Red Army

THE BOMBINGS in East Africa demonstrate again how dangerous a place the world has become for the United States, despite the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism. The two attacks on U.S. embassies, moreover, underscore an emerging trend in international terrorism: the infliction of mass, indiscriminate casualties by enigmatic adversaries, striking beyond terrorism's traditional theaters in Europe and the Middle East.Above all else, the tragic incidents in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, serve notice that terrorism is -- and will remain -- one of the pre-eminent threats to international security in the 21st century.

BERLIN -- When the last trainload of Red Army troops rolled out of Germany last week, the Russians left unanswered a major question: What to do with all the vacated real estate -- 1,026 tracts totaling 667,000 acres, pocked with tumbledown buildings, toxic dumps and many thousands of unexploded artillery shells?Germany was studying this dubious windfall even before the Russians boarded their trains for home. In the past three years, Germany has had to spend $700 million just to keep the ground water safe.

Warsaw lay inert under Nazi German occupation in the early summer of 1944. Further east, German armies collapsed and Soviet forces rolled forward. The first Russian tanks reached Polish soil in January. The underground Polish Home Army lay low, awaiting the moment to rise. While the Allies jointly fought Adolf Hitler's Germany, they tugged over Poland's fate.The half-century anniversary of joy at the liberation of Paris on Aug. 25 was inextricably a reminder of the simultaneous agony of Warsaw, and the heroic rising that was willfully let fail.

President Boris N. Yeltsin's decision to create a separate Russian Ministry of Defense is the latest acknowledgment of the transitional nature of the Commonwealth of Independent States. In trying to replace the centralized organs of the Soviet Union, the CIS has proven to be quarrelsome and inefficient. Such weaknesses might not be crucial, except that the main functions of the new grouping were to oversee the former Soviet armed forces and control their vast nuclear arsenal. So far, the CIS has not performed either task convincingly.

Editor's note: Eric Frees, a senior running back at Western MarylandCollege, just returned from a cultural exchange trip to Russia with the school's football team, designed to teach the Russian players about American football. Dawn Frees, Eric's mother, accompanied the teamon the trip. While visiting with the Russian football players, the Ephrata, Pa., native kept this diary of his experiences.FRIDAY, MARCH 13We departed from WMC at 1:30 p.m. aboard two buses, headed for Dulles Airport in Northern Virginia.

THE WINNER of last year's Nobel Peace Prize, the politician who entranced a gullible world with talk of reform and glasnost, the supplicant we have just given a billion dollars in food aid to help keep in office, the Soviet leader supposedly working behind the scenes to cut a deal in the Persian Gulf -- has just ordered his tanks into Lithuania to roll over the bodies of patriots resisting his dictatorship.The timing of the brutal and bloody crackdown is no accident; he knows the focus of world attention is far from the scene of the crime he has long planned.

I'VE BEEN out of touch for a few weeks; anything happen while I was on vacation?No Rip Van Winkle could be more delighted: Communism is dead. The Soviet empire is breaking up. This is a glorious moment for human freedom.We should savor that moment, thanking God, NATO, the heroic dissidents in Russia and the internal empire, and the two-generation WilliamSafiresacrifice of the American people to protect themselves and the world from despotic domination.We should seize the moment, too, to urge our new comrades in freedom to use counter-coup momentum to destroy the institutions and bring down the elite that oppressed them.

Chaim Shapiro has plenty of stories about his experiences in Europe and the Soviet Union during World War II.One of the stories involves a man named Ludwik Seidenman. Shapiro, a 68-year-old Pikesville resident, says Seidenman saved his life with a compassionate act amid the war's horrors.This weekend, the two will meet at Seidenman's New York home for their first face-to-face encounter in 49 years."It's unbelieveable. It just came out of a blue moon," Shapiro says of the way the two men found each other after five decades.

REVEALING the true colors of a tyrant, Mikhail Gorbachev now seeks to thwart the democratic will of the independent republics of his former empire by bidding for the support of the veteran Red Army generals.He is responding to the declaration of independence and formation of a commonwealth by Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia by encouraging what amounts to a military coup.That puts the truth nakedly, but even his remaining apologists in the West cannot escape this fact: He seeks to enlist the power of arms to overrule the decision of elected representatives of the freed peoples.

ALEKSANDR BESSMERTNYKH came over to me at a reception a couple of years ago, said he heard I'd written a book about Lincoln and our Civil War, and proceeded to cast Mikhail Gorbachev as the Soviet Lincoln -- dedicated to preserving his Union.I suggested this difference: Lincoln believed in human freedom and Gorbachev was trying to perpetuate a system of political slavery.Bessmertnykh, who rolled his eyes at such old thinking, became foreign minister 48 hours after "Bloody Sunday," when Red army tanks killed or injured nearly 400 unarmed Lithuanian patriots.

Maryland Air National Guard cargo crews are prepping for an expected deployment to Afghanistan next year, flying a critical mission of air-dropping supplies to U.S. troops fighting in remote locations. Delivering ammunition, rations and water by parachute from the Guard's C-130J cargo planes is increasingly necessary in Afghanistan, not just because troops are being scattered to small, local bases as part of a new strategy, but also because of the growing danger that ground convoys will be attacked by Taliban insurgents, senior U.S. officers said.

Maryland coach Gary Williams often claims to have the best fans in the nation backing his program. But when it comes to a portion of the student fan base that has made its presence known in recent years, especially when archrival Duke visits College Park, Williams has a different opinion. For a number of years, Williams and school officials have blushed at the sight of scores of T-shirts emblazoned with a profanity aimed at the Blue Devils. Three years ago, immediately after a stunning overtime loss to Duke at Cole Field House, the mother of former Blue Devils center Carlos Boozer was struck in the head by a plastic water bottle thrown by a student.

Early in the Battle of Stalingrad, when it looked as if Hitler's forces would deliver a death blow to the Red Army, a Soviet super-sniper named Vassili Zaitsev - a shepherd from the Urals - calmly began to pick off 242 German soldiers. For a dispirited Soviet citizenry, Vassili became a steppe-spanning symbol of proletariat resistance to fascism and devotion to the motherland. Out of Vassili's exploits, director Jean-Jacques Annaud and his co-writer, Alain Godard, have fashioned "Enemy at the Gates," a magnetic war film.

THE BOMBINGS in East Africa demonstrate again how dangerous a place the world has become for the United States, despite the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism. The two attacks on U.S. embassies, moreover, underscore an emerging trend in international terrorism: the infliction of mass, indiscriminate casualties by enigmatic adversaries, striking beyond terrorism's traditional theaters in Europe and the Middle East.Above all else, the tragic incidents in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, serve notice that terrorism is -- and will remain -- one of the pre-eminent threats to international security in the 21st century.

Warsaw lay inert under Nazi German occupation in the early summer of 1944. Further east, German armies collapsed and Soviet forces rolled forward. The first Russian tanks reached Polish soil in January. The underground Polish Home Army lay low, awaiting the moment to rise. While the Allies jointly fought Adolf Hitler's Germany, they tugged over Poland's fate.The half-century anniversary of joy at the liberation of Paris on Aug. 25 was inextricably a reminder of the simultaneous agony of Warsaw, and the heroic rising that was willfully let fail.

BERLIN -- When the last trainload of Red Army troops rolled out of Germany last week, the Russians left unanswered a major question: What to do with all the vacated real estate -- 1,026 tracts totaling 667,000 acres, pocked with tumbledown buildings, toxic dumps and many thousands of unexploded artillery shells?Germany was studying this dubious windfall even before the Russians boarded their trains for home. In the past three years, Germany has had to spend $700 million just to keep the ground water safe.

Editor's note: Eric Frees, a senior running back at Western MarylandCollege, just returned from a cultural exchange trip to Russia with the school's football team, designed to teach the Russian players about American football. Dawn Frees, Eric's mother, accompanied the teamon the trip. While visiting with the Russian football players, the Ephrata, Pa., native kept this diary of his experiences.FRIDAY, MARCH 13We departed from WMC at 1:30 p.m. aboard two buses, headed for Dulles Airport in Northern Virginia.

President Boris N. Yeltsin's decision to create a separate Russian Ministry of Defense is the latest acknowledgment of the transitional nature of the Commonwealth of Independent States. In trying to replace the centralized organs of the Soviet Union, the CIS has proven to be quarrelsome and inefficient. Such weaknesses might not be crucial, except that the main functions of the new grouping were to oversee the former Soviet armed forces and control their vast nuclear arsenal. So far, the CIS has not performed either task convincingly.

REVEALING the true colors of a tyrant, Mikhail Gorbachev now seeks to thwart the democratic will of the independent republics of his former empire by bidding for the support of the veteran Red Army generals.He is responding to the declaration of independence and formation of a commonwealth by Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia by encouraging what amounts to a military coup.That puts the truth nakedly, but even his remaining apologists in the West cannot escape this fact: He seeks to enlist the power of arms to overrule the decision of elected representatives of the freed peoples.

Chaim Shapiro has plenty of stories about his experiences in Europe and the Soviet Union during World War II.One of the stories involves a man named Ludwik Seidenman. Shapiro, a 68-year-old Pikesville resident, says Seidenman saved his life with a compassionate act amid the war's horrors.This weekend, the two will meet at Seidenman's New York home for their first face-to-face encounter in 49 years."It's unbelieveable. It just came out of a blue moon," Shapiro says of the way the two men found each other after five decades.