Soviet

Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, orbited the world on a Wednesday - April 12, 1961 - and by Saturday was in Moscow for a parade before millions of people. It was a huge event. Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev called him the new Columbus; President Leonid I. Brezhnev made him a Hero of the Soviet Union. The world was at his feet - and hardly anyone knew his shoes were untied. Andrian Nikolaev, who would become the third cosmonaut in space in 1962, accompanied Gagarin to Moscow and recalled that day during an interview in 2001.

MOSCOW - In a small television studio in central Moscow crammed with cameras and video gear, anchorman Andrei Norkin recently sat at his desk and began what in Russia is a politically sensitive exercise. He delivered his afternoon newscast. Increased defense spending, he reported, is leading to more accidents during military exercises. The nation's politically sensitive courts, he predicted, would allow prosecutors to extend the custody of a businessman of keen interest to the Kremlin.

Twenty years ago this fall, as the Orioles triumphed in the World Series, baby boomers flocked to The Big Chill and radios played Michael Jackson's Thriller, the superpowers drifted obliviously to the brink of nuclear war. That is the disturbing conclusion of a number of historians who have studied the bellicose rhetoric and mutual incomprehension of the United States and the Soviet Union, which then had more than 20,000 nuclear warheads between them....

MOSCOW - If there's a soft spot in a Stalinist's heart, it is the old Moskva Hotel - the looming gray hulk near the entrance to Red Square that has been the host of generations of Soviet luminaries and Politburo members in the kind of dilapidated luxury only a Communist could love. Service? Nyet. Plumbing? Leaky. But the Lights of Moscow cafe on the 15th floor commanded a view of the Kremlin's towering brick ramparts and onion domes like nowhere else in the capital, and for generations the Moskva's marble lobby was a crossroads of the Soviet empire's powerful, famous and merely ambitious, a meeting point for visiting artists, democratic dissidents and defecting spies.

MOSCOW - Authorities in the former Soviet republic of Georgia said yesterday that they had discovered two boxes of highly radioactive material that officials said could have been used to make a "dirty bomb," as well as a container of nerve gas, in a taxicab in the capital, Tbilisi. The announcement appeared to underscore concerns about the vulnerability of the former Soviet Union's vast, crumbling nuclear infrastructure and chemical weapons arsenal to thieves and terrorists. Georgian officials said police were conducting a routine search of the cab on May 31 on the road to Tbilisi's main railway station when they found three boxes, two of which contained Cesium-137 and Strontium-90, both of which are by-products of nuclear fission.

MOSCOW - Voters in Lithuania approved this weekend the former Soviet republic's entry into the European Union, adding to momentum for a planned 10-state expansion of the group next year. With polls showing strong pro-European Union sentiment in the Baltic state, supporters of membership had been primarily worried about a requirement that in order for the two-day referendum to be valid, a majority of eligible voters had to cast ballots. After a low turnout Saturday that frightened some EU supporters into making greater efforts to get to the polls, that threshold was easily passed yesterday.

When Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made his quip about "new Europe," the concept looked more like a diplomatic crutch than a geopolitical reality. When most of the countries he had in mind signed on the dotted line in support of America's stance on Iraq, Jacques Chirac, France's president, chastised them like naughty adolescents. Now the new Europeans - at least, quite a few of them - seem to be putting their troops, as well as their land and airspace, where their mouths were. On the face of it, that might deepen Europe's divisions.

MOSCOW - Deep beneath the streets of Moscow, one of the world's best public transit systems is rediscovering its roots. The Park Pobedy Metro station, which opened Tuesday, represents much more than just a 2.4-mile extension of the vast underground rail network, officials say. It is the first station in decades to aspire to the sumptuous look of those built during the height of Soviet power. "It is built in the style of classical Moscow Metro architecture," says Svetlana Tsaryova, a spokesman for the Metro system.

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.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -The view from here is less tranquil nowadays, with North Korea test-firing missiles and making nuclear noises just a short hop over the Pacific while the rest of the world is preoccupied with Iraq. Just 3,700 miles away - not a huge distance in missile terms - North Korea has an untested ballistic missile capable of reaching the western United States, U.S. intelligence officials say. That includes Alaska, with its 800-mile oil pipeline and four major military bases employing more than 17,300 members of the armed forces.