Eve Conant

The staff of the weekly Versiya had a scoop. They'd spent 10 days frantically reporting one of the biggest stories any of them could remember--the siege of a Moscow theater that ended in a dramatic assault by Russian Special Forces and the use of a knockout gas that killed more than 100 civilians.

Sandra Liedskalna, a fruit seller in Latvia's capital of Riga, is getting evil looks these days. As an early snow falls on the marketplace, Liedskalna is offering steep discounts on her imperfect yet fresh, honey-scented apples.

Anatoly Beloyusov had never seen anything quite like what he found in the ruined auditorium. The professional rescue worker was right behind the Special Forces who stormed Moscow's Melnikova Street theater in a predawn raid, ending a 58-hour standoff in which nearly 850 performers and theatergoers, dozens of them children, were held hostage by a suicide squad of Chechen terrorists.

Anna Politkovskaya was in Los Angeles yesterday, waiting to attend a dinner honoring her for her courage in covering the war in Chechnya. She didn't make it to the dinner.

The skeletons were twisted around each other, many frozen in a fetal position as if they were trying to stay warm. There were skulls and tibias, femurs and ribs, all piling up in the claw of the tractor breaking ground for an elite Vilnius housing complex. "The bones wouldn't stop coming out of the ground," recalls one worker.

Sept. 12 started out like any other day for Sergey Kukura, the finance director of one of Russia's largest oil firms, LUKOil: he plunked down onto a soft leather seat in the back of his chauffeured automobile.

Sheraly Akbotoev received the summons in Kabul last November. An Uzbek religious instructor and avowed jihadist, Akbotoev was a member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a hard-line group with ties to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. "Come to Logar province" in northern Afghanistan, his superiors told him by phone. "Something has happened." U.S. fighter planes had attacked a convoy of IMU fighters fleeing Konduz, where some 300 of them had been helping the Taliban resist the U.S.-backed...

The skeletons were twisted around each other, many frozen in a fetal position as if they were trying to stay warm. There were skulls and tibias, femurs and ribs, all piling up in the claw of the tractor breaking ground for an elite Vilnius housing complex. "The bones wouldn't stop coming out of the ground," recalls one worker at the construction site in the Lithuanian capital last winter.The horrified work crew feared they had uncovered a mass grave of either Jewish Holocaust victims or those...

Once upon a time, the town of Muynak was a bustling port along the Aral Sea. City workers still paint the street signs with images of seagulls and ocean waves, and here and there the masts of ships poke up between the buildings.

Father Krzysztof Kempa has a congregation but no church. As he reads mass for 15 Roman Catholics in a dark, cramped apartment in the southern Russian city of Belgorod, he struggles to make himself heard over a curbside car alarm, the hum of an old Soviet refrigerator and a boiling tea kettle.

It's not often that billboards urge you not to buy or sell something. But the Moldovan capital of Chisinau is an exception. Its streets are filled with admonitions: TU NU ESTI MARFA (YOU ARE NOT FOR SALE).The dawn of market economics in Moldova has had an infamous side effect--a fire sale of its women.

Anyone can spend a holiday at the beach. But what about at a teeming slum, a nuclear-meltdown site or a former concentration camp? A growing number of vacationers are looking for just such hardship holidays.

Hardly anyone these days has a good word for the language of the former Soviet Union. Teenagers in Central Asia say they hate it; thousands have taken to the streets of Moldova and Belarus to protest it; former Soviet governments have deleted it from their mandatory-education programs, and some countries, like Latvia, have passed discriminatory laws against those who speak it.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has long been suspected of trying to rekindle the glory of the former Soviet Union. But last week he more than hinted at just the opposite, coming down hard on Belarus's President Aleksandr Lukashenko two days after the two met in St.

Pope John Paul II is finally getting involved in one of the biggest scandals in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Last week he called for an emergency meeting (to be held this week), directing a dozen American cardinals and the top two officers of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to convene with Vatican officials in Rome to discuss the recent U.S. sexual-abuse scandals.

"Marziya," 36, is hiding at Samarkand's only women's shelter, a private home tucked behind an unmarked iron gate. Her husband began beating her in 1992, at the height of Uzbekistan's economic turmoil.

Sinking submarines, desertions within the ranks, suicides, corruption, decay and dissolution. Russia's generals are no longer running a superpower's military, but they still think Army life is fine--and are fighting fiercely to stave off anything that smacks of change.

In the basement of Afghanistan's culture ministry, a statue's broken foot and part of a skirt lie discarded in the corner. A lion's paw peeks out of a pile of rubble; a small rock turns out to be part of an elephant head.

While driving through Kabul in November, I saw two women leaning against a stone wall, chatting with each other. They were both enveloped head to toe in light blue burqas, but that didn't seem to get in the way of their conversation, as they touched each other on the shoulder.

Ask Afghans how old they are, and most will scratch their heads and look to their friends for guidance. NEWSWEEK's house here in Kabul is something of an anomaly, because most of our staff here say they do know their ages.Or do they?

On the wall of the Nukus Museum, a crazed-looking bull with pointed horns stares out at visitors. The picture was painted by a man named Lysenko. Art historians don't know his first name, or much else about him--except that he was forced to enter a Soviet mental institution for his depiction of that bull.

A group of about 100 armed Islamic guerrillas, some wearing balaclavas, gather in a circle in an unidentified forest in Chechnya. In a grainy scene from a videotape found by Russian intelligence agents, they are shown in the middle of a meeting led by Chechen field commander Shamil Basayev, some time after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Vladimir Putin has been enjoying the limelight. He's been lionized by NATO and feted by Tony Blair. His speech to the German Parliament got raves. Even President George W.

Elena Yaskevich hunches over her desk and lights up another cigarette. Her office phone, one of Moscow's few drug-addiction hot lines, rings once again. She begins yet another round of questions, the same as the last. "How old is your daughter?" Pause. "I see, 17.

Azov is hardly the kind of place where most people would look for adventure. Life is slow in this postcard-pretty Russian town on the delta of the muddy river Don.

The dinosaurs may all be dead, but at least we still have the sturgeon. When it appeared during the age of the big dinosaurs 200 million years ago, it was covered with an armor of shiny interlocking scales.

Nina Ungureanu is tired of having visitors come to her gate. "They all want the same thing," says the Moldovan housewife, 40. That is, to join the ranks of the other seemingly lucky villagers, like Ungureanu, who have mortgaged their bodies to buy a roof over their heads.

White males may be king in most places, but not in Russia. In addition to rampant alcoholism, men there face rising AIDS and tuberculosis rates, as well as the stresses of unemployment and the military draft.

This is a revolution!" exclaims Ivan Ursu, a lifelong communist, surveying the banquet tables at the Inauguration of Moldova's new communist president. "And there wasn't even any shooting!" In Moldova, the party is partying again.

With his close-shaven head and his small, feral eyes, Yuri Budanov, 37, is not the kind of man to inspire affection. Yet he's got plenty of fans. Outside the courthouse in southern Russia, where Budanov's case is being tried, demonstrators hold up placards proclaiming his innocence and calling for his release.