SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1021 (88), Tuesday, November 16, 2004
**************************************************************************


TITLE: LDPR Fortunes Fall, Rise
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal-Democrat Party faced a setback in gubernatorial elections in the Pskov region, which neighbors the Leningrad Oblast to the south, on Sunday.
 
But in St. Petersburg the nationalist party is gaining in strength as lawmakers joining its faction hope that this will help them get re-elected to the city parliament in 2006.
 Pskov governor Yevgeny Mikhailov, who was elected in 1996 on the LDPR ticket but is running for this third time as a candidate in the Kremlin-backed United Russia party, led the race for governor with 29.71 percent, but faces a run-off second round on Dec. 5. 
 In 2000, Mikhailov won the elections after the local Legislative Assembly dropped the turnout requirement from 50 percent to 25 percent.
 Mikhailov will now contest the governorship against Mikhail Kuznetsov, head of the Pskov Flour Mill and a former LDPR deputy in the State Duma, who collected 18.34 percent of the vote. A relatively big protest vote against all candidates came next with 17.43 percent.
 The turn out was estimated at 49.36 percent.
 Alexei Mitrofanov, deputy leader of LDPR, could only manage 6th place with 8.24 percent support.
 A scandal arose over Mitrofanov's campaign posters that said: "Criminal people from the South: get out of the Pskov region." 
 Pskov's Azeri community filed a protest letter to the regional election commission in October complaining that Mitrofanov was inciting ethnic hatred. The commission declined the community's request to ban the posters.
 Pskov mayor Mikhail Khoronin, who was elected in March with 82 percent of votes by city residents and who had been described by local politicians as Mikhailov's main competitor, was removed from the race after the Supreme Court ruled this month he had used the mayor's office for campaigning.
 "The result of the elections is in line with what we expected," Interfax quoted Mikhailov saying Monday after the results became clear. "Of course, we were hoping the result would be a bit better, but hopes are always hopes and reality is reality."
 "As governor, the protest vote doesn't worry me all that much because it is based on a particular stance of big political forces," he added. "One of the candidates had been practically approaching voters with a request to vote against all candidates. The Communist Party adopted the same position."
 The big protest vote was directly linked to Khoronin being excluded from the race, said Boris Vishnevsky, a Yabloko faction member.
 "They took the mayor out the race and the effect was similar to what happened in Vladivostok, where the same happened to Viktor Cherepkov," Vishnevsky said Monday in a telephone interview. "There, though, the protest vote was bigger, up to 50 percent."
 Khoronin's election campaign was hard hit just two weeks before the elections when Pavel Drozdov, a deputy mayor of Pskov who was responsible for fund raising for the mayor's campaign, was detained on charges of a extorting a bribe, Interfax reported. 
 Meanwhile in St. Petersburg, the LDPR strengthened its presence Nov. 3 after disappearing as a faction from the Legislative Assembly in October. A faction must have at least five members to be recognized in the assembly. Konstantin Sukhenko, a former United Russia member who was expelled from the pro-Kremlin party during the St. Petersburg gubernatorial elections last year, unexpectedly resurrected the faction.
 The other deputies in the faction are Denis Volchik, head of the regional LDPR office, Vadim Voitanovsky, a former Rodina faction member, and independent lawmakers Vitaly Martynenko, Vladimir Belozersky and Gennady Ozerov.
 The lawmakers calculated that in 2006, when elections to the assembly are expected to be conducted according to party lists, being in LDPR will raise their chances of re-election.
 "This is being done to make it possible for them to be re-elected," Tatyana Dorutina, head of St. Petersburg League of Voters, said Monday. "This is an absolutely businesslike approach, which has nothing to do with politics. 
 "All the lawmakers who formed this faction, including Sukhenko and Belozersky, have switched factions many times," she said. "It is a big shame that current legislation allows deputies to change factions anyway they want to, despite Sukhenko, for instance, being originally elected as the United Russia candidate and the others being independent. This makes it possible for such deputies to act as they like rather than heed those who voted for them, which is wrong."
 Sukhenko had no comment.
 Sukhenko has been criticized by the Yabloko faction after, on Nov. 1, he signed an agreement to join the Democratic faction that unites Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces in the Legislative Assembly. Two days later he become the LDPR faction coordinator.
 Sukhenko was expelled Nov. 5 from the St. Petersburg Democratic Council because he did not seem to be taking his membership seriously.

TITLE: City Urged to Spruce Up Its Unwelcoming Image
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The first billboard greeting visitors at the arrivals at the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo airport welcomes them to Marlboro country. 
 
This is just one example illustrating the lack of vision in how Russia's northern capital is mismarketed. 
 "For God's sake, show me something else," said Christer Asplund, managing director of Stockholm-based Place Invest. "I am sick and tired of Marlboro in my own country, and I am definitely not coming to Russia to smoke."
 Mind you, things are worse on the Polish-Russian border; those crossing by train are welcomed by a sign with much graffiti that invites everyone who sees it to f*** off.
 Asplund and business rival Thomas Gad, the founder and brand strategist of international firm Brandflight, gave a hard-hitting presentation on marketing cities to City Hall officials on Monday. 
 The meeting was aimed both at explaining the nuances of branding locations and pointed out major flaws in St. Petersburg's branding policies. 
 "These are most respected experts in the field of marketing, with Thomas Gad's experience in working with 50 different brands, including Nokia," said Lyudmila Murgulets, vice-president of the Stockholm School of Economics, which organized the experts' visit and presentation. 
 "The goal is to show how branding strategies could be applied to a city," she added.
 The idea of branding seems plain and simple: find out what is unique about your product and present it to the right customers. 
 The competition for marketing locations is huge. In Europe alone, there are 150,000 towns and territories promoting themselves.
 Asplund said developing brands for big cities is particularly difficult.
 "Too many ideas get conflicted, and it is difficult to develop priorities and focus on something in particular," the expert said.
 St. Petersburg's most promoted brand is the White Nights, its summer season, which was developed in the Soviet era. 
 "We are lucky we have that as it brings millions of dollars to the city," said Sergei Korneyev, director of the Northwest branch of the Russia's Union of Travel Industry. "But what is bad is that this offering is not a unique local thing. There are white nights in Murmansk, too, let alone in the neighboring Scandinavian states."
 Gad advised city authorities and industry professionals to think carefully about the image they would like to promote and to ensure that the image fits with reality. 
 "You might like to present St. Petersburg as a refined city of intellectuals," he said, addressing an audience, half of which were representatives of the city government. "Step out of any building, and what you see around is mud, mud and mud ... so it doesn't really fit, does it? So, something should be done about this if you like the concept of the refined city."
 He said Russians prefer another word to branding, one from the all-too- familiar Soviet lexicon. They like to call it ideology.
 "At first I was afraid of using it as you've had too many years of ideology already," he said. "But having tested it, I felt it works well. People understand that we talk about the managing of ideas and beliefs, and appear interested. But talk to them about branding, and everyone looks blank and uninspired."
 The major mistake in local branding is the attempt to brand Russia as a whole, when it is its localities that should be promoted, Gad said. 
 "We see these 'Welcome to Russia' posters everywhere but it doesn't work like that," he said. "You need to be precise and specific about what you are promoting."
 It is useful to ask what people's main associations with or impressions of the city are, Asplund said. 
 This month, immediately before his visit to Russia, Asplund's company asked Stockholm businessmen with what they associated St. Petersburg. 
 The top 10 images and issues were "Russia's gate to the West," "a center of education," "palaces," "bureaucracy," "a rising star," "The Winter Palace," "classical music," "visa regulations," "The Grand Hotel Europe" and "in 10 years' time, a jet set city for Europe."
 Of these associations, only two are negative and crime isn't mentioned at all, despite the city's image as the criminal capital of Russia, with which St. Petersburg was tarred in the mid-1990s. Since the popular TV series "Banditsky Peterburg" hit the screens, the "brand" has stuck within Russia.
 Asplund suggested that those involved in selling the city should look for as many "clusters" of branding ideas as possible, saying that even a small cluster can provoke a huge interest. 
 "Sometimes just one museum or one factory makes a place famous," he said. "Food, fashion, literature, technology could become a successful cluster."
 The city could be promoted through the images of Russian art created here, he added. 
 "I had a gorgeous breakfast in my hotel this morning, and the best thing about it was the classical music that was played in the dining hall," he said. "With your rich musical history and magnificent orchestras, classical music should be used for the city promotion to a much higher extent - and don't be intimidated by the competition you'd be facing from Vienna." 
 Quoting a story in last week's International Herald Tribune, Asplund said millions of dollars were paid for Russian paintings at London auction house Christie's. 
 "A work by Aivazovsky sells for a million dollars, so why not offer people to come and see the real thing," he said.
 Every city in the world is ranked and rated every day in virtually every sphere of life, the experts said. 
 An mention in a rating adds to a destination's positive reputation. For instance, Copenhagen was named as having the best subway in Europe, while glossy magazine Wallpaper praised Berlin for having the best bar.
 "Stockholm was once called the gay capital of Europe," Asplund said. "Of course, this wasn't something all citizens would proudly discuss every day between themselves, but it attracted millions of people to the city."
 Gad said St. Petersburg should exploit its connection to Alfred Nobel, which has already proved a brilliant marketing tool for Stockholm. 
 "Nobel once lived in your city, and you could think of a concept that would bridge St. Petersburg with Stockholm and Oslo."

TITLE: Putin Says Russia Willing to Cede 2 Islands
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin on Monday said Russia is willing to hand over two of the four disputed Kuril Islands to Japan under a declaration that the Soviet Union signed in 1956.
 
Putin has made the offer before, and there is no sign that Japan might accept it. But Putin's latest remarks, which came a day after Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made similar comments, suggest the Kremlin is undertaking a new push to reach a compromise over the islands, which the Soviet Union seized from Japan at the end of World War II.
 Putin is to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi at a two-day summit of the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation group starting Saturday in Santiago, Chile. Lavrov is expected to meet with Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura at the summit.
 Japan claims the four southernmost islands of the Kuril chain, which stretches from the Kamchatka Peninsula to Japan, and the dispute has prevented the two countries from signing a peace treaty formally ending their wartime enmity.
 Under the 1956 declaration, the Soviet Union agreed to give back Shikotan and Habomai and retain the two other islands, Iturup and Kunashir.
 Japan has rejected the compromise and insisted that all four islands be handed over.
 The Japanese Embassy said Monday that Tokyo's position has not changed.
 "We will conduct future negotiations based on the 1993 declaration that stated a peace treaty must involve a decision about the four islands, not only Shikotan and Habomai," an embassy spokesman said.
 President Boris Yeltsin signed the declaration during a visit to Tokyo.
 Putin said at a Cabinet meeting Monday that "Russia has always fulfilled and will continue to fulfill all of its obligations, especially ratified documents," Interfax reported.
 But Russia will observe these obligations "only within the parameters that our partners are prepared to honor," he said.
 "As we know, so far, we have not managed to reach an understanding on these parameters - as we see them now and as we saw them in 1956," he said.
 Lavrov said Sunday on NTV television that Russia wants to "completely settle relations" with Japan but the two sides must sign a peace treaty before any handover can take place, he said.
 Citing a recent border agreement with China as an example, Lavrov said the same approach "based on strategic partnership" could be applied to the Kurils dispute.
 Russia ceded two uninhabited islands and an uninhabited portion of another island to China several weeks ago, putting an end to years of disagreement.
 The agreement led to protests in the Khabarovsk region, which incorporates some of the islands.
 Talk of a possible compromise over the Kurils stirred up a wave of protest Monday.
 "The main principle that should be on every state official's mind is: 'Not a single inch of land to a friend or foe,'" Dmitry Rogozin, leader of the nationalist Rodina party, said on Ekho Moskvy radio.
 He said the islands belong to Russia because it won "a horrible and bloody war."
 Lawmakers in Sakhalin, which incorporates the islands, passed a resolution denouncing any territorial concessions, and they called for a protest rally Saturday in the regional capital, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Interfax reported.
 Putin has twice before confirmed Russia's adherence to the 1956 declaration, first during a visit to Japan in 2000 and later at a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori in Irkutsk in 2001.
 Viktor Pavlyatenko, a Japan expert at the Institute of the Far East, said Moscow was launching a trial balloon to gauge Tokyo's reaction before the two sides celebrate the 150th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties next year.
 "We won't have a reason to go there" for a celebration if no compromise is reached, Pavlyatenko said.
 Sergei Markov, a political analyst, said Moscow was also gauging public opinion to its proposed compromise.
 Former Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Kunadze said on Ekho Moskvy that a peace treaty would help Japan and Russia join forces to counter China's growing dominance in Asia.
 Kunadze said Habomai is an uninhabited group of islands and Shikotan has a fish cannery and a border outpost.
 
 o
 Putin will meet U.S. President George W. Bush on the sidelines of the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Lavrov said Monday.

TITLE: City Hall Plans Debt
 Write-Off for Palace
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Governor Valentina Matviyenko is ready to wipe out a $25 million debt owed to the city budget by the joint-stock company Ice Palace, the hockey arena built in St. Petersburg for the World Hockey Championship in 2000 and owned by City Hall, Legislative Assembly representatives said Friday.
 
To rid the Ice Palace of its debts to the city, Matviyenko has introduced an amendment to the draft city budget for 2005, proposing to issue a 704 million ruble ($25 million) subsidy to the Ice Palace that will be given to the hockey arena next year and immediately taken back as if the debt had been paid off.
 The Legislative Assembly's Yabloko faction last week opposed the amendment, but failed to defeat it against the backing of the United Russia majority.
 "I don't understand one thing: If they do this for the joint stock company Ice Palace, why doesn't the Kremlin issue a subsidy of the same kind to Yukos so that the company can pay back its debt?" said Boris Vishnevsky, a member of the Yabloko faction said Friday in a telephone interview.
 "I really don't like this double standard," he added.
 Vishnevsky said the $25 million that the city will forgo would be enough to raise financial assistance for pensioners so that they could continue to ride free on transportation in the city after free use of transportation is abolished from Jan. 1, under a federal law on replacing so-called privileges with cash payments. 
 Critics say the cash payments won't compensate for the privileges lost.
 Vice Governor Mikhail Brodsky said Friday that in the four years since the Ice Palace was built its market value has dropped from $95 million to $35 million and its shares are worthless because of its huge debts.
 Besides its debts to City Hall, the joint stock company has debts to Sberbank, Vozrozhdeniye construction company and Russian Railways, all of which have agreed to postpone payment for15 years if Matviyenko wrote off the debt to the city.
 "Just imagine if one of the creditors filed a lawsuit to get the loan back," Brodsky said in a telephone interview. "In that case the Ice Palace would have faced bankruptcy proceedings, which would mean automatic arrest of the palace's bank accounts and suspension of its concert activity."
 If City Hall writes off its part of the debt, the value of the Ice Palace would go up, Brodsky said
 "I respect very much the deputies [from the opposition], but if we don't do this we risk losing not only the Ice Palace, but at least another $45 million [that could be gained if it is sold]," he said. "We have already lost $65 million."
 Even United Russia deputies who supported City Hall are now in doubts.
 "We shouldn't have rushed," Vla-dimir Yeryomenko, a lawmaker in the United Russia faction said Friday in a telephone interview.
 "The reasons presented by City Hall are not very convincing," Yeryomenko said. "It looks like the interests of certain bank structures are involved in this question - Sberbank on one side and some other big bank in the region from the other. As for all these talks about bankruptcy this is just about an attempt to scare off deputies. We should have thought more about it."

TITLE: Spain Returns Cross Taken From Novgorod
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The cross from one of Russia's most significant churches - Novgorod's Sophia Cathedral - taken to Spain during the Second World War, will return to Russia on Tuesday.
 
Spanish Defense Minister Jose Bono will deliver the relic to the Russian Patriarch Alexy II in the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow.
 "Spain has been planning to return the cross for a long time, and finally it's happening," said Luis Alberto Rodriguez Blanco, Spain's honorary consul to St. Petersburg.
 The cross that stood atop the main dome of Sophia Cathedral fell down during the bombardment of Novgorod, probably in 1942, when Spanish military units of the so-called Blue Division occupied the city. The division of Spanish volunteers was sent by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco to help Hitler on the Eastern Front.
 A Spanish officer ordered that the cross be taken out of the Soviet Union, because he feared the godless Soviets would destroy it.
 In 2002, Novgorod Governor Mikhail Prusak wrote to the Russian Embassy in Madrid asking for the location of the cross to be found.
 It was located in the museum of Madrid's Military Engineering Academy.
 As a result of negotiations the Spanish government decided to return the cross to the Russian Orthodox Church.
 The cross made of metal is size is 1.5 meters wide and 2 meters high and it is decorated with a figure of a dove.
 The cross will stay in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior for the religious festival Faith and Glory that continues until Nov. 18, after which it will be transported to Novgorod.
 Novgorod authorities will decide whether the cross is in good enough condition to be returned to the top of the cathedral, where a copy has taken its place, or whether to display it inside the cathedral.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Baku Mission to Open
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - A Consulate General of Azerbaijan will be opened in St. Petersburg, RIA-Novosti quoted Governor Valentina Matviyenko saying Friday after her return from visits to Azerbaijan and Iran. 
 "Azerbaijan's consulate general will be opened in St. Petersburg because about 200,000 Azeris live in the city," she said. 
 Opening an Iranian consulate in St. Petersburg is being considered, she added. 
 A consultative council for national issues and a working group for the tolerance program have been formed under St. Petersburg's government, she added. 
 
 
<b>Foreigner Attacked
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - A Chinese man was hospitalized after unidentified attackers beat him, breaking his nose in the St. Petersburg metro on Saturday night, Interfax reported Monday.
 Several people approached the man in a passage of the Sadovaya metro station. When the man, who works for the Vienna Theater told them that he didn't speak Russian, the attackers started to hit him, the report said.
 
 
<b>Entrepreneurs Protest
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - More than 100 St. Petersburg entrepreneurs protested against the elimination of retail kiosks at public bus stops and near metro stations on Monday, Interfax reported.
 The protesters held placards saying: "Small business helps a normal economy" and "We are not the targets of terrorists, we are targets of big finance," the report said.
 Sergei Zimin, deputy head of the city's economic development committee, promised the protesters that kiosks will remain in the city's dormitory districts and on the outskirts in the interest of the residents who live there.
 Organizers said removing the kiosks will cost 30,000 to 40,000 jobs.
 
 
<b>Body is Pumane's
 </b>

MOSCOW (SPT) - The Moscow city prosecutor's office has finally confirmed that an unidentified body belongs to Alexander Pumane, a former submarine officer from Pushkin on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, Interfax reported.
 "Results of a molecular-genetic analysis have confirmed that the man who died of body injuries is Alexander Pumane," Interfax cited an official from the Moscow prosecutor's office as saying.
 Pumane was interrogated early on Sept. 18 after he was stopped in the center of Moscow. He was driving a Lada car in which explosives, including two mines and 200 grams of TNT, were found. Suspected of being a terrorist, he was allegedly beaten to death during an interrogation.
 
 
<b>44 Oil Leaks in Neva
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Forty-four oil leaks in the Neva River have been cleaned up to date this year, Interfax reported Friday, quoting City Hall's committee for environment protection.
 In this period, the service has removed 63,500 kilograms of different products made of oil, which is almost twice the amount removed in 2003, the committee reported.
 



TITLE: Cabinet Wants to Manage Sport Federations
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - With a mix of armchair quarterbacking and unusual cause and effect arguments, officials at a Cabinet meeting last week supported handing control of sports federations over to government officials as a way to recapture the glory of the vaunted Soviet sports machine.
 
At the meeting Thursday, hockey legend Vyacheslav Fetisov, who heads the Federal Agency for Physical Culture, Sports and Tourism, told officials that the Russian Olympic team's performance in Athens - second place in the overall medal count with 92 medals, including 27 gold medals - was a success. 
 Nonetheless, he said, the government should push for laws demanding accountability for poor performances by Russian athletes on the international stage.
 Fetisov laid much of the blame of Russia's athletic failures on the leadership of national sports federations and suggested forcing federation heads whose athletes underperform to clean out their desks.
 &quot;Those people who aren't capable of working should be replaced by those who want to work and who know the trends in international sports,&quot; Fetisov said at the Cabinet meeting, much of which was shown on television news programs.
 Unsurprisingly, he cited the troubles of the national soccer team, noting that the team has not made it out of the qualifying round of the Olympic tournament since the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
 Vyacheslav Koloskov, president of the Russian Football Union, the country's governing soccer body, earlier this month reluctantly confirmed his plans to step down after Fetisov blasted his record.
 Koloskov said he had agreed to resign in the wake of Russia's humiliating 7-1 thrashing by Portugal last month in a World Cup qualifier.
 UEFA, European soccer's governing body, has criticized the government for pressuring Koloskov. &quot;If Mr. Koloskov is forced into resignation it will be a case of pressure from the government on the federation, which, under UEFA statutes, is unacceptable,&quot; UEFA spokesman William Gaillard said by telephone from Geneva.
 Fetisov, who was asked by President Vladimir Putin to take over Russian sports just over two years ago, was unfazed by the criticism.
 &quot;We know our sports better than those bureaucrats in the West,&quot; Fetisov said. &quot;International sporting structures don't have the right to interfere.&quot;
 It is unlikely that Koloskov's head will be the last to roll, judging by the reaction to Fetisov's proposal Thursday. 
 Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov supported a suggestion by Russian Olympic Committee head Leonid Tyagachyov that government officials take over the leadership of the federations, as did the star armchair quarterback of the meeting, Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu, who suggested Fradkov should do the appointing. 
 Shoigu offered up some questionable causal links in trying to establish the benefits of having government officials head up sports federations. He cited former KGB chief Yury Andropov's affection for hockey and current Federal Security Service director Nikolai Patrushev's presidency of the Russian Volleyball Federation.
 Patrushev took over the federation in April, and the women's volleyball team went on to win the silver medal in Athens and the men's team the bronze. Andropov's tenure at the KGB, from 1967 until his elevation to Soviet leader in 1982, coincided with the Soviet national hockey team's domination of the international game.
 &quot;Andropov was a hockey guy, and we had success,&quot; Shoigu said. &quot;Now volleyball is emerging, meaning we have to find someone else for hockey.&quot;
 Shoigu also took a swing at Russia's most successful professional sports club in recent years, the CSKA Moscow basketball team, for filling its roster with foreign players instead of homegrown talent, though the team has eight Russian citizens on its 13-man roster.
 &quot;There's not one Russian last name [on the CSKA roster],&quot; said Shoigu, a native of Tuva, a traditionally Buddhist republic. &quot;They have two Greeks and three black guys. What sort of approach is that?&quot;
 CSKA has three black Americans on its roster, one of whom, J.R. Holden, obtained Russian citizenship last year and is eligible to play for the Russian national team.
 Alexander Gomelsky, president of CSKA Basketball and the patriarch of Soviet and Russian basketball, dismissed Shoigu's criticism, saying that the numerous foreign players taking the floor all across Russia have helped make the Russian league one of the strongest in Europe and popularized the sport at home. &quot;Look at how popular the game has become in places like Rostov, Kazan and Perm,&quot; Gomelsky said. &quot;It's easy to say, 'Let's ban them [the foreigners],' but what will you have instead?&quot;
 Prominent sports figures were divided on whether a bureaucratic coup in sports federations could help put Russia back on the road to the athletic glory of the Soviet Union.
 Gomelsky said it could be a positive move if the official could attract financing and visibility for the sport.
 &quot;But if he's too busy with his main duties in the government, I think the consequences would be negative,&quot; he said.
 Vladimir Radionov, coach of the Soviet under-21 soccer team from 1986 to 1990 and a veteran member of national and international governing bodies of soccer, said he strongly opposes the idea of bringing in a bureaucrat to run the soccer federation.
 &quot;It is important that the federation does not end up in hands of a government official or lawmaker, a person who has not had direct relations to soccer before,&quot; said Radionov, now deputy head of the Russian Soccer Union. &quot;It is even worse if such a person has already been picked and approved.&quot;
 Alexander Steblen, head of the Russian Hockey Federation, said certain federations could benefit from having a government official at the helm. But, he added, it is unrealistic to expect to restore the dominance of Soviet sports.
 &quot;Back then we lived in a gigantic country that included millions of other people, including from Belarus and Ukraine,&quot;he said. &quot;The team lived and trained together the entire year. It was a powerful system, but it has fallen apart. Our federation's main job now is to build more arenas and increase the number of quality coaches in the country.&quot;
 Steblen said he did not see an analogy between, for example, a hockey federation president advising Shoigu on how to put out fires and Shoigu's statement that the hockey federation needs a new president.
 &quot;Anyone in the government has a right to give advice,&quot; Steblen said. &quot;Whether the advice is acted upon, that is another question.&quot;
 Yevgeny Volk, head of the Moscow office of the Heritage Foundation, said the Cabinet's discussion of sports echoed Soviet times when the Communist Party and the government interfered in the management of every aspect of society.
 &quot;It runs in the blood of our leaders,&quot; Volk said in a telephone interview. &quot;Cabinet members have inherited the style of the Soviet leaders.&quot;
 He added that sports are like the weather: &quot;Everyone thinks that he knows better and feels obliged to speak out, no matter how stupid it sounds.
 &quot;I cannot picture heated discussions of sports at a Cabinet meeting in any other country.&quot;

TITLE: City Eyes Metro Deals in Iran
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Negotiations on St. Petersburg metro builders building metro lines in Iran will be held next month, RIA-Novosti quoted Governor Valentina Matviyenko as saying Friday after she visited Iran last week. 
 
&quot;In Iran, we talked about the designing of two new metro lines in Teheran,&quot; she said. In addition, the Isfahan administration has shown interest in our proposals concerning the metro and promised to give its answer.&quot; 
 &quot;We want to preserve our school [for training metro builders], our contractor capacities. Metro building projects have been rather few in St.Petersburg in the recent years, we shall build up the pace, but ... in the meantime, we would like to export this business to Iran,&quot; she said.. 
 Two trade agreements were signed in Teheran by Iran's and St.Petersburg's chambers of commerce and industry. Matvienko suggested installing a permanent display of Iran's commodities in St.Petersburg and urged promoting joint investment projects. 
 Also under review are wider education contracts. Only 60 students from Iran are now enrolled at St.Petersburg universities and colleges, Matviyenko said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Smoking Ban Passed
 </b>

MOSCOW (AP) - The State Duma approved legislation Friday to prohibit smoking in workplaces, on public transport and in certain public areas. 
 The measure now goes to the Federation Council and, if approved, would have to be signed into law by President Vladimir Putin. 
 
 
<b>Media Violence Bill
 </b>

MOSCOW (AP) - State Duma deputies are considering a bill that would tighten restrictions on showing violence on television, a measure that critics warned could make everything from boxing matches to news coverage of terrorist attacks illegal. 
 The Duma unanimously passed the bill Wednesday in the first of three required readings that would forbid news programs, documentaries, films and other series from showing details of murders and other violence from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. 
 
 
<b>241 Killed in Chechnya
 </b>

MOSCOW (AP) - The Memorial human rights group said Friday that 241 Chechens have been killed and 128 kidnapped this year alone. 
 The group accused security forces of being primarily responsible for the spike in abductions, which it said were up 25 percent compared with last year.
 
 
<b>Troop Cut in Chechnya
 </b>

ROSTOV-ON-DON (AP) - The military will cut its deployment in Chechnya by about 1,000 troops and stop using conscripts in the war against rebels beginning next year, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Friday. 
 However, the announcements did not appear to indicate that Moscow believes it is gaining advantage over guerrillas. The 42nd Motorized Division - the military's main unit in Chechnya - "will stay there forever," Ivanov said. 
 Authorities have said 70,000 armed forces are serving in Chechnya. 
 
 
<b>'99 Blast Suspect Held
 </b>

MAKHACHKALA (AP) - A suspect in a 1999 bombing of an apartment building that killed 64 people was brought to Dagestan Saturday after being arrested in Azerbaijan, authorities said. 
 Magomed Salikhov is suspected of helping organize the attack in the Dagestani city of Buinaksk - one of four apartment-house blasts that authorities cited as a reason to renew their military campaign in Chechnya. Salikhov was detained in Azerbaijan's capital, Baku, on Friday, Dagestani police spokeswoman Anzhela Martirosova said. 
 
 
<b>Rebel Site Reopens 
 </b>

HELSINKI (Reuters) - The Chechen rebel web site Kavkaz Center has reopened, one month after it was closed by the Finnish company that hosted it. 
 Finnish news agency STT reported Saturday that the site, www.kavkavcenter.com, was now hosted on a Swedish server with a backup in Finland. 
 
 
<b>Radio Liberty Revamp 
 </b>

PRAGUE (AP) - Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is revamping its programming for Russia to broaden its appeal to younger listeners, officials said, denying news reports that the Russian-language service was being phased out. 
 Donald Jensen, director of communications for the U.S.-funded broadcaster, said RFE/RL was "modernizing its Russian service to do better what we already do, which is to broadcast information and news to the Russian Federation." 



TITLE: Arafat: A Soviet Friend Russia Cast Aside
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat found a strong ally in a Soviet leadership intent on undermining the West and pleased with his profuse gratitude for its support, but the Soviet collapse and Russia's shifting priorities led to an unbridgeable gulf.
 
Arafat died in a Paris hospital on Thursday and was buried Friday in Ramallah at his West Bank compound.
 Many believe Arafat's meteoric rise to influence and fame in the 1960s and 1970s would not have been possible without Soviet support, but the extent of that assistance remains shrouded in mystery even after Arafat's death on Thursday.
 &quot;I'd better refrain from talking about that for now,&quot; former KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov said by telephone.
 Leonid Shebarshin, former head of the KGB's foreign intelligence department, also declined comment.
 The Soviet romance with Arafat began in the late 1960s when he became leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said Irina Zvyagelskaya, a Middle East researcher at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.
 &quot;We were in the middle of the Cold War, and we were playing a zero-sum game against the West: whatever was bad for them was good for us,&quot; she said, referring to Arafat-orchestrated attacks on U.S.-backed Israel and its citizens.
 The Communist leadership, however, did not take a big gamble on Arafat, preferring instead to put its efforts into leaders of countries such as Iraq, Egypt and Syria who promised to follow a socialist path, said Vitaly Naumkin, head of the Center for Strategic and Political Studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies.
 Arafat's PLO was regarded at the time as a moderate group in the Middle East, and Moscow picked it as a political partner, Naumkin said. &quot;Of course, the PLO was supported by the Soviet Union through different channels, including the special services,&quot; he said. &quot;But there is nothing unusual about that. Most liberation movements were supported by them.&quot;
 Ion Pacepa, a former senior Romanian intelligence officer who defected to the United States, claimed in an article published in The Wall Street Journal last year that Arafat was a creature of the KGB. Citing what he called the KGB's personal file on Arafat, Pacepa wrote that the KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. He said Arafat was an important undercover operative for the KGB and his actions were orchestrated from Moscow.
 Naumkin dismissed the claims, saying Arafat had always been an independent leader who - despite Soviet support - sometimes jeopardized Soviet foreign policies with his actions.
 Relations between Arafat and the Soviet Union were sometimes strained by difference of opinion and interpretation of events. Still, Arafat was treated warmly by the Communist leadership, Zvyagelskaya said. &quot;Always smiling, friendly and always offering hugs, Arafat behaved just like the Communist bosses of the time,&quot; she said. &quot;He never forget to express his personal gratitude to Soviet leaders for their support.&quot;
 Arafat showered gratitude on all Russians, not just Soviet leaders, said Air Force Major-General Yevgeny Kopyshev, who met Arafat in the 1970s.
 &quot;Unlike many other leaders of liberation movements who not only suckled from Russia but were ready to bite off its nipples, Arafat never tired of thanking Soviet rulers as well as any Russian man he happened to meet,&quot; he said.
 The beginning of the end came when the Soviet Union broke up and the new Russian leadership made no effort to maintain the close friendship, Zvyagelskaya said, recalling a televised meeting in the early 1990s when President Boris Yeltsin dodged a hug from a clearly shocked Arafat. &quot;Although he was very bright and quick at adjusting to new realities, Arafat failed to change his style in his relations with Russia,&quot; she said. &quot;He put earlier allegiances above the immediate interests that began to dominate Russian politics.&quot;
 Arafat and his cause lost importance as Russia's post-Cold War policies evolved to take into account the wave of Russian Jews who emigrated to Israel.
 There was a brief renaissance when Yeltsin appointed Yevgeny Primakov, an Arab-speaking Soviet diplomat and former intelligence official, as foreign minister in 1996. A year later, Israeli media reported that Primakov announced during a meeting with Arafat in Ramallah that Russia would be the first country to recognize Palestinian statehood.
 The last time Arafat visited Moscow was in 2000, when he asked President Vladimir Putin to mediate in talks with then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and U.S. President George W. Bush. Some Russian media called the Kremlin meeting &quot;empty.&quot;
 In 2002, Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov canceled a scheduled meeting with Arafat in Ramallah during a trip to Israel, calling any visit &quot;useless.&quot;
 Putin sent his condolences Thursday to Arafat's family and the Palestinian leadership, praising Arafat as &quot;an influential political figure on an international scale who dedicated his life to the Palestinian people's just cause, the fight for their inalienable right to create an independent state, which would coexist with Israel within recognized and secure borders.&quot; State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov and Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Saltanov are scheduled to attend Arafat's funeral in Cairo on Friday.

TITLE: Kozak Ends Crisis In Cherkessk
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Protesters left the Karachayevo-Cher-kessia government building early Thursday after overnight negotiations with Kremlin envoy Dmitry Kozak, but tensions continued to simmer over seven slayings linked to the son-in-law of the republic's president, Mustafa Batdyev.
 
Some 35 people, most of them elderly relatives of the dead men, filed out of Batdyev's ransacked office in the republic's capital, Cherkessk, at about 4 a.m. after several hours of negotiations with Kozak, President Vladimir Putin's envoy to the Southern Federal District.
 Kozak told the protesters there is solid evidence that Batdyev's son-in-law, wealthy businessman Ali Kaitov, ordered the Oct. 11 killings and that it is &quot;inevitable&quot; that heads will roll in the republic's government agencies after an investigation into the deaths is completed. 
 Kozak, however, cautioned the protesters and their supporters against pressing for Batdyev's resignation.
 &quot;Questions about changes among the authorities are not decided in such a way. They can only be decided ... through political procedures and established constitutional laws,&quot; Kozak said in televised remarks to the protesters, who had holed up inside Batdyev's office for two days.
 Batdyev, who met with Kozak earlier in the night, said he will step down if he is implicated in the murder investigation, RIA-Novosti reported. He was to fly to Moscow for talks with Putin on Saturday, Vremya Novostei said.
 Kozak quickly reacted to Batdyev's offer, telling protesters that a resignation could fuel the unrest that has gripped the republic for the past month by bringing thousands of Batdyev's supporters into the streets. He called on all sides to show restraint, warning that the republic has been balancing on the brink of a civil war.
 Kozak and Batdyev spoke again Thursday about the crisis at a meeting attended by a senior federal prosecutor and local legislators. Local opposition lawmakers tried to convene the republic's legislature for an extraordinary session to discuss the crisis and Batdyev's possible resignation on Wednesday, but they failed to gain the necessary quorum after the local faction of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, which holds a majority of the seats, refused to attend.
 Scores of protesters have held almost daily rallies over the past few weeks outside the government building to demand the resignations of Batdyev and local law enforcement chiefs over the killings of local lawmaker Rasul Bogatyrev and six other shareholders of a local cement plant.
 The protests culminated with the storming of the building Tuesday after the charred remains of Bogatyrev and his partners were found in a pit outside Cherkessk. Bogatyrev and Kaitov belong to rival clans and had been battling for control of the Kavkaz Tsement plant, Russian media reported.
 Kaitov, who is suspected of ordering his bodyguards to shoot the seven men during a business meeting at his dacha, has been arrested. 
 Fourteen of his bodyguards - who include members of the republic's police force - are also under arrest.
 Police reinforcements have poured into Cherkessk from other North Caucasus republics this week. 
 Local prosecutors opened an inquiry into the storming of the building by hundreds of protesters on Wednesday. 
 Thirteen police officers and an unknown number of protesters were injured during the storming, which caused about 10 million rubles ($350,000) in damage, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Duma Gives Nod to Bill Limiting Parties
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The State Duma on Wednesday approved a Kremlin-backed bill requiring political parties to have 50,000 registered members, an increase from 10,000.
 
By a vote of 360 to 62, with two abstentions, deputies gave a first reading to the bill, which was sponsored by the pro-Kremlin United Russia majority, the nationalist Rodina and the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party factions.
 The bill requires parties to have branches of at least 500 members in more than half of the country's 89 regions, and branches of at least 250 members in the other regions.
 Under existing law, parties are required to have at least 100 members per regional branch.
 Under the bill, existing political parties will have until Jan. 1, 2006 to register the minimum number of members. 
 Parties that fail to register enough members would lose their status and would not be able to run in the 2007 Duma elections, said United Russia Deputy Sergei Popov, presenting the bill to the chamber. 
 Out of 44 registered political parties, 23 took part in last December's Duma elections. Only four parties - United Russia, the Communists, Rodina and LDPR - made it past the 5 percent barrier in the party vote to enter the Duma, while most of the rest gained less than 1 percent of the vote.
 Liberal parties Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces, or SPS, failed to clear the 5 percent hurdle.
 &quot;Many of these parties are totally obscure, lacking any ideology,&quot; Popov said. &quot;But when they ran in the Duma elections they enjoyed free airtime on television and spent budget funds, which they often do not bother to return.&quot; Communist Deputy Valentin Romanov warned that the bill would lead to the gradual elimination of the multiparty system and further domination of the Duma by the pro-Kremlin United Russia party.
 The Communist faction was the only one not to support the bill Wednesday. 
 The Communist Party, with about 500,000 members, is one of the few parties that will not be affected by the change.
 United Russia, according to its official web site, has more than 800,000 members.
 The LDPR, founded in 1990, has about 600,000 members, party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky has said.
 Yabloko says it has 85,000 members, while SPS claims about 35,000 members.
 The parties' membership bill, an amendment to the 2001 law on political parties, needs to be approved by the Federation Council before it can be signed into law by President Vladimir Putin.
 The Duma voted last month for a bill backed by the Kremlin to replace the popular vote for governors with a system under which the president nominates gubernatorial candidates to regional legislatures to confirm.
 A vote on a Putin-backed plan to eliminate single-mandate district races in the Duma elections is also due soon.

TITLE: EU Summit Next Week
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BRUSSELS - President Vladimir Putin will attend a rescheduled summit meeting with the European Union on Nov. 25, the EU announced Thursday. 
 
The meeting had been scheduled for Nov. 11 but was postponed last week when EU officials said insufficient progress had been made toward a long-awaited partnership agreement between Russia and the 25-nation bloc. The summit will be held in The Hague. 
 It was not immediately clear whether Putin would now sign the agreement, which his EU envoy, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, criticized Tuesday as falling short of Russia's ambitions for closer ties. 
 Yastrzhembsky said Russia is too important to be bound by an EU formula for partnership that would place it on the same level as the union's other neighbors. He blamed the summit postponement on internal difficulties within the EU.
 In a statement, the EU said Jose Manuel Barroso, incoming president of the commission, and Commissioner for External Relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner were due to attend the rescheduled meeting.

TITLE: Minister Denies Reports He Gained From Fund
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - IT and Communications Minister Leonid Reiman has denied reports that he received financial gain from a trust fund that until 2003 held the shares of Telekominvest, a major shareholder of No. 3 mobile provider MegaFon. 
 
Reiman also accused Alfa Group of using oligarchic tactics to achieve its goals by mentioning his name.
 Reiman's name has appeared in an affidavit provided to a court on the British Virgin Islands by Danish lawyer Jeffrey Galmond, according to a report in the Financial Times this week. Galmond said that Reiman was the main beneficiary of Liechtenstein-registered Fiduciare Commerce Trust, the paper reported.
 &quot;The idea behind this was very simple,&quot; Reiman told journalists Thursday. 
 &quot;At the time we were thinking of an IPO for Telekominvest or First National Holdings [which controlled Telekominvest]. And as part of the planned IPO the scheme would allow the trust to be the beneficiary of the IPO to receive a premium, which was to be divided later.&quot; 
 The initial public offering never took place, however, and the shares were instead sold privately to various buyers, Reiman said. 
 &quot;So a system was created but never worked out,&quot; he said, adding that the trust was in compliance with Russian and international laws.
 Reiman acknowledged his participation in creating companies behind MegaFon but stressed that it took place before he became a high-ranking government official. 
 Galmond's affidavit is a part of an international legal feud over the rights to a 25 percent MegaFon stake between Alfa Group and a little-known Bermuda-based company, IPOC International Growth Fund. 
 Alfa, a major shareholder in No. 2 mobile phone operator VimpelCom, made the contested purchase in 2003.
 In separate suits filed in Switzerland and the British Virgin Islands, IPOC is disputing Alfa's rights to the stake in MegaFon, which is owned by Telekominvest and Sweden's TeliaSonera.
 As for his relationship to Galmond, Reiman said he has known the lawyer since the late 1980s, when he used his services to create joint ventures in St. Petersburg. Their working relationship ended by the mid-1990s, Reiman said, and since then the two men have been seeing each other &quot;for a cup of tea about every couple of years.&quot; He said he had no intention to cut off ties to Galmond.
 Reiman reiterated that he had no interest in any of the companies behind MegaFon. 
 &quot;There is no conflict between me and Alfa,&quot; Reiman said. &quot;There is a conflict between Alfa and IPOC. It's just that Alfa, as an old oligarchic structure, is trying to use old methods. ... Essentially my name is being artificially plugged into the case, even though it has little or no relation to it.&quot;
 Reiman said he is considering clearing his name and reputation through the courts.

TITLE: Microsoft Chooses India
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HYDERABAD, India - Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Monday concluded multimillion-dollar software partnerships with two of India's leading outsourcing firms and stepped up plans to hire more programmers in India. 
 
The deals with Infosys Technologies Ltd. and Wipro Ltd. will enable them to use Microsoft technologies to build software for their outsourcing clients. 
 Infosys and Microsoft said they would together invest $8 million in the new venture. 
 Ballmer, speaking to reporters in Bangalore, India's main technology hub, said Microsoft will hire hundreds of Indians in the coming months, but didn't give any figures. 
 He said customers would be the beneficiaries of Microsoft's partnership with Nasdaq-listed Infosys, India's largest exporter of software services. The agreement will lead to &quot;increased efficiency and cost savings,&quot; a Microsoft-Infosys statement quoted Ballmer as saying.

TITLE: The Flying Belarussian
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - He may be banned from Western Europe and the United States because of his human rights record, but that does not mean Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko can't travel in style.
 
Although it is a closely guarded secret, Lukashenko gave up his Tupolev 154 in September to jet around in a sleek Boeing Business Jet, a senior Belarussian aviation official said Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
 &quot;There is an unofficial taboo. No one can talk about this aircraft,&quot; said a spokesman for Belavia airline, which operates the presidential jet.
 The jet, a Boeing 737-800, has a range of up to 11,500 kilometers and sells for more than $60 million in its basic option. Lukashenko's jet is valued at $100 million, Belarussian media has reported, with a plush interior fitted with a gym, a bedroom and a shower. A spokesman for Boeing in Moscow confirmed the delivery of the jet.
 Lukashenko made his first flight in the plane to Kiev last month to attend the 60th anniversary commemorations of Ukraine's liberation from the Nazis. With the acquisition, he joins the ranks of some 70 owners of the BBJ, including billionaire Roman Abramovich.
 President Vladimir Putin prefers Russian jets, flying in an Ilyushin 96.
 &quot;We would have been happy to buy a Russian jet, but there wasn't one available,&quot; said the aviation official. &quot;This is not about not being patriotic, but the BBJ uses much less fuel than a Tupolev and it meets European noise regulations that come into force in 2006.&quot;
 Because Western countries have placed a travel ban on Lukashenko for his human rights record, it may be hard for him to take advantage of these features. The aviation official insisted that the travel limitations were of little significance: &quot;The jet was not bought for a particular personality but for the position. There may be another [president] tomorrow. Don't you worry about us.&quot;

TITLE: Zealous City Firms See Profit From Car-Towing
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: About 80 cars are towed off St. Petersburg streets daily due to parking violations. The increasing activity of tow-away companies has been due to the fact that a tender on car-towing services for the city is expected to take place by the end of the year. 
 
So far there are six such companies in the city, but as much as 30 companies are expected to participate in the tender that promises to bring lucrative returns for the winner. Car-towing companies make about $200,000 in monthly profits, according to business daily Delovoi Petersburg estimates. 
 &quot;We would like to participate in the tender, though it's unclear how the process will be run,&quot; said the head of the largest city towing company, Spetzavtotekhnika, which services 12 of the 19 suspension parking lots operated by the city's road police. 
 &quot;The tender will be held to increase the quality of operation in these parking lots and to lower the running costs,&quot; said Yury Ushatov, head of the department responsible for parking lots accommodating towed-away cars.
 &quot;The conditions of the tender have not been finalized yet, but it has to be held by Jan. 1 next year,&quot; he said.
 The practice of towing away cars as a means to fight unlawful parking began in St. Petersburg in September, after the city administration determined the tariffs base for towing and suspended parking services.
 The transportation of the law-breaking vehicle costs its owner 2,927 rubles ($100), and the parking fees are set at about 30 cents per hour.
 Initially, the cars targeted by towing services firms were limited to those parked illegally on Nevsky Prospekt. An average of 30 cars were removed daily.
 &quot;Now we tow away cars not only on the Nevsky but in 12 city districts,&quot; said Sergei Kranzevitch, senior road police inspector, to Delovoi Peterburg.
 Cars are liable to be removed if they are determined as blocking traffic in a busy city transportation areas.

TITLE: State Bans Import of German Flowers and Veg
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: A temporary ban on German plant and flower imports to St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast went into effect Monday after a pest was discovered in a German shipment of flowers, the Agriculture Ministry said.
 
Included in the ban were fruit, vegetables, flowers, seeds and herbs, after inspectors found a virus-spreading insect - the Western California thrip - in flowers shipped from Germany on two occasions last week.
 Officials said the ban could be lifted provided Germany took necessary measures: &quot;Germany needs to present convincing documents that it has taken measures to guarantee that Russian sanitary requirements are to be met when exporting plant-based products to Russia,&quot; said Sergei Dankvert, chief of Rosvetnadzor, Russia's federal veterinary and plant sanitary control service, as reported by Interfax.
 The ban does not, however, extend to processed plant products such as jams or canned vegetables, said a ministry spokeswoman, who declined to be identified. The insects that prompted the current ban were discovered in flowers imported from Germany on Nov. 5 and 9, she said.
 Russia already introduced a ban on flowers from the Netherlands over the summer, also due to thrips. Dutch flowers were allowed to arrive in Russia through third countries, however, providing they satisfied the intermediary country' sanitary requirements.
 Dankvert said that Belgium, too, could receive a 'final warning' about pests in its plant exports to Russia, Interfax reported. Russia, likewise, is monitoring the case on the border with China.
 Dutch flowers accounted for 90 percent of the city's flower market before the ban in July. At that time Dankvert refused to estimate when the ban could be lifted. &quot;It is impossible to settle the matter without sending Russian specialists to the Netherlands, where they can examine the greenhouses used for growing products for import,&quot; he said. No solution has been introduced as of yet.
 The Russian flower business is estimated at $1 billion. The policy of bans, undertaken by the government, has been seen by some wholesalers as an attempt to re-organize the market.
 The director of St. Petersburg-based wholesaler Flora, Vladimir Kuleshov, said that in his opinion &quot;someone is provoking the redistribution of shares in the flower market.&quot;
 &quot;Holland has the best system of quality control in the world. There is no importer to replace Dutch exports to St. Petersburg,&quot; said Kuleshov.
 Other city wholesaler, Aalsmeer said they have been importing flowers from Israel, Colombia and Ecuador in an attempt to fill the gap in flower imports.
 But these measures &quot;cannot possibly last long,&quot; said Aalsmeer's director, Roman Kivel, as they are taking a considerable toll on transportation and packaging costs.
 <i>(SPT, AP, Bloomberg) </i>

TITLE: Future Computing Embraces Integration
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: As the computer novelties market expands, several nifty innovations are planned to bring technological joy to all, including toddlers, in the near future.
 

 <strong>
LIVING IN A DIGITAL HOME
 </strong>Intel corporation is getting ready to present a new platform for the so-called &quot;digital home&quot;.
 
In 2005, with a mass advertising campaign called Fast Work, Intel will present a new series of chips made for home computer multimedia systems, Reuters reported.
 The platform, which performs with a new microprocessor, chip set and Wi-Fi module, will be made as part of the company's &quot;digital home&quot; concept.
 A &quot;digital home&quot; will encompass a series of interconnected multimedia appliances that can receive, transfer and reproduce information from anywhere in the home using a PC that has a Microsoft Windows desktop.
 With the &quot;digital home&quot;, you can send a photograph from a digital camera to a computer to edit and then view the result on TV with any transfer complications.
 Likewise, music downloads from the Internet can be heard on your home stereo system.
 Observers believe that the new digital home platform will permit Intel to offer desktop computers the same integrational ease that notebooks with Centrino processors already enjoy. Furthermore, the company is keen to continue developing such multi-function platforms, as opposed to separate appliances, considering them the best way to find mutual understanding with customers, who are not keen on technical details.
 
 <strong>
POCKET COMPUTING
 </strong>Recently, PC Magazine informed that Rover Computers is to develop a second version of its communicator - a palm top computer and telephone in one - to be called RoverPC S2. 
 
The company, which recently announced that communicators will become the main trend in super portative appliances, said the new model is rather different from its original communicator RoverPC S1.
 For a start, RoverPC S2 is made in the shape of a flip-top mobile phone. With the flip-top shut, the size of the communicator is pretty similar to its rival, iPAQ 2210, only RoverPC S2 is a little wider. 
 The communicator also has an external monochrome screen with a blue back light that allows it to displayed information when folded. The gadget is priced at $650.
 
 <strong>
SAFE EMAILING FOR KIDS
 </strong>Meanwhile, Norwegian computer programmers have developed Magic Mail software that allows children from two years old to surf the net safely and use e-mail without adult help or supervision.
 
The so-called 'child operation system' is designed for children from two to twelve years old. The idea behind Magic Mail was to protect children from pornography, spam, and other harmful net phenomena, informed Delovaya Nedelya newspaper in October.
 The software serves as a &quot;protective shell&quot; on regular Windows operating systems. The shell lets though only authorized information, which helps parents create a 'white list' of websites that children can visit.
 When using e-mail programs, there are special multicolored icons instead of the usual Windows buttons. Thus, if a child wants to send a multimedia message to his grandmother, he clicks on the image of a speaking parrot, with its help records a song or some short text, and then selects his grandmother's picture.
 Magic Mail is part of a Magic Desktop system, which includes both educational and entertainment programs. With Magic Desktop, in order to get to the entertainment programs, children first have to win points solving intellectual tasks.

TITLE: SP: Telecom Has Best Promise
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Standard and Poor's rating agency named Russian telecommunications sector as having the most potential for a ratings raise, as investors are readying for the privatization of the country's major fixed-line communications operator.
 
Svyazinvest, which dominates Russia's fixed-line telecom market, is expected to auction off 75 percent minus one of its shares, currently under the Russian Federal Property Fond (RFPF) management. 
 The minister of communications Leonid Reiman said that the privatization of Svyazinvest will take place as early as next year, business daily Vedomosti reported.
 Reiman's words echoed statements from the Ministry of economics, suggesting that there will be a minimum of bureaucratic hold ups along the way, the paper said.
 Before the big sale, Svyazinvest has started to auction off its stakes in seven regional subsidiaries: Center-Telecom, North-West Telecom, Ural-svyazinform, VolgaTelecom, Sibir-Telecom, South Telecom and Dalsvyaz. 
 By the end of the year, the head of RFPF, Vladimir Zelentsov said, the state intends to sell about 10 percent of CenterTelecom' shares and about 6 percent of Uralsviazinform, Vedomosti reported.
 The state already has sold some of its shares in Dalsviaz, but an auction of Volga Telecom, which was supposed to take place at the end of October was postponed. 
 Investors name the state's high asking price as the main reason for the cancellation. &quot;The price of VolgaTelecom shares [at its first auction in May] was about 40 percent higher than the market price,&quot; said Aton analyst Yelena Bazhenova.
 Nonetheless, VolgaTelecom shares were up 2.5 percent and CenterTelecom's shares 1.4 percent on the Russian Trade System index at the end of last month, outperforming the second-tier oil companies.
 The consolidation of the regional operators from 72 Telecom companies to seven regional giants, and the rising liquidity of their trading papers makes them a good investment alternative to oil, reported managing fund Interfin Trade in an annual study of the domestic market.
 &quot;The formula for success in any sector of the Russian market is the presence of a strategic investor. The telecommunications sector definitely has such investors. Also, should the ruble exchange rate rise, the companies whose revenues are in rubles will have an additional advantage,&quot; Interfin's study said.
 Calling the sector the &quot;new oil&quot; may be a bit early, but its potential is very high, said Web-invest bank analyst Maria Kalvarskaya.
 &quot;Their growth is basically determined by the economic growth of the regions, where new mobile communications, Internet access, and network organization services have not yet been fully introduced,&quot; she said.
 The telecommunications sector in Russia is viewed as one of the most attractive markets, both in terms of mobile and fixed-line communication operators. However, the regional operators' growth has been limited by state-set tariffs and high equipment costs, Kalvarskaya said.
 Raising tariffs (as already occurred this fall) as well as limiting the state's influence on the industry - expected after the Svyazinvest sale - should make the sector's potential more accessible, she said.
 According to Troika Dialog's analyst Evgeny Golosnoi, the sale of regional company shares may interest the same players who will be eyeing the upcoming Svyazinvest deal. 
 Companies who have expressed interest in Svyazinvest so far have been AFK Sistema, Telecominvest and Alfa group, Vedomosti reported.

TITLE: Mobile Telecom Ads Project Warm Imagery
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Leading mobile phone operators are vowing to concentrate more on image advertising than tariffs in order to maintain customer loyalty. Also, with St. Petersburg and Moscow markets being near-saturated (70-90 percent), operators will switch to increased advertising in the regions to follow up on their regional expansion.
 
Meanwhile, an emergent key factor for attracting and keeping clients through advertising is the explanation and promotion of new technologies and extra services for mobile phone users.
 
 <strong>
IMAGE MAKING
 </strong>Most mobile networks would like to see customers choosing an image they associate with, so as to move advertising emphasis away from competition on figures.
 
&quot;Operators will have to attract people by some kind of image objectives,&quot; said Timofei Vashchilin, Beeline's marketing and advertising manager for St. Petersburg, noting the difficulty in finding new customers in a city market with a 70 percent saturation. &quot;Whether it's sports, arts, love, or humour - customers should associate with something, and it should mean something.&quot;
 As an example of image politics, Vashchilin names Beeline's posters with Andrei Arshavin, the Zenit FC striker - a summer advertising campaign in St. Petersburg which marked company subscriber number reaching half a million.
 &quot;We are associating those who came to Beeline during that time with a team - because they also played well,&quot; he said, adding that the campaign portrayed Arshavin's personal viewpoint, and was not an official link with the football club.
 If Beeline advertises an image of confidence and convenience, the other market players are also carefully carving out a niche for their image, said Vashchilin.
 &quot;I think, MegaFon are basically working on the emotional side, building an image of heart; and MTS are projecting an idea of team spirit,&quot; he said.
 Most operators agree that price wars are unlikely to disappear, and that informing about costs and services is one of the main objectives of their advertising. 
 However, with the high chance of a new law allowing customers to keep their number even if they change operator, as reported in Kommersant last Wednesday, building loyalty in the increasingly flexible mobile phone market will depend on more than offering limited-period discounts.
 &quot;First on our agenda is image advertising,&quot; said a member of the MegaFon Northwest press service in an interview last week. The press office added that increased focus on product placement, PR, and marketing strategies such as BTL (Beyond The Line) will combine &quot;to promote the image of MegaFon as a national operator&quot;.
 Vadim Zlobin, MTS's head of marketing in St. Petersburg echoed the trend, saying his company &quot;was very interested in image credibility&quot;. Even the new operator on the city's mobile market, Delta Telecom (brand name Sky-link), forecast tariff-based advertising playing a limited role in the future.
 &quot;Next year, we see that tariffs will kind of stabilize, and there will be little effect to pitch adverts on a tariff basis,&quot; said Maxim Chernyak, head of Skylink advertising in St. Petersburg.
 &quot;People are still looking for offers, but that will end sooner or later. Then, advertising should become more aggressive, in a good sense, more interesting and with more humour,&quot; Vashchilin from Beeline maintains.
 While tariff ads will not completely disappear, Chernyak adds that in the future the company will create advertising to &quot;establish our position as a provider with a solid high-tech base,&quot; emphasising Skylink's anti-fraud technologies, mobile internet services, and low radioactive emissions from handsets.
 The ads will be aimed mainly at the bigger-spending middle and top managers, Chernyak said, noting that already more than half of Skylink's 80,000 subscribers in the city and Leningrad Oblast fit in to that category.
 With mobile networks' advertising often turning up side by side in the metro, on opposing pages of the same newspaper, or in closely following TV and radio slots, only one operator - Tele2 - said that image advertising was inconsequential at present.
 &quot;Our adverting is very largely tariff-orientated. We don't feel the need to position ourselves or our image too heavily,&quot; said Ilya Chernetsky, marketing manager of Tele2, citing, nonetheless, that spending on advertising was most definitely up.
 
 <strong>
ADVERTISING VOLUME 
 </strong>Yulia Fesenko, the general director of Fusion media advertising company, confirmed that mobile network operators stand out among other advertisers in their will to cover all available advertising slots.
 
&quot;A company deciding on its advertising television campaign usually sticks to one main channel, and then one or two smaller channels. In contrast to Telecom firms such as Tele 2 or Megafon, very few advertisers can cover all advertising vehicles&quot;.
 Still, it is unlikely that in general the volume of mobile operators advertising will keep increasing significantly. &quot;I don't think there will be either more and less advertising of mobile phone operators in St. Petersburg or Moscow,&quot; Leonid Konik, editor-in-chief of ComNews Group said in an interview on Friday.
 &quot;Marketing and advertising budgets will be aimed mainly at regional development now, where the market is far less saturated - say, at the Far East of Russia,&quot; he said. &quot;Another important factor is that in every region mobile networks have their own tariffs and promotion - that's why they have to develop specific campaigns for each region of Russia.&quot;
 
 <strong>
THE EXTRA DEAL
 </strong>According to Konik, along with image promotion most mobile phone operators will have to tackle the question of promoting new technologies and news services. &quot;As in other segments of telecommunications sector, new technologies appearing require to be thoroughly explained, clarified and promoted, because it is mainly because of them that the market will continue changing and growing&quot;, he said.

TITLE: Outsourcing Growth Outstrips Staff Supply
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The past few months St. Petersburg's software outsourcing industry has seen tremendous growth, with large multi-national and Russian companies opening branches in the city.
 
Yet, as the industry began to overcome problems related to a general market immaturity, it was the shortage in the supply of qualified personnel that emerged as the biggest challenge locally.
 St. Petersburg's software outsourcing industry is second only to Moscow in size, claiming a 19 percent market share: that's almost $100 million of the country's total $540 million software export sales this year.
 &quot;The recent [expansion] trend leads us to believe that St. Petersburg is becoming an increasingly attractive destination for establishing research and development centers (R&amp;DC),&quot; said Valentin Makarov, president of Russoft - an association of Russia's software developing companies. 
 &quot;The list of multinationals that have established R&amp;DCs here in the last few months is amazing: Intel, Sun Microsystems, Alcatel ... as well as the biggest Russian companies, such as Epam and Luxoft,&quot; he said.
 Nevertheless, a recent survey of offshore software development conducted by Outsourcing-Russia.com showed that more than 80 percent of Russia's industry players are still independent companies, and less than 14 percent serve as development centers for large multinationals.
 
 <strong>
CONSOLIDATION
 </strong>Although the size of St. Petersburg's software companies has been increasing, there has developed a tendency to settle more market consolidation as opposed to out-and-out growth, said the editor of Outsourcing-Russia.com, Alexey Shorin.
 
Among the promising upcoming deals, Shorin named the acquisition of St. Petersburg-based Star Software by a major industry player, Epam Systems. The deal has not been officially announced, but Epam System's director of business development confirmed that the acquisition was at the signing stage, in an earlier statement to business daily Vedomosti.
 Shorin believes that this emergence of big industry players should make it easier for Russian companies to secure bigger and more lucrative contracts from desirable clients, and to compete more with more muster on the global market.
 
 <strong>
CLIENTS
 </strong>Despite industry surveys reporting the U.S. as a key market for Russian firms, Star Software CEO Nickolai Puntikov said that, in the first place, Russian companies aim for the European markets. In fact, most the key clients for St. Petersburg software developers are in Europe, and Puntikov's own company relies on 80 percent of its business coming from European clients.
 
Scandinavia is another area increasingly attractive to the Russian IT sector, with a few St. Petersburg-based developers, such as Arcadia, working closely with companies in Norway.
 &quot;In St. Petersburg, American companies have never been the leading clients. Even Luxsoft, that does [software] development for [American] Dell works with Dell's EMA division (Europe, Middle East, Africa),&quot; said Puntikov.
 The traditional choice for American companies, with a large outsourcing budget at their disposal, has been India. Considering that in Europe the practice of outsourcing began to develop much more recently, Eastern European countries, including Russia, were seen as more suitable and geographically closer territory, said Puntikov.
 &quot;India's strengths are in routine maintenance, while ours is in R&amp;D. We do challenging problem-solving, dynamic XP programming. Plus Russia is close to Europe so it's a natural choice for most European countries,&quot; said Puntikov.
 
 <strong>
QUALITY ASSESSMENT
 </strong>One major obstacle to securing big contracts up to now, has been the lack of agencies providing quality assessments (QA) in Russia. Over the last year the amount of companies that have adopted their practices to international ISO and SEI CMM standards has sharply risen.
 
As of now nine St. Petersburg companies have been certified and twenty others are on the way to certification, Makarov said. &quot;Russoft organizes dozens of training sessions and events devoted completely to QA. In my opinion, the certification process is not an obstacle to doing business in Russia anymore,&quot; he said.
 
 <strong>
PERSONNEL
 </strong>Though welcoming in terms of credibility and expansion, the entrance of large, new companies to the local market has heightened the competition for the industry's main resource: human capital.
 
&quot;The haunting problem of the domestic software development market is the lack of qualified personnel,&quot; said CNews analyst Roman Borovko to Vedomosti. Market consolidation is part of the solution, he said, as smaller companies fill the void. 
 Maintaining strong human resource capital, however, requires long-term commitment and educational investments.
 &quot;Large companies such as Intel started investing into education right away, upon entering the city,&quot; said Puntikov. &quot;They established connections with the city's universities, made sure specialists in the fields were being prepared. &quot;But, smaller companies should also participate in the process. For example Star Software is getting ready to launch its own commercial educational center, which will provide continuous education and training to the professionals in the field.&quot;
 The education is exactly one area where the government could step in to help, said Puntikov, suggesting that by making sure professor salaries were attractive to retain the highly-caliber staff, the country's universities would secure a continued line of quality personnel in the future.

TITLE: An Investment Banker's Bonkers Confession
TEXT: In my career as a strategist with various local financial institutions, since shortly after the 1998 financial crisis, I have repeatedly - some would say tediously - argued that Russia was finally turning the corner. Its economic edifice was being rationalized, its political structure consolidated and, given the more rational use of Russia's huge mineral, human and technological resources, intrepid investors would inevitably be richly rewarded.
 
More recently, I have been bitingly critical of sundry Western opinion-makers - politicos, journalists, a few of my peers, but especially the various &quot;independent and objective&quot; foundations and think-tanks that have benefited so greatly from the generous financial support of Menatep's principals. That is those self-appointed &quot;patriots and heroes of Russian reform&quot; now bent on wreaking maximum damage via a $250 million PR campaign savaging Russia's reputation in global financial and political circles.
 And yet now - suddenly - I am coming to realize how wrong I have been. Those of us with a long-term professional commitment to Russian financial markets should instead be thankful to the Russophobes and other doomsayers for allowing us to maintain our marvelously comfortable lifestyles with such minimal effort.
 A confession is in order here. As an investment banker, I have benefited greatly from the Russian financial markets massively outperforming their peer group against a backdrop of international pessimism and distrust. Profits are made by trading against misinformation, misconceptions and mispricings. Extracting superior returns from totally efficient markets is like trying to squeeze blood from a stone - while making money in markets populated by misinformed, fearful and overly emotional players is child's play: Trade against the consensus and you're home free.
 In the grim autumn of 1998, at a time when, inter alia, The Economist was warning of Russia imminently splitting into four warring states, GDP collapsing and the ruble being rendered worthless by a new bout of hyperinflation, some were foolish enough to issue a &quot;buy&quot; recommendation on Russia 2028 eurobonds, then selling at a price of 21 cents. Six years later, the total return has comfortably exceeded 1,400 percent. Russian equities have done at least as well. Indeed, Russia has consistently boasted both the world's best-performing bond and equity markets.
 Unlike theology or philosophy, finance ultimately has an objective benchmark for success: Either you make money or you lose it. Has this caused the skeptics to re-examine their fundamental beliefs and capitulate? Not a chance. Open any newspaper and you'll find warnings of a fearsome acceleration of capital flight (never mind that Russia's currency reserves recently increased by $4 billion in a single week) and massive disinvestment (although fixed capital formation is forecast to be up 11 percent on the year). Yukos lawyers and PR firms are warning that foreign investors are fleeing Russia, yet apparently no one told BP, Ford, Total, Conoco or the Koreans - much less the horde of investors who made the recent RusAl eurobond and the Mechel and Efes IPOs such absolute blowouts. And, as always, Russia is about to be thrust into crisis by a collapse in commodities prices. Meanwhile, driven by surging Asian demand, commodities markets seem to take a perverse pleasure in breaking historical records on an almost weekly basis. Investors are right to worry ... all the way to the bank.
 Despite the severe dysfunctionalities of the Russian state, the macroeconomic situation could hardly be better. Thanks perhaps to &quot;managed democracy,&quot; the administration has been able to resist the temptation of buying popularity - instead maintaining budgetary discipline so rigorous that Russia has gone from international basket case to the world's sixth-largest reserves position. GDP growth remains enviable and reform, while slow, is undeniable.
 Perhaps the most vital point to remember, though, is, as I wrote on these pages in 1998: &quot;If the locals are not getting their share, don't expect to get yours!&quot; Happily, we finance jockeys are now in good company. With the reduction in widespread poverty one of President Vladimir Putin's major goals, his government has forced redistribution of at least some of the fruits of economic growth throughout society. Not only official statistics, but every proxy indicator, from mobile telephones to meat consumption, from rail traffic to car registrations, confirms the rapid improvement in living standards.
 The year 2004 has proved more difficult than foreseen. Every market participant has suffered from the egregiously mishandled Yukos affair (stocks sold off, trading volumes shriveled and so on). One would have expected the administration to demonstrate a bit more concern for innocent bystanders, i.e. the Yukos minority shareholders who got caught in the crossfire. 
 Yet beyond any reasonable doubt, had Putin failed to crush what can only be described as a hostile takeover bid by Khodorkovsky and Co. for the Russian state, we would now be witnessing the restoration of the disastrous &quot;oligarchic model,&quot; leading to the sort of financial mayhem last seen in 1998. 
 Despite concerns over Yukos and fears of a global recession causing a drop in commodities prices, over the past three months, Russia has boasted the world's second-best performing investible equity market, outperformed only by mighty Ukraine.
 So thank you, Mikhail! Thanks to the FT, The Washington Post and The Economist! Thanks to the New Right and to the Old Left. Thanks to Carnegie and Heritage and New American Century. 
 Given the biased and sometimes hysterical rhetoric, any rational investor should by now be rushing to cut his exposure and go short. Although professional ethics requires that we warn against such folly, our words are likely to be met with a healthy dose of skepticism. Your friendly brokerage will be delighted to establish stock-shorting facilities for those who think they know better. 
 How much money do you want to lose?
 <i>Eric Kraus, chief strategist at Sovlink Securities, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times. His full views can be found at: www.sovlink.ru </i>

TITLE: The Cooling Trend Will Continue
TEXT: President Vladimir Putin has enthusiastically welcomed the re-election of U.S. President George W. Bush, as has much of Moscow's political elite. Putin has made clear that he believes that the decision of the U.S. electorate to return Bush for another four years represents a decisive rebuke to international terrorists. The driving assumption behind the Russian political elite's preference for an encore performance by the Bush administration, assuming their views are not simply a Kremlin echo chamber, holds that Republicans form their foreign policy goals on the basis of national interests rather than values and are consequently less likely to be critical of Russian domestic affairs.
 
Let's first look at the terrorism issue more closely. There is little question that at least rhetorically Putin and Bush share a similarly visceral hatred of international terrorists. Their feelings are understandable, given that Russia and the United States have suffered the most debilitating terrorist attacks on their watch. They view the terrorist challenge through the same prism as a showdown between good and evil that can tolerate neither compromise nor shades of gray. This mindset, and the perception of a shared enemy in al-Qaida and the Taliban, drove Putin to unprecedented historical cooperation during the war in Afghanistan.
 Since then, Moscow and Washington have disagreed on Iraq, and the notion of a strategic partnership to fight terrorism rings more hollow. In fact, one wonders whether Moscow and Washington view each other more as a liability than an asset in efforts to combat Islamic-inspired terrorism. Most Russians viewed the war in Iraq as a strategic mistake that would further destabilize the Middle East and serve as a great recruiting cause for al-Qaida. Likewise, both Republicans and Democrats in Washington broadly agree that the Kremlin's brutal war and failed policies in Chechnya have increased the terrorist threat to Russia. The series of terrorist attacks over the summer, culminating in Beslan, force Washington to ask whether Russia may be the weak link in the so-called &quot;war on terror.&quot; 
 Each country has an overflowing plate of problems in Iraq and Chechnya. It is unrealistic for the United States to expect significant - if any - assistance from Russia in Iraq. It appears unlikely that Russia would welcome assistance from the United States or other countries in Chechnya. Putin may genuinely want the United States to be successful in Iraq; the Bush administration certainly does not want Chechnya to remain a haven for terrorists. But to expect that the U.S.-Russian relationship will grow in importance in each capital on an anti-terror basis does not appear very promising at present.
 Let's take a look at the Russian political elite's second assumption about the realistic and pragmatic bent of Republicans as opposed to the supposedly moralizing and idealistic Democrats. The reality is more complicated. There are pragmatic and idealistic wings in each party. Republican neo-conservatives share with many Democrats an almost ideological optimism about the primacy of democracy and the U.S. capacity to promote it abroad. They are united in their critique of growing authoritarian rule in Russia and its potentially dangerous implications for European security. While Russian commentators have been quick to point to the high number of former Clinton administration officials who signed the &quot;letter of 112&quot; to NATO and the European Union criticizing Putin's domestic and foreign policies earlier this fall, one should not forget that the signatories also included a number of leading Republican figures, including Senator John McCain. The initiative for the letter came from both parties, and earlier this year McCain along with Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman introduced a bipartisan initiative to consider expelling Russia from the G8. The degree to which the second Bush administration will be critical of domestic developments in Russia as well as its foreign policy will depend on two factors, first and foremost - developments in Russia itself. If Russia moves further in an authoritarian direction, and this is combined with more domineering policy in the former Soviet republics, a cooling in U.S.-Russian relations is inevitable. 
 The second factor is what importance the Bush administration places on partnership with Russia in the coming years. Recall that on the campaign trail in 2000, and initially as president, Bush was very critical of Russia. But six months into his first term Bush's desire to move on missile defense and NATO expansion inspired him to do some soul-searching, and Russia climbed up the priority list. Then the need to fight a war in Afghanistan after 9/11 made Russia all the more important for Washington, and we heard very few critical comments about Russian domestic affairs.
 Dealing with the Iranian nuclear program may be the key issue that will require Russian help during Bush's second term - that is, if a cooperative diplomatic rather than a military solution prevails. But here Russia will be one of several key players, and for now the Europeans are taking the lead. Once the Yukos issue is finally resolved, the U.S.-Russian energy partnership may regain lost momentum. Something quite unpredictable could drastically change calculations about Russia in Washington, but most likely Russia will remain a secondary priority at best for the Bush administration, whose primary goals are stabilizing Iraq, strengthening the falling dollar, and promoting an ambitious domestic socio-economic agenda. The less Bush may want from his friend Vladimir, the less constraints his administration will feel about critically assessing Russian domestic and foreign policies. Under these circumstances, don't expect a change in the cooling trend in U.S.-Russian relations anytime soon.
 
 <i>Andrew C. Kuchins, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times. </i>

TITLE: Correct Approach to Beneficiaries Crucial to Reform Success
TEXT: It looks as if we will soon see noticeable progress in the reform of communal housing services. Governor Valentina Matviyenko's team of reformers are now preparing the ground for this. The moment of truth will come in the first week of 2005. And the probability of success is very high.
 
This has been made possible due to the Petersburg reformers putting their priorities, in my view, in the correct order. Last week I described the great importance of reform of the city's state orders to the success of any reform. Reforming the state orders is one necessary condition, but it is not the only. No less important is getting the people and structures who have a direct interest involved in the reforms.
 Reform for the sake of reforming is doomed to failure. If those for whom the reform is being made are not interested and in addition even hinder the reformers then there can be no movement forward. In a market economy everything is decided by consumers. They are the kings and if they don't see in a reform an advantage for themselves, then it is senseless to start it. This is especially true when we come to the reform of services, among which are the communal housing services.
 The parties with the greatest interest in the communal housing sector is private business that now services, above all, newly built residential properties - and St. Petersburgers who live in old apartment blocks that are part of the city's state-owned housing stock, which are serviced by state organizations. 
 When undertaking the reform of the communal housing services, the initiators in Matviyenko's team directed their main efforts not at improving the performance of these state organizations, but at making the reform attractive to those who are interested among the St. Petersburg community.
 Business is much better at servicing residential buildings than the state. This is obvious to the naked eye - all you have to do is drop in on an apartment block where a private firm does the cleaning. The widely held view that to do this firms demand huge amounts of money is erroneous. Of course, they have to make a profit, but that does not mean that they have to rob the population by charging enormous fees. As is well known, since July 1 the administration has raised the fees for servicing residences. That led to an increase in fees for communal housing services of 20 percent (the main part of the increase being due to payments for hot water, which is not really a housing service, but a communal one). As a result, we are all paying about twice as much for cleaning as the private firm Proski charged its customers in June.
 It seems as if the reformers deliberately raised the fees - to stimulate private firms. Their calculations have been correct - business in this sector has become very profitable. And that has created a powerful stimulus for business. Oleg Vikhtyuk, head of the directorate for working with the united owners of houses and management companies for the Residential Committee, and who is the main motor behind the reform, says that since the fees have been raised private companies have been feverishly active. They have practically laid siege to the committee, proposing the most varying schemes, all with one thing in mind - to get in on the business of servicing apartment blocks. For instance, they are energetically tendering their services &quot;for experiments,&quot; asking that they be given to manage several residential quarters (from the city's residential stock) - &quot;so that the administration and the residents can have the opportunity to compare the quality of their work with that of the state's service.&quot; Now, at their insistence, the Residential Committee is developing a plan to give over all of the apartment blocks in Krasnoye Selo to the management of private firms. In addition, Vikhtyuk confirms, they agree to meet the standards of any certificate regarding qualifications set by the administration in order to get on the registry of companies servicing the housing sector. Of course, there is no talk of any more rises in fees - the firms are prepared to work for the current payments, which one must acknowledge are not that high for the population.
 A director of one of these companies told me that immediately after the New Year, when the new Residential Code comes into force, many barriers preventing businesses from entering the communal housing services market will be removed and private companies will begin actively to canvass residents of state serviced apartments. They will advertise their services, including by door knocking and persuading residents to stop taking the services of the state organizations and sign up with a private firm. I emphasize again - for the same as now. This will be the moment of truth that I spoke about at the beginning.
 It would be logical if householders get together somehow. Best of all will be if they formed consortiums, but a house committee would also work. They might just conduct a meeting of the residents of an apartment block (not necessarily all of them) to make a decision to switch the servicing of a building to a private firm. From Jan. 1, the new Residential Code will allow all of this. The greatest difficulty here is to overcome our own inertia, our built-up indifference towards dirty staircases, piles of garbage decomposing in the rubbish tubes, dirt underneath windows and in children's playgrounds.
 Matviyenko's team understands full well that it is this passivity of the population that is that greatest obstacle to reform of the communal housing services. And that is why they have concentrated most of their efforts on overcoming this inertia. That is where the idea of household committees arose - creating a group of motivated residents to persuade the others to allow the management of the apartment block to transfer into the residents' own hands. The Residential Committee would be able to give the household committee the right and the money to clean the apartment block.
 Judging by Matviyenko's behavior, she fully supports that approach. In almost all her declarations about reform of communal housing services there is an appeal to residents to raise their involvement and a promise to support them if they do. She has issued an order to make money, which is currently spent on capital works that are conducted without resettlement, available to those who do take initiative and for the introduction of &quot;passports&quot; for those homes where a group of residents has been formed. 
 By the way, the administration does not always follow through by supporting citizens' initiatives. Thus, when the second reading of the 2005 city budget was held, the Legislative Assembly with Smolny's backing declined to support an amendment proposed by Yabloko members that would have guaranteed a level playing field for all forms of ownership of residential property when it came to subsidies from the budget. Forming either a consortium or a service group has often been a condition for obtaining these subsidies. It was important that a law forbade this kind of discrimination, but the assembly did not, because City Hall was against it.
 One has to understand that this resistance will grow as the reform progresses. The characteristic evidence for such intentions could be the attempts from within City Hall to exclude the communal housing sector from the system of city state orders - there was a proposal to create a special tender commission for the sector and separate rules for running its tenders. Today, however, it will be much harder to subvert tenders. The number and the influence of private companies have grown so much that it is unlikely they would tolerate fraud.
 But the main barrier to falsification must be the residents themselves. The initiative of citizens has been significantly raised. On Jan. 1 they will have the right to choose a management firm without holding any tender. And if St. Petersburgers really care about the servicing of their apartment blocks, no shady deals will be done. In general, a population that is self-interested is the best guarantee that reforms will be realized. The opposite also holds true - if people are indifferent no reform will succeed.
 
 <i>Vladimir Gryaznevich is a political analyst with Expert Severo-Zapad magazine. His comment was first broadcast on Ekho Moskvy in St. Petersburg on Friday. </i>

TITLE: Game Boy
TEXT: 
 
We said it here over and over, going back to 2003: If the U.S. presidential election was close enough to be gamed, it damn sure would be gamed. And the chunks of evidence now rolling in - like so many cracked shells of fact in a high tide of pompous drivel - increasingly indicate that millions of votes were indeed monkeyed with on the way to amassing George W. Bush's teeny-tiny 1 percent majority on Nov. 2.
 
It seems we were all a bit too quick to concede the reality of Li'l Pretzel's &quot;mandate.&quot; For example, in county after county, state after state, unprecedented discrepancies between the exit polls and the final result turned up - in areas that used electronic voting, that is, usually without a recountable paper trail. In almost every such case, exit poll leads for John Kerry - sometimes very substantial leads, beyond the realm of statistical error - were converted in the end to narrow victories for Bush. Yet strangely enough, in those areas that relied on paper ballots - utterly tangible records of voter intent - the exit polls and final counts were in virtual lockstep. Of course, for decades exit polls have been phenomenonally successful in gauging the actual electoral outcome - until the advent of national elections involving Bush and his political puppeteer, Karl Rove.
 There was also the wild imbalance between party identification in voter registration and the actual vote in key counties across the nation, particularly in Florida. In the latter, counties where Democrats comprise more than 70 percent of the voters suddenly showed Bush winning 50, 60, even 70 percent of the total. In Calhoun County, for example, an 82 percent Democratic registration somehow morphed into a 63 percent Bush vote. To be sure, an incumbent in wartime, running on a campaign of wild fearmongering and deliberately stoked (or is it stroked?) sexual panic might peel away a few of the other party's voters. Yet every single measure of the electorate this year showed that partisanship was extraordinarily high and remarkably solid: Only a sliver of party-identified voters crossed the line to vote for the other side. 
 So where did they come from, these astounding registration reversals that produced, in discrete packets here and there, hundreds of thousands of extra Bush votes that no one had expected?
 We've often spoken here of the fact that more than one-third of all American votes were counted this year on machines owned, programmed, installed - and in some cases even inspected - by private companies whose bosses are major Bush financial donors and campaign officials. Some of the main players in the virtual-vote game were originally bankrolled by a single Bushist tycoon, Howard Ahmanson, who spent decades pushing &quot;Christian Reconstructionism&quot; - i.e., complete theocratic rule of society and government by Christian mullahs who advocate, among other delights, death by stoning for homosexuals. Studies by leading scientists at Stanford, Johns Hopkins and other bastions of the &quot;reality-based community&quot; showed that these corporate e-vote systems are eminently - even laughably - hackable, either from the inside, by the Bushist companies themselves, or from the outside, by, say, &quot;information warfare&quot; specialists at the CIA or Pentagon, as investigative journalist Robert Parry notes. Nor would this hackery require placing gremlins in the thousands of voting machines operated by the Bushist firms; the final tabulations are actually made by a handful of central computers drawing together totals from outlying precincts, as analyst Thom Hartmann reports. Thus one little aptly placed &quot;worm&quot; could poison the well of an entire state. 
 Meanwhile, legions of phantom voters stalked polling booths across the land. In one key Ohio county alone - carried by Bush - the number of votes cast outstripped the number of actual registered voters by 93,000 - a pattern repeated in numerous e-voting precincts. Yet another Ohio county sealed its vote count from public scrutiny after Bush's Homeland Security commissars told terrified local officials that their suburban area had suddenly become a terrorist target of &quot;the highest order,&quot; MSNBC reports. 
 Bush's limp mandate was also engorged with a double dose of electoral Viagra: voter purges and voter suppression. As intrepid investigator Greg Palast notes, key states controlled by Bushist officials conducted mass purges of qualified voters from the rolls, utilizing an array of arcane laws, obscure regulations and - as in Florida 2000 - race-specific lists of supposed convicted felons, drawn up by private corporations using deliberately vague criteria that guaranteed false &quot;matches&quot; with legitimate voters, disenfranchising thousands of people - the majority of them law-abiding African-Americans. Meanwhile, an unprecedented voter suppression operation flooded low-income areas with bogus &quot;official&quot; letters and phone calls warning the poor they could be imprisoned for voting if they had unpaid bills or outstanding debts. 
 Even when these targeted minorities were able to get to the polls, they had to run a gauntlet of antiquated machinery that produced a massive amount of &quot;spoiled&quot; votes by mangling ballots, leaving those infamous chads unpunched and otherwise failing to register the voter's choice. Official U.S. government studies confirm that the majority of this &quot;spoilage&quot; does indeed occur in minority precincts; in 2000, for example, more than 1 million African-American votes were simply thrown in the trash. With this year's higher turnout straining the thin resources of such precincts, experts say the spoilage rate will be even higher.
 Of course, given Bush's strong support among the vast Deluded-American community, he might have won the election anyway, even without all this criminal <i>katzenjammer</i>. But now we'll never know. His &quot;mandate&quot; - miniscule as it is - will be forever tainted by doubt, smeared with the vicious sleaze and contempt for democracy that has marked every aspect of his malevolent reign.
 
 <i>
For annotational references, see Opinion at www.sptimesrussia.com </i>

TITLE: Putin Forms Civil Society Body
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - In an apparent attempt to boost Kremlin control over civil society, President Vladimir Putin has dissolved the Human Rights Commission and replaced it with the Council for Developing Civil Society Institutions and Human Rights.
 
Commission head Ella Pamfilova has been appointed to lead the new council, while Kremlin-connected political analysts and prominent human rights figures are among its members.
 The council will likely act as a liaison body between the authorities and nongovernmental organizations, promoting top-down initiatives on civil society, some of its members said Wednesday.
 Pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov, one of the council members, said that the commission had overlapped with the government's human rights ombudsman, Vladimir Lukin.
 &quot;The council will focus more on human rights organizations. Lukin will be more involved in dealing with individual cases,&quot; Markov said.
 Sergei Karaganov, chairman of the Defense and Foreign Policy Council and another pro-Kremlin council member, said the council would also help civil society develop. &quot;Without help from above it does not develop,&quot; he said. &quot;The commission can generate ideas and also collect money to help the process.&quot;
 New figures invited by Pamfilova to join the council include respected pollster Yury Levada and former Nezavisimaya Gazeta chief editor Vitaly Tretyakov.
 &quot;I still do not know if my work can be useful for the council or not,&quot; Levada said. &quot;Civil society is not organized by the government, president or king. Historically, it develops very slowly.&quot;

TITLE: Former Dissidents Rue Backsliding
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - More than 50 former Soviet dissidents who spent years in prisons and Siberian exile say Russia is in danger of slipping back into a police state under President Vladimir Putin and the former KGB colleagues he has brought to power.
 
Graying and aging, the former political prisoners reminisced one night this week about how they challenged the totalitarian superpower to abide by laws that on paper guaranteed free speech, a free press and fair trials.
 Today Russians are turning to Putin, a former KGB colonel, to restore order in their chaotic, market-driven democracy, said Eduard Kuznetsov, 65, who spent 17 years in prison for planning to hijack a plane in Leningrad in 1970 to get out of the Soviet Union.
 &quot;More than 50 percent of the key state positions are occupied by former KGB officials,'' Kuznetsov said. &quot;The KGB officials have a specific mentality. They can't change. There is a danger that it will really be a police state. Not so straightforward as it was under Brezhnev, because there is inertia.
 &quot;Because they have to balance between the [opinion of] the free world and a controlled society.'' Leonid Brezhnev ruled from 1964-82, now labeled the era of stagnation.
 Vladimir Bukovsky, who was labeled insane and spent a total of 12 years in Soviet jails and psychiatric hospitals for repeatedly demonstrating, said Russia is &quot;slowly returning to the pre-1991 situation'' before the end of the Soviet Union.
 &quot;But it will never go back all the way to Brezhnev's time. History doesn't repeat itself so precisely. But they will make a couple of generations miserable again. That's what they will do,'' said Bukovsky, 61.
 &quot;You cannot return to the Soviet system. It collapsed because it had to collapse. Not because the CIA undermined it or subverted it. They cannot understand in their small minds that it was absolutely doomed. Now by trying to restore it, they are simply bankrupting the country.''
 Bukovsky, who won his freedom in a swap for Chilean Communist Louis Corvalan on Dec. 18, 1976, recalled that Putin has lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union as &quot;a tragedy.'' He said Putin's colleagues also share this view.
 &quot;They do so because they used to be young officers of the KGB ... and they still have the feeling that they served the great power and now they want the great power to be back, and they think by repeating the Soviet example they once again will bring greatness to Russia,'' Bukovsky said.
 Putin, who proposed ending the direct election of governors after the Beslan school hostage crisis in September in which more than 330 people, mainly children, were killed, has denied that his planned overhaul of the electoral system signaled a retreat from democracy. Putin earlier drew criticism for shutting down two independent television stations with national reach - purportedly for financial reasons.
 Yury Orlov, a physicist, now 80, who spent seven years in Soviet prisons and five in Siberian exile for forming a group to monitor Soviet compliance with the 1975 Helsinki agreement on human rights, said he fears Russia will regress but not to what it was. &quot;Russia today is different.''
 The reunion was held at the headquarters of the nonprofit American Jewish Committee. Vladimir Kozlovsky, who grew up in the Soviet Union and emigrated to the West in 1974, said the assembled dissidents were his idols.
 &quot;They were a major factor in turning Russia into a semi-free country from a heavily authoritarian one. My childhood heroes. People I don't cease to admire. They probably spent a couple of hundred years combined in Soviet jails. And those were nasty jails. It was no picnic.''
 Ludmilla Thorne, a veteran of the human rights movement who worked with Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, said: &quot;The initial stage of the Soviet Union's demise is here in this building.
 &quot;The people you see in this room are the people who laid the foundation. The first epoch was dissent. These were a small group - 2,000 no more.''
 She said the dissidents were using words like &quot;glasnost'' and &quot;perestroika'' nearly 20 years before former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev made them the slogan of his push for democratic and free-market reforms.
 &quot;After coming to power in March 1985, Gorbachev borrowed the term 'glasnost' and made it his own.''

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Ivory Coast Embargo
 </b>

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) - African leaders backed an arms embargo and other immediate UN sanctions against Ivory Coast on Sunday, isolating President Laurent Gbagbo's hard-line government even further in its deadly confrontation with its former colonial ruler, France. 
 As a French-led evacuation of Ivory Coast builds to one of Africa's largest, French President Jacques Chirac denounced President Laurent Gbagbo's "questionable regime" - and said France would not tolerate much more. 
 Presidents from Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Togo and Gabon, meeting in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, on Sunday backed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an arms embargo, a travel ban and asset freezes against anyone blocking peace in Ivory Coast. 
 
 
<b>Basque Peace Plan
 </b>

SAN SEBASTIAN, Spain (Reu-ters) - A Basque nationalist party banned by Spain as ETA's political wing has unveiled a plan to end the long-running conflict in the region, saying it wants peace talks.
 Batasuna's plan calls for an agreement between Basque separatist guerrilla group ETA, Spain and France on demilitarizing the 36-year-old conflict and a referendum in the Basque country on its future.
 However, Batasuna stopped short of condemning ETA violence as Madrid's main political parties had urged it to do, and dashed media speculation about a possible ETA ceasefire.
 
 
<b>Kosovo Albanians Tried
 </b>

THE HAGUE (AP) - The war crimes trial of three former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army started at the UN Yugoslav tribunal on Monday, marking the first time ethnic Albanians face charges stemming from the Kosovo war.
 Fatmir Limaj, Haradin Bala and Isak Musliu will be tried for their alleged roles in the murder, torture and imprisonment of Serb civilians and Albanian dissenters during the 1998-1999 conflict.
 The arrest of the trio in February set off protests in Kosovo's capital Pristina, where many Albanians view them as heroes in a war for independence. All have pleaded not guilty.
 
<b>Dollar Surcharge in Cuba
 </b>

HAVANA - The value of a dollar in Cuba dropped to 90 cents on Monday as a surcharge on the American greenback took effect, the latest step in the island nation's conversion from an economy based on U.S. currency to one using the new convertible peso. 
 As of last week, U.S. currency no longer was accepted at Cuban stores, restaurants, hotels or other businesses, and the new 10 percent surcharge is meant to further discourage people from bringing currency from Cuba's No. 1 enemy to the island. 
 
 
<b>Schwarzenegger Bid
 </b>

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - Californians will soon see advertisements urging them to help give Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and other foreign-born citizens the chance to run for president.
 The cable television ads, set to begin running Monday, are from a Silicon Valley-based group that wants to amend the U.S. Constitution, which limits the presidency to people born in the United States. Schwarzenegger was born in Austria but became a U.S. citizen in 1983.
 



TITLE: Williams Forced to Face Up to Sharapova
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LOS ANGELES, California - Serena Williams pretended she couldn't remember playing Maria Sharapova in the Wimbledon final, amnesia being a convenient way of forgetting her one-sided loss. 
 
&quot;I don't know who it was,&quot; she said, half serious and half smiling. &quot;I wasn't at Wimbledon this year.&quot; 
 The Russian trounced Williams 6-1 6-4 for her first Grand Slam title at 17, a victory that propelled Sharapova to worldwide stardom and turned her blonde sex appeal into a lucrative off-court industry. 
 &quot;In reality, there was one,&quot; Sharapova said. &quot;She might not have been in reality.&quot;
 Williams won't be able to pretend Monday night, when she plays Sharapova in the final of the season-ending WTA Championships. The winner will receive $1 million, and a car to donate to her favorite charity. 
 Williams won the tournament in 2001 and was second in 2002, while Sharapova is playing for the first time. Sharapova is ranked sixth and Williams is eighth. 
 &quot;She obviously is going to want her revenge,&quot; Sharapova said. &quot;Hey, I'm in the finals of the championships and I want it, too.&quot; 
 Williams will try to salvage a season that, by her definition, wasn't the best. 
 She won two titles, but none in Grand Slam events. She skipped the Australian Open while rehabilitating her knee, then had quarterfinal losses to Jennifer Capriati at both the French and U.S. Opens and lost Wimbledon after beating Amelie Mauresmo in a three-set semifinal. 
 On Sunday in the semifinals, Williams outlasted Mauresmo 4-6 7-6 (2) 6-4, and Sharapova beat Anastasia Myskina 2-6 6-2 6-2 for the first time after losing to her countrywoman three other times this year. 
 Mauresmo's loss guaranteed Lindsay Davenport will retain the top spot when the year-end WTA rankings are released Tuesday. The Frenchwoman had to win the tournament to topple Davenport, who failed to advance to the semifinals. Davenport also ended the year No. 1 in 1998 and 2001. 
 &quot;It's not my main concern,&quot; said Mauresmo, who spent five weeks at the top after the U.S. Open before Davenport surpassed her. 
 Mauresmo failed to convert any of her 12 break points in the third set, when Williams hit winners on 10 of them. 
 &quot;I felt like I forced her to play her best level and really make some passing shots and make some unbelievable saves,&quot; said Mauresmo, whose 11-match winning streak ended. 
 Mauresmo had six break points in the fourth game, but Williams held at 2-all. Williams outlasted Mauresmo in a 13-deuce, 32-point game to hold for a 5-3 lead. 
 &quot;It was definitely intense,&quot; Williams said. She alternately blasted powerful groundstrokes, served in the 120-mph range and rushed the net, where she won 38 of 54 points. 
 &quot;I'm doing in the match what do I in practice, so for me that's really important,&quot; she said. &quot;That's what I'm happy most about. Now I just got to make sure I make them all.&quot; 
 Sharapova was assessed a code violation for being coached in the fifth game of the third set by her father. 
 &quot;He always coaches her,&quot; Myskina said, adding that most players' coaches do the same thing at matches. &quot;Maria's father did something really loud. That is why the chair umpire saw it.&quot; 
 Sharapova said, &quot;I didn't hear what he said. It doesn't matter what the coach says. You still have to go out and you have to win.&quot;

TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: <b>Loko Take Title
 </b>

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Lokomotiv Moscow clinched the Russian national soccer title on the final day of the Premier League season with a 2-0 win at Shinnik Yaroslavl last week. 
 Diniyar Bilyaletdinov and Dmitry Sychev scored in the first 20 minutes Friday to power Lokomotiv to its second Premier League crown in three years. 
 The win gave the railway side 61 points from 30 matches, one point above last year's champion CSKA Moscow, who beat city neighbor FK Moscow 4-1. Krylya Sovietov Samara finished third with a come-from-behind 2-1 win at Saturn Ramenskoye. 
 Samara stayed above Zenit St. Petersburg, also on 56 points after crushing bottom side Rotor Volgograd.
 
 
<b>Slutskaya's China Win
 </b>

BEIJING (AP) - Russian figure skater Irina Slutskaya won the women's portion of the Cup of China on Saturday with a crowd-pleasing comeback performance after an extended break because of illness. 
 Slutskaya had the crowd cheering from start to finish as she piled on triple jumps and acrobatic spins. Even before the scores were posted, spectators knew they had just watched the winning routine - especially since she had already won the short program Thursday. 
 "I fight with my illness, and I feel pretty good right now," Slutskaya said, adding she was "so happy" about her win, since it was a long time coming. 
 The Olympic silver medalist and 2002 world champion has been hampered the past two seasons by ailments including vasculitis. 
 
 
<b>Estonia Qualifier 
 </b>

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) - Star goalkeeper Mart Poom of Sunderland and defender Andrei Stepanov of Torpedo Moscow will both miss Estonia's World Cup qualifier in Russia this week because of injuries. 
 Estonia, coached by Jelle Goes, is third in the Group 3 standings with seven points, three behind Portugal and Slovakia. Portugal routed Russia 7-1 last month. A Euro 2004 finalist, Russia is only fourth in the standings with four points. 
 Wednesday's match takes place in Krasnodar. 
 
 
<b>Russia's Karjala Win
 </b>

HELSINKI (AP) - Alexander Skugariov had two goals and two assists, leading Russia's national ice hockey team past the Czech Republic 6-3 Sunday for its first victory in the four-nation Karjala Tournament. 
 Ilya Kovalchuk, the Atlanta Thrashers sharpshooter who tied for first place in the NHL's goalscoring race last season, added two goals and one assist for Russia. 
 The Czechs finished the tournament with four points, one ahead of Russia. 
 
 
<b>Georgian Grave Robber
 </b>

TBILISI (Reuters) - Georgian police have arrested a man after he tried to sell a bronze soccer ball stolen from the gravestone of one of Georgia's most popular players. 
 A police spokesman said Friday that Shukri Aroshidze was detained after he tried to sell the 67-kilogram ball to a scrap metal yard for 40 lari ($20). 
 Aroshidze admitted he stole the ball from the grave of former Soviet and Dinamo Tbilisi striker Mikhail Meskhi.