Pravda, now and then

WITH Lenin's Pravda shut down and his pickled corpse soon to be removed from Red Square, Boris Yeltsin yesterday travelled 150 miles and back nine centuries to revive an ancient personality cult that might hold Russia together.

The dusted-off Lenin substitute is Yaroslav the Wise - an 11th-century prince and founder of the original 'Pravda', a legal code that fixed, among other things, the penalty for stealing a beaver and breaking a tooth.

President Yeltsin, making his first trip to the provinces since he shelled the White House on 4 October, unveiled a statue of Yaroslav in a town on the Volga that shares his name.

'One of the lessons we learn from this,' he said, referring to violent family quarrels of the medieval court, 'is that nothing can be worse than treason.'

This was not just a tourist visit. 'This means a radical change in the mentality and actions of the democratic forces, primarily the President,' said Krasnaya Zvezda of Red Star, the official organ of the Russian Defence Ministry. The tribute to Yaroslav, the paper said, shows that Mr Yeltsin has come round to the idea of a 'united and indivisible state'. It scoffed at earlier promises to give Russia's 88 regions as 'much power as they can swallow'. The paper's front page featured a bust of Yaroslav and a photograph of his statue under the headline: 'It is Time for us All to Remember the Ancient Testaments of Yaroslav the Wise.' Yaroslav gained the throne of Kiev Rus, the original Russian state, after routing his brother in civil war. Credited with regaining territory from the Poles and defeating nomads, Yaroslav was a vindictive man. His legal code - Russkaya Pravda or Russian Truth - spells out the rules of revenge: who kills whom and how. Yaroslav's sons, in subsequent updated editions of Pravda, replaced his system with a form of monetary compensation.

Mr Yeltsin seems to have no regrets about the revenge exacted on his enemies in the White House. 'Half my headache has gone now that all this fighting for power has ended,' he said when he arrived in Yaroslav. 'Now I can concentrate on building a state.'