Estonian policymakers have presided over a robust economy over the past few years, and the country, in addition to being a frontrunner for European Union accession, is often perceived as a neo-Scandinavian country. In reality, however, it will be decades until Estonians achieve the standards... MORE

Intensifying Russian efforts to peddle arms abroad (see the Monitor, April 26), are but one part of a broader program to revitalize Russia's underfunded and increasingly decrepit defense industrial sector. And just as the Kremlin has launched plans in recent months aimed at restructuring the... MORE

Opposition to Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov's military reform plan appears also to be brewing among regional leaders. The Kremlin appeared to try to head off this not-unexpected reaction last month, when it presented the draft restructuring program to the State Council presidium and entrusted... MORE

Boris Nemtsov, who heads the Union of Right-Wing Forces (SPS) faction in the State Duma, said yesterday that SPS and Yabloko might possibly put forward a single candidate in the 2004 presidential elections and suggested that candidate could be Yabloko's leader, Grigory Yavlinsky. In an... MORE

Russia's Interior Ministry said late last week that the U.S. bureau of Interpol, the international crime fighting agency, should search for Media-Most founder Vladimir Gusinsky if he shows up on American soil and provide local police agencies there with sufficient information to detain him. The... MORE

The Communist takeover of power in Moldova has suddenly turned that European poorhouse into a beacon for international Communism's remnants. High-level delegations of Communist parties from some twenty countries converged on Chisinau on April 20-22 to attend the celebratory congress of Moldova's Party of Communists.... MORE

Chinese delegate Cai Wu, deputy chief of the Communist Party Central Committee's international relations department, in his address recycled the Chinese comrades' familiar thesis about "Leninism as the theory of socialist construction in backward countries." Moldova's Communists, for their part, seem more interested in capitalizing... MORE

The State Duma yesterday passed a bill in first reading which would require any media company registered in Russia to be less than 50-percent owned by foreign companies or citizens. The document was drafted during the battle for control over NTV, the flagship channel of... MORE

On April 25, officers of the Main Military Prosecutor's office searched the apartment of Valery Shiryaev, deputy general director of the biweekly newspaper Novaya Gazeta, in Moscow. Yesterday (April 26), an unnamed spokesman for that office was quoted as saying that the search was carried... MORE

On April 25, a building belonging to the Chechen republic's anti-organized crime unit (an elite unit of the Chechen police force that it subordinated to the federal forces) in the city of Gudermes was blown up, killing five people and wounding six. Akhmed Dakaev, head... MORE