Johnson's Russia List
#5613
23 December 2001
davidjohnson@erols.com
A CDI Project
www.cdi.org

[Note from David Johnson
1. UPI: Martin Walker, Central Asia - Is the US settling in?
2. AP: Russian director Sokurov shoots monumental film in St. Petersburg's 
Hermitage Museum.
3. New York Times: Thomas Friedman, Russia's Last Line.
4. Washington Post: David Ignatius, Russia Wins the War.
5. Itar-Tass: Russian liberal leader hopes for "constructive cooperation" 
with authorities. (Yavlinsky)
6. The Observer (UK): Ian Traynor, Atrocity museum angers Russians. 
Kremlin accuses Germans of 'making us look like Nazis'     
7. Los Angeles Times: Eugene Rumer and Jeffrey Simon, Russia Should Have 
a Seat at the Table.
8. Luba Schwartzman: ORT Review.
9. Newsweek Poland: Andrew Nagorski, Who is Vladimir Putin? The Russian
leader has demonstrated a healthy disdain for ideology, but he’s still a product of
his KGB upbringing.
10. BBC Monitoring: Russian defence chief's contradictory statements aim to 
avoid conflict - paper.
11. New York Times: Michael Wines, You Pretend to Drive, We Pretend to Get 
You There.] 
 
*******

#1
Central Asia - Is the US settling in?
December 23, 2001
By MARTIN WALKER, UPI Chief International Correspondent

Since Saddam Hussein was not toppled, a historian might say that the most
important outcome of the 1991 Gulf War was to establish a long-term United
States military presence in the Arabian Peninsula and to turn the Persian
Gulf into an American lake. The same historian could now also argue that
the most significant result of the Taliban war will be to establish a
similarly prolonged U.S. military presence in Central Asia — which we now
know rivals the Gulf in oil and gas reserves.

Last week, the Pakistani newspaper Dawn said that President Pervez
Musharraf had agreed to an American request to prolong its stay at the
Jacobabad air base for the foreseeable future.

The article quoted local military sources and went into considerable
detail: "The Americans had asked for 40,000 metric tons of concrete to
renovate the base in Jacobabad, according to an aviation source. U.S.
officials have asked that a wall surrounding the base be raised four feet,
and they want to construct air-conditioned barracks for U.S. troops in time
for summer."

Air conditioning and barracks, and 40,000 metric tons of concrete (which
means a bigger, stronger runway) suggests that the U.S. is settling in for
a considerable period, and that the military personnel will not be
restricted to pilots and flight crews.

There has been no clarification from the Pentagon about the expected tour
of duty in Jacobabad. (God help the troops stationed there. Jacobabad is
one of the hottest places on earth, with summer temperatures soaring to 130
degrees Fahrenheit, and local says one of the few pleasures is watching the
scorpions die of heat.)

So far, there has been no equivalent reporting of plans for extended stays
in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan, where temporary U.S. air bases have been
established for the Taliban war. Nor is there any suggestion that the
airmen, or the troops of the 10th Mountain Division are preparing to pack
up and go home.

There are obviously very good reasons for the U.S. to have established
temporary bases in the countries around Afghanistan while the war against
al Qaida and the Taliban was under way. There are similarly good reasons to
stay on as the hunt for Osama bin laden continues and as the international
community seeks to restore stability to the battered people and fabric of
Afghanistan.

But at some point the question will be raised in the congress, which must
vote for the funds to pay for it, how long should this American presence be
maintained. And one factor that should figure in their deliberations is
that however useful in military and geopolitical terms, American bases can
impose some sobering costs. 

Take, for example, the bases established since the Gulf War. The
headquarters of the Fifth Fleet are in Bahrain. There are two big U.S. air
bases in Kuwait, at Ali Salem and Ahmed al Jaber, and some 5,000 U.S.
troops at Camp Doha. In Saudi Arabia, another 5,000 troops are at the
Prince Sultan airbase at al-Kharj, just south of Riyadh.

We know why they are there. It's a dangerous neighborhood, with Saddam
Hussein just the most immediately threatening factor. The U.S. bases have
helped stabilize the region, safeguard the strategic asset of oil, and — to
put it charitably — bought time for the less than democratic local regimes
to broaden their political base.

At the same time, the U.S. bases have become a target. Remember the 19 U.S.
troops killed in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi
Arabia. And recall that in his fatwas, Osama bin Laden always put top of
his complaints list the presence of the infidel Crusader troops on Islam's
holy peninsula.

This is not just an Islamic phenomenon. This week saw riots in the South
Korean capital of Seoul over the continued American presence at a military
base in the heart of the city. The American bases at Okinawa are a constant
irritant, however welcome the broader American security umbrella has been
to Japan as a whole.

The presence of American troops and airmen in Central Asia came with a
conditional Russian approval, which seems to have included an understanding
on the Russian side that these would be temporary postings. Maybe the
Russians would welcome an extension, if the current NATO-Russian courtship
prospers.

Maybe, but two big questions remain. The first is the reaction of Beijing,
which now sees American bases to the West, in Japan and South Korea, and
now to the East, in Pakistan and Central Asia. Whatever may be the Chinese
word for encirclement, they are probably using it in the Peoples Liberation
Army HQ these days.

The second question may be more immediate. Last week's attack on the India
parliament in New Delhi, and India's blame of Pakistan, has revived the
worries about relations between those two nuclear-armed neighbors. Not that
the presence of the American air base at Jacobabad guarantees any kind of
U.S. protection or involvement, and it may even help to cool the situation.

But it certainly exposes American troops to a highly dangerous situation,
before Congress or public opinion has had much chance to think about the
implications.

*******

#2
Russian director Sokurov shoots monumental film in St. Petersburg's Hermitage 
Museum
December 23, 2001
By IRINA TITOVA
  
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (AP) - Renowned Russian director Alexander Sokurov 
turned his camera on the Hermitage on Sunday, shooting a film on the museum's 
300-year history in a single, 90-minute take. 

``It's a movie as if in one breath,'' Sokurov said. 

The maker of cult movies about Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin and Adolf Hitler 
said the film, titled ``The Russian Ark,'' was meant to be a unique ``art 
form that combines stage play, documentary, and musical moments'' shot in one 
place at one time. 

``I have a great desire to create this form,'' Sokurov said. ``It's not a 
universal way of shooting, but it's so challenging.'' 

The Russian Ark project required more than six months of rehearsals with 
1,000 actors, dlrs 2.5 million in investment, and 13,000 costumes. 

It also required enormous strength from Tilman Buttner, Germany's premiere 
steadicam specialist, to carry 35 kilograms (77 pounds)of camera equipment 
non-stop while shooting the action on the 1.5-kilometer (1-mile) route 
through 35 Hermitage halls. 

The Hermitage, housed in the former Winter Palace, has 350 rooms. It is one 
of the surviving glories of imperial Russia, built when St. Petersburg was 
the ``window looking out on Europe'' as envisioned by the city's founder, 
Peter the Great. 

In the film, the main character, French aristocrat Marquis de Custine, played 
by Sergei Dreiden, takes spectators on a fantastic journey inside the palace 
from the beginning of the 18th century to modern times. 

He encounters characters from different eras of Hermitage and St. Petersburg 
history, including Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Czar Nicholas I. 
The Winter Palace is shown during the 1941-44 siege of Leningrad, as the city 
was known in Soviet times. 

The film also portrays the dynasty of museum directors, including the present 
director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, who plays himself in the movie. 

*******

#3
New York Times
December 23, 2001
Russia's Last Line
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
 
MOSCOW—Because of Moscow's exploding middle class, you quickly notice two
things driving around this increasingly European city — sushi bars are
opening all over (yes, from borscht to Big Macs to California-Kremlin rolls
in one decade!) and so many people have cars now that traffic is
permanently snarled (imagine Jakarta with snow and ice and you've got
today's Moscow). So sitting in gridlock the other day in Pushkin Square, I
had plenty of time to ask my Russian friend Viktor a cosmic question: Is
your life easier or harder now than it was under Communism?

"Both," he remarked. "It's easier because I don't have to hunt for food
every day and wait in lines for everything. Stores are full now. No lines.
But it all costs a lot of money. The saying here now is that there is only
one line left in Russia — the line for money."

So Karl Marx's theories have finally triumphed in today's Russia: it's all
about money. That's the key to understanding President Vladimir Putin, too.
He's not a tougher Mikhail Gorbachev, or a more sober Boris Yeltsin. He is
Russia's first Deng Xiaoping — Mao's pragmatic successor who first told the
Chinese that "to get rich is glorious" and put in place the modernizing
reforms to do it.

Abba Eban once said that men and nations will always do the right thing in
the end — after they exhaust every other possibility. That is Mr. Putin's
basic message to Russians: "For a decade, we've tried every bad idea, from
default to devaluation to shock therapy. Now there's only one idea left:
passing real reform legislation so we can get real investment to build a
real modern economy. Because in this world, without a real economic
foundation, you're nothing. So we're going to focus now on the only line
that matters — the line for money." This is Putinism: From Das Kapital to
DOScapital.

And it explained to me why Mr. Putin rolled over so meekly on President
Bush's decision to walk away from the ABM treaty, limiting missile
defenses. In 1972, when that treaty was forged, Russian foreign policy was
about one thing — geopolitics, the ideologically driven global competition
for influence with the U.S., and everything, particularly economics, was
subordinated to that. Hence all the food lines. Today, Russian foreign
policy is about two things — geopolitics and geoeconomics — and there is a
real competition between the two. So if Russia can save money and win
Western help by walking away from the ABM treaty, then walk it will.

Don't be fooled, though. Russia's military and foreign policy elite
considered Mr. Bush's ABM move "a slap in the face," said the Russian
pollster Igor Bunin. If the U.S. doesn't come through now with what Mr.
Putin believes he's been promised — a new accord for deep cuts in nuclear
weapons, a real Russia-NATO partnership, plus debt relief, W.T.O.
membership and Western investment, Mr. Putin will be seen as another
Gorbachev — always giving and never receiving. "Then elites could start to
form a front against him," added Mr. Bunin. But for now, Mr. Putin is
ignoring the whispers because in his view Russia will never again be a
player in geopolitics unless it first masters geoeconomics.

What's new in today's Moscow is that there are young capitalists coming of
age, and they believe they can get rich the Chinese way, by making things,
not the old Russian way, by taking things from the state or from the
ground. And without anyone noticing, in 2001 Russia's Parliament quietly
passed a lot of the judicial and tax reform legislation that America was
beating on it to pass for a decade.

I had lunch the other day in a combination art gallery-restaurant, Ulitsa
OGI, which is part of a successful new chain started by Dmitry Jekovich and
his partner. "The difference between us and the oligarchs is that we're
oriented on creating something new, not just privatizing something that
existed before," he explained.

The self-confidence of Russia's new generation that it can actually do this
"capitalist thing" has enormous geopolitical significance. One reason that
Russia was so zealous about keeping so many nukes, and reflexively opposing
the U.S., was because these were the only currency that defined it as a
superpower. If Russians believe they can be powerful on the basis of
geoeconomics, they aren't going to surrender all their nukes or quest for
influence, but the chances of their being real partners with the West will
be much, much greater.

So keep rootin' for Putin — and hope that he makes it to the front of
Russia's last line.   

*******

#4
Washington Post
December 23, 2001
Russia Wins the War 
By David Ignatius

As the dust begins to settle in Afghanistan, it's increasingly clear that the 
big winner in terms of post-Sept. 11 energy politics is Russia, which now 
rivals Saudi Arabia as the world's dominant energy producer. 

Since oil and politics tend to flow in the same direction, the rise of 
Russia's oil industry will have major strategic impact. It will transform 
global business, too, as Russian oil companies such as Lukoil and Yukos join 
the likes of Exxon-Mobil and BP among the "super-majors." 

The Afghanistan war will give Russia control over the oil flowing out of 
Central Asia, according to energy experts. That's the practical price Russian 
President Vladimir Putin can exact for supporting George W. Bush after Sept. 
11. The output from the two big Central Asian producers, Azerbaijan and 
Kakazkhstan, could total roughly 3 million barrels per day by 2010. 

Russian companies may also be the dominant players in Iraq, regardless of 
who's in power there. That would add another 6 million barrels per day of 
potential production under Moscow's loose control. 

Then add Russia's own production, which now totals more than 7 million 
barrels per day, and it's obvious that Moscow is on its way to becoming the 
next Houston -- the global capital of energy. Russia would have a degree of 
control over about 16 million barrels per day, roughly double the current 
production of Saudi Arabia. And those totals don't include natural gas, where 
Russia is already the dominant producer, by far. 

Russia's emerging dominance of the energy industry is a theme of a recent 
study by the Petroleum Finance Co., a Washington consulting firm. Their 
analysts note that when you combine Russia's proven oil and gas reserves, it 
is already the world's leading energy nation, with about 15 percent more 
proven reserves than Saudi Arabia. 

"The U.S. need for Russian cooperation means Moscow will gain most in the new 
strategic environment," argues a Petroleum Finance analysis of "winners" and 
"losers" in the post-Sept. 11 world. Russia's political hegemony in Central 
Asia will be strengthened, according to the study, as will its control over 
regional pipelines and other export routes. 

The big change will come as Russian oil companies change from sluggish 
state-owned giants (and their toxic successors, the privatized companies 
whose shares were looted by Russian "oligarchs") into dynamic modern 
companies. 

These Russian companies today are chronically undervalued because of their 
robber-baron roots. Yukos, for example, has reserves roughly equal to those 
of TotalFinaElf. Yet its market capitalization is less than one-tenth that of 
the European company. 

"The Russians have realized you can make more money by real capitalism than 
by stealing," notes J. Robinson West, chairman of Petroleum Finance. Already, 
Lukoil is planning to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange -- which 
will force the company to meet tough U.S. accounting standards.

The Russian oil giants are beginning to invest aggressively outside their 
home market, in areas where the Russians have easy political access. Lukoil, 
for example, is investing heavily in Iraq's West Qurna field, which is 
expected to produce nearly 700,000 barrels per day. The company is also 
exploring for oil in Algeria, Sudan and Libya. 

"The Russian companies are going to play a major role," agrees Walid 
Khadduri, the editor of Middle East Economic Survey, an authoritative 
newsletter on the industry. A big question, he says, is whether Russia will 
be open to foreign investment in its own energy reserves. 

Another energy winner in the post-Sept. 11 world is Iran, according to both 
Petroleum Finance and Khadduri. Like the Russians, the Iranians were 
important -- if invisible -- allies in America's war in Afghanistan. And 
they're likely to be rewarded. "Washington has been forced to recognize 
Iran's strategic interests in the Middle East and Central Asia," explains the 
Petroleum Finance study, "but Russia's ascendance in Central Asia will limit 
Iran's political and economic gains."

Iran's biggest problem in capitalizing on its new status is its political 
dual personality. It has a moderate president and a young population so 
restless it's holding pro-American riots after soccer games. But Iran's 
mullahs and secret police are clinging to power, and they may hold the 
nation's oil industry hostage.

Saudi Arabia's immense oil reserves will make it a key player in the oil 
business, regardless of what happens with Russia and Iran. That's why some 
recent calls by American politicians to reduce dependence on Saudi oil miss 
the point. Americans can buy less Saudi oil if they want, but in a global 
marketplace that oil will simply be bought by someone else. 

Oil is a proxy for power. And the rise of Russia's oil industry is a symbol 
of Putin's success. In just a few years, Russia has moved from being an 
economic basket case to Bush's key ally. The economic rewards for Russia's 
new status are beginning to trickle in. 

********

#5
Russian liberal leader hopes for "constructive cooperation" with authorities 
ITAR-TASS

Moscow, 23 December: The main goal of Yabloko is to put Russia on the way
of European development, Grigoriy Yavlinskiy said at a congress of the
Yabloko Russian Democratic Party on Sunday [23 December]. The Yabloko
movement was transformed into the party on Saturday, and Yavlinskiy was
elected as the Party Chairman.

Yabloko realizes that freedom and justice are impossible without
consciousness, tolerance and solidarity, therefore it recognizes the
possibility and need for a constructive cooperation with the authorities,
Yavlinskiy said.

Vladimir Lukin is first deputy chairman of Yabloko, while Aleksey Arbatov,
Sergey Ivanenko, Sergey Mitrokhin and Igor Artemyev are chairman's deputies.

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who recently became the head of
the Russian Social Democratic Party, attended the Yabloko congress. "The
political and moral components" of the Yabloko programme coincide with the
position of the Social Democrats on key issues, Gorbachev said. The Russian
Social Democratic Party is ready for cooperation with Yabloko, he noted.

*******

#6
The Observer (UK)
23 December 2001
Atrocity museum angers Russians 
Kremlin accuses Germans of 'making us look like Nazis' 
By Ian Traynor

In the flat countryside north of Berlin, a decaying triangular complex of 
wooden huts and barracks remains a chilling symbol of Hitler's killing 
machine. 

Opened in 1934, the Sachsenhausen concentration camp became the SS 
headquarters for running the elaborate camp network in which millions were to 
die. It was here that 'medical experiments' were conducted on human guinea 
pigs, that mass killing was refined using gas chambers before the Nazis 
practised 'industrial murder' on a vast scale. 

Yet Sachsenhausen also harbours a more obscure, more recent history as the 
lynchpin of Stalin's gulag in Europe. Mass graves discovered on the site in 
the former East Germany a decade ago, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 
contained the corpses of hundreds of victims not of the Nazis, but of the 
NKVD, Stalin's secret police. 

A museum just opened on the fringe of the complex sheds light on the 
little-known story of the NKVD takeover of the camp after Hitler's defeat. 
This exercise in historical recovery is angering the Kremlin by highlighting 
Russia's reluctance to face up to the crimes perpetrated in its name, 
particularly anything that sullies its great triumph over Nazi Germany. 

'This is an attempt to diminish the crimes of the Nazis, to compare the Nazi 
and the Soviet regimes,' protests Mark Kilevich, a Russian who survived the 
Nazi camp in the Forties and is now vice-president of the Sachsenhausen 
International Committee. 'This museum puts the victims and their torturers 
side by side.' 

The idea that the new museum is a German attempt at historical revisionism, 
equating the Holocaust with the gulag, is vehemently rebuffed by the Germans, 
but forcefully argued by the Russian government. 

The Russian embassy in Berlin boycotted the opening of the museum earlier 
this month. The Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Aleksandr Yakovenko, 
attacked the entire concept of a museum devoted to Soviet crimes 'as an 
attempt to whitewash the crimes of the Nazis. Sachsenhausen testifies to the 
darkest side of the Nazi genocide, where thousands of our countrymen fell 
victim,' he said. 'The [museum] organisers aim to equate the crimes of 
fascism with the actions of the Soviet occupation powers.' 

The German organisers dismiss the accusations as absurd and the result of a 
misunderstanding. 

Irina Shcherbakova, a Moscow historian who helped with the years of research 
that led to the Sachsenhausen museum, says the fierce Russian opposition is a 
'very ominous sign' of a historical taboo. 'It's like the earlier Soviet 
demagogy that can only talk of victory in the Second World War. We have lots 
of black spots concerning Germany and the war. The KGB kept it all secret for 
years.' 

Sachsenhausen, where Stalin's son Yakov was murdered by the Nazis, was taken 
over by the NKVD in August 1945. At least 12,000 of the 60,000 people 
incarcerated there by the Russians died, mainly starving or freezing to death 
in the bitter winters of 1946 and 1947. 

The detainees included thousands of junior Nazi officials subjected to rough 
Russian justice. Many, however, were innocent - including victims of 
denunciations, large numbers of emigrčs who fled Russia to Berlin during or 
after the revolution, anti-communists, German social democrats and teenagers 
groundlessly suspected of being Nazi guerrillas. 

The Russian government says it has now 'rehabilitated' 8,000 German victims 
of the NKVD from those years. But the barbarism meted out by the Russians in 
Germany in the early post-war years - revenge for the appalling suffering 
inflicted on the Soviet Union by the Third Reich - remains largely hidden 
from contemporary Russians. 

In Berlin at the war's end, it is estimated that up to two million German 
women were raped, mainly by Soviet soldiers. Talk of this and Sachsenhausen 
is still largely taboo in Russia, where opposition to the museum is 
reinforced by the fact that most of the 30,000 victims of the Nazis there 
were Russians. 

******

#7
Los Angeles Times
December 23, 2001   
Russia Should Have a Seat at the Table
By EUGENE RUMER and JEFFREY SIMON 
Eugene Rumer and Jeffrey Simon are senior fellows at National Defense 
University's Institute for National Strategic Studies. The views expressed 
here are their own. 

WASHINGTON -- Russia does not belong in NATO. The Russian people and their 
leaders are ambivalent about membership in the alliance, nor is the North 
Atlantic Treaty Organization ready to fully embrace its former enemy and 
commit to its defense, which could include, for example, a pledge to defend 
Russia against China.

But unless NATO gives Russia a more meaningful seat at the table and a real 
vote on select issues of mutual interest, the alliance cannot retain its 
claim as the mainstay of European security.

The current arrangement of 19-1, whereby the alliance's 19 members consult 
Russia, but make decisions without it, maintains Cold War-like divisions in 
Europe and constrains NATO's already limited capabilities to address the two 
biggest threats to the continent--terrorism and proliferation of weapons of 
mass destruction. By denying Russia a vote on these key issues, NATO will run 
the risk of consigning itself to irrelevance. Next year will be a crucial one 
for NATO. At the Prague summit in November, the alliance is all but certain 
to admit new members, including, over Russian objections, the three Baltic 
nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which were once part of the U.S.S.R.

But expanding membership is not enough for the alliance to fulfill its new 
goals. The vision embraced by NATO leaders at the end of the Cold War was 
that of an alliance transformed and adapted to bring stability to Europe's 
East and address new challenges to the security of all Europe. This 
transformation was never intended to mean only geographic expansion. Nor was 
it supposed to draw new dividing lines in Europe.

As a military and political alliance, NATO has two fears when contemplating 
Russian involvement in its affairs: that the alliance's ability to act 
militarily might suffer, and that its status as an alliance of democratic 
nations with shared values would be compromised. Neither fear is justified. 
In fact, the war on terrorism necessitates closer cooperation between NATO 
countries and Russia.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Russia, with its political and 
military support for the war on terrorism and its willingness to stay out of 
the way of U.S. deployments in Central Asia, has made a greater contribution 
to the war effort than most of our NATO allies combined (with the notable 
exceptions of the United Kingdom and Turkey, both of which enjoy special 
relationships with Washington).

The alliance's invocation of its mutual-defense clause on behalf of the 
United States after Sept. 11 underscored the fact that NATO's strength is no 
longer primarily military: It's political. Beyond such support, the allies 
have few means to help the United States defend itself. NATO's ability to act 
militarily is increasingly dependent on the dwindling group of members with 
more than token military capabilities and the political will to maintain and 
use them.

Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, the first batch of new NATO members 
after the Cold War, have struggled to meet the military commitments inherent 
in their membership. Judged in terms of military capabilities alone, alliance 
strength has, so far, been diluted by expansion. The candidates for the 
second round of enlargement--Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, 
Macedonia and the Balkan states--are unlikely to reverse this trend.

But new and prospective NATO members do not deserve to be singled out for 
criticism. Most older NATO members, eager to reap the post-Cold War peace 
dividend, have not kept up with their defense commitments, either. If NATO 
has turned a blind eye to the military failings of its current members, why 
would it consider Russia a threat to NATO defense?

Nor is there a credible argument that NATO's political cohesion will be at 
risk if Russia is given a real voice and a vote on key European security 
issues. Does anyone really believe that Moscow will have more clout in a 
gathering of 20 or more European nations, most of which have a long-time 
relationship with and commitment to the U.S., than Washington? If so, we 
ought to rethink our commitment to the alliance. Anyone who fears that Russia 
will exert disproportionate influence in alliance deliberations has no faith 
in NATO cohesion.

There are likely to be crises--in the Caucasus, for example--during which 
Russia could obstruct alliance moves and decisions. But there are likely to 
be times when Russian involvement--also in the Caucasus--could prevent a 
crisis.

In the end, greater Russian involvement in NATO is likely to have more 
influence on Russia than vice versa. The likely result of Russia receiving a 
vote on select NATO decisions is that it will face, in some instances, the 
choice between isolation or union with the rest of Europe. It is a safe bet 
that Moscow will not want to be the odd man out.

Arguments that Russia is politically incompatible with NATO do not stand up 
to scrutiny, either. True, its democracy is young and highly imperfect, its 
treatment of ethnic minorities often appalling and its relations with 
neighbors frequently contentious. But when Russia sits down with NATO, it 
will be sitting at the same table with Turkey, whose ill treatment of Kurds 
is well known; with France, whose hands and nose were bloodied in a violent 
colonial war in Algeria and whose top government officials are routinely 
implicated in corruption scandals; with Germany, whose post-Cold War founding 
father ended his political career in disgrace after an embarrassing 
investigation into his party's slush fund. None of this excuses Russia's 
failings, but they are hardly reason enough to disenfranchise Russia in all 
matters of European security.

When NATO embarked on the path of post-Cold War transformation, it committed 
itself to do for Europe's East what it had done for Europe's West. Its 
mission cannot stop at Russia's borders. Russia most likely will choose not 
to join the alliance formally. But NATO's self-interest dictates that Russia 
be given a vote on select issues. Practically speaking, this would mean that 
on issues selected in advance by NATO and Russia--including such things as 
the deployment of peacekeepers, proliferation controls and anti-terrorist 
operations--Russian representatives would sit at the table and forge common 
decisions with NATO members. They would be involved in the crafting of plans 
instead of being presented with them after the fact.

The alliance can use Russian help--its intelligence information and airlift 
capabilities could prove useful in the war on terrorism, certainly, and 
Russian cooperation in efforts to combat the spread of weapons of mass 
destruction and missile technologies will be essential.

By bringing Russia into its decision-making, NATO will push Russia in the 
right direction. A seat at the NATO table for Russia represents an essential 
step for the organization to renew itself to face the real challenges of the 
new century.

*******

#8
ORT Review
www.ortv.ru
Compiled by Luba Schwartzman (luba7@bu.edu)
Research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology and
 Policy at Boston University

HEADLINES, 
Friday, December 21, 2001
- Questions for Russian President Vladimir Putin are still pouring in - he
will answer some of them live on the ORT and RTR television channels on
December 24th.
- The state of emergency is still in effect on the Black Sea coast of the
Caucasus; electricity supplies have been partially restored in the
Krasnodarsk krai.
- Deputy Minister Viktor Khristenko met with a number of regional leaders
to discuss the performance of electricity and heating enterprises.  
- Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres answered some questions for ORT.
He expressed his hopes that Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat is
truly in control of the situation in the occupied territories, noted that
terrorism is a global development, and asserted that he hopes Russia will
maintain good relations with Arab nations as well as with Israel -- since
Israel also seeks friendly relations with the Arab states.
- The new Gepard nuclear submarine has arrived at its permanent station --
the Gadzhievo naval base of the Northern Fleet.
- Reports came in today that the Imandra floating technical station
collided with a decommissioned nuclear submarine on December 13th.
According to the emergency services of the Northern Fleet and the Murmansk
[office of] marine sea-faring, the Imandra was not damaged.  
- The first contemporary meeting of the Russian Marine College tool place
in the St. Petersburg Admiralty.  The meeting was chaired by Prime
Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.
- President Putin has begun his two-day  visit to Great Britain.  At
today's meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in Blair's
suburban residence, President Putin discussed the struggle against
international terrorism, Russian-NATO relations, the situation in
Afghanistan and bilateral commercial and economic relations. 
- The fall draft has almost ended.  Over 5,000 young men have been sent
out from Moscow to military divisions.  It's been found, however, that the
conduction of the conscription is sometimes unorthodox.  Yesterday, about
25 young men of draft age were detained on the street and forcibly brought
to the recruitment center.
- A new gun model -- the GSh-18 (developed by weapons manufacturers
Gryazev and Shipunov) -- was presented at a scientific-technical
conference of Tula armorers.  The GSh-18 has been tested in Chechnya, and
has proved to be an excellent weapon.
- Prime Minister Kasyanov thinks that the recent crisis in Argentina could
not be repeated in Russia.  
- The Russian State Duma has passed the Labor Code in the third reading.
A special commission has made about 4,000 corrections to the original
bill.
- In London, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov met with British
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.  They discussed, among other issues,
bilateral cooperation in the fight against international terrorism and the
non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
- A major fire on Moscow's Mir Avenue has been extinguished; no one was
injured.  The cause of the fire is under investigation.
- The Rostov Oblast court has found former Novocherkassk prosecutor
Nikolai Voskresov  guilty of bribery, abuse of position, and wrongful
arrests. 
- The Declaration of the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent
States was signed 10 years ago in Alma-Ata.  
- A powerful explosion rocked an apartment building in the center of
Krasnoyarsk. The bomb was placed in the drainage pipes near the apartment
of Pavel Struganov [Pasha Tsvetomuzyka], notorious criminal and deputy
candidate of the Krasnoyarsk Legislative Assembly.  The neighboring
apartment was damaged, but none of its residents were hurt. A case against
Krasnoyarsk entrepreneur Anatoly Bukov, who is accused of plotting
Struganov's murder has been under investigation.
- All stationary police posts on the highway to Georgia were closed for
fear of an avalanche.

******

#9
Newsweek Poland
December 20, 2001
Who is Vladimir Putin? 
The Russian leader has demonstrated a healthy disdain for ideology, but
he’s still a product of his KGB upbringing 
By Andrew Nagorski

    Mikhail Margelov is a fastidious dresser. On the day I come to
interview him, he’s wearing a lavender-striped shirt with a white collar, a
deep red bow tie, matching cuff links and suspenders. A tall, beefy young
parliamentarian, he exudes confidence and charm. At 37, he’s already the
chairman of the Russian Federation Council’s Foreign Relations
Committee—and, more importantly, close to Vladimir Putin. Like Putin, he
has a KGB resume and is quick to let you know it.    
    “WEREN’T YOU HERE in the early 1980s?” he asks with a grin as he ushers
me into his office. One of the benefits of hooking up with the KGB early,
he explains, was that he got to read my dispatches from Moscow that led to
my expulsion from Russia in 1982. He speaks in nearly flawless English, and
speaks Arabic, too. He studied both languages at Moscow State University,
and then became an Arabic-language professor at the KGB Academy. His
grandfather, he notes, was a famous Red Army commander of the Pskov
paratrooper division, and his father, who bounced his family around the
world “pretending to be a diplomat,” is now deputy chief of the SVR, the
Foreign Intelligence Service.  
     Although this introduction takes the form of a casual conversation, it
sends a couple of clear-cut messages. First, a KGB background in today’s
Russia is a decided plus, and those who have it are proud of it. Second,
outsiders should realize that, contrary to their popular image, KGB
veterans have the knowledge, experience and breadth of vision that so many
of their countrymen lack. In other words, they are among the best and the
brightest precisely because their jobs allowed them to see and learn more
than anyone else. So, Margelov and others from the Kremlin implicitly
argue, no one should be surprised that Putin is proving to be just the
leader Russia needs to usher in a new era of political stability and
economic growth at home, and to win new respect abroad.
       
AT EASE WITH THE WEST?
     Those whose political memories stretch back to the early 1980s can be
forgiven if they have a sense of déjŕ vu. After all, Yuri Andropov received
similar billing when he was preparing to take power then. Although he had
presided over the KGB for 15 years as it methodically persecuted a
dwindling dissident movement, his supporters claimed that he represented a
much-needed chance for renewal after the stagnation and demoralization of
the Leonid Brezhnev era. “You Westerners see him as a man of the KGB,” a
Soviet official told me at a reception in 1982, when Andropov was
positioning himself for the top job. “But he is intelligent, open to new
ideas. If he succeeds Brezhnev, he will be more liberal than the current
leadership.” Andropov’s minions also spread the word that he spoke English,
played tennis, listened to jazz and read mystery novels—most of which was
patent nonsense. 
      All of which suggests that a healthy dose of skepticism is still in
order when evaluating who Putin is and where he will take his country in
2002 and beyond. But make no mistake: these are very different times than
the 1980s, and Putin is a very different leader than Andropov. Putin really
is a sportsman—a former judo champion who still knows how to take an
opponent to the mat—and really does speak a foreign language, German, very
well. More significantly, he is demonstrating both in word and deeds a
healthy disdain for ideology—unlike Andropov, who not coincidentally took
over the ideology portfolio of the Central Committee before he became
general-secretary. This has led to some sensible economic reforms, like a
personal-income flat tax, and, of course, Putin’s remarkable overtures to
the United States in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11.
Even after President George W. Bush announced last week that the United
States would withdraw from the antiballistic missile treaty in six months,
the Russian president offered only a muted dissent, telling The Financial
Times of London that this decision wouldn’t jeopardize “the spirit of
partnership and even alliance” between Moscow and Washington. 
      Nonetheless, Putin’s KGB credentials are, to put it delicately,
something less than an unadorned blessing. His growing popularity is both
impressive and troubling because of the means he has used to achieve it. It
would be far too simplistic to label Putin as a throwback to the Soviet era
who is trying to rebuild the Soviet system. When he insists that he doesn’t
want to restore the Soviet Union, he means it. Above all, he’s a pragmatist
and, as such, understands that Russia must chart a new course both at home
and abroad. But in his own words, he was “a pure and utterly successful
product of Soviet patriotic education,” and the evolution of his thinking
has to be measured from that starting point. The beliefs he still clings
to, as well as those he has jettisoned or at least claimed to have revised,
are all part of the answer to the question about what his leadership will
mean for Russia and the world. 
       
WHAT STALINIST TERROR?
     Even a cursory examination of the young Putin suggests that, as he was
growing up, he questioned nothing in the system he lived in. On the
contrary, he was fixated on the idea of joining the KGB because of the
organization’s image in “romantic spy stories.” Asked by a Russian
interviewer whether he thought about the years of Stalinist terror when he
signed up for his dream career, he replied: “To be honest, I didn’t think
about it at all.” Referring to the late 1970s when he received his training
and began practicing his trade, he blithely added: “Now people say that was
when Leonid Brezhnev was beginning to tighten the screws. But it was not
very noticeable.”   
     In “First Person,” the series of interviews published in book form
when Putin was running for the presidency, his first somewhat critical
remark concerns the collapse of East Germany, where he worked during much
of the 1980s. “Actually, I thought the whole thing was inevitable,” he
claimed, referring to the fall of the Berlin wall. “To be honest, I only
regretted that the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe, although
intellectually I understood that a position built on walls and dividers
cannot last. But I wanted something different to rise in its place. And
nothing different was proposed. That’s what hurt.” 
      Putin, of course, was speaking with the benefit of hindsight. It’s
impossible to know whether he truly saw the collapse coming, particularly
since he had been blind to so much else before. But the passage is
extraordinarily instructive. He doesn’t bemoan the end of communism; he
does bemoan the loss of the Soviet Union’s place on the world stage. He
longs for “something different” to take its place, clearly a powerful and
once-again proud Russia. But that doesn’t happen. Polish writer Ryszard
Kapuscinski, whose book “Imperium” chronicled the end of the Soviet Union,
concludes that this defines Putin’s current agenda. “He still has the
complex about Russia’s loss of great power status,” he says. “That’s what
he wants to get back. His strategy is to rebuild Russia as a great power.
Everything else is secondary to him. He won’t achieve this goal, but he’ll
get as close as he can. And this will make him very popular with his own
people. Russian pride always dictated that you are willing to endure
anything to be a great power.” 
       
STUDIES IN THE RED-LIGHT DISTRICT
     If Putin was confused and resentful in 1989 and its immediate
aftermath, his reeducation began in the 1990s. He started a new job as
deputy to St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, a leading reformer. Reforms
in this period went hand in hand with massive crime and corruption, and St.
Petersburg was one of the leaders in this department, as well. Putin
managed to maintain a reputation as Mr. Clean in the midst of all this,
despite a couple of close brushes with local scandals. As head of St.
Petersburg’s Committee for Foreign Economic Relations, he had the chance to
work closely with Westerners and travel to the West for the first time. In
Hamburg, he admitted later, he went with his wife Lyudmila and some friends
to an erotic show. He claims to have been reluctant to go, and, he added in
“First Person”: “You won’t believe me, but I was assigned to study their
red-light district as part of my job. At the time we were trying to bring
order to the gambling business in St. Petersburg.” The night out ended
melodramatically, when his friend’s wife fainted as “a huge black man” and
“a black woman who was just a little girl” began to strip.
      But the serious side of Putin’s new role was that he began to expand
his field of vision. The West, particularly Western investors, were no
longer the enemy. In looking for clues to Putin’s dramatic embrace of the
United States after Sept. 11, officials close to him point out that this
was the period when he began to depart from the assumptions that many of
his former colleagues still cling to. Interestingly enough, another veteran
of the secret services, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, reacted totally
differently to the terrorist attacks. Four days after September 11, Ivanov
angrily ruled out the possibility that United States and their allies would
be allowed to use former Soviet bases in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan for
their offensive. “It’s not very strange that it took some time for him to
adjust the way he sees the world,” says Margelov, the former KGB Academy
professor. He notes that Ivanov spent the 1990s in the SVR headquarters on
the outskirts of Moscow while Putin was “polishing his attitude toward
another civilization” by working with Westerners in St. Petersburg. Putin
quickly set Ivanov straight, and the president’s willingness to see the
deployment of U.S. troops in Central Asia as a positive development
represents a dramatic break with old-line Russian thinking.   
     Putin is convinced that Russia no longer has to fear the West; he
believes that the main threats are coming in the south, where Islamic
fundamentalism is on the rise, and in the Far East, where China’s huge
population is pressing against sparsely populated Russian territory. In
that scheme of things, the next round of NATO expansion, while still
irritating, should be no cause for alarm. Especially if the new talk of
expanding Russia’s relationship with the 19-member alliance really does
develop into a new “NATO at 20,” giving the Kremlin an active role in some
of its decision-making. But if Putin’s St. Petersburg experiences changed
his thinking about the West, they didn’t dim his pride in the KGB. Igor
Shadkhan, a local documentary filmmaker, got to know Putin well in that
period-and began making films about him. At one point, Putin urged him to
make a film about the KGB building in St. Petersburg. Shadkhan balked,
explaining that his grandparents went through the Gulag. “He asked me to do
it so that I could see that the new people who worked there had the same
feelings about the Gulag as I do,” Shadkhan recalls. But as much as Putin
wanted to prove that the KGB had changed with the times, there were clear
limits to his new thinking. When a friend of Shadkhan asked Putin what he
thought about the writings of Viktor Suvorov, the famous defector from the
Soviet military intelligence agency GRU, the future president of Russia
snapped: “I don’t read books by traitors of the homeland.” 
       
A COMPLETE UNKNOWN
     After Sobchak was defeated in the 1996 elections, Putin left St.
Petersburg and rapidly began rising through the ranks in the Kremlin. By
1998, Boris Yeltsin appointed him head of the FSB, as the former KGB is now
called. For all of Putin’s attachment to St. Petersburg where he grew up,
he was enjoying the excitement of power in Moscow. When filmmaker Shadkhan
visited him and asked him whether he’d return to the city where he grew up,
Putin replied: “It’s boring in St. Petersburg.” In August 1999 Yeltsin
plucked the faithful bureaucrat out of relative obscurity and made him
prime minister. At that point, his approval rating stood at 2 per cent; for
most Russians, he was a complete unknown, and the general assumption was
that he would be just another in a string of short-term prime ministers.
How Putin turned into a president who now boasts an approval rating of
about 75 percent reveals a lot about his concept of leadership. 
      Shortly after he became prime minister, a series of explosions tore
apart Russian apartment buildings killing hundreds of their inhabitants.
Putin promptly emerged as the tough new boss, blaming the Chechens for
these killings and vowing to prosecute a new war in their breakaway
territory until the army would “wipe the terrorists out wherever we find
them, even if they are sitting on the toilet.” Despite the rueful precedent
of the first war in Chechnya, most Russians applauded. “In a difficult
situation, people look to the boss for leadership,” notes Alexander Oslon,
the president of The Public Opinion Foundation, which works mainly for the
Kremlin. “At the time, the West didn’t understand what was happening with
Putin’s approval rating. Now, we see the analogy with Bush after September
11.” (What he fails to mention, however, is that a small but not
insignificant minority of Russians believes the persistent rumor that the
FSB was responsible for the apartment building bombings.) Oslon and others
who seek to bolster Putin’s image claim that much more than Chechnya
accounts for his growing popularity. They point to his early, successful
drive to end the problems with irregular payments of pensions. Then he put
an end to much of the squabbling in the Duma by cutting a deal with the
communists and neutralizing other potential opponents. His reorganization
of the Federation Council meant that he ended the virtual autonomy of many
regional governors and brought federal policy in line with “the vertical
chain of government” that he espouses. He also pushed through a sensible
budget, and began pressing for a series of reforms in other areas—taxes,
the judiciary, private land sales and education. 
      Much of this is still in the early stages, but he has convinced many
of his countrymen that he is dedicated to bringing order out of the chaos
of the 1990s. As in foreign policy, he has demonstrated a willingness to
rethink economic priorities. In a meeting with American correspondents in
November, he criticized Russia’s “excessive dependence on the fuel and
energy sector over the last decade” and the failure to create “a genuinely
modern and cost-effective economy.” This would suggest that he will be
aiming for that goal in the years ahead, and that he will try to convince
foreign investors who were burned in the economic crisis of 1998 that it’s
safe to return. It’s on the home front, though, that troubling signs
remain. Pollster Oslon finds nothing wrong with explaining that another key
reason for Putin’s high approval ratings was his successful campaign “to
distance big capital from politics.” Or, in plain language, the pressure
that led to the takeover of media outlets, like NTV and the weekly
newsmagazine Itogi (which was published in cooperation with NEWSWEEK until
then) that had been critical of his policies. Media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky
was briefly imprisoned then fled the country, as did another once-powerful
“oligarch,” Boris Berezovsky. 
       
TOTAL DENIABILITY
      To Putin and his team, media criticism was the problem, for instance,
when the Kursk submarine sank last year—not the president’s initial
reluctance to cut short his vacation in Sochi or his seeming indifference
to the plight of the doomed submariners and their families. “If the subject
exists in the mass media, it exists in public opinion,” says Oslon. “If it
doesn’t, it doesn’t exist in public opinion.” Ergo, take control of the
messenger. While praising the vision of the late dissident Andrei Sakharov,
Putin calmly explained during a radio interview in the United States last
month that “the Russian mass media are as free as in any other nation.” At
the same time, a new campaign was already underway to seize control of TV
6, the last major station to provide a haven to journalists who lost their
jobs in the previous crackdown. Such actions are conducted with total
deniability. The struggle for ownership of TV 6, Putin’s chief of staff
Alexander Voloshin told me, is “a question for businessmen.” Similarly, the
fact that successive anticorruption campaigns often target political foes
is purely coincidental, Putin’s people say.   
      But this was a tactic that Andropov used in the old days, and critics
maintain that the echoes are eerie at times. They note that many of the
current reforms—for instance, of the judiciary—provide the state with more
levers of influence rather than less. And recent arrests of “spies” on hazy
charges, and prosecution of environmentalists and scholars for violating
new secrecy laws in their contacts with foreigners only accentuate those
fears. “We’ve been warning for years that the special services have a
growing influence in this society, and no one wanted to listen,” says
former political prisoner Sergei Grigoryants, the president of the Glasnost
Foundation. “Now you can see the result.”
      In Putin’s Russia, the president is no longer billed as Yeltsin’s
successor. Instead, the same imagemakers who ran Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection
campaign now present the two men as opposites. According to them, Yeltsin
was “a destroyer,” someone who performed the unpleasant if necessary task
of destroying the Soviet Union and its way of life. Putin, however, is “a
builder,” someone who is building the new Russia that he so sorely missed
when the Soviet system collapsed. Judging by his high approval rating, this
strategy is working—and Putin genuinely deserves credit for some bold
initiatives. But it helps that there are fewer and fewer avenues to
seriously challenge the hold of the man whose formative years were spent in
the KGB.
       
NEWSWEEK POLAND (Newsweek Polska) is Newsweek’s newest foreign-language
edition. It was launched in September.  

******

#10
BBC Monitoring
Russian defence chief's contradictory statements aim to avoid conflict -
paper 
Source: Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Moscow, in Russian 21 Dec 01

According to Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Defence Minister Sergey
Ivanov has made certain statements which are not entirely in line with the
Kremlin's official position. The newspaper says one reason for such a
situation is that the defence minister must take into account the position
of the General Staff, which still sees NATO as a potential enemy. The
following is the text of the report, published on 21 December. The
subheadings have been inserted editorially:

Russian Federation Defence Minister Sergey Ivanov is still making mutually
exclusive statements on highly important foreign policy problems. While in
Brussels, he announced Russia's readiness to support counterterrorist
operations outside Afghanistan if it "receives weighty, well-reasoned proof
of the existence of international terrorist structures." However, the
following day in London Ivanov said that he considered it premature to
conduct such operations in other parts of the world. Previously similar
contradictions were discerned in Sergey Ivanov's position on the problem of
the use of CIS territory by the US and other NATO states' armed forces in
the course of the operation against the Taleban regime as well as with
regard to a Russian contingent's participation in the peacekeeping forces
in Afghanistan.

Some statements by defence minister fail to conform

A number of statements by the head of the Defence Ministry, to be specific,
with regard to the problem of a professional army, have been directly at
variance with the Kremlin's official line. The Foreign Ministry is also
showing serious concern. People there consider it abnormal for Sergey
Ivanov and [Foreign Minister] Igor Ivanov to put forward opposing
viewpoints on the same international problem.

Let us point out that the evolution of Sergey Ivanov's views is taking
place with amazing rapidity. Thus, at the 37th International Conference on
Security Issues in Munich in February 2001 he sounded the alarm, saying
that the deployment of the US national antimissile defence system "would
lead to the destruction of the whole structure of strategic stability,
creating the preconditions for a new arms race, including in space".
However, in December during a meeting with the leaders of the Strategic
Missile Troops high command the defence minister abandoned his former
radicalism. In his opinion, the United States' unilateral withdrawal from
the ABM treaty will merely create a "certain vacuum" from the viewpoint of
strategic stability and Ivanov himself takes a "fairly calm" view of this
decision on the part of the United States. What is more, national missile
defence "is a myth". Moscow's line that the "United States' withdrawal from
the ABM treaty does not threaten Russia's security" was officially
enshrined 18 December in the final communique of the North Atlantic Council
session at defence minister level.

Sergey Ivanov claimed in Munich that Russia is prepared for "mutual radical
cuts in strategic offensive arms to 1,500 warheads or even lower with the
United States" only provided that the ABM treaty is preserved. Now this has
been safely forgotten. Following Ivanov's talks in Brussels with Rumsfeld
the preparation for the conclusion of a new treaty on strategic offensive
arms will take an accelerated pace. This document will be ready for signing
as early as summer 2002. At the same time, as the Russian defence minister
said in Brussels, "the ceilings for strategic offensive arms cuts are
known, neither side will discuss who needs how many warheads on the ground,
at sea, and in the air - our hands are free on this issue".

General Staff still sees NATO as possible enemy

Why is this division occurring? On the one hand, Sergey Ivanov has to take
account of the position of the General Staff, which still regards the
United States and NATO as the potential enemy. A typical example of the
level of strategic thinking of the Russian military top brass is an article
by Col-Gen Yuriy Baluyevskiy, first deputy chief of the General Staff, with
the pretentious headline "instrument of US hegemonism," which was published
not so long ago in Voyenno-Istoricheskiy Zhurnal [the military history
magazine]. In the author's opinion, "the United States is pursuing a policy
of strong-arm pressure on the governments of sovereign states everywhere,
often violating the norms of international law". Baluyevskiy then reaches
the conclusion of the "offensive thrust of US military policy." There is no
need for comment here. On the other hand, as the Kremlin's political
appointee, Sergey Ivanov is obliged to implement President Putin's policy
and he has chosen the course of close rapprochement with the West and the
establishment of partnership relations with the United States. Teetering
between the Kremlin and the General Staff, the defence minister is forced
to say one thing today and quite another tomorrow.

*******

#11
New York Times
December 22, 2001
MOSCOW JOURNAL 
You Pretend to Drive, We Pretend to Get You There
By MICHAEL WINES

MOSCOW, Dec. 21 — This city's widest, busiest, most expensive and most
fabled 
highway was first built under Nikita Khrushchev's rule, but it was not until 
late 1998, after an ambitious reconstruction project, that it reached its 
current exalted status. Ten lanes wide, 67.73 miles long, costing more than 
$1 billion (nobody seems quite sure how much more), it draws a colossal 
limited-access concrete circle around Russia's capital.

Its formal name is Moskovskaya Koltsevaya Avtomobilnaya Doroga — the Moscow 
Ring Automobile Road — but everyone calls it by its acronym, MKAD,
pronounced 
"muh- COD." It is the nation's only Western-style superhighway.

At 7 p.m. one week ago, 23-year-old Andrei Bogdanov got on the MKAD, intent 
on spending a snowy evening with friends who live near an interchange some 20 
miles away. Unfortunately, there was a traffic jam.

He did not reach his exit until 11 a.m. the next day.

Mr. Bogdanov's is an amazing story, filled with good old Russian ingenuity 
and classic Russian stoicism. It is all the more amazing because the 16-hour 
traffic jam on the MKAD — an event which, among many other things, led 
frantic parents to entrust their children to passing strangers and left one 
man dead of a heart attack — passed virtually unnoticed here.

Traffic in Moscow can be that bad.

Indeed, Mr. Bogdanov said, his wife, Anya, did not bat an eye when he failed 
to turn up for 16 hours.

"She's a Muscovite," he said. "She knows such things can happen."

To be fair, Dec. 14 was not a good day to be on the MKAD. A four-inch 
snowfall had made driving tricky. That morning, 45,000 people swamped the 
grand opening of an Ikea furniture store south of town, overloading the ring 
road.

And as every good Russian knows, Friday is the day to leave work early and 
head to one's dacha, meaning main roads are already clogged.

This did not deter Mr. Bogdanov. That evening he left his job at a downtown 
Moscow computer firm and set out for the forest of modern high-rises in 
Moscow's Mitino neighborhood, where his friends live.

He pointed his 1998 silver Subaru station wagon east until he reached the 
MKAD interchange, where he entered, heading north.

Rather, he tried to head north.

"I was driving on the outer side of the ring road. All the roads toward the 
city center were blocked by cars — they were jammed," he said.
"Gradually, I 
drove up to Yaro slavsky Road, where we actually stopped completely."

It was now 9 p.m. He dialed his wife on his cellular phone to say he was 
stuck in a traffic jam. Over the next two and a half hours, his Subaru moved 
about 45 yards.

It was 11:30 p.m. About midnight, Mr. Bogdanov saw strange doings among 
drivers in another lane. "They were trying to organize this movement 
backwards," he said. "There was a turn to some side road leading to a 
village, and they hoped they'd be able to move backwards to this side road 
and somehow get out."

Some 100 cars began edging backwards in unison, to little avail. Drivers 
seized the space they created, trapping them even farther behind.

The parade edged past swooping cloverleaf interchanges, yet nobody could 
exit. Each time, apparently, the way was blocked by pileups of cars and 
trucks.

By 1 a.m., drivers began abandoning their cars.

At about 2 a.m., cars that had been creeping more swiftly along the MKAD's 
inner ring, in the opposite direction, began pulling over. Out came relatives 
of marooned drivers, bringing fresh provisions, warm clothes, even gasoline 
to loved ones located by cellular phone.

It was now 2:30 a.m. In the dead of night, entrepreneurs sprang from houses 
near the superhighway with bags of homemade sandwiches, hawking them to 
starving drivers and passengers.

"There were children in some cars," Mr. Bogdanov said, "and in some cases the 
parents took their kids, got on the other side of the road and begged people 
to take them home. I saw one case where somebody's friends stopped on the 
other side to bring food. So one driver took his kid, about 7 years old, and 
asked this lady to drive him home."

It was 3 a.m. Nature's call, long insistent, became irresistible for some. 
But the MKAD is fenced in by tall, soundproofing walls, leaving no discreet 
place to seek relief.

Four drivers edged their cars into a bumper-to-bumper rectangle. Despite the 
occasional headlight and 5- degree cold, the instant privy did land-office 
business.

It was 4 a.m. Tempers long held in check began to flare. According to 
www.auto.ru, an automotive enthusiasts' Internet chat room that chronicled 
the tie-up, a band of furious drivers ordered a truck driver to turn off his 
idling engine. He refused. They shattered his window.

"Where are the authorities?" someone cried out. "We've been here long enough 
to get a loan from the Americans and buy choppers from Japan to clear this 
mess."

Meanwhile, radio stations made no mention of the jam.

It was 6:30 a.m. Success!

Mr. Bogdanov managed to edge off the ring onto an obscure side road. He 
immediately became hopelessly lost. He edged southward until he again found 
the ring road.

"I saw some movement there. Finally, the cars had begun moving!" he said. He 
rejoined the throng, only to find that the movement was by cars whose 
drivers, like himself, had found their way off the freeway.

It was 7 a.m. The sun rose.

It would take another four hours and, in all, 10 gallons of gas for Mr. 
Bogdanov to complete the 20-mile trek to his friends' house.

Asked today about the huge traffic jam, a senior inspector at the department 
for propaganda of the Moscow traffic police said, in essence, that it never 
happened.

"The situation became stable in two or three hours," said the official, who 
refused to be identified. "All the drivers had a chance to leave the ring 
road. There were many exits. There is no way they could just stand there for 
16 hours."

The official conceded that a man died during the tie-up. "He died from heart 
insufficiency," the official said. "That could happen to anyone."

Just the same, Moscow newspapers report, the traffic police have issued a bit 
of holiday advice for Moscow motorists. From Dec. 20 to Jan. 10, the advisory 
said, it is probably better not to drive at all.

******