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"ACTION UKRAINE REPORT"
In-Depth Ukrainian News and Analysis
"The Art of Ukrainian History, Culture, Arts, Business, Religion,
Sports, Government, and Politics, in Ukraine and Around the World"

"VAST LAND BOUND BY TRAGEDY"
Arkady Ostrovsky reads of dark acts in post-Stalinist Russia, pieced
together with forensic precision...they are part of a vicious circle of
wretchedness, fear, denial and self-destruction which the book describes.

Book Review by Arkady Ostrovsky, FT's Moscow
Financial Times, FT.com site; London, UK, Feb 27, 2004

"Black Earth: Russia After the Fall"
by Andrew Meier, HarperCollins, Euro 25, 511 pages

Three weeks ago, on February 6 2004, a bomb ripped through a Moscow
underground station killing 40 people. Vladimir Putin, the Russian
president, blamed Chechen terrorists for the attack, and hours later a
nationalist Russian politician and Putin supporter called it an "ethnic"
crime. A few days later, a gang of skinheads in St Petersburg, Russia's most
westernised city, killed a nine-year-old Tajik girl in an apparent racist
attack. Her body had 11 knife wounds and bruises from being beaten with a
chain.

These events are not described in "Black Earth," a book by Andrew Meier who
worked as a Time Magazine correspondent in Moscow between 1996 and
2001 - but they are part of a vicious circle of wretchedness, fear, denial
and self-destruction which the book describes.

Meier's book is not strictly a history or political analysis - although it
does provide both. He is first and foremost a reporter who travels across
Russia, recording its striking features, collecting details and personal
testimonies and trying to piece together a portrait of the country 13 years
after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is not a flattering portrait. Composed from a hundred small details, it
reveals a nation in limbo, demoralised and haunted by its past, drenched by
a bloody war in Chechnya, faced with alcoholism, Aids and TB - and
uncertain about its future.

It is a thorough journalistic investigation into the state Russia is in
today and it raises core questions which stretch outside the time and
geographic scope of the book. The most burning question of all is posed by
the father of a 20-year-old conscript killed by the Chechens who, in "a
deal" with Russian officers, paid their way through checkpoints: "Can a
country live without a conscience?"

To find out, Meier travels to the four extreme corners of Russia to compose
his portrait: south to Chechnya, north to Norilsk - the site of Stalin's
largest Gulag camps - east to Sakhalin and west to St Petersburg. Divided by
thousands of miles and several time zones, each of these corners of Russia
reveal human tragedies and chilling tales of self-destruction.

His survey of post-Soviet Russia begins in the war-torn republic of
Chechnya. On February 5 2000, two months before Vladimir Putin became
the president of Russia, contract soldiers - "easy to spot because they look
like criminals" - marched into the Chechen village of Aldy. They killed 52
men and eight women, and looted and burned their houses.

In Russian this was called a "zachistka" - a clean-up operation. "To
Chechens 'zachistki' meant state-sponsored terror, pillage, rape and
murder."

Meier collected testimonies from survivors in order to reconstruct minute by
minute, yard by yard, house by house what happened when Russian soldiers
marched into the village. With forensic precision, he separates eye-witness
accounts from hearsay and arrives at a chilling conclusion: what happened in
Aldy was not a zachistka but a massacre, ignored by the world and hushed up
by Russian authorities.

Meier's reporting answers the key questions, when, where, who and how. The
one question he struggles with is why. Why did these soldiers beat and kill
innocent men and women? Why, on the day Putin became president, did a
Russian colonel in another Chechen village hit, rape and kill an 18-year-old
Chechen girl? And what was going on in the head of this colonel when that
very night he celebrated the birth of his own daughter? And, even more
disturbingly, why did people applaud Putin's brutal policy in Chechnya,
which propelled him to the Kremlin and then refuse to hear about its
victims? What kind of country is it?

The subsequent chapters may not provide a full answer, but they give some
idea of what has happened to Russia and its people over the years.

Meier moves north to Norilsk, above the Arctic Circle. But he is also
travelling back in time, winding back the story of Russian suffering.
Norilsk is home to Norilsk Nickel, the word's largest nickel producer, built
on the bones of prisoners from Stalin's Gulag. Today it is controlled by a
Moscow business tycoon.

Meier meets some of the survivors of the Gulag and their children who grew
up playing among the graves of those who perished in the permafrost land -
their bones and skulls still protrude through Norilsk's thin layer of earth.

He is told that in 1953 Soviet troops quelled a revolt in Norilsk by simply
opening fire on the camp and killing at least 100 people. Yet despite all
these atrocities, Stalin's victims continued to believe in the communist
system and in Stalin.

Meier does not link the killings in Norilsk to the atrocities in Chechnya
but they are part of the same tragic chain that binds Russian history.

Stalin was not the first to use forced labour. In 1890 Chekhov travelled to
the island of Sakhalin, infamous for its "katorga" - a system of forced
labour and servitude instituted by Peter the Great. Meier retraces Chekhov's
steps, and finds a place which is rich in oil and gas and poor in every
other aspect of human life, a place where vodka is the only consolation.

Meier ends his journey in St Petersburg, Russia's most beautiful city, yet
the one that has suffered most. The "fairytale", as St Petersburg is
sometimes called, consumed the lives of thousands of those who built it on
the marshes of the Neva river. Its streets still bear the signs of the siege
of Leningrad that lasted 900 days and claimed a million lives.

Back in Moscow, Meier asks an old Jewish woman, who survived both the
ravages of the war and of Stalinism, the difference between Hitler and
Stalin. She answers without a pause: "Hitler killed only his enemies."

Yet despite all the soul-draining descriptions of suffering, Meier's is not
a dark book. It is lightened by his passion for the country and the people
he meets: a doctor who helps the parents of soldiers killed in Chechnya to
identify and bury their children, a woman who entertained the wounded during
the siege of Leningrad, or a historian who dedicated his life to the memoirs
of Stalin's victims.

These are the people who try to break through a vicious circle of
wretchedness. But they face an inhuman task. (END) (ARTUIS)

"ACTION UKRAINE REPORT"
In-Depth Ukrainian News and Analysis
"The Art of Ukrainian History, Culture, Arts, Business, Religion,
Sports, Government, and Politics, in Ukraine and Around the World"

LENIN UNDERGOES EXTREME MAKEOVER
Lenin looks better than the day he died, his embalmer brags

By Mark McDonald, Associated Press, Moscow, Russia, March 1, 2004

MOSCOW - Vladimir Lenin has been dead these 80 years, but the founder
of Soviet communism has never looked better. Just ask his curator.

"He looks quite fine, as good as he did 30 years ago," said Yuri
Denisov-Nikolsky, the Russian doctor who just supervised an extensive
makeover of Lenin's corpse. "He looked terrible when he died, but
what you see now is Lenin's face, not someone else's."

Denisov-Nikolsky has been working on Lenin since 1970, and in a rare
interview he pulled back the shroud of secrecy surrounding the body,
its original embalming and its periodic makeovers.

When Lenin died of a stroke and heart attack on Jan. 21, 1924, his
widow said he'd wished to be buried next to his mother in a simple
cemetery plot. But the communist elite had other ideas.

They originally planned to freeze their beloved leader, but his body
began to deteriorate badly as a super-freezer was being built.
Instead, using an untested chemical process, Lenin was embalmed and
his skin carefully treated to preserve a lifelike appearance.

He's entombed in a granite-and-marble mausoleum in Red Square. The
body is sealed in a glass sarcophagus, cooled to 61 degrees, with the
humidity between 80 and 90 percent. Some say Lenin appears to be
sleeping. Others compare him to waxed
fruit.

With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian government
stopped financing the preservation of the body, Denisov-Nikolsky
said. Private donations pay the meager salaries of his 15-person
staff at a research lab called Medical Biological Technologies. The
physicians and professors on the team, he said, earn $200 a month.

The mausoleum staff also visits Vietnam to check on the body of Ho
Chi Minh, on display in Hanoi. Denisov-Nikolsky was on the Soviet
team that secretly embalmed "Uncle Ho" in a North Vietnamese jungle
cave in 1970.

Denisov-Nikolsky, 71, said he'd never talked or sung to Lenin's
corpse when he'd been alone with it in the mausoleum, and he sees
nothing odd or macabre about his work. But he does remember that his
hands trembled when he first began working on the body.

"Not every expert is allowed to restore such treasured historical
objects, like a Raphael or a Rembrandt. Those who do it, we tremble.
I feel a great responsibility in my hands."

About 1.5 million tourists visited the mausoleum last year, despite
the fact that hours are limited and it's not always easy to find the
entrance. Red Square is often closed for security reasons: There can
be no more tempting target for a suicide bomber in Russia than
Lenin's tomb and its body-under-glass - the Russian equivalent of the
Statue of Liberty or the Washington Monument.

Mausoleum security was improved this winter, Denisov-Nikolsky said,
but the mausoleum and sarcophagus were never built to be bombproof.
(During World War II, fearing a direct hit by the Nazis, Soviet
authorities secretly shipped Lenin - code-named "Object No. 1" - to a
warehouse in central Russia. They put him back on display in March
1945.)

Specially filtered lighting gives Lenin's face a warm glow. Botox,
collagen and modern cosmetics aren't used, Denisov-Nikolsky said,
with a polite harrumph. A mild bleach is employed to combat
occasional fungus stains or mold spots on Lenin's face.

The skin is examined closely each week, using precision, Russian-made
instruments that measure its moisture, color and contour.
Dehydration - and time - are the principal enemies.

Lenin gets an extreme makeover every 18 months or so. The mausoleum
is closed for two months and the body is immersed in a bath of
glycerol and potassium acetate for 30 days. The skin slowly absorbs
the solution, regaining its moisture and pliancy.

With current techniques, the body could last "many decades, even for
100 years," said Ilya Zbarsky, 90, a doctor who worked on the body
from 1934 to 1952. His father, Boris, participated in the original
embalming in 1924.

Lenin's blood, bodily fluids and internal organs were removed as part
of the initial embalming. His eyebrows, moustache and goatee are his
original hair - no molting. And his genitals are intact.

No one seems to know what's happened to Lenin's heart, but Soviet
ideologists were sure that his brain was something special. They
brought in a renowned German scientist to examine it for clues to the
great man's genius, but nothing came of it.

The brain is still kept at a Moscow institute. "But it's not easy to
see it," Zbarsky said. "It's mostly dissected."

A poll last month by the Public Opinion Foundation in Moscow found
that nearly 60 percent of Russians younger than 50 want Lenin to be
removed and buried.

"Only people over 50 more frequently reply that they're against
Lenin's burial," said foundation President Alexander Olson. This age
group views "suggestions that the body be removed as blasphemous."

Others argue that an emerging democracy - even if it's a democracy in
name only - shouldn't maintain monuments to a dictator responsible
for decades of suffering and millions of deaths.

"The body should be removed, yes, and it should cease to be an object
of worship," Zbarsky said. "It should be buried or kept in a
laboratory somewhere."

Lenin himself never wanted any of this. "Do not put up buildings or
monuments in his name," his widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, said in
the days after his death.

But the communist propaganda machine already had begun turning out
heroic posters, worshipful biographies and everything from massive
statues to miniature busts. Boulevards, hospitals, schools, train
stations, collective farms and the city of St. Petersburg were
renamed in Lenin's honor.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the
secret police, pushed for the preservation of Lenin's remains. Red
Army soldiers quickly began building a wooden mausoleum, using
dynamite to blast open the winter-hard earth in Red Square.

A special commission decided that freezing would be the best method
of preservation, so a massive freezer was ordered from Germany. But
the appliance took months to build, and as winter turned to spring,
Lenin's body began to deteriorate: His face and hands darkened, body
wrinkles began to appear and his lips were cracking.

The freezing method was abandoned in favor of embalming and an
experimental method of chemical preservation. Bodies had been
embalmed before, of course, but never with the idea of maintaining a
lifelike appearance. A team led by Vladimir Vorobiov, an anatomy
professor from Ukraine, did the work.

"This was an unprecedented task," Zbarsky said. "It would have been
dangerous to fail."

But Vorobiov's experiment worked. A stolid new mausoleum was built
along the Kremlin wall, and the mausoleum scientists received perks
and privileges not available to most Soviet workers. They had nice
apartments, decent food, country cottages and well-equipped labs.

At one point, however, the scientists became perplexed - and
terrified. A mysterious black spot had appeared on Lenin's right
cheek, a bloom of mold that resisted all known treatments. They
didn't want to ponder what would happen to them if they couldn't fix
the problem.

"They might have even killed us," said Zbarsky, who eventually
bleached away the mold himself. "The atmosphere of fear and terror
was there for us scientists, just as it was for everyone in the
society."

Zbarsky and his father were arrested without warning in 1952, during
Stalin's wave of terror, accused of being German spies. Boris Zbarsky
was imprisoned and his son was placed under house arrest.

When Stalin died soon after that, in 1953, he was embalmed by the
Zbarskys' former assistants at the mausoleum.

Stalin shared the Red Square mausoleum with Lenin for eight years,
then he was officially discredited and was quietly taken away and
buried under the Kremlin wall.

In the new mood of anti-Stalinism at that time, according to Ilya
Zbarsky, Muscovites created a new saying: "Don't sleep in a mausoleum
that doesn't belong to you."

The first calls for Lenin to be removed from Red Square came 15 years
ago. Communism was about to collapse and most reformers wanted Lenin
buried along with Marxism-Leninism.

President Boris Yeltsin, saying Red Square "must not resemble a
cemetery," suggested a national referendum in 1997 on the disposition
of the body. But this proposal, along with numerous other demands for
Lenin's eviction, was met with outrage by the Communist Party.

Last month, on the 80th anniversary of Lenin's death, Communist Party
leader Gennady Zyuganov laid a wreath at the mausoleum and
proclaimed, "The bright, clever cause of Lenin lives and thrives."

Zyuganov and the communists were resoundingly beaten in parliamentary
elections in December, and their defeat opened the way for another
possible campaign to remove Lenin. But no new groundswell has
emerged, and President Vladimir Putin, whose re-election seems
assured March 14, has skirted the issue.

One of Putin's closest advisers, Parliament Speaker Boris Gryzlov,
said, "The problem of the removal of Lenin's body should be solved in
due time - probably in 2024, after the 100th anniversary of Lenin's
death." (END) (ARTUIS)