Russia

Throughout its history, Finland has been a borderland in battles between the East and West. For 600 years it was part of Sweden. An 1809 Russian victory turned it into an autonomous czarist grand duchy. Independence came a century later -- only to be followed by two devastating wars against the Soviet Union. Yet Finland persisted in defending its values and sovereignty.A milestone on this historical journey was reached last week, when Russia and Finland signed a package of three treaties governing their future state and economic relations.

Russia's plunge into price reform begins a shock treatment without anesthesia. The unanswered question is: Will the patient walk again? But President Boris N. Yeltsin showed commendable decisiveness by not just talking about price reform and vacillating as Mikhail S. Gorbachev did for years.If handling finances was so easy, everyone would be a millionaire. Yet many individuals, and even countries, barely survive from paycheck to paycheck. Few universal panaceas exist to complicated monetary problems.

The East-West disputes erupting at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Budapest provide the best justification yet for having the CSCE. If those disputes exist, they cry out for a forum in which to be addressed.CSCE was born in 1975, proposed by the Soviet Union to get the West to ratify the borders of sovereignty and hegemony in Eastern Europe. The West saw it as a way to pry the lid off human rights abuses in Communist countries. That seems so long ago. Now CSCE is a large tent for all the European countries (plus the U.S.)

The temperatures in Moscow these days are the same as they were 30 years ago in Voronezh -- 250 miles to the south. The city is saving money in winter and doing less environmental damage by using a milder blend of road salt, because of the warmer conditions. At the same time, all of Russia is experiencing an explosion in its tick population. Plagues of locusts have appeared where they never visited before. Flooding becomes ever more commonplace. None of this confirms global warming, much less a human role in global warming -- but the circumstantial evidence is likely to be enough to prod the Russian government into action.

Not even a year has elapsed since last August's abortive coup d'etat sounded the death knell to the Soviet Union. But Moscow again is a battle ground. Not of tanks or gun-toting soldiers but of politicians trying to bring Russia's free-wheeling media under tighter controls.The Supreme Soviet, the legislature of Russia, has targeted the country's most respected daily newspaper as the test case. It wants to take over Izvestia, which spoke courageously for freedom of the media during the rule of Mikhail S. Gorbachev and has outspokenly exposed corruption and official duplicity ever since.

Russia's merciless winter has come early this year. Heating systems go on the blink, lights flicker and then go out. Buses and trains break down; nothing seems to work. Tempers run short.This is the backdrop against which Russia's first post-Communist parliamentary elections take place today. Across 11 time zones from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific, 107 million eligible voters will elect members of a new bicameral parliament from a bewildering array of candidates.Even more important, they are being asked to ratify a new constitution to replace the much-amended basic law that Boris N. Yeltsin's Russia inherited from the now-defunct Soviet Union.

PHILADELPHIA -- Irina Yasina once was the vice chairwoman of the Open Russia Foundation, the largest private Russian organization supporting human rights. Now the government has frozen the foundation's accounts and shut down its operations; even an orphanage it funds is under threat of closure. "Only two people remain on the payroll," Ms. Yasina told me on a visit to Philadelphia, "one to liquidate the assets, another to represent us in court." This sad saga reflects Russia's slide back toward authoritarian rule.

ALEXANDER Solzhenitsyn is about to end his 20-year exile and return to his native Russia. "I hope I can be at least of some help to my tormented nation," he recently told a town meeting in Cavendish, Vt. Many in his homeland harbor similar hopes. The desperate conditions Russia faces today make his entry into politics not only feasible but also desirable.The political process in today's Russia is hopelessly deadlocked. It is immaterial who is heading the government, for the state currently has no power to carry out a coherent policy or enforce its decrees.

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- Spirited away from Germany in the chaos of 1945 and then hidden in darkness and secrecy, three masterpieces of 19th-century painting were unveiled yesterday for a first, brief public glimpse in more than half a century.The three works of art -- painted by van Gogh, Degas and Gauguin, and displayed on an ornate stage -- were offered by the State Hermitage Museum as a tantalizing hint of an exhibit opening next month: 74 Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings that were seized in Germany by the Soviet army at the close of World War II and taken to the Soviet Union.

THE real question behind this NATO trip," Professor Michael Mandelbaum told several of us just before the president's trip, "is, 'Does Boris Yeltsin have a better idea of the dangers to him than we do?' "With those curious words, expressed at a Freedom House briefing in the U.S. Capitol, President Clinton's leading adviser on Russia encapsulated the treacherous suppositions behind the president's 7 1/2 -day trip this week to Brussels, Prague, Moscow, Minsk and Geneva.The lurking fear among many here is that the administration's overweening focus on Russia -- a virtual capitulation to Russia at the expense of everything and everybody else -- could historically spell out a modern-day Yalta.