Soviet

With about 75 onlookers waving goodbye from the Inner Harbor dock, a Soviet training ship sailed for Europe today minus two naval cadets who jumped ship yesterday and apparently sought asylum at the downtown office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.The two cadets were identified by crew members as Alexei Litovko and Pyotr Zolotorev, both from Kaliningrad and about 20 years old.The Sun reported today that the two left the tall shipKruzenshtern yesterday afternoon and ran straight to the nearby INS office in Hopkins Plaza, about four blocks away.

At the same time he was selling U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union, former FBI Special Agent Robert Philip Hanssen was a key supervisor in a 1980s domestic-spying program questioning the loyalty of U.S. citizens and monitoring their activities, newly obtained FBI documents show. In this program, federal agents filed reports on teachers, clerics and political activists who were primarily affiliated with liberal causes. FBI domestic spy operations under the Reagan and first Bush administrations came to light a decade ago, prompting congressional rebukes.

IN A FEW WEEKS, Azerbaijan will junk the Russian script in favor of the Latin alphabet system. The country's renewed political independence has brought linguistic independence as well. Azerbaijan is not alone. Several former Soviet vassals have gotten rid of the Cyrillic script of their erstwhile Moscow masters. Even Mongolia is considering it. Oil-rich Azerbaijan, though, offers a poignant illustration of how language can be used as a tool in shifting political winds. For centuries, Azerbaijan's overwhelmingly Islamic population wrote its poetry, books and letters with Arabic characters.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush said yesterday that the Soviet Union's peace proposal "falls well short of what would be required" to end the Persian Gulf war, putting Iraq on notice that it can't use talks with Moscow to forestall a violent ground campaign.Mr. Bush did not reject the still-secret Soviet terms outright, and Secretary of State James A. Baker III crafted a detailed and thorough U.S. response, which was sent to the Soviets late Monday night.But the president's comments, delivered while Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz was still en route to Baghdad to deliver the Soviet proposal to President Saddam Hussein, appeared to leave Iraq little chance of avoiding an imminent ground war unless it announced and started to act on a massive withdrawal.

THE ORIGINS OF the Cold War have long been in scholarly dispute. Revisionists argue American right-wingers were responsible for the collapse of the World War II alliance between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. They claim Stalin was keen on continuing cooperation and could have been trusted.The recent declassification of deciphered Soviet spy cables from the U.S. during the latter part of World War II discredits that view. While claiming to be allies, Stalin's operatives were busy infiltrating to the highest levels of American government.

KLAIPEDA, Lithuania -- In the central square of this old port city, as in the central squares of thousands of other Soviet cities, stands the obligatory statue of V. I. Lenin striding vigorously into the future.But for nearly six months it has been flanked by a pair of armored personnel carriers.A soldier with a Kalashnikov submachine gun slung across his back shivers in Lenin's shadow. Two more soldiers and two Ministry of Internal Affairs troopers police the perimeter of the monument. The rope fence bears signs in Lithuanian, Russian and Polish politely explaining that anyone attacking the "guarded object" will be shot.

WASHINGTON -- Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin continued to reap the benefits of Aldrich Ames' treason against the United States long after the collapse of the Soviet Union by making it difficult for the United States to figure out the Russian leader's intentions on critical foreign policy issues, CIA Director John M. Deutch revealed yesterday.Offering newly declassified information from the CIA's internal damage assessment on the Ames spy scandal, Mr. Deutch disclosed that Ames' betrayal complicated the nation's ability to predict Mr. Yeltsin's intentions on such issues as nuclear proliferation and Moscow's role in other former Soviet republics.

DUBNA, Russia -- If ever there was a bright and promising moment in the Soviet era, a time when communism seemed poised to solve all problems and build a better world, then Dubna must have been one of its foremost emblems.Dubna, a new town built around the country's leading nuclear physics laboratory, was among the finest creations of the system -- a system that Russia's conservative politicians still remember as a source of pride, whose loss they blame on their reform-minded opponents.Built in the late 1950s and early 1960s and devoted expressly to nuclear research, Dubna is a small city that was a lodestone of Soviet power and optimism.

MOSCOW - A Russian news Web site has published a report claiming that two former top Soviet military officers visited Iraq less than two weeks before the start of war to advise the Iraqi military leadership. The report, posted Wednesday on the www.gazeta.ru Internet site, showed three photographs of the two former Soviet generals receiving an award from Iraq's defense minister, Sultan Hashem Ahmed. Though the precise nature of the visit was unclear, one of the generals, Vladislav A. Achalov, a former Soviet deputy defense minister, acknowledged in a transcript of a brief telephone interview posted on the site that it had taken place shortly before the war. In the interview, Achalov declined to detail the visit, saying only that he "did not go to drink coffee," and that he and his colleague were "with the minister" less than 10 days before the war began.

WASHINGTON -- In a scathing new book about misbehavior in the Navy, Adm. Charles R. Larson, the superintendent of the Naval Academy, is accused of having tried to cover up the rape of a U.S. female sailor by Soviet sailors in San Diego in 1990, a charge the admiral vociferously denies."