Radio Liberty

Washington. -- Things have changed so rapidly in Russia tha we reflexively think of what it was, not what it is. Because we have big decisions to make, some perspective is in order.Demography can shape destiny. In 1991, the old Soviet Union had a population of 284 million, somewhat larger than America's. Last year, after the Soviet Union split apart, the population of the new Russia was 149 million.And so, even though Russia takes up 11 time zones' worth of real estate, it is not a very big country.

An international dispute will bring lawyers for some of the nation's top news organizations to Maryland's highest court today to argue that freedom of the press will be threatened if U.S. journalists are forced to pay libel judgments won in foreign courts.The case centers on Vladimir Matusevitch, who saw his father dragged off to a Soviet gulag when he was a child and his family and their Moscow neighbors harassed, all for being Jewish.Matusevitch, now a U.S. citizen who lives in Bethesda, was infuriated after he read a column in the London Daily Telegraph in 1984 complaining that the British Broadcasting Corp.

MOSCOW -- The men running the Soviet Union did everything they could to make sure everyone got the story right. They filled television with old movies, they jammed radio programs and they shut down any newspaper that didn't get it right:Mikhail S. Gorbachev was sick and would be back to work eventually. The conscientious vice president was taking over to carry on the ailing president's philosophy. The motherland was being saved from anarchy and chaos.Within hours, most of Moscow was ridiculing this version of events as the truth swept the city.

MOSCOW -- In this land where for nearly seven decades the truth was monolithic, two very different wars seem to be taking place around the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, both of them fully documented by the media.First, there is the war described by Armenia and its sympathizers in the Russian democratic movement.This war is a brutal, ruthless campaign against peaceful Armenian villagers inside Azerbaijan, inspired by Azerbaijani militants but now backed by the full force of the Soviet military.

The decision to send American soldiers to Georgia, ostensibly to help President Eduard A. Shevardnadze's government in its struggle with terrorism, is provocative, risky and wrong-headed. Worse, it's being presented by all sides as something that it's not. The stated goal is to train Georgian soldiers so they can fight "tens" of terrorist al-Qaida fighters in the Pankisi Gorge, which abuts Russia's breakaway republic of Chechnya. But Georgia doesn't care about Pankisi -- it cares about its own secessionists on the other side of the country.

MOSCOW -- Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright began a visit to Moscow yesterday by confronting her hosts over the war in Chechnya, accusing Russia of using excessive force and worsening its problems in the region by indiscriminately targeting civilians. Igor S. Ivanov, the Russian foreign minister, told Albright that Moscow would fight Chechen terrorists as it saw fit, whether its methods were popular or not. "We have made quite clear that we think that there has been an incredible amount of misery injected upon the civilian population of Chechnya," Albright said at a news conference, "both militarily and also because of the creation of so many refugees."

"Next, from Toledo, we have a call from Phyllis. Go ahead, Phyllis, you're on with the president of Russia ..." Tonight at 7:30, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin will entertain the questions of National Public Radio anchor Robert Siegel, and then take e-mails and calls from the rest of America. The NPR interview and ensuing discussion will be carried on regional affiliates WJHU (88.1 FM) and WAMU (88.5 FM). Under Soviet regimes, said Kevin Klose, NPR's president, "this would have been impossible to imagine.

MOSCOW - For many Russians, the climate has turned even chillier than the cold north winds bearing down on the country these days would warrant. The political party associated with Vladimir V. Putin is distributing a book to St. Petersburg first-graders that describes the president in the same tone once reserved for another Vladimir - Vladimir I. Lenin, the founder of the Communist Party and leader of the Bolshevik revolution. Perhaps the unprepossessing little book would not have been enough on its own to send shivers down so many spines, but it arrives at a time of concern about Putin's authoritarian inclinations, given the arrest of a Radio Liberty reporter in Chechnya, the assault on Moscow's only independent television station and a clampdown by the former KGB on the flow of information in a Volga River city.

MOSCOW -- The hard-line Communists who ousted Mikhail S. Gorbachev from power moved yesterday to claim control of the country, but opposition to the coup rallied around Russia's president, Boris N. Yeltsin, and threatened to split the army.Thousands of people who had gathered outside the Russian parliament building cheered and shouted "Yeltsin, Yeltsin," when tanks from the elite Tamanskaya division shifted position just after 10 p.m. Moscow time and pointed their guns outward.Other loose ends were appearing in the coup that had seemed so chillingly final in the morning hours.

MOSCOW -- For decades on Petrovka Street there was a mammoth display labeled, in foot-high metal letters, "Leading Workers of Sverdlovsk District." The proud unsmiling portraits of the dozen heroes of labor of the month gazed out at passers-by in inspiring example.In the absence of more mercenary inducements to show up at work sober and on time, citizens of this central Moscow neighborhood were supposed to be motivated by the hope that one day, they, too, might have their photos on the honor board.