Soviet Union

Here is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author of The Gulag Archipelago, the man who more than any other made the world understand the cruelty and senselessness of the Soviet prison camp system and, by extension, of the Soviet Union itself. Here is Mr. Solzhenitsyn, a former prisoner of the gulag, an exile in Vermont for many years, more recently a refusenik by choice when offered prizes by Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Boris N. Yeltsin - here he is accepting an award in June from President Vladimir V. Putin, whose career began in the organization that imprisoned the truth-seeking writer.

A whopping 1 percent of the 36,000 people of Hagerstown were born outside the United States, so maybe the attempt to resettle about 40 refugees a year there was asking for trouble. In any case, trouble was what it got. A few townspeople were up in arms over the hiring of refugees - mostly from Africa and the former Soviet Union - at a local plastics plant. Theirs, by the way, were among the 2,000 jobs that Hagerstown has added just since 2006. Then a pregnant woman from Burundi had a spell of morning sickness on a public street, and once the hazmat team had arrived in full moonsuit get-up, you could guess that the municipal welcome mat wasn't going to stay out much longer.

Cecilia Danieli, 56, who built her family's steel tool company into a major company doing business with the former Soviet Union and the Middle East, died Thursday in Udine, Italy, of cancer. Ms. Danieli was nicknamed Italy's "Iron Lady" by the foreign press, who reported on her deals with Iran, Central America and the former Soviet Union.Under her direction, the family business expanded to include bases in the United States and Italy as well as in Buttrio, near Udine. It also began selling completely furnished steel plants.

MOSCOW -- They started school in the Soviet Union and now are graduating in Russia. While their country endured coups, the collapse of communism, parliamentary rebellions and the rise and fall of great economic aspirations, they were doing something more momentous: growing up and getting an education.The last school bell rang in Moscow last week for 60,000 members of the high school class of 1999, and ceremonies at each of 1,400 schools offered the emerging young adults a moment to contemplate what lay ahead and to reflect on what was past.

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukrainian voters repudiated a return to the communist past yesterday, propelling pro-democratic President Leonid Kuchma toward a second five-year term over Communist challenger Petro Symonenko, according to exit polls.Voter surveys from Ukraine's third presidential election since the Soviet Union disintegrated eight years ago showed the 61-year-old president with more than 58 percent of the vote, compared with 36 percent for Symonenko, Ukraine's Communist Party leader. Final results weren't expected until today.

Iosif Mogilevskiy was hunting for a job. But not just any job.New to Baltimore after fleeing anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union, Mogilevskiy wanted to resume his career. He was, after all, an expert in his field, an authority on sunflowers -- or, more precisely, the science of squeezing oil from sunflower seeds."Want work sunflower factory," he would say in what little English he knew.What followed was a job search unlike any other in memory at the Pikesville offices of the Jewish Vocational Service, which has located work for many of the 8,000 Russian-speaking immigrants who have settled in the Baltimore area since 1991.

WASHINGTON -- George Shultz, Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, believes Mr. Reagan bolstered foreign policy by an act of domestic policy -- the 1981 confrontation with the air traffic controllers. Mr. Reagan warned that if the controllers struck, they would be fired. They struck. They were fired. And, says Mr. Shultz, leaders around the world noted Mr. Reagan's forcefulness.Now leaders may have drawn some conclusions from President Clinton's domestic difficulties, may have noted his self-absorption, his willingness to sacrifice anyone and anything to his short-term calculations of personal convenience, his inattention to anything (including everything in foreign policy)

Hillary is pro-Palestinian in Washington, pro-Israeli in New York. What's to understand?Richard Riha for mayor! Riha's Hardware is one of the last places that sharpens lawn mowers left in this city.Bill finds poverty a better enemy to be against than the Soviet Union because it will not vanish on him.The Orioles should try putting Mia Hamm in the lineup. She knows how to score.Pub Date: 7/12/99

UNITED NATIONS -- Across many of the post-Communist countries of the former Soviet Union and in parts of Eastern Europe, the ratio of men to women is falling, the United Nations says in a new report, because men in those countries are leading shorter and less healthy lives.These countries are paying "a high social and human cost for their transition to a market economy," the U.N. Development Program says in its report on the former Communist countries of the Soviet Union and the old Soviet bloc.

THE Clinton administration should agree to publish as much of a congressional report on military technology leaks to China as possible while protecting intelligence sources.Republicans in Congress should pursue an even-handed, nonpartisan investigation.As things stand, Republicans are shouting that a hemorrhage of weapons technology during the Reagan administration is Bill Clinton's fault. The administration says it is on top of any problems.The Nixon administration began military collaboration with China more than 25 years ago, to strengthen it against the Soviet Union.

ALEXY II, 79 Russian Orthodox patriarch Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II, who presided over a vast post-Soviet revival of faith but was accused of making the church a force for nationalism, died yesterday at his residence outside Moscow. No cause of death was given. He had long suffered from a heart ailment. Patriarch Alexy became leader of the church in 1990 as the officially atheist Soviet Union was loosening its restrictions on religion. After the Soviet Union collapsed the next year, the church's popularity surged.

In 1950, Dalton Trumbo, a top Hollywood screenwriter, was sent to federal prison for maintaining that his political beliefs were a personal matter and none of Congress' business. After serving his sentence he was punished again when the studios barred him from working. His playwright son, Christopher Trumbo, tells the story in Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted, which Rep Stage is presenting through Sept. 28. James Dalton Trumbo, born in Colorado in 1905, had many of the characteristics traditionally ascribed to Westerners.

WASHINGTON - In the early 1990s, the United States began beefing up Georgia's army as the tiny republic gained its independence from the collapsing Soviet Union - an effort accelerated after 9/11 in what President Bush said was a fight against al-Qaida. That "train and equip" program is part of a growing, global American initiative to bolster military forces in such unlikely and unstable places as Ethiopia. Chad, Albania, Kazakhstan, Sri Lanka, Lebanon and Yemen. Cease-fire Russian military reportedly violates truce.

MOSCOW - Nobel laureate Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, the reclusive icon of the Russian intelligentsia and chronicler of communist repression, has died of heart failure, Russian news agencies reported. He was 89. Stephan Solzhenitsyn told the Associated Press his father died late yesterday, but he declined to comment further. The soulful writer and spiritual father of Russia's nationalist patriotic movement lived to be reunited with his beloved homeland after two decades of exile - only to be as distressed by communism's damage to the Russian character as he was by his earlier forced estrangement from the land and people he loved.

What should be the most important issue in this election is one that is rarely, if ever, addressed: Why is U.S. military spending at the highest point, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than at any other time since the end of World War II? Why, without a sophisticated military opponent in sight, is the United States spending trillions of dollars on the development of high-tech weapons systems that lost their purpose with the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago? The 2009 defense budget commits the United States to spending more (again, in real dollars)

At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had about 45,000 nuclear warheads. At the moment, Iran has none. But when Sen. Barack Obama said the obvious - that Iran does not pose the sort of threat the Soviet Union did - Sen. John McCain reacted as though his rival had offered to trade Fort Knox for a sack of magic beans. "Such a statement betrays the depth of Senator Obama's inexperience and reckless judgment," exclaimed Mr. McCain. "These are very serious deficiencies for an American president to possess."

ALEXANDER FEKLISOV, 93 Soviet-era spy chief Alexander Feklisov, the Soviet-era spy chief who said he oversaw the espionage work of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and helped mediate the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, died Oct. 26. His autobiography, The Man Behind the Rosenbergs, described his work guiding the work of the couple. The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953 after being convicted of spying for the Soviet Union.

Expand our empathy to embrace refugees I felt unsettled myself after reading "Unsettled by resettlement" (Oct. 4). Hagerstown residents are disturbed by the arrival of 200 refugees (in a city of 37,000), largely from countries in Africa and the former Soviet Union - mainly claiming these new arrivals are taking job opportunities away from other residents. But do these residents honestly feel that their jobs will be threatened, and their children's economic opportunities diminished, because refugees need work?

A whopping 1 percent of the 36,000 people of Hagerstown were born outside the United States, so maybe the attempt to resettle about 40 refugees a year there was asking for trouble. In any case, trouble was what it got. A few townspeople were up in arms over the hiring of refugees - mostly from Africa and the former Soviet Union - at a local plastics plant. Theirs, by the way, were among the 2,000 jobs that Hagerstown has added just since 2006. Then a pregnant woman from Burundi had a spell of morning sickness on a public street, and once the hazmat team had arrived in full moonsuit get-up, you could guess that the municipal welcome mat wasn't going to stay out much longer.

Ironically, it was the American press, not the Soviet press, which gave the Sputnik launch such immense coverage, allowing it to become one of the most powerful weapons of propaganda the Soviet Union had." - SERGEI KHRUSHCHEV, son of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, on the impact of the launch of Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, 50 years ago today