Pskov

Pskov, March 13, Interfax - Participants in the procession with the cross that has marched from Moscow through St. Petersburg to Pskov have installed on Tuesday a reverence cross at the Dno railway station near Pskov, where the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II abdicated from the throne in 1917.

There were many children among those who carried the cross. As the St. Andrew’s Flag Foundation has informed Interfax, some icons of the holy Czar Nicholas II carried by the procession exuded myrrh.

After the installation of the cross, the procession marched on to Pskov, where Archbishop Yevsevy of Pskov and Velikiye Luki led the clergy, monastic and the faithful in a thanksgiving said at the Chapel of the Royal Passion-Bearers.

The procession began and ended at the Church of Our Lady of Kazan at Kolomenskoye in Moscow where the Icon of Our Lady the Powerful had been found. On March 15, the Divine Liturgy at the Church of Our Lady of Kazan will be celebrated by Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow and All Russia.

There will be a national procession with the cross to march from the Church-on-the-Blood in Yekaterinburg on Thursday. The Icon of Our Lady the Powerful will be taken to many churches and monasteries in the diocese and will be sent to Kursk in mid-April. In mid-June, on the eve of the commemoration day of the holy royal martyrs, the icon will be brought back to Yekaterinburg.

This year will mark the 90th anniversary of the emperor Nicholas II’s abdication and the 90th anniversary of the finding of the Icon of Our Lady the Powerful.

Here is a not an accurate and biased article with some stereotypes of any foreigner from Western Europe, but we publish it since it covers the same problem we have been writing for so many.

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Thousands of Russians may have been poisoned by bootleg alcohol containing medical disinfectant causing drinkers' skin to turn yellow before they fall dangerously ill or die.

Pskov is the end of the line. I got off the Moscow overnight express and the earth started to buckle in front of me.

On the Pskov express I had played chess with a couple of Russians, the vodka bottles had come out, and soon every move of a pawn was celebrated with a toast.

If you're interested, I was about to win when the Russian bloke nicked my queen - anyway, I had had enough to drink to kill a small horse.

There is something about the light - or the lack of it - that eats the soul in Russia, that makes you drink. The dark days in winter, the grimness of ordinary life. They say one in six Russians is an alcoholic.

That is why President Putin, the former KGB man, is something of a puritan - at least in public.

He has brought in a series of laws, tripling the price of vodka and threatening dire penalties if people drink black market moonshine, which they call samogon.

And that is, of course, what everybody who can't afford shop-bought vodka does.

They called it the yellow death. It started in the summer when dozens of people turned up in casualty, a vile shade of yellow.

The dozens turned to hundreds, then a thousand. The better cases recovered, but will die long before their time.

The worst cases? Natasha is not yet 30, she's got a seven-year-old boy called Maxim and she has less than a year to live.

Her whole body has gone yellow - an instantly recognisable feature of toxic hepatitis.

Something has destroyed her liver and now all the natural toxins in the body are stacking up.

Her own body is poisoning her and there is nothing medicine - or at least nothing state medicine in Russia - can do about it.

Natasha and everyone else in the hospital corridors had bought samogon, moonshine, as usual - but something had been added to it.

Clear liquid

In Pskov, the authorities have tracked more than 1,000 poisonings with 120 dead.
Across Russia as a whole, officials have not counted, but some estimate 10,000 poison cases and 1,000 dead.

So who is responsible for this mass poisoning? I had gone to Pskov to try to get to the bottom of the yellow death.

We made friends with a gentlemanly Russian, Alexei, who was also an alcoholic, gave him a secret camera bag and sent him off to buy the samogon moonshine.

The plan was that we would then get it tested and analysed to see what the problem was. He bought the stuff for 20 roubles ($0.80, £0.40), a clear liquid in an old Coke bottle. I had a quick sniff.

The bouquet - rocket fuel with a touch of boot polish. And a quick gulp.

In the film Flash Gordon, the heroine is given a slug of bright green alcohol so that she can bear to sleep with Emperor Ming The Merciless. It tasted something like that.

We filmed the local cops going round busting all the little people, the street traders in samogon.

The local chief of police in Pskov, Gen Sergei Matveyev - a plump bureaucrat with a fatter gold watch - was not keen to tell me what was the most likely source of the poison.

Not many in authority give much of a damn about the nameless wretches of the earth: winos, moral degenerates.

The sense that many of the yellow people were ordinary Russians who had been poisoned through no great fault of their own seemed to be missing.

Medical disinfectant

A doctor told me that the most likely cause was something which had been added to the moonshine - polyhexamethylene biguanide hydrochloride.

And that stuff had got on the market as a medical disinfectant, Extrasept. It was 95% pure alcohol and tax exempt - making it cheaper than moonshine.

Dodgy traders had mixed the cheaper Extrasept with the home-made samogon - and made a killing.

It was only once I had learnt about polyhexo that I got seriously worried about the samogon I had drunk. It might have been contaminated too. Had I poisoned myself? Was I going to turn yellow, too?

We set off from Pskov to St Petersburg, to the Institute of Toxicology. They had been feeding Extrasept to rats. The results were inconclusive. I brought along a little bottle of the stuff I had drunk. They tested it and they found no polyhexo, so I was clean.

The Extrasept factory was a vast sprawling mess in Alexandrov - a town associated with Ivan the Terrible.

The technical director said there was nothing wrong with his product - and he even drank some to prove it. I asked him: "You're not afraid of turning yellow, are you?".

Later, when we got back to London, we had Extrasept tested on human liver cells - and it killed every single one.

Pskov, Russia, March 1 (NNN-BELTA) Belarus and Russia are drafting an inter-governmental agreement on mutual supplies of military products in wartime, the deputy chairman of the Russian-Belarusian inter-governmental commission for military-technical co-operation, Vladimir Drozhzhov, stated Tuesday at a seminar of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Belarus-Russia Union State in Pskov, northwest Russia.

According to him, the agreement will be drafted on the initiative of the Belarusian side. The document has already been co-ordinated in the Russian Federation and has been submitted for consideration of the government of the Republic of Belarus. “The necessity to conclude the agreement arose during the joint command-headquarters game played by the defense ministries of Belarus and Russia,” Drozhzhov said.

At present the level of integration between the two states in the military-technical field is rather high. Belarusian companies are involved in executing the Russian state defence orders.

According to Drozhzhov, the current Belarusian-Russian agreement of 1994 on mutual supplies of military component parts and equipment has become outdated.

“That is why we have drafted a corresponding agreement on inter-action in designing, exploiting, repairing, modernizing and destroying military equipment. The agreement is of a multi-sided format bearing in mind the fact that it will be signed by all members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO),”, he said.

According to him, the document has already been considered by all CSTO countries and will be included in the agenda of the meeting of the interstate commission for military-economic cooperation, scheduled for March this year in Moscow.

Meanwhile, Belarus has suggested to Russia that a Union State programme on designing future weapons and materials covering the 2008-2010 period should be worked out. The statement was made by Sergei Turbin, head of the defence support agency of the State Defence Industries Committee of Belarus, at the Belarusian-Russian parliamentary seminar on military affairs in Pskov on Wednesday.

He said Belarus and Russia were working hard to build up the existing legal base of the military and technical cooperation. In particular, a new agreement was being developed to replace and expand clauses of the 1994 treaty on mutual supplies of military hardware components.

“Laws of Belarus and Russia allow supplying components only to produce military products. The option is not available for repairs, modernization and other kinds of work,” explained Turbin.

Therefore, it was decided to work out a new Belarusian-Russian agreement on cooperation for the design, exploitation, repair and modernization, extension of service life and utilization of military products.

According to the representative of the State Defence Industries Committee of Belarus, the Belarusian side is revising a draft bilateral agreement, which regulates the supply of military products in a period of threat and wartime.

“The problem is when the military and political tensions are escalating and the military threat is on the rise, a state’s demand for arms, materials and other defence products soars. We used a war game training plan to prepare a list of such products,” he said.

“Certain problem aspects have been unearthed. For example, the Russian Federation does not manufacture certain products, as several assembling lines have been put in dead storage.” Turbin said next week the Belarusian government would complete revising the agreement.

Regulations have been developed to fulfil the agreement: it has been defined who compiles lists of defensive products each side needs in a period of threat, who is contacted for adjusting these lists, how these demands meet the production capacity of defence industries, what decisions need to be taken if these or those products are not manufactured and some other aspects, added Turbin.

In addition, the problem of providing Belarusian defence industries with military standards of Russia is being resolved. “These military standards are not supposed to leave the country of origin. It was decided to handle the problem within the CSTO framework,” he added.

“A session of the interstate military and economic cooperation commission took place in Bishkek to consider the development of regulations concerning the provision of CSTO member-states with military standards of Russia. It was decided that Russia together with Belarus would develop a simplified procedure for supplying defence industries fulfilling the CSTO’s defence contracts with Russia’s military standards.”

By Denis Pinchuk

ST PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) - Regional polls in Russia next Sunday may be a blueprint for nationwide elections in the coming 18 months. If they are, the Kremlin's harshest critics will be watching the national votes from the sidelines.

The March 11 elections for local legislatures in 14 of Russia's nearly 90 regions have seen an unusually high number of parties -- most of them Kremlin critics -- barred from taking part on technical grounds.

Those left out accuse the Kremlin of trying to purge Russian politics of its most awkward opponents in preparation for a parliamentary vote in December and, most importantly, a presidential poll in 2008.

President Vladimir Putin is to step down after that vote and analysts say Kremlin political managers want no surprises as they try to engineer a smooth handover of power to a favoured successor, whom Putin has yet to name.

In Russia's second city of St Petersburg, local observers said the liberal Yabloko party was set to win between five and 10 percent of the vote before election officials disqualified it on a technicality.

"All independent players in (the Kremlin's political) system must be destroyed and Yabloko is one of the those independent forces which is not controlled by the Kremlin," Mikhail Amosov, a senior Yabloko official in the city, told Reuters.

He said the Kremlin plan was to mould a new system dominated by United Russia and Fair Russia, two faithfully pro-Kremlin parties that never criticise the president.

The parties that have been disqualified from the regional votes do not have strong nationwide support in a country where most voters back Putin and his allies.

Nevertheless, their exclusion at the beginning of a vital election cycle has revived worries over whether Putin is really committed to a democratic handover of power.

"Much that will take place this December in the Duma (parliamentary) elections and in the presidential elections is taking place at the moment in St Petersburg," analyst Stanislav Belkovsky told the Ekho St Petersburg radio station.

FAIR ELECTIONS?

A spokesman for the Kremlin declined to comment on the regional elections. Putin has though, said in the past that Russian elections are free and fair.

Election officials deny any political motive and say the parties were disqualified because they failed to comply with election rules.

Yabloko's exclusion has provoked a storm of outrage in St Petersburg, Putin's hometown which is also a stronghold for the small but vocal liberal opposition.

Yabloko's problems began when the party submitted petitions showing support for its participation in the vote.

The city's election commission said the proportion of invalid signatures was over the threshold of 10 percent. An appeal was rejected.

Elsewhere, the Communist Party was denied registration in the Caucasus region of Dagestan and the Siberian region of Tyumen but managed to overturn the decisions.

The pro-business Union of Right Forces overturned a decision to bar it from elections in Samara but was refused registration in the Vologda, Pskov, Dagestan and Tyumen regions.

New, more demanding election rules adopted by the pro-Kremlin majority in Russia's parliament are part of the reason for the problems.

Parties with fewer than 50,000 members are barred and anyone wanting to take part in an election has to submit a large bond or thousands of signatures -- all rules which smaller opposition groups say discriminate against them.

Supporters of the new rules say they were needed to weed out "one-day parties" and encourage the emergence of durable political groups that will bring stability.

The victims of the new rules disagree.

"They allow the Kremlin to make a selection: who can take part in the country's political life and who can't," said Vladimir Ryzhkov, whose opposition Republican Party has been ordered to close because it does not meet the membership rules.

(Additional reporting by Guy Faulconbridge, Oleg Shchedrov and Christian Lowe in Moscow)

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