RUSSIA: Moscow has had a miserable summer, one of the coldest and wettest in decades, but Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has made sure nothing will rain on his parade this weekend.
"Special air force planes have started 'cloud-busting' to make sure of good weather over Moscow on September 6th and 7th," air force spokesman Col Alexander Drobyshevsky said yesterday.
Today is City Day in Moscow, an annual celebration of the founding of Russia's capital, and a chance for the 10 million or so residents of this teeming metropolis to walk around a city centre closed to cars and open for concerts, street performances and food and drink vendors. Nothing as mundane as the elements is going to stop Mr Luzhkov's city enjoying its 856th birthday.
"The air force's best-prepared test pilots . . . will scatter special reagents over clouds that could spoil Muscovites' holiday on City Day," Col Drobyshevsky said of nine planes that were circling Moscow yesterday to guarantee good weather for today's festivities.
Russians are used to such elemental trickery, having enjoyed mostly sunny major holidays since Stalin ordered his cowed scientists to research weather-control in the 1930s.
It meant set-piece Soviet extravaganzas, such as the May Day military parade through Red Square, always passed without a meteorological hitch, and Moscow appeared to the world as not only a military superpower, but a pleasant place to spend a spring day.
Guided by weather-watchers on the ground, the "cloud-busters" look to catch rainclouds before they reach the city. They release dry ice, carbon dioxide or silver iodide into the clouds, thus inducing rain before they threaten any celebrations.
Sometimes the operation goes according to plan, and towns and villages ahead of the city get an unexpected soaking. Sometimes the chemicals delay rain until the clouds have passed over the party location, and douse people unwise enough to have remained in the suburbs while the metropolitan glitterati are thronging the sunny city centre.
The partygoers themselves often get a surprise lashing of rain to accompany their hangover the day after a major municipal shindig.
President Vladimir Putin dispatched the cloud-busters to clear the skies above his hometown, St Petersburg, when the old imperial Russian capital marked its 300th anniversary this spring.
After a grey, rainy week, St Petersburgers basked in the sun as celebrations reached their peak on Saturday afternoon.
Then - in a turn of events that came as no surprise to many a patriotic Russian - the Americans spoiled the day.
President George W. Bush's arrival on Air Force One demanded all other aircraft abandon the skies, even Mr Putin's doughty cloud-busters.
Sure enough, by the time world leaders gathered by the Hermitage museum to hear their host speak from a floating platform on the River Neva, the weather was more than a little inclement.
As winds and rising waves threatened to dampen Mr Putin's eulogy to St Petersburg and the Neva, the Russian leader scuttled back to the safety of dry land.
But some here fear the cloudbusters' chemicals more than a drop of rain.
Moscow's Chief Medical Officer, Nikolai Filatov, waved away such gripes yesterday. "These preparations do not present any threat to people, animals, plants or insects," he said.