SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1015 (82), Tuesday, October 26, 2004
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TITLE: Human Rights Group Slams Army Hazing
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Growing numbers of recruits in the military are dying of injuries inflicted by hazing or committing suicide after mistreatment, a report released by Human Rights Watch says.
Inhuman and degrading hazing against first-year conscripts by their seniors is so prevalent that it is "clearly undermining" the military's effectiveness and is one of the country's biggest human rights problems, the report says.
The report, compiled by Human Rights Watch's senior researcher on Russia, Diederik Lohman, criticizes the government as ignoring the problem of hazing, and calls on President Vladimir Putin to combat widespread abuses known as dedovshchina, or the "rule of grandfathers," the nickname given to second-year conscripts.
HRW's deputy chairman for Russia, Alexander Petrov, introduced the report at a news conference in Moscow last week, saying, "There are two places in Russia that people die practically on a daily basis: Chechnya and the Army." Chief Military Prosecutor Alexander Savenkov has reported that 25 conscripts died as a result of abuses associated with hazing in the first half of 2004. A total of 109 soldiers committed suicide during this period, an increase of 38 percent compared to the same period last year.
Savenkov said that 60 of those conscripts who killed themselves had been "driven to suicide" by hazing.
An aide to Savenkov responded on Wednesday to a request for the latest figures on hazing, saying in a faxed statement that 2,500 servicemen were convicted of hazing in the first nine months of 2004, out of 3,200 criminal cases heard.
A total of 3,400 servicemen, including 500 officers, were convicted during 2003, he said, out of about 3,500 cases.
Most of the suicides had been due to "personal motives," Savenkov's aide said.
The report calls for the appointment of a government ombudsman for military servicemen, the establishment of an independent monitoring body and the creation of a professional non-commissioned officers' corps.
It also urges holding officers responsible for covering up hazing incidents.
The 86-page HRW report documents a range of abuses against new conscripts, from sexual abuse and beatings to pointless servitude, deprivation of sleep and confiscation of food, money and personal belongings.
"There are initiation systems in other armies as well, but nothing like the one in the Russian Army, in the scale of its cruelty and abusiveness," Lohman said.
Diederik said the report was compiled over three years, and based on interviews with over 100 conscripts, their relatives, officials, NGOs, former military servicemen and other experts.
The report says that researchers spoke to relatives of eight conscripts who committed suicide. Some letters home from the conscripts said they were being "pressured," but "typically [relatives] knew few details about the problems [they] were having," the report says.
"None of the young men conveyed in their letters the troubled mental state they must have been in when they wrote them," the report says, adding that several of the parents believe that their sons were accidentally killed by fellow soldiers.
Relatives told researchers of cases when conscripts were sexually abused after being accused of being informers.
One first-year conscript, referred to in the report as Igor U., was accused by a dedy, or second-year conscript, of being an informer for the commander of the company. The dedy threatened Igor U. with rape and ordered other first-year recruits to rape and sexually abuse him, which they refused to do. After several nights of threats, Igor U. ran away from his unit.
Other cases involved sleep deprivation. Researchers interviewed one conscript, Andrei S., who said that a dedy in his unit deprived him and his fellow first-year conscripts of sleep for two weeks, abusing them severely every night: "In the end I couldn't stand it, so I took a metal rod and broke a senior conscript's head."
Alexei, a former airborne division conscript serving in Novorossiisk, told reporters Wednesday how his unit commander victimized him after his mother telephoned to ask how he was.
"It was pretty bad from the first day with beatings and stuff. But after my mother rang the regiment commander and enquired about my state, my unit commander ... made me stand before everyone and said: 'We have discovered a stukach [informer], among us. Do to him whatever you like, I will not reprimand you.' Then it got really hard for me."
Eventually, Alexei's mother gathered documents allowing him to gain a medical discharge.
There is also an ethnic dimension to relations between conscript soldiers, the report says.
Diederik said Wednesday said that broadly there are three hierarchies in the military: official, ethnic and dedovshchina - and often, ethnic Russians face discrimination in all three ways. Ethnic Caucasians and other tightly organized groups often dominate the rest, he said.
Alexei, the former conscript, said: "Even officers were afraid of people from the Caucasus. At first, we listened to the officers, then it appeared that one has to be above all loyal to people from the Caucasus."
As a result of widespread abuse, the report says, thousands of first-year conscripts flee their units every year, mostly due to hazing, and describes official statistics on conscripts absconding as "artificially low."
The report says this partly explains why many parents devise ways for their children to avoid military service, and why the majority of the 800,000 conscripts who make up the bulk of the military come from poorer families.
In September 2002, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov described the conscripts drafted in the fall of that year as a "pathetic lot, afflicted with drug addiction, psychological problems and malnutrition."
Valentina Melnikova, a spokes-woman for the Union of Soldiers' Mothers Committees, the largest organization dealing with hazing, said, "The only progress we have achieved so far is that the situation with the abuses has become more transparent. But in its essence and quantity, the problem has not decreased. What do you expect? We have fought in Chechnya for 10 years now. The inhumanly waged war affects the Army and produces more violence. Soldiers get infected with it there."
"We have a problem that exists nowhere else: soldiers go missing in peacetime," Melnikova said. "One of the most recent outrageous examples was when parents were told for two years that their son was being transferred from one military unit to another, but at the end of his service term they couldn't find him. It appeared that he never had been in his unit."
The report says the government has failed so far to take appropriate steps to prevent hazing against conscripts.
"Instead of taking a clear and public stance against the abuses, government officials have largely ignored the issue in their numerous speeches about military reform," the report says, adding that military officials threaten runaways with prosecution.
The report warns that this situation "clearly undermines the military effectiveness of Russia's army" and says the government's current stance is "puzzling."
"We have come across a widespread attitude that dedovshchina is something inevitable, but our research shows that it can be avoided," Lohman said. "Several of the conscripts we interviewed said they served in some military units with dedovshchina, and some without it."
TITLE: Competitive Triathlon Team Nurtures Olympic Dreams
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Sasha and Masha pedal furiously, concentration etched on their young faces, as cycling coach Alexander Vasilyev glides along beside them offering encouragement. They are racing to catch up with the rest of a St. Petersburg triathlon team which has temporarily pulled ahead on the morning training ride.
Cycling 50 kilometers is tough. Doing so in St. Petersburg in mid-October, where the average temperature is 5 deg C, on two lane roads with giant trucks and farm tractors belching clouds of diesel exhaust as they rumble past at alarming speeds is nerve wracking. Nevertheless, these two 14-year-old girls are up to the challenge.
Established in 1991, the St. Petersburg Triathlon Team was the first such team in Russia: its members range in age from 12 to 25. It is one of two teams in St. Petersburg. The other team is affiliated with the army.
Over the years, hard work and expert coaching has produced a number of exceptional triathletes. Natasha Shlyakhtenko, 17, is one of these. She's been with the team for two years and won both Russia's winter and summer triathlon championships this year. In doing so, she has established herself as Russia's premiere female triathlete at the junior level.
Shlyakhtenko is the youngest of five children. Her father is also a triathlete. She hopes to represent Russia at the Olympics one day.
The team's last major competition this year is the 14th annual Alanya International Triathlon in Turkey on Wednesday. This event is an Olympic distance triathlon that features a 1,500 meter swim, 40 km of cycling and a 10 km run.
The race starts on a small beach below Alanya's famous Red Tower - an eight-sided 13th century fortification. Everyone swims straight out into the harbor, rounds a single mark and returns. The cycling follows immediately with four laps on a flat course. Finally, the run takes the competitors an undulating route through the center of town. The temperature has been forecasted to be around 23 deg C.
Mufit Kartanoglu, the Race Director, said via e-mail that 350 athletes from 25 countries are expected at the event.
The St. Petersburg Triathlon Team has sent 15 people and two coaches to Turkey. Shlyakhtenko will be among those competing, but she'll do so after having recently suffered from a recurring pain in her lower left leg. Although she was able to continue swimming and cycling despite this injury she was forced to stop running for 10 days.
Dr. Irina Gizha, part of the medical staff at the St. Petersburg Olympic Center and who has been treating Shlyakhtenko, believes that Shlyakhtenko's injury is partially related to the poor condition of her running shoes.
Because of ongoing budget difficulties each member of the team receives only one pair of running shoes per year. These shoes are used to run some 50 to 75 km a week.
Generally available running shoes are good for up to 800 km, according to an article posted by U.S. magazine Runners World at www.runnersworld.com. Beyond that point their ability to absorb the shocks inherent in long distance running is significantly decreased; stress to feet and legs increases dramatically and injury may result. Gizha estimates that each team member should have at least four pairs of first-rate running shoes a year.
Unfortunately in Russia, austerity measures are a fact of life.
Last year the team was able to travel to competitions outside Russia five times: to Finland, Germany, Holland (twice) and Turkey. But this year they only had enough money for three trips. Finland was selected because it's possible to drive there, and Turkey's warm temperatures mean wetsuits aren't necessary.
Other significant items the team must do without include: a car to follow behind them when they go cycling on public roads; at least two high quality bikes designed exclusively for triathlons; and brand-new wetsuits. Even something as simple as a video camera to expedite swim stroke and running gait analysis would be a bonus. Currently, one of the coaches brings his personal video camera from home to handle this essential task.
There are also any number of pie-in-the-sky items on any team's wish list as well. These include: heart rate monitors to fine tune performance while cycling or running; aero bars to increase aerodynamic efficiency and comfort on the bike; and energy gels to provide extra calories during training and competition.
In western countries, most of these items are commonplace even among amateur triathletes, but they are well beyond the modest budget of the St. Petersburg Triathlon Team. And so Alexander Gizha, the head coach, has been actively seeking donations and sponsors so that the team can successfully compete at an international level.
The St. Petersburg Triathlon is part of a government-sponsored sports program that includes three schools and a facility for training Olympic athletes. All of these are located near Ploshchad Muzhestva.
This past summer, the Olympic Center sent 16 people to compete at the Olympic games in Athens, Greece. They returned with one silver medal in track and field, one team bronze medal in gymnastics and a team bronze medal in fencing.
Yulian Malishev, 22, has been to Alanya with the St. Petersburg Triathlon Team five times. His best finish was in 2001 when he came in 6th with a time of 1 hour, 48 minutes and 9 seconds.
Malishev joined the Russian army and two years ago so he is also a member of its triathlon team. In June he represented the army at a military world championships in France.
In addition to training year round, Malishev has been careful not to neglect his education. Last year he graduated first in his class from the three year coaching program at St. Petersburg's Middle School of Olympic Reserve. He is now working on a degree in clinical psychology at St. Petersburg State University.
This year Malishev was invited to be a member of the Olympic Center. This is quite an honor, but while he has great respect for his coaches here in St. Petersburg and is grateful for all the assistance he's received, Moscow was able to offer more money and so he has decided to train there.
The St. Petersburg Triathlon team has been looking forward to competing in Turkey for some time. It went to Alanya last week to get acclimated, sort out its equipment and practice on the course.
During regular training, all the athletes on the team commit to four training sessions a day, five days a week. A staff of four coaches works with them to perfect their swimming, cycling and running techniques.
A typical day begins at 7 a.m. with a 4 kilometer swim in an indoor pool. Then they towel off and eat breakfast before cycling 60 to 70 km. (Just before a big event they only do 50 km.) When that's completed it's back to the pool for another 3 km swim. Then at 1 p.m. they have lunch, followed by schooling before setting off to run 10 or 15 km. That concludes the days training and they gather for dinner at 8 p.m. After that it's time for homework before bed at 11 p.m.
After the competition in Turkey, the team returns to St. Petersburg on Saturday for a well-deserved 10 day rest before resuming its regular training schedule.
Anna Osipova contributed to this story.
Anyone wishing to donate money or equipment to the St. Petersburg Triathlon Team should contact Alexander Gizha, the head coach by e-mail gizha@ mail.ru
Results of this week's competition can be found at www.triathlon.org.tr
TITLE: Report: 'Save Baltic Area Environment'
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The United Nations Environmental Program presented its Global International Waters Assessment (UNEP-GIWA) report on the Baltic Sea on Friday during the 12th annual session of the Baltic Sea States Sub-regional Cooperation organization in Malmo, Sweden.
The report identifies two key issues for the improvement of the environment of the Baltic Sea: the integration of ecological and agricultural policies, and Russia's involvement in the European Union's Water Framework Directive.
The report acknowledges the damage caused by agricultural run-off, urban waste-water discharges, industrial chemical pollution and oil spills. Excessive fishing has been featured in a separate complaint.
"There is a decreased viability of fish stock in the Baltic ecosystem," the report says. "Cod, herring, salmon and eel are suffering not only from the reduced water quality but from being fished at unsustainable rates."
UNEP-GIWA scientific director Dag Daler said future policies should be based on precautionary principles.
"It is always an easier task to prevent damage than to mitigate problems," Daler said. "This is particularly true for the Baltic Sea environment as it is an enclosed sea."
The report suggests an increased integration between environmental and agricultural activities through encouraging cooperation programs. Baltic Sea countries have also been advised to improve mutual cooperation in fishing policy.
UNEP-GIWA has its headquarters at the University of Kalmar on the Baltic Sea coast of southern Sweden. Its Baltic Sea assessment program is part of a systematic global environmental study of the marine environment, including marine, coastal and fresh waters.
This research is led by the UN Environmental Program and is conducted in 66 trans-boundary water regions.
Brunon Synak, the chairman of the Baltic Sea States Sub-regional Cooperation, believes the region currently finds itself in a very important and exciting phase.
"The Baltic Sea has become an inland sea of the EU with Russia as a direct neighbor," he said. "All of us living in the region see great new opportunities but are aware of some major challenges."
In Daler's opinion, the major challenge is to revert to environmental sustainability.
"We must be able to use the sea without damaging the environment or depleting fish stocks and other aquatic resources," Daler said. "This can only be achieved by uniting social, economic and environmental decision-making."
The Baltic Sea States Sub-regional Cooperation organization was established in 1993, aimed at improving sub-regional cooperation in the Baltic Sea countries which includes Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Russia.
More than 100 sub-regions - counties, lander, oblasts, etc., - regularly participate in the organization's annual sessions.
TITLE: 2,000 Call For End to Chechen War
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - At least 2,000 people gathered in Moscow on Saturday to call for an end to the war in Chechnya. It was one of the largest anti-war protests in years and also provided a rare public platform for broader criticism of President Vladimir Putin's rule.
Protesters listened to speeches from prominent anti-war figures and chanted slogans like "Peace in Chechnya!" and "Down With Putin's Politics!"
They also held posters of jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and photographs of people who died in the storming of the Dubrovka theater in 2002.
Saturday's protest fell on the second anniversary of the beginning of the Dubrovka hostage crisis.
The protest was organized by For Human Rights and the Committee for Anti-War Activities and supported by the Committee 2008.
Lev Ponomaryov, head of For Human Rights, focused attention on Putin's plans to scrap elections for regional governors and abolish single-mandate seats in the State Duma.
"If the authorities don't hear us, if the State Duma votes for legislation that we consider a constitutional coup, then we'll gather again," he said on Ekho Moskvy on Saturday.
The number of participants was much higher than anticipated, Vasyukov told Interfax, noting that organizers had predicted around 500 people would show up when applying for permission to hold the rally.
Speakers included prominent human rights activist Valeria Novodvorskaya, journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and Vladimir Kara-Murza of Committee 2008.
"Someone has to stop shooting first in this war," Politkovskaya said. "The residents of our country should demand this of the Russian authorities. Only in this way can we create peace in Russia."
The protest also drew participants angry at the increased role of the security services under Putin and the proliferation of criminal cases they see as politically motivated.
Interfax reported Saturday that central district authorities were dismayed that some participants and speakers - citing specifically Novodvorskaya - strayed from the anti-war message and encouraged general anti-government sentiment.
Novodvorskaya wore a sign around her neck that read "Putin Is Not Yeltsin's Successor, But Rather Andropov's," referring to former KGB chief and Soviet leader Yury Andropov.
TITLE: Officer Named in Pumane Case
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Prosecutors have named a second suspect in the case of alleged police violence that led to the death of Alexander Pumane, a man detained for driving a car rigged with explosives in the center of Moscow last month.
Junior Sergeant Yevgeny Gulin, 23, was detained on Wednesday, said Svetlana Peterenko, a spokeswoman for the Moscow City Prosecutor's Office.
Petrenko was one of the three officers from Precinct No. 83 that detained Pumane on Sept. 18.
Kommersant and Moskovsky Komsomolets reported on Friday that Gulin was a suspect because he asked for, and received, handcuffs from the precinct's duty police officer immediately after Pumane arrived at the precinct.
Investigators believe that the handcuffs were used during Pumane's interrogation in the precinct's basement, Kommersant reported.
Judging by marks on Pumane's wrists, he was handcuffed when he was lethally injured, the newspaper cited sources close to the investigation as saying. But investigators said that Gulin did not take part in the interrogation, Kommersant reported.
Gulin said that he needed the handcuffs to locate and detain the man whom Pumane said had asked him to drive the car, the paper said.
Police have said they are also looking for Major Vyacheslav Dushenko, a counterterrorism police officer, who has been charged with overstepping his authority and inflicting grievous bodily injuries that led to Pumane's death.
TITLE: Campaign Contractors 'Illegal'
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The City Election Commission has accused candidates campaigning for municipal elections scheduled to take place in December of using illegitimate methods to advertise their programs, local media reported last week.
Candidates for the 21st municipal district have officially signed agreements with a number of voters to campaign on their behalf, a fact that the city election commission treats as vote-buying.
"Candidates have no right to sign contracts and be in the role of an employer. They can only sign agreements to carry out some particular work," said Dmitry Krasnyansky, the city election commission deputy head, quoted by Delovoi Peterburg Daily on Thursday.
Krasnyansky said that although the use of such agreements is considered a violation of the election law, the case will not be handed over to the prosecutor's office because the city election commission has not received any complains.
But representatives of the election commission in the 21st municipal district said the agreements are legal and are mentioned in the commission's documentation as one of the methods to run the election campaign.
"I saw people walking around here with these agreements. It is court's business to determine whether it's legal or not. As for us, we have certain regulations, which say such agreements can be used by candidates," said a representative of the commission who wouldn't give her name in a telephone interview Monday.
The municipal election commission representatives said their opinion is based on Article No. 59 of the federal election law, which says "a candidate has a right to sign an agreement with citizens to fulfil particular works."
TITLE: Tsarist Spy Catcher Could Be New Symbol for FSB
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The reburial of a tsarist-era counter-intelligence hero in Moscow last Wednesday by agencies affiliated with the Federal Security Service has sparked a flurry of media speculation that the FSB could be looking for a new symbol to replace its Soviet founder, Felix Dzerzhinsky.
Soldiers of the Kremlin regiment fired off a three-round salute as World War I spy catcher Nikolai Batyushin, who died in Belgium in 1957, was laid to rest at the Nikolo-Arkhangelskoye cemetery.
"General Batyushin always served the law and the state to which he had vowed loyalty," Itar-Tass quoted Lieutenant General Vladimir Nosov, first deputy chief of the FSB's Military Counter-Intelligence Department, as saying at the burial ceremony. "He regarded it as his sacred duty to ensure the security of his Fatherland. The military intelligence service of Russia also adheres to these principles today."
The exhuming of Batyushin's remains in Belgium and their reburial in Moscow was in line with public sentiments to build a bridge between tsarist and contemporary Russia, said Vitaly Shlykov, a retired officer in the Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, and a member of the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy.
"Dzerzhinsky will little by little take a secondary role and they will turn to their origins more," Shlykov said of the FSB on Thursday. "It's been almost 15 years [since the breakup of the Soviet Union]. The Dzerzhinsky generation has decreased in numbers, and a new generation has come along."
Some newspapers speculated Thursday that Batyushin could be about to replace Dzerzhinsky in the FSB's affections.
"Today's security officers apparently need a new role model because 'Iron Felix' doesn't have moral authority in society," Izvestia said in a comment Thursday.
Novaya Gazeta on Thursday went as far as to speculate that Dzerzhinsky's portraits in the FSB's Lubyanka headquarters could be replaced in the future by portraits of Batyushin.
The FSB, Russia's main successor agency to the KGB, did not officially participate in the reburial and declined to comment Thursday.
Alexander Zdanovich, president of the Society for the Study of the History of Russian Special Services and a former FSB spokesman, said the reburial was not meant to give a new image to the FSB.
"That's absolute rubbish," he said.
The way to improve the FSB's image is to be more open to the public and the news media, he said.
Vasily Soima, president of the fund for the social and legal support of the FSB's former and current officers, which also helped organize the reburial, said the move was not about image.
No one was taking care of Batyushin's grave in Belgium and it could be damaged, he said.
Zdanovich said the decision to rebury Batyushin's remains was made in 2003, 100 years after the creation of the tsarist intelligence service. In 1903, Tsar Nicholas II ordered the creation of an intelligence unit reporting to the General Staff, Zdanovich said.
The reburial was carried out this year to coincide with the 130th anniversary of Batyushin's birth, Zdanovich said.
As an intelligence officer in the Warsaw Military District, Batyushin uncovered 30 spies during World War I, Zdanovich said. Batyushin came to prominence when Nicholas II appointed him to investigate why Army supplies were not getting through to the front.
Some of his investigations targeted people close to Grigory Rasputin.
Batyushin emigrated to Serbia after the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917, where he wrote the book, "Secret Military Intelligence and How to Combat It." During World War II he went to live in Belgium, where he died at the age of 84.
TITLE: City Lures Moscow Businesses
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The city's governor, Valentina Matviyenko, is on an ambitious drive to lure some of the nation's biggest companies to the northern capital.
Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller has announced that its new subsidiary, Gazpromneft - set to become one of the country's major oil producers - will register in St. Petersburg, as well as its unit Gazpromregiongaz.
Miller is a native of St. Petersburg and a close ally of the president.
The country's No. 2 bank, Vneshtorgbank, is also said to be planning to move its headquarters to St. Petersburg, and more than half a dozen large companies are in negotiations to follow suit, the city has said.
"The administration will provide a favorable environment for doing business in St. Petersburg," Natalia Kutabayeva, Matviyenko's spokes-woman, said by telephone.
The governor's appeal to the business community is intended to raise funds to help maintain the city's cultural heritage, she said.
Although it is nearly impossible to estimate how much extra money is at stake, the city could conceivably reap tens of millions of dollars in extra revenue.
Earlier this year, Matviyenko told reporters that the city is in talks with eight large companies about transferring their tax registration to St. Petersburg.
Kutabayeva confirmed there are negotiations with LUKoil, state-owned oil company Rosneft and TNK, but would not name the other companies. She also refused to comment on the reports of Vneshtorgbank's moving plans, as did a spokesman for the bank.
However, Vneshtorgbank officially announced late last week that its observers' council had approved a move to St. Petersburg, Kommersant reported Saturday.
In spite of Matviyenko's energetic attempts to tip the country's financial center of gravity away from Moscow, some experts doubt her success.
"It's not enough for someone to say that the financial center will move for it actually to move," said Andrei Yemelin, managing vice president of the Association of Russian Banks. "There are no economic reasons for such a move."
Nevertheless, shipbuilder Sovkomflot is moving its headquarters from Moscow, Kutabayeva said, and Transneft will open a regional office in St. Petersburg. Matviyenko has welcomed Transneft's decision as "an important addition to the city budget."
"This will allow us to attract $30 million to the city next year, in addition to the 450 million rubles that [Transneft] is transferring to the [city] budget," Matviyenko said in a statement earlier this month. "We are providing the company with a building ... so [the office] could function properly."
Rosneft is also planning to open a recently established subsidiary, RN-Trade, in the northern capital.
"We have the right to make these sorts of decisions without explaining them to anyone," said Rosneft spokesman Alexander Stepanenko when asked why St. Petersburg - and not Moscow - will become the trading company's base.
The deputy head of the presidential administration and a St. Petersburg native, Igor Sechin, was appointed to the board of Rosneft in July.
What is certainly important in a company's decisions is that labor costs are lower in St. Petersburg than in Moscow and that IT services and other infrastructure are well developed, said Yekaterina Trofimova, financial sector analyst with Standard & Poor's, in a telephone interview from Paris. These factors can make the relocation of some financial institutions to the city possible, but they do not provide enough of an incentive for a mass exodus, she added.
"Banks will remain near their large clients and in Russia, large clients are in Moscow," she said. "There were efforts to build up St. Petersburg as the financial center in the past but they failed."
Trofimova recalled that the late St. Petersburg mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, spearheaded an initiative that eased the process for foreign banks to open subsidiaries in the northern capital.
"Nothing came of it, largely because Russia's financial flows are highly centralized," Trofimova said.
However, if Vneshtorgbank ends up moving to the city, it could boost the city's image as a financial heavyweight.
Furthermore, the city's proximity to the West could be a good reason for creating a greater financial presence there, said Natalia Orlova, banking sector analyst at Alfa Bank.
"St. Petersburg is already the country's second-most important financial center," said Alexei Titkov, a regional analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center. If the bank relocates, he said, St. Petersburg's banking weight would double, as the city would gain almost 6 percent of total assets held by Russia's largest 200 banks. Still, the bank's departure would have a "serious but not critical" effect on Moscow, where 88 percent of assets of the largest banks are located, he added.
Yemelin cautioned against overestimating the effect of any such move.
"St. Petersburg, luckily, already has banks," he said. "Moving one bank to Cheboksary will not make Cheboksary into a financial capital."
There has also been talk of moving higher courts to St. Petersburg, Yemelin said, and nothing ever came of that.
Following her election in October 2003, Matviyenko has often mentioned the need to transfer one of the government branches of power - namely the judiciary - from Moscow.
Over the summer Matviyenko said publicly that a decision had been made to move certain "capital functions," to St. Petersburg, which the Kremlin promptly denied.
While there are no new developments in moving the judiciary to St. Petersburg, Kutabayeva said, work to attract more corporate money to the city is at full steam. For the doubters, however, "it seems more like a PR game aimed at increasing St. Petersburg's profile," said Titkov.
TITLE: City Hall not Obliged To Repay Federal Money
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg's Arbitration Court has denied Finance Ministry demands for a repayment of the $20 million budget debt by the city administration Friday.
The money is owed to the federal budget for the high-speed railway terminal - now a huge pit by Moskovsky railway station - the construction of which was started in the city almost 10 years ago.
Instead, the court deemed RAO Vysoko Skorostniye Magistrali (VSM), the company that was in charge of the project, responsible for repaying the debt.
The city does not carry responsibility for repaying any of the VSM-associated debt to the Finance Ministry nor to anyone else Vice Governor Mikhail Oseyevsky has said repeatedly over the last few months. "As to the pit near Moskovsky station - it is the property of the Russian Federation," business daily Kommersant cited Oseyevsky as saying.
The case against Smolny was jointly filed in February this year by the Finance Ministry and Vnesheconombank. The plaintiffs insisted that the city was responsible for repaying a part of the $200 million loan received by VSM in 1997 for the high-speed rail project because it served as a guarantor in the deal.
However, the city administration argued that although the former St. Petersburg governor Vladimir Yakovlev did sign a guarantor's agreement for the loan, he did so without the Legislative Assembly's agreement and only as a co-guarantor with Kremlin.
The $200 million loan was provided to VSM by British banks Indosuez and UBS Warburg.
About $65 million of it was used to dig the pit which was later to become a railway terminal serving high-speed trains between Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 1999, VSM declared the project bankrupt and halted the construction.
Although both the Finance Ministry and VSM are expected to appeal against the decision, Smolny lawyers say the case is 99.9 percent won, Kommersant reported.
The guarantor's agreement signed by Yakovlev, the federal government, and the British banks has been rendered invalid by Friday's decision, making VSM the sole party bearing responsibility before the Kremlin for repaying the outstanding debt.
A group of investors headed by the city-based Veda Systems holding company bought the pit for a total of $80 million at the beginning of the summer. Veda declared it will turn the pit into a recreation center.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Elcoteq Starts Building
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Finnish telecommunication equipment company Elcoteq started the construction of its first St. Petersburg plant Monday, in a project that is said to cost about 100 million euros.
The plant will occupy a 147,000 square-meter area by Pulkovo airport, and will employ about 1,500 people.
Out of the total investment, about 15 million euro was spent on land and plant construction, about the same amount will be invested in equipment, while the main funds will be put towards personnel training and Information Technology purchases, Interfax reported.
The Russian Elcoteq subsidiary was founded in 1997. It completes orders for customers including SonyEricsson and American Lusent Technologies.
VTB Re-registers in City
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Vneshtorgbank, the second largest bank in the country, will prepare a list of changes necessary for it to re-register the bank's headquarters in St. Petersburg by the end of November, said VTB's senior vice president Vasily Titov on Monday.
He said the VTB's board of directors made the decision to study the changes involved and discuss them during a shareholders meeting held on December 15, Interfax reported.
Though positive, Titov said: "It is too early to discuss the changes in detail."
TITLE: Russia Profited From Iraqi Oil
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia was former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's oil agent of choice and Russian companies benefited much more than those of any other country from the United Nation's oil-for-food program, according to newly published UN records and U.S. congressional investigators.
Information released late last week by two of several committees investigating abuse of the UN program appears to support claims that Hussein attempted to use the program to buy influence in the UN Security Council.
Russian firms bought $19.2 billion of Iraqi oil and exported $3.3 billion worth of food and other UN-approved items to Hussein's regime, much more than any other country, UN records show.
State-owned oil company Zaru-bezhneft, soon to be acquired by Gazprom, was the top buyer of crude under the program, paying almost $3 billion for an unspecified amount.
Such deals with Iraq were not illegal under the terms of oil-for-food, which ran from 1996 to April 2003. Under the program, Iraq was allowed to sell limited amounts of oil to UN-approved companies and use the proceeds to purchase food and certain kinds of humanitarian goods.
Providing funds to Iraq outside the UN program, however, would have violated sanctions. An earlier report by Charles Duelfer, the head U.S. arms inspector in Iraq, charges that Hussein often imposed illicit surcharges on vouchers for Iraqi oil and demanded illegal kickbacks from companies that won the right to make sales to Iraq.
Duelfer published a lengthy list of oil voucher recipients, which included dozens of Russian companies, politicians, political parties and government ministries.
A U.S. congressional investigation uncovered a list of hundreds of firms approved by Hussein and his lieutenants to sell humanitarian goods to Iraq.
The document lists more than 280 Russian and 100 Saudi companies, together accounting for more than half the list, according to The Associated Press.
The list, which investigators said might not be complete, includes companies from more than a dozen other countries, but none from permanent UN Security Council members China, France or the United States.
An unnamed congressional investigator called the Iraqi list for selling it humanitarian goods equivalent to the voucher list in the Duelfer report.
"Until now, it had been thought that only vouchers for oil were handed out, but due to disclosures by Iraqi officials from the Ministry of Trade, we now understand that the practice was spread even further," the investigator said.
Russian companies on the exempt list include Gazprom, LUKoil and Tatneft, all three of which also appear in the Duelfer report. No representatives of those companies were available for comment Sunday.
The UN records say 248 oil companies from different countries bought a total of $64.2 billion of Iraqi oil under the program, and that 3,545 companies sold $32.9 billion worth of food and other goods to Hussein's regime.
France was the second-biggest purchaser of Iraqi oil after Russia, buying $4.4 billion worth. France was also the second-biggest exporter to Iraq under the program, selling $2.9 billion worth of goods.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Friday that the ongoing scandal is damaging the work of the United Nations.
"There is no doubt that the constant campaign has, and discussions have, hurt the UN," he told reporters. "That's why we want to get to the bottom of it and clear it as quickly as possible."
Many Russian companies and officials have denied any wrongdoing, although some businessmen have said off the record that violations were widespread.
Russian officials say they are cooperating with the UN investigation, led by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker.
A spokesman for the Volcker commission said UN member states are cooperating with the investigation, but he declined to discuss specific governments.
TITLE: FDI Flow Directed Towards East Europe
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Eastern Europe's "Big Four" countries are luring foreign direct investment projects away from the continent's more advanced economies, according to a new study.
Russia and new European Union members Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland attracted a combined 283 investment projects from abroad in the first half of the year, up from 156 on the same period a year-earlier, a report by Ernst & Young said. That gives the four countries a fifth of Europe's total, up from 14 percent in the first six months of 2003.
"The most striking trend is the strong growth in the East," said Marc Lhermitte, a partner at Ernst & Young and one of the authors of the report. "If this trend is maintained, the FDI map of Europe will be fundamentally altered."
Overall, the number of foreign direct investments into European countries grew 27 percent to 1,432. Britain led the way with 313. Russia attracted 66 projects in the period, up from 58 in the first half of 2003 and more than wealthier Spain. Almost a quarter of new investments into Russia in the first halves of 2003 and 2004 came in the food sector, the report said, although investments into non-metallic minerals - which include oil - chemicals, plastic and rubber, as well as machinery and equipment, were also significant.
Nigel Wilcock, one of the authors of the report, said cheaper labor is driving the eastward shift. The kinds of investments being made in Eastern Europe show that investors are moving to target domestic consumption, he said.
Ernst & Young counted new investment projects as "substantial cross-border investments that are new, expanding or co-located," said Vladimir Merkushev of Ernst & Young in Moscow. Investments into retail, hotel and leisure sectors were not included.
The reason the report focused on the number of projects instead of the amount of money invested is that "dollars can flow in one year and out the next," Wilcock said. "The thing about solid foreign direct investment is, it creates employment opportunities which have a multiplier effect on the economy."
Most Russian investments in the first half of 2004 went to Moscow and St. Petersburg. The United States and Germany account for about a third of the total, with the rest coming mostly from other Western European countries.
Last year Russia attracted some $7 billion in foreign direct investment. But while Russia has had roughly $90 to $100 per capita FDI since 1994, Hungary, the Czech Republic and some of the Baltic states are closer to $2,000 per head, said Peter Westin, chief economist at Aton.
Westin said the numbers might mean that the oil major Yukos' legal standoff with the government has not significantly damaged international investors' willingness to do business in Russia.
"It would be interesting to see if we have more companies, more players being active" despite Yukos, he said. "One big difference between the first six months of 2003 and this year is that in 2003 we did not have Yukos."
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Ruble Strengthens Anew
MOSCOW (SPT) - The Russian ruble took its strongest position against the dollar since May at 28.86 rubles to the dollar on Monday, at which point Central Bank started market-support buying.
Dealers say the dollar has fallen by 25 kopecks in the last two days, reported Interfax. This reflects the monetary authority policy of withholding buy quotations as the dollar dips on the international Forex market.
Meanwhile, the euro did well on the Russian market and also approached the $1.28 mark on the Forex on Monday. It has gained 20.84 kopecks to 36.8321 rubles.
Crude Continues to Rise
OSLO (Reuters) - Norwegian oil and gas employers threatened Monday to shut down all output by the world's No. 3 crude exporter from Nov. 8 in a bid to end a deadlocked four-month conflict with striking rig workers.
Crude oil prices rose to new record highs on worries about the threatened closure of Norway's 3 million barrels per day output. In London, Brent benchmark crude hit a record of $51.90, up 68 cents.
The striking OFS union vowed to continue its action. It said the threat was a ploy to force Norway's center-right government to invoke emergency laws allowing it to end strikes when they threaten oil and gas output, the backbone of the economy.
The Norwegian Shipowners' Association, which represents employers in the rig workers' dispute that began in early July, said it would start a secondary lockout on 94 offshore service vessels and shuttle tankers in two weeks' time.
EU Removes Tariffs
BRUSSELS (AP) - The European Union's top trade official said Monday he would move to lift millions of euros in punitive tariffs on U.S. goods after Washington repealed corporate tax breaks that were ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization.
"We shall be putting an end to our sanctions," said EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy.
But the two-decade trans-Atlantic fight will continue because of EU concerns about loopholes in the bill signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush last week. That allows big exporters like Boeing to benefit from the breaks beyond the two-year transition period agreed to by the EU. Lamy said he would ask the WTO for another ruling on whether the new U.S. law fully complies with global trade rules.
Prodi Chides 'Failure'
LONDON (Reuters) - Europe's attempts to overtake the United States as the world's most competitive economy are "a big failure", Romano Prodi, the outgoing European Commission president, said in an interview published Monday.
Countries' use of national vetoes had blocked progress in spite of efforts by the Commission, Prodi told the Financial Times.
The EU set out in Lisbon four years ago to outstrip the U.S. economy by 2010, but few ministers, officials or outside observers believe that will happen, with some saying the gap has widened. "Lisbon is a big failure," Prodi added.
TITLE: Invisible Salaries Cast the Long Shadow of High Retail Spending
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: While the amount Russians spend on products and services keeps growing year by year, it is significantly falling behind the annual rate of salary increases, making experts believe many businesses are still operating a system of 'cash-in-hand' salaries to avoid taxation.
Despite estimates by experts at the Federal Center for Macroeconomic Analysis (FCMA) that, on average, black payments make up not more than 32 percent of all paid salaries, commercial operators say salaries of small and medium-sized business employees are 3 to 16 times higher than the figures being officially declared.
"I come across it quite often seeing how [small] businesses operate here. It's quite a widespread practice. Of course, it doesn't happen anymore that companies declare their employee receives only the minimum wage, as was the case in 1990, but it does still exist. It just looks a bit different," said Igor Chubakha, an operator at a local publishing business.
The only sector where the system of undeclared salaries has been almost wiped out is big industry, which prefers to play by the rules Chubakha said.
"It is especially clear with market traders and small retailers where [management] declares employee salaries of about 2000 rubles, but in fact they pay up to $300 a month. Such businesses in Moscow don't bother with cash-in-hand salaries, since it is considered as rather small amounts of money. Unlike their counterparts in St. Petersburg, they'd rather pay the taxes," he said.
Representatives of St. Petersburg's trade unions have pointed out that the changes in payment methods at big industrial plants are linked to more production orders from abroad, especially in the defense industry.
"If a military ship is being built for hundreds of million dollars for India, it doesn't make sense to hide real salaries," said the Trade Unions' representative on conditions of anonymity in a telephone interview last week.
Looking into the salary market January last year, FCMA experts had some confusion when comparing figures for 2002 with 2003. While January 2003 growth in cash income made 15.9 percent gains compared to the same time the previous year, the average salary level grew by only 10.2 percent. Meanwhile, in January and February 2003, Russia's population spent 865.3 billion rubles ($29.7 billion) on products and services - 171.7 billion rubles ($5.9 billion) higher than during the same period in 2002.
The growth in the amount of hard currency held in bank accounts in February last year was estimated as up by 57.7 percent on the previous year.
Experts admitted that with a significant part of income sourcing from street and small retail trade, or stock market deals, it is still hard to estimate population's real spending on products and services. One thing, however, is clear: both keep growing.
"According to the [federal] Center for Development, the growth of population's income in January 2003 was estimated at 8.2 percent up on the previous year. This is half of State Statistics Committee's estimated figure," an FCMA study says.
Alongside trade, the health and education sectors are widely affected by cash salary payments, with actual salaries up to twice higher than officially declared, said Igor Polyakov, an expert at the macroeconomics center. "Cash-in-hand salaries in these sectors are mostly seen in big cities, such as Moscow and St. Petersburg. If [health] services are given, patients turn into an unofficial source of income. [Some] though, can not look after their health or education needs because they are not part of the current system of income," Polyakov said in a telephone interview last week.
A local teacher said his total profit was up by $500 a month, although his official salary totaled 5,000 rubles ($171), plus a couple of thousand rubles from another official source. "Official salaries do grow, but so slowly that each year they still form the same low percentage of a worker's overall profits," a member of the teacher's family said on conditions of anonymity.
While federal experts believe salaries depend very much on conditions of the sector, businesses say the fault for people and companies not declaring real incomes lies with the state.
"There are two factors governing this matter: psychological and practical," said an Estonian businessman who works with a St. Petersburg partner, on conditions of anonymity.
"The psychological one comes in tax payers not knowing how their money is being spent by the state. There are no closed budget items in Estonia, for instance, and nobody builds $300 million palaces for the president," the businessman said.
"The practical one comes in that most people in Estonia live with long term bank loans at 3 to 4 percent interest - not 15 or 16 percent like here. To get such a loan, people need to show their official salary. It's certainly a strong stimulus when a person can acquire a loan to buy a car or an apartment for $200,000. That is why the middle class makes up 60 percent of the population in Estonia and only 5 percent in Russia," he said.
TITLE: City Companies Join the Training Line
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT:
GROWTH IN TRAINING
Interest in training has grown dramatically in St. Petersburg over the last two years. Corporate spending on training has increased across the board, in medium-sized and large companies, and it will continue to increase as economic growth continues and competition for qualified professionals intensifies.
Half a decade of sustained economic growth and relative stability has meant that more Russian companies are thinking about where they'll be in three to five years, rather than where they'll be a month from now.
Many of the city's companies are expanding rapidly, and if they don't have established in-house training and development programs, they're unable to maintain their own growth rates. The city's labor market doesn't make it any easier. There is a lack of qualified staff and this is forcing individual organizations to reach into their own pockets to improve the professional competence of their staff.
WHY INVEST IN TRAINING?
Local brewery Vena defined and finalized its training needs last year and, and in accordance with this plan, increased training spending this year by 60 percent, according to Inna Fedorova, the training and development manager at Vena. Training spending will be higher again in 2005, due to the company's growth, she said.
"It's much more efficient to promote and grow professionals from within a company, than to attract 'stars' from the market," she said. This efficiency is not only related to cost considerations, but also to sharing best practice within the company and maintaining loyal employees.
St. Petersburg's labor market has become increasingly volatile over the last four years. Russia's labor force is not keeping up with high rates of economic growth and the federal government estimates that by 2006, there will be a serious shortage of qualified workers. Sectors like construction are already scrambling to find ways to train more workers and hold onto current staff. Offering training opportunities seems to be one way to attract and maintain employees.
Kelly Services conducted a survey recently in Moscow which looked at what motivated people to leave their job. Less than a third of respondents said they left their jobs because they were seeking higher salaries. Most were seeking more challenge and better opportunities for promotion and training.
Galina Shirinova, the HR manager for Kelly Services Russia, was a bit cynical about why employees wanted training. She said that applicants often asked questions about training opportunities in job interviews, but didn't usually ask anything specific.
"I get the sense that many of them just want to collect certificates," she said. "It's rare that they say: 'I want to improve these skills; is that going to be possible?'"
THE PRACTICALITIES
OF TRAINING
Most companies use a combination of in-house and external training. In-house knowledge is good for the specifics of how to do the job and external courses are relied on more for generic skills like communications, time-management and sales and management strategies.
Since St. Petersburg's Taleon club opened the Eliseev Palace Hotel, its training budget has increased considerably and it has been relying more on external training providers.
"When we opened the hotel, we knew we needed some external expertise," said Sergey Scalon, Taleon's general manager, who added that their external courses focused on skills like communication competencies and customer-relations.
However, even before it looked to other training providers, the Taleon's in-house training system was turning out staff with world-class service standards. A good indication of this is that after only six months of opening, the hotel was offered membership of the prestigious association: 'The Leading Small Hotels of the World'. At the hotel, a new staff member with no prior relevant experience could do as much as three-months off-the-job training before they start in their position. Then, as part of their ongoing development, they will do an average three days off-the-job and eight to 16 hours on-the-job training per month.
COSTS
Costs vary depending on whether courses are open or corporate, but, generally speaking, St. Petersburg training courses are around 50 percent cheaper than similar courses offered in Moscow.
A typical two-day open training course at one of the better-known training providers in the city costs in the region of $250 per person.
TARGETED COURSES
Increasing demand for training services have been met by a mushrooming of new training companies in the city. St. Petersburg has many new local training companies and is seeing an influx of Moscow training companies establishing offices in the city.
At the Moscow exhibition: Training 2004, there were 89 training companies from Moscow taking part, and not all of the city's training companies were represented.
With increased competition among local training providers, some providers, like the city's training leaders: Concept Training, the Stockholm School of Economics and the International Management Institute of St Petersburg (IMISP), are focusing on more personalized courses, designing and customizing targeted courses to meet the specific needs of companies.
There is an increasing demand for this kind of personalized service. Several of the city's HR managers said they hoped to see the trend spread across all local training providers.
"You learn a lot about a company once you start training their staff: about the company's culture and the difficulties its staff are facing," said Shackleton.
"This means you're in a position to give more general advice about how to improve certain situations to support the training you're providing."
COURSES AND
DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS
Different courses are trendy at different times. Several training providers said that currently communication, assertiveness, negotiation skills and presentation courses were the most in-demand during 2004.
The most useful courses are those that satisfy employee needs the most, said Fedorova. She said that for Vena employees, the most useful included: time management, finance for non-financial managers, project management and managerial programs like personal influence and situational leadership.
Several training providers said that there still wasn't enough recognition among Russian companies about the importance of structured development programs for staff.
Shackleton said that with the exception of some multi-national companies, most organizations in St. Petersburg still organize training in an ad hoc way. That means booking courses that they think would be useful, rather than mapping out the general and specific training requirements of their staff in a structured way, and thus aiding the growth of individual personnel along with the changing needs of the company.
"The approach of Russian companies to training is not always very planned," she said. "Most companies rarely have a budget set aside for it, but there is a growing understanding that employees are a valuable asset worth investing in."
Some say this is changing.
"Companies are starting to understand the importance of taking care of their employees," said Maria Margulis, from Ancor recruitment agency. "We are seeing a definite trend of companies implementing assessment, training and career-development programs," she said. "More organizations are starting up incentive and awards programs as well. Russian managers are realizing that staff motivation is not just about salary, but that employees want to be recognized and trained as well."
Shirinova worried that the latest preoccupation with training, was a bit of a fashion trend. "More Russian companies are realizing that they need to restructure to become more Western-oriented if they want to attract more staff with experience in foreign companies," she said, adding that many companies jumped on the training bandwagon without first identifying what kind of training they needed and why.
TITLE: Firms Strive to Calm the 'Should I Stay or Should I Go' Mentality
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: High personnel turnover is fast becoming one of the key issues for companies, with industries such as IT reporting a doubling in staff turnover this year.
Head of Arcadia++, an IT recruitment company, Yuri Ivanov said the norm of 3 percent turnover reached 5 to 7 percent in 2004, and it is not due to personnel leaving to work abroad.
In the fields that depend on intellectual property, such as information technology, employee knowledge and skills are the main asset of a company. As one IT company boss admitted: "we are nothing without our people. So we have to make them stay."
If a few years ago, the Russian IT industry regularly lost about 2 percent of qualified workforce to the West, with the entrance of such IT giants as Intel, Sunmicrosystems and Motorola onto the St. Petersburg market, the amount of empty seats waiting to be filled has become a real sore point, and much closer to home.
Some IT companies report their staff receiving two to three job offers every week. "With such a growth in demand, specialists now have come to dictating their own terms to employers," said Ivanov.
Furthermore, a flow of outsourcing projects from abroad have sparked the appearance of many small companies on the market who are ready to minimize profits for the sake of offering good salaries to the right people, said Ivanov who believes "money is still the number one motivational factor in Russia."
FACTORS
FOR RETAINING STAFF
Money is all that matters is not a viewpoint shared by most human resources managers (HRMs). They cite employee motivation as the key, although admit that the balance of motivational factors does vary with the company.
According to Galina Melnikova, CEO of HR Partners, a Moscow-based recruitment agency, a healthy start would be to eliminate staff desire to leave by reducing negative factors at the office.
She notes that at a work place, 85 percent of all mismanaged tasks are due to poor work organization - be it bad office conditions or lack of clear and open communication.
"Do not try to motivate people, rather seek to exclude demotivational factors," said Melnikova. "People want to work, just don't get in their way," she said.
One of the most important things to instill in the office environment is a systematic approach, said Andrei Doroshin, an HR director at IT company Arcadia Inc. "It [should be] a process that would be understandable to everybody, and would explain the way things run - be it promotions, new office supplies or internal communications," he said.
A clear office "system" would eliminate unnecessary reasons for jealousy, confusion, and behind-the-back dealings among the staff.
"Treat your employees well," said Doroshin. That means making sure that people feel a sense of achievement and recognition from top management.
Employees should feel comfortable inside the office; and it's achievable by providing them with good furniture, functional computers and enough air to breathe, he said.
It is also important to keep one's finger "on the pulse" of the company's internal life: communicate, even help out with some personal problems. Working in an industry where many new recruits come from outside the city, Arcadia, for example, arranges accommodation for their first few weeks.
KEY PERSONNEL
Realizing that it is impossible to stop all those who wish to leave, many large companies have instead chosen to focus on retaining key personnel (those with most company knowledge or growth potential).
"It's important to determine what are the long-term targets of each of your 'stars' and tailor individual development plans that will serve both business and personal goals," recommended Melnikova.
Among other perks, key personnel often get 'unofficial' bonuses, access to mortgage loans and consumer credits.
An influential way of retaining personnel that has begun to be appreciated and promoted in Russia is brand development. Brands - not product brands, but well-known and prestigious company names - are gaining value in the eyes of the employees.
"A good company brand increases the value of an individual CV and thus raises the importance of the job," said Ivanov. Many job seekers have began developing a personal company ratings value system, with the strongest six or seven companies in the particular field occupying the top niche, he said.
Concurrently, with evolving Internet communications, it is much easier for people in similar positions to find out the conditions that their counterparts at other companies enjoy, said Ivanov.
TITLE: Prepare for a Successful Job Interview
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A job interview "can be a 60 percent fool-proof tool for making the hiring decision," says Yury Mikhailov, managing partner of city HR agency Consort Petersburg.
So, how do you prepare for such an important occasion?
Being positive, alert and lucid must start even before you enter the office. "The first thing that we notice about a candidate is ... the tone of the voice and the general oral impression over the phone," notes Mikhailov. "Sluggish responses, unclear speech, depressed tones are not the mark of proactive and dynamic individuals."
Before dialling the potential employer or arriving for the interview, try to put yourself in a good mood. A friend of mine, for example, always swore by pulling faces at yourself in the mirror. "It felt so ridiculous, but it guaranteed me a laugh, which totally calmed me down," he would explain. On the other hand, a more ordinary prep might be to listen to your favourite song, have your favourite breakfast, or take longer to prepare in the morning.
"Those to whom smiling comes more naturally you instinctively bracket as people with well-balanced lives, both professional and personal, good achievers and easy communicators," says Mikhailov.
Nearly all employers like to see initiative and problem-solving skills. It may seem trivial, but finding the interview from the address given over the phone, without asking at length for directions, shows you have at least the basic ability to seek information actively.
Furthermore, research the company. Nothing is more insulting to an employer than to see that they have paid an interest in you and your resume, yet you have little idea of who they are. In addition, when it comes to the legendary question, "Where do you see yourself in 2-5 years time?", good research will help you name a part of the business that you may like to enter. There is a huge difference between "I want to be a manager" and "I want to be a manager of sales and promotions".
Two questions you most likely will hear are: "Why should we hire you?" and "What are your weaknesses?" In short, the first asks for your positive sides, the second - negative. Without memorizing answers word for word, have a list of points of achievement, especially detailing how you managed to achieve what you did. When it comes to the negatives, however, be frank but constructive. "I am a weak speller but I always check my work with a dictionary" will sound much better than a veiled positive, such as, "Oh, you know, I work to much". So - working a lot is a weakness and you'd rather not work much at all?
Naturally, you cannot prepare for so-called 'unexpected' questions or tasks. The trick is to train your reactions. For example, something Mikhailov does during interviews at Consort is to ask candidates straight away to talk in English. "Once [candidates] recover from the shock of the request, they settle back naturally and I can be sure they would easily deal with any other stresses that abound in our working lives," he says.
Furthermore, thinking logically or creatively through a tough, unexpected question can be more important than giving the right answer: facts can be learned, thinking cannot.
Lastly, one thing about interviews that nearly all HRMs and employers stress: arrive early. The metro may have broken down, the traffic awful, the streets without a sign or number, yet these are excuses. The interviewer may well ask: "Why didn't you leave yourself with more time to get here?"
TITLE: A Woman with Many Degrees Could Not Find Employment in St. Petersburg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Finding the right job is a challenge even for those with a great education and a prestigious diploma. And in St. Petersburg, being very well qualified can be more than just a little difficult.
Cambridge graduate Christina Gribaleva spent five months digging through job vacancies on the St. Petersburg market, before eventually accepting an offer in Moscow.
"I would have liked to stay in St. Petersburg if I had the chance," said Gribaleva, who now works as a project manager at a private Moscow-based English company ETI. "But the positions I was being offered [in the city] were either lower than my expectations or they demanded more work experience".
Gribaleva, who grew up in the city, graduated with a top Marketing degree from the Finance and Economics Institute (FinEc), and continued searching for education opportunities while working on marketing projects at a French company Jacob Delafon.
"I really wanted to continue my education after graduating FinEc with what was still deemed to be a Bachelor's degree in the West," said Gribaleva.
Gribaleva applied for a very competitive British Petroleum Chevening scholarship and, in the summer 2002, was one of the seven Russian winners. The prize: an opportunity to complete a 10-month Masters degree at the UK's top education institution, Cambridge University.
While abroad, Gribaleva attended various career fairs looking to find a suitable position. "Employers and recruiters would seem interested, but the second they would hear that I'm Russian they would turn their heads," said Gribaleva, adding that Western employers were scared off by the work permit paperwork necessary to hire a Russian national. Thus, upon completing the program, Gribaleva came back to St. Petersburg.
The homecoming proved less spectacular, however.
"I had a lot of illusions about the St. Petersburg job market when I started searching for a position in September 2003. My ambitions and expectations were too high," said Gribaleva.
The gap between Gribaleva's education and her lack of real work experience proved to be one of the hardest issues to get around when speaking to employers. "Everyone I spoke to was searching out a 'ready-made' specialist - to spend the minimum time and effort on training, " said Gribaleva.
While job-hunting, Gribaleva had an opportunity to speak with representatives from many large companies and recruitment agencies, including Kelly Services, Ancore and Antal. For the most part, however, recruiters could do little to help. "I would have liked to receive more advice from recruiters. They are the ones who understand the job market situation better than anyone," she said. "They could have pointed out where I needed to be more realistic in my expectations and what kind of a job I could count on," she said.
Instead, Gribaleva found it difficult to explain her qualifications to recruiters and was continuously sent to interviews for positions that were badly matched for her skills. "Often, after the interview, the employers themselves would say that the job would be boring for me or the position too elementary," said Gribaleva.
While looking for a marketing position, interviews with Binatone, Sony, L'Oreal, Procter & Gamble, among others passed without success. When an offer from Mars came, it wasn't what Gribaleva was looking for.
"I never thought [finding a job] would take so long," she said. "But you have to be prepared to wait if you want to find a job that can grow into a professional career."
For the full-time task of finding a job, Gribaleva used personal contacts, newspaper classifieds, Internet vacancies, as well as recruiting agencies. Judging those to be ineffective, Gribaleva then started to go through lists of different companies and send out unsolicited resumes.
"I must have sent about four hundred such speculative CVs. For every hundred I got about five replies, three of which said 'sorry, there is nothing for you at the moment,' and the other two would assure me that my resume is to be kept on file. Only the odd reply would actually result in a meeting."
It was exactly one of those unsolicited CVs, however, that led Gribaleva to the Moscow position, which valued her job experience and Western education.
For those in a similar position Gribaleva suggests to remain positive, focused, and - most importantly - energetic. "A job search should be a very active and involved process to bring in results, " she said.
TITLE: Kicking the Stress Balls into Touch:10 Points to Help You Relax
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Work-related stress does not pick on only executives and those in 'high-power' jobs.
It's a real issue affecting most lives, and yet, paradoxically, as companies are putting more effort into training people to work more effectively, we are forgetting the basic rules of how to relax, often unwinding with alcohol, exhaustive partying, or loud entertainment.
The problem is gaining professional analysis in the UK where half a million people believe that work-related stress is making them ill, according to The British Heart Foundation statistics published by the BBC.
Already, a number of institutes have started company courses and seminars dealing with psychodrama, self-monitoring, and shame attacking.
If that strikes you as all a little too serious, or that shame attacking sounds like something your mother used to do by commenting on your clothes before you left for a party, you could try the following.
STRESS MANAGEMENT
1. Admit the problem. Since stress in small volumes is a natural human reaction, it would be rather superbly Zen-like or emotionally reductive not to recognize occurrence of a stress problem. Having stress does not mean that you are weak, incompetent or unable to cope with work just like everyone else is seemingly doing. The trick is not in denying stress, it's in coping with it.
2. "Wiggle Your Big Toe". If you've see Kill Bill, you'll know that Uma Thurman's character The Bride is not only a deadly assassin, but also a master of stress management. Following the Bride's escape from a hospital after a near case of comaphilia, she climbs into a yellow 'Pussy Wagon' truck, lies back quietly and comfortably and, while clasping her hands together, speaks calmly to her paralyzed legs: "Wiggle your big toe". A tranquil environment, a soft voice, an alternating tension and relaxation of muscles, and deep breathing are all part of the Progressive Muscle Relaxation technique. As well as clenching and unclenching muscles, it is useful to count your breathes as you let them out.
3. "All I need is the air that I breathe". Nothing benefits more naturally than simply leaving the office environment with its static, fetid air for a stroll round the block.
4. Keep a diary. Take a cue from Robinson Crusoe in dealing with upsets of fortunes: try writing them down and seeing them in a more balanced, almost 'book-keeping' light. Often, just by writing it down, the main angst of the problem is released. Equally it's a good way of recording what circumstances or people stress you out. Use the diary to avoid the noted stressful circumstances in the future.
5. Phone a friend. Your friend does not need to be Oprah Winfrey or a psychoanalyst for a good discussion to ease the mind. Just voicing the problems to a sympathetic soul can help.
6. Healthy body - healthy mind. Advice like "Improve your diet" and "Start exercising" may be obvious and not always easy to apply, but taking the steps instead of the elevator, walking across the office to a colleague instead of emailing them, and more fruit in your diet are simple starts. And exercise will keep immune from illnesses in winter much better than 100 grams of vodka will.
7. Magic green leaves. Green leaves have always proved a welcome relaxation tool. Only remember, that the Chinese gained a peace of mind and longevity not from the five-leafed variety, but from tea leaves.
8. "And on the last day he rested." Call it Sabbath, Sunday, or Sweet FA Day, one should always retain at least one free day a week. Making work and private time divisions lends itself to some professions more than others, yet without the leisure time to look forward to every working day becomes a drag.
9. Wish you were here? Sun, sea, and sizzling cocktails may be the postcard image in your mind as you wade through long lists of files and dull documents, however, beach holidays often cause as much stress as they promise to remove.
Wrong hotel, dodgy tour guide, herded around like sheep for two weeks, lost luggage at airport - sound familiar? A trek through Vietnam jungle will relax you more. No, really - Vietnam is a very peaceful, calming place (outside of Saigon).
10. Be positive, which is not the same as not caring about important matters.
Try to avoid negative people, wearing dark colours, or thinking about the total sum of what you have to do during the day at once. Smile. If you find it hard to smile to a person, imagine that they are stood in front of you wearing frilly underwear.
And, for the chic foreign phrase in a conversation, try using "La vita e bella"; it will make you much happier than nodding helplessly along to the sour "C'est la vie".
TITLE: George Bush as Manna From Heaven
TEXT: You don't often see Russia's political leaders endorse American presidents, certainly not conservative Republicans. But Vladimir Putin's recent comments at a news conference in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, amount to a ringing endorsement of U.S. President George W. Bush.
Moreover, by declaring that terrorists in Iraq are directing their attacks personally against Bush and that their goal is to prevent his re-election, Putin clearly played into the hands of the Bush campaign. The American incumbent's central message has been that he is the best man to make the world, and the United States, safe from terror.
This wasn't the first time the Kremlin extended a helping hand to Bush. Last June, for example, Putin suddenly declared - without a shred of evidence - that Russian security services had repeatedly warned Washington about terrorist attacks on U.S. soil being prepared by Saddam Hussein's agents. That too was helpful to Bush, who at the time was struggling to explain to the American public the link between the war on terror and the Iraqi dictator.
But for the source of those statements, they could have easily been used in Bush/Cheney commercials running in battleground U.S. states. However, you can't separate the message from the messenger. An apparent endorsement by Putin puts Bush into a rogue gallery of foreign political leaders whom Russia supports, including Belarussian strongman Alexander Lukashenko and convicted felon and Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.
At first sight, it seems clear why Moscow should back that unsavory twosome. Keeping the two Slavic ex-Soviet republics on a tight leash is integral to the revival of Russia's imperial ambitions under Putin. It seems far less obvious what Russia hopes to gain from Bush's re-election.
In reality, it is exactly the opposite. Lukashenko has been nothing but an embarrassment and a financial burden on Russia, and Ukraine under a universally ostracized President Yanukovych would be the same.
On the other hand, Russia should thank its lucky stars for Bush's first term. In fact, Bush should be placed high on the list of crazy favors Providence seems to have showered Russia with in the course of its history.
All successful modern nations benefited from good fortune or lucky turns at some point in their history. However, Russia has been particularly favored by fortune. Throughout its history, there is always some inexplicable event saving Russia from inevitable destruction at the last moment or helping it expand its already vast domains. In the 14th century, invading Tatars turned back from Moscow after Tamerlane had a vision of the Virgin in a dream. Peter the Great was briefly captured by Crimean Tatars while battling the Swedes, but was then suddenly let go.
Invading foreigners, from Napoleon to Hitler, were driven out of Russia by unusually vicious winters.
It should also be mentioned that Russia has been blessed not only by a vast territory but by a wide variety of natural resources, which the other two large countries in the Old World, China and India, so glaringly lack.
It is therefore not at all surprising that the most beloved character in Russian folklore is the simple-minded younger son, who spends his days lying by the stove but who in the end, with the help of incredible good fortune, gets the firebird, the kingdom and the beautiful princess.
But to counteract their good fortune, Russians have been going out of their way to do great harm to themselves.
The communist era was especially egregious in this respect. In the two decades from the October Revolution to 1937, the country exterminated its writers, artists and scientists, shot and exiled its service nobility and competent administrators, expropriated its entrepreneurs and business managers, and dispossessed its productive peasants.
The great Soviet economic experiment created a remarkably wasteful system, which for eight decades produced machinery to mine coal and iron ore in order to produce steel and make more machinery.
Naturally, when the entire rotten system came apart, Russia was plunged into a severe economic, political and social crisis, which culminated in the 1998 ruble devaluation and debt default.
Things seemed dire enough until 2000, when the United States elected Bush as president. Bush's foreign policy blunders have been tailor-made to help Russia resolve its numerous problems. First and foremost, Bush's misguided invasion of Iraq stirred trouble in a volatile, unstable region, driving oil prices to record levels and heightening Russia's strategic position as a relatively predictable supplier of energy. In addition, Washington's single-minded concentration on the war on terror in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, provided a unique opportunity for Moscow to find a multilateral solution to its festering separatist war in Chechnya.
Finally, by straining the United States' relations with its allies in Western Europe, Bush's White House raised fears in Paris and Berlin that America could turn into a rogue nation, driving them closer to Moscow.
All this created conditions for Russia to become a pivotal international player once again, and to develop its economy by attracting foreign investment. During Putin's stable first term, the country seemed to be moving in this direction.
However, the judicial persecution of Yukos, which began in the summer of 2003, was a watershed. Since then, Russia has definitively turned away from economic reforms and democracy, wasting its considerable financial windfall and reminding potential Western partners why they had been so leery of Russia to start with.
The good luck represented by Bush's election has not run its course yet. Bush may yet be re-elected. However, having good luck is not the same as taking advantage of it. While the hero of Russian folklore is always skillful in exploiting his big chance, Russian leaders have been rather the opposite. Russia's great good luck of having Bush in the White House for another four years is likely to be wasted as well. What Russia has never had good luck with is the quality of its leadership.
Alexei Bayer, a New York-based economist, writes the Globalist column in Vedomosti on alternate weeks. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Smolny's Reformers Hurry to Overcome Intransigents
TEXT: It has probably not occurred to many St. Petersburgers that the last year has been one of feverish reforms in the city. Until now this has been going on mainly in the offices of bureaucrats-the reforms are being refined and they are then being confirmed by the city government. That's why from the outside nothing is going on. But the amount of the reformers' activity is impressive.
For the second time since the collapse of the Soviet regime, Smolny resembles a revolutionary headquarters. The first time this occurred was in 1991 and the impression was that the reforms were more profound.
But that was when the main changes were merely political, and many aspects of life in the city were untouched by the government's activity and changed little. It would take another 13 years before they would be addressed.
A year in the governorship of Valentina Matviyenko and the reform efforts have entered almost all spheres of activity in the city-wherever local authorities have the power, albeit small, to regulate: the communal housing services sector, the hotel sector, energy supplies to homes, the methodology for fees for state services, land classification, industry and the drugstore sectors.
This is not to mention that there has been a complete change in the approach to such holistic problems as the socio-economic development of St. Petersburg. Planning this development, the role of the government in it, the adoption of methods to achieve them - at least in words all these have changed fundamentally.
Smolny's accomplishments can be summed up as one action-that it intends to spend its budget rationally, and where possible to avoid the squandering and theft that used to occur on a grand scale. Apart from introducing order to the system of the city's state orders, not one of the other reforms that have only just started has yet borne fruit.
The implementation of the current reforms in the city will facilitate a large number of improvements. As they say at the headquarters of the reformers-the committee for economic development, industrial policy and trade that is responsible for the economic justification of all reforms, the fundamental problem is addressing the "entrenched interests," i.e. those who receive regular income from their relations with the government. They resist using all kinds of different tactics, including making appeals to Governor Valentina Matviyenko.
And when it comes to confirming a reform in the face of resistance from these entrenched interests, there can be a roadblock. It is due to such hold-ups that the reforms of the city's natural monopoly of city water utility Vodokanal and the communal heating services, for example, are still paused. In such cases the only one who can move the reforms is the governor herself. To do that, Matviyenko will have to take a choice that favors one or the other sides.
If a reform reaches the stage of direct implementation, then conflicts and blockages will, sooner or later, always arise. The only solution again lies with the governor.
The reform of the city's state orders reached that stage. In June that led to a huge scandal at the government level. Matviyenko took the side of the reformer-the head of the economics committee, Vladimir Blank.
Reforms of transportation and the communal housing services are looming. A scandal is unavoidable and there are billions of rubles at stake. Whose side Matviyenko will take in the conflict is already being decided down to the fine print and the outcome is uncertain. As regards the communal housing services, going by her statements she supports the reformers. Intrinsic to the entire reform process in St. Petersburg is a significant degree of chaos. But it should be said that all the reforms are linked-they all depend on each other and affect the planning and accomplishment of each other. In addition, they all need to be completed in a sequence, partly because the material and intellectual capacity of the city is limited.
But the reformers are in a hurry. The unhappy experiences of their predecessors have told them that you have to seize the moment: the state of affairs can change at any moment. In addition, the new trends adopted by the Kremlin make reformers' tasks even more difficult-teams like Blank's are no longer in demand.
Therefore the St. Petersburg enthusiasts have thrown themselves at reforms in all spheres of the city at once, even obviously breaking the order that they need to do these in. By the way, it looks as if they will still succeed.
If Matviyenko's team, and she especially, have enough guts to carry the reforms through to their logical conclusion early next year, we can expect yet another revolution-the simultaneous effect of all the reforms starting will have a cumulative effect.
The moment will have arrived when life in the city beings to change before our eyes. And it is quite possible that this will come about even earlier than was expected when it all began.
Vladimir Gryaznevich is a political analyst with Expert Severo-Zapad magazine. His comment was first broadcast on Ekho Moskvy in St. Petersburg on Friday.
TITLE: Hysterica Passio
TEXT: Now we come at last to the heart of darkness. Now we know, from their own words, that the Bush Regime is a cult - a cult whose god is Power, whose adherents believe that they alone control reality, that indeed they create the world anew with each act of their iron will. And the goal of this will - undergirded by the cult's supreme virtues of war, fury and blind faith - is likewise openly declared: "Empire."
You think this is an exaggeration? Then heed the words of the White House itself: a "senior adviser" to the president, who, as The New York Times reports, explained the cult to author Ron Suskind in the heady pre-war days of 2002.
First, the top Bush insider mocked the journalist and all those "in what we call the reality-based community," i.e., people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." Suskind's attempt to defend the principles of reason and enlightenment cut no ice with the Bush-man. "That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," he said. "And while you're studying that reality, we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Anyone with any knowledge of 20th-century history will know that this same megalomaniacal outburst could have been made by a "senior adviser" to Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini or Mao. Indeed, as scholar Juan Cole points out, the dogma of the Bush Cult is identical with the "reality-creating" declaration of Mao's "Little Red Book": "It is possible to accomplish any task whatsoever." For Bush, as for Mao, "discernible reality" has no meaning: Political, cultural, economic, scientific truth - even the fundamental processes of nature, even human nature itself - must give way to the faith-statements of ideology, ruthlessly applied by unbending zealots.
Thus: The conquered will welcome their killers. The poor will be happy to slave for the rich. The Earth can sustain any amount of damage without lasting harm. The loss of rights is essential to liberty. War without end is the only way to peace. Cronyism is the path to universal prosperity. Dissent is evil; dissenters are "with the terrorists." But God is with the Leader; whatever he does is righteous, even if in the eyes of unbelievers - the "reality-based community" - his acts are criminal: aggressive war that kills thousands of innocent people, widespread torture, secret assassinations, rampant corruption, electoral subversion.
Indeed, the doctrine "Gott mit Uns" is the linchpin of the Bush Cult. Tens of millions of Americans have now embraced the Cult's fusion of Bush's leadership with Divine Will. As a Bush volunteer in Missouri told Suskind: "I just believe God controls everything, and God uses the president to keep evil down ... God gave us this president to be the man to protect the nation at this time." God appointed Bush; thus Bush's acts are godly.
It's a circular, self-confirming mind-set that can't be penetrated by reason or facts, can't be shaken by crimes and scandals. That's why Bush's core support - comprising almost half of the electorate - stays rock-solid, despite the manifest failures of his administration. It's based on blind faith, on poisonous fantasy: simple, flattering ("We're uniquely good, God's special nation!"), comforting, complete - so unlike the harsh, bewildering, splintered shards of reality.
This closed mind-set is constantly reinforced by the ubiquitous right-wing media - evoking the threat of demonic enemies on every side, relentlessly manufacturing righteous outrage - and by Bush's appearances (epiphanies?) at his carefully screened rallies, where even the slightest hint of demurral from his Godly greatness is ruthlessly expunged. For example, three schoolteachers were ejected from a Bush rally under threat of arrest last week. Not for protesting - they hadn't said a word - but merely for wearing T-shirts that read, "Protect Our Civil Liberties." Thus the faithful "create the new reality" of undivided loyalty to the Leader.
The dogma of Bush's godliness is no rhetorical flourish; it has been forged with blood and iron. Consider General Jerry Boykin, who, in uniform, toured churches across the United States, declaring openly that "George W. Bush was not elected by the majority of the American people; he was appointed by God" to lead his "Christian nation" against Satan and the "idol-worshippers" of Islam, as Salon.com reports. Bush then made Boykin the Pentagon's chief of military intelligence - the point man for wringing information out of Islamic captives in the "war on terror." The result - confirmed even by the Pentagon's own anemic investigations - was a military intelligence system gone berserk, systematically torturing and occasionally murdering prisoners who, as the Red Cross notes, were overwhelmingly innocent of any crime. Bush signed orders removing these prisoners from the protection of U.S. and international law; Boykin's boys then visited divine wrath upon the heathens. But these atrocities cannot be crimes, because Bush and Boykin are, in the general's phraseology, "Kingdom warriors" in the "Army of God."
This isn't politics as usual - not even an extreme version of it, not McCarthyism revisited, Reaganism times two, or Nixon in a Stetson hat. There's never been anything like it in American life before: a messianic cult backed by vast corporate power, a massive cadre of religious zealots, a highly disciplined party, an overwhelming media machine and the mammoth force of history's most powerful government - all led by men who "create new realities" out of lies, blood, theft and torment.
Their "empire" - their Death-Cult, their power-mania - is an old madness rising again.
For annotational references, see Opinion at www.sptimesrussia.com
TITLE: Man Utd Ends Arsenal's Unbeaten Record
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MANCHESTER, England - Manchester United emerged triumphantly from an uncompromising Battle of the Titans to end Arsenal's 49-match unbeaten league run with a 2-0 victory at Old Trafford on Sunday.
In a match fuelled more by passion and crunching tackles than tactical niceties, United won with a controversial Ruud van Nistelrooy penalty and a late goal from Wayne Rooney, who celebrated his 19th birthday with the cheers of almost 68,000 people ringing in his ears.
Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger was deeply critical of referee Mike Riley, especially for giving the penalty against Sol Campbell for a foul on his England team mate Rooney 17 minutes from time.
What Wenger failed to mention, however, was that United winger Cristiano Ronaldo was clearly fouled by Ashley Cole shortly after Rooney's fall and Riley rejected what looked entirely legitimate claims for another spot-kick.
Despite Wenger's complaints, United deserved to win because they created more chances, and eventually took them.
Arsenal came to Old Trafford seeking a victory that would have moved them 14 points clear of their arch-rivals with a quarter of the season played.
For once, however, their artistry and touch failed to bring success.
Boosted when their captain Patrick Vieira was declared fit while United skipper Roy Keane failed to recover from a virus, Arsenal tested United with deft approach work from Vieira, Dennis Bergkamp and Jose Antonio Reyes.
But nothing came off against a back line in which Rio Ferdinand was outstanding alongside Mikael Silvestre and Gary Neville, who threw himself into every tackle as if his life depended on it.
Ferdinand was, however, fortunate to stay on the pitch after body-checking Fredrik Ljungberg when the Swede was through on goal, Riley failing to even censure him when a red card looked a real possibility.
Wenger, who could hardly contain his anger, criticised Riley for that decision, for Reyes being "kicked off the park in the first half," and, particularly, for the penalty he said "turned the game." With Gabriel Heinze swinging in crosses from the left, Ferdinand imperious and goalkeeper Roy Carroll a spectator for long periods, United were the more enterprising side and matched Arsenal tackle for crunching tackle in midfield.
One or two touches from Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs may have lacked direction, but they created enough for Rooney and Van Nistelrooy to keep the Arsenal defence fully occupied.
Although the penalty may have been fortunate, Van Nistelrooy, who blasted a spot-kick against the bar when the teams drew 0:0 at Old Trafford last season, calmly sent Jens Lehmann the wrong way with a low shot to the keeper's left.
Rooney added the second deep into stoppage time after good work from substitutes Louis Saha and Alan Smith, and Arsenal's fate was sealed.
Manchester United have now shown reports of their terminal demise to have been fanciful nonsense. Since losing to Chelsea on the season's opening day they have gone 13 matches without defeat and are only eight points behind Arsenal.
Arsenal, meanwhile, need not be too despondent.
Their incredible unbeaten run may be over but they remain top, are still very much the team to beat and will surely not be down for long.
Arsenal broke the previous English record of 42 games without a loss set by Nottingham Forest in the 1977-78 and 1978-79 seasons on Aug. 25 after going through last season undefeated on its way to the Premier League title.
Arsenal's previous defeat in a league game was a 3-2 loss to Leeds on May 4, 2003. No other English club has gone undefeated for so many league games since the Football League began in 1888.
In other games played Sunday, Southampton and Birmingham played out a goalless draw, Middlesborough could only manage a 1:1 deadlock with Portsmouth, whilst Newcastle and Manchester City played out a nine-goal thriller at St. James' Park- Craig Bellamy's late winner sealing all three points for the home side. Liverpool and Chelsea both managed impressive home wins Saturday.
(Reuters, AP, SPT)
TITLE: Safin Heads to St. Petersburg Buoyed by Madrid
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MADRID, Spain - Marat Safin defeated David Nalbandian 6-2 6-4 6-3 Sunday to win the $3 million Madrid Masters and moved closer to locking up a berth in the season-ending Tennis Masters Cup in Houston next month.
Safin was due to travel to St. Petersburg for his next ATP event held in the SKK sports complex, starting Monday.
The third-seeded Russian got off to a quick start in Madrid, breaking Nalbandian's first two service games and winning the first set in just 29 minutes. Safin had at least one ace in each of his own service games in the second set.
Safin had 14 aces in the match, while the fourth-seeded Argentinian had just one. Nalbandian had not lost a set en route to the finals.
Safin earned $534,000 and captured 100 points, moving him ahead of Britain's Tim Henman into sixth place in the battle for the eight spots in the Tennis Masters Cup. Nalbandian, a 2002 Wimbledon finalist, stayed in 10th place.
In Zurich on Sunday, Australia's Alicia Molik beat Maria Sharapova 4-6 6-2 6-3, snapping the Russian's 12-match winning streak and capturing the Swisscom Challenge title.
The 17-year-old Sharapova was looking for her third straight title, after Seoul and Toyko, and the seventh of her career. It was her first loss in a final.
It was the third title of Molik's career, including a victory at Stockholm in August.
"We had a good match," Molik said to Sharapova following her victory. "I'm looking forward to more of these battles in the future."
Meanwhile, French Open winner Anastasia Myskina has pulled out of the Generali Ladies tournament because of the flu, organizers said Monday. Despite the absence of the 22-year-old Myskina, the seedings will remain unchanged.
Many of the world's best players are due to appear at the St. Petersburg event looking to win the crown won last year by Gustavo Kuerten. Safin, buoyed by his Madrid win, is likely to enjoy crowd support from the Russian crowd.
TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Zenit Show Form
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - FC Zenit went into its top of the table clash with CSKA Moscow, due to kick off Monday night, in good form after last Thursday's UEFA clash with AEK Athens.
Zenit striker Alexander Kerzhakov, available again after injury, scored a hat-trick, with Andrei Arshavin and Igor Denisov adding one apiece for a 5-1 win over the Greek team.
Kerzhakov could beef up a previously goal-shy Zenit attack ahead of the key clash against second-place CSKA Moscow. CSKA was outmuscled by Chelsea in its Champions League game Wednesday.
With leader Lokomotiv Moscow drawing in its Russian Premier League game against Rubin Kazan on Sunday, a win for either Zenit or CSKA would put them top of the table with three games remaining in the season.
Red Sox Advance
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Pitcher Curt Schilling, playing with a tendon barely intact, gave up one run and only four hits in a 6-2 Red Sox victory in their second World Series matchup against the St. Louis Cardinals on Sunday.
The Red Sox gave up four errors for the second game in a row, but St. Louis could not capitalise with Jason Varitek, Mark Bellhorn and Orlando Cabrera making valuable hits with the bat to keep them at bay.
The Series heads to St. Louis on Tuesday where Boston need to win two out of three games to prevent it heading back to Boston's Fenway Park. Ace Pedro Martinez is due to pitch Game 3 for the Red Sox.
However, the Red Sox should know better than anyone that at 2-0 this series is far from over - they trailed the Yankees 3-0 before winning four straight games to beat them.
By taking the World Series, Boston would be breaking a hoodoo, which many people blame on the trade of Babe Ruth in 1920, from their last World Series victory in 1918.
Where Eagles Dare
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Philadelphia survived a close call with the Browns in Cleveland as David Akers kicked a 50-yard field goal in Over Time to give them a 34-31 win. New England's defense forced two fumbles and carried the load for the champs, holding the Jets to only one touchdown in their 13-7 victory at Foxboro. After Week 7, only the Eagles and Patriots have yet to taste defeat.
Palmer's Namesake
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Florida (AP) - Arnold Palmer couldn't have done it much better. With a Sunday charge that would have made his namesake proud, Ryan Palmer (no relation) birdied four straight holes down the stretch and closed with a 10-under 62 to win the Funai Classic at Disney by three shots over Vijay Singh and Briny Baird.