SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1035 (1), Friday, January 14, 2005
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TITLE: Victory
 Day Irks
 Baltics
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The three Baltic states are wary of attending Russia's 60th anniversary celebrations of the defeat of Nazi Germany.
 
The Kremlin has invited international leaders to the Victory Day parade in Moscow in what it plans will be the highlight of this year's celebrations.
 On Wednesday, Latvian president Vara Vike-Freiberg announced she would attend the celebrations, but emphasized that for Latvia, World War II did not end on May 9, 1945. For Latvians it ended on May 4, 1990 when a declaration of independence from the Soviet Union was signed, she said.
 "May 9 is not only the day of victory over fascism," website www.gtnews.ru quoted her saying. "It also represents the loss of independence for all three Baltic states. We have to show the world the other side of the date."
 She justified her decision to attend by saying that as the president of a member country of the European Union she belongs with the other leaders of EU countries at the celebrations. 
 "We cannot allow a repeat of the Yalta and Potsdam conferences where the fate of Latvia was decided without its participation," she added.
 But the Baltic states, who had been part of the Russian Empire, were independent after World War I and refer to the Soviets who occupied them in 1940 as invaders. The Nazis drove out the Soviets in 1941, but the Soviets returned in 1945, resulting in mass persecution of Balts by Soviet secret police. Many Balts went into involuntary exile.
 The political map of Europe was redrawn at conferences in Yalta and Potsdam, resulting in an Iron Curtain running across the heart of Europe. 
 Ill feelings continued after the fall of the Soviet Union, with Moscow regularly condemning treatment of ethnic Russian minorities in the Baltic countries. Some Balts demand compensation for mistreatment they received in Soviet times, something that Moscow has fiercely rejected.
 Moscow had hoped to use the Victory Day gathering as an opportunity to finalize post-Soviet borders with the Baltic states.
 Baltic politicians say signing a border agreement is not a sufficient reason for heads of Baltic States to come to Moscow.
 "By attending the commemorative events in Red Square, the Baltic presidents will essentially acknowledge Russia's victory," the English-language Baltic Times, published in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, said in an editorial this week. "No spin control, be it from the Kremlin or the presidential palaces here, can refute this. If the Baltic presidents decide to do that, fine, we won't second guess them, but they should get something commensurate in return - and that is not a border agreement.
 "The only thing worthwhile is recognition of a different kind - namely, that the Baltics suffered as a result of Soviet occupation," the editorial said.
 Aldis Kushkis, a member of the New Time faction in the Latvian parliament, was critical of Russia's stance on Tuesday.
 "Russia is one of a few countries that has not admitted the facts about the occupation and annexation of Latvia," he was quoted as saying by Riga newspaper Chas. 
 Latvia's claims against Russia are to the state, but not to the Russian people, he added.
 "Because Russia is a successor of the U.S.S.R., it has to answer for its [the U.S.S.R's] actions," he said.
 A petition signed by the faction's members on the issue has not been sent neither to President Vladimir Putin, nor to the Russian embassy in Riga, because the deputies have decided "this would be a too big honor for them," the paper said.
 Yevgeny Volk, a political analyst at the Moscow based Heritage Foundation, said the spat is only the beginning of wide ranging discussions within political circles of the Baltic States and also in dialogue with the Kremlin.
 "This is going to be a very sharp political discussion," he said Thursday in a telephone interview. "I've just been to Estonia and the discussion there has already broke through the level of business-related interests and turned into a very serious issue." 
 "Russia has made it very clear that the visit of the heads of the Baltic States will be tightly linked to the question of signing the border agreement," he said. "How this question will be resolved is still open. It's going to be a matter for a serious concessions on particular questions between these states and Russia." 
 After the Baltic States became part of the Soviet Union in 1940, some eastern territories was given to the Russia. Lithuania signed a border agreement in 1997 and ratified it in 1999, but it was not ratified by Russia's State Duma.
 "Judging by the current foreign policy in the country, it is unlikely that Russia will make any compromise to the Baltic States' demands," said Tatyana Protasenko a political analyst in the sociological department of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
 "No concessions will be made," she said Thursday in a telephone interview. "This was clearly seen in the last State Duma elections when the genie of nationalism was let out of the bottle. This is the country's policy at the moment. I had a chance to see and hear on TV a new song performed by Oleg Gazmanov called 'I was born in the U.S.S.R.' This is not a joke. This is serious ideological [propaganda]."

TITLE: Holidays Called Too Long, Too Expensive
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Although fears that this year's extended New Year holidays would result in a crime wave and a huge alcohol binge did not materialize, many St. Petersburg citizens say the break was too long.
 
"I'm so tired after this long holiday," said Olga Yakovleva, 31, a psychologist. "For me it meant hard work serving my family; I had to cook and wash dishes for 10 days." 
 She had no doubt legislators had meant well when they voted in a new holiday regime right at the end of last year, but she said they still "didn't think it over well enough." 
 Her opinion was echoed by many citizens.
 Many said they didn't have enough money to entertain their children and themselves; they complained about the depressing, winter weather and were particularly critical of losing a "useful" former day off on May 2, which was dropped so that an extra day could be added to the January holidays. 
 May 1 remains a holiday.
 The May 1-2 holiday has traditionally been a time when people go to their dachas to plant the seeds of the crops that will help them survive in straitened financial circumstances.
 "If the government can't create the conditions so that its citizens can earn a decent salary, it should at least give them time to plant their own potatoes and carrots," said Mikhail Zhevunov, 53, an engineer.
 Zhevunov said the traditional three- or four-day, spring holiday at the start of May helped his family to do the major planting in the garden of their dacha.
 "Why do we need so many days off in January to just sit inside and watch TV when in early May we won't be able to go outside during good weather and work at our dachas?" he said.
 However, hopes for the return of the May 2 holiday remain. At the end of 2004, Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov said the council would insist on making Dec. 31 a new day off and restoring the May 2 holiday.
 Mironov prepared a bill to this end, but the State Duma is yet to consider it.
 Vladimir Yeryomenko, a deputy in the United Russia faction in St. Petersburg's Legislative Assembly, said Wednesday he welcomed the long New Year holidays, which his party supports.
 "Karl Marx said that the wealth of a society is defined not by its material wealth, but more by the amount of free time that a person can dedicate to oneself and one's family," he said in a telephone interview.
 However, Yeryomenko agreed that for many people the holidays dragged on because they didn't have enough money to enjoy them to the full extent and had to spend a long time with bored children because kindergartens were closed.
 "I think our city authorities should have thought about preparing more activities for children in the city's districts for this period," he said.
 Police said St. Petersburg's criminals had taken a holiday along with everyone else and there had been no increase in crime.
 Georgy Livanov, the city's head toxicologist, said the number of the residents hospitalized for alcohol poisoning over the New Years holidays, did go up, but only by between 10 percent and 15 percent. 
 "Therefore we can't say that the holidays provoked severe abuse of drinking in the city," Livanov said.
 However, Livanov said people are drinking more now than they did in Soviet times, when the country was notorious for its alcohol problems. Today the national average per capita consumption of alcohol is 11-12 liters, with even eight liters a year "already a catastrophe," he said.
 In Russia, heavy drinking has to do with "easy access to alcohol when one can buy it 24 hours a day, its comparatively cheap prices and the lack of leisure opportunities, especially for young people," he said. 
 "The main remedy for alcoholism would be to increase workers' wages; they would then have more opportunities for a more prosperous and therefore happier life, and they would care more about their jobs," he said.
 Accidents with fireworks caused injuries to many people.
 St. Petersburg's ambulance service reported that between Dec. 31 and Jan. 10 at least 28 people, including 12 children, suffered because of fireworks, including with injuries to eyes and hands. Out of these injuries, 26 were reported on New Year's Day.
 Alexei Boikov, head of the service, said Wednesday that for December of 2003 and January and February of 2004, only 16 such cases had been reported. Misuse of fireworks is linked to drunkenness, he added.
 While poverty made the holidays tough for many, others seized the opportunity and went shopping.
 Retail chain Paterson said its sales during the New Year break were up by 20 percent to 25 percent, Interfax reported Tuesday.
 Yelena Prokofyeva, spokeswoman for Paterson, said that on Dec. 31 sales are traditionally up by 400 percent to 500 percent on regular shopping days. On Dec. 31, 2004, the chain's sales were up 20 percent on the same day a year earlier.
 The shopping splurge continued through Jan. 1-2, which hadn't happened in previous years, she said.
 The most popular products sold were expensive wines and fancy foods.
 Metro Cash and Carry also had a substantial increase in sales at New Year, Interfax reported.

TITLE: City Lawmakers Revisit Appointment of an Ombudsman
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The city's Legislative Assembly is to make its ninth attempt to elect a human rights ombudsman this month. 
 
The city has gone without an ombudsman for the past six years, because every time the post comes up for election the battle for it is very intense. 
 Whoever claims the post can position themselves as the last surviving bastion of democracy in the city. 
 Political analysts blame the continued failure to elect an ombudsman on a lack of strong candidates and the confrontation between the city government and local democratic parties. 
 At every ombudsman election, a pro-government candidate is up against a democrat. 
 In any case, human rights advocates say that even if consensus is reached and a winner is declared, the ombudsman will be a toothless tiger in the current political climate.
 "Talking about human rights in the authoritarian police state that Russia is today is nothing but blasphemy because people's rights exist only on paper," said Irina Flige, head of the historical branch of human rights group Memorial. "The ombudsman's job is a fictitious one, and St. Petersburgers may not have realized this yet only because the city hasn't had one for such a long time. But the crazy ridiculous battles around the post show that the city is struggling hard to hold this last barricade, however fictitious it may be." 
 The exact date for the vote hasn't yet been scheduled, but a vote is on the assembly's agenda list, and the latest two candidates have been named.
 This time the two contenders are Alexander Shishlov, a Yabloko party member, former State Duma deputy and Russian representative to the European parliament, and Vatanyar Yagya, a Legislative Assembly lawmaker and head of the World Politics department in international relations faculty of St. Petersburg State University. 
 In previous years, democrats have routinely accused pro-government candidates of being City Hall stooges and little more than puppets manipulated by the authorities. 
 But democratic candidates have faced accusations of lacking the influence required by someone holding such a key position in politics. The ombudsman will have to deal not only with human rights groups and members of the public, but also with courts, prisons, law enforcers and the local administration.
 Yagya said he decided to run for the job about a year ago, adding that his motivation to stand had emerged after frequent conversations with Nikolai Girenko, who was the city's leading expert on racial issues before he was murdered last year, and had been a student of Yagya. Girenko was gunned down at the doorway of his apartment on June 19.
 "We were very close in age but formally I still happened to be his teacher," Yagya, 66, said Thursday in a telephone interview. 
 "We often talked about growing xenophobia and ethnic intolerance in the city, and after his brutal murder, I became even more convinced that I personally should be doing more in this field."
 If elected, Yagya said he will raise public awareness on racial issues and develop international connections with ombudsmen from other cities and countries.
 "I entirely agree with human rights advocate Alexander Yesenin-Vopin, who said that knowledge of the law and understanding of one's rights is the main protection a citizen may have from violation of their rights," Yagya said. 
 But Olga Pokrovskaya, spokeswoman for the local branch of Yabloko party, said Shishlov is the better candidate, an opinion shared by many local democratic politicians. "An ombudsman should be an independent political figure, both correct and forceful in his efforts to defend people's rights, and be energetic and experienced in dealing with non-governmental organizations," she said. 
 "Shishlov is exactly that kind of person, and also a lawyer by education, which is another benefit. 
 "Yagya doesn't really have a history of going against City Hall," she added.
 The tricky thing with the position is that if an ombudsman does their job well, their activities are sure to irritate City Hall, she said.
 "Read the Constitution, go through all the rights the Russians are supposed to have, and you will see that most of them are violated and trampled upon - and in most cases there are government officials of all levels who abuse ordinary people's rights," she said. "Shishlov has proven ability to stand for the people against the authorities."
 But human rights advocates have apparently lost hope. 
 "The consolidated power structure has been established and it has solid foundations; and there is no place left in Russia for a real battle for people's rights," Flige said. "At least, not in the near future."

TITLE: Bill Raps Foreigners
 Who Lack Respect
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The State Duma on Wednesday tentatively approved legislation that would allow authorities to deny a visa to foreigners who show disrespect toward Russia, are sick or use illegal drugs.
 
The bill also envisages banning foreign cruise ship passengers from coming ashore unless they have visas, a move that St. Petersburg's tourism committee says could cost the city about 300 million euros a year.
 Cruise ship passengers are able to come ashore without visas for up to three days, but they may lose this because many countries refuse to allow Russian cruise ship passengers the same conditions.
 Political analysts said the bill falls short of democratic norms and that President Vladimir Putin may reject it in an attempt to flash democratic credentials in the faces of critics worried about a rollback on free speech and human rights.
 Duma deputies passed the amendment to the law "On Exit From the Russian Federation and Entry Into the Russian Federation" in the first of three readings by a vote of 353 to 44 with six abstentions.
 The amendment says foreigners could be denied entry if they "commit actions of a clearly disrespectful nature toward the Russian Federation or the federal organs of the government of the Russian Federation."
 Denial of entry could also result from actions that disrespect "spiritual, cultural or public values," bring about "significant material harm," or are harming or have harmed "the international prestige of the Russian Federation."
 "Other disrespectful or unfriendly actions" could also result in a foreigner being barred from entering the country, the bill says.
 The bill does not spell out what specific behavior could lead to being denied entry, but states that such a judgment would be in the hands of the president, the Federation Council, the State Duma, the government or a court.
 Independent Duma Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov has denounced the bill as a way to stifle critical voices. "This is completely consistent with Russia's current course," he said last month. "It is another tool to persecute critics and a viable opposition."
 Vladimir Pligin, the bill's author and chairman of the Duma's Constitution and State Affairs Committee, defended the legislation, telling Itogi news magazine in an interview published Tuesday that "attempts to portray us as some kind of closed country are absurd."
 "If we're talking about actions of a clearly disrespectful nature toward [Russia], I believe we have the right to take such an action," Pligin said. "Other countries have such norms on an unofficial basis, and the fact that we have it written into legislation is nothing new or inexplicable."
 While he did not specify what would qualify as "disrespectful" behavior, Pligin said foreigners would receive an explanation for visa denials at the respective Russian Embassy if the bill is passed into law.
 Repeated calls to Pligin's office went unanswered Wednesday.
 Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panorama think tank, said the Duma and Federation Council will easily pass the legislation and send it to Putin for his signature. Putin, however, may soften its language or scrap it all together as an act of democratic grandstanding, he said.
 "This gives the president a chance to play the role of the liberal," Pribylovsky said. "He's done this before. But, of course, it's just a show."
 In March, the Duma passed in a first reading a bill banning rallies in virtually all public places. The bill was widely condemned as an attack on constitutionally protected democratic freedoms.
 Putin subsequently requested changes to the bill that would allow protests outside government buildings, lower the age requirement for organizers, and shorten the period of advance notice needed to be given for some events.
 The bill approved Wednesday also would permit authorities to deny entry to foreigners who are drug addicts or suffer from infectious diseases that endanger others. The bill also stipulates that foreigners who do not present proof that they are HIV-negative can be denied long-term visas.
 Aside from visa refusals, the legislation does contain changes that promise to be welcomed by foreigners. For example, one measure would allow foreigners to obtain business and other visas for up to five years if their countries offer the same visa to Russian citizens.


TITLE: Hunger
 Strikers
 Resume
 Protest
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A group of St. Petersburg workers who helped to bring the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster under control resumed a hunger strike Wednesday that they broke off after a few days in December.
 
The workers, who were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation at Chernobyl, are demanding more compensation for the damage to their health. They said they resumed the strike because pledges made by authorities last month were not fulfilled.
 The workers on hunger strike in St. Petersburg's suburban town of Sestroretsk blamed the management of the national Chernobyl of Russia Union, of which all Chernobyl workers are compulsory members.
 Sergei Kulish, the leader of the hunger strikers, said the union was in cahoots with federal authorities in trying to reduce the workers' entitlements .
 "We suspect, that such people as Vladimir Dragush, head of the Chernobyl of Russia Union, would wreck the demands," he said Thursday in a telephone interview. They are cooperating with the authorities who put us in these conditions in the first place."
 According to documents obtained by the strikers, a Supreme Court hearing due to be held on Tuesday will recommend that the government increases compensation by only 38 percent, while the strikers want at least a 700-percent increase, Kulish said.
 "We met officials from City Hall on Wednesday," he said. "They apologized that they had not fulfilled the demands made in December and have made more promises. We don't believe them. This is like a kindergarten."
 Dragush said the union does not support the hunger strike because it is organized at the wrong time and the group's demands are unrealistic.
 "There are more important questions at the moment such as the current reforms of privileges that will heavily impact Chernobyl workers in February and March," Dragush said Thursday in a telephone interview. "We will have to protest, to go on the streets with posters and maybe start a hunger strike then, but it wouldn't be as effective because they are already doing one now."
 He also rejected Kulish's accusations that the authorities do nothing to help the former Chernobyl workers.
 "Forty apartments are assigned to Chernobyl workers at City Hall's expense annually and Kulish is on hunger strike in one such apartment," he said.

TITLE: Police Officers Shoot, Kill
 Driver Who Fled Check
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg policemen accidentally shot dead a driver who was tried to flee a police document check on Monday, NTV reported.
 
The incident occurred in the city's Krasnogvardeisky district when officers of the police guard service stopped a Zhiguli car with no number plates. While one officer was checking the driver's documents, the man pushed him, got back in his car, and tried to drive away.
 When the driver ignored the demands to stop, police fired a warning shot. However, the man drove on.
 Police cornered the car on Prospekt Tukhachevskogo. 
 When one officer approached the driver, the car abruptly moved, almost hitting the officer.
 A shot at the car's tires didn't stop the driver, who then aimed his vehicle at the police car.
 When police shot at the Zhiguli's tires, a bullet apparently ricocheted and hit the driver. He got out of the car but then fell on the ground. When doctors arrived on the scene he was declared dead.
 During a search of the driver's belongings, police found Russian and Georgian passports both in the same name, which has not been released.
 NTV said the driver was suspected of being on drugs.
 The case was sent to the Krasnogvardeisky district prosecutor's office, which is investigating if the police were justified in their use of weapons.
 Meanwhile, on Wednesday a man believed to have posed as a policeman twice stabbed a 20-year-old man, who was raising cash by playing his guitar on commuter trains, Fontanka. Ru said Thursday.
 The unidentified man approached the musician, showed him a police ID document, and ordered the young man to get out from the train because he needed to address the musician's non-payment of taxes.
 Near the platform, the "policeman" suddenly stabbed the musician. 
 However, the young man sprayed gas into the attacker's face and escaped.
 The young man was later hosptalized aspolice went continued to searchfor the attacker.

TITLE: Butov, Prosecutors Appeal
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Nenets region governor Vladimir Butov on Wednesday appealed a three-year suspended sentence issued by the city's Petrograd district court on Dec. 31.
 
The court found Butov guilty of beating up a traffic policeman on April 11, 2003. Two others who were in a car with him that day also received suspended sentences.
 Butov's lawyer Vsevolod Yesakov called for the conviction and sentence to be annulled on the grounds they were based on evidence obtained illegally and that evidence substantiating Butov's innocence was ignored, Interfax reported.
 Earlier St. Petersburg prosecutors, who had demanded a five-year jail sentence for Butov, appealed the same ruling on the grounds that it represented "unjustly mild punishment."
 On Friday, the Supreme Court is to consider another appeal by Butov against his being prevented running for governor for a third term Jan. 23, Interfax said.
 The elections in the oil-rich western Siberian region will be the last before governors are to be appointed under a new scheme signed into law at the end of last year.

TITLE: Pulkovo Merges With Rossiya
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - State-owned Pulkovo, the nation's No. 3 carrier, will cease to exist after it merges with smaller airline Rossiya later this year, government officials said Tuesday.
 
Presidential Property Department spokesman Viktor Khrekov said by telephone that Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov late last month signed a resolution defining the new status of Rossiya, which carries the president and senior government officials, as well as commercial passengers.
 "The merger will be completed within a year," Khrekov said.
 The resolution calls for Rossiya to transfer about 30 of its 41 jets to the Kremlin, which will then hire pilots and crews from the airline on a contract basis, Khrekov said. "This will allow us to save up to a quarter of budget allocations on these flights," he said.
 The new airline, tentatively called Soyuz, will get the remainder of Rossiya's fleet, Pulkovo's 40-plus Tupolevs and Ilyushins, and the licenses and routes of both airlines.
 Pulkovo Airport, St. Petersburg's only commercial airport, which currently belongs to the eponymous airline, will be spun off as a separate commercial entity.
 Gennady Chernov, deputy head of the Federal Air Transport Agency, said the new airline will offer stiffer competition for flagship carrier Aeroflot.
 In the first 11 months of 2004 Pulkovo carried 2.5 million passengers, while Rossiya carried 578,000. Aeroflot and No. 2 airline Sibir carried 6.3 million and 3.5 million, respectively.
 In end of year figures, Pulkovo announced a 12.3 percent rise in passenger numbers for 2004, Interfax reported Wednesday. The figures showed that the main rise was in the number of international passengers: up by 17.2 percent to 1.35 million.
 The number of domestic travelers rose by 7.8 percent to 1.35 million, and the freight flights carried a 9.5 percent increase, totaling 9.364 tons. Neither Pulkovo or Rossiya would comment on the merger.
 "It is early to say," Pulkovo spokeswoman Alexandra Cherkasova said. "The government resolution does not offer any concrete details."
 Last year Pulkovo announced that it planned to acquire several Boeings due to a lack of available Russian-made craft, but Cherkasova said it was unclear if that plan will now have to be revised.
 Both Rossiya and Pulkovo have acting general directors, and there is no clear indication of who will run the new company. 
 "There are a number of candidates to head the airline, but no firm decision yet," Chernov said.
 
 <i>
Additional reporting by Yuriy Humber. </i>

TITLE: Customs Fee on Import Goods Gets Doubled
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The registration fee on imported goods has almost doubled following a government decree, passed in the last days of 2004.
 
The decree, signed by Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov on Dec. 30, is part of the new customs code, adopted by the Tax Ministry in the middle of last year. Last year's fees on registration of imported goods worked on a percentage basis, 0.15 percent of the total shipment. The new decree states fixed fees.
 For all imports under 200,000 rubles, the sum collected will be 500 rubles; under 450,000 rubles - 1,000 rubles; and under 1.2 million rubles - 2,000 rubles. Imports worth over 30 million rubles will cost 100,000 rubles to register.
 &quot;The decree was not unexpected. As a matter of fact, had it not been signed before the end of the year, customs registration fees would have been left unregulated,&quot; said Marina Volkova, custom tax expert at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
 Among other changes in the customs legislature in 2005 are the expected implementation of a pre-shipment inspection for imports and changes in the customs tariffs law, Volkova said.
 Expected or not, the new decree places another weight on the shoulders of the country's importers and cargo shipping businesses.
 &quot;We have already began making payments under the new system,&quot; said Mikhail Kudakov, imports manager at Sautek, a construction and trading company. &quot;Although for us the registration fees are not as considerable compared to about 800,000 rubles we pay for the total customs and import tariffs every month, it does add to the headache,&quot; he said.
 Smaller and medium-sized importing companies will be particularly affected, Kudakov said.
 The change will also bear heavily on ship transportation fees. From this month, a ship travelling through Russia will be free of customs registration fees only if it serves as a means of transportation. However, if it is to be sold or even sent back to its original port for repairs, fees collected will reach 10,000 rubles, on-line daily Vremya Novostei reported. 
 New regulations appear more lax on individuals who import products not targeted for sale. In such cases, collection fees will not exceed 250 rubles, the Federal Customs Agency (FCA) assures. Those importing vehicles, however, will feel the change: instead of the 600 ruble fee on imports of car valued at $15,000-$16,000, a thousand rubles will be collected.
 Imports to Russia totaled $59.8 billion from January to October 2004. Of that amount, 45 percent were of ships, cars and equipment, FCA statistics said.

TITLE: Web Plus Swallows Teleport
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In an attempt to increase the number of its large and medium-sized business customers, Internet provider Web Plus has bought Teleport St. Petersburg, Interfax reported Wednesday.
 
The St. Petersburg division of Web Plus, a 100 percent subsidiary of Telecominvest, swallowed up local telecommunication services provider Teleport to strengthen its market share of corporate telephony and network services said Web Plus general director Andrei Shirenko.
 &quot;We plan to gain 15,000 new subscribers in 2005, and to increase substantially our number of large and medium-sized business customers,&quot; Shirenko said.
 Currently, Web Plus says user number of its dial-up internet via a modem totals hundreds of thousands, although there are only 7,000 subscribers to fast internet or ADSL lines, Interfax reported.
 &quot;The market has a lot of players at the moment, more than 10 to 15 in St. Petersburg, but the major share is held by the big companies, such as Peterstar, Lanck, Westcall and Web Plus,&quot; Denis Kuskov, general director of Sotaweek, a net-based telecom info-analytical agency said Wednesday in an interview.
 With recent takeovers including Peterstar's purchase of Concept, Kuskov sees Web Plus' move primarily directed at maintaining its position in the top five companies in the city.

TITLE: Putin Vetoes Ban On Drinking in Public
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Brewers raised their glasses Tuesday after President Vladimir Putin unexpectedly vetoed a draft law that would have banned drinking beer in public.
 
The Federation Council approved the bill Dec. 8, after rejecting an earlier bill passed by the State Duma for not being strict enough. 
 The revised bill, hammered out by lawmakers from both houses of parliament, broadened the number of places where beer drinking would have been banned to include public transport and cultural and sports buildings. 
 Streets, medical, educational and youth organizations were already on that list.
 In a letter to State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov, Putin acknowledged the &quot;need to develop legislative protections for the morality and health of the people, in particularly minors.&quot; Putin added, however, that &quot;adding changes [to the law] will allow local authorities to be more flexible in enforcing restrictions on the consumption of beer and drinks made on the basis of beer.&quot;
 The Russian Brewers Union, which lobbied heavily against the ban, toasted the veto. 
 &quot;The law is very confusing and self-conflicting from the point of view of applying this legislation in practice,&quot; union chief Vyacheslav Mamontov said via e-mail. &quot;I believe that this is the main reason for the president's veto.&quot;
 Deputies have no intention of giving up on the ban, however. Lyubov Sliska, first deputy Duma speaker, told Interfax that the lower house would begin amending the draft law as soon as possible.
 Sliska said she agreed with Putin's criticism that parts of the bill, such as the locations where beer sales and consumption would be banned, were unclear. 
 Analysts said that if a similar law eventually does come into force it would deal a crushing blow to the world's fifth-largest beer market.
 &quot;If the ban on public beer consumption is passed and enforced, it will hit the beer industry very hard,&quot; said Georgy Tvalchrelidze, Business Analytica's analyst. 
 Restricting where beer can be consumed would be much more damaging to the industry than the bill Putin signed last year banning beer commercials on television between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m., Tvalchrelidze said.
 &quot;People are not going to immediately forget all the beer brands that they know,&quot; he said.
 
 o
 
 The overwhelming majority of Russians believe that the ban on beer drinking in public should come in force, and some of the strongest support comes from the Northwestern region, Interfax reported Wednesday.
 Throughout the country 80 percent of citizens support the ban in some form, while only 16 percent are outright against it, according to ROMIR Monitoring, a statistics holding that carried out a survey in 100 towns across Russia.
 The staunchest backers of public beer drinking regulations come from the Northwest, where 85 percent of those surveyed agreed with government legislation.
 <i>(SPT) </i>

TITLE: Gref : Oil Should Be Privatized
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref has said he supports the privatization of both Rosneft and Yuganskneftegaz, in a move that appears to put him in opposition to the Kremlin's policy of greater state control over the oil industry.
 
Gref told the Kommersant newspaper in comments published Tuesday that state companies have lower growth rates than private companies because the state is &quot;ineffective,&quot; and used Gazprom as an example.
 &quot;I consider that both Rosneft and Yugansk, if it becomes state-controlled, should be privatized,&quot; Gref told the paper. &quot;Gazprom's lack of effectiveness is obvious.&quot;
 That places Gref, one of the key architects of economic policy in President Vladimir Putin's first term, in opposition to current Kremlin policy, which seems to favor the creation of a state-controlled energy giant, possibly using some of Yukos' assets.
 &quot;I think Gref is seen as the investors' friend, but I don't think he pulls the reins any more,&quot; said James Fenkner, head of research at Troika Dialog.
 &quot;He jumpstarted reforms for Russia, and really not much has been done on reforms over the past few years. The market doesn't believe he has the ear of the president.&quot;
 Putin last week stripped his maverick economic adviser Andrei Illarionov of one of his key duties as Russia's representative to the Group of Eight nations in what seemed to be punishment for his criticism of the Kremlin's conduct of the Yukos affair.
 State-controlled Rosneft took control of Yugansk, Yukos' main production unit, last month after buying Baikal Finance Group, a shell company whose backers are still unknown.
 Business daily Vedomosti reported Tuesday that Rosneft had acquired Baikal Finance Group, which had paid a $1.7 billion deposit to participate in the auction, for just 10,000 rubles ($358). The paper reported that Rosneft paid the balance of $7.65 billion for Yugansk into Court Marshals Service accounts in MDM Bank on New Year's Eve.
 A Rosneft spokesman declined to comment on the transaction or financing. It is also still unclear from where Baikal raised the $1.7 billion deposit.
 Rosneft paid $7.65 billion through state-controlled Sberbank, according to bankers in Moscow who asked not to be named. Investors and bankers said other state banks - such as Vneshtorgbank and Vnesheconombank - and possibly Surgutneftegaz, the country's No.4 oil producer, may have helped to finance the Rosneft transaction.
 If that is true, then state-controlled banks helped a state-controlled oil company purchase a controlling stake in Yugansk, which was being sold by the state for tax debts owed to, and defined by, the state.
 &quot;On the question of 'Where will they get the money?' we can say: They will take the money from us, from the citizens of the nation,&quot; Illarionov told reporters at a Dec. 28 news conference, a few days before he lost his G8 brief.
 Confusion persists over who will eventually own Yugansk and what is happening with the oil being produced there, about 1 million barrels per day.
 When Yukos controlled Yugansk, oil was sent to the oil major's refineries in Samara, which Yukos now says are oversupplied.
 Yugansk's former managers are being investigated by law enforcement agencies in the Khanty-Mansiisk autonomous district for large-scale tax evasion, Itar-Tass reported, citing a prosecutor in the Urals region, from where the investigation is being controlled.
 The Khanty-Mansiisk regional budget did not receive about 2 billion rubles in taxes, Itar-Tass reported, without giving any further details.
 A Yukos spokesman said reports that the company was slashing its workforce at its Moscow headquarters were incorrect. But after the loss of Yugansk, managers were preparing a restructuring plan as part of the bankruptcy proceedings that could involve layoffs, the spokesman said. No employees have been dismissed so far, he said.
 As Yukos prepares to defend its bankruptcy application against arguments by Deutsche Bank that it has no right to Chapter 11 protection in the United States, a lawyer for Gazpromneft said the bankruptcy case is unfounded and that Yukos itself could be the subject of damages.
 &quot;Yukos should be more concerned with the damages they and their lawyers have caused with these improper threats and their wrongful Texas suit. We are confident that the court will see it has no jurisdiction and the bankruptcy will be dismissed,&quot; Michael Goldberg, a lawyer in Houston at Baker Botts, wrote by e-mail in answer to questions about the Houston court case. Baker Botts is acting for Gazpromneft.
 &quot;By sending over one of its 100,000 employees to Houston with his laptop and money for lawyers, Yukos is trying to manufacture jurisdiction to find a Texas judge to help them settle this Russian tax dispute,&quot; Goldberg wrote.

TITLE: Government Misses Inflation Target for 2004
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - Yearly inflation fell slightly in 2004, but exceeded government forecasts, the State Statistics Service said Tuesday.
 
Inflation was 11.7 percent in 2004 compared with 12 percent in 2003, but exceeded a government target of 8 percent to 10 percent. 
 While recent high world oil prices have been a boon to the country's oil-dependent economy, consumers and businesses have felt the pinch of soaring gasoline prices. The price of gasoline jumped 31 percent locally in 2004, acting as a major inflationary factor.
 The 2005 budget counts on an inflation rate of 8 percent.
 &quot;It will be difficult for Russia to meet this year's inflation target as well because the world oil price still will put pressure on Russian domestic prices across the board, from fuel to services,&quot; said Peter Westin, an economist at Moscow-based brokerage Aton. &quot;The government will do well if it pushes inflation this year below the 2004 level.&quot;
 Russia is trying to contain inflation, at the same time printing rubles to prevent the national currency from rising too much against the U.S. dollar and the euro. The ruble rose 5.5 percent against the dollar in nominal terms last year and government officials have said the appreciation is hurting domestic producers, eroding their advantage over imported goods.
 Food prices grew 1.7 percent in December. Prices for fruit and vegetables rose 5.4 percent while meat and poultry became 2.8 percent more expensive during the month.
 Prices charged for services increased 1 percent and prices of manufactured goods rose 0.4 percent, the Statistics Service said. 
 <i>(AP, Bloomberg)
 </i>

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Alcan to Build in Russia
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (Vedomosti) - Canadian firm Alcan will invest $55 million into the building of two packaging factories in Russia. Experts say Alcan can hope to win 30 percent of the country's packaging market, which is worth $125 in total, if it squeezes out imported packaging produce.
 In St. Petersburg, Alcan will build a plant to manufacture cigarette packages, a project that will cost $30 million, said Chryst&egrave;le Ivins, press secretary of the company's European office. Although the location for this plant has not yet been confirmed with the city administration.
 The rest of Alcan's investment, $25 million, will go into a factory to produce flexible packaging for confectionary and dairy products, to be situated in Moscow. The company is in the process of picking out a location in the capital.
 Both factories are expected to start operations in spring 2006.
 
 
<b>SPCE Trade Up 20%
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Trading volumes on the St. Petersburg Currency Exchange (SPCE) grew by 20.7 percent in December 2004 compared to November's figures, a statement from the exchange said.
 The total trading volume amounted to 159,608 billion rubles ($5,723 billion). The U.S. dollar trading volume was $2,538 billion, while the euro trading volume reached 161.4 million euros.
 The combined trading volume of the deals made by St. Petersburg operators on SPCE grew four-fold to 4.8 billion rubles. The amount of the deals made by St. Petersburg-based operators on MICEX grew by 18.9 percent, amounting to 69 billion rubles, SPCE said. The amount of corporate bond deals on SPCE dropped by 12 percent in December to 196 million rubles.
 
 
<b>City Invests in Staff 
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The city administration will allocate 6 million rubles of budget money to fund personnel training, the Committee for trade, policy and economic development (CTPED) said Thursday.
 In a statement, vice governor Mikhail Oseyevsky, said that most of the financing for the training, known as the presidential program of management personnel qualification, will come from the federal budget and European Union grants.
 About 270 people are to participate in the program in 2005: among those will be St. Petersburg officials and state employees. Over 30 percent of the participating officials will come from innovative fields such as IT and other high-tech fields, Interfax quoted Vladislav Raskovalov, the deputy head of the St. Petersburg branch of the commission in charge of the program, as saying.
 The total amount of funding for the program has not been announced, but it will include a 35,000-euro grant from the European Union, Interfax reported.
 
 
<b>Capital Flight Triples
 </b>

MOSCOW (AP) - Capital flight from Russia more than tripled last year compared with 2003, the Central Bank said Thursday on its website. The bank said capital flight rose to $7.9 billion last year, up from $1.9 billion in 2003. 
 Capital flight (money sent overseas rather than invested or saved domestically) has been a matter of key concern for Russia's economic stability. The World Bank said in November that capital flight also reflects changes in the Central Bank's exchange-rate policy.

TITLE: Silence Is Dangerous
TEXT: At a time when the Kremlin is becoming a closed box to even the most seasoned Russia watchers, one of the few administration insiders who has openly expressed his views is being punished for doing so.
 
Andrei Illarionov has never been one to keep silent on matters he believes are important, seeing debate as one of the ways a society is informed about issues thought to be vital to economic growth.
 His strong rhetoric, at times irreverent, gets people's attention and helps drive his point home. 
 Inside the Kremlin, he has been in position to provide his boss, President Vladimir Putin, with an independent view, to help him judge the economic plans and policies put forward by his ministers. 
 Illarionov has publicly challenged government policies since his appointment in 2000, and his comments, whether criticism of electricity sector reform or support for paying off foreign debt, have influenced the country's economic course.
 But as authoritarian tendencies in the Kremlin have grown and voices of dissent have been hushed, he has come to take on the role of the medieval court jester, the one who entertains by speaking the uncomfortable truths but is otherwise ignored.
 The public, Illarionov said in his Dec. 30 interview on Ekho Moskvy radio, has a right to know what officials do and think. 
 &quot;I think it is very dangerous if people holding state office become totally secret and silent and society does not know what they do, does not know their opinion on certain issues and has no way of judging them,&quot; he said.
 In recent months, Illarionov had grown increasingly critical of the attack on Yukos. He also had criticized plans to do away with gubernatorial elections and harshly blamed government policies for the slowdown in economic growth.
 But until his parting shots at the end of the year over the Kremlin's handling of the demolition of Yukos, he had never opposed or contradicted Putin directly. 
 Illarionov added fuel to the fire by sarcastically praising Russia's interference in the Ukrainian presidential election and warning that Russia's current policies - the &quot;expropriation of private property&quot; a la Yukos and the dismantling of democratic checks and balances - could eventually lead to a similar revolution here.
 Such criticism, it was later explained by one well-informed official, is not allowed in Putin's Kremlin. 
 &quot;If you are working in the Kremlin administration, you should not criticize,&quot; the official said in commenting Monday on Putin's decision to strip Illarionov of his duties as Russia's representative to the Group of Eight.
 If this is so, Kremlin decision-making will become even more opaque, the prerogative of a close circle of advisers accountable only to a president increasingly in danger of being ill-informed and isolated.

TITLE: Kremlin Bureaucrats Lost
 Ukraine, But Russia Won
TEXT: Over the last six months, Russian politicians have been discussing Ukraine and its affairs so fervently that now I, as a Ukrainian politician and parliamentary deputy, have the perfect right to discuss Russian affairs. And in the same light I have the right to talk about the future of Russian-Ukrainian relations after the new president of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, whose team I have the honor of belonging to, gets to work.
 
I hear constantly that Russia lost the presidential election in Ukraine. 
 I do not agree with this at all. If we are talking about political spin doctors who are Russian citizens, then yes, they did lose the election. They never quite figured out the nature of Ukrainian statehood or the mentality of various groups within the Ukrainian electorate. If we are talking about a couple of Russian businessmen who pinned their hopes of taking part in the basically criminal crony privatization of Ukrainian companies and on Yanukovych, and had invested lots of money in him, then yes, they indeed lost the election. But if Yanukovych's sponsors had done some serious analysis at the right time, they would have understood that there are several reasons why this sort of leader was not what Ukraine needed and thus would never become president.
 Russia is not just politicos and not just a handful of unsuccessful investors. It is a 1,000-year-old state with its own long-term strategic interests. These fundamental interests will not suffer at all with Yushchenko as president of Ukraine. On the contrary, new opportunities to pursue these interests will open up.
 After spring 2004, we have tried to get through to the Kremlin and explain that Russia did not need to be afraid of us. We wanted to keep Russia's presidential administration from doing something reckless. Alas, we did not succeed. The political spin doctors and Yanukovych investors fretting about the fate of their money threw another wall up around the Kremlin in order to prevent a reasonable dialogue between Russia's leaders and the clear favorite in Ukraine's presidential election. Later, those who had openly led Russia and its leaders astray came up with a new tale. Yanukovych, or so the story goes, won the Nov. 21 elections, but then along came the United States and staged a revolution. For this reason, Russia should get revenge in part by practically blockading Ukraine's new leaders and fomenting a split in Ukraine. We need to acknowledge that relations between Ukraine and Russia are historically determined. They can't be farmed out to those playing political games. 
 Ukraine and Russia have a lot that unites them.
 First, we belong to the same civilization. Despite numerous differences, our peoples have a profound closeness that always makes cooperation easier. 
 Second, whether we want to or not, our countries belong to the same geopolitical space left behind after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ukraine and Russia are destined in the next 10 years to be high-priority economic partners. Once Yushchenko is president and the oligarch clans have been distanced from state power, we will be able to offer responsible Russian investors new opportunities to participate in investment and privatization programs in Ukraine. We want Russian capital not only to play an active role in Ukraine, but to guarantee the economic stability of our two countries. We should discuss uniting our defense industries and coordinating our military technology. Together, we will be able to reach a new level of modern weapons production and conquer new arms markets.
 Third, we have similar domestic policy tasks before us.
 President Vladimir Putin is building a strong state, and so are we. The Ukrainian people have passed through the stage of initial self-identification. Recent events have shown that Ukrainians have already united into a political nation. This nation will build a full-fledged state that will not be perceived as a temporary or accidental phenomenon of recent history.
 So, Putin is distancing the oligarchs from state power? Yushchenko also intends to keep the state separate from big business and make state institutions serve all Ukrainians. The end has come for the system in which the country's political direction was basically the product of compromises between a couple of extremely wealthy people.
 Fourth, we have the same foreign policy goals. With time, Ukraine and Russia will enter the European fold. Ukraine today is moving in the direction of a united Europe a bit faster, which means that it could help Russia keep up the pace and keep on the politically justified track. Yushchenko's authority and reputation in the international arena will help not only Ukraine, but also Russia, solve many of its problems, including the Russian authorities' stated goal of joining the World Trade Organization. In other words, Ukraine could become Russia's lobbyist when appropriate and helpful for both countries.
 And what about the Russian language? No one in Ukraine under President Yushchenko will threaten its use in any way. Education in Russian, Russian-language literature, Russian theaters, newspapers, television and radio will all develop. Ukraine's Russian speakers are an inalienable part of the Ukrainian political nation, and no one can infringe on their right to speak and think in their native language. There will be no forced assimilation of Russians.
 What about NATO? I won't rule out the possibility that Ukraine might become a member of the alliance in the not-so-distant future. But we will do so together with Russia. Ukraine and Russia should not end up as two different, let alone hostile, military zones.
 Finally, we need to remember that we are united by Orthodox Christianity. It will help us forget our petty squabbling and look at cooperation between Ukraine and Russia from the heights of a great historical mission.
 Perhaps for those in Russia's bureaucracy who are used to solving problems under the table without thinking in terms of national interests, Yushchenko's arrival is something bad indeed. But for Russia and its people, it is a good thing.
 
 <i>Yulia Tymoshenko is a deputy in Ukraine's parliament. This comment originally appeared in a longer form in Vedomosti. </i>

TITLE: City Officials Should Beware of Pensioners
TEXT: Unless she has a death wish, St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko shouldn't use public transportation. She would feel terrible if she gave a thought to St. Petersburg's 1.2 million pensioners, most of whom since Jan. 1 have been obliged to pay for public transportation, which was formerly free. I bet if Matviyenko met all of them in one place, she would be torn to pieces in a fraction of a second.
 
On Sunday, I took the metro after spending a couple of weeks abroad for the holidays. The scene that confronted me at the ticket office was novel: Pensioners were lining up to buy tokens. &quot;We might have to buy another couple of these just in case we're going to go somewhere next week,&quot; an old man said wearily to the woman next to him. 
 Matviyenko, meanwhile, is out of reach, hiding behind the tinted windows of her official car.
 Unpleasant comments and surly pensioners are just the beginning. They will be followed by more problems for local authorities in the near future. The trouble will start in February, when the city is likely to see widespread protests. They will begin right after pensioners get their first communal housing services bills, which will feature hefty increases under a law passed by the city's Legislative Assembly last year.
 The pensioners could probably cope with paying for public transport if that was the only extra cost they faced. But it will be extremely hard for them to find another couple of thousand rubles to pay for heat, electricity, gas and water. For many, paying for these essentials will consume their entire pension. For a city in which every fourth person is a pensioner, this could lead to unpredictable consequences, such as mass protests. Of course, people who use services should pay for them, and higher rates may help make the housing and utilities system work better. One of the reasons for its ineffectiveness has been the lack of money.
 Following a similar logic, City Hall has decided to raise fares for public transportation from seven or eight to 10 rubles per ride. This, together with the additional cash flow from the pensioners, police and soldiers, who also previously did not have to pay, will inject a huge amount of money into public transportation.
 The extra money will amount to billions of rubles per month. The additional three rubles people have been forced to pay for bus rides starting Jan. 1 will probably allow City Hall to buy a few new vehicles by the end of the year, but at the same time hundreds of thousands of pensioners will be stuck at home; they cannot afford to go anywhere. For this reason, they will most likely walk to their next destination - City Hall.

TITLE: Meanwhile, back in Chernobyl
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Ukraine has been a happening place since Ruslana, dressed as a warrior, won the Eurovision Song Contest earlier this year. Now that the Orange Revolution has put Ukraine squarely on the map, tour operators are expecting a boom this summer. 
 
Kiev, or Kyiv, as the Ukrainians say, is a gorgeous panorama of golden-domed churches. If you go to the Kyiv-Pechersk Cave Monastery and then take in the adjacent World War II memorial complex with its giant silver statue of the grieving Mother, you can see Ukrainian history from the 11th to the 20th century in a single sweep. As for the night life, well, this autumn there was no need to go in search of clubs, as the main thoroughfare, the Khreshchatik, was one continuous orange street party.
 But what to do with that extra free day? Despite the distractions of contemporary Kiev, I couldn't get Chernobyl out of my mind after coming across a web site written by Yelena, a biker who zooms down the abandoned roads of the contaminated Zone and calls herself the Kid of Speed. On her web site, kiddofspeed.com, Yelena waxes lyrical about the peace of the countryside, left to nature since the residents were evacuated following the nuclear power plant disaster on April 26, 1986. 
 But Yelena detests journalists and refuses to give interviews. I was stuck until I found a small business run by a former Chernobyl worker that organizes single- or multiple-day tours to the Zone. Chernobyl External Services deals mainly with foreign specialists going to ecological conferences, of course, but it will also get out the white minibus and roll out the red carpet for the curious layperson. If 20 people can be found to fill the bus, then the cost for each individual is only $60.
 The firm says that on a short visit to Chernobyl, the danger from radiation is now no greater than flying in an airplane, and advertises its guided tour as a &quot;safe adventure.&quot; In fact, CES is not the only company offering trips to the Zone, although the number of takers among visitors from overseas has evidently not been great so far. The contaminated air is only one disincentive: In order to enter the 30-kilometer exclusion zone that was thrown around the nuclear plant after the accident and is still in force, visitors also need permission from the SBU, the Ukrainian successor to the Soviet KGB. 
 Tour leader Sergei Akulinin works with good humor and military precision. &quot;See you at the bus in eight-and-a-half minutes,&quot; he joked. Not eight, not nine, but eight-and-a-half.
 On the eve of the tour just over two weeks ago, I left Kiev for Slavutich, the new town that was built for atomic workers after the accident made their old town of Pripyat uninhabitable. It is a journey of 186 kilometers to the north. Slavutich, with a population of 25,000 people, is like a model of the old Soviet Union, as different Soviet republics helped to build it. 
 Dinner was in a converted bomb shelter, now a restaurant with nautical themes called Nautilus. 
 The wall decorations hinted at the Great Barrier Reef. Trout was on the menu, not locally caught. The drinking water was bottled. Accommodation was in the three-star European Hotel, originally built by Finns to be the town hospital. The tour started at 7 a.m. sharp. 
 Before the tour began, Sergei took me to the Slavutich Cultural Center to see its explanatory exhibition and memorial bells. The diagrams of pipes and turbines could only be of interest to a specialist, but I was moved by the sight of 30 faces staring from photographs. These were the first victims who died from massive doses of radiation immediately after the accident, which happened because an experiment on the fourth bloc went wrong. On another wall was the face of Viktor Bryukhanov, the then-director of Chernobyl, who was made to bear the responsibility and jailed for 10 years.
 &quot;It was not an atomic explosion but a heat explosion,&quot; Sergei made clear. Nevertheless, radioactive dust from the ruined reactor was carried on the wind over a wide area of Ukraine and into neighboring Belarus and Russia. The communist authorities failed to warn the population immediately - indeed, May Day parades went ahead in Kiev - and it was Sweden that first alerted the world to the disaster.
 The death toll has now run into the thousands, and incidences of thyroid cancer and leukemia are high in the area. Hundreds of thousands of people, including Army conscripts, were involved in the cleanup, and all of these people face the possibilities of illness and premature death. An exact toll will never be calculated.
 Under pressure from Europe, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma closed the whole power station in 2001. Which was why I was astonished to start the tour the next morning by commuting to the mothballed power station on an electric train together with hundreds of workers from Slavutich. Far from being a ghostly scene, the power station is a hive of activity, as the workers have to maintain the metal sarcophagus that seals the fourth reactor and keep an eye on the other closed blocs.
 The route to Chernobyl from Slavutich runs through the territory of Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus. Because I did not have a visa to enter the country, I went on the train with all the sleepy workers, who are not checked by the border guards. The driver of the white minibus took my luggage over the Belarussian border and met me with it at the station, which is back inside Ukrainian territory. I had spent 10 days in Kiev with the orange protesters, and if Lukashenko was interested, my rucksack contained nothing but dirty clothes. 
 The train passed through a landscape of pine forests and rust-colored marshes. Storks' nests and bunches of mistletoe decorated the dark skeletons of the deciduous trees.
 The workers poured out onto a platform enclosed with corrugated iron and trudged down a plastic-floored corridor to machines that checked them for radiation. Then they changed into the clothes they keep for work - turquoise jackets with black suits underneath - so as not to spread the contamination back home. They are happy to work here because the wages at Chernobyl average $350 per month, which is good pay by Ukrainian standards.
 After the dosimeter machine pronounced me clean, I was whisked off to the Sarcophagus Viewing Center, where you get to watch a video and see a scale-model of the inside of the wrecked fourth reactor while looking out the wide glass window at the encased reactor itself. For some reason, I had expected a dome, but the sarcophagus, built to last for 30 years, looks more like a roof, gray as a crow's wing.
 In elegant English, tour guide Yulia Marusich explained that the sarcophagus is unstable and that plans are being drawn up to replace it, as the plutonium and other elements in the reactor will be lethal for centuries to come.
 Next stop was the ghost town of Pripyat, abandoned in the days immediately after the accident. The silence was eerie. Sergei pointed to his old flat in an apartment building at 34 Lesya Ukrainka. He sighed. &quot;My wife and I used to push our sons' baby carriage up this alley. Our youth is here.&quot; Stray dogs barked. We thought it wise to move on.
 The air smelled sweet after the car fumes of Kiev. Blue jays flitted in the bushes. In the absence of people, the streets and countryside around were completely litter-free. The red rose hips and black wolfberries looked a normal size. Sergei said that after the accident, monster pinecones had appeared and the needles of the pine trees had grown the wrong way around, but that gradually Nature had righted herself.
 We drove on to the town of Chernobyl, an old settlement with little cottages and a white, blue and yellow Orthodox church. Here, specialists from the Ukrainian Emergency Situations Ministry work 15 days on and 15 days off, studying and cleaning up the Zone. We lunched royally in their cafeteria; from the taste of the food, there was nothing wrong with it.
 Mykola Dmitruk, the information officer for the ministry, said that scientists are still not sure how safe the Chernobyl area is and that, personally, he does not recommend visits to ordinary tourists.
 &quot;The tour operators include a day at Chernobyl,&quot; he said. &quot;Twenty to 30 people sign up, but when Day Zero comes, most of them decide to stay in Kiev. We get one or two people coming. Mostly they have an interest in ecology.&quot; 
 Our last stop was the village of Ilyntsi, once home to 100 people but now nearly deserted except for a few elderly residents who returned after evacuating to other regions of Ukraine. Up a lane, some men were cutting wood. In the yard of one house, clean washing was hanging on a line. We rang the bell and were invited into the home of Galya Pavlovna. 
 Weeping, the old woman, originally from southern Ukraine, explained how she had married for a second time and come to the Zone with her new husband. Then he had died and she had been left in what she called an &quot;alien&quot; place with few social services.
 As a parting gift, Pavlovna pressed on me a pillowcase decorated with Ukrainian embroidery. To my shame, I passed this gift from the heart, together with myself, through the dosimeter when I departed. The radiation reading was normal.
 
 <i>
To book a trip to Chernobyl through Chernobyl External Services, contact Sergei Akulinin at chvs@slavutich.kiev.ua </i>

TITLE: CHERNOV'S CHOICE
TEXT: The launch of &quot;Huinya,&quot; the much-talked-about joint album by the local ska-punk band <strong>Leningrad</strong> and London cabaret trio <strong>The Tiger Lillies</strong>, is likely to be postponed again, according to the Moscow-based indie record company that is releasing the record in cooperation with Shnur'OK, Leningrad frontman Sergei Shnurov's own label.
 &quot;The thing is that The Tiger Lillies are studying the contract for the album with their lawyer,&quot; said BadTaStE's Pavel Golovin by telephone from Moscow.
 &quot;Shnur'OK had no ready contract so it sent it late, and then the holidays started.&quot;
 Golovin added that the album will appear in stores as soon as the contract is signed, but hesitated to name a definite date. Although the album was recorded in September 2003 when The Tiger Lillies came to St. Petersburg to record with Leningrad, the release of the resulting album has been postponed a number of times for various reasons.
 Whether the CD is released in time or not, Platforma club is planning to hold a <strong>launch party for the album</strong> on Monday. Leningrad won't perfrom, said Shnur'OK director Svetlana Kostitsyna.
 &quot;It's Platforma's own initiative, they are going to screen a film [about the making of the album] and play the tracks,&quot; she said.
 Meanwhile, Shnurov won a landmark lawsuit against his former record company Gala Records in late December.
 Vadim Uskov, Leningrad's lawyer, said that the Basmanny Court in Moscow annulled the copyright and mechanical rights agreements that Shnurov had signed with Gala in 1999. 
 Shnurov sued his former label for mishandling his royalties in Aug. 2003, claiming he was not paid at least $74,000.
 The Leningrad frontman and songwriter is likely to get an unprecedented more than 4.6 million rubles ($165,000) compensation from the Moscow-based label, said Uskov.
 Shnurov will also regain the copyrights and mechanical rights to his band's five albums released on Gala. 
 Gala Records will appeal the court's decision, said the company's lawyer Alexei Musatov.
 <strong>Tequilajazzz</strong> will play at Red Club on Saturday. 
 Three years since his band's fifth studio album, &quot;Vyshe Oseni&quot; (Higher Than Autumn), frontman Yevgeny Fyodorov is vague about any new releases from the band. 
 &quot;Nothing much is happening, everyone is busy with their own stuff,&quot; he said.
 Fyodorov was more keen to talk about the debut album of Optimystica Orchestra, his spin-off project with members of Lenin-grad, Spitfire and Markscheider Kunst, which is almost finished. 
 Launched earlier this year as to provide live musical accompaniment to Russian screenings of the art-house film &quot;Ten Minutes Older: The Cello,&quot; Optymistica Orchestra performed at Moloko last week.
 Finally, Platforma remains popular hosting folk band <strong>Dobranotch</strong> on Friday and <strong>Markscheider Kunst</strong> on Saturday.
 
 <i>- By Sergey Chernov </i>


TITLE: Cool curry
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: It has become something of a cliche, put about by the British Council and others whose job it is to promote the United Kingdom's image abroad, that fish and chips is no longer Britain's national dish. Tireless pluggers of &quot;Cool Britannia,&quot; the campaign initiated by Prime Minister Tony Blair to prove his predessor John Major wholly out of date when he said Britain is a &quot;country of long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist,&quot; would have you believe that fish and chips has gone the way of the Conservative Party (into oblivion) and has been replaced by curry.
 
The proprietors of Tandoori Nights, a restuarant which opened on Voznesensky Prospekt on Dec. 25, seem to agree. In a perky welcoming note in the restaurant's menu, they write that London is at the &quot;epicenter of change&quot; in Indian cuisine and the food they sell introduces this new style to St. Petersburg. The men behind the restaurant, Tilak Tripathi and chef Sanjay Gupta, ought to know: they were previously associated with St. Petersburg's well-established and popular Indian restaurants Tandoor and 3 Monkeys.
 From the street, Tandoori Nights (not to be confused with Tandoor which is next door at 2 Voznesensky Prospekt) looks a little vulgar with a huge red lighted sign announcing its presence. However, this far end of Voznesensky between Admiralteisky Prospekt and Malaya Morskaya Ulitsa is partially closed because Lobanov-Rostovsky House, which backs on to it, is falling down and a barrier has been erected to protect the street from its potential collapse. This has made this section of the street somewhat dark, and with a further two restaurants, Koleso and Aktyor, jostling for attention, its not surprising Tandoori Nights wants to make an impression.
 Inside, the restaurant is far from vulgar. With two intimate rooms and a lobby-bar, Tandoori Nights is not big but says it can accommodate groups for banquets of up to 60 people. Up to waist-height the walls are painted a dark shade of terracotta and from there to ceiling the walls are textured and painted white. On the far wall is a panel painted in a light shade of terracotta on which have been arranged chrome cut-outs of characters from some Asian, presumably Indian, language. 
 The host, again presumably of Indian origin, is freindly and relaxed, and takes great care to seat guests where they feel most comfortable. Some guests may not want to sit under the loudspeaker, although the modern jazz-funk-bangra playing in the restaurant is not loud; others may not want to sit near the windows, although they are discreetly frosted for privacy; yet others may want to sit in the other room to avoid smoking guests. 
 In another sign of the subtle professionalism of the service, all the staff spoke Russian and English with ease, and the waitress was happy to explain the composition and purpose of the dishes on offer.
 With poppadoms and three types of dipping sauce on hand, choosing items from the simply presented menu was easy. It is priced in euro-determined &quot;conditional units&quot; (&quot;y.e.&quot;) - not dollar units - at a rate only revealed when the bill arrives. On this day the rate was 38 rubles to the unit. 
 From the range of hot and cold starters the Khumbi Salad for 3.30 y.e. (125 rubles) was a pile of marinated mushrooms on a bed of lettuce, which despite, it was said, &quot;looking like someone's brain,&quot; had hints of onion and curry infusing the chilled, juicy champignons that were a perfect curtain-raiser to the meal. 
 With piping-hot servings of fluffy <i>naan</i> bread, reasonably priced at 0.80 y.e. (30 rubles) for two peices, delivered promptly on request, the meal progressed to the main course. 
 Among those available, the cheapest main course, Dal Makhani, a vegetarian <i>dal,</i> a dish made of simmered, pureed and spiced legumes, is 4.05 y.e. (154 rubles), while the most expensive, reflecting the Portuguese and seafood elements of the cuisine of Goa, a coastal state in west India which was once a colony of Portugal, is the prawn <i>biryani,</i> a rice-based casserole, for 14.15 y.e. (538 rubles). As well as Goan influences, Tandoori Nights says its dishes were inspired by the cuisine of India's northwest frontier. 
 On this occasion, Nawabi Chicken Tikka for 6.40 y.e. (243 rubles) with Pulao Rice for 2.15 y.e. (82 rubles) and Lamb Kumani for 7.70 y.e. (293 rubles) with Lemon Rice for 2.15 y.e (82 rubles) comprised the dinner for two.
 Both sets of rice - the blindingly yellow lemon variety, and the variageted red, pink and white <i>pulao</i> (pilau) rice - came in copper pots from which the waitress helpfully served out a couple of spoonfuls. The lamb curry also came in a copper pot which disguised its true, generous volume. Meanwhile the <i>tikka,</i> five hefty peices of spiced skewer-grilled chicken breast, arrived on a long dish with a lemon wedge and some lettuce. 
 The curry's sauce was thick with the syrup and texture of apricots, slathering boneless chunks of tender lamb and softened cashews. Ladled onto the lemony rice, the dish was satisfyingly soft, sweet and sour. 
 The chicken tikka and pulao rice combination was, by contrast, a earthy, dry mix redolent of ground spices and clay ovens. Cobra beer - a smooth, herby lager imported from India - was served to irrigate the meal at 2.70 y.e. for a 33 centiliter bottle (102 rubles). Trendy Petersburg brew Tinkoff is also available, as are pots of vaious tea for 1.60 y.e. (60 rubles). 
 Along with tempting sweet and salty <i>lassis,</i> Indian yoghurt drinks for 1.70 y.e (65 rubles), the menu offers a decent selection of desserts, including a standard but always refreshing ice cream assortment (chocolate, caramel, stawberry scoops with spray cream) for 2.60 y.e. (98 rubles), for which the waitress knowingly provided two spoons. 
 Wholly reasonable prices in a bright, freindly and above all professionally run restaurant will make Tandoori Nights a success in St. Petersburg, particularly among foreigners who are familiar with the standards of Anglo-Indian dining.
 It is doubtful that curry will heat up Russia's Northern Capital enough to dislodge its traditional cuisines, as in the U.K., but the good people at Tandoori Nights will be happy to spend many nights trying. &quot;Cool Brittania&quot; has arrived.

TITLE: Revolutionary debut
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Miracles happen. A recent one might well have been a surprise free gig last week by Laetitia Sadier, the French frontwoman of the British band Stereolab that played a one-off local concert last July.
 
&quot;My visit to Russia was of a friendly nature,&quot; said Sadier who arrived on Dec. 25 and spent a part of the New Year holidays in the city.
 &quot;I was invited to come here and spend New Year, which is, I was told, the major celebration and I can confirm that it <i>is</i> a major celebration. I had a really wonderful time once again in St. Petersburg.
 &quot;We walked a lot. I find St. Petersburg a very good city to walk in. I mean that it is itself a good occupation to drift in the streets of the big city.&quot;
 Sadier sings and plays trombone and Moog synthesizer with Stereolab, but she played an electric guitar when she performed solo, singing the songs she wrote for her own band Monade, both in French and in English. 
 &quot;I have to play much, much more guitar before I feel comfortable with it,&quot; said Sadier who writes her songs with a guitar.
 &quot;Although I've been playing it for a long time, I don't play a lot. I don't play every day; I play when I need to play, which is not very often. I can't sit down in my bedroom for eight hours...&quot;
 Sadier admitted that the recent impromptu concert at Platforma was her first solo performance, while her quartet Monade has played nine shows together.
 &quot;We are still very new and very flash,&quot; she said, adding that she is planning to go on tour with Monade when the band's second album, &quot;A Few Steps More,&quot; is released in March.
 She said her intention is &quot;just to go there and do it, to become more of the band together.&quot; 
 The Bordeaux-based band's debut album, the 2003 &quot;Socialisme ou Barbarie,&quot; was named after a French revolutionary group and included some of Sadier's songs written and recorded over a period of years since 1996.
 She took the band's name from French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis' book &quot;The Imaginary Institution of Society.&quot;
 Sadier's political sympathies lie with such movements as Britain's now-defunct RCP, or Revolutionary Communist Party, but while her lyrics for Stereolab are frequently politically-charged, it is not so much the case with Monade, she said. 
 &quot;[The lyrics are] not so obviously political as with Stereolab, but I think what's political about it is one needs to have certain autonomy,&quot; she said.
 &quot;This is a way for me to separate myself from Stereolab and Tim [Gane, Stereolab founder and Sadier's ex-husband], be more autonomous, and walk on both my legs; it's more personal, certainly, but it's about being an adult, creating something which I think is political.
 &quot;I think that setting out to be creative is a political act, an act of resistance in front of people like [President Vladimir] Putin, who don't want people to be creative, they just want people to be sheep, feared, paralyzed. It's about not being scared, just do it and no-one exactly knows what is going to come out of it. Do it.&quot;
 For Sadier, not only rock and roll, but all music, is able to affect society.
 &quot;I think everything affects everything. I mean not 'change the world,' not that,&quot; she said.
 &quot; I do what I do and it affects people around me, just like I get affected. The other day we watched [French singer and activist] Barbara, she's a phenomenon. Well, Barbara didn't change the world but she did inspire a lot of people, because she's so completely amazing. We get affected what's around us.&quot;
 Sadier's songs definitely do not sound like revolutionary anthems; they are sad, quiet and melodic.
 &quot;It's not like Russian techno, which tries to be happy but in fact is completely depressing,&quot; she said.
 &quot;I can't help it. I can't control that, it's just what comes out.&quot;
 Sadier's impromptu concert in St. Petersburg was swiftly arranged when cello player and promoter Seva Gakkel came up with the idea.
 &quot;It just happened, thanks to Seva and Chris [Gordon, a friend and the promoter of Stereolab's summer concert],&quot; she said.
 &quot;It was nice to see how casual it is, because in France if you want to organize a show you have to get off very early, very much in advance, it's kind of bureaucratic thing. So it was nice to see that it could simply happen.&quot;
 Even if many visitors to Platforma were having supper and spoke loudly over the music, Sadier said she liked the place.
 &quot;Platforma is good. It's a quite simple, functional place. Its a nice, good club with, I think, no-one living above so you can make a noise. And you could have more people if you moved the tables. It's a good size for smaller bands. Put 200 or 300 people in there. Long live Platforma.&quot;

TITLE: Authorial views
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The visit of two foreign authors whose work is popular in Russia last month capped a literary year in St. Petersburg that saw deepening links with the European scene.
 
Despite their wildly different writing styles, and lifestyles, the French writer Frederic Beigbeder and the Norwegian Erlend Loe brought to St. Petersburg a European perspective on contemporary literature.
 The visit of Beigbeder, organized by the French Institute, coincided with the publication of his novel &quot;Memoires d'un jeune homme derange&quot; in Russia. 
 During lectures at the St. Petersburg State University and meetings with readers, Beigbeder picked random books by French authors and read a couple of lines from them, giving his interpretations of French classics. 
 Beigbeder is also familiar with Russian contemporary literature. He told The St. Petersburg Times that he reads Viktor Pelevin and Irina Denezhkina and compared the former with Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. 
 &quot;In the '70s, literature went a strange way, with experiments with words, meanings etc. - further and further away from plots, narratives, readers,&quot; said Beigbeder. &quot;But in the '80s, it came back to the narrative structure and came up with several amazing authors and amazing narratives.&quot; 
 After 10 years in the advertizing business, Beigbeder is now better known in his native France as a media celebrity, hosting television shows, acting in films (including pornographic films), and taking part in electoral politics as an advisor to the Communist party. 
 In Russia, his books have caught the attention of Gosnarkokontrol, the federal anti-drug service, which filed a suit against Novgorod and Samara bookstores for selling Beigbeder's &quot;Stories under Ecstasy.&quot; Although the case was won by the bookstores, many copies of the book have been withdrawn from Russia's bookshops.
 The Norwegian writer Erlend Loe, however, is unlikely to see his books taken to court - his new book &quot;Four tales about Kurt&quot; is aimed at children, although adults can also enjoy it.
 &quot;The idea of a book came to me when I saw an island - I thought what a wonderful idea would it be to place my character on that island,&quot; Loe said. 
 The book is both gentle but exciting. Written in simplistic language, as if the main character (and the author) is discovering the world every day from the start, it demonstrates a fresh, pure, and honest viewpoint. By revealing life in general, Loe's characters learn to deal with the world, they learn to cope with other people and the order of things, remaining true to themselves and standing aside from normal life. 
 In one tale about Kurt, the characters find a dead fish, on which they sail on the sea - while they eat the fish. The characters are constantly surprised by life, by their discoveries and revelations. 
 Loe's first book &quot;Naive. Super&quot; was published in Russia in 2001, and two more, &quot;Facts about Finland (The Best Country in the World)&quot; and &quot;In the Power of a Woman&quot; were published in 2002. Loe's publisher in Russia, Azbooka, plans to publish two more of Loe's books in 2005.
 For the last three years Loe has been working as a feature film consultant at the Norwegian Film Fund and thus reads film scripts most of the time. &quot;Whenever time allows, I also prefer to read the literature that I am comfortable with - such as classics by Strindberg, Lagerlof, and so on, as well as popular scientific literature,&quot; he said.
 When he is in Russia, Loe said he also tries to &quot;trace the features of the way people lived before and the way they live now in this country.&quot; 
 In one of him books, &quot;Facts about Finland,&quot; the image of Russia and Russians is somewhat stereotypical - a large cold country full of gloomy people. 
 &quot;That is just a stereotype that exists in Norway. But you can't leave out the fact that this country has had a very extreme history. And it obviously has had an impact both on people living here and on its image abroad.&quot;

TITLE: Here comes the bride
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Anna Netrebko stars as the passionate and poisoned Marfa in the Mariinsky Theater's new production of &quot;The Tsar's Bride. The Mariinsky Theater's famous blue curtain rises and Grigory Gryaznoi, the mighty commander of Ivan the Terrible's feared bodyguards, the <i>oprichniki</i>, bemoans his unrequited love for young beauty Marfa Sobakina. Gryaznoi sits on a shabby bench in a place resembling one of the so-called Culture and Leisure parks that were a typical feature of the Soviet era. 
 
A seashell-shaped summer theater with quiet alleys and a ferris-wheel in the background is the setting for a new production of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's 1899 opera &quot;The Tsar's Bride,&quot; which premiered on Dec. 29 at the Mariinsky Theater.
 Director Yury Alexandrov moves the characters into the post-war Russia of the late 1940s. Sixteenth-century Russian boyars throw their fur coats over casual mid-20th century clothes, and Ivan the Terrible's oprichniki look more like NKVD officers. Fear and uncertainty abounds the stage. 
 Alexandrov and set designer Zinovy Margolin mix the features of two eras to give the plot resonance in the modern day since symbols of fear, beauty and horror change over time. Visually, however, the production has become an eclectic and slightly confusing mixture of styles. Russian beauties, vigorously dancing the can-can cabaret-style, and the seashell theater, which houses a cupboard resembling Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior, are simply kitsch ornaments, rather than elements signifying self-parody as presumably intended. 
 This historical melodrama is Rimsky-Korsakov's most popular and frequently staged opera both at home and abroad. 
 Featuring evil intrigue, poisoning, unrequited love and brutal murder, it is also drastically different from the composer's 14 other operatic works, inspired by fairy tales, romantic themes and folk stories, like the thoughtful and melodic &quot;Snow Maiden,&quot; the festive &quot;Sadko,&quot; the spiritual &quot;Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh&quot; and the satirical &quot;Golden Cockerel,&quot; all of which are in the Mariinsky's repertoire.
 The story takes place in Moscow in 1572 during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. The libretto is loosely based on a 19th century play by Lev Mey about Ivan the Terrible's ill-fated third wife Marfa, daughter of the Novgorod merchant Vasily Sobakin.
 Marfa, named Ivan the Terrible's bride, is in love with another man, Ivan Lykov, and is herself adored by the tsar's bodyguard Grigory Gryaznoy, who uses a love potion to entrance her. But Gryaznoy's mistress Lyubasha takes revenge on her rival and substitutes the love potion with poison. Gryaznoy blames Lykov for the crime and executes him as Marfa descends into madness. In the brutal finale, the truth comes to light, and Gryaznoy stabs Lyubasha to death as Marfa expires.
 The Mariinsky has assembled an excellent cast for their first operatic premiere this season. 
 Soprano Anna Netrebko's performance of Marfa is full of ease, brightness and grace as she effortlessly soars through the score. Radiating innocence and charm in Act I, the singer brings depth, anguish, and despair into the final scenes of Marfa's madness and physical suffering.
 Bass Viktor Chernomortsev, possessing the required artistic might and dark ponderous bass for the role of Gryaznoy, captures the character's power, rage and obstinate, uncontrollable obsession. The singer generates lightning, radiating with electricity, as he accepts the blame for giving love potion to Marfa and executing Lykov for his own crime. 
 In an interview before the premiere, director Alexandrov said his ambition in this staging was to explore the Russian character, with its &quot;harmonous coexistence of contradictory emotions: ungovernable passion and sentimentality, nobility and cruelty.&quot;
 How well the above description fits the the Russian character is questionable, but Chernomortsev's performance is Alexandrov's intention personified. 
 Mezzo-soprano Zlata Bulychyova, although vocally adroit, produces a somewhat shallow image of Lyubasha. Gryaznoy's forsaken lover acts more like an abandoned provincial housewife. It appears as if it isn't her profound love for Gryaznoy but wounded self-esteem that leads her to poison Marfa.
 Internationally, &quot;The Tsar's Bride&quot; is often linked to the Mariinsky Theater's star mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina, who has sung the role of Lyubasha to tremendous acclaim for the San Fransico Opera and other respected companies. But the singer, known for being strongly reluctant to be cast in experimental bold renditions of classical works from past centuries, is not featured in the new production.
 Musically, the production is stunning. The musicians of the Mariinsky Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of maestro Valery Gergiev, demonstrate a complete rapport with each other. From the nuanced ensemble pieces to dark scenes, the orchestra plunges the audiences into a moving drama of destructive, unresolved love.

TITLE: Boris Shtokolov (1930-2005)
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Boris Shtokolov was a member of the Mariinsky Theater from 1957 to 1989. Renowned Russian bass Boris Shtokolov, a leading soloist at the Mariinsky Theater from 1957 to 1989, died at St. Petersburg's Mechnikov Hospital on January 6. He was 74. The singer was buried at the Literatorskie Mostki, a memorial part of Volkovskoye cemetery, where some of the city's famous arts figures are laid to rest, on Tuesday.
 
Shtokolov, whose most famous roles included Mephistopheles in Gounod's &quot;Faust,&quot; Ivan Susanin in Glinka's &quot;Ivan Susanin&quot; (also known as &quot;A Life For The Tsar&quot;), Boris Godunov in Musorgsky's &quot;Boris Godunov&quot; and Gremin in Tchaikovsky's &quot;Eugene Onegin,&quot; was one of country's brightest artistic talents.
 The singer was often referred to as the &quot;Soviet Shaliapin&quot; for his bottomless, dark, profound and sonorous bass and powerful, emotional, dashing stage presence, which allowed him to thrive in the challenging bass repertoire. Shtokolov even sang the role of Boris Godunov in Shaliapin's own costume.
 His recordings of Russian romances earned the bass praise and recognition across the country, far away from the Mariinsky Theater.
 &quot;His every stage appearance was always so festive and gorgeous, and he always had a full audience,&quot; Mariinsky mezzo-soprano Irina Arkhipova told Rossiya Television channel this week.
 Born on March 19, 1930 in the town of Kuznetsk in central Russia, Shtokolov trained as a pilot in the late 1940s, but his miliatry career took a drastic turn when he graduated from flying school in Sverdlovsk. The Soviet war chief, Field Marshall Georgy Zhukov, who served as the Urals Military District commander at the time, attended the graduation evening. When he heard Shtokolov perform at the graduation party, Zhukov was so impressed he ordered the pilot to go straight to the conservatory and arranged his release from military service.
 &quot;Aviation will survive without you, but the world will lose a lot if don't become a singer,&quot; Shtokolov often recalled Zhukov as saying, with warmth.
 Shtokolov died of complications from an operation to treat peritonitis. Hundreds of people attended a farewell ceremony at the Mariinsky Theater before his burial. The ceremony had to be extended owing to the great numbers of people who wanted to bid farewell to their opera icon. Sadly, few representatives of St. Petersburg's younger generations were in attendance.
 In past years Shtokolov had kept a low profile. He rarely appeared in concerts and was said to be letting out his flat in central St. Petersburg to earn some extra money - a traumatic experience for an artist who had once been the most acclaimed bass in the Soviet Union, and a genuine &quot;people's artist.&quot;
 &quot;He was a true Russian man, who did everything on a superlative scale, be it singing, celebration or love,&quot; said actor Kirill Lavrov, artistic director of the Bolshoi Drama Theater.&quot; He was a wonderful man, a child of his nation, country and epoch.&quot;
 Shtokolov, who dreamt of establishing his own school or class, left no acolytes. Many fellow musicians regret that Shtokolov's talent wasn't in demand at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where the singer never had the opportunity to teach. 
 &quot;He taught at the Herzen Pedagogical University and his students weren't professional singers, but even so he was very enthusiastic about his classes,&quot; said Mariinsky Theater tenor Konstantin Pluzhnikov. &quot;But he could have done so much more.&quot;
 Colleagues said during his last years Shtokolov suffered from not being able to perform more often than his sporadic concert appearances. 
 &quot;He suffered a lot and felt depressed and longed for the stage, as perhaps every aging artist does when their stage lives expire,&quot; Lavrov said. &quot;He wanted to sing and was happy about every opportunity.&quot;


TITLE: Yanukovych to File
 Appeal in Ukraine
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KIEV - Representatives of losing presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych said Wednesday it may be days before they file a new appeal of the election results, a delay that would prolong the tensions that have plagued Ukraine for months. 
 
Western-leaning reformer Viktor Yushchenko on Monday was declared winner of the Dec. 26 voting, but cannot be inaugurated without Supreme Court approval of the results. Yanukovych has refused to concede, alleging that the vote was marred. 
 Yanukovych campaign manager Taras Chornovyl said law gives the camp until Tuesday to file its appeal with the Supreme Court. He said the appeal will consist of more than 600 volumes of documents and some 240 videotapes. 
 &quot;We will file the complaint within a few days,&quot; he told reporters, though he said the filing could have come as early as Thursday. 
 The high court and the Central Elections Commission already have rejected an array of appeals by Yanukovych's campaign. 
 Yanukovych's allies had warned earlier that his backers could pour into Kiev to stage massive protests and announced a possible complaint to an unspecified European court. 
 On Wednesday, hundreds of Yanukovych supporters rallied in his hometown of Donetsk. 
 The crowd, clad Yanukovych's blue-and-white campaign colors, chanted anti-Yushchenko slogans. 
 A dog carrying a blue and white flag in his mouth took part in the protest in the city's main square, named after Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. 
 The Dec. 26 election was a rerun of Nov. 21 fraudulent balloting in which Yanukovych was declared winner. 
 The November vote was followed by massive opposition protests dubbed the Orange Revolution after Yushchenko's campaign color. Eventually, the Supreme Court annulled that election. 
 Shufrich said earlier that the appeal would focus on an electoral reform enacted after the Nov. 21 vote that blocked absentee ballots and home voting - mechanisms that had allegedly been a prime source of voting abuse. 
 That reform was overturned by the Constitutional Court just a day before the Dec. 26 election, leaving little time for many elderly and ailing Ukrainians to make voting arrangements. 
 Ukraine's political tensions derive partly from an ethnic fault line between the country's east, which is heavily Russian-speaking, and the center and west, where Ukrainian nationalist spirit is strong. 
 Yanukovych supporters fear a Yushchenko presidency could marginalize Russian-speakers and stoke tensions with Moscow, which is Ukraine's largest trading partner and energy supplier. 
 Yushchenko has said he wants to nudge Ukraine closer to the NATO and the European Union, but also maintain close relations with Russia.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Ohio Challenge Ends
 </b>

COLUMBUS, Ohio - The Ohio Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed a challenge from voters to the presidential election in light of last week's certification of the electoral vote and the upcoming inauguration. 
 A lawyer for the plaintiffs, a group of 37 voters, had moved Tuesday to drop the lawsuit, saying it is now moot. 
 The election turned on Ohio's 20 electoral college votes, and not until preliminary results were available early Nov. 3 did Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry concede. 
 Attorney Cliff Arnebeck, who represented the voters, said he would still pursue challenges in courts.
 
 
<b>Outrage at Le Pen 
 </b>

PARIS (AFP) - Nazi Germany's occupation of France in World War II was "not especially inhumane," National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen said in an interview published in an extreme right-wing magazine Wednesday, sparking widespread outrage. 
 "In France at least the German occupation was not especially inhumane, even if there were a number of excesses - inevitable in a country of 550,000 square kilometers," he told Rivarol weekly. 
 The remarks caused outrage, with the French justice minister calling them an insult to the memory of victims and resistance fighters in occupied France and ordering prosecutors to investigate the extreme right-wing politician, while anti-racist groups announced their own legal action. 
 Le Pen claimed in his interview that if the Germans had carried out mass executions across the country "as the received wisdom would have it, then there wouldn't have been any need for concentration camps for political deportees." 
 
 
<b>WMD Search Over
 </b>

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ended last month, but the analysis of documents seized in the hunt continues, U.S. officials have said.
 Charles Duelfer, the CIA special adviser who led the investigation, has returned home and is expected next month to issue a final addendum to his September report that concluded pre-war Iraq had no WMD stockpiles, officials said.
 Asked if Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group, or ISG, had stopped actively searching for WMD, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said: "That's my understanding." He added, "A lot of their mission is focused elsewhere now."
 The Washington Post newspaper on Wednesday quoted ISG officials had folded up the effort shortly before Christmas.
 
 
<b>Arnie Visits Mudslide
 </b>

LA CONCHITA, California (AP) - Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said Wednesday that California has seen "the power of nature cause damage and despair" after nearly a week of record-breaking rainfall.
 But he says people will "match that power" with their own resolve.
 He spoke after touring La Conchita - the scene of Monday's mudslide. Schwarzenegger says he's determined to make the town safe again for people who want to rebuild.
 Ten bodies had been pulled from the muddy mess. At least eight people were still missing. Torrential rain has snarled traffic, knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of customers and killed 28.

TITLE: SKA Suffers Losses, Lack Of Faith
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg hockey team SKA failed to break their losing streak falling to top placed Dinamo Moscow 3-2 in overtime Wednesday night in Moscow. 
 
By forcing the game into overtime the struggling Petersburgers picked up their first point since Dec. 22 when they beat next-to-last place Sibir from Novosibirsk. Buffalo Sabres winger Maxim Afinogenov, who returned to his native Dinamo during the NHL lockout, scored at 3:10 in overtime stealing SKA's chance at breaking the streak.
 Since then they were beaten by Metallurg Novokuznetsk 3-1, blown away by both lowly Spartak Moscow and Lokomotiv Yaroslavl, 6-0 and 7-2 respectively, lost to Ufa's struggling Salavat Yulayev 5-2, and were edged by powerhouse Lada Tolyatti 2-1. 
 &quot;The team is not sure of itself and has some psychological problems,&quot; SKA head coach Boris Mikhailov said following last week's loss against Lada. &quot;These things happen during losing streaks. Players stop believing in themselves and they commit gross errors which end up costing the team. The two big losses [against Spartak and Lokomotiv] really demoralized the players.&quot;
 SKA has been under pressure not to fall too far behind or out of the playoff race. Losses to the Super League's cellar dwellers Salavat Yulayev and Spartak came as a shock. 
 &quot;Many players simply lack the talent that is needed. They found character to keep the game [against Lada] close, but didn't have the strength and the skill to win,&quot; Mikhailov said last week. His statement proved prophetic in light of the Wednesday's overtime loss to Dinamo. 
 Mikhailov tried to be upbeat by saying that SKA would keep fighting. 
 SKA's next home match is on Jan. 18 against Avangard Omsk, which is currently in St. Petersburg playing in the International Ice Hockey Federation's European Champions Cup at the Ice Palace until Sunday. 
 The competition is the first of its kind and features last year's champion clubs from Russia, Sweden, Finland, Slovakia, Germany, and the Czech Republic. 
 Six teams will fight for the right to call themselves European Champion. 
 
 o
 At more than 120 days and counting, the suspension of the North American Hockey League season is now the longest industrial dispute in the sport's history. The previous lockout a decade ago was resolved after 103 days. 
 With no end to the lockout in sight, player agent Allan Walsh told the Ottawa Sun that he is telling all clients of his Octagon Hockey agency to sign with European clubs as soon as possible. Over 300 players already are playing in Europe but some have remained home with hopes the NHL season would be salvaged. 
 &quot;We're advising our clients who have been waiting for an agreement in the NHL that they shouldn't wait any longer and they should get over to Europe right away if they want to play this year,&quot; Walsh said. &quot;It's our estimate the year is over here and there's not going to be any hockey.&quot; 
 <i>(SPT) </i>

TITLE: Simutenkov Wins Right
 To Play in EU Countries
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BRUSSELS, Belgium - A Russian soccer player has won backing for his right to play in European Union countries in a ruling that could open up EU leagues to even more foreigners. 
 
A top adviser to the European Court of Justice ruled Tuesday in favor of Igor Simutenkov, who contends his playing opportunities in Europe were hampered by limits on non-EU players in Spain. 
 Simutenkov argued that since a 1994 EU-Russia agreement banned job discrimination, the Spanish league had to accept him on the same grounds as any other EU player. When playing for Deportivo Tenerife, the league had refused to do so. 
 Tuesday's ruling was made by Christine Stix-Hackl, an advocate general at the EU's highest court in Luxembourg. 
 &quot;Professional footballers of Russian nationality who are legally employed in a member state have an unrestricted right to participate in competitions run by their association,&quot; she wrote. 
 The ruling is not binding, but the court follows the adviser's opinion in about 80 percent of cases. A definitive ruling is set for later this year. 
 The case comes as European soccer's governing body, UEFA, is finalizing proposals for soccer clubs to have a certain number of &quot;homegrown&quot; players. UEFA argues the increase in foreign players stifles the development of local talent. 
 Previous limits on EU players in European leagues were outlawed by a 1995 court ruling in a landmark case involving Belgian player Jean-Marc Bosman. He sued to halt the practice of clubs requiring transfer fees for players whose contracts had expired. 
 If Stix-Hackl's advice is now backed by the court, Russian players would have unrestricted access to EU leagues.

TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Love Leaves CSKA
 </b>

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - CSKA Moscow forward Vagner Love says he is leaving the Russian club and has agreed terms with Corinthians in his native Brazil. 
 "There's no way I'm going back to Russia," he said. "I'm fed up with the cold and I don't want my two-month-old son suffering in the Russian winter." 
 Vagner, who is one year into a four-year contract, said he wanted to play for a club where he would be noticed by Brazil coach Carlos Alberto Parreira. 
 "Even when I was scoring goals, I was being overlooked," he said. 
 Vagner said he had agreed terms for a four-year contract with Media Sports Investment, the London-based group of investors who in November signed a $35 million 10-year partnership deal with the Sao Paulo-based club.
 
 
<b>Italy Euro 2012 Bid
 </b>

ROME (Reuters) - Italy kicked off its bid to host the 2012 European Championship on Wednesday, with officials warning the country will have to combat racism and violence to be in with a chance. 
 "With this bid, our prestige will be judged not only by Italy but by the whole of Europe. We will be more credible if there are moves to fight and beat the racism and violence that we have seen around soccer matches," Italian Football Association chairman Franco Carraro said. 
 Italy, which hosted the World Cup in 1990, won the European Championship for the only time in 1968. 
 
 
<b>Nets Lose Jefferson
 </b>

EAST RUTHERFORD, New Jersey (AP) - New Jersey Nets leading scorer Richard Jefferson will miss the rest of the regular season with a wrist injury that he claims resulted from a dirty play by Detroit guard Chauncey Billups.
 An MRI scan on Monday night revealed Jefferson ruptured a ligament in his left wrist. Surgery is expected within the next two weeks.
 Nets president Rod Thorn said that Jefferson would not be ready to play again until the second half of May, effectively ending his season. However, the 24-year-old Jefferson hoped to be ready for the postseason if the three-time defending Atlantic Division champions found a way to get that far without him. 
 
 
<b>Rostov Welcomes Brit
 </b>

MOSCOW (Reuters) - British coach Paul Ashworth has joined FK Rostov as sporting director, the Russian Premier League club said Wednesday. 
 Ashworth, who resigned as coach of Latvian side FK Riga last month, becomes the first Englishman to be appointed to a top post in modern Russian football. 
 He will assist Gennady Styopushkin, who was appointed Rostov's head coach in place of Sergei Balakhnin last month.
 
 
<b>Armstrong Unsure
 </b>

SILVER SPRING, Maryland (AP) - Lance Armstrong is still unsure about his plans for this year's Tour de France. 
 Armstrong said Monday he plans to ride in several of the European spring classics before deciding in late April whether to try for a seventh consecutive Tour de France victory in July. 
 "I'll definitely be in France this summer," Armstrong said. "It just might not be on the bike."
 
 
<b>Manning MVP
 </b>

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - Peyton Manning's record-setting season earned him his second straight award as The Associated Press' National Football League Most Valuable Player. 
 The Indianapolis Colts' quarterback, who surpassed the records of Dan Marino and Steve Young with his passing prowess in 2004, earned all but one of 48 votes from a panel of American sports writers and broadcasters who cover U.S. pro gridiron football.
 
 
<b>Fine Looms for Moss 
 </b>

NEW YORK (AP) - Randy Moss is almost sure to be fined for pretending to moon at fans in Green Bay during a playoff win, according to NFL rules. The league is looking into the star receiver's antics in Minnesota's 31-17 win over the Packers on Sunday and will announce its ruling this week. 
 "[I was] just having a little fun with the boys," Moss told Fox television. "I hope I don't get in trouble by it, but if I do I'll take the heat."
 
 
<b>Butcher Injured
 </b>

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) - England's No. 3 batsman Mark Butcher was ruled out of the rest of England's tour of South Africa Monday as his sprained wrist had not recovered enough for him to be considered for this week's fourth test. 
 Butcher, 32, was left out of last week's third test in Cape Town, which England lost by 196 runs as South Africa squared the five-match series 1-1.