After a heated debate that seemed to exemplify Russia's post-Communist identity crisis, the Russian parliament last week refused to approve the national anthem, flag and emblem proposed by President Yeltsin. All the insignia proposed by Yeltsin -- the white-blue-and-red striped flag, the two-headed eagle and... MORE

General Aleksandr Lebed is said to be thinking of standing for the post of governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai, which comes up for election this year. (NTV, January 25) Since losing his Security Council post, Lebed has declined to run for public office, insisting that an... MORE

Kommersant-daily has published what it says are highlights of the draft text prepared for President Yeltsin's annual "state of the nation" address, due for delivery to the Russian parliament at the end of February. (Kommersant-daily, January 21) According to the newspaper, "numerous passages" in the... MORE

Saratov oblast on the Volga, which last year became the first Russian region to legalize the free sale of agricultural land, has other innovations up its sleeve. Governor Dmitry Ayatskov told NTV on December 24 that the oblast intends to abolish the notorious "sobering-up stations"... MORE

Russian and Japanese delegations, meeting in Moscow yesterday, signed an agreement that could bring the two countries another small step closer to the signing of a bilateral peace treaty ending World War II. The delegations, led by Russian deputy foreign minister Grigory Karasin and his... MORE

On January 20, striking workers at a phosphorus plant in Janatas in southern Kazakhstan's Zhambyl Region called on President Nursultan Nazarbaev to order an independent audit of the state-owned "Phosphorite" enterprise. The strikers say they are owed a total of $6 million in unpaid wages,... MORE

In talks with Russian president Boris Yeltsin in Moscow yesterday, Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbaev reportedly raised two major oil-related issues. Nazarbaev asked, first, that the Russian director-general of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, Vladimir Stanev, be replaced by an American representative. The CPC plans to lay... MORE

Col. Gen. Anatoly Kornukov, appointed this week as the new commander of the Russian Air Force, admitted yesterday that it was he who had given the order in 1983 to shoot down South Korean Airlines Flight KAL-707. The airliner, with 269 people aboard, was downed... MORE

Azerbaijani president Haidar Aliev announced yesterday that he has ordered the presidential commission on legal affairs to prepare and submit within three months draft laws on reforming the police, the public prosecutor's office, the bar, and the municipal administration. Aliev simultaneously ordered the commission to... MORE

At a meeting of the Russian government on January 15, chaired by First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais, the work of the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations was described as disorganized and "amateurish." The head of the government staff, Vladimir Babichev, blasted trade minister Mikhail... MORE