Word: russian
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...time, and you can get a sense of the pressure and fear that have tightened their grip on Moscow. The city is still traumatized by the apartment-house bombings that killed 226 last September and a pair of bombings in other cities that killed 81. At the time, Russian officials pinned those attacks on Chechen separatists--and used the explosions as justification for a bloody war that is still under way. But no one responsible for the Moscow bombings was ever caught. The latest attack may also go unsolved. Police arrested a couple of men shortly after the bombs went...
...bombings have played an important role in Russian politics. Last fall's barrage triggered the most dramatic political changes in Russia since 1991. The attacks--and the war they engendered--thrust then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin into a role of unexpected prominence and eventually into the presidency of Russia. That chain of events has also provided rich ground for a whole crop of conspiracy theories: that the bombs were planted by ex-KGB goons trying to push Putin into power, for instance. Some Muscovites and many liberal Russians are worried that the Pushka killings will become a precursor...
...more civil rights. Throughout the post-Soviet reform period, Moscow's city government has been enforcing Soviet-era rules that require visitors to register with the police. Russia's Constitutional Court, the nation's highest legal authority, has repeatedly held that these rules violate the rights granted by the Russian constitution. But constitutional debate in Russia is shaped more often by shrapnel than by legal doctrine. Putin's anti-Chechen rhetoric often seems a calculated reminder that a country at war should hardly hope for enlargement of civil rights...
...some quarters, however, the bombs are upping pressure for a negotiated solution. Boris Berezovsky, a Russian tycoon who has become staunchly anti-Putin, captured that sentiment when he told TIME recently, "You can't defeat terrorism unless you have talks ...Are we waiting for a nuclear plant to explode to make us come to our senses?" Putin's view is that the only language the Chechens understand is violence. That is how he intends to talk to them. The worry in Moscow last week was that the Chechens have begun to talk back...
...Russian authorities report that the Kursk represents no nuclear danger to the region - its reactors were shut down, and it wasn't carrying nuclear weapons. But even if it is rescued, that won't make Scandinavia a whole lot safer from the risk of nuclear disaster in the Murmansk region, where a full fifth of the world's nuclear reactors and fuel are concentrated, often aboard decrepit vessels that don't exactly inspire confidence. After all, one came close to meltdown in 1995 when an unpaid bill prompted a utility company to shut down its port electricity supply, disabling...