Soviet Union

NARVA, Estonia -- In this quiet Estonian city on a wide river separating the small Baltic nation from its mammoth Russian neighbor, the official state language, in practical terms, is also a foreign one. One hardly seems to need Estonian in Narva, where the majority of residents are ethnic Russians and where ordering a taxi, getting medicine at the pharmacy, even instruction in school, are done in Russian. The use of Estonian is so limited here that many have a similarly limited ability to speak it. That, the Estonian government says, is the problem.

Dec. 25 1991 President Mikhail S. Gorbachev went on TV to announce his resignation as the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union.

As the leaders of the NATO countries talk today and tomorrow about the worsening problems of Afghanistan, we hope they take a moment to look around them. This year's summit is in Riga, Latvia, an atmospheric old Baltic seaport - and a place that should serve to remind the assembled presidents and prime ministers that Afghanistan has a long and painful history as a wrecking ground of international ambitions. Plenty of Latvians have experience fighting in Afghanistan - as Soviet soldiers in the 1980s, when Moscow tried and ultimately failed to subdue the mujahedeen there.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's resignation has unloaded a great deal of unwelcome baggage for the Bush administration, but the nomination of Robert M. Gates is unlikely to help resolve the disastrous war in Iraq or the uniformed military's opposition to the civilian leadership at the Pentagon. Unlike successful secretaries of defense in the recent past, Mr. Gates lacks essential experience in military and industrial affairs and has had serious problems with the congressional confirmation process.

I have specific dietary needs such as gluten-free bread and nondairy drinks. Will I be able to find these items while traveling in Europe? If you're going to be eating out a lot, you should not expect that all European restaurants will be able to accommodate your dietary needs. However, you can carry small index cards, translated into the languages of the countries you'll be visiting, that specify your allergies and requirements. You can make your own using a phrase book or asking for help from a native speaker or language teacher.

Tarnished bits of metal lay among the rocks in a pass north of Vladivostok, on Russia's far eastern coast. There were .50-caliber machine gun shells, a silver-plated spoon engraved with the letters "USN," a fragment of human bone and what at first glance appeared to be debris from an American naval aircraft. Lt. Col. Michael O'Hara of the Pentagon's Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office, investigating reports of a crash site in the pass, reached that site in July. He suspected it contained scattered pieces of a missing Navy surveillance aircraft shot down in November 1951.

MOSCOW -- Today used to be their day. This country used to be their country. But as the nation's Communists celebrate the 88th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution that brought Lenin to power and laid the foundation of the Soviet state, their party finds itself without reason to celebrate much else. Once a well-organized and dominant force in the first decade after the Soviet Union's collapse, the Communist Party now stands on the outskirts of power. The party lost more than half its seats in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, in 2003.

WASHINGTON - CIA Director Porter J. Goss invited eight of his predecessors and two of their widows back to the agency recently, prompting his executive secretary to exclaim, "Is this a great day for the CIA or what?" Well, not exactly. The party was, in fact, a wake, marking the end of Mr. Goss' role as director of central intelligence, the CIA's role as the central intelligence agency in the intelligence community and, most important, President Harry Truman's creation of an authoritative intelligence agency outside the policy community providing objective and balanced intelligence estimates.

THE LAST SENTRY: THE TRUE STORY THAT INSPIRED THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER By Gregory D. Young and Nate Braden. Naval Institute Press. 250 pages. Tom Clancy, an obscure Maryland insurance agent neglecting business because he wanted to write, was nosing about in the basement of the Naval Academy library when he stumbled on a postgraduate thesis by a young U.S. Navy officer that described a mutiny on a Soviet warship called the Storozhevoy -- in English, the...

OIMYAKON, Russia - A few years ago, a retired math teacher named Tamara I. Vasileva began poring through diaries and records of births and deaths in this Siberian village of 950 people. As the community's unofficial archivist, she studied the records of about 20 of the town's oldest families, dating back to the 1920s, and she noted something odd. Until roughly the 1960s, the records documented the lives of people who lived well into their 70s and 80s - one or two even into their hundreds.