Irina Glushchenko

  • Crisis-hit Russians look to the stars

    Crisis-hit Russians look to the starsMOSCOW — Suddenly, the Russian capital has been overrun by rabbits. You can find them in the markets, on the newsstands and in the toyshops. The reason? In Chinese astrology, 1999 is

  • Russian authorities fail AIDS test

    MOSCOW — When Russian President Boris Yeltsin in late December refused to sign this country's first-ever AIDS legislation into effect, the broad response among health workers and human rights activists was one of relief.

  • Women in Russia: what the research shows

    MOSCOW — To know their conditions of life are bad and getting worse, women in today's Russia do not need graphs, maps or statistical tables. Nevertheless, the newspaper Segodnya performed a useful service recently

  • Picket keeps heat on Russian polluters

    MOSCOW — After more than five weeks, a picket placed by environmentalists on one of Russia's worst industrial polluters came to an end on August 7. Defying harassment from local authorities, the protesters outside the

  • Russia's environmental movement falls on hard times

    MOSCOW — If Russia's economic crisis has brought any benefit, it has been to small animals. During the past two years there have been more hares in the forests, and more mice in the fields. In Siberian rivers, there are

  • Chernobyl: problems worse than imagined

    MOSCOW — Every spring since the Chernobyl catastrophe in April 1986, the Russian press has returned to history's worst nuclear disaster. In the first years, the articles focused on the heroism of the

  • Yeltsin's environment adviser quits

    MOSCOW — In the final days of 1993, Professor Alexei Yablokov resigned as Russian President Boris Yeltsin's personal adviser on environmental matters. "I have resigned of my own will", the famed biologist told the paper

  • Russia: Alarming rise in infectious diseases

    MOSCOW — Not so long ago, all that most Russians knew of serious infectious diseases was what they read in the classics of their national literature. After surviving a bout of typhus, Tolstoy's heroine Anna Karenina had

  • Moscow authorities spur racism

    MOSCOW — In the weeks after Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party polled strongly in the Russian parliamentary elections, a phrase constantly on the lips of government supporters was "the threat of fascism". On

  • Liberal reforms and Russian godfathers

    MOSCOW — Russia's capital, it was reported recently, has now entered a select group of world centres. For anyone not content with a bread-and-potatoes standard of living, Moscow has become one of the

  • Chernobyl: the problems won't go away

    MOSCOW — "I'm standing before a sign: Construction Administration of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The name of this modest little town is to be transferred to one of the giants of nuclear power generation ... The

  • The return of the Cossacks

    MOSCOW — Late at night in a town in southern Russia, two youths are breaking into a car. Suddenly they are disturbed. They take to their heels, but are run down; they gasp with fear, because the squad of men in peaked