Johnson's Russia List
#5602
16 December 2001
davidjohnson@erols.com
A CDI Project
www.cdi.org

[Note from David Johnson:
1. Los Angeles Times: John Daniszewski, Disregard for Health Is Killing 
Russians. Europe: As pollution and alcoholism raise the death rate, 
economic uncertainty lowers the birthrate, creating a demographic crunch.
2. Newsweek: Christian Caryl, A New Arms Game. Bush scraps a treaty, ends 
an era, and Moscow... shrugs. What just changed? 
3. AP: Jason Keyser, A decade later, Russian Jews and Israel have 
profoundly changed each other.
4. The Independent on Sunday (UK): Leo Lewis, Russia and Opec in new 
oil-price battle.
5. The Russia Journal: Otto Latsis, Russians abroad need help.
The state should help would-be immigrants. 
6. Reuters: Kazakh leader predicts decade of growth, harmony.
7. Newsday: Paul Saunders, Withdrawal Imperils U.S.-Russian Bond.
8. New York Times: Patrick Tyler, The Morning After Dawns on Moscow.
9. The Guardian (UK): John O'Mahony, Russia's lost tribe. In a controverial 
social experiment, a Jewish social experiment, a jewish autonomous state 
was set up in Siberia in 1928. Despite the terrors of Stalin and Hitler, 
John O'Mahony finds it still intact, a frozen mini-Zion. (Birobidzhan)]

*******

#1
Los Angeles Times
December 16, 2001 
Disregard for Health Is Killing Russians
Europe: As pollution and alcoholism raise the death rate, economic 
uncertainty lowers the birthrate, creating a demographic crunch.
By JOHN DANISZEWSKI, TIMES STAFF WRITER

DZERZHINSK, Russia -- After a career on the front line in the battle to stave 
off Russia's worsening demographic nightmare, Dr. Sergei Shamin has a few 
choice words for his fellow Russians.

"What irritates me and makes me furious is why our people don't want to be 
healthy!" he says. "Why do they want to be sick?"

In a city so polluted that even a puritanical lifestyle is unhealthful, he 
has seen it all. "If there's a person who should not be anywhere near a 
smoker, he smokes himself. If there is a person who should not get even a 
whiff of alcoholic fumes, he gets himself drunk. If there is a person already 
in weak and perilous health, he applies for and takes a job working in 
hazardous conditions." Shamin, 48, is a gadfly for good health in Dzerzhinsk, 
which is about 250 miles east of Moscow. He directs the Institute of 
Industrial Disease and Pathology in the city, which is regarded as one of 
Russia's most severely polluted. He recalls catching a man sent to breathe 
salt vapors as therapy for his chemical-seared lungs sneaking off into a dark 
corridor for a cigarette.

Such self-destructive tendencies, he believes, help account for the widening 
gap between births and deaths in Russia. He also blames public policies that 
he believes pay people to be sick but discourage them from getting early 
treatment or taking steps to stay healthy.

There are approximately 4 million fewer Russians than there were 10 years ago 
when the Soviet Union collapsed. The country's population, 148 million in 
1992, has dropped to 144 million this year, even counting the millions of 
immigrants from other post-Soviet states that it has absorbed over the same 
period.

Long part of the world's third-most populous country, the Soviet Union, 
Russia now ranks sixth behind China, India, the United States, Indonesia and 
Brazil.

Behind Each Death Is a Personal Tragedy

Some demographers believe Russia's population will dwindle to 130 million by 
2015, and Russia will find itself even lower on the totem pole, behind 
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Mexico, the Philippines and perhaps a few 
other countries.

Russia's demographic squeeze is caused by a significant rise in the rate of 
deaths, coupled with a plummeting birthrate. In the 1990s, in the face of 
economic uncertainty, many women delayed or abandoned plans to have children.

The death rate accelerated, especially among working-age males. In a recent 
Rand Corp. paper, "Dire Demographics: Population Trends in the Russian 
Federation," researchers theorize that social upheaval and declines in real 
incomes in some segments of society heightened stress and increased mortality 
from cardiovascular disease and from alcohol-related accidents, violence and 
poisonings.

Behind those grim global numbers are heart-rending individual cases, says Dr. 
Svetlana Solovyova, a general practitioner in Dzerzhinsk, who says she sees 
patients in their 30s every day who are being killed by alcohol and disease.

The 38-year-old physician does not expect to live a full life herself. Her 
husband, Mikhail, is on disability after developing a pancreatic disease, 
which he believes was caused in part by working as a teenager in a factory 
that produced DDT. He is only 33.

"Some people in the country, working in villages, somehow they survive until 
their 90s. I must say, we will never live to that age. It would be great if I 
even live to see my pension," Solovyova said. She becomes eligible at 55.

Although there is nothing wrong with her, she expects to die "because of this 
constant stress of trying to survive, trying to find something to eat and 
give an education to our child."

At any rate, the doctor, who earns 1,500 rubles a month--about $50--is 
convinced that "we will never, ever live well."

As for her patients at a public health clinic, vodka is a major shortener of 
lives. She said the proclivity to drink is an outgrowth of their lack of hope.

"People reckon they have enough money to buy food, and what's left--they will 
drink it away--because this money will be worthless in a while anyway."

Dzerzhinsk was designated by Communist central planners as a center of 
Russia's chemical and chemical-weapons industries. In 1997, the environmental 
group Greenpeace claimed that the average life expectancy of its citizens had 
dropped to around 45.

Shamin disagrees with that estimate but noted that the city's annual death 
rate, 17 per 1,000, is significantly higher than Russia's national average of 
14 per 1,000.

Retirement Often Cut Short by Death

In the city of 300,000, that translates to about 900 extra deaths annually. 
(In the United States, the morbidity rate is around 9 per 1,000.)

"Retiring sometimes may sound very sad in this town because people go on 
pension and die in three years, two years, sometimes a year or less. It often 
depends on what enterprise you worked at," said Dimitri Levashov, 28, an 
ecological activist.

According to figures from the city's ecology department, prior to Russia's 
1998 economic crash, about 300,000 tons of chemical waste were dumped around 
town every year and some 190 chemicals were emitted into the atmosphere, many 
of them hazardous, Levashov said. The situation is better now, because the 
factories are operating at 30% of capacity.

Plant managers of failing businesses have few means to clean up their 
operations and only toothless legal requirements, he said.

Shamin uses contacts with industry executives to encourage them to improve 
conditions. He also argues, mostly fruitlessly, that workers should limit 
work in environmentally dangerous plants and seek treatment when they first 
notice problems with their pulmonary and nervous systems. Fearing to lose 
pay, they typically wait years, until they are almost disabled, he said.

Shamin has been speaking out on health issues since he was a young man 
battling the local Communist Party. One incident sticks out in his memory as 
an example of the old party bureaucracy's callous disregard for public health.

In 1988, a cloud of noxious gas descended on him and others in line at 
Dzerzhinsk's only cinema. He believes the gas was a nitric oxide leak from a 
chemical plant. The next day he wrote the first secretary of the city 
Communist Party committee, demanding an investigation.

Shamin was summoned to the committee, where the infuriated secretary for 
ideology almost screamed at him, telling him to mind his own business.

"We will show you!" he recalled the red-faced woman shouting as they parted. 
But Shamin, then a communist himself, said: "I know I am right and you can't 
scare me."

Now Shamin irks the establishment in other ways. When he proposed in public 
recently that the social security system reduce benefits to people who refuse 
to quit smoking and drinking, municipal authorities were peppered with 
demands that he be dismissed.

Shamin still has the same answer: "I know I am right."

Sergei Loiko of The Times' Moscow Bureau contributed to this report. 

*******

#2
Newsweek
December 24, 2001
A New Arms Game 
Bush scraps a treaty, ends an era, and Moscow... shrugs. What just changed? 
By Christian Caryl

   Vladimir Belous should be very disappointed. The former general, a
veteran of the Soviet Union’s elite nuclear-strike forces, has spent the
better part of his retirement working to discredit U.S. plans for missile
defense. At the behest of the Kremlin, Belous has treated foreign diplomats
in Moscow to countless presentations about its perils. The small but
energetic general used to explain in frightening detail why the White House
push for a revised Star Wars system would lead to a “new arms race.” 
      BUT SOMETHING STRANGE happened when the dreaded moment of truth
finally arrived. In one stroke last week, President George W. Bush called
an end to a 30-year era of arms-control treaties. Bush made good on a
campaign promise and announced that the United States would withdraw from
the antiballistic-missile treaty in six months—in order to test missile
defense systems that are now prohibited. It was the first time any country
had unilaterally abrogated an arms agreement since World War II. Yet Bush
came away unscathed politically from what was once a hot-button issue—with
the war on terror, “who’s going to complain?” asked a former Clinton
official—and even Belous was forced to search for a positive spin. “This is
the best thing that could have happened,” he said. Although he wasn’t happy
that Washington had withdrawn from the treaty, Belous believes that Russia
will now win political points for seeming like a peacemaker.
      How do we explain the striking sense of calm that permeated the
Russian power elite last week? Russian weakness is a good place to start.
There was nothing Moscow could have done to prevent Washington from pulling
out of the 1972 treaty. Putin’s generals have talked about mounting
multiple warheads on existing missiles, perhaps to scare the United States
into being more cooperative. But most Russian missiles already are
“MIRVed,” and Moscow simply doesn’t have the money to retrofit its already
rusty arsenal. On the other hand, the recent White House proposals for
sharp cuts in offensive arms—what one Bush official described hopefully as
“a deal in a sense” in exchange for Moscow’s passivity on ABM—could save
the Kremlin loads of desperately needed cash.  
       The money could be used by Moscow to gear up for more proximate
threats. These include the militant Islamic rebellion in Chechnya and the
internal weaknesses of a dilapidated economy. In return for Moscow’s
mild-mannered response on missile defense, Washington might lead a campaign
to provide Russia with debt relief, and could also aid its bid to join the
World Trade Organization. It could even invite wider Russian participation
in NATO decision making. “Putin is after something bigger [than the ABM
treaty],” says a senior U.S. administration official. “He’s after a serious
strategic relationship with the U.S.”
      Yet scrapping the treaty creates political problems for Bush
elsewhere—especially across the Pacific. China’s deterrent of a mere 20 or
so ICBMs is potentially threatened by a viable missile defense system. And
China, unlike Russia, could mount a missile-building drive that might
provoke a new arms race with nuclear-armed India and Pakistan. To forestall
just that, Bush called Chinese President Jiang Zemin last week, and the two
agreed to schedule high-level talks soon.   
     The political wrangling, in any case, misses a larger question: does
missile defense make sense for the United States? Many analysts think not.
By conservative estimates, a limited missile shield will cost untold tens
of billions of dollars. Yet the shield is still a theoretical abstraction;
the latest test of a booster rocket failed last week. And it’s becoming
increasingly clear to some analysts, at least, that the big danger to
America these days is not missiles, which have a return address—it’s
suitcase bombs and biological agents. And even while Bush hints at
rewarding Russia on the ABM issue, Moscow still refuses to cooperate fully
on nonproliferation matters. The danger for Bush is that with his
attention—and budgetary dollars—focused on the skies above, the real threat
to Americans could arrive by another means.
With Andrew Nagorski, Roy Gutman and Tamara Lipper in Washington and
Jeffrey Bartholet
              
*****

#3
A decade later, Russian Jews and Israel have profoundly changed each other 
JASON KEYSER, Associated Press Writer
December 15, 2001 

KIBBUTZ MIZRA, Israel (AP) -- Sasha Damidov laughs when he remembers how it
was a decade ago: Israeli audiences sat in uncomfortable silence when he
and the other actors tried comedy and flattened punchlines with their
tortured pronunciations. 

The all-immigrant Gesher troupe was established in 1991, about a year after
Soviet Jews began streaming en masse to Israel, and in a poignant effort to
fit into their new homeland, the actors performed in Hebrew, a language
most of them could not speak. 

"We didn't understand what we were saying!" Damidov recalls. 

Damidov, 43, is quite convincingly Israeli today, with a light Russian
accent in his speech. Israel has changed him -- but he and his fellow
immigrants have changed Israel, too. 

The influx of some 900,000 Russian-speakers since 1989 has increased
Israel's Jewish population by almost 20 percent, to 5.2 million. The
immigrants, now 14 percent of the population, have made Israel more
European, and less religious. They have become a political force widely
credited with deciding three elections. Nathan Sharansky, once a jailed
Soviet dissident, is now a power broker in Israeli politics. 

Just as the breakup of the Soviet Union 10 years ago this Christmas
reshaped the world, so the immigrant wave has reshaped Israel. 

"It is a critical mass that has created a little Russia in Israel, and it's
still not finished," said Eliezer Feldman, a Russian immigrant and
sociologist at the National Institute for Immigration Research. "There are
constantly things being built in this little Russia in Israel -- magazines,
institutes, higher education." 

With a preponderance of scientists, doctors and engineers, they provided a
booster rocket to a sluggish economy that has since almost doubled in size
and helped transform Israel into a high-tech power. 

And a people that loves fine arts suddenly got more. Gesher, now one of
Israel's most acclaimed troupes, travels around the country, on one recent
night selling out the 440-seat theater in this northern Israeli communal
farm for an unusual performance of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's
Dream" -- set to Beatles music. 

Still, the name Gesher, which means "bridge," highlights the paradox of a
community of immigrants who are also widely characterized as doggedly
keeping open the bridges to the old country. 

Jews move to Israel from places as different as Morocco, Argentina and the
United States, and many keep in touch with their native cultures. But none
arrived in such large numbers at once or were able to create the sort of
state-within-a-state that the Russian-speakers have. 

There are schools, bars, restaurants, even entire neighborhoods that are
solidly Russian-speaking. Russian-language dailies abound. A
Russian-language TV station is about to go on the air. It will run Hebrew
subtitles in hopes of bridging the divide between immigrants and Israelis.
Its director, Yulia Berkovic, says that when veteran Israelis watch, "they
will understand what the immigrants are going through." 

Russian-speaking Jews have been a mainstay of Zionism for at least a
century. They have included Golda Meir, a future prime minister, and
Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew. Many beloved Israeli folk
songs are set to Russian melodies. 

During the Cold War, the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate was an
international cause celebre. U.S. lawmakers struck at Moscow's trade
privileges in part to make it let the Jews go. The Soviet Union was the
chief arms supplier to Israel's enemies, and had no diplomatic ties with
Israel. 

Today officials from the states that once formed the Soviet Union are
welcomed as friends, and cultural ties are strong because the immigrants
have given Israel one of the world's largest Russian-speaking expatriate
communities. 

The immigrants have strengthened trade ties, too. Many businessmen hold
dual citizenship and live in Israel while working in their native land.
Weekend flights from Moscow and Kiev are packed with immigrant businessmen
returning to Israel. 

The immigrants come from all over the former Soviet Union -- 887,267 in all
between 1989 and 2000, according to official figures. 

Of these, 285,713 came from Ukraine, 280,341 from Russia, 111,173 from the
Central Asian republics, 68,400 from Belarus, 55,054 from the Caucasus
region, 47,302 from Moldova and the remainder not specified by source
country in the statistics. 

The wave of immigration seems to have crested. Last year, about 51,000
former Soviets came, down from a peak of 185,000 in 1990. 

The decline is because of a slightly improved economy and expanded
religious freedom back home, said Yehuda Weinraub, a spokesman for the
Jewish Agency, which brings Jews to Israel. Others have stayed away because
of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. 

In Moscow, actor Damidov's aunt, Mariam Zarubinskaya, 52, says she never
considered moving to Israel. She says she feels more Russian than Jewish.
While her nephew in Israel is experimenting with Judaism, Zarubinskaya
shuns religion. 

"I think in Russian. I grew up with Russian culture," she said. 

Zarubinskaya, a businesswoman, acknowledges that life in Russia hasn't been
easy in recent years -- but the rage and bloodshed of Israel's conflict
with the Palestinians can't be much better, she reasons. 

There are at least 1 million potential immigrants still in the former
Soviet republics, because of the Israeli government's liberal definition of
eligibility: one Jewish grandparent. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said
that one of Israel's main tasks is to bring them in. 

Those who need reasons to stay away don't have to look hard. 

Only about 35 percent of immigrants with university degrees are working in
their fields, said Anna Isakova, a former government adviser on
immigration. Unemployment among the immigrants hovers around 13 percent,
she said, compared with 9 percent unemployment overall. 

Some 20,000 painters, writers, journalists and humanities professors are
out of work. 

Mechanical engineer Efim Rubinshtein still hasn't found a job in his field
11 years after leaving Minsk, Belarus, for Nazareth Illit in the Galilee,
nearly half of whose 50,000 residents are Soviet immigrants. 

"Everyone who was working in Russia -- they were professors, academics,
engineers," sighs Rubinshtein, 48, waiting with fellow immigrants outside
an employment agency. "They had tenure and experience." 

So he became a laborer at a plastics factory. 

Rubinshtein says his struggle is worth it. His parents and his brother and
sister died of cancer linked to the 1986 accident at Ukraine's Chernobyl
nuclear power plant. He and his wife survived, but are glad to have access
to Israel's high-quality medical services if they are needed. 

Every wave of immigrants to Israel finds itself resented by some of those
who came before, and the latest wave is no exception. Many immigrants
complain of being stereotyped as racketeers, prostitutes and alcoholics,
and there are frequent reports of brawls between immigrant youths and Jews
from older communities. 

"Many bad things happening in Israel have been brought by the Russians,"
grumbled Miki Levi, a 19-year-old seminary student from Jerusalem. "They
steal cars. They write anti-Semitic things on synagogues." 

The stereotyping suggests to journalist and immigrant Edward Kuznetsov that
Israeli society doesn't really understand its newest community. 

In 1970 Kuznetsov led 15 other Soviet Jews in an attempt to hijack a plane
to Israel. The plot failed, but Kuznetsov finally got here, with "a lot of
optimism about Israel, a lot of illusions." 

Under the Soviet regime, Jews were persecuted for being Jews, he said. In
Israel, as immigrants, they sometimes feel like second-class citizens. 

Some of the worst bitterness derives from painful encounters with Israel's
tangled relationship between religion and state. 

The law says one Jewish grandparent entitles an immigrant to instant
citizenship. But the rabbis who control marriage and divorce, manage most
cemeteries and wield enormous political clout, have a tougher definition:
Only a person with a Jewish mother is Jewish. 

Immigrants have occasionally been denied a Jewish burial, even in cases
where they died in military service or in terrorist attacks. In 1993, a
rabbi refused to pray over the grave of an immigrant killed in a bus
bombing. She unlike her husband, wasn't Jewish, and was buried in a
non-Jewish section of the cemetery. 

There have been feuds between ultra-Orthodox Jews and the immigrant owners
of non-kosher butcher shops. The Jewishness of some new arrivals is
scrutinized, right down to DNA tests to show they have Jewish relatives. 

But the death of immigrants in the conflict with the Palestinians has
served to bring the newcomers into the fold. 

Last June, when it emerged that most of the 21 young people killed by a
suicide bomber at a Tel Aviv disco were immigrants, the country united with
them in their grief, and many immigrants said that for the first time, they
felt truly Israeli. 

Such is the only consolation for Olga Gordokal, whose only son was killed
in a firefight in the West Bank town of Ramallah in September. 

Paratroop Sgt. David Gordokal, a 23-year-old immigrant from Ukraine, had
finished his army service three years earlier -- but he re-enlisted after
the disco bombing, which killed one of his best friends. 

At home in Nazareth Illit, Olga Gordokal sifts through a photo album. Her
son's red paratrooper beret lies in a plastic bag next to a stack of
condolence cards. 

"Israel -- how can I say it? Now this is really our land," she says. 

As evening settles, she wraps a black scarf around her head and walks to a
nearby cemetery to visit the grave, above a valley flecked with squares of
window light and a floodlit patch of soccer field where a match is under way. 

"It's beautiful," she says, taking in the view. 

Then she cries. 

******

#4
The Independent on Sunday (UK)
Russia and Opec in new oil-price battle
By Leo Lewis

Another fierce showdown between Russia and Opec is expected in the week 
between Christmas and New Year. Though the oil-price war being waged between 
Opec and non-Opec countries has calmed slightly recently, industry experts 
believe hostilities are about to resume.

Opec is understood to have set a deadline of 27 December for Russia and 
others to agree a production cut of 500,000 barrels a day. The Saudi-led 
cartel plans an emergency meeting on 28 December if its demands are not met.

The battle, over the need for sweeping production cuts, has caused crude 
prices to tumble more than 25 per cent in two months. Russia, the world's 
largest non-Opec producer, has said it will make the cuts, but insiders said 
individual Russian oil companies will not comply by the given date, which 
will inflame Opec.

One Moscow-based oil trader said: "Lukoil, Yukos and the others will 
outwardly support the cuts, but in reality they will never make them. It's 
all money to them, regardless of crude prices. Every barrel that can be sold 
will be."

Jay Bhutani, an oil industry analyst at Lehman Brothers, believes the present 
crisis is not a passing phenomenon. The output battles "will be repeated many 
times over the coming years", he predicted. 

******

#5
The Russia Journal
December 14-20, 2001
Russians abroad need help
The state should help would-be immigrants 
By OTTO LATSIS

President Vladimir Putin’s latest weekly meeting with the government
coincided with International Human Rights Day. Putin didn’t forget to point
out the importance of human rights in his remarks. He asked the government
to pay closer attention to fundamental social and economic rights and to
follow the progress of draft laws on pension and labor reform in the Duma. 

Putin also mentioned the need to work with Russians living abroad and do
more to defend their rights. This call was directed primarily at the
Foreign Ministry, suggesting what kind of work Putin had in mind – the
traditional role played by embassies in foreign countries. 

But in the case of Russia and some of the other former Soviet republics,
the issue of compatriots abroad is of a different nature than in most other
countries. Most people who think of themselves as Russian and live abroad
didn’t leave the state where they were born. Rather, the state left them
stranded by shifting borders. As a result, 20 million to 25 million ethnic
Russians – equivalent to the population of a medium-sized European nation –
now live in countries that 10 years ago were part of the Soviet Union.

In some of these countries, such as Tajikistan, which has had to defend
itself from armed attack from the south, the question is not one even of
human rights, as such, but of pure survival. Few of the former Soviet
republics have given the Russian language official status alongside the
native language, as did Kyrgyzstan. None of the new republics recognize
dual citizenship, and nor does Russia itself. 

This citizenship issue has given Russians abroad a difficult choice between
giving up civil rights in their countries of residence and renouncing the
Russian citizenship they see as a sort of insurance policy if events at
home take a turn for the worse. Two of the former Soviet republics –
Estonia and Latvia – don’t even give their people this choice. Many
Russians in these countries find it virtually impossible to get citizenship
and end up stateless persons in the countries they were born in or lived in
for many years. Finally, Russians in a number of countries face
restrictions on getting education in their native language. Latvia, for
example, is moving toward a complete phasing out of all education in Russian.

With problems like these, just asking the Foreign Ministry to do something
won’t help much. On the contrary, some Russian officials’ clumsy propaganda
campaigns have at times just made things worse for Russians abroad by
making local leaders only more irritated with them. This is most evident in
Estonia, Latvia and Kazakstan – the three countries that felt the most
threatened by Soviet-era nationalities policy. The Kazaks are already a
minority in their own country, and the Latvians and Estonians come
dangerously close. This in part explains why the authorities in these
countries have taken such a tough line with the Russians since gaining
independence.

Routine embassy work won’t be of any help in resolving this tangle of
problems, some of which don’t depend on the new independent states at all.
What’s needed is a well-financed Russian state program specially aimed at
helping Russians abroad move back to Russia if they wish to do so.

Of course, some of them are coming anyway. In the decade following the
collapse of the Soviet Union some 4 million people are estimated to have
immigrated to Russia from neighboring countries. But this is only a
fraction of those who would like to come but don’t because of material
difficulties and of Russia’s own demand for people. 

Russia faces a serious depopulation problem. Annual natural population
decline reaches hundreds of thousands of people, but this was offset by
migration from neighboring countries only during the initial years
following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, almost all those willing
or able to come to Russia without special state assistance have already
done so, and Russia hasn’t exactly put on much of a welcome for them. This
year, migration to Russia will only compensate for 5 percent of natural
population decline, and next year the figure might be zero.

This decrease in migration coincided with the period when Russia made up to
$30 billion a year in additional revenue from oil exports alone. It’s not
that there was no money to help Russians return; rather, there was no
political will. 

For comparison’s sake, Israel had 4 million Jews 10 years ago, and now it
has 5 million Jews. The 4 million Jews already there have absorbed the 1
million newcomers, and Israel intends to do the same in the next decade. If
we transfer these proportions to Russia, this would mean the arrival of at
least 35 million people over 10 years, not the 4 million that actually
came. Such an influx of people would do a lot to help solve many of
Russia’s strategic problems, but so far, no Russian politicians have
proposed developing programs to encourage this. They all limit themselves
to making appeals to protect the rights of Russians abroad.
 
******

#6
Kazakh leader predicts decade of growth, harmony
By Dmitry Solovyov
  
ASTANA, Dec 16 (Reuters) - President Nursultan Nazarbayev on Sunday set
growth, inter-ethnic harmony and the alleviation of poverty as the main
goals for Kazakhstan over the next decade, after the first 10 "difficult
but happy" years of independence. 

Nazarbayev said the country had managed to overcome the economic tumult
that followed the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, preserve civil peace
and establish warm relations with its giant neighbours Russia and China. 

The charismatic 62-year-old leader, who has ruled the sprawling nation of
15 million since Soviet times, was made a "People's Hero" by parliament on
Saturday for his role in securing independence and market reforms. 

"We had never lived and will never live again such difficult but happy
years," Nazarbayev said during an emotional 50-minute independence day
address from the sumptuous Congress Hall of the new capital Astana. 

Kazakhstan's economic performance could be compared to that of Poland and
Hungary, seen as the reform front-runners of the post-Communist world.
Kazakhstan's gross domestic product will rise 12 percent this year after
last year's 9.8 percent. 

Economic growth would not be short-lived, he said. 

"Our forecasts show that Kazakhstan is able to increase its gross domestic
product by five to seven percent annually, while industrial output is set
to rise 10 percent. But we must set even more ambitious goals," he said. 

"In the forthcoming decade, we must eradicate poverty in general and secure
the predominance of a middle-class in our country." 

ADAPT TO SURVIVE 

Compared to other post-Soviet nations of the 12-member Commonwealth of
Independent States, Kazakhstan enjoys relative social stability. But
monthly wages still average just $130 and, unlike oil and metal workers, a
bright future remains a far off dream for most citizens. 

Nazarbayev, himself a former steel worker, said the resource-rich state
would over the next 10 years concentrate on developing its metals, oil and
agriculture sectors, and improving its infrastructure. 

The economy is also being diversified by developing food, processing and
chemical industries, he said. "It will take a very short time for
Kazakhstan to join the world's leading oil producers. But we must remember
that oil and other natural resources...will inevitably end one day." 

After the overnight collapse of the Soviet Union, many political scientists
predicted Kazakhstan would sink into the sort of inter-ethnic strife and
separatism that afflicted other post-Communist states. 

But those fears have so far proven groundless and Nazarbayev praised the
ability of the country, which has more than 100 different ethnic groups, to
avoid the sort of strife seen in some ex-Soviet neighbours. 

"We hold in our hands the future of one of the most multi-national and
multi-faith countries of the world," said Nazarbayev. Muslims peacefully
co-exist with Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics in Kazakhstan, which
earlier this year hosted a visit by Pope John Paul. 

In Soviet times, this vast Central Asian republic was turned into a huge
melting pot with millions of Germans, Koreans, Chechens and other "enemies
of the people" sent to Stalinist labour camps or evicted to its endless
steppes. 

******

#7
Newsday
December 14, 2001
Withdrawal Imperils U.S.-Russian Bond
By Paul J. Saunders
Paul J. Saunders is director of The Nixon Center in Washington, D.C.

PRESIDENT George W. Bush's announcement that the United States will
withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is hardly the disaster some
have sought to portray. 

However, the president's decision to pull out of the treaty, which has been
met with disappoinment but little surprise in Moscow, does represent a lost
opportunity in America's evolving ties with Russia. Keeping those ties on
track toward the "new relationship" the Bush Administration has called for
will require serious effort.

Taking into account the possibly catastrophic consequences of a missile
attack, no reasonable measures to defend American lives and property should
be rejected. The treaty was a clear obstacle to such efforts and had
outlived its usefulness. 

President Richard Nixon, who signed the agreement with Soviet leader Leonid
Brezhnev in 1972, concluded almost 20 years later that "the time has come
to move beyond the ABM Treaty." Developments in Iraq and North Korea, not
to mention India and Pakistan, only strengthened the case against the
treaty in the intervening years.

Nevertheless, the Bush administration's failure to reach an understanding
with Russia on modifying or replacing the treaty is an important lost
opportunity. The U.S.-Russian relationship has improved substantially since
the first meeting between Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin in
June. The improvement has markedly accelerated since Sept. 11, as each side
has focused on the shared objective of destroying the al-Qaida terrorist
network and Afghanistan's Taliban regime. 

But continued improvements in the relationship are not foreordained: Both
sides will have to work at the relationship, and both presidents will face
challenges in doing so. An agreement on missile defense would have paved
the way for broader cooperation. Now, U.S. withdrawal from the treaty will
ultimately make it more difficult.

The Kremlin's pragmatic and relatively quiet reaction- Putin called the
decision "mistaken" - should not be misunderstood. From the Russian
perspective, the withdrawal is likely to raise important questions about
U.S. intentions. Putin is already far in front of Russian public opinion on
relations with the United States.

There is little doubt the announced end of the treaty will increase the gap
and put pressure on him to demonstrate that closer relations with America
will bring tangible benefits to Russia. In the absence of such benefits, it
will become increasingly hard for him to accommodate U.S. preferences on
other issues, such as the post-Afghanistan phases of the war on terrorism,
Iraq and NATO enlargement.

This is where the challenges to the United States become more difficult.
Improving the U.S.-Russian relationship was relatively easy during the war
on the Taliban, whose brand of Islamic extremism Moscow has long considered
a serious threat to not only the stability of Muslim states on its southern
perimeter, but also to Russia's own internal security (such as in
Chechnya). Now that the war seems to be winding down, our list of common
interests will be shorter - and the list of divergent interests may grow,
especially as Washington likely pays greater attention to Iraq.

Moving the U.S.-Russian relationship forward in such an environment will
require greater sensitivity to Russian interests and a serious effort to
help Putin show his people how cooperation with Washington can benefit
them, directly and unambiguously. This is by no means an insurmountable
problem, but if it is to be addressed successfully, it must be recognized
as a problem and approached accordingly.

Reassuring Russians that the United States wants a close and strong
relationship with their country - through actions, not words - can help
ensure that America's withdrawal from the treaty is little more than a bump
on the road to that new relationship. Failing to do so risks making the
treaty's collapse into the first in a series of wrong turns and
disappointments. 

******

#8
New York Times
December 16, 2001
The Morning After Dawns on Moscow
By PATRICK E. TYLER
WASHINGTON

UNTIL last week, Russia and its leader were on a roll. In this season of 
strategic realignment and war against terror, Russia once again became 
central to American foreign policy and it seemed that one of the big winners 
was its president, Vladimir V. Putin. Then came President Bush's announcement 
that the United States was pulling out of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty of 
1972.

Now a question arises: In the most interesting game of diplomatic casino in 
decades, between the son of a former C.I.A. chief and a man who grew up in 
the K.G.B., who is getting the better of whom?

After the inferno of Sept. 11, no foreign power acted as swiftly and 
decisively as Russia to offer intelligence support, air rights and a free 
hand for United States military forces to fly into bases in Central Asia to 
conduct their war in Afghanistan. 

And no one gained from that cooperation more than Mr. Putin. His exposure at 
Mr. Bush's side in four summit meetings stripped away much of the negative 
image he had in the West — as a former K.G.B. officer who had brutalized 
Chechnya and stifled Moscow's independent news media.

Now, with victory in sight in Afghanistan, President Bush's decision to pull 
the plug on the ABM treaty, which had come to preoccupy the affairs of the 
two big nuclear powers, raises the question whether Mr. Bush is moving on 
from his Russian dalliance. 

If foreign policy was a song, said Toby T. Gati, the Russia specialist who 
was the State Department's intelligence chief in the Clinton administration, 
Mr. Bush's actions brought to mind the Paul Simon refrain, "Fifty ways to 
leave your lover." An aide to Mr. Powell had a similar thought, likening the 
question on the minds of Russian parliament members who recently met with Mr. 
Powell to another song: "Will you still love me tomorrow?"

Those Russian legislators did not know that the ABM announcement was coming, 
but they were already concerned that Mr. Putin's decision to align Russia 
squarely with the United States, to open the doors of Central Asia to 
American forces and to renew Russia's embrace of the NATO alliance could 
backfire — if it turned out that Mr. Bush was simply "playing" Mr. Putin to 
win support for American war aims.

That would be rich irony, since some of Mr. Bush's American critics have 
grumbled for many months that Mr. Putin has been using wiles learned in 
K.G.B. days to manipulate the American president.

It was, after all, Mr. Bush who said he had looked into Mr. Putin's soul and 
found a partner to be trusted. And now, in Afghanistan, America was fighting 
the war against terrorism that Mr. Putin wanted. Russia did not have to 
contribute a single soldier for the military operations. But it gained 
immensely from them, stanching the flow of heroin from Afghanistan and 
cutting the infiltration routes of Islamic militants who have been part of 
the Chechen rebellion.

For three months, Mr. Putin has cheered America from the sidelines, offering 
political support at the United Nations and opening for Washington a library 
of Russian intelligence dossiers on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda's terror 
network, which has plagued Russia and Central Asia for years.

"Putin now had the Americans doing his business in Afghanistan and he was 
fighting to the last American," Ms. Gati said.

When Kabul, the Afghan capital, fell last month, the Russian-backed Northern 
Alliance was the first to claim the city. Russia's guys had won. A dozen 
Russian air transports flew in to Kabul even as British and French troops — 
hoping to play a role in the security and humanitarian chores of liberation
— 
were barred from entry by the Northern Alliance and by Gen. Tommy Franks, the 
American commander.

For Russia, it was clear that America did not want to stay in Central Asia 
and, therefore, Russia's role there — as a member of the coalition and a
new 
American partner — would gain legitimacy even though the whole region's
newly 
independent leaders had spent the last decade straining to keep Moscow at 
arm's length. Russia was back in the great game, garnering influence and a 
chance to dominate oil and gas extraction in the region because all roads 
there — especially pipeline routes — lead to Russia.

And there was more. Saudi Arabia's image has been suffering from the 
discovery that so many of its mosques were infested with bin Laden 
radicalism. Mr. Putin deftly suggested that Russia — with its abundant
energy 
resources and pipeline network — could assume the role of a critical
supplier 
of energy to the West if the Arabian peninsula was convulsed by instability.

But if that was a clear vision of how things looked last week, to many in 
Moscow it now feels like the morning after.

Mr. Putin's first reaction to the ABM decision was tempered, as Washington 
had hoped. No hysterical recriminations in public. The decision was a 
mistake, he said, but it "does not create a threat to the national security 
of the Russian federation."

Where does that leave Russia now in American foreign policy? Mr. Putin and 
the political establishment that has been supporting him would certainly like 
to know.

Ivo Daalder, a Brookings Institution specialist on Russia who served under 
President Clinton, wonders whether Russian- American relations "can endure 
and become stronger even with this big blot" on the ledger. Russian 
cooperation might slowly dry up again in critical areas, like securing 
Russian nuclear weapons and their radiological innards that many terrorists 
would like to get their hands on.

"I don't know the answer," Mr. Daalder said, "but I fear the worst."

The reason a number of specialists are thinking so darkly about the long-term 
impact of Mr. Bush's ABM decision is that the Russians see — as Americans
can 
see — that there is an ideological struggle going on within the Bush 
administration and Russia policy is often the fulcrum of that debate. To some 
of Mr. Bush's advisers, it is a mistake to give Russia an exalted status; 
they think it just doesn't deserve it, given its decline and its geopolitical 
irrelevance in a globalized economy. 

A month ago, Mr. Bush promised Mr. Putin at their meeting in Crawford, Tex., 
that the United States would welcome Russia into NATO's decision-making 
councils. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sought to remove from a 
press statement all references to "NATO at 20" — the new characterization
of 
19 NATO members sitting with Russia as an alliance of 20 nations.

Mr. Rumsfeld lost the battle, but his intervention delayed the debate over 
how to integrate Russia into the alliance. One thing the hard-liners wanted 
to insure was that Russia would not get to influence next year's round of 
NATO enlargement, in which as many as nine new nations will enter. 

AT week's end, the White House statement welcoming Mr. Putin's acceptance of 
the ABM decision was conspicuously void of any reference to Russia's role in 
Western security and seemed to drive home the new reality that the strategic 
chips are falling exclusively in America's favor. 

"Raw national interests dictate that other countries" — including Russia
— 
"will continue to cooperate with us when it is in their interest to do so," 
Mr. Daalder pointed out. But in the long run, he said, Russia's 
disappointment over the ABM treaty could end "the presumption of future 
cooperation that has been so central to our relations with allies and friends 
around the world."

******

#9
The Guardian (UK)
15 December 2001
Russia's lost tribe 
In a controverial social experiment, a Jewish social experiment, a jewish 
autonomous state was set up in Siberia in 1928. Despite the terrors of Stalin 
and Hitler, John O'Mahony finds it still intact, a frozen mini-Zion
By John O'Mahony

It is Sabbath in Birobidzhan, capital of the Jewish autonomous region. A huge 
illuminated menorah candelabra, its stems fashioned from rough metal pylons, 
its seven flames gracelessly represented by crude bare lamps, calls the 
Jewish congregation to service through the bitter winter morning. The huddled 
figures that come tramping through the snow are mostly elderly, all of them 
swaddled in hefty coats, brightly coloured scarves and fluffy fur hats. 
Temperatures are already swooping down towards -10 C, and within a few days 
will reach a ferocious -30 C. This is one consideration that Stalin neglected 
to take into account when he marked out this desolate corner of Siberia's 
frozen far east as the Soviet homeland for the Jews: Zion was never meant to 
be this cold. 

The synagogue itself, pinned between grey apartment blocks on the city's 
outskirts, might be mistaken for a simple wooden shack but for the menorah 
and the blue stars of David adorning its walls. Inside, it is so cramped that 
the sexes must be segregated by a grubby curtain that cuts the women off from 
view. The reading today, appropriately, is Jacob's dream at Bethel, in which 
God promises a land that will belong to him and his descendants. At the end, 
Oleg Shavulski, the region's only rabbi, asks the congregation: "Who 
understood that? Can anyone sum it up in a couple of words?" There is a 
mumbling of female voices from behind the curtain: "The Jews were supposed to 
be killed but they were saved," bleats one woman. The rabbi patiently 
acknowledges this as one interpretation, but goes on to emphasise themes of 
spirit and endurance. 

However, the voice behind the curtain cuts him off, growing ever more 
strident and insistent: "It's all about spiritual and physical annihilation," 
the unseen woman cries, "Stalin didn't want to convert Birobidzhan into a 
homeland for us. He wasn't any better than Hitler. He just wanted to gather 
all the Jews together in one place and wipe them out. That is the message of 
Birobidzhan..." 

Founded in 1928, and given its full legal status in 1934, there can be little 
doubt that the Jewish autonomous region - known locally simply as Birobidzhan 
- ranks as one of humanity's most unusual, exotic and misguided social 
experiments. Mooted in a time of post-revolutionary fervour, when it was 
government policy to dole out territories to national minorities, the scheme 
was originally planned for the Ukraine, Crimea and Belarus, areas that 
already had a large Jewish population. 

Why exactly the Soviet authorities eventually chose a remote strip of land on 
the Chinese border 8,000km from Moscow is still unclear, though it probably 
had something to do with objections from Ukrainian and Crimean residents, 
securing the border against the threat of Chinese invasion and the lack of 
availability of other options. Some have even put it down to a particularly 
cruel joke on the part of Stalin (who, following Lenin, believed that the 
Jews were "a people without a future, whose very existence had yet to be 
proved".) What is certain is that, thousands of miles from Jewish centres, 
without historical links of any kind, the Soviet Zion seemed blighted right 
from the start. 

This didn't stop the Soviet propaganda machine from cranking out countless 
posters of smiling Jews toiling the fields under banners that proclaimed: 
"Build a socialist Birobidzhan" and "Strengthen the great achievements of the 
Leninist nationality policy". An aeroplane called the Birobidzhanets was 
commandeered to fly over Belarus and Ukraine dropping leaflets. Novels were 
written in Yiddish extolling its virtues and in the mid-30s a propaganda 
film, Seekers Of Happiness, depicted the journey of an American family who 
moved to the Jewish autonomous region to escape the great Depression. 

Birobidzhan was to be a haven where the Jews could escape the squalor of the 
Shtetl and toil the land, where Zionist Hebrew would succumb to proletarian 
Yiddish, and where the synagogue would be supplanted by Jewish theatre and 
music. 

However, when the first Jewish settlers arrived in 1928 all they found was a 
train station, a few huts and a large marsh. Of the first wave who arrived 
that year, almost all left immediately. During the first decade of its 
existence, when almost 40,000 Jews were persuaded to relocate to the region, 
the drop-out rate was in excess of 50%. Yet despite this, the Jews of 
Birobidzhan managed to erect a city almost with their bare hands and drain 
the surrounding area for agriculture. Just as they were getting a foothold, 
however, the region was struck in 1936-37 by Stalin's great terror, which saw 
thousands of Birobidzhan Jews fall victim to the purges and many of its 
political leaders thrown in jail. Almost all the Yiddish schools were closed 
and the Jewish influx into the region virtually stopped. By the onset of war, 
Jews in Birobidzhan accounted for just 16% of the overall population. The 
Soviet Zion experiment had come to an abrupt halt. 

The Birobidzhan project saw a brief revival at the end of the second world 
war, when victims of the Holocaust were shipped out east en masse. However, 
Stalin's campaign against the Jews (deemed "rootless cosmopolitans") was soon 
in full merciless swing, resulting in the closure, in the early 50s, of 
Birobidzhan's last Jewish cultural institutions, its Jewish theatre and its 
Yiddish newspaper. The Judaica collection of the public library was burned. 
Stalin even began exiling Jews to Birobidzhan, some suspect, with a view to 
mass exterminations. Any second far eastern holocaust was averted by the 
dictator's death, though subsequent Soviet leaders have tried simply to 
ignore the Jewish autonomous region as at best a failed experiment, at worst 
a vicious hoax. 

Birobidzhan today bears many of the marks of this curious history. The huge 
soviet-style concrete banner perpetually unfurling itself on Birobidzhan city 
limits and the sign over the main train station, convey to travellers their 
imminent destination in both Russian and Yiddish. Many street signs are also 
bilingual: Shalom Aleichem Street, Emmanuel Kazakevich Street, Buzi Miller 
Street, all named after Yiddish writers who lived in the region. And 
Birobidzhan Shtern, the newspaper which reopened after Stalinism, still 
publishes a Yiddish edition. 

Thanks to a 10,000-strong post-perestroika surge in emigration to Germany and 
Israel, the Jews now make up just 3-4% of the overall population. Yet there 
are still many who refuse to leave, harbouring a grudging affection for their 
fractured Zion. Among the congregation at the synagogue, it is possible to 
find the last survivors of the first wave of settlers who came here brimming 
with idealism: "In 1929, I came here from the Ukraine with my parents when I 
was just 13," says retired factory worker Lyubov Israelovna, now aged 85. "It 
really was an empty place, there was nothing at all here. My father had to 
build our wooden house. We built the whole city from scratch ourselves. In 
the Ukraine, we were surrounded by Jewish culture, Jewish music, but here 
there was none of that. We stayed only because of the belief that we could 
somehow build a better life for ourselves." 

Jews from the second major influx of settlers can be found at the Ghetto 
club, a group of survivors who meet in a community centre in downtown 
Birobidzhan every month to celebrate Sabbath: "Our camp was in Ukraine, it 
was a small Jewish borough about 220 kilometres from Kiev," says Verkhleb 
Abramovich, a labourer in his 60s. "There was a sandpit where Nazis were 
shooting people. Some were hanged in public. My cousin had her breasts cut 
off and my brother had a five-cornered star cut into his skin. 

"So, in 1947 when the recruiters came and proposed the journey to 
Birobidzhan, we all wanted to go. We were excited about the idea of a Jewish 
republic. And, in general, we weren't disappointed. We were given bread and 
potatoes, we weren't hungry any more. For the first time, we could live a 
decent life." 

Another member of the Ghetto club, a former furniture factory worker named 
Mikhail Kiselbrener, has an altogether different recollection: "When we were 
taken to go to Birobidzhan, they promised us the golden mountains," he 
remembers. "They told us that we would have our houses, the land, that we 
would be given everything and it would be wonderful there. It was very hard 
in Ukraine at the time, especially the first 18 months of starvation after 
the war." The reality turned out to be less radiant: "It was the same 
starvation as in the Ukraine. We were placed in barracks which were full of 
holes, you could almost see right through, and it was winter, -40 C. I 
remember we were given potatoes that were frozen the next morning. There was 
absolutely nothing to eat. People were dying from hunger even more then in 
Ukraine." 

Those born after the death of Stalin generally avoided such physical 
hardships, but faced an entirely different and perhaps more insidious 
malaise: total assimilation. "We grew up knowing nothing at all about Jewish 
traditions," says 32-year-old Nina Kaufmann, now the synagogue secretary. "We 
ate pork, we even ate salo (Russian salted pork fat). We had no idea that it 
was forbidden. 

"We were brought up in the communist system, and that took priority. We were 
pioneers and everyone was paying the usual compliments to Stalin and Lenin. 
In my childhood, I didn't even know anything about Israel. Sometimes, my 
parents would get a letter from Israel and they would be too scared to open 
it. They would simply hide it." 

Even the rabbi, prior to his "spiritual awakening" in 1989, claims to have 
known little about Jewish traditions: "Even as late as '96, when the rabbi 
came from Jerusalem to circumcise the boys, we didn't know what circumcision 
was. It was terrifying." It is this complete identity blackout, more than the 
purges, the hardships or, more recently, the falling Jewish population, that 
has led Rabbi Shavulski, aged 32, to denounce Birobidzhan: "The only thing I 
could say is that this Birobidzhan was given to the Jews who were leaving 
Ukraine and coming here because they were running from hunger. And the Jews 
who came saved themselves physically, not spiritually." 

However, even Rabbi Shavulski would agree that since perestroika, there have 
been flickers of light. Thanks to a post-communist relaxation, children in 
the main primary school once again receive instruction in Jewish traditions. 
On the day we visited, the teacher was presiding over a class of 10- and 
11-year-olds: "Today we are going to learn about the celebration of the 
Hanukkah," the teacher said. After lighting each candle of the eight-stemmed 
Hanukkah candelabra, the class sang Yiddish songs before attempting to 
explain why they are interested in Jewish culture: "Because I myself am a 
Jew," said 10-year-old Maxim. "Because few people understand the Jewish 
religion and culture," said Katya, "and everybody understands the Russian." 

Just down the street, a group of young college students are also learning 
Yiddish in a tiny room adorned with charts showing the migrations of the Jews 
and the Russian equivalents of the Yiddish alphabet. Bizarrely, none of the 
pupils is Jewish: "We were given the option of two languages, French and 
Yiddish," says 21-year-old Nadya, "I chose Yiddish because it is more 
interesting for me than French, and more useful." 

The teacher, Elena Belayeva, works for Freid, one of the main Birobidzhan 
Jewish organisations. She explains forthrightly: "None of these girls will 
ever get the chance to go to France and not many French people come to 
Birobidzhan. So, whether Yiddish is a dead language is theoretical for them. 
Why not learn it? It is more interesting and more exotic." 

Perhaps the most bizarre side-effect of the Jewish/Russian melting pot is the 
Taiga Vostok vodka factory, whose sweeping production line rattles out a 
selection of four different types of Kosher vodka, all emblazoned with the 
Star of David and Jewish caricatures from Fiddler on the Roof: "It is all 
checked by the chief rabbi of Moscow, Pinchas Goldschmidt," one technician 
assures me, "and the rabbi has the right to come in at any time to inspect 
and ensure that we are following the regulations and doing everything 
correctly. This is a serious undertaking and it's important that nobody gets 
cheated. That's why we make sure that everything is being done according to 
kosher recipes." 

However, scratch the surface and it's difficult to escape the suspicion that 
these changes are no more permanent and meaningful than the old propaganda. 
In the classroom, most of the children express a desire to emigrate to 
Israel: "Because you can swim in the sea and there is no winter," says 
10-year-old Yana Maslova. 

Lurking under every cultural aspect of the Jewish autonomous region is the 
same insidious confusion. "Jewish identity here is a complicated thing," 
continues Beleyeva, who has studied in Israel and works also for one of the 
main Birobidzhan cultural institutions, "You cannot define it as you can in 
Israel. Are you religious? Secular? Do you or don't you believe? The very 
fact of being in a place called this Jewish autonomous region challenges 
everything immediately." 

But some commentators prefer not to see the whole idea as doomed from the 
beginning: "I don't think that it necessarily was, right from the start," 
says Robert Weinberg, author of Birobidzhan, Stalin's Forgotten Zion 
(University of California Press): "I think that certain policies and 
decisions made it very difficult. What kind of Jewish culture can you have if 
you cannot talk about Jewish history and Judaism, if the whole breath of 
Jewish history - everything - has got to be strait-jacketed to work for the 
building of socialism. I wouldn't say that it was doomed from the start but 
it had everything stacked against it." 

Weinberg also feels that the experiment ultimately wasn't a total failure, 
that it raised interesting issues about the nature of being Jewish: "There 
are many Zionists who say that you can't have a Jewish homeland unless it is 
in Palestine. But you can certainly think of Jewish civilisation outside of 
Palestine and there are plenty of Jewish thinkers who argue that you can have 
a Jewish nation outside of a specific territory in Palestine. It certainly 
didn't help that there was no infrastructure there of Jewish culture, that it 
all had to be imported wholesale. Can you have a Jewish nation without 
Judaism - can it be entirely secular? That is a very tough question." For the 
moment, however, it would seem to be one that the Jewish autonomous region 
has answered in the negative. 

But for those Jews who remain there, the thought of Birobidzhan as a 
sociological experiment is particularly galling: "I hate it when people talk 
about the Birobidzhan 'project', as if it was a huge laboratory," says Rabbi 
Shavulski. "It's easy to forget that we are talking about people." 

Ultimately, it will be left to people like Shavulski to care for the victims 
of this piece of social engineering gone awry. Despite the downward trends, 
in everything from population to social conditions, the rabbi remains 
stubbornly optimistic: "The future depends on God and on us," he says, 
lighting up the bulbs on the Menorah once more to see us along our way. "At 
Hanukkah last week we had more than 70 people here in the synagogue. My 
position is that if people emigrate, then it is a good outcome. If they go to 
Israel, then they will probably be happy there. But if people decide to stay, 
that is equally good. As long as there are two people left, I will stay and 
do my duty. If only one remains, I'll stay on for that one. Who cares whether 
or not this is the Jewish autonomous region? My job is to stay here and serve 
the Jews." 
 
*******