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New publisher of fireplace mantels modern The Moscow Times
Ekaterina Son will be appointed as new publisher of The Moscow Times as of September 1, 2008. Ekaterina runs Smart Money - the Russian-language business publication of the Independent Media Sanoma Magazines business editions portfolio.
Maxine Maters will be leaving the newspaper after four years of work. Maxine has agreed to stay on as a consultant until the end of 2008.
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Business: RenCap Cuts RTS '08 Target to 2,350
Renaissance Capital on la modern auctions Monday slashed its year-end forecast for the benchmark RTS Index from 3,000 to 2,350 and increased its equity risk premium for the country from 4 percent to 5.5 percent in a sign of continued investor jitters.
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Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Updated at 06 August 2008 22:07 Moscow Time.
The Moscow Times » Issue 3961 » Frontpage Top
Solzhenitsyn's Troubled Prophetic Mission
07 August 2008Alexander Solzhenitsyn, viewed as a political figure, was very much in the Russian conservative tradition -- a modern version of Dostoevsky. Like the great 19th-century writer, Solzhenitsyn despised socialism and yet had no use for Western culture with its stress on secularism, freedom and legality.
I recall very well the commencement address that he delivered 30 years ago at Harvard University. The audience of students and their families, aware of Solzhenitsyn's anti-communism, expected a warm tribute to the modern chinese music food and fashion West -- and especially to the United States, which had granted him asylum. Instead, they were treated to a typical Russian conservative critique of Western civilization for being too legalistic and too committed to freedom, which resulted in the "weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer modern glass cups and stronger." At the bottom of this censure lay a wholesale rejection of the course of Western history since the Renaissance.
Solzhenitsyn blamed the evils of Soviet communism on the West. He rightly stressed the European origins of Marxism, but he never asked himself why Marxism in other European countries led modern malice not to the gulag but to the welfare state. He reacted with white fury to modern technology in healthcare any suggestion that the roots of Leninism and Stalinism could be found in Russia's past. His knowledge of Russian history was very superficial and laced with a romantic sentimentalism. While accusing the West of imperialism, he seemed quite unaware of the extraordinary expansion of his own country into regions inhabited by non-Russians. He also denied that Imperial Russia practiced censorship or condemned political prisoners to hard labor,
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which, of course, was absurd.
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In some of his historical writings, there are strong hints of anti-Semitism, a recordio discs modern common vice of writers of the conservative-nationalist persuasion in Russia. In his 1976 book, "Lenin in Zurich," Solzhenitsyn depicts Helphand-Parvus as a slimy character who tries to persuade Lenin to return to Russia to start a revolution. In "August 1914," published in its expanded form in 1984, he explains the assassination of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin by Dmitry Bogrov, a thoroughly assimilated Jew, on the alleged grounds that Stolypin's plans for a better Russia promised nothing good for the Jews. Fortunately, in his last book published in 2003, "Two Hundred Years Together," an ambitious history of Jews in Russia, Solzhenitsyn unequivocally exonerated the Jewish people of responsibility for the Russian Revolution.
It is difficult to envisage what kind of a Russia Solzhenitsyn wanted. He was not unhappy about Russia's loss of its imperial possessions, yet he did not favor a state based on law and democracy. He disliked what greek mythology in modern literature he saw after his return to Russia in 1994, during Boris Yeltsin's rule, but, strangely enough, he came to terms with then-President Vladimir Putin and his restrictions on both democracy and the free market. Although Solzhenitsyn vehemently rejected communism, in many ways he retained a Soviet mind-set. Anyone who disagreed with him was not merely wrong but evil. He was constitutionally incapable of tolerating dissent.
His comments on current events were sometimes bizarre. In 1999, he condemned the NATO bombing of Serbia in defense of Albanian Kosovo, action which he described as following the "law of the jungle: He who is mighty is completely right." He went so far as to assert that there was "no difference in the behavior of NATO and of Hitler." Yet he did not ask himself whether the Albanians, persecuted by the more mighty Serbs, did not have the right on their side. Nor did he compare NATO's actions in Kosovo to those of Putin in Chechnya, where modern language oral past paper exam the Russian military not only bombed a population that sought independence, but destroyed the region's capital, Grozny -- a city that was part of the Russian Federation.
Solzhenitsyn's assumption that he would become a prophet upon his return to Russia did not play well with the public. My impression is that he was widely considered a relic of the past. For this reason, his television program, "A Meeting with Solzhenitsyn," attracted so small of an audience that it had to be canceled. His October 1994 speech to the State Duma was tepidly received, as was his ambitious historical novel, "The Red Wheel."
When all is said and done, Solzhenitsyn will be remembered primarily for his remarkably courageous resistance to and criticism of the Soviet Union. Although many commentators claim that he was the first to alert the world to the horrors of the gulag, this is not true; there were quite a few books on this subject before the publication of his "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and "The Gulag Archipelago." Nonetheless, it is correct to say that Solzhenitsyn's works were the first to be issued from the Soviet Union and, in the case of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," the first to be published in the Soviet Union. The effect of these works was immense both in the Soviet Union and abroad, helping to discredit morally the communist regime among those who still entertained illusions about it. In this manner, Solzhenitsyn contributed to the Soviet Union's ultimate collapse.
No one can deprive Solzhenitsyn of this honor. But when it comes to the recommendations he made to his compatriots, many doubts remain. Russians obviously have little in common with the Oriental nations; by race, religion and high culture, they belong to the West. Therefore, when Solzhenitsyn rejects Western values as inapplicable to his country, he leaves it in a cultural limbo -- it belongs d20 modern classes nowhere and only to itself. This is a recipe for isolation, and isolation breeds aggressiveness.
Richard Pipes is professor of history, emeritus at Harvard University and author, most recently, of "Russian Conservatism and Its Critics," which has just been published in Russian translation.
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– compared to nearly 3,000 for Mt. Everest. Though 66 climbers had died on K2 as of last year, no more than six had been lost in a single event, according to Explorersweb.com.
"I think there were some tactical modern stencila errors made, but it wasn't the tactics that killed them," says US climbing veteran Chris Warner, who led a successful expedition to K2 last year – among the latest of 140 career expeditions. "You can point and say: 'They got to the summit at 8 o'clock [in the dark].' That was a mistake, but it wasn't what killed them. You can say 'those people on oxygen probably ran out of oxygen.... But that's not what killed them. What killed them was the ice fall."
Two climbers, a Serb and a Pakistani, died on the summit attempt on Friday. It ran into further trouble when a European team led by Dutch climber Wilco van Rooijen found that safety ropes fixed at the narrow sideboards and modern Bottleneck had been placed wrongly.
"We were astonished," Mr. van Rooijen told the Associated Press after being rescued by a Pakistani helicopter. "We had to move it. That took, of course, many, many hours. Some turned back because they didn't trust it anymore."
Many climbers made the summit. But a large chunk of ice – part of a 500-foot-tall glacier that permanently overhangs the Bottleneck – broke off, ripping out safety ropes along the gully as well as on an even more dangerous traverse along near-vertical ice. A number of climbers were trapped overnight in the high-altitude zone with little modern media centers oxygen and temperatures of -40 degrees F.
Teamwork broke down
Daylight brought thick clouds that limited visibility and climbers couldn't find each other, van Rooijen said. Teamwork broke down. "People were running down but didn't modern fence know where to go, so a lot of people were lost on the mountain on the wrong side, wrong route, and then you have a big problem," he said. The Climbers made their way down, and some fell to their death trying, but other teams had not marked modern day aphorism the route with flags to the tents at Camp Four as they had promised.
"Some climbers did not take their responsibility and then accidents like this happen very easy," said van Rooijen.
Colleagues in close touch with those on the mountain say the Dutch team was the first to arrive at the K2 base camp this season, in mid-May, and shouldered much of the burden of route setting and logistics.
"Wilco and his team ... were putting up all the fixed ropes, and other people were climbing on it," says Mr. Sjogren, who also runs a company supplying satellite and other technical equipment to expeditions.
That created some friction among the teams, Sjogren says. On custom modern office furniture summit day, van Rooijen's group was further delayed by climbing down to aid a fallen Serbian climber, only to find that he was dead.
The result was a nighttime summit on Friday, though the weather was exceptionally bathroom modern design good.
"So it's a little hard to say: 'That was the wrong decision, you should have a [cutoff] time,' " says Sjorgen. "You really should have a cap of time. But sometimes things happen that make you change your decision.... This accident can't be put history of the modern electromagnetic speakers on the climbers, that they've been careless."
Mr. modern controls atascadero Warner agrees, saying though there were tactical errors, the determining factor was the ice fall. He knew a dozen of the climbers on the mountain this week, all of them "tremendously experienced."
Top climbers, not 'trophy hunters'
Many of the climbers on K2 this week – such as Norwegian climber Rolf Bae, who was swept away with the ice fall – were experienced polar explorers. Mr. Bae was on his second K2 climb, and in early June had completed a new route on Pakistan's Trango Tower face, spending 27 days on one of the biggest sheer rock walls in the world.
"This is the kind of climber we are talking about here," says Sjogren, noting that van Rooijen had summitted Mt. Everest before without bottled oxygen – a very rare feat. "These were not the trophy hunters, the first-time climbers. And modern mia none of them were on a commercial expedition."
But Reinhold Messner, the Italian thoroughly modern millie posters climbing legend who first tackled all 14 peaks taller than 8,000 meters (26,250 feet), was critical. "People today are booking these modern olympic facts K2 package deals almost as if they were buying some all-inclusive trip to Bangkok," he told a German television station. Reaching the summit after dark "is just pure stupidity; that is not professional."
Warner says that though the modern aero edina tragedy will raise the issue of commercial guiding, it didn't factor on K2 bidet modern this time.
"Let's just pray that they were driven to climb [K2] by some deeply held personal goal and not for some external hope to become rich and famous," adds Warner. "The world is not going to be a better place because the 280th person summited K2. But hopefully they, as an individual, are better for it."
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