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Sveiki, all!

It was an important week, as Riga finally celebrates her 800th anniversary. Riga's history was well covered in two lengthy articles in the news services, including the story of a seven year old girl, Vaira, fleeing Latvia on New Year's Day in 1945. A week to look back and look forward as well!

In the news:

  • 10 years after USSR fell, freed republics still in Russia's orbit; only the Baltics seem to have truly broken free; as sorry as the circumstances are in Russia, it is the pillar for the others to lean against
  • Reuters historical calendar - August 21; hardliner coup fails in the USSR; Latvia declares independence
  • Moscow delegation cancels trip for Riga's 800th anniversary; miffed over a mayoral aid not getting a visa for security reasons (ITAR-TASS claims discrimination, of course); Muscovites boycott the celebration; their loss!
  • FEATURE-Balts look back on coup that freed them; the coup was first thought to be the end of aspirations for freedom; instead, its failure opened the door
  • FEATURE-Latvian capital turns 800, looks to future; Vaire Vike-Freiberga's journey; Godmanis' mistrust of Russia
  • Latvia's capital celebrates its 800th anniversary; a shorter summary; President Bush sends congratulations

We've been busy on our web site the last few days, so no link or picture this week. [Archived mailer includes picture from the following...] However, we invite you to our web site, www.latvians.com, to tour the latest addition: a tour of Rīgas Zooloģiskais Dārzs (Zoodārzs) — the Riga Zoological Garden — from our vacation this July.

As always, AOL'ers, Remember, mailer or not, Lat Chat spontaneously appears every Sunday on AOL starting around 9:00/9:30pm Eastern time, lasting until 11:00/11:30pm. AOL'ers can follow this link: Town Square - Latvian chat. And thanks to you participating on the Latvian message board as well: LATVIA (both on AOL only).

Ar visu labu,

Silvija Peters

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Visit the Riga zoo! Follow the links (Personal... Photo Features...) from our home page, at www.latvians.com

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10 years after USSR fell, freed republics still in Russia's orbit
AP WorldStream Tuesday, August 14, 2001 5:39:00 AM
Copyright 2001 The Associated Press
By JUDITH INGRAM
Associated Press Writer

    MOSCOW (AP) — Crowds of sweaty men in shirt sleeves, toting briefcases, gym bags and cell phones, rush down the railroad platform as a lumbering locomotive drags their homebound train into a Moscow station on a stiflingly hot Friday night.
    They could be commuters anywhere, after a long day at the office. But these workers go home only on weekends at best, because their jobs are in Russia and their homes are far away in Ukraine.
    When the Soviet Union collapsed 10 years ago, so did a web of ties developed over seven decades. Thousands of huge factories went idle after their suppliers or customers ended up across new borders, in new countries.
    Contracts evaporated and jobs disappeared. Some of the former Soviet republics started knocking on NATO's door, and their citizens, too, turned away from Russia -- enrolling their children in English and German classes in hopes of a career-launching stint in the West.
    Yet today, most of the former republics remain in Russia's orbit, tied by economic and security needs, their politics and professions still dominated by leaders who were bred in the same Soviet universities, Communist Party and KGB.
    "The mentality of the ruling class is a strong binding force," said Vitaly Tretyakov, until recently the editor in chief of the Russia' Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily.
    On the Moscow platform, smoking a cigarette, was Vladimir Nikolayevich, heading home to his wife and son in Kharkiv. Born and raised in Ukraine, his job is in Nadym, in Russia's Far North -- about 3,200 kilometers (2,000 miles) from Kharkiv.
    The sandy-haired road engineer was making the commute when Russia and Ukraine were the same country, and little has changed for him, he says, except that the 10-hour rail trip has grown to 13 hours because of restored borders and customs checks.
    Another change is that although he's an ethnic Russian, being a Ukrainian citizen makes him an alien in Russia, and he risks arrest if his work papers aren't in order. "We're somehow foreigners," he said with disbelief.
    Vladimir Nikolayevich wouldn't give his surname or reveal his income, but salaries and benefits in the far north are much bigger than the Russian average wage of about 2,900 rubles (dlrs 100) a month, and far above what he could make in Ukraine.
    Russia has become a safety valve for the impoverished republics. It has absorbed 8 million immigrants from the former republics since 1991. An additional 100,000 foreign citizens work legally in Russia, and millions more work illegally.
    They come by train and bus, fruit vendors carting juice-stained boxes of peaches and grapes, construction workers in dust-caked pants and T-shirts.
    As Russia imports labor, it continues to export influence.
    For all the flowering of national culture in the republics following independence, Russian remains the lingua franca across much of the vast territory that made up the Soviet Union, and about 25 million Russians live in the former republics -- what Russians call "the Near Abroad."
    Those minorities, and Moscow's increasingly assertive defense of them, make a strong argument for sticking with Russian for transacting much official business.
    Russia's state television networks broadcast news throughout the former republics, putting on a Kremlin spin on events. Their soap operas, gangster series and quiz shows have devotees far beyond Russia's borders. When Russian rock groups such as Mashina Vremeni performed in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, 500,000 fans showed up.
    The Kremlin plays regional policeman, too, along the old Soviet frontiers. Russian MiG-29 jets patrol the border between Armenia and Turkey, a NATO member, and Russian troops guard Tajikistan's volatile frontier with Afghanistan, trying to stem the flow of drugs, weapons and radical Islamic fighters.
    The former republics used to account for 54 percent of Russia's trade. Now it's just 19 percent, according to government figures, partly because of Russia's protectionist trade policies.
    But Russia remains a huge customer for goods that may not find ready markets elsewhere: produce and wine from Moldova and the Caucasus nations of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, trucks from Belarus, cotton from Central Asia.
    Russian companies have pumped more than dlrs 1.5 billion into the former republics in the past 10 years, according to official data -- and have snapped up industries there, stoking nervousness among nationalists.
    Many of the former republics get their oil and natural gas from Russia. They might prefer to have other options, says Vladimir Baranovsky, of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow, but "their dependence has continued, and from that comes an economic stimulus to continue cooperation."
    Nowhere is that dependence clearer than in the economic and political union Russia has formed with Belarus, and many believe Ukraine and Moldova are next in line to join it. Communist influence is high in all three countries, and their leaders have all voiced nostalgia for Soviet times and balked at reform.
    The three also depend overwhelmingly on Russian energy shipments, and they're behind in paying their combined 53.71 billion rubles (dlrs 1.85 billion) debt to Moscow. Many Russian experts think Moscow might forgive the debts in a trade-off for creating a large, Moscow-led regional community counterbalancing the United States and European Union.
    "The geostrategic gain makes up for the economic losses," Tretyakov, the editor, said.
    Conversely, the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, have been most successful in escaping Moscow's embrace. All have their sights set firmly on membership in NATO and the European Union, and their trade with Russia has plunged.
    The pattern is less clear in the Caucasus Mountains region. Russia is balking at removing its last military bases from Georgia. Moscow is accused of supporting separatist rebels there, and Moscow accuses Georgia of aiding the fighters in neighboring Chechnya whom Russia has been battling off and on for seven years. Moscow has imposed a visa requirement and occasionally suspended gas shipments -- reminding Georgians that it still has the power to turn off their lights.
    Azerbaijan, a Caspian Sea country with potentially large oil and gas reserves, has managed to chart a more or less independent course. Major international oil companies have signed 21 production-sharing agreements with Azerbaijan, which could net the country some dlrs 60 billion. The nation's leading trade partner is Italy.
    "We used to have solid ties with Russia, but nobody can deny that we've done more over the past 10 years to solidify relations with the West than over 100 years with Russia," said Zardusht Ali-zade, head of Azerbaijan's Social-Democratic Party.
    Both Azerbaijan and its rival, Armenia, have to tread carefully with Moscow because they need Russian mediation in their dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. But Azerbaijani President Geidar Aliev has flirted with NATO, and his Armenian counterpart, Robert Kocharian, says flatly his nation would never consider entering any union with Russia.
    The Central Asian states all have tried to look outward to Turkey and China, but concerns over drug trafficking, international terrorism and radical Islamic movements have drawn them back into Russia's sphere of influence.
    "No matter how much we've been pulled in different directions, we're looking for unity," said Myktybek Abdyldayev, director of Kyrgyzstan's Institute for Strategic Studies. "People are looking for a common language, and they'll find it."
    Baranovsky, the international relations expert, said the euphoria that swept the newly freed republics isn't gone.
    "They've realized miracles don't happen. Central Asian countries can't claim to have rainbows around the corner or be a new Switzerland," he said.
    "There's economic reality, geopolitical and cultural reality, and a very weighty part of that reality is that Russia is nearby and it's a country with which they need to have stable, constructive ties."

Reuters historical calendar — August 21
Reuters World Report Wednesday, August 15, 2001 5:03:00 AM
Copyright 2001 Reuters Ltd.

    LONDON, Aug 14 (Reuters) — [excerpts] Following are some of the major events to have occurred on August 21 in history:
    1944 — Representatives of the United States, Britain, Russia and China met at Dumbarton Oaks near Washington to plan for the formation of the United Nations.
    1968 — Forces from the Soviet Union and four other Eastern Bloc states marched towards Prague after crossing the Czech border overnight.
    1991 — Latvia declared independence from the Soviet Union.
    1991 — Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev declared he was back in full control after a 60-hour coup by Communist hardliners crumbled under popular resistance.

Moscow delegation cancels trip for Riga's 800th anniversary
AP WorldStream Wednesday, August 15, 2001 4:12:00 PM
Copyright 2001 The Associated Press

    MOSCOW (AP) — Moscow's delegation to 800th anniversary celebrations in Latvia's capital Riga canceled its trip because a mayoral aide was denied a Latvian visa Wednesday, in the latest sign of tension between Russia and its Baltic neighbor.
    Alexander Perelygin, aide to Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, was denied a visa for security reasons, the Baltic News Service reported. Russia's ITAR-Tass news agency suggested the refusal was connected to Perelygin's outspoken support for the ethnic Russian minority in Latvia.
    In response to the denial, the Moscow mayor's office canceled the trip of a delegation that was to have been led by deputy mayor Valery Shantsev, ITAR-Tass and state-run RTR television reported. The delegation had been invited by the Riga legislature to take part in anniversary celebrations Aug. 17-19.
    The mayor's office urged Latvian authorities to "revise their decision, which mars a big holiday in the capital of Latvia and entails negative consequences for relations between our cities," ITAR-Tass said.
    The Riga City Council asked the Latvian Foreign Ministry and the Interior Ministry to issue an entry visa to Perelygin "as an exception," ITAR-Tass and BNS said. But the authorities refused, citing a decision made last November to deny Perelygin entry for a year for security reasons.
    Relations between Russia and the three other former Soviet republics on the Baltic Sea -- Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia -- have been strained since the collapse of the USSR 10 years ago.
    Russia and Latvia have sparred over the rights of ethnic Russians in Latvia, and Russian requests to ease the export of Russian goods through the Baltic country's ports. Moscow has also protested the Baltic nations' bid to join NATO.

FEATURE-Balts look back on coup that freed them
Reuters World Report Wednesday, August 15, 2001 10:12:00 PM
Copyright 2001 Reuters Ltd.
By Burton Frierson

    RIGA, Aug 16 (Reuters) — Ivars Godmanis knew something was wrong when he looked up from the waves during a morning swim in the Baltic Sea on August 19, 1991, and saw his interior minister standing in the sand.
    At the time, Godmanis was the prime minister of Latvia, one of the three Baltic states trying to work its way free from the Soviet Union after five decades of rule by Moscow.
    He was about to learn that communist hardliners had launched a coup to oust Mikhail Gorbachev, the Kremlin leader whose perestroika reforms had changed the face of the Soviet Union, and that his own government in Riga was under threat.
    "My feeling was that this was the end," Godmanis told Reuters.
    Instead, the plan for the putsch proved to be fatally flawed and led to the unravelling of the rest of the Soviet Union.
    Its eight conspirators would lose their nerve within days and in the face of defiant opposition by protestors in Moscow.
    The chain of events would leave the Baltic states independent countries almost immediately. The end of the Soviet occupation drove them to seek security in the European Union and NATO, which they hope join in the next few years.

    ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE
    The Balts had been pressing for independence since Gorbachev came to power in 1985, taking advantage of his late 1980s glasnost reforms aimed at fostering openness in the repressive Soviet Union.
    Estonia and Latvia declared sovereignty in 1988 and 1989, in the hope of negotiating a full exit from the Soviet Union after a transition period. In 1990 Lithuania did the unthinkable, declaring full and immediate independence from Moscow.
    Shocked by the move and Gorbachev's inability to rein in the three tiny republics, conservatives backed a January 1991 crackdown aimed at snuffing out their independence movements, killing 14 in Vilnius, Lithuania, and six more in Riga.
    They failed to topple their pro-independence governments, which had been elected in 1990, but left many believing the January events were a dress rehearsal for something bigger.
    "I should say we were even more afraid in August than in January because in August we knew what kind of brutality could be implemented by the Soviet Army," said Andrius Kubilius, a Lithuanian independence activist then and later prime minister.
    Back in Riga, Godmanis met parliamentary leaders and the government. The parliament speaker Anatolijs Gorbunovs condemned the coup and urged Latvians not to heed orders given by the putschists.
    The other Baltic states made similar statements and pleas for international help.
    Lithuanian president Vytautas Landsbergis, the spearhead of his country's independence movement, appealed to the United Nations and vowed "We will resist faithfully," in a CNN interview.
    Latvian foreign minister Janis Jurkans was sent to Sweden to lead a government in exile should the hardliners topple Godmanis, who was holed up in the government awaiting attack.
    In Vilnius, the Sajudis independence movement met and decided to call on Lithuanians to rally around their parliament in peaceful defence, just as they had done in January.
    Estonia's supreme soviet also gathered.
    Godmanis decided against rallying Latvians around public buildings after receiving a warning from a top Soviet general in the region that it would result in bloodshed.
    "He said that if we called the people on the street as in January 1991 with the barricades, that he'd would crush the people with tanks," Godmanis said.
    Meanwhile, elite Soviet troops began seizing vital communications facilities, including broadcast centres and telephone exchanges, throughout the region.
    At that point, the coup did not look set for failure.
    "It was very short, a couple of days really, but it is only now we hear everybody saying they expected the coup to fail. The feeling was not at all that certain back then," Gorbunovs, now Latvia's transport minister, told Reuters.

    THE LONG WAIT
    For Godmanis, it seemed a question of when, not if, Soviet troops would come for him and it was vital Latvia not capitulate easily, as the Baltic governments did in the 1940 takeover.
    "So we had to show that they were attacking the real government and that we were not on the run," he said.
    A tense waiting game followed, with Godmanis, security guards and deputies sitting in the government building, surrounded by troops outside.
    A bizarre series of phone calls followed, but no attack. First the phone rang with warnings of violent and imminent assault, advising Godmanis to leave.
    Then came calls from Colonel-General Fyodor Kuzmin, the Soviet commander of the Baltic military district, demanding the surrender of a cache of arms in the government building. Kuzmin was responsible for implementing the coup on the ground there.
    Still no attack, and Godmanis — puzzled by the vastly superior Soviet army's hesitance over a few rifles -- decided to make a deal for a handful of weapons to buy more time.
    "This situation was not really clear to me because it was totally against my feeling that this was the end," he said.
    Shots were fired when an armoured vehicle arrived, presumably to take the arms, and several of the Latvian security guards disappeared, arrested but released shortly afterwards.
    But the night passed with no invasion and Kuzmin said in a call early on August 20 that the arrests of the guards were due to a miscommunication among his forces.
    "I do believe that at this moment when this happened it was a decisive time when Kuzmin got information that things would go very wrong in Moscow," Godmanis said.

    COUP UNRAVELS
    The hardliners had hesitated in Moscow, leaving Russian President Boris Yeltsin in place at his headquarters at the White House parliamentary building and sparking doubts about their resolve to see the putsch through.
    "I think that first night was the most terrible, when it seemed in Moscow they would occupy both the Kremlin and the so-called White House," said Kubilius, who was Lithuania's prime minister from 1999 to 2000.
    "And when it failed the first night, it became more and more clear that something was wrong in the organisation of the coup."
    Late in the night of August 20 Estonia's parliament declared immediate independence and Latvia's followed suit the next day.
    Arnold Ruutel, then chairman of Estonia's Supreme Soviet, said his country would have declared independence in a month or two anyway. But the Balts seized on the putsch for a quicker exit of the Soviet Union.
    "Definitely the developments in Moscow were crucial to the outcome of the coup, and in those conditions of a power vacuum the Baltic states successfully used their chances," he said.

FEATURE-Latvian capital turns 800, looks to future
Reuters North America Thursday, August 16, 2001 9:54:00 AM
Copyright 2001 Reuters Ltd.
By Burton Frierson

    RIGA, Latvia (Reuters) — Watching the coast of Latvia disappear into the mist as she fled by ship from the Soviet advance on New Year's Day 1945, a small girl named Vaira clung to the hope that she would return home someday.
    Just seven years old at the time, she was fleeing the country's third invasion in five years and one of the countless foreign occupations witnessed over the centuries by her native city Riga, which is celebrating its 800th birthday this month.
    As she stood with other refugees on the deck of that vessel carrying wounded German troops and munitions, the Latvians near her sang the national anthem, cried and wondered if they would see their country again.
    But Vaira, who eventually emigrated to Canada with her family, says she somehow figured she would make it back to Latvia and the city of her birth.
    "It was a certainty that I felt in my heart, but the strange feeling is that I also knew that it would be a very, very long time before I would do so," she told Reuters.
    Five decades later, the once-exiled Vaira Vike-Freiberga is the now country's president and one of the most prominent refugees to flee over the centuries from Riga -- a Hanseatic port that has seen much to run from through the years.
    From the time of the Crusaders to Communists, nations have paid in blood to control this crossroads between east and west.
    But now, as the city celebrates the 800th anniversary of its founding, it also marks a new beginning.
    This year is the city's first centenary under the flag of an independent Latvia.
    And, with the country's prospects for joining the European Union looking fairly bright in the next few years, as well as perhaps NATO, it may be closer than ever to making sure it never sees another foreign occupation again.
    The August 17-19 celebrations also end on the 10th anniversary of a failed coup by Soviet hardliners, which let Latvia to slip away with its independence and seek ties with the West.
    "So, in spite of its very long history in many other ways it's starting anew," Vike-Freiberga said in an interview.

    LEAVING THEIR MARK
    All of Riga's conquerors — Germans, Poles, Swedes and Russians -- have left their mark on the Latvian capital.
    Perhaps as compensation for the havoc they wrought, they also contributed to a rich architectural tapestry of Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, Art Nouveau and Soviet Realism structures that gives the city its cosmopolitan air.
    The Germans were the first, coming at the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th centuries to bring Christianity, at the end of a Crusader's sword, to some of Europe's last pagans -- the Baltic tribes who settled in the region centuries before.
    "It was important that they became Christians in those days because it was development...it was a step forward," said Jewish intellectual Mavrik Vulfson, whose own ancestors came to Latvia in the 16th century and moved to Riga in the 17th.
    In 1201, the German Bishop Albert of Livonia laid the foundations of what was to become Riga near a collection of trading villages, where Baltic peoples had been at least since the previous century trading wax and furs from the east for salt and cloth from the west.
    The Riga 800 celebrations loosely mark events around Albert's arrival, although there is no historical significance in the dates.
    From Albert's time on, Riga became a key port on the Baltic -- and a desirable conquest by a host of hostile neighbors -- that entered the Hanseatic League in the 15th century.
    The Poles were next to rule. The Swedes defeated them in the 17th century and introduced education for peasants and basic rights for the Latvian serfs.
    Peter the Great moved them out and the Russians in, but German barons, descendants from the times of the Crusades, still ruled on the ground and tightened their grip under the tsars.

    FIRST INDEPENDENCE CRUSHED
    Russian rule was harsh, but Riga somehow thrived, vying to be the largest port of the Tsarist empire at times.
    The Baltics became a battleground between Germany and Russia in World War One, but eventually broke free of both. Riga became the capital of a new, democratic nation, with a tolerant view to its rich ethnic mix of Latvians, Germans, Jews and Russians.
    This changed somewhat when Latvian nationalist Karlis Ulmanis took power in a bloodless coup in 1934. Ulmanis was considered mild compared to fascist Germany or communist Russia but still stifled the opposition, especially the left.
    "Latvia was very, very progressive until 1934," said Vulfson, who was a young communist during the 1930s.
    "I remember that many of my teachers were arrested and we wept with them, but no one was shot," Vulfson said.
    Independence was next to go after democracy. The Soviet Union invaded in 1940, killing or exiling to Siberian labor camps tens of thousands during the 1940-1941 Year of Horror. The Nazis invaded the following year, bringing their own version of brutality.
    Vulfson, who had entered the Red Army, escaped with the retreating Soviet forces, but lost most of his family during the Holocaust, which wiped out most of Latvia's Jews.
    As the Red Army prepared to sweep back through, Vike-Freiberga's family fled, fearing life under the Soviet Union after losing friends and neighbors to the deportations.
    "Particularly my mother was violently opposed to it. She felt this atheistic system of lies was not for her," she said.
    Her family left Riga and made it out of the Latvian port of Liepaja on the next to last ship not sunk by Soviet torpedoes.
    The next time she saw the city of her childhood was on a visit in 1969, when Latvia was still in the cold embrace of the Soviet Union, and has lived in Riga since 1998.
    "There are still little pockets where I can sort of find again the Riga of my childhood," she said.

    DEEP FREEZE, THAW
    Riga's Soviet freeze lasted until the thaw of the 1980s under liberal Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, when public figures began to speak out against Moscow's rule.
    Vulfson was one of the first to call for Latvian independence. Now he worries that Russia has not forgotten losing Riga. He also warns Latvians not to give in to nationalism amid the euphoria of their relatively new-found independence.
    "We must be careful with Russia," he said.
    To many Latvians, Riga's recent and distant past under foreign occupation still casts a shadow, and many see only one solution -- to make permanent links with the West through the European Union and NATO.
    "We regained independence...the question is for how long? Is it forever?" said Ivars Godmanis, who was prime minister from 1990 to 1993 and led his country out of the Soviet Union.

Latvia's capital celebrates its 800th anniversary
AP WorldStream Friday, August 17, 2001 12:45:00 PM
Copyright 2001 The Associated Press
By HOWARD JARVIS

    RIGA, Latvia (AP) — The Latvian capital of Riga has faced domination by Swedes, Danes, Lithuanians and finally the Soviet Union in the 800 years since it was founded by German Crusaders.
    But it began a three-day celebration of its 800th anniversary on Friday as the capital of an independent country, since it severed ties with Moscow in 1991.
    About half of the Baltic country's 2.4 million people and dozens of foreign dignitaries, including German President Johannes Rau and the leaders of neighboring Lithuania and Estonia, were expected in the city for the festivities.
    "There is already a festive atmosphere in the Old Town, and the weather is beautiful," said Rudite Kalpina, one of the organizers. "We are expecting the presidents of Germany, Lithuania and Estonia, 20 mayors, and delegations from 30 cities around the world."
    Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf joined Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga Friday afternoon to open of an exhibition dedicated to the histories of Stockholm and Riga, which was the largest city in Sweden's 17th-century empire.
    U.S. President George W. Bush also sent a message of congratulations to Vike-Freiberga on Friday, praising the "substantial transformations and development" made by Latvia since it regained independence from the Soviet Union, the Baltic News Service reported, citing a presidential spokeswoman.
    Since it was founded as a German fortress during the Crusades, Riga has been ruled by Russians, Swedes, Danes and Lithuanians before a 20-year period of independence between the two World Wars ended in 1940 with the invasion of the Red Army.
    The city of some 800,000 people finally reclaimed independence following a three-day coup attempt by communist hard-liners in Moscow, which unraveled on Aug. 21, 1991, leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
    Other events planned through Sunday included dance performances, music festivals, a light show over the River Daugava and fireworks.
    — — — — —
    On the Net:
    Festival site, http://www.riga800.lv/en/index.asp

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