The Soviet Union: The Blank Spots

By Maria Lipman

In 1992, barely a year after the collapse of the USSR, three Russian lawyers were granted unprecedented access to the holy of holies -- the minutes of the Politburo, the Soviet Communist Party's highest body. President Boris Yeltsin was anxious to secure his political triumph by seeking to outlaw the Communist Party, and his lawyers were entrusted with using the historical records to prepare his case before the newly formed Constitutional Court.

Secluded in a former Soviet government compound, the legal team went through boxes and boxes of secret documents. It was an incredible trove, inspiring the lawyers to dramatize Politburo sessions and then collapse with laughter at the absurdity of the discourse of late totalitarianism. (The earlier, Stalin-era documents were more likely to make them shudder in shock and pain.)

They had a rich variety of amusements to choose from: One evening I had a chance to join them in their seclusion as they re-enacted the 1985 Politburo session in which the communist leadership discussed what to do with Nobel-winning dissident Andrei Sakharov, at that time kept in internal exile in the city of Gorky. The astonishing archive also included descriptions of plans to cover up the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, private letters sent by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and intercepted by the KGB, and reams of minutiae such as the decision to place a KGB officer in the role of the Canadian correspondent for the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Massive disclosures filling in the "blank spots" of history, as they were commonly referred to at the time, had already begun emerging in the preceding years of glasnost, when the Soviet media, the mouthpieces of Soviet propaganda, were suddenly transformed into nationwide reviews on the country's history. At that time people's appetite for the exposure of the dark communist past seemed insatiable. But most of those secrets were not entirely news: Some had come out during the Khrushchev thaw in the 1950s and early 1960s, others through samizdat or Western media. The publication of truly secret documents began after the 1991 collapse of communism, when state control over the archives was eased and academic researchers, amateur historians, inquisitive journalists, and lawyers like those on Yeltsin's team rushed to see the newly available trove of data.

And yet these secrets, however fascinating, ultimately had a limited impact among the people they most directly concerned: Russians. In the hardship and insecurity that followed communism's collapse, disillusionment set in, and the interest in Soviet secret histories quickly faded away. More recently, and especially over the last decade of Vladimir Putin's rule, a majority of Russians have not wanted to be reminded of communist crimes; they often resent attempts to reinvigorate critical debate of the Soviet past. This may explain why top-level decision-making in today's Russia is no more transparent than it was in its communist predecessor. New dark secrets build up fast.

Below are ten out of a host of disclosures of the past decades that may have brought back pieces of history yet failed to add up to a nationally shared historical narrative.

1. In 1992, Yeltsin's government released secret documents from the special archive of the Communist Party providing definitive evidence that the 1940 Katyn massacre, in which 22,000 Polish nationals were killed, was ordered by Stalin. (The fact had been denied by all communist leaders, including Mikhail Gorbachev.) But almost two decades later a plurality of Russians still stuck with Stalin's version of history and blamed Hitler for Katyn. After the tragic crash of the Polish president's plane last year and the broadcast on Russian television of Katyn, a movie by Polish director Andrzej Wajda that told the correct story, the numbers shifted: In April 2010, 35 percent held Stalin responsible, and only 18 percent said it was Hitler's crime. A year later, however, the effect had somewhat worn off: While 34 percent blamed Stalin, 24 percent blamed Hitler.

2. Vast archival evidence accumulated over the post-communist years proves that Stalin was not just the mastermind behind the Soviet terror, but also directly responsible for the executions of innocent people. He routinely mocked justice by simply signing off on "shooting lists" put together by state security officials. The condemned would be executed within days or weeks. Today the Russian nation remains divided on Stalin: Thirty-eight percent consider him a "state criminal," but 44 percent do not.

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How'd We Do Covering the Revolution?

By David E. Hoffman

Yevgeny Bushmin seemed to embody all the promise of Russian democracy on a cold December day in 1995 as he campaigned for reelection to the lower house of parliament. When we met, Bushmin was 37 years old, had made it as a young businessman in the last years of the Soviet Union, had become the first chairman of the fledgling stock exchange in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, and now in a suit, black cloth coat, white scarf, and fur hat, was seeking a second term from District 122.

He had a reformist record in the Duma, but could see the tide was running the other way. In Nizhny, called Gorky in Soviet times and best known as the internal exile of Nobel-winning dissident Andrei Sakharov, the huge military-industrial complex stood idle, the workers uncertain about their future. People were hurting so badly the word "democracy" itself had come to be associated with hardship.

At 9:15 a.m., we arrived at the gate of a sprawling defense factory, which once made laser equipment but was now quiet and empty. This was only Russia's second post-Soviet parliamentary election, and the workers we met were sour. "I'm not allergic to democracy," Bushmin told them. "The only advice I have is let's give it a different name and keep doing it."

And indeed, a day spent watching Bushmin field complaints from angry, sullen voters left me still optimistic that despite the hardships, democracy might take root in Russia after seven decades of Soviet rule. I wrote in the Washington Post at the time that Bushmin's race highlighted the "fascinating, wobbly, yet striving character of Russia's young democracy."

A decade and a half later, however, Russian democracy is flat on its back. When parliamentary elections are held this December, there will be no individual districts like the one where Bushmin campaigned. They were abolished in favor of a party-list system that effectively makes it impossible for independents to win. Governors, once elected, are for all practical purposes now appointed by the Kremlin. While in 1995 there was a vibrant if uneven free press in Russia, today the main broadcast channels -- through which 90 percent of people get their news -- are all firmly under the Kremlin's thumb. Over the last decade, Vladimir Putin, as president and then prime minister, has established a monopoly on politics and the policy it drives.

It was not the outcome I expected while covering Russia's transition as the Post bureau chief in the 1990s. Russia zigzagged from oligarchic capitalism to crony capitalism, and in politics from proto-democracy to soft authoritarianism. All of us who witnessed the events of those years -- journalists, scholars, government officials, businessmen, and others -- ought to ask ourselves: Why did Russia turn out this way? What did we get right, and what did we get wrong?

For the most part, Russia had to choose its own direction, and the West's ability to change that path was always somewhat limited. No amount of aid, loans, or well-intentioned advice was going to endow Russia with a broad consensus about its identity, direction, or place in the world, all of which are still in play. But to the extent that outsiders could help, did the West try too hard to remake Russia in its own image? Were the basic choices -- democracy and free markets -- somehow wrong or alien for Russia? Were there alternative paths? These questions have reverberated for years.

The answers could be important for a new generation of democracy activists, particularly those in the Arab world. The protesters who gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square in early 2011 will undoubtedly be facing many of the same frustrations that unfolded in Russia 20 years earlier. There are lessons to be taken from the collapse of Soviet communism. History may not repeat itself, but it can certainly be reusable. It should be examined with a generous dose of humility.

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A Kremlin Built for Two - An FP Photo Essay

BY JOSHUA E. KEATING

Seeing double: In a political experiment unique in Russian and world history, Russia has been ruled for the last three years by two men: technocratic lawyer turned businessman turned President Dmitry Medvedev, and KGB veteran turned president turned astonishingly powerful Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Here's a look at how their partnership developed and where it may be heading.

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The Long, Lame Afterlife of Mikhail Gorbachev

By Anne Applebaum

See a slideshow about Gorby's life in the limelight

In the most notable of the many photographs snapped at the gala held to mark his 80th birthday, Mikhail Gorbachev seems shorter and rounder than he did in his prime, back when he was one of the most important people in the world. He is inscrutable, only half-smiling; he also looks disheveled, and perhaps unsure of himself. Those impressions may of course be exaggerated by the fact that in this particular picture, the onetime general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has his arm around Sharon Stone. Stone is wearing a slinky, champagne-colored dress and bright red lipstick. She is grinning widely. In heels, she is a good 6 inches taller than Gorbachev, which certainly takes away from his aura of authority.
But then, it has been a very long time since Gorbachev actually had an aura of authority. In fact, everything about his garish birthday party screamed "B-list celebrity." Stone hasn't starred in a hit movie for a good while; neither has Kevin Spacey, who co-hosted the event alongside her. Also in attendance were Goldie Hawn, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ted Turner, Shirley Bassey, and, I'm sorry to say, Lech Walesa. The gala was ostensibly a fundraiser for the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation, which helps raise money for the care of children with cancer. But mostly the evening served to underline the strangeness of Gorbachev's fate. Here was the man who had launched glasnost and perestroika, who had presided over the dismantling of the Soviet empire and then the Soviet Union itself, one of the founding statesmen of modern Russia -- and yet his birthday gala was held in the Royal Albert Hall, in London, among people who hardly knew him.

This was not an accident: Twenty years after the dissolution of the USSR, Russia is ambivalent, at best, about Gorbachev. Far from being hailed as a hero, he is mostly remembered as a disastrous leader, if he is remembered at all. Yes, he launched a new era of openness with previously unthinkable freedoms in the 1980s, but in Russia he is also held responsible for the economic collapse of the 1990s. Most Russians don't thank him for ending the Soviet empire either. On the contrary, the current Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, has described the dismantling of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century. An opinion poll released in March, at the time of his birthday, showed that some 20 percent of Russians feel actively hostile toward Gorbachev, 47 percent of Russians "don't care about him at all," and only 5 percent admire him. And this was an improvement: Another poll, in 2005, found active hostility toward him in 45 percent of Russians. The word "perestroika" in Russia today has almost purely negative connotations.
In London and Washington, Gorbachev's reputation is of course more positive. He is regarded with affection -- he was invited to Ronald Reagan's funeral and to George H.W. Bush's own 80th birthday party -- and frequently hailed as a "symbol" of peace and the Cold War's welcome end. But he tends to be paid rather bland and even inappropriate compliments. At his birthday party, Paul Anka sang a duet with a Soviet-era rock musician. The chorus: "One day we'll recall, he was changing the world for us all." Stone then lauded him with a rhetorical question: "Where would Russia be if it weren't reaping the benefits of a free democracy?" I wish I'd been there to see the embarrassment on the faces of the spectators at the Royal Albert Hall -- for Russia has not actually reaped the benefits of free democracy, as every Russian in the room knew perfectly well. Even Gorbachev himself recently described Russian democracy as a sham: "We have institutions, but they don't work. We have laws, but they must be enforced."

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Soviet Union Meltdown

By Gennady Burbulis with Michele A. Berdy

"That scum!" Boris Yeltsin fumed. "It's a coup. We can't let them get away with it."
It was the morning of Aug. 19, 1991, and the Russian president was standing at the door of his dacha in Arkhangelskoe, a compound of small country houses outside Moscow where the top Russian government officials lived. I had raced over from my own house nearby, after a friend called from Moscow, frantic and nearly hysterical, insisting that I turn on the radio. There had been a coup; Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had been removed from power.
Five minutes later I was at Yeltsin's dacha, an unassuming two-story yellow brick building, where a small group of his closest associates soon gathered. In addition to me (at the time, his secretary of state), there was Ivan Silayev, the head of the Russian cabinet; Ruslan Khasbulatov, the acting chairman of the Supreme Soviet; Mikhail Poltoranin, the minister of press and mass information; Sergei Shakhrai, the state councilor; and Viktor Yaroshenko, the minister of foreign economic relations. Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of Leningrad, and Yuri Luzhkov, the deputy mayor of Moscow, arrived not long after. Everyone crowded into Yeltsin's small living room.

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Three Days in Foros
In August 1991, Soviet hardlines held Mikhail Gorbachev captive in a last-ditch effort to save the Soviet empire. His foreign policy advisor tells the story.

For months we had half-expected something like this. By the summer of 1991, the Soviet Union was falling apart at the seams. The economy was imploding, the deficit was ballooning, hard currency and gold reserves had been decimated, and Gorbachev's stopgap reforms had only exacerbated the crisis. The notion of a "Soviet people," unified under the banner of socialism, was collapsing along with it. Legislatures in the republics, which had already demanded greater freedoms within the USSR, began calling for independence. By the spring of 1991, five republics -- Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, and Lithuania -- had declared it officially. In Russia, democratic forces wanted an end to Soviet totalitarian rule. Our aim was not to allow the chaotic dissolution of the USSR, but to transform it into a confederation that would afford each republic considerable self-determination under its aegis.

We had been moving in this direction for several years. Yeltsin and the other democratic candidates had been elected to the Russian parliament in 1990 with the goal of securing more legally protected rights and freedoms, as well as a market economy, and Yeltsin had been elected president of Russia in June 1991 with almost 60 percent of the vote. But while we were secure in our popular mandate, we were utterly powerless to deal with the greatest threat to Russia: economic collapse. More than 93 percent of the economy, by our estimation, was controlled by the Soviet government. Yeltsin and those of us in his circle of closest associates soon came to believe that unless we were to content ourselves with being nothing more than a ceremonial body, we had to change the legal and economic bases of the union itself.
Gorbachev and a small group of Soviet reformers had accepted this, too. We began to work together on a new union treaty that would transform the Soviet Union into a confederation of sovereign states with a limited central government. Yeltsin planned to sign the controversial pact on Aug. 20.
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Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Is Wrong

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A Kremlin Built for Two
Putin and Medvedev Through the Years

BY LEON ARON | 

Every revolution is a surprise. Still, the latest Russian Revolution must be counted among the greatest of surprises. In the years leading up to 1991, virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it one-party dictatorship, the state-owned economy, and the Kremlin's control over its domestic and Eastern European empires. Neither, with one exception, did Soviet dissidents nor, judging by their memoirs, future revolutionaries themselves. When Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, none of his contemporaries anticipated a revolutionary crisis. Although there were disagreements over the size and depth of the Soviet system's problems, no one thought them to be life-threatening, at least not anytime soon.
Whence such strangely universal shortsightedness? The failure of Western experts to anticipate the Soviet Union's collapse may in part be attributed to a sort of historical revisionism -- call it anti-anti-communism -- that tended to exaggerate the Soviet regime's stability and legitimacy. Yet others who could hardly be considered soft on communism were just as puzzled by its demise. One of the architects of the U.S. strategy in the Cold War, George Kennan, wrote that, in reviewing the entire "history of international affairs in the modern era," he found it "hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance … of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union." Richard Pipes, perhaps the leading American historian of Russia as well as an advisor to U.S. President Ronald Reagan, called the revolution "unexpected." A collection of essays about the Soviet Union's demise in a special 1993 issue of the conservative National Interest magazine was titled "The Strange Death of Soviet Communism."
Were it easier to understand, this collective lapse in judgment could have been safely consigned to a mental file containing other oddities and caprices of the social sciences, and then forgotten. Yet even today, at a 20-year remove, the assumption that the Soviet Union would continue in its current state, or at most that it would eventually begin a long, drawn-out decline, seems just as rational a conclusion.

Indeed, the Soviet Union in 1985 possessed much of the same natural and human resources that it had 10 years before. Certainly, the standard of living was much lower than in most of Eastern Europe, let alone the West. Shortages, food rationing, long lines in stores, and acute poverty were endemic. But the Soviet Union had known far greater calamities and coped without sacrificing an iota of the state's grip on society and economy, much less surrendering it.
Nor did any key parameter of economic performance prior to 1985 point to a rapidly advancing disaster. From 1981 to 1985 the growth of the country's GDP, though slowing down compared with the 1960s and 1970s, averaged 1.9 percent a year. The same lackadaisical but hardly catastrophic pattern continued through 1989. Budget deficits, which since the French Revolution have been considered among the prominent portents of a coming revolutionary crisis, equaled less than 2 percent of GDP in 1985. Although growing rapidly, the gap remained under 9 percent through 1989 -- a size most economists would find quite manageable.
The sharp drop in oil prices, from $66 a barrel in 1980 to $20 a barrel in 1986 (in 2000 prices) certainly was a heavy blow to Soviet finances. Still, adjusted for inflation, oil was more expensive in the world markets in 1985 than in 1972, and only one-third lower than throughout the 1970s. And at the same time, Soviet incomes increased more than 2 percent in 1985, and inflation-adjusted wages continued to rise in the next five years through 1990 at an average of over 7 percent.
Yes, the stagnation was obvious and worrisome. But as Wesleyan University professor Peter Rutland has pointed out, "Chronic ailments, after all, are not necessarily fatal." Even the leading student of the revolution's economic causes, Anders Åslund, notes that from 1985 to 1987, the situation "was not at all dramatic."
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Appearance of Democracy: Cover for a More Aggressive Russia

New Zeal Blog

This excellent piece is written by Lauren Goodrich of Stratfor. Very few have such a good grasp on the way the Kremlin thinks and operates, and the growing threat it represents. This is one of those articles that you read and then email on to friends. 

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Russia has entered election season, with parliamentary elections in December and presidential elections in March 2012. Typically, this is not an issue of concern, as most Russian elections have been designed to usher a chosen candidate and political party into office since 2000. Interesting shifts are under way this election season, however. While on the surface they may resemble political squabbles and instability, they actually represent the next step in the Russian leadership’s consolidation of the state.

In the past decade, one person has consolidated and run Russia’s political system: former president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Putin’s ascension to the leadership of the Kremlin marked the start of the reconsolidation of the Russian state after the decade of chaos that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. Under Putin’s presidential predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s strategic economic assets were pillaged, the core strength of the country — the KGB, now known as the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the military — fell into decay, and the political system was in disarray. Though Russia was considered a democracy and a new friend to the West, this was only because Russia had no other option — it was a broken country.

Perceptions of Putin

Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister of Russia

Putin’s goal was to fix the country, which meant restoring state control (politically, socially and economically), strengthening the FSB and military and re-establishing Russia’s influence and international reputation — especially in the former Soviet sphere of influence. To do so, Putin had to carry Russia through a complex evolution that involved shifting the country from accommodating to aggressive at specific moments. This led to a shift in global perceptions of Putin, with many beginning to see the former KGB agent as a hard-nosed autocrat set upon rekindling hostilities and renewing militarization.

This perception of Putin is not quite correct. While an autocrat and KGB agent (we use the present tense, as Putin has said that no one is a former KGB or FSB agent), he hails from St. Petersburg, Russia’s most pro-Western city, and during his Soviet-era KGB service he was tasked with stealing Western technology. Putin fully understands the strength of the West and what Western expertise is needed to keep Russia relatively modern and strong. At the same time, his time with the KGB convinced him that Russia can never truly be integrated into the West and that it can be strong only with a consolidated government, economy and security service and a single, autocratic leader.

Full story...

Russia's Evolving Leadership

STRATFOR

 By Lauren Goodrich | July 5, 2011

Russia has entered election season, with parliamentary elections in December and presidential elections in March 2012. Typically, this is not an issue of concern, as most Russian elections have been designed to usher a chosen candidate and political party into office since 2000. Interesting shifts are under way this election season, however. While on the surface they may resemble political squabbles and instability, they actually represent the next step in the Russian leadership’s consolidation of the state.

In the past decade, one person has consolidated and run Russia’s political system: former president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Putin’s ascension to the leadership of the Kremlin marked the start of the reconsolidation of the Russian state after the decade of chaos that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. Under Putin’s presidential predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s strategic economic assets were pillaged, the core strength of the country — the KGB, now known as the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the military — fell into decay, and the political system was in disarray. Though Russia was considered a democracy and a new friend to the West, this was only because Russia had no other option — it was a broken country. Read more »

The COSMOS 954 Accident: Soviet nuclear satellite crashes in Canadian North

I've managed to amass quite a bit of info on the Russian Cosmos 954 satellite than crashed in the NWT in the late 70's, thanks to the wonders of the Internet. However, I'm always searching for more info, so if you know any information about this event, please write and share it with me.

Meanwhile, here is what I've put together: (info taken from various web sites and magazines)

Cosmos 954 was a Soviet Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite (RORSAT) which was powered by a nuclear reactor. Previous Soviet missions using such technology would split the reactor from the parent body of the spacecraft and boost the radioactive material into a higher orbit where the reactor would remain for 300-1000 years once the short lifetime of the satellite was over (which was well beyond the life of the radioactive material). Cosmos 954 had a special problem however - it went out of control and the technicians were unable to separate the reactor from the spacecraft's parent body.

The Russians sent out a warning that one of their satellites was going to crash and it was monitored on radar by NORAD. On January 24, 1978, Cosmos 954 deorbited and came crashing into the Great Slave Lake area of the Northwest Territories, disintegrated during reentry into a shower of radioactive debris which spread over some 124,000 square kilometers. A radioactive portion of the craft fell near a trapper's camp. A canoeist travelling through the north found this, looked at the unusual phenomenon and then left it alone. A massive search was begun to locate the debris that was made up of over 200 troops from both the Canadian Air Force and the US military and lasted until October. Around "key" areas of the crash, tight security was present and no civilians were permitted to view the scene(s). The canoeist and his radioactive find were both located and taken back to Yellowknife, where the canoeist was found to be in good health and the reactor pieces were impounded. Some of the debris was flown to Manitoba for testing.

After the clean-up, the Canadian Government sent a $15 million bill to the Soviets. The Soviets paid less than half of this amount and agreed not to take back the spacecraft. The Canadians were happy with the amount they received and were happier still that the Soviets had acknowledged the spacecraft's existence.
Of the thousands of radioactive fragments that reached the earth's surface, some were potentially lethal (i.e., the gamma ray radiation, near contact, was as high as 500 R/h). However, less than 1% of radioactive material was recovered. Think about that - 99% of the radioactive parts of this satellite are now floating around in Great Slave Lake. Keep an eye out for three-eyed trout next time you're out fishing...
As an interesting aside, psychic Earl Curley claims to have been the one who located the crashed satellite (while working in conjunction with DND). 

Read more...

More  information from the Canadian Goverment  Here...

Georgia Sentences Russian Officer, 14 Others Over Terrorism

(Civil.Ge) — The Tbilisi City Court found fifteen people guilty of terrorism and sentenced most of them, some in absentia, to lengthy prison terms in connection to series of explosions including in the capital city Tbilisi, which Georgia said was ordered by a Russian military officer. The court said in a statement on June 28, [...] Eurasia Review - A Journal of Analysis and News

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The Lost World Of Lake Vostok

Top Documentary Films

It sometimes seems as if our planet has no secrets left – but deep beneath the great Antarctic ice sheet scientists have made an astonishing discovery. They’ve found one of the largest lakes in the world. It’s very existence defies belief. Scientists are desperate to get into the lake because its extreme environment may be home to unique flora and fauna, never seen before, and NASA are excited by what it could teach us about extraterrestrial life. But 4 kilometers of ice stand between the lake and the surface, and breaking this seal without contaminating the most pristine body of water on the planet is possibly one of the greatest challenges science faces in the 21st century.

In 1957 the Russians established a remote base in Antarctica – the Vostok station. It soon became a byword for hardship – dependent on an epic annual 1000km tractor journey from the coast for its supplies. The coldest temperature ever found on Earth (-89°C) was recorded here on the 21st July 1983. It’s an unlikely setting for a lake of liquid water. But in the 1970’s a British team used airborne radar to see beneath the ice, mapping the mountainous land buried by the Antarctic ice sheet. Flying near the Vostok base their radar trace suddenly went flat. They guessed that the flat trace could only be from water. It was the first evidence that the ice could be hiding a great secret.

But 20 years passed before their suspicions were confirmed, when satellites finally revealed that there was an enormous lake under the Vostok base. It is one of the largest lakes in the world – at 10,000 square km it’s about the extent of Lake Ontario, but about twice as deep (500m in places). The theory was that it could only exist because the ice acts like a giant insulating blanket, trapping enough of the earth’s heat to melt the very bottom of the ice sheet.

I bet the Russians are shaking in their boots over this

From  barenakedislam

Muslim baghead in London has her panties in a wad over some other baghead who apparently has been arrested in Russia and now she’s protesting in front of the Russian Embassy. Listen sista, you can get away with that crap in the UK, but the Russkies would just as soon lock up your big fat ass, too.

#Russia - The World History of Organized Crime - #Maffia

IgorRussland

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia switched to a free market economy, opening the doors for the Red Mafia to take control of an estimated 40% of the nation's economy. As one of the most fearsome, violent, creative, and well-educated criminal organizations in the world, the Red Mafia has been difficult to locate and shut down.

Ultimo filme de Andy García molesta a los rusos ["5 Days Of August"]

Armando de Armas/ martinoticias.com  

Andy García en una escena mientras actúa como el presidente georgiano Mikheil Saakashvili.

La película Cinco Días de agosto fue proyectada con gran éxito de público durante el Festival de Cinematográfico de Cannes, filme en que el reconocido actor cubano americano, Andy García, actúa  en el papel del presidente georgiano Mikheil Saakashvili.

La película dirigida por Renny Harbin, cuenta además con la actuación de la famosa Sharon Stone y refleja la guerra ruso-georgiana de 2008.

Cinco días de agosto, que clausuró La Mostra de Valencia, festival dedicado al cine de acción, fue rodada hace dos años y relata el breve pero cruento conflicto que enfrentó a rusos y georgianos por el control de la región separatista de Osetia del Sur, entre el 8 y el 12 de agosto de 2008.

García, que se incorporó al rodaje en octubre de 2009, guarda un notable parecido con el presidente Saakashvili, al que incluso imitó a la hora de comerse nerviosamente la corbata ante las cámaras de televisión.
"Este cubano temperamental, gesticula como yo", dijo Saakashvili tras asistir al rodaje de la cinta en el país caucásico. Algunas de las escenas de la película en las que interviene el actor cubanoamericano fueron rodadas en la misma residencia de Saakashvili, que llegó al poder pistola en mano tras derrocar al autoritario mandatario y ex canciller soviético, Eduard Shevardnadze, en la Revolución de las Rosas, en 2003.
Educado en la Universidad George Washington, de la capital estadounidense, el presidente de Georgia habla inglés y español, por lo que no tuvo mayores problemas para departir con el actor y el resto del equipo de rodaje.
Saakashvili, que tiene 43 años, once menos que García, está considerado el principal aliado de Estados Unidos en la región del Cáucaso.
La escenas bélicas, en las que se utilizaron helicópteros y carros de combate, fueron grabadas en una base militar en las afueras de la capital georgiana, Tiflis, y en la ciudad de Gori, esta última ocupada por el Ejército ruso durante el conflicto.
Rusia, que ha realizado varios documentales sobre la guerra, también ha querido producir una película de ficción como contrarréplica a la versión georgiana del conflicto, pero el director serbio Emir Kusturica rechazó la propuesta. Por otra parte, los medios oficialista rusos han criticado acerbamente el filme Cinco Días de agosto.

Obama and Medvedev talk #missiles at G8

With figureheads from the most influential countries in the world meeting at the G8 summit this week, many are turning to two leaders in particular: US President Obama and Russian President Medvedev. While issues including the economic and terrorism have been brought up at this week's gathering, the topic of missile defense between the two superpowers has been put on the table. Mark Adomanis of Inosmi discuses with RT.

Tanques T-72 y otro equipamiento militar procedente de Rusia llega a #Venezuela

El Ministerio de Defensa de Venezuela ha recibido los primeros 35 carros de combate T-72B1 procedentes de Rusia. Los vehículos blindados adquiridos en 2009 (92 en total) fueron trasladados a la base Fuerte Paramacay, en el norte del país.

#Medvédev: "El presidente sirio tiene que pasar de las palabras a las reformas"

Russia abandons #Gadhafi, offers to mediate his exit

HERE...

Obama and Medvedev talk missiles at G8

With figureheads from the most influential countries in the world meeting at the G8 summit this week, many are turning to two leaders in particular: US President Obama and Russian President Medvedev. While issues including the economic and terrorism have been brought up at this week's gathering, the topic of missile defense between the two superpowers has been put on the table. Mark Adomanis of Inosmi discuses with RT.

Top #Gorbachev Adviser Chronicles Final Year of the Soviet Union

Marking the 90th birthday of former top Gorbachev advisor Anatoly Sergeevich Chernyaev, the National Security Archive today publishes on the Web at www.nsarchive.org the latest installment of the unique and invaluable Chernyaev diary, covering the final fateful year of the Soviet Union, 1991.

Chief foreign policy aide to Gorbachev from 1986 through 1991 and a leading architect of perestroika and "new thinking," Anatoly Sergeevich remains a champion of glasnost, sharing his notes, documents and first-hand insights with scholars trying to understand the peaceful end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 2004, he donated the originals of his detailed diaries covering the years from 1972 through 1991, to the National Security Archive in order to ensure permanent public access to this record -- beyond the reach of political uncertainties in contemporary Russia.

Translated into English for the first time, by Anna Melyakova and edited by Svetlana Savranskaya of the Archive's Russia/Eurasia program, today's posting on the year 1991 is the sixth installment of the Archive's publication of the Chernyaev diary, now covering all of the crucial Gorbachev years, 1985 through 1991.

Visit the Archive's Web site for more information.

http://www.nsarchive.org

The Diary of Anatoly Chernyaev, 1991  [PDF]