Soviet Era

With its broken windows, crumbling staircases and sagging perimeter fence, the National Tuberculosis Center on tree-shaded Gorodskaya Street stands as a fitting monument to the lofty and elusive goals of the Soviet medical system. Tuberculosis is epidemic in this and other former Soviet republics, but the costly and ineffectual treatment regime bequeathed by Communist-era planners is proving more hindrance than help in efforts to check the disease's spread.

David G. Riggs, a local aviator whose flight privileges were revoked after he buzzed the Santa Monica Pier in 2008, lost his pilot's license again this week for illegally selling rides to the public in a Soviet-era military jet. The enforcement action by the Federal Aviation Administration stems from an accident in Nevada on May 18 in which an Aero Vodochody L-39 Albatros crashed in the desert, killing a veteran pilot and a passenger who had purchased...

More than a decade after political reforms opened the floodgates to critical examinations of the Soviet past, a quiet move is underway to rein in the teaching of Russian literature, underplaying dissident novels such as "Dr. Zhivago" and the chilling tales of Soviet prison camps in favor of more "patriotic" works.

Federal authorities are investigating whether a local pilot who lost his flight privileges for buzzing the Santa Monica Pier in 2008 illegally sold rides to the public in his Soviet-era military jet. The investigation of David G. Riggs stems from an accident in Nevada on May 18 in which a Czech-built L-39 Albatros crashed in the desert, killing a veteran pilot and a passenger who had purchased a ride. Authorities said Riggs was flying with a passenger in his own Aero Vodochody L-39 next to the ill-fated plane shortly before it crashed.

There are no Jews left in Lisets. An abandoned cemetery of tumbling gravestones engraved in Hebrew is the only visible reminder of the 40 Jewish families that lived in this western Ukrainian village before the Nazis deported them in the first phase of Adolf Hitler's Final Solution.

President Boris N. Yeltsin broadened the campaign against his foes in Russia's heartland Friday by ordering new legislative elections in 68 of 88 territorial subdivisions by the end of March. The decree, issued late in the day without official comment, will turn out thousands of Soviet-era lawmakers and their costly perks. Each new legislature will be limited to 50 members; many of the huge, unwieldy councils now in place have hundreds of members apiece.

Watching in Russia "Tsar" Pavel Lungin's bloody and much-discussed film stars Soviet-era rock star Pyotr Mamonov as Ivan the Terrible. Reading in India "2 States: The Story of My Marriage" Chetan Bhagat's novel tells of Krish and Ananya, deeply in love but from Indian states with different cultures, who battle conservative traditions as they try to marry in a country where arranged marriages remain the norm. Watching in Afghanistan "Dahlezha" ("Corridors")

Fire roared through a drug treatment center in Kazakhstan with a history of safety violations, killing 37 people as patients tried to escape through barred windows, officials said. The blaze broke out around 5:30 a.m. and quickly spread through the single-story Soviet-era building. About 40 people were evacuated, emergency officials said. The cause of the fire, about 120 miles north of Almaty, the country's largest city, was not immediately known. Locked doors on wards and bars on the windows blocked some potential escape routes, Emergency Situations Minister Vladimir Bozhko said.

Re "Moscow Hotel, Grand Lady of Soviet Era, Checks Out," July 24: Several of my friends and I went to Moscow in 1994, just after the Soviet Union had collapsed. We stayed at the Moscow Hotel -- everybody called it the "Moskva" -- for a week. The place was a pile, a shabby dump. We ate breakfast each day in the main dining room, a vast hall with 30-foot ceilings and curtains that looked as though they hadn't been cleaned since Nikita Khrushchev's time. The staff was surly and unresponsive.

Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Saturday he had met with Russian spies swapped in an exchange with the United States earlier this month, and promised them a bright future in Russia. "I have no doubts they will have interesting, bright lives," Putin, a former KGB agent, told reporters during a working visit to Ukraine. Ten people pleaded guilty this month to being agents for Russia while living undercover in the United States in one of the biggest spy scandals since the Cold War. They were deported to Russia, which in turn agreed to release four people imprisoned for suspected contact with Western intelligence agencies.

In a short but fiery presidential campaign speech, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Thursday called on voters to prepare for battle to protect the country's future. Government opponents and foreign influences are threatening to weaken Russia, Putin told tens of thousands of people at a rally in Moscow held on Defender of the Fatherland Day, a national holiday known as Red Army Day during the Soviet era. "We won't allow anybody to interfere with our internal affairs and we won't allow anybody to impose his will on us because we have a will of our own!"

Remember perestroika? It's back — in an exhibition of political poster art. "Deconstructing Perestroika: Soviet Ideology and its Discontents," at the Craft and Folk Art Museum through May 6, offers 24 original versions of posters neatly lined up on walls. But the hard-hitting images are unruly blasts from the Soviet past. Mostly made from 1987 to 1991, they reflect the period when Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring)

Molotov's Magic Lantern Travels in Russian History Rachel Polonsky Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 390 pp. $28 To say that Rachel Polonsky is a lifelong Russophile probably still understates the level of her engagement with the country that has so captured her imagination, heart and soul. This British journalist has written about its culture and experienced its realities, first when it was synonymous with the Soviet behemoth and then in the two decades of its more recent transformation.

The more than 300-year-old Torah survived the Holocaust, was later rescued from a deserted Jewish temple in Prague and eventually wound up at a Northridge synagogue. On Sunday, Temple Ahavat Shalom will hold a ceremony to mark the beginning of its restoration. Because of its fragile state, and its age ? scrolls this old are a rarity in the United States, scribes say ? the Torah is exhibited during holidays and services but is seldom used for learning. Temple Ahavat will begin restoring the Scriptures so they can be fully utilized.

Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Saturday he had met with Russian spies swapped in an exchange with the United States earlier this month, and promised them a bright future in Russia. "I have no doubts they will have interesting, bright lives," Putin, a former KGB agent, told reporters during a working visit to Ukraine. Ten people pleaded guilty this month to being agents for Russia while living undercover in the United States in one of the biggest spy scandals since the Cold War. They were deported to Russia, which in turn agreed to release four people imprisoned for suspected contact with Western intelligence agencies.

Russia's most feared counterintelligence service took on even wider powers under a law approved Friday in parliament, and critics warned that the country was sliding back toward Soviet-era repressions. The FSB, a modern-day successor to the Soviet KGB, will now have the authority to issue warnings to people who have broken no laws but are viewed as potential criminals. Rights monitors have criticized the law as a throwback to the times when Russians lived in fear of state persecution for appearing ideologically objectionable.

Three decades ago, the Yasnogorsk Machine-Building Factory stamped out thousands of pounds of steel and iron into parts for wagons, pumps and locomotives for Russia's mining industry. Now two-thirds of its stamping and welding machines have been shut down. The old Soviet-era equipment is rusting, and fewer than 280 employees clock in every day -- from a peak of 7,000. The factory that had kept this town alive since the days of the czar is on its last breath, the victim of a global recession that has shaken Russia to the core.

In front of the barbed-wire fence and iron gate of Buchenwald concentration camp stands a refurbished bear house, part of what once was the Buchenwald Zoological Garden for Nazi guards and their children in World War II. In the forest behind the wind-swept camp, temporary crosses and stones mark mass graves for thousands of inmates who died in Buchenwald after the war, when Soviet occupation forces held prisoners there.

A pilot and movie producer who startled beachgoers by buzzing the Santa Monica Pier in a Soviet-era military jet was convicted Thursday of recklessly operating an aircraft. A Los Angeles County Superior Court jury found that David G. Riggs, 48, violated a rarely used section of the state public utilities code designed to protect life and property from careless and reckless pilots. Judge Harold Cherness is scheduled to sentence Riggs on Monday. The misdemeanor charge carries a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

The plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski on Saturday gutted a nation's leadership and silenced some of the most potent human symbols of its tragic and tumultuous history. It was, in a sense, a nation colliding with its past: The aircraft ran aground on a patch of earth that has symbolized the Soviet-era repressions that shaped much of the 20th century, near the remote Russian forest glade called Katyn where thousands of Polish prisoners of war were killed and dumped in unmarked graves by Soviet secret police in 1940.