Word: chechnya
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Vladimir Putin is a man possessed. He wants to rebuild a strong Russia with a powerful presidency and a flourishing economy. He is determined to crush separatism in Chechnya or anywhere else within Russia's borders. But first and foremost, he wants to end a decade of deep Russian despair. These are dramatic and ambitious goals but they are not new. Since Peter the Great, Russia's leaders have come to power dreaming of sweeping reforms. Most have ended up disappointed, thwarted by the country's unwieldiness and its bureaucrats' subtle sabotage. Despite Putin's refusal to offer explicit policies...
...pulled their countries out of chaos and catastrophe--neither of them Yeltsin. One was Charles de Gaulle, who created a solid, centralized state in France (and quickly pulled his country out of a colonial war in Algeria, a conflict that is often compared with that in Chechnya); the other was Ludwig Erhard, architect of West Germany's postwar economic revival. Putin sees obvious parallels with France of the 1950s and Germany of the late...
...anyway, and what are his plans for Russia - remain unanswered. Putin ran the campaign that George W. Bush could only dream about, saying little and revealing even less about how he will govern, which has allowed the West to confidently label him a reformer (and politely ignore that whole Chechnya thing) while at the same time let Russians believe he's there to impose order and restore the Russian state. Both views could be right; now, of course, we get to see if they...
Inside a cramped apartment on Moscow's eastern edge, Lyudmila Babitskaya never moves far from the television or telephone. For more than a month, she has been waiting to learn the fate of her husband Andrei Babitsky, a U.S.-funded Radio Liberty reporter who disappeared in Chechnya. "It started as a nightmare," she says of her vigil, "but it's turning into a horror story...
Detained by Russian soldiers as he left the ruins of Grozny on Jan. 16, Babitsky, who had broadcast hard-hitting reports about Russian casualties and brutalities in Chechnya, was held incommunicado for 12 days. Later his wife learned he had been in a prison where the Russians claim to "filter" terrorists from civilians--using torture, according to human-rights groups. On Feb. 3 the Russians suddenly made a deal with the Chechens to swap Babitsky for two Russian POWs. The outrage was immediate. "What kind of state arrests a journalist and then uses him in a POW swap?" asks Radio...