RUSSIA'S YARD SALE Psst! Wanna buy a MiG jet fighter? How about 200 lbs. of uncut emeralds or a little nuclear-reactor fuel? In once secret military-industrial cities, all this and more is for sale. But beware: the mafia, the KGB, old party officials and new Moscow bureaucrats may want a piece of the action.
It was late November, the temperature outside hovered near zero, and six of us were sitting fully clothed in an unused basement bathhouse beneath a rundown hotel in central Russia. The water in the green-tiled pool had long ago turned an oily, opaque black, and from the...
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