Soviet Union

WASHINGTON -- A high-ranking Russian official says that thousands of U.S. prisoners of war captured by the Germans had been transferred to the Soviet Union after World War II and that some were still living in Russia.The official, Dmitri Volkogonov, a military adviser to President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia, told a U.S. Senate committee yesterday that more than 22,000 U.S. soldiers had been taken to the Soviet Union from German prisoner-of-war camps.The Russian official said most of the U.S. servicemen were returned to the United States shortly after the war, but that 119 U.S. citizens with Russian, Ukranian or Jewish names were kept behind.

My book club, which focuses on works with a Jewish theme, is reading "The Free World" by David Bezmozgis. It was one of the better novels we've read, though it conntinued a common theme of a rootless people looking for a safe haven. In 1978, when a trickle of Jews were allowed to leave the Soviet Union, three generations of the Krasnansky family land in Italy, a way station to their new home. Each member of the family carries a particularly poignant bit of personal baggage, which weighs on their decision to seek a new life in the United States, Israel or Canada.  You'll like this if: You enjoy a well-written character study, rather loosely plotted.

THE LATEST and best argument in favor of massive U.S. aid for the citizens of what used to be the Soviet Union comes from the new Soviet foreign minister. The United States, the official argues, was prepared to do far more in behalf of Kuwait, which occupies a far less strategic rung than Russia on the ladder of international importance. Billions for Kuwait but only millions (if that) for Russia? Where is our sense of priorities? Where is our sense of history? Where is our sense of self-preservation?

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many strategists suggested that the Cold War arms race had bankrupted its economy and caused its downfall. More than 20 years later, it appears that some in Washington are driving the U.S. toward a similar fate. Most recently, House Republicans (led by Rep. Paul Ryan) introduced a budget that both lavishly funds the Pentagon and slashes domestic programs. Mr. Ryan has even questioned whether generals were being honest in their assessment of the president's budget, suggesting, "We don't think the generals are giving us their true advice.

GSE Systems, a Columbia company that makes and designs software and simulators to train workers in the nuclear power and manufacturing industries, said yesterday that it has won a contract to supply control room training simulators to the former Soviet Union.The company was awarded the $6.5 million contract by Pacific ZTC Northwest National Laboratory, a quasi-government agency connected to the U.S. Department of Energy. The contracts are part of an international effort to train workers and improve nuclear plant safety in the former Soviet Union.

The recent political and social changes in the Soviet Union have come to the small, sleepy Eastern Shore town of Cambridge in the form of an economic blessing.Western Publishing Co. picked up one of the largest contracts in its 30-year history early this year when it was asked to print 2 million copies of the New Testament for distribution in the Soviet Union.By now these copies have made their way to residents in Moscow, Minsk and St. Petersburg, who have more freedom these days to read the words of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and more orders could come in the future.

Howard Community College will offer a 14-day trip to the Soviet Union from June 30 through July 3.The trip, which will be led by Russian historian and HCC Associate Dean Vladimir Marinich, will feature tours of Moscow's Red Square and the Kremlin; a trip to Kiev with a cruise on the Dnieper River and a visit to the Museum of Folk Art; a journey to Leningrad during the White Nights Festival with tours of the Winter Palace, Hermitage Museum and St. Issac's Cathedral;...

ALTHOUGH Mikhail Gorbachev insists that "neither the internal nor the external policy has changed" in the Soviet Union, the truth is that everything has changed.The Soviet interventions in Lithuania and Latvia have demolished any lingering hopes that Gorbachev could transform the Soviet Union into a free association of republics. In essence, the Soviet Union has ceased to exist.The great question, which will be played out over the next months and years, is what will emerge in its stead.Before the Jan. 13 invasion of Lithuania there was still hope that the republics could attain political independence peacefully and go on to freely establish economic ties that would benefit them all. This still may occur but not under the leadership of Gorbachev, who has clearly chosen to save the empire by falling back on the army, secret police and central bureaucracy.

One on One is a weekly feature offering excerpts of interviews conducted by The Evening Sun with newsworthy business leaders. Robert Walker recently was sworn in as Maryland's Secretary of Agriculture and has been active in promoting trade between Maryland and the Soviet Union.Q.What progress has the state made toward turning friendship agreements with the Russian Republic, Baltics and the Ukraine into tangible business opportunities?A. We recently formed a Soviet advisory group -- business advisory group -- which includes representatives from the universities and private sector and state agencies that have an interest to really see how we can best and most effectively use these agreements to the benefit of Maryland's businesses and the people of Maryland while at the same time trying to help the people of these republics make this reformation . . . this change into . . .democratic institutions and creating a free market economic system.

WASHINGTON -- CIA chief Robert M. Gates yesterday predicted the worst civil disorder in the disintegrating Soviet Union since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.He expressed concern over control of 30,000 nuclear weapons in such "a dangerously unstable" situation and warned that the Soviet arms industry could turn to export sales to stay in business."The hunger for hard currency could take precedence over proliferation concerns," Mr. Gates told the House Armed Services Committee, noting that thousands of military scientists were already leaving the Soviet Union for jobs elsewhere.

Twenty years ago, tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets of Moscow, just as Egyptians, Tunisians and Syrians have this year — rejecting the old order, demanding freedom and democracy. That August, the Russian democrats prevailed because their will was greater than that of those who plotted the coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The dynamics of the Arab Spring are strikingly similar. I was there that day, as the ABC News correspondent in our Moscow bureau.

Dr. Faina Nagel, a dentist who practiced in Columbia and had earlier lived in Leningrad and Israel, died of stomach cancer March 9 at her Howard County home. She was 54. Born Faina Okun in Belarus, she grew up in Leningrad and attended the Leningrad Pediatric Institute. Her father, a physics teacher, suffered the loss of his family, who were Jews, during World War II. Her mother was a store manager. As a teen, she was a member of the Young Communist Party. Family members said she encountered anti-Semitism and left the U.S.S.R.

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.

A MARXIST, Antonio Gramsci, put it best. "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and and the new cannot be born," he wrote from his prison cell in the 1920s."

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)