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Last week the Kazakhstan inventory of uranium was half a ton lighter as officials in Washington and the Kazakh capital of Almaty (formerly Alma-Ata) announced that the team, after six weeks of feverish activity, had successfully moved the material to the Oak Ridge nuclear-storage facility in Tennessee. Over the next several months, the Energy Department will entertain offers from private industry to turn the highly enriched uranium into lower- grade commercial reactor fuel. The Administration touted the mission as a good reason to keep money flowing to the beleaguered Nunn-Lugar account. The fund -- named for sponsors Senator...
...Zhirinovsky's autobiography, The Last Thrust to the South, a book that James Billington, U.S. Librarian of Congress, calls "in some respects psychologically an even more unstable work than Mein Kampf." In it, Zhirinovsky recounts in extravagant detail the injustices of an emotionally and economically deprived childhood in Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan...
...visit to Alma-Ata and conversations with several of those who knew him as a boy reveal a quite different picture. He writes, for example, of living in squalor with his mother in a filthy communal apartment where he had to endure the indignities of a communal toilet ("it smelled bad"). Yet the two-story house was, at the time, one of the best in the city, constructed during the 1930s for elite Russian workers. "Zhirinovsky complains there was no hot water, but it was a rare house in Alma-Ata that had hot water then," recalls Vladimir Rerikh...
Despite his claim of having had "almost no education," the school where Zhirinovsky spent 11 years was actually the most prestigious institution of its kind in Alma- Ata. His fellow students came from the families of top party functionaries and KGB officers. Indeed, as classmate Yuri Anoshin explains, the school, following a popular practice of factories and government offices at the time, was "adopted" by the local KGB administration. This enabled Zhirinovsky and his peers to enjoy such rare amenities as flowers, potted palm trees, upholstered armchairs and pet canaries...
...Zhirinovsky's own account, his father was Volf Andreyevich Zhirinovsky, a legal adviser with the Turkish- Siberian railway, who died in a car crash before Zhirinovsky was born. But an American reporter working for the Associated Press and CNN recently unearthed a set of alleged family documents in Alma-Ata suggesting that Zhirinovsky's real father was a man named Volf Isaakovich Edelshtein, a name most Russians assume to be Jewish. Zhirinovsky claims the documents are forged, and has vigorously denied Jewish heritage...