SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1054 (20), Thursday, March 24, 2005
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TITLE: Amendments to Mariinsky 2 Design Approved
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: One of several disputes swirling around French architect Dominique Perrault’s design for a second building for Mariinsky Theater artists ended Friday when the city’s architecture committee approved changes to the design.
Perrault won an international competition to design the building in July 2003, but the federal government has been in no rush to get things started as debates over the design’s costs and artistic merit rage.
“This is not merely an architectural experiment, but a test of human relations and cultural relations between two countries as well,” Lyudmila Likhachyova, Perrault’s representative in Russia, said at a news conference Friday after the committee met.
Since the architect won the competition, the projected cost of the building had gone up from $100 million to $244 million. Construction of the new building, located near the exising one, is due to start in October.
Perrault, who attended the committee meeting, said the final cost of the project will be 192 million euros ($250 million), not including the cost of installing utilities. The estimated cost of construction has changed several times, as the Culture and Press Ministry, which is funding the project, has been urging the architect to build more cheaply.
Perrault’s designs have been significantly altered. The building will be 3 meters lower than first planned. The city’s chief architect Alexander Viktorov said the building’s 46-meter height caused many protests from local experts.
“The current height and size of the building … tactfully fit with the parameters originally intended for the entire historical center,” Viktorov said.
Viktorov stressed the building’s concept hasn’t changed and all the alterations only concern details. Some of the details are key to the design, however.
Significantly, the golden color of its dome has been abandoned.
“Made of aluminum, glass and bronze, the dome will reflect the sky and it will have the color of St. Petersburg’s weather,” Perrault said. “The dome will serve to create a special halo around the old building. From a certain perspective, it looks like raisins in a muffin.”
It was the golden “wrapping” of Perrault’s building that initially won him praise. Supporters of Perrault’s design welcomed his ideas from the start, comparing the new building’s silhouette with the golden cupolas of Orthodox churches, and opposed drastic changes.
After Perrault won the contest in July 2003, jury member Colin Amery, director of the World Monuments Fund in Britain, named the golden dome a key element in the French architect’s victory.
“I think [Perrault] won the competition because of the golden dome, and its symbolism for St. Petersburg,” Amery told The St. Petersburg Times then. “But I think it’s fair to say that there was a reservation about the practicality of that enormous glass structure in this climate. ... This was a major concern.”
Many St. Petersburgers said they would never accept the French design, branding it too revolutionary, or lacking in taste. One of the more harmless nicknames applied to the new building is “the golden potato.” Critics said Perrault’s design is too elaborate and not in keeping with the classical lines of the neighborhood.
Responding to the local architects’ request to create a stronger link between the historical building and the new one, Perrault has made apertures — meant to resemble windows in the Mariinsky Theater building — across the body of his creation.
Governor Valentina Matviyenko showed little enthusiasm at the signing ceremony in May 2004. Her speech implied a lot of work has to be done to harmonize Perrault’s designs with the surrounding architectural landscape.
“What you saw is not the final version,” she said. “We are going to ask the architect to make his design a harmonious component of the part of the city surrounding the historical building.”
Perrault offered a diplomatic answer when asked how he felt about the battles surrounding his design.
“In Paris, there are still people who hate the Eiffel Tower although it has long been seen as a symbol of the city,” he said Friday.
As for the changes to his design, Perrault compared them to tailoring a dress. “We already had a dress, we just made some alterations to make it suit the person, like shortening it a bit and changing the color,” he said.
Modern architecture often gets a tough reception in old cities. In 1984 Britain’s Prince Charles compared the then newly built Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square with “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.”
In St. Petersburg, Perrault said impatient audiences should be able to enter the new hall in the autumn of 2009.
“That is, if we work in efficient cooperation,” the architect was quick to add.
Earlier this month the Mariinsky Theater received more encouraging news from Moscow. The theater is set to get funding to transform its former warehouse located nearby on Ulitsa Pisareva, which burnt down in 2003, into a new concert hall.
TITLE: Akayev Agrees To Probe
AUTHOR: By Kadyr Toktogulov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: OSH, Kyrgyzstan — President Askar Akayev ordered a probe Monday into alleged election violations that have triggered demands for his resignation and weeks of increasingly violent protests across Kyrgyzstan.
Police, security forces and local officials in the nation’s second-largest city, Osh, fled Monday in the face of about 2,000 demonstrators, some armed with clubs and Molotov cocktails, some shouting: “Akayev, Go!” The protesters seized the governor’s office, regional police and security stations.
About 100 protesters later took control of Osh airport, where they met no resistance, police said.
The opposition has also taken control of government buildings in four other cities and towns across Kyrgyzstan’s impoverished south, Interior Ministry spokesman Nurdin Jangarayev said.
“This is a new day in our history,” exulted Omurbek Tekebayev, an opposition official in Osh.
“Power in Osh has been taken over by people! ... I congratulate you on our victory and urge you to maintain order,” another opposition member, Anvar Artykov, told the crowd.
On Sunday, protesters in the town of Jalal-Abad burned much of the police headquarters, freed 70 detained protesters and occupied the governor’s office. About 15,000 people were demonstrating peacefully in Jalal-Abad on Monday, a local government spokesman said, and the Interior Ministry said hundreds more were rallying in at least two other towns.
No casualties were reported Monday. Police denied media reports that up to 10 people might have died and that four officers had been beaten to death.
Nevertheless, the opposition demonstrations forced Akayev to take action. He ordered the Central Election Commission and the Supreme Court to investigate the elections, telling them “to pay particular attention to those districts where election results provoked extreme public reaction ... and tell people openly who is right and who is wrong,” said a statement from his office.
“The disputes need to be solved fully and fairly.”
Protests against Akayev, who has led the mainly Muslim nation for 15 years, began after parliamentary elections on Feb. 27, and swelled after subsequent runoffs that the opposition and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said were seriously flawed.
The Kyrgyz government has denied the accusation, and Russia joined the fray on Monday.
In Moscow, the Foreign Ministry condemned the protests, saying that “extremist forces must not be allowed to use political instability to create a threat to the democratic foundations of Kyrgyz statehood.”
It also rebuked the OSCE for its critical evaluation of the Kyrgyz elections, urging it to “be more responsible in formulating its conclusions to prevent destructive elements from using these assessments to justify their lawless actions.”
A Central Asia expert with Vremya Novostei, Arkady Dubnov, said the situation in Kyrgyzstan was irreversible.
“The only question now is when the government will be changed,” he told Ekho Mosvky radio. “What is happening today in Kyrgyzstan ... is the result of an absolute lack of professionalism on the part of the current authorities.”
He called the protests “another link” in the chain of political change sweeping through the former Soviet Union. Peaceful revolutions have swept Georgia and Ukraine in the past two years.
On Monday, Ukraine recalled Oleksandr Baldynyuk, its ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, because of a letter he wrote in support of the regional governor of Jalal-Abad. “I hope that common sense will prevail in the minds of people, which have been clouded by unjust and empty views,” he wrote, according to Ukraine’s Unian news agency.
Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Dmytro Svystkov said Baldynyuk’s “position contradicted the official position of Ukraine.”
Abdil Seghizbayev, an Akayev aide, vowed that security forces would not take action against the protesters, but he said peace talks would only be possible after order is restored. “Neither the authorities nor opposition leaders can control the crowd right now,” he said. “If an [opposition] leader emerges who can control the protesters, the government will be ready to talk to him.”
Kyrgyzstan’s opposition parties have long been fractured along regional lines and have resisted moves to unite them. With pressure on Akayev to step down, rival opposition leaders are positioning themselves as possible successors.
The opposition has charged that Akayev, who is prohibited from seeking another term, planned to manipulate the parliamentary vote to gain a compliant legislature that would amend the constitution to allow a third term. The 60-year-old leader has denied wanting another term.
TITLE: No Work Permits for Representative Offices
AUTHOR: By Kevin O’Flynn and Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Hundreds of expatriates might be refused work permits after the Federal Migration Service unexpectedly stopped issuing the documents to employees of scores of foreign companies, Western business leaders and lawyers said Monday.
Affected are expatriate staff at the representative offices and branches of foreign businesses, and employees and their companies face fines of more than $1,000 for each employee who does not have a work permit.
“The problems are accumulating very fast,” American Chamber of Commerce president Andrew Somers said Monday. “Essentially the government is saying that as a foreigner you must be employed by a Russian company, which excludes representative and branch offices.”
Somers said the change appeared to be an attempt to increase tax collection but warned that it was becoming a “serious inhibitor to operating here.” Repeated telephone calls to the Federal Migration Service and the migration department of the Moscow police went unanswered Monday. The migration service apparently modified its policy in January to bar companies that are not registered as “legal entities” from receiving the permits, according to businesspeople and lawyers familiar with the problem.
Foreign workers at representative and branch offices had been receiving work permits in the two years since the Law on Foreign Workers came into force in November 2002.
The law requires foreigners to have the permits, and when it was approved it was widely perceived as an attempt to stem the flow of illegal workers from impoverished former Soviet republics — not to create a headache for employees of well-establish companies.
“It cannot fail to upset investors because we are talking about tens of thousands of foreign workers,” said Sergei Melnikov of Your Lawyer, a law firm that specializes in visa and work regulation issues.
By law, a work permit lasts for one year and the migration service must respond to an application for a permit within one month. Over the past three months, however, the service has been holding onto the applications for much longer, foreign companies and lawyers said.
Companies whose foreign workers lack work permits face fines of 5,000 to 20,000 rubles per employee, and company heads can be fined up to 10,000 rubles per employee. The employee can also be fined up to 5,000 rubles.
Three major foreign companies contacted Monday refused to discuss the problem, saying the issue was too sensitive.
An official with a major Western accountancy said he first became aware of problems a year ago, when the migration service refused to issue work permits for some staff posted in regional offices. Migration officials began refusing everybody — including those employed at head offices in Moscow — from the start of this year, he said.
The official suggested that the change in policy might be aimed at forcing all foreign companies to set up local subsidiaries and bring all employees onshore. “Meanwhile, the cost of bringing everybody onshore can be very high, and not all the companies are interested in doing that,” he said.
Tim Carty, head of the human resources committee at the Association of European Businesses, said AEB’s members started reporting work permit problems in February. About 20 percent of the association’s 400 members are representative offices.
“The AEB has raised the issue with the government and the authorities in an attempt to determine an appropriate way forward,” said Carty, who is a partner at Ernst and Young’s Russian office.
Somers said he recently met with Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov’s chief of staff, Sergei Naryshkin, and won a promise that the matter would be investigated.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Starovoitova Progress
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) —The St. Petersburg City court on Monday finished the investigation part of the hearing in the trial of those accused of slaying State Duma Deputy Galina Starovoitova, Interfax reported.
The court heard final statements made by the defense and the evidence of two prosecution witnesses, which implicated one of the main suspects participating in the hearing, Yury Kolchin, a former military intelligence officer.
The court has scheduled to resume April 4.
Protesters Detained
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Police detained members of Yabloko’s youth branch on Saturday reportedly in an effort to stop a rally against racism in St. Petersburg, Interfax reported quoting the activists.
About 20 people participated in the rally in the city center holding posters “Let’s clean up the city from the brown [referring to Nazi brown shirts] plague” and “Stop racism” when some of them were stopped while crossing Nevsky Prospekt.
“These people were crossing Nevsky Prospekt outside a pedestrian crossing zone. We’ll take them to a police station and charge them with an administrative violation. We treat this precedent as a provocation of the police, but will act in accordance to the law,” Interfax cited an unidentified policeman as saying.
In a private conversation with organizers the police said they detained them in order to prevent the rally from going down Nevsky Prospekt, the report said.
All the detained activists were released soon after.
Ridiculous Sculptures
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) —A competition for the most ridiculous sculpture in cities and villages across Russia was announced by the Dmitry Likhachyov Foundation on Saturday, Interfax reported quoting organizers.
Participators are offered to send 2 or 4 photos of a sculpture, which they think is the most ridiculous, with a short description of its history.
The competition is scheduled to run until October.
The organizers believe there would be a few examples for nomination such as the city’s Nose of Major Kovalyov, the sculpture of a goat in the city of Uryupinsk, The Statue for the Merits of a Wolf in Tambov and The Statue for Merits of a Hare in the Pushkin Mountains.
No Change at City Hall
n ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Governor Valentina Matviyenko will not disband or change the way the city government is formed in order to obey a recent City Charter court decision, Interfax reported Saturday quoting City Hall.
The city court ruled this month that the city government was formed in 2003 with violations of the city charter, which says that members of the previous administration should be officially fired before the new government is appointed. Matviyenko did not do this.
“A group of lawyers is working on a way to solve this question and the answer of City Hall is being prepared at the moment,” she said.
Border Treaty Alive
TALLINN (SPT) — Estonian president Arnold Ruutel has denied concerns of Russian politicians that the scheduled border treaty between Russia and Estonia could be revised, Interfax reported Monday quoting the president.
“[According to the new treaty] some of the settlements that belonged to Estonia would be left on the Russian side. Many residents living on both sides of the border are not happy that the current border regime prevents them from interrelating with each other,” Interfax cited Ruutel as saying.
“This is, of course, one of the most emotionally loaded questions, which, only after solving would we be able to hope for fast growth of our trade and economic relations,” the president said.
TITLE: Gref : Privatization Is Way to Save Palaces
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The list of state-owned real estate that can be privatized, including architectural monuments such as palaces and historic buildings should be broadened, Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref said at a government meeting Thursday.
A substantial proportion of such buildings are in St. Petersburg.
The only buildings that should remain in federal ownership are those of national significance, such as the State Hermitage Museum, and the thousands of dilapidated houses and palaces should be handed over to businesses that, unlike the state, have the money to renovate them, Gref said.
Federal- and municipality-owned companies, which are poorly managed by the state, should also be auctioned off, he added.
“The high level of bureaucracy in the state structures is not in line with the dynamic demands of the market in the process of managing commercial projects,” a report presented by the minister to the government said.
The government approved the proposal and ordered the responsible governmental bodies to come up with implementation plans by April 20.
But Vladimir Yeryomenko, a member of the United Russia faction in the city’s Legislative Assembly, said Gref’s proposal, especially in relation to old buildings and palaces, has little chance of being approved by the State Duma.
“The process of approval is rather difficult,” Yeryomenko said Friday in a telephone interview. “It has to be passed by the State Duma and the Federation Council, but I think the United Russia faction of the State Duma will not support it.
“Is he talking about privatizing the foundations that remain of collapsed palaces or old palaces?” the lawmaker asked. “Besides, the government should take into account the historical and cultural significance of such architectural monuments and relieve the population of the burden.”
In April 2004, St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko gave the Stieglitz Palace at 68 Angliiskaya Naberezhnaya to LUKoil on the condition that the oil company invest $30 million in the renovation of the building.
In May that year, Matviyenko said one in 10 historical buildings in Russia is in St. Petersburg, but that City Hall does not have the money to pay for their restoration. She proposed transferring responsibility for 140 St. Petersburg historical monuments from federal bodies to the control of City Hall.
In June, the governor’s proposal was backed by Mikhail Shvydkoi, head of the Federal Culture and Cinematography Agency, but since then the government has not taken any further steps.
“So far [the government] has not returned to this topic,” said Natalya Kutabayeva, City Hall spokeswoman.
TITLE: Leading Cold War Diplomat Kennan Dies
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WASHINGTON — George Kennan, a prominent U.S. diplomat and historian who was an important architect of the containment policy designed to curb Moscow’s influence after World War II, has died at age 101.
Kennan died on Thursday night at his home in Princeton, New Jersey.
Kennan was key among U.S. diplomats in the wake of World War II in establishing the framework for policies toward Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union.
While serving as counselor at the U.S. Embassy in February 1946 and sick from flu and a toothache, Kennan answered Washington’s queries about Stalin by dictating a 5,542-word memo. Called by some authors the most influential cable in U.S. Foreign Service history, the “Long Telegram” outlined how the West could deal with the coming face-off with the Soviet Union.
Summoned to the State Department in Washington, Kennan wrote a highly influential article under the pseudonym “X” in Foreign Affairs quarterly in July 1947 setting out arguments for a policy of containing what he saw as Soviet expansionism.
Kennan argued the United States’ former wartime ally was seeking to expand its influence at the West’s expense — to “fill every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power.”
He urged the United States to pursue a “long-term, patient, but firm and vigilant containment” of the Soviet Union.
As the Cold War dragged on and containment became the justification for such undertakings as the Vietnam War, Kennan said his original proposal had been misunderstood.
He said he had not meant containment to entail the United States becoming a world policeman, and maintained the Soviet Union posed more of a political than a military challenge for the West.
Kennan, regarded as a foreign policy “dove” by the late 1960s, insisted Washington should vigorously pursue efforts at superpower detente and arms control.
In the 1980s, he frequently criticized the hard-line arms policy of the Reagan administration.
Kennan served in German and Baltic posts and was a member of the first U.S. diplomatic mission to Moscow in 1933. He also served in Berlin, Vienna and Prague, Czechoslovakia, in the late 1930s as Europe moved to world war.
Appointed ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1952, he served in the post only five months when he was declared persona non grata after comparing life in the U.S. Embassy to that in a Nazi internment camp.
A year later, he left the State Department to do research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and to lecture on foreign policy.
Kennan served as adviser on foreign affairs to Secretary of State Dean Acheson in 1949 and as ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1961 to 1963.
He wrote 17 books. Two of them, “Russia Leaves the War,” published in 1957, and “Memoirs: 1925-1950,” published in 1967, won Pulitzer prizes.
His last book, “Sketches From A Life,” compiled from his diaries, was published to enthusiastic reviews in 1989.
TITLE: Mobile Phone Jammers Worry Public
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Mobile phone calls made from at least two of St. Petersburg’s detention centers will soon be jammed, raising fears that residents and businesses living around them will also be affected.
“The jamming equipment is being installed in those St. Petersburg’s detention centers,” a spokesman for the Federal Punishment Service, or FISP, said in a telephone interview from Moscow on Monday. He declined to be identified.
One of the St. Petersburg sites is the notorious Kresty prison, which is located in the central city.
The FISP introduced the measure to prevent prisoners of detention centers, where people can spend many months before their case is brought to trial, from making illegal phone calls, the spokesman said.
“We had to introduce this measure to prevent prisoners from making unsanctioned communication with the outside world,” he said.
The FISP representative said that the first jamming systems were tested in January on three of seven detention centers in Mos cow.
The tests showed that not only mobile calls from detention centers are blocked by the technology used, but also calls made in a radius of 1.5 kilometers around them.
The punishment service said the jamming is being introduced to hinder those prisoners, who one way or another gain access to mobile phones. Although everyone who enters a prison is required to leave his mobile phone outside, some lawyers and even center employees illegally bring them to prisoners.
The jamming equipment is an ordinary computer that sends a message to the main station of a mobile operator and gives a command to switch off a subscriber who is trying to make a phone call from a cell.
Journalists of the Moscow office of Vedomosti, The St. Petersburg Times’ Russian-language sister newspaper, which is close to Moscow’s Detention Center No. 5, lost their mobile connections during the tests.
“It was very inconvenient and reporters were angry for many of their newsmakers usually reach them only on mobile phones,” Vedomosti reporter Svetlana Vitkovskaya said Monday.
Operators of all mobile phone companies also voiced their concern about the situation for they received complaints from their clients, who also had problems with mobile connection in the area of the capital’s Butyrki and Matrosskaya Tishina detention centers.
The FISP representative said the Moscow jamming equipment has been turned off while FISP specialists attempt to adapt it so that it will operate only inside prisons’ boundaries.
People held in detention centers were dissatisfied with the new measure, though they have no legal right to make calls, he added.
Similar mobile jammers are installed in prisons abroad, including in France.
One jammer costs about $100,000, meaning the Justice Ministry will have to spend millions of dollars to install such devices in all Russian prisons, Vedomosti reported.
The jammers are destined to be installed only in detention centers because this is where calls can do the worst damage to a case before it gets to court.
Vedomosti quoted a source in the Justice Ministry as saying that sometimes one mobile phone call is enough to ruin a criminal case.
TITLE: Basayev Says Maskhadov’s
Phone Calls Led to Demise
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev said Friday that rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov was not betrayed but tracked down by federal special services who had intercepted his telephone calls.
The Federal Security Service has said Maskhadov was killed by FSB commandos during a sweep in the Chechen village of Tolstoy-Yurt on March 8. It announced last week that it had paid a $10 million reward to “citizens” for providing information about Maskhadov’s whereabouts. The FSB also confirmed its pledge to pay $10 million for the information leading to Basayev’s capture or death.
“I often asked him to at least call from the town, but he wanted to speak from where he was, and I could not do anything with it,” Basayev said in a statement on the rebel Kavkaz Center web site. “Generally speaking, they established his location through his phone, and there wasn’t a betrayal.”
Basayev claimed that the Kremlin tricked Maskhadov into making a flurry of phone calls by secretly inviting him to participate in negotiations.
Maskhadov, who was elected Chechen president in 1997, had pressed the Kremlin to enter peace talks. “In this situation it was necessary to get more operative information from envoys abroad, and he began using the phone. ... He was calling the military units of mujahedin in the mountains very often,” Basayev said. “Initially, he used precaution and drove away from the village, but then he began receiving calls at home and even calling from home himself.”
TITLE: Group Slams Kidnappings
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Human Rights Watch said Monday that kidnappings in Chechnya carried out by pro-Moscow forces now constituted “a crime against humanity.”
Meanwhile, Chechen government officials in informal talks with human rights activists in Strasbourg, France, acknowledged that abuses had taken place, but said rights campaigners had exaggerated the scale of the problem.
In a report issued Monday, the New York-based watchdog said that between 3,000 and 5,000 civilians had been abducted in Chechnya since 1999 with the full knowledge of federal authorities.
According to the 57-page report, based on a fact-finding trip to Chechnya last month by HRW’s Moscow staff, Russian and Chechen officials have acknowledged the scale of the problem.
HRW blamed federal troops and pro-Moscow Chechen police for the vast majority of the abductions.
With not a single prosecution brought in abduction cases, HRW argued that the abductions constitute a crime against humanity.
Chechen President Alu Alkhanov said Monday that HRW had exaggerated the number of disappearances.
“We do admit that human rights and legal abuses are still a reality in Chechnya and that the state of affairs in the social and political sphere is not as good as it should be,” The Associated Press quoted him saying in Strasbourg.
TITLE: Bear Cub Attracts Attention
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Visitors to the city’s Leningrad Zoo were excited last week to see a three-month-old polar bear cub, who on Thursday came out of his lair with his mother Uslada for the first time.
The zoo is still a bit puzzled about the sex of the cub because they have not had the opportunity to determine it. However, the zoo’s experts say it is likely the cub is male, said Boris Topolyansky, the zoo’s spokesman.
This time Uslada gave birth to three cubs. It is not clear what happened to the missing two cubs, which were recorded by a video camera inside her lair just after they were born, he said.
Bears often kill cubs if they sense that they are ill or that they will be unable to feed them. Uslada has previously raised sets of two and three cubs, he added.
Zoo staff think that without siblings the cub will be bored and have appealed to visitors to bring hard toys for it.
Topolyansky said more than 50 toys, mostly balls, have been donated. Visitors have also brought a toy bone for the cub. The cub has already destroyed many of the balls by playing with them.
Uslada tries every new toy herself and only then allows her baby to play with it, he added.
Topolyansky asked visitors not to throw new toys into the bears’ enclosure, but to bring them to the zoo’s administration so that staff could ensure that they were suitable.
TITLE: Sotheby’s Auction House
Says Faberge Egg Genuine
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Sotheby’s auction house says the Spring Flowers Faberge egg, bought by Russian magnate Viktor Vekselberg last year, is genuine.
“The Spring Flowers Egg was carefully reviewed by both Sotheby’s and outside experts prior to its sale last year and at that time we saw no reason to question its authenticity,” Diana Phillips, a Sotheby’s spokeswoman, said in a written response to questions.
Last month, St. Petersburg expert Valentin Skurlov said that the egg, which Vekselberg bought just before Sotheby’s could auction it, is a fake. It is one of 15 Faberge eggs owned by Vekselberg that came from the estate of U.S. billionaire Malcolm Forbes.
Skurlov, who is a consultant for Christie’s auction house and the Culture and Press Ministry, said he found at least 10 aspects that showed that Faberge craftsmen did not make the egg.
“Despite Skurlov’s recent comments, we see no reason to question the egg’s attribution to Faberge,” Phillips said, adding that the Sotheby’s estimated the value of the egg at $700,000 to $900,000. Skurlov said that if it was confirmed that the egg is a fake, it would be worth little more than 20,000 euros.
Asked whether there is a tradition of paying compensation to a purchaser who bought an article which turned to be fake, Phillips said that “every situation is unique.”
The cost of Vekselberg’s purchase was not revealed, but media reports say he paid more than $100 million for the 180-piece collection that included the eggs.
Authentic eggs were once made by court jeweler Carl Faberge for the Russian royal family, who gave them as gifts on special occasions.
TITLE: Ikea to Carry Out Its Mega Ideas in Oblast
AUTHOR: By Sveta Skibinsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Ikea, the home-furnishings giant, will begin construction of a mega-complex and a new store in the Leningrad Oblast before the end of the year, with total investment in the area reaching $300 million.
The company, which has four stores in Russia — two in Moscow and one each in St. Petersburg and Kazan, has long announced its intentions to build more stores in the northwest region, but was previously unable to confirm locations.
At the meeting with the Oblast Governor Valery Serdyukov Friday, Anders Binmyr, Ikea Russia’s deputy general director for real estate, said the company picked a 30-hectare land plot in the town of Bugri, in the Leningrad Oblast, to host the company’s fifth Russian store.
Construction will begin this summer, Binmyr said.
The land plot neighbors the Eastern part of the city’s ring road. The expected increase in traffic that the presence of an Ikea store will create has already made the area more favorable to other investors.
One of the reasons for the store’s location was the lack of space within the city limits of St. Petersburg, a spokesperson for Ikea said.
“We found that the city simply had no suitable land plots that were large enough,” Maria Ivanova, Ikea’s project coordinator, said Monday in a phone interview.
Investments in the new store are approximated at $40 million, the same amount as was spent on opening Ikea’s Kudrovo store.
Meanwhile, the Kudrovo store will be upgraded to a MEGA center, similar to the one Ikea finally managed to open in Moscow by the end of 2004.
To turn the store, which opened in December 2003, into an entertainment and retail complex, the company will spend about 250 million euros ($329.4 million), Ivanova said. The design for the complex includes five to seven separate buildings, as well as an ice-skating rink.
“The mega center will be like the one operating in Himki [in the Moscow region],” Ivanova said.
The developer for the complex, which will occupy a 60-hectare territory Ikea leased from the Leningrad Oblast in 2003, has not yet been determined, and neither have the possible tenants.
“We will hold a tender for the tenants in the near future,” Ivanova said.
Possible tenants include up-scale retailer Stockmann and French supermarket chain Auchan.
The developer of the current store in Kudrovo was Turkish firm Emka, also the general developer of the Ramstore hypermarket chain.
Russia is set to see much more of the Netherlands-based company as Ikea plans to open up to 22 more outlets around the country within the next 15 years.
Ikea Russia’s spokeswoman Irina Vanenkova said last year that the company was confident it could tap into a booming consumer demand in the country.
TITLE: JTI Picks Up Another $15M Tax Bill
AUTHOR: By Sveta Skibinsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Another subsidiary of Japan Tobacco International (JTI), St. Petersburg-based factory Petro, has been handed a $15 million back-tax bill by the federal tax service.
The latest claim, which adds to the $79 million bill the tax authorities presented before the JTI’s marketing and sales division, has already been slammed by some within the company as part of a game by the officials bent on limiting the tobacco manufacturer’s expansion in Russia.
“The company confirms that it has received a back tax claim from the St. Peterburg branch of the federal tax authorities against its Petro factory for the 2001 tax year. The total sum, including the fines, makes up about $15 million,” Andrei Yerin, spokesperson for JTI in Russia, said Monday in an e-mailed statement.
Yerin added that the claim, which was received at the beginning of this month, will be fought through courts.
“The company categorically disagrees with the validity of the claims and will defend its position in St. Petersburg’s court of appeals at the hearing on April 20,” the statement said.
Tax authorities’ grievance against the world’s No. 3 cigarette maker JTI started at the end of last year, when officials issued an initial claim for what they maintained were unpaid taxes for 2000.
According to division No. 41 of the Tax Ministry, the claim results from the difference in official company numbers and those used internally between JTI’s marketing and sales division and Petro.
The involvement of another division of JTI in the tax claim was read as a deliberate moot gesture from the authorities by some at the tobacco firm.
“This is just another step in the tax authorities’ game, who are now going to fight two entities instead of one,” Irina Galiyeva, JTI marketing and sales media relations manager, said Monday in a telephone interview. Galiyeva would not comment further on the situation.
The general director of JTI marketing and sales, Rick Cofield, went as far as saying the tax authorities’ actions hindered the company’s expansion in Russia — incredible considering that Petro was awarded with a “best taxpayer” diploma by the city recently.
“The demands for Petro together with the demands presented to the sales and marketing venture earlier recall the feelings of uncertainty and instability from the company’s management,” Cofield told business daily Kommersant. “[They] undermine the possibility of further development of our company in Russia.”
The company is one of the largest tax payers in the region and is the second-largest tobacco manufacturer in Russia after American Philip Morris.
In an earlier comment to The St. Petersburg Times, Vasily Dermanov, associate professor at the Stockholm School of Economics in Russia, called the claims against JTI the “erroneous interpretation of well-accepted business practices.
“Every major international company employs such tax minimization schemes, and thus the case can serve exemplary for future tax revisions,” Dermanov said.
n The country’s third-largest oil producer TNK-BP reported Monday that they expect their 2005 tax bill to rise to $10 billion, Interfax said. The joint venture said it expects to pay at least $10 billion in taxes this year, up from $6.5 billion last year, Interfax reported, citing Chief Executive Officer Robert Dudley.
Last week Dudley said that TNK-BP’s 2004 net income probably rose 43 percent to about $4 billion, Interfax reported.
Staff writer Yuriy Humber contributed to this report.
TITLE: UES, Fortnum Battle for Power Sector Control
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian power monopoly Unified Energy System, Nordic energy group Fortum, a presidential envoy and several businessmen have emerged as candidates for the board of a new $1 billion power firm being formed as part of Russia’s utility reforms.
Interfax agency said Monday that Fortum had put forward three candidates and UES four candidates for the 11-seat board of the northwestern regional power generation company TGC-1, which Fortum has valued at $1,023 billion.
Other candidates seeking seats on the TGC-1 board are presidential envoy to the Northwest Federal District, Lyubov Sovershayeva; industrial group Interros’ managing director, Andrei Bugrov; Lonburg Limited General Director James Gerson and Lenenergo General Director Andrei Likhachev, Interfax said.
Fortum will have an 18 percent stake in TGC-1, which is being formed by UES together with three northwestern regional power companies, St Petersburg-based Lenenergo, Kolenergo and Karelenergo.
TGC-1 is being formed as part of Russia’s long-delayed electricity sector privatisation plan, which envisages the spin-off of UES generation and distribution assets.
TGC-1, which stands for Territorial Generating Company No. 1, is due to start operating in July.
Interfax said officials of Lenenergo, Karelenergo and Kolenergo met at the weekend for TGC-1’s founding meeting.
Fortum owns 30.7 percent of Lenenergo, which is 49 percent owned by UES.
Fortum has said Lenenergo will receive a 63 percent stake in the charter capital of TGC-1, while co-founders Kolenergo and Karelenergo will receive 25 percent and 12 percent respectively.
TGC-1 will initially lease generation assets of Lenenergo and Kolenergo, which are owned 49 percent by UES, as well as assets from utility Karelenergo, 100 percent owned by UES.
TITLE: State May Ask Oil Firms For $214M ‘Cooperation’
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: LONDON — The government may ask oil producers to pay for two ice for building two ice breakers worth $214 million to ensure navigation in the country’s largest Baltic Sea oil port.
The state has invested only 190 million rubles ($6.7 million) of the 2.9 billion rubles needed this year for the ships’ construction, Transport Minister Igor Levitin said Monday.
The ice breakers have to be built to ensure shipments of as much as 1.24 million barrels a day from the port of Primorsk next year.
“The port will service between 50 and 70 tankers a month with 100,000 tons or more dead-weight,” he said in a speech in Moscow, distributed by e-mail to news services. “I can see a solution in cooperation of financial resources to secure private funds of oil business on the basis of state-and-private partnership.”
Transneft, Russia’s oil pipeline monopoly, may expand the capacity of its Baltic oil pipeline to the port of Primorsk near St. Petersburg to the planned maximum by April 2006.
Russia’s oil output, has surged about 50 percent since 1999, straining pipeline capacity.
State-owned oil producer Rosneft, which is being taken over by Gazprom, proposed the ministry build new ice-breakers to allow tankers to ship oil in the Arctic between the ports of Dikson and Murmansk, Levitin said.
“This can be an example of such cooperation’’ in relation to Primorsk, he said.
The ice-breakers are being built at Baltic Plant JSC, one of St. Petersburg’s biggest ship-building companies that constructs nuclear ice-breakers, tankers, refrigerator ships, boats, and yachts.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: VTB Stake on Sale
n MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia will sell a stake in Vneshtorgbank, the nation’s second-biggest lender, through an initial public offering rather than a sale to a foreign bank, Vedomosti reported, citing the bank’s president Andrei Kostin.
Vneshtorgbank, which is 100 percent state-owned, won’t sell a stake to a foreign lender, Kostin said at a press conference in Kiev with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to the paper.
The Moscow-based bank had been in talks in 2003 to sell a minority stake to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Financial Corp. Last year, Kostin said Vneshtorgbank was in talks to sell a stake to Deutsche Bank AG and Mediobanca SpA, Italy’s largest investment bank.
Tatneft Wins in Syria
n NISCOSIA, Syria (Bloomberg) — Tatneft, the country’s seventh-largest oil producer, won the right to explore for oil and natural gas in eastern Syria, Ath-Thawra newspaper said.
The agreement signed Sunday in Damascus with the state-owned Syrian Petroleum Co. allows Tatneft to explore in a plot near the Iraqi border and to take between 25 and 30 percent of any oil it produces there, the Syrian state-owned newspaper said.
The contract requires Tatarstan, Russia-based Tatneft to spend $7 million on exploration in three years and can be renewed twice, for two-year periods during which the company will have to spend $6.3 million and $12.8 million respectively, Ath-Thawra said.
Cardboard Expansion
n ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Ilim Pulp, the city-based timber and wood processing corporation, will invest more than $100 million into corrugated cardboard packaging manufacturing by 2009, the company said Monday, Interfax reported.
“Ilim Pulp is creating a new line. The corrugated cardboard division will be orientated towards having a $300 million capitalization and initial investments will form $100 million,” the company told Interfax.
Over the next five years, the company will be looking to either buy or construct five factories to manufacture the cardboard. An Ilim Pulp spokesperson said the company was intially interested in building a new plant in St. Petersburg or the Leningrad Oblast. Meetings with potential subcontractors are taking place at the moment, the company said.
TITLE: The Forgotten History of Dissent and Hope
AUTHOR: By Alexei Bayer
TEXT: In the 100 years since the democratic revolution in 1905, Russia has suffered more wrenching, radical changes than probably any other nation on earth. Yet, strangely, it remains deeply rooted in its history, if not imprisoned by it.
That was something Lenin’s Bolsheviks found out soon after importing into Russia a creed born of the Western Enlightenment and further fashioned by German political philosophers. The system meant as a new stage in world history quickly became Russified, and its architects began searching for antecedents in Russia’s past. The 1917 Revolution was variously portrayed as a descendent of the Cossack rebellions of Stepan Razin in the 17th century and Emelyan Pugachev in the 18th century, or even of the Decembrist plot hatched by high-born officers in 1825.
The deep conservatism of Russian society and the lightning-fast changes it endured help explain one of the more ridiculous patterns of Russian politics: Each new Russian leader tends to reject and vilify his predecessor and promise a clean break, a renewal or a purification. Meanwhile, the population at large keeps pining away for past rulers and idealized regimes.
There is, therefore, nothing new or extraordinary in the current wave of nostalgia for the communist past that has inundated Russia. Nor is it any surprise that the government of President Vladimir Putin both promotes and exploits such nostalgia for its own ends. Actually, it is a rational nation-building strategy: to honor the past, warts and all, while building a democratic future within the community of nations.
That’s what most other countries seem to do. The United States, for example, remains proud of its democracy and Constitution, despite harboring dark skeletons in its historical closet, such as slavery and racial discrimination.
The question is which past a nation chooses to honor. In Putin’s Russia, the rehabilitation of old Soviet heroes is now in full swing. Deputies in the State Duma periodically cry for a return of the statue of blood-soaked Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky to its original place in front of FSB headquarters on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad. Monuments and memorials to Yury Andropov, a longtime chief of the KGB and Putin’s old boss, have appeared in Russian cities. Even Stalin’s name is attaining a measure of legitimacy under the pretext of celebrating the 60th anniversary of Russia’s victory in World War II.
The revival of this particular pantheon is all the more troubling since it is set against the backdrop of the complete oblivion reserved for Soviet-era dissidents, who are the true heroes of recent Russian history. A few months ago, while working on a column for Vedomosti, I tried to look up information on a group of Moscow ninth-graders who in 1966 were caught distributing anti-Stalinist leaflets. I had a personal interest in the story, since those kids were upperclassmen at my own school, and we all suffered from the resultant crackdown.
The leader of the group, Irina Kaplun, was later expelled from Moscow State University for organizing a protest rally on Stalin’s 90th birthday. She became a human rights activist and in 1980 died in a suspicious car crash while collecting information for the samizdat journal, the Chronicle of Current Events.
I found these facts in an old issue of the Chronicle on the web site of the human rights group Memorial. Another reference to Kaplun turned up in an old posting on the site of Gratitude, a charitable fund set up in New York to help former dissidents. Without naming them, the fund announced that Kaplun’s elderly mother and teenage daughter were in dire need of financial assistance.
In general, the Russian Internet has surprisingly little information about the dissident movement. And, as the popular saying goes, if you are not on the web, you don’t exist.
These days, on the 20th anniversary of Mikhail Gorbachev’s important reforms, much debate has been focused on the nature of perestroika and glasnost. But all you really need to know about the post-Soviet Russia engendered by his perestroika is that people who fought for democracy and freedom in the Soviet Union have been utterly forgotten here.
Though small, the human rights movement made an important contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ousting of the Communist Party. Meticulously and nonviolently, human rights activists insisted that the authorities uphold their own laws. Just as importantly, they undermined the myth of monolithic Soviet society. And most importantly, demands put forward by dissidents — such as the rule of law, the freedom of speech, religious tolerance, ethnic self-determination and emigration — supposedly constitute the legal foundation of post-Soviet Russia, the basic law of which Putin has sworn to defend.
For a short time at the start of perestroika, dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov provided a measure of moral authority. After the Soviet Union collapsed, some elements in the newly liberated Russia sought to establish a direct lineage between Boris Yeltsin’s regime and the human rights movement. But it got no further than naming a sterile Brezhnevite artery through the center of Moscow’s Sakharov Prospekt. There were timid plans for a monument as well, but since the advent of the Putin administration, Sakharov’s widow, Yelena Bonner, has been opposed to the idea. Today, the project seems utterly irrelevant.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” wrote author William Faulkner. It may still be true in the American South, and it is certainly very true in Russia. It is highly symbolic, then, that as the Putin administration slides toward Brezhnevism, its subservient prosecutors have decided to go after Yury Samodurov, the director of the Andrei Sakharov Museum and Public Center in Moscow, for an exhibit related to religious freedom. The fact that Sakharov is, albeit indirectly, being tried on trumped-up charges in a kangaroo court means that, despite the false hope of the 1990s, the work of the Soviet dissidents begun in the 1960s and 1970s is far from finished.
Alexei Bayer is an economist based in New York and writes the Globalist column for Vedomosti. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Free Housing Is an Illusion No One Wants to Give Up
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Gryaznevich
TEXT: A significant part of the new Housing Code that came into force on March 1 is dedicated to the position of the government on the provision of housing. Forty-two articles in the third part of the code talk about the rules under which citizens are allocated state apartments.
The politicians and community leaders who have been criticizing the Housing Code talk almost exclusively about this part. Their main idea is that the state has canceled out yet another of the achievements of socialism — the right to free housing. According to the many critics, since March 1 the state has offered free housing only to the poor, and without the right to privatize. By and large this claim in untrue.
It’s true that state housing is not allowed to be privatized. Nonetheless, it will continue to be offered and not only to the poor, but to a large number of citizens. This is clearly stated in point 3 of article 49. The state of affairs list of dwellings that cannot be privatized covers not only federal but also regional laws. In addition, the Housing Code does not set any special limits to this list.
As before, free housing is provided to citizens whose needs are greatest. For instance, in point 2 of article 57 it is directed that the only people who can receive housing ahead of the waiting list are those whose residences are unfit for habitation and unsuitable for repairs or reconstruction. Others who are entitled to skip the waiting list are orphans, children who are not supported by their parents and citizens who suffer from chronic illnesses.
Practically all categories under which citizens, or more precisely families, can be considered in need of housing have been retained. This includes the main criteria — that each member of a family is entitled to a certain number of square meters according to norms that are calculated. It is interesting that this criteria is not linked to the form of ownership of a home. This means that if a large family lives in its own mansion, but its living space per person is less than the norm, then that family is entitled to be put on the waiting list for free housing.
The most important conditions for the right to free housing have been retained. Article 60 states that the right to state housing is unlimited in time and that a change in the circumstances that led to residents obtaining the right to the dwelling is not a reason for the provision of the dwelling to cease. That is to say that if someone gets a free state apartment, and then becomes a dollar millionaire, they won’t take the apartment off him. Only one thing has changed — now the millionaire cannot sell the apartment, since, you remember, it cannot be privatized. But most citizens can cope with that. The right to residence is more important than being able to sell a residence.
In this way, almost everything has remained as it was. And there is one very important condition – the right of citizens to free housing remains, but it is almost impossible to realize that right for the absolute majority of those on waiting lists.
Even in Soviet times the waiting lists grew much faster than new square meters of residential space constructed by the state. At the end of the 1980s, the waiting lists took decades to clear. At the beginning of the 1990s in St. Petersburg state construction of apartments almost stopped. The only people who got apartments were those who lived in condemned buildings, and even then only with great efforts.
In the last 15 years it has become completely obvious that the state cannot and never will be able to offer free housing to all those on the waiting list. And the reason for this is not the fault of an especially ineffective government, but in changes to the socio-economic systems in Russia.
The market revolution that began in 1991 radically reduced the powers of the state and its ability to organize the lives of citizens. Now citizens themselves should build their own lives and solve their most important problems, including housing. To put it another way, it was Russians themselves who took away the ability of the government to provide them with free housing.
It’s true that in return we expected that we would receive the possibility of buying a residence with the fruits of our labors, which is the case in developed countries. But that is still impossible for the absolute majority of Russians to this day. Looking for who is to blame is pointless, because everybody is guilty. The mechanism of paying for a residence, for instance, using a mortgage, works only in sufficiently developed countries – where wages are decent, inflation is low, the political system is stable, the banking sector is developed and there is a market for residential construction. Russia still doesn’t have any of that.
It’s our duty to create a Russia that has all these things, and to do that we must vote not with our hearts, but with our minds. That means not supporting politicians who call for the strengthening of our defensive capacity that leads to spending billions on military machinery, but those who really want to strengthen the economy of the country by adopting the widely approved methods of the civilized world.
The government, not wanting another people’s revolt like that which followed the reform of in-kind benefits, has decided to preserve the illusion of being able to solve the housing question. In accordance with tradition, Russians believe that if they are put on a waiting list, sooner or later they will be at the front of the line. The administrators know that they are unable to provide people with housing, but they know that they can maintain the illusion. It’s like medicine for a nervous breakdown. Maybe they are right.
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: Thousands Homeless After Japanese Quake
AUTHOR: By Shizuo Kambayashi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: FUKUOKA, Japan — Thousands of people took refuge at shelters Monday as aftershocks battered southern Japan a day after a powerful magnitude-7.0 earthquake damaged or destroyed hundreds of homes, leaving one person dead and hundreds injured.
The tremor hit early Sunday off Japan’s southern main island of Kyushu near Fukuoka city and was followed by some 100 aftershocks, giving the region’s residents a jittery night, the Meteorological Agency said.
The worst damage occurred on Genkai island, near the epicenter, where the earthquake triggered landslides and leveled homes. In all, 780 homes were damaged and 18 destroyed — most of them on Genkai, the National Police Agency said.
A 75-year-old woman in Fukuoka died after a section of stone wall fell on her. Hundreds of other people — mostly in Fukuoka and Saga states — were injured by toppling cabinets, falling objects and shattered glass. At least 400 people were treated at hospitals, public broadcaster NHK reported.
The Meteorological Agency on Sunday warned of a possible tsunami but lifted the warning about an hour later.
A Fukuoka prefectural police spokesman said the initial jolt, which lasted about 30 seconds, made it difficult to stand. Water and gas pipes burst, hundreds of homes reported power outages and landslides reportedly triggered a safety mechanism that halted local and bullet train services.
NHK footage showed tall office buildings and street lamps in the center of Fukuoka shaking violently. In residential areas, cracks appeared in sidewalks and parts of retaining walls flaked off.
About 120 Japanese troops flew to Genkai island to offer food and medical aid. Except for some local officials, all of the island’s 750 residents were evacuated to neighboring Fukuoka city, prefectural official Eiji Tsukamoto said.
As of Monday morning, nearly 2,800 people in Fukuoka state had been evacuated to temporary shelters with more people expected to join them, he said.
“Aftershocks are still continuing rather frequently,” Tsukamoto said.
Police, defense troops and local officials toured Genkai to assess the damage. “Many houses had collapsed, or may collapse any minute,” police official Kazuhiko Maekawa said. “I must say we were lucky that the number of injuries was relatively small.”
Fukuoka Mayor Hirotaro Yamasaki walked through rows of damaged houses with roofs caving in on Genkai and said he was considering building temporary housing for people who lost homes.
“Looks like we have to rebuild this place from the scratch,” Yamasaki said.
Sunday’s quake was centered 5 miles below the seabed, close to Genkai island. Nearby Fukuoka is about 560 miles southwest of Tokyo.
A magnitude-7.0 quake can devastate heavily populated areas. Sunday’s temblor didn’t directly hit a populated area, and injuries and damage were minimized by Japan’s quake-safe buildings.
Located along the Pacific Ocean’s seismically active “Ring of Fire,” Japan is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries.
TITLE: Slutskaya Overcomes Anguish
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Irina Slutskaya stood on the podium, giving her gold medal a playful bite and kiss. Gone, for the moment, was all the anguish — the heart ailment, the knee injury, the family troubles — that posed such a burden these last few years.
Slutskaya won the title for the second time at the world championships, combining strength and style to cap an extraordinary season and more than meet the expectations of her home fans. She finished ahead of Sasha Cohen who won the silver medal for the second straight year.
“My hands are still shaking,” Slutskaya said at her victory news conference Saturday. “I hope I will serve as a good role model to people who feel bad and have no faith in themselves.
“This gold medal is probably the dearest to me in all my collection,” she added. “I was sick and I still could come back.”
The 26-year-old Russian delivered a bold and draining program. She gave a double thumbs-up to the crowd afterward, her face beaming.
“I’m happy because it’s so difficult to come back so many times, to suffer so many misfortunes,” said Slutskaya, who missed the 2003 worlds because of her ailing mother.
Carolina Kostner of Italy won the bronze. Michelle Kwan the five-time world champion, was fourth, the first time since 1996 the American finished a world championship without a medal.
“I can leave Moscow satisfied, but disappointed, satisfied — kind of a roller-coaster ride and not as consistent as I wanted it to be,” Kwan said.
The only indication of Slutskaya’s health problems — an inflamed heart lining for which she’s taking medication — was an apparent ebbing of energy in the steps sequence near the end of the program. Her confident skate to jazzy piano music was in striking contrast to the worlds a year ago in Dortmund, Germany, where she was low on energy and uncertain, finishing ninth.
Russian skaters won gold in three of the four events, failing only in the men’s after defending champion Yevgeny Plushenko withdrew because of a groin injury.
TITLE: Zenit Takes the Lead As League Rivals Stumble
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: FC Zenit St. Petersburg took pole position in Russia’s Premier League on Sunday as a 3-0 away win over helpless Alania Vladikavkaz left its rivals eating dust.
It was Dynamo Moscow’s Portuguese striker Miguel Gomes who shone brightest on the day, however, in a sensational 2-1 win in a Moscow derby against Torpedo.
Dynamo staged a brave comeback on frosty home turf after conceding a headed goal from Torpedo’s Estonian striker Andres Oper midway through the first half.
The police club’s attacking midfielder Gomes drew level just before the interval.
Then, in the 69th minute, the striker grabbed the ball in his own half, blasted it past four defenders to square it left to Vladimir Bestchastnykh, who struck home the winner.
Six clubs had maximum points after the opening round last week, but Zenit now has the lead to itself after all its rivals lost points. CSKA was upset with a goalless draw by league newcomer Tom Tomsk and title-holder Lokomotiv Moscow was forced to settle for a disappointing 0-0 draw against FK Moskva at home.
In other action on Sunday, it was: Spartak Moscow 3, Rubin Kazan 0; Terek Grozny 2, Krylya Sovietov Samara 0; Saturn Ramenskoye 2, Amkar Perm 0; Rostov 2, Shinnik Yaroslavl 2.
TITLE: Annan Calls for UN Reforms
AUTHOR: By Edith M. Lederer
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: UNITED NATIONS — Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for the boldest changes to the United Nations in the history of the world body, saying they are needed to tackle global threats in the 21st century. But getting leaders to agree on the package won’t be easy.
Some questioned the timing of his appeal, just before former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker releases the results of his investigation into corruption in the UN oil-for-food program in Iraq. In particular, Volcker is looking into the activities of Annan and his son, Kojo, who worked in Africa for a company that had an oil-for-food contract.
The scandal is one of several that have dogged the world body this year. The sex abuse by peacekeeping troops in Congo and the resignation of the UN.refugee chief amid sexual harassment charges have also tainted the UN image.
Mark Malloch Brown, the secretary-general’s chief of staff, dismissed media claims that Annan’s report was “a panicked response” to the UN’s problems.
“Look at it as the secretary-general refusing to be distracted,” he said.
Annan is proposing the most extensive overhaul of the world body since it was founded in 1945. His reform package calls for a realignment of the United Nations to give additional weight to key development, security and human rights issues. It also sets out plans to make the world body more efficient, open, and accountable — including strengthening the independence and authority of the UN’s internal watchdog.
Volcker’s report is expected by the end of March, but Annan is operating on the belief that he will be cleared: He has invited world leaders to a summit in September to consider the reform package, which was released Sunday ahead of its presentation to the UN General Assembly on Monday.
“These are reforms that are within reach — reforms that are actionable if we can garner the necessary political will,” Annan said in the introduction to the report, which called 2005 “a historic opportunity” to create a better life for millions of people.
He urged the leaders to “act boldly” and adopt “the most far-reaching reforms in the history of the United Nations.”
But getting leaders of all 191 UN member states to agree on the package will be a challenge.
“It’s a very well-prepared gamble,” Malloch Brown said, urging world leaders to adopt the package by consensus in September.
“For us, the key point is that the deal holds together,” he said. “This is a package. Don’t go for a la carte shopping on it.”
One of the major proposals in the package calls for a new Human Rights Council as a major UN organ — possibly on a par with the Security Council — to replace the Geneva-based Commission on Human Rights. That panel has long faced criticism for allowing the worst-offending countries to use their membership to protect one another from condemnation.
“The creation of the council would accord human rights a more authoritative position,” and put it on the same level as security and development, Annan said.
Annan also called for an expansion of the UN Security Council to reflect the global realities today, but he left the details to the General Assembly. He urged its members to decide on a plan before the September summit, preferably by consensus, but if that’s impossible by a vote.
The report said the Security Council already has the authority under the UN Charter to use military force, even preventively, but it should adopt a resolution specifying the criteria for decisions on whether to use force.
The criteria should include the seriousness of the threat, whether non-military action could stop it, and whether there is a reasonable chance that military action would succeed.
In cases of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, Annan urged all states to accept that there is a “responsibility to protect” those being killed, which requires collective action.
Currently, the report noted, half the countries emerging from violent conflict revert to conflict within five years. To prevent the return to war, Annan called for the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission, as well as a Democracy Fund to provide money and technical expertise to countries seeking to establish or strengthen their democracy.
TITLE: U.S. Envoy Asks for China’s Help to Curb Korean Crisis
AUTHOR: By Anne Gearan
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING — U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hinted Monday that North Korea faces possible international sanctions if it flouts a diplomatic effort to halt its nuclear weapons program.
Rice also delivered subtle rebukes to China for raising the stakes in the perennial standoff with Taiwan and for the communist country’s limitations on religious freedom.
“I made the point… that I do hope there is an understanding that religious liberties are not a threat to changing societies,” Rice said at a press conference.
Rice said she asked Chinese leaders for more help to bring the North Koreans back to the six-way weapons talks. The Pyongyang regime has said it already has at least one nuclear weapon and has given no indication it is ready to bargain further.
“It goes without saying that to the degree that a nuclear free Korean peninsula gets more difficult to achieve if the North does not recognize that it needs to do that then of course we’ll have to look at other options,” Rice said at a press conference.
Rice did not spell out a fallback position, but it could include seeking tough economic sanctions on North Korea through the United Nations Security Council. Theoretically, the United States might also launch a military attack, although Rice and other U.S. officials have repeatedly said they do not intend to do that.
“Obviously everyone is aware that there are other options in the international system,” Rice said.
At the news conference, Rice said she told Chinese leaders the United States is unhappy with the recent passage of a law codifying China’s intent to use military force if Taiwan formally breaks away.
The law, she said, “was not a welcome development because anything that increases tensions… is not good.
“China and Taiwan cannot do this alone. They are eventually going to need one another to resolve this… We are not pleased when either side does anything unilaterally.”
Rice reiterated U.S. opposition to the potential lifting of an international arms embargo on China, a move the European Union seemed sure to take before the recent escalation of tensions with Taiwan.
Rice said she didn’t discuss the embargo specifically with the Chinese, but she sounded encouraged by recent remarks from British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw that may signal that the EU is rethinking its plan.
Beijing was the final stop on a weeklong tour of Asian capitals for Rice, and it was the most delicate for America’s new chief diplomat. President Bush’s second-term pledge to carry democratic ideals around the globe has met with suspicion in China, where government control remains a strong and constant fact of daily life.
The United States is cooperating with China on several fronts, including the talks over North Korea’s nuclear program. But Washington has complaints about China’s record on human rights, its treatment of dissidents and the rampant piracy of movies, books and other goods.
TITLE: AK Bars’ Deep Pockets Fail To Assure Top Performance
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: The best team money can buy is on the brink of elimination in the Russian hockey league playoffs.
AK Bars Kazan, with 15 locked-out NHLers on its roster, lost the second home game of the best-of-five quarter-finals against Lokomotiv Yaroslavl on Saturday and can be eliminated in a three-game sweep when the series was due to resume Monday in Yaroslavl.
After losing Game 1 on Friday by a 2-1 score, AK Bars was leading Game 2 3-1 after the first period but lost 4-3 after New York Islanders centre Alexei Yashin scored two goals and added one assist to key Yaroslavl’s comeback.
Vincent Lecavalier of the Tampa Bay Lightning scored one goal for AK Bars while Atlanta Thrashers winger Dany Heatley had one assist.
Kazan also has Nikolai Khabibulin of the Lightning in goal, as well as Thrashers star Ilya Kovalchuk and former Montreal Canadiens winger Alexei Kovalev up front.
Another heavy favorite is also facing elimination Monday as defending Russian and European Cup champion Avangard Omsk also went down two games to nothing to Metallurg Magnitogorsk with Saturday’s 2-1 loss.
The usually potent Avangard offence, led by New York Rangers sniper Jaromir Jagr, has only scored three goals in two games on San Jose Sharks goaltender Yevgeny Nabokov.
Elsewhere, 2004 first overall NHL draft pick Alexander Ovechkin and Detroit Red Wings centre Pavel Datsiuk had one goal each in Dynamo Moscow’s 4-2 win over Neftekhimik Nizhnekamsk as the winner of the Superleague’s regular season grabbed 2-0 lead in their series.
Meanwhile in the Swedish playoffs on Saturday, Rangers prospect Henrik Lundqvist won the duel against Habs star Jose Theodore in the battle between the two hottest goalies in Sweden.
Theodore’s Djurgarden Stockholm dominated at home in the first game of the best-of-seven semifinal, but Lundqvist made 27 saves as his Frolunda Gothenburg stole a 2-1 victory.
Farjestad, playing without the suspended Zdeno Chara (Ottawa) but with Montreal’s Sheldon Souray, defeated Sodertalje (with NHLers Kyle Calder and Scott Thornton) 4-2 on the road in Game 1 of the other semifinal matchup.
In the Swiss league playoffs on Saturday, Boston Bruins centre Joe Thornton was ejected from Game 4 of the HC Davos-SC Bern semifinal after a two-hand slash against Bern goaltender Marco Buhrer. Florida’s Niklas Hagman scored the winning goal for Davos with seven minutes remaining.
TITLE: Federer’s Eclectic Skills Give Win
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: INDIAN WELLS, California — Roger Federer has all the obvious talents needed to be a tennis star: a good serve, powerful and accurate groundstrokes, and quick reflexes at the net.
The subtle parts of his game may be what sets Federer apart from everyone else.
The world’s No. 1 player has raised his game several notches, evident in a 6-2 6-4 6-4 victory over No. 2 Lleyton Hewitt on Sunday to defend his Pacific Life Open title.
Federer is deceivingly quick on the court and has a fine instinct for knowing where he should be. It seems almost as if he’s watching his opponent play in slow motion, anticipating what shot is coming at him next.
Then, there’s the tennis savvy.
Early in his match against Hewitt, Federer noticed the Australian seemed to be having a leg or foot problem, so he adjusted his game to take advantage.
Hewitt was slowed by sore toes, but said he probably wouldn’t have won anyway. He gave Federer full credit.
“That’s sort of the standard that he’s put himself in week in and week out,” Hewitt said of his opponent’s outstanding play. “It’s not like he’s doing something freaky, out of the blue.
“If you want to be the best player in the world, you’ve got to look at where the benchmark is. And he’s set it pretty high.”
Federer has won 42 of his last 43 matches and seven of his last eight tournaments.
He’s also won 17 consecutive finals.
“It’s always been my dream to be the best. Now I am, and I am enjoying it,” he said. “The more victories you get, the better you feel.”
Hewitt spoke of Federer’s agility.
“His movment is superior,” he said. “I don’t think people give him enough credit for his moving around the court.”
There’s also the huge wave of confidence Federer is riding.
“He’s purely just playing on confidence, I think, at the moment,” Hewitt said. “He believes the big points and the big shots are going to come off for him. The last year and a half, they have.
“He knows when to pull the trigger.”
Hewitt said both his big toes began aching the previous night, when he beat Andy Roddick in a grueling semifinal that went three sets and three tiebreakers.
Federer noticed Hewitt wasn’t moving normally.
“I see very quickly when my opponent has got some sort of a problem,” he said.
“It definitely changed my setup against him.”
Federer said Hewitt normally prefers to get him into long rallies, but instead he often went for quick winners this time.
“I got that feeling very quickly, and I just had to really focus on my serve,” Federer said.
They still played one amazing, 45-shot rally when Federer held break point in the second game of the second set.
Toward the end of the rally, Federer chased down a shot near the net, sprinted back and across the court to return a lob, came up again to hit another shot, then scurried back again to flick the ball over his shoulder to return another lob.
Hewitt then hit a drop shot just over the net far to Federer’s right. It looked to be a winner, but Federer raced forward, stretched as far as he could and hit the ball back. Hewitt went sprawling to his right and volleyed for a winner — finally.
Both players were gasping by then, but managed big grins. The crowd roared its approval, then gave the players a standing ovation.
Federer said it was “an unbelievable point.”
“One of my best in my life,” he said. “During a final against Lleyton, that was fantastic, and that it didn’t finish in an error.”
Both players appreciated the standing ovation, very unusual for a single point in the middle of a game.
“Maybe after you win a Davis Cup final or something, in five sets,” said Hewitt, who went on to win that game. “But not normally after a point, especially when neither of you is from America.”
Federer defeated Hewitt for the U.S. Open title last year. Federer’s only loss since he started that tournament was to Marat Safin in this year’s Australian Open semifinals. Safin then beat Hewitt in the final.
The 24-year-old Hewitt, No. 1 in 2002 and 2003, lost for just the third time in 21 matches this year.
The men’s final was changed to a best-of-five sets format this year, after Federer’s 6-3 6-3 win over Tim Henman a year ago lasted just 65 minutes. This time, the match still lasted only an hour and 52 minutes.
Kim Clijsters defeated Lindsay Davenport 6-4 4-6 6-2 for the women’s title Saturday. Clijsters, also the 2003 champion, missed most of last year after hurting her left wrist during the tournament.
TITLE: Rice Urges China to Embrace Spirit of Reform
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BEIJING — U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged China Monday to embrace religious freedom and think about political reforms to match its economic opening.
Rice raised the sensitive issues of human rights and democracy with Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing in Beijing on the final day of her six-nation tour of Asia, and after attending a church service Sunday.
“We… talked a good deal about the need for China to think about a more open political system that will match its economic opening and allow for the full creativity of the Chinese people,” Rice told a news conference.
Days before her visit, China freed one of its highest-profile political prisoners and Washington opted not to seek a UN rebuke of Beijing’s rights record, in what appeared to be reciprocal concessions.
The State Department cited “significant steps” in China for its decision, including Beijing’s pledge to give prisoners convicted of political crimes the same rights to parole and sentence reduction as other inmates.
But rights groups say China still detains and tortures those who advocate for changes to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, curbs media freedoms and uses the war on terrorism as a pretext for cracking down on peaceful opponents.
Rice called the church service she attended “an extraordinary experience” and said China’s leaders should not view religion as a threat.
“I hope that there is an understanding that religious communities are not a threat to transitional societies. In fact they are very often… a source for good, for stability and for compassion in societies that are undergoing rapid change,” she said. Beijing banned the Falun Gong spiritual movement in 1999.