SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #696 (63), Friday, August 17, 2001
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TITLE: August 1991: The End of Leningrad
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: "We first heard the news of the coup when we were at our dacha, about 40 kilometers from St. Petersburg," recalls Tatyana Sallier, an associate professor of English at St. Petersburg State University. "A neighbor was walking along the street and shouted to us to switch on the television. That is when we first heard the proclamation of the State Committee for the Emergency Situation." It was Aug. 19, 1991.
 Ten years later, it is hard to find anyone who remembers the exact words of the "Address to the Soviet People," which was broadcast over all the national and local radio and television channels, and printed in all the major newspapers. But even now the words are chilling.
 "Our motherland is in imminent, serious danger," it read. "The reform policy begun on the initiative of Mikhail Gorbachev has reached a deadlock for a number of reasons. ... Extremist forces have appeared that are bent on the liquidation of the Soviet Union, on the destruction of the state, on taking power at any cost. ... We call on all true patriots, people of good will, to put an end to the current Time of Troubles."
 One way or another, perestroika was finished.
 "It was about 9:00 in the morning, and for about an hour or so we just wandered around in a kind of stupor, not knowing what to do, and thinking that our lives were about to change drastically," Sallier recalls.
 But St. Petersburg immediately and almost unanimously proclaimed its resistance to the State Committee for the Emergency Situation, or GKChP. Almost spontaneously, and without any discussion, the local executive branch, the city legislature and the police declared the putsch illegal and unconstitutional.
 "[In St. Petersburg] only one side came out into the streets," recalls Yury Kravtsov, a former speaker of the Legislative Assembly, who was a City Council deputy in 1991. "The other side was just sitting somewhere calmly, waiting to see if things would turn out the way they wanted them to."
 Mayor Anatoly Sobchak arrived by airplane from Moscow on the morning of Aug. 19. Early in the day, he opened negotiations with the commanders of the Leningrad Military District, and then he proceeded to the Mariinsky Palace. Toward evening, together with other City Hall officials, the mayor managed to slip into the studios of Leningrad Television. He boldly denounced the coup in a general appeal to the public, calling the GKChP members "former politicians."
 "These plotters have wrecked [the plan] to sign the Union agreement, which says that all existing power structures must be [democratically] elected. [The GKChP members] understood that there would be no place for them there, and that is the main reason why they have resorted to this reckless act, toying with the fate of the people in order to protect their own privileges," Sobchak said.
 In general, however, access to the media was a considerable problem for the forces that opposed the coup. When the events began, no local radio or television stations would broadcast news from the Mariinsky Palace, which was then the seat of the City Council. National state-controlled television channels broadcast only the ballet Swan Lake, interrupted by periodic pro-GKChP bulletins from Moscow.
 The management of the Leningrad metro refused to allow the mayor to disseminate news through its public-address system. Likewise, the management of the city's civil-defense system would not grant City Hall permission to use the system of loudspeakers on the streets.
 Yury Vdovin, at that time a deputy in the City Council and now an activist with the NGO Citizen's Watch, spent Aug. 19 at the Leningrad Publishing House trying to get City Council announcements placed in local newspapers. 
 "There was a KGB officer there when I arrived who had been sent to censor the papers. I told him that if he followed his orders, he would go to jail after the coup failed. After a little while, he vanished," Vdovin remembered.
 Andrei Potapenko, who was a journalist for Nevskoye Vremya at the time and who is now the deputy head of the Agency for Investigative Journalism, noted that the staff supported the City Council.
 "We discovered that the staff there had made extra copies of the printing plates for some of the pages, in case the first set was confiscated," Pota penko said.
 The only media outlet controlled by anti-GKChP forces was Otkrytoye Radio, or Open Radio, a weak portable transmitter that was set up in the Mariinsky Palace on Aug. 20.
 Organizing Sobchak's televised address was therefore difficult, and it happened as a result of a chance. At the time, the Boris Petrov controlled the station, then the head of Leningrad Channel 5 and now the director of the local office of the Itar-Tass information agency.
 "[Petrov] let them in only because [Vice Mayor] Vyacheslav Shcherbakov was with them," said Alexander Shchelkanov, who was a deputy of the Supreme Soviet at the time, and who now works for the AlRos diamond company. "[Shcherbakov] had been included on the list of people approved by the GKChP, which didn't know that he opposed the coup."
 Shchelkanov first heard of the coup on board the train from Moscow to Leningrad, about 20 minutes before he arrived in the city. His first thought was to head immediately back to Moscow, but he soon decided he could be more useful in Leningrad.
 "It was immediately clear to me that a coup was underway. In a single moment, everything began looking gray and cruel, but immediately a sequence of things that needed to be done began forming in my mind," said Shchelkanov, now a deputy in the Legislative Assembly.
 Shchelkanov hurried home, made some phone calls, and wrote out a short statement for distribution to the local press. By about 11 a.m., he was with his colleagues at the Mariinsky Palace. By 2 p.m., an emergency response committee had been created, and Shchelkanov was responsible for organizing the defense of the palace.
 Police, however, remained loyal to Sobchak and even joined the effort to provide security for the palace. "We must not act illegally, and we will not act illegally, even if we are ordered to," said City Police Chief Arkady Kramarev, now a deputy in the Legislative Assembly, in a televised interview on Aug. 20.
 By the evening of Aug. 19, citizens had begun gathering on St. Isaac's Square, preparing to defend City Hall and just trying to find out more about what was going on.
 "People began coming to the square to find out the news and to be together. All the official channels of communication were blocked, and not all of us had shortwave radios for listening to Western stations," Sallier said.
 "As I was going to the rally, I was very frightened. Officially, public gatherings were forbidden under the state of emergency, and I didn't know whether there would be any resistance at all," she said.
 To the surprise of many, however, the people did come out, in ever-increasing numbers. Even many who participated were stunned to see such initiative on the part of their friends and colleagues.
 "At our institute, we started organizing small resistance groups, about five to 10 people in each, and each group having a car," said Yevgeny Abramenko, a former employee of the Leningrad Synthetic Rubber Research Institute, who is now an assistant in the Legislative Assembly.
 "I noticed that some people, who before the coup were always shouting about democracy, suddenly disappeared, hiding at their dachas," Abramenko recalled. "Others, though, including some with whom I reluctantly shook hands at the office, started coming up to me, asking me to put them on the list."
 "At that time, people were not motivated by their own private interests," said Yury Kravtsov. "They just wanted to achieve freedom."
 Shchelkanov went out to the square in the afternoon to address the crowd and instruct them on what to do in the event of a confrontation with the military. By then, word had arrived from Moscow that tanks had entered the capital.
 "I told them to stay calm and to put up barricades in the streets around City Hall. I told them that they should form human chains if tanks appear, but under no circumstances should they lie down in front of them," Shchelkanov said.
 "Obviously, the barricades we built were a joke from the military point of view. They would be demolished in a minute if tanks appeared," said Shchelkanov.
 For the entire decade since the coup, rumors have been flying as to the whereabouts of Sobchak during the night of Aug. 19-20. He left the Mariinsky Palace just as reports arrived that military intervention was imminent. Supporters say that, fearing arrest, the mayor spent the night in a bunker at the Kirovsky Zavod. He led a column of demonstrators from the factory to the demonstration on Palace Square on Aug. 20. 
 Others, however, merely say vaguely that it is not proper to speak ill of the dead. Sobchak died of a heart attack on Feb. 20, 2000.
 The demonstration on Palace Square on Aug. 20, 1991, was the most massive local rally in recent decades, certainly dwarfing anything that has been seen since. Over 200,000 people thronged onto the square itself, and the surrounding streets were clogged for blocks by people who couldn't push their way into the demonstration. 
 "At the rally, I noticed that I stopped being worried," Yevgeny Abramenko recalled. "I don't know why. Maybe because there were so many people, many more than the 2,000 or so in front of the Mariinsky Palace. But here, there were so many. I've never seen so many people before."
 "At that moment, it became clear to me that it's impossible to break these people down," he said.
 The danger of military intervention reached its peak following the rally. During the night of Aug. 20, the Leningrad Military District command ordered several units to enter the city.
 "There were military units coming into the city, but they had stopped in the region around Pulkovo Hills and did not go any further," said Alexander Belayev, the City Council speaker at the time, who now works for a Moscow-based insurance company.
 "Who gets the credit for this? There were many people involved in the negotiations with the military, including Sobchak and [Vladimir] Putin, who played a technical role as someone with links to the KGB," Belayev said. "But really, I would say that it is the people who did it. The whole chain of events, including the rally by City Hall, the living chain around it, the demonstration on Palace Square and so on. The military did not dare act when it was so clear how the people felt."
 On Aug. 21, the coup suddenly collapsed, and Gorbachev returned to Moscow. In Leningrad, people continued to wander the streets, euphorically chanting "We won!"
 "I remember lawmakers inviting me early in the morning to watch them seal up Smolny [the Leningrad Communist Party headquarters]. I remember a second deputy party head crying in a corner, asking us not to shoot him," recalled Anna Polyanskaya, who was a correspondent for the BBC in Leningrad at the time.
 Looking back a decade later, many people who had such high hopes in 1991 are disappointed. Locals have been casting about for reasons why the hopes of Aug. 22 were largely unrealized.
 "It is clear that it is impossible to get beyond the legacy of the totalitarian regime [so quickly]," said former Lenin grad dissident Vyacheslav Dolinin. "Totalitarianism is not just a government, but something inside people's minds."
 Ruslan Linkov, local head of the Democratic Russia political party, agrees. "Those three days were a rare opportunity for the residents of St. Petersburg to feel like free people. They defended freedom, but could not retain it," Linkov said.
 Belayev assigns blame to both the people and the government. 
 "A revolution is like an orgasm. Very intense, but it doesn't last long," Belayev said. "The government did not maintain the unity with the people that characterized that time. But the people also made the mistake of thinking that they had won, and that was it. People did not understand - and still don't - that they have to defend their rights every day. That is what democracy is."
 Vdovin, in contrast, assigns most of the blame to the authorities and the way the state developed after the coup.
 "It is true that some opportunities were lost then. It was easy to get rid of the Stasi [the East German secret police] because their country merged with West Germany, and they just fired them all. Here, many Communists stayed on in their old positions. They want revenge, but it is impossible now. All they can do is slow things down," Vdovin said.
 Polyanskaya, who now lives in Paris, agrees. "We only thought about the Communist Party and totally forgot about the KGB, which kept on working, working silently, busy carrying out its revenge," she said.
 "Those days were the greatest happiness of my life," she said. "Everything was done correctly, and it cannot be repeated. All our [democratic] values have been defiled and trampled. That is why I will never go back."

TITLE: Did Putin Help Prevent Military Confrontation?
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Ever since Vladimir Putin was named prime minister and then acting president in 1999, rumors have periodically surfaced concerning the role that he played in St. Petersburg during the August 1991 coup attempt. At the time, Putin served as the head of the External Affairs Committee of Mayor Anatoly Sobchak's administration.
 In January 2000, The Washington Post reported without attribution that Putin had "quietly played a key role" in protecting Sobchak at the moment of the coup. "Sobchak, in Moscow at that moment, vowed to defend [Boris] Yelt sin and fight the coup, and took the risky step of flying back to his city to oppose the putsch. Putin, with good ties in the local security services, showed up at the airport with armed guards to protect Sobchak, who was potentially vulnerable as a leading democrat," the paper reported.
 Other reports have also claimed that Putin, using his links to the KGB, negotiated with the military authorities and was primarily responsible for preventing a military confrontation during the crisis.
 In his campaign biography, "In the First Person," Putin himself claims a far more modest role.
 "I was on vacation. And when everything started, I was very anxious that at such a moment I happened to be goodness knows where. I managed somehow to get to the city on Aug. 20. Sobchak and I virtually moved into the City Council building. We weren't alone, but a whole crowd of people were there during those days, and we were there with them," he writes.
 "We undertook a number of active measures: We went to the Kirovsky Zavod, gave speeches to the workers, went to other enterprises. ... We even passed out weapons to various people. Of course, I kept my regulation firearm locked in my safe."
 Politicians who were involved in the events confirm this more limited role, saying that Putin - who had joined Sobchak's team just two months earlier - was still such a minor figure in the administration that he would not have been able to influence events significantly.
 "It's kind of hard to remember what he was doing there. I actually don't remember at all that he was there at that time," said Alexander Shchelkanov, who was a Supreme Soviet deputy at the time and who was responsible for organizing the Mariinsky Palace defenses.
 "[Putin] was working as Sobchak's assistant before the inauguration, and he continued doing so during the coup," recalls Ruslan Linkov, who was a journalist for the ANI information agency at the time.
 Photographs taken in the palace on Aug. 22 by American businessman Dean LaBaron show Putin seated beside Sobchak, conferring with the mayor animatedly. The copyrighted photos can be seen on the Internet at <i>www.deanlebaron.com/misc/putin.html. </i>
 Yury Kravtsov, the former Legislative Assembly speaker who was then a deputy in the City Council, said that it was Sobchak who prevented the tanks from entering the city. &quot;As far as I remember, Anatoly Sobchak had a very serious 'man-to-man' talk with General Valery Samsonov on the phone that night and convinced him not to [move],&quot; Kravtsov said.
 &quot;What did [Sobchak] say to him? He just said the general would be responsible if he gave an order to move against the people,&quot; he said.
 Representatives of Putin's administration also downplayed the story of Putin's involvement in this aspect of the coup. 
 &quot;To be honest, I can't confirm or deny this. In his book, he said that he met with factory workers, but to say that he stopped the tanks himself, I don't think so,&quot; said Natalya Chumakova, deputy head of the presidential press service, in an interview on Wednesday.

TITLE: Diplomats Allege Police Brutality
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Two Swedish diplomats visiting St. Petersburg as guests of acting Swedish Consul General Stefan Eriksson have said that they were punched, bloodied and detained by local police for not carrying their passports.
 Police have refused to confirm any details about the incident or even that it happened at all, pending an investigation into the matter.
 The diplomats allege that the incident began at 12:30 a.m. on Aug. 7, when a patrol officer approached them while they were walking along Kanal Griboyedova and asked to check their documents. 
 According to Jonas Bergstrom, one of the diplomats involved and currently assigned to the Swedish Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, the men produced their driver's licenses. In their experience, such identification is sufficient in other countries, Bergstrom said.
 The second diplomat, who is currently between assignments, asked that his name not be revealed. Both men have returned to Stockholm.
 &quot;We didn't take our passports with us because we were warned that it is dangerous to carry your passports in St. Petersburg at night, since they can be stolen,&quot; Bergstrom said in the telephone interview on Tuesday.
 When the diplomats failed to produce passports, Bergstrom said, the patrol officer radioed for a police unit in a car. The diplomats resisted getting in the vehicle. 
 Then suddenly, as Bergstrom recounts it, both men found themselves on the ground with their arms wrenched behind their backs. Bergstrom had also been struck in the face.
 According to Bergstrom, one of the officers shouted: &quot;How can we know who you are? Maybe you're Chechen terrorists!&quot;
 The two were then taken to St. Petersburg Central District Police Precinct No. 79 where Bergstrom was left simply to sit with his a bleeding nose and a black eye from an elbow blow from one of the patrolmen, he said. 
 Police at precinct No. 79 could not be reached for comment.
 According to Bergstrom, the two men were held for 40 minutes until their diplomatic connections were established, and then they were driven to the Swedish Consulate. 
 &quot;Of course, [the police] didn't apologize,&quot; said Bergstrom. 
 &quot;My friends were shocked because they did nothing wrong and didn't expect such treatment,&quot; said Eriksson.
 The Swedish consulate helped the two visitors file a complaint with the Special Service Police Department, or VSSM, which deals with crimes committed by and against foreign citizens.
 Sergei Shachnev, an officer from VSSM who questioned the diplomats regarding their complaint, confirmed that the case has been handed over to the internal-affairs unit, which investigates complaints against the police.
 &quot;If the incident is confirmed, it will be sent to the City Prosecutor's Office,&quot; Shachnev said.
 But Bergstrom and Eriksson said they hope this case is not handled as an isolated incident against these specific visitors, but as part of a general pattern. 
 &quot;As soon as [police violence] seems to be some kind of regular practice, it needs to be stopped,&quot; Bergstrom said. &quot;St. Petersburg is an attractive city to visit, but such incidents spoil the image of the city, and [police behavior] may influence the flow of tourists to St. Petersburg.&quot; 
 Eriksson said he had heard of a number of similar incidents of police mistreatment directed at foreigners, many of which go entirely unreported.
 Shachnev said that his unit has dealt with a number of such complaints, but added &quot;sometimes the foreign citizens are wrong, sometimes the police are wrong.&quot; 
 Shachnev pointed out that foreigners are required to carry their passports or a document provided by the hotel where they are staying. Police officers have the right to detain anyone without documentation for up to three hours.

TITLE: Kremlin Splits State TV and Broadcasting
AUTHOR: By Andrei Zolotov Jr. 

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin on Monday signed a decree ordering that the All-Russian State Television and Radio Co. be split into two parts, one in charge of programming, the other in overseeing transmissions for state and private broadcasters.
 The decree calls for the creation of a state-owned non-stock company called the Russian Television and Radio Broadcasting Network, or RTRS, to handle transmissions. RTRS will incorporate the Ostankino television broadcasting center, the relay communications lines previously controlled by the Communications Ministry, and about 100 regional transmission centers with about 15,000 transmitters and satellite uplink stations around the country. Aside from some of the ministry's relay lines, the other assets were part of VGTRK.
 VGTRK is the conglomerate of state-owned media that is the parent company of RTR and other state television and radio stations. 
 Press Ministry spokesperson Yury Akinshin said Monday that RTRS will report to the Press Ministry. 
 The Press Ministry and VGTRK have long warned that without hundreds of millions of dollars in investments, the current system would collapse within a few years. Press Minister Mikhail Lesin said in December that $350 million to $400 million was needed to replace outdated equipment. 
 Lesin also said that the transmission system would be turned into a joint-stock company that could be privatized. 
 &quot;After long and careful thought, they came to the conclusion that to attract investment by turning the transmission network into a joint-stock company was wishful thinking and such a company would be doomed,&quot; Akinshin said in a telephone interview. 
 &quot;The main point of the decree is to preserve the network,&quot; he added. The question of investment will have to be resolved at a later date.&quot;
 According to the decree signed Monday, the 2002 federal budget must include subsidies to RTRS for delivering national television and radio broadcasts to towns of fewer than 200,000 people.
 Akinshin said those subsidies would amount to $35 million to $45 million.
 The decree, which gives the cabinet three months to draw up RTRS' charter, also aims to bring back under government control all parts of the transmission systems that have slipped out of its grasp. 
 Although transmission stations are barred from privatization, many regional transmission centers have set up private companies on the side by lending equipment or licenses. The decree orders the government to carry out an &quot;inventory&quot; of its transmission facilities, to cancel deals that &quot;run counter to the law,&quot; and return the assets to RTRS.
 &quot;I would like to have a closer look at the documents and details of the reform,&quot; said Anna Kachkayeva, a professor at Moscow State University and television analyst with Radio Liberty. &quot;At the moment, it looks a little like nationalization. The decree means that all private broadcasters that have had contacts with the private transmission companies set up by regional state-owned transmission centers will have to renegotiate their contracts&quot;

TITLE: Moiseyev Sentenced for Spying for South Korea
AUTHOR: By Sarah Karush 

PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: The Moscow City Court on Tuesday convicted Valentin Moiseyev, a former high-level diplomat, of spying for South Korea, and sentenced him to 4 1/2 years in prison. 
 The city court had previously convicted Moiseyev, sentencing him to 12 years, but the Supreme Court overturned that conviction and ordered a new trial. 
 Tuesday's verdict &quot;practically does not differ from the verdict that was already overturned,&quot; Moiseyev told reporters before he was escorted out of the courtroom. His lawyers said they would appeal again. 
 Moiseyev, a former deputy chief of the Foreign Ministry's first Asia desk, has been in jail since his arrest in July 1998, following the detention of South Korean diplomat Cho Sung-woo. Russia expelled Cho, alleging that he was a spy. The South Korean government protested Russia's handling of the case, especially Cho's brief detention by the Federal Security Service despite his diplomatic immunity. 
 When reading the verdict, Judge Marina Komarova said she had taken into account Moiseyev's good behavior, his long confinement in pretrial detention and other factors, and reduced the sentence beyond the minimum 12 years set by the Criminal Code. 
 Moiseyev's time in pretrial detention counts toward the sentence, leaving him a year and five months. In addition to the prison term, the sentence also calls for Moiseyev's property to be confiscated. 
 Lawyer Anatoly Yablokov said he was confident the verdict would be overturned again, since the judge &quot;did not take into account those direct and specific instructions given by the Russian Supreme Court&quot; when it overturned the first decision.
 Yablokov said the conviction relied on a law regarding state secrets that was passed after the time when Moiseyev allegedly engaged in his spying activities. 
 &quot;There is an old principle: If there is no law, there is no crime and there is no punishment,&quot; he said. &quot;It was this principle that was forgotten by the Moscow City Court. The law did not exist during the period for which Moiseyev has been accused, and it is illegal to bring him to trial [under it].&quot; 
 Yablokov said the retrial, which had been dragged out since the June 2000 Supreme Court decision, was ultimately rushed. The case was transferred among four different judges, and after each transfer had to be started anew. Judge Komarova heard the case in eight sessions, less than half the number it took the other judges, he said. 
 Moiseyev's supporters have accused the judges of passing around the case in an attempt to avoid responsibility for what is a politically sensitive case. 
 Yablokov suggested that the court had given a relatively short sentence so that Moiseyev would not have time to complete the appeals process and win a full acquittal.

TITLE: Putin Congratulates North Korea's Kim
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin sent a telegram of congratulations to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, who celebrated a major Korean holiday Wednesday while on a long train trip home across Russia, officials said.
 In an almost identical note, Putin also congratulated South Korea on the holiday, which marks the liberation of Korea from Japanese colonial rule in 1945.
 In his note to North Korea's Kim, Putin said that their talks in Moscow earlier this month have given a &quot;powerful impetus&quot; to ties.
 The cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang &quot;answers the interests of both countries and helps to strengthen peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia,&quot; said the statement released by the Kremlin.
 Kim answered with a quick telegram saying his summit with Putin was &quot;an epochal event&quot; in bringing bilateral relations to a new level, North Korea's official news agency reported Wednesday.
 Moscow's ties with the communist North suffered after the 1991 Soviet collapse and after Moscow established ties with the South in 1990. Putin has pursued pro-market economic policies but is also reviving ties with Soviet-era allies such as North Korea and Iraq.
 Putin's envoy to the Far East, Konstantin Pulikovsky, who is accompanying Kim during his trip, described the North Korean leader as &quot;cheerful and sociable&quot; behind an official image, in an interview published Wednesday in the business daily Kommersant.
 Kim, who reportedly dislikes flying, traveled for nine days across the Far East and Siberia to Moscow for talks with President Vladimir Putin on Aug. 4. Kim then traveled to St. Petersburg for two days, and, after a brief stopover, began the 6,400-kilometer trip from Moscow back to Pyongyang.

TITLE: Putin's Surprise Visit Fires Up Rumor Mill
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: President Vladimir Putin made an unexpected stop in St. Petersburg Wednesday for late-night talks with the region's political leadership on his way to a vacation in Karelia.
 Between 9 p.m. and 4 a.m., the president held first a group meeting with Governor Vladimir Yakovlev, Lenin grad Oblast Governor Valery Ser dyu kov and Northwest Region Governor General Viktor Cherkesov. He then met individually with each of these leaders.
 By 5 p.m. road blocks began springing up around the Mariinsky Palace on St. Isaac's Square, and police refused to comment about what was going on.
 Participants have declined to elaborate in detail about the content of the midnight talks or the reason behind their apparent urgency.
 Serdyukov's office released a statement Thursday saying that Putin had discussed the oblast as an area of &quot;strategic importance for the whole country.&quot; The two also discussed the Ust-Luga cargo port, an ambitious project that has been delayed for many years.
 Serdyukov's statement also said that the two discussed plans for the 1,250th anniversary of the oblast town of Staraya Ladoga, about 130 kilometers east of St. Petersburg, which will be celebrated in 2003.
 Yakovlev and Cherkesov were even less forthcoming about the talks. Yakovlev's only official comment was that he spoke to the president about planning for the 2003 tercentennial of St. Petersburg.
 Cherkesov, as is his usual practice, issued no statement at all.
 Alexander Afanasiev, the governor's spokesperson, repeated Yakovlev's assertion and claimed that Putin's stop in St. Petersburg was a natural side trip on his way to Karelia.
 &quot;If I was going to vacation somewhere and came over to see you on my way there, would it look that strange?&quot; Afanasiev said in a telephone interview Thursday. &quot;I don't think so.&quot; 
 Interfax later reported that Yakov lev and Putin had talked about placing more than 1,000 historical landmarks in need of restoration under the control of City Hall.
 Many local observers and politicians, however, were skeptical of these explanations, unconvinced that Putin would make such a sudden trip and hold all-night meetings to discuss such topics. As a result, political circles were abuzz with gossip on Thursday.
 &quot;This looks kind of strange to me,&quot; said Olga Pokrovskaya, the spokesperson for the Yabloko faction in the Legislative Assembly, in an interview Thursday.
 &quot;One of my guesses is that [the discussions] could have concerned the proposal to merge St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Ob last,&quot; said Po krov skaya. &quot;[B]ut why there would be such a rush about this question, which would necessitate another regional election?&quot; 
 Sources in the Legislative Assembly who requested anonymity also suggested that the talks were part of a process aimed at reducing the number of Russia's regions from the current 89 to 54 or fewer. The Kremlin has argued that such a system would facilitate federal coordination.
 &quot;Discussions were begun this summer about holding a referendum next fall [about uniting the oblast and the city],&quot; said one Legislative Assembly lawmaker, who requested anonymity. 
 &quot;This could be the beginning of the regions' consolidation process,&quot; he said. 
 Yakovlev maintained that plans for Putin's visit had been arranged long ago. However, this statement seemed to be contradicted by other reports. According to Kommersant, even Kremlin officials believed that the president was planning to vacation in Sochi and knew nothing about his impending trip to St. Petersburg.
 &quot;It's just funny to me to hear all these reports about [the talks being about] the anniversary,&quot; said a source close to Yakovlev who requested anonymity. &quot;That was obviously not the topic at all.&quot; 
 &quot;Look who was present at the meeting,&quot; the source continued. &quot;This is the first time something like that has happened, and it looks like a settling of scores. But don't worry. We'll find out everything soon,&quot; the source said.
 After the talks, Putin left the city on a boat for the island of Valaam in Lake Ladoga. Arriving there on Thursday at 11:00 a.m., the president toured the monastery complex. According to press reports, Putin will also visit the open-air architectural museum of Kizhi. 
 Kommersant reported that he would be back in Moscow on Aug. 23.

TITLE: Report: Allen To Host Spectacular Party
AUTHOR: By John Varoli

PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: While Bill Gates has been studying the byte-sized details of his XML Web Services program, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, reported to be worth around $30 billion, has been planning another one of his extravagant parties to be held this weekend in St. Petersburg, reported the New York Observer last month.
 Details of the bash, which is being organized by Merv Griffin Productions, the top American events company, are being held in strict secret, but local officials and businesspeople whisper that Allen is dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars with catering companies, dinnerware makers and transport companies to entertain almost 350 guests at his party.
 Among those reportedly on the guest list are Rolling Stone lead Mick Jagger, Madonna, ex-Beatle Sir Paul McCartney and actor Tom Hanks, according to both the Observer and local city officials, who wished to remain anonymous, saying that they have been sworn to secrecy. Whether such illustrious guests will actually show up for the event is not clear.
 Allen, 48, is listed by Forbes magazine as the world's third-richest person. He owns the Seattle Seahawks American football team and the Portland Trailblazers basketball team. He is also the largest shareholder in Steven Spielberg's Dream Works studio.
 Guests have been told they will be flown in one of Allen's jets to Helsinki, Finland, before taking a luxury liner to St. Petersburg, reported the Observer. A helicopter ride to Estonia, a private tour of the State Hermitage Museum and a visit to a shooting range, where the guests can blast away with Russian automatic weapons, will be among the highlights of the three-day extravaganza.
 Allen's fete, which begins Friday, will reportedly feature a party at the Tauride Palace on Saturday night and culminate Sunday night with a five-course dinner and black-tie ball at the Catherine Palace, the lavish summer residence in Pushkin. How big the celebrity contingent will be has yet to be determined, but actors Robin Williams and Geena Davis are known to have attended Allen's 1997 party in Venice, so it's likely the world's richest bachelor won't be partying alone.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Palace Nudity
 

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Seven tourists were detained Tuesday evening by police in St. Petersburg after part of the group posed nude for a photograph on St. Isaac's Square in front of the Mariinsky Palace. 
 After the five male members of the group -aged 28 to 30 - stripped down for the photo and posed for the camera, aimed by their female companions, they were detained by police and fined for minor hooliganism, police press officer Alexander Rostovtsev said.
 The five nudists were fined about 50 rubles each and soon released, Rostovtsev said. 
 "The men were drunk," he added.
 The men all reside in London, but do not hold British citizenship and were in St. Petersburg on tourist visas. The bare-all tourists included three citizens of New Zealand, one Australian and an Irishman, according to Yelena Mishkinyuk, press and public affairs officer at the British consulate in St. Petersburg. 
 She also said they were leaving the country Thursday.
 
 
Radioactive Theft
 

MOSCOW (AP) - Unidentified thieves have stolen radioactive devices from a depot at a Siberian airport, officials said Wednesday.
 The theft occurred at the airport's depot in Ulan-Ude, a city in southern Siberia on the border with Mongolia. The robbers, who remain at large, stole 36 gauges containing radioactive strontium-90, which are used to measure the degree of a plane's icing during flight, said Vitaly Skripko, spokesperson for the local branch of the Emergency Situations Ministry.
 Skripko said the aluminum-covered gauges didn't pose any danger, because their level of radioactivity was extremely low. 
 He said the thieves had apparently wanted to sell the metal for scrap.
 
 
New ISS Roomies
 

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) - Two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut have moved into the international space station for a four-month stay.
 For the first time in five months, an American was in charge again at space station Alpha. NASA and the Russian Aviation and Space Agency are taking turns providing the commander.
 Mission Control extended a warm welcome to astronaut Frank Culbertson, replacing cosmonaut Yury Usachev as skipper.
 Culbertson and his crewmates, Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Tyurin, won't be back until December. They are the third crew to live aboard the space station. 



TITLE: How Television Foiled the Coup
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A coup of another sort took place Aug. 19, 1991, on Channel 1, the main state television channel in the Soviet Union.
 From early morning, the anchors dutifully read official documents announcing that the new leadership had taken over to prevent &quot;chaos and anarchy&quot; and to save the Soviet Union, but their black clothing and gloomy expressions communicated a darker development. 
 Looking back, Channel 1's part in thwarting the coup appears to have been the result of people standing up for their principles individually, coupled with the inactivity of those whose job it was to make sure the party line was delivered without a glitch.
 For Channel 1, the coup started in the very early hours of Aug. 19, 1991, when Leonid Kravchenko, the head of the State Committee on Television and Radio, or Gosteleradio, was swiftly delivered to Communist Party headquarters on Staraya Ploshchad, at about 1 a.m.
 According to Sergei Medvedev, a 33-year-old &quot;Vremya&quot; evening news commentator at the time, Kravchenko was presented with a handful of documents that were to be read to the country, starting with the first morning broadcast.
 Kravchenko, though, insisted on sticking to the established procedure for disseminating information in the Soviet Union and asked that state news agency TASS be the first to report the changes in leadership. TASS chief Gennady Shishkin was promptly called in. At 2 a.m., Kravchenko then delivered the documents to Ostankino.
 &quot;It's incredible, but many of those papers were either written by hand or typed out in such a rush that they contained mistakes and typos,&quot; said Medvedev, now chairman of the board of television production company RTS, which makes shows for ORT.
 When the staff at Ostankino saw the documents, they decided the day's whole broadcasting schedule had to be changed. &quot;At that time, the morning news was a cheerful, friendly show aimed at putting people in a good mood. With these documents, it was obvious the show would not be cheerful, nor would any other part of the daily broadcast,&quot; he said in a recent interview.
 When a woman anchor saw what she was to read, she insisted on changing into something more somber. &quot;So she put on a man's black sweater that she had borrowed from somebody in the office,&quot; Medvedev said.
 &quot;And the mood here wasn't the best. Not only did everyone quickly realize that something serious was happening, people also had no news from anywhere apart from the stack of papers,&quot; he said.
 At 4 a.m., a tight ring of troops sealed the office in Ostankino so that no one could get in or out. A KGB colonel was placed in the editorial offices to monitor the reports and give final approval, Medvedev said.
 The documents themselves, however, gave away the members of the State Committee for the Emergency Situation, or GKChP, and undermined their cause. Their announcements were full of Soviet-style patriotic clich&eacute;s, such as &quot;patriotic readiness&quot; and &quot;age-old friendship in the unified family of fraternal peoples and the revival of the fatherland,&quot; phrases that harked back to the period of stagnation under Leonid Brezhnev. The television anchors did their part to make sure the implications of the coup were fully understood by reading the announcements with grave faces.
 Channel 1 chose to fill up air time with solemn music and classical ballet, which also served to alert viewers that something serious was happening. Remarkably, &quot;Swan Lake&quot; was scheduled to be shown that day anyway, but it was shown over and over in the absence of regular programming. 
 Programming was canceled on Channel 2, or Russian Television, which supported Yeltsin as president of the Russian Republic. Channel 1 was seen on all TV channels.
 There were also conscious attempts by Channel 1 staff to tell the truth, starting with the coverage of the news conference given by self-proclaimed acting President Gennady Yanayev and four other GKChP members. 
 While experienced in covering up leaders' failures in the past, the Ostankino television crew chose not to apply this skill that day. Instead, an observant lens went after Yanayev's weakness: his constantly trembling hands. What viewers saw was a group of agitated men who did not look sure of what they were doing.
 The most exciting point of the news conference came when young Nezavisimaya Gazeta reporter Tatyana Malkina, just out of journalism school, bluntly asked Yanayev, &quot;Could you please say whether or not you understand that last night you carried out a coup d'etat?&quot;
 Not only did this particular question get aired, but as Yanayev mumbled something incoherent, the camera kept showing Malkina's face bearing an expression of disdain. Even though it seemed the screws were tightening in the country, people saw that it was still possible to speak out.
 The TV crew, not knowing whether their reporting would ever be aired, went to Manezh Square. There, among a mix of armored vehicles, disconnected trolley buses, soldiers and police, people were walking around looking worried.
 Medvedev's crew shot the tanks moving across the city and went on to the White House to film its defenders. Medvedev caught the key event: Yeltsin standing on a tank and speaking to &quot;the citizens of Russia.&quot;
 Three defenders of the White House - a blue-collar worker, a young man and a bearded intellectual - spoke on camera and, in different words, all three said the same thing. They said they did not want to submit to the GKChP and were determined to protect democracy and freedom, &quot;to defend our legitimate elected representatives, our power,&quot; as the intellectual put it.
 Before returning to Ostankino, Medvedev did an impassioned stand-up during which he said that he was not sure whether his report would ever be broadcast. He quoted Yeltsin, calling the GKChP a coup d'etat, and described &quot;the human waves that kept rolling in, one after another&quot; to defend the White House.
 The crew returned to Ostankino about 40 minutes before &quot;Vremya&quot; went on the air. According to Medvedev, at some point during editing, the report was shown to Krav chenko's deputy Valentin Lazutkin. Lazutkin gave it his approval.
 But even more surprising was the reaction, or to be precise, lack of reaction, of the KGB colonel who had been sent specifically to monitor what was aired.
 &quot;He just looked at it and said nothing,&quot; Medvedev said.
 At 9 p.m., &quot;Vremya&quot; started with the two anchors reading the official documents as if they were under a spell. Later came the bombshell: Med ve dev's report and the reaction to it.
 &quot;The telephones just exploded in our offices. It seemed as if there was not a phone that was not ringing,&quot; he said.
 To protect their reporter, Channel 1 immediately sent Medvedev on a vacation, which he began by going back to the White House.
 Thousands of Muscovites did the same, and many of them did so after being inspired by the least likely source - the state mouthpiece &quot;Vremya.&quot;

TITLE: Gorbachev Looks Back At August '91 Betrayal
AUTHOR: By Deborah Seward

PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: His emotions have settled with time, and the details of the August 1991 coup attempt are fading. But a decade later, Mikhail Gorbachev's dark brown eyes still flash with contempt when the former Soviet leader remembers how his fellow Communists betrayed him.
 &quot;They were serious people ... smart people,&quot; Gorbachev said of the coup plotters. &quot;They did it because their time was up, and they couldn't agree to that. They wanted to prolong being in power and keep it.&quot;
 Time has been kind to Mikhail Gorbachev. After the roller-coaster reforms of former president Boris Yeltsin, many Russians now view Gorbachev's gradual approach to change favorably. He's a globetrotter in demand, and President Vladimir Putin has sought his counsel.
 Looking tanned and relaxed, Gorbachev, 70, sat straight up during a 45-minute interview in a room decorated with a fireplace, an aquarium, and mementos at the Gorbachev Fund, the political think tank he set up in the 1990s after resigning as the Soviet leader.
 Gorbachev said he has no special plans for Sunday, the 10th anniversary of the attempt by hardline Communists to remove him from power, an event that paved the way for the demise of the Soviet Union four months later. He will stay at his desk, in front of a portrait of his beloved late wife, Raisa, giving interviews and answering questions.
 &quot;Time settles things down. Details are slipping away. The emotional atmosphere that arose at the time, and the reactions to it, have already faded,&quot; Gorbachev said. &quot;What remains is the essence, the essence of what happened and its consequences, seen with greater clarity.&quot;
 Gorbachev has spent years trying to understand what happened during those three days in August.
 &quot;Every year ... I've analyzed it,&quot; Gorbachev said. &quot;The main analysis made in the first days remains the same. It was the appearance of reactionary forces, forces in my surroundings, in the government, the Central Committee, that caused the coup.&quot;
 While Gorbachev was on vacation in the Crimea, a group of hardliner Communists decided to prevent the signing of a new treaty that would have given more power to the 15 Soviet republics and far less to the party. Gorbachev became a prisoner in the Black Sea villa, and a group of eight senior Communists announced that they had seized power. Tanks rolled into Moscow. The Soviet Union was in shock.
 &quot;Their main concern was to keep the power that they were losing,&quot; Gorbachev said of the coup plotters. &quot;They were ready to fight to the death to stay at the helm.&quot;
 Gorbachev blamed himself for being too concerned about playing by democratic rules and not ridding the party of his opponents earlier.
 &quot;You can't be such a Mr. Clean when revolutionary changes like this are happening, when the system is changing,&quot; Gorbachev said. &quot;One has to be more decisive and reform.&quot;
 He said that he had been too self-confident and had underestimated his opponents.
 While Gorbachev was under house-arrest, Yeltsin led the resistance to the coup. &quot;You have to be objective. In that moment when he appeared, and in essence led the opposition to the putsch, it was a risky situation and it could have gone in any direction. I think here, you have to give him credit. He played a gigantic historic role&quot; in preventing the coup plotters from taking power, Gorbachev said.
 But as he has done in the past, Gorbachev denounced Yeltsin's maneuvering behind his back in the fall of 1991 and Yeltsin's decision to forge a union with Ukraine and Belarus, which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
 &quot;Yeltsin's a gambler,&quot; Gorbachev said, measuring his words. &quot;A gambler, an intriguer; these qualities are well-developed in him. He has two indefinable wishes, incessant: to be in power ... at the very top, and of course his passion for fame and glory.&quot;
 Yeltsin's abrupt policies are responsible for many of Russia's current woes, Gorbachev said, which is making Putin's job very hard. &quot;I think the president is feeling his feet in his role step by step,&quot; Gorbachev said, warning that there were still people in the Kremlin from Yeltsin's entourage maneuvering against Putin.
 Gorbachev said he regretted he hadn't kept Yeltsin's ambitions in check when the two clashed in the 1980s.
 &quot;I should have sent him somewhere as an ambassador,&quot; Gorbachev said. &quot;The world's a big place.&quot;

TITLE: Telecominvest Makes Noise With Megafon
AUTHOR: By Elizabeth Wolfe

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Local holding Telecominvest got a marvelous face-lift Tuesday, slipping into the capital city by absorbing Moscow's mobile operator-in-waiting, Sonic Duo.
 It did so by becoming the anchor in a new holding, for now called Megafon, together with two leading Nordic operators - Sonera and Telia - and Moscow investment boutique LV Finance, Sonic Duo's major shareholder. The merged company has mobile licenses covering 80 percent of the country's population and foresees investing $600 million over three years, to capture eventually a third of all mobile users in as much time.
 Andrei Mikhailenko, acting general director of Telecominvest, said that customers could expect a single national tariff system by the end of next year.
 The announcement Tuesday ended months of speculation about how Telecominvest, which was founded in St. Petersburg in 1994 by men who are now top telecoms officials in the government, would enter Moscow. Currently, almost all of Telecominvest's operations are centered around local provider North-West GSM. Sonic Duo is expected to start up in Moscow this fall.
 But the competitors aren't blinking an eye. Mobile TeleSystems and Vimpelcom, Russia's No. 1 and No. 2 providers, say No. 3 has more practical tasks ahead before it treads on their turf. Those include marketing, assembling a management team, building base stations, finding and keeping customers and getting the cash in hand. The particular details of Telecominvest's growth into a pan-regional cellular operator are still to come.
 &quot;Our three years of regional development have given us a competitive advantage,&quot; said MTS spokesperson Eva Prokofyeva. &quot;At the moment, we are talking about [Telecominvest's] plans. In a planned investment, 'planned' is the key word.&quot;
 &quot;We're not worried at all, because we have the necessary resources: investment, a management team, a brand,&quot; said Vimpelcom spokesman Mikhail Umarov. &quot;We're ready for the competition.&quot;
 Megafon already has 400,000 subscribers, mostly with North-West GSM. In comparison, Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) is the leader, with 2 million, and Vimpelcom trails with 1.2 million.
 Telecoms analysts said Megafon has a fighting chance to build itself into a big-league player, but stressed it would probably be years before the holding was a serious competitor. &quot;It's easy to get the [GSM] licenses, especially if you're well-connected, but it's more difficult to start selling and get this whole thing running,&quot; said Iouli Matevossov of Deutsche Bank.
 For now, Megafon is a license holder rather than an operator everywhere but in the northwest. Of its assets - North-West GSM, Sonic Duo, Ural GSM (negotiations are wrapping up), and six operators in the Far East, Siberia, Southern and Volga federal regions - only the Northwest has a large subscriber base.
 The $600 million investment will consist of assets, bank and vendor credits and profits. It includes expected loans from the World Bank's International Finance Corporation and the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development of about $120 million, said Leonid Rozhetskin, head of LV Finance.
 In comparison, MTS spent almost $500 million through the year 2000, and expects capital expenditure of $350 million this year, said Michael Alexeyev, senior consultant at J'son and Partners.
 While Telia said it was not putting money into the new venture, Sonera Vice President of Public Relations Jyrki Karasvirta said his company would invest $20 million to $30 million over the next five years. Megafon may be taken public in a few years, officials said.
 The announcement of a revamped Megafon project surprised the market only by the way it was done. It was practically set in stone that Telecominvest would find its way into Moscow, the city with the highest cellular penetration in Russia. Such common knowledge grew out of charges that Telecominvest is no stranger to special treatment from telecoms officials. While a slew of government favors over the years has helped all the top operators get where they want to go, it's Telecominvest that analysts say has been winning out recently.
 Telecominvest was created in 1994 by the St. Petersburg Telephone Network, or PTS, when it was run by Valery Yashin and Leonid Reiman. After fellow Petersburger Vladimir Putin became president, Reiman was appointed communications minister. Ya shin became head of state telecoms holding Svyazinvest.
 &quot;Telecominvest has been clearly consolidating its license properties with the blessing and enthusiastic support of the regulatory authorities,&quot; J'son and Partners' Michael Alexeyev said. &quot;Not surprisingly, it's the only company that managed to get access to GSM licenses across seven macro-regions.&quot;
 The company says Reiman's participation is a thing of the past, and points to a clear shareholder structure as a sign that the minister does not have financial interests in the company: PTS' stake has since been diluted to 15 percent, and Luxembourg-offshore First National Holding now owns the remainder, with Sweden's Telia and Germany's Commerzbank as its shareholders.
 Commerzbank is believed by some analysts to be a nominee shareholder for another anonymous party, but a spokesperson for the bank denied that claim. In addition, United Financial Group brokerage suggested in a note Tuesday that Accord-Tel, a shareholder in Telecominvest's regional operators, includes former officials from the ministry, Rostelecom and Svyazinvest.
 The Megafon project presented Tuesday, to be legally finalized in the first part of 2002, merges Sonic Duo with seven of Telecominvest's operators, including North-West GSM - and in the near future - Ural GSM. North-West GSM, the only operator in Megafon with a significant subscriber base, becomes the proud controller of each operator, including 100 percent of Sonic Duo.
 Although penetration in Moscow is nearing 20 percent, it's around 3 percent in the country overall, compared to more than 60 percent in Western Europe.
 Telecominvest takes 31 percent of Megafon and Sonera takes 26 percent, while Swedish operator Telia has 8 percent, IPO Growth Fund has 6.5 percent, and 3 percent is held by other minorities. Both Sonera and Telia helped form North-West GSM years ago, and this week also announced a buy-out of Norwegian operator Telenor's stake.

TITLE: Q2 Profits Add to MTS' Cell War Chest
AUTHOR: By Elizabeth Wolfe

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Leading Moscow cellular provider Mobile Telesystems posted higher-than-expected profits in the second quarter, notwithstanding a onetime write-off of $26 million connected to previous customer acquisition costs.
 MTS, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, reported a net income of $35.04 million, up from $31.22 million in the first quarter and $28 million in the second quarter of 2000. Net revenues grew to $205.89 million, compared to $166.3 million in the first quarter and $120 million in the second quarter last year.
 MTS also announced it had acquired controlling stakes in three operators in the regions for $27 million, pushing its nation-wide subscriber base to 2.164 million.
 The company beat analysts' expectations in almost all areas, with one big surprise being that revenue per user, or ARPU, had hardly budged, dipping only $1 in the quarter to $39, even though subscriber growth was strong and the latest sign-ups are generally more frugal with their phone time.
 The company attributed the stabilization partly to higher &quot;seasonal&quot; usage that included the May holidays. Outside Moscow, subscribers pay around 30 percent less, MTS said. 
 &quot;It's a little difficult to understand how, with such rapid growth, the ARPU can remain so high, because people were expecting it to fall quite dramatically,&quot; said Will Draper, analyst at Lehman Brothers in London.
 Company officials said the entrance of Sonic Duo, Moscow's third operator, expected to kick off this fall, could affect prices.
 MTS showed that it was unfazed by the emergence this week of the Megafon holding, led by St. Petersburg's Telecominvest, which joins North-West GSM with Sonic Duo and seven other regional GSM operators.
 &quot;We believe that the first entrant will win the regional battle,&quot; said MTS president Mikhail Smirnov in a statement, underscoring that their regional development began a few years ago. 
 Sixteen percent of MTS customers are outside Moscow, and the company will enter St. Petersburg before year-end to compete with North-West GSM.
 MTS announced it had acquired three regional operators in Siberia, the Urals and the Far East by buying 81 percent of Telecom-900 from AFK Sistema, which owns 43 percent of MTS. Telecom-900 has majority stakes in each of the operators, whose combined subscriber roster is 117,000.
 MTS' share price responded by going up 5.5 percent to $24.32 at 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

TITLE: Severstal Director's Ex-Wife Freezes Stock Package
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW - A Moscow court has frozen a 32.5 percent stake in steel giant Severstal after the former wife of Alexei Mordashov, the company's director and main shareholder, contested their divorce settlement.
 Nikulinsky Interregional Court prosecutor Vladimir Ponevezhsky, who has been involved in several high-profile and unusual cases, was responsible for getting the stake frozen on behalf of Mordashov's ex-wife, Yelena Mordashova.
 Mordashov personally owns 16.63 percent of Severstal - a stake that made $7.5 million in dividends alone last year. In total, he controls more than 50 percent of the company through co-ownership of other companies, such as Severstal-Invest, that hold stakes in Severstal.
 But Mordashova, who divorced the businessman in 1996, and the couple's 15-year-old son Ilya, get only a small portion of his income -18,000 rubles ($620) per month -under their alimony agreement.
 The complaint, a copy of which was obtained by Vedomosti, seeks to annul the alimony and property-division agreements, to transfer the 32.5 percent stake and stakes in several of the plant's shareholding companies to Mordashova, and to force Mordashov to pay his son a quarter of his income each month and 563.2 million rubles ($19 million) in back alimony for the past1 1/2 years.
 Ponevezhsky filed the complaint on July 24, and the Nikulinsky court reviewed it this week, deciding to freeze the stake and transfer the case to the municipal court in Cherepovets, where the Mordashovs are both registered as residents.
 Ponevezhsky is the same prosecutor who filed a series of suits against Dzhalol Khaidarov, the former director of the Kachkanarsk vanadium ore plant, when his erstwhile partner, Iskander Makhmudov, was trying to oust him from the company.
 &quot;The case contains facts that indicated this was 'contracted' [by an outside party],&quot; Mordashov said. He declined to say who he thought was behind the suit. &quot;The complaint against me was filed by ... the same prosecutor who drummed up criminal charges against Khaidarov, which then crumbled away. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he has decided to defend the rights of a juvenile, Ilya Mordashov, my oldest son,&quot; Mordashov said.
 An official with Urals Mining and Metals Co., or UGMK, which is controlled by Makhmudov, said the company had no connection to the suit, but was watching developments closely. If the businessman's former wife won the shares, UGMK &quot;would be ready to consider acquiring them,&quot; he said.
 Severstal sales director Dmitry Goroshkov said, &quot;I don't think this will have a sudden impact - positive or negative - on our current activity.&quot;

TITLE: FinMin 2002 Budget Carries $4M Surplus
AUTHOR: By Torrey Clark

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The government plans to meet its debt payments in 2002, even if oil prices fall, with no talk of debt restructuring, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said in a newspaper interview published Tuesday.
 The Finance Ministry submitted the 2002 draft budget to the government Tuesday. Kudrin called it a &quot;highly effective budget,&quot; aimed at ensuring stable economic growth.
 &quot;[It is] the foundation and the key to solving the problem of 2003 and 2004,&quot; Kudrin said in a statement Monday. Foreign debt hits a peak of $18 billion in 2003, compared with the $14 billion anticipated in 2002.
 The 2002 budget sets spending at 1.867 trillion rubles ($59.3 billion) and revenues at 1.995 trillion rubles, including 257.5 billion rubles in social-tax revenues that go to the pension fund. The social taxes, previously controlled by extrabudgetary funds, have been brought into the federal budget in a move to heighten transparency while attempting to decrease corruption and costs, said Alexei Moiseyev of Renaissance Capital.
 Gross domestic product is forecast to grow 4.3 percent from 7.75 trillion rubles this year to 10.6 trillion rubles. The preliminary budget target in June was 10.27 trillion rubles.
 The estimated oil price of $22 per barrel and exchange rate of 31.5 rubles to the dollar remained unchanged from the June draft.
 Non-interest expenditures have also risen since June.
 The government has pledged to carry out pension reforms and to boost salaries for employees in government sectors, including the military, the judiciary and other law enforcement agencies.
 An assistant to Kudrin said salaries would increase on average from 60 percent to 80 percent.
 Military forces would receive a large salary boost, in place of the current housing and service subsidies.
 In addition to about $7 million in foreign interest payments in 2002, the government will make 57.9 billion rubles ($1.8 billion) in interest payments on domestic debt.
 A planned budget surplus of about $4 million will be used to pay down debt, as will be a planned Eurobond issue. Kudrin said Russia may issue from $500 million to $1 billion in Eurobonds, Prime Tass reported, depending on oil prices.
 Even if oil prices drop to $17 per barrel, the government will meet its debt payments, said Kudrin in an interview in Vremya Novostei published Tuesday.
 If oil prices remain high and revenues exceed budget estimates, the excess will be used to pay down debt and form a stabilization fund.
 Analysts were positive on the budget.
 &quot;I think it is a realistic budget,&quot; said Moiseyev. &quot;It is really positive that additional revenues on top will go toward paying down the government's debt,&quot; he added.
 Paying down debt, however, is not everyone's recommendation for surplus revenues.
 &quot;It is more important to support domestic demand than to prepare for a debt peak, which will occur again in 2005 and 2008,&quot; said Natalya Orlova, an economist at Alfa Bank.
 But the budget's inflation forecast raised some analysts' eyebrows.
 &quot;I think the assumptions, except for inflation, seem to be quite realistic. Budgeted inflation is at such a low level because the government understands that it makes sense to accumulate some revenues on top of the budget,&quot; Orlova said.
 The draft budget was calculated using an inflation forecast of 10 percent to 13 percent, well below 2001 forecasts of 16 percent to 20 percent. Analysts have forecast a higher rate of 15 percent to 20 percent for 2002.
 The government is also under pressure from President Vladimir Putin to lower inflation. &quot;Inflation is a serious political issue,&quot; Moiseyev said. &quot;The president would probably not accept a budget with higher inflation forecasts,&quot; he added.
 &quot;It seems to me that inflation has gotten more than its share of attention over the past six months. After all, inflation has not had any sharply negative effect on the economy itself,&quot; Kudrin said in the Tuesday interview.

TITLE: LUKoil Profits Set Record for Oil Cos.
AUTHOR: By Anna Raff

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia's largest oil producer LUKoil barely beat out No. 2 Yukos in announcing Tuesday the largest annual profit ever posted by a Russian oil company.
 As well as setting a record for the oil major itself, the results beat market expectations and helped the company's shares rise 1.5 percent to $11.18.
 Net profits audited to U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, more than tripled last year to $3.31 billion. LUKoil's 1999 profits came to $1.06 billion. This came on an almost doubling of revenues from $7.38 billion in 1999 to $13.24 billion in 2000.
 In June, Yukos announced 2000 profits of $3.23 billion.
 The company has had a rough ride with investors this year because it delayed the release of 1999 results for months. At the annual shareholders meeting in June, LUKoil officials said to expect 1999 GAAP results in mid-July.
 With the release of a third set of financials audited according to GAAP standards, LUKoil seems set on becoming a company of international renown.
 But as with the release of GAAP accounts, company officials have continually pushed back the date for a tentative listing on international markets.
 They did so again Wednesday, when LUKoil Vice President Leonid Fedun said the company hopes to have a listing on the London Stock Exchange by the end of the year.
 In 1996, LUKoil President Vagit Alekperov announced that the company would seek a listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 1997. These plans failed to materialize, as did successive announcements.
 At a June shareholders meeting, LUKoil officials said they would seek a London listing instead of one in the United States because they wanted to sidestep any political dispute over sanctions in Iraq.
 The State Property Fund - which holds the 6 percent stake to be placed with various investors - said the listing could be expected in October or November, depending on market conditions. Officials hope to net $630 million from the floatation.
 Around the same time, Alekperov estimated that it would take place in September or October.
 In the end, it is the government that will make the decision, said Dmitry Avdeyev, an analyst for the United Financial Group brokerage.
 &quot;LUKoil has every chance of making it this time,&quot; Avdeyev said. &quot;But if the government decides the market conditions aren't conducive, then there's really nothing LUKoil can do.&quot;
 LUKoil needs this float to increase the company's market capitalization, Fedun said.
 &quot;There are some technical things that need to be taken care of in order for the global perception of us to improve,&quot; he said.
 &quot;A listing will undoubtedly increase liquidity. We also need to increase our presence in foreign projects,&quot; he added.
 LUKoil already has a slew of foreign assets, ranging from a chain of U.S. gas stations to refineries in Eastern Europe.
 LUKoil said it plans to buy an 85 percent stake in the Norsi holding company, which the government put on the auction block earlier this week. Norsi assets include a refinery and two marketing companies in the Volga Region. The asking price is $22 million.

TITLE: Boeing To Train Local Engineers
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEATTLE, Washington - Hoping to boost expertise at its Eastern European operations, Boeing Co. and the Russian aerospace company Ilyushin Aviation Complex will open a Moscow-based training center to develop computer skills for engineers, the two companies announced Tuesday.
 The center will train Russian aerospace engineers in CATIA, the computer software Boeing uses to design its aircraft, the company said.
 The center, which can train up to 50 engineers at a time, will also offer English-language classes.
 Engineers will be trained to work at the Moscow-based Boeing Design Center, which does work for the aerospace giant's commercial-airplanes division.
 Sergei Kravchenko, Boeing's vice president for cooperative programs and business development in Russia, said the company also plans a major investment in upgrading technology at the training center.
 &quot;We believe that the center soon will become the leader of computer-design training in Eastern Europe,&quot; he said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Arms Sales at $3 Bln
 

MOSCOW (AP) - Russia expects to earn $3.2 billion from weapons sales this year, down from last year's figure, officials said Wednesday.
 Weapons exports have already brought Russia $2.8 billion so far this year, said Sergei Chemezov, the first deputy chief of Rosoboronexport, Russia's leading state arms-trading company.
 Speaking at a news conference at the Moscow International Air Show at Zhu kovsky air base southeast of Moscow, Chemezov said Rosoboronexport now has export contracts totaling $13 billion, according to Russian news reports.
 Russia sold $3.68 billion worth of weapons last year - a 10-year high, but still only a fraction of the approximately $20 billion exported by the Soviet Union each year in the 1980s.
 Russia is the world's fourth-largest arms exporter, behind the United States, Britain and France.
 
 
Norilsk Wins Suit
 

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A regional court has rejected a suit launched by a Norilsk Nickel shareholder against the metals giant that led to the suspension of trade in the shares of one of its units, Norilsk said Monday.
 Trade in shares in Norilsk subsidiary Mining and Metals Co. Norilsk Nickel was suspended Thursday on the Moscow International Currency Exchange, or MICEX, after a court order from the Siberian town of Kemerovo.
 Norilsk said in a statement that the order, launched after a suit by an individual shareholder, had been overturned as groundless. A ban on the use of Norilsk's brand name to advertise its goods and services was also overturned.
 
 
Soros Buys Out Potanin
 

MOSCOW (SPT) - Financier George Soros has enlarged his stake in state telecoms monopoly Svyazinvest by buying out Interros head Vladimir Potanin's 7 percent stake in the Mustcom consortium, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing people close to the negotiations.
 Four years ago, Mustcom paid almost $2 billion for a 25 percent stake in Svyazinvest that is now worth around $300 million.
 Soros already owned 53 percent of Mustcom. 



TITLE: How the Battle for the White House Was Won
AUTHOR: By Pavel Felgenhauer

TEXT: WHEN the State Committee for the Emergency Situation, or GKChP, dismissed Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev on Aug. 19, 1991, I was the chief military correspondent of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, one of the few uncensored newspapers at the time. As the tanks slowly moved into Moscow that morning, I headed to the White House - the seat of the Russian government, parliament and President Boris Yeltsin.
 I had good connections in the Russian State Defense Committee, a small prototype Defense Ministry that had been formed by Yeltsin and headed by General Konstantin Kobets. The White House was a natural center of resistance to the coup.
 On Aug. 19, the entrances of the building were watched at first by a detachment of extremely distressed police officers armed with snub-nosed AKS-74U guns, the same men who usually guarded the building. These men didn't want to fight at all.
 A column of T-72 tanks from the Tamanskaya motor rifle division moved onto the Krasnopresnenskaya Naberezhnaya, but before it could pass the White House it was stopped by a crowd of Yeltsin supporters. The tank crews did nothing then nor when Yeltsin himself climbed up on top of a tank and appealed to the crowd to defy the coup. Short of running over the defenders, they could have done little anyway. The tanks had no ammo and even the soldiers' hand guns were not loaded.
 A separate unit from the Tamanskaya division had orders to guard the nearby bridge. Yeltsin's men persuaded the officer in charge, Major Sergei Yevdokimov, to move six unarmed tanks close to the White House to form a semblance of a defense. Officers from the defense staff that was forming around the Kobets committee immediately began phoning their military friends, telling them &quot;part of the Tamanskaya division has turned coat,&quot; creating panic and disorder in the Defense Ministry ranks.
 On the same day, I attended a meeting of the Russian government. It was short - all pledged support to Yeltsin - and then all present were encouraged to go to another room where weapons would be handed out.
 There were more than 100 guns in the White House, but mostly snub-nosed AKS-74U assault rifles and various hand guns - no good for any serious fighting against stormtroopers backed with armor. There were also several Kalashnikov assault rifles with ammunition.
 The first thing the defense staff in the White House did was to stop handing out guns to men who did not know what to do with them, to disarm as many politicians as possible and to send machine-gun crews to the roof where they could at least prevent an Mi-8 helicopter from landing an assault party. It was obvious that the defenders inside the White House were only capable of putting up a token resistance. Professional military officers were awaiting what looked like an almost inevitable assault with bewilderment: They knew they did not have a chance and that their lives depended on the attackers' disposition to take prisoners.
 But instead of stormtroopers came demonstrators, thousands of them, to defend Yeltsin and democracy. Inside the defense staff there was an instant surge of energy and enthusiasm: A human shield could be a serious defense against an army reluctant to kill civilians in its own capital. The officers also knew that their soldiers were trained to obey any order, but still this was a glimmer of hope.
 At 10 p.m. on Aug. 19, a battalion of paratroopers from the Ryazan regiment of the Tula 106th airborne division arrived with up to 20 armored BMDs, small armored personnel carriers. They were led by General Alexander Lebed, who was the deputy of Pavel Grachev, the commander of the Soviet airborne corps. Lebed announced that he had been given orders to &quot;secure&quot; the building.
 Colonel Alexander Tsalko, a deputy to Kobets, believed that Lebed was moving in to attack. Tsalko saw Lebed with officers of the Alpha KGB special anti-terrorist assault unit, which came to the White House to do reconnaissance.
 The plan, according to documents seen later, was for the paratroopers to secure corridors through the crowd and storm the entrances, giving Alpha room for a final room-to-room, hand-to-hand sweep of the building. A similar plan with paratroopers and Alpha was successfully executed in October 1993 by troops loyal to Yeltsin.
 Tsalko ordered the demonstrators to stop the paratroopers with friendly embraces 10 meters from the walls of the building. Flag-waving youths climbed onto the BMDs and sat on the hatches so the paratroopers inside could not suddenly go on the attack. These defenses were flimsy, but on the morning of Aug. 20, Lebed's troops withdrew without explanation.
 General Mikhail Kolesnikov was army chief of staff. His superior - the commander of the army and active member of the GKChP, General Valentin Varennikov - left for Crimea and Kiev, leaving Kolesnikov in charge. Varennikov asked Kolesnikov to go to the Moscow military district staff and help General Nikolai Kalinin, who was appointed commandant of Moscow, to impose martial law and a curfew.
 Kolesnikov later told me: &quot;I came to Kalinin and asked his men, 'What do you have?' They reported, and I said, 'Guys, I'm going home to have a nap and advise you do the same - with the forces you have assembled you don't have a leg to stand on in a martial-law situation.'&quot;
 In 1989, the Chinese sent 10 full-strength divisions (more than 100,000 men) into Beijing to enforce a curfew in a city smaller than Moscow. In 1991, the Soviet army managed to send in fewer than 10,000 men. Together with airborne, Interior Ministry and KGB units, there were up to 20,000 men in Moscow, with more than 100 tanks and up to 1,000 other pieces of armor, but there was no effective unified command. The city police force was neutral, and the curfew was not enforced at all.
 On Aug. 20, near Mayakovskaya Ploshchad, I met a major from the Kantemirovskaya division with 10 T-80 tanks. He told me he had not slept for almost 40 hours, his men had no rations, no decent sanitation, and that he, personally, was fed up.
 The military brass apparently believed that just showing armor was enough to quell all opposition. When this did not happen, they did not know what to do. This was a sad preview of the disastrous march into Grozny in 1995: Tanks sometimes with only a driver, without ammo, not ready for any action. Of course, the Muscovites in 1991 did not have RPG-7 launchers to slaughter the armor, but they began to mass-produce Molotov cocktails, drinking up to empty the bottles.
 The rebels in Moscow were becoming increasingly aggressive as the moral of the troops sagged. An assault on the White House resulting in heavy casualties could have caused a mass rebellion that the military would have been unable to control.
 On Aug. 21, the military chiefs decided to move the troops back to the barracks. It was all over. We had a great party with officers from the White House defense staff - with tons of hot pizza and other food and drink provided to the defenders of freedom by new capitalist joints after it became obvious who was winning.
 The next morning, bewildered troops began their retreat from Moscow - a preview of what would happen in Grozny in August 1996.
 
 <i>Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times. </i>

TITLE: Don't Underestimate the Dacha
AUTHOR: Alexei Pankin
TEXT: THE Russian press of late is filled with articles devoted to the 10th anniversary of the August 1991 putsch. I join my voice to the choir of memoirists and analysts.
 In August 1991 I was the deputy editor of the Mezhdunarodnaya Zhizn (International Affairs) magazine, the Soviet equivalent of America's Foreign Affairs. I had landed the job several years before with the blessing of Eduard Shevardnadze, Soviet foreign minister and Georgian nationalist, Politburo member and favorite of the &quot;democrats.&quot; This fact alone made me &quot;one of ours,&quot; both in the halls of power and in the maze of &quot;democratic&quot; politics.
 In my study of both camps, I made frequent use of a time-tested sociologist's tool: the heart-to-heart talk over a bottle of vodka. Often these talks occurred at the dacha.
 During these talks, I developed a peculiar view of the historical process.
 As the summer of 1991 began, I realized that the putsch the &quot;democrats&quot; had been warning the public about for the past two years would actually take place. 
 At that moment, the Supreme Soviet's commission for the war on privileges, driven by the prominent &quot;democrat&quot; Ella Pamfilova, released a report revealing the privatization of state-owned dachas by the Soviet nomenklatura. All this was true.
 The central bureaucracy had come to terms with its inevitable loss of power, and now former top officials were providing for a comfortable life in retirement. 
 The commission's report disrupted the peaceful course of the Soviet Union's democratic revolution.
 The party, military and industrial bureaucracy might stand aside while the Soviet state fell apart, but it would never give up its dachas without a fight. 
 In August, my gloomy forecast came true. Since that time, the &quot;dacha question&quot; has been the decisive factor in Russian politics.
 You may recall that accusations of building luxurious dachas with money stolen from public coffers were the centerpiece in the war of ideas between Boris Yeltsin's &quot;reformers&quot; and Ruslan Khasbulatov's &quot;red-brown coalition.&quot; The conflict ended in shots, bloodshed and a new constitutional system in October 1993.
 Interest in other people's leisure homes peaked again during the media wars of 1997 and 1998, which ended in the stinging financial crisis of August 1998. 
 We all remember the presidential campaign of 1999. The pro-Kremlin ORT network showed aerial shots of Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov's extensive holdings in the countryside. The pro-Luzhkov NTV network responded by broadcasting aerial footage of a luxurious castle in the south of France that ostensibly belonged to Yeltsin's daughter Tatyana Dyachenko.
 And was NTV itself not doomed from the moment in September 1999 when Sergei Dorenko, Boris Berezovsky's &quot;hit man&quot; on ORT, aired an expose on Media-MOST, featuring the company's executive dacha complex in Spain?
 History shows, however, that state dachas also possess the potential to stabilize. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, for instance, had every right not to obey the hasty decisions that were contained in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha accord. But the first Soviet president's will to resist was broken when he was offered a state dacha for life.
 For the first time in the 20th century, power passed from one leader to another in a more or less orderly fashion. And do you think that Yeltsin would have stepped down so easily if he hadn't been able to take the presidential residence in Barvikha along with him?
 The chief lesson of the last decade comes down to this: state dachas, passed down from the totalitarian Soviet Union to democratic Russia, are a strategic resource that is as important as oil and gas.
 Only wise stewardship of these reserves will ensure political stability during this century and into the next.
 
 <i>Alexei Pankin is editor of Sreda, a magazine for media professionals (www.internews.ru/sreda). </i>

TITLE: Palestine Deserves Own State
AUTHOR: By Noam Chomsky

TEXT: &quot;WHAT we feared has come true,&quot; Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling writes in Israel's leading newspaper. Jews and Palestinians are &quot;regressing to superstitious tribalism; war appears an unavoidable fate,&quot; an &quot;evil colonial&quot; war. This prospect is likely if the United States grants tacit authorization, with grim consequences that may reverberate far beyond.
 There is, of course, no symmetry between the &quot;ethno-national groups&quot; regressing to tribalism. The conflict is centered in territories that have been under harsh military occupation since 1967. The conqueror is a major armed power, acting with massive military, economic and diplomatic support from the global superpower. Its subjects are alone and defenseless, many barely surviving in miserable camps.
 The cruelty of the occupation has been sharply condemned by international and Israeli human-rights groups for many years. The purpose of the terror, economic strangulation and daily humiliation is not obscure. It was articulated in the early years of the occupation by Moshe Dayan, one of the Israeli leaders most sympathetic to the Palestinian plight, who advised his Labor Party associates to tell the Palestinians that &quot;you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave.&quot;
 The Oslo &quot;peace process&quot; changed the modalities, but not the basic concept. Shortly before joining the Ehud Barak government, historian Shlomo Ben-Ami, a dove in the U.S.-Israeli spectrum, wrote that &quot;the Oslo agreements were founded on a neocolonialist basis.&quot; The intent was to impose on the Palestinians &quot;almost total dependence on Israel&quot; in a &quot;colonial situation&quot; that was to be &quot;permanent.&quot; He soon became the architect of the latest Barak government proposals, virtually identical to Bill Clinton's final plan.
 These proposals were highly praised in U.S. commentary; the Palestinians and Yasser Arafat were blamed for their failure and the subsequent violence.
 That presentation &quot;was a fraud perpetrated on Israeli - and international - public opinion,&quot; Kimmerling writes accurately. He continues that a look at a map suffices to show that the Clinton-Barak plans &quot;presented to the Palestinians impossible terms.&quot; Crucially, Israel retained &quot;two settlement blocs that in effect cut the West Bank into pieces.&quot; The Palestinian enclaves are effectively separated from the center of Palestinian life in Jerusalem; the Gaza Strip remains isolated, its population virtually imprisoned.
 Israeli settlement in the territories doubled during the years of the &quot;peace process,&quot; increasing under Barak, who bequeathed the new government of Ariel Sharon &quot;a surprising legacy.&quot; As the transition took place early this year the Israeli press reported the highest number of housing starts in the territories since the time when Sharon supervised settlements in 1992, before Oslo. 
 The nature of permanent neocolonial dependency was underscored by Israel's High Court of Justice in November 1999 when it rejected yet another Palestinian petition opposing further expansion of the (Jewish) city of Maale Adumim established to the east of Jerusalem, virtually partitioning the West Bank.
 The court suggested that &quot;some good for the residents of neighboring [Palestinian villages] might spring from the economic and cultural development&quot; of the all-Jewish city. While they try to survive without water to drink or fields to cultivate, the people whose lands have been taken can enjoy the sight of the ample housing, green lawns, swimming pools and other amenities of the heavily subsidized Israeli settlements.
 Immediately after World War II, the Geneva conventions were adopted to bar repetition of Nazi crimes, including transfer of population to occupied territories or actions that harm civilians. As a so-called high contracting party, the United States is obliged &quot;to ensure respect&quot; for the conventions.
 With Israel alone opposed, the United Nations has repeatedly declared the conventions applicable to the occupied territories; the United States abstains from these votes, unwilling to take a public stand in violation of fundamental principles of international law, which require it to act to prevent settlement and expropriation, attacks on civilians with U.S.-supplied helicopters, collective punishment and all other repressive measures used by the occupying forces. 
 For 25 years, there has been a near-unanimous international consensus on the terms of political settlement: a full peace treaty with the establishment of a Palestinian state after Israeli withdrawal, an outcome that enjoys wide support even within Israel. It has been blocked by Washington ever since its veto of a Security Council resolution to that effect in 1976.
 It is far from an ideal solution. But the likely current alternatives are far more ugly.
 
 <i>Noam Chomsky is a philosopher and social critic. He contributed this comment to the Los Angeles Times. </i>

TITLE: We Must Never Forget Spirit Of August 1991
TEXT: IT is amazing how sometimes situations that seemed so clear-cut as they unfolded later become clouded in doubt and uncertainty. In recent years, there has been no more vivid example of this phenomenon than the August 1991 coup attempt in Moscow.
 Remember how the hardline oppressors of freedom stood on one side of the barricades, spouting rhetoric that was already outdated and clearly embodying a past to which no one wanted to return?
 And, on the other side, stood only defenders of liberty and democracy, spontaneously speaking in Jeffersonian tones, singing songs and representing a future of hope and energy? Remember the incredible, unrepeatable feeling that came with the realization that this time it was the hands of the tyrants that were trembling, and their voices that cracked with the strain? For once, it seemed, democracy and freedom would triumph in this world.
 Now, 10 years on, it takes an effort of mind and will to recall those feelings. Within a few months of August, the good guys in white hats were squabbling among themselves. First, Boris Yeltsin fell out with Mikhail Gorbachev. Then came shock therapy in the first days of 1992, and the whole sequence of events that led up to the October 1993 shelling of parliament. No image of the breakdown of August 1991 could be more telling than that of Alexander Rutskoi and Ruslan Khasbulatov - Yeltsin's onetime friends who stood beside him during the coup - being led away in handcuffs. And that was followed quickly by voucher privatization, loans for shares, the oligarchs, the corruption scandals, the murders of journalists, the 1996 election farce, and so on.
 And that is just in Russia. August 1991 was an ambiguous milestone for most of the other countries of the former Soviet Union as well. Many of them - Georgia, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, etc. - were thrown into bloody and vicious conflicts. Many others - Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, etc. - have been occupied by oppressive and undemocratic dictatorships that have little to distinguish them from the Soviet regime.
 A decade after the events of August 1991, there is indeed much to think about. Those people who still feel somehow that those were the finest days of their lives must confront the disappointments that ensued. And they must counter the inevitable claims of those who supported the coup that the wrong side prevailed.
 Most of all, perhaps, they must make the effort to recapture the hope and determination of those times. We cannot allow the spirit of 1991 to be overwhelmed by what followed.
 
 <i>This comment appeared as an editorial in The Moscow Times on Aug. 13. </i>

TITLE: making videos on a shoestring
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A new Babslei video for the song &quot;Ispanskaya&quot; (Spanish) will premiere in September, but it is already a hot topic in music circles. The all-girl folk-punk group appears with some of the most famous local rock personalities, such as Leningrad's Sergei Shnurov and Tequilajazzz's Yevgeny Fyodorov, and is based on the classic Soviet war film, &quot;The Dawns Here Are Quiet.&quot;
 Shot on an island on the Vuoksa River by video director Alexander Rozanov in late June, the landscape is similar to the swamps of &quot;The Dawns,&quot; where a poorly equipped Soviet all-female volunteer regiment led by a <i>starshina, </i>or sergeant major, dies fighting the Germans. In Rozanov's version, the female soldiers are played by Babslei, the starshina is Andrei Figa of the punk band Nordfolks, while the Nazis are played by Shnurov, Fyodorov, Auktsyon's Oleg Garkusha, and Spitfire's Andrei Kurayev.
 &quot;I've always wanted to film these people as some sort of villains, armed villains who kill good people, and now I had a chance,&quot; says Rozanov. He admits, however, that Figa gave the best performance.
 &quot;Unfortunately, for everybody it was a kind of picnic,&quot; he says. &quot;It was fun for them. They were driven there, fed with shashlyk and allowed to fire assault rifles.&quot;
 The original &quot;The Dawns Here Are Quiet&quot; was directed in 1972 by Stanislav Rostotsky, who died last week, and was nominated for the Oscar for &quot;Best Foreign Movie&quot; the next year, but lost to Louis Bu&ntilde;uel's &quot;The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.&quot; 
 Although Oleg Grabko of Bomba-Piter, Babslei's label, initially wanted to get some kind of blessing from Rostotsky, Rozanov objected. &quot;I was categorically against it,&quot; he says. &quot;They just can't be compared - his work of art and our playing cowboys and Indians. I feel a little awkward because of the hype.&quot;
 Described as the &quot;best director of low-budget music videos,&quot; Rozanov does not see it as a compliment. &quot;It's a dubious reputation,&quot; he says, adding that a budget is a must for a music video.
 &quot;To make the picture interesting and worthwhile, to be able to play with it, you have to shoot good-quality footage,&quot; says Rozanov. &quot;You can't film it with a [cheap] camera like this, without proper light.&quot;
 However, he admits that he works with very low budgets. &quot;A $500 budget is absurd, but some [bands] can't even get that much together. They can raise, say, $100,&quot; he says adding that the minimum budget of a music video in Moscow is between $3,000 and $5,000.
 &quot;They will laugh at me there,&quot; says Rozanov. &quot;But in the end they are right, because it is best to shoot on 16-millimeter film, which costs $140 a roll, plus development, plus transfer to Betacam. So it's already $1,000 for 30 minutes of material.&quot;
 Rozanov, 38, came to St. Petersburg from the Tula Region and went through many odd jobs before he finally found himself studying in the Institute of Culture in the early 1990s. He says, he chose the college because it was the only educational insitution that offered the diploma of &quot;photo artist.&quot; But he found that he preferred cinema and video.
 Apart from music videos, Rozanov made the full-length documentary &quot;Tormozi Svoi Parovoz&quot; (Stop Your Train). Released on cassette in 1999, the film was sponsored with a grant from George Soros' Open Society Foundation and is a seminal document of the so-called &quot;TaMtAm Generation&quot; - the bands associated with the pioneering alternative club TaMtAmfounded by Seva Gakkel.
 The documentary is pretty much the opposite of Alexei Uchitel's perestroika-era full-length film &quot;Rock.&quot; Unlike Uchitel, who had documented Kom somol congresses and dealt with so-called &quot;youth problems&quot; previously, Rozanov looks at the culture from the inside.
 &quot;['Rock'] was made for outside viewers. He wanted to show people like himself that they needn't be afraid of such 'monsters,' with whom [the authorities] were scaring the public,&quot; says Rozanov. &quot;But 'Stop Your Train' is real, and it doesn't try to explain anything.&quot;
 Rozanov says showing rock stars such as Boris Grebenshchikov and Oleg Garkusha with their small children in &quot;Rock&quot; was sudsy and redundant.
 &quot;Train&quot; doesn't contain any interviews, but it shows mainly punk musicians in such situations as sound checks and rehearsals, documenting surprise improvisations and sudden phrases that sometimes tell far more about the subjects than lengthy conversations and concert footage.
 &quot;It's not so interesting to watch live performances on the screen,&quot; he says. &quot;It's a living thing that can't be conveyed in a film, no matter how hard you try. It's not interesting to me personally to watch concerts on television.&quot;
 In April 1996, two weeks after Rozanov received a confirmation from the foundation, TaMtAm folded. But he still managed to convey some of the club's spirit by filming bands in different local venues and using some footage from Gakkel's archives.
 From the point of view of the music business, a video is simply a commercial for a song to make people buy the CD. Rozanov, whose favorite works include videos for alternative bands such as Pyat Uglov and Spitfire, agrees with this view.
 &quot;I used to think that there should be a different approach, to make an art of the video, based on my own experience, my own vision, my own taste,&quot; he says. &quot;But now I understand that the main task of a video is to present a song or an act in an interesting way, to make it memorable so that people will run out and buy the band's tapes or CDs.&quot;
 Rozanov's videos are mostly shown on the local Channel 6 and Channel 22, although his video of S.P.O.R.T.'s &quot;Progulka&quot; spent a brief period on MTV Russia. He has made a few attempts to make a pop video, but with no success.
 &quot;I understand that I simply can't do it,&quot; he says. &quot;I have a different job. I can't separate the video from the music and my personal taste. I can't take long-legged girls and make them dance so it looks beautiful. I don't find this beautiful at all.&quot;
 
 <i>Babslei's video and debut album will be released next month. You can see them live at Moloko this Sunday. See listings for details. </i>

TITLE: a brief history of russian reforms
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Reforms in Russia are often wildly varied in their conception and execution. They have not always enjoyed sufficient popularity to enable them to survive long enough to produce the desired effect. And some reforms never got beyond mere words.
 An exhibition that opened at the Museum of the Political History of Russia on Wednesday traces the history of reforms in Russia, from the first attempts at liberal reforms by Tsar Alexander I in the first half of the 19th century, up to World War I.
 As Alexander Kalmykov, head of the exhibition department of the museum, puts it, the country has often been perceived in the light of 19th-century poet Fyodor Tyutchev's famous lines that Russia cannot be understood with one's mind, but can only be believed in.
 Kalmykov hopes the exhibition will help change this attitude. In his opinion, reforms, rather than revolutions, may give a better understanding of what sort of country Russia is.
 This exhibition, which occupies two of the museum's halls, is part of a larger project that aims to reflect the history of Russian reforms up to the present day. It is dedicated to the 140th anniversary of the 1861 reforms, when serfdom was abolished under Alexander II. These reforms provided an impetus for positive changes in other spheres, and were eventually followed by military, legal, agrarian and political reforms.
 The exhibition also marks another anniversary. On Aug. 14, 1991, Nikolai Gubenko, then-Russian minister of culture, signed a decree that transformed the Museum of the Great October Socialist Revolution into the Museum of the Political History of Russia. 
 &quot;It was the most appropriate time to change our name, since by then all the appropriate research had been done,&quot; recalls Yevgeny Artyomov, the director of the museum. &quot;We became the first Russian museum of its kind, and remain the only collection that thoroughly documents contemporary Russian political history.&quot;
 The display features a selection of portraits and busts of Russia's most prominent reformers and politicians, including Mikhail Speransky, liberal reformer and initiator of the creation of the State Council in 1810, Tsar Alexander II and Pyotr Stolypin, Russian prime minister and author of several agrarian reforms from 1907 to 1911. 
 Legal-reform memorabilia includes documents relating to the first jury trials, while several guns used by the Russian Army in the 19th century, and considered to be among the best in the world at that time, illustrate the success of military reforms.
 The organizers of the project believe that the exhibition will encourage both ordinary people and politicians to study the valuable lessons of previous reforms.
 &quot;People in the Kremlin could apply many of the strategies used by Speransky or Stolypin,&quot; Kalmykov said. &quot;There are so many things that link us with the past. For instance, Russia is now returning to jury trials and justices of the peace, which were first introduced under Alexander II.&quot;
 &quot;Kremlin officials are now turning to Spe ransky's writings to develop a concept of parliamentary reforms,&quot; said Andrei Gusev, a guide at the museum. &quot;Our leaders should remember that people judge politicians by their attitudes toward reforms, both past and present.&quot;
 If nothing else, the exhibition is a timely reminder of an old formula that is present in many historical textbooks, but that is often forgotten: A successful reform requires an environment in which reformist ideas can flourish, a leader who is capable of pushing the reforms forward and a society that is ready to accept them.
 <i>The exhibition joins the permanent display at the Museum of Political History. See listings for more details. </i>

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: When The Beatles sang &quot;Back in the U.S.S.R.&quot; in 1968, they could hardly have imagined the effect it would have in the Soviet Union. The parody of the Beach Boys' &quot;Back in the U.S.A.&quot; was seen as further proof of the fact that The Beatles had in fact visited the Soviet Union. The most popular myth was that they came on tour, only to find their concerts had been banned. The irreverent U.K. foursome did play a show, it was said, right in the Moscow airport. Some people were there and saw them with their own eyes.
 What NTV reported Monday fits in pretty well with early Russian hippy mythology. <strong>Paul McCartney </strong>was in St. Petersburg last weekend, the channel announced, quoting the Daily Telegraph. He was not alone, but was among &quot;200 guests from the worlds of entertainment and business&quot; who were invited by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, for a three-day party in the city with a lot of exotic entertainment. A little research showed that the newspaper confused the weekends - the celebrities will arrive <i>this </i>weekend. Reports say McCartney did get an invitation. Soon we'll see if he accepted it.
 One more Beatles-related ghost this week was <strong>George Martin, </strong>the Beatles' producer, who was to arrive in St. Petersburg for the &quot;Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Plays The Beatles&quot; show on Wednesday, according to the Ice Palace, the concert's local venue and promoter.
 Martin's presence would have added credibility to the concert by the classical-music renegades, but he also failed to materialize.
 &quot;It's old information,&quot; said an Ice Palace spokesperson on Tuesday. &quot;When we learned that he was not coming, we just stopped distributing the news.&quot; But they failed to send a correction, and the local press kept raving about the &quot;legendary Beatles' producer&quot; visiting the city.
 No less sensational, but more founded in fact, is the news that <strong>The Residents </strong>will play a concert at Moscow's 16 Tons on Sept. 8. 
 The iconoclastic San Francisco-based band enjoys a cult following in Russia, with half a dozen of their albums pirated here.
 Little is known about the members - we don't even know their names. What is more or less definite is that there are four of them. In accordance with their &quot;Theory of Obscurity,&quot; they appear in public only in disguise.
 Currently the Residents are on the European leg of the Icky Flix Tour promoting the band's first DVD.
 &quot;Icky Flix&quot; is a retrospective compilation of old, new and restored material. In concert, the Residents perform these songs with the video projected over the stage - the band has been rehearsing 10 to 12 hours daily to synchronize the live music with the video.
 See the band's exhaustive official Web site at www.residents.com for more details.
 Tickets costing 500 rubles will go on sale four days before the show.
 Local highlights this weekend include <strong>Auktsyon, </strong>which is supposed to be playing some new material for the first time in seven years at Poligon Saturday, and the all-girl folk-punk band <strong>Babslei, </strong>which will release its debut album in September, at Moloko on Sunday.
 
 <i>- by Sergey Chernov </i>

TITLE: the riddle of kama sutra
AUTHOR: by Simon Patterson

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The 6th and 7th linii of Vasilievsky Island have seen a lot of changes over the past year. What used to be a haven for the homeless to gather over a bottle of portwein, and try to sell their remaining possessions to buy another is now a swish pedestrian zone - or will be, that is, when the buildings have been refurbished. For the moment, virtually every facade is covered with scaffolding, and most of the still-functioning shops and cafes must be doing atrocious business.
 One such victim is the Kama Sutra Cafe on the 6th Liniya, concealed under a mass of railings and showing every sign of being closed. This is a shame, as it's worth a visit. The decor is certainly worth a look, with Indian love art hanging on the wall, a sitar - albeit stringless - some Indian drums, and a statue of an Indian love god to which one can leave money.
 The food is also interesting, though most certainly not Indian - rather more like someone's ill-advised attempt to recreate Indian food without having any of the necessary spices at hand.
 For starters, we ordered the tomatoes stuffed with garlic sauce (70 rubles) and the mushrooms with cheese (70 rubles) - neither of these being particularly Indian, of course, but both tasty enough. My tomato soup with sour cream and croutons (70 rubles) was also fine, though what national cuisine it was supposed to represent was unclear. To wash this down, two of us ordered Baltika beer (30 rubles for a half liter), while one opted for green tea (20 rubles). Neither of these choices was any less unsuitable than the other.
 It was puzzling that the waitress tended to bring us our dishes one at a time, with considerable gaps between them, and we wondered if she wasn't also cooking them for us. This may have been just as well, as our table was too small to fit more than two dishes on it.
 Our mains were even stranger, with two of us choosing the &quot;Nirvana Steak&quot; (130 rubles), which was actually chicken served with vegetables. Unfortunately, if one of the chicken fillets was tender and juicy, the other one was tough and chewy. I did slightly better with my &quot;Murga Curry&quot; (160 rubles), which did not live up to its name, but was a spicy chicken stew that tasted like it had originated from somewhere in the Caucasus. The rice (19 rubles) that accompanied it was particularly well done, in this case worthy of an Indian restaurant, with the right spicy touch.
 While we couldn't complain that we hadn't had a decent meal, we all felt it was one of the stranger dining experiences we could remember having. What exactly the management is trying to accomplish is difficult to say. In the meantime, fans of Indian cuisine should stick to the city's only two Indian restaurants that are worthy of the name: Tandoor and Swagat. But for the curious, Kama Sutra is also worth a visit, and certainly is much easier on the wallet.
 <i> Kama Sutra, 25 6th Liniya, Vasilievsky Island, 323-3881. Open seven days a week, 12 p.m. to 12 a.m. Dinner for three with beer and tea, 1,120 rubles ($38). No credit cards. </i>

TITLE: dispatches from the chechen front
AUTHOR: by Carlotta Gall

PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: It seems incredible that seven years after Russia first intervened in Chechnya to suppress its bid for independence, it is still waging a war there. It is no longer surprising that Russia's politicians and generals are so cynically careless about the suffering of the Chechen people and of their own soldiers, but it is hard to understand how the Russian public puts up with it.
 Even if Russia was so weary and beaten up that it embraced Vladimir Putin and his new war in the 2000 election, I cannot help thinking that the public outcry at the Kursk disaster last August was not just about the sailors drowned in that submarine, but about all the young lives lost in service to a cruel and indifferent state, the tens of thousands killed over a decade in Afghanistan, and now thousands more in the Caucasus.
 The fate of Chechnya is largely forgotten or ignored internationally, which is also shortsighted but not incredible. Few foreign reporters go there anymore because of the difficulties thrown in the way by the Russian authorities, and perhaps also because of their own reluctance or lack of interest.
 There have been two extraordinary exceptions to this during the second war of the decade in Chechnya, which began in September 1999: Anna Polit kov skaya, reporter for the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and Anne Nivat, Mos cow correspondent for the French daily, Liberation. Polit kov skaya's &quot;A Dirt y War: A Russian Reporter in Chech nya,&quot; and Nivat's &quot;Chienne de Guerre: A Woman Reporter Behind the Lines of the War in Chechnya,&quot; are books produced from their reports. Both have appeared in English translation. 
 Their accounts represent some of the finest journalism to come out of the seven years of tumult in Chechnya. Both concentrate on the fate of civilians and individual stories, and tell gripping, and often heartrending tales of people and combatants caught up in the war. Together they amount to a profoundly anti-war testimony, showing so clearly how mistaken the world and Moscow's leaders are to forget the war or ignore the brutality, which can only rebound on Russia and its leaders.
 In this sense, Politkovskaya's &quot;A Dirty War&quot; is by far the more important of the two books. A Russian journalist known for her reports on social issues, she began writing articles around the edges of the conflict in Chechnya, until she was drawn in to rail against the injustice and social trauma of every aspect of the war. The book is a collection of those articles, written for the Russian reader but with an intensity and informative power that will be appreciated by readers abroad.
 The publishers have added an introduction by Thomas de Waal that helps place the conflict in a larger historical and political context, and examines how the second Chechen war began only three years after the first ended with a peace deal. (Thomas de Waal and I co-wrote &quot;Chechnya: A Small Victorious War,&quot; published in 1997.)
 De Waal blames the rebel commander Shamil Basayev for his invasion of Dagestan in August 1999, and a murky mixture of Dagestani warlords and secret-service connections for the apartment bombings that killed hundreds of Russians and led directly to the Russian invasion. I would add the very aggressive hand of Vladimir Putin that Chechen officials said they had felt in the months before the outbreak of war, when he took over as head of the Federal Security Service. And I blame Russia for failing to work with the Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov in the interim years after the first war, and in fact persistently seeking to undermine him.
 Politkovskaya's book is a hugely important contribution because hers is one of the few voices in Russia to question the morality of President Putin's military campaign in Chechnya, which he insists on calling an &quot;anti-terrorist operation.&quot; She is troubled to witness the terrible wrongs done to Chechen civilians as well as to the Russians still living there. And she is caustic in her criticism of the authorities, whether small-time bureaucrats, brutish generals or the president himself.
 &quot;What earthly use to me is the Putin we see, prancing about on television and telling us he's going to 'wipe out' the bandits after they're cornered 'in the toilet'?&quot; she writes, repeating Putin's infamous phrase. &quot;I want a different Putin. Not the man who, in front of the television cameras, climbed into the cockpit of a bomber wearing a pilot's helmet that was obviously the wrong size, but someone who will go to the Staropromyslovsky District and visit the Grozny old-people's home,&quot; she says, writing during a long campaign with her newspaper to help the old people trapped under the bombardment of the city.
 Politkovskaya appears ahead of the curve in Russia. The majority of the population still supports Putin and his campaign against the Chechens, who have been successfully branded terrorists by politicians and the state media. But she warns that the brutality being meted out in Chechnya will rebound on Russian society, turning the Chechens more resolutely against Russia with every atrocity, creating brutal Russian soldiers who return home violent or crazed, and trampling civic and human rights for society at large.
 She is modest in her aims. &quot;My notes are written for the future. They are the testimony of the innocent victims of the new Chechen war, which is why I record all the detail I can,&quot; she writes.
 Yet her understanding of the war and its consequences leads her to some shocking conclusions and, when she feels like it, she weighs in with withering comment or that cynicism so peculiar to Russian journalism.
 &quot;Abandon all logic, ye who travel here. Shake off your Moscow stereotypes and conceptions,&quot; she writes. Far from the confident, purposeful army that the authorities depict, storming forward without losses, &quot;you see exhausted men with unbalanced minds. Then there's the flu, scabies, rotting feet, drunkenness and hashish.&quot; 
 Politkovskaya shows how morale among the Russian troops, which began at a high level nearly two years ago, is now dangerously low. She writes that the catchphrase among the troops is, &quot;I've no wish to die,&quot; and as soldiers run amok, she says, the dangers are increasing for the civilian population. She describes a mad general riddling a cow with bullets in a senseless act of cruelty, a scary encounter with two young OMON riot police who watch violent videos and talk only of dismembering their enemies, and the looting, killing sprees and corruption at checkpoints that were so common in the 1994-96 war.
 The authorities have to act differently, either focusing the war within clear limits or a local arena, or else halting it altogether, she concludes at the end of one report. &quot;The settling of accounts lies ahead,&quot; she warns in another. 
 Nivat's book, &quot;Chienne de Guerre,&quot; is a lighter read, almost a travelogue through wartime Chechnya. It bears the most appalling title - literally translated, it means &quot;War Bitch&quot; - apparently a play on the name of a feminist group in France called &quot;Chienne de Garde,&quot; and an attempt to make something sexy out of the danger of being a war correspondent. The jacket cover bears not one but two photos of her, but none of the Chechens she is writing about. Instead of giving background to the war, the preface is all about Nivat.
 But the window dressing is misleading, because most of the writing is in the best tradition of war reporting. Her descriptive writing is her strength; she displays a light touch, using short, succinct phrases, and avoids drawing conclusions to what she is witnessing. She travels almost purely on the Chechen side, staying in villages with families and friends, sheltering from Russian bombardments with them, interviewing ordinary people, as well as several of the rebel leaders and commanders, and twice meeting the Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, who is continuing to fight from a base somewhere in the woods.
 By necessity Nivat was mostly traveling incognito, outside the official accredited trips. As a result, she has little material from the Russian side, and what she does have is flat.
 But her book brings the Chechen experience of the war alive and close up as no other account has. She writes at the end that Russia has won the propaganda war, if not the military campaign, but her reports and this book will deny them that victory. For it above all shows the Chechen civilians as they always have been: generous, hospitable, brave in the face of impossible odds, educated and law-abiding, nothing like the terrorists so commonly depicted by Russian officials.
 Her eyewitness account of the disastrous rebel retreat from Grozny in February 2000, and the terrifying bombing unleashed on the village of Alkhan Kala afterwards, will surely be remembered as one of the great pieces of reporting from the war, equaled only by the remarkable photographs taken that day by Thomas Dworzak, unfortunately not reproduced in the book.
 She ends with a simple but important conclusion: that the war will not cease until first Russia, and then the rest of the international community, work towards that end.
 &quot;One way or another, the Russians will be forced to come to the negotiating table,&quot; she quotes Maskhadov as saying in the summer of 2000. He said he thought Putin had realized the generals who promised him a quick victory were good-for-nothings, but that he could not yet acknowledge that officially. &quot;And the Russians will leave in the end,&quot; the Chechen president said.
 
 <i>&quot;A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya,&quot; by Anna Politkovskaya. 336 pages. The Harvill Press, $17.00 
 &quot;Chienne de Guerre: A Woman Reporter behind the Lines of the War in Chechnya,&quot; by Anne Nivat. 273 pages. Public Affairs, $25.00 
 Carlotta Gall is a reporter with the New York Times in the Balkans and covered the first war in Chechnya for The Moscow Times. Her book, &quot;Chechnya: A Small Victorious War,&quot; co-written with Thomas de Waal, was published by Macmillan in London in 1997. She has been denied a visa by the Russian authorities since October 1999. </i>

TITLE: dinosaurs just keep getting smarter
AUTHOR: by Kenneth Turan

PUBLISHER: The Los Angeles Times
TEXT: The dinosaurs are getting smarter. The people are getting stupider. A lot stupider. But really, what did you expect? This is &quot;Jurassic Park III,&quot; not Henry James, and after two previous films detailing the unstoppable savagery of what grumpy paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant calls &quot;genetically engineered theme-park monsters,&quot; who with even a trace of sense would wander anywhere in their vicinity?
 As if getting themselves onto the restricted Isla Sorna off Costa Rica wasn't doltish enough, these new Jurassic Parkers yell when they should be quiet and move when they should be still. They wander into lairs, steal eggs and act so obtusely that when one of them says, &quot;You have to believe me, this was a stupid decision,&quot; no one will care to object.
 Thank heavens for the dinosaurs, like the massive Tyrannosaurus rex and our old friends the raptors, which Dr. Grant has discovered are not only &quot;smarter than we thought,&quot; but also &quot;socially sophisticated.&quot; We don't exactly see them air-kissing and eating peas with a knife, but that doesn't mean they couldn't if they had to.
 New beasts even fiercer than these make their film debut as well. There's the predatory spinosaurus, so enormous and powerful that it uses an airplane fuselage as a hacky sack. And the flying pteranodon, strong enough to carry a human in its claws and no less impressive for being, well, imaginary. The sheer physical presence of these creatures is much more believable and convincing than what can be generously characterized as the film's plot.
 As written by well-regarded newcomer Peter Buchman and the sharp &quot;Election&quot; team of Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, &quot;Jurassic III&quot; has more amusing lines than you might be expecting. But it can't escape its obvious Buck-Rogers-in-the-21st-century story line, can't stop being the kind of film that, when someone says &quot;no force on heaven or Earth will get me on that island,&quot; you know he'll be on the ground inside of 10 minutes.
 That someone is our Dr. Grant, back on screen after an eight-year hiatus and played by veteran Sam Neill with an appealing irritated geniality. With his beautiful colleague Ellie (a cameo for Laura Dern) now a happily married woman, he makes do with the handsome Billy (Alessandro Nivola) for his assistant.
 It's Billy, in fact, who pushes for the doctor to meet with Paul Kirby of Kirby Enterprises (William H. Macy) and his wife, Amanda (T&eacute;a Leoni). They say they're adventure-travel junkies who want to fly over Isla Sorna for their anniversary. Dr. Grant may know a lot about bones, but a great judge of people he's not, and the flight is on.
 Once the group lands on the island (did you really think it wouldn't?), all kinds of paper-thin shenanigans transpire. Because encounters with the more predatory dinosaurs are distinctly one-sided - they chase, humans flee like it was a sequel to &quot;Run Lola Run&quot;- it's a tribute to the action skills of director Joe Johnston (&quot;Jumanji&quot; is the relevant credit) that this film is as brisk and involving as it is.
 And don't forget those dinosaurs (as if). Once again, we're the beneficiaries of state-of-the-art special effects of the computer-generated and animatronic variety, combined with physical stunts supervised by Michael Lantieri.
 Jim Mitchell oversaw the ILM visual-effects team, which did an exceptional job with herds of moving beasts, as well as with the immense and lordly brachiosaurus. And gifted veteran Stan Winston built remarkable models, such as the 13-meter, 12-ton spinosaurus replica.
 Some of the film's creatures, such as the flying pteranodons, are noticeably chilling, while the raptors, fierce as they can be, have a tendency occasionally to look like demented chickens on steroids. But it matters not. Humans may be stupid and fragile, but dinosaurs, dinosaurs are forever.
 
 <i>&quot;Jurassic Park III&quot; opens at the Leningrad cinema on Aug. 24. See listings for details. </i>

TITLE: NATO Opts for Small Force in Macedonia
AUTHOR: By Jeffrey Ulbrich

PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BRUSSELS, Belgium - NATO gave the go-ahead Wednesday for 400 troops, the vanguard of a mission to disarm rebels, to deploy in Macedonia. But deploying a full 3,500-member NATO force will depend on whether a cease-fire takes hold in the troubled Balkan country.
 The British servicemen and women from the 16th Air Assault Brigade will set out for Macedonia on Friday, most of them headquarters, communications and other support personnel, officials said.
 The 19 NATO members approved the smaller force in an urgent meeting that was called despite a Roman Catholic holiday. The 400-member contingent represents an attempt to find middle ground - avoiding the risk of sending in the entire force while fighting persists, and at the same time moving quickly to support the fragile peace deal signed Monday.
 NATO says that until there is a durable cease-fire, it won't send all 3,500 troops, including Americans, into Macedonia - where they will be in what are now front-line areas, collecting weapons from ethnic Albanian rebels.
 The North Atlantic Council, NATO's ruling body, plans to meet again at the end of this week or early next week to decide on the entire deployment of the mission, code-named Essential Harvest.
 The troops can be sent &quot;once the council is satisfied the conditions for the deployment as stated before are completely fulfilled,&quot; NATO spokesperson Yves Brodeur said.
 Fighting has broken out each night in parts of northern Macedonia since the peace deal was signed by political leaders. The Macedonian Defense Ministry said Wednesday there was fighting overnight between the insurgents and government forces in the second-largest city, Tetovo, and in surrounding villages.
 The rebels also attacked government forces in the Kumanovo area, north of Skopje, and the soldiers returned fire. There was no word on casualties.
 Still, Brodeur said: &quot;It's very positive since the signature of the agreement. Lots of things have happened and we are encouraged by what has happened so far.&quot;
 The Macedonian government on Wednesday approved the deployment of NATO troops. President Boris Trajkovski also asked parliament to begin the process of amending the constitution to give the ethnic Albanian minority greater rights - a key part of the peace plan.
 The rebels have agreed to turn in their weapons, another requirement NATO set for the deployment. But the alliance is still trying to get the rebels and the government to agree on how many weapons will be destroyed.
 The rebels said they would surrender around 2,000 weapons. But Marjan Djurovski, a Defense Ministry spokes person, said a &quot;fair and moderate estimate&quot; would be that the rebels have at least 8,000 weapons.
 Trajkovski also issued a statement offering amnesty to rebels who voluntarily surrender and who did not commit war crimes, the second major condition of the accord.
 The amnesty and the constitutional reforms are important incentives for the rebels, who did not sign onto the peace deal. They launched their insurgency in February, saying they sought greater rights for ethnic Albanians, who make up about a third of Macedonia's 2 million people.
 While NATO wants to ensure calm on the ground before it deploys in force, it also is wary of waiting too long and having the deal fall apart.
 &quot;Events are unfolding quickly as NATO prepares to fulfill its promise to assist the Macedonian people by collecting arms and ammunition from the ethnic Albanian rebels,&quot; said Major General Gunnar Lange of Denmark, a senior NATO representative in the Macedonian capital, Skopje.
 NATO officials insist that this is a very narrowly defined mission, lasting only 30 days, and will involve collecting weapons being turned in voluntarily.
 &quot;Our soldiers will not come here to enforce peace,&quot; said Lange.
 Military officials say that if the cease-fire collapses, NATO forces will withdraw.
 In Washington, State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said a few 100 Americans would take part in the larger contingent. He said they will be mostly support units - communications and medical support, among them - and will be drawn largely from forces already in the area.
 The complete deployment of troops from Britain, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Turkey and the United States, would take about two weeks, though the first weapons collection could begin earlier.
 The mission will be led by Brigadier Barney White-Spunner, 44, commander of the 16th Air Assault Brigade. White-Spunner previously served with British forces in Bosnia.

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: No More Castes?
 

KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) - The Nepalese government said Thursday it would outlaw discrimination against lower-caste Hindus and pledged to pass a law ending the centuries-old system that deems certain people "untouchable."
 "Effective from this day, the practice of untouchability and any discrimination based on it will be considered a crime punishable by a severe sentence," Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba told Parliament.
 
 
Genocide Plea
 

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - A Bosnian Serb colonel pleaded innocent at the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal Thursday to charges of genocide for the killing of Muslims in the former UN enclave of Srebrenica in 1995.
 Colonel Vidoje Blagojevic, a former commander in the eastern Bosnian town of Bratunac, was charged with eight counts of war crimes in the July 1995 genocide of Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.
 Blagojevic, 51, was still active in the Bosnian Serb Army when he was arrested by British NATO forces a week ago. At his arraignment, he pleaded innocent to each count of genocide, complicity to commit genocide, extermination, murder, persecution, deportation and inhumane acts.
 
 
Floods Kill 27
 

MANILA, Philippines (AP) - Torrential rains caused flooding in eight central and southern Philippine provinces early this week, killing at least 27 people and leaving 10 others missing, officials said Thursday. Thousands of people have fled their homes.
 The weeklong downpour abated Monday, allowing rescuers to deliver food and medicine and inspect areas affected by the flooding.
 The National Disaster Coordinating Council said the floods caused $8.4 million in damage to crops and property.
 
 
Execution Protest
 

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Police used tear gas to disperse spectators who threw stones at them in protest of a public execution, a newspaper reported Thursday. The protest Wednesday in southeast Tehran began after the family of the victim refused to accept a request from relatives and friends of Vali Hezarasb to spare his life, the daily Nowruz reported.
 "A number of friends and relatives of the convict started throwing stones at police after their request was rejected [by the family of the victim]."
 According to Iran's Islamic laws, a victim's family has the right to pardon a murderer or call for his execution. Police used tear gas to bring the tense situation under control, the newspaper reported.
 
 
Diplomats Rebuffed
 

KABUL, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Afghanistan's ruling Taliban said on Thursday three Western diplomats seeking to visit eight detained foreign aid workers accused of promoting Christianity had completed their mission and should continue monitoring the case from Islamabad.
 "They discussed their viewpoints with us [for visiting the detainees] and their first-phase mission had nothing more than this," Abdur Rahman Hotak, head of the Taliban's consulate department, told a news conference. 
 The diplomats, who have been denied consular access to the detainees, said earlier the Taliban had suggested they return to Islamabad in neighboring Pakistan, and that they were unlikely to be granted visa extensions. 



TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Sound Off
 

NASHVILLE, Tennessee (AP) - A minor-league baseball team fired its sound-effects operator when he ignored warnings and played "Kung Fu Fighting" to try to upset a South Korean batter for a visiting club.
 The Triple-A Nashville Sounds fired Brian Kirsch on Monday after Iowa Cubs general manager Sam Bernabe called the front office and complained.
 Kirsch previously had played David Bowie's "China Girl" before another of Hee Seop Choi's at-bats earlier in the same weekend series.
 Kirsh had been warned by fellow employees about going too far, said Chris Snyder, the Sounds' director of operations.
 "He should've known better," Snyder said Wednesday. "As soon as it was brought to my attention, he was fired. The Nashville Sounds do not condone in any way, shape or fashion anything that goes against someone's beliefs, ethnicity or religion."
 
 
Pats Suspend Glenn
 

BOSTON (Reuters) - Wide receiver Terry Glenn, already suspended by the NFL for four games for substance abuse, was shelved for the entire 2001 season by the New England Patriots Wednesday for his training-camp holdout.
 "We have informed the league office that we put Terry Glenn on the reserve/left-squad list, which will prevent him from playing football this season," Patriots coach Bill Belichick said at a news conference.
 "This action is exclusively about a player with a signed NFL contract, who has violated that contract by an extended and unexcused absence from the team."
 The Patriots will not pay Glenn, who also faces possible assault-and-battery charges brought and then withdrawn by the mother of his son.
 Glenn, 27, signed a six-year, $50 million contract extension last year, including an $11.5 million signing bonus.
 
 
Little League First
 

WILLIAMSPORT, Pennsylvania (AP) - Khovrino of Moscow defeated Tbilisi YMCA of Georgia 12-2 last Friday to become the first team from the former Soviet Union ever to qualify to play in the Little League World Series. 
 Nikolai Lobanov, who pitched five innings, worked a total of 16 innings at the tournament in Kotna, Poland, allowing only four runs. 
 Khovrino is the first team made up of native Europeans to qualify for the Little League World Series, played every year in Williamsport. 
 Previous European qualifiers have been made up mostly of children of American military, diplomats or business personnel.