Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (15850)	1/25/2000 9:52:00 PM
From: goldsnow	Respond to of 17770

Well, Russians had a control of Kabul too... Russian media criticism of the war is rising as casualty figures are soaring, often faster than the government admits. Russian news agency Interfax, which previously reported only official casualty figures, reported that 1,152 Russian soldiers have been killed and 3,246 wounded. Russian media criticism of the war is rising as casualty figures are soaring, often faster than the government admits. Russian news agency Interfax, which previously reported only official casualty figures, reported that 1,152 Russian soldiers have been killed and 3,246 wounded. The Interfax report was based on unnamed sources. Russian television station NTV said casualty figures could be 10 times as high as government figures. quote.bloomberg.com

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (15850)	1/26/2000 6:12:00 PM
From: goldsnow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Gus, your teachers remember you all right, yes?..So when you are Belgium President I plan to visit...You accept foreign contributions from reputable donors, right? <gg> Putin's Shadowy Past When Vladimir Putin became Russia's acting president on December 31 last year, the question on just about everyone's lips was: Who is he? A spy turned successful politician was as much as anyone could come up with. Now nearly one month later and two months from the presidential election he is slated to win, only a little more is known about the 47-year-old's past in his native Saint Petersburg. Ask his teachers. Nobody remembers much of him. "You always remember the rascals and the stars. Putin was neither, he was discreet and retiring," says Tamara Stelmahkova, a history teacher at Secondary School number 281 where the young Putin was a pupil. His university teachers have even thinner memories of their new leader. Putin seems to have glided through the prestigious Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) law faculty without leaving a trace. He got his degree in 1975 and with it, a job in a Russian secret service department, then part of the KGB. Gus, your teachers remember you well, right? Exactly what his role was in the KGB in those first years as a youthful agent remains something of a mystery. What has emerged is that the KGB sent him to Germany after a few years. He was to stay there until the end of the 1980s. Back in Russia and still with the KGB, he was appointed rector of Leningrad university, a post which allowed him to keep a discreet eye out for faculty dissidents and to recruit KGB agents, according to Stanislav Lunev, a former army colonel who was employed at the time by the military secret service, a rival to the KGB. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. Putin lost no time, angling a key post for himself in the Saint Petersburg town hall. The former KGB agent served as the town's head of external relations, alongside the liberal and popular mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. It was a post his years abroad had qualified him for. The early years in Germany had given him insider knowledge into how to conduct foreign affairs. Under Putin, the contracts began to pile up. "Saint Petersburg owes most of its foreign investment during that period to Vladimir Putin," says Vladimir Churov, Putin's former deputy and now the head of external relations for the city. Putin had become the first stop for anyone wanting to do business in Saint Petersburg. Sobchak promoted him to the post of first deputy in 1994. According to one former colleague, real power then lay in Putin's, not Sobchak's, hands. "Sobchak was just window-dressing. Putin was omnipresent, he held the reins of the place," says one ex-colleague who identified himself only as Alexei. He was, Alexei says, a tough taskmaster. "Discipline in his department was very hard. He ruled those he worked with with an iron rod," he says. "Putin knew how to be hard, but just to those below him, and how to be obedient and absolutely necessary to his superiors," Alexei remembers. Churov remembers things slightly differently. "Putin was the sort of boss who gave those under him an enormous amount of independence," he says. Sobchak was ousted in municipal elections in 1996. His would-be successor Vladimir Yakovlev approached Putin with the invitation to join his electoral campaign. Putin had, after all, good contacts with just about everyone. But Putin by then had his eye on other horizons. He went to the capital, just as former Russian deputy premier Anatoly Chubais had done before him. The rest -- a meteoric rise that took him through head of the Federal Security Service, to prime minister (August 1999) and then acting president upon Boris Yeltsin's retirement last month -- is history. ((c) 2000 Agence France Presse) russiatoday.com