Soviet

WASHINGTON -- The Soviet Union announced last night that the Kremlin and Baghdad had agreed on a way to end the Persian Gulf war that would require Iraq to withdraw its forces from Kuwait "on a fixed time frame" with withdrawal to begin after a cease-fire.The White House said President Bush had "serious concerns about several points" in the plan, but it did not elaborate. The United States would consult with its coalition partners and analyze the plan further, but in the meantime the war would continue, spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said.

MOSCOW - The devil is back in Moscow, and he's got a lot of people rattled. Film director Vladimir Bortko and his crew took to Moscow streets this month to begin filming a 10-part television miniseries, an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's celebrated Soviet-era novel, The Master and Margarita. And there was tension in the air - about doing Bulgakov's story justice. "Of course, I'm very fearful," said Anna Kovalchik, the slim Ukrainian-born actress who plays Margarita, standing in period costume between takes.

Alone among this year's nuclear-disaster pictures, K-19: The Widowmaker has the virtue of believability. Based on the real-life near-meltdown, in July 1961, of the first Russian submarine to carry ballistic missiles, the movie follows the ship's scheduled sea trials - and the unscheduled calamity that compelled its men to weld a leak and jerry-rig a cooling system in one of the reactor chambers. The officers in this brave new world of atomic nightmare make decisions in the dark; the sailors make repairs amid savage radioactivity.

Nikolai Drozdetsky, 38, a Soviet and Olympic hockey champion, died Saturday in St. Petersburg, Russia, from complications of diabetes. He helped the Soviet national team win an Olymic chamionship.

Oct. 15 1964: It was announced that Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev had been removed from office.

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon has flatly rejected a Soviet request to reduce its presence at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or to provide notice of military maneuvers in the region in return for a planned Soviet troop withdrawal from the island."

COLLEGE PARK -- In the post-Sputnik era, a star faculty member who invoked the advice of Karl Marx at the convocation of a U.S. university might have caused a stir.But when Raoul Sagdeev did that here yesterday, the audience of mostly faculty laughed.A measure of how far things have changed in U.S.-Soviet relations and in academe was evident yesterday: The speaker, a distinguished professor of physics at the University of Maryland in College Park, was, until recently, science adviser to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

The outcast Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein welcomed the restoration of conventional Communist authority in Moscow. This sentiment will be felt wherever rogue regimes survive that received aid and comfort from Leonid Brezhnev that dried up under Mikhail Gorbachev.There are terrorists hoping once again for Soviet sponsorship of terrorism, dictators wanting pay-offs for thwarting U.S. policies, petty conquerors hoping for weapons at old concessionary rates, enemies of Israel hoping for Moscow to renounce its proposed co-sponsorship of a peace conference.

MOSCOW - In a distinct throw-back to the pre-Gorbachev past, 60,000 people turned out for a hard-line conservative rally outside Red Square yesterday.Banners denouncing the U.S. -led war against Iraq figured prominently in the demonstration, the main targets of which were Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin and other Soviet reform politicians, particu-larly in the restive Baltic Republics.Ostensibly held to honor the Soviet military on Army Day - commemorating the creation of the Soviet army and navy 73 years ago -the rally was in fact organized by the Communist Party with the goal of propelling the conservative tide in Soviet domestic and foreign policy.