SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1044 (10), Tuesday, February 15, 2005
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TITLE: Love Letters Straight From the Heart
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: August, 7, 2004 London - Moscow, ICQ:
23:34 Serge: In the morning I was smelling the shirt that you slept in. I smelt it in the evening, too.
23:34 Squirrel: You are a maniac! Aren't you ashamed? So, does it smell like me yet?
"You attract me: sly, gentle, obedient, self-willed. I want to see you always: when you are nine months pregnant, three months pregnant or at any other month," Maxim, writing to his wife Tatyana in 1972.
Maxim's letter is only one of hundreds of love letters that St. Petersburg residents can enjoy these days at an unusual acoustic exhibit presented by Swiss project of "5,000 Love Letters" in Baltiisky Dom theater.
About 100 years separate samples of love letters sent, which include those of a Russian man named Serge and his girlfriend using the Internet identity of Squirrel on chat program ICQ and that of two Swiss, Friederike and Ludwig, who wrote to each other on paper in 1907.
But one idea unites the whole collection - love.
The arrival of "5,000 Love Letters" in St. Petersburg around St. Valentine's Day on Monday was well-timed.
Appreciating it is possible in an audio bar where people can choose to listen to recordings of hundreds of love letters from the 5,000 love letters collected by Swiss linguist Eva Lia Wyss.
The letters were sent in, following advertising campaigns, usually anonymously. Originals are copied then returned. More letters are being sought by the organizers.
Mats Staub, who brought the project to St. Petersburg will later take it to Moscow and Novgorod, said the project has a number of goals.
"Firstly, we wanted to let people enjoy the topic, which is close to everybody. Secondly, this project allows people to have a feeling for history. At the same time, it stimulates the human imagination," Staub said Monday.
The letters offer the broadest possible picture of what love is, show that it is not exclusive to one age group and illustrate the troubles it often has to overcome to survive.
One can only imagine the ordeal of Swiss schoolboy Rafael in 1998 when three Swiss girlfriends simultaneously wrote to tell him they had fallen in love with him.
"Dear Rafael! What about us two?" wrote Sandra in fall of 1998.
"I know you will in any case say 'no' but give me at least one chance. But if you want to be with Klarisse, forget it. Yours, Sandra," the girl wrote.
At the same time a second girl, Eliane, wrote to Rafael advising him that all three girls love him "with similar strength" and that he had "to make his choice."
Another girl, Sybille reminded him that "on her piece of paper" there was "1,000 feelings".
Staub said the correspondence of married couple Maxim and Tatyana, who apparently lived apart, she in Ivanovo and he in Moscow where he worked, is usually of great interest to the audience because it lasted from 1972 through 1988.
Maxim and Tatyana come together through their incredible love for each other, the birth of two children, the temporary presence of another woman in Maxim's life, the couple's efforts to keep the family together, and a return to tender affections.
Many people also come to the audio bar to listen to old love letters, which contain the fragrance of the past century and its sophisticated courting language.
"I greet your desire to connect our lives with all my heart," wrote Friederike to Ludwig in 1907.
"My beloved Hanny, is it too late? Are you going to reject my written proposal to you with contempt? I can't give you wealth but I can give you my hot and sincere love. Let me make my wish to see you happy as my highest goal," wrote Max to Hanny in 1911.
The correspondence of Dorli and Otto in 1940 conveys the difficult plight of Switzerland during World War II, when men had to serve in the army and women stayed home amid military alarms.
"How are you without your boy? Not very good, right?" wrote Otto. "I would also rather be with you than in the army now. You will have snow, too. The fascists won't get to you in such weather."
Valentina Grigoryeva, 31, who visited the audio bar said she went there with particular purpose to listen to love letters from the old days.
"Today, when we all live at high speed, people often confess their love too directly, as if in an attack," she said. "In old times, people probably had more time to relish their feelings, find beautiful words to express them."
Times have changed not only in regard to how humans think, but also the medium they use to correspond when electronic mail and ICQ have largely replaced letters written by hand. Today lovers don't need to wait for weeks or even months to get the answers to their letters. They exchange their feelings within seconds.
The correspondence between Serge and Squirrel, who managed to exchange 129 ICQ messages for 2 1/2 hours in one night proves the convenience of information technologies.
23:38 Serge: I love you so much!
23:39 Squirrel: I love you, too! I miss you so much, and I see your face in a crowd all the time.
23:41 Squirrel: I also smile all the time. They yell at me but I smile like a crazy.
23:56 Serge: Tomorrow I will go to look for a double-bed for the dacha. They now have a discount season and a big choice.
The project was launched a year ago in Zurich. In Switzerland, the visitors to the audio bar of love ranged from 20 to 70 years old. While in Russia it mostly consists of 20 to 30 year olds, Staub said.
"Initially we thought the project would be most popular among women. However, now we have not only couples coming to our bar but also men alone," he said.
The audio bar consists of open cabins equipped with cassette players. The cabins face each other. The open cabins reflect the the organizers' wish to let people see each other and each other's reaction to the letters.
"My biggest wish was always to have a love story start in our bar," he said.
Staub said in St. Petersburg audio bar visitors can enjoy about 500 letters of 80 couples from Switzerland, Germany and Russia.
Letters in German can be listened to both in German and translated into Russian. All reading of the letters is performed by the city's professional actors.
Staub said love letters in German and in Russian do not differ much as "they all are about passion, disappointment, hope or other feelings," which are all part of love.
However, he said that Russian love letters are "more direct" and "show more feelings."
A 70-minutes performance of love letters costs 100 rubles.
The Love Letters acoustic performance will continue in St. Petersburg on Feb. 18 - 20 at 5 p.m.; 6:30 p.m.; 8 p.m. On Feb. 18 there will also be a performance at 3:30 p.m.
TITLE: Nemtsov
To Advise In Kiev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: KIEV - Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has tapped liberal politician Boris Nemtsov, an old friend who stood at his side during the Orange Revolution, as an adviser to help boost Russian investment and mend ties with Russia.
"The decree on my appointment clearly outlines my task: I must attract Russian investments and, thus, help improve Ukraine's investment climate," Nemtsov said Monday.
"I am not a Ukrainian government official and I am not a Russian government official, so there won't be any thickheaded lobbying," he said by telephone.
Nemtsov - a former leader of the Union of Right Forces party who has held various government posts over the past decade, including a 1997-98 stint as deputy prime minister - said he will continue living in Moscow and receive no salary as Yushchenko's adviser.
Yushchenko's spokeswoman Irina Gerashchenko said Nemtsov will not join the presidential staff but act as an external adviser - and, as such, not receive a paycheck. Ukrainian law prohibits the president from hiring non-Ukrainian staff members.
Gerashchenko said Nemtsov was appointed in a bid to not only increase Russian investment but also to bolster Kiev-Moscow ties.
"Right now there are a lot of myths about Ukraine in Russia - myths that we are anti-Russian," she said. "If this can help show that that's not the case, that would be wonderful."
Nemtsov is the second liberal in the Russian business and political elite to be tapped by a government of a former Soviet republic. Last year, industrialist Kakha Bendukidze was named a Georgian minister after Mikheil Saakashvili became president in that country's Rose Revolution.
Nemtsov strongly backed Yushch-enko during the Orange Revolution, the weeks of national protests over a fraudulent Nov. 21 election won by Kremlin-backed Viktor Yanukovych.
The election was annulled, and Yushchenko won a repeat vote in late December.
Nemtsov and Yushchenko struck up a friendship in 1997, when he was deputy prime minister and Yushchenko was the chairman of Ukraine's Central Bank, Nemtsov said.
During the election crisis, Nemtsov made a serious effort to persuade the Kremlin to adopt a friendlier stance toward Yushchenko, a source close to the Kremlin said.
Nemtsov also stood at Yushchenko's side on Kiev's Independence Square when it was packed with tens of thousands of protesters. "A union between a chekist and a recidivist is perverse," Nemtsov told the crowd the day after the Nov. 21 election, in a reference to President Vladimir Putin's career in the KGB and Yanukovych's criminal record.
"We need a democratic Ukraine the same way as we need a democratic Russia," he said.
Nemtsov on Monday kept up his criticism of Russia's leadership and suggested that Russian businesses might move to Ukraine if the investment climate does not improve at home. "It is no secret. Many of my friends and acquaintances look at Ukraine enviously. And many are considering a permanent move there, should the situation become unbearable here," he said.
Russian business leaders are very worried about their investments, capital and personal safety, he said. "But instead of parking their money in some offshore accounts, they would gladly invest it into the Ukrainian economy," he said.
The legal assault on Yukos, stalled reforms, vast corruption and signs of a crackdown on civil liberties have caused grave concern among investors, political observers and some parts of general public.
Nemtsov said many Russians see the Orange Revolution as an opportunity for change, but "I am not talking about exporting revolutions. That is a very wrong approach." Instead, he said, they are heartened by Yushchenko's drive to bring Ukraine closer to Europe and to adopt democratic reforms. "If they are successful, that means that Russia also has a chance," he said.
One of Nemtsov's first tasks as adviser will be to deal with fears that Ukraine might reverse shady privatizations carried out under President Leonid Kuchma. Just Monday, Kiev announced that it had voided the sale of the Kryvorizhstal steel mill to a member of Kuchma's family last year. The plant was sold for nearly half the price offered by other bidders.
"My position is that there should be a law limiting such re-nationalizations to a specific list, so others will know that they are safe," Nemtsov said, adding that he will urge Yushchenko to back the needed legislation.
Market observers said Nemtsov's appointment is a partly symbolic gesture of Yushchenko's commitment to economic transparency, democratic freedoms and the fight against corruption - platforms that Yushchenko's Our Ukraine party and Nemtsov's SPS emphasize.
Andriy Blinov, a senior economist with Kiev's International Center for Policy Studies, said Yushchenko is trying to strike a sharp contrast between his promises to level the playing field for business and Putin's style of government.
"Yushchenko's policy is to be rather anti-Russian, not in any ethnic sense but in the sense that he is against Putin's vertical of power," he said.
Blinov said the appointment may ruffle some feathers in Moscow. "Many politicians will probably see this as an unfriendly act," he said.
Dmytro Tarabakin, head of sales at Dragon Capital, Ukraine's biggest brokerage, said Nemtsov should be able to boost trade ties - even though Russian interest in Ukrainian assets is already sky-high.
Ukraine's economy shot up 12 percent last year, and more than 9 percent in 2003. The benchmark PFTS index grew by over 200 percent last year, and is up about 30 percent since Jan. 1.
"There's been a tremendous pickup from practically all the Russian brokers," Tarabakin said.
"Before, we were going to Moscow to meet them. Now they come to Ukraine to meet us."
Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin consultant, noted that while Nemtsov's appointment could be seen as a slap in the face, it would probably be overshadowed by other controversial appointments, such as Yulia Tymoshenko as prime minister.
Valeria Korchagina reported from Moscow, and Greg Walters reported from Kiev.
TITLE: Rival Rallies Draw Thousands to City Streets
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Two political rallies, one in favor of and the other against the replacement of in-kind benefits with cash, took place in St. Petersburg on Saturday with a total of up to 12,000 people taking part.
Those in favor met in front of the Theater of Young Spectators (TYuZ) and those against on Lenin Square.
Mikhail Obozov, head of the recently formed youth opposition group Idushchiye Bez Putina, or Moving Without Putin, said those rallying in favor of the reform were gathered using administrative pressure from district authorities who have forced local students to come to the pro-governmental rally.
"I came to the meeting about half an hour before it began and immediately started spreading leaflets by a metro station with colleagues [from Yabloko]," Obozov said Monday in an interview. "Students and young people from schools that were walking in solid columns together with their teachers, had been accepted the leaflets quite often unlike important ladies in fur coats, who appeared to be employees of district administrations."
About a dozen municipal buses that had brought students to the spot were parked next to the theater, according to local media reports.
"I don't have any information that some sort of buses were used," Natalya Kutobayeva, spokeswoman for Governor Valentina Matviyenko said Monday in a telephone interview. "In any case, the governor has nothing to do with the meeting."
The crowd led by the local branch of United Russia party welcomed the government's reform with the slogans, "Putin, We Are With You," "Youth for the President," and "It Is Necessary To Pay for Everything," and were addressed by city officials, including Vadim Tyulpanov, the Legislative Assembly speaker and city head of United Russia.
"Privileges are a cancer tumor on the body of the state, which can kill it," Tyulpanov said.
Privileges are how the government has branded the in-kind benefits, which included such services as free rides on public transport. Because a large proportion of the population, including people who could afford to pay for them, was entitled to the benefits, many were considered perks.
Tyulpanov even cited reformist pre-revolutionary prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, who said: "Give us 20 years of tranquility at home and abroad and you will not recognize the country."
Russia is not only threatened by "privileges," but also by clans of oligarchs "who would go to great lengths to get rid of the president," he said.
In response, activists from the National Bolshevik Party among the pro-Kremlin demonstrators threw eggs and snowballs at him.
"They threw them, but they missed," Interfax quoted Yelizaveta Agamalyan, the speaker's spokeswoman, as saying Saturday. "This did not distract the speaker even once and he continued his speech. Without opposition no rally is a rally, but merely a party meeting, so for this reason we treat this [incident] with a sense of humor."
Eleven people were detained by police, including local Yabloko spokesman Alexander Shurshev and Moving Without Putin's Obozov.
"They didn't put us in the cells," Obozov said. "The police, of course, were a bit peasant-like. They were telling boring jokes and complained that by ending the privileges the state had robbed them too."
"[The high ranking policemen] conducting the interrogation were quite polite and smoked a lot, which did not have a good effect on my asthma, especially in a confined space," he added. "They have even invited me to work for the police," which I didn't understand the first time they said it, but then I just laughed and replied that I don't work for the KGB. As a result, they have promised to talk to me again."
After the interrogation the detainees were taken to court, where Obozov faced charges of attempting to prevent the pro-government rally by displaying anti-government slogans, cursing and distributing leaflets. All the charges against Obozov were dropped, while others faced administrative fines of 500 rubles ($17.80) and were released.
"I am sorry for one member of the National Bolshevik Party who complained outside the court that it is hard enough for him to raise the money to pay the 100-ruble party membership fee, let alone find the money to pay the fine," Obozov said.
Moving Without Putin are preparing to send a complaint to the Council of Europe over numerous violations of human rights violations allegedly committed by authorities and the police during protests against the recent governmental initiatives, Obozov said.
"We have a person who's studying at the Moscow Institute for International Relations, so he is busy putting legal papers together," he said. "When he is finished, we will send the documents. I guess this would happen within a month."
On Lenin Square, about 5,000 people, most of them pensioners rallied to protest against the reform, calling for the replacement of in-kind benefits to be abolished, higher pensions, better financing for the army and navy and for State Duma and the government to be disbanded.
None incidents were reported from this meeting.
About 257,000 people attended 238 rallies in 70 cities, from St. Petersburg in the northwest to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in the Far East at the weekend, the Interior Ministry said. Some 21,600 police officers and 3,700 soldiers were on hand to maintain order.
Among pensioners carrying red hammer-and-sickle flags protesting against the reform there were also young people with orange flags, the color, which was used during the presidential election rallies in Ukraine.
In the biggest single rally, more than 40,000 people marched in Moscow down Tverskaya Ulitsa on Saturday morning in a United Russia-organized rally. It was the first show of support for Putin and the government after weeks of national protests against the reforms by tens of thousands of pensioners.
TITLE: Criminals Seize Nurse as a Hostage
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Two criminally insane patients at a mental hospital on Arsenalnya Ulitsa took a nurse hostage early Sunday morning and demanding to be taken to Nikolsky Cathedral where they would pray and for them to be shown on television, local media reported Monday.
The police was notified about the hostage taking about 1a.m. with a report that two patients, Nikolai Parshenkov and Vladimir Ulyanovich, who have both been in the hospital since the end of the 1990s after committing serious crimes, including murders, had captured nurse Vera Ivanova.
"The demands of the convicts were constantly changing from a request to make a statement on on television to demands to bring them to church," Interfax cited city police as saying Monday. "When one of the detainees was taken to the church, which had to be opened in the night especially for him, the second man who was holding the hostage released her before 8 a.m., by which time the first detainee had returned."
The police did not use force to free the hostage, Fontanka.ru reported Sunday, although a special police unit and senior officers were at the scene.
The incident started about midnight, shortly after most of the patients finished watching an action movie and started going to bed, the report said.
One patient went into Ivanova's office to ask her to wake him up a bit earlier so that he would have enough time to shave.
At that moment, two other men entered the office and hit the first patient on the head with a hammer after he tried to protect Ivanova. The nurse spent more than seven hours with a sharp knife held by her throat.
The kidnappers surrendered to police of their own will, the report said.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Complaint Over Paper
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Local human rights advocates have filed a complaint to the city prosecutor's office, demand that it examine material published by nationalist newspaper Za Russkoye Delo, or For the Russian Cause, which allegedly incites national hatred, Interfax reported Friday quoting Citizen's Watch, a local human rights organization.
The advocates drew the attention of prosecutors to one article in particular. Called "Jewish Happiness, Russian Tears," the article "advertizes the exceptionality and superiority of one nation above other."
Citizen's Watch and the Democratic Russia party have asked the prosecutor's office to examine the facts presented and to initiate a criminal case for inciting national and racial hatred.
Oblast, City Rides Deal
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The governments of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast have reached an agreement that people who were previously entitled to free rides on public transport can use discounted monthly passes for transport in both administrative regions on a mutual basis, Intefax reported Monday quoting City Hall.
The decision came as a result of a meeting between governors Valentina Matviyenko and Valery Serdyukov, who agreed that the budgets of the two regions would compensate losses that would occur in the transportation system as a result of the agreement.
Skating Hall Frozen
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - City Hall may stop the construction of the Academy of Figure Skating because the project has been running for years without any result, Intefax reported Saturday quoting City Hall.
"If [the project initiators] do not finish construction of the first ice rink by the end of this year, we will freeze the construction," Interfax cited Governor Valentina Matviyenko as saying.
"It is impossible to keep being busy for so many years on a site, at a total cost of $15 million, [with nothing happening]" she said.
Oleg Nilov, head of St. Petersburg federation for figure skating earlier promised that the first rink, scheduled to be built by Komendatsky Prospekt metro station, would be ready by the end of 2004. Later he changed this to March 2005.
State to Use Building
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The former Senate and Synod building located on Senate Square will be used for state's needs after the State Historical Archive moves out, Interfax reported Monday quoting the presidential property department.
"Nothing will be placed in the Senate and Synod building that could bother city residents," Interfax cited department head Vladimir Kozhin as saying Saturday. "The building will be used strictly for state's needs. What needs those will be will be clear in the near future."
Local media reported Monday that the Kremlin plans to locate one of the federal courts in the buildings.
"We have the chance now to finish a new building for the historical archive, which would be completed by September 2005," Interfax cited Governor Valentina Matviyenko as saying. "Now it is located in a building in the historical part of the city, which isn't suited to storing archive materials."
Korean Student Shot
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - A Korean student was shot Saturday morning by a group of alleged skinheads, Interfax reported Monday quoting the city police.
Two students aged 16 and 17 were on their way home when they were attacked in a yard on Grivtsova Pereulok. Both were hospitalized with moderate injuries.
One was shot in the leg. According to the students, there were eight attackers who had shaven heads and wore dark clothing.
TITLE: UN Human Rights Chief to Visit Chechnya
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - United Nations' human rights chief Louise Arbour said Sunday she plans to visit Chechnya, where Russian and Kremlin-supported forces have been widely accused of kidnapping and abusing civilians.
Chechen deputy premier Ramzan Kadyrov, who heads a security force that is the focus of some of the harshest allegations, meanwhile accused human rights groups of double standards and said he would consider suing groups that accuse him of abductions.
Arbour, the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Russian officials had invited her to visit Chechnya and "I look forward to a visit to the region in the near future."
Russian troops have been fighting separatist rebels in Chechnya since 1999 and human rights groups complain that the soldiers and Chechen forces flagrantly abuse civilians through abductions, intimidation and summary seizure of men suspected of supporting the insurgents.
Russia says any offences were committed by all sides in the conflict and that Russian perpetrators were duly punished. International human rights groups dismiss those claims, while the Kremlin contends the rights groups apply double standards in pursuit of a political agenda.
President Vladimir Putin, who met with Arbour during her four-day visit, said "it's not acceptable for anyone to use the human rights theme to achieve political or, sometimes, economic aims." But Arbour indicated she would continue to look into claims of Russian abuses. "Action ceases to be legitimate . . . and it sometimes becomes ineffective when it steps over the clearly articulated norms set by international human rights law," Arbour said Sunday at a news conference. "When law enforcement officers abuse their powers with impunity and when civilians have no true remedy for violation of their rights by state agencies, society is doubly victimized."
A representative office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights will be opened in Russia, she added. Some rights groups have pointed to the Kadyrov-run security force as being behind the disappearance of several relatives of Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov.
The complaints speculate that the security force kidnapped them with the aim of trying to force Maskhadov to give himself up.
Kadyrov said he would consider filing suit against representatives of groups who accuse him of involvement in kidnappings. "I'm going to sue those who make such accusations," he told reporters. "These claims are false."
He also complained that some rights groups apply double standards.
"When a mullah is killed near his mosque or the head of a village administration is killed, they are silent. But if a man has to be detained on suspicion of serious crimes against peaceful people, they simultaneously state their position," Kadyrov was quoted by the ITAR-Tass news agency as saying.
TITLE: Individual Treatment For Trophy Art Cases
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia will return so-called trophy art taken from Nazi Germany during World War II only on a case-by-case basis, an official said Friday, arguing that most of the cultural treasures Moscow retains were seized as compensation for huge Soviet wartime damage.
Anatoly Vilkov, deputy chief of the Russian government agency that preserves the nation's cultural legacy, said Russia held some 249,000 art objects, more than 260,000 archive files and 1.25 million books and publications seized as compensation.
Germany and other countries have pressed for the return of the collections, which they argue were taken illegally.
A Russian law that went into effect in 2000 distinguishes between illegal trophies - taken without a military commander's sanction - and those Moscow sees as restitution for the 27 million Soviet lives lost, 100 museums destroyed and utter ruin of entire cities during the conflict it calls the Great Patriotic War.
Since 2000, Russia has satisfied six claims, for four archive and two art collections, said Vilkov.
Just one of those claims came from Germany, to which Russia returned a set of stained-glass windows from a church. The others were from the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Ukraine - none of them Nazi allies. In addition, Hungary, Austria, Poland, the United States, Britain and Greece have lodged claims against Russia.
"We are prepared to satisfy claims for objects that were taken as trophies, and also if they belonged to Holocaust victims or governments that suffered from [German] occupation," Vilkov said at a news conference.
As to objects that Russian courts have ruled legitimate Russian state property, "they can be returned to Germany only on the basis of an adequate exchange and the passage of a special international agreement," Vilkov said.
"So if for example, Germany calls for the return of the Schliemann gold, [we'll reply] 'No, you propose what would be an equal exchange,'" Vilkov said, referring to a legendary trove of gold objects excavated from Troy by a German archaeologist and once displayed in Berlin.
"Of course they won't find anything, but that's the only way it can be returned," he said, chuckling.
n The Baldin collection of 362 drawings and two paintings, which is not subject to Russia's trophy art law, will be returned to Germany in the second half of 2005, Germany's Netzeitung Internet news agency reported.
"These works [which originate from the Bremen Kunsthalle and were brought to Russia by Soviet office Viktor Baldin in 1945] must be given back," Vilkov was quoted as saying.
Only works brought to Russia on the orders of the Soviet military administration in Germany at the end of the war are covered by the Russian law.
An agreement for the return of the collection, under which 20 works would remain in Russia, was made in 2003, but was not executed because of opposition from State Duma deputies and others. At one point the Prosecutor General's Office summoned then Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi to hand him an official warning that he faced criminal charges if he went ahead with the plan to return the collection to Germany.
(SPT)
TITLE: Rebel Site: Kadyrov Torturing Arsanov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Former Chechen rebel Vice President Vakha Arsanov was detained in Grozny last month, a Chechen rebel web site and Interfax confirmed Friday. The web site said he was being tortured in an unofficial prison run by Deputy Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov's security forces.
Kommersant, citing a senior FSB official in Chechnya, reported on Jan. 17 that Arsanov had been detained by Chechen OMON commandos. But the Chechen Interior Ministry, to which the OMON reports, denied any knowledge of it at the time, and the ministry's chief of staff described the newspaper report as "conjecture."
Rebel web site Kavkaz Center said Friday that Arsanov was detained in mid-January and transferred to the prison in the Kadyrov clan's home village of Tsentoroi. The web site said Arsanov is being tortured and being told to publicly denounce former rebel President Aslan Maskhadov and admit "the wrongness of the course of the Chechen people toward an independent state." Last week, Maskhadov called on Moscow to begin peace talks with the rebels.
Kavkaz Center said Arsanov's elder son went to Chechnya from Baku, Azerbaijan, in an attempt to assist his father and was also detained by Kadyrov's security force.
Interfax, citing "well-informed" Chechen law enforcement sources, said Arsanov was detained and that no arrest warrant had been issued for him beforehand. Chechnya's chief prosecutor, Vladimir Kravchenko, said his office was looking into the reports about the detention, Interfax reported.
A spokesman for the federal troops in Chechnya, Major General Ilya Shabalkin, said he had no knowledge of the matter, while Chechen Interior Minister Ruslan Alkhanov and Chechen Security Council head Rudnik Dudayev declined to comment, Interfax reported.
Human rights groups said in late January that eight of Maskhadov's relatives who disappeared earlier in the month were being held at the Tsentoroi prison.
In October, Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov suggested detaining terrorists' relatives as a way to prevent attacks in the wake of the Beslan tragedy. Kadyrov said Sunday that he would consider suing human rights groups that accuse him of abductions, Itar-Tass reported.
Arsanov, who was elected vice president on the same ticket as Maskhadov in 1997, has reportedly been providing political support and protection to Chechnya-based religious extremists, who are widely believed to have undermined Maskhadov's authority in the waning days of the republic's de facto independence in the late 1990s. Maskhadov fired Arsanov as vice president in January 2001 for refusing to fight federal troops when the second Chechnya campaign started in 1999, Kommersant said.
TITLE: Lavrov Slams Rhetoric of Western Media
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has lashed out at Western media, accusing them of trying to bring back the Cold War atmosphere by criticizing Russia and focusing on tensions between Moscow and its Western partners.
In an article published Thursday on the front page of the Izvestia daily, Lavrov said the media were engaged in a campaign to "whip up suspicions and hatred toward Russia," a venture that he said sometimes "surpasses all bounds of journalistic and simple human ethics."
The foreign minister noted that it came paradoxically during a time of what he called a dynamically developing partnership between Russia and the West. Lavrov objected in particular to Western criticism of President Vladimir Putin's political restructuring, which ended direct elections for regional governors and individual parliamentary deputies, and allegations that independent media had been muzzled in Russia.
He also said it was high time to stop treating Russia's every move in the former Soviet republics as a reassertion of its imperialist ambitions.
"There are no fatal reasons for a confrontation between Russia and the West," Lavrov wrote.
He said Moscow was ready for dialogue to solve existing problems, but that it would help if Russia's partners would refrain from "stereotypes" that harm relations.
Without naming Britain, he criticized its failure to prevent last week's television broadcast of an interview with Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, who has claimed responsibility for September's school hostage-taking and other terror attacks in Russia.
Lavrov also said that it was not just policymakers, but rank-and-file Russians who were alarmed by what he called the anti-Russian tone in Western media.
"All the same, I think that it does not make sense for us to give in to irrational anti-Western emotions, to create an atmosphere of a 'besieged fortress' in the country. Russia does not need a new Cold War," the foreign minister wrote.
TITLE: Russia Still Fields Cold War Army of Spies
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - In the five years since former KGB spy Vladimir Putin assumed power, the number of Russian spies has swelled to meet or exceed Cold War levels in the United States and Germany, according to Western media reports and a former KGB agent in London.
Former KGB spies living in Russia, however, scoffed at the notion of increased spy activity, saying Putin has no reason to jeopardize relations with two of Russia's closest allies. They suggested that the spy claims may be part of a disinformation drive to spoil ties with Russia or divert more funds to Western intelligence.
In the United States, the spies are reportedly engaged in industrial espionage and are aggressively collecting information about government strategies regarding former Soviet republics, China, the Middle East and energy. In Germany, they are said to be spying on scientific research institutes, the armed forces, political parties and companies.
Russia has more than 100 spies working under diplomatic cover through its embassy in Washington and the United Nations in New York, while an unknown number are working under unofficial cover as businesspeople, journalists and academics, Time reported in its Feb. 7 issue, citing government sources and unidentified experts.
"Although the Cold War is long over, Russia is fielding an army of spooks in the U.S. that is at least equal in number to the one deployed by the old, much larger Soviet Union," the American magazine said.
Infiltration has been made easier by simpler immigration rules and a shift in FBI priorities from counterespionage to counterterrorism after Sept. 11, 2001, it said.
In Germany, the number of Russian intelligence operatives has grown to about 130 - almost as many as the KGB deployed in Soviet times, Focus, a German magazine, reported last month, citing an unidentified official from the German Federal Criminal Investigation Agency.
Retired KGB Colonel Oleg Gordiyevsky said Russia has stepped up its spying activities and its U.S. network is even bigger than reported in Time. "I communicate with people who keep tabs on the situation," he said by telephone from London. "There has been an increase in activity over the past five years, after Putin became prime minister" in 1999.
He said Russian spies under official diplomatic cover number more than 300 in the United States, while Russia has about 40 working under unofficial cover there. As for Germany, he said the estimate of 130 operatives was "close to reality."
In Britain, there are 31 officers under official cover and 13 under unofficial cover, about the same as during the Cold War, he said.
Gordiyevsky said the number is lower than for many other Western countries because Britain has often expelled Russian spies, as in 1971, when it declared 105 Soviet diplomats personae non gratae.
He said the number of spies in Germany has sharply increased since the Cold War, when Moscow could rely on East Germany to assist in its espionage efforts. Putin was a KGB spy based in East Germany in the late 1980s.
Gordiyevsky said, however, that he believes Moscow has always maintained its network of spies at Cold War levels in the United States.
He said many of the operatives are Russians who are working abroad but who were recruited while they still lived in Russia. In addition, he said, many Russian spies travel to the United States with fake documents identifying them as citizens of Eastern European or Baltic countries.
While the number of spies may be growing in some places, what is truly remarkable is a surge in their aggressiveness, Gordiyevsky said.
Under President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, they were instructed to avoid scandals and expulsions, but it is different now, he said.
"They are trying to build connections to lawmakers, journalists and businessmen," he said.
Focus appeared to confirm the claim, quoting a source as saying that the Russians are spying "in an extremely aggressive way."
Boris Labusov, spokesman for the Foreign Intelligence Service, refused to comment on the Western media reports. "Not a single security service will comment on its activity," he said.
Moreover, the Russian side cannot discuss the reports because they relied exclusively on unidentified officials for specific information, Labusov said.
"The only name is that of the FBI's assistant director, but he doesn't talk about anything like that," he said.
The FBI's assistant director for counterintelligence, David Szady, told Time that he wants to double the number of agents chasing foreign spies over the next five years, but he did not mention Russia specifically.
Szady also said that the FBI placed counterespionage units of at least seven agents in each of its 56 field divisions last year, but again he did not mention Russia.
If the reports had identified their sources, Russia would have been forced to formally react, and that could have sparked a diplomatic dispute, said Nikolai Poroskov, a military columnist at Vremya Novostei.
Defense Ministry officials could not be immediately reached to comment on behalf of the military's espionage branch, the Main Intelligence Directorate.
The United States is using a so-called Technology Alert List to filter out visa applicants who might want to illegally export sensitive information or goods.
Background checks on Russian applicants, however, are more connected to concerns about nuclear proliferation than espionage, said Maury Harty, head of the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs. "That is a nonproliferation question," Harty said in an interview Thursday. The Technology Alert List "does not represent a group of people that we think are all spies."
James Pettit, consul general at the U.S. Embassy, said the number of Russian visa applicants who get red-flagged by the Technology Alert List has increased, but that is only because more people are applying for visas. He would not reveal any figures.
A number of veterans of the Russian and Soviet intelligence services discounted the idea that Russian spy efforts are growing.
The stories are "premeditated disinformation," said the last head of the KGB's foreign intelligence department, retired Lieutenant General Leonid Shebarshin. Given friendlier relations with the United States and Germany, "I don't accept the possibility that an increase in espionage activity is possible in this situation," he said.
"I think this is all in the past," said Mikhail Lyubimov, a retired KGB colonel. "With the current relations with the West, why step up the number of agents?"
Lyubimov said the reports could be an effort by U.S. and German intelligence agencies to use a nonexistent threat to obtain more funding.
Or, he said, the reports could be an attempt to cast Russia in a bad light and prevent it from growing closer to Western countries. "There have always been forces that wanted to undermine relations," he said. "There are forces that don't want closer ties - they are better off catching spies."
Putin moved quickly to align Russia with the United States in its struggle against terror after the Sept. 11 attacks, and he has had a warm friendship with U.S. President George W. Bush over the past four years.
Moscow also enjoys cordial relations with Berlin, and Putin, who speaks fluent German from his spy days as a KGB lieutenant colonel in Dresden, has a close friendship with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
A former espionage officer, retired Major General Yury Kobaladze, suggested that the Time report may be linked to displeasure in the Bush administration over what it considers a rollback of democracy under Putin. "I don't see any reason to have more spies abroad now than, say, five years ago," he said.
Bush is expected to bring up his concerns about Russian democracy with Putin at a summit in Slovakia this month.
Gordiyevsky said operatives also could be seeking information about the U.S. struggle against terror, "especially now that the U.S. has bases in former Soviet republics" where Russia wants to dominate.
According to Time, Russian agents are looking to gain access to dual-use technologies such as the latest lasers, and to learn the Bush administration's plans for former Soviet republics, China, the Middle East and energy. Focus said agents are spying on scientific research establishments, the military, political parties and companies.
Gordiyevsky said Russia's spies are more efficient in obtaining commercial secrets these days because they are better educated in business and technology than their Soviet-era counterparts.
However, there is a limit to how much they can achieve: Russia's economy is not able to swallow all of the information that can be gleaned through industrial espionage, he said.
Staff Writer Carl Schreck contributed to this report.
TITLE: Paper To
Be Warned
Over Rebel
Interview
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The government plans to issue a warning to Kommersant for violating an anti-extremism law by publishing an interview with Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov, a government spokesman said Wednesday. Under the law, the government may ask a court to close a publication after two warnings in a one-year period.
The newspaper denied any wrongdoing and said it ran the interview Feb. 7 to provide a first-person account of Maskhadov's cease-fire order and his call for peace talks. Some government officials called the order "a lie" after it was announced on rebel web sites.
The Federal Service for Media Law Compliance and Cultural Heritage is having experts analyze the interview and is working on the text of the warning that will formally appear "in the near future," said a spokesman for the service, who asked not to be named.
By publishing the interview, Kommersant violated Article 4 of the 1991 Law on Mass Media and Article 11 of the 2002 Law on Counteracting Extremist Activity, the spokesman said.
The media law prohibits a publication from promoting or assisting "extremist activity," while the anti-extremism law prohibits the media from disseminating "materials that support or justify extremist activity." The anti-extremist law states that a court may close a publication after it receives two warnings within 12 months. The law, however, does not force the government to take legal action, so a publication may be allowed to stay open even after receiving a second warning, the spokesman said.
Georgy Ivanov, head of Kommersant's legal department, denied that the interview justified terrorism. "It calls for peace, if you read it," he said by telephone Wednesday. If the warning is issued, Kommersant will most likely dispute it in court, Ivanov said.
In one of his most aggressive statements in the interview, Maskhadov is quoted as saying, "If the sober mind of our Kremlin opponents prevails, we'll end the war at the negotiating table. If not, the bloodshed will likely continue for a long time."
Kommersant relayed questions and received answers through a Maskhadov envoy, whose whereabouts the newspaper did not disclose.
Andrei Richter, director of Moscow's Media Law and Policy Institute, said the warning could be intended to give Kommersant, a Boris Berezovsky-owned daily, a "cold shower" and discourage other media from giving space or airtime to people the Kremlin does not like.
Kommersant's prospects of disputing a warning in court are likely very slim, as in 90 percent of cases courts refuse to consider such complaints, Richter said. But if a court agrees to hear the case, Kommersant could easily win, he said.
In 2000, the government warned Kommersant for publishing an interview with Maskhadov, but a court overturned the warning, Kommersant general director Andrei Vasilyev said Feb. 8, Interfax reported.
"It was an exception, not the rule," Richter said about the court's willingness to hear the case. Three Russian newspapers - the National Bolshevik Party's Limonka newspaper, Den and Gubernskiye Vesti - have been closed after warnings, but those were over inciting ethnic hatred, Richter said.
TITLE: Poland Asks for Apology Over Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WARSAW - Poland's president said Wednesday he will attend the commemorations of the end of World War II in May in Moscow, but said the notorious 1939 pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union should be condemned at the event.
"My decision is a yes, but we want this to be full of dignity and historical truth," President Aleksander Kwasniewski told TVN television during a visit to Washington.
"On May 9, words should be heard ... words of condemnation of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, words saying unequivocally that not all nations were given full sovereignty after World War II and not all could experience the democratic privileges enjoyed by a large part of the world," Kwasniewski said.
After the Nazi defeat, Poland became part of Moscow's sphere of influence and remained under communist rule until 1989.
A secret addendum to the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which Nazi and Soviet leaders concluded in 1939, foresaw the division of much of Eastern Europe - including Poland - in case war broke out.
Shortly after German troops entered Poland in September 1939, Soviet troops occupied the country's east. Soviet forces then occupied the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in June 1940 but were driven out by the Germans a year later. The Soviet Army retook the Baltics in 1944 and reincorporated them into the Soviet Union. The Baltic states gained independence only after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, and only one of their leaders has accepted Russia's invitation to the May 9 anniversary celebrations in Moscow.
Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga has agreed to participate, but has urged Russia to denounce the pact.
If Russia were to renounce the secret pact, it would tacitly be acknowledging some responsibility for World War II - a stance seen as sacrilege in a country that lost some 27 million people during the conflict.
TITLE: Probing the Plot to Poison Ukraine's Yushchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - It was a clear September night when Yevhen Chervonenko left presidential hopeful Viktor Yushchenko healthy and in good spirits ahead of a secret meeting at a dacha near Kiev.
Chervonenko, at the time Yushchenko's head of security and now Ukraine's new transportation minister, said he usually went everywhere with Yushchenko and even tasted his food. But that night was an exception. Yushchenko was going to the dacha to dine with Ukrainian Security Service chief Ihor Smeshko and his deputy, Volodymyr Satsyuk.
"I was told that I was not required that night because the organizers wanted the meeting to be confidential," Chervonenko said in an interview.
Yushchenko's bodyguards also were not allowed to accompany him, he said. The only member of his team who went along was his campaign manager, David Zhvania. Yushchenko, who was already leading Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych in the polls, had requested the Sept. 5 meeting to discuss the election campaign and death threats he had begun receiving in July. The men sat down for a meal of boiled crayfish, a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers and corn and beer, followed by cold meats washed down with vodka and cognac.
The next day, Yushchenko fell seriously ill and his body was racked with pain, Chervonenko said. Slowly, a mask of bumps and cysts crept across his once-handsome face - symptoms that he had ingested a dose of pure TCDD, the most hazardous dioxin, Vienna doctors later determined.
Now that Yushchenko is Ukraine's president, difficult questions are being raised about who could have wanted him out of the race so badly that they were willing to kill him. Interviews with members of Yushchenko's camp and former KGB officers suggest a shadowy Ukrainian-Russian plot most likely involving members of the security services of both countries and quite possibly members of the former Ukrainian government or organized crime figures that feared losing wealth and influence.
Both President Leonid Kuchma and President Vladimir Putin had placed their bets on Yanukovych.
At least one other attempt was made on Yushchenko's life during the campaign, when a car bomb was found outside his campaign headquarters on the eve of the Nov. 21 runoff vote.
Two Russian citizens from the Moscow region were arrested in connection with the planned car bombing. Radio Liberty, citing police records, identified them as Mikhail Shugai, 35, and Marat Moskvitin, 33. A third man, identified only as Surguchyov, contacted Shugai in Moscow and promised the two men $50,000 to organize the bombing, according to investigators.
Ukrainian prosecutors are investigating both cases but have said little.
Yushchenko has refused to discuss the attempts on his life while the investigations are ongoing. But in an interview with CNN last week, he said he had "no doubt" that his "opponents in the government" had had the most to gain from his death. Pressed over whether he was poisoned at the Sept. 5 dinner, he replied, "Most likely."
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Svyatoslav Piskun, who was in Vienna to investigate the dioxin poisoning, said medical records support the suspicions that Yushchenko was poisoned around the time of the dinner, Reuters reported.
"There is no doubt that this was a planned act, in which several people from the government were probably involved," Piskun said in an interview with the Austrian paper Der Standard released on Feb. 9, ahead of publication Thursday, Reuters reported.
A former KGB agent familiar with the Yushchenko poisoning case said suspicion had fallen on Satsyuk, the former deputy security service chief and the host of the Sept. 5 dinner. The former agent, who asked not to be identified for fear of potential repercussions, said two people with knowledge of the poisoning were willing to testify against Satsyuk.
The former agent said he firmly believed that the dioxin TCDD was cooked up in a former KGB laboratory in Russia. "They produced poisons that killed a person in such a way that the death seemed natural," he said. "This lab was kept secret, and it existed only in Moscow, not in Ukraine. For this reason it would have been impossible for the Ukrainians to get the poison in their country. They needed Russia's cooperation." TCDD is a chemical that laboratories in only a few countries, including Russia and the United States, are able to produce.
Serhiy Shevchuk, a Ukrainian lawmaker and the deputy head of a parliamentary commission investigating the poisoning, said he had looked into where the poison could have been produced.
"I have talked to experts who, sometimes speaking off the record, said that such a lab existed on Russian soil. But I don't think that Russia is the only country that has them," Shevchuk said.
Some suspicion has been cast on Gleb Pavlovsky, a Kremlin spin doctor, who opened a "Russian Club" in Kiev during the election campaign. Ostensibly a nongovernmental forum to discuss bilateral relations, the club was widely seen as a means for Moscow to influence the outcome of the election.
In late December, a courier left an envelope with an unsigned letter and a computer disc at the offices of Ukraine's independent Channel 5 television. On the disc were excerpts of a telephone conversation between a man in Moscow and a man in Kiev that suggested the poisoning was Pavlovsky's idea. The man from Moscow said Pavlovsky did not want to kill Yushchenko but just "spoil the messiah's appearance and put the seal of Satan on him."
The disc's authenticity has yet to be confirmed, but Volodymyr Ariev, the Channel 5 journalist who looked into the case, believes it is a key piece of evidence. He said that through extensive research he had been able to identify the two men and that they had confirmed to him that they had had the conversation. Ariev said he could not identify the men for their own safety but described them as "a well-informed person who lives in Kiev" and a man who "works for the analytical department at the presidential administration in Moscow."
Ariev appeared to be referring to the expert department. The Kremlin press service said it did not know how many people worked in the department or have its telephone number.
"The man in Moscow belongs to a faction in the Kremlin that opposed what Pavlovsky's people were doing in Kiev," Ariev said by telephone from Kiev. The Kiev man is helping prosecutors investigate the case, he said.
Ariev said the men told him that security service officers carried out the poisoning and the car bomb attempt but did not say whether they were Russians or Ukrainians.
Pavlovsky rejected repeated requests to comment for this article.
Three former KGB officers said they strongly doubt that Pavlovsky had anything to do with the poisoning. "Only someone with a KGB mind could come up with such an idea. This is not the case with Pavlovsky," said Konstantin Preobrazhensky, a retired KGB lieutenant colonel who lives in Washington.
Oleg Gordiyevsky, a former KGB officer living in London, and Yury Shvets, a former KGB operative who lives in the United States, agreed. Both said the computer disc could not be trusted and that they could not imagine someone like Pavlovsky organizing the poisoning.
All three, however, said the Kremlin most likely gave the Ukrainians a hand in organizing the poisoning.
Although Ukraine had the biggest KGB department outside of Moscow in Soviet times, it still did not possess the technology to make poisons, he and Preobrazhensky said.
The KGB had to get approval from the Soviet leadership to poison someone, but its Russian successor, the Federal Security Service, is "without control - they don't have to ask anyone for permission now," he added.
Alternatively, the dioxin could have been delivered by former KGB agents who now work in the private sector and offer their services for a fee, said independent security analyst Anton Surikov.
The FSB declined to comment last week.
Preobrazhensky said he believed Moscow and Kiev worked together to poison a candidate they feared they could not "maneuver." Putin is trying to build a strong state and needs Ukraine as part of the plan, while Ukrainian oligarchs sought someone able to guarantee their corrupt business interests, he said, and Yanukovych was the candidate who fitted both needs.
Moreover, he said, poisoning has been a preferred political tool to silence foes since Putin assumed power five years ago. One of the most prominent cases was that of Yury Shchekochikhin, a liberal State Duma deputy and journalist who fought corruption and died in July 2003 after suffering a severe allergic reaction. Colleagues in the Yabloko party and at the Novaya Gazeta newspaper believe he was poisoned. A prominent Chechen rebel, Lecha Islamov, died in a Volgograd prison hospital in April, also after suffering a severe allergic reaction. His relatives called it a case of deliberate food poisoning. More recently, Anna Politkovskaya, a Novaya Gazeta reporter known for her reports about Chechnya, accused the FSB of poisoning her after she fell seriously ill on a flight to cover the Beslan school hostage-taking in September.
Shevchuk, the Ukrainian lawmaker, said many questions remained about the poisoning, including whether a single chemical or a combination of chemicals was used. Doctors found only dioxin after months of research, but other agents might have been used that disappeared within a few hours, he said.
Shevchuk said there were two plausible theories about how Yushchenko was poisoned: that he was slipped a large dose at the Sept. 5 dinner or that he was poisoned on the campaign trail and then given a large dose at the dinner.
Arnold Schecter, one of only a handful of dioxin specialists in the world, said it usually took several days before a person contaminated with dioxin felt sick. "It would be very unusual that someone feels sick soon after he was given the dioxin - unless the dose was very huge or the person is very sensitive," he said.
However, if Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin earlier and then was slipped a dose of another chemical at the dinner, he would feel sick immediately, Schecter said.
Ukrainian newspapers reported that Smeshko, the security service chief, said Yushchenko had felt ill before the dinner and had postponed the meeting at least once because of his health. But Chervonenko, Yushchenko's head of security, said his boss did not complain of any illness before the dinner. "The last time I saw him healthy was when he got into Satsyuk's car to be driven to the meeting," Chervonenko said.
Smeshko did not appear to be aware of the poison plot.
The former KGB agent who asked not to be identified said the two people ready to testify against Satsyuk were being held by Yushchenko's team. He would not identify the two.
The Australian newspaper The Age reported last month that the cook and waiter who had worked at the Sept. 5 dinner were spirited out of the country by Yushchenko's team and had admitted their involvement in the poisoning.
Satsyuk, who was fired by Kuchma in mid-December, has denied any involvement in the poisoning.
An additional unanswered question is whether those who poisoned Yushchenko wanted to kill him or just ruin his appearance.
Surikov, the security analyst, said the security services of the former Soviet republics were so unprofessional these days that "if they wanted to kill him, they would have disfigured him, but if they planned to disfigure him, they would have killed him."
When it became clear that Yushchenko had a good chance of winning the election, two people who supported Yanukovych died, while others left the country.
Yuriy Liakh, a close ally of Kuchma's chief of staff, Viktor Medvedchuk, and chairman of Ukrkreditbank, died on Dec. 3 in an apparent suicide. Ukrainian news reports said his bank was suspected of having laundered money for Yanukovych's election campaign, which reportedly spent $600 million. It was on Dec. 3 that the Ukrainian Supreme Court overturned the Nov. 21 vote and set a repeat runoff for Dec. 26, which Yushchenko won easily.
On Dec. 27, Transportation Minister Heorhiy Kirpa also died in an apparent suicide. Yushchenko supporters had accused him of siphoning off government funds for the Yanukovych campaign and of providing trains to carry Yanukovych supporters to vote with multiple absentee ballots in the Nov. 21 runoff.
According to media reports, Yanukovych has fled to Russia.
On Feb. 2, Ukraine's parliament asked the Prosecutor General's Office to initiate a criminal case against Kuchma and take him into custody on suspicion of corruption and wrongdoing. No charges have been filed to date.
TITLE: Petrosoyuz Looks for Partnership, Heinz Waits
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg-based ketchup and condiments producer Petrosoyuz said Monday the company will open a new manufacturing plant in the Leningrad Oblast next month.
The expansion comes on the heels of last week's announcement by Petrosoyuz that the company is preparing to form a joint venture with a large Western manufacturer.
Petrosoyuz, which has seven manufacturing facilities in Russia, Uzbekistan and Ukraine said the new ketchup plant would be located in Otradnoye district of the Leningrad Oblast and have a monthly production capacity of 4,000 tons, Interfax reported Monday.
Dmitry Filatov, the managing director of the Petrosoyuz group did not reveal the total amount of investments in the new plant, but confirmed earlier reports to business daily Vedomosti that the company will form a joint venture with a Western food producer before the end of the year.
"We are in the preliminary stage of forming a joint venture with a Western company, but neither its name nor the amount of the deal can be revealed at this stage," Filatov said.
So far, other market players have tipped American condiments and packaged goods producer H.J. Heinz as the most likely to be Petrosoyuz's partner.
"Heinz has long been interested in expanding operations to Russia," Alexander Antipov, president of the largest domestic ketchup producer after Petrosoyuz -Baltimor, said Friday to Vedomosti.
"Two years ago we also discussed a deal with Heinz but could not settle on the price. After us the most interesting for Heinz would be Petrosoyuz," Antipov said.
According to Antipov's estimates, Heinz would only be interested in Petrosoyuz's ketchup manufacturing operations, which make up 30 percent of the company's total sales.
The London Heinz office would not comment on a deal until it was completed, Vedomosti reported.
"The company is planning to develop operations in Russia, and it will either be through organic growth (import and distribution expansion) or through acquisitions," Michael Mullen, corporate communications director, said Friday. Heinz's turnover in 2004 reached $8.4 billion.
Although Petrosoyuz's Filatov insisted that the company was not planning to sell the ketchup division, market players say the move for forming a joint venture in Russia may be just a preliminary step.
It could be used by a company like Heinz to gain a better perspective on the local market and on the value of Petrosoyuz operations in particular. Petrosoyuz's business was estimated at about $110 million in 2004.
"For a long time Heinz refused to produce its brand name [Heinz ketchup] in Russia. The local tomato paste did not match its standards," Maxim Protasov, head of the board of directors of canned food manufacturer Pomidorprom told Vedomosti.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: LUKoil in Finland Deal
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Lukoil, Russia's biggest oil producer, plans to acquire full control over Finland's gasoline and diesel fuel retailers Teboil Oy AB and Suomen Petrooli Oy.
Lukoil has notified the European Commission of its plan, the company said in a press statement. The company didn't say how much it plans to pay for the retailers.
"The main effect for Lukoil will be the entrance into sales of oil products to Finland's end-users,'' Lukoil said.
The company intends to make additional profit on the supplies to Finland of environmentally clean diesel fuel with low sulfur content, produced on the new hydro-cracking installation of the Perm refinery.
Teboil and Suomen Petrooli have a total of 289 gas stations and 132 outlets selling diesel fuel in Finland, Lukoil said.
"The dominating position of Teboil AB Oy and Suomen Petrooli Oy on the Finnish furnace fuel market will also allow LUKoil to count on additional export of boiler oil and gas oil from the Russian oil refining companies," the press release noted.
Evrosib to Get $30M
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Rail freight firm Evrosib Group plans to take out a $30 million loan over seven years from the International Financial Corporation in order to increase its volume of timber transportation, Mikhail Sverdlov, the company's communications director, said Monday to Interfax.
"The loan funds will be directed towards the buying of wagons to transport timber: 600 wagons for whole timber and 400 wagons for sawdust," Sverdlov said, adding that the company owns 3,500 wagons in total.
The company said that it hopes to receive the loan in several months since the corporation's credits committee has already approved the application.
Evrosib is a holding that incorporates rail freight, car dealerships, construction and real estate management companies.
Foreign Firms Can Bid
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Russia may let foreign companies help develop offshore oil and gas fields because Russian companies can't do the work as quickly on their own, Interfax reported, citing Natural Resources Minister Yuri Trutnev.
The development of offshore projects should be a priority in Russia, which will have difficulty replacing oil reserves without offshore resources from 2015, Interfax said Monday, citing a Trutnev interview on the radio.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Fidelity Telecom Stake
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Fidelity Investments, the world's biggest mutual fund company, has acquired nearly 6 percent of Moscow-based Golden Telecom Inc., a provider of Internet and fixed-line phone service.
Fidelity holds 1.74 million shares or 5.9 percent of Golden Telecom, according to a Fidelity filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Fidelity in the fourth quarter cut its stake in VimpelCom, the country's second-biggest mobile-phone company, to 2.85 percent from more than 5 percent.
Alfa Group, a financial-industrial group, is the largest shareholder of Golden Telecom, owning 30 percent. Telenor ASA, Norway's largest phone-services provider, has a 20 percent stake.
7.4% Lukoil Increase
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Lukoil, the country's biggest oil company, produced 7.4 percent more crude last year as higher prices spurred it to increase output.
Lukoil pumped 86.2 million tons (1.73 million barrels a day) of oil, up from 80.2 million tons in the previous year, the Moscow-based company said.
The amount includes both Russian and overseas projects, and Lukoil's shares in affiliated companies. The company last year reported 2003 output of 81.5 million tons, including total production at partly owned affiliates.
Gas production rose 14 percent to 6.47 billion cubic meters.
Usmanov Exits Corus
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Billionaire Alisher Usmanov sold his 1.2 percent stake in Corus Group for $59 million, disposing of his last shares in the steelmaker, Vedomosti said.
Usmanov told the paper he sold the stake to Credit Suisse First Boston and has an option to buy it back after a year, if the price falls 30 percent by then. "In my opinion, Corus shares are trading at a maximum level now," Usmanov told Vedomosti.
The billionaire had accumulated 13.4 percent of the British-Dutch steelmaker by last April, having spent $294.7 million. He sold most of it in December.
Surgut Lacks Pipelines
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Surgutneftegaz, the country's fourth-biggest oil producer, plans to limit crude output growth to 6.4 percent this year because of a lack of capacity in oil pipelines.
Surgutneftegaz plans to pump 63.2 million tons (1.27 million barrels a day) this year by drilling more wells, the company said today in an overview of its activities posted on its web site.
Surgutneftegaz raised output last year by 10 percent to 1.2 million barrels a day.
Russia may increase crude output by 3.8 percent this year, less than half the 2004 growth rate, as pipeline constraints limit exports, the International Energy Agency said last week.
The country has boosted oil pumping by 50 percent in the last six years.
Surgut plans to produce 14.3 billion cubic meters of gas this year, the same amount it produced in 2004.
Zinc Output to Rise
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Urals Mining and Metals, the country's second-biggest copper smelter, wants to increase zinc output by 40 percent in the next two to three years, Vedomosti reported.
Annual production will increase from 130,000 metric tons of zinc concentrate to between 170,000 and 180,000 tons, Vedomosti reported.
TITLE: Rosneft Shelves $5.5Bln Loan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Kremlin appears to have shelved Rosneft's plan to borrow $5.5 billion from a mystery company via its units, Vedomosti reported Monday, citing an unidentified official in the presidential administration.
By indebting its units in a possible scheme to pay for Yuganskneftegaz - Yukos' key production unit auctioned off for $9.3 billion in December - Rosneft would have hindered plans to merge the company into Gazprom, analysts said.
A senior official in the presidential administration ordered Rosneft President Sergei Bogdanchikov to cancel shareholders' meetings that were to approve the borrowing scheme, Vedomosti said. A source in Gazprom confirmed that scenario with the paper.
In a statement late Friday, Rosneft said that reports of the borrowing scheme were "premature" and that the dates of the shareholder meetings may be changed or canceled.
Rosneft spokesmen declined to comment Monday.
The news comes as investors watch a high-level Kremlin battle over the Rosneft-Gazprom merger, which was intended to give the state formal control over the gas giant and be the first step in liberalizing the Gazprom share market.
But the merger plans have been complicated by Yukos' legal maneuvering in U.S. courts and Rosneft's intransparent purchase of Baikal Finance Group, a shell company that originally won the bidding for Yugansk.
A source close to Gazprom told Vedomosti that Rosneft's borrowing scheme was thought up to harm the merger plans.
"We will use all of our power to make sure that deals of this kind do not hinder the merger of this state-company into Gazprom," the Kremlin source told Vedomosti.
Analysts and investors see a high-level Kremlin struggle with Putin's Chief of Staff Dmitry Medvedev and Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller on one side and Deputy Chief of Staff Igor Sechin on the other. Medvedev is board chairman of Gazprom and Sechin is board chairman at Rosneft.
"Both sides basically agree on the importance of the merger but they are battling for control of Gazprom," said Konstantin Simonov, director of the Center for Current Politics in Russia.
"Formally Sechin supports the merger but he is trying to discredit Miller in the eyes of the president by showing that he is unable to implement this merger, which the president approved."
Yukos ramped up the pressure on Friday when it made a filing in a Houston court to seek more than $20 billion in damages from Gazprom, Rosneft, Baikal Finance Group and Gazpromneft for what it calls the expropriation of Yugansk.
The financing of Rosneft's acquisition has been the target of fevered speculation.
AK&M news agency reported Friday that shareholders of three Rosneft subsidiaries - Purneftegaz, Sakhalinmorneftegaz and Stavropolneft - will vote at extraordinary shareholders meetings later this month on agreements to lend Rosneft a total of $5.5 billion. The loans would financed by sales in promissory notes - also known as veksels - to an unknown company called Trade-Express, AK&M reported, citing materials prepared for the meetings.
Alexander Voloshin, President Vladimir Putin's former chief of staff, helped found AK&M, which stands for "Analiz, Konsultatsii i Marketing."
TITLE: New Firm Plans Chain
Of 4-Star Hotels, Offices
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Russian Hotels, a new company launched late last year, has announced ambitious plans for a chain of four-star hotels and office centers all over Russia and the CIS.
Investing between $200 million and $250 million in the project, Russian Hotels wants to create a portfolio of 20 to 30 new or renovated buildings over the next three to five years - chiefly in the Russian regions and CIS capitals like Kiev, Tbililsi, Yerevan, Dushanbe and Baku.
Some of the project's financing will come from metals conglomerate Basic Element, which is said to be close to the new venture. Basic Element would not comment on its relationship to Russia Hotels, nor the extent of its investment in the portfolio.
"Land in Moscow is very expensive and from a business standpoint it makes sense to build up-scale hotels on this land," said Stanislav Kapinos, general director at Russian Hotels. "But with all the projects already announced for Moscow, the market may soon be close to saturation."
Kapinos added that growing business tourism and strong economic growth in the Russian regions, coupled with "an almost complete lack of tourism infrastructure," makes them very attractive for hotel developments that "answer modern European criteria."
"We are aiming to occupy an unfilled niche, as there is unfulfilled demand for our services in the regions," he added.
Yelena Guryanova, spokeswoman for Russian Hotels, said the company is currently thinking about acquiring existing hotels in Irkutsk, Nizhny Novgorod and Krasnoyarsk, as well as investing in new projects in Krasnodar and Yekaterinburg, but stressed that negotiations were still at very early stages.
Earlier this month, Russian Hotels agreed to invest $10 million to $12 million in the construction of a 12,000-square-meter office center in central Tbilisi.
The company is also about to begin construction of a 12,000-square-meter, 150- to 200-room hotel in Novosibirsk. The project, estimated to cost between $10 million and $12 million, is scheduled for a 2007 completion.
Guryanova said that Russian Hotels and Novosibirsk City Hall have agreed on the site of a future mid-range hotel on Ulitsa Chaplygina in the center of the city, but added that it was difficult to say when construction may start as the land has not been officially allocated and the architectural concept has yet to be decided.
South Africa's Protea Hotels chain will be operating the hotel once it is completed. Protea will enter the Russian market in September, when it is scheduled to open its first, 136-room hotel in Yekaterinburg, Sergei Ermilov, Protea's representative in Russia said.
The management contract with Russia Hotels is likely to signed in the next two to three months, he added.
Stephane Meyrat, senior consultant at Hotel Consulting & Development Group, said that while in theory Russian regional cities look like desirable expansion destinations, in practice many of them do not generate enough demand to make an international-standard hotel profitable.
"Fine, you need hotels in many cities, but how do you get to them? Lack of tourism infrastructure is a double-edged sword," he said, adding that lack of frequent flights or good roads to many regional cities will translate into low occupancies and longer payback periods.
"The cities picked by Russian Hotels [for their regional development] make sense, but they need to assess the demand and the location of the proposed hotels to guarantee that the projects become economically feasible," he added.
TITLE: A Classic Approach to Niche Marketing Pays Off
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Few would believe that one can base a business on promoting classical music as a way of life - and even aim for profit. One of the few, and more successful than most, is Alla Shpanskaya, founder and general director of St. Petersburg's Radio Classica.
Radio Classica St. Petersburg began broadcasting at the end of 2002 on the 88.9 Mhz frequency. From the first note it broadcast, the station followed the policy of broadcasting global classics, not in local selections. It is a belief that has made Radio Classica the only project of its kind in Russia.
Eighty percent of the radio's airtime is devoted to classical music (in the broadest sense of the term) with the rest shared between classical jazz, rock operas, film music, folk and world music.
"We interpret 'the classics' in a rather broad sense, not just confining ourselves to academic genres," says Shpanskaya.
In addition, Radio Classica broadcasts a number of programs hosted by well-known local musicians, actors, film directors and artists.
"We see our audience as educated, spiritual, successful and dynamic," Shpanskaya said.
It is an audience that even Moscow sponsors are keen to support.
Elster Metering, a Moscow-based holding formed after Ruhrgas Industries acquired ABB's global metering division, funded a series of projects in Moscow in memory of famous Russian pianist Svyatoslav Richter. It then sponsored a Richter series on Radio Classica, although the station does not even broadcast in Moscow. Classica's recordings had to be sent to the sponsor by mail.
Elster general director Andrei Denisov regrets that the St. Petersburg station has not yet expanded to Moscow - he estimates a potential audience exceeding 100,000 people in the Russian capital.
"But Moscow is like Babylon: [sponsors and backers] are only looking for quick money," Denisov said. "Also the process of obtaining a [radio] frequency is horrendously bureaucratic."
Similar projects launched in Russia during the last 10 years have not been successful, with stations either closing or changing their format. The latter happened at the Moscow-based station Radio Klassika, which began as a commercial, classical-music-focused FM station in 1997. Its strictly classical playlist policy was soon abandoned due to the station's small audience share.
Several times a day, Radio Classica features brief news summaries with a focus on cultural events.
"It is a shame that people here know nothing about the successes of, say, Russian orchestras and singers at highly acclaimed international festivals," says Shpanskaya.
"Audiences are ignorant of what is going on in the international music and art scenes. But, if we want Russia to be a cultural Mecca rather than a cultural backwater, we should start by telling our audience more about culture in the contemporary world."
Shpanskaya was inspired to launched the station by the U.K.'s Classic FM station, a respected and commercially profitable project.
St. Petersburg's Radio Classica has not yet turned a profit, although it is fulfilling its business plan.
"According to our plan, the station will fully establish itself somewhere between its third and fifth year," Shpanskaya said.
"We realize that we cannot claim a great share of the market, because our target audience is rather limited," Shpanskaya said. "However, classical music is impossible to ignore. Classical music stations are very successful as business enterprises in Europe ... It was inevitable that a classic music station would be launched in St. Petersburg. Why not us?"
Shpanskaya often asks herself why she enjoys her work. The answer, she says, is the challenge.
Many analysts agree that arts management in Russia is made all the more difficult because the arts have for decades been seen as treasures to be available to all at no cost.
"The people's mentality is: 'It has always been taken for granted, why should I pay for it?'" Shpanskaya said. "It is still a popular view in this country that classical art has to be promoted and supported by the state. It will take some time to change this thinking."
For that reason, Shpanskaya's list of business partners is not as wide as she might wish.
"And yet, those people who just stand by giving compliments without getting involved are losing out on much more than I am," she argues. "What makes a human being happy is drive, a desire to do something, a sense of direction. Otherwise, life makes little sense."
The business partners that Radio Classica has are faithful and appreciative.
Alexei Kuznetsov, general director at Kapital Polis insurance company, said his company's image benefits from collaboration with Radio Classica.
"We are offering health insurance policies: an established and conservative product. But, health, just like classical music, has an eternal value."
"Interestingly enough, the CDs with classical music, which Radio Classica presented us with for the New Year, were very good in terms of relaxation and giving a sense of well-being," Kuztensov added. "We even sent some as gifts to our most important clients."
Denisov said people like Shpanskaya should be nurtured.
"What if, God forbid, they stop doing what they are doing," he said. "The loss would be huge, even immeasurable. Apart from Radio Classica, nobody else is promoting contemporary classical music."
Shpanskaya is one of those people who make the environment better, Denisov says.
"Atmosphere is not just air or the quality of water," he said. "Moscow's best place, in terms of atmosphere, is the Grand Hall of the city's Conservatory because it has a pure spirit."
The difference between promoting a mass product and a product for a particular audience is in the approach, Shpanskaya believes.
"Mass products aren't meant to be tailor-made. We have to be more sophisticated," she said. "Straightforward, frontal attacks are not for us."
Even the advertising campaigns that Radio Classica offers to its partners are different.
"A company, which makes windows, sponsored the program series 'St. Petersburg Windows.' In the program we talked about the windows on the apartments of the city's finest musicians, singers and composers," Shpanskaya says.
TITLE: An Electric Answer to Realtor Problems
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Four new power substations will boost St. Petersburg's electricity infrastructure and solve the problem many potential investors currently face when buying city property, officials said last week.
Speaking at the unveiling of new power substation 36A, Governor Valentina Matviyenko proposed that this was the first of a series of four substations that will satisfy realtor interest by relieving the electricity shortage of businesses in the central areas.
"The new substation gives us the possibility to provide connections for still new users," Matviyenko said at the opening. She added that construction of another new substation will start this year, while the negotiations for two more were underway.
Substation 36A officially began providing electricity for downtown St. Petersburg last week.
REALTOR BENEFIT?
How much the new substation's 126-watt capacity will benefit investors looking at central business property is as yet unclear. Industry insiders say that the substation's capacity has been distributed long before the official completion of the construction; now, it is just a case of getting those subscribed registered on paper.
Although Alexander Kholopov, director for connection issues and business development at power monopoly Lenenergo, could not be reached for comment Monday, the power monopoly's press office gave an appraisal of the situation.
"We are not able to disclose the list of users and whether any more capacity will be left [for new subscribers]," Valentin Shushovsky, Lenenergo's press officer, said Monday, revealing only that two users were strategic objects under state operation.
Lenenergo ploughed 325 million rubles ($11.6 million) into the construction of 36A after several financing schemes between the monopolist and City Hall fell through in the late '90s.
The costs are to be recovered from users, Lenenergo's Shushovsky said, with rates being set as "according to the scheme and tariffs regulated by the regional energy committee."
This year saw a near 40 percent increase in power connection rates in the city. The average connection of 7,700 rubles per kilowatt jumped to over 10,000 rubles.
FURTHER PLANS
Lenenergo's press office said a new substation to cover the Mariinsky Theater and Novaya Gollandya (New Holland) island may be constructed in the area of Rizhsky Prospekt. No further details of other construction plans can be disclosed because negotiations are under way, Lenenergo said.
Considering that it took some 17 years to carry out plans to build substation 36A, the plausibility of governor Matviyenko's promise - three further substations in the near future - turning into reality is doubted by industry insiders, with many realtors retaining a skeptical view.
"We've heard all these fairy-tales before. Nonetheless, neither the Mariinsky Theater nor the Admiralteisky Verfi, and furthermore Apraksin Dvor, have stable electricity," said Alexander Shabasov, general director of Apraksin Dvor, a 14-hecatre outdoor shopping complex in the city center.
The construction of a power substation on the premises of the Lenizdat printing house, located in Apraksin Dvor, has been considered by the city, but the matter of the premises ownership has not yet been resolved, impeding further developments.
"In my opinion it could be the most feasible and timely energy solution for the city center, since we have the financing scheme ready, but there needs to be activity on the part of the city to get things moving," Shabasov said.
Under previous Dvor proposals, a power substation on the Leninszdat premises would have a 120 kilowatt capacity, out of which Apraksin Dvor would use 20 kilowatt, with the rest allocated to the Central and Admiralteisky city districts.
THE FAMILIAR ISSUE
Electric capacity shortage has long been a major problem for many potential investors in the city center. In one example, food chain T.G.I. Friday had to pass over a prime property on Nevsky Prospekt due to the slow processing of it request to Lenenergo for increased wattage at the site.
"The answer on whether we would have the right level of electric output was crucial for our decision and we waited for over four months for [Lenenergo's] reply," said Alexander Remizov, representative of Rosinter in St. Petersburg, the holding that operates restaurant brands such as T.G.I. Friday, Rostiks, Planet Sushi and Il Patio in Russia.
In terms of the new substation, Remizov said it was hard to judge its helpfulness in solving the center's power problem. "Another 20 or 30 watts won't do much," he said.
Remizov added that the company's headline chain, fried chicken-based restaurants Rostiks, still have not entered the St. Petersburg market because they heavily rely on a high-wattage level of electricity.
FASTER CONNECTIONS
New developments on the federal level may be able to help speed up things in the Northwest. At the beginning of the year the government finally released guidelines to clarify various aspects of energy policy. Among them was an outline of the steps necessary for new user connection.
"It s a positive development if only for the fact that now we have a legal base for dialogue, whereas there had been no such base before," said Natalya Dyatlova, a consultant at Ernst & Young. "It sets up the game rules."
As for making Lenenergo reply quicker, the new law stipulates that a request has to be answered within 30 to 90 days; however, there are many grounds for refusal to prolong the reply period, Dyatlova said. In another theoretical improvement, there will be a governmental body set up specifically responsible for the technical overview of who the power station provides connection for and at what wattage level - something that is currently decided by Lenenergo.
Whether it will be a wholly new body or an added function of the already existing one remains to be see. However it should help investors negotiate reasonable electricity connection costs, Dyatlova said.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Corinthia Remodels
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Corinthia Nevskij Palace, part of the Corinthia Hotels International group, has finally started reconstruction of its adjacent building on 55 and 59 Nevsky Prospekt, two years after it received permission to carry out the work.
Designs for remodeled buildings include a retail complex and an extension of the hotel, with a total of $45 million to be invested, business daily Delovoi Peterburg reported.
Europe's Tallest Tower
MOSCOW (SPT) - The Federation Towers complex, dubbed Europe's highest building, had its foundation-laying ceremony in Moscow last week.
The $500 million project, scheduled for a late 2007 completion, will consist of two towers 84 and 57 stories high, at 340 and 240 meters tall, respectively.
The 355,000-square-meter complex will feature 131,000 square meters of Class-A offices, 68,000 square meters of elite apartments, and 32,000 square meters of retail establishments. It will also feature a five-star hotel, which will be managed by Hyatt.
Mirax has secured a $250 million, five-year credit line from Vneshtorgbank to finance construction.
When completed, the Federation Towers will be managed by the United States' Turner Construction, while China's Shanghai Construction General Corporation will be consulting on the building process. The Federation Towers are part of the ambitious Moskva-City project to create a new business district in western Moscow, witht the construction of as much as 2.5 million square meters of offices, stores and apartments.
Gruesome Flat Ad
OSLO (AP) - A Norwegian realtor tired of glowing but inaccurate property advertisements opted for blunt honesty in offering an apartment for sale.
"Gruesome two-room apartment with balcony," said the advertisement posted on the Finn.no Internet portal last week. "A very worn-out apartment."
Some Norwegian real estate brokers exaggerate wildly in their ads. Arne Leo Soerlie, a professional real estate investor, said he had wasted so much time because of such advertisements that he wanted to be truthful in his own ad to spare others the same irritation.
"I wanted people to know what to expect. I'd rather that they found it better than expected."
TITLE: A New IT Attitude for a New Silicon Valley
TEXT: The city has large clusters of gleaming glass buildings surrounded by expensive cars. Youthful and well-dressed workers come and go as they please. A whole new type of economy has been created where none existed before. Nearby, a large academic institution feeds the hungry technological ecosystem with the necessary brainpower. Banks, accounting firms, office parks, laboratories, shopping malls, restaurants, night clubs, movie theaters, sports venues and all manner of small businesses open up to serve the new, well-heeled residents and workers.
While this may sound like a tour of Silicon Valley, I'm actually describing Novosibirsk in 10 years. Or Sarov. Or Dubna. Or Zelenogorsk near Krasnoyarsk. It is not only possible, but very likely, if the government plays its cards right in assisting the technology sector.
Forty years ago, Silicon Valley didn't exist. San Jose, California, as well as places like Los Gatos, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Mountain View and the other communities that sprouted as a result of the economic and technological development of the region were all farms, woodlands or grassy hills. Local people were, for the most part, farmers and laborers.
How did this fantastic evolution from a place for crops to futuristic city happen? What was the formula? Proximity to an academic institution was essential. Stanford University was the spawning ground. Access to a large local pool of talent and knowledgeable workers was indispensable. A groundswell of technological inventions was compulsory. Availability of large amounts of capital for small business financing and growth was very important. A way for those investors to exit profitably was required. A spirit of entrepreneurship and willingness to fail and try again was crucial.
But the most important element, the glue that held everything together, was governmental support. It did not necessarily come in the form of money, but the U.S. government assisted Silicon Valley by avoiding the unpleasantness of over-taxing and over-regulating.
The same thing could and will, I believe, happen in Russia.
Provided, of course, the government recognizes the potential for a similar economic development model to work here. This means pouring more of its finite oil revenues into the Russian Academy of Sciences and associated institutes to keep the technology pipeline filled and flowing with fresh, world-changing inventions. It definitely means a change in the government's thinking toward entrepreneurs and scientists alike. The government, in fact all of Russian society, must abandon the stigma attached to business failure, which de-motivates people, and espouse the value of trying. It must recognize the benefit of failing but learning. Politicians paying lip service to expanding the economy should deliver on their word and fund small business and technology development. Government leaders should be benchmarking and modeling their economic development strategies on other more advanced and successful countries around the world.
Take Norway, for example. The Norwegians were serendipitously blessed with surprisingly large oil reserves a while back. Were they content to just sit back and let the oil billions improve Norway's quality of life? No, they are investing and reinvesting a good portion of those one-time oil revenues in investment funds, technology parks and entrepreneurship. Russia needs to be doing the same thing.
If we were to search out the world's most successful economic development initiatives that employed a focused strategy - interestingly, Silicon Valley had no such intentional strategy; it just happened - we would see cities such as Cyberjaya, an entire man-made city of technology created outside the congestion of Kuala Lumpur, where a 20-year plan for economic development is working and paying big dividends with Ericsson, NTT, Fujitsu and Shell coming in as anchor tenants; Hong Kong's Cyberport, a multibillion-dollar public/private partnership for technological innovation involving a significant slug of government money and subsidy; and Helsinki's proximity-based Biomedicum and Technomedicum incubators, which are located right next to the University of Helsinki Hospital and are designed as a crossroads for pure technology and biotech.
Russia needs to make a strong commitment to technology and quit obsessing about oil and gas. It needs to carefully pick the cities where it will focus its early efforts. Akademgorodok, near Novosibirsk, looks like a logical first choice. Home to Novosibirsk State University, the Computing Center, the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, as well as the institutes of Catalysis, Hydrodynamics, and Cytology and Genetics, this proverbial petri dish of research and innovation has the ideal depth and breadth of possible technologies and inventions for the springboard launch of the Russian technology sector.
Here's a possible formula for creating a new Silicon Valley in some of the sleepy "closed cities" in Russia.
One, the government must start investing large amounts of money into the scientific and technological institutes that for so long have been accomplishing so much with so little. Making this investment will pay off with better-funded, stronger Russian technologies with better spin-off potential, direct foreign investment and improved ties to Western markets, investors and partners. Not making it will result in the loss of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of man-years of scientific research already conducted in these remote, out-of-the-way places.
Two, the government again can help to create an atmosphere of success and abundance, even wealth, in Russia. This mind-set is vital for the success of the businesses that will spring up. Without it, they will wither and die.
Three, these initiatives should be focused on towns with significant academic and research operations already located within easy integration distance. The university towns are where everything will happen, at least initially.
Four, the development of local investment capital is essential. This will only happen if the government takes the lead and makes the required first steps by investing, showing faith and risking. Then and only then will local indigenous venture capital spring up. For instance, Singapore is one of the only governmental entities in the world that directly invests in small enterprises, and this has worked out brilliantly for its technology community.
Finally, the Russian government must recognize, reward and trumpet the success of its entrepreneurs widely, and show what exactly the benefits to the community and to the individuals can and will be. Failure should be understood and encouraged; for it is only through failure that Russian entrepreneurs will figure out success. In the European Union, entrepreneurs are clearly stigmatized when they fail and have a very tough time getting any financing, investment or support. This is an extremely inhibitive climate for any economy, particularly a nascent one.
These are just a few suggestions for the Russian government. It must start doing the right things now, while the country has the gift of vast oil and natural resource revenues to finance and promote IT ideas. With state help and understanding, Russia can undeniably cultivate another Silicon Valley right here on Russian soil.
Wouldn't that be an excellent way to improve wages, increase outward investment, expand the business and personal tax base, and provide employment opportunities for students, scientists and the general workforce?
Bill Robinson is a London-based journalist specializing in IT issues.
TITLE: Bankruptcy Shows
Business a Kinder Face
TEXT: The Russian federal law On insolvency (bankruptcy) stipulates four stages of bankruptcy, which at first glance may seem rather mournful: supervision, financial improvement, external management, and bankruptcy proceedings. However, each stage can offer businesses certain advantages. The term bankruptcy rarely brings out positive associations. In fact, in a theatrical setting the phrase I am broke is often followed by the even bleaker attempt at suicide. But what about the reality of it?
Today many managers at Russian firms use the opportunity of various bankruptcy procedures not only for the withdrawal of assets or seizure of the other company, but also as an opportunity for respite. The bankruptcy process allows for a moratorium to satisfy creditor requirements (which includes tax and other obligatory payments) and allots a time frame of between four months to two years.
STAGE 1: SUPERVISION
Supervision begins the moment an arbitration court sets bankruptcy proceedings in motion. It then lasts while the case is prepared for further court hearings. The court may either accept the debtor's status of bankruptcy, establish external management for the business in debt, approve an amicable settlement agreement, or - which happens rather seldom in Russia - reject the debtor's bankrupt status.
The supervision period lasts, as a rule, about six months, but can be prolonged for another month.
From the moment supervision initiates, fulfillment of all executive documents on property collection is suspended and assets are frozen. The creditor has the legal right to sell the mortgaged assets of the debtor.
The court will not freeze the processing of wage payments, payment of compensation under the author's agreements, or demand property held illegally by a third party.
The positive result is obvious: the court bailiff suspends executive production, but the basic assets necessary for realization of economic activities remain with the company - instead of being sold off through tenders for below-market prices. Bankrupt companies have a further seven months to settle debts.
It is necessary to mention, however, that there are certain restrictions that forbid managers to make transactions. The debtor company's property cannot be transferred outside of the company's possession and neither can the debtor receive loans without the consent of the temporary property supervisors.
Besides this, controlling authorities have no right to take the decision on firm restructure, payment of dividends, issuing of bonds, and so on. If during the supervision period the company's affairs are impossible to improve financially, we go onto step two.
STEP 2: FINANCIAL
IMPROVEMENT
This stage stipulates that the proprietor of the company must be employed to find a solution to the financial problems. Financial improvement is introduced by the arbitration court on the basis of the creditors' meeting. And in fact, this stage is carried out on rare occasions. More often the following is applied.
STAGE 3: EXTERNAL MANAGEMENT
As soon as the company status is legally confirmed as bankrupt, the firm is assigned an external manager. External control is removed only if bankruptcy proceedings are terminated after a recommendation from the external manager is court approved or if there is an amicable agreement made between debtor and creditor. This stage lasts for about 18 months and can be prolonged for a term not exceeding 6 months.
As soon as the external management comes in, all measures realized earlier - for the maintenance of creditor requests - are cancelled. The freezing of assets or the lien creditors have over the debtor's property can be imposed exclusively within the framework of the bankruptcy proceeding. In short - the creditor is not free to rule over the debtor's property freely.
There is established a moratorium, a document to guarantee the satisfaction of creditors requests under payment liabilities. This document extends the repayment period, and plus the procedure of supervision can be repeated to win you even more time.
STAGE 4: BANKRUPTCY PROCEEDINGS
If nothing else has helped, then comes the last step. Bankruptcy proceedings can take 12 months, but the term is sometimes prolonged by up to 6 months.
Using the opportunity of bankruptcy procedures, the company can gain time to make payments to creditors and also evaluate objectively the financial situation that had developed. After all, the external assessment of the company's financial dealings should come up with many a pragmatic observation.
Anton Sayenko is the executive director of BusinessConsulting (BK).
TITLE: State Control Over Lock, Stock and Barrel
TEXT: The recent announcements that Russia intends to exclude companies or groups that are not majority Russian-owned from bidding for natural resource development licenses, together with the plan to prioritize the building of a $15 billion, 4,200-kilometer pipeline to Nakhodka on the Pacific, do not make great economic sense. But as mechanisms to further government control over the country's most important industry and to use that control to further its geopolitical ambitions, they make perfect sense.
Over the past year, the state has moved to restore greater direct and regulatory control over the oil and gas industry. Officials intend not only to use greater export volumes of oil and gas to encourage GDP growth, but also to push for fast-track integration into the global economy. More oil exports will also mean broader geopolitical gains, including a possible push for WTO entry by the end of this year and for more results from Russia's upcoming chairmanship of the G8 in 2006.
In practical terms, the government's apparent dithering over the reform plan authored by Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref can be seen as part of a strategy shift away from supporting Gref's idealistic diversified growth plan toward a more focused - and more pragmatic - effort to increase budget revenues from oil and gas and to sustain these revenues by building future volume growth that might compensate for an inevitable cyclical decline in export prices. Higher export volumes also give Russia substantial bargaining power with energy consumer countries, leverage that President Vladimir Putin has already used successfully to deflect a whole range of potential criticisms. This would surely have otherwise marginalized Russia in the international community, if the supply of oil from OPEC countries were more secure.
Thus, the government will likely encourage and approve initiatives - albeit based on majority Russian control - that will lead to faster development of the country's untapped oil and gas resources. It will push the approval of the Nakhodka pipeline, followed by other new export routes, such as those to the United States via Murmansk. Yukos, in its attempt to defend itself against the actions of tax officials, produced a report that claimed the hydrocarbon reserves of Yuganskneftegaz are close to 90 billion barrels of oil equivalent, or in other words, nine times the most recent audit figure. While this claim understandably assumed the very best-case scenario, there is growing credible evidence to support the view that Russia's oil reserves are substantially higher than the 69.1 billion barrels cited by the BP Statistical Review. The fact is that a large part of Russia's territory has not been explored adequately or has not been explored using the most modern techniques. Using the total audited reserves claimed by the oil companies, Russia's total current reserves are closer to 110 billion barrels. Several audit agencies see 150 billion as a more realistic figure that will eventually be confirmed. This amount of reserves would be more than capable of sustaining the higher production and export volumes that the government envisages over the next six to eight years.
Without a doubt, Putin's government was fortunate to come to power just as the world was about to experience a paradigm shift in the sustainable average price of oil and right when the major consumer countries embarked on efforts to secure a better balance in future supplies. Oil and gas have proven a very reliable route to economic and geo-political health. Putin is a second-term president, but he heads a first-term power structure. The people behind this power structure cannot afford to lose much more public support, if their vision of a modern Russia is to be sustained beyond 2008. Changing a proven economic model, though based on risky high commodity prices, is clearly not an option for reasons of both domestic and international expediency. Hence, the main reform initiatives envisaged by Gref's plan, namely administrative reforms and growth incentives for small and medium-sized business, are destined to sit on the shelf for at least several more years.
The need to restore state control over this critical lynchpin of the economy and international policy goes a long way to explain such events as the Yukos/Group Menatep case and the government's desire to consolidate ownership and control over the energy sector under one holding, Gazprom. Of course, an unfavorable ruling by a Texas court may delay the creation of this national energy giant. However, it will not derail the goal of setting up Russia's rival to Saudi Arabia's Aramco, probably by the end of Putin's presidency.
A state industrial policy for developing the oil and gas industry is already emerging. It resembles a sort of macro central planning, and the Yukos case, along with the proposed Gazprom-Rosneft merger, was the mechanism to consolidate the state's direct control.
The proposal to restrict foreign participation in licenses for future oil projects is therefore not surprising. It will not slow down the expansion of Russia's oil industry. For the government, control is critical. But of equally critical importance is the need to involve international energy majors in new projects to import technology and project management expertise via these partnerships, as well as to cover a big chunk of the estimated $50 billion needed to develop Russia's planned oil and gas projects over the next 10 years. Foreign partners would furthermore help add the international sales infrastructure that Russian oil companies, other than BP-TNK, now lack. Hence Putin's eagerness to have Conoco acquire the government's stake in LUKoil when it was sold late last year and the likely future involvement of CNPC of China, ONGC of India and others in new oil projects.
Apart from developing internal production and export capacity, another important element of Putin's attempts to position Russia at the center of global energy will be greater efforts to forge alliances with Kazakhstan and other energy producers around the Caspian. Having effectively lost Azerbaijan to the West with the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, Putin is unlikely to risk losing Kazakhstan with a similar route for the million-barrel pipeline that will feed off its giant Kashagan field. Already Russia, the United States, China, India and Iran are positioning to play this 21st-century version of the Great Game. The difference this time is that while Russia played the original Great Game with tsarist cavalry and spies, this new version will be played with pipelines and oil train wagons.
Oil, the "devil's blood" to those who have suffered in the battle for its control, has the potential to become the foundation of a solid and stable economic future for Russia. Yet history shows that all too often, oil can also be abused in political games. One has only to think of Indonesia under General Suharto, where high oil revenues not only slowed the process of economic diversification, but also led to a sharp increase in corruption at the highest levels of government. Prioritizing a 4,200-kilometer pipeline, limiting the access of foreign oil companies and the Yukos affair are not encouraging signs to those hoping for economic liberalism and a free economy. To the government, it seems that these are the pragmatic steps necessary not only to sustain GDP growth, but to achieve its political goals.
Christopher Weafer, chief analyst at Alfa Bank, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Housing Reform is Stymied by Recalcitrant Officials
TEXT: Despite my promise last week to talk about the incomes of beneficiaries, another hot topic demands immediate attention - the conflicts between City Hall and citizens over the reform of community housing services.
The new Housing Code will come into force on March 1, and it will seriously change the way the sector is run. Most importantly, it will allow business to get involved in providing communal housing services, which hitherto has been a state monopoly.
The directors of several companies say they will start to actively convince residents of city-owned apartment blocks to drop the state's maintenance departments and to choose their services instead.
Judging by what is going on in the city, many residents are ready for it. In 2004, due to the efforts of the reformers, the process of creating housing associations accelerated.
While the numbers of such bodies in the total state housing sector is not that high, the absolute number of Petersburgers who are willing to change the system of servicing their apartment blocks is significant.
It is already in the hundreds of thousands, and several thousand of them - who are activists (those who head housing associations in old apartment blocks, private apartments and housing committees) are tuned into taking decisive steps. I should even say they are in a fighting mood, and this was clearly seen at a conference on the new Housing Code on Feb.7.
People feel that, in contradiction to City Hall's official policies that have the personal support of Governor Valentina Matviyenko, the city's committee on community housing services and some of the district administrations are quietly blocking the reform. There are lots of indications of this.
To change the servicing organization in apartment blocks where no residents' group has been formed, tenders must be conducted. However, in most cases companies cannot service only a few separate blocks - to be profitable, they must service several blocks in a single area. But to conduct tenders to serve such an area, the city's housing committee must prepare documentation for the tender.
Organizing of these areas is part of the reform and has been reinforced by direct orders from the governor. And yet, it has still not been done.
The same can be said about the process of structuring the city-run communal housing services and the way they are financed. According to the spirit of the reform, there should be several of them in each district so that they can compete against each other, because only through competition can the quality of their work be improved.
But in several districts, including the Krasnoselsky, Vyborgsky and Frunzensky districts, all such service teams have been amalgamated into one company. As a result, the huge and therefore hard to run companies that service 3 million to 4.5 million square meters of housing cannot provide high quality. Furthermore, they are very difficult to compete with, especially when the heads of the districts act in their favor.
Attempts by reformers to use bylaws to ban such monopolies have been blocked by opponents of the reform. This is clearly an area for the antimonopoly authorities to investigate.
The head of City Hall's financial control committee, Dmitry Burenin, should pay attention to the mechanism of financing the maintenance companies. Despite their fear of complaining publicly, several directors of such enterprises have revealed to journalists the secrets of kick-back deals in the sector.
Officials, who have the authority to order housing services, are fining maintenance companies supposedly because of complaints from the public; hence, they reduce payments for the work. The cash saved in this way is forwarded to "good" maintenance companies as payment for their additional work, which as a rule are repairs.
Such repair work offers a very good opportunity to steal money since the costs for the job are purposely overestimated. Complaints from residents can be prepared easily when they are needed.
The stolen money is then shared by heads of "loyal" maintenance companies with the official. Meanwhile the housing companies that were robbed have big problems paying staff their wages, which are already modest, and the knock-on effect is that staff lose the motivation to work well.
People know that with the current price of real estate, they can seriously improve the condition of their apartment block if they can lease out parts of the premises that are not used for apartments. In several known cases officials have gone on to break all laws just to scupper the legal transferal of the unused parts to the block's residents.
There are also other cases of cynical indifference from representatives of district administration to the needs of residents. Does weeks without cold water or heating sound familiar?
One only has to hear the kind of names residents of such apartment blocks call officials, to understand that they are ready to go and protest at City Hall. And, inspired by the success of the pensioners, who recently protested against the replacement of in-kind benefits with cash, St. Petersburgers have became more ready to protest. Neither will the opposition parties miss an opportunity to demonstrate their care for the population. So it is only a matter of time before more public protests start.
Matviyenko must now discipline the housing maintenance officials. If she doesn't do it, City Hall's problems are likely to get even worse. The public protests might be supported by those maintenance companies that are now being cheated by the officials and district administrations.
Vladimir Gryaznevich is a political analyst with Expert Severo-Zapad magazine. His comment was first broadcast on Ekho Moskvy in St. Petersburg on Friday.
TITLE: Mother Lode
TEXT: The hoary adage that "there are none so blind as those who will not see" should be carved in stone at the National Press Club in Washington. Surely there can be no better motto for the cozy clubhouse of America's media mavens, who seem preternaturally incapable of recognizing the truth - even when it stands before them, monstrous and unavoidable, like a giant Cyclops smeared with blood.
For just as they botched the most important story of our time - the Bush Administration's transparently deceptive campaign to launch a war of aggression against Iraq - the clubby mavens are now missing the crowning achievement of this vast crime: the mother of all backroom deals, a cynical pact sealed by murder, unfolding before our eyes.
The Administration's true objective in Iraq is brutally simple: U.S. domination of Middle East oil. This is no secret. Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz began writing about this "strategic necessity" in 1992, as Alternet reminds us; and in September 2000, a group led by Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld openly called for a U.S. military takeover of Iraq - even if the regime of Saddam Hussein was no longer in power. At every point in their savaging of Iraq, the Bushists have pressed relentlessly toward this oily goal.
The objective was revealed - yet again - in a recent Washington appearance by Iraqi Finance Minister Adil Abdel-Mahdi. Standing alongside a top State Department official, Abdel-Mahdi announced that Iraq's government wants to open the nation's oil fields to foreign investment - not only the pumped product flowing through the pipes, but the very oil in the ground, the common patrimony of the Iraqi people. The minister said plainly that this sweet deal - placing the world's second-largest oil reserves in a few private hands - would be "very promising to the American investors and to American enterprise, certainly to oil companies," InterPress reports. These are the spoils for which George W. Bush has killed more than 100,000 human beings.
The American media completely ignored Abdel-Mahdi's declaration, but this is not surprising. After all, it occurred in the most obscure venue imaginable: an appearance before oil barons and journalists at the, er, National Press Club. Where better to hide open confessions of war crimes than in the very midst of the Washington hack pack? Yet here was a story of immense importance. For Abdel-Mahdi is not only a functionary in the discredited collaborationist government now in its last days. He is also one of the leading figures in the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the Shiite faction that has been swept to somewhat more legitimate power by the national election that was forced on George W. Bush by Islamic fundamentalist Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. In fact, Abdel-Mahdi is frequently mentioned as a leading choice for prime minister in the new government; whatever happens, he will certainly play a primary role.
So we have a top official - perhaps the top official - in the incoming government offering American oilmen ownership rights in Iraqi oil. We have top American officials - such as Cheney and Rumsfeld this week - taking a benign view of the UIA's demand that the new Iraqi state be based solely on Islamic law, with crippling restrictions on women's rights, free expression, free association, plus, if Sistani has his way, Talibanic bans on music, dancing and even playing chess, Newsweek reports.
What we have, in other words, is the making of a monstrous, Cyclopean deal: not just "Blood for Oil," as the anti-war critics have said all along, but also "God for Oil." The Shiite clerics - who eschew direct control but whose precepts can be translated into state power by secular representatives like Abdel-Mahdi - seem willing to trade a goodly portion of Iraq's oil wealth in exchange for establishing a de facto "Islamic Republic" in the conquered land, with tacit American approval.
Sistani's word could move millions into the street to hamstring U.S. forces; but despite his notional disapproval of the occupation, he has stayed his hand, waiting for power to fall like a ripe fruit into the Shiite basket. Like Bush, he is apparently willing to countenance mass slaughter by the U.S.-led "Coalition" to achieve his objectives; but then, like Bush, Sistani is not an Iraqi either: He's an Iranian. Now these two foreigners are rolling dice to settle the nation's fate.
But there's yet another glaring truth that's escaped the media mavens, and most of the war's opponents as well. Even if the grand objective of oil control slips away somehow - through a falling-out with Sistani, say, or civil war - Bush has already won the game. The war has transferred billions of dollars from the public treasuries of the United States and Iraq into the coffers of an elite clique of oilmen, arms dealers, investment firms, construction giants and political operatives associated with the Bush family. And this goes beyond the official, guaranteed-profit contracts to favored firms; Bush's own inspector general reported this month that $8.8 billion in unaccounted "reconstruction" funds have simply vanished - much of it in bribes for Bush officials and corporate kickbacks, the BBC reported.
This blood money will further entrench the Bushist clique in unassailable power and privilege for decades to come, regardless of the bloody chaos they cause, or even the occasional loss of political office. The American power structure has been permanently altered by the war - just as American society has been immeasurably corrupted by Bush's proud embrace of aggression, torture, lawlessness and militarism as national values.
Bush lied. He stole. He murdered. In broad daylight. And he got away with it. That's the story. But you'll never hear it at the Press Club.
For annotational references, see Opinion at www.sptimesrussia.com
TITLE: Bloody Sunday, Tourism and Hate Crimes
TEXT: In response to Bloody Sunday Recalled, a news analysis by Vladimir Kovalev on Jan. 11.
Editor,
Why don't these annual the world was so much worse under the tsar reports give a little more historical background?
The day before the march, a gun battery fired live shots in the direction of the Imperial Family during a ceremony. The shots landed just a few meters from the Grand Duchesses. The members of the Imperial Family were immediately whisked away to the country as there were fears that an organized coup was under way.
For there to have been a march the day following the firing incident while fear and emotion were running wild was an open invitation for disaster in any historical context.
Ari Stophenes
Los Angeles
Visitor Deterrents
In response to Tourism Growth Halted, an article by Galina Stolyarova on Dec. 28.
Editor,
The only way to promote St. Petersburg properly is to take a step back and work out exactly what the city really wants to achieve from tourism.
I think it is wrong to compare Prague to St. Petersburg. I can jump on a plane and spend a weekend in the Czech capital with little or no fuss. Prague is becoming the best destination in Europe to go for a stag night. The beer is cheap, flights are cheap, and there are plenty of three-star hotels.
Compare that to St. Petersburg: I'd need to get a visa; flights are not that cheap; there are not many three-star hotels ... and the beer?
Street crime is something you will find in every major city of the world. London is no exception, but in London you will find a lot of police on the streets, and security cameras are in abundance. If you are unfortunate to fall victim to crime you can be sure of a sympathetic ear from the authorities at the very least.
Can you say the same thing of the police in St. Petersburg?
Given the choice between visiting Moscow and St. Petersburg, I would go to the latter every time. St. Petersburg has all the elements to make it a top-five tourist destination but that is not dependent on how much money it spends visiting tourist exhibitions worldwide. It is about the will and the desire of the people and authorities of the city to embrace tourism and foreign visitors, to understand their requirements and put into place long-term plans to meet their needs.
Be it hotels, security, transportation or attitude. The potential is there, the benefits are there for the whole of St. Petersburg and its residents to reap. The best form of marketing is word of mouth, so if you can get 3.12 million visitors to tell their friends, you need to go visit St Petersburg, it does not matter if you only have 6 million rubles ($215,000) to spend on promoting the city - people will come anyway!
The city is at a critical point in terms of its popularity. The wave of promotion of the 300th anniversary has passed. The city now has to stand or fall on its merits. I hope it understands that what actions it takes now will have a long-term effect on it as a tourist destination.
Kevin Rymell
Norwich, England
Editor,
I would like to say that some of the problems in trying to increase visitor numbers are due to the lack of flexibility and long-term business sense from the hotels and travel agencies.
For example last year one of the most well known hotels in St. Petersburg demanded cancellation fees at 90 days prior to arrival in high season for groups, which is just one example of the disincentive for tour operators to continue to sell Russia as a viable tourist destination.
There are many similarly over zealous cancellation fees, visa-registration fees and other regulations, almost set up to punish the visitor for visiting.
Russia needs to think of itself as just one of many destinations on offer, and think how it can make it more attractive than other European countries.
Although it seems that there is always a tendency to blame others, particularly the government, for failing to invest, it would be better if all of those involved in incoming tourism in Russia could work together towards the common aim, and trying to be flexible and focus on the customer.
Visas, lack of hotel space, and climate all play a role, but customer service and a positive business sense would go a long way to help while we are waiting for the bigger improvements.
Gillian Elliott
London
Editor,
I remember my first trip to St. Petersburg in 1991 when I could eat a huge meal at Sadko's for just a couple dollars worth of rubles. I stayed in a rented apartment for almost nothing. What a Soviet experience! I realize that time is gone, and very few tourists would have coped in those days. Young people my age were amazed I could walk and talk with them - an American walking freely in their city.
On a return trip in '98, relations were not so good with the U.S., and it showed when arriving at Pulkovo. Customs had removed all the English declaration forms. I was able to use a French form. Today, I would have to pay European prices and be gouged as a rich tourist at St. Petersburg's museums. I would worry about the police who, I have read, now target tourists together with their own citizens for money. Shouldn't they be protecting us from thieves and promoting their city?
Additionally, why should I have to get a visa to visit Russia - because the U.S. requires this of Russians? Americans have no desire to illegally stay in Russia, but illegal immigration is a serious problem in the U.S. In 2004, more than 3 million illegal immigrants entered the U.S. Yes, Russians want to move illegally to the U.S.
St. Petersburg could be one of the world's great cities, as it was historically, but today I have no desire to return.
Anonymous
San Francisco
Editor,
One reads with interest the various comments about tourism to St. Petersburg and of the decline in numbers last year. Much soul searching can be done as to why more and more tourists don't flock to see the glories that this wonderful city has to offer.
The answer is simple - acquiring a Russian visa, then the registration and bureaucracy that happens once one eventually arrives there are handicaps to the growth of your tourist industry. A small country like New Zealand has made every endeavor to make going there as friendly, easy and hassle-free for visitors as possible. And as such, tourism is its second biggest industry.
There should be no doubting that if were simpler and easier to obtain visas to Russia then it too would see huge increases in the numbers of visitors and of the real worth they are to the economy and the country at large.
A regular visitor to St Petersburg
Editor
Tourism is being restricted because of the bureaucracy that surrounds getting and registering a visa. A lot more people from England arrange their own travel abroad and don't use travel agencies. With the growth of the Internet and direct online booking and, of course, it being cheaper, travelers are going to go to those countries where visas are easier to get.
There is a belief in England that getting a visa for Russia is difficult and expensive, which it can be if you don't know what to do. Tour group visas don't allow you to leave the group and explore and other methods are very bureaucratic.
A personal invitation costs Pound30 ($56), which has to be applied for several months in advance. This is then posted to England (two weeks). You then send my documents and application form plus fee to the Russian Embassy in London for my visa, which arrives within the two-week timescale for the fee paid.
In Russia, you have to go and register some distance away and if you didn't know where to go is very difficult to find.
This registration can take several hours, and you have to go back some days later and collect my papers. You need a Russian national to do the paperwork if you don't speak much Russian. Of course, it is easier if you stay in a hotel, but this is expensive and people like to rent apartments etc.
With advanced computer systems why can't all of this be done, as in America, on entry to Russia? This would allow tourists to decide to come to Russia one day and travel that day or the next, without all the bother of organizing visas before their visit.
I like St. Petersburg and have been coming here for the last eight years and seen a huge improvement in the quality of buildings and new shops. I have never felt insecure nor have I been robbed.
Anton Glinski
Reading, England
Editor,
My suggestion would be to concentrate your limited promotional funds on contacting American travel agency owners, directly, by e-mail and via a web site. Too few agents know about your area or have ever been there.
There is nothing like having first-hand experience of a destination. The people I was with on a cruise liner want to tell people how we enjoyed in St. Petersburg, what we did there, and offer others suggestions based on our experience.
I love St. Petersburg. It would have been easier the last time, if we had not been forced to restrict ourselves to taking the trips ashore that were offered by our cruise line so that we could have seen new and more interesting areas of your lovely city.
Ramon Wilson
Newark , Ohio
Editor,
While St. Petersburg is a very beautiful city with many great attractions it has some serious drawbacks that must be addressed before you can even hope to become a top-five city. Having visited London before coming to St. Petersburg I can say that St. Petersburg has a very long way to go to come anywhere near to the standard of London.
I had my camera stolen on Nevsky Prospekt by three people. This happened when I crossed the street in front of Nevsky Prospekt metro station. Two men stood in front of me and impeded my path as I went to cross the street. Meanwhile a third man used a knife to cut the strap on my camera and steal it.
When I apprehended one of the men who impeded my progress and started questioning him where my camera was and called for the police, nobody came to my aid. In fact, a few Russian pedestrians pulled me off of this man and allowed him to escape.
Such a thing would never happen to someone in London or the other popular tourist destinations. These cities understand the importance of a tourists' safety and the importance to their economies.
I am afraid after witnessing first-hand crime in your city and seeing the apathy of your police force I could not recommend in good conscience that any of my friends visit your city. How long before one of these gangs stabs and seriously injure or kill a tourist?
David Achilles
London
Editor,
Most people are excited to visit St. Petersburg, and Russia as a whole. But one thing that has to hurt the tourist industry, even if it's just a small percentage, is that many visitors feel unjustly treated when they have been robbed.
But the big injustice people feel, is not only at being violated by the thieves who prey on helpless foreigners, but at the authorities who are not able to make people feel the law and its supposed enforcers are on their side. This has been an issue for many years, with no hope of change on the horizon.
People will forever cherish, and remember their time spent in St. Petersburg, as I have. But if they have been victims of these injustices, they will also never forget their mishaps. You can bet your tourist revenues.
Daniel Martinez
Los Angeles
Freedom and Democracy
In response to Freedom House Says Russia Is Not Free, an article by The Associated Press on Dec. 28.
Editor,
Is pure democracy and freedom of the press good for every society? Sometimes I wonder if that is so, depending on the evolutionary level that a particular culture has reached.
Robert Johnson
Chicago
Hate Crimes
In response to Police: City Tops Country for Attacks on Foreigners, an article by Vladimir Kovalev on Dec. 10.
Editor,
I was very sad to read this article because it shows that most Russians still don't realize how racism is growing in your country. I lived in St. Petersburg for three years and have a lot of good Russian friends, but to this day they don't understand the racism I faced while living there; I was once attacked in front of one of my good friends who defended me and told me later that it was the first time he felt ashamed of how his fellow Russians acted and he never thought that a Russian was capable of such things. Even my friends would sometimes make racist comments jokes against Jews, Blacks or other foreigners without realizing that it's wrong to do that.
I now say to my friends that Russia taught me how to be a man and be strong because I never felt safe there. I was insulted every day and attacked many times, but somehow I always managed to escape.
On some occasions other Russians helped me to get away. Russia is full of good people, I met the most amazing human beings there, with big hearts and deep souls but you must start to recognize that there is racism in your country and try to find a way to deal with it, otherwise any memory of your country a foreigner can have will always be tarnished by the racism he faces every day.
The media has the duty to expose this problem and help find a solution by educating people about what is right or wrong, what is racism and what is the civilized way of acting towards foreigners. An incident at a hockey game against a black Canadian player is making news here and it's giving a bad image to Russia and to one of the most beautiful cities in the world, St. Petersburg.
Douglas Smith
Vancouver, British Columbia
Editor,
It does not surprise me that the authorities continue to feign ignorance, but these problems will not go away.
The people of St. Petersburg need to know the importance of the students for the country's economy.
Three medical institutes and other technical economic universities have over 15,000 students. Foreign students. On average each medical student pays $3,500 per year plus additional costs. We are not being educated for free.
The Russian people and Russia benefit from our presence. We contribute to the economy.
We were invited with large posters and leaflets that say: Come to Russia, Come to study. Now the people want us gone. They attack and put fear in out hearts and minds. After they have driven us away they will turn to the Russian people. People of Russia - violence in whatever form is wrong. You ruin your reputation in the eyes of the world and you lose face in our eyes. Where are these proud people who defended themselves against an obliterating army? Stand up for your country and its good reputation. Your future depends on it.
Anonymous
3rd year medical student.
Mechnikov Medical Academy
St Petersburg
More letters, page 15
TITLE: Ray Charles' Last Record Honored at Grammies
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LOS ANGELES - On the night when all of music bands together for one genre-busting party, Ray Charles received a fitting eulogy Sunday as his final album, "Genius Loves Company," won a leading eight Grammys.
Much like his career, the album Charles recorded in the last months of his life spans soul, rock 'n' roll, R&B, country, jazz and blues.
It won album of the year and best pop album; the song "Here We Go Again," with Norah Jones, won record of the year and best pop collaboration with vocals.
"I'm going to cry, actually," Jones said as she accepted the trophy for record of the year. "I think it just shows how wonderful music can be."
Other winners included Alicia Keys and Usher, each nominated for eight Grammys. Keys won four while Usher had three. They shared one award, for best R&B performance by a duo or group with vocals for their chart-topping duet, "My Boo."
U2 won three awards, including best rock performance by a duo or group. Green Day, the most nominated rock act with six for their politically charged punk opera "American Idiot," won best rock album.
The oft-maligned Britney Spears also won her first Grammy - best dance recording for "Toxic."
Spears wasn't present, but another newlywed was on hand: Jennifer Lopez performed a duet in Spanish with new hubby Marc Anthony, their first public performance together.
But ultimately, the night belonged to Ray Charles. "Genius Loves Company" sold more than two million copies - the most of his 60-plus albums. Besides the four awards for best album and song, "Genius Loves Company" won for best instrumental arrangement accompanying a vocalist, best gospel performance, best engineered album and best surround sound album.
Charles was 73 when he died in June, with a total of 12 Grammys in his 50-plus year career. The most he ever won in one night was four in 1960, including two for the classic "Georgia On My Mind."
That was the song performed Sunday by Keys and the actor Jamie Foxx, considered an Oscar lock for his portrayal of Charles in "Ray."
Foxx, a more than decent musician, sat at a piano opposite Keys
as Quincy Jones conducted the orchestra.
"For an old friend," Foxx said as he began to play.
TITLE: DNA Test
Confirms
'Baby 81's'
Parentage
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KALMUNAI, Sri Lanka - DNA test results released Monday confirmed that a 3-month-old infant found amid the rubble in tsunami-battered Sri Lanka and dubbed "Baby 81" belongs to the couple who fought desperately for weeks to gain custody of him.
The tests ended eight weeks of uncertainty and drama surrounding the infant, who became a symbol of families torn apart by the Dec. 26 tsunami.
Earlier, eight other couples had said they were the boy's parents, though none of them followed through on their claims.
"I am so happy, and I only have to thank God for giving my child back," the boy's father, Murugupillai Jeyarajah, said. "We've got the results for all our hardships."
The couple said the baby was swept out of the arms of the mother, Jenta Jeyarajah, by the tsunami, which also carried away their home and family records proving their claim to the infant.
The Jeyarajahs say the child's name is Abilass, and that he was born Oct. 19.
"It has been confirmed that the baby belongs to that couple," court official Mohammed Nazir said Monday.
The finding was based on last week's court-ordered DNA test of the couple and the boy. It ended eight weeks of uncertainty and drama surrounding the infant, who had come to symbolize the plight of families destroyed by the tidal wave.
Since they couldn't document their claim to the baby, a court ruled that he must stay in the hospital in Kalmunai, 185 miles east of Sri Lanka's capital, Colombia, until DNA tests could confirm his parentage.
Jenita Jeyarajah said the first things she'll do when she gets custody of the baby will be to fulfill vows to smash 100 coconuts at a temple of the elephant-headed Hindu god, Ganesh, offer sweet rice to the warrior god, Murugan, and kill a rooster for the goddess Kali.
Confirming the parentage of infant "Baby 81" - so nicknamed because he was the 81st admission on the day he arrived at the hospital - was an increasingly rare bright spot in a disaster that killed hundreds of thousands of children and left thousands more orphaned when killer waves smashed coastlines in nearly a dozen nations in Asia and Africa.
Although tens of thousands of people are still officially listed as missing from the unprecedented disaster, hopes of finding more survivors have faded and hundreds of bodies were still being pulled from the debris.
The overall death toll on Monday stood at 166,000 - with the vast majority of the victims in Indonesia's Aceh province.
Recovery workers in Aceh found 546 bodies on Saturday, the latest day for which figures were available, and 411 on Friday.
Aftershocks of the magnitude-9.0 quake on Dec. 26 have continued to rattle the region, some of them causing widespread panic.
Two struck Aceh about an hour apart on Sunday, shaking buildings in the provincial capital, but there were no reports of damage.
One of the underwater quakes had a magnitude of 5.6, according to U.S. Geological Survey, which had no immediate details about the second.
TITLE: Sunnis Sidelined by Shiite Victory in Iraq
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD, Iraq - Clergy-backed Shiites and independence-minded Kurds swept to victory in Iraq's landmark elections, propelling to power the groups that suffered the most under Saddam Hussein and forcing Sunni Arabs to the margins for the first time in modern history, according to final results released Sunday.
But the Shiites' 48 percent of the vote is far short of the two-thirds majority needed to control the 275-member National Assembly. The results threw immediate focus on Iraqi leaders' backdoor dealmaking to create a new coalition government - possibly in an alliance with the Kurds - and on efforts to lure Sunnis into the fold and away from a bloody insurgency.
Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, the secular Shiite chosen by the United States to lead this country for the last eight turbulent months, fared poorly - his ticket finishing a distant third behind the religious Shiites and Kurds.
"This is a new birth for Iraq," election commission spokesman Farid Ayar said, announcing results of the Jan. 30 polling, the first free election in Iraq in more than 50 years and the first since Saddam fell. Iraqi voters "became a legend in their confrontation with terrorists."
Iraqi Kurds danced in the streets and waved Kurdish flags when results were announced in the oil-rich, ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk. Thousands more Kurds - a people who were gassed and forced from their homes by Saddam's forces - turned out in Sulaimaniyah, firing weapons in the air and carrying posters of their leaders.
"I feel that I am born again," said Bakhtiyar Mohammed, 42. "I am very happy because we suffered a lot. Now I can say that I am an Iraqi Kurd with pride."
U.S. President President George W. Bush praised Iraqis and said America and its allies should be proud for making the election possible. "I congratulate the Iraqi people for defying terrorist threats and setting their country on the path of democracy and freedom," he said in a statement. "And I congratulate every candidate who stood for election and those who will take office once the results are certified."
The Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance ticket received 4,075,295 votes, or about 48 percent of the total cast, officials said.
The Kurdistan Alliance, a coalition of two main Kurdish parties, finished second with 2,175,551 votes, or 26 percent. And the Iraqi List headed by Allawi stood third with 1,168,943 votes, or nearly 14 percent.
Parties have three days to lodge complaints, after which the results will be certified and seats in the new Assembly distributed. It appeared only 12 coalitions would take seats.
The election results highlighted the sharp differences among Iraq's ethnic, religious and cultural groups - many of whom fear domination not just by the Shiites, estimated at 60 percent of the population, but also by the Kurds, the most pro-American group with about 15 percent.
The results also draw attention to the close and longtime ties between now-victorious Iraqi Shiite leaders and clerics in neighboring Iran.
The Shiite ticket owes its success to the support of Iraq's clerics, including Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
In contrast, many Sunni Arabs, who make up an estimated 20 percent of the population, stayed home on election day, either out of fear of violence or to support a boycott call by radical clerics opposed to the U.S. military.
Overall, national turnout was about 60 percent, the commission said - but only 2 percent of the eligible voters cast ballots in Anbar province, the Sunni insurgent stronghold that includes Ramadi and Fallujah.
TITLE: Blast Destroys Paris Theater
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PARIS - An explosion ripped through a well-known Paris theater Sunday morning, gutting its first two floors and slightly injuring seven people, officials said.
The cause of the blast at the 3,000-seat Theatre de l'Empire, or Empire Theatre, near the Champs-Elysee was not immediately known. Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin said nothing was being excluded. He did not address the possibility of a terrorist attack.
Seven people, primarily passers-by, suffered minor injuries in the explosion, mostly scrapes from shards of glass and shock to the eardrums, said Olivier Delplace, spokesman for rescue workers. Two watchmen inside the building were among those slightly injured, police said.
Authorities rushed to the scene shortly after 6:30 a.m., local time.
Police used sniffer dogs to try to determine the origin of the blast and to ensure that no one was trapped inside.
TITLE: It's All Over Bar The Shouting
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - A federal mediator tried to help the NHL and the players' association reach a deal just hours before a deadline to save the season.
That didn't work, either.
No progress was reported by the sides Sunday after a five-hour meeting in Washington that occurred as time ticked down on the NHL's weekend deadline.
After vowing not to reach out to the other after talks broke off Thursday, the sides met at the request of a high-ranking federal mediator. Neither commissioner Gary Bettman nor players' association executive director Bob Goodenow attended.
It wasn't clear if this meeting would extend the commissioner's deadline. Bettman said a new collective bargaining agreement had to be in place by Sunday for there to be a shortened season.
If Bettman's mind is made up, then a decision would likely be made Monday. An announcement that the season is canceled would be expected soon after.
NHL chief legal officer Bill Daly was joined at the meeting by outside counsel Bob Batterman, with players' association senior director Ted Saskin and outside counsel John McCambridge on the other side.
"There was no progress to report as a result of this meeting, and in fairness to the process it would serve no purpose to comment further," Saskin said.
The sides were assisted by mediators twice before - as recently as a Feb. 2 negotiating session in Newark, New Jersey. Sunday's meeting was requested by Scot B. Beckenbaugh, the acting director of the U.S. Federal Mediation & Conciliation Service.
"No progress in the collective bargaining process resulted from the meeting," Daly said.
That wasn't the biggest surprise. Neither side thought mediation would help end the stalemate that has lasted five months.
"This isn't a negotiation that failed due to a lack of understanding," Daly said Thursday. "This is a negotiation that has failed for other reasons. I don't think a mediator would help in this process."
After two days of talks broke off Thursday in Toronto, Saskin also didn't see mediation as the way to reach a deal.
"That's not something we've given a lot of consideration to, and certainly the NHL has made clear from day one that they're not interested in any form of mediation - binding or nonbinding," he said. "If the NHL came forward and said they wanted to do binding mediation, then we'd have to do the analysis and have the discussion."
Earlier Sunday, neither side seemed willing to budge or come together again to work on a deal.
"Our position hasn't changed," a players' association spokesman said.
"We will not be reaching out to them," Daly said.
The lockout reached its 151st day Sunday, when the league was supposed to hold its All-Star game in Atlanta. So far, 824 of the 1,230 regular-season games have been lost and the remainder of the schedule is close to being wiped out.
Bettman had said the sides needed to put a deal on paper by Sunday if the NHL was going to hold a 28-game season and a regular 16-team playoff.