January 22, 2000    
This Date's Issues: 4057 4058 4059

Johnson's Russia List
#4059
22 January 2000
davidjohnson@erols.com

[Note from David Johnson:
1. The Nation: Calvin Trillin, The Russians in Chechnya.
2. AFP: Putin's KGB spy career bombed, say US-based experts.
3. smi.ru: LIBERAL INTELLIGENTSIA CALLS PUTIN TO ACCOUNT.
4. ITAR-TASS: RUSSIA DEPUTY PM ASSESSES STATE OF AGRICULTURE.
5. AP: Soviet Friend John Chrystal Dead at 74.
6. Matt Bivens: 4058/Goble on deportation.
7. Financial Times (UK): Writers come in from the cold: In Moscow, Andrew Jack talks to Natasha Perova about her crusade to bring Russian authors to the attention of the English-speaking world. 
8. Andreas Umland: Election Time in Yekaterinburg.
9. U.S. News and World Report: Christian Caryl, Fighting for every yard. Slow going for Russian forces in Grozny.
10. U.S. News and World Report: Christian Caryl, MOTHERS' HELPERS. 'What are you crying for?'
11. Baltimore Sun: Kathy Lally, Russia chills journalist in reminder of old days. Police come knocking with warrant to take him to mental hospital.
12. The Guardian (UK): Radislav Millrood, Why foreign training is failing Russia's teachers.
13. The Electric Telegraph (UK): Marcus Warren, Russians in Chechnya 'murdering and raping']

*******

#1
The Nation
February 7, 2000
The Russians in Chechnya 

It seems so familiar to me:
They know one more tank, one more gun'll
Allow best and brightest to see
The light at the end of the tunnel.

Calvin Trillin 

******

#2
Putin's KGB spy career bombed, say US-based experts

WASHINGTON, Jan 22 (AFP) - 
Russian acting President Vladimir Putin's career as a Soviet spy was 
third-rate at best and ended in apparent humiliation, US-based intelligence 
analysts say.

After 15 unexceptional years with the KGB, Putin was removed from active duty 
and dumped into the kind of job usually reserved for aging spies headed for 
retirement, the analysts said. He resigned from the KGB soon after.

"He had a very mediocre career (with the KGB) at best," said Paul Joyal, a 
former staff member of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, who now works as 
an analyst in the private sector.

According to an official biography circulated by the Itar-TASS News Agency, 
Putin's spying career began in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, in 1975 when 
he joined the KGB after graduating from Leningrad State University with a law 
degree.

The biography contains no information on his early duties. But former KGB 
spymaster Oleg Kalugin, now a Washington-based consultant and lecturer on the 
former Soviet Union and Russia, said Putin's first job was in the small 
office of the KGB's First Chief Directorate.

His role was to shadow foreigners visiting Leningrad for possible recruitment 
purposes -- a "peripheral job," as General Kalugin put it.

Nine years would elapse before Putin got the kind of assignment that trained 
agents routinely expect -- field work abroad.

"It's clear that he wasn't at the top of his class," said Joyal. "If he was, 
he would have been posted (abroad) immediately."

Putin's chance finally came in 1984, when his KGB bosses dispatched him to 
East Germany.

For KGB agents, the popular postings were in the West. East Germany not as 
sought after, but Berlin had its good points, experts say.

"We viewed assignments in East Germany as an indication that your chips are 
down and management believes you are up to no good," said Stanislav Lunev, a 
former Soviet Army Colonel who worked for the GRU, the Soviet military 
intelligence service and a KGB rival.

According to reports published in Russia and in the West, Putin had a stellar 
career while based in Germany. 

According to these accounts which are spare on detail, Putin was based in 
Berlin and crossed into the West where he is said to have conducted espionage 
against high-tech companies including US computer giant IBM.

Not so, said Kalugin, Joyal and Lunev, a Soviet defector who is now a 
Washington-based consultant on Soviet and Russian military intelligence.

Putin was not posted to Berlin, but to Dresden, a Cold War backwater, the 
US-based analysts said.

"The center was in Berlin," said Kalugin. "But Dresden was a village from the 
operational standpoint."

Kalugin said reports circulating about Putin's stellar career were propaganda 
put out by his political backers.

"I think they are deliberately building up his reputation in Moscow for him 
to look better as an intelligence officer," Kalugin said.

According to Kalugin and Joyal, Putin worked in Dresden under cover of the 
German-Soviet Friendship House, where he was listed as deputy director.

No ripple appears to have crossed his life until 1990, when he returned to 
Moscow. It was then, the analysts agree, that his career bombed.

Not only was he sent back to Leningrad, but he was removed from active duty 
and transferred to the KGB reserve.

His official biography records this puzzling twist in matter-of-fact terms: 
"After his return to Leningrad, Putin became an aide to the vice president of 
the Leningrad State University in charge of international issues."

"This is the KGB's active reserve," said Lunev. "In reality, these people try 
to ferret out dissidents among faculty and recruit people for the KGB."

The sudden transfer to the reserve was, in Kalugin's opinion, the final nail 
in the coffin of Putin's KGB career.

"To get a man at 37, as he was, to get him into the reserve, this is the end 
of anyone's career," he said. "When a guy is 55 and he is sent into the 
reserve, that's fine because the next step will be retirement. But if someone 
is sent at 37 into the reserve, that is simply a very bad sign."

Putin resigned from the KGB later in 1990 to become adviser to Leningrad 
Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, his former law professor.

Why Putin's KGB career flamed out remains a mystery. 

The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) declined to comment on any aspect of 
Putin's service in Soviet intelligence.

*******

#3
smi.ru
19:59 21.01.00
Government
LIBERAL INTELLIGENTSIA CALLS PUTIN TO ACCOUNT 
A group of Russian "cultural and scientific figures" has publicly voiced its 
indignation at what happened in the State Duma in an appeal addressed to 
Vladimir Putin. "The political scandal that erupted during the first session 
of the Third State Duma, provoked by the collision of the "Unity" bloc 
supported by you with CPRF and the "People's Deputy" parliamentary group, has 
stirred up the public and met with active negation on the part of the 
democratic intelligentsia". The appeal is signed by: the chief "member of the 
intelligentsia" in the whole Russian Federation - Sergei Filatov, Academician 
Alexander Yakovlev, writers Daniil Granin, Boris Vasilyev, Artyom Anfinigenov 
and Alexander Rekemchuk, poets Rimma Kazakova and Tatyana Kuzovleva, social 
journalists Yuri Karyakin and Yuri Chernichenko, editor-in-chief of the 
"Problems of Literature" journal Lazar Lazarev, literary critic Valentin 
Oskotsky, theatrical producer Mark Rozovsky, ecologist Alexei Yablokov. 
Comment: The only names missing here seem to be those of Sergei Kovalyov and 
Yelena Bonner. By the way, Sergei Adamovich Kovalyov has mumbled some 
familiar phrases at Grigory Yavlinsky's nomination at the Central House of 
Journalists on January 19, something about "opposing authoritarianism and the 
police state". Actually no one had expected our diehard dissidents to react 
to the State Duma events differently. Their own ideologist, Leonid 
Radzikhovsky, did have something there when he described these characters in 
such terms: "Taken by itself, it (the liberal intelligentsia - translator) is 
not numerous, but it shapes public opinion. In the meanwhile, the 
intelligentsia is even easier to fool than the people - it is still dumber. A 
couple of simple hooks have proved sufficient to catch it: "for the free 
market", "against Communism", "not anti-Semitic". There is only one 
comforting thing: judging by the number of those who signed this appeal, the 
straggling ranks of the liberal intelligentsia have been thinned somewhat 
recently. That may be not much, but that's definitely progress. 
Cultural figures call upon Putin t express his attitude to the goings-on in 
the Duma 
"Odnako" TV show on Polit.ru site: Mikhail Leontyev. A Liberal 
Intelligentsia Is an Absurd Notion 

*******

#4
ITAR-TASS: RUSSIA DEPUTY PM ASSESSES STATE OF AGRICULTURE

Moscow, 21st January: Russia may be short of 10m tonnes of fodder grain this 
year and this gives grounds for the cabinet's particular concern, Deputy 
Prime Minister Vladimir Shcherbak told a press conference here on Friday 
[21st January]. 

He said that shortage of fodder grain may bring meat production in the 
country down below the current figure, which should not be allowed to happen 
because this will jeopardize Russia's food security. 

Shcherbak stressed that the gross output of farm products grew by 1 per cent 
in Russia in 1999 as compared with the previous year and the country's 
agroindustrial complex rounded off the year without any losses, which 
amounted to R26bn in 1998. 

Summing up the results of the year, he said that grain production increased 
by 14 per cent as compared with 1998 and that Russia harvested a total of 
54.7m tonnes of grain. The sugar beet harvest grew by almost 41 per cent and 
sugar output added up to 1.5m tonnes, the deputy prime minister stated. "This 
allowed us to satisfy all the sugar requirements of the population and 
industry," he added. Shcherbak noted "the population's growing demand for 
individual types of products turned out by the food and processing complex, 
due to which their output grew by 10 per cent last year". 

The deputy prime minister described 1990 [presumably 1999 meant] as a 
"crucial" year for the agroindustrial complex and said he was sure that 2000 
will be marked by "a stable supply of food to the population of Russia at the 
current level of consumer demand". At the same time, he admitted that this 
figure is "still rather low". 

Shcherbak adduced figures showing that the share of imported vegetables and 
fruits added up to 7 per cent on the country's food market and the share of 
meat products to 23 per cent. The deputy prime minister said that the 
government was planning to call an all-Russia conference of agroindustrial 
workers in February with the participation of representatives from scientific 
institutions. It will discuss ways to develop Russia's agriculture. 

******

#5
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 
From: "Daniel G. Clark" <dclark@muscanet.com>
Subject: John Chrystal has died

[David, I haven't seen anything on JRL yet about the passing of John 
Chrystal. Much more will be said--or should be--about Gorbachev's 
first American friend! --Dan Clark]

Thursday January 20 3:49 PM ET
Soviet Friend Chrystal Dead at 74
By MELANIE S. WELTE Associated Press Writer

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - John Chrystal, an Iowa farmer and banker who
followed in his uncle's footsteps as Cold War-era agricultural adviser to
Soviet leaders, has died at 74.

Chrystal died of cancer Wednesday.

In 1959, with the Cold War in full swing, then-Soviet Premier Nikita
Khrushchev toured the United States and made a much-publicized stop at the
Coon Rapids, Iowa, farm of Roswell Garst, Chrystal's uncle. Garst had already
visited the Soviet Union as part of a farm delegation.

Chrystal later recalled the visit as ``like somebody coming from Mars. The
Highway Patrol, the National Guard, the newspaper people nearly destroyed
the town. I'd never seen anything like it.''

In 1960, when Roswell was invited to the Soviet Union and didn't want to
go, ``he offered me on a platter,'' Chrystal said. ``I had never been east
of Notre Dame before.''

From that time on, Chrystal traveled about every other year to the Soviet
Union at the government's invitation. He toured the land, dined with
Khrushchev and, in the early '80s, talked farming with Mikhail 
Gorbachev when the future Soviet leader was still an obscure official.

``If we can become less afraid of each other, we have a better chance of
stopping the arms race and not blowing each other up,'' Chrystal said in a
1987 interview. ``I think it's the proper thing for an American to do.''

Sizing up Gorbachev, he said: ``He is smart and confident. Self-confidence
gives you the ability to be self-critical. Gorbachev is willing to recognize
the shortcomings of the economy and the country and ask other people to work
with him.''

Chrystal was chairman and chief executive of Bankers Trust Inc. and a
partner with his brother on the family farm.

He also was a former state banking superintendent and president of the Iowa
Bankers Association and Iowa Civil Liberties Union. He unsuccessfully sought
the Democratic nomination for governor in 1990.

``He had a keen perspective on political affairs, unclouded by ideology or
bias,'' longtime friend Sen. Tom Harkin said Thursday.

Chrystal is survived by a brother and a sister.

******

#6
From: "Matt Bivens" <mattbivens@hotmail.com>
Subject: 4058/Goble on deportation
Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000

In his analysis from Washington, Paul Goble dissects "a document, apparently 
leaked in Moscow and circulating in the West this week ... [which] suggests 
that Moscow has decided on even more radical measures. The document in 
question consists of a report on the December 15 meeting of the Russian 
Security Council under the chairmanship of then-prime minister and now 
acting President Vladimir Putin. Marked for official use only, the two-page 
paper is addressed to Duma speaker Gennady Seleznev. According to this 
report, which several Western analysts consider authentic ..."

This document is almost certainly a fake. It first appeared on the 
kavkaz.org website of the Chechen resistance, which is littered with 
similarly dubious documents. It has also been published in Nezavisimiya 
Gazeta, along with the commentary that it was a forgery; and Nez Gaz 
subsequently followed up with an official reply from the Security Council to 
the effective of, yep, we never said that.

There is one intriguing detail -- a nice touch for a forgery -- which is 
that Seleznyov did indeed miss the Dec. 15 meeting. That gave it enough 
credibility in our eyes to bother checking into it last month. Our reporter 
Yevgenia Borisova learned, however, that it is basically a Security Council 
press releases about a Dec. 15 meeting where the CIS was discussed -- only 
someone has inserted a graph or two in the middle to the effect of, "and the 
SC also formally decided to commit genocide in Chechnya and put it on 
paper."

Officially, the last time the SC discussed Chechnya was Nov. 13.

Cheers,
Matt Bivens
Editor
The Moscow Times

******

#7
Financial Times (UK)
22 January 2000
[for personal use only]
BOOKS: Writers come in from the cold: In Moscow, Andrew Jack talks to Natasha 
Perova about her crusade to bring Russian authors to the attention of the 
English-speaking world. 

When the Soviet Writers' Union collapsed alongside Communism at the start of 
the last decade, Natasha Perova sought the support of an unusual patron in
her 
crusade to bring Russian authors to the attention of the English-speaking 
world. 

She turned to Dr Benjamin Spock, the US paediatrician whose radical approach 
to child-rearing had attracted widespread interest around the world since the 
1960s - except in the Soviet Union. His unwitting sponsorship helped support 
the creation of Glas, a Slavic version of the literary magazine Granta, the 
history of which mirrors the difficulties faced by the Russian people over 
the last 10 years. 

Perova, hounded out of the Progress publishing house in the early 1970s for 
her support of the dissident writer Solzhenitsyn, had risen to become head of 
the English language edition of the magazine Soviet Literature. But in the 
harsh new capitalist era of the 1990s, she faced a challenge just as daunting 
as the censorship and repression of the past. 

"We didn't realise how much support for literature came from the state," she 
says. "We didn't have much experience in dealing with foreigners, and we were 
not at all familiar with words like 'invoice' and 'business plan'." 

The Writers' Union split into seven feuding factions and, with state funding 
drying up, Perova wondered how to continue offering translations of Russian 
literature. Her desire was driven both by love for her country's contemporary 
authors, and a frustration that - while translations existed in French, 
German and other languages - the works of just a handful of well-established 
names were available in English. 

At first, Soviet Literature and the magazine Literary Gazette held talks with 
a US businessman about setting up a new joint venture. The Russian 
publications put up Rbs1m, but the American's money never arrived. He spent 
six months in Moscow living in luxury at the Literary Gazette's expense, and 
then disappeared. 

Determined to push ahead with a collection of original translations into 
English, Perova launched the journal Glas - meaning "openness" or "voice" - 
in 1991 without outside backing. "Some people said Russian literature died 
with the 1960s generation, but I think there is a lot of talent today," she 
says. 

Using the recommendations of authors and critics, she had little problem in 
identifying writers to publish. Some were already well-known within Russia 
and were keen to use Glas as a rare chance to reach an English-reading 
public. Others were just starting out and have since become internationally 
known, such as Victor Pelevin. 

The problem was money. Perova was forced to fall back on the success she had 
had 20 years before, when she translated Benjamin Spock into Russian. Spock's 
work contrasted starkly with the more formal Russian child-rearing methods, 
which Perova describes as "designed to train revolutionary soldiers", and 
when while living in Pakistan during the 1960s she came across a copy of the 
doctor's revolutionary approach to child-rearing, she recalls bursting into 
tears of joy. 

On her return to the USSR, she resolved to translate the text. But the Soviet 
authorities had other views. It was only when she met a doctor who knew of 
Spock's work that she found a sympathetic ear. He pushed her into acting 
fast, after Spock's criticisms of US involvement in the Vietnam war made him 
an acceptable figure in the USSR. 

The result was a modest print run which swiftly sold out. But the benefits 
for Perova were short-lived. Soon after the first edition was published, 
Spock made further comments critical of the USSR, and re-printings became out 
of the question. 

Instead, thousands of illegal photocopied versions were sold on the black 
market. Perova was left inundated with letters of thanks from Russian parents 
- but with scant royalties. Only when the thaw of the mid-1980s allowed Spock 
to be officially re-published could she profit from sales of the Russian 
edition. (Spock himself never collected the royalties - in roubles - that he 
had been allocated.) 

If Spock contributed substantially and unwittingly to funding the first issue 
of Glas, his help was not be sufficient to keep it going. Soviet Literature 
had had a circulation of 60,000 copies, but Perova soon realised that most 
had been subsidised by the state and given away. As the large remaining 
stockpile of her first issue demonstrated, sales of a commercial magazine 
would be far more difficult. 

The grand launch of Glas 1 at the International Congress of Librarians in 
Moscow was over-shadowed by the August coup in 1991, which began as the 
meeting was being inaugurated. Instead of listening to her presentation, 
delegates fled back to the airport. 

Foreign publishers took copies of the new magazine, but claimed never to have 
received invoices, or sent hard currency cheques that were impossible to cash 
in Russia. Distributors - including Collet's, London's famous left-wing 
bookshop - collapsed with large stocks that had not been paid for. 

With high inflation wiping out the value of her rouble royalties, Perova 
found herself bartering space in her office with a provincial cheese factory 
that wanted a bureau in Moscow. She received payment in the form of a 
truck-load of cheese, which she exchanged for paper and the printing of the 
second issue. 

Kicked out of her office by the time of the third issue, Perova spent 
evenings and weekends on her sister's office computer - shared with 10 others 
in a mathematics research institute - where she learnt to carry out the 
type-setting herself. 

Forced to adapt to market conditions, she has gradually shifted the contents 
of the magazine away from compilations of different writers to volumes 
dedicated to asingle author. Early last year, she produced a collection of 
works by Andrei Platonov on the centenary of his birth. Other recent editions 
of Glas are dedicated to contemporary authors Irina Muravyova, Leonid Latynin 
and Asar Appel. "We discovered that English speakers did not like 
compilations," she says. 

While Glas today looks professional in its appearance and confident in its 
editorial choices, it still suffers from the malaise gripping much of the 
Russian publishing industry. A few established authors may find publishers, 
but most either have to pay to see themselves in print, or increasingly 
resort to the internet and other free methods of distribution. Each issue of 
Glas sells just 2,000 copies around the world. 

There is a growing group of rich Russians living both within and outside the 
country, but Perova says: "They only want to do something that helps raise 
their own profile. Glas doesn't interest them." Meanwhile, British publishers 
have said they are only interested in supporting journals that carry Russian 
versions of their own authors. The Russians argue that they have no funds to 
support translations into English, which are only of interest to foreigners. 

If Benjamin Spock helped give birth to Glas, the magazine - like much of the 
rest of the Russian publishing industry today - is still struggling with the 
growing pains of post-Soviet childhood. Details of 'Glas' are available on 
www.bham.ac.uk/glas 

******

#8
From: "Andreas Umland" <umland@mail.ru>
Subject: Party Development in the Sverdlovsk Oblast
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 

Attached is a review of the impact of last year's elections on party
development in the Sverdlovsk oblast. Would that be of interest to the
readers of your list?

Thank you.
Sincerely,
Andreas Umland
Visiting Lecturer
Ural State University
Yekaterinburg
Temporary mailing address until 30 June 2000: RUSSIA
620083 Ekaterinburg, pr. Lenina, 51, Uralskii gosudarstvennyi
universitet, Istfak, k. 464, Otdelenie mezhdunarodnykh otnoshenii
work-tel.: +7-3432-557543, fax: +7-3432-495652

Election Time in Yekaterinburg
By Andreas Umland

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin's formerly closed and renamed
home-town Yekaterinburg (alias Sverdlovsk) has drawn attention to itself
among Russia's provincial capitals several times. Examples were: the
influx, in Yeltsin's tail, into Moscow of several political figures from
Yekaterinburg who came to occupy high position in Russia's new
state-apparatus; the heated disputes around the death, burial and forms of
remembrance of Russia's last Tsar Nikolai II. and his family; and some
ambitious moves by Governor Eduard Rossel including his intention to
transform the Sverdlovsk oblast into an `Ural Republic'.

In the 1999 State Duma elections, Russia's third industrial, academic and
cultural center again was a place somewhat peculiar. Above all, it has seen
the meteoric rise of a new political party in the Sverdlovsk oblast:
Aleksandr Burkov's left-populist Movement of Labourers for Social
Guarantees `May' founded in April 1999. The movement was created after a
meeting between Eduard Rossel and the dubious entrepreneur and recently
appointed director of the large Serov Metallurgical Factory Anton Bakov, a
friend of Burkov, who initially provided most of the financial base of
`May'. Burkov, a previously little-know regional deputy and administrator,
became famous during the August-September 1999 gubernatorial elections when
he surprisingly beat Arkadii Chernetskii during the first round of the
elections, came second after Rossel, and thus made it to the run-up.
Rossel, to be sure, won with 63.11% against 28.32% for Burkov. Most
observers, however, had seen Chernetskii, the Mayor of Yekaterinburg, as
Rossel's main competitor. Chernetskii's humiliating defeat against Burkov
in the first round, and the quick local entrenchment of the `May' movement
radically changed Sverdlovsk oblast's political landscape and represents a
relatively novel, curious phenomenon in Russian regional politics.

Partly duplicating an earlier, abortive attempt of Rossel's older regional
party Preobrazhenie Urala (Transformation of the Urals), the `May' Movement
is now claiming a place within Russia's landscape at large. It participated
in the State Duma elections not only in the Sverdlovsk oblast's
single-majority districts, but also in other electoral districts and
regional elections as well as in the proportional part of the vote within
the `all-federal district' as an independent electoral association under
the title Mir. Trud. Mai (Peace. Labour. May). It was the only among the 28
registered electoral blocs the origins of which lay not in Moscow.
Initially it was a creature of Rossel's electoral headquarters invented to
split the Sverdlovsk oblast's protest vote in the gubernatorial elections,
and to draw votes away from Chernetskii. In the Duma elections, the `May'
Movement was seemingly thought to play a similar role for Yeltsin's
administration. The Kremlin's electoral strategists appeared to be using
May to draw away votes, especially in the `Red Belt', from the Za Pobedu!
(For Victory!) State Duma electoral bloc dominated by the Communist Party.
The dismal result of `May' in the proportional part of the vote (below 1%
of the vote) indicates the provisional failure of this strategy. It remains
to be seen whether, in the future, `May' will be able to use possible
further patronage of the political establishment and favours by
state-officials to become a significant political force on the federal
level too.

A second peculiarity of Yekaterinburg politics exemplified in the local
election campaign is the activity and open participation in the State Duma
elections of the so-called Socio-Political Union `Uralmash'. Not to be
mixed with the large Yekaterinburg combine Ural Machine-Building Factory,
the above mentioned Uralmash grouping is a criminal clan labelled after
Yekaterinburg's largest satellite city, the industrial rayon Uralmash
(named, in turn, after the huge, heavy industrial stock-company Uralmash
once headed by former Soviet Prime-Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov). It was there
where some twenty former sportsmen calling themselves uralmashevtsy started
a bloody racketeering business in 1989. By 1999, the Uralmash grouping
managed not only to suppress all other relevant rival criminal gangs in
Yekaterinburg (partly by shooting their leaders). It has established
contacts with Governor Eduard Rossel (1), and taken under its controls
dozens of legal enterprises in the Sverdlovsk oblast. It is now
contributing a considerable amount of tax money to the oblast's budget, and
officially registered as a social movement. Uralmash takes an active part
in Yekaterinburg's social life by, for instance, supporting financially the
action `A City Without Narcotics'. The group has established its own
WWW-site <www.ops-uralmash.ru> arguing extensively against accusations
concerning the criminal past of Uralmash. 

It is, perhaps, less the link between politics and the underworld per se
that distinguishes the Uralmash phenomenon. (2) Rather the explicit
transformation of a whole gang - able to survive the disappearance of
individual leaders such as the killing of Grigorii Tsyganov in 1991 - into
an open political, local-patriotic organization with official statutes,
press conferences, etc. and manifest influence on political decisions that
makes Yekaterinburg politics different. In the mid-1990s, Uralmash started
indicating its political ambition going beyond the Sverdlovsk region when
two of its leaders Konstantin Tsyganov and Aleksandr Khabarov became
official local representatives of former State Duma speaker Ivan Rybkin's
Socialist Party. The preliminary peak of this development was reached when
one of the founding-fathers and leaders of Uralmash, Aleksandr Khabarov
(alias `Khabar') posed as a registered State Duma elections candidate
officially campaigning on an Uralmash ticket with the slogan `The Urals for
the Uralites!' in the Ordzhonikidze electoral district of Yekaterinburg.
Moreover, Khabarov announced that, in the party-list elections, the
Uralmash grouping will support the Inter-Regional Movement `Edinstvo
(Unity)' led by Russian Federation Minister of Emergency Affairs Sergei
Shoigu. (3) Although Khabarov was in terms of the street campaigning,
perhaps, the most visible candidate in Yekaterinburg, his district's
electorate showed considerable maturity by casting most votes in the line
`Against all candidates' on 19 December 1999, and thus invalidating the
single-majority part of the State Duma elections in the Ordzhonikidze
district. The elections will thus have to be repeated there in 2000. Given
the weakness of his competitors, support from the Oblast administration,
and sound financial base of Khabarov's electoral campaign, it looks not
unlikely that the uralmashovets will eventually become a State Duma deputy.

For the near future, Rossel's fiefdom will seemingly continue to represent
an especially revealing case study of Russian regional politics.

Andreas Umland is a 1999-2000 Civic Education Project - Robert Bosch
Foundation Visiting Lecturer, Ural State University, Yekaterinburg. The
author would like to thank Valerii I. Mikhailenko, Professor of
International Relations, Aleksandr G. Nesterov, Senior Lecturer in
International Relations, both of the Faculty of History of Ural State
University, and especially Ilia M. Gorfinkel, political consultant at the
Sverdlovsk Oblast administration, for their advice and help in the
preparation of this essay. Some of the most relevant information for this
article was provided in a private conversation with Mr. Gorfinkel on 8
December 1999.

(1) See the revealing article Aleksandr Kakotkin, `Eto on - Edichka!: Byt i
nravy v Sverdlovskoi oblasti vremen gubernatora Rosselia', Sovershenno
sekretno, no. 8, 1999, pp. 10-11, 14.

(2) For instance, a former criminal patron, Boris V. Ivaniushenkov, is the
current Russian Minister of Sports. On Ivaniushenkov's biography, see
Larisa Kislinskaia, `Dolzhnost' ministr - operativnaia kategoriia
``avtoritet''', Sovershenno sekretno, no. 9, 1999, pp. 14-15.

(3) The local Edinstvo branch, one would have to add though, was not
informed about Khabarov's move in advance. See Vechernye vedomosti iz
Ekaterinburga, 8 December 1999, p. 3.

*******

#9
U.S. News and World Report
January 31, 2000
Fighting for every yard
Slow going for Russian forces in Grozny
By Christian Caryl 

MOSCOW-When a rebel sniper shot at Russian forces in the Chechen capital of 
Grozny last week, the Kremlin's soldiers had a simple but effective response: 
They fired back with artillery until the multistory apartment block crumbled 
into ruins. Multiply that act of destruction by 2,500--the number of rebel 
fighters said by the Russians to remain in the city--and consider the result. 
As one Moscow newspaper put it, "There is the danger that there will be 
practically nobody left in the city to liberate from bandits after the 
operation is over."

Ever since the war began, the Russian high command has been making optimistic 
predictions about impending victory. Last week, as Russian troops pushed into 
the center of Grozny, there was plenty of talk from Moscow's side about the 
impending fall of the city. Gen. Gennady Troshev, deputy commander of the 
Russian forces in Chechnya, said that the combat operations there would be 
over by February 26–just in time, presumably, to ensure the victory of
acting 
President Vladimir Putin in national elections exactly one month later. But 
the talk of triumph is beginning to undercut itself. Russian TV has spent 
days repeating claims of the capture of parts of Grozny only to report later 
that fighting continues in the same places. 

Mistakes. The rebels hit back from cellars and rooftops. On Friday, Defense 
Minister Igor Sergeyev confirmed that Maj. Gen. Mikhail Malofeyev, one of the 
commanders of the Grozny operation, had "disappeared" in the center of 
city–by some accounts hit by a sniper, by others taken prisoner by the 
Chechens. If the latter is true, Kremlin officials must consider the 
possibility that he may next turn up on rebel videotape, a grim counterpoint 
to their public declarations that the war is going well. Further, one general 
spoke of "mistakes" in the wake of a series of rebel raids deep within 
Moscow-controlled territory. That, in turn, led some members of the otherwise 
boosterish Russian media to begin questioning the government line. The 
private NTV television station showed viewers terrifying footage of Grozny 
civilians ducking bullets and pulling elderly corpses from the ruins. 
Hospital interviews with wounded soldiers increasingly run counter to 
official optimism. At least one survey showed that few Russians believe 
official casualty figures. And, as if to thwart Troshev's hopeful timetable, 
NTV showed footage of smiling rebel soldiers: "We'll go on fighting for 
another 45 years," one told the cameras.

Sanctions in store? Putin undoubtedly found some consolation in the news that 
some Chechen commanders were considering switching sides. And not unlike talk 
of "Vietnamization" during the U.S. war in Southeast Asia, members of the 
political elite are debating the virtues of letting pro-Moscow Chechens bear 
more of the load in the struggle against separatist Chechens under President 
Aslan Maskhadov. But international condemnation of Moscow's offensive in the 
province has some Putin insiders worried about the upcoming summit of the 
Council of Europe, which may consider economic sanctions that could deal a 
heavy blow to the Russian economy. 

For Leila Grazuyeva, 63, the talk of strategists and politicians is a world 
away, and the war is within earshot. For weeks now the Chechen woman and her 
husband, who live in a house on the border of the upstart republic, have been 
harboring 20 refugees from the fighting. The members of the extended 
household have been getting by on one bowl of soup a day apiece, while the 
lack of information about relatives trapped in the fighting takes a 
psychological toll. "Every evening when I go to bed, I say to myself, 
'Tomorrow it will all be over.' When I don't hear the noise of the bombings, 
I'm optimistic," says Grazuyeva. "But then, in the morning, I realize that 
the war is still with us." 

With Anne Nivat on the Chechen border 

******

#10
U.S. News and World Report
January 31, 2000
MOTHERS' HELPERS
'What are you crying for?'
By Christian Caryl 

MOSCOW-Anxious parents crowd the dingy hallway outside the cramped offices of 
the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers. Raul Georgadze, 52, is trying to get in 
touch with a nephew in the war zone; the last the family has heard from the 
young man was at the beginning of November. Lyuda Groznova, 39, is terrified 
for her son: "They told him he's going to Chechnya. But he's only 18 years 
old." He's been in the Army eight months, not much training when you're 
preparing to face battle-hardened rebels. A woman next to her nods and weeps. 

Valentina Melnikova, the committee's coordinator, tells how another mother 
recently called in trying to find her wounded son. Committee members tracked 
him down in a military hospital in far-away Volgograd. "When she heard that 
he'd only lost a finger, she burst into tears," says Melnikova with a sad 
smile. "We said, 'Hey, what are you crying for? He's alive.' " Melnikova, 53, 
can be forgiven for appearing matter-of-fact about these things. She's seen 
it all before. She began her crusade against the authorities back in 1987, 
when she resolved to keep her two military-age sons from falling into the 
meat grinder of the war in Afghanistan. "I decided that we have an insane 
government and an insane military," says Melnikova, "and that I wasn't going 
to give them my sons." So Melnikova and some friends formed the committee, an 
organization whose scrappy, hands-on humanitarianism came of age during the 
1994-96 Chechen war. The services provided can include consulting on legal 
matters, arranging prisoner exchanges, extracting information from a 
tight-lipped military, and even, she says, "helping parents to steal their 
children from Army bases." 

But now Melnikova and her colleagues are taking their campaign of defiance to 
a new level. On January 17, they sent an open letter to acting President 
Vladimir Putin demanding that he end the war. An excerpt: "The Russian state 
is systematically violating the general principle of respect for human rights 
and basic freedoms . . . ." 

Until now, Melnikova says, the "information blockade"--tight Kremlin control 
over news from the war zone--has forestalled antiwar sentiment. "They [the 
media] aren't showing the horrors of war. So people don't think." But that 
could change as the fighting gets nastier. The committee, which keeps track 
of casualties through its own Russia-wide information network, contends that 
official losses are vastly understated. Melnikova thinks that the death toll 
on the Russian side could already be as high as 3,000--well over three times 
what the Russian generals have been saying. -C.C.

*******

#11
Baltimore Sun
21 January 2000
[for personal use only]
Russia chills journalist in reminder of old days
Police come knocking with warrant to take him to mental hospital
By Kathy Lally 
Sun Foreign Staff

MOSCOW -- Aleksandr Khinshtein, a 25-year-old newspaper reporter with a 
penchant for writing nasty articles about powerful officials, was home in bed 
when the police came for him. In a chilling reminder of the Soviet past, they 
were armed with a warrant to take him to a mental hospital.

"It was a political order," his mother, Inna A. Regider, said yesterday. 
"It's the same thing they used to do to dissidents. He's completely healthy 
mentally and they're looking for an excuse."

Although his lawyer managed to fend off the police in a five-hour 
confrontation, Khinshtein went into hiding yesterday. The incident was deeply 
unsettling to journalists, who said that even though Khinshtein was suspected 
of representing the viewpoint of the FSB, a successor to the KGB, and was one 
of the highly visible combatants in the mudslinging media wars here, the 
authorities had gone much too far.

"This is persecuting a journalist for his professional activities," said 
Ludmila Scherbina, a spokesman for the Russian Union of Journalists. "If they 
think he has violated the law, they should take him to court."

Fortunately for Khinshtein, when the police came to the door Tuesday morning, 
he was ill and had a certificate from his doctor, the usual procedure when 
someone misses work.

"That saved him," his mother said. "If they had gotten him into a car, they 
could have injected him with something to make him behave abnormally."

Khinshtein's lawyer, Andrei Muratov, pointed out to the police that under 
Russian law, a person officially registered as sick cannot be taken away for 
investigation, and persuaded them to retreat.

Khinshtein works for one of Russia's most popular newspapers, Moskovsky 
Komsomolets. Though the paper leans heavily on coverage of celebrities and 
sensation, it also offers serious investigative reporting.

In 1994, Moskovsky Komsomolets reporter Dmitri Kholodov, who had been 
investigating military corruption, was blown up by a suitcase bomb.

Khinshtein has been attacking Boris A. Berezovsky, one of Russia's financial 
oligarchs, and Vladimir Rushailo, who as head of the Interior Ministry is the 
country's top policeman.

Khinshtein recently accused Rushailo of intervening to drop criminal charges 
against friends and of heading off an investigation of Berezovsky, who was 
connected to a company accused of bugging Kremlin officials and members of 
Boris N. Yeltsin's family.

He accused Berezovsky of helping to finance Islamic militants fighting in 
Chechnya. In addition to writing about Rushailo and Berezovsky, Khinshtein 
has attacked them on his Sunday evening television show, broadcast by TV 
Center, a station controlled by Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov.

Politically savvy Russians saw Khinshtein as an instrument of the FSB in the 
highly political wars. They saw Berezovsky's interests as being represented 
by Sergei Dorenko, who has a weekly analysis program on the powerful ORT 
station. So the action against Khinshtein has been interpreted as part of a 
larger campaign, reflecting fierce political infighting.

"Anything can happen to a journalist in Russia," said Oleg V. Panfilov, who 
works for the Glasnost Foundation, which is concerned with protecting the 
rights of journalists. "Everything will depend on the caliber of his patron. 
To all appearances, his patron is fairly influential."

His editors said this week's police action was prompted by Khinshtein's 
investigations into corruption.

"It was a pure political provocation," said Pyotr Spektor, deputy editor of 
Moskovsky Komsomolets. "For Rushailo and Berezovsky, he was like a bone in 
the throat. They would like to have him locked up, and any method would do."

Muratov, Khinshtein's lawyer, said the police gave no details about any 
charges against the reporter, saying only that sending him for a psychiatric 
evaluation was in the interest of their investigation.

Russia has been curbing the work of journalists recently, especially from 
covering the war in Chechnya.

In response to questions about the incident, Vladimir Martinov, the Interior 
Ministry spokesman, sent a statement by fax that said Khinshtein had been 
charged with using false documents and that he had failed to appear for 
questioning Tuesday. The statement said that because Khinshtein had been 
disqualified from the draft for medical reasons and had been treated in 
"specialized clinics," investigators decided that a psychiatric examination 
would be helpful.

Martinov said it was decided to take Khinshtein into custody because he was 
so well known in Moscow and because "his connections could hinder the process 
of investigation."

Apparently, Khinshtein was being investigated in connection with an incident 
in 1997, when he was stopped in a car and police found irregularities with 
his driver's license. Spektor said it was peculiar that the investigation 
should be reopened more than two years later and that Khinshtein should be 
ordered to a psychiatric hospital in Vladimir, a four-hour drive from Moscow.

"If they had succeeded in doing this," Spektor said, "anyone could find 
himself in a mental hospital or in Lefortovo," the notorious KGB prison.

Vladimir Mukusev, director of Khinshtein's television program, "Secret 
Materials," said the authorities have begun an offensive against journalists.

"It means the command has been given: Attack!" he said.

******

#12
The Guardian (UK)
21 January 2000
[for personal use only]
Why foreign training is failing Russia's teachers 
By Radislav Millrood
Dr Radislav Millrood is head of ELT at Tambov State University, Russia 

A British university recently completed a joint teacher-training project in 
my home city of Tambov in central Russia. British colleagues and local 
professionals ran training workshops, organised study trips to Britain, wrote 
and published teachersÍ training packs, produced videos and set up a website. 

With so much accomplished it should be possible to say that the project 
achieved its goals. Yet the principal aim of projects like these - to develop 
human resources and to make the process of change sustainable - are all too 
often missed. The question so often left unanswered is what happens when 
foreign trainers depart and local teachers go back to their towns and 
villages? My answer is, not much. 

What holds back change is the power of the local teaching culture. Every 
teacher knows how to teach when the classroom door is closed and there are no 
inspectors. In Russia teacher-centred lessons are firmly rooted in the minds 
of teachers, children and their parents. One can often hear parents advising 
the teacher: "You should be much stricter with him, it will do him good." 
Learning is also teacher-dependent. Lessons are closely linked to assessment 
of homework, and the emphasis is put on input from the teacher rather than on 
output from learners.

So is a teacher-centred lesson a good or a bad thing? Can we say for sure 
that a learner-centred communicative class is what the children really need? 
In 20 years from now research might prove the opposite to be true. After all, 
hasn't there been a return to phonics in Britain after decades of 
communicative reading?

The conflict between imported methodology and conservative local teaching 
culture is the achilles heal of most joint training projects. Yet in Russia 
at least barriers to exploiting and developing local expertise remain firmly 
in place. 

The first barrier is "affective" and is a matter of trust. No matter how well 
educated or talented they are, local professionals always play the role of 
students when experts arrive from abroad. Though they may share their local 
knowledge with their foreign guests they are there to learn.

Another barrier is "ethical" or doing what is proper. There is still a view, 
held since the time of Peter the Great, that the proper way to boost 
teachers' professional development is to invite experts from abroad. Today 
that foreign assistance is even more fiercely fought for because of the 
logistical support and funding that comes with it. 

The third barrier is "conservative", or the belief in the "good" of the 
precedent. We have always relied on experts from Britain or the United 
States, and we believe they have helped us to achieve positive results. But 
as one American teacher trainer said after working here, "Russians applaud, 
demonstrate, but do not remember". 

These barriers can be surmounted, however, and two models for teacher 
development come to mind. One is the fairly common unfreeze-change-refreeze 
model. This says that teacher trainers should motivate trainees to change 
(unfreeze), to develop new professional behaviour based on innovative 
methodology (change) and to stabilise these changes (refreeze). I call this 
model pessimistic because it institutionalises that period when the process 
of change comes to an end and teachers stop developing any further. 

My own ideal is an optimistic model of teacher development that is designed 
to carry on working. The first stage of this model is "Letting the jinnee out 
of the bottle", or triggering critical thinking in teachers. The second stage 
is "Fulfiling the four wishes". Every teacher wants to be Successful, 
Achieving, Great and Effective. Until these wishes are satisfied no real or 
long-lasting change will take place in teaching. The third stage is 
"Obtaining a magic wand", or giving teachers research skills. 

Critical thinking, professional expertise and research skills are the 
foundations for teacher-training programmes that are based on local skills 
and knowledge. Both pre-service students and in-service teachers want to be 
firm on both their feet, and for this they need a solid grounding in local 
expertise.

What needs to change is the whole approach to pre-service training and 
in-service development so that teachers can be armed with the weapons of 
critical thinking, professional expertise and research skills. Questioning 
instead of asserting, noticing and taking up instead of "accepting what is 
passed down" are just some of the strategies we need if teachers are to 
continue to develop beyond the life of their training project.

*******

#13
The Electric Telegraph (UK)
22 January 2000
[for personal use only] 
Russians in Chechnya 'murdering and raping'
By Marcus Warren in Moscow

RUSSIAN soldiers in Chechnya were accused yesterday of raping local women and 
killing at least one of their victims.

Chechen refugees told a human rights organisation they had spoken to rape 
victims in Russian-controlled Chechnya. Other refugees said they had been 
forced to hide their daughters from drunken soldiers. The true scale of the 
violence against the women of Chechnya may be hidden by the local taboo on 
sexual assault, a report by Human Rights Watch said.

Chechen women who survive rape are liable to be divorced if married or never 
to find a husband if single and the strict rules of conduct for sexual 
relations in the strongly Muslim region deter victims from speaking out. The 
allegations are thus unlikely to be proven, but they tally with accounts of 
widespread looting, harassment and cases of arbitrary shooting of Chechen 
civilians in Russian-held territory.

One 23-year-old pregnant woman was raped and murdered in Shali last month, a 
neighbour told Human Rights Watch. When local people prepared her body for 
burial they found it scarred by bruises and toothmarks.

According to Human Rights Watch researchers, several women, aged from 20 to 
their 50s, had been raped by soldiers in Alkhan Yurt, scene of an alleged 
massacre after troops took the village at the beginning of December.

One woman from Alkhan Yurt disclosed that she and a neighbour hid their five 
daughters in a pit covered with earth and with a pipe to supply air for 
several days to protect them from soldiers hunting for young girls.

Paramilitaries in the Balkans in the Nineties raped systematically to 
terrorise civilians, but there is no evidence that Russian soldiers' attacks 
on Chechen women are part of such a campaign. Indiscipline is acute in the 
Russian army and violence against the local population is often colluded in 
by officers unable or unwilling to rein in their men.

Some civilian officials have even justified the looting of bed linen, 
mattresses and rugs on the grounds that soldiers have not been supplied with 
proper bedding.

*******

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