our judicial system said that laws which detain indefinitely without charge, without trial, without defense, without prosecution, without evidence, without cross examination, are a greater evil than terrorism, and I feel the same, actually.

COSTAS: You do?

REDGRAVE: Mm-hmm.

COSTAS: You feel that Guantanamo ...

REDGRAVE: Terrorism has to be - what do we do about it? There are a lot of things that have to be done, clearly, but to abandon the rule of law, I don't think that can solve terrorism for one moment.

COSTAS: A number of reasonable people say, all right, we understand the objections to certain American behavior. Let's say as one example, at Guantanamo. But where is the proportion over outrage over possible mishandling of the Koran or questionable interrogation techniques that set up violent protests in the Muslim world, some resulting in death, where at the same time radical Islamists blow up mosques, attack the funeral processions of Muslims. How can those not be greater desecrations of the Koran and everything that Islam is supposed to stand for, and where is the outrage from a certain portion of the political spectrum over that? There is no proportion here.

REDGRAVE: Oh, I am sorry there is great - If you read, as I am able to do, and work with the human rights movements in all the different countries. I work with my friends in Russia. Torture is now endemic in Russia because of the war in Chechnya and has the United States or Britain - they have made certain representations but democracy in Russia is hanging by a thread because political repressions have come back and the Soviet secret services are back, according to statistics my Russians friends give me, they are back into 60 percent of the seats of powers in all the ministries and in all fields, business, culture, let alone military and intelligence, etc, etc.

We have a very difficult situation in our world, there is no doubt about it.


[passage omitted]


COSTAS: Jane Fonda almost idolizes you. Named her own daughter Vanessa after you. You and she appeared together in "Julia" and obviously there are some similarities between the two of you with being politically outspoken and perhaps paying a price for it. What are your thoughts about Jane Fonda? Have you read her recent autobiography?

REDGRAVE: Yes I have. I think it is very, very good. Yes, she sent me a couple. I was very thrilled. It is a difficult thing to write.

COSTAS: Did she confide in you during the Vietnam War when she was speaking out as she did, catching some flak for it. Did she commiserate with you?

REDGRAVE: No she didn't commiserate with you, I rang her up and I said, Jane, I'm starting to work with GIs here in England, can you tell me what you've been doing and how you're doing it because we were all involved against the war in Vietnam.

COSTAS: What would you say to her regarding those, and they may have good reason, who no matter what Jane Fonda does, as an artist or as a person, no matter her good works and good deeds, they will never forgive her? She will always be Hanoi Jane. And there were some who will never forgive you for what they perceive to be your stances through the years, no matter what you do.

REDGRAVE: And you want me to answer that?

COSTAS: What would you tell her about dealing with that?

REDGRAVE: I think she deals with that very well. I mean, at my point of life and I guess, us two, we have led very different lives in many respects but I've come to see through the course of my life people haven't know really what I was up to or maybe I didn't explain it well or whatever, whatever, I come to see people understand what I've tried to do, however inadequately I do it. I'm very capable of bring (unintelligible), you know, but I've just found people have come to understand me and be glad that I tried to do what I tried to do. And I do feel very inadequate about it but I feel I must try other ways. As one wonderful Soviet dissident said who suffered terribly in the Soviet psychiatric prison, had just made a film called "Russia, Chechnya, Voices of Dissent" and she was asked, well, why did you go into Red Square on August 25th 1968 against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and she said simply, well the Soviet government said the whole of the Soviet Union rejoiced in saving their Czechoslovakian brothers and since I was a Soviet citizen I wanted to show that actually there was a couple - some at least, Soviet citizens who were horrified at what their country had done and she said I would have felt ashamed if I hadn't made a protest.

And I think that any citizen can understand that whatever mistakes they feel anybody has made that you must raise your voice and do the best you can to speak out.

(Hat tip: M.L.)

Estonia's Postimees newspaper has an elegant view of the European Union in its present undignified plight.

(Hat tip: Leopoldo)

The Finland Diary recently published in the Washington Post provoked a huge number of comments. In fact, the comments make much more interesting reading than the posts themselves. Try this example, which focuses on the differences between Finland and the U.S.A.

A new film about the Russian-Chechen conflict - 14 Episodes, by Murad Mazaev - has been released. The web site of UNPO, the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation, notes that

the film consists of material from the first and second Russian-Chechen wars. Showing its bitterness, violence, cruelty and sorrow the film bears testimony to the scale and severity of the war. In eight minutes, Chechen resistance fighters, a bus carrying women and children destroyed by Russian aircraft, mad people after bombardments, and blood and tears are shown. Torn metal, the bare face of death, and helplessness, reflected in 14 episodes.

The footage used came from Ukrainian journalist Tarak Protsuk, who was killed in Baghdad on April 8, 2003, as well as from editor Islam Saidayev, and the materials of Adam Tepsurkayev, who was killed in Alkhan-Kala, Chechnya by so-called 'death squads' for his active and truthful coverage of the events in the Chechen-Russian war. Some pictures from this film have been taken from the film “Things I remember” 2000 L&L Studio Filmowe Krakow, Poland.

The film won the Amnesty International Prize at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in the Netherlands. Besides at IDFA the film has already participated in IFF Locarno (Switzerland), CIDF Chicago (USA), IDFM, München (Germany), DM, Madrid and TekFestivale, Rome.

Murad Mazaev was born in 1977 in Grozny, Chechen Republic of Ichkerya. In 1999 he graduated from Chechen State University, philosophical faculty. In 2003 he graduated from Georgia State University of Theatre and Cinema.

Social Change in Contemporary Latin America looks at the social and political problems presented by the discrepancy between the officially massive support for Catholicism in the countries of Latin America (the blog notes that trust levels for the Catholic Church run well into the 70 and even 80 percent mark), and the fact that social and political change in this region of the globe is currently posing a major headache for Vatican policy. So far the new Pope has remained silent on Latin America, preferring to concentrate on such European-focused issues as the desired rapproachement between Catholicism and the Russian Orthodox Church. The blog considers that while this may be a worthy cause, the issue of the Catholic Church's role in Latin America is even more pressing:

However, it would be a huge mistake if the Vatican forgets Latin America. In Latin America, the Church faces equally important challenges that require not only resources, but above all the imagination and compromise of the church’s grassroots organizations, hierarchies, and the laypersons. Moreover, unlike Europe, where it is forced to seek collaboration and support from the Orthodox churches, in Latin America the Church goes by itself.

Elsewhere, on specifically Mexico-related matters, the blog has an interesting post on the political labyrinth of the gubernatorial election in Mexico state, and its implications for the national presidential election scheduled for 2006.

In the JC (subscription required), Simon Rocker writes about a new report on anti-Semitic incidents recorded by police in London, U.K., over the past four years. The report says that most of the suspects in such incidents were white European men:

In more than 60 per cent of the cases where someone was charged, cautioned or the subject of other police proceedings, the offender was a neighbour, or sometimes a business associate, of the victim.

One in six incidents involved allegations of physical violence and one in six, threats or harassment.

The survey of a total of 1,296 incidents recorded by the Metropolitan Police from January 2001 to December 2004 is the result of a groundbreaking collaboration between the police and the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. It is the first time an outside body has been given access to the Met’s official statistics on anti-Semitism.

Their analysis shows that incidents often peaked in months of heightened tension in the Middle East. “These four years correspond with the second intifada, which not only marked an upsurge in violence against Jews in Israel but also an increase in attacks on Jews in a number of European countries,” according to the latest issue of the institute’s newsletter, JPR News, which reported some of the findings.

In a breakdown of suspects, 57 per cent were classified as white European; 15 per cent, Afro-Caribbean; 12 per cent, Indian-Pakistani; seven per cent, Arabic-Egyptian: six per cent, dark European; one per cent, Chinese/Japanese; and one per cent “unknown.”

The most common allegations involved threats or harassment, 26 per cent; criminal damage, 21 per cent; malicious communications, 17 per cent; and violence, 16 per cent; while in 13 per cent of cases, there was no criminal offence.

A further two per cent concerned robbery, with two per cent “sex-related.”

Nearly two thirds of incidents were carried out by men against men. Male victims proportionately suffered more violence, while women were more often the victims of malicious communications.

According to JPR, suspects generally fell into “younger age groups,” although most of those against whom the police took action were in the 41-60 bracket.

Victims were “fairly evenly distributed” across the age groups.

A third of the incidents were recorded in Barnet, “matching the proportion of London’s Jewish population that lives in the borough.”

Peak months — where reported incidents numbered 30 or more — tended to coincide with events “such as the aftermath of the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in September 2001, the violent conflict involving the Israel Defence Force in Jenin in April 2002, and the Iraq War in the spring of 2003,” according to JPR News.

Rebecca MacKinnon at Global Voices Online has posted links to petitions for jailed Iranian bloggers. It's possible to sign the petitions, and send email to those involved in making the judicial decisions.

Robert Mayer has a post about a visit he recently made to one of the illegal Iranian polling stations located in Tucson, Arizona. He conducted an interview with one of the poll "monitors", and the responses he got to some of his questions were bizarre, to say the least.

He said that now that the Cold War is over, and since we aren’t fighting the “Ohhhh evil commies! Scary!” anymore, we had to find a new enemy, that being Muslims and “terrorists.” He believes that the recent bombings in Khuzestan and Tehran were covert operations by U.S. forces. He said that our foreign policy was specifically designed so that it would only create more terrorists, so that we would have a perpetual reason to be at war and invade other countries.

On this note, we talked about the nuclear issue. He insisted that Iran is solely trying to develop nuclear power for its own use, and that the United States is trying to make Iran dependent on foreign sources for energy. He says that Iran does not want to develop a nuclear bomb, and insisted that Khamenei issued a fatwa last year declaring their development a sin. According to him, the fact that Iran’s Islamic government can declare nuclear bombs a sin and and Southern Baptists cannot is “telling.”

The whole thing is well worth reading.

(continued)

One noticeable feature of life at MGU during the late 1960s, as one strolled around the place, was the prominence given to Soviet support for the North Vietnamese side in the Vietnam War. In the autumn of 1969, at the entrance to the main building, just inside the main doors, there was a large exhibit entirely devoted to this theme, with large portraits of Ho Chi Minh and many photographs, including Eddie Adams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of the execution of a member of the Viet Cong at the hands of South Vietnam's police chief, Lt. Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan, at noon on Feb. 1, 1968. There were also long statements by Viet Cong and Soviet leaders, all presented in Russian, and the usual red-and-white or red-and-black slogans in praise of “world communism” and the communist parties of the USSR and Vietnam. No one ever seemed to pay this exhibit much attention – it just stood there, for the most part unnoticed, like a large commercial advert or a display for the latest model of some ideological motor car.

During 1968, like many or most of my student contemporaries in Britain, I’d grown very critical of the U.S. presence in Vietnam. The constant barrage of negative U.S. and European press reports on the war, both U.S. and European, had contributed to a general hostility towards the American engagement, and there were several large demonstrations in London – the biggest of these took place on March 17, and ended in violence near the US embassy on Grosvenor Square. I didn’t take part in that demo, but did take part in the demonstration on October 27, which was largely peaceful, but also ended violently when a breakaway group of 6,000 tried to storm the US embassy. I didn’t join in the breakaway action, but left when the majority of marchers did. I remember the point where it seemed that mass arrests of demonstrators were about to begin – but we were told by police to walk across Lambeth Bridge, which we did, and then didn’t look back. I remember the strong sense of disillusionment and anger that we felt – I was there with my wife and two friends – after this event, though I’m still not sure why we felt so let down.

In Moscow, I met face to face with North Vietnamese students. This was a decisive moment for my view of the war. The meetings took place on two or three evenings, in a room in MGU, and were organized by a Soviet student committee. There were quite a lot of American research students there, and the atmosphere was quite heated. I remember getting into discussion with one Vietnamese student in particular, who had given a talk in Russian. He told me that his people hated the Americans and British (from 1961 to 1963 Britain had fully supported US Vietnam policy),and that their aim, like the aim of Communists the world over, was to destroy them. The look of inflamed and violent hatred on his face was very striking – and I could see that he meant what he said. Also that he found my shock amusing.

That evening in Moscow, I also talked to some Cuban students. In London I’d been reading Cuban poetry – in particular, the work of Heberto Padilla. I’d seen Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s film Memorias del subdesarollo, which had been released in London the previous year. I had no real knowledge of the social, historical and political context in which the film was made (most of the European left just swallowed it n ritual fashion along with the work of Godard, Truffaut and Pasolini), nor any real understanding or knowledge of Cuban literary history. At that time, a rosy and sentimental view of the Cuban revolution was widespread among Western students, and I guess that in my eagerness to try to find some saving grace among what seemed like an oncoming tide of disillusionment with “leftist” ideas I was casting around in Castro’s Cuba for reassurance – a stupid thing to do, and that evening began the resolution of the problem for me. The Cuban students pointed to the attitudes and preoccupations of the North Vietnamese students which I’d just experienced, and asked me if I thought that the attitudes of Cuban communists really differed. One of them told me that it was a total mistake to think that Cuban communism was in any way distinct from the brand promoted in Moscow. He said that Havana was used by Moscow as a kind of display window with a fake version of “revolution” for use as a propaganda tool. This message, which I absorbed in a rather simplified form, stayed in my mind, for I was struck by the frankness and non-sentimental sincerity of these students, who seemed several years older than me (I was already 24).

Looking back on it now, that evening marked a breakthrough for me in terms of political awareness – but it also returned me to where I’d been before the outbreak of fashionable “revolutionism” in Britain and the West. I realized that I was going to have to reconstruct my whole outlook on the world – and it was in the work, activities and ideas of Soviet dissidents, who were resisting, from the very centre of its initiation, the consequences of a revolution that 52 years later was still affecting large parts of the globe, that I found the beginnings of a way to do that. It wasn’t an easy process.

(to be continued)

See also:

Going Back Again
Going Back Again - II
Going Back Again - III
Going Back Again - IV
Going Back Again - V

Some excerpts from the IA Regnum interview with Ruslan Aushev, former President of Ingushetia [tr. M.L., my minor editing]:

"First they will abolish the president, then - the nation"


IA REGNUM, 06.06.2005 17:03


IA Regnum: The Ingush, together with the Dagestanis, are the only North-Caucasian peoples that didn’t take part in the Abkhazian war against Georgia. Why was that?

I will speak only for the Ingush, I will not speak for Dagestan. In general, taking part in wars in the Caucasus is a mistaken thing to do. Even more so when your nighbour has some internal problem. To interfere in someone else’s home -that's not right. There are people there, who will work things out for themselves. The Ingush, who have lived next to Georgia for centuries, have never once during their entire history permitted themselves to transgress the framework of mountain etiquette. And we, the Ingush, are grateful to the Georgians. When we were deported in 1944, the territory of Checheno-Ingushetia was distributed between the adjacent republics, including Georgia. When in the fifties we began to return from deportation, the Georgians who populated the Ingush villages said that they could not live in our houses, and they left, even leaving their crockery for the returning Ingush families. If in 1957 the Ossetians had acted in similar fashion, the situation between Ossetia and Ingushetia would not be as tense as it is now.

IA Regnum: Why did the Chechens, who are very close to the Ingush, take an active part in the war in Abkhazia?

I talked with Dudayev about this a lot. I asked him: how do you justify the fact that your units, the representatives of the Chechen republic, fought in Abkhazia? I know that later he regretted this. Maskhadov, as is known, came officially to Georgia and also said that it was a mistake.

IA Regnum: In Georgia it’s considered that the mass participation of North Caucasians in the Abkhazian war was organized by Russia. Do you, the former president of a Russian Federal subject, agree with this opinion?

No wars happen spontaneously. For example, people talk about the "Ingush-Ossetian conflict". There was no Ingush- Ossetian conflict whatsoever. Ingushetia did not fight against Ossetia. All those events occurred in the Prigorodnoye district, in North Ossetia. It was North Ossetia's problem. But what was the plan of those politicians who were in power in Moscow in 1992? To put pressure on the Ingush, taking into account the fact that this would create a problem for the Chechen republic, and Dzhokhar Dudayev would have to come to the aid of the Ingush. And then the chance to accuse him of aggression and to apply force against him would come up. It all flowed from this. When wars break out, nothing is simple. You see, an everyday conflict of the Ingush with Ossetians was converted into an entire war. I was there in 1992, when the troops arrived - why, if it were just n order to separate the Ingush from the Ossetians, were all those Grad rocket systems, self-propelled artillery and all the rest needed? And when that convoy was directed at Chechnya, it was scarcely possible to stop it at the border of Ingushetia and the Chechen Republic. This was Moscow’s first attempt at solving the Chechen problem by force. In other words, what happened was that the federal centre attempted to solve its problem with the Chechen republic, and the Ossetian leadership attempted to solve its problem, having demonstrated that if the Ingush tried to solve the problem of interrelations, then blood would be spilled.

[passsage omitted]

IA Regnum: Why has the post of president been abolished in North Ossetia, thereby reducing the degree of its statehood even further?

I don't know on what basis Dzasokhov took this decision. Probably, he wanted to help the federal centre, which has been pursuing this policy of strengthening the vertical of power, for the unitary state. But, in the [Russian] constitution it is written that a republic is a state. It is not a region -- it is a state. Therefore, it should have a president. Now first they plan to abolish the president, then they will abolish the language, then the traditions, then everything [else] that links us with the name Ossetian, Ingush, Kabardian, Balkar... Today they are abolishing presidents, tomorrow they will abolish everything else - the flag, the coat of arms, the anthem. It's not for nothing that a president and a flag is needed. We want the English, the French, the Italians, the Irish, the Chinese, to be joined in the world by the Ingush, the Kabardians, the Ossetians, the Georgians... So that these names are heard and have resonance. I want to live according to my customs and traditions - why must someone abolish them?

[passage omitted]

(via chechnya-sl)

On June 16, investigative reporter Alexander Khinshteyn wrote an analysis of the new situation in the Caucasus following the resignation of North Ossetian President Dzasokhov and the reconfirmation of Murat Zyazikov in the post of President of Ingushetia. The first part of Khinshteyn's article is here, in my quick tr.:

The President submitted the candidature of Murat Zyazikov to the examination of the Ingush parliament. This happened two weeks after Zyazikov’s neighbour – Aleksandr Dzasokhov – announced his resignation.

Dzasokhov, now former Ossetian leader, is the only Caucasian president to have had sufficient conscience to voluntarily resign from power. If he had done it properly, of course, he would have made the announcement last year - immediately after the disgrace of Beslan – but better late than never, for the rest of his colleagues are not even thinking of saying good-bye to the throne.

They are clinging on to power by tooth and nail. They are prepared to try any subterfuge just as long as they can stay, hold their ground, last out. Power is not just about influence and esteem. It is first and foremost about money. All the Caucasian republics long ago turned into family enterprises, where the numerous relatives of the presidents have "privatised" the tastiest slices of the pie. (I have written so much about this, with concrete facts and examples, that to repeat it again is embarrassing.)

"We must make way for the young", Dzasokhov said in farewell. For the Caucasus this sounds like a challenge. The most obvious case of "making way for the young" is Daghestan’s leader Magomedal Magomedov, who has ruled the republic since the days of Chernenko. Yesterday this venerable personage celebrated his 75th birthday, but he hopes to be appointed as before. And together with him – his entire family, which has gained solid control of Daghestan.

But the crisis of power in the Caucasus is not confined merely to wild, unrestrained corruption. Its main misfortune is the incapacity of the authorities to take responsibility and to make decisions. The absence of real authority in the regions.

Where, it would be interesting to know, was that same General Zyazikov (though damn it, what kind of general is he, specially appointed by election to a comfy post in the Special Envoy's office - the candidate looked more confident in a general’s uniform), when a year ago guerrillas burst into Ingushetia? No one knows. On the evening of June 21 he was in the republic. As soon as the fighting started, he mysteriously disappeared. But subsequently he received a military decoration all the same.

And what about Ossetian President Dzasokhov, who at the moment of the assault on the Beslan school ran around the headquarters in a hysterical state, shouting that he was a “political corpse”? It was not the lives of the children that disturbed him during those moments, but his own selfish well-being...

And Daghestan’s leader, Magomedov? In response to the 20,000th meeting held at Khasavyurt after he removed the local mayor, Magomedov could think of nothing more intelligent than to dissolve the regional assembly, remove the chief of the Interior Ministry and send a group of detectives to arrest the trouble-making mayor. Were there not an immediate intervention by the Kremlin administration, it would be impossible to stop the unrest in the republic.

No surprises there. A puppet – by definition - cannot be independent. Without the experienced hand of the puppet-master it is only a piece of papier-mache wrapped in a rag.

The Kremlin brought all the Caucasian leaders to power on the end of a bayonet. Brazenly throwing the rivals around. Closing its eyes to all kinds of violations. Like a switch turning on the administrative resources.

Because in the new concept of power the principal virtue has become loyalty and controllability.

Let them steal millions. Let them trade in posts and positions. Let them stamp out any kind of form of dissent. In exchange they won’t utter a word of contradiction. Just click your fingers - and they’ll stand to attention. (It’s not for nothing that more than 80% of electors in the Caucasus vote for Putin.)

It’s true that after that the next cataclysm begins, and the bewildered presidents run about the trenches in fear. But after all, terrorist acts and attacks don’t happen every day. On the other hand, loyalty is a twenty-four hour concept...

After Beslan many people thought that now at last order would finally be restored in the Caucasus. The President sternly frowned and knit his brows. He spoke of a crisis of power. But it was all limited to the replacement of the Russian president’s Special Envoy.

Think about it: Zyazikov has been reappointed. Daghestan’s Magomedov is on his horse.

And these decisions are more eloquent than any words...

(via Marius)

(continued)

My wife and I were the only married couple in the Moscow British student group that year, and so we got the largest room. Bare and spartan it might be, but it did have plenty of space, and we’d tried to make it a little more liveable – record player, some Klee and Kandinsky posters on the walls, and so on. Then after about six weeks we got the idea of holding a sort of "house-warming" party for the group and assorted Soviet guests. I think this was partly because, as I mentioned before, there was much less of a sense of group solidarity and cohesion than I’d noticed in 1967, and the embassy seemed now to be taking a rather lower profile in terms of social functions and get-togethers that involved postgraduates. This may have been connected with pressure from the Soviet authorities, though there was no way of knowing for certain.

At all events, we held the party one weekend – I remember it started around 9pm on the Saturday night, and was a moderately uninhibited affair, with a lot of dancing and drinking. It was interesting mainly because it attracted some non-Western guests, not all of whom turned out to be members of the local komsomol group, and not all of whom were even Russian: there was the son of a Yugoslav diplomat, who had been invited by one member of the British group who had met him at another party earlier in the semester, and there were also a couple of Estonians. Mary had invited the poet Mikhail Yeryomin, a friend and associate of Brodsky, to the evening, and we had an interesting chat, in the course of which I began to get involved in plans for a trip to Leningrad. The Yugoslav diplomat’s son gave a flamboyant speech about his visit as a student to Moscow, including some intentionally “controversial” statements about freedom of speech and assembly which caused a mild ripple of interest among some of the Russian guests. The Estonians looked on with distaste, I thought, and one of them told me that he didn’t approve of the Yugoslav and thought he might be some kind of KGB provocateur or informer. Most people went back to their rooms at around 3am, except for one or two of the Russian guests, who stayed on to drink. I distinctly remember one of them telling me how he was going to take me back to his village in Siberia to show me “the real Russia”.

A few days later, we had a visit from Jaak, one of the Estonians who had been at the party. Jaak was a friend of Michael, who lived in the other room in the block, and also of Mary. We talked for a while, and Jaak told us that was a teacher in Tallinn, married with two children, and had come to Moscow to get an education diploma. He was tall and anxious-looking, but friendly, with a sense of humour, and apparently open about himself. He said he was personally acquainted with one or two Estonian poets, including the well-known P.E. Rummo, and had a book of Russian translations of Rummo’s poetry, from which he liked to read aloud, and he suggested that I might like to work on translating some of the poems. This was my first contact with Estonian poetry. Difficulties arose, however, when the talk turned to the subject of Brodsky, and to Soviet dissidents in general. The first time this happened, Jaak rose to his feet, looking pale, put his hands on my shoulders and those of my wife, and asked us to come out into the corridor with him. There he informed us that our room was bugged. He didn’t know where the bugging device was hidden, and said it might even be concealed behind the wallpaper or plaster, but he was quite certain there was at least one microphone in the room. Although we had been warned of this by the British Council back in London, it came as something of a shock to us, and at first we couldn’t take it seriously. My wife assumed that Jaak was merely suffering from stress, and tried to reassure him that it was all right to talk freely in the room, but he insisted that it wasn't – and from then on, whenever he visited, usually with Michael or Mary, we had to take care not to let the conversation turn to topics that were “sensitive”, or else be prepared to make the trip out to the corridor.

The thought of the microphone in the room also began to have an effect on D. and myself, I think, and we became more guarded in the comments we passed to one another, which was an odd experience. We conducted several searches of the place to see if we could find the hidden bug, but without success. Playing music on the record-player seemed to be the best way of covering our voices - so if we wanted to talk without worrying about what we said, we usually played some jazz or rock music.

(to be continued)

See also:
Going Back Again
Going Back Again - II
Going Back Again - III
Going Back Again - IV

More and more details of what really happened at Beslan during the hostage crisis on September 1 2004 are emerging at the trial of Nurpashi Kulayev, the sole surviving member of the hostage-taking group. On June 14, the independent electronic newspaper Kavkazy Uzel, which is published under the aegis of the respected Russian human rights NGO Memorial, released an account of new statements at the trial by eyewitnesses. The latest issue of Jamestown Foundation's Chechnya Weekly offers a summary of what the article contains. Among other things, it states that

Regina Kusraeva, who was in the school with two of her children, told the court: "While we were sitting in the assembly hall, the terrorists tried to contact the government of the republic [and] the country. The terrorists summoned the director of the school Lidia [Tsalieva], who after a few minutes came back to us and said that no one needs us, no one is picking up the phone – neither in Putin's office or from our [North Ossetian] government."

According to Kavkazky Uzel, practically all of the living victims of the terrorist attack have reached the conclusion that it was the "the federals" who "destroyed" the children who died in the incident – over half of the 330 people killed. The website quoted the head of the investigative department of the Interior Ministry branch in North Ossetia's Pravoberezhny district, Elbrus Nogaev, as saying that what happened on September 3 "was not a freeing of hostages," but rather a "military operation."

Regina Kusraeva told the court that on the first day of the hostage seizure, one of the hostage takers told the hostages: "Judging by past experience, we suspect that there will be an assault. If the lights go out, everybody lay on the floor, but don't run; they'll kill you." Kusraeva said the terrorists treated the hostages "reasonably" on the first day of the incident, giving them food and allowing them to line up for water. "But on the second day, they told us that they were declaring together with us a dry hunger strike, inasmuch as their demands were not being met," she said. "Then on the third day the assault began. I sat with the children under the window in the assembly hall. There was such heavy [weapons'] fire that I was afraid that it would pierce the walls. Why did that happen? Then one of the terrorists told me: ‘Get of here; the roof is on fire, you can die.' We ran to the cafeteria; the situation was the same there, and there the militants told us to run out: ‘Now this part of the building will be fired on; get out of here.' Then they forced the hostages to stand on the windowsills, to tear down the drapery and to wave it, to shout [at them] not to shoot. I myself saw how they were shooting from the streets. I sat with the children on the floor, but in one moment I looked and saw a mountain of corpses on the windowsills. Then, an APC [armored personnel carrier] pulled up, three [soldiers] jumped out and point blank began to shoot those hostages who continued to stand on the windowsills. At that moment I was absolutely not scared of the militants; they were not firing at us. The only thing I feared was that they were going to kill them [the terrorists] and then come in the school and shoot all of us."

Almost every week now, Russian troops and Chechen law enforcement officials carry out so-called "mopping up" operations in the village of Prigorodnoye, just south of the Chechen capital Grozny. Men are arrested and abducted, and many disappear without trace. A new RFE/RL report describes one recent incident, which involved the stabbing of a Chechen security agent by a young woman. From the report:

On 14 June, members of the Chechen presidential security service arrived in Prigorodnoye to arrest a young man living there.

When they went to his family's house and discovered he wasn't there, the security officers attempted to take away his father instead. A neighbor, who identified himself only as Islam, described what happened next: "When they attempted to arrest the young man's father, he put up stiff resistance. The women in the house and their neighbors came to his rescue too. The attackers, who had come in two cars, did not expect they would have such a difficult time of it. They asked for backup and two more groups soon arrived. In the fighting and shooting that ensued, one of the villagers had a heart attack and died on the spot. When the security officers realized they weren't even going to be able to handcuff the old man [whose son they had wanted to arrest], one of them hit him with his rifle butt. They were dragging him out of the house when a girl caught up with them and thrust a knife into one of the officers' neck."

The daughter fled, and the security officers soon set out in an attempt to find her. But after a daylong search, said Islam, they were unable to track her down.

"In spite of the fact that they brought death to the village and aroused anger among the people here, they spent the whole day here looking for her," he said. "But apparently she managed to escape. Even the backup didn't help."

From this week's RFE/RL Caucasus Report:

"In the [Russian] constitution it is written that a republic is a state. It is not a region -- it is a state. Therefore, it should have a president. Now first they plan to abolish the president, then they will abolish the language, then the traditions, then everything [else] that links us with the name Ossetian, Ingush, Kabardian, Balkar." -- Former Ingushetian President Ruslan Aushev, commenting on the decision by the parliament of the Republic of North Ossetia to abolish the post of president (from an interview with the Russian news agency Regnum reposted on 6 June on the Ingush opposition website ingushetiya.ru).

From The Russian-Chechen Friendship Society

PRESS-RELEASE #1324 FROM JUNE 14, 2005

THE INFORMATION CENTER AT THE RUSSIAN-CHECHEN FRIENDSHIP SOCIETY

Elita Magomadova, a passenger of "Grozny - Moscow" train: "Many of the victims have not turned to doctors for help because of the shock"

Elita Magomadova, a third year student of Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod, has been a volunteer of the Information Center at the RCFS for a long time. She teaches the Chechen language to the staffers of the editorial office in Nizhny Novgorod. On 12 June, 2005 she was going to Moscow on the train that was blasted in Usunovo-Bogatischevo span by unknown terrorists. Today Elita Magomadova told about that ill-fated morning to the correspondent of the Information Center.

The Grozny - Moscow train that I was going by was to arrive in the capital at 9.34 am on 12 June. At about 6 am the woman who was in my compartment, Khazhar by name, woke me up. I washed my face and returned to the compartment. We were talking sitting at the table. I was looking through the window and Khazhar was sitting leaning against the back of her berth. It was 6.45 am when we heard a sound of an explosion.

Khazhar leapt up from the berth and rushed to the door. I saw through the window some metal pieces flying in the air. I was thrown to the floor. At that moment there was another much mightier explosion. My carriage No2 was tossing and then it started to fall to the right. The carriage was falling to pieces. Its parts and walls were coming off.

Then the carriage stopped suddenly. It stroke against a signpost that stopped it. The post breached the wall near the floor and its end entered our compartment. I was blocked up with a strained piece of metal. I could have been beheaded with it.

Strange as it may seem, nobody was screaming. I even thought that I was the only one who survived. Then a few young men from an adjacent compartment helped me to get out. They were injured too. One of them cut his arms. Another one hurt his leg. Then I looked into the corridor. I saw a woman there whose eye was cut with a plastic fragment of the carriage facing. She was not screaming either. All the people were shocked so much that they could express their emotions. The period between the two explosions was just two minutes. I noted the time by my cell phone that I was holding in my hand.

Then other carriages started falling down. When we managed to get out of the carriage, we saw that the train had been torn asunder. The locomotive and the first carriage were standing on the railway a few meters away. If the post had not stopped our carriage, the outcomes would have been much graver. The front pane of the locomotive was smashed. We went away from the railway as fast as we could because we were afraid that new explosions might follow.

Policemen convoying the train ran up to our carriage. They started to help people to get out and they rendered the first aid to some of them. However, many people managed to get out without any help although they were injured. All the people went down the railroad embankment, sat down on the ground and just looked at the six carriages lying on their sides. In ten or fifteen minutes a little girl started crying and screaming as one of her legs was burnt. Some policemen who arrived at the site in the car drove her away. Some twenty minutes after that an ambulance arrived. But people living in dachas situated along the railroad had already begun to help us. They brought water, medicines and took some people to their houses. They also offered their cell phones to call our relatives. However, cell communication was blocked soon. The police videoed the site and prohibited all the other people to take pictures. They said that it was necessary for their security.There was one girl among the passengers who also videoed the site but the police forced her to give the tape to them and then erased the video. Many of the victims didn't ask for help as they were shocked.

It was about 10 am when a suburban electric train came. We got into it. Nobody helped us. I didn't feel any pain at that time. However, I feel sick now and all my body is aching. To all appearances, I have a brain concussion.

When we were going through the territory of the North Caucasus,everybody seemed worried as if people had foreseen some danger. Then we calmed down and fell asleep. Nobody thought that we were in danger in the territory of Russia. It is clear that Chechens could not commit this act of terror. It's absurd.

Editor in chief Stanislav Dmitriyevskiy

(via chechnya-sl)

(continued)

The TsGALI archive itself, which came under the jurisdiction of the Soviet MVD (Ministry of the Interior), was housed in a low building in a rather non-descript suburban street. On my first visit there, I had an interview with the archive’s director, a small man in a dark suit, with a distracted and unfocused air, who looked at me with a boredom that suggested he'd perhaps seen too many foreign research students, and really just wanted to get off home. After briefly inquiring about the nature of my research, and nodding perfunctorily when I mentioned the name of Annensky, he told me that much of the material I required would be in a “classified fond” (restricted access archive), fond 6, and I would not be able to consult it (since 1993 such classifications of repressed material have mostly been removed). Also, I would have to order the units of each opis’ ("inventory”) separately. Annensky’s manuscripts were classified because they related to the pre-revolutionary period, and were written by a poet and scholar who belonged to a school of Russian literature (the writing of the "Silver Age") which was considered ideologically hostile to the prevailing Marxist-Leninist interpretation of history and literature. An exception would, however, be made for manuscript material already used by the Soviet scholar Andrei Fyodorov in his Biblioteka poeta edition of Annensky’s poetry, the only such collection then available in a Soviet edition, which had been published in 1959 in a print run of 15,000 copies (a tiny number). This I could consult freely.

In the event, however, when I actually ordered the material I wanted, I found that it arrived in a haphazard and sporadic fashion. The files and boxes of manuscripts were brought up from the deep and labyrinthine cellars in cloth bags by stooped women in headscarves and overalls who looked as if they were heaving sacks of coal. I found that I wasn’t given precisely what I had ordered, but a mixture of material, only some of which was the same that Fyodorov had used: there were also sheets and notebooks that he hadn’t referred to in his 1959 book,and in general the whole Annensky archive appeared to be in some disarray, classified or not. It was as if the Annensky manuscripts hadn’t been properly organized or filed, and I was struck by the way that some of the fragile and aging material was just slapped down on the desk in front of me as though it was old magazines or newspapers. At the end of the day, the papers, files and boxes had to be returned to the desk, and taken back to the cellars. On the next visit, the same ritual had to be gone through all over again. And sometimes I had to wait four or five days before the material I'd applied for was delivered. None the less, I was able to start reading the variants of the poems I wanted to consult, and my work began to make some headway.

On leaving the archive in the late afternoon, on my way to the metro station I usually passed a store where vodka was on sale, and very often there were one or two men lying on the sidewalk, apparently dead drunk. I got used to this sight, but it continued throughout the winter, even in the worst of the snow and frost. It always struck me as an “Annenskian” sight – like something from the Baudelaire-inspired prose poems Annensky wrote in the 1890s. I never saw the drunks being moved on or arrested, and never saw anyone intervene or talk to them. It was as if this was their function: to be respected – or ignored – by passers-by. Later in life, I saw similar drunks in Finland, with a similar attitude on the part of the public, but back in those Moscow days in my early twenties it came as something of a shock (even to one who, like myself, had grown up in Scotland).

On other days, I worked at the pervyi zal (first reading room) of the Lenin Library in the centre of town, and returned to MGU in the evening.

(to be continued)

See also:
Going Back Again
Going Back Again - II
Going Back Again - III

In today's EDM, Sergei Blagov discusses the growing rapprochement between Russia and China. At present, the Russo-Chinese collaborative efforts are centred on a plan to gang up on Washington and present a united opposition at the UN to the planned U.S. National Missile Defense (NMD) program. "After the recent failure of the 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty talks in New York, China and Russia seem determined to isolate the United States in a different venue," Blagov notes.

But there are also other more terrestrial points of focus for the new co-operation between the two states:

The bilateral "strategic partnership" now increasingly seems to be firmly based upon growing economic ties. At an investment conference in St. Petersburg, Russian and Chinese companies signed seven agreements to invest a total of $1.5 billion in joint projects. Chinese Deputy Prime Minister Zeng Peiyan, who attended the conference, said China encourages its companies to invest more in Russia and would aim at bringing total Chinese investment in Russia to $12 billion by 2020 (RIA-Novosti, Xinhua, June 10).

Even the lack of clarity over the proposed Russian Pacific oil pipeline, a matter of competition between China and Japan, has failed to entail negative repercussions for Russo-Chinese ties. For instance, in May 2005 the Russian parliament ratified a final border agreement between Russia and China.

The case of Igor Sutyagin is only one of a whole sequence of similar cases in Putin's Russia involving journalists, researchers, diplomats, and former security agents accused of having improper contacts with foreigners. Victor Yasmann has written an overview of the problem for RFE/RL.

from today's RFE/RL Newsline:

SCHOLARS ASK PRESIDENT TO PARDON SUTYAGIN
The Public Committee for the Defense of Scholars has sent an open letter to President Putin asking him to pardon political scientist Igor Sutyagin, who was convicted of espionage, Regnum reported on 14 June. Sutyagin was sentenced in April 2004 to 15 years in prison (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 29 April 2004). The appeal alleged that the entire case was "fabricated" and represented a "conscious compilation of accusations without evidence." The authors of the appeal also reported that Sutyagin received information in recent months that a pardon was possible if he admitted his guilt, but that "Sutyagin, naturally, has refused to acknowledge his nonexistent guilt" (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 25 March 2005). This is the second such appeal sent to the president, Regnum reported. The first -- sent in the fall of 2004 -- reportedly received no response from the president. JAC

Update: The Russian text of the letter can be read here.

It's possible to send Igor Sutyagin a postcard of support to the camp where he is imprisoned. The address is:

Russian Federation
427965 Republic of Udmurtia
Sarapul
ul. Raskolnikova 53 "A"
YaCh-91/5 section 14
SUTYAGIN Igor Vyacheslavovich
(It's important that the full name be written on the postcard)


427965 Республика Удмуртия
г. Сарапул
ул. Раскольникова, 53 "А"
ЯЧ-91/5 14 отряд
СУТЯГИНУ Игорю Вячеславовичу


(via Andy)

Finland For Thought points out the unexpected fact that Helsinki, Finland is one of the Western world's most dangerous cities.

(continued)

Amazingly, it turned out that our cases and bags weren't opened at the customs control on disembarkation in Leningrad. Other people were not so lucky – the abiding memory of that particular morning is of opened cases, with distraught owners trying to explain their contents to surly and uncomprehending male and female Soviet customs officials. At the same time, the general atmosphere was one of euphoria at having arrived. We got through unscathed with our Sinyavskys and Solzhenitsyns – not that these were especially dangerous, and we could and probably should have tried to take in some copies of Grani or Sintaksis, or even some Russian-language Bibles.. I think the reasoning was that as members of the British Council group, we didn’t want to cause embarrassment and get it and ourselves into trouble at the very outset. Or perhaps it was just that we were too cowardly to make the attempt – it’s too long ago to remember now. I mention Bibles, by the way, not because we were particularly religious, but because they were in huge demand among young people in the Soviet Union.

After the by now familiar ritual of the bus trip to the station and the night train to Moscow, we settled in to MGU fairly quickly. Once again the lodgings were in Zona V, though this time on the 8th floor. As a married couple, we were given a rather spacious room, of a type I hadn’t known existed in the Zone. It was rather bare, however, with hardly any furniture except for two metal-framed single beds – rather like hospital beds – with thin, hard mattresses, a table and two chairs. There was also a writing desk and the obligatory radio speaker, which one was not supposed to unplug, and which continuously played the lugubrious output of Radiostantsiya Mayak, with its 1950s-style “canned” music, military marches, and propaganda talks and speeches. While one could – and we did – unplug the radio, it had to be reconnected whenever the sankom or “sanitary committee” came round on its routine inspections, and many students in the British group actually kept their radios plugged in, playing softly throughout the day. This added a rather strange dimension to one’s everyday life – like an inner voice that wouldn’t go away. Later I remember reading the account by an imprisoned Soviet poet of this “compulsory” radio listening, where she talks about the instinctive desire she felt to tear the electric flex from the wall – in MGU we weren’t actually in prison, but it often felt like it.

At a fairly early stage of the semester, I told D., my wife, that I thought we should buy a record player to offset the radio. After all, there were all those Melodiya discs to buy and play on it, and we were both keen on classical music. D. agreed, and we went to GUM to look for a player. It turned out that there was only one model on sale, and there was a two-week wait for it. A couple of weeks later were able to buy the machine, and took it back to the university in a cab. Superficially it looked like a conventional record player, but was made of heavy, whitish wood. The turntable and pickup appeared to be fairly standard, but the stylus was not – in fact, the stylus had to be replaced after every 7-10 sides of playing, and fortunately the machine came with a pack of spares. The volume control was also extremely erratic. We had brought some LPs from England, and I’d hoped it would be possible to play them, but the machine couldn’t really cope with Western stereo discs, and would only play the Soviet-made (and some East German) mono ones. However, it was certainly better than nothing, and we were both glad of it during the months that lay ahead.

Unusually, we didn’t have a Soviet block neighbour. Our neighbour was one of the British students, Michael, with whom we shared the shower and toilet. Incidentally, all names of people in the British group, apart from my own, have been altered in this account of our stay. Some others have also been changed - the practice is the same one that I followed in the first series of posts.

Most of September was taken up with arranging our study schedules. D. was mainly in the mathematics department in Zone A, in the main building, while I had to organize my research at TsGALI – the Central State Archive of Literature and Art (now RGALI) – which lay right at the other end of town, up at Vodny Stadion, and involved an hour-long metro journey each way.

(to be continued)

See also:
Going Back Again
Going Back Again - II

The Moscow Times has more on the theories about who was responsible for Sunday's bombing and derailment of the Grozny-Moscow train:

Alexander Verkhovsky, a researcher with the Moscow-based Sova think tank specializing in radical nationalist and neo-Nazi groups, said that neo-Nazis appeared to be most motivated for such an attack.

"They may feel that beating dark-skinned migrants on the streets is no longer an effective way to 'cleanse' Russian cities," he said. "Bombing a train coming from the Caucasus sends a much stronger signal and is much easier and safer to do."

He said that neo-Nazi groups probably did not fear arrest, due to the poor track record of law enforcement agencies in catching the perpetrators of such attacks.

"Whenever we are shown someone tried and prosecuted in terrorism cases, there is often a doubt that the right person is being punished," he said. "Neo-Nazis feel the same way and if a Chechen were to be tried in a bombing they carried out, it would suit them fine."

Russian neo-Nazis have been suspected of involvement in several smaller bomb attacks, including the planting of a hand grenade attached to an anti-Semitic poster near a highway outside Moscow in 2002. A woman who picked up the poster was badly wounded.

Alexander Savostyanov, leader of Russia's biggest radical nationalist group, the National Power Party of Russia, said by telephone Tuesday that nationalists would never bomb a train from Chechnya "because there were Russians among the passengers and crew."

He said, however, that he would not rule out that some fringe element or mentally disturbed individuals in Russian nationalist circles could have bombed the train.

Makarkin of the Center for Political Technologies said that the bombing fitted the pattern of previous attacks outside Chechnya claimed by Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev.

On Monday, there was the spectacle of Putin embarrassing an importunate guest with a gaffe that was doubtless intentional:

RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin sparked uproar yesterday by saying Africans had a history of CANNIBALISM.

He lashed out at the continent’s past after being challenged about his human rights’ record.

In an astonishing outburst, Mr Putin said: “We all know that African countries used to have a tradition of eating their own adversaries.

“We don’t have such a tradition or process or culture and I believe the comparison between Africa and Russia is not quite just.”

Tony Blair, who had just finished talks with Mr Putin, was left squirming with embarrassment as the former KGB boss let rip.

Minutes before the outburst, Mr Blair had hailed reaching a deal with the Russian leader on aid and debt relief for Africa.

The report adds:

Earlier Mr Blair made a grovelling public apology for being the only senior world leader to miss a gathering to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War Two in Moscow last month.

(via chechnya-sl)

Official statements by the Russian authorities about Sunday's train blast are changing almost hour by hour. Interfax reports that

Experts said that the bomb used in Sunday's railway explosion and the improvised explosive device used in the attack on Russian national power monopoly UES CEO Anatoly Chubais were somewhat identical.

The experts said that terrorists behind the train bombing had acted unprofessionally.

The investigation is now trying to establish whether the explosion was staged by inexperienced terrorists or it was a professional demolitionist who faked a lack of knowledge to delude investigators,one of the experts told Interfax.

"My feeling is that one of the terrorists was reading an Internet printout from a "Cook Book for Terrorists" and the second terrorist was assembling a bomb based on the printout," he said.

"All components of the explosive device have now been sent for an examination," the expert said.

Then there's another version:

MOSCOW. June 14 (Interfax) - Investigators think Sunday's bombing of a train near Moscow was most likely the work of "Islamic terrorist groups or nationalistic Caucasus groups or members of pro-fascist extremist organizations," the Moscow region prosecutor's office said on Tuesday.

Via chechnya-sl

Yulia Latynina, writing in Yezhednevnyi Zhurnal about Sunday's bomb blast which derailed a train travelling from Grozny to Moscow:

But never yet has a Chechen organized a terrorist act directed against Chechens in general. To mortar a police station – yes. To place a landmine under a police car – by all means. But even the explosion that killed President Kadyrov spared those who were standing around. Chechens have not blown up aircraft full of Chechens and have not seized Chechen schools. The aircraft were Russian, the school was Ossetian.

So why derail the Grozny to Moscow train? In order to secure the deaths of a few hundred blood enemies in the case of success? And why arrange this simplified act of terror not in Chechnya, where it’s easier for the boyeviks to operate, but 150 kilometres from Moscow, where it’s easier for the Chekists to operate?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not at all a supporter of the conspiracy theory which supposes that all the terrorist acts in Russia are organized by the FSB. What my theory supposes is that our Chekists lack not only conscience, but also balls. You can’t organize explosions on Kashirskoye Shosse without balls.

It’s simply that the FSB, being unable to save us from real terrorist acts – apartment bombings, “Nord-Ost”, Beslan – are all too pleased to save us from imaginary ones.

It appears that Chechen boyevik Shamil Basayev has a pilot's licence and is able to fly passenger airliners. From Kommersant:

Stepashin: Basayev planned airstrike on Kremlin in 1995

On June 13 Sergei Stepashin, chairman of the State Auditing Chamber, stated that as early as 1995 Chechen fighter Shamil Basayev had prepared the plan of a terrorist act that was subsequently used by the Al-Qaeda boyeviks during the terrorist acts of September 11.

According to Mr. Stepashin, who in 1995 occupied the post of director of the Federal Service of Counter-espionage (FSK), at the time of the raid of Basayev's gang beyond the republic's borders the terrorists' final target was not Budennovsk. "His plan was to [to reach] Kavminvody, to seize an aircraft [there], fly to Moscow and strike the Kremlin," the chairman of the State Auditing Chamber said in his interview for the ORT television channel. According to him, the fighters "deployed and took the ROVD and hospital (in Budennovsk - Kommersant) "in their fright" (Rus. s perepugu)."

(via chechnya-sl)

by Catharina Gripenberg (b. 1977, Jakobstad, Finland), from the collection Ödemjuka belles lettres från en till en (Humble Belles Lettres from One to One), Schildts, 2002.


I stepped in through the door when my father was three years old.
and sat at the kitchen table fastening a pinecone to a ball of yarn.
When father stepped out through the door, I took hold of the cone
and hung there on the end of the yarn that remained in my father’s hand.

Father hurried out along the road. I rattled forward in the gravel.
On the field father’s brothers stood gazing up at the sky
where a fighter plane flew lower and lower
and made an emergency landing on the field where father’s brothers got excited.
Father vanished into the oats and fingered one of the struts.
The pilots stepped onto the field and looked up at the house.
That’s where we live! shouted father’s brothers.
Horizon line instrument, I thought at the landing wheel.

The pilots stepped in through the door and settled down in the drawing room
and were called conductors.
Father and I sat in the kitchen with the ball of yarn and the pine cone.
There was pointing at the clouds and at discs on the pilots’ uniforms.
With a teaspoon one pilot illustrated their emergency landing on the field.

In the evening the pilots smoked and drew sketches outside in the gravel.
Father and his brothers breathed at the window and held their pinecones tightly.
At night the pilots went roaring aloft
on the double sheet next to the dresser.

Father slept in a small double bed with the ball of yarn in his hand.
My mother’s side still was empty.
I told father bedtime stories about companies until he closed his eyes
and we dreamt that the pilots’ broken airplane started.
That we mended it with wood from a pinecone.

The neighbouring houses searched about in their engine hatches .
Small steps arose in the field. As the plane was assembled back together.
And the pilots kissed cheeks and foreheads. When the pinecones and the sky
were ready for takeoff. And the pilots sat in the drawing room
and raised their teaspoons to the ceiling and illustrated their departure.
But father showed them us running a lap round the house
and me ploughing through the grass. Father’s brothers stood in the field,
for a while they were hidden in a cloud of smoke,
but soon we saw them gazing up at the heavens
where the pilots were growing smaller and smaller and waving
with their black airmen’s gloves like little notes in the sky.


[my tr] See also Ghost Train

Today, June 14, is a national day of mourning in Estonia. A newly released factsheet from the Estonian Foreign Ministry marks and commemorates the day in 1941 when the Soviet authorities organized the first mass deportation of Estonians to Siberia:

Following the illegal occupation of Estonia in June 1940, the Soviet Union launched unprecedented political and economical rearrangements, carrying out purges that resulted in up to 100,000 Estonians being killed or deported in the 1940s and early 1950s.

As a result of summary arrests, mass deportations and executions almost all of Estonia’s governmental administration was executed. President Konstantin Päts and the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces Johan Laidoner were arrested and deported to Russia in July 1940. June 14, 1941

The deportations reached their first tragic peak on 14 June 1941, when nearly 10,000 people were deported to Russia in one single night. Preparations for carrying out a simultaneous mass deportation in all three Baltic States on this day were carried out throughout the first year of Soviet occupation.

On the night of 14 June, families were woken up in the middle of the night, given a few hours to pack, taken to the train stations, and separated without warning. Women, children and elderly people who were to be deported for 20 years were sent to Siberia, while men were sent to forced labour camps in the far north. The total number of deportees on 14 June was equivalent to about 1 per cent of the Estonian population.

The deportees included people from all levels of society, including members of ethnic minorities such as the Jewish community, who lost about 400 people or 10 per cent of their pre-war community.

The list of victims of 14 June deportations includes 16 members of the Constituent Assembly, 25 ministers, including some former ministers and heads of state, 63 members of parliament, of whom 26 were shot in prisons, 421 police officers and more than 300 career officers. Among the victims, there were also almost 4,000 children. The highest death rate occurred among infants of up to two years of age.

Towards the end of the 1950s, survivors were granted the opportunity to return to their homeland. However, approximately only one in four June deportees benefited from this decision. It is known that at least 6,957 persons never returned home because they were either murdered or tortured to death, starved to death in prison camps or during their forced migration, or simply went missing.

Every year on June 14, the anniversary of the first major deportation, widely viewed as an act of genocide and crime against humanity, is commemorated throughout Estonia. Memorial ceremonies were devoted to all of those who were deported, arrested and executed during the Soviet occupation. Not only were people deported, but also due to the repression they had to leave their homeland and escape to foreign countries. Forced émigrés are included in general population losses during the Soviet occupation.

(continued)

We knew that the new political situation of 1969 that had been caused by the invasion of Czechoslovakia would mean that our visit was going to be a difficult one. The process of "normalisation" (the term used for the reintroduction of Stalinist modes of government in Eastern Europe) was also spreading to the sphere of higher education and intellectual life in the Soviet Union itself. Accounts of the increased repression of Soviet dissidents were already filtering through to the West during 1969. The relative cultural "thaw" which had been ushered in by Khrushchev after Stalin’s death 1956 had lasted fitfully into the second half of the 1960s, even after the change of leadership when Khrushchev was replaced by Brezhnev and Kosygin in 1964. After Prague, however, the partially-raised Iron Curtain came down again in Europe decisively – and in Russia the fates of those who dared to speak out against the repressive nature of the Soviet regime became known in the West. It was a system which denied even the most elementary political freedoms to its citizens, and imprisoned and tortured those whom it could not assimilate and subdue. Thanks to the activities of human rights organisations like Amnesty International, the names of those who resisted were by now becoming well known in the West. The leading dissidents included the poet Joseph Brodsky, the writers Andrei Sinyavsky (who wrote under the pen name Abram Terts), Yuli Daniel (whose pen name was Nikolai Arzhak), Anatoly V. Kuznetsov (who defected to Britain in 1969), Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Ginzburg, Yuri Galanskov, and Andrei Amalrik; the editor Alexander Tvardovsky; the economist Viktor Krasin; retired general Petro Grigorenko; and the historian Pyotr Yakir. Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defected to the West in 1967 and took up residence in the United States. The repression did not only affect writers, artists, historians, economists and retired military personnel – it also crept increasingly into scientific circles: the Nobel Prize winning nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov and the geneticist Zhores Medvedev were leading figures in the loosely-connected dissident movement. My wife, who was preparing to write her first research paper in pure algebra, was already in contact with figures in the Soviet mathematical world who were associated with the workings of these groups. if not actively involved in them.

Aware that we were going into a country where information about the outside world was growing increasingly scarce, and where the activities and writings of the dissidents were suppressed on an ongoing basis, we decided to take with us some printed material that might or might not get past the security and customs checks at the disembarkation point. In our luggage we took some of Solzhenitsyn’s work, both in Russian and English, including One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which had actually been published in 1962 by Tvardovsky’s journal Novy Mir – the only work of Solzhenitsyn’s to be officially permitted (in 1969 it was also the only "dissident" work recommended by the British Council as suitable for the postgraduate students to take in with them). We also took work by Sinyavsky, published in Paris in the Russian original, well aware that it was likely to be confiscated if discovered, and one or two émigré books that had been recommended by Viktor and his Finnish wife, by now based in Canada, but also visiting from time to time in Finland and England. I also took quite a large number of books related to my dissertation, a few works of history (including Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, published only the year before) and some contemporary English novels in paperback – though many famous classics were also available in Moscow thanks to the British Embassy’s cultural section, and the students were encouraged to give those as presents (not always welcome ones, as hardly anyone in Moscow, even the most educated people, seemed or professed to know much English).

The boat trip from Tilbury aboard the Marya Ulyanova, on which we had sailed three years earlier, was a rather subdued affair compared to the lively voyage I’d made in ’67. On the boat we met several people with whom we subsequently maintained contact, but there wasn’t the same sense of group solidarity I remembered from the previous visit. One of the people we met was a postgraduate student of education, Mary, who was also bound for Moscow. Mary told us that the year before, while on a visit to Leningrad, she had met the poet Joseph Brodsky, and had interviewed him in a rowing boat on the Gulf of Finland, far out of the reach of observers and potential informers. She had recorded the interviews – much of which consisted of Brodsky reading his poems aloud – on a portable tape recorder, and had made some of them available to Index on Censorship, the Amnesty International magazine published in London. She was planning to contact Brodsky again on this visit, and promised to introduce me to him, though it would involve me travelling to Leningrad.

On the Ulyanova we all had a chance to think about our situation, and there were discussions about the role we were playing: whether it was a good thing to be a "cultural diplomat" in this sense. There were certainly some in the group who didn’t see themselves in that light at all, and were merely going along on the trip for purely practical purposes of research. But it was, almost by definition (the "British Council" label stuck), hard to stay aloof from what was, after all, an attempt to reach out from the West to people in the East through almost impenetrable barriers of fear and suspicion. It’s also hard to recall now the very real sense of threat posed at that time by the nuclear arms race between the two great powers, and the periodic crises during which the world’s continued existence seemed to hang in the balance. All of that, plus the political upheavals of the past year in Prague and Paris and Berlin, made a journey to the Soviet Union for the purposes of cultural exchange an occasion for quiet reflection. After the docking at Helsinki, as we sailed parallel to the coast of Estonia and thought about what had happened and was still happening there, the old oppressive feeling I’d had in 1967 returned. I think some of the others in the group also felt it – but they were mostly those who, like me, had been on a British Council visit before. At Leningrad, the first of the hurdles arose: we had to get through customs those books we’d brought with us.

(to be continued)

See also: Going Back Again

At UPI, Mark N. Katz discusses the implications of Russia's military failure in Chechnya:

Putin's policy toward the borderlands is counterproductive and could well result in far worse consequences for Russia than the ones he hopes to avoid. Far from preventing secession, Putin's continued failure to crush the Chechen rebellion may convince other parts of Russia that Moscow is too weak to prevent them from seeking independence. Moscow's fear of a U.S. military presence in various former Soviet republics is simply wrong-headed. Far from being a threat to Russia, this serves to protect it from Islamic threats (arising either from inside these countries or to the south of them) that Moscow is clearly incapable of dealing with by itself. Finally, Russia's security would surely be enhanced if the former Soviet republics to its south and west became democratic, stable and prosperous instead of remaining autocratic, unstable, and poor.

(via chechnya-sl)

from the Newsline:

DEFENSE MINISTER SAYS RUSSIA WOULD VIEW NATO BASES IN BALTICS AS 'SERIOUS THREAT'
Sergei Ivanov told the weekly "Profil," No. 23, that any deployment of NATO military bases in the Baltic states would be viewed by Russia as a "serious military threat." He also said Russia does not welcome the prospect of Ukrainian and Georgian membership in that military alliance but is not involved in that process. "We fully realize that if Ukraine or Georgia decides to join NATO, they will be there," Ivanov said. He said the extension of NATO to any former Soviet states is painful for Russia from any perspective, including economic. Russia faces the difficult task of restructuring its defense industry, which was closely tied to corresponding sectors throughout the CIS, Ivanov said. "This is especially true for the integration between the Russian and Ukrainian military-industrial complexes, which is very high," Ivanov said. VY

From today's RFE/RL Newsline:

In a statement posted on chechenpress.org on 12 June, Akhmed Zakaev, whose title is special representative abroad of Chechen president Abdul-Khalim Sadullaev, accused the FSB of staging the bomb attack earlier that day on a Moscow-to-Grozny train in order to lend further weight to the Russian Foreign Ministry's appeals to the British government to "abandon double standards" and "take action against anti-Russian politicians " living in England -- a clear allusion to Zakaev himself, who was granted political asylum in the United Kingdom in early 2003. Zakaev expressed sympathy for all those injured in the bombing. In Grozny, pro-Moscow Chechen administration head Alu Alkhanov blamed the bombing on "forces that want to instill in the Russian people the conviction that Chechens are a nation of terrorists," newsru.com reported. LF

Update: A translation of Zakayev's statement has now been posted on chechnya-sl, together with the link to the Russian-language original:

Chechenpress, Department of Official Information, 12.06.05g.


Government Minister of the ChRI and Special Envoy of the ChRI President in Foreign Countries Ahmed Zakayev has issued a brief statement in connection with the explosion on the "Johar-Moscow" passenger train:

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the RF and the FSB were thoroughly prepared for the forthcoming visit of British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Moscow: The MFA of the RF called London "to abandon dual standards" and "to suppress the activity of a number of anti-Russian politicians" who are located in the capital of Great Britain, and the FSB of the RF, in order to lend more political weight to this call, carried out a terrorist act against the "Jokhar-Moscow" passenger train.

One recalls the words of the first president of the ChRI, which he expressed in response to the charges made against him by the Kremlin: "Russia isn't operated by Johar Dudayev, and neither is it operated by the Chechen people". Actually, we have observed for a period of many years how the Kremlin is trying to decide its internal and external political questions by means of the propagandistic bugaboo of "Chechen terrorism", though for some reasons the victims of the terror are most frequently Chechens themselves, like in that terrorist act on the railway.

Fortunately, according to the arriving reports, there were no human victims this time. On behalf of the Chechen government and in my own name, I would like to express sympathy to the injured and their families and to wish the injured the quickest possible recovery.

http://www.chechenpress.org/events/2005/06/12/04.shtml

The Carnival of the Revolutions is up at Gateway Pundit.

To write about the second study trip I made to the Soviet Union, in late 1969 and early 1970, is a different task from the one I set myself earlier, in the series of posts I called Going Back, about my visit to Moscow University in 1967.

The world - especially the Communist world - had changed.

I spent the early months of 1968 in Cambridge. Recently married, I’d been continuing to work on my Annensky dissertation, while paying attention to events in the U.K., particularly the student revolt, begun as elsewhere in the U.K. largely in imitation of the events in Paris, which were covered daily on TV and radio, and in the press, from which it was hard to remain detached if one lived in Cambridge: the so-called “Free University” was everywhere in evidence, with boycotts of lectures and lecturers, meetings and demonstrations. There was a sense of genuine change in the humanities side of the academic world, and the ideas of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Benjamin, Lukacs, and so on were debated in a direct though feverish way that hadn’t been known in England before. The memories of my recent visit to Moscow hadn’t really faded much, and the conflict and contrast between what I’d experienced there and what was going on in British intellectual life – a steady leftward drift that proclaimed itself free of the “reified” machinations of Soviet ideology – had an effect on many, including myself. Looking back on it now, I think I wanted to believe that somehow there could be a viable alternative both to the dialectical materialism of the Soviet outlook and to what seemed the ossified rationality of “bourgeois” positivism, as evidenced by the Oxford school of philosophy and practitioners like Ayer and Popper, who gave the impression of having given up on any kind of creative or hope-inducing interpretation of contemporary society and the modern world. Rebellion and protest were in the air, and as a twenty-three year old student I wanted to rebel and protest – though somehow inside of me I knew that the whole crazy “situationist” experiment was probably doomed from the start. In Cambridge, we followed the events of the “Prague spring”, which radical students in the West were trying to associate with the Paris uprising, interpreting the Czech students’ very different revolt as an assertion of a “liberal” Marxism. Reading an unholy mix of Lacan, Heidegger, Benjamin, Artaud, Bataille, Bachelard, and so on, I tried at the same time to concentrate on drafting the first version of my dissertation, with its study of the influence of French symbolism on early Russian symbolism, and particularly on the work of Annensky.

A major shock came in August, with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. For most in the West – and in Czechoslovakia, too – this was a truly unexpected event. No one had believed that the Soviets would intervene, in a replay of Hungary 1956, taking on themselves again the ignominy that intervention had involved. There was also the possibility, for the first time since the late 1940s, that the Soviets would start exerting military pressure on the West, and even move into Western Germany. The prospect of a tactical nuclear war was, for a time, quite a real one - though this was downplayed in the Western press.

The poet W.H. Auden wrote:

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

The British and European “New Left” and the “student revolution” which had become infatuated with dreams of “socialism with a human face”, seeing this ideal realized in the aspirations of Alexander Dubcek and his fellow politicians, did not really recover from this shock, which in addition to shattering the dreams of Czech democrats, also checked the impetus of a Western social movement which, for a few months, had looked as though it might radically transform the political landscape of Europe. The demonstration outside the Soviet embassy in London that took place shortly afterwards was a much smaller and more restrained affair than the massive demonstrations against U.S. involvement in Vietnam that had rocked Grosvenor Square earlier in the year. I’d taken part in them all, yet it was the Czech demonstration that began to finally change my thinking about world politics, and to lead me to realize that most of the ideas my generation had fed on were hollow and empty. It also led me to a split in perception and allegiance: while part of me identified with my Western and British contemporaries, who weren’t involved with the study of Russia and the Soviet Union, and didn’t know what life was like over there, another part of me felt increasingly allied with those people of my age in Eastern Europe and the USSR who were resisting a brutal enslavement of minds and persons.

I spent most of the rest of 1968, and the early part of 1969 in Cambridge, continuing to work on my dissertation. At the same time, looking back on it now, I think it’s true to say that throughout all this time I was casting around for a way to unite within myself the “Western” and “East European” modes of seeing the world and its problems. This made the prospect of the forthcoming second study trip to Moscow all the more auspicious. My wife, who was preoccupied with mathematical research, didn’t see the forthcoming visit in quite the same terms – yet for her, too, this was to be an eye-opening experience in terms of personal and political awareness, and cultural contrast.

(to be continued)

AP reports:

A suspected terrorist bomb blast derailed a train traveling from Chechnya to Moscow on Sunday morning, injuring at least 15 people, officials said. It was a national holiday, the Day of Russia, and the blast occurred hours before President Vladimir Putin held a reception and awards ceremony in the Kremlin. Many Chechen rebel attacks have been timed for significant Russian holidays

The part in italics gives rise to a comment at chechnya-sl, where a poster writes:

"This nonsense has now been repeated so consistently by the Russian propaganda that international agencies have begun to present it as a fact in their ritual introductions."

Global Voices Online has a skypecast interview with China blogger Isaac Mao in Shanghai on the implementation by the Chinese authorities of the latest regulations requiring bloggers in China to register.

Update: Rebecca McKinnon writes that

Microsoft has launched a Chinese-language version of its Spaces blog hosting service, and guess what? Users are banned from using the word “democracy” and other politically sensitive words to label their blogs - although it does appear possible to use those words within blog posts, for now. (As noted in my interview with Isaac Mao, people who set up blogs under this service don’t have to register with the authorities because MSN is already obliging the government by policing their content.) But then, MSN is already in the censorship game even in the U.S., as Boing Boing discovered soon after the service’s launch.

And it's no surprise that the BBC, like most of the rest of the mainstream media, not only counsels "constructive engagement" with the Chinese authorities, but has got the story wrong. From Global Voices:

Actually, as we clarified with Isaac who invests in blog-hosting services, people who set up blogs within BlogChina or Blogbus or the Chinese version of MSN Spaces don’t have to register. Just people who set up blogs on their own independent server. I hope the MSM will pick up on this distinction eventually. So far none of them have, because few of the journalists writing the articles on this story actually understand the technicalities of blogging.

The online database at compromat.ru, which publishes material from the journal Kompromat, has reproduced an article smearing Yulia Latynina and Anna Politkovskaya, the two journalists who have done more than any others to reveal the extent of the Kremlin's involvement in the ongoing attempts to whip up ethnic conflict in the Caucasus. As Masha Gessen has pointed out, the magazine "prints for the highest bidder -- defamation is the service it provides."

Ingushetia.ru has a report here.

(via Marius)

Marc Cooper discusses Richard Rodriguez, the celebrated Mexican American writer who is currently the object of a boycott and protests by graduating students at Cal State East Bay. The students, led by their authoritarian-minded tutors, are up in arms because

Rodriguez has written in opposition to bi-lingual education and has questioned the rationale for university affirmative action programs. He does this neither as a zealot, nor as political activist, but rather as an intellectual who grew up tough, made it to Stanford, and genuinely wants the best for others like him. Maybe he's right. Maybe he's wrong. He's certainly willing to talk about it.

From an interview with Rodriguez:

We're looking at complexity. We're looking at blond kids in Beverley Hills who can speak Spanish because they have been raised by Guatemalan nannies. We're looking at Evangelicals coming up from Latin America to convert the U.S. at the same time that LA movie stars are taking up Indian pantheism. We're looking at such enormous complexity and variety that it makes a mockery of "celebrating diversity." In the LA of the future, no one will need to say, "Let's celebrate diversity." Diversity is going to be a fundamental part of our lives.

Anthony Barnett's Fable label has now released the new CDs in the jazz violin series, and I'll be aiming to write a post about some of them when I've had a chance to listen - the discs only arrived here yesterday. They include:

ABCD1-009 EDDIE SOUTH
Tzigane in Rhythm
SOLO, TRIO, ORCHESTRA BROADCASTS, FILM & FUGITIVE 1940–1947
Including unreleased live broadcasts, private recordings with pioneer bebop-inflected pianist Allen Tinney, film soundtrack, unreleased Columbia and a previously unknown release

ABCD1-010 GINGER SMOCK
Strange Blues
STUDIO & DEMO RECORDINGS 1946–1958
Including unreleased and rare recordings by the Central Avenue LA violinist who studied with Stuff Smith in genres from bop to blues to pop including an unreleased RCA Victor session by The Jackson Brothers

ABCD2-011/12 I LIKE BE I LIKE BOP
Disc 1: Abbey’s Boogie / Disc 2: Bebop Woogie
ODDS & SVENDS OF EARLY AMERICAN & EUROPEAN BEBOP VIOLIN
& CONTEMPORARY VIOLIN CURIOSITIES 1940s–1950s

An ear-opening double anthology with rare 78s and unreleased broadcasts that establishes the chronology and context of early bebop violin and rescues contemporary curiosities from obscurity with 96 page analytical-historical photo-essay Almost Like Being in Bop: A Not-So-Brief Account of the Swing to Recorded Bebop & Progressive Violin in America and Europe The essay ranges far and wide and includes new biographical-discographical findings, new interview quotations, previously unseen photos The CDs include rare and unreleased recordings by Americans: Abbey; Bella; Creach; Frigo; Girard; Kennedy; Lookofsky; Nance; Nero; Orloff; Otis; Perry; Smith; Smock; South; Wetmore Europeans: Asmussen; Bacsik; Christensen; Grappelli; Iwring; Kahn; Laurence [Hodeir]; Ottersen; Wentzel Larsen; Zacharias Many of the rare 78s have never before been rereleased including the only known example of a 1950s Leon Abbey recording and an overlooked Grappelli recording with George Shearing

ABCD1-014 RAY NANCE
When We’re Alone
COMPLETE 1940–1949 NON-DUCAL VIOLIN RECORDINGS FEATURING BEN WEBSTER CLARINET TRANSCRIPTIONS
Including unreleased only known clarinet solo home recordings by Ben Webster with Jimmie Blanton and other sessions with Ray Nance on violin and some trumpet away from Duke Ellington incl. Horace Henderson, Eddie Heywood, Earl Hines, Ivory Joe Hunter, etc

XABCD1-X013 BOWNUS 2005
Almost Like Being in Bop
BONUS CD TO FIRST 123 ADVANCE SUBSCRIBERS
Unreleased location and broadcast material by
Elek Bacsik, Harry Lookofsky, earliest Jean-Luc Ponty, Stuff Smith, Dick Wetmore
and other surprises
The advance subscription offer is formally closed so this bonus issue is no longer generally available


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


the CDs are priced as follows:
single CD £14 / €24 // double CD £28 / €48 / incl. mail
US$ or other currency enquire

Orders can be made at http://www.abar.net

Two short news reports which raise more questions than they answer:

Jun 10 2005 1:51PM

No signs of terror attack detected at Chagino sub-station - FSB

MOSCOW. June 10 (Interfax) - An examination has not revealed any signs of a terrorist attack or an act of sabotage that might have led to an accident at the Chagino electrical sub-station, which caused massive power blackouts in Moscow and nearby regions in late May, the press center of the Federal Security Service's branch for Moscow and the Moscow region told Interfax on Friday.

A fire that broke out at the Chagino sub-station on May 25 cut electricity supplies to southern Moscow, parts of the Moscow region and several districts in the Tula and Kaluga regions.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jun 10 2005 2:41PM

Chagino substation wasn't main cause of outages - Duma deputy

MOSCOW. June 10 (Interfax) - Head of a Duma ad-hoc group Vladimir Pekhtin doesn't think Chagino substation was the main cause of the May 25 massive power outages in Moscow.

"We saw for ourselves that Chagino substation was not the main cause of the accident," Pekhtin said after the group visited the substation on Friday.

However, as electric equipment is extremely worn out at many facilities similar accidents are possible in other places, he said.

(via chechnya-sl)

The Russian government continues to use the "War on Terror" as a propaganda tool, presenting itself as a trustworthy opponent of Al-Qaeda while at the same time supporting illiberal, authoritarian and dictatorial regimes in Central Asia and around the world:

DEFENSE MINISTER ALLEGES FOREIGN HAND IN UZBEK UNREST, AL-QAEDA EXPANSION TO NEW REGIONS. Sergei Ivanov suggested in Brussels on 9 June that the May insurrection and violence in Uzbekistan was "instigated from the territory of Afghanistan and nearby regions," RTR reported. Ivanov was speaking at a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council. He said "the Taliban, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and other extremist organizations" were to blame. "We are concerned by information that the training of terrorists for further export has continued in Afghanistan," Ivanov said. Ivanov said that about 50 foreign nationals whom he called extremists were killed during the Uzbek violence. He said that Russia opposes an international
investigation into the bloodshed and believes such a probe falls within the purview of the Uzbek authorities. He claimed that Al-Qaeda has extended its activities into new regions, including Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Northeastern Africa, and Latin America. Ivanov urged Russia and NATO to continue their cooperation to combat terrorism. VY (RFE/RL Newsline)

While reading about the recent historic meeting at Bialowieza on the Polish-Belarusian border, I remembered visiting this part of the world when driving with a friend in an old Renault 9 with British plates from Helsinki, Finland, to London. England, via Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Germany and Holland in the late autumn (November) of 1991.

It was an unusual sort of drive – while Estonia and Latvia had more or less readjusted and grown calmer after the events of earlier in the year, in Lithuania the roads were still patrolled by Soviet army units, and the possibility of being stopped, arrested, or becoming involved in some military activity was still there, though receding with each day that passed. The main difficulty we encountered in Lithuania was getting out of the country into Poland – at Lazdijai-Ogrodniki, for example, we found ourselves waiting in a long queue of cars stretching for over half a kilometre up to the Soviet checkpoint. When I walked up to the heavily fortified and barbed-wired checkpoint, the Soviet (ethnic Russian) duty officer told me that while he was prepared to let us through (as Western “tourists” we could jump the queue, he said), on no account would we be able to pass through the Polish border control. This proved to be correct, and when we challenged the Polish official on duty, showing him our British passports. he merely threatened us with his sub-machine gun. We had no success at the other crossing-points we tried. Finally we were told we would have to enter Belarus, and drive all the way down to Brest, where we would have no difficulty in crossing into Poland. However, we couldn’t get petrol for the journey – all the (three) filling stations in the Lazdijai area claimed to be “empty”. Eventually some Lithuanian soldiers we talked to told us that we should go to the nearby filling station and say that we were British embassy personnel travelling on urgent official business. Amazingly, this worked without proof being required, and we got a full tank of high octane, for which we didn't even have to fork out any rubles.

So, after crossing the Lithuania-Belarus border, and making a fruitless detour through the Belarusian end of Suwalki, we set off south, to Grodno, and then in the afternoon, as the light began to fade, drove down what seemed to be a fairly decent road which on the map, at any rate, looked as though it went straight to the town of Pruzhany. But this road gradually became poorer and poorer, the surface more and more potholed. By now it was completely dark, but we decided to press on. Eventually, the road became a kind of forest track. There was forest all round – the ancient Bialowieza Forest, which is the only remaining part of the immense forest that once spread across the whole of the European Plains. We moved at a snail’s pace for what like seemed like endless kilometres along the narrow dirt track, bordered on each side by dense coniferous forest. Every so often, there was a “surfaced” stretch – the surface consisting of ancient, tiny cobblestones, which made the driving even slower and more difficult. These were apparently village roads, though we saw very few houses, and almost no people, except at one strange intersection, where an onion-domed church and a bakery came eerily into view. There were six or seven people outside the bakery, and they looked like something from a Tolstoy play – men in peasant costume, with tunics, belts and high boots. My friend went into the bakery, and she proudly returned with a loaf of back bread. We asked for directions to Pruzhany and Brest, and were told to keep driving along the narrow road.

Eventually we hit the Pinsk-Kobryn-Brest highway, and reached Brest at about 11pm. The Intourist hotel we found, after making inquiries, was taken over that night by a wedding party. We were told it was too late to give us a regular meal, but the wedding guests – there must have been about fifty of them, all at long tables in the hotel dining room – invited us to share in the wedding meal, which was quite elaborate, and certainly better fare than we would have got on a regular weekday evening. After paying a hundred and fifty US dollars, we got a room for the night, and next day made the crossing into Poland with only the usual hour-long vehicle search at the Soviet (now Belarusian) customs ramp.

At RFE/RL, Patrick Moore and Daniel Kimmage ask: Was Andijon Uzbekistan's Tiananmen Square?, and conclude:

Tiananmen Square was sufficiently momentous to determine the context for subsequent events, driving some into stunned silence even as the leadership eventually decided on a reformist course in 1992. And if the tensions of Tiananmen remain unresolved, the impact of reforms has been significant enough to sustain an ongoing debate over the perils and promise of "the Chinese way."

For Uzbekistan, Andijon is a similarly momentous event, and one that is likely to dominate the domestic context for some time to come. Yet the crackdown comes against a backdrop of official domestic policy that betrays no sign of reformist inclinations, and the Uzbek government's initial reactions point only toward a hardening of an already hard line. There is still time for the Uzbek leadership to heed the limited lessons of China's post-Tiananmen path, but the violent tensions that surfaced in Andijon suggest that time may be running short.

The caption under a rather dramatic photograph that accompanies an article headed "Taskent Under Siege" and published today in Kommersant Daily draws attention to the fact that

Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) is the only remaining world leader prepared to continue relations with Islam Karimov (right).

The article, by Sergey Strokan, examines the attitudes of Western governments to Karimov's regime, and focuses on a new Human Rights Watch report on the massacre in Andijan on May 13:

The Human Rights Watch report, which was full of shocking details from the accounts of 50 eyewitnesses and victims of the Andijan events, contained evidence that the Uzbek authorities authorized the carnage in Andijan. In particular, the human rights activists claim that the authorities rejected the demonstrators' offer to enter into negotiations with them and the army units surrounding the demonstration site received the order to open fire to injure. Witnesses told Human Rights Watch that the soldiers finished off the wounded, shooting them at point-blank range to eliminate unwanted witnesses. This explains why there were so many dead and so few wounded in Andijan. The bodies of the dead were also manipulated. By order of the authorities, the corpses of old men, women, and children were removed from the scene of the events, leaving only the bodies of young men for public viewing in order to pass off the massacre in Andijan as a confrontation between security forces and militants.

After presenting the report, Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, harshly criticized the Bush administration's policy regarding Uzbekistan. In Roth's opinion, if, despite all of the calls heard today, Tashkent refuses to conduct an independent investigation of the events in Andijan, the United States will have to seriously reconsider its relations with Karimov's regime and renounce its strategic partnership with Uzbekistan in the global antiterrorist coalition and end its military presence in that country.

"China, Russia, and the United States are fighting for influence in Central Asia, but I hope that no government of any of these countries wants to buy influence, while ignoring the murder of hundreds of peaceful citizens of Uzbekistan," Roth said in summing up.

(via global-geopolitics)

In National Review Online, James S. Robbins points out that The Gulag Of Our Time is in North Korea.

(via Free Thoughts)

See also: The World's Best Hope

The comment by poster "K" on this post was long and interesting, and I've taken the liberty of reproducing it here now:

The Russian “legal system,” which would be funny if it wasn’t so painful, has declared Mikhail Khodorkovsky guilty on a dozen or so counts of anti-social behavior. For this, he has been stripped of all assets and will spend the next nine years in jail.

Moscow has always been spectacularly obvious about her tolerance for those who rise above the rest. And yet to solely blame the evil Putin would be to underestimate the unbelievable ability of the Russian people to blame the exceptional among them for all ills, and of the West’s unbelievable ability to glaze over the obvious. Here is a quick review of the simple, and sadly unoriginal story of the fallen “oligarch.”

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapses on itself – not least because its government-run industries are incredibly expensive to maintain due to their inefficiency and voodoo economic principles. Yeltsin attempts to plug the power vacuum by unraveling the threads of state-run industry. He forges ahead quickly, as popular economic theory insists that property (power) spread among the population is less likely to be captured by a single group. In a country without financial, legal or administrative institutions that establish the parameters or enforce the rules of property transactions –the cart was placed under the horse. Could it have been done a different way? There are entire schools of thought dedicated to such retrospective analysis. However, many agree that Yeltsin’s main objective was to secure the power against the obnoxiously loud Communists.

So lets look at the facts: we’re in a hurry to dismantle state-run industry (create ownership, throw off the yoke of debt) and we haven’t established institutions that enforce regulations, contract laws, property taxes, independent judicial systems, etc. There were attempts to adopt Western-style institutions, by (in Microsoft terms) copying and pasting. Even the word “business” was adopted from English to become the Russian “biznes.” A foreign idea in a broken land. For the sake of simplification, it can be said that state assets were auctioned off through several schemes, and eventually ended up in the hands of “the oligarchs.” Now – this is the point of contention: How did these people get these assets? Some had political/economic connections. Others developed them. The biznes-savvy seized the moment. There was not a single asset that was acquired for its actual worth. And anyway, how does one establish the worth of an asset that didn’t have a single honest accounting book to its name? Khodorkovsky stood out because he brought transparency to a company he made thrive - enough transparency to create western interest in Russian oil. Putin’s inner circle framed the predicament as follows: he can allow American leverage over his only security (Russian oil) or he (and several others) can make a few billion rubles while removing a very annoying and brilliant biznesman. A tough choice…

So was Khodorkovsky after political power too? Anyone claiming that a Russian Jew is guilty of displaying serious (presidential) political ambitions will be met with laughter from anyone remotely aware of Russian society. The media has formed another naively western analysis. The generation of Russian Jews that will be politically ambitious without being labeled delusional is yet to be born. The tolerant West must not underestimate Russian anti-Semitism. That is not to say that Khodorkovsky & Co. were oblivious to the political game or that they didn’t attempt to fund (buy) political influence in the State Duma to protect their economic interests. But to expect someone to stay clean in a pile of manure is almost as naïve as to attempt it.

For two years we watched as western media fell for the oldest trick in the socialist book – nationalization through accusation. The uncanny auctioning of Yukos assets to a non-existent company was a predictable season finale to a bad drama series. Roman Abramovich, owner of Sibneft oil company (and Khodorkovsky’s replacement as Russia’s wealthiest man) played the decoy de jour. The Yukos-Sibneft deal effectively subjected Yukos assets to Sibneft’s Board of Directors. But the deal was perhaps too obvious (albeit not to western media) and an auction of assets was necessary to repay the State its dues. An obscure company placed a last-minute bet on Russia’s most successful oil giant, and won. Surprisingly, the company had a non-existent forwarding address. I haven’t heard of what happened to the hundreds of thousands of Russians previously employed by Yukos, but I hear the former Yukos board members (that aren’t in jail) fled to Israel.

Perhaps these accusations are too complicated for the West to rock the boat while fighting the war on terror.

The outcome: Putin got away with something worse than murder. He reminded every foreign investor and aspiring biznes talent who’s boss. And that will take a bigger toll on Russia’s short-lived “democracy” and its non-existent “market economy” than if he had put on his KGB uniform and done what suits him best.

Some extra facts for the still perplexed:
-Yelena Baturina, owner of a construction and plastics company, and incidentally the wife of Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, is worth $1.4 billion.
-The millionaire owner of Russia’s largest juice producer, Nikolai Bortsov, is a member of Russia's parliament and among 18 government officials on the Forbes list of the “Golden 100.”
-Russia’s richest “public servant,” Suleiman Kerimov, is worth $2.6 billion.
-Let’s dare Russia to investigate their tax records.

I'd like to point out that the Haloscan comments on this blog are moderated, and may sometimes take a couple of days to show up.

In Kommersant Daily, Leonid Gankin describes how Islamism came to Uzbekistan:

The population of Uzbekistan was rather religious during the Soviet rule, in the Fergana Valley especially. That’s why any protest movement there was inevitably to take on an Islamic slant, which in fact happened. When the country found itself in turmoil during the years of the USSR’s collapse, the people of the Fergana Valley stood up for Islamic slogans. Today these slogans can amaze with their mildness. For instance, the locals demanded that Friday (the time when they went to mosque) be made a day off. They also wanted cattle be slaughtered in keeping with Muslim rules so as the faithful Muslims could buy meat at state-run shops. At that time, the meat of the animals slaughtered in the way their region kept it was sold only at markets, and they could not afford buying it there.

Islam Karimov took these innocent demands as a personal challenge. The protests were brutally suppressed. It is then that Islamites emerged in the Fergana Valley, took up arms and hid in the mountains. During the civil war in Tajikistan they supported the Taji opposition, later left for Afghanistan and tried to penetrated into the territory of Uzbekistan from there. After the American intrusion into Afghanistan the Uzbek militants fought alongside the Talibs.

There also existed a secular, democratic opposition - yet this was ruthlessly crushed in the first year of Uzbekistan's independence. "Opposition leaders were murdered in dark gateways, thrown into prisons and tortured. Nowadays those of them who managed to escaped, live out their days abroad," the article's author notes. So if an an election were held now, it's fairly clear that, in the absence of any other alternatives to Karimov's repressive regime, Islamists would win a rather large number of votes:

This alternative is by no means pleasant, and the way-out is not clear at all. Except the US intervenes and makes Islam Karimov embark on the path of democracy. But this may happen only if Washington understands that the strategic alliance with the dictator is not only immoral but it is also myopic, since there is no certainty what this regime can do next, while geopolitical consequences of its overthrown may be disastrous. But the current administration fixed all its attention on the war on terrorism and the energy security and will not want to lose an important ally. Thus, one should not lay much hope on Washington, let alone Moscow.

In the light of the forthcoming parliamentary elections in Germany (they will probably take place on September 18), and a possible change of German government,Vremya novostey’s political correspondent Yuri Shpakov interviewed Wolfgang Schäuble, since October 2002 deputy leader of the CDU/CSU Bundestag faction and spokesman on foreign policy, security and European integration. The interview contained some interesting moments, particularly in relation to a possible realignment of German policy towards Russia and Eastern Europe, as the following excerpt makes clear:

The German chancellor is jokingly called "the long arm of Moscow" when he lobbies the interests of Russia in the EU or the G8. Can Moscow count on retaining its status as the privileged partner of Germany?

Chancellor Schroeder would object to being called "the long arm of Moscow". However, Germany, in the person of federal chancellors - former, present and future – has indeed spoken and speaks in favour of the support of the valid interests of Russia in the European and Euro-Atlantic structures. And this is especially important for the good relations of Russia with Europe and the effective partnership of Russia with NATO. Nevertheless, the CDU/CSU has always criticized Schroeder for the fact that his policy has been based on "special relations". At any rate, it’s possible to interpret it that way. In the longer term, this is not in Russia’s interests - Russia is interested in good relations with the EU as a whole. This is also true of the transatlantic partnership. Special relations between Russia and Germany and new "axes" don’t help anyone, they don’t improve the situation as a whole and they narrow the field for collaboration. After a change of government, the relations between Germany and Russia will take a different shape. And then, for example, our Polish neighbours will no longer fear that the relations between Germany and Russia are being built over their heads.


Why must Poland be more involved in bilateral German-Russian relations?

Our conception of Germany’s foreign policy is based on integration, and in this sense the CDU/CSU is an advocate of good relations with Russia within the EU. If we give other countries of the European Union reason to believe that Russia and Germany are connected by "special relations" which allow them to ignore their partners, then the field of constructive mutual links between the EU and Russia will not be enlarged, but reduced. Therefore the involvement of Poland in our bilateral relations is the correct way. At one time I proposed that Poland should take part in the summits of the "triumvirate" of Chirac, Schroeder and Putin. Where intergovernmental affairs are concerned, there must not be even the shadow of distrust.

[my tr.]
(via Marius)

Anne Applebaum, writing in the Washington Post (June 8):

Like Khan and Schulz, I am appalled by this administration's detention practices and interrogation policies, by the lack of a legal mechanism to judge the guilt of alleged terrorists, and by the absence of any outside investigation into reports of prison abuse. But I loathe these things precisely because the United States is not the Soviet Union, because our detention centers are not intrinsic to our political system, and because they are therefore not "similar in character" to the gulag at all.

Most of all, though, I hate them because they are counterproductive. Like the Cold War, the war on terrorism is an ideological war, one that we will "win" when our opponents give up and join us, just like the East Germans who streamed over the Berlin Wall. But if the young people of the Arab world are to reject radical Islam and climb that wall, they will have to admire what they see on the other side. Almost never before have we so badly needed neutral, credible, human rights advocates who can investigate the U.S. detention policy in context, remembering that we live in a system whose courts, legislature and media can all effect change.

Amnesty, by misusing language, by discarding its former neutrality, and by handing the administration an easy way to brush off "ridiculous" accusations, also deprives itself of what should be its best ally. The United States, as the world's largest and most powerful democracy, remains, for all its flaws, the world's best hope for the promotion of human rights. If Amnesty still believes in its stated mission, its leaders should push American democratic institutions to influence U.S. policy for the good of the world, and not attack the American government for the satisfaction of their own political faction.

The newspaper Versiya recently published an article by Novaya Gazeta correspondent Orkhan Dzhemal about developments in "law enforcement" within the Russian Federation in the context of Andijan:

The MVD and FSB are trying to prevent a "velvet" revolution in Russia. Instead, they are preparing an “Uzbek version”.

Versiya has already written (see No 20 30.05 - 05.06. 2005 issue) that in all probability the bloody tragedy in Andizhan was a provocation by Uzbekistan’s law enforcement agencies [silovyye struktury]. However, conflict in the ruling elite is not only customary for Uzbekistan, but also for Russia. Moreover, the issue here is not so much in the conflict itself, as in the creation of the conditions in which this provocation becomes possible.

In Russia, as in Uzbekistan, the probability of an “Islamist revolt" is very high. In recent weeks and months, the MVD and FSB of the Russian Federation have literally been creating an Islamic underground, and their methods do not differ from those used by the Uzbek authorities.

It is now no longer a secret that for many years Islam Karimov has fostered an "unconstructive" opposition in the country, carefully creating what is now called the Islamic underground. Karimov's conflict with the Islamists began at the very beginning of the 1990's, when the Islamic movement Adolat ("Justice") appeared.in the Fergana Valley.

Initially the president even viewed the activity of the "Adolatovites" with approval. During the first presidential elections Takhir Yuldashev, leader of the Adolat movement, issued a call to Muslims to vote for Karimov, and in response Karimov promised to build a large number of mosques, and to make a pilgrimage to Mecca.

However, when the crowd at Namangan demanded that he fulfill those promises, he changed his attitude toward Adolat. Towards the end of 1991 the movement was destroyed, and its leaders went into the underground to become guerrillas. Thus, with Karimov's efforts, a militarized Islamic movement has created in Uzbekistan.

Karimov did not forgive the Muslims for the humiliation at Namangan. After the Adolat, the authorities went after the "Hizb-ut-Takhrir al-Islamiya" party which, although it was anti-government, was nevertheless a pacifist organization. Now any Uzbek who did has had some difference with a street policeman may find himself behind bars because the following standard equipment will be 'discovered" on his person: an Islamic leaflet and two [bullet] cartridges.

In Uzbek jails the fight against "prisoners of conscience" is being continued with particularly refined methods. Beatings to the point of death, the rape of convicted Muslims, electrical torture, starvation are a normal occurrence in Uzbekistan. These measures are also applied also to the close relatives of those religiozniki (religionists), who are not yet in prison.

All these horrors would hardly be worth enumerating were it not for the fact that wholly analogous practice exists in today’s Russia. The Memorial human rights organizations “Memorial” and "Civil Co-operation" have made available to Versiya materials which testify that in recent months the FSB and MVD of Russia are ata rapid rate “churning out” Muslims who are dissatisfied with the rule of the Russian regime .

[a list of repressions, torture, forced confessions and other punitive actions follows, with accounts of arrests and beatings of Muslims in different areas of the Russian Federation, including Astrakhan, Nizhny Novgorod, Orenburg, Samara, Kazan, Bugulma, Naberezhnye Chelny, Udmurtiya and Chelyabinsk]

[tr. by M.L. and D.M.]:

R.Kh.: ... Revolutions and social revolts are the direct product of the policy of the ruling circles, and therefore it is senseless and simply foolish to engage in a fight against revolutions. In order not to allow them - it is necessary to see the basic purpose of state administration, for example, not in the creation of business, the appeasement of bureaucracy, the suppression of opponents, etc. (these are all just instruments) – but in service to the PEOPLE as the highest purpose of state and government, in a continuous improvement of its material and cultural conditions. If we treat the people as "cattle", who will “swallow anything”, get the offshore accounts ready - the revolution will come as suddenly as a mountain avalanche. The revolution does not ask politicians for "permission".

Russia's rulers need to think about this, too. To be less fascinated by propaganda, judgments about some "caliphates" or other, planned by Russia’s enemies, or in connection with "the global threat from the Wahhabis". In their intrigues the ideologists invent any nonsense, which the representatives of the ruling bureaucracy willingly swallow (obviously because of their corresponding level of intellect). Religion is a form of consciousness, and any dissatisfaction of people is expressed through a specific form – an ideology, a religion, an ethnic or regional factor. When there are no other suitable unifying ideas (and leaders), or political-ideological views - for the expression of mass protest, then politicized religious consciousness appears on the scene, based on the idea of justice. And it transforms itself into a terrible force, the most various kinds of people rush into it, including the non-believers, who have completely different aims. It seems to me in general that, for example, the leaders of the most important states of the world are making tragic errors in placing the emphasis on the struggle with Islam. Though they present it as allegedly a fight with "bad Islam - Wahhabism". It should be noted that religious consciousness is quite closely related to the original socialist ideas. Crusades should be left to the epoch of the middle ages, and contemporary world problems must be solved not by force and by propaganda, but by economic prosperity, by humanism and by the development of man.

O.Sh. Are you referring to Islamic consciousness?

R.Kh. Not only Islamic, but also Christian - all the basic ideas of these religions rest on the principle of justice. They proceed from the rejection of the exploitation of man by man; the need for honest labor and for obtaining subsistence for oneself and one’s family by means of that labor alone, from the equality of the members of society. The famous ten commandments – they are the same in all of the world religions.

Ruslan Khasbulatov, talking to Olga Shlyakhtina about Chechnya: the Unfinished Tragedy.

[my tr.]
(Via Marius)

Russians who marry foreigners face exile, if a new bill is approved.

(Via MAK)

Rachmaninoff International Piano Competition & Festival Makes Los Angeles
Debut

The 2005 Rachmaninoff International Piano Competition & Festival will bring the drama, excitement and artistry of a world-class piano competition to Los Angeles for the first time from June 3-18.

The event brings together some of the world ' s most promising young pianists to compete for lucrative prizes and career recognition before a jury made up of some of the most revered names in the piano world.

With the final rounds making their debut in the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and played with the Russian Federal Symphony Orchestra, the competition looks to be one of the most compelling and important cultural events on the West Coast.

The final concerto rounds will be held on June 16 and 17 - with an Awards Gala and Closing Concert (Walt Disney Concert Hall) on Saturday, June 18.

The Piano Competition starts Monday, June 6th at the Redcat Theater in the Disney Hall complex. Today, Sunday June 5th, all the contestants were asked to draw numbers according to which they will play in rotation. Ms. Juurikas from Estonia drew number 19. Therefore she will be performing in the first round of competition on Wednesday, June 8th during the 1.30 to 4.30 session.

Tickets are $20-40. 213-237-2800 or www.redcat.org

Age Juurikas, 25 year old pianist from Estonia. She was nominated for the Young Musician of 1998 at her native Estonia. She has won a number of national and international competitions and has participated in festivals and has performed solo and chamber music in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France, Germany, Russia, Cyprus and Poland. Currently she is studying at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory with Prof. Vera Gornostayeva. Her previous teachers include Prof. Kalle Randalu, Prof. Matti Raekallio, Prof. Liisa Pohjola, Peep Lassmann and Toivo Nahkur.

Many thanks to Estonian Air for covering a large part of Age's travel expense!

Honorary Consul Jaak Treiman

(via MAK)

PRESS RELEASE Tallinn, 7 June 2005
For immediate release

INFORMATION CENTRE OF FINNO-UGRIC PEOPLES
Tallinn, Estonia
Phone/fax: + 372 644 9270
E-mail: suri@suri.ee

ETHNIC MINORITY CONVENES ITS CONGRESS IN THE UNDERGROUND

The 2nd Congress of Ethnic Maris of the Republic of Mari El was held in the forest in fear of persecution

The extraordinary congress condemns the policy of Russian administration and expresses its gratitude to the international community for support

Amidst a wave of persecution on ethnic grounds and physical violence against the indigenous nation of Russia's autonomous Republic of Mari El, the 2nd extraordinary Congress of Ethnic Maris of the Republic of Mari El was held June 5 in a traditional holy grove, the cultural organisation Mari Ushem reported.

Attended by foreign press and visitors, the popular representative assembly was decided not to be convened in the capital city of the republic, remembering the 1st Congress in December 2004 that took place in the street, in frosty weather and encircled by the riot police armed with submachine guns. This time the congress was prepared in secrecy. To avoid provocations and attacks organised and supported by the authorities, the event was conducted in the forest, including the press conference.

Speakers at the Congress condemned the acting president of the republic Leonid Markelov for his policy of producing ethnic and economic disorder, and destabilising cultural and social life. In their speeches, visitors and guests of the Congress condemned the late events in Mari El including the mass beatings of ethnic Maris and the policy of breeding a conflict between the Maris and other nationalities, and artificially splitting the population into separate communities.

In its resolution, the congress declared any attempts to accuse the Mari nation in "nationalism" as ill-founded and provocative. The resolution says: "We demand that our constitutional rights in our own republic be observed, without restraining the rights and interests of the whole population irrespective of ethnic origin."

The congress condemned the hysteria boosted by the republic's administration and the authorities-controlled collection of signatures in protesting against the European Parliament's Resolution "Violations of human rights and democracy in the Republic of Mari El in the Russian Federation" passed this May.

The congress also expressed its gratitude to "all progressively-minded people in Russia and abroad who have publicly condemned the policy of the present authorities of the Republic of Mari El under Markelov".

(via MAK)

This summer Finland's YLE Radio 1 will hold a Punainen heinäkuu (Red July). From July 4 through August 1 it will broadcast features on the history, culture, literature, sociology, science, political reality and daily life of the Soviet Union from 1917 until 1991. Advertised programming includes a discussion of the concept of homo sovieticus (Soviet man), a feature on Soviet schools and education, and broadcasts of material from Finnish state radio archives, interspersed with such musical rarities as the 1945 recording of the Sibelius 80th birthday concert in Moscow. While it all sounds as though it could merely be the pretext for a long month of unhealthy nostalgia (and the fake Cyrillic lettering on the web page arouses one's worst suspicions), one should remember that until quite recently critical discussion of the Soviet Union was officially discouraged in Finland. Only since the publication of books like Esko Salminen's Vaikeneva valtiomahti? (The Silent Estate?) [1996], with its searching historical study of Finlandization, has it been possible for the many complex issues raised by Finland's relations with its giant neighbour to be aired in public. The series of programmes will also include work by younger Finnish writers born in the 1970s, and will feature a radio play by Sofi Oksanen (born 1977), Siniposkiset tytöt (The Girls With Blue Cheeks), about Estonia in the postwar years. Other items on offer, such as the feature on the poet Mayakovsky and his significance in Soviet life, look distinctly less promising, though it's hard to tell in advance. But for all the apparent tedium of some of the contributions to this month-long "carnival", in which the country will relive a large chunk of its recent past (independence was, after all, only achieved in 1917, when Soviet recognition was granted), the fact that such material can be re-broadcast at all in this way, and especially with an editorial commentary, is encouraging. As a footnote to the advertised items, it's amusing now to read a Finnish radio listener's exasperated comments, reproduced from 1979:

"Tämä on jo toinen ohjelma Neuvostoliitosta tänään! Se on liikaa! Kohtuus pitää sentään olla kaikessa!"

"I mean, this is the second programme about the Soviet Union today! That is too much! There really should be moderation in all things!"

The BBC reports that two of Vladimir Putin's "key media advisers" are putting together a 24-hour English-language television news channel, to improve Russia's image in the world. Former Information Minister Mikhail Lesin is one of the prime movers (the other is Putin spokesman Alexei Gromov), and the report comments that "the project has been a long-standing aim of Mr Lesin, who once warned that Russians - in his words - 'must do propaganda for ourselves - or else we'll always look like bears'."

The proliferation of classical music radio stations and resources on the Web has to be experienced to be believed. A visit to one blog which takes this development very seriously is On An Overgrown Path. Recently I posted a link to the Arnold Schoenberg Jukebox discovered by Bob Shingleton. Now on his blog, he considers the question: Is recorded classical music too cheap?

The whole of his post is well worth reading, as it raises many varied and fascinating questions about recorded music in general, and also draws attention to the relatively unnoticed but extraordinarily comprehensive Naxos Web Radio.

I'm particularly taken by a quote from the composer Benjamin Britten, cited in the post. Long before the advent of Internet classical music radio, Britten was pointing to the dangers inherent in recorded music:

Anyone, anywhere, at any time can listen to the B minor Mass upon one condition only - that they possess a machine. No qualification is required of any sort - faith, virtue, education, experience, age. Music is now free for all. If I say the loudspeaker is the principal enemy of music, I don't mean that I am not grateful to it as a means of education or study, or as an evoker of memories. But it is not part of true musical experience. Regarded as such it is simply a substitute, and dangerous because deluding. Music demands more from a listener than simply the possession of a tape-machine or a transistor radio. It demands some preparation, some effort, a journey to a special place, saving up for a ticket, some homework on the programme perhaps, some clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts. It demands as much effort on the listener's part as the other two corners of the triangle, this holy triangle of composer, performer and listener.

The Carnival of Revolutions is up at Publius Pundit. While one might wonder about the use of the word "carnival" in some of the contexts referred to, there's no doubt that this is a good way to keep track of developments in the pro-democracy movements around the world. Robert Mayer has put in some hard work on this issue, and the result is both useful and enlightening.

from RFE/RL Newsline, June 6 2005

BELARUSIAN PRESIDENT CONSIDERS INCREASING AIR FORCES TO FEND OFF 'ANTI-BELARUSIAN HYSTERIA.' Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka said at a fighter air base near Byaroza, Brest Oblast, on 3 June that Belarus may increase its military aircraft fleet in response to increased "anti-Belarusian hysteria" in neighboring countries and NATO's eastward expansion, Belarusian Television and Belapan reported. "We're considering very attractive offers for purchasing Su-30 planes for our armed forces," Lukashenka said. "A decision has been made to buy [Czech-made] L-39 fighter-trainers to train future pilots theoretically and practically on the territory of Belarus." According to Lukashenka, foreign countries may be harboring
military-intervention plans against Belarus under the pretext of spreading democracy. "A great military potential is being amassed on Belarus's borders," Lukashenka said. "We have no right and we cannot light-heartedly ignore today's realities and real threats to [our]security." JM

On May 30, the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita published an account of an historic meeting on the Poland-Belarus border:

Take Belarus back from Lukashenka

Politicians who met during the weekend in Bialowieza (Poland) will attempt to change the EU policy towards Belarus. They signed the Bialowieza declaration. They demand, amother other things, the international isolation of people who fight actively against democracy in Belarus.

The declaration states that the Lukashenka regime holds power illegally. It also announces aid for Belorussian society - scholarships, support of NGOs and the establishment of radio stations on the border zone of Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine.

The conference was attended by European deputies from Poland and Lithuania, parlamentarians from Latvia and Ukraine, and some representatives of the Belorussian opposition.

The participants of the conference will try to introduce motions from the Bialowieza declaration to a resolution of the European Parliament on Belarus, which may be voted on in the next session of the Parliament.

The European deputies drew attention to the fact that the states of "Old Europe" do not understand politics beyond the Eastern border, and this is the reason for the collaboration of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, which want to play the main role in the EU policy towards Eastern Europe.

”’Eurasia’ is a terrible word. We must return Belarus to Europe,” commented Vytautas Landsbergis, the first president of free Lithuania, presently a Euro MP.

Before signing the declaration, Vintsuk Vyachorka, leader of the Belarusian Popular Front, talked about this symbolic place - Bialowieza. Close by, in the village of Wiskuly, on the other side of the border, the Soviet Union was dissolved. “Not long ago, the president of the state to the east of our eastern border said that the Soviet Union's collapse was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century. We, in our naivety, thought it was the greatest good fortune,” said Vyachorka.

Elżbieta Poludnik

(tr. by M.L., my minor editing)

RFE/RL reports that Russian Deputy Prosecutor-General Vladimir Kolesnikov said on NTV television on 5 June that more cases will be brought against Russia's so-called oligarchs.

Bjørn Staerk has strong words for some on the right of U.S. politics in connection with the recent furore over Irene Khan's use of the word "gulag" in her widely-reported comments on Amnesty International's annual report:

"It was dumb of Amnesty to compare Guantanamo to the Gulag. Dumb in the way it was dumb of Bush to call the war on terror a crusade," he begins. But, he notes:

Among Bush-friendly bloggers, healthy media skepticism and appeals to a higher standard than diplomatic relations seems to have degenerated into little more than a need to deflect and minimize criticism of the Bush administration. The rhetorics is now on autopilot, and it's as shallow as that of those once so ominous Chomskyites.

The war on terror has spawned a whole gallery of fallacies and rhetorical tricks:

1. Don't defend, counterattack. "That's the left for you, what do you expect? They hate America because they're transnational progressives whose failed deconstructionist utopian thingamabobs have turned them into moral degenerates." Remember to pile on with the buzzwords - the more of them there are, the smarter you look.

2. Always choose the most favorable interpretation compatible with undeniable facts. When there is no hard evidence of torture, assume it doesn't happen. When photographic evidence is presented, call it an "isolated incidence". Never admit to the possibility of any abuse that hasn't been photographed or admitted by the perpetrator.

3. When morality fails, go for legality. Show how this sort of thing is perfectly legal, so you have no idea what people are getting so worked up about.

4. Finally, if you can't deny abuse, and you can't defend it, accept it as a "deeply unfortunate" side effect of war. Act tough and adult-like, bow your head solemnly as you contemplate the horrible things war forces us to do, but protest wildly any suggestions that we should just stop doing them.

How can we fix this? We should start by not using the flaws of human rights organizations as an excuse to ignore everything they say that we don't like. If Amnesty makes 1 idiotic claim about the US in their annual report, and 10 well-founded ones, don't forget the 10 in all the excitement over the 1. There's no reason to be defensive about criticism, even when some of it is unfair. We won, remember?

It's also time to accept that the war on terror has a war part and a judicial part. Invading an al-Qaeda stronghold is war, and should be judged by the standards of war. Arresting suspects, interrogating and imprisoning them is a form of police work, and should be carried out by the standards of the justice system. When a civilian is accidentally shot on a battlefield, that's a deeply unfortunate side effect of war. When a civilian is arrested and held for years without trial, or sent to another country to be tortured, that's not "deeply unfortunate", it's injustice.

Governments are inherently abusive, they will abuse any unchecked, unobserved power we give to them. Agreeing with some politician about foreign policy should not mean throwing centuries of democratic experience overboard. By looking for any excuse to ignore legitimate criticism of the war on terror, that's exactly what many Bush supporters are doing.

On June 3, Finnish MP Jari Vilén gave a forthright and candid interview [audio link] to the OBS news show on Finnish TV's Swedish-language channel, in which he discussed the 11 violations of Finland's airspace by Russian jets that have taken place since last October. As he pointed out, the violations are being ordered by the Russian government in an apparent attempt to test Finnish reaction and public opinion, and they are a matter of concern not only to Finland, but also to the EU, of whose airspace Finland's is a part. Barroso and Solana have agreed that the matter needs to be brought into the open, but the official Russian government reaction is still to deny that the violations have taken place at all (an old Soviet practice). In the interview, Vilén speculates that Russia doesn't really know how to orient itself to the new European Union, which now contains states that were formerly under Russian and Soviet control - he also points out that the rhetoric employed by official Russian spokesmen has changed radically since the days of Yeltsin, with issues like the Winter War and the Continuation War being brought up by the Russian side in bilateral discussions with Finland in a way that was unthinkable before. Russia is stronger than it was in Yeltsin's time, the economy is doing better - and so there's more confidence on the Russian side, bordering at times on aggressivity, Vilén believes.

RFE/RL NEWSLINE Vol. 9, No. 105, Part I, 3 June 2005

INGUSHETIAN AUTHORITIES DENY DETAINING POLISH JOURNALISTS.

Ingushetian Interior Ministry acting spokesman Murad Zurabov denied on 2 June that three Polish television journalists were detained in Ingushetia, ITAR-TASS reported (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 2 June 2005). Zurabov said all three were invited to Interior Ministry headquarters "for their own safety" after a threat was received to take foreign nationals hostage. According to gazeta.ru, the three men were detained on 29 May in Nazran following an official visit to Chechnya last week during which they shot unauthorized footage of Russian forces. They had hoped to return to Grozny to interview Chechen officials. LF

At chechnya-sl, a poster comments:

Just for the record, a few remarks on this story when reading some articles about it in the Polish press. M.L.

Russian Interior Ministry couldn't explain to the media why the Polish journalists were detained. On the questions from the media, the Russian MVD anwered that the Poles filmed military objects, then that they didn't have valid documents, then that they left their organized tour-group.

Nobody takes seriously explanations of Ingush FSB that this detention had to save the Poles from kidnapping. My understanding is that the journalists wasn't happy with materials filmed during their official trip with their minders, and took some
extra video-clips on their own.

And btw according to the Polish paper Rzeczpospolita, as of Saturday, the Polish consul who went to Nazran, hasn't been able to get back those video-cassettes recordings confiscated by the FSB from the Poles.

At Social Change In Contemporary Latin America, the account of a realization:

As I was teaching today it came to me. Of course, the happiest guy in the World now that Europe has imploded is George Bush.

RFE/RL NEWSLINE Vol. 9, No. 105, Part I, 3 June 2005

IS GOVERNMENT LOOKING FOR A FEW GOOD HACKERS?

At the beginning of this month, announcements began appearing in the specialized press and on the Internet saying that the Interior Ministry is looking to hire former computer hackers, "Nezavisimaya gazeta" reported on 3 June. The daily speculated that the announcement could be connected with the government's concern about a possible "colored" revolution in Russia and its desire to control the spread of oppositionist information via the Internet. It reported that hackers shut down the anti-Putin site Walking Without Putin in January, replacing it with a call to show greater respect for the president. The daily quoted the Federal Security Service's (FSB) Information Security Department director, Dmitrii Frolov, as saying the FSB's authority in the area of Internet control "must be significantly broadened." The Internet, he said, is becoming increasingly influential and could be used "to mobilize political forces against the authorities." In January 2002, the FSB refused to press charges against hackers who violated the Kavkaz-Tsentr website, which supports the Chechen resistance, saying that the hacking did not violate the law and was merely a way for the students to express their views as Russian citizens (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 1 February 2002). RC

(via chechnya-sl)

Chechenpress has now published a transcript of ChRI President Sadulayev's interview with Radio Liberty (my tr. from Russian):

On 3 June this year ChRI President Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev gave an interview to the Chechen editorial staff of "Radio Liberty". It is published in a translation from the Chechen language.

Baudi Martanov: Almost three months have passed since Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov perished in Doykur-Evle [Tolstoy-Yurt]. The calculations of the Russian leadership that with Maskhadov’s death the war in Chechnya would start to die down were not justified: the war continues, the strikes of Chechen soldiers against the Russian troops do not weaken. The Chechen resistance was headed by Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev. In his first interview he replied to questions from Radio Liberty. The material was prepared by Aslan Ayubov.

Aslan Ayubov: Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev never thought that he would become a leader of Chechen soldiers. But what happened during March of this year changed his entire life. On 8 March Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov perished in combat with the Russians. Some time after this the military committee SDC-Madzhlisul Shura of the ChRI, created by the decree of Aslan Maskhadov, was assembled in Urus-Martan for the election of a new leader. One of the participants of this conference told us that initially Shamil Basayev was proposed for the post of leader of the resistance. But he refused, referring to the fact that Aslan Maskhadov had appointed Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev as his successor. So the 38-year-old scholar became head of the Chechen resistance. A.- Kh. Sadulayev describes how he was appointed Vice President.

Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev: In 2001 Aslan Maskhadov wrote a decree about my appointment to this post, but for a long time he did not publish it, because I several times rejected the appointment. I was ready to carry out any commission from the President, but did not want to take upon myself this inordinate responsibility. However, in 2002 Aslan Maskhadov issued a decree appointing me as Vice President for the consideration of the State Defense Committee, and after the GKO-MSh affirmed my candidature, he made arrangements for me to begin the discharge of my new responsibilities. I never even dreamed that I would ever replace Aslan Maskhadov in the post of President, because I have never aspired and do not aspire to leadership. But today, in time of war, we must all fulfill our duty and the responsibilities that have been placed on us. When we cleanse our land of occupiers, our nation will choose for itself in conditions of freedom the leader whom it considers most deserving.

Aslan Ayubov: The loss of Aslan Maskhadov is a heavy blow for the Chechen soldiers, says Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev. But the war does not depend on one person, and the death of Aslan Maskhadov will not stop it.

Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev: Today Maskhadov's death is a great loss for us, it is a heavy blow for us, and everyone knows that. But this war and the liberation of the people do not depend on one name. However glorious a hero the man was, he is only one small part of the people, not the whole people. Therefore the jihad will not stop because of the death of leaders. Those who will remain alive will continue the struggle.

Aslan Ayubov: We asked A.- Kh.. Sadulayev what changes he intends to make to the course followed by Aslan Maskhadov.

Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev: There will be no changes to our cause, we consider that our path is correct. Aslan knew and highly valued the cause, which he headed, and he was ready to live and to die for it. And for that cause he gave up his life, without blinking an eye. There will be no readjustments or changes in our course, and I see no need for them.

Aslan Ayubov: A.-Kh. Sadulayev sees only one prospect for the Chechen people – the attainment of national independence. Only in an independent state of their own will Chechens be able to defend their honor and their rights.

Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev: We have one path – the attainment of independent statehood, and for our state to be free. Because only in a free state can people ensure their rights and freedoms. In a tyrannical state the people have no rights, and the entire history and present of Russia proves that. I frequently focus attention on this, as in the crime reports on Russian television Russian militiamen are seen beating the legs of those who have been arrested. In Russia they do not even have enough sense to conceal these beatings, which show the entire world that no human rights are observed there. Indeed: why do they beat those who are arrested and show this to the entire world? Here there is either stupidity or contempt for the people. In truly democratic states if they put handcuffs on an innocent person he will take the police to court for violating his rights, and those policemen will be punished. But for Russia the deprivation of rights is the norm. Therefore Russia has neither the moral nor the juridical foundations for asserting that it attacked the Chechen state in order "to introduce order" and "to ensure the rights" of our people. How can Russians give to others what do not have themselves, and never have had?

Aslan Ayubov: A.- Kh. Sadulayev says that his foreign and internal policy will be directed toward achieving agreement in Chechen society, because, as he says, the Chechen people are few in number, and therefore they must be monolithic.

Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev: Today I will not turn my back on anyone who supports our cause in some way. We must direct our efforts into a united course. The point is not my tolerance for people, but the fact that we are a small nation, and it more than any other nation needs cohesion and unity on its historic path.

Aslan Ayubov: Soon it will be 10 years since Shamil Basayev took more than 1, 500 people hostage in Budyonnovsk. And in the second war Basayev seized unarmed people. There can be no doubt that terrorism harms the image of the Chechen resistance in the entire world. Aslan Maskhadov understood this well, and in his interviews for our radio he repeatedly condemned terrorism. We asked A.- Kh. Sadulayev what his attitude to such actions is.

Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev: Today we not only have the right, we also have the duty, based on military necessity, to inflict maximum political and ideological losses on the enemy. But the targets of our attacks must be the enemy’s military and economic objectives. Not long before his death, we discussed this with Aslan Maskhadov. Aslan categorically insisted that the mujahadeen must select for their strikes the military targets, economic objectives and state institutions of our enemies. That is our right, those are legitimate objectives in any war. However, it is inadmissible to make peaceful, unarmed people who do not participate in military actions, and especially women and children, the object of attacks. Our position is straightforward and immutable: we categorically condemn terrorism! That is not our method, not our way.

However, one ought not to forget that such actions are provoked by the limitless cruelty of the Russian occupiers with respect to the inhabitants of Chechnya. Torture, the seizure of hostages, the mass murders of people who are not guilty of anything – that is what the Russian occupiers of our land have created every day for a period of many years. Of our children alone they have killed some 50,000! There is not a single Chechen family to which the Russians would not bring grief, pain and bitterness.

Aslan Ayubov: Alu Alkhanov often states that the situation in Chechnya is becoming normalized. We asked A.- Kh. Sadulayev whether it does not seem to him that the Chechen people are accepting this authority?

Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev: The things these Russian puppets are doing in the Chechen land, against the Chechen people, do not make it possible for people to accept and support them. They have brought people to such a state that they rejoice in every blow we inflict on those puppets and traitors. For example, recently there was the "mopping up" in Samashki. What happened there? The Munafiki ruined and destroyed people’s property, as if competing among themselves in cruelty, and each group of traitors was supervised by Russians, who were testing their zeal. And this was seen not just by one person – it was seen by all the inhabitants of Samashki. There is nothing that is Chechen, nothing that is Moslem left in these Ramzans, Sulims and so forth. How can people support them, their executioners and tormentors?

Aslan Ayubov: We asked A.- Kh. Sadulayev about the prospects for peace in Chechnya. He replied that the Kremlin is destabilizing the situation not only in Chechnya, but also in the entire North Caucasus.

Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev: Putin and his generals see their potential enemies in all Caucasians. Fearing that somewhere new forces of the mujahadeen will appear, they, so they imagine, are beginning to inflict "pre-emptive" strikes against people who are entirely peacefully disposed, but in doing so they embitter them and create new centers of military conflict all over North Caucasus. Apart from punitive instincts, Putin has no policy in the Caucasus. The proof of this is that there are almost more explosions and mujahadeen attacks in Makhachkala than there are in Dzhokhar [Grozny]. In Ingushetia, too, there are almost more attacks on Russian troops than there are in Chechnya. Kabardino-Balkaria, where the occupiers, after killing one mujahadeen, trumpet that they killed ten, does not lag behind in this regard. Military actions are occurring in Karachayevo-Cherkesia with increasing frequency. Adygeya is not yet drawn into the conflict, but the Russians trying their utmost to bring that about. Next in line will be Kalmykia, where Putin, using the new law on the appointment of governors and heads of republics, intends to aggravate the situation and, using this as a pretext, to oust Kirsan Ilyumzhinov and replace him with his protegé.

Aslan Ayubov: All wars come to an end some time. But A.- Kh. Sadulayev considers that Putin himself has, by his statements and actions, deprived himself of ways toward peace. But, however that may be, A.- Kh. Sadulayev is convinced that the war will not be end in the subjugation of the Chechens.

Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev: Putin began this war, but has left himself no ways to end it. Because the Chechens will never end their resistance, they will never submit, and Putin has no other way toward peace. If he were a cleverer politician, he would not bind himself with categorical statements and would leave open the possibility to step back without losing face. The high prices of oil still make it possible for him to send his mercenaries into Chechnya, though with each year that passes there is increasingly less cannon fodder in Russia. It will wage war until we break its back. But we have not weakened, have not grown tired, have not lost our strength, for as long as the enemy is in our land our resources of resistance do not grow exhausted, but merely grow.

The three-part article published May 24-26 in Moskovsky komsomolets about what really happened at Beslan on September 1 2004 has had predictable consequences. Lenta.ru reports that the author of the article has now been interrogated by a state investigator:

On the Ekho Moskvy radio station, Moskovsky Komsomolets journalist Aleksandr Minkin reported on the interrogation of Svetlana Meteleva, author of the article entitled "Beslan without the vultures" [Beslan bez grifov]. According to Minkin, an investigator is demanding that the woman journalist divulge her information sources.

Minkin described how he became a witness to the beginning of this questioning. "The investigator came to the editorial office and suggested to Svetlana Meteleva that she should agree to divulge her sources in an amicable fashion, saying 'we will find them, we will punish them'," Minkin reported. He added that the investigator came to the editorial office "apparently in an informal capacity", and did not take any written statement.

As Minkin says, Meteleva's article contains no secret information. "Just now the trial of the only surviving hostage-taker is in progress, and the court is open to the public. It's hard to understand why sources are being sought, as these materials are being heard in the criminal case," the journalist said.

According to the existing law regarding the media, journalists are not obliged to reveal their sources of information. Minkin said that the investigator threatened to open a criminal case if Meteleva refuses to name her sources.

The article "Beslan without the Vultures" was published in three issues of Moskovsky komsomolets which appeared on May 24, 25 and 26 this year. According to Minkin, the article "describes in detail what happened in Beslan at the moment of the seizure and assault and who was to blame for the fact that it all ended in the deaths of hundreds of people."

(via chechnya-sl)

Liz Fuller at RFE/RL presents a comprehensive account of the interview given to RFE/RL's North Caucasus Service today by Abdul-Khalim Sadullaev, the successor to slain Chechen President and resistance leader Aslan Maskhadov. In the interview, which consisted of replies to questions put by RFE/RL, Sadullaev appears closely to follow the line of Aslan Maskhadov, condemning terrorism:

Sadullaev [..] said that while the resistance will continue to try to inflict the maximum damage on the Russian armed forces and military targets, they will not attack peaceful civilians, women, and children, and will not take them hostage.

The last part of the interview, where Sadullaev gives his comments on the policies of Vladimir Putin, is particularly noteworthy,and contains some shrewd and realistic political analysis:

Asked to comment on the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Sadullaev said he [Putin] seeks to create new points of tension in the North Caucasus by provoking "people who are living peacefully" to the point that there is a backlash against Moscow. Sadullaev said explosions and killings in Daghestan have become as frequent as in Grozny because Putin has no cohesive North Caucasus policy. He said the situation is just as bad in Ingushetia, and only a little better in Kabardino-Balkaria. Adyegya, for the moment, remains comparatively quiet, but Moscow is trying to provoke unrest there, too, he said.

Sadullaev predicted that Putin will move against the long-time president of Kalmykia, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, as "he wants to install his own people everywhere." Sadullaev went on: "It was Putin who began this war and he has no way to end it. The war cannot end with us being forced to our knees and capitulating, and Putin has left himself without an alternative. With his loud pronouncements, those of a stupid and shortsighted person, he has cut off the only path to ending the war." Sadullaev predicted that the war will continue "as long as the price of oil remains high, as long as Russian kids are ready -- despite the demographic crisis -- to put on Russian uniforms and serve in the army, and until something breaks Putin's back." But he continued: "I do not think this can go on for much longer. There will have to be an end, especially as our forces are not becoming weaker, and we are prepared to go on fighting." Sadullaev went on to predict that "Putin will try to get rid of those people who witnessed massive human rights violations and genocide. He will try to destroy anyone" who could record what happened for posterity.

Mosnews quotes U.S. businessman George Soros as saying that Vladimir Putin urged Ukraine's President Kuchma to use armed violence against pro-democracy demonstrators during the Orange Revolution. Putin apparently also offered the same advice to President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, who followed it.

IWPR's Caucasus Reporting Service has a report on recent relatively large-scale protests in Kabardino-Balkaria, following the murder of a local leader:

Hundreds of people from the Balkar ethnic minority defied a security crackdown at the weekend to hold a rally in Nalchik, the capital of the North Caucasian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, in protest at what they describe as persistent discrimination by the authorities.

Some of the 1,500 people at the May 28 demo called for the recreation of Balkaria within its 1944 boundaries – a time when the Balkars were deported to Central Asia en masse by Stalin, shortly after the mass deportation of the Chechens and Ingush. The demonstrators also complained about police intimidation and abuses in Balkar villages in Kabardino-Balkaria.

The immediate trigger for the protest was the murder of a leading Balkar politician who had opposed a new law which redraws all the territorial boundaries inside the republic. The legislation is encountering mass opposition.

More trouble broke out on May 30 in the town of Tyrnyauz when a spontaneous rally was held to protest against attempts to sack Elbrus district head Khizir Makitov, another strong opponent of the territorial law. A delegation of ministers arrived in the town to announce the dismissal of Makitov and the appointment of his successors, but failed to persuade deputies in the local assembly of their decision.

Balkars, a Turkic ethnic group, currently comprise around ten per cent of the population in Kabardino-Balkaria, being outnumbered by Kabardins and Russians.

The authorities made strenuous attempts to obstruct the initial rally, cutting off access to mountain villages from the early morning of May 28 and even cancelling public transport. The square in front of the government building was surrounded by a triple cordon of police and interior ministry troops. The spot where the protest actually took place - a memorial to victims of political repression - had an even higher concentration of troops.

The residents of the Balkar village of Khasanya, on the edge of Nalchik, got through the cordons with difficulty and walked into the centre of the city. “The actions of our authorities cannot be explained,” said Ramazan Friev, deputy head of administration of Khasanya. “You can’t call it anything but provocative.

“We made an application to hold the rally ten days in advance, as is required by law, and met the interior minister on the day before. He promised that they would not obstruct us. We are capable of providing our own security and we have a group of 250 trained sportsmen who keep an eye on things.”

The Russian government is now trying implicate "Chechen terrorists" in the May 13 Andijan violence:

LAVROV DENIES REPORT OF KYRGYZ TROOP REQUEST, HINTS AT 'CHECHEN' TIES TO UZBEK VIOLENCE. Sergei Lavrov on 1 June dismissed reports that the political leadership of Kyrgyzstan has raised the possibility of expanding Russia's military presence in that country (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 25 May 2005), Interfax reported. Lavrov was speaking to journalists in Vladivostok after talks with his Chinese counterpart Li Zhaoxing. Moscow has received no such official request from Kyrgyzstan, Lavrov said. He noted that the "Kyrgyz leadership has a sovereign right to decide how to ensure the security of its territory," Interfax reported. Lavrov also suggested there might have been "Chechen terrorist" involvement in the violence in Uzbekistan's eastern city of Andijon on 13 May (see also Uzbek item below). Pro-Moscow Chechen administration head Alu Alkhanov rejected as unfounded Lavrov's allegation, according to RIA Novosti as cited by yufo.ru. Alkhanov said that while some of the people involved might have been Chechens, they have no ties to his administration or to the Chechen people. VY/LF

(from today's RFE/RL Newsline)

A Beslan hostage-taker accuses Russia

At his trial, the only member of the group to escape alive contradicts Moscow's version

By Lorraine Millot
Thursday 02 June 2005 (Libération - 06:00)
Moscow
from our own correspondent


It was actually an "assault" by Russian special forces that started the massacre in Beslan on September 3, Chechen Nurpashi Kulayev, the only hostage-taker to escape alive, claimed before the law-court in Vladikavkaz, where he has been on trial for the last two weeks. On the third day of the hostage-taking, the "colonel" who led the group suddenly "rushed" into the gymnasium where more than 1,000 children, parents and teachers were huddled, 24 year old Nurpashi Kulayev said on Tuesday.

According to Kulayev, the colonel shouted: "The assault is beginning", announcing that a sniper had just cut down one of his men. He then called the headquarters of the police force on his mobile phone and yelled: "What are you doing? Have you started an assault? Don't you know how many children there are here?" Then, enraged, he threw the phone [on the ground] and gave the order "to fight till the end".

According to this account, Russian snipers succeeded in killing the two hostage-takers who were holding two large mines placed in the gymnasium, which then detonated, causing the first two very loud explosions, heard just after 1 p.m..

This version contradicts that of the Russian authorities, who have always claimed that the outcome of taking of hostages of Beslan had been caused by Chechens themselves, in a completely "unexpected" way . The account of the defendant, who claims "not to have killed anybody", must, of course, be taken with caution. But the official version was never very plausible. The authorities themselves had indicated on September 3 that at 1 p.m. precise, i.e. just before the two large initial explosions, they had sent three "first-aid workers" close to the school, to collect corpses from the courtyard. The later course of the events and Nurpashi Kulayev's testimony give to think that those "first-aid workers" were in fact snipers charged with preparing the assault.

The Beslan hostage crisis, for which Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev claimed responsibility, officially caused 330 deaths, 186 of which were of children, mostof them killed during this final assault.


Ce fut bien un «assaut» des forces spéciales russes qui a déclenché le massacre de Beslan le 3 septembre, a assuré le seul preneur d'otages rescapé, le Tchétchène Nourpachi Koulaïev, devant le tribunal de Vladikavkaz qui le juge depuis deux semaines. Au troisième jour de la prise d'otages, le «colonel» qui dirigeait le commando a soudain «accouru» dans le gymnase où étaient entassés plus de 1 000 enfants, parents et professeurs, a raconté mardi Nourpachi Koulaïev, 24 ans.

«L'assaut commence», aurait crié ce colonel, annonçant qu'un sniper venait d'abattre l'un de ses hommes. Il aurait alors appelé avec son portable le quartier général des forces de l'ordre et hurlé : «Qu'est ce que vous faites ? Vous donnez l'assaut ? Vous ne savez pas combien il y a d'enfants ici ?» Puis il aurait rageusement jeté son téléphone et ordonné de se «battre jusqu'au bout». Selon ce récit, les snipers russes auraient réussi à abattre les deux preneurs d'otages qui tenaient en main deux grosses charges placées dans le gymnase, qui auraient alors explosé et provoqué les deux premières très fortes détonations, entendues juste après 13 heures.

Cette version contredit celle des autorités russes qui ont toujours assuré que le dénouement de la prise d'otages de Beslan avait été provoqué par les Tchétchènes eux-mêmes, de façon totalement «inattendue». Le récit de l'accusé, qui assure n'avoir jamais «tué personne», est bien sûr à prendre avec précaution. Mais la version officielle n'a jamais été très plausible. Les autorités elles-mêmes avaient indiqué le 3 septembre qu'à 13 heures précises, c'est-à-dire juste avant les deux grosses explosions initiales, elles avaient envoyé trois «secouristes» près de l'école, pour ramasser des cadavres dans la cour. Le déroulement ultérieur des événements et le témoignage de Nourpachi Koulaïev laissent à penser que ces «secouristes» étaient plutôt des tireurs d'élite, chargés de préparer l'assaut.

La prise d'otages de Beslan, revendiquée par le terroriste tchétchène Chamil Bassaïev, a fait officiellement 330 morts, dont 186 enfants, la plupart tués lors de cet assaut final.


(via chechnya-sl)

Neeka's Backlog has a post about a three-part series at The World on pro-democracy movements - there's a portion devoted to Russia, with photographs by Veronica Khokhlova.

Arnaud Leparmentier, writing in Le Monde on May 31:

Le non français est un non nationaliste, isolationniste, un refus de faire le saut fédéral rendu indispensable par l'élargissement. Cette hésitation française n'est pas nouvelle. Elle a accompagné toute l'aventure européenne.

Depuis cinquante ans, ils se croient européens, mais n'ont accepté l'Europe qu'à condition qu'elle soit une grande France,un levier d'Archimède qui lui permette de recouvrer sa puissance d'antan et de se protéger de l'Allemagne.

[...] les Européens ménagent le souverainisme qui sommeille chez les Français. L'Europe avance prudemment,dans un subtil dosage de supranational et l'intergouvernemental. Rien ne se fait contre la France, que l'on veilleà ne jamais mettre en minorité.

Cet équilibre favorable à la France tombe avec l'élargissement. [...]Ainsi,avec la crise irakienne de l'hiver 2003, Paris découvre que, même alliée à Berlin, elle peut être mise en minorité et qu'elle n'a aucune chance d'imposer sa vision d'une "Europe-puissance".

Window on Eurasia:

Russian Nationalist Skinheads Attack Mari Cultural
Figures

Paul Goble

Tartu, May 31 - Less than a month after the European Parliament
condemned the Mari El authorities for human rights abuses, a group of 30
Russian skinheads shouted racist epithets at and then beat up 15 leading
Mari cultural figures Friday night in that Middle Volga republic's capital
city of Yoshkar-Ola (http://www.mari.ee, May 29-30).

Mari opposition groups say that several of the skinheads involved had told
them that Mari El officials had asked the notorious Russian National Unity
(RNE) organization to carry out the attacks and promised them both immunity
and rewards for doing so (Press release from the Information Center of
Finno-Ugric Peoples, May 31).

According to the Mari opposition, the skinheads -- who number some 2,000 in
Yoshkar-Ola alone according to "Izvestiyia Mari El" in its May 20-26 issue,
added Markelov's right-hand man, Andrei Tsaregorodtsev, had promised to
give the RNE a plot of land on which the group could organize a base for its
future activities.

But republic President Leonid Margelov has denied that he or his government
had had anything to do with the attacks and promised a thorough
investigation to identify the "persons unknown" who had beaten the Mari
figures, some of whom his office said were government employees
(http://gov.mari.ru/main/news/rep/pres/2005/3005_1.html .

Markelov's denial, however, is not entirely credible. On the one hand, he
has repeatedly denied any responsibility for similar attacks in the past but
failed to bring their perpetrators to justice, and he has long had close
ties to Russian nationalist extremists, including Vladimir Zhirinovsky's
Liberal Democratic Party.

And on the other, Markelov has routinely attacked the Mari opposition in
terms that recall those used against dissidents in Soviet times. Less than
72 hours after the latest beatings, Markelov arranged a declaration by local
officials against them and their foreign supporters
(http://gov.mari.ru/main/news/rep/life/2005/3005_1.html).

That hastily prepared declaration, passed not by the parliament as a whole
but signed only by four of the five faction heads within it, went
significantly beyond what the Russian Foreign Ministry had said on May 20.
At that time, the Russian MFA simply suggested that the European Parliament'
s action was based on misinformation.

Yesterday's declaration by the Mari El parliament leaders, however,
condemned that international action in the broadest possible terms, arguing
that it represented "a crude interference in the economic, social-political
and cultural life" of the Republic of Mari El.

It said that such criticism of the Mari El government reflected the joint
efforts of a small group of Maris without support at home who are prepared
to cooperate with those "international forces" who seek to spark ethnic
tensions there to distract attention from "the violation of the rights of
Russian speakers in the Baltic countries."

And it concluded with a ringing assertion that both the actions of the Mari
opposition and those of its international supporters in the European
Parliament or elsewhere "are condemned to fail regardless of their source."

Given the international attention that the European Parliament's action of
May 12 attracted to the situation in Mari El, this latest round of beatings
and statements almost certainly raises the stakes for all involved -- the
Mari opposition, Markelov himself, and the international community as well.

For the opposition, this latest round of beatings and the parliamentary
declaration are clear signals that Markelov has no plans to back off from
his approach and that if anything he plans to increase the level of
repression that he has visited upon the Republic of Mari El since becoming
president there in 2000.

For Markelov, these events represent a turning point. If he gets away with
them, he will probably be able to crush any opposition to himself for
sometime to come. But if Moscow decides that he has gone too far and that
his actions are causing trouble for Russian foreign policy, then Markelov
might find himself out in the cold.

And for the international community, these beatings and the parliamentary
declaration also represent a test. If the European Parliament and other
groups concerned with human rights decide that they have done all they can
in a small republic far away, then Markelov will probably be able to claim a
victory.

But if they view his actions and those of the most notorious skinheads as
threats to democracy and the rule of law not only in Mari El but in the
Russian Federation as a whole, then such international groups and
organizations will have to consider what they might do in response to change
that situation.

As Markelov and his supporters in Moscow understand, the international
community does not have that a large number of good options. But that many
in that community have bitter memories about what can happen when it fails
to take action against those who are prepared to use fascist groups to
intimidate their opponents.

Window on Eurasia:

Two Faces of Vladimir Putin

Paul Goble


Tartu, June 1 -President Vladimir Putin's colorful suggestion
last week that if Riga continues to press its territorial demands against
the Russian Federation, Moscow won't give Latvia land but rather only "a
dead donkey's ears" attracted widespread attention not only in Moscow but
internationally as well.

And the Russian president added in equally emotional language
that such demands now were especially inappropriate and wrong because
"Russia at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Europe had given away tens
of thousands of square kilometers of its historical territories."

But during the very same media appearance, a May 23rd visit to
"Komsomol'skaya pravda" on the occasion of that paper's 80th anniversary,
Putin made an acknowledgement that is likely to prove far more important in
the long run -- but one that so far has attracted little attention even from
those who might be expected to care the most about it. .

Responding to a question from one of that paper's editors about
the withdrawal of Russian bases from Georgia and other former Soviet
republics, Putin again began with a colorful Russian saying about not crying
over the loss of your hair if you have lost your head but immediately became
serious:

"All the countries which you have named are former republics of
the Soviet Union. But I want to stress that these are former republics.
Today they are independent countries. This means that we recognize their
right to define independently their foreign, domestic and defense policies."

And the Russian leader continued: "All foreign bases, if they
are not occupation forces, are maintained there with the agreement and at
the request of partner countries. And if there is no such desire on the
part of our partners, then we have no choice" but to withdraw them, although
he added that he hoped no one would bring "pressure" to bear on Russia to do
so.

For Putin, as for most Russians, any territorial claim against
their country is naturally a far more sensitive issue than the withdrawal of
Russian forces from the former Soviet republics, however disturbing that is
for many of them. Consequently, Putin's paired responses may be nothing more
than an accurate reflection of his feelings and theirs.

But there is another and more intriguing possibility, one that
was suggested by Moscow analyst Tat'yana Stanovaya a few days after Putin's
remarks. In an essay posted online, she suggested that Putin may have made
a self-sconscious choice to adopt these two different approaches in so
public a way (http://www.politcom.ru, May 25).

By using colorful language to condemn the Latvian demands, Putin guaranteed
the kind of media attention that will show himself to the Russian people as
a leader who shares their concerns and fears, even as his more measured but
less widely reported comments indicated that he is prepared to deal more
calmly with Russia's declining power.

If that analysis is correct, then Putin would appear to have accepted the
advice of Fedor Luk'yanov, the editor of the journal "Russia in Global
Politics." In an April 28 essay in "Izvestiya," Luk'yanov urged the Kremlin
to recognize that Russia's declining power in the former Soviet space is "to
a large extent not a political but a psychological" problem.

Pointing out that Moscow is not in a position to stop or reverse this
decline anytime soon and that suggestions to the contrary are dangerous and
counterproductive, Lukyanov urged that the Russian leadership study the ways
that other countries have dealt with a withdrawal from empire.

"It is no accident," he wrote, that the British carefully organized
ceremonies on the occasion of their departure from their colonies "lest the
impression be created that they had been forced to leave. [And because they
did so,] the British left with their head held high and a feeling of their
own worth."

"The psychological importance of such behavior is enormous," Luk'yanov
continued, and this is a lesson that the current leadership of the Russian
Federation must learn and use to help the Russian people get through this
particular and largely unprecedented phase of their national life
(http://main.izvestia.ru/print/?id=1695478).

Putin's comments at "Komsomolskaya pravda" suggest that he may be edging
toward just such an understanding, but of course, in the nature of things,
he can do so effectively only by not directly acknowledging publicly or
perhaps even to himself that that is precisely what he is doing.

Window on Eurasia:
Moscow in 2002 Secretly Authorized Police to Shoot
Demonstrators

Paul Goble

Tartu, June 1 - The Russian Interior Ministry in October 2002
issued an order, restricted "for official use only," to militia offices
around the country permitting them in undefined special circumstances to use
lethal force against protesters even if the latter are unarmed and to
confine suspects of various kinds in "filtration points"

This order, numbered 870 and signed by Boris Gryzlov, who was
then Russian Interior Ministry and is now chairman of the State Duma, was
uncovered by human rights activists looking into police attacks in
Blagoveshchensk and reported by them at a press conference on Monday
(http://www.polit.ru/analytics/2005/06/01/prik_print.html).

Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the longtime president of the Moscow Helsinki Group and
a leading specialist on Russian government violations of human rights, said
that she and her colleagues had long suspected the existence of just such an
order but that they had not been able to extract a copy from the authorities
until recently.

As she and other human rights activists examined the Blagoveshchensk
incidents, she continued, "local law enforcement organs themselves showed
[them] the order as a justification for their actions." They were, from
their perspective, simply following orders from above.

Georgiy Satarov, another leading human rights activist, pointed out at the
same press conference that this order had been issued long before the events
in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine that some have suggested were prompting
Moscow to take a new, harder line. Rather, he said, the country's force
structures were given a green light for cruelty much earlier.

And Valeriy Borshchev, the president of the Social Partnership
Fund, said that the order, being a normative act of the state, should have
been made public immediately rather than issued "for official use only." And
other participants said that the failure of the order to precisely define
the circumstances in which it could be used invited official misconduct.

Valeriy Gribakin, the head of the Interior Ministry's Public
Affairs Administration who attended the press conference, dismissed the
argument that Russian law somehow required that this order be made public.
He said that the issuance of orders "for official use only" was normal
practice within the Russian MVD.

But in response to questions from the audience and other
participants, Gribakin said that he personally was not in a position to
provide definitions of what constituted "extraordinary circumstances" that
would justify the use of force by the militia or to define "filtration
points" and the actions permitted against those confined in them.

For their part, human rights leaders Alexeyeva and Satarov said
that they were calling on General Procurator Vladimir Ustinov and Justice
Minister Yuri Chaika to explain just what this order actually means and also
to consider whether both its provisions and the way it was issued are in
conformity with Russian law.

But these human rights activists are not hopeful that the
Russian government will annul this 2002 order. Indeed, in an interview in
yesterday's "Nezavisimaya gazeta - Religii," Alexeyeva that she fears that
the Russian government now is more interested in restricting the rights of
its citizens than in defending those rights.
(http://religare.ru/print18186.htm)

From the Time Archive, a short book review from the years just after World War II:

Apr. 19, 1948
TELL THE WEST (358 pp.) — Jerzy Gliksman—Gresham ($3.75).

When Jerzy Gliksman, a Polish Socialist, was about to be released, in 1941, from the Siberian forced labor camp in which he had been held for a year, he asked a fellow prisoner if he could help her in any way.

"You can do one thing for us, and one thing only," she replied. "Tell all you know about us. ... Tell the West. . . ."

The next day Gliksman repeated these words to another slave laborer, Professor Strovsky, an aging Russian scholar. Strovsky, with the fatalism of those who have suffered too much, doubted if telling the West would help much: "They won't want to believe you anyway. . . ."

Strovsky's bitter words are a damning comment on that double standard of morality by which large sections of the Western world, especially its intellectuals, have judged the Stalin dictatorship. Many of the same people who, in the 1930s, had been stirred by reports of Nazi concentration camps, refused to face the unpleasant fact that Russia used them too. Now Gliksman, who found himself in a Siberian labor camp after Poland was carved up by Hitler and Stalin, tells the story of that experience with a better chance of attention. The book is an unadorned record of human suffering devoid of literary flourish.

Gliksman was one of those Socialists who had thought that the Stalin regime would welcome non-Communist radicals. When he was arrested he tried to convince the NKVD it was making a mistake. The mistake, as others have discovered before & since, was his.

The international (English-language) edition of Helsingin Sanomat has a summary of news on this subject:

Russia has denied that its military planes had violated Finnish airspace over the Gulf of Finland, as claimed in a diplomatic note sent by Finland to Russia a month ago.

The response was presented by Russia’s Ambassador to Finland, Vladimir Grinin on Friday last week; he read the statement from a piece of paper, which he insisted on keeping himself. The official denial was followed by a tacit admission that violations of airspace may have occurred; the Ambassador said that Russia has now improved the organisational and technical aspects of its air traffic control system.

The Finnish government is sticking to its view that Russian planes have violated Finnish airspace eleven times between October last year and May this year.

Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen (Centre) saw the Russian response as a de-facto admission of the violations. However, the government was not satisfied with it.

The issue was discussed on Wednesday at a meeting of the government’s committee on foreign and security policy, which was also attended by President Tarja Halonen.

Finland now expects a new explanation from Russia. Vanhanen said that he hopes that the matter can be cleared up before he visits Moscow on Tuesday next week.

The government also decided that in the future, it would report all territorial violations as soon as they are confirmed. The Ministry for Foreign Affairs says that the new practice would also apply to submarines and other vessels encroaching on Finnish territorial waters.

Previously Russia has appreciated Finland’s willingness to deal with such awkward issues in silence.

A statement issued after Wednesday’s meeting notes Russia’s denial of the territorial violations conflicts with information from Finnish officials, and that Russia has not presented any evidence to back up its version. Finland, meanwhile, has given Russia detailed information about the incidents.

After Wednesday’s meeting, Ambassador Grinin was summoned to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs where Undersecretary of State Markus Lyra gave him an oral account of the Finnish view. Grinin said that he would inform Moscow about the Finnish point of view.

"The ball is now in Russia’s court", Vanhanen said on Wednesday. He would not say if Finland wants an open admission and apology from Russia.

The Ministry for Foreign Affairs believes that the violations were more the result of indifference on the part of the pilots than any deliberate tests of Finland’s ability to monitor its airspace.
The last such incident occurred over a month ago.

Writing in the May 30 edition of Novaya gazeta, Anna Politkovskaya, the bi-weekly's special correspondent covering Chechnya, compared the situation over the past few weeks in Chechnya and Ingushetia to 1937, the high point of Stalin's terror. She also said the rash of kidnappings in both republics was very similar to what happened just prior to the Beslan school seizure and the Dubrovka theater siege, and cited the case of the Gorchkhanov family, whose home in the Ingushetian village of Plievo was raided by unknown men in camouflage and masks on May 23. According to Politkovskaya, the raiders, who identified themselves as being "from the FSB," severely beat Magomed-Bashir Gorchkhanov after demanding to know where he was hiding weapons. They kidnapped his brother, Adam, who relatives describe as not being entirely mentally competent, as well as all of the brothers' documents and the family's photo album.

In Politkovskaya's view, such raids and kidnappings are something other than just another attempt to create the impression that the security services are conducting successful anti-terrorist operations. "‘They' are again concocting something," she wrote. "They are preparing ‘terrorist material'. And there are too many coincidences here: for example, those who were carried off prior to Nord-Ost and Beslan were also without fail kidnapped with [their] documents. When they simply want to destroy the latest ‘accomplice', they don't take documents. Passports are needed for lying in the pockets of neutralized terrorists – they must be shown on television later to demonstrate to us [that] the terrorists went on their business with identity cards. And it very much helps in quickly ‘determining the malefactors' identity'."

Politkovskaya reported that as the May 30 issue of Novaya gazeta went to press, Adam Gorchkhanov was taken to a hospital in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia, practically dead. "The doctors do not doubt that he was tortured," she wrote.

(from