New Russian Sci-Fi Movie Promises to be a Treat for Fans of the Genre

The new big budget Russian sci-fi movie – “Inhabited Island” (Obitaemyi Ostrov) – promises to be a treat for fans of the genre.

Russia’s most expensive movie ever – production and promotional budget is nudging $40 million (£27 million) – is due to be released across the country on January 1st 2009.

Judging by the invitation-only preview I attended this afternoon at Moscow’s Oktyabr cinema, it is going to be hit in Russia, where many of the viewers will be familiar with the Strugatsky Brothers 1968 novel on which it is based.

Written at a time when science fiction offered an acceptable way of writing about subjects that could not be broached in more political ways, “Inhabited Island” imagined a far away world, far in the future where a dreadful junta of five sadistic and scheming leaders keep a planet’s population subjugated through fear and mind control.

A joy-riding young space traveler from earth crash lands on the planet and finds his fate intimately interwoven with the planet’s.

The movie – which will be released in two parts in Russia, although possibly a shorter single version internationally – is very dark, very Russian.

Without having seen a subtitled version, even though my Russian is good enough to follow much of the dialogue, it is not fair to give here more than a first impression.

Rich in detail, splendid sets, costumes and computer graphics, the film moves at a pace that leaves little time to fully appreciate the alternative world its makers have created.

With liberal nods to Fritz Lang’s 1927 futuristic classic “Metropolis” and Ridley Scott’s 1982 “Blade Runner” (the crowded market scenes, drenching rain and heavy, dark sense of concrete and steel particularly), and the Wachowski Brother’s 1999 “The Matrix”, “Inhabited Island” is bound to create excitement well beyond the normal sci-fi fan niches.

With a world oligarchy cast in way that brings elements of Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union – not to mention the current day intrigues of the Kremlin and other ‘real’ world powers – “Inhabited Island” is subtly subversive in a way that marks it as very different from other recent Russian sci-fi blockbusters, “Day Watch” and “Night Watch”.

Producer Alexander Rodnyansky – who joined the small crowd of a dozen or so Moscow film critics and agents today, along with director Fedor Bondarchuk – has taken a big, brave punt on a film that opens at a time when the current world climate does not always seem so far from that of the imagined far away world of 2157 in “Inhabited Island”.

Unique Account of Vlasov Army Veteran Published

“The Russian Patriot – A Red Army Soldier’s Service for His Motherland and Against Bolshevism”.

A gripping wartime account of one man’s unique experience in the vast cauldron of conflict that was the Eastern Front.

Traitor or patriot? For Russian-born naturalized Australian Sigiamund Diczbalis the more than 60 years since the Second World War ended have done little to erase a question that has troubled him lifelong

A committed young Communist who joined the Red Army on the day Hitler’s Blitzkrieg tore across the Soviet Union’s borders in June 1941, Sigismund unquestioningly offered his life to the service of his motherland. Captured and thrown into a barbaric open-air prisoner of war camp by German conquerors fought for survival using all his cunning and intelligence. Fate offered him escape from certain death through service to the ‘new order’; chance made him a red partisan spy.

Ordered to infiltrate a German-run anti-partisan unit, Sigismund’s path to a new and radically different future began.

As Soviet armies turned to the offensive and swept westwards in 1944 Sigismund fled before them. Questioning Soviet orthodoxy, Sigismund’s conversion began and soon he was a committed anti-Bolshevik who joined an obscure new army – one devoted to toppling Stalin and bringing democracy to Russia.

It was all too little too late and when in the spring of 1945 Sigismund fell into the hands of Soviet spy-hunters death seemed a certainty…until fate once again played a part in giving him a new lease of life in a far away land.

Did Sigismund betray his motherland, or was his conversion to the anti-Bolshevik cause the act of a true patriot? That question is at the heart of this compelling account of one man’s tumultuous war.

Published by specialist Spellmount Books, a division of specialist British publisher The History Press, “The Russian Patriot” is the result of several years’ close collaboration between Moscow-based journalist and writer Nick Holdsworth and Brisbane, Australia-based Sigismund Diczbalis.

The two met when Nick was researching a film script about the life of General Andrei Vlasov, a former Red Army officer who founded the Russian Army of Liberation.

Working closely together via telephone, email and occasional meetings in Moscow and St Petersburg during Sigismund’s infrequent trips back to the land of his birth, they expanded and added new material to an earlier Russian language version of the memoirs.

The result is a detailed, lively and gripping read that is thought to be the first ever English-language publication of the memoirs of a rank and file member of the Russian Army of Liberation.

The book is available via Amazon, other internet booksellers and High Street bookstores in Britain, USA and Australia.

The Battle of the Somme - 92 years later

Back in Britain earlier in the month it was fascinating to see how much interest there remains in the First World War.

The 90th anniversary of the end of what was known then as the Great War was marked in Britain on 11th November with memorials that included the laying of wreaths at the Cenotaph in London with three of Britain's four surviving veterans of the conflict present.

A two minute silence was observed; I was driving to Oxford that day for a meeting with a historian at All Souls in connection with my previous posting on this blog. I pulled over into a lay-by and noticed that other drivers had done the same. Amazing.

Nearly 20 years ago I was fortunate enough to have met and become close friends with a veteran of the Great War; two years ago on the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, (July 1st 1916) I retrieved the tape recordings I had made of conversations with Joe Corcoran and wrote a feature for specialist military history magazine The Armourer.

The following is based on that and may be of interest to readers of this blog.


Memories of a Somme Veteran, story drawn from interviews with Joe Corcoran (born 1897) conducted in Coventry in April 1989. Story based on tapes of interviews recorded at the time.


SOMME – Veteran


Joe Corcoran’s voice remains clear and strong as if we were sat across from one another at his old oak table in his Coventry home today and not nearly 20 years ago.

The veteran of the Battle of the Somme was approaching the end of a long life when we met in 1989 in response to a newspaper advertisement Joe had placed seeking Great War comrades from the ‘Cameronians’ – the Scottish Rifles.

It was a long shot and one that, sadly, did not find its mark: at 91 years of age Joe was one of a fast dwindling band of Great War survivors and none of his fellow Cameronians were to be found in Coventry, his home of 70 years.

As a young reporter on the city’s evening newspaper, I spotted the ad and, sensing a story, made contact. A keen student of the history of the Great War – my own grandfather who died long before I was born was also a veteran of battles ranging from Mons through the Somme and Ypres – I yearned to speak a man who had been there.

Joe had and his crystal clear memories spilled out in the stillness of his sitting room in Holbrooks, Coventry, like the unspooling of an old film.

“When I arrived in France in January 1916 at La Bassee and was sent up to my platoon I was not made welcome. I was not a Scot and had not taken part in the earlier battles these men had,” Joe says on the tape in his distinctive native Potteries accent.

“But after the fight at the Quincy Brickstacks I became a hardened soldier and was accepted as a fellow Cameronian.”

Joe had lied about his age when he signed up as a regular soldier in 1915 and was just 18 when he arrived in France – a year younger than regulations allowed men to serve at the front. His secret was discovered but his bravery and steadfastness in battle persuaded his commanding officer to make an exception and he was allowed to stay.

As the youngest solider in his platoon he soon became a popular figure and despite the hardships of frontline trench warfare life – the rats, the lice, the lethal artillery airbursts, the casual deaths of new friends and comrades – his recollections displayed a pride, if not joy, in having served on the Western Front.

“We continued with regular battalion discipline. Stand to at dawn before cleaning up the trenches, checking for casualties and repairing any damage done in the night.

“The German artillery was perfect. Their snipers were perfect. We didn’t even have any trench mortars and no steel helmets until April 1916,” Joe recalled.

When the first Mark 1 Brodie steel helmets were brought up to the front Joe’s platoon was issued with just one. As the youngest soldier he was given the helmet, but first one of the old hands propped it on the end of a rifle and bayonet to test its efficacy.

No sooner had the helmet been raised above the trench’s parapet than a German sniper put a bullet clean through its thin, barely shrapnel-proof, steel.

“I wore that helmet for the rest of my time at the front and was the butt of continual jokes – ‘he’s had a clean hair cut’; ‘it went right through his head’,” Joe said. On the tape there is a hint of a chuckle in Joe’s voice at this point. For a man who was eventually invalided out of the army in February 1917 with shell-shock so severe that he lost the ability to speak for months and left him subject to terrifyingly vivid nightmares for the rest of his life, his capacity to retain scraps of humour from hell was remarkable.

Dark humour was a thread that ran through all of Joe’s stories, told in a matter of fact way with little that could be construed as elaboration of self-glorification. Repeated visits to Joe’s modest home – and the occasional pint or so at his community club where he was considered a true local hero – demonstrated the the consistency of his memory. Months would go by, but when the same story cropped up again the details were always the same, the memory drawn from his own private reservoir of technicolour images as fresh as the days he had witnessed them so long before.

Around Givenchy, where constant shelling and the blowing by both sides of huge mines had turned the battlefield into a moonscape, Joe once got into a dark farce typical of the chaos of trench warfare.

Sent up a front-line sap to the edge of a massive mine crater one night to harass the Germans – whose lines fronted the fringes of the other side of the crater from the British – Joe was told to keep the enemy on his toes by lobbing a few Mills bombs into the crater. The Germans would do the same in retaliation. The explosions were enough to create a racket, but nothing more serious.

“I always thought this was a waste of ammunition and one night chucked a bomb a little too high and a little too far – it landed in the German frontline,” Joe said. “They must have thought a big attack was on and it started up a terrific firefight. Coming back to our lines I was collared by Captain McDonnell who gave me a right talking to, telling me that I wasn’t running the war!”

On another occasion, by now a Number One in a three-man Lewis Gun team after scoring top marks at a machine-gunners course behind the lines at Le Touquet, Joe and one of his gun-team were sent out into No Man’s Land after relieving the Welsh Fusiliers. In the stillness of the night his comrade insisted on chatting despite Joe’s exhortations to zip it.

“Of course the Germans heard his chit-chat and sent four air-burst shells over – two on top of us and two either side. We were buried in earth and when I dug my way out I found my comrade lying there with a big piece of shrapnel sticking out of his back. I carried him back to our lines but the only question the Sergeant-Major had was what had I done with the bolt from my Lewis Gun,” Joe said.

“King’s Regulations I was told – no gun can be left behind that the enemy may make use of. There was nothing for it, I had to go back over the top to collect the bolt.”

After half an hour of so of scrabbling around in the dark Joe found his gun and got back safely, bolt in hand. Other soldiers in similar situations – rescuing comrades under fire – were awarded medals, even Victoria Crosses, Joe said without malice. His reward was to avoid being put on a charge for breaching King’s Regulations.

The clarity and lack of egoistic or self-serving statements were the hallmark of Joe’s recollections. Listening to the tapes again after so many years it is this factual, unemotional retelling of events both horrific and miraculous that is so striking.

Joe had no time for self-pity or even bitterness, although he still held strong opinions.

“Medals didn’t mean much to us then; it was survival. The conditions we lived under were terrible. The old soldiers had two enemies – the Germans and the Top Brass. Some of the orders we were given were ridiculous.”

Joe was a deeply religious young man who always carried a rosary given him by his devout Catholic aunt. Divine intervention saved his life on numerous occasions, he claimed.

He heard his name and as he was arguing with a group of soldiers who denied calling him over a shell dropped on the spot he had being occupying on the trench firing step; going over to a miraculously unscathed crucifix in the ruins of a shelled church, he avoided another blast; a spur of the moment decision to hop over a second-line trench to collect flowers from a field of poppies blooming there to decorate the grave of a friend killed bringing up rations attracted the attention of German artillery observers…the subsequent salvo missed Joe because he returned to the trench at a different spot from where he had left it.

Many veterans of combat have such stories to tell [nb Sigismund Diczbalis, with whom I worked on his Second World War memoirs "The Russian Patriot - A Red Army Soldier's Service for His Motherland and Against Bolshevism" just published by the History Press, tells of avoiding a shell burst during the Prague Uprising of May 1945, because, on a whim, he returned to a room to pick up a statue of the Virgin Mary]; Joe’s had the ring of contemporary conception, not post-war rationalisation.

Ninety years after the Somme among the handful of aged survivors of the Great War there are probably none who went through a battle that has become an icon for the terrible waste of young life.

Talking to Joe in 1989 – and on subsequent occasions up until his death in the summer of 1994 – I can only say that I was left in awe by what he went through as a lad of 18. Joe did not go over the top on July 1st, when 20,000 men died and more than 40,000 were left wounded or missing in action. He and his battalion came up through Albert and Beaumont Hamel on July 2nd, pulling the Lewis Gun along on an eight-feet long barrow mounted with bicycle wheels, passing Canadian artillery batteries and settling down in Death Valley to await their part in the action.

There had already been a lot of fighting by the time Joe went into action mid July around Mametz and High Wood.

“We were sent into Mametz Wood – two or three lines were sent in there to clear the Germans out, but nothing serious really,” Joe said with characteristic understatement.

By July 19th the fighting around High Wood was reaching a culmination and the once thick woods were now a death-strewn collection of skeletal shell-riddled stumps that had been taken and retaken four or five times.

“We of the 19th Brigade were supposed to be the last resort. On the 19th of July we went into the front lines opposite Mametz Wood. At the top of an incline sat High Wood and at the bottom there was a sunken road. We moved up and went over the top along with the Welsh Fusiliers. We went out in extended order and ran smack bang into two German machine guns using enfilade fire [firing from the sides] where one bullet can take out two or three men at a time. Enfilade fire was very unpopular.”

At this point Joe’s memories become a kaleidoscope of images: he found himself covered in mud along with his gun – “We must have had a shell under us” – but otherwise uninjured. He lost contact with his company but eventually, after dodging German artillery running and jumping from shell hole to shell hole, dropped into a hole holding 13 men and an officer from his regiment, to whom he could report.

With German shells falling all around and a fierce fight going on in and around High Wood, the officer said there was a desperate need to bring up ammunition from the sunken road behind them.

The artillery barrage was so intense that to minimise losses, the officer instructed the men to make the dash down the slope in groups of five at a time. The men did as told and began bringing up ammunition as the German shells did their dreadful work.

“We had lost seven and another five went out. We lost three out of that five. We did another run and did not lose so many that time. We had managed to bring up most of the ammo from where it had been stored in recesses of the sunken road. There were three of us left. The officer looked at us and said: ‘We had better go once more; we must do our best.’ We did a roll call back at the sunken road and it was just me and the officer,” Joe said.

“The officer looked at me and promised that if we got through this final run he would write up a report on the good job I had done. ‘You may be rewarded,’ he told me. The Germans put a curtain of fire across it and opened up with the heavy stuff. It was clear a counter-attack was coming. The officer said we may just get through the barrage during a lull. I was 18 and had a bit of running power in me; the officer was in his 30s and was lagging 10 yards behind me. Two shells dropped. One landed at the officer’s feet, so I knew I was alone. The other blew me over.”

When Joe came to he was shaking all over and his pockets had been rifled. He realised he must have been left for dead and eventually learned that he had been lying unconcious for two days. Wandering around a now silent battlefield, in the sunken road he found a corpse draped over a Lewis Gun, but from the brass buttons on the uniform knew it was not a Cameronian – which as a light infantry regiment wore black buttons. Shell-shocked and “one the point of tears” he eventually found a survivor of his regiment – from another gun team who was distraught after having lost a brother in the fight – and was sent back for a 48 hour rest after seeing a doctor.

The regiment and 19th Brigade were pulled out to be brought up to strength, such had been the casualties suffered during the battle, Joe recalled.

After a period behind the lines Joe was sent back to the front and served in France until December 1916 when another shell blast put him in hospital suffering shock so severe that he lost both his memory and ability to speak. Transferred to hospital in back home in ‘Blighty’ at the end of the month, Joe passed his 19th birthday on December 30 1916 fast asleep aboard a hospital train bound for Glasgow.

His shell-shock was so severe that doctors initially did not believe his symptoms and thought he was “swinging the lead” – as Joe put it – to avoid a return to active service. To test their theory the doctors pulled out three of his teeth without anaesthetic to see if he would scream. He did not. Joe was eventually given a medical discharge in February 1917 and although he eventually recovered both voice and memory, he remained subject withdrawn and subject to nervous episodes for many years.

Joe Corcoran became a engineering draughtsman and was involved in the early development of the Coventry car industry – working with many of the names that subsequently became famous inb the British car industry. Despite his severe shell-shock and a major stomach operation in his 40s, he outlived all of them and died in 1994 aged 96.

It was my privilege to have known Joe for the last five years of his life – during which time we became good friends. Shortly after his death I had a vivid dream in which I found him packing up boxes in the attic of his house. In the dream he turned to me and handed me a war-time searchlight, saying: ‘This is for you’. I like to think that this remarkable man’s spirit is still helping light my way.

Stalin Story – A Controversial Read

News about Stalin still has the power to ignite interest and controversy.

A story I wrote for the Sunday Telegraph that was published a few days ago has elicited great interest in Britain, Russia and around the world.

Emails that have found their way to me have cast me both as a ‘bourgeois’ anti-communist representative of the Capitalist press and the story a ‘rehash’ of Stalinist propaganda.

Fascinating stuff for what I thought was just a good read….

First a couple of links to the story from the Russian press, followed by the story itself:

http://www.newsru.com/russia/20oct2008/stalinunedali.html

http://www.russiatoday.com/features/news/32132

Stalin 'planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact'

Stalin was 'prepared to move more than a million Soviet troops to the German border to deter Hitler's aggression just before the Second World War'

By Nick Holdsworth in Moscow
Last Updated: 1:14AM BST 19 Oct 2008

Papers which were kept secret for almost 70 years show that the Soviet Union proposed sending a powerful military force in an effort to entice Britain and France into an anti-Nazi alliance.

Such an agreement could have changed the course of 20th century history, preventing Hitler's pact with Stalin which gave him free rein to go to war with Germany's other neighbours.

The offer of a military force to help contain Hitler was made by a senior Soviet military delegation at a Kremlin meeting with senior British and French officers, two weeks before war broke out in 1939.

The new documents, copies of which have been seen by The Sunday Telegraph, show the vast numbers of infantry, artillery and airborne forces which Stalin's generals said could be dispatched, if Polish objections to the Red Army crossing its territory could first be overcome.

But the British and French side - briefed by their governments to talk, but not authorised to commit to binding deals - did not respond to the Soviet offer, made on August 15, 1939. Instead, Stalin turned to Germany, signing the notorious non-aggression treaty with Hitler barely a week later.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named after the foreign secretaries of the two countries, came on August 23 - just a week before Nazi Germany attacked Poland, thereby sparking the outbreak of the war. But it would never have happened if Stalin's offer of a western alliance had been accepted, according to retired Russian foreign intelligence service Major General Lev Sotskov, who sorted the 700 pages of declassified documents.

"This was the final chance to slay the wolf, even after [British Conservative prime minister Neville] Chamberlain and the French had given up Czechoslovakia to German aggression the previous year in the Munich Agreement," said Gen Sotskov, 75.

The Soviet offer - made by war minister Marshall Klementi Voroshilov and Red Army chief of general staff Boris Shaposhnikov - would have put up to 120 infantry divisions (each with some 19,000 troops), 16 cavalry divisions, 5,000 heavy artillery pieces, 9,500 tanks and up to 5,500 fighter aircraft and bombers on Germany's borders in the event of war in the west, declassified minutes of the meeting show.

But Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, who lead the British delegation, told his Soviet counterparts that he authorised only to talk, not to make deals.

"Had the British, French and their European ally Poland, taken this offer seriously then together we could have put some 300 or more divisions into the field on two fronts against Germany - double the number Hitler had at the time," said Gen Sotskov, who joined the Soviet intelligence service in 1956. "This was a chance to save the world or at least stop the wolf in its tracks."

When asked what forces Britain itself could deploy in the west against possible Nazi aggression, Admiral Drax said there were just 16 combat ready divisions, leaving the Soviets bewildered by Britain's lack of preparation for the looming conflict.

The Soviet attempt to secure an anti-Nazi alliance involving the British and the French is well known. But the extent to which Moscow was prepared to go has never before been revealed.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, best selling author of Young Stalin and Stalin: The Court of The Red Tsar, said it was apparent there were details in the declassified documents that were not known to western historians.

"The detail of Stalin's offer underlines what is known; that the British and French may have lost a colossal opportunity in 1939 to prevent the German aggression which unleashed the Second World War. It shows that Stalin may have been more serious than we realised in offering this alliance."

Professor Donald Cameron Watt, author of How War Came - widely seen as the definitive account of the last 12 months before war began - said the details were new, but said he was sceptical about the claim that they were spelled out during the meetings.

"There was no mention of this in any of the three contemporaneous diaries, two British and one French - including that of Drax," he said. "I don't myself believe the Russians were serious."

The declassified archives - which cover the period from early 1938 until the outbreak of war in September 1939 - reveal that the Kremlin had known of the unprecedented pressure Britain and France put on Czechoslovakia to appease Hitler by surrendering the ethnic German Sudetenland region in 1938.

"At every stage of the appeasement process, from the earliest top secret meetings between the British and French, we understood exactly and in detail what was going on," Gen Sotskov said.

"It was clear that appeasement would not stop with Czechoslovakia's surrender of the Sudetenland and that neither the British nor the French would lift a finger when Hitler dismembered the rest of the country."

Stalin's sources, Gen Sotskov says, were Soviet foreign intelligence agents in Europe, but not London. "The documents do not reveal precisely who the agents were, but they were probably in Paris or Rome."

Shortly before the notorious Munich Agreement of 1938 - in which Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, effectively gave Hitler the go-ahead to annexe the Sudetenland - Czechoslovakia's President Eduard Benes was told in no uncertain terms not to invoke his country's military treaty with the Soviet Union in the face of further German aggression.

"Chamberlain knew that Czechoslovakia had been given up for lost the day he returned from Munich in September 1938 waving a piece of paper with Hitler's signature on it," Gen Sotksov said.

The top secret discussions between the Anglo-French military delegation and the Soviets in August 1939 - five months after the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia - suggest both desperation and impotence of the western powers in the face of Nazi aggression.

Poland, whose territory the vast Russian army would have had to cross to confront Germany, was firmly against such an alliance. Britain was doubtful about the efficacy of any Soviet forces because only the previous year, Stalin had purged thousands of top Red Army commanders.

The documents will be used by Russian historians to help explain and justify Stalin's controversial pact with Hitler, which remains infamous as an example of diplomatic expediency.

"It was clear that the Soviet Union stood alone and had to turn to Germany and sign a non-aggression pact to gain some time to prepare ourselves for the conflict that was clearly coming," said Gen Sotskov.

A desperate attempt by the French on August 21 to revive the talks was rebuffed, as secret Soviet-Nazi talks were already well advanced.

It was only two years later, following Hitler's Blitzkreig attack on Russia in June 1941, that the alliance with the West which Stalin had sought finally came about - by which time France, Poland and much of the rest of Europe were already under German occupation.

Rural Poverty Reduction Project in Kyrgyzstan

Kyrgyzstan Documentary Film

The work of a cost-effective and innovative European Union-funded poverty reduction project in rural Kyrgyzstan is being turned into a film by the Turin, Italy-based European Training Foundation.

My involvement, as script-writer and location assistant, recently took me to Kochkor, a small village situated high on a narrow mountain plain, where the above photos were taken.

Here are a couple of stories I wrote for the ETF some months back about the project during an earlier visit:

CHOLPON, KYRGYZSTAN – Taalaikul Sadbakasova is equally at home milking her cows or teaching a class of sometimes boisterous little girls and boys at the village kindergarten she heads.

Today she is just as comfortable running a stall at the weekly market where she sells home-produced butter, yoghurt, sour cream, kefir, milk and other dairy products.

It was not always that way. Until last year Mrs Sadbakasova, a 42 year old graduate of Bishkek’s KZHPI women’s teaching college, was content to run the Cholpon village ‘Buchur’ pre-school and use the milk from her smallholding for family needs.

A native of what was in Soviet times a rural ‘kholkoz’ collective farm in Kyrgyzstan’s mountainous south-eastern Naryn region, where the majestic Tien Shan range rises like a massive edifice that divides the small central Asian state from China, Mrs Sadbakasova was interested in her professional development as a pre-school teacher but thought little about the family farm.

Then one day a publicity campaign offering free, European Training Foundation-backed agricultural business development training caught her eye.

The project – part of a poverty reduction project using skills upgrading to help the rural poor develop small businesses to improve their living standards – was run via a local vocational training school in district centre Kochkor.

Even better, the practically-based training was delivered not a long bus ride 25 kilometres eastwards on the old silk road in Kochkor but right on her doorstep: the project trainers would come to Cholpon.

“Straight away I knew that was what I wanted and signed up without a second thought,” Mrs Sadbakasova, a slender black-haired woman said, flashing a smile that lit up her face.

No stranger to western donor-backed programmes – she has benefited from several teacher-training projects over the past few years – Mrs Sadbakasova is clearly a self-motivated and energetic woman.

Married to farmer Talantbek Busurmankulov – who she also signed up for the ETF-initiative – she has two sons of 12 and 15 years old and has long been involved in village activities. Last year with regional government financial support, she founded a women and children’s educational NGO ‘Naristekyt’ to help improve the educational programme at her kindergarten.

Post-Soviet privatisation and agricultural reforms in Kyrgyzstan had given every rural resident of a collective farm a piece of land commensurate with the size of their ‘kholkoz’ and its population.

Although Soviet central planning allowed for a complex of agronomical, veterinary and technical support for farmers, division of labour and bureaucratic structures meant few people had the knowledge or skills required to run their own farms.

Market reforms meant they could buy those skills in – but cost and a rapid exodus of the best experts to better paid jobs, other regions or countries soon meant that even the most basic knowledge of good animal husbandry, crop development and product manufacturing and marketing were lost.

“I had been longing for such a course – I’d had ideas about doing more with our farm produce but didn’t know how to go about it. This course gave me that chance – I learned such a lot there,” said Mrs Sadbakasova, who like most farmers in the region speaks only Kyrgyz.

Although she grew up and went to college in Soviet times – she graduated in 1990 – her Russian language skills have atrophied through lack of use.

“We all took such a lot from this course – particularly veterinary knowledge,” Mr Sadbakasova said as we sat talking in a kindergarten classroom, the smell of freshly baked ‘lavash’ – flat unleavened bread – wafting through from the one-story building’s kitchen as the couple of dozen three and four-year olds played outside on the first warm day of March.

“Our small farms were fine but we did not always know how to medically treat our cattle, horses and other livestock. We had no idea how to expand our businesses, to develop marketing to make knew products.”

An integral part of the modular five-month long course that piloted last year with 32 students from Cholpon divided into two groups, was the development of a business plan and provision of state bank loans of up to 20,000 Som (400 Euros).

Mrs Sadbakasova knew what she wanted to do: buy a cow so she could produce more milk for the various dairy lines she had in mind and – ultimately – move into the lucrative value-added ice-cream business.

The ETF scheme gave her the necessary know-how to manufacture dairy products on a small scale – and the contacts and backing to raise the necessary state food quality certificates and hygiene approvals.

Mother nature gave her the rest: she bought a pregnant heifer for 18,000 Som and spent the rest on top grade fodder.

The heifer gave birth to a female calf that within a year will be ready for mating and will become another source of milk.

“The first cow is already pregnant again and by the summer I should have plenty of milk and be ready to start producing ice-cream,” Mrs Sadbakasova said, her face aglow with her radiant smile.

A couple of minutes away from the kindergarten down on her family small-holding – the farmyard recently concreted to make it easier to keep clean and sanitary – Mrs Sadbakasova shows off her milking skills. No factory farming here – everything is still done by hand.

With just one more payment to go after a profitable year to repay the 20,000 Som credit she is confident she will raise the additional 100,000 (2,000 Euros) credit she needs to buy a 100 litre capacity electric powered ice-cream making machine from Bishkek.

The big capacity freezer is ready.

The 22% interest state Ail Bank now charges (up from 15% last year and a sign of the global credit crunch) does not worry her.

All that Mrs Sadbakasova needs is some warm sunshine, hungry customers and a business that promises to bring both profit and pleasure – the first local ice-cream maker in her village – will be ready for its grand opening.

KOCHKOR, KYRGYZSTAN – Bank manager Ulan Kydyraliev knows how to tackle rural poverty in this remote mountainous region four hours drive from Bishkek: give farmers small loans.

A key stakeholder in a pioneering European Training Foundation-backed poverty reduction scheme, Mr Kydyraliev, 44, understands that it is not as simple as merely throwing money at the problem.

His loans come with a catch – the farmers have to sign up to take short but intensive agricultural skills development courses that include drawing up business plans.

Taught through a novel outreach programme developed at a vocational education and training school, the five-month long courses are designed to equip small farmers to move beyond subsistence and into profit.

Teaching new veterinary techniques, optimum livestock feeding schedules, superior crop development or basic food processing and marketing techniques can bring swift and substantial benefits.

“The project helps these people improve their farming techniques and businesses,” Mr Kydyraliev, Kochor branch manager of state Ail Bank said.

“We now have very few good agricultural and veterinary specialists in this region – after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ‘kholkoz’ collective farm system many of the best left,” he said.

“We need to create a new generation of experts. We are pleased with the results – the farmers have increased their profits and we have had no defaults in repayments.”

Providing credit lines to participants in the project – launched last year in a pilot involving 32 students divided into two training groups involved in arable and livestock farming – is a safe bet, he admitted.

The students were all farmers with some experience a bank consultant helped them created tailored business plans.

The loans were small – a maximum of 20,000 Som (400 Euro) – and although no special terms were given, the 15% interest charged compares very favourably with rates of up to 32% charged by commercial banks for similar unsecured credit.

As a stakeholder in an 80,000 Euro project that involved a foreign donor, regional administration officials, village government heads, adult learners and a key regional VET school, the bank role is probably the most traditional one.

Not so that of Kochkor’s VET school No 15, lead institution for the project.

Eduarda Castel Branco, the ETF’s Mozambique-born expert responsible for the three-country poverty reduction project – which has been running since early 2007 in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan – credits it with breaking the mould.

“VET schools have a very strange mission in post-Soviet countries,” Ms Castel Branco, a fluent Russian speaker, said.

“They are more about social assistance than education. Passive not participatory, their main function to train young people according to state orders under out-dated curricula with little or nothing for the wider population.”

At a time when demand for skills-based, flexible market responsive training has probably never been greater in emerging economies such as Kyrgyzstan’s VET schools are crying out to be used as open centres for learning.

Addressing that challenge – as a way to tackling the wider issues of rural poverty – is a key component of the ETF project.

“Responding to local needs and local questions cannot be done without changes in the VET school approach too,” said Ms Castel Branco, whose work has involved her in education and training projects in countries as diverse as Russia, Jordan, Benin, Angola and Togo.

In this the ETF was fortunate in finding a VET school head with the experience, drive and attitude that was an exact fit.

Although Mr Tilemishov, 62, formally retired as head of school No. 15 last December (2007), he continues to lead the poverty reduction project.

With 18 years experience at school principal – and before that as boss of a local state freight truck repair and maintenance depot and a stint as a regional Communist party political instructor to his credit – Mr Tilemishov, who also farms a three hectare plot of land himself, brings a wealth of experience and local connections to the job.

“Until this project came along we did not think about what professional skills might be needed beyond the training we provided. We did not think about whether they would be in demand,” he admitted.

All that changed when, with central government VET agency approval, school No. 15 began working with the ETF.

A student-centred approach meant that Mr Tilemishov and his staff had to design the modular-based curriculum around the demands of the students, not the school.

So they took the lessons to the learners and provided largely practical training down on the farm for their busy students. Traditional ‘talk and chalk’ classes were ditched in favour of group seminars run as question and answer and discussion sessions.

The learning curve was as steep – if not steeper – for the VET school teachers than for the small farmers.

“We took advice from the student group and changed the study plan accordingly. That had never happened before,” Mr Tilemishov said.

The course addressed crucial issues, such as how to swiftly run a blood test on an animal to determine its health, methods for growing top quality cereal crops, effective ways to fatten up livestock or produce rich, creamy milk.

The results are impressive. Average incomes have more than doubled to 70 Euro a month.

A few dozen better educated farmers earning more money in a region with a population of 59,000 – nearly half of which are involved in agricultural – may not sound like much, but the Kochkor scheme can become an agent for change.

Peer review seminars with the graduates of the Tajik and Kazakh projects and Kyrgyzstan’s still strong system of clan and village social assistance will help spread the new techniques.

And a further 60 students will be trained this year.

“We would like to see such training groups in every village,” said Roza Adysheva, deputy head of the regional administration

“This sort of training could be organised by our own government structures; if such an approach were applied across the country it would have a major impact on the Kyrgyz economy.”

South Ossetia and Russia: Marry In Haste, Repent At Leisure

Moscow Friday August 29 2008


Russia’s future absorption of South Ossetia seems in little doubt if you watch the ‘body language’ following the Kremlin’s rapid recognition of independence of the Georgian secessionist area this week following the short and brutal war.

Take this outdoor placard that appeared this week on Ulitsa Bolshaya Gruzinskaya.
The poster, which shows intertwined South Ossetian and Russian flags
knotted togther in a flowing ribbon, carries the slogan ‘Tskhinval -
We're With You!’

Local Russians can’t fail to have noticed that the placard is situated on a street that is the main artery of Moscow’s historic Georgian quarter – the name means ‘Big Georgian Street’ and the poster is very close to Tishinskaya Ploschad (Tishinskaya Square) where a massive Georgian-Russian friendship monument, cast in bronze, is situated.

The designer of the monument is Georgian artist Zurab Tsereteli – a favourite of Moscow's mayor Yuri Luzhkov - who lives on Bolshaya Gruzinskaya just a few doors down from the old Georgian Orthodox church where Moscow's Georgian community still worships.

Surely no coincidence....

But study the design of the poster: South Ossetia’s colours are firmly knotted into Russia’s. Absorption of South Ossetia into Russia is surely the longer term objective of Kremlin policy.

Russia Goes to War After Georgian Attack on South Ossetia

Moscow, Monday August 18 2008

The crisis between Russian and Georgia over the break-away region of South Ossetia – and riding on the back of that, Abkhazia – has dominated the world's attention in the past ten days.

Russian tanks and armour are deep inside Georgian territory proper and the Kremlin is dragging its heels over the withdrawal that western world leaders are demanding.

For readers of the western press the overriding impression is that Russia has attacked its small southern neighbour and ushered in the sort of brutal ethnic cleansing last seen in the separatist areas 15 years ago (see previous post from Abkhazia in June).

It seems that already most western leaders and opinion makers are overlooking the fact that it was Georgia’s military assault against South Ossetia – targeting both civilian areas and bases occupied by Russian peacekeepers who had been stationed there alongside Georgian peacekeeprs – that provoked Russia’s response.

Clearly Vladimir Putin – Russia’s former president, current prime minister but de facto leader – was delighted when Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili gave him the accuse for ordering an armed incursion into Georgia.

That Russia has long been backing South Ossetian separatist provocations – roadside bombs, attacks on Georgian military installations etc – on Georgian territory around the separatist enclave, is not in doubt. That Saakashvili – renowned for his hot temper and less than mature emotional character – should respond in precisely the way that suited Russian foreign policy aims was, sadly, in little doubt either.

Russia has done itself a grave disservice by going well-beyond what might have been considered a proportionate response; by arming and encouraging groups of North Ossetian and other ‘irregulars’ who have reportedly been killing, looting and raping in the wake of the Russian military advance.

The Georgians are not innocent of similar horrors – although with a few notable exceptions this is largely unreported in the western press. For a fine example of balanced reporting on the conflict see Mark Franchetti’s story in the Sunday Times of August 17, link here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4545980.ece

For the majority of Russians – starved as they are of the full picture, with Kremlin-controlled national television concentrating on footage from South Ossetia and ignoring the Russian aerial attacks in Georgia – the story is one of a justified Russian response to a heavily armed attack on civilians in South Ossetia, many of whom hold Russian passports.

The attitude here can be summed up by the response of most ordinary Russians: “If the west backed independence in (Serb separatist area) Kosovo, why not South Ossetia?”

That there is little or no tension between Russians, Georgian and Ossetians in Moscow or elsewhere (where as the Moscow Times reports members of the different ethnic groups have been working together to put together aid shipments) reflects the political roots of the conflict: Saakashvili allowed himself to be pushed into starting the war and, unsurprisingly, the Kremlin leapt at the opportunity to pursue long-held ambitions to begin rolling back some of the territorial and egotistical setbacks Russia has suffered since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is also worth noting that Saakashvili by no means enjoys universal support in Georgia. When I was last there in December shortly before the presidential election and just after major disturbances on the streets of Tbilisi during a stand off between the opposition and the administration, many ordinary Georgian’s voiced their disdain for the American-educated lawyer. Some government employers spoke of the culture of fear that Saakashvili’s administration had installed in Georgia. Only last month I spoke to an academic from Tbilisi who fled to America with her husband after being harassed by Georgian security services for speaking out against Saakashvili.

Talk in the western media of a fledgling democracy being crushed by the hawks of the Kremlin fail to understand the nuances of this tragic story.

Had Saakashvili pursued a more clever policy over South Ossetia – relying more on European-backed diplomacy and less on a rush to join NATO, which has been read as an aggressive step by the Kremlin – the status of the separatist territory and that of Abkhazia may have been resolved peacefully.

The war was a tragedy. As ever, ordinary innocent people have died for the ambitions of politicians. And, as the following story on part of the Russian reaction to the war illustrates, their deaths as ever are used to forward those ambitions.

RUSSIA HONOURS DEAD HERO:

To his friends he was a brilliant young officer with a promising career
ahead of him. To his wife Ekaterina he was the father of a two year old daughter. To a group of civilians ambushed in South Ossetia on the day President Dmitry Medvedev ordered his troops to invade Georgia, he was a hero: Russian army Major Denis Vetchinov died saving their lives in a horrific ambush in Tskhinvali.

On Friday (Aug 15) the 32 year old Kazakhstan-born major from the 58th Army group was buried in accordance with his wife’s wishes with full military honours in Volgograd the Russian city that as Stalingrad came to symbolize heroism in war time – after President Dmitry Medvedev named him a Hero of the Russian Federation.

Russia’s highest award for bravery in wartime – equivalent to Britain’s Victoria Cross and formerly known as the Hero of the Soviet Union – is a rare award but
Major Vetchinov’s was one of two awarded for combat during brief but bitter war with Georgia.

The other recipient, Lt Colonel Konstantin Timerman, survived the war as did dozens of other soldiers who received lesser awards for distinguished service during the five days of combat.

But it was Major Vetchinov’s sacrifice that last week came to symbolize
Russia’s pride in what it sees as a heroic operation to restore peace and stability to South
Ossetia and Georgia’s other Russophile enclave Abkhazia in the face of what the Kremlin has portrayed as aggressive military adventurism by Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili.

“He was kind, gentle and fair and always wishes people to be better
than they are in reality and did everything to work for that,” his 25 year old widow Ekaterina told Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Still in shock at her husband’s sudden death Mrs Vetchinova who currently lives in Kazakhstan, is planning to move with her daughter Masha to Volgograd, where several close army friends live.

“She needs help and simple human warmth,” said one friend. “She is only 25 and it is very bitter to call her a widow. Her happiness has ended before it had really begun.”

Major Vetchinov, who army friends recall was always keen to be in the
thick of action, was due to enter Moscow’s prestigious joint staff college next year – a key step on the ladder to senior promotion in the Russian army.

“In combat conditions Denis proved to be a brave and courageous officer
capable in any conditions of executing a combat order and of making correct decisions
in critical situations,” said an army friend Alexander Borisenko.

The dead major was also a keen strategic thinker who wrote a brilliant
analysis on the lessons learned during the Russian army’s operation to free scores of patients taken hostage by Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev in the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk in 1995, he added.

Alexander Kots, a Russian war correspondent for popular tabloid Komsomolskay Pravda, whose life the major saved during an ambush in Tskhinvali, paid tribute
to the dead hero.

Speaking to Russian last week from his hospital bed, Mr Kots – an experienced
reporter who has covered Russia’s conflicts in Chechnya, Dagestan and elsewhere –
said the major had not hesitated to act when Georgian troops ambushed a Russian convoy entering the South Ossetia capital on the first day of the war.

“As we entered Tskhinvali on a back road through a wooded area I noticed
some Georgians hiding behind a couple of knocked out tanks. Suddenly we were under fire from all sides. In the scramble to get into our armoured vehicles fell between a troop carrier and an UAZ military jeep,” Mr Kots said.

“The windows of the jeep started shattering and I realized that they
were shooting at me and my colleagues. Shots were coming from everywhere and men – both theirs and ours – were falling all over the place. A couple of our armoured vehicles were hit and started to burn fiercely.”

Deciding to make a run for it Mr Kots came face to face with a Georgian
soldier as he rounded the corner of a burning armoured car.

“I shouted out that I was a journalist – he responded: ‘And I am a killer!’ and opened up on me from just a few yards away.”

Hit in the arm the reporter collapsed to the ground expecting to be finished
off in the next second.

“Nothing happened. I turned my head and saw the Georgian lying dead
and heavily wounded Russian major, blood flowing from wounds in the head and knee.”

Still not safe Mr Kots, the major and a several other Russian reporters
clung to the ground as grenades exploded all around them. Eventually in a lull in the fighting, the newspaper correspondent was able to make it to the safety of a Russian amoured car where he was treated for his wounds.

The major was not so lucky: he died before reaching medical help.

President Medvedev’s decision to award the dead major Russia’s highest
award for bravery reflects widespread support in Russia for what most people see as a heroic military operation to defend Russian passport holders in a region of Georgia that has long yearned for independence.

As the international community moves to find a way forward beyond the
conflict the mood in Russia is intransigent: Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov bluntly stated last week that Moscow no longer recognized Georgia’s territorial sovereignty, suggesting the Kremlin is prepared to absorb South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Russian media reports from South Ossetia – which remains in Russian
hands despite international calls for the two sides to return to their pre-war positions
– pictured a major operation in full swing to normalize the region under Russian control,
with refugees being assisted to return home, help given for those without proper papers and the resumption of pension payments – in Russian roubles – to the neediest.

The prospect that Russia will simply turn around and leave South Ossetia
seems remote.

Mikhail Yuriev, a Russian business and former deputy parliamentary speaker,
whose book “The Third Empire” foresees the creation within the coming decades of a
Russian empire stretching across Europe from the Pacific in the east to the Atlantic in the west, said bringing the two breakaway regions of Georgia back into the Russian fold had long been an unspoken Kremlin priority.

“I predicted that sooner or later Russia would stop trying to be part of the so-called civilized, that is western world, and at that point start taking back its own territories.The only obstacle to that is the desire of the west – of America – to stop it. Apart from that there are no other obstacles.

“South Ossetia and Abhkezia will never be part of Georgia again. Russia may not annex them but instead will find it better to recognize their independence.”

Ordinary Russians agree: Valeri Buyenevich, 44, a hospital anaesthetist from Astrakhan, southern Russian said: “In Europe there is a precedent for separatist regions: Kosovo. If Kosovo can be independent then why not Southern Ossetia and Abkhazia?”

Major Vetchinkov’s bravery award comes at a time when Russia’s beleaguered
military sorely lacks such apparently unsullied heroes.

After the debacle in Afghanistan 20 years ago and the more recent moral and military minefield of the war in Chechnya, Russia’s army is a demoralized conscript mass.

The violent hazing of new conscripts – such as the notorious incident last year that left a young soldier castrated and a double amputee after a severe beating by more senior men – has stained the reputation of an army that still rests of the laurels of its World War Two victories.

Now flush with oil wealth the Kremlin is determined to put the military
back on its feet.

Last year then President Vladimir Putin announced plans for a £100 billion arms programme over the next seven years to pay for new, modern weapons and ordered military chiefs to ‘strengthen the battle-readiness of the army and navy’.

On a small scale last week’s war with Georgia has done just that.

A shorter version of this story was published in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/2569650/Russian-soldiers-who-died-in-Georgia-conflict-hailed-as-heroes-by-Kremlin.html