SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1057 (23), Friday, April 1, 2005
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TITLE: Pope Mourned in Land That Eschewed Him
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: As the world mourned the death of Pope John Paul II, hundreds of people came to Catholic churches in Russia - a place he could never visit - to pay their respects.
Services in memory of the pontiff were conducted in St. Petersburg Catholic churches on Sunday and will continue all week, culminating in simultaneous services as his funeral service is held in Rome on Friday, city priests said.
"The services are conducted in very many languages, including Russian, Polish, English, Italian and even Korean," Father Kshishtov, of St. Stanislav's Church, said Monday in a telephone interview.
"There are six Catholic churches in St. Petersburg," he said. "This is not that many for such a big city with a population of 5 million people as St. Petersburg is. All the churches have been full with thousands of people participating in services."
"There are from 50,000 to 60,000 Catholics in St. Petersburg," he added. "Many of them are people who came to the city from Belarus and Lithuania.
Several thousand of them often attend services."
St. Mary's conducted a service dedicated to the Pope on Sunday and will continue praying for the pontiff all week.
"We're praying for Pontiff constantly," Father Pietro said Monday in a telephone interview. "Yesterday many people came to our Russian-language service. On Sundays we also had a service in Polish at 3 p.m."
Russian religious leaders, politicians and cultural figures also paid tribute to the Roman Catholic leader whose persistent desire to visit Russia was blocked by the Russian Orthodox Church.
In Moscow, hundreds of Catholics and non-Catholics alike packed into the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on Malaya Gruzinskaya for a special Mass on Sunday morning.
Flowers and candles were lit in the ornate Gothic cathedral as Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, the leader of Russia's 600,000 Catholics, celebrated a Mass for the Pope's soul.
He told the congregation that John Paul had been "the voice of East Europeans under communism.
"His call to 'open the door to Christ' was a special address to the countries of Eastern Europe who lived behind the Iron Curtain," he said. "At that time, he spoke to us and for us. And the Iron Curtain fell.
"I met with him many times, but the last time I saw him was March 8," Kondrusiewicz said on the steps of the cathedral, before going in to celebrate afternoon Mass in Polish and Russian.
Kondrusiewicz, his voice cracking, was on the verge of tears outside the cathedral and later during the Mass as he spoke of the pope's death. Many of the congregation also shed tears as he spoke.
The cathedral on Malaya Gruzinskaya has had a special link to the Pope through the Polish Catholic members of its congregation. Flowers and candles were lit close by a plaque thanking the pope for his help in restoring the cathedral after it was returned to the Catholic Church by the Soviet government.
The cathedral was built from 1906 to 1911 by the city's Polish Catholic community but was closed 25 years later by the Soviet government. Much of its interior was destroyed.
"I have always thought well of him," said Yelena, a pensioner and Russian Orthodox believer who did not give her second name. She had traveled from the outskirts of the city to place six carnations, an even number by funereal tradition, next to his photograph in the cathedral. "He was so kind, let's hope God sends another like him," she said.
"I will light a candle for him," said Fratishek, a regular churchgoer, who also did not want to give his full name. "Many international leaders could learn a lot from how he led the Church."
Alexy II, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church who had prevented John Paul from visiting Russia, was one of many who paid their tributes late Saturday.
"Together with you we grieve over the loss that has befallen the Roman Catholic Church," Alexy II said in a letter to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, dean of the College of Cardinals, Interfax reported. "I will pray for the repose of the soul of Pope John Paul II in heaven. May his memory live forever."
However, he also appeared to allude to the dispute.
"The upcoming new period in the life of the Roman Catholic Church will, hopefully, help renew the relations of mutual respect and fraternal Christian love between our churches,'' the patriarch said in a condolence letter.
Other prominent Russians including President Vladimir Putin and author Alexander Solzhenitsyn did not mention the dispute in comments on John Paul's death. Russian media reports only rarely mentioned the presence of Catholics in the country.
Russia is home to about 600,000 Catholics - less than one-half percent of the country's people. Most Russians identify themselves as Orthodox Christians, and the Orthodox Church is considered by many inseparable from Russian national identity.
Tensions between the Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches have been strained for decades, with the Orthodox Church accusing Catholics of proselytizing in Russia. The disagreement had consistently proved a stumbling block to a papal visit.
Calling John Paul an "outstanding figure of our times," President Vladimir Putin, who met the pope most recently in the Vatican in 2003, said he had "the warmest memories of my meetings with the pontiff. ... He was a wise and understanding man who was open for dialogue."
Russia's chief rabbi, Berl Lazar, said he felt deep sorrow at John Paul's death.
"Taking into account the great contribution made by the Pope to the development of dialogue between the different religions, I know his death will be a great loss for all believers all over the world," Interfax quoted Lazar as saying.
Ravil Gainutdin, chairman of the Council of Muftis of Russia, expressed his condolences on behalf of the country's Muslims, RIA-Novosti reported. "John Paul II was the only Catholic leader who apologized for the Crusades," he said.
In St. Petersburg, the Polish Consulate General has opened a condolence book in which people who mourn the Pope's death can record their commiserations.
Under the orders of the Polish Foreign Ministry, the consulate will not take part in any of the activities previously planned for three days and its entire activity will be dedicated to mourning, although visas that are ready for collection will be handed over, Interfax reported Monday.
(SPT, AP)
See further reports, pages 14, 16.
TITLE: Governor Matviyenko Paints Rosy Picture
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Governor Valentina Matviyenko painted a rosy picture of St. Petersburg in her annual address, saying she would like to see it as a prosperous European city in which the incomes of its citizens grow steadily.
In her second address delivered to the Legislative Assembly on Wednesday, Matviyenko ignored the fact that official statistics show that the strengthening ruble and rising inflation slowed income growth in 2004. She focused on figures suggesting the city has been successful in improving the investment climate.
"The arrival in the city of some of the country's biggest tax payers will raise city revenues by 5 billion rubles ($180 million)," she said. "And that is a conservative estimate."
In 2004, City Hall succeeded in convincing several large enterprises, most of which have strong connections to the federal government, to re-register their head offices from other regions, mainly Moscow, to St. Petersburg. The companies include Vneshtorgbank, Sovkomflot, Transnefteprodukt, the Northwest Federal Network Co. and Territorial Generating Company No. 1.
LUKoil and Rosneft have also opened branch offices in the city.
The total volume of investments in the city grew 40 percent to an estimated $900 million, according to City Hall statistics.
"The main thing here is not the figures, though the statistics are at record levels," Matviyenko said. "The investment landscape has been changed. We are no longer being treated as an economic province, as a city that is merely a source for pleasure because of its culture sites, where it is impossible to operate big business."
Among the biggest projects launched in the city in 2004 Matviyenko mentioned electronic equipment production plant Elcotech, a Knauf plant making construction materials, the Tinkoff brewery, Gillette, Pepsi, Russky Standart, Yarovit Motors and First Furniture Factory. Investments in these projects ranged from $20 million to $100 million.
While the investments are growing, the average income of city residents stayed practically the same last year, going up by about 13 percent in face value compared to 2003, or about the same amount as inflation, according to official statistics presented in the local media. In 2003, city incomes grew about 32 percent.
But Matviyenko said the average city income grew 26.5 percent in 2004 to about 8,665 rubles ($311) a month.
"These are good results," the governor said.
While the federal government wants the public to pay in full for communal housing services in the next few years, Matviyenko said she would like to postpone full payments from Jan. 1 2006, to one year later.
"Despite the demands of the federal legislation that such practice should be implemented in Jan. 1, 2006 we should carefully weigh all the social consequences," Matviyenko said.
"It would be correct, in my opinion, to raise the payments to 90 percent or 95 percent from Jan. 1, 2006 and to 100 percent from Jan. 1, 2007."
City residents now pay 82 percent of the cost of communal services, the rest of which is subsidized from the budget.
Vadim Tyulpanov, the Legislative Assembly speaker, appeared swamped by information when he left the Mariinsky Palace where the Legislative Assembly meets after the governor's speech.
"The address was so broad-ranging and touched on so many different issues that I will only be able to get the point when I read a printed version of it," Tyulpanov said at a short briefing Wednesday.
"The address will form the basis of planning our city budget but the address is not detailed enough to determine the social and economic development of the city because that itself has not been sufficiently developed," Deputy Governor Mikhail Brodsky said.
Before the address, Legislative Assembly deputies passed amendments to the City Charter that bring the main city law in line with federal legislation that allows President Vladimir Putin to appoint regional governors.
The amendments imply that the Legislative Assembly will confirm the next city governor after the president nominates them.
Lawmakers also introduce other amendments to the City Charter that allow them to fire a governor if the Legislative Assembly loses confidence in them.
This could occur if the governor signs legislation that is a clear breach of the law or if a governor fails to fulfill their obligations, according to the amended City Charter.
On March 23, lawmakers failed to pass the amendments as they sought a tradeoff with City Hall over how Legislative Assembly lawmakers should be elected. This week, they reportedly dropped their demands after being threatened by the Justice Ministry that it could disband the assembly if it did not bring local laws in line with federal ones.
TITLE: Kremlin
Fears A Break Up
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A rift among national power brokers threatens the country with disintegration that could have even more violent consequences than the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kremlin chief of staff Dmitry Medvedev warned in a wide-ranging interview published Monday.
"If we don't manage to consolidate elites, Russia may disappear as one state," Medvedev told Expert magazine. "The disintegration of the Soviet Union would look like a kindergarten party compared to the collapse of the modern Russian state."
The elites should unite behind the idea of "preserving an effective state system within the existing boundaries," he said.
The normally publicity-shy Medvedev gave the interview - his most extensive and comprehensive since his appointment in 2003 - only days after a popular uprising swept away the regime of Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev and as debates continued about what could happen after President Vladimir Putin ends his second, and constitutionally final, term in 2008.
Liberal politicians said Monday that Medvedev's calls for the elites to close ranks could pave the way for a crackdown on opposition and dissent, Ekho Moskvy radio reported Monday.
Irina Khakamada, leader of the liberal party Our Choice, or Nash Vybor, said Medvedev wanted to scare officials out of supporting dissenting groups, the radio reported.
According to analysts, however, the interview was the Kremlin's response to growing discontent among politicians, business people and intellectuals with Putin's policies
Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panorama think tank, said Medvedev could be trying to engage regional and national elites that feel sidelined by Putin's retinue, which mainly consists of his former colleagues in the administration of former St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak.
"The current authorities do not represent all elites," he said. "Many of them do not like that they are being oppressed."
Alternatively, Pribylovsky said, Medvedev could be sending a message to various groups in the presidential administration including the siloviki, the St. Petersburg economists and the St. Petersburg lawyers. These groups have been at odds recently over control of economic assets, he said.
In his interview, Medvedev - a 39-year-old lawyer by profession who graduated from Putin's old law school in St. Petersburg - admitted differences among administration members.
"We are not the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and we do not campaign for unity of thought," he said. "The main thing is not to lose your ability to criticize yourself, and not to stoop to using primitive management schemes, forgetting about the real goal of statecraft."
Some analysts have speculated that members of Putin's administration have been split over what to do with the spoils of the state takeover of Yukos' main production unit, Yuganskneftegaz. Kremlin deputy chief of staff Igor Sechin is chairman of state-owned Rosneft, which acquired Yugansk after last December's auction, while Medvedev is chairman at Gazprom, which is due to merge with Rosneft. The two companies have openly bickered over control of assets under the terms of their merger.
Pribylovsky said the threat of Russia's disintegration was a very powerful argument, because "80 percent of people believe that should not be allowed."
But Pribylovsky took issue with Medvedev's analysis, saying that the primary threat to Russia's unity was the ongoing conflict in Chechnya and instability in the North Caucasus as a whole, a subject Medvedev did not touch upon in his interview.
Medvedev said another problem that endangered Russia's territorial integrity was the insufficient development of sparsely populated Siberia and the Far East. "If we don't develop the east, Russia will not be unified," he said.
The project to build an oil pipeline from Eastern Siberia to the Pacific coast could boost the economy of the vast region, he said, adding that the government has until May 1 to make up its mind on a route so the project could go ahead.
Medvedev also supported merging Russian regions, saying that this would help strengthen Russia's territorial integrity. But he said regions should unite voluntarily.
Part of why Medvedev fears splits at the top of society is based on growing unrest among sections of the business elite, said Sergei Markov, a Kremlin-connected political analyst. Many business leaders who built their empires in the Yeltsin years are increasingly uncertain about what direction Putin's economic policies will take, and they are halting their investments in Russia, he said.
Many analysts saw former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov's return to politics and his statement that he could possibly run for the presidency as a sign that the splits were coming out into the open - and that some, particularly among the business elite that Kasyanov represents, were daring to move into open opposition.
Staff writer Catherine Belton contributed to this report.
TITLE: 'Orange Plague' Kills
Concert
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A concert called "Pitersky Maidan" (St. Petersburg's Maidan) featuring top Russian and Ukrainian bands, which had been scheduled to take place Sunday has been canceled for political reasons, claims its promoter.
But there may be more to the story than meets the eye.
According to posters, the festival was to feature Ukrainian bands Vopli Vidoplyasova, Okean Elzi, Lyuk and Tanok na Maidane Kongo, as well as Russian bands Chizh & Co., Va-Bank, Nogu Svelo, Tequilajazzz, Butch, and Markscheider Kunst, among others.
But this Tuesday the promoter issued an electronic statement saying that the concert was canceled.
A photograph attached to it showed the concert's poster with words "Bei oranzhevuyu chumu," or "Beat the Orange Plague" written over it in white paint.
The term "Orange Plague" has been used by opponents of Ukraine's Orange Revolution both there and in Russia.
Later on Tuesday most of the posters were pasted over with white paper.
The Ukrainian word "maidan" (square) has taken on a political meaning in Russian after protests on Kiev's Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) last year led to the rerunning of flawed presidential elections.
In a restaged second round run-off, opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko won over Russia-backed Viktor Yanukovich, then Ukraine's prime minister.
The concert was promoted by director Andrei Nekrasov's film company Dream Scanner. The original plan was to film the concert and use the footage in Nekrasov's documentary "Ekho Maidana" (Echo of Maidan), the concert's producer Olga Konskaya said in a telephone interview from Germany.
Konskaya said that the idea behind the film was to look at the "place of rock music in socio-political life on post-Soviet territory."
Nekrasov is best-known for the documentary "Nedoveriye" (Disbelief), which questions the government's view that Chechen rebels were responsible for a series of apartment bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk in Sept. 1999. Released early last year, the film was financed by Boris Berezovsky, the exiled oligarch and President Vladimir Putin's bitter opponent.
Despite prominent use of the word "maidan," the promoter claimed the concert was not "aimed at conducting a political action."
But the concert's official web site said it was dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the First Russian Revolution, and Nekrasov is quoted on the site as saying, "Early spring. Time of change. Thaw. We need a new thaw."
"Of course, the first thing that I asked was, 'What has it to do with the Orange Revolution?,'" said Yevgeny Fyodorov of the local politically-minded, alternative-rock band Tequilajazzz, which was due to take part.
"'Nothing, nothing at all,' I was told. Of course, I didn't believe them and was right. If people use the word 'maidan' and insist on using it, it's all clear."
Fyodorov, who is known to make political statements during his band's concerts, said he would agree to take part just to express his political stance, but, as he was told the event was not political, he agreed just for the money.
"I will not conceal that the commercial offer was very good," he said.
"But when all the fuss started out, it led me and my friends to consider two versions of the story. First, this concert might have been organized just to be canceled so as to claim it was banned. Or, secondly, the concert was not planned at all - [the goal might have been] to print posters and then say, 'We're sorry, it was banned.'"
"As a romantic I hope that there was some pressure. I would like to take part in some sort of 'Orange' event - I have some questions to present to the authorities," said Fyodorov. "But I'm afraid it was a stitch-up."
"When I saw how Putin acted on behalf on Yanukovich, which we saw the same on a smaller level when Valentina Matviyenko was being elected as [St. Petersburg] governor, when the man comes and poses for pictures with one definite candidate, shakes hands with him, I felt ashamed. Low techniques. I think citizens of Ukraine felt they were considered to be like cattle.
"I liked the energy and enthusiasm [in Ukraine]."
Fyodorov said that he received a call from Konskaya about the cancellation on Monday, a day before the posters had been allegedly vandalized and the promoter's final statement had been issued.
"There emerged a danger that our concert would be turned into an arena of political provocation, and we received enough signs that we should temporarily reject the idea of this part of shooting the film," said Konskaya, who added that she had received threatening phonecalls.
According to Konskaya, threatening phonecalls were also received by local journalist Nikolai Peshkov, whom she described as the concert's press officer.
However, Peshkov denied he was the press officer for the event, saying he was just helping to place the ads in the press on behalf of the promoter. Speaking by phone on Thursday, he said he did not receive any threats.
In the earlier statement issued late last week, the promoter said that the concert was under threat after the main sponsor withdrew from the project, allegedly "under political pressure from the power structures."
Konskaya would not name the sponsor, saying that it was "rather a partner, who has been working with us on film projects for years."
She insisted that the sponsor's withdrawal was still not the main reason for the cancellation.
The management at Yubileiny Sports Palace, the venue that was to hold the event, said the reasons behind the cancellation were not political.
"We think it's most likely there's no political grounds here, it's purely for financial reasons caused by one of the sponsors withdrawing," said the venue's manager Vladimir Rutsky by phone on Thursday.
Whether or not the government was involved in the cancellation of "Pitersky Maidan," the Kremlin is showing signs it fears an "Orange Revolution" in Russia. Young people and rock musicians played an important part in the Ukrainian protests and Russian authorities secretly established pro-Kremlin youth group "Nashi" (Us) in February.
Last month, the deputy head of the presidential administration Vladislav Surkov conducted a secret meeting with top rock musicians, including Zemfira, Akvarium's Boris Grebenshchikov and Leningrad's Sergei Shnurov, which left its participants unusually tight-lipped.
Speaking "unofficially," one participant said that the Kremlin expressed dissatisfaction about the abundance of cheap pop acts in the media, expressed interest in rock music and offered certain opportunities to the rock musicians.
"I think it sounds like a joke. They still think we are cattle, said Tequilajazzz's Fyodorov.
"I would go there, but with only one goal - to ask them a few questions. But they didn't ask me to come. Either they don't think that I'm a figure that can influence youth or they know my position too well. I say something at every concert, especially when it's anniversary of, say, apartment bombings or [the 1995 hostage seizure] in Budyonovsk."
TITLE: Mitki Artists Fighting Eviction From Studio
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Nonconformist artistic group Mitki, famous for their blue-and-white striped sailor shirts, faces losing its studio this month.
The group has about 15 members who use the studios, and has been running since the early 1980s.
The striped shirts are not only worn by members, but are also a central feature of their art works.
But if in the Communist era artists were oppressed for ideological reasons, this time Mitki's persecutors are eyeing their lair with commercial profit in mind.
Next Monday, Mitki will appear in the Kuibyshevsky district court, where the artists will have to prove their right to the attic at 16 Ulitsa Pravdy, where their art center Mitki-VKhUTEMAS and private studios have been located since 1996.
The studios occupy 193 square meters of the attic, and the art center takes up the remaining 200 square meters.
"But in the documents several rooms in the attic are still listed as residential, although there are no gas, or sewage facilities, or even heating radiators in them," said artist Dmitry Shagin, a member of Mitki group. "The district administration used a trick to register some people in the rooms, the rooms were quietly privatized and now half of the attic is up for sale at the awesome price of $1,300 per square meter."
Mitki's philosophy of nonaggression is encapsulated in their memorable slogan "The Mitki aren't out for victory."
But since a group of people who claimed to represent the owners broke into the attic at the end of March, the artists have organized a round-the-clock watch and barricaded the entrance to keep intruders out.
"We still don't know who those people were," Shagin said. "They looked like complete bandits to us.
"They broke one of the doors, and started knocking down a wall. They only left after the police and a TV crew arrived."
Anna Kondratyeva, head of the real estate deals registration department of the city property committee, said her office is investigating the matter.
"We have to find out whether the privatization was legal," she said Friday in a telephone interview.
However, it is unlikely that Mitki will regain full use of the attic.
"Only untenantable space can be used for studios," Kondratyeva said. "But several rooms in the attic are considered tenantable and several people are registered there."
Shagin laughed at this comment. Showing one of those rooms to The St. Petersburg Times, he pointed to the absence of water heaters and the huge chunks of gypsum falling from the roof and walls. The artists use this room for storage purposes, he said.
In the meantime, a group of the city's leading and most respected cultural luminaries, including film director Alexander Sokurov, head of the city's Union of Composers Andrei Petrov, the chairman of the St. Petersburg Writers' Union Valery Popov, rock musician Boris Grebenshchikov and the international vice-president of writers' organization PEN Andrei Bitov sent a letter to Governor Valentina Matvienko asking her to intervene on Mitki's behalf.
"The Mitki-VKhUTEMAS art center is one of the very few surviving footholds of St. Petersburg culture, and once again, it is at risk of going underground," reads the letter. "What we see is the brutal violence of a brainless but forceful barbarian against a weak artist over a potentially profitable subject."
Ulitsa Pravdy has recently been turned into a prestigious pedestrian area, lined with boutiques and smart coffee shops. The view from Mitki's studio tells it all: this industrial landscape looks onto the giant construction site of a Turkish company building a shopping center.
The Mitki studio crisis has been dragging on for months.
A year ago City Hall informed the group that their rent of the attic would not be extended, Shagin said.
"They gave us no explanation," he added. "We made a huge fuss so they stepped back, but only to change their methods."
In June 2004, City Hall issued a decree ordering the privatization of city-owned studios so that they could subsequently be sold or rented at market prices. Few artists' incomes are high enough to buy the studios.
The right to rent studios at discounted prices is granted by 14 city artistic unions. A deal between the city government and the unions terminates in 2010, and City Hall is not eager to prolong it.
City Hall invited artists renting the studios to pay in advance the rent until 2010, which would on average be $2,000. The officials then said that those who failed to pay would be evicted and their studios sold. The officials view the studios as inefficiently managed.
In the fall, officials inspected all studios in the city. City Hall's contract with every single studio has been revised, and where violations of rules were found, the lease was terminated. But violations were found in less than 10 percent of cases. The most common reasons for termination were that artists sublet their studios, use them rarely, don't maintain them or don't pay rent on time.
The officials are now looking at ways to bite a few more square meters off artists, Shagin said.
"From a mass campaign, they switched to individual campaigns," the artist said with a bitter laugh.
City Hall's plans for the studios is apparently part of a campaign to boost privatization. Matviyenko is pushing plans to put palaces, mansions and even forts at Kronstadt up for sale to fill the city coffers.
This reminds Mitki of Soviet times, and the group says little has changed in the state's attitude toward independent artists.
"In 1984, we had one of our first apartment exhibitions, and the police broke into the flat and destroyed it," Shagin recalls. "Some of the paintings still bear the impressions of the policemen's shoes. And really, while methods have changed, the mentality hasn't."
TITLE: Chisinau Re-Elects Voronin
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CHISINAU, Moldova - Pro-Western President Vladimir Voronin was re-elected Monday in a parliamentary vote, and he pledged to continue efforts to bring Moldova closer to the European Union.
Voronin, who won with 75 votes in the 101-seat legislature, has made a complete turnaround in his foreign policy since 2001, when he advocated a union with Russia and Belarus. He now favors closer ties with the West.
In Monday's vote he was up against Gheorghe Duca, who is also from the Communist Party and is chairman of the Science Institute and a former ecology minister in the Communist government of 2001-04. Duca's candidacy was seen only as a formality, as Moldovan law requires two candidates for a presidential vote to be valid. He won only one vote.
Voronin won the vote with support from several smaller opposition groups.
"We voted for Voronin because early elections would have favored the forces supported by Russia," said Iurie Rosca, who heads the Christian Democrats.
Voronin, a former baker, engineer and police general, first became president of Moldova in 2001. For years, he held close relations with Moscow, but finally broke with Russia in 2003 over its support for the separatist Russian-speaking region of Trans-Dniester, where Russia has about 1,800 troops.
In March, parliament elected Marian Lupu, a Communist, to be the chamber's speaker. That vote was seen as a signal that Voronin would likely be able to draw enough support to be re-elected by lawmakers.
TITLE: Mariinsky Singer to Perform at Royal Wedding
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Young and exciting Mariinsky contralto Yekaterina Semenchuk is to sing at the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. The singer will perform Gretchaninov's "The Symbol of Faith" at a church blessing, following the civil wedding next Friday.
The 29-year-old Mariinsky soloist has gone to Britain specially for the wedding ceremony, which will take place at Windsor Castle.
Semenchuk's performance will be a present from the board of trustees of the Mariinsky Theater, of which Prince Charles is a patron. The board will celebrate its 10th anniversary this year.
Semenchuk was among the finalists of the prestigious BBC Singer of the World Competition in Cardiff in 2001.
Semenchuk said she was touched and flattered by the invitation.
"It is, indeed, a great honor for me," she said Thursday. "I am very excited. It is a huge responsibility because I represent not only the Mariinsky Theater but the entire country: I will be the only Russian performer at the festivities. And I never took part in performances at such a high level."
The Russian Orthodox Creed, which Semenchuk will sing during the church ceremony in St. George's Chapel of the Windsor Castle, is one of Prince Charles' classical favorites, the Mariinsky press office said. The work was sung by the Mariinsky Theater choir in 2003 in the same chapel at a memorial service for the Queen Mother, who died in 2002.
All the music that will be performed at the blessing, has been chosen by the Prince and his fiancee. Apart from the Gretchaninov work, the list features choral and orchestral pieces by J. S. Bach, Handel, Walton, Elgar, Finzi and Greig.
Apart from Semenchuk, organist Roger Judd, musicians from the British Philharmonic and the St. George's Chapel Choir have been invited to perform at the blessing.
Prince Charles saw Semenchuk perform the role of Sonya in the Mariinsky's much acclaimed production of Sergei Prokofiev's "War and Peace" on the company's tour in Covent Garden in 2000, according to the Mariinsky press office.
TITLE: Flying Squads to Check City Police Doing Their Job
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: On the orders of Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov, the City Prosecutor's Office has launched a campaign to stop the police from reporting misleading crime statistics.
Ustinov last month confirmed that law enforcement bodies' official records are extremely far from reality.
Vladimir Vladimirov, deputy city prosecutor, said St. Petersburg law enforcers have formed flying squads to monitor "registration discipline" in police departments across the city,
"The flying squad will contain six prosecutor's office representatives and six police officers," Vladimirov said Thursday at a briefing. "They will be visiting police departments to conduct checks on their activities. The decision on which department they will inspect will be made right before they set off."
The deputy prosecutor confirmed repeated allegations from the public that police put pressure on victims of crime so that they do not make official complaints about the crime. In addition, police have falsified forms and reports to make the statistics look better.
The city prosecutor's office has initiated 38 criminal cases against local policemen for hiding 6,000 crimes, Vladimirov said.
Ustinov last month blasted the federal police, saying crime statistics cannot be taken seriously and only 20 percent to 25 percent of crimes are being officially registered.
"If that's the case, last year we had not 2.9 million crimes as head of the Interior Ministry has reported, but about 9 million to 12 million," Ustinov said at a briefing in Moscow on March 9.
In 2004, the General Prosecutor's Office uncovered 120,000 crimes that were not registered, which was just the tip of the iceberg, he said.
"This problem is not only typical of Russia, but in other countries the ratio of reported to unreported crimes is estimated at 1:2, while in Russia it's 1:5,"Ustinov said.
To show how ridiculous the Russian statistics look, Ustinov pointed at the number of crimes registered in Western European countries.
"In France with a population of 60 million people [the police] registers 3 million thefts a year and Germany records 6 million similar crimes. As for us, there are 1 million thefts a year in Russia. This way it looks as if countries with much better living standards have a crime rate six times higher than ours," Ustinov said.
The police could not be reached for comment.
The city's human rights advocates hailed the effort to ensure crimes are recorded as a positive development, but were wary of saying it would lead to any change in police behavior.
"If they have set up such a group, I would like to believe that this is a useful thing to do, but somehow I have a feeling that they will always have the opportunity to negotiate stuff among each other in the end," Yury Vdovin, co-head of the city branch of human rights organization Citizen's Watch, said in a telephone interview Friday.
Ruslan Linkov, head of the Democratic Russia party, said it was not the first time such flying squads have been created," he said Friday in a telephone interview. "In the past it was the public, who were asked to work in the police departments to monitor them, but those members of the public very soon started committing the similar crimes together with the police.
"While the prosecutor's office at least tries to work with victims of the police, it could happen in the future that they will do nothing after becoming involved with them in one business," he said.
"The only way to solve the problem is to fire them all as it was done in the Baltic States and hire new people with a European training," Linkov said.
TITLE: Prosecutor: Slayings Of Foreigners Solved
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: City Prosecutor Sergei Zaitsev on Wednesday announced that the murders of two foreigners last year have been solved, and has stated unequivocally that the motive was racial hatred.
He said the suspects in the killing of Khursheda Sultanova, nine, who was stabbed to death on Feb. 9, and those who murdered Vietnamese student Vu An Tuan on Oct. 13 have been charged. Both murders produced reactions of horror, fear and condemnation from city leaders and the public.
"Seven of Khursheda's attackers have been charged with hooliganism, and one - with the racially motivated murder of a helpless person," Zaitsev said. "The guy who is charged with the murder was 14 years old when the crime was committed."
Fourteen youths face charges over the slaying of Tuan near a student hostel on Vasilyevsky Island.
The prosecutor refused to give any names.
The investigation revealed that the defendants, who were aged between 14 and 21, had committed other crimes against foreigners and Russian nationals, Zaitsev said.
"Five new criminal cases have already been opened," the prosecutor added.
Hooliganism is the usual charge against those who attack foreign citizens in St. Petersburg, with law enforcement agencies apparently reluctant to level more serious charges when racist motives are alleged.
The city prosecutor's office has been criticized by human rights advocates for ignoring such motives when witnesses report that attackers have chanted phrases such as "Russia for the Russians."
Zaitsev acknowledged that the city has problems with extremist groups, but said it should not be exaggerated.
"In many cases, crimes against foreigners and citizens of former Soviet states have common, domestic, rather than racial or nationalist motives," the prosecutor said.
Governor Valentina Matviyenko made an enthusiastic statement Wednesday, saying that "all ethnically motivated crimes in the city have been solved."
"Our city, which is known to the country and to the world for its intelligentsia and tolerance, has several times been shocked by horrible murders on racial grounds," Matviyenko said in her annual televised speech. "We are not going to tolerate the escapades of extremists. [...] I firmly say that we will confront all manifestations of xenophobia, anti-Semitism and discrimination."
But some experts say it is much too early to trumpet successes. Matviyenko's statement sounds overblown to human rights advocates, who note that the murder of Nikolai Girenko, the country's leading expert on ethnic crimes, who was gunned down on the doorway of his apartment on June 19, 2004, hasn't been solved.
Vladimir Lukin, the federal ombudsman for human rights who released his 2004 report on Thursday, expressed concern about growing nationalism and chauvinism in the country.
On Wednesday, Zaitsev also announced the start of a new investigation against an extremist group.
Eight people have been detained in connection with the activities of Mad Crowd, a group of young nationalists who have been attacking natives of Armenia, Azerbaijan, China and Korea.
The group's organizer has gone missing, Zaitsev said.
Earlier this week web site Fontanka.ru reported that 15 Arab students were planning to drop out of their universities in St. Petersburg and leave the city in protest over the regular attacks on them.
The publication quoted Gannam Mohamad, head of the Union of Arab students, as saying that "the situation has gotten to the point when the students can only guess whether they will make it to the hostel each night."
But on Thursday, Fontanka said Mohamad denied the earlier statement.
"There is no mass exodus of Arab students from the city, and there won't be," he was quoted as saying in a letter to Alexander Viktorov, head of the city committee for Science and Higher Education.
"The problem is currently in the process of being resolved positively," Mohamad added.
TITLE: Would-Be Diplomats Debate at Model UN
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: International students of diplomacy took part in a simulated United Nations in St. Petersburg this week, and although the sessions were staged, the subjects were pressing and participants hope the resolutions will help the UN.
A model Security Council addressed the problem of breaches of international agreements in space.
It's a great and up-to-date topic, said Senia Febrica, a student from Indonesia. Terrorism can spread not only on Earth, but even in space. It can be a real threat to the Earth and our common task is to join and prevent it.
Febrica, one of about 100 foreign students attending the four days of events, was representing Brazil at a session on Wednesday. Delegates were required to represent a country other than their homeland.
The debate hasn't finished yet, but France already has a good draft resolution, which I think I will support, Febrica added.
The debates were in English, so every participant had to have a good knowledge of the language. For them the sessions were not just a formality, they were really interested in making wise resolutions. That was why they came to Russia.
I've never been to Russia, let alone any European country, Febrica said.
The participating students have lived with St. Petersburg families.
We can't afford to lodge everyone at a hotel, said Olga Savchenko, a spokeswoman for the St. Petersburg-based International Youth Diplomacy League, which organized the events. We think living in families is much better, she said.
The foreign students can see our life and communicate with our students, which is useful for both sides. It leads to international understanding beyond the conference, Savchenko said.
Armine Manykian, a St. Petersburg student from Kazakhstan, played host to Hungarian student Nora Tukor, who is taking part in the model Commission of Science and Technology for Development.
I've been a student who lived in family in America, but I hadn't had any similar experience at home, she said. So I invited a foreign student from the Model UN. We communicate in English and it's a great experience for us to understand the way of life of different nationalities.
The hosts also organized a cultural program for the delegates.
My host Dmitry has taken me to see many beautiful sites in St. Petersburg, Febrica said. I really love those places, especially the Hermitage.
TITLE: Kiselyov Urged to Resign
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Moskovskiye Novosti's supervisory board has urged that Yevgeny Kiselyov hand over his post as editor to fired deputy editor Lyudmila Telen but retain his position as the newspaper's general director to resolve a bitter labor dispute, a board member said Monday.
The request was among recommendations made at a meeting last Tuesday, said board member Alexander Gelman, Interfax reported.
He said the board did not initially disclose its recommendations because it wanted to give MN owners Leonid Nevzlin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky time to consider them. The board, however, decided Monday to go public to end "unneeded speculations that could damage the newspaper," he said.
Gelman said the board also recommended that Telen and six other journalists fired by Kiselyov last month be reinstated.
He said he did not know when Nevzlin and Khodorkovsky might respond to the board's recommenmdations.
Kiselyov's spokeswoman Tatyana Blinova said it was the board members' right to make their recommendations public whenever they pleased.
TITLE: Foreign Firms May Adopt Russian Names
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: All foreign businesses operating in Russia may soon be forced to translate their names into Russian or pick a more Russian-sounding word equivalent, according to a leaked report to be put before the Duma on Friday.
Officials from the Federal Committee for Russification are expected to present the State Duma with a list of proposals for a correct behavior code foreign companies should observe while working in Russia.
Among the committee's main proposals are making foreign companies adopt a more Russified name that is not just a direct transliteration from another language and to force all foreign firms to provide the option of Russian cuisine at the staff canteen.
In the current world, we see English, or French, Italian words everywhere, they are infiltrating our consciousness and weakening the business confidence of Russian companies, a member of the federal committee who spoke on the condition of anonymity said Thursday in a phone interview from Moscow.
[Domestic firms] think that they must always present themselves with a foreign-sounding name to sound credible. Just take a look at the financial world. Every second mutual fund management company is called Something-Something Development Fund, he said.
Or how many times have you heard 100-percent Russian companies use the words 'management' or 'investment' in their name when there are perfectly adequate Russian synonyms, the committee member said.
This is our chance to strike back, he said, adding that the suggestion has already received backing from Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov and positive responses from the Culture and Press Ministry.
Although the draftsmen of the proposals have not made a definitive list of possible name changes, some suggestions have already been put forward. Global consultancy firm Ernst & Young could become Seryozha & Molodoi, hi-tech giant Motorola - KrutaMotorik, and washing machine manufacturer Electrolux - Dorogoi Tok.
In addition, research by the federal committee gathered over the last three years points out that most foreign companies eschew traditional Russian food in their canteen in favor of trendy western cuisine.
The response of most foreign companies was varied, some approving of the idea in general, if not of its application.
I could see us as Molodoi, definitely, because we want to present an image of youth and vitality in Russia. But Seryozha? I think it sounds too informal, Vlad Spamovich, general director of the Internet division of Ernst & Young, said Thursday by e-mail.
The heads of recruitment agency Kelly Services were more critical.
If Kelly is a typical Irish name, then what - do we need to rename ourselves as Masha Services, or Sveta Obsluzhit [Sveta will Serve you]?! said one of the company's managers.
Several foreign IT corporation directors said they would consider the switch, but only if it was financially compensated by the government. In addition, one director called for the new company name to be picked by an independent, non-governmental committee, saying that such decisions were best left to outsourcing.
The federal committee maintains that the proposals, which could form part of this fall's Law on Russification, would benefit foreign companies in the long-term by bringing them closer to their Russian end-consumer.
Why keep the name McDonald's in every country? Companies should adapt to their local environment, the committee member said.
Instead of a McDonald's, let's have Lermontov or Yashkin, or something. I'm going to grab a buterbrod from Lermontov - that sounds much more Russian, the committee member.
He glanced at the calendar and saw the words: April 1, Fool's Day.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Starovoitova Sentences
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Deputy city prosecutor Alexander Korsunov on Monday called for sentences of betwen 4 1/2 years and life for those on trial for their roles in the murder of State Duma Deputy Galina Starovoitova, Interfax reported.
The prosecutor requested life sentences for Yury Kolchin and Vitaly Akishin. Yury Ionov and Igor Krasnov should be jailed for 15 years each and Igor Lelyavin for 12 years, Korsunov said.
The deputy prosecutor asked for 4 1/2 years for Alexei Voronin because the suspect had merely assisted the killers and had cooperated with the investigation.
Starovoitova was killed in St. Petersburg in November 1998.
Shnurov in TV Doco
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - St. Petersburg musician Sergei Shnurov will host a historical documentary on the Leningrad Front that is scheduled to be broadcast on St. Petersburg municipal television, Interfax reported Friday.
The historian Lev Lurye has already shot four parts of the documentary, each 40 minutes long, the report said. In addition, Shnurov, the front man of the group Leningrad who is notorious for his use of foul language in his lyrics, will sing four war songs in the documentary.
"When he found that such a documentary was being made, he asked to participate in it because he is the son of a survivor of the Siege of Leningrad and the grandson of a soldier who fought on the front," Interfax cited Alexander Matveyev, the channel's chief producer, as saying.
Flash Mob on Nevsky
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - More than 300 young people participated in a flash-mob rally on Nevsky Prospekt on Friday, Interfax reported.
Several hundred young people following a person dressed in yellow clothes along the city's main thoroughfare. They copied all his movements and shouts.
According to rules of flash mobs, the crowd is not supposed to talk to pedestrians or comment on their actions. However, one participant said they has found out about the action from a leaflet that he found in the street.
The action did not attract any attention from the police.
Metro Station Opens
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - A new metro station, Komendantsky Prospekt opened in the north of St. Petersburg, Interfax reported Saturday.
"The opening of the new station after a long break is a really big celebration for the city," Interfax quoted Governor Valentina Matviyenko as saying at the opening ceremony.
Within the next 10 years there will be another 21 metro stations opened in the city, Matviyenko said.
Komendantsky Prospekt station had been under construction since 1986 and is a part of the Pravoberezhnaya Line.
Air Marshals to Fly Soon
MOSCOW (SPT) - Plainclothes police officers carrying weapons will soon serve as air marshals on international flights flown by Russian airlines, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev told Interfax on Friday.
Air marshals were envisioned in a new aviation security law that was passed late last month.
Nurgaliyev also said 700 firearms have been confiscated in airports since September 2004 and that 53 criminal investigations have been opened in connection with the weapons.
TITLE: Court Rules for Simpsons Cartoon
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - After spending a day in court watching cartoons, a Moscow judge on Friday rejected a lawsuit brought against RenTV for broadcasting two American programs that the plaintiff said had piqued his young son's interest in cocaine and prompted the child to insult his mother.
The Khamovniki District Court judge rejected the claim by Igor Smykov, who filed the suit almost three years ago claiming that the cartoon series "The Simpsons" and "The Family Guy" were morally degenerate and promoted drugs, violence and homosexuality.
Smykov sued the channel in June 2002, asking for compensation of 50,000 rubles, which was eventually increased to 300,000 rubles ($10,770). He also demanded that the station be banned from airing the two programs or at least be required to show them later in the evening.
"The Simpsons," which RenTV still runs, is a popular and sophisticated cartoon series that chronicles the adventures of the Simpson family, while "The Family Guy," known in Russia as the "Griffins," is darker. Its characters include a talking dog and an evil-genius baby with ambitions of world domination and homicidal inclinations toward his mother.
Smykov said that his son Konstantin, who was 6 in 2002, approached his parents after watching an episode of "The Family Guy" and asked them what cocaine was. After he was reprimanded, Konstantin called his mother a toad, Smykov said. The suit alleged that RenTV, by broadcasting the two programs, was interfering with a child's right to a normal, healthy childhood.
But Judge Lyubov Dednyova was apparently not impressed by the evidence, which included video recordings of several of the offending episodes.
Smykov was not present in the courtroom Friday. RIA-Novosti reported that he had appeared for the start of the day's session drunk.
He sounded distraught when reached by telephone at his home that afternoon. "I am shocked to the depths of my soul," Smykov said. "I cannot even talk. It is scary. I cannot understand why no one wants to defend the children."
Smykov, who explained his absence during Friday's proceedings by saying he "could not take it" if he lost, said he nevertheless had expected to win. "I did not care about the money," he said. "I was hoping to set a judicial precedent."
Smykov and his lawyer, Larissa Pavlova, said they would appeal the decision.
RenTV lawyer Viktor Zinovyev looked relieved as he lit up a cigarette outside the courthouse Friday afternoon. "This was the absolutely correct decision," he said. "There could not be any other decision consistent with the law. Parents above all should decide what a child watches. The government cannot decide that for parents."
The decision had been expected Thursday, but the plaintiff introduced more evidence in the form of video recordings of several episodes of the two shows. The judge and both sides, along with representatives of the Federal Drug Control Service, spent most of Thursday's session watching the cartoons on a television placed in front of the judge's bench. Reporters in the courtroom could not see the screen and simply listened to the audio tracks, while Pavlova and Zinovyev traded barbs.
As evidence that "The Simpsons" promoted homosexuality, the plaintiff played for the judge an episode called "Homer's Phobia," in which the family befriends a local gay businessman. Homer Simpson is scared that his son Bart will become gay if he spends time with John, but in the end he learns to accept the businessman.
The court also watched a "Family Guy" episode titled "If I'm Dyin' I'm Lyin,'" in which the buffoonish Peter Griffin lies and says his son is dying in order to prevent his favorite television show from being canceled.
"You call this a normal family," Pavlova snapped at Zinovyev.
Several of the trial participants were laughing during the screening, including one woman from the Moscow branch of the Federal Drug Control Service, who went red in the face trying to hold in her guffaws.
The involvement of the drug police in the case could have been far from funny for RenTV, one of the last bastions of critical news coverage in the country. The service presented as evidence for the plaintiff expert opinions from linguists that the two programs contained language that promoted drugs.
RenTV has already received one warning from the federal service that oversees the mass media. The service issued the warning in November for what it deemed drug propaganda on the television show "Priznaki Zhizni," or "Signs of Life," with host Artyom Troitsky. Under Russian law, a second warning could result in the channel having its license revoked.
RenTV spokeswoman Maria Olshanskaya said the channel was "obviously satisfied" with the court decision.
TITLE: 'Aide Shot Maskhadov'
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov was shot by an aide at his request to avoid being captured alive, Deputy Prosecutor General Nikolai Shepel said Friday, in a remarkable departure from the previous official version of Maskhadov's death.
"Maskhadov died from multiple bullet wounds that were inflicted at his request by individuals who were with him in the bunker," Shepel told reporters at his offices in Vladikavkaz, Interfax reported.
"He had a suicide belt on him at the time, but he did not want to detonate it because he wanted his accomplices to live. So he asked them to shoot him," he said, Itar-Tass reported.
The Federal Security Service, or FSB, has said Maskhadov was killed in a bunker during a raid by FSB commandos in the Chechen village of Tolstoy-Yurt on March 8. It said three aides who were with Maskhadov, as well as with the owner of the house above the bunker, were arrested during the raid.
The detained rebels told investigators that one of them killed Maskhadov after FSB commandos blew up the top of the bunker and were preparing to move in, Interfax reported Shepel as saying.
In addition, investigators have confirmed that Maskhadov was killed with a gun and that the gun belonged to one of the detained rebels, Shepel said. Also, bullet holes in the bunker are consistent with the rebels' testimony, he said.
Alexei Malashenko, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, noted that Shepel's account was politically convenient in light of Western regret that Moscow did not capture Maskhadov alive.
The European Union has demanded an explanation about why Maskhadov was killed, and the Council of Europe, a human rights watchdog, has expressed regret that authorities lost the opportunity to bring Maskhadov to court.
Shepel also said Friday that forensic tests had confirmed that Maskhadov died March 8, RIA-Novosti reported.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Prince Andrew to Visit
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Britain's Prince Andrew will visit Murmansk for 60th anniversary celebrations of the defeat of Nazi Germany in early May, Interfax reported last week citing the regional administration.
The prince is to spend three days in the region together with British veterans of the World War II arctic convoys. He will visit British-funded projects to store waste from decommissioned Russian nuclear submarines, visit the flagship of the Northern Fleet, Peter the Great, and pay his respects at the graves of sailors who died in the convoys.
More Hermitage Space
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Plans for an entertainment center in the eastern wing of the General Staff Building on Palace Square have been reduced and the State Hermitage Museum will take 80 percent of the space after restoration, Interfax quoted Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky as saying last week.
In the space where it was initially intended to have cinemas there will be a picture gallery, he said.
The first stage of the reconstruction of 38,000 square meters is to be completed in 2009, the report said.
Orchestra to Play N.Y.
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra led by Yury Termikanov will play a concert dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in the United Nations in New York on May 7, Interfax reported last week.
The orchestra will peform Dmitry Shostakovich's wartime Leningrad symphony, which was performed in St. Petersburg, then known as Leningrad, during the Nazi siege of the city.
Galina Logutenko, deputy director of the orchestra, said not only diplomats of all UN missions are invited to the peformance, but also war veterans living in the United States.
EU-Russia Crossing
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The first joint border point between Russia and the European Union is to be created as an experiment in the Kaliningrad region, Interfax reported last week.
It will be staffed by Russian and EU customs officers, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, the presidential envoy to the EU said during a visit with ambassadors to the region.
City Leads HIV Rates
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - St. Petersburg together with Moscow, the Moscow region and Irkutsk have the highest rates of HIV infection among 20- to 25-year-olds in Russia, Interfax reported last week.
Citing Health and Social Development Minister Mikhail Zurabov, the report said that 75 percent of people infected with HIV are drug addicts, but the remainder of cases are almost all spread through heterosexual contact. Previously, heterosexual infection had accounted for only 4 percent of cases, he said.
'Nord-Ost' Wins Case
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The city arbitration court has recognized as valid a contract between the producers of the musical "Nord-Ost" and the city's Music Hall, Interfax reported Thursday.
The Music Hall in the fall refused to honor the contract allowing the musical be staged in the Hall, claiming it was in need of repairs. The producers filed a lawsuit in the Moscow Arbitration Court claiming 10 million rubles ($360,000) in damages from the Music Hall.
The St. Petersburg property committee then applied to the St. Petersburg Arbitration Court to annul the contract. As a result the Moscow lawsuit was postponed until the St. Petersburg court made its ruling.
In January, the new directors of the Music Hall agreed with the "Nord-Ost" producers to stage the musical. In return, the producers said they were prepared to drop their lawsuit.
Although the city property committee declined to drop its lawsuit, last week's ruling appears to clear the last obstacle to the musical's performance in the city.
Court 'Unnecessary'
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Deputy Governor Viktor Lobko sees no need for the city's Charter Court, which monitors legislation to see it does not breach the city charter, Interfax reported late last month.
Speaking at a conference of the United Russia party, Lobka said federal laws do not recognize the court as part of the government.
"The court was created during a difficult time," he said. "Today, the situation is much better and we don't really need it."
He noted that the court's mandate extends only until September and has already reduced its activities.
Botkin to Be Razed
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The Botkin hospital is to be closed and the buildings demolished, Governor Valentina Matviyenko said late last month.
"This year we will complete the architectural plans and next year we will begin building a new hospital for infectious diseases," Interfax quoted her saying.
TITLE: 20 Years Jail for Ex-Head of Yukos Security
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A Moscow City Court judge on Wednesday sentenced former Yukos security chief Alexei Pichugin to 20 years in prison on charges of double murder and conspiracy to commit murder, rejecting a prosecution demand for life imprisonment.
Pichugin, 42, was the first Yukos employee to receive a jail sentence in the state's vast legal onslaught against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business empire.
His sentencing came after a six-month trial that was closed on the grounds of state security.
"This is a political order, I will fight it for as long as possible," Pichugin said from a glass defendant's box in court after the sentence was handed down. He reiterated that he was innocent, but said that given the situation he would have not been surprised at an even harsher sentence.
"It could have been more," Pichugin said with an ironic smile.
The prosecution had asked for life imprisonment for Pichugin, but the judge, Natalya Olikhver, fixed the sentence at 20 years.
As if to prove that he had little hope of any other outcome, Pichugin appeared uninterested in the sentence as it was read out. His thoughts seemed to be elsewhere and he could not take his eyes off his wife, Tatyana. It was the first time he had seen her in a year and a half.
Also in court were other relatives of Pichugin, including his mother. She could not hold back her tears and was visibly disturbed by the packs of cameramen following her steps outside the courtroom.
Pichugin's defense lawyers told reporters at a briefing after the sentence that they planned to file a cassation suit to the Supreme Court to annul the trial, and to take his case to the European Court of Justice, on the grounds that he had not received a fair trial.
Pichugin was arrested in June 2003 after being called in by prosecutors for questioning. He was later charged with ordering the murder of Olga and Sergei Gorin. Prosecutors contended that the Gorins were longtime acquaintances of Pichugin and had been killed after a group of people stormed into their house in the Tambov region in November 2002.
The Gorins have never been found.
According to the prosecution, Pichugin was also behind attempts on the life of a former adviser to Khodorkovsky, Olga Kostina, and Viktor Kolesov, a senior official at Rosprom, a Menatep-controlled predecessor of Yukos-Moskva.
Prosecutor Kamil Kashayev told reporters earlier Wednesday afternoon that Pichugin was acting on the orders of Yukos' top managers, including key Khodorkovsky lieutenant Leonid Nevzlin. According to Kashayev, the Gorins were killed after Sergei Gorin had been involved with Pichugin in criminal activities, including attempted murders. Gorin, Kashayev said, had threatened to contact law enforcement agencies unless he was properly rewarded. "He was promised control of a few petrol stations," Kashayev said.
Kashayev cited a witness as saying that Gorin "went to the country house of Khodorkovsky's father, where he talked [with Boris Khodorkovsky] for an hour and a half."
"Gorin told Khodorkovsky's father about contracts and murders," Kashayev said.
But in the defense team's briefing, lawyer Dmitry Kurepin said Boris Khodorkovsky had denied to prosecutors that the visit, or the conversation, ever took place.
Kashayev denied that Pichugin's case had any connection with politics.
"What kind of politics are we talking about when there are explosions and murders, when there are real dead bodies?" he said.
When a reporter pointed out that no bodies had ever been found in the case, Kashayev replied cryptically, "a person cannot live without brain matter."
Investigators claimed they found a piece of human brain tissue near the Gorins' house, which they identified as belonging to Sergei Gorin. It was not clear, however, what testing procedure was used to identify the evidence. The defense claimed that the blood group of the tissue sample and Gorin's did not match. It was also unclear whether more precise techniques, such as DNA matching, were used.
Kashayev denied that the timing of Pichugin's case and his sentencing, which came just as the trial of Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev neared its end, could be read as part of an organized campaign.
Khodorkovsky and Lebedev are charged with large-scale fraud and tax evasion. State prosecutor Dmitry Shokhin called last week for 10 years in jail for both men.
"If the two cases are being heard at the same time, it is just a normal coincidence; there is nothing compromising in it for me," Kashayev told reporters Wednesday.
Pichugin's defense lawyers, meanwhile, continued to maintain Wednesday that their client was innocent of the charges, and insisted the trial was unfair and biased.
According to lawyer Georgy Kaganer, the defense was denied the chance to dismiss most of the evidence or question the prosecution witnesses' statements. The trial was also conducted behind closed doors on the grounds that classified documents would be produced in court, but not a single document was ever produced or even discussed, he said.
Kaganer said that the entire prosecution case was based on the statements of a few witnesses, who were practically all members of an organized crime group and were already serving long prison terms for serious crimes, including murder and rape.
"Pichugin entered into a criminal conspiracy at an undetermined time, in an undetermined place, with unidentified Yukos managers," Kaganer said. "How can you mount a defense against that?"
Kaganer also said the case was a part of a larger political campaign.
"It is one thing to accuse Yukos of tax evasion, but another to charge that it was a gangster organization."
Kaganer said the defense planned to forward a cassation suit to the Supreme Court within 10 days calling for the trial to be annulled. In a cassation hearing, lawyers can only object to procedural errors during a trial. The Supreme Court is required to consider the suit within a month of its filing.
Another defense lawyer, Ksenia Kostromina, said that a complaint would also be filed to the European Court of Justice.
Kashayev said Wednesday that the defense had no chance for a successful appeal to the Supreme Court.
TITLE: Chechen Court Sends OMON Officer to Jail
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: GROZNY - A Grozny court on Tuesday sentenced a federal Interior Ministry serviceman to 11 years in jail for severely beating a Chechen civilian - the first time such a trial has been held in Chechnya.
Sergei Lapin, an officer of the elite OMON special forces who was serving in Chechnya, was convicted of causing severe bodily harm to Zelimkhan Murdalov and of abusing his authority.
Murdalov, 22, left his home in Grozny on Jan. 2, 2001, saying he would be back in an hour, according to the London-based human rights organization Amnesty International.
That was the last Murdalov's family ever saw of him, and his whereabouts remain unknown. His father discovered that a young man matching his description had been detained in central Grozny. Police told him that his son was detained on charges of possessing cannabis and was later released.
However, detainees who had been held in the same cell reportedly said that when they saw Murdalov a day after his arrest he was unconscious after being severely beaten and his body was mutilated. A criminal case was opened in January 2001 into Murdalov's "disappearance," but his father still does not know the fate of his son.
Relatives of the victim wept in court as the judge spent more than half an hour describing the details of his beating and torture, including electric shocks and the use of dogs, according to footage broadcast on NTV television.
Lapin protested his innocence and denounced the court verdict as unfair. His lawyers will appeal, NTV said.
"I didn't expect anything else," he said from inside a steel cage for defendants in the courtroom.
"It's unlawful, unjustified and unproven," Lapin said.
But a lawyer for the victim's family said they welcomed the verdict even though it would not bring back Murdalov, believed to be dead.
"They are satisfied. A crime has been acknowledged as a crime and a real punishment meted out," Stanislav Margelov said.
The verdict was the first to be handed down by a Chechen court against a federal serviceman accused of committing crimes against Chechens. A military officer, former Colonel Yury Budanov, was convicted by a Rostov-on-Don court in July 2003 of the kidnapping and murder of an 18-year-old Chechen woman.
TITLE: Media Pledges $200M to Stop HIV/AIDS
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A group of some of Russia's biggest media organizations plans to donate $200 million worth of cash, airtime and column inches to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS in a three-year campaign to halt the spread of infection in the country, Gazprom Media said last Wednesday.
Gazprom Media-owned television channels NTV, TNT and NTV-Plus are joining with other media in the campaign, including Ren-TV, Muz-TV, MTV, Ekho Moskvy radio and Russian Media Group radio stations.
Gazprom Media chairman Alexander Dybal announced the campaign contribution at a meeting Wednesday of 60 government and business officials and members of nonprofit organizations dedicated to fighting HIV/AIDS. The spread of the disease in Russia is among the world's fastest.
Health officials this month registered a total of 312,000 HIV-positive people in the country, but said the real number of people carrying the virus could be as high as 1 million. HIV/AIDS is depleting the country's labor force, the World Bank said, estimating that a further growth in infection rates could cause a 4 percent fall in gross domestic product by 2010.
"The spread of the virus has reach a critical level," said Vadim Pokrovsky, head of the Federal AIDS Center. "One hundred people get infected every day. As we have been speaking here over the last hour, four or five people could have been infected in Russia."
Health and Social Development Minister Mikhail Zurabov said the federal government would finance treatment for HIV/AIDS patients through the $1.8 billion that it allocated to subsidized medicine for low-income groups this year, Zurabov said.
By attending the meeting, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov became the first senior Cabinet minister to publicly address the issue of HIV/AIDS, said Kristalina Georgieva, the World Bank's director for Russia.
John Tedstrom, head of Trans-Atlantic Partners Against AIDS, an international NGO that fights AIDS in Russian and Ukraine, said that while turnout by business leaders at the meeting was limited, organizers had expected that.
"It's not broad, but it's a start," he said.
TITLE: Ban on Jewish Groups Urged
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - About 5,000 people, including former world chess champion Boris Spassky, have signed a letter asking prosecutors to ban Jewish organizations because they believe one of the basic Judaic books professes religious hatred, according to a center that monitors religious freedom.
The group sent the letter to the Prosecutor General's Office on March 21, the Sova center said.
The signatories claim that "Kizur Shulkhan Arukh," an abbreviated version of a 16th-century book that lays out daily rules for Jews, teaches hatred toward non-Jews, Sova said.
Moscow sculptor and head of the obscure nationalist All-Russian Cathedral Movement Vyacheslav Klykov, a signatory of the petition, confirmed the report, Interfax said.
One of Russia's two chief rabbis, Adolf Shayevich, condemned the letter as a way for "a number of ambitious politicians" to "earn cheap popularity."
Boruch Gorin, a spokesman for the Russian Federation of Jewish Communities, called for an investigation into manifestations of anti-Semitism. "People who have achieved success in life and have certain authority in society must understand that they cover their names with indelible shame by signing such documents," he said, in an apparent reference to Spassky, Interfax reported.
Shakhmatnaya Nedelya, or Chess Week, of which Spassky is editor, said last month that he was in France and was not available for comment.
The letter came two months after 20 State Duma deputies sent a similar letter to the Prosecutor General's Office.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Surkov: No Amendments
MOSCOW (SPT) - The deputy head of the presidential administration Vladislav Surkov told journalists Tuesday that he is against any changes to the Constitution and Russia becoming a parliamentary republic.
Rumors about amending the Constitution to allow President Vladimir Putin to stay in power after his second term expires have been strong in recent months. One option is to make Russia a parliamentary republic, with Putin becoming its prime minister.
Activists' Sentences Cut
MOSCOW (MT) - The Moscow City Court on Tuesday reduced the prison terms of seven National Bolshevik Party activists for hooliganism and damaging property.
The men, who stormed into offices of the Health and Social Development Ministry in August 2004 in protest of government social policies, were each sentenced to five years by a Moscow district court in December.
Three had their sentences halved Tuesday, while the other four had their terms reduced to three years.
No-Confidence Vote
MOSCOW (SPT) - Regional lawmakers approved a no-confidence motion against Altai Governor Mikhail Yevdokimov in a 46-5 vote Thursday. But Yevdokimov said he would not resign.
Earlier this month, a group of politicians and NGOs urged President Vladimir Putin to dismiss Yevdokimov over heating problems in the eastern Siberian region.
Kim Invited for May 9
MOSCOW (AP) - Moscow said Thursday that it hopes North Korean leader Kim Jong Il will accept its invitation to visit for Victory Day celebrations on May 9.
Kim has not yet responded to the invitation, Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said at a news conference.
Itar-Tass, however, on Thursday quoted an unidentified member of the Moscow-based organizing committee for the May 9 festivities as saying Kim would not come and would send a senior official in his place.
Al-Jazeera Criticized
MOSCOW (AP) - The Foreign Ministry on Thursday angrily criticized the al-Jazeera Arab satellite channel for what it described as biased reports on Chechnya.
A ministry statement said al-Jazeera's coverage of Chechnya "completely distorts the actual state of affairs in the Chechen Republic and ignores the continuous efforts of federal and local authorities to restore the economy and normalize the social and political situation." It accused "foreign circles" of trying to hamper the development of Russia's ties with Arab nations through reports on Chechnya by Qatar-based al-Jazeera. "We are certain that they will not succeed," it added.
Deal With Scientist
DETROIT (AP) - The Russian government has settled a dispute with a scientist accused of fleeing the country in 1991 with $350 million worth of nonradioactive isotopes.
The settlement was approved Monday after 10 years of wrangling in federal court in Detroit, court documents said.
The deal authorizes lawyers for Russia and a Detroit company controlled by the scientist, Alexandre Rodionov, to sell the isotopes and split the proceeds. Russia is to get 65 percent, while Rodionov's company, High Technology Products, is to get 35 percent, the Detroit Free Press reported Wednesday.
TITLE: SOS Children's Village Offers Hope, Independence to Abandoned Children
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Four years ago, when Zhenya Anisimova, then aged five, arrived at the SOS Children's Village for abandoned children near the town of Pushkin, she talked only to herself and a TV set.
Today Zhenya, a slim, lively girl with dark hair and brown eyes, is the most communicative person among six children in her new family.
"I want to be a policewoman to catch criminals and defend our Motherland," Zhenya says, her eyes sparkling.
"I want to be a waitress, too, or a physical education teacher, though that doesn't pay well," she gushes excitedly.
The SOS Children's Village in the village of Gumolassary 30 kilometers south of St. Petersburg was opened five years ago. It is one of four such villages in Russia. There are 450 such villages worldwide.
Austrian Hermann Gmeiner founded the international non-governmental organization SOS Children's Villages in 1949. The primary aim of the organization, also known as SOS Kinderdorf International, is to provide long-term, family-style care for orphaned and abandoned children.
SOS is the international signal of distress and its incorporation in the name of the organization recognizes the children's distress and need for help.
Gmeiner's concept of how the children aged from a few months to 15 years old should best be cared for is to provide them with comfortable homes located in a village of cottages, and to place them in a family with a foster mother.
In Gumolassary's SOS village Zhenya is one of 75 children who live in 12 cozy, redbrick cottages arranged in a circle in the middle of a large open space.
The home where Zhenya lives with her three SOS sisters and two SOS brothers and SOS mother Yelena Volostnova smells of mouthwatering pirozhki cooked by Volostnova. The dwelling glows with the soft colors of wood furniture and bright carpets.
"At first we had to do everything to make Zhenya speak," Volostnova says.
"Now we can't stop her," she smiles.
Volostnova, 47, has worked as a SOS mother for almost five years, living with children and their problems day and night. She gets only four days off a month.
"It was hardest at the beginning," Volostnova says, as her foster daughter Nina, 13, irons her blue jeans decorated with fancy embroidery. The other girls are putting a huge jigsaw puzzle together.
"Back then I had to explain what an iron was to seven-year-old Dora," she said. "Nina would only eat pasta if she could drink water with it, which was what she had gotten used to in her previous home. Out of curiousity, Denis would just open someone's bag in the metro just to see what would happen.
"I still remember how four-year-old Danya cried because I fed him with what he called 'sour stuff.' He was referring to peaches, which he had never seen in his life. He demanded to be given cookies and water, which was what his family had fed him on."
Today all of Volostnova's foster children, most of whom are now teenagers, know how to take care of themselves. They cook breakfast and dinner, clean the house, go shopping, replace burnt-out light bulbs, and understand the family's budget. Teaching the skills of self-reliance is one of the most important aims of SOS homes.
Abandoned children's dependence on others creates the biggest difficulties. When they leave a regular orphanage, where food and clothes are always at hand, they don't know how to get on in the world outside institutions.
"Recently I cooked my first pasta with cheese all by myself," Zhenya says proudly.
Volostnova nods in agreement, whispering that when Zhenya was boiling the pasta "all by herself," the rest of the family took turns to peep through the doorway to make sure if Zhenya was not doing anything dangerous with the gas stove.
Another mission of SOS homes is to teach children a family-oriented lifestyle.
Mikhail Kolomytsev, director of the Gumolassary village, said the SOS concept is for children to learn what "home, mother, sisters and brothers, and what normal communication in a family should be."
"Even if their mother argues with them, the children should see that conflicts in the family exist but that there are ways to solve them," he said.
Gmeiner, whose mother died while he was still an infant, fought in Russia during World War II. He founded the first SOS village in Austria in 1949 after witnessing the plight of Russian children left homeless as a result of the war. He died in 1986.
Today the organization operates villages in 132 countries. The head of the organization, Helmut Kutin, was one of the children raised in the first SOS village.
In Russia, there are four SOS Children's Villages. One is located in Tomilino near Moscow, another is located in Lavrovo near the city of Oryol, the village in Gumolassary and the fourth is situated in the Murmansk region.
All the villages are dependent on international charity.
Kolomytsev said he is quite frustrated that little sponsorship comes from Russian businesses.
"It's a bit of a paradox that Russian children are receiving help mainly at the expense of foreign sponsors, but not from the children's compatriots," he said.
Marina Anoshina, spokeswoman for Russia's SOS Children's Villages, said the lack of donations from Russian sponsors is partly because there is little tradition of being charitable for many Russian businesses, and because the government does not give any incentives for charity.
"The state does not offer any tax breaks to companies that provide charity," Anoshina said.
Most donations come from poor, kind-hearted elderly people who send part of their pension to the villages, she said.
Volostnova said a challenge in her family is that she has to constantly urge the children to help around the house and to study.
The children come from families that did not bother to teach them to be industrious from early childhood. The children's attitude to work is that it is unpleasant, she said.
Volostnova's foster daughter Dora Markovskaya, 12, said the things she dislikes most of all are cleaning the house and having to go to school.
"I'm too lazy to do that," Dora said. "Should I try to overcome my laziness? No, I'm too lazy to even try."
Nevertheless, she still likes the food and the good clothes that her foster home provides for her.
All the children said they like Volostnova, whom they call "Mama."
"Mama is good. She believes in God," says Zhenya as she passes Volostnova's room and points at a little icon hanging above the door.
The SOS Children's Village charter declares it to be a non-religious, independent NGO.
"We respect varying religions and cultures," Kolomytsev. "We also respect the beliefs of each SOS mother.
"If an SOS mother trusts in God it doesn't prevent her from bringing up SOS children. Some children go to Sunday school, but only if they want to."
Valya Fabrika, 15, whose parents were alcoholics, said she felt lucky to have met Volostnova, and to have found herself in the SOS Children's Village home rather than in a regular orphanage.
Fabrika was particularly excited about the annual summer trips to the Black Sea, where the SOS Children's Village used to send its children for vacations. This year, the budget is insufficient to pay for this and the children won't go unless some sponsors help out.
Volostnova, who used to work as a secretary in a law firm and has two adult daughters of her own, said her life changed greatly after she had come to work at the village.
"Now I'm a public person, who the children see as a role model," she said.
"I always have to eat as if I am in a restaurant with all the appropriate manners. I can't just lounge in front of TV or jump out of the shower wrapped only in a towel," she said.
"Why did I apply for this job? I think, I just felt I could really help here," she said.
The foster mothers have to sacrifice their private lives when they work at the villages.
Volostnova said she cannot invite her own friends over to the house. Since she has no time to visit them herself she has lost touch with many friends.
Under the rules of Russian SOS villages, the mothers are usually either divorced women, whose own children have already grown up, or single women without children.
The children are selected on an individual basis using a pedagogical adviser and the director of a village. They may start the process with the knowledge that an SOS mother can take one or two more children into her SOS family.
If she says she would like a girl, but not one that is too young, the director and pedagogical adviser go to a state orphanage or children's home and search for a girl. When they have found a suitable child, they find they try to find out if she has any biological brothers and sisters, who may be housed in different orphanages. If she has, the SOS Children's Village takes them all.
The villages do not have doctors, so seriously ill children are not accepted. The children attend normal schools, kindergartens and polyclinics.
Lyubov Alexandrova, another SOS mother, who has taken care of seven children in the neighboring cottage for the last four years, said that her work has put her through almost every psychological state: inspiration, despair, depression and reconciliation.
"I was really in despair when Yan, who was then nine, used to take his revenge on me for doing the smallest things that he didn't like," Alexandrova, 47. "For instance he would release a rat or a mouse in the house. It would take us ages to catch them to save our groceries."
Although most children call her Mama, in accordance with the SOS rules, this is not very natural for them, she said.
Most children's parents are alive, but have abandoned them or have had their children taken away because they are alcoholics or neglected the children. Nevertheless, their birth parents are often still dear to the children.
Alexandrova, a trained teacher and mother of two grown-up children, said the SOS Village is a symbiosis of family and institution.
She is worried that her foster son Danila, whom she has raised since he was one will be psychologically stressed when he realizes that the family he lives in is not his own family, and that he'll have to leave it when he is 15.
Under the SOS program children have to leave the SOS villages when they are 15 for a SOS Youth Home. This is a kind of dormitory, where children can lead more independent leaves, but with SOS help still near at hand.
Danila is obviously the darling of the family. The other children are all teenagers.
Alexandrova is proud that all the older children know how to take care of the boy: they collect him from the kindergarten, wash him before he goes to bed, feed him, and read him a good-night fairy tale.
"Now that the older children are so experienced I can leave home with a light heart to do other things, knowing that they'll do everything all right," she said.
Varya Osharina, 14, Alexandrova's foster daughter, said she was grateful to her SOS mother for teaching her cooking, knitting, cleaning and about the prices in shops.
Alexandrova said that the village families lack cars, which they could use to transport heavy bags with groceries from distant shops.
However, despite all the problems the family has, Alexandrova said the idea of such family village was great.
"Thank God, someone came up with the idea," she said.
The SOS Children's Village in Gumolassary can be contacted
by tel. (812) 465-51-29
e-mail: ddsos-spb@lek.ru
website: www.dd-sos.spb.ru
Russian Committee for SOS Children's Villages at (095) 718-99-18
Website: www.sos-dd.ru
TITLE: Tourism Officials Warn of High Hotel Rates
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The vexing question of the continued development of St. Petersburg's tourism sector was raised once more at this year's ITB international tourism fair in Berlin last month. Nikita Savoyarov was there.
BERLIN - St. Petersburg's top tourist official warned that there could be a 25 percent decrease in the number of foreign tourists visiting the city if its hotels keep putting up their rates.
Viktor Pakhomkov, speaking at the Internationale Tourismus Boerse in Berlin last month, said that nearly all hotel owners in St. Petersburg have disregarded City Hall's recommendation to restrain annual rises in room prices.
This year two city luxury hotels - the Grand Hotel Europe and Corinthia Nevskij Palace - announced new prices: 500 and 380 euros a night for a single room respectively. Tourism officials predict this pricing policy could lead to a 20-25 percent drop in the numbers of foreign tourists visiting the city.
Representatives from St. Petersburg participate in the ITB show every year. The exhibition stand presented by the city this year was split into several parts: a city stand organized by the St. Petersburg-Express company, a stand about tourism to Russia in general and several stands organized by independent tour operators as well as Pulkovo airlines. The first two stands featured local hotels and tour operators.
But the doleful appearance of the stands did not correspond with the favorable situation in the Russian tourism industry but evidently reflected recent government reforms in how tourism is administered in Russia.
In November last year, the Federal Agency for Physical Culture, Sports and Tourism - the main state body for tourism in the country - was split into two independent agencies: the Federal Agency for Physical Culture and Sport and the Federal Agency for Tourism. Responsibility for tourism was assumed by former Deputy Economic Development and Trade Minister Vladimir Strzhalkovsky.
Most importantly, reflecting the government's recognition of travel and tourism's importance to the national economy and to the image of the country abroad, both agencies report directly to Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov. In his former position, Strzhalkovsky was responsible for tourism and neither he nor his deputy Natela Shengeliya, is a newcomer to the industry. Both are well known by major travel and tourism players and have been regular visitors to ITB Berlin in the past.
Inbound tourism to Russia accounted for more than 22 million arrivals in 2004. A growth in the number of inbound tourists to St. Petersburg (3.4 million) and Moscow (2.92 million) in 2004 was reported the tourist authorities.
The Berlin show provided an opportunity for St. Petersburg to learn from the success of other destinations. For example, the problem of St. Petersburg's rising hotel prices has been successfully tackled by the city of Kaliningrad, which is very popular among Germans and Poles.
Even during its 750th-anniversary year, the price for a single room in a four-star hotel in Kaliningrad has not exceeded $120, said Albert Prokhorchuk, general director of Baltma Tours from Kaliningrad at his stand in Berlin.
Price increases in St. Petersburg are making German tour operators in particular very worried about the coming season. Vladimir Ilin, executive director of Olympia Reisen confirmed his anxiety at a news conference held by the St. Petersburg delegation in Berlin.
The most acceptable solution for every player in the tourism market is the attraction of foreign tourists into the city in the low season with the "White Days" promotion, presented by Pakhomkov and Thomas Noll, the newly appointed general manager of the Grand Hotel Europe. They believe the promotion will redistribute tourist flows more evenly.
However, St. Petersburg's position is rather weak since the boost of its 300th anniversary celebrations in 2003 is wearing off and there is a lack of money from the federal budget for city infrastructure development, including construction of new metro lines. Even the separate efforts of Pulkovo, which sells a round-trip ticket from St. Petersburg to Germany for just 150 euros have not changed the situation significantly.
Moscow's program for boosting tourism, inspired by its bid for the 2012 Olympic Games, far exceeds St. petersburg's This program was presented at the ITB by Grigory Antyufeyev, the chairman of Moscow's tourism committeeI n the capital, large investments are being made into the modernization of old hotels and construction of new ones. In less than three years, the number of hotel rooms in Moscow will increase from the existing 64,000 up to 120,000.
As much as 80 percent of the sports facilities needed to host the Olympic Games are now available while rest will be finished within the next three years.
Sports tourism dominated the ITB in 2005. Next year's soccer World Cup in Germany is an extremely attractive event for millions of people across the world, and the event was given the full support of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who spoke about it during the opening ceremony party. Germany expects an additional 4 to 5 million tourists in 2006 due to the event.
There was some good news for the Russian tourism industry: IPK International's "World Travel Monitor" - the largest and in fact only tourism study in the world that monitors the pulse of international tourism - puts the total number of outbound trips from Russia at just over 12 million for 2003, and with up to 14 million expected in 2004. Russia is also among the 6 most dynamic European source markets recording growth in outbound travel.
This has been the first "crisis-free" ITB for several years despite the effects of the Southeast Asian tsunami. Sales are increasing for most destinations and travel suppliers while the industry returns to its normal growth model. No more discounting is expected. Tourism companies can at last expect improvements to the bottom line in 2005.
TITLE: Gazprom to Invest in Network
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Gazprom will invest over 560 million rubles ($20 million) in repairing and renovating St. Petersburg's heating energy networks in 2005, according to an agreement signed Tuesday by Alexei Miller, head of the gas giant, and St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko.
The investment comes as part of a partnership program started between the city and the company at the end of last year. Under the agreement, Gazprom will construct and renovate the heating infrastructure in the city's Petrogradsky district, including the replacement of 114 water boilers and 190 kilometers of piping, a statement from the company said.
The company promised to supply its city customers with 10.8 billion cubic meters of gas in 2005 and also said it will "chip in" for the financing needed to provide the Pushkinsky and Kurortny city suburbs with gas and heating infrastructure the districts lack.
In exchange, St. Petersburg's administration said it will make sure all gas deliveries to the customers that are paid for by the city budget are "fully paid on time." It will also cover any debts left from earlier purchases, the agreement said, and compensate Gazprom with the difference between the reduced gas tariff prices enjoyed by some of the city's veterans as in-kind benefits and the price agreed to by the city.
Andrei Korotkov, an analyst with rating agency Fitch, said that although the city's side of the agreement may seem simply common sense, the agreement will also act as a positive signal to would-be investors.
"The provision of cost replacement for in-kind benefits costs relieves some of the fears investors had about the recent exchange of cash payments for in-kind benefits taking a heavy toll on the city budget," he said Thursday in a telephone interview.
"It shows the city is ready to pay, and unlike many other regions, St. Petersburg has been very thorough in honoring its debt obligations," Korotkov added.
The city has been facing the need to increase capital expenditure to replace the highly depreciated assets of its utility and transport companies, and Gazprom's involvement will take some of the financial weight off its shoulders, Piskunov said.
Apart from the projects that are to be implemented this year, Gazprom is a long-term partner of the city on several other initiatives, including the construction of a new international-standard new football stadium for the city soccer team Zenit, the opening of a city Gazprom office and construction of a new thermal energy station in the southwest of the city.
Gazprom's total investments in the city will be between 4 billion and five billion rubles ($143.5 million to $179.3 million) by the end of 2008, according to the administration's estimates.
Matviyenko has supported Miller's plea to deregulate gas prices, which he proposed to the Kremlin this week.
"Regulating gas prices for industrial consumers limits the [country's] economic growth and development," Interfax cited Matviyenko as saying Tuesday.
Gas prices should, however, remain fixed for individual consumers, communal services and enterprises registered on the city budget, she said.
All industrial gas consumers buy gas from Gazprom or its local subsidiary Peterburgregiongaz at fixed prices under state-regulated quotas.
However, the amount specified by the quotas is usually not enough to cover demand, so customers either decrease production or buy gas at expensive "free" tariffs.
TITLE: New Anti-Fraud Law Targets Names of Insurance Firms
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - More than half the country's insurers may have to change their names within three months or face the possibility of losing their licenses. In an effort to crack down on fraud, a provision in the recent insurance law will make it illegal for insurance companies to repeat "full or partial" components of competitors' names starting on July 17.
A lack of originality could mean that hundreds of insurers will be forced to dream up new trademarks. Many insurers use variations on words like strakhovaniye (insurance), and some even share identical names.
The problem will become acute in three months' time, said Pavel Samiyev, an insurance analyst at Expert Rating Agency, though it remains unclear how the law will be enforced. The provision that targets copycat companies was originally passed to protect established insurers from low-quality providers, who try to cash in on others' success by setting up shop under similar-sounding names, Samiyev said.
In 2003 there were some 1,400 insurers domestically, according to the All-Russia Insurance Union, and last year the market was worth 472 billion rubles ($16.96 billion).
Market watchers said that the law's provision may affect more than half of the country's insurers, though the exact number was hard to estimate.
Andrei Biryukov, a spokesman for Rosgosstrakh, one of the country's oldest insurers, said the company welcomed the provision because it tries to prevent the copying of trademarks by "unconscientious parties." Nevertheless, he said, "the law has defects."
Some companies, like a St. Petersburg insurer and a company in Moscow use exactly the same name-Doveriye.
Others use some of the same words, which may also become illegal, depending on how the new provision is interpreted, said Eduard Grebenshchikov, analyst with the All-Russia Insurance Union. Like Rosgosstrakh, numerous companies use "strakh" -shorthand for strakhovaniye - in their names. It is not clear whether the Federal Insurance Oversight Service, the industry watchdog, will penalize this practice under the new law.
The service could not be reached for comment Thursday.
"Rosgosstrakh doesn't plan to make any sort of changes to the company's name," Biryukov said. The interests of "serious" companies should win over "day-old" insurers, he added.
In the case of a conflict, the Federal Insurance Oversight Service will leave it up to insurers to decide which company will need to rebrand, said Pavel Danilov, head of Metropolis insurer and a member of the National Insurance Guild's expert council.
"The letter of the law doesn't differentiate between registration dates of companies, making both same-name insurers equally at fault," Danilov said. The guild is set to hold a series of meetings to develop a plan of action, he said.
TITLE: Transparency Rules Spur Debate
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Russian business owners have a different view to their foreign counterparts of what a financially transparent company is, experts said Thursday at a seminar.
But they will have to "break their heads" and change their stance if they want to attract investors and ensure competitiveness, the experts said.
U.S. and Russian investors, entrepreneurs and service agents discussed their view of business transparency, and what it means to be a transparent company in Russia at a seminar organized by the U.S. Russia Center for Entrepreneurship and the St. Petersburg International Business Association and other partners.
"Transparency has its limits," said Gregory Chernov, general director of Hotel Corporation, which owns the city's Radisson SAS Royal hotel.
"Clearly foreign investors want maximum transparency, but Russian businesses have to think very carefully about what kind of information they can disclose, since - let's face it- every [Russian] company has skeletons in its closet," he said.
Chernov's company faced the need to become transparent in 1997, when it wanted additional investments to continue the development of the hotel. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy at the time it signed an investment deal with Delta Private Equity Partners (formerly Delta Capital Management).
"We, therefore, could not disclose all the financial information, so as to not scare the investor off," Chernov said. "However, we were sure that as soon as Delta got on board the city government would give us [a payments deadline] extension, and we would be able to regulate the situation," Chernov said.
The U.S. investment fund signed, and Radisson soon became one of the most successful city hotels.
However, Paul Price, the managing director of the fund, who supervised the deal at the time, said awareness of the true situation from the start would have allowed both the company and the investor to fix problems a lot more cheaply. "Tell us [the investor] the truth, and we promise not to run away and hide," he said, also speaking at the entrepreneurship group's seminar.
Price explained the textbook benefits of transparency to the group, adding that keeping a company's books in order allows it to tap into various new financial resources and increases its value by 20 percent to 30 percent.
However, Konstantin Gubin, a partner of Moscow's PR Partnership consulting firm, said keeping the books in order may well be worth a lot more if the company owners are looking to sell the business or go public in the future.
As an example he cited the Delta Bank-GE deal, where the bank, worth $25.5 million in capital, was sold to GE consumer finance for $100 million. Meanwhile another bank, Menatep, with capital worth $300 million, was sold off for $100 million."
"Transparency made the real difference in these cases," he said, adding that in a few years it will become a determining factor for the success of Russian companies on global markets.
"Russian businesses have been prone to lack transparency due to the specific business culture that formed upon the breakup of the Soviet Union," Gubin said.
There were several reasons for the distorted nature of the business structures that evolved. Above all, it was the flawed legislature, which made it possible to backdate rule changes and scared companies from declaring the correct figures, Gubin said.
The judicial system was corrupt and left loose any ends it could have tightened. Also systematic tax evasions practiced by companies made it non-competitive to become a transparent taxpayer, he said.
The level of transparency in a country indicates the overall health of the country's business environment, he added.
"When we see a rise of transparency in the country it means the overall business environment is healthy. When we see it decline, it's a sign that the country's government is making some general mistakes in its economic policy," he said.
Meanwhile, the situation in St. Petersburg's industries in terms of honest and transparent business dealings is just about the same as it was 15 years ago, Radisson's Chernov said.
"I am asked to consult various businesses on projects all the time, and when I start getting down to details I see that the level of business consciousness has stayed at about the same level it was in the early 90s," he said.
TITLE: Sale of Oktyabrskaya Hotel
Stake Earns City $49.6M
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: City Hall on Tuesday sold its 60-percent stake in the three-star Oktyabrskaya Hotel at auction for $49.6 million, about four times the starting price.
The winning bid came from Severnaya Stolitsa, which is reported to be related to the Alfa-Eko investment company, part of Alfa Group.
On Monday, Alfa-Eko announced that it would buy out a 37-percent stake in the hotel from St. Peterburg's Viking Bank.
The bidder for Severnaya Stolitsa was Alexei Ustayev, the chairman of the board of Viking Bank.
Vedomosti noted that the winning bid was larger than the bank's assets of about 1 billion rubles ($35.9 million) recorded on Jan. 1 2005.
The newspaper quoted an unnamed banking analyst as saying that if a bank pays a sum exceeding the size of its assets, it is evidently acting on someone else's behalf. The paper quoted a hotel market player as saying it was likely that Viking Bank was working in partnership with Alfa-Eko.
Fourteen bidders took part in the auction, including the Intourist Hotel Group, Eurofinans-Mosnarbank and two Norwegian chains, Linstow and Olympic Park.
No one expected the stake to sell for such a high price, with several participants expecting the winning bid to be between $30 million and $45 million.
Vedomosti quoted analysts as saying that Alfa-Eko's announcement that it would acquire the 37-percent stake had backfired and instead of lowering the price did just the opposite.
The hotel consists of two buildings in a prime location. One faces the Moscow station and has 558 rooms. The other is on Ligovsky Prospekt and has 111 rooms plus 700 square meters of office space.
Built in 1851, it is to be refurbished and divided into five-star and three-star hotels and a retail center.
Also this week, a company called Arla asked the St. Petersburg Arbitration Court to cancel the auction of the city's 74.42-percent stake in the Moskva hotel for about $40 million on March 3.
Arla's appeal is based on a claim that the privatization of the Moskva was unlawful. Web site Nevastroika quoted an unnamed source in the city administration as saying the appeal has no chance of success.
With the sale of the Oktyarbrskaya, City Hall has exited the hotel business. The Property Fund has reported that the sale of city stakes in 11 hotels this year has generated 4 billion rubles for the city budget, achieving the goal it had set last year.
TITLE: 25% of Construction Firms 'Break Law'
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The safety and quality of housing in St. Petersburg is being put at risk because a quarter of the city's construction companies break the law, a city official said Monday.
"One in four construction companies in St. Petersburg builds houses in breach of the law, thus jeopardizing their quality and safety," web site Nevastroika quoted Alexander Ort, head of the city's construction permit and inspection agency, as saying in an interview.
In 2004, the agency monitored 1,500 construction sites and inspected 388 buildings. It found illegal construction and irregularities in 70 percent of these, he said.
"One of the principle violations is working without formal authorization from Gossanstroinadzor [the agency that issues building permits]," Ort said.
Construction companies work without permits because it is cheaper for them to pay a relatively small fine of 10,000 rubles to 30,000 rubles ($359 to $1,077) for breaking regulations than to halt work for 7 weeks while they obtain the necessary documents, have them processed and get permits, he said.
Several attempts to restructure Ort's agency so that it will lead to higher compliance have been made in the past. Next year a federal body will be created that is supposed to oversee the work of regional inspection and monitoring agencies.
Putting the inspection and monitoring functions in one organization confuses the roles and may lead to even more breaches, Nevastroika quoted unnamed managers at the city agency as saying.
As regards St. Petersburg, the federal law on building inspections says that houses lower than 3 stories are exempt from inspections. This means that much of the historic center of the city, not to mention one- and two-story elite residential projects are not subject to the law.
Critical problems of stability, safety and quality of buildings under construction "are discovered in the early stages and are corrected through the agency's recommendations," Ort said. "In addition, every other company has problems with the quality of finish."
A poor finish might be a euphemism for new apartments that are uninhabitable, one woman said.
"My husband and I went to see an apartment," said Valentina, who declined to give her last name. "There was a hole in the ceiling, half a meter by half a meter wide. Technically speaking, the building was completed and half of apartments in the building had been already sold."
Dmitry Barolin, general director of Northwest Construction Corp., said the worst problems occur among the many new companies in the city.
"Companies that have operated in St. Petersburg for a number of years have a good reputation and do not have problems with the quality of construction," he said.
He conceded that even well established companies may not have all permits because the approval processes are very slow.
Construction companies would be happy to comply with stricter regulations, but would like the permit process to be shorter and simpler, Barolin said.
TITLE: Tax Authorities Freeze JTI Petro's Bank Accounts
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: Japan Tobacco Inc.'s St. Petersburg plant Petro may have to halt production as early as this week after tax authorities froze some of its bank accounts, business daily Kommersant said Monday, citing company spokesman Vadim Botsan-Kharchenko.
Petro's bank accounts were frozen March 23 as part of tax authorities' efforts to collect $15 million in back taxes and fines, preventing the company from paying its suppliers, the newspaper said.
Petro was hit with the back tax charge for 2001 in March and is set to appeal the bill in the St. Peterburg Arbitration Court on April 20.
Japan Tobacco made the decision not to transfer any money to Petro's accounts until the situation resolves, leaving it with no funds to purchase production materials, the newspaper said.
JTI's spokesperson Andrei Yerin confirmed the accounts freeze in a telephone interview from Moscow, but was unable to provide further comments Monday.
JTI probably has enough cigarettes in inventory to last until the end of April, Kommersant said, citing an unidentified Japan Tobacco dealer for the Moscow region.
The company was second in Russia in cigarette sales as of November, with 18.4 percent of the market, Kommersant said, citing research company Business Analytica.
It had revenue of $1.2 billion last year, the newspaper said.
(SPT, Bloomberg)
TITLE: Arkhangelsk Officials Welcome British Mission
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A trade mission organized by the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce to the Arkhangelsk region late last month was a success, said Dan Kearvell, director of St. Petersburg and Northwest Russia branch of the chamber.
One deal was signed and more are expected to follow, he said, but declined to release details on the basis of commercial confidentiality.
Kearvell said the members of the Arkhangelsk administration and business leaders showed great interest in more foreign involvement in the region, and not only in terms of money.
It was very gratifying to hear the head of the industrial committee saying, "it's not just about money. We need consultants and technologies from the U.K. and other western countries," Kearvell said.
The mission was led by George Edgar, the British Consul-General to St. Petersburg, and consisted of 18 representatives of chamber member companies, including Shell, Tensar International, LonMadi, Raiffeisenbank and PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
The group spent two days in the city, where they attended a reception by Arkhangelsk Governor Nikolai Kiselyov and visited the Arkhangelsk pulp and paper exhibition, Russia's largest in this industry sector.
The two-day visit included a business summit and a program of individual meetings with potential partners for each of the companies in the delegation.
"We build the bridges between the two parties," Kearvell said.
The key industry sector in the forest-covered region, which is twice the size of Britain, is the pulp and paper industry, he said.
Talks were also held with state-owned oil firm Rosneft, as well as Zvyozdochka and Sevmash, which are heavy engineering plants serving the maritime industry.
The region has a long history of ties to Britain beginning with English navigator Richard Chancellor who blundered into the White Sea in 1553 when he was trying to sail to China.
British supply convoys docked in Arkhangelsk and Murmansk during World War II.
"The people in the regions appreciate that," Kearvell said.
The chamber plans to organize annual trade missions to Arkhangelsk, Murmansk and Kaliningrad as well as smaller visits to the Vologda, Pskov and Novgorod regions, he added.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: New EBRD Office Head
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Tetsuya Uchida has been appointed head of the St. Petersburg office of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development.
He will be the main EBRD representative responsible for all the bank's operations in Northwest Russia. Uchida formerly worked for the Japan Bank for International Cooperation.
Five Reals to Open
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Real, a German retail chain, is planning to open five or six hypermarkets in the city before the end of 2010, the company said early this week.
The first hypermarket will be based in the new shopping center Peter Raduga, which is set to open next year. Another hypermarket will open before the end of 2006, Interfax quoted Yulia Belova, Real's press officer, as saying.
Real, a part of the German Metro Group, which operates the Metro Cash&Carry centers, is to be the anchor tenant of the new shopping complex.
Metro Group consists of six independent retail divisions including two supermarket chains, appliance chain Saturn and construction materials stores Praktiker.
New Ferry to Germany
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - A new scheduled ferry service will begin operating between St. Petersburg and Bremerhaven next week.
The route from Russia to Germany will include two stops in the Finnish ports of Hamina and Helsinki. The Japanese-owned K-Line group ferry boat Volga Highway will make weekly trips, on Friday, to Germany. The boat is of roll-on, roll-off class and can carry up to 600 vehicles on board, Interfax reported.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Oil Output Rises
Moscow (Bloomberg) - Russia pumped 3.5 percent more oil in the first three months of this year than it did in the same period last year, the Industry and Energy Ministry's Central Dispatch Administration reported on its web site Monday.
Russia, the world's second-largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia, produced 114.3 million tons of oil and gas condensate (9.3 million barrels a day) in the first quarter of the year. It pumped 39.5 million tons in the month of March, a 10.7 percent increase from February.
Gas production rose 2.7 percent to 172.7 billion cubic meters, Interfax said, citing data from the Central Dispatch Administration. Companies pumped 59.98 billion cubic meters in March, a 9 percent increase from February, the news agency said.
Russian oil exports to countries outside the Commonwealth of Independent States rose 13 percent in the first quarter to 48.9 million tons, Interfax said.
Baturina Sells Firm
Moscow (Bloomberg) - Yelena Baturina, the wife of Mayor Yury Luzhkov and Russia's only woman on Forbes magazine's list of billionaires, sold her cement business to Euro Cement for $800 million, Vedomosti reported.
Baturina's holding company, Inteko, which specializes in plastic products such as stadium seats, sold controlling stakes in five factories, including one in Ukraine, and minority stakes in two others, the newspaper said, citing both companies.
Forbes in May estimated Baturina's fortune at $1.1 billion, making her the 35th-richest person in Russia.
Berezovsky Sues Fridman
Moscow (Bloomberg) - Boris Berezovsky, who controls Kommersant Publishing House, is suing Alfa Bank chairman Mikhail Fridman for saying that Berezovsky threatened him, Kommersant reported, citing Berezovsky.
Fridman accused Berezovsky of making threats after Fridman had offered to lend money to Kommersant's managers, a loan that could have prevented Berezovsky from taking control of Kommersant in 1999, Vedomosti reported. Fridman's comments were aired in an NTV talk show on Oct. 28, Vedomosti reported.
The decision to sue follows a Russian court ruling that Kommersant defamed Alfa Bank in a July article.
GM-AvtoVAZ Boost
Moscow (Bloomberg) - GM-AvtoVAZ, the joint venture between the largest U.S. and Russian automakers, increased output by nearly half in the first quarter as rising incomes fueled demand for consumer goods.
The maker of Chevy-Niva sports utility vehicles rolled out 13,480 units in the first three months of 2005, 43 percent more than in the same period last year, the company said on its web site. It plans to produce 75,000 of the SUVs this year, which would be 36 percent more than last year and triple its output in 2003.
GDP Growth Forecast
MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Economic Development and Trade Ministry has raised its forecast for 2005 GDP growth to 6.5 percent from 5.8 percent, a ministry spokesman said Friday.
The new forecast is higher than a consensus view in a new poll of 6 percent growth this year. The economy grew by 7.1 percent last year.
TITLE: Khodorkovsky Hopes To Get Presidential Amnesty
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - The chief lawyer for jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky said Friday his client could be pardoned under a traditional May 9 presidential amnesty to coincide with the celebrations marking the end of World War II.
Genrikh Padva, the head of Khodorkovsky's defense team, voiced the hope in the wake of last week's request by prosecutors that Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev be sentenced to 10 years in prison for embezzlement, fraud, tax evasion and other charges related to Yukos.
The sentencing request is the final chapter in the nine-month criminal trial against Khodorkovsky, which has been widely seen as a Kremlin response to his funding opposition political parties in the run-up to the 2003 State Duma elections. Khodorkovsky - once one of Russia's wealthiest men - has been in jail since October 2003.
A separate legal assault against Yukos itself has resulted in Russia's No. 1 crude producer being dismantled and partly renationalized to pay off a disputed $28 billion tax bill.
Khodorkovsky's legal team has said the prosecutors' request last week was no surprise and they maintain that the final verdict, expected in May, will be decided not by the court but by the Kremlin.
For that reason, Padva said President Vladimir Putin might pardon Khodorkovsky as part of the May 9 Victory Day celebrations.
"Theoretically, of course, it is possible if [the amnesty] is broad enough and if there are no limitations specifically concerning them," Padva said in televised comments outside the courthouse.
The Kremlin declined to comment, directing questions to the Prosecutor General's Office, which is responsible for implementing presidential pardons. A spokeswoman there refused to comment, saying that the Duma was charged with approving pardons. The Duma press office did not answer phones Friday afternoon.
Christopher Granville, head of research at United Financial Group, said pardoning Khodorkovsky at a time when dozens of world leaders will be in Moscow attending the 60th anniversary war celebrations would be a public relations coup.
"Instead of a punitive approach to Khodorkovsky, I think it would be perfectly realistic to have him a convicted felon, but have him on the street," he said.
"Putin has achieved his goals: Khodorkovsky no longer has the means to try and privatize the state again," Granville said.
Putin has been stepping up efforts to regain investor confidence. Two weeks ago, he instructed the government to streamline muddled tax legislation and draft a moratorium on investigations into Russia's shady privatizations.
The prospect of more investigations similar to the Yukos case has been hanging over virtually all big Russian industrial groups, which snapped up industrial assets at cut-rate prices in deals in the early 1990s.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Hyundai Made in Russia
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Hyundai Motor Co., South Korea's largest carmaker, will start making trucks in Russia in May, Interfax reported, citing the chairman of the company that will assemble the vehicles.
"The production area for this project has already been prepared and the first 3,000 assembly kits of various models have already been purchased from the South Korean producer,'' ZAO Avtotor Chairman Vladimir Shcherbakov said, the news service reported.
Avtotor already assembles several foreign models, including top automaker General Motors Corp.'s Hummer H2 and the 7-Series of Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, the world's second-largest maker of luxury cars.
Alrosa Shares Frozen
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Shareholders of Alrosa, which produces about a quarter of the world's rough diamonds, won a court order freezing 4 percent of the company's equity on claims of illegal trading, the company said Friday.
The shares were sold to outside investors without first being offered to existing shareholders, the company said in a statement.
The frozen shares are held by a nominee, Depositary & Clearing Company, the statement said.
TITLE: Finnish Manager Gives IT a Kick-Start
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: When he was 11 years old Jari Angesleva, a businessman from Finland who today works in St. Petersburg, was at a youth camp where he burned the shoes of a famous Finnish communist who has since been buried in the Kremlin Wall.
Now aged 36, Angesleva says he is still paying back for his petty act of destruction and defiance by working in Russia as a project manager for the International Finance Corporation.
In 2003, the IFC, the financial arm of the World Bank, set up a two-year program to help Russian information technology businesses enter the European computer industry market.
The program will finish this month, and Angesleva is happy about what the program has achieved.
"Russia's IT sector is growing in Russia at a faster tempo than the national oil industry, about 50 percent a year," Angesleva said Wednesday.
One could wonder how a businessman can repay his unpleasant childhood experience dealing with communists in his country by running a program in one of the most successful areas of Russian business.
But apparently he did, especially when he was looking for a suitable apartment in St. Petersburg when he arrived from his previous job as a consultant in Tallinn in the winter of 2002.
"I lived in a hotel for a month while all the time trying to find an apartment," he said. "It is well known that the prices here often do not correlate with the product that is being offered.
"One apartment we found in city center had rats in it. I have never seen such big rats in my life. We tried to poison them, but they didn't go away."
But one month appeared to be enough payment for the burned shoes - the couple found a nice apartment in the heart of the city near the Five Corners on Ulitsa Rubenshteina.
Hassles with Russian conditions are nothing new for the Finnish manager. In 1984, when he was 15, Angesleva arrived in St. Petersburg with a group of tourists escorted by his parents. Here he got in trouble with a local tour guide.
"It was my first trip abroad and everything here looked new for me. I had many questions, one, for instance, about those [hard-currency] Beryozka shops, opened to sell Marlboros and other different things to foreigners only. Russians were not allowed to go there and there were no such things in the ordinary shops on the street.
"I had got used to all shops in Finland being for everyone, so I asked our local tour guide about it. But she approached my mother and asked her to talk to me because the guide said I asked too many questions. She said that it could get her into trouble because she had to write a report about every day she spent with our group."
Angesleva said that in some ways he liked St. Petersburg more back in the 1980s when it was still called Leningrad than he does now. The appearance of the city was more in keeping with its history. It was not marred by shiny advertisements, long traffic jams and millions of cars polluting the city air every day.
"It was a bit cleaner in a way," he said.
"At that time there were only 1,500 cars in the city while now there 2 million. They create huge traffic jams that are sometimes three kilometers long. As for advertising, you can see such signs as Megafon or something else everywhere.
"Nevertheless I would suggest doing the same in St. Petersburg on Nevsky Prospekt as was done Kiev, where the central street of Kreshchatik is closed to traffic on Sundays and given over to pedestrians," Angesleva said.
But unpleasant traffic congestion is partially compensated by good news coming from Finnish IT businesses operating in Russia. The software business is global and Russian companies have also established their subsidiaries in Finland, Angesleva said
Examples are Moscow-based company CBOSS that last year bought an e-billing unit in Finland and St. Petersburg-based Arcadia, which founded a Finnish subsidiary last year.
"These are clear signs that the software-based business is maturing and becoming more competitive," Angesleva said.
"Finnish IT companies are quite well established in St. Petersburg. There are several companies employing over 100 talented Russian software engineers and coders. The main reason for this Finnish invasion is the lower salary costs and the high education of personnel. It's a mix that is hard to ignore in this very competitive business."
Finns are not alone in St. Petersburg. Lots of international players such as Siemens have established offshore development centers in the city and are heavily recruiting local staff.
The sector itself, mainly offshore programming, is rapidly growing, recording about 40 percent growth and revenue of more than $500 million last year. According to the local software association, it will surpass the $1 billion threshold this year and this has attracted interest from the government.
"IT and technoparks are now the next hot potato under wide discussion," the Finnish project manager said. "Plans for four parks in St. Petersburg are underway and more are expected in cities like Nizhny Novgorod and Novosibirsk. This is clearly a step in the right direction and follows the path that many technologically orientated countries like Finland and India have taken."
Arkady Khotin, general director of Arcadia, praised the program Angesleva has led.
"Everything was great and super and it's a shame that this program is finishing," Khotin said Thursday in a telephone interview. "We would have been glad if it was extended. Finns are just great."
"They have provided very creative training for our staff and for all the [computer] specialists who wanted to participate in them.
"I only wish that governments of other countries, Swedes for instance, would do something similar, or our own companies," Khotin added.
"Now we're trying to do something similar ourselves."
Nikolai Puntikov, CEO of Star Software who worked together with the Finnish program manager on the IT project, said that for Angesleva working in Russia is not just business, but also fun.
"He is very energetic, takes decisions very fast and it's very easy to negotiate with him," Putnikov said Friday in a telephone interview.
"He's got very good representational skills and a great balance between business interests and interests of business partners," he added. "And another important thing is that he loves Russia, so for this reason he does everything with his soul in it. It doesn't happen so often that people running businesses here do it this way, because some just come to make money. He is not one of those people."
TITLE: Tchoban Brings European Style
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Expectations have been running high for years that Russia will be flooded by foreign architects looking for work beyond the stagnant European construction market.
However, despite the many ambitious plans by foreign architects around the country, local architects have maintained a monopoly and few projects have been realized.
Perhaps no one is better positioned to navigate the difficult local terrain than a Russian-born German architect Sergei Tchoban. After completing a series of prominent designs in Germany, Tchoban turned his sights to Russia, and especially to St. Petersburg.
"What attracted me here," he said by e-mail from Berlin last Wednesday, "is the opportunity to work in the context of the European architectural tradition, which I have always identified with."
His Berlin-based firm's growing involvement with projects in and around St. Petersburg could signal an emergent cooperative relationship with local designers and developers. His works also articulate a vision of contemporary architecture for a city that is increasingly beset by issues of historical preservation.
Sergei Tchoban is a St. Petersburg native, a graduate of the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. He emigrated to Germany in 1991, just in time for a major urban renewal campaign in the newly unified Berlin.
Tchoban's career prospered amid the construction boom and the buoyant economy that accompanied the German unification. He started working for the renowned Hamburg-based NPS firm in 1992. By the mid-1990s Tchoban was already a partner and head of the new office in Berlin. The firm became known as nps tchoban voss.
Among his best-known designs in Berlin are the Cubix movie theater on Alexanderplatz and Dom Aquarèe, a multifunctional complex in the historical city center. Dom Aquarèe, finished in 2002, is Tchoban's most daring work. It features an aquarium wrapped around the central elevator shaft, which glides through a tank full of fish.
In recent years Tchoban's visits to Russia have grown more frequent. He was a member of the jury of experts at the international competition for the second stage for the Mariinsky Theater. Last year he curated a graphics exhibit at the Museum of Architecture in Moscow. Finally, a month ago, construction started on the Federation towers in Moscow, co-designed by Tchoban and projected to become the tallest skyscraper in Europe.
At the heart of Tchoban's renewed association with Russia, however, is his work in St. Petersburg. Several projects are underway. The most current ones he mentions are residential complexes on Naberezhnaya Martynova and Deputatskaya Ulitsa, and a multifunctional building on Kamenoostrovsky Prospekt.
Tchoban has collaborated on all of these designs with Yevgeny Gerasimov and Partners, a major St. Petersburg architectural firm.
Gerasimov said he was attracted to Tchoban because of his familiarity with local concerns and his foreign experience.
"His outlook after a 10-year career abroad and the current outlook here could result in a third way," Gerasimov said. "Our joint work produces distinctly modern structures but we try to abide by what we call the principle of 'noble circumspection' in regard to the existing built environment."
The most effective elaboration of this approach is the residential complex on Naberezhnaya Martynova on Krestovsky Island. The challenging site is positioned at the convergence of Srednyaya Nevka river, Grebnoi Canal, and the Gulf of Finland. The development calls for a set of twelve, freestanding 4- to 6-storied buildings. The modestly sized structures are inscribed into what has traditionally been a parkland and recreational area.
In a technical summary of the project by nps tchoban voss, the appearance of the complex is described as a "combination of modern stylistics and the historical canon of the Northern Capital."
Tchoban said adopting the style of contemporary European countryside villas is a way of responding to the natural setting and sustaining the architectural fabric of the Krestovsky Island.
The central pedestrian esplanade within the complex continues the unswerving axis of Grebnoi Canal. Residential areas are complemented by fitness centers, sauna, cosmetic salons, and other facilities. An extended use of glass opens the interior to the panoramic views of the surroundings.
Tchoban's attitude to building in St. Petersburg is based on "a contextual approach and a careful regard for the cultural and architectural tradition that is specific to this place." He will not single-handedly undo the decades of architectural isolation that St. Petersburg endured. But his understanding of the city's history and awareness of the latest European trends could leave a lasting mark on local architecture.
So far Tchoban is pleased with his experience in the city where he was born. "I was fortunate to work with very professional clients and developers in St. Petersburg," he said.
"I would like to hope that after construction is finished, these projects will measure up to European designs and will be consistent with what I consider to be the high standards and quality of contemporary architecture."
TITLE: Business Centers Expand
To Fulfill Growing Needs
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Business centers have become one of the fastest growing sectors of the local real estate market. More than 200 complexes are functioning in the city with around 100,000 square meters of office space added in 2004.
Experts predict that demand will gradually level off this year. The quality of services and property location will shape the market dynamics in 2005.
The growth of rental rates has slackened, but companies now tend to lease larger areas of office space.
"Businesses are expanding and growing and thus are not likely to reduce the rented area," said Igor Gorsky, the director of Becar agency group.
Dmitry Zolin, a St. Petersburg-based development director of London Consulting & Management Co. (LCMC), said that 95 percent of available office space has consistently been rented out between 2001 and 2005.
"The market demand is absorbing the newly available areas," he said. "However, supply should approach demand in 2005, since the tempo of the economy cannot keep up with the creation of new office space."
Business centers tend to differ in size, from about 2,000 to more than 30,000 square meters of rentable office space. According to data compiled by Becar Consulting at the start of 2005, the total volume of office space in the city just exceeds 800,000 square meters. Class C areas comprise 67.2 percent, while Class A and Class B respectively make up 4.8 percent and 28 percent.
Toward the end of 2004, rental rates for Class A business centers were between $450 and $700 per square meter while Class B was in the range of $310 to $500. The rates for Class C office space varied between $110 and $310.
The analysts surveyed for this article predicted steady but weakening growth of rental rates, as the market assumes a more stable configuration of supply and demand.
Office costs in St. Petersburg lag behind those in Moscow, where prime rates already far exceeded $700 per square meter last year, according to Colliers International's office market report.
The supply structure also differs in the capital. According to Moscow-based Stiles & Riabokobylko real estate company, more than 35 percent of office space in Moscow is categorized as Class A, a much larger proportion than in St. Petersburg.
Yet for the first time in three years, the city witnessed the completion of several new class A business centers in 2004. Among the newcomers are Genium and Nevsky 38.
A further 17,000 square meters will be added this year, said Viktoria Kulibanova, development manager at Astera estate agency.
"Highest-quality centers will command even more interest if major state companies relocate their headquarters to St Petersburg," Kulibanova noted. "Vneshtorgbank has already confronted the problem of being unable to find appropriate office space to rent. For that reason, large companies will build their own office buildings for their branches in the city."
Several new class A business centers will be launched this year, including Veda-Haus on Petrogradskaya Naberezhnaya and an additional section of Severnaya Stolitsa on Volynsky Pereulok.
Class A property continued to account for the majority of investments. According to LCMC, the total share of new office space of that type in 2004 amounted to 103,000 square meters with 70,000 more forecast for this year alone.
"Today class B office space yields a 15-percent annual profit, which is only slightly less than the earnings in retail and higher than the interest on bank deposits," said Igor Gorsky, the director of Becar commercial real estate company.
The returns on investments in class B business centers remained substantial although market analysts note a downward trend.
LCMC's Zolin said the annual yield has fallen 5 to 7 percentage points from a previous 20 percent. Nonetheless, these yields still exceed those of class A and C properties.
Class B business centers tend to occupy buildings left unfinished from the Soviet period or expand into converted industrial structures.
Astera's Kulibanova noted that facilities of those types constituted more than three-quarters of the aggregate office space made available in 2004 or about 76 percent of the total.
"They account for a shift in the supply structure," Kulibanova said. "Their total share has grown by 6 percent to 7 percent in comparison to 2003."
New office complexes in that market segment continued to affect the conventional system of classification. More business centers are now graded as B+.
The nearly completed Feniks on Sverdlovskaya Naberezhnaya is an example of that trend. Located in the former Sverdlov Factory, the wholesale renovation cost $6 million. The building will now feature high-speed elevators and soundproof interiors, with the addition of a mansard roof planned for later this year.
Class B complexes not only overlap with higher-quality centers, but also appeal to occupants of class C office space.
The architectural typology of business centers is evolving. Most new complexes tend to reproduce the historicist approach that is common in St. Petersburg.
Becar's Gorsky said there are instances of successful use of contemporary architecture and high-tech solutions.
LCMC's Zolin said a contextual approach is optimal in the historical center while the city periphery could use more daring designs that anchor the surrounding environment.
Restrictions on building in the center are likely to make the outlying areas more appealing even for class A projects. Veda-Haus on Petrogradskaya Naberezhnaya is an instance of this emergent trend.
TITLE: Dusting Off a Difficult Amnesty
TEXT: Late last month, at the start of a meeting in the Kremlin with business leaders, President Vladimir Putin came out with an important initiative on property rights: to reduce the Civil Code's statute of limitations on privatizations - that is, the period after a privatization deal in which it can be legally challenged - from the existing 10 years to three years. This effectively upgrades the amnesty on the 1990s privatizations implicit in the original Kremlin-oligarch deal struck after Putin first came to power in 2000 from de facto to de jure. Taken together with the proposed reforms to the Tax Code procedures on back tax audits that Putin publicly endorsed in January and February, the road to any further Yukos-style expropriations is looking reassuringly blocked.
Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov later said that the government had already received a formal instruction from the president to draft the legislation necessary to put the shortened statute of limitations on privatizations into effect. Zhukov added that meanwhile the government was close to submitting the amendments to the Tax Code on administrative procedures to the State Duma. These are the very changes that would make it impossible in practice to repeat the tax attack on Yukos that destroyed the company.
This was a pleasant surprise. Generic remarks from Putin on the need to protect business from the bureaucracy were expected - and Putin duly made such remarks. But the addition of this concrete initiative on the statute of limitations for privatizations is a major plus. In Putin's own words: "The aim is to ... bring long-awaited reassurance to the business community that property rights will be guaranteed."
There can be no doubt about the political signal here. Putin aims to put the Yukos affair behind him and repair as much as possible of the collateral damage from that affair. That damage had palpable effects on some key macroeconomic indicators, most notably investment growth. Indeed, the deceleration of investment growth - from well into the double-digit territory in the first half of 2004 to as low as 7 to 8 percent more recently - has been attributed in no small part to the adversities experienced by Russia's business climate. Given that Russia needs at least 14 to 15 percent investment growth according to our estimates to double its gross domestic product in 10 years, the overarching goal of securing high growth rates was at risk of being derailed.
In the past, Putin himself has spoken of a privatization amnesty as desirable but politically difficult, given that the majority of the Russian public regards the privatizations of the 1990s - and especially the notorious "shares-for-loans" deals - as unfair and therefore illegitimate. According to a recent Public Opinion Foundation poll, in January, 64 percent of the population believed that in most cases the process of privatization was conducted with infringements of the law, while only 9 percent viewed the majority of the deals as legitimate. Public opinion does not appear to have changed on this issue in the past seven years. In 1998, the corresponding figures stood at 63 percent and 6 percent. At the same time, the number of those favoring a revision of privatization results has declined notably from 60 percent in 2000 to 51 percent in 2005. Furthermore, only a third of the population reckoned that the process of privatization should not have been carried out at all, while 46 percent held the opposite opinion.
It was interesting to see that Putin addressed the problem of public opinion by stressing that his proposal would cover the security of all privatizations, including the apartment privatizations completed by "millions of people" in the 1990s. This example of the mass privatization of housing was not relevant to Putin's audience of oligarchs and other businessmen, but it was highly relevant to selling this move to the country as necessary and beneficial for the whole of society.
There is a paradoxical feature in the way the decision on the amnesty was arrived at. The Yukos affair might be reckoned not only to have made this privatization amnesty all the more necessary, but also, to some extent, to have made it possible. For a large proportion of the public, it may have created an impression of a past wrong being at least symbolically righted in this one-off episode, in turn allowing the country to move on, finally leaving behind past controversies.
Of the two key measures the government is considering this year to repair the investment climate, the tax procedure changes are more important in operational terms, since tax claims were the instrument used to destroy Yukos. At the same time, experience shows that the implementation will not be easy: Earlier reform measures introducing the so-called principle of "one window" for the registration of businesses attest to that. In a country where, despite all of the efforts of administrative reforms, the bureaucracy has persistently swelled from year to year, and implementation at the regional and local levels is likely to face significant challenges.
On the other hand, making the 1990s privatizations off limits to prosecutors is more significant for changing the longer-term sentiment underlying the investment climate. Confidence can be severely damaged overnight, but it can take years to recover. Hence, no legislative measures in themselves can substitute for a strong track record. Even now, there will be concerns about possible loopholes in Putin's revived pro-business dispensation. One present concern, for example, is a proposal backed by the prosecutor's office to reinstate in the Criminal Code the penalty of blanket property confiscation for those convicted of certain serious crimes. But given complex ownership structures, it is difficult to see how even this could lead in practice to the expropriation of shares in companies.
More generally, the implementation of Putin's admirable initiatives should enable Russia to reap the full benefits of favorable macroeconomic conditions. Russia's economic indicators are currently so strong as to make it into the record books: In 2004, the current account posted a record 10 percent of GDP surplus and the fiscal surplus reached an unprecedented 4.2 percent of GDP, while Central Bank reserves reached an all-time high of $124.5 billion. True, the lion's share of these achievements is due to high oil prices. But then again, oil is not just Russia's curse, but also its blessing, with no small help from the stabilization fund. Add to this the low indebtedness of the country, which makes it less vulnerable to the rise in Federal Reserve rates, and the potential for investment in Russia becomes quite strong. In this regard, with a thaw under way in Russia's business climate, there is no reason why Russia's economy should not move away from the volatility and uncertainties currently plaguing emerging markets.
If the recent decisions by Putin are implemented, which is very likely in our view, Russia will finally be allowed to close a chapter of its history and to move on.
Christopher Granville is chief strategist of UFG, an investment bank in Moscow partly owned by Deutsche Bank. Yaroslav Lissovolik is UFG's chief economist. They contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Who Benefits? A German Experience to Warn Russia
TEXT: The story of one Helmut Trienekens, a man who made millions from garbage, is astonishingly similar to many other stories of corruption in the sphere of community services all over the world. When politics meets economics, it seems that no country, not even the precise, the correct, the respectable Germany can escape a tangle of corruption. It's a tale Russia would do well to take heed of.
Garbage collecting and the recycling business was always very politicized in Germany. Since the early '80s a rise in communal services fees and construction of garbage-disposal plants made the sector very lucrative, and Trienekens wanted to get a big piece of the pie. What Trienekens perceived was that to be successful in this business, one had to have close ties to city hall and keep at hand good lobbyists who knew and could manipulate local government policy.
Thanks to such good relations, Trienekens won a stake in a garbage-disposal plant under construction, and without any competition. Seeing his chance, Trienekens also raised money by providing the facility with technical servicing. His affiliate companies earned large profits for this related work
The German "entrepreneur" raised another storm in 1991 during the privatization of a garbage-disposal plant in the Märkisch district. All participants, except officers for the communal services tender, were connected to Trienekens' companies. The tender's consultancy firm worked for Trienekens. The firm put forward the candidacy of an assessor who also had common business interests with Trienekens. The legal opinion was prepaid by a lawyer "friendly" with Trienekens. There was no way the "entrepreneur" could lose. Officially, the local authorities didn't know any of this, but according to the chief investigator in the case, Hans-Georg Klein, this was "a complete cartel."
The idea that elected public officers are independent and act only for the public good is an illusion not only in Russia. Many countries have to fight corruption in the field of communal services. According to calculations by Transparency International corruption costs Germany about 5 billion to 10 billion euros a year.
Since the early '90s the German government has been trying to develop legislation that could bar manipulation of public tenders. The core of the reform is a procedure that puts together rules providing for fair competition, transparency and non-discrimination of bidders. It is suggested the rules be adopted as part of renewed EU directives.
The Russian government is also conducting a reform of the government communal services system, the main aim of which is to develop a new transparent, competition-based system for all government bodies at all levels (federal, regional, local). Contracts are to be awarded on the basis of objective criteria and standard bidding documents are to be tested and introduced to improve the tender system. It is supposed to help the sectors formerly led by the government shift toward a market economy as described by the Model Regulations of the UN Commission on trade law, the GATT Agreement on governmental procurement and World Bank directives.
But there are some problems delaying reform in Russia, the most important of which is a lack of experience in a system based on the principles of competition. That's why the study of international experience in this sphere is of incredible importance to Russian officials dealing with social services. Russian regional and local authorities are also able to borrow some elements from international practice to cover the controversies and unclearness of federal legislation, because they have autonomy in this area.
In order to increase the use of competitive procedures and the transparency of state orders, it is important to improve Russian law. Namely, there needs to be a detailed procedure that cuts out tenders where there is only one bidder. The public needs to be permitted access to records of government purchases and there needs to be a strong supervisory body at all levels of government.
Russia could do well to borrow the experience of other nations and to learn from their current solutions, as well as their mistakes.
International practice shows that communal services are good for small business, women-owned enterprises, and for local and regional development (since the companies that will operate will be local.) For example, there is a special method in the United States, known as Small Business Set-Aside Purchases, which permits purchases only from small businesses. These good intentions should be governed by legal frameworks.
But the study of international legislation is not enough: effective corruption control means also that no infringement against the law goes unpunished. Even the best legislation and transparent proceedings are not enough to ensure fair competition if repeated offending is not punished.
Anastasia Rusinova is completing a doctorate in law in St. Petersburg. She spent two years in Germany, where she completed a Master of Laws. She wrote this comment for The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Reaching for Religious Reunion
TEXT: Unlike Poland and the Baltic states, Russia lacks a key source of soft power: a united body of ethnic expatriates who can be relied on to support the mother country's policies in places like Washington. But this could change in the very near future. Moscow may bring into its sphere of influence what used to be a key ideological base for the Kremlin's emigre foes, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, or ROCOR. The Kremlin and the domestic, Kremlin-dominated Russian Orthodox Church could gain a new seal of moral and historical legitimacy at a time when Russia faces growing criticism for its swing toward authoritarianism.
In the 1920s, when the Bolsheviks were jailing or killing thousands of Orthodox Christians, a small group of refugee bishops formed what eventually became ROCOR. That body inherited or founded hundreds of parishes among Russian emigres in Western Europe and the Americas, while seeing its own existence as temporary. Its position has always been that once the domestic Moscow Patriarchate clearly renounced certain toxic habits adopted under Soviet pressure, the Russian church should reunite.
One of those habits is Sergyanism, named after the tame bishop chosen by Stalin as patriarch of Moscow. Under Sergy and his successors, the domestic church's top clergy systematically collaborated with a regime that systematically persecuted the church's own members. The habit continued to the end of Soviet rule and beyond. Critics of the Moscow Patriarchate note that to this day, it collaborates with tyrants such as the current rulers of Belarus and Turkmenistan, as well as with Russia's siloviki. Sergyanism lives on, observe these critics, not just as past history the church has never repented, but as unreformed present reality.
Consider the Moscow Patriarchate's relations with Saparmurat Niyazov, better known as Turkmenbashi. Turkmenistan's president for life presides over a totalitarian cult of personality bordering on self-deification. He has authored his own personal holy scriptures, which must be studied exhaustively in the state schools and venerated in both Christian and Muslim places of worship along with the Bible and the Koran. The importation of Russian-language religious literature is forbidden: Orthodox Christians in Turkmenistan cannot legally subscribe even to the Patriarchate's theological journals.
Instead of telling the truth about Niyazov, the Russian church has awarded him with the Order of St. Danil, its highest honor for secular rulers. The Patriarchate's priest Andrei Sapunov serves as an official of the Niyazov government's Council for Religious Affairs, the direct continuation of the state agency that controlled religious life when Turkmenistan was a Soviet republic. Sapunov works directly with the secret police in persecuting Protestants who have been arrested, fined or fired from their jobs simply for holding worship services in their own homes.
Nevertheless, the Moscow Patriarchate seems confident that it is on track toward reunification with Orthodox emigres. The public statements of both sides have resumed their previous cordial tone after expressions of disagreement in February over disputed church properties in Palestine. Among the honored guests at the Patriarchate's recent Worldwide Russian People's Council in Moscow were several ROCOR clerics.
The speeches at that gathering, devoted to celebrating the Soviet victory in World War II and linking it to the Kremlin's current policies, suggest that the domestic church is counting on Russian nationalism to woo the emigres. Especially striking is the distinctively Soviet flavor of that nationalism. The main speeches failed to mention the victory's dark sides, for example the imposition of totalitarian atheism on traditionally Christian societies such as Romania and Bulgaria. Patriarch Alexy II made the incredible statement that the victory brought the Orthodox peoples of Europe closer and raised the authority of the Russian Church. If one had no other information, one would think that the establishment of Communist Party governments in the newly conquered countries was purely voluntary - and that what followed was unfettered religious freedom.
The Moscow People's Council also failed to reach out to a peculiarly tragic group of war victims, whose descendants are well represented in the emigre church. Facing cruelly limited choices, General Andrei Vlasov and the ex-POWs who fought in his Russian Liberation Army decided that a temporary alliance with the Nazis offered the best hope of liberating their homeland from Bolshevism. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has poignantly described their dilemma, observing that never before had so many Russians chosen to wage war against their own government. But reflections on why this happened would have diluted the triumphalist, state-worshipping flavor of the Moscow gathering, which declared that the 1945 victory was achieved on the basis of unprecedented unity among the government, the army and the people. It is as if the United States' religious leaders were still silent about their own country's war atrocities in Dresden and Hiroshima.
Sergyanism is clearly still thriving, despite the Moscow Patriarchate's occasional abstract statements asserting its right to criticize the state. The Patriarchate's leaders still openly celebrate Patriarch Sergy's memory, with some even favoring his canonization as a saint. With rare exceptions, they still issue commentaries on President Vladimir Putin's policies, which read like government press releases. They seem sure that this issue will not be a deal-breaker in their quest for reunion with the emigres. Putin's Kremlin will be hoping that they are right.
Lawrence A. Uzzell is president of International Religious Freedom Watch, a Christian organization dedicated to protecting religious believers of all faiths from persecution by their own governments. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Prosecutors'
Warnings Are Not Enough
TEXT: The Prosecutor General's Office acts like a lazy worker who, after his employers tell him to do something, does everything possible to avoid it. At least this is how prosecutors behaved in response to calls to act against newspapers that regularly publish articles insulting certain nationalities. Jews, people from the Caucasus or representatives of other communities who are in some way different from the average Russian villager are all identified as a threat to Russia.
Despite this, hundreds of newspapers across the country such as Rus Pravoslavnaya continue to disseminate extremist ideas every single day. Yet prosecutors let the newspapers off with mere warnings. St. Petersburg human rights advocates say there can be only one explanation for this: Some people in law enforcement, at the federal and regional levels, share these views.
In an inquiry sent to the city prosecutor's office in late March, Ruslan Linkov, head of the St. Petersburg branch of the Democratic Russia party, believed prosecutors were following policies determined by certain political circles in Moscow that indirectly support extreme nationalism. Linkov wrote: "The systematically similar behavior of the St. Petersburg prosecutor's office in its formal replies to citizens' inquiries leads me to suspect that there is some kind of internal regulation from the Prosecutor General's Office that says not to open criminal cases against extremists. Also, informal meetings between the St. Petersburg prosecutor's office and the journalists and owners of nationalist media outlets have become more frequent recently."
Human rights advocates are left in a difficult position when extremists only get warnings. They can try to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to resolve the problem. But when the national law enforcement agencies appear to have taken some remedial action, the European Court will not hear these cases. Under federal law, a media outlet can be closed by the courts after two warnings from the prosecutor. But prosecutors work suspiciously slowly, and that could take ages. Owners will simply open a new extremist media outlet.
The local branch of the Federal Press and Mass Media Agency is also of little help. Last summer, officials at the agency, which is supposed to see that media outlets in the region stick to the law, sent an official reply to the Democratic Russia party saying that they had found no violations in the articles that received warnings from the city prosecutor's office in February.
Unfortunately, the human rights advocates are not powerful enough to change the situation. But at least they are trying.
TITLE: Warning! Jurisprudence
TEXT: The Sakharov Museum director and his assistant were convicted not only of violating the rights of radical Orthodox believers not to have anyone anywhere challenge their views, but also of "insulting the dignity of the Russian people," as the judge put it at Monday's sentencing. The court came to this conclusion by reasoning that since the majority of Russians consider themselves Orthodox, anything that insults a small number of Orthodox believers insults the entire nation.
While Orthodoxy and Russian nationalism are closely intertwined, one cannot help but wonder why the court felt the need to reinforce the tie via the law against inciting racial and religious hatred. One would hope this law would be used to do more than to protect the fragile sensibilities of the dominant religious and ethnic group in Russia.
Anti-Semite writers and politicians can send letter after letter directly to Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov with no legal consequences whatsoever. And young Chechen women like Zara Murtuzaliyeva, convicted in a flawed January trial of planning a bombing that never happened, can be sent to jail for expressing religious beliefs no more radical than those of the vandals who attacked the Sakharov Museum's "Warning! Religion" exhibit last summer.
In the end, the conviction shows that Russian courts can be bent to the will of religious bigwigs, as well as of political bosses. And perhaps this gives us some insight into how tightly interconnected the institution of the church has become with the government.
At the same time, the final sentences for museum director Yury Samodurov and his assistant Lyudmila Vasilovskaya belied the harsh wording of the verdict: Both defendants were fined around $3,500, not imprisoned as prosecutors had originally demanded. Perhaps the judge found the best compromise possible under the circumstances by delivering a guilty verdict while avoiding the dawn of a new generation of prisoners of conscience in Russia.
Beyond the strange logic of the court and the political clout of the church, the trial also reflects the elegant use of legal scare tactics as a form of social control. What better way to put the fear of God into artists, writers and protesters than to take them to court, threatening years in a penal colony, only to let them off with fines or - as in the case of several National Bolshevik activists, whose sentences were reduced this week - to halve their jail time a few months later? Fortunately for the Russian people, many artists and activists are not too easily frightened.
TITLE: A Universal Vision of Dignity
TEXT: A priest who was at the Vatican II council 40 years ago recalls, "I remember raising my head and thinking, 'Who is that prophet?' "The speaker who had caught his attention was a Polish prelate named Karol Wojtyla, and his subject was a proposed declaration renouncing the ancient accusation of enduring Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus. "Wojtyla spoke of the church's obligation to change its teaching on the Jews with a passion that could only have come from personal experience," the priest said. "For an unknown bishop from Poland it was amazing. Wojtyla made the difference."
This incident, related in James Carroll's book "Constantine's Sword" - a study of the church's tortured dealings over the centuries with the Jewish people - was a precursor to what Carroll regards as "the most momentous act" of the papacy of John Paul II: the day when the pontiff formerly known as Wojtyla stood before the Western Wall in Jerusalem "to offer a prayer that did not invoke the name of Jesus . . . to leave a sorrowful kvitel, a written prayer, in a crevice of the wall." The speech at Vatican II was also a sign that this was a man with considerable ability to lead and inspire - charisma, as it's been called since long before politicians discovered the term.
He came on the world scene in 1978 as a refreshing new personality: Possessed of a sunny smile, athletic bearing and a friendly manner, he was a media dream. His willingness - eagerness, really - to be out among the people extended his appeal well beyond the church, as did his courageous survival of and recovery from an assassination attempt. But John Paul II made it clear early on that he was no public-relations pope, seeking to accommodate the church to modernity. A man of considerable depth and learning - more so perhaps than the public understood at the time of his election - he acted and spoke boldly and confidently over his quarter century as pope, often in ways that were neither popular nor politic.
He could be - and was - called conservative in matters of Catholic doctrine, in his determination to maintain such institutions as the male celibate clergy and in his strict adherence to the church's positions on birth control and abortion. He provoked debate and dissent within the church with his stands in these areas, as well as opposition from outside, for policies that affect the temporal realm, especially in matters of population control. The sexual abuse scandal in the U.S. church that troubled his last years as pope was attributed by many, at least in part, to his adherence to the hierarchical chain of command and to a lack of democracy in the church.
But this pope might equally well have been called liberal - even radical - in such areas as workers' rights, capital punishment, disarmament and human freedom, and in the message of hope that he carried literally across the globe. He was indisputably a visionary in seeking to lead the church out into the greater world - traveling, evangelizing and preaching the unity of humankind in places that no pope before him could have hoped to reach.
And certainly no pope ever made a trip like John Paul's journey back to Poland in 1979 - the most joyous conquest in the long and tragic history of his country. How many divisions has the pope? For John Paul they were many and powerful, all seemingly armed with guitars and flowers as they converged by the hundreds of thousands in Poland to celebrate his presence, sending an unmistakable message of national solidarity to the rulers of Central Europe and helping set in motion the peaceful revolution that was to bring down a Communist empire within a decade.
As the priest who observed him at Vatican II sensed, there was much of the personal in John Paul's fervor on certain matters. The pope who sought a new relationship with Judaism had been a friend of his Jewish neighbors from childhood, in a time and place darkened by anti-Semitism. Brought up in a close, tolerant and deeply religious family, the future pope was made aware of the fragility of life by the loss of his mother when he was nine, of his father when he was 18, and of his older brother, a physician who contracted a fatal disease from one of his patients. In his lifetime, he lived under two cruel, seemingly all-powerful social ideologies with millennial pretensions, worked against them and saw both fall, while the church to which he had committed himself endured. It may be that this personal experience has something to do with a conservatism grounded in preservation of what he thought good in his church and in human life - but not in fear of change.
"The pope is a thoroughly modern man who nevertheless challenged a lot of the conventional wisdom of self-consciously modern people," his biographer George Weigel said in a magazine interview some years ago. "In a world dominated by the pleasure principle and by personal willfulness, he insists that suffering can be redemptive and that self-giving is far more important to human fulfillment than self-assertion. In an intellectual climate where the human capacity to know anything with certainty is under attack, he has taught that there are universal moral truths . . . and that, in knowing them, we encounter real obligations. To a world that often measures human beings by their utility, he has insisted that every human being has an inviolable dignity and worth."
One who exercises as much power as the pope will never be free of controversy, no matter how exemplary his life; the secular world is not in the habit of conferring sainthood on people. But John Paul II, after his death on Saturday at 84, will be seen by most, we think, as a remarkable witness, to use a favorite term of his - witness to a vision characterized by humaneness, honesty and integrity throughout his reign and his life.
This comment originally appeared as an editorial in the Washington Post.
TITLE: Exposing the Cheats Will Help City Hall Make Better Decisions
TEXT: The City Charter Court recently declared illegal the way that the administration of the city was made the administration of the governor.
Behind this game with words, however, is hidden a very important event - a revolution in administration created by the first point of an order issued by the city government on Nov. 18, 2003.
Under article 16 of the city charter, the city administration is taken to mean the entire system of executive authority, including the government headed by the governor and the committees and directorates and even the district administrations. As a result of the renaming, Viktor Lobko, the head of the governor's administration, became the formal head of the system of the city's executive power. It is natural that the Charter Court declared the renaming as contrary to the charter and invalid.
From the point of view of society what is important is not the legal problem but the contents of the transformation that came about as a result of the order. The essence is that Lobko's body was granted enormous authority. According to the order, his team "co-ordinates the work of all other executive organs of the St. Petersburg government," controls the district administrations, and conducts the financial aspects of the governor's and the government's activities. Without the approval of his team, no document can reach the governor or the government. The same goes for financial orders from the district administrations and their deputies. As a result, Lobko's team has become a second government. Such a situation has a harmful effect on the progress of reforms in St. Petersburg.
Reformers in the city government have always had problems with administrators. In the time of Governor Vladimir Yakovlev many reforms were blocked by the legal directorate of the governor's Chancellory. Its head could willfully declare that the innovative work of the property committee or of the finance committee was flawed and on that basis send the documents around for eternal corrections over many months, supposedly in order to bring it in line with the law, but actually to block any progress. In this way, an initiative of the property committee to develop a law of delegated management of shares, stakes, and part-ownership of commercial structures was stifled.
With Matviyenko's arrival at Smolny things got even worse. Her administration, those who know say, has significantly boosted its power. Apart from a formal expansion of their authority, it also grew in real terms.
One of the main defects of the "administrative system," a term created by Gavriil Popov to describe the way Soviet authority worked, is in the way documents are processed in the St. Petersburg government. Under this system, all relevant authorities in the administration must give provisional agreement for each document. For ordinary documents this may even be a good idea, but such a system kills reforming initiatives.
Even the smallest serious reform always hurts the interests of many bureaucrats in the arms of the administration and those of the business people close to him. As a rule, this clan knows how to operate the mechanisms, to slow the legal system, to create holes and to find ways of generating feeding troughs that will maintain the well being of all players at the expense of the budget. Of course, they don't any change to the rules of the game. But a serious reform will radically change them and take away the feeding trough of conscienceless bureaucrats. Otherwise it would not be possible to raise the effectiveness of budget expenditure and to create a modern, market-oriented mechanism for the functioning of a sector.
In these circumstances during the process of "agreement," a bureaucrat in the sector involved will do all he can to ruin the reform or at least to amend it in such a way that it is rendered useless. That seems to be the fate of public transport reform in the city, about which I spoke last week. The thinking of those who designed the reform was rational, but it turned into an absurdity, only leading to a strengthening of the monopoly of the state-owned enterprise Passazhiravtotrans.
Understanding the danger, the reformers try various tricks so as not to frighten those working in the sectors. To do that, the text is intentionally full of hot air that is designed to quietly introduce the key elements of the reform, counting that those in the sectors will get lost in the words and overlook the innovations that are most dangerous to them. But sometimes no tricks help and the opposing sides go into a clinch. Only the governor can decide such conflicts. This happened with the reform of city orders in summer last year. Matviyenko took the side of the reformers, dealt with the malcontents and everything turned out well.
Of course, such measures could well work in the future, but it would be more rational to change the system of processing documents. Now, after the Charter Court issued its verdict, Matviyenko and the government once again have to examine the status of Lobko's team and to regulate his authority.
If City Hall really wants progress on reform in the city, it makes sense to bring order to the administration. That is, it should remove the right of all committees, including Lobko's, to demand that they have to agree to all government documents. All their views of any initiative should be presented simultaneously and openly to the government. In the course of public discussion, the government can express its opinion and vote on it.
I recommend adopting a procedure similar to that already used by the Legislative Assembly and the State Duma whenever they pass a law. Experience shows that it is a rational mechanism and avoids mistakes and serves the interests of all parties.
The main thing is that public discussion excludes all types of undercover battles. In addition, conservative bureaucrats lose the possibility of pushing through wording that is convenient for themselves and the reformers are relieved of the need to use tricks and harmful compromises to push through reforms.
To implement such a mechanism, one shouldn't change the operations of the administration all that much - significant issues are already discussed at public meetings of the administration. My proposal is to make a logical extension of this procedure. I have not doubt that it would accelerate reforms in St. Petersburg and contribute to the improvement of their quality.
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: Infinite Injustice
TEXT: Today we take up the case of Murat Kurnaz, one of the thousands of innocent captives held illegally in the belly of the new American beast: U.S. President George W. Bush's deadly global gulag, where homicide and torture are quite literally the order of the day. Kurnaz, a German national of Turkish descent, was grabbed from a bus of Muslim missionaries in Pakistan in October 2001, when Bush was getting his first taste of unbridled blood-and-iron power. Although Kurnaz was far from the battlefield in Afghanistan, he was of course guilty of being one of those swarthy Koraniacs, so he was shoved through the beast's guts before ending up in the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, The Washington Post reported. There he languished for more than two years until he was hauled before one of Bush's "military tribunals" last fall. The khaki kangaroo court duly ruled that Kurnaz was a heinous terrorist who should be locked up forever - despite the fact that both U.S. military intelligence and German police had cleared him of any connection whatsoever to terrorist activity anywhere in the world. Completely ignoring almost 100 pages of exculpatory evidence offered by these experts, the kangaroos relied instead on a brief, uncorroborated memo submitted by an unidentified Bush official just before the proceedings began. The last-minute Bush memo - clearly intended to keep Kurnaz in chains without charges, without counsel, without appeal, for the rest of his life - "fails to provide significant details to support its conclusory allegations, does not reveal the sources for its information and is contradicted by other evidence in the record," said a federal judge who examined the case. In other words, it was just lies and unfounded assertions - the same scam the Bushists used to "justify" their war crime in Iraq. The judge ruled that Kurnaz's imprisonment, indeed, Bush's whole kangaroo pen, was illegal and unconstitutional. To which Bush - a staunch defender of law, liberty and civilization - answered: Who cares? So Kurnaz, 23, remains in captivity: year after year of hellish limbo, his youth sacrificed to the caprice of the prissy autocrat in the White House. Meanwhile, Bush is appealing all of the pending judicial challenges to his arbitrary power, while ignoring or skirting any ruling that goes against him. As we first reported here in November 2001, he continues to assert his right to capture, imprison or even assassinate anyone on earth he designates a "terrorist," without any judicial review or congressional oversight of his decision. The Washington Post - normally a willing handmaiden of Bush's abuses of power, marshalling "bipartisan consensus" behind his blood-soaked foreign policy and much of his morally deranged domestic agenda - seemed uncharacteristically troubled by the Kurnaz case. Perhaps the tyranny was a touch too blatant for the paper's well-wadded consensus-seekers. They brought in an expert on military law to "suggest" that the tribunals might be - gasp! - "a sham," where "the merest scintilla of evidence against someone would carry the day for the government, even if there's a mountain of evidence on the other side." Another lawyer wondered why the U.S. government would ever imprison a man it knew was innocent. Poor lambs. Now that the American Republic has been well and truly lost - seized by a band of extremist goons after decades of slow rot from corporate and militarist corruption - a few Establishment worthies are bestirring themselves to express some mild perplexity at the hideous reality that has arisen outside their comfortable cocoons. But their questions come too late. The reality is already entrenched. Each day brings new revelations of torture, murder and government whitewash in Bush's gulag. At least 108 prisoners have died in Bush's captivity so far; dozens of these have been listed as homicides, CBS reported. But last week, the Pentagon declined to prosecute 17 soldiers for brutal murders of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite the recommendation of Army prosecutors. Army investigators also released 1,200 pages of new evidence last week detailing widespread "systematic and intentional" abuse of prisoners throughout Iraq, especially in Mosul; again, the Pentagon declined to prosecute. A trial of low-ranking scapegoats who, under orders, "pulpified" an Afghan prisoner's leg in a fatal beating revealed that such "compliance blows" were taught by the Pentagon as an "accepted way" of dealing with prisoners, Knight-Ridder reported. Let's pause here to praise these military prosecutors. Many of them are doing outstanding work in a thankless and dangerous mission: investigating their fellow soldiers for crimes committed in a lawless system established by their own superiors. The Bush Regime has not yet been able to remove all of these honorable soldiers from the ranks, so fragments of the truth are still getting out. But be assured: The Regime is relentlessly bringing forward cadres of mindless zealots to replace them - and everyone else in government. Another term or two of Bushist Party rule, and there won't be an officer, judge or civil servant left with any loyalty to the old Constitutional Republic. As for the cocooners' anxious questions - "Why imprison the innocent? Why the sham tribunals? What's with all this torture stuff?" - there is a simple answer. Bush's gulag has little to do with "fighting terrorism;" it is itself an instrument of terror - state terror - designed to strike "pre-emptive" fear into the hearts of anyone, at home or abroad, who might oppose the Regime's crusade to make the world safe for klepto-plutocracy. Such a system actually requires innocent victims and lawlessness, in order to underscore its arbitrary nature - an essential element of terror. For Bush, Murat Kurnaz is a more important prisoner than a genuine criminal like Osama bin Laden. For annotational references, see Opinion at www.sptimesrussia.com
TITLE: Land of the deaf
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Nikolai Makarov is trying to save the world - one film at a time.
The St. Petersburg-based documentary filmmaker creates films that give voice to little-known and often misunderstood communities in Russia, such as the blind and the deaf. His latest movie "Ya Glukhoi" ("I am Deaf") premiered recently at Dom Kino to critical accolades and a rousing and emotional response from the audience.
The film portrays deaf children and adults with unflinching, unsentimental honesty, highlighting the dignity and humor in their everyday lives. The lives of disabled people in Russia is often ignored in the media, reflecting a general social and political lack of awareness of the challenges they face.
There are thought to be as many as 12 million deaf and hearing-impaired people living in Russia, which represents nearly 1 percent of the population.
"I am Deaf" is the second work in a series that began with "Family of the Blind" (2001), a film which Makarov produced for television that highlights the problems of a blind couple after the birth of their first child. The films offer a sympathetic, humanist portrayal of their subjects.
"I'm an idealist," says Makarov, 50, a soft-spoken, unassuming man who has the glasses, moustache and thoughtful demeanor of a Russian intellectual. "It's a central Russian idea."
The spirituality of the fabled Russian soul is a popular refrain in Makarov's films. His subjects are often damaged people, but Makarov's lens is never pitying or paternalistic.
In "I am Deaf," he depicts a vibrant, dynamic and creative universe, a "deaf planet," as one character says, of people who act in plays, paint lyrical scenes from childhood, weld and construct ships, sing and worship, travel and tell jokes.
"In the film, one of the subjects, a talented and successful artist and teacher, reflecting on the many countries his art has taken him, says, 'Perhaps God closed my ears so I could concentrate on other things in life, in the world,'" Makarov said. "I share his viewpoint. I want to be in harmony with the world, as a director, as a human being, as a Russian."
Alexander Pozdnyakov of St. Petersburg's Lenfilm studios said: "Nikolai's films show the enigma of the Russian soul, the real Russian mentality. These are people who can do anything. Russians are so patient. They can do a job for decades and receive almost nothing in compensation. They are innocent and they believe in God."
In the final, arresting scene, a crowd of deaf people gather to salute the launching of a ship largely built by a team of deaf builders.
A bottle of champagne is smashed on the bow and the ship is launched to the cheers of the crowd. Afterward, the camera soars overhead, gently spying on the dozens of spirited, silent conversations, all done in zhestovy yazik (sign language).
Makarov describes the experience of working with the deaf community as a revelation. "Seeing how they understood the world was fascinating. I was also surprised to learn that there are many different sign languages," he said.
The film puts different sign languages from around the world into historical context and even explains the meaning behind some examples of Russian sign language.
For instance, the sign for Moscow is an awestruck face with upraised hands, mimicking the reaction of someone seeing the big city for the first time. The sign for St. Petersburg traces an imaginary moustache sported by Peter the Great.
Makarov said that making a film about the deaf community is an idea that has been simmering in his mind for decades.
His father was a professional sportsman who taught sports at an internat or boarding school for handicapped children. Years after he was an established filmmaker, Makarov repeatedly pitched the project to various production companies but was met with rejection.
Ultimately, St. Petersburg's Lennauch Film Studio agreed to sponsor the project and appealed to Moscow's Ministry of Culture for financing, which it agreed to do.
Although financing was secured, the film didn't get the green light until Makarov could find people to participate in the film. This would prove to be the biggest challenge of all.
Makarov was disheartened to receive the cold shoulder from deaf societies and schools in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Having been burned by unflattering portrayals in the past, they were less than enthusiastic to let an outsider with a camera into their world.
But eventually administrators sensed Makarov's sincerity and integrity and introduced him to the group of dynamic, upbeat people who appear in the film.
The film took a year to shoot and Makarov gathered over 20 hours of film, which he then edited into a 75- minute movie. He described this task as "painful but necessary."
The explosion in polemic documentary filmmaking in the U.S. prompted by such recent films as Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911" and "SuperSize Me," a critique of U.S. fast food culture, doesn't impress Makarov.
Makarov characterizes Moore as a self-promoting journalist with a yen for the sensational. Unlike the agenda-driven Moore, Makarov says he tries to leave all biases and prejudices behind. "I enter each film with a tabula rasa [blank slate]."
If Makarov hadn't discovered filmmaking in his first year at the Tula Polytechnic Institute, he would probably be working as an engineer for the metro right now.
But Makarov fell in love with creating quirky celluloid vignettes with his pal and fellow film aficionado, Sergei Silyanov, who has gone on to become one of Russia's most successful producers. The pair shirked their studies, created dozens of films, and started a film club. Together, they made hundreds of short student films and participated in many student film festivals around Russia.
Makarov sent his best work to the State Institute of Cinematography or VGIK, a training ground for filmmaking in the Soviet Union. On the strength of his films, he was admitted to VGIK, where such masters of Russian film as Eisenstein and Tarkovsky studied and taught.
At VGIK, Makarov immersed himself in the craft of documentary filmmaking and garnered accolades and more than his fair share of criticism for his underground, experimental works.
Makarov was invited to the prestigious Leningrad Scientific Popular Film Production Company (Lennauch) where he created many unflinching documentaries, including "The Sea Was Opened Wide" (1987).
The film, which gets its name from a popular Russian folk song, looked at the human impact of a Soviet public works project to build an enormous dam. Many villages were submerged as a result. Makarov's film shows former inhabitants of the submerged villages traveling by boat to the site of their lost village. They beg divers to bring up something from the bottom, a brick, a piece of wood, or a cross from the local cemetery.
Makarov's documentaries explore questions of memory, time and impermanence. The main principle of documentary filmmaking, he explains, is to be a witness of an event, or a person, to "leave traces in the memory of people because life is so fleeting and changes so quickly."
"I believe there are three secrets to making a good documentary," said Makarov, who also teaches filmmaking at St. Petersburg State University for Film and Television. "You must be open to life and you must love the moment you are shooting because in the next moment, it will be gone. Above all, if you are not in love with your subject, your film will be flat and one-dimensional."
The glossy lure of feature filmmaking has never appealed to Makarov. Even in the darkest days of his career, at the end of the 1990s when the documentary film market was saturated and there was little work to be had, Makarov resisted the move. Many filmmakers either left the country or left the field altogether, according to Pozdnyakov, who characterizes Makarov as a "rare bird" in today's film world. Makarov continued making his gem-like films, feeling that there were more stories to tell.
Now Makarov is working to find a wider audience outside of Russia for "I am Deaf. After its Dom Kino premiere, the film is now in a state of limbo, a frustratingly common plight for films of this genre, Makarov acknowledges. He hopes the film will find a home on television and at various film festivals around the world.
Makarov's dream is to screen "I Am Deaf" at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., one of the few universities in the world which serves the deaf community. He is still waiting to hear from the school, after sending an email introducing himself and the film.
Despite its distribution problems, Makarov feels enriched by the experience of making "I am Deaf."
When asked what Russians can learn from the deaf community, he responds without missing a beat, "two things. First they can explore a new, hidden world and then they can learn compassion for damaged people. Wider society needs to understand the problems of the minority."
Makarov hopes that hearing audiences will discover the film because very little is known or understood about deaf society in Russia.
"The main thing I want them to take away from the film is that the deaf have the same feelings, ambitions, and fears about life as the hearing. They fall in love, they have jobs, they create art and live full, happy lives. Their language is different but the soul is the same."
TITLE: CHERNOV'S CHOICE
TEXT: The Prodigy returns to St. Petersburg this week. The British dance veterans were first seen in St. Petersburg in the form of the Jilted Generation, which was actually a tribute band that cunning local promoters tried to sell as the real thing in 1998. The genuine Prodigy finally made it to the city a year later.
The Prodigy's current set draws mainly from "Fat of the Land," the band's breakthrough 1997 release, and its current album "Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned," according to Malaysian publication The Star. The paper describes the band's one-hour performance in Kuala Lumpur late last month as "fantastic" and an "unforgettable event."
The Prodigy will perform at the Ice Palace on Saturday.
The only Russian concert by esoteric band Dead Can Dance sold out days before the event - which is extremely rare in Russia.
"Friends call us and say they want to buy tickets for any amount of money," said Mila Skvortsova of promoter Svetlaya Muzyka by phone on Thursday. She sounded surprised.
Earlier, the band refused to give interviews or take part in an advertizing campaign for the concert, probably so as not to contradict its enigmatic image.
Dead Can Dance formed in Melbourne, Australia, in 1981 but relocated to London within a year. The band is essentially the duo of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry, but, according to promoters, they are backed by a five-member band in concert.
Dead Can Dance has not toured since 1996 and the band's most recent studio album "Spiritchaser" was also realeased that year. Since then there was a box set, "Dead Can Dance 1981-1998" in 2001, and Gerrard's solo album "Immortal Memory" in 2004.
Just as The Pixies before it, the band is recording its European dates, then mastering them to release 13 different live albums. The limited-edition CDs (500 copies of each will be printed) are on sale for 30 euros each, while a full, 13-disc set cost 347 euros. The Paris and Hague shows and the "All Shows" sets are now sold out. For some reason, the St. Petersburg concert is not included in the project.
From St. Petersburg, Dead Can Dance will head to London where it will wrap its tour with shows at The Barbican and the Forum on April 6-7.
For those who have not yet bought tickets, the only hope might be scalpers selling tickets outside the venue before the show.
Dead Can Dance will perform at the Oktyabrsky Concert Hall on Sunday.
Of local acts, La Minor will perform at Red Club on Friday. Although the posters for the concert say that the band will be launching its new album, the band has had second thoughts and moved the launch concert to Platforma where it will play on April 12. The Friday concert has been described as a "usual gig."
Alternative guitar-based band Kirpichi will perform at Red Club on Saturday, while Vyborg-based punk band PTVP will play at Moloko on Tuesday.
- By Sergey Chernov
TITLE: Swiss miss
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Childhood days when we had fondue were always something special. The whole family gathered around the shining silver pot, waiting for the oil to heat up. Each of us was armed with two skewers with which to fry pieces of pork or lamb to eat with various sauces, salad, and toasted bread. Having fondue was a real feast for all the senses.
When two of my friends and I visited La Fondue on Dvortsovaya Neberezhnaya not far from the Winter Palace over looking the River Neva, it was also supposed to be a special evening.
The restaurant's interior is absolutely stunning. High walls are painted in a fresh rose color, with white net curtains elegantly draped around the windows. Guests can choose to be seated either downstairs or on a balcony overlooking the main hall.
We decided to sit at a table from which we could admire a great view of the Peter and Paul Fortress across the river.
But I was soon disappointed to find only one page of the menu is devoted to fondue entrees with just three varieties: cheese, cheese with tomatoes and cheese with smoked salmon.
Well, so much for indulging in nostalgic culinary dreams.
Each of the fondue varieties is billed as being served with a French baguette and salad and, according to the menu, should suit four people. We opted for cheese fondue with smoked salmon for a whopping 1,800 rubles ($64.98).
The menu boasted a wide range of wines from all over the world. Since none of us is a great connoisseur of wine, I turned to our waitress for advice but she seemed puzzled by my simple questions and disappeared into the kitchen.
A Cabernet Sauvignon Rosé Baron Philippe de Rothschild (900 rubles, $32.49) has the flowery bouquet I had requested, she told us some minutes later. Somehow it felt strange that a waitress working in an allegedly top-class eatery does not know what sorts of wine the restaurant has.
We were no less amazed when she inappropriately poured soft drinks (60 rubles, $ 2.17) into red wine glasses.
Meanwhile, music boomed out of loudspeakers and rhythmic techno filled the room, making it feel like a nightclub rather than a smart restaurant.
Although the choice of hot starters was impressive, I settled on a salad, anticipating that the fondue would be filling.The carpaccio of tomatoes and mozzarella with cedar nuts and basil (270 rubles, $9.74) sounded like an interesting composition.
Up to this point I had only tasted the original version of carpaccio, an Italian starter of thinly sliced raw beef with parmesan and lemon vinaigrette. Carpaccio is also a synonym for "thinly sliced" and applies to vegetables, meat, fish and even fruit.
My friends ordered a bowl of soup made of salmon and prawns with potatoes and cream (190 rubles, $6.86) and a smoked fillet of duck with a salad of celery, apples and French mushrooms (260 rubles, $9.39).
The duck fillet was rich and the salad said to be "unusual but delicious." As it turned out this dish was the single culinary highlight of the evening.
The fish soup featured globules of fat swimming on the surface that were not exactly appealing to the eye.
But the golden raspberry goes to the carpaccio.
It didn't taste bad - it was simply ridiculously small. Three slices of tomato and three mozzarella slices were put on top of each other, with one single basil leaf on top. How on earth is this worth nearly 10 bucks?
After this setback, I pinned my hopes on the fondue.
The black pot had already been put on our table while we were still eating our starters and the cheese was heating up.
But what would we dip into it?
Surely not the hard bread cubes we found in the bowl next to the fondue set? And what about the salad? Was the little plate of it we were served supposed to be sufficient for four people? Actually, yes.
"A perfect dinner for birds," someone said with irony. But I was not in the mood for jokes, especially considering the large amount of money the meal was costing.
We were all still hungry after the main course (imagine, if there had actually been four of us!) and we decided to have dessert elsewhere.
If La Fondue's owners consider investing the ill-deserved profits this rip-off restaurant no doubt reaps, they should spend it on staff training (even amateurs can refill a glass without spilling wine, although the waitress couldn't manage that here) or a trip to Switzerland, the birthplace of fondue.
Maybe then it would be worth to paying the place a second visit.
In the meantime, I am thinking about buying a fondue pot to use at home; in terms of quality and service I can easily compete with La Fondue.
TITLE: The blind leading the bland
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Action pictures are probably one of the hardest movies to nail at this point in history. All right, the requirements are few - a hero plus plenty of action - but so much has already been done in the genre and cliches lurk around every corner, wearing sunglasses and touting berettas in each hand.
The typical Hollywood response to the seen-it-all-before problem is the magic word more - more stunts, more special effects, bigger explosions, bigger car chases and rapidly escalating stakes.
Such an approach reached its height - some might say nadir - in the mid-'90s blow outs of Schwarzenegger's late period and even today, unreconstructed musclemen like Vin Diesel and The Rock beat their head against this particular brick wall.
The most successful attempt to rejig the action formula in recent times has been the Bourne Identity series, which replaces save-the-world scenarios with almost believable plots, gadgets with tradecraft, and blood spattering overkill with believable violence.
The latest Russian contribution to the action genre, Shadow Boxing (Boi s tenyu), perhaps cannily, perhaps because of budget considerations, is quite up-to-date in its approach . Director Alexei Sidorov commendably attempts to introduce excitement through the plot, not action set pieces, and there isn't an explosion in sight, although there are plenty of energetic thrills.
Artyom, played by Denis Nikiforov, is a boxer who decides to enter a title bout, against the advice of his ophthalmologist girlfriend Vika (Yelena Panova). He loses the fight but also his vision, and he needs an expensive operation in a couple of days or he will be blind forever. Unfortunately for Artyom, his manager is an oligarch (Andrei Panin doing a good impression of Marlon Brando in The Godfather), who decides that his boy has outlived his usefulness and casts him aside like a squeezed orange.
At this point it looks as if Shadow Boxing will be a boxing redemption movie with the hero overcoming various personal and financial obstacles to win out against all odds.
But the director keeps us guessing. The entire first third of Shadow Boxing actually turns out to be the backstory for the real action plot. This comes about when Vika, attempting to raise money from a rich friend from her shady past, blunders into a contract hit and falls under suspicion by the Russian security services (FSB). So begins the plot proper, with the blind Artyom, Vika and her younger brother (for some reason) on the run from the killers and the FSB.
The plot ticks along nicely enough but my pulse rate stayed disappointingly steady throughout. Several things undermine Shadow Boxing and stop it reaching its full potential as a decent thriller.
What sort of action movie has a hero who is blind and can barely walk across the room? There are precedents for blind action heroes - Japan's Zatoichi has been going for years, as has Marvel's Daredevil - but each of these characters compensates for his disability in other ways.
By contrast, the hero of Shadow Boxing is a Mr. Magoo, too much of a lame duck for most of the movie to earn anything but our profound pity. We can't believe he is really capable of getting what he wants.
The next problem is an overcomplicated plot. It would be enough that our discarded fighter had to find the money for his eye operation without the mob chasing after him.
Or, better yet, if the hero wasn't blind but was on the run from the mob and the FSB. Running these two plots simultaneously makes frustrating viewing because the two goals are always clashing.
Finally, we aren't even sure what the heroes really want. Is Artyom reconciled to his blindness and ready to start a new life as soon as he escapes from the mob and the FSB? Or is the clock ticking, with Artyom desperately looking for some way to raise the cash for the operation? This isn't made clear, and for a while the film faces a fatal quandary: the heroes visit the zoo; they dance; they make love.
Meanwhile, the tension evaporates. Slow and meaningful scenes are undermined by the almost constant rock soundtrack. It turns drama into melodrama, tells you how you should feel and reduces every emotion to the inconsequential level of a pop video.
Shadow Boxing gets better toward the end and reclaims some of the potential you felt it had at the start. Sampson can't stay weak forever, and when Artyom finally breaks his fetters, it is a welcome release for the viewer. At last some action. But it is too little, too late and the climax of the movie is bungled.
The flashy technical accomplishments of most modern directors are not in question. If all we wanted out of movies were spinning cameras, slow motion shots and stylish freeze frames, Shadow Boxing would more than satisfy.
But the heart of a film is its story, and more work on this part and less dazzle would ultimately have been more fulfilling.
TITLE: Free for all
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: When U.S. President George W. Bush read Natan Sharansky's "The Case for Democracy" last fall, he liked it so much that he circulated it among his colleagues and invited the author to the Oval Office for a chat. Public attention quickly zeroed in on the diminutive Ukrainian-born mathematician who had devoted himself to the Jewish refusenik struggle in the Soviet Union after being denied an exit visa to Israel in 1973. Arrested in 1977 as an American spy, Sharansky spent nine years in captivity before becoming the first political prisoner to be released by Mikhail Gorbachev. After a few years he entered Israeli politics, founding his own party and holding various cabinet positions. Sharansky's biography can be found in his 1988 memoir, "Fear No Evil." "The Case for Democracy" is the sum of his political beliefs.
Greatly admired for his steadfastness as a Soviet prisoner, Sharansky is a controversial figure in Israel. Reading "The Case for Democracy," it's not hard to see why. "I am convinced that all peoples desire to be free. I am convinced that freedom anywhere will make the world safer everywhere," he writes with characteristic conviction before applying his theory to the Arab-Israeli peace process, the situation in the West Bank and Gaza, and other such specific questions.
This is the kind of indomitable belief that sustained Sharansky during his long years in captivity, and it comes as a welcome antidote to excessive realism in politics - the idea that little or nothing should be done to rock the boat, that dictators should be appeased because the results of action and intervention are so unpredictable. Looking back at the Cold War, he praises U.S. President Ronald Reagan's pressure on the Soviet Union to conform to the human rights standards laid out in the 1975 Helsinki Accords and denounces Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and others who advocated a policy of detente.
But can it be categorically claimed that all people want freedom and that democracy, when imposed, will inevitably lead to peace? Reagan's policy was ultimately not so radical, since the spadework for Helsinki had been done years before by Kissinger's former bosses Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and even by Reagan's predecessor, Jimmy Carter. Sharansky praises the late Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik who titled his prescient 1969 book "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?" But he seems to forget that Amalrik based his prediction that the Soviet Union would implode on cataclysmal events such as a war with China, rather than on the inherent weaknesses and festering injustices of the Soviet regime.
As it happens, political thinkers have been asking whether humans have an innate need for freedom since the days of Rousseau and Kant. Social psychologists who are by no means in favor of tyranny and dictatorship have found that aggression and the fear of freedom also seem to be part of the human condition. If Sharansky had argued that no one wants to be tortured or grossly exploited or persecuted for his or her beliefs, his case would have been irrefutable. But democracy, unfortunately, does not flourish everywhere. It took a long time to develop even in those countries where it is now firmly rooted. And if, for instance, a religion maintains that sovereignty rests not with the people but only with God, then those who fully accept this dogma cannot possibly embrace democratic reform. They may eventually make political concessions, but probably not for a very long time.
Sharansky's optimism comes as a relief at a point when too many Americans and still more Europeans have accepted the notion that even the peace of the graveyard is preferable to taking foreign-policy risks on behalf of freedom. And this is no doubt what appealed to Bush as the Iraq war came under attack during last year's election. Once upon a time, it was the political left that intervened for freedom's sake in other countries' affairs, but today this can no longer be taken for granted. All too often, the guiding principle is "peace at any price." One cannot help but think that if a new Hitler suddenly appeared on the scene, at least some members of the left would be sure to argue that violence has never solved anything - that resistance would be too expensive and therefore irresponsible.
Yet what has the call for more freedom and democracy achieved in the Third World in recent decades? All too often, the result has been the replacement of a repressive regime - such as that of the Shah in Iran - by a regime that was far more repressive. And there is little doubt that free elections in, say, Saudi Arabia or Egypt would have similar results. It would be wrong to state that the prospects for democracy are hopeless in certain parts of the world or that some countries will never be democratic. Nevertheless, each case is different. What is true with regard to Switzerland or Sweden does not necessarily apply to every Middle Eastern and African country. The road to freedom is long and arduous, and there are no shortcuts. Sharansky's absolutist approach to world politics is reminiscent of the old Latin proverb, Fiat justitia, pereat mundus: Let justice be even if the world perishes in the process.
Nor can Sharansky's second thesis - that democracies are by necessity more peace-loving than dictatorships - be accepted as axiomatic. It is true some of the time, but by no means always. Much depends on whether a country is big or small or whether it has old territorial conflicts with its neighbors. If in the contemporary world, all-out wars between powerful countries are highly unlikely, it is simply because war has become so costly and destructive that few countries can afford it anymore.
Will democratization help overcome terrorism? One wishes that this were the case, but the experience of the last hundred years teaches that freedom and terrorism often go hand-in-hand. A certain measure of freedom is key for terrorism to operate.
All of which does not mean that tyranny is preferable or that Sharansky is utterly wrong. What it does mean is that his idealism needs an admixture of realism.
Walter Laqueur was director of the Institute of Contemporary History in London from 1964 to 1995.
TITLE: All will be revealed
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: You may never see these videos on MTV, but this weekend Petersburgers have the chance to view rarely-seen clips by local and national artists at the second annual Kinorock festival at Stary Dom.
Featuring videos, documentary films and live music, Kinorock provides an outlet for young and underground bands who have been relegated to the fringes of popular culture.
"This is the least we can do to promote young musicians who are trying to make their own way outside of big labels and governmental support," said festival organizer and frontman of '80s new wave band Postoronnim V., Innokenty Volkomorov. "The material we are going to show is ignored by official culture."
With the help of Zhenya Glyukk, a DJ at Radio Roks who also fronts her own band, the organizers have collected both new and classic videos which will be shown on three different screens during the event.
New videos will be judged by a panel of respected rock glitterati in such categories as Best Video, Best Animated Video, and Best Low Budget Video. Judges include Oleg Grabko, president of Bomba Piter record label, Andrei Burlaka, rock journalist and historian, and Anatoly Gunitsky, poet, journalist and former member of the influential '80s band Akvarium. Audience members will also have a chance to vote for their favorites which will be shown at a later festival in October.
"We want to show what these groups are creating on very little money," said Glyukk. "Their talent shines through even a very low budget."
"For example, Markscheider Kunst made their video for 'Dengi' for something like $40," said Grabko. "But it's still nicely done and entertaining."
Along with showcasing the winners of the last Kinorock festival, the main stage of Stary Dom will play host to the bands Banana Gang, Scary B.O.O.M, NEP, and headliners Pep-See. No strangers to music video, Pep-See have produced eight highly-original clips and will be premiering a new animated video for the song "Veter Lyubvi" (Wind of Love). A collection of great videos by Western acts will also be shown on the main stage.
Festival organizers have also put together a special DVD of archive footage and videos from the '80s and '90s. Highlights include German rockers: The Scorpions, looking uncharacteristically unkempt and ratty performing in the "Red Corner" of the Leningradsky Rock Club in 1988 in front of a bust of Lenin; a long-lost video from the group Nol for the song "Chelovek i Koshka;" and a rare video by the Petrozavodsk group Revolver for the song "Novogodneye" featuring Sergei Shnurov of Leningrad fame filmed in the early '90s when he was just a wee lad with rosy cheeks.
Additionally, lost and lovingly-restored concert footage of early Russian rock groups Alisa and Televizor will be unveiled for the first time.
Russian Rock legends Auktsyon will also be presenting a video for the song "Kolpak" that was banned by both MTV and Muz TV due to band member Oleg Garkusha's full frontal nudity. Whether viewers really want to see Garkusha naked remains to be seen.
Kinorock will take place at Stary Dom on Saturday, April 2 from 6 p.m. through 11:30 p.m. See listings for details.
TITLE: Intensity and grace
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: At the Fifth International Ballet Festival, currently in full swing at the Mariinsky Theater, modern choreography takes the center stage. The event, showcasing performances of works by William Forsythe, Kenneth MacMillan and George Balanchine, opened on March 24 with a world premiere of a ballet by prominent British choreographer David Dawson.
Dawson's Reverence, an abstract work set to Gavin Bryars' String Quartet No.3, beautifully suits the Mariinsky Theater ballet company, with its emotional, romantic and sentimental flair.
The 40-minute-long ballet features three pairs of dancers and fully exploits the concept of reverence in its literal and choreographic sense.
Dawson, 33, says he reveres the traditions of the Mariinsky Theater, which is sometimes referred to by its old Soviet name the Kirov and reverence also means a deep bow or curtsy performed in ballet. Dawson says that the Mariinsky corps de ballet found his choreography demanding.
But the ballet master, turning potential pitfalls into stepping stones, used the habits, attitude, mentality and training of the Mariinsky troupe - the special Kirov port de bras - to the ballet's advantage.
He has captured the company's signature style - its elegant regal grace - and made the most of it in the context of modern dance, creating a sublime and dashing fusion.
To revere something, to hold it in high esteem, is a gift, Dawson said before the premiere.
A 'reverence' ... is also a bow or an ending. And there is a darkness to the ballet that is talking about ending in terms of disappearing into mini-deaths or mini-ecstasies.
Dawson wraps the entire stage in black but there is no gloomy feel to the performance. The ballet creates a floating, ethereal world, with dancers emerging from and disappearing into the edges of the black box.
Dawson's Reverence was shown as part of two choreographers' evenings that opened the festival, which also featured George Balanchine's Apollo (on March 24) and The Four Temperaments (on March 25), and William Forsythe's Approximate Sonata.
The Mariinsky made a wise decision to show Dawson's ballet after the Forsythe works so as to expose the roots of the British choreographer's art.
Dawson, who spent two years with Forsythe's Frankfurt Ballet, is a demanding ballet master, who openly states he expects dancers to perform to their limits straight from the end of their toes to the end of their fingers and to disappear into another state of mind.
But the British choreographer has produced a low-voltage, non-radical work, where intensity is matched by grace.
Staging a new work for a theater with the unparalleled pedigree of the Mariinsky is a challenge anyone might find paralyzing. But Dawson says he experienced an incredible amount of respect and gratitude for what the company has done for dance.
It wasn't long ago that Dawson was dancing himself and the choreographer likes to work on dancers' minds before their bodies.
I am interested in a person, in what makes them tick, and that goes into the piece, he said. I am interested in relationships between the dancers as well, and that, too, goes into the piece.
This year the Mariinsky has restored the long-lost tradition of tribute evenings to current ballet stars. Before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Imperial Ballet organized annual tribute performances to the company's brightest dancers and its corps de ballet. The company's three principal ballerinas - Diana Vishnyova, Daria Pavlenko and Ulyana Lopatkina - have been honored at this week's festival.
The Mariinsky's often unsung corps de ballet is also the subject of a tribute. Friday's performance features scenes from Petipa's La Bayadere, Nijinsky's The Rite of Spring and Lander's Etudes.
The festival concludes Sunday with a traditional gala-performance, which this year assembles an array of top-flight international talent such as London's Royal Ballet's Roberta Marquez, who will dance her Russian debut alongside Vyacheslav Samodurov, a former Mariinsky soloist who is now her fellow dancer at Covent Garden. Joining her will be Royal Ballet colleagues Alina Cojocaru and dance partner, Johan Kobborg. Dancers from the Opera de Paris ballet include soloists Agnes Letestu, Manuel Legris and Jean-Guillom Bart.
TITLE: Eifman's Anna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A new ballet based loosely on Leo Tolstoy's novel "Anna Karenina" premieres at the St. Petersburg Conservatory on April 1 and 2.
Well-known St. Petersburg choreographer Boris Eifman says his choreographic rendition of the celebrated 1877 literary masterpiece explores women's dependancy on sexual relationships.
For Eifman, the key to Tolstoy's novel is Anna's emotional and sensual dependence on her lover Vronsky. The choreographer feels the story is highly relevant today, and argues it is a mistake to see the relationship as obsolete.
"As far as I can understand, she commits suicide to end this painful, unbearable connection, to break the ties she is unable to do anything about [in life]," he said.
The "mystical" love triangle between Anna, Vronsky and her husband Karenin, as Eifman himself puts it, is the main focus of his work.
The balletmaster describes the eponymous heroine as a kind of werewolf.
"Two confrontational human beings co-exist in her," he explains. "Anna belongs to high society, yet she is a woman plunged deeply into the world of stormy passions, unknown even to Dostoevsky's characters."
The choreographer believes that Anna's story appeals to women in general.
"Female emotional bondage lies within womens' nature, and all this talk about emancipation is hypocritical," he said. "To me, the story is about sexual dependence and it is this aspect that is most interesting, captivating and worth exploring."
The ballet had its world premiere last week in Krasnodar in southern Russia to crowded halls, winning rave reviews. The choreographer explains why he chose to debut the ballet in the provincial city.
"The prominent producer Leonard Gatov invited the company to show the premiere in Krasnodar, which not only meant performing on an excellent stage but also it gave us the appropiate level of facilities and a rehearsal venue," Eifman told reporters at a news conference this month.
These words implied that no such venue was available for the company in their hometown of St. Petersburg.
Eifman's company, founded in 1977, has often been referred to as a group of "wandering stars." The troupe performs almost exclusively abroad, but, as Eifman is always keen to point out, its touring schedule would be less packed with foreign tours if the company had a base on home soil.
"There are very few local venues, where we can perform: the Mariinsky, the Alexandrinsky, the Mussorgsky and the Conservatory," Eifman said. "But they are almost always occupied."
Eifman's company spent many years looking for a permanent place to settle, consuming a gerat deal of time and energy. Now, the troupe is pinning its hopes on a proposed Palace of Dance to be built on a site dubbed the European Embankment in St. Petersburg. An ambitious construction plan backed by the city administration, the $100 million European Embankment will occupy 4.5 hectares and will also feature a large business center, a fitness center, shopping arcades and a series of mansions offering upmarket accommodation. It is set to open in 2008.
Boris Eifman's ballets always contain psychological drama and most of them were inspired by the biographies of extraordinary people with tragic fates or based on literary plots.
"Red Giselle" tells the real-life story of the great Russian ballerina Olga Spessivtseva, who fled the country after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and spent 20 years in a psychiatric ward in New York.
"The Russian Hamlet" is devoted to the tragic life of Tsar Paul I, the unloved child of Catherine the Great and Peter III who was killed in his bedroom in the Mikhailovsky Castle.
Eifman's ballets "The Karamazovs," "The Master and Margarita" and "Don Quixote" are based on famous novels.
The first act of Eifman's "Anna Karenina" is set to music by Tchaikovsky, while contemporary electronic music was composed specifically for Act II, with the balletmaster himself contributing to the score.
The choreographer, who closely examined film versions and available recordings of dramatic productions of "Anna Karenina" when he embarked on the ballet, says almost everything he saw left a strange aftertaste. Eifman criticized these adaptations for their simplified approach and superficial interpretation. He wasn't specific about particular versions.
With the new work the balletmaster aims to find fresh insight into the well-worn classic.
"Ballet is [the] realization of psychological drama," Eifman said.
"When I read Tolstoy's prose, I feel that in 'Anna Karenina' he wanted to present his readers with a psycho-erotic analysis of the heroine's passions. In my production, I am attempting to touch on that very theme, which remains ignored by and unreflected in films and dramas."
TITLE: Lukin: Social Issues Top Concern in Russia
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: COPENHAGEN - Social issues remain the major human rights problems in Russia, Vladimir Lukin, the federal ombudsman for human rights, said Thursday.
"The problems of pensioners, delayed payments, breaches by private entrepreneurs of labor laws against their employees, the problems of working migrants, army conscripts' lack of rights - such complaints make up 50 percent of all complaints that the Ombudsman's Office receives," Lukin said in an interview.
Lukin, who was in Denmark to participate in celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Danish Ombudsman, said another 30 percent of Russia's human rights problems related to illegal actions of the police and prison staff.
Lukin, who receives about 40,000 complaints a year, said that the remaining 20 percent of violations are varied and include the violation of mass media rights.
"Those facts are especially relevant for the regional mass media,where reporters sometimes even can even be fired if the governor gets dissatisfied with what they say," Lukin said.
Speaking at a round table of ombudsmen, Lukin also said that Russia needs to give regional ombudsmen more independence.
At least 30 of Russia's 89 administrative regions have their own ombudsmen.
However, they are elected by local parliaments, which may be dependent on the governor, meaning the ombudsmen in turn are dependent on the governors.
Such a system is in complete contradiction to the principles of the institution of ombudsman, he said.
Therefore Lukin asked the international ombudsman institution to help solve this problem by recommending additional legislation.
He suggested that regional Ombudsmen be elected under the auspices of the federal ombudsman, who could also be in charge of deciding if a regional ombudsman should be dismissed.
"It should obviously be not regional governors who decide such questions," Lukin said.
Lukin was among 52 international Ombudsmen who gathered in Copenhagen to discuss the institution's activities and to mark the 50th anniversary of the Danish Parliamentary Ombudsman.
The Danish Ombudsman institution was the third in the world, following the first ombudsmen organizations founded in Sweden and Finland.
Today more than 100 countries have an ombudsman, many of them inspired by the Danish model.
An ombudsman provides assistance to civil complaints - they protect individual citizens in their legal relations with administrations.
Speaking about the human rights problems in the Chechen republic, Lukin said one of the major problems there currently was kidnappings. Lukin said he hoped the recent creation of an ombudsman in Chechnya would assist in solving that problem, too.
Alvaro Gil Robles, Commissioner for Human Rights in the Council of Europe, also called kidnapping one of the major human rights problems in Chechnya.
"Kidnappings are performed by all sides - bandits, fighters, Chechen police, and, they say, even by federal troops," Gil Robles said.
Gil Robles, who recently traveled to Russia and is about to publish a big report on human rights in the country, said among the more pressing human rights issues in Russia he would name freedom of speech, the need for a more independent legislative system and police, the consolidation of civil society and the needs of social groups.
Russia is working on those problems, he said.
"But we shouldn't demand everything from Russia at once. We should not criticize it all the time but should help," he said.
Meanwhile, the European Ombudsman Nikiforos Diamandouros spoke about the human rights problems in Europe and said the European Union also has several urgent human rights problems.
One of the biggest problems was human trafficking. Since 1991, trafficking, which mainly involves trafficking of women from former Soviet republics is the "the third-largest source of illegal money after trafficking arms and drugs," he said.
"Therefore the exploitation of human beings, which also involves organized prostitution, is an important source of concern for the European Union," Diamandouros said.
Another problem the EU Ombudsmen have to deal with is restitution of property.
Diamandouros said this problem mainly concerns the Baltic states, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, where a lot of property was nationalized by Socialist regimes after World War II and now the former owners want their property returned.
Diamandouros said the third big problem with human rights in Europe arises from "people's increased mobility," he said. This phenomenon evoked certain phenomena of racism and xenophobia in European countries.
However, when speaking about the world's human rights problems Diamandouros said that the worst human rights problems arise in wars, upheavals and famines.
"Of course, in such situations the major danger is to the right to life," he said.
TITLE: Ailing Pope Becomes Object Lesson in Right to Die Cases
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VATICAN CITY - The use of a feeding tube for Pope John Paul II, struggling to recover from throat surgery, illustrates a key point of Roman Catholic policy he himself has proclaimed: It is morally necessary to give patients food and water, no matter their condition.
As Parkinson's disease and other ailments have left him increasingly frail, John Paul has been emphasizing that the chronically ill, "prisoners of their condition... retain their human dignity in all its fullness."
A leading Vatican expert, meanwhile, said in comment published Thursday that John Paul is not considering resignation.
The Vatican has repeated that principle recently in comments concerning Terri Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged American woman whose feeding tube was removed earlier this month. While John Paul is fully alert, some see parallels in the two cases.
Hospitalized twice last month following two breathing crises and with a tube placed in his throat to help him breathe, John Paul has become a picture of suffering. When he appeared at his apartment window Wednesday to bless pilgrims in St. Peter's Square, he managed to utter only a rasp.
Later that day, the Vatican announced the pope had been fitted with a feeding tube in his nose to help boost his nutritional intake.
Meanwhile, Vittorio Messori, a leading Catholic author who helped the pope write the 1994 best-selling book "Crossing the Threshold of Hope," wrote in the Corriere della Sera newspaper Thursday that he's wondered if John Paul might resign, given his frail health.
But, he added: "John Paul II will not step down."
"Whetever happens, whatever the evolution of John Paul II's pathologies, the church will not register another ex-pope in its annals," Messori wrote.
Papal resignation is extremely rare, but is allowed by church law. With speculation swirling, many officials have insisted the pope's grip on the church remains firm despite his ailments.
Under John Paul, Vatican teaching on the final stages of life includes a firm rejection of euthanasia, insistence on treatments that help people bear ailments with dignity and encouragement of research to enhance and prolong life.
A 1980 Vatican document makes the distinction between "proportionate" and "disproportionate" means of prolonging life. While it gives room for refusal of some forms of aggressive medical intervention for terminally ill patients, it insists that "normal care" must not be interrupted.
John Paul set down exactly what that meant in a speech last year to an international conference on treatments for patients in a so-called persistent vegetative state.
"I should like particularly to underline how the administration of water and food, even when provided by artificial means, always represents a natural means of preserving life, not a medical act. Its use, furthermore, should be considered, in principle, ordinary and proportionate, and as such morally obligatory."In the Schiavo case, the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano said recently that removing the feeding tube was tantamount to capital punishment.
"But Terri has committed no crimes, if not that of being `useless' to the eyes of a society incapable of appreciating and defending the gift of life," it said.
TITLE: Clijsters Mounts Comeback By Drubbing Dementyeva
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KEY BISCAYNE, Florida - The comeback trail has been arduous for Kim Clijsters. She faced four consecutive seeded opponents in the past week and must now take on another one: No. 1 Amelie Mauresmo.
Rather than grouse about her unaccustomed role as an unseeded floater in the field, Clijsters navigated her way to the semifinals of the Nasdaq-100 Open against Mauresmo on Thursday night.
Win or lose, it's clear Clijsters again deserves to be listed among the WTA Tour's top players.
"Kim is coming back pretty strong," Mauresmo said.
Returning from a career-threatening wrist injury that sidelined her most of last year, Clijsters won her 12th consecutive match Wednesday, drubbing fourth-seeded Yelena Dementyeva 6-2 6-1 in 56 minutes.
Clijsters also has beaten players seeded 24th, 12th and fifth without losing a set. Because she came into the tournament ranked 38th, she wasn't among the 32 seeded players who received a first-round bye and an easier draw.
"It's not something that has bothered me," the amiable Belgian said. "If you want to get through the tournament, you have to beat them anyway. I took it more as motivation and as a challenge."
Clijsters was ranked 133rd before winning the Indian Wells title this month and will climb into the top 30 next week. That means she'll likely be seeded in May at the French Open, where she's a two-time runner-up.
"I feel like I'm hitting as good as I can at the moment," Clijsters said. "It's a great feeling to be back out there."
She had help against Dementyeva. Of the 58 points Clijsters won, 41 came on unforced errors by the Russian, including eight double faults.
The No. 1 ranking may be beyond Mauresmo's reach this week, but she'll settle for winning the tournament. The top-seeded Frenchwoman advanced by beating 17-year-old Ana Ivanovic 6-1 6-4.
Mauresmo, who spent five weeks at No. 1 last year, will regain the top spot only if she defeats a top-five player in the final. That means she needs for No. 3-ranked Maria Sharapova to beat No. 9 Venus Williams in the other semifinal Thursday.
Lindsay Davenport, who skipped the hardcourt tournament to protect her troublesome knees, has been No. 1 since October.
"Of course I would love to get it back," Mauresmo said. "But having had it once, it's pretty different. My goals are somewhere else. Doing well in these big events is today more important to me."
She'll try to break a streak of six consecutive losses to Clijsters.
Unseeded David Ferrer and No. 29-seeded Rafael Nadal advanced to an all-Spanish semifinal Friday. Ferrer swept No. 26 Dominik Hrbaty 6-2 6-3, and the 18-year-old Nadal beat No. 25 Thomas Johansson 6-2 6-4.
"We're friends," Ferrer said. "At least a Spaniard will go on in the tournament."
No man from Spain has ever won the title.
Mauresmo won the first five games and nine of the first 10 against Ivanovic, slowed by hamstring and ankle injuries and looking nervous in her first Tier I quarterfinal. The youngster committed 34 unforced errors, double-faulted five times and won only three of 17 points on her second serve.
Before this year, Mauresmo won only four matches at Key Biscayne in three appearances. She's 18-4 in 2005 and seeking her second title of the year.
"Since the tournament started, I feel like I'm playing better and better," she said. "The first set and a half today was the best. But also she was giving me some free points. I didn't have to work too hard for the first nine or 10 games."
Ivanovic, who began the year ranked 97th, will move into the top 50 next week for the first time. She upset U.S. Open champion Svetlana Kuznetsova in the fourth round.
"I am pretty happy," Ivanovic said. "But there are so many things I have to still improve."
TITLE: Basketball Boom Sees Rising Payouts in Superleague
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A decade ago professional basketball players in Russia were about as confident as striking miners that they would receive their salaries.
But thanks to backing from big business, regional politicians and the Federal Security Service, top Russian clubs this season are awash in cash and readily paying top dollar to some of the best players in Europe.
"Ten years ago, players in Russia were just praying they would get paid by their clubs," said Reed Salwen, whose U.S.-based sports agency, Entersport, has represented more than 10 athletes playing professional basketball in Russia. "Some clubs would not pay their players at all, some would pay them late. You had players fighting with the management and agents filing lawsuits. Players were afraid to sign contracts. Now many of the best contracts in Europe are available in Russia."
As a result the Russian first division, a 14-team competition known as the Superleague, has become one of the strongest leagues in Europe and joined the Italian and Spanish leagues as perhaps the most lucrative options in the world for professional players outside of North America.
Just how much money is floating around the Russian Superleague is difficult to say. The details of players' contracts are as a rule not disclosed in Europe. Furthermore, Superleague clubs are notorious for keeping the size of their budgets under wraps.
But sports magazine ProSport estimated ahead of the 2004-05 season that the Russian teams would spend a total of $71 million this season.
In an informal survey conducted by The Moscow Times of 10 of the 14 Superleague clubs, including last year's top four finishers - CSKA, UNICS, Dynamo Moscow and Ural-Great - only one, BC Samara, would discuss its budget openly. A club spokeswoman said she hoped Samara could muster up a paltry $1 million budget for the season.
The top clubs spend far more. ProSport estimated CSKA Moscow's budget at around $20 million this season, likely making it the richest basketball club in all of Europe. CSKA has a major supporter in Mikhail Prokhorov, a basketball fanatic and controlling owner of Norilsk Nickel with Vladimir Potanin, with whom he is tied for the honors of Russia's seventh-richest man with an estimated fortune of $4.4 billion, according to Forbes. Prokhorov satisfies his basketball passion as the owner of a controlling stake in the club.
Even $20 million could be a conservative estimate, given that sources close to CSKA management said the club's budget last season totaled around $23 million and a CSKA executive said this year's budget is larger than last year's.
To put these numbers in perspective, the average budget for clubs in the Spanish first division, one of Europe's richest leagues, is around $7 million this season, according to a league spokesman. The league's smallest is around $3.5 million, while the largest is between $14 million and $18 million.
The CSKA executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue in a nontransparent industry, declined to give the size of the club's budget for last season or this season. But he said this year's budget is larger than last year's due to several factors, including CSKA's hosting of the Euroleague Final Four at Olimpiisky Stadium in Moscow on May 6-8.
The club is in the final year of a three-year project under general manager Sergei Kushchenko to win the Euroleague championship, the basketball equivalent of European soccer's Champions League.
CSKA, the two-time defending Russian champion and one of Europe's best clubs, has lost narrowly each of the past two years in the Euroleague Final Four. It has already made the European playoffs this year, and a glance at the club's roster shows it is sparing no expense to capture the championship in front of its hometown fans in May.
According to ProSport, CSKA has put up about $5.5 million for its six highest-paid players, with last year's Euroleague MVP, American guard Marcus Brown, topping the list with a $1.5 million contract.
The expensive talent has paid off so far. CSKA started off the season with 42 straight wins in Euroleague and Russian Superleague play. Its 18-game winning string in the Euroleague, going back to a victory in the third-place game at the Final Four last year, set a record for consecutive wins in European Cup games. The streak was snapped with a home loss to Barcelona on March 16, CSKA's only loss of the season so far.
Dynamo Moscow and Dynamo St. Petersburg, two clubs backed by the Federal Security Service, also are spending more freely this season.
Dynamo Moscow's budget is estimated at between $13 million and $15 million this year, ProSport reported, with American guard Lynn Greer and Turkish forward Mirsad Turkcan each earning more than $1 million.
The club made waves last year with a surprise third-place finish thanks to the financial backing of the Dynamo sports society's Moscow branch, headed up by FSB deputy director Viktor Zakharov.
Dynamo Moscow is currently in second place in the Superleague behind CSKA with three games left to play before the playoffs begin in late April. But the club crashed out of the ULEB Cup, basketball's equivalent of soccer's UEFA cup, in humiliating fashion to the Serbian club Hemofarm earlier this year, proving that big contracts do not necessarily add up to wins.
Dynamo St. Petersburg became the most financially transparent Russian club in recent history by publicly announcing its budget ahead of the season. Club president Vladimir Rodionov announced at a press conference that the budget would total $6 million, though he declined to name the sponsors.
Most of the other clubs, including top-flight clubs such as UNICS Kazan and Ural Great from Perm, are funded primarily by regional governments.
But despite business and political patronage, no one is under the illusion that professional basketball in Russia is a profitable business.
"It's not a business yet," the CSKA executive said. "It's closer to long-term social projects and image campaigns for investing companies."
This leaves most clubs vulnerable to the whims of the companies or regional governments that fund them. Ural Great, for example, has faced a reduction from last year's budget of $5 million due to the loss of its club president, former Perm Deputy Governor Anatoly Tyomkin.
Tyomkin followed former Perm Governor Yury Trutnev to Moscow in March 2004 when Trutnev took over as natural resources minister in President Vladimir Putin's government reorganization.
"Tyomkin went to Moscow, and that affected our fate accordingly," Ural Great spokesman Yevgeny Permyakov said.
UNICS Kazan has an estimated budget of $9 million this year.
Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, also has a professional hockey club supported by the regional government. The Kazan club, Ak Bars, has an estimated budget of $50 million and has attracted an array of NHL stars freed up by the NHL lockout.
The money invested in professional basketball in Russia is still small compared to hockey and soccer, despite the rising popularity of the sport. Hockey clubs in the Russian Superleague had a combined budget estimated at $255 million this season.
Officials from several Superleague clubs say that the financial stability of the basketball league will depend primarily on the overall economic situation in the country.
But for this season, at least, players know they have found a real cash cow.
Argentine center Ruben Wolkowisky told sports daily Sovietsky Sport that he chose to sign with the Russian club Khimki, in the dreary Moscow suburb of the same name, after declining offers from NBA clubs.
"I had a pretty good offer from the NBA," said Wolkowisky, who ProSport reported will earn $600,000 this year. "The Indiana Pacers wanted me. But Khimki offered me conditions that were even a little bit better."
TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Mets' Galarraga Retires
NEW YORK (AP) - Andres Galarraga overcame non-Hodgkin's lymphoma twice in five years to prolong his stellar career. When he thought he wasn't reaching his usual standards, he retired - even though he was only one home run shy of 400.
The 43-year-old first baseman walked away from the game Tuesday after hitting just .235 with three home runs and seven RBIs in 17 games for the Mets this spring.
A five-time All-Star and two-time Gold Glove winner in a 19-year career, The Big Cat probably would have been left off New York's 25-man roster when the team broke camp.
Wade Murder Charge
TEMPE, Arizona (AP) - Former Arizona State running back Loren Wade was charged Tuesday with first-degree murder in the shooting of another former Sun Devils player.
The 21-year-old Wade has been held without bond since Saturday, when he was arrested at the slaying site outside a Scottsdale nightspot.
Witnesses say they saw him approach the car of Brandon Falkner, and exchange words with Falkner before a single gunshot rang out.
Referee Questioned
GLASGOW (Reuters) - Heart of Midlothian fans have asked the Scottish Football Association to find out which teams their referees support after Rangers were awarded a late penalty in a 2-1 win over the Edinburgh club this month.
Four supporters' groups have written to SFA chief executive David Taylor to protest about what they view as biased refereeing towards Glasgow rivals Rangers and Celtic.
"We do not believe this is just about Hearts as we believe that every Scottish Premier League club outside Rangers and Celtic has had the same experience," the letter reads.
"We cannot overstate how serious we think this matter is."
Referees and assistants in the English Premier League disclose which clubs they follow and the Hearts fans have urged the SFA to follow suit.
Rooney Off the Hook
LONDON (Reuters) - Police have dropped an investigation into claims that Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney had assaulted a man in a nightclub.
Officers in Manchester launched the inquiry after a student said the 19-year-old player had attacked him at a bar in the city center on March 22.
Media reports said Rooney had reacted after being taunted by the 22-year-old student about his controversial 27 million pound transfer from Everton last year.
Mourinho Banned
NYON, Switzerland (Reuters) - Chelsea was fined 75,000 Swiss francs ($62,800) and coach Jose Mourinho handed a two-match touchline ban by UEFA on Thursday over the Anders Frisk affair.
The London club, charged with bringing the game into disrepute, had alleged Barcelona coach Frank Rijkaard visited the Swedish referee at halftime during the first leg of their Champions League first knockout round tie at the Nou Camp on Feb. 23.
UEFA had accused Chelsea of making false declarations and "deliberately creating a poisoned and negative ambience" after they refused to attend the post-match news conference and submitted a report detailing their allegations.
"Mourinho... will have to sit out the quarter-final tie against Bayern Munich, subject to an appeal," a UEFA statement said.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Syria to Withdraw
BEIRUT (Reuters) - The second and final phase of Syria's troop withdrawal from Lebanon will start Thursday and conclude as announced by April 30, a Lebanese military source said Monday.
The source said the timing and details of the pullout, which involves 8,000 troops, were agreed at a meeting of Syrian and Lebanese military commanders in Lebanon's eastern Bekaa Valley.
Syria began moving its troops and intelligence agents to the Bekaa or across the Syrian border on March 8 under the first phase of a plan announced by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Lebanese military sources said the first phase had been completed on March 17, but they and witnesses have reported more Syrian troops crossing the border since then.
Sunni Speaker Selected
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi politicians chose a Sunni Arab to be the speaker of parliament on Sunday, ending a political impasse and taking a decisive step toward forming a government nine weeks after historic elections.
In a ballot, the members of the 275-seat National Assembly voted overwhelmingly to elect Hajem al-Hassani, the industry minister, as speaker. Hassani, a religious Sunni, is an ally of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.
But he also warned against complacency: "If we neglect our responsibilities and fail, we will hurt ourselves and the people will replace us with others."
Brazil Police Massacre
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) - Two police officers suspected in a shooting spree that killed 30 people last week were identified by witnesses who saw them at the crime scene, officials said Sunday.
Police officers Fabiano Goncalves Lopes and Jose Augusto Moreira Felipe, who were arrested Saturday, were seen near the drive-by shootings that left 30 people dead on the city outskirts, officials said.
Police had arrest warrants for two other suspects who were linked to the crime by witnesses.
TITLE: New Star Nadal Snaps at Federer's Heels
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KEY BISCAYNE, Florida - Rafael Nadal fell short in a bid to upset Roger Federer on Sunday, the end coming when he dumped a weary backhand in the net on championship point.
But Nadal's just getting started.
Twice two points from defeat, Federer conceded he was lucky to win the Nasdaq-100 Open final 2-6 6-7 (4) 7-6 (5) 6-3 6-1. And he expects the 18-year-old Nadal to be heard from again.
"We'll see ... very much from him in the future," Federer said. "For me this was a big match, because I know what a great player he will be one day."
By becoming the youngest men's finalist at Key Biscayne, and then nearly beating Federer, Nadal stamped himself as one of the favorites at this year's French Open - and future major events as well.
Wearing white clamdiggers, an orange sleeveless shirt and a white bandanna, the left-handed Spaniard displayed shotmaking worthy of his flashy outfit.
He led 4-1 in the third set and 5-3 in the ensuing tiebreaker, but Federer's forehand then became more accurate and aggressive, and he overtook a tiring Nadal in a 3-hour, 43-minute marathon.
"Any time I play well and play a match like this, I have fun," Nadal said. "But as soon as I lose the last point, the fun stops."
An upset would have been a streak-snapper: Federer has won 22 consecutive matches this year, and 18 consecutive finals since July 2003. Like Kim Clijsters, who beat Maria Sharapova in the women's final Saturday, he earned his first Key Biscayne title.
Nadal came out swinging. A Davis Cup hero in Spain's victory over the United States last December, he hit deep groundstrokes with heavy topspin. The result was a rash of mistakes by Federer, who finished with 74 unforced errors.
"His forehand is huge," Federer said. "And because he's a lefty, it changes so many things. We don't have many great lefties in the game right now, so it's good we have one again."
TITLE: Yartsev Quits, Mutko Vows Clean-Up
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: The newly-elected president of the Russian Football Union, Vitaly Mutko, received the resignation of long-serving Russian national coach Georgy Yartsev on Monday, the Interfax news agency reported.
Mutko previously expressed his intention to replace Yartsev and didn't rule out the idea of hiring a coach from outside Russia.
"I hope this day will be remembered as the dawn of a new era in Russian football," Mutko said Saturday after succeeding Vyacheslav Koloskov as Russia's soccer chief.
Koloskov resigned in January after more than 25 years in the job, forced out by government officials unhappy at the way he was running the country's most popular sport.
In the run-up to the election, Mutko's rivals accused the St. Petersburg politician of having "big friends in the Kremlin" and enlisting the support of government officials.
Parliamentary speaker Boris Gryzlov, who is also leader of the majority pro-Kremlin party, openly endorsed his fellow Duma deputy last week, saying that the government would give soccer wide-ranging financial backing if Mutko won.
The allegations of government interference in Russian soccer have alarmed both FIFA and UEFA, world and European governing bodies, prompting them to send an independent observer to Moscow to monitor the elections.
But Mutko, who is also a close friend and a former colleague of Russian President Vladimir Putin, dismissed those claims.
"You have to differentiate between being dependent or having support from the government," he told Reuters in an interview.
"When we talk about football - the country's No. 1 sport - there is no way we can succeed in making it prosper without government support," said the 46-year-old, who headed Premier League side FC Zenit St. Petersburg from 1997 to 2003 before embarking on a political career.
Mutko also called on Russia's "oligarchs" to help finance the sport.
"I know for a fact that Roman Abramovich wants to get involved," he said, referring to the billionaire owner of English club Chelsea.
Asked if he would offer Abramovich a job as one of his vice-presidents, Mutko said: "First, let's see if Roman is interested, but I wouldn't rule it out."
Mutko also called for openness and transparency, vowing to fight corruption in Russian soccer, the problem which some insiders say Koloskov's regime could not get under control.
"I want to present a new image of our sport to the world. I want people to respect our great nation for what we do on a pitch and not for what's going on behind the scenes," he said.
n Superstar striker Andrei Arshavin scored a hat-trick in FC Zenit St. Petersburg's 5-1 thrashing of Terek Grozny on Sunday at Petrovsky Stadium. With 12 points, Zenit top the Premier League after three games in the season, three ahead of FC Saturn Moskovskaya Oblast.
(SPT, Reuters)
TITLE: N.Y. Yankees Trump Red Sox in Season Opener
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - The tallest Yankee ever began the big task of putting the Boston Red Sox back in their place.
Randy Johnson shut down Boston in his New York debut, dominating his new team's old rival. He outpitched David Wells, got help from Hideki Matsui and a rejuvenated Jason Giambi and led the Yankees over the World Series champions 9-2 Sunday night in the major league opener.
"I was pretty excited to go out there," said Johnson, who remembered how fans cheered him when he walked out to the bullpen to warm up.
Already, there were bad omens for the Red Sox: Matsui leaped in left to rob Kevin Millar of a two-run homer in the third, Giambi stretched to reel in two bad throws by shortstop Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez made a diving stop at third on Edgar Renteria, and Tino Martinez made a backhand dive at first to prevent an extra-base hit by Johnny Damon.
By the time Matsui hit a two-run homer off Matt Mantei for an 8-1 lead in the eighth, it was almost piling on.
"We're not disappointed," Damon said. "We accept the fact that we really weren't that good tonight. We'll get better."
With Boston taking the field as champions for the first time in 86 years, the Red Sox returned to the scene of their improbable triumph staring directly at the 6-foot-10 Big Unit, brought to the Bronx to help the Yankees win their first title since 2000.
Giambi, back at first base following injury, illness and a reported admission of steroid use, received a pair of standing ovations from the sellout crowd of 54,818 and went 1-for-2 with a single and two hit-by-pitches.
"I had a calm feeling because I knew I did everything I could to get to this point," he said. "They respect a guy who worked hard to get back to where he was."
Gary Sheffield, back from offseason shoulder surgery, hit a go-ahead single in a three-run third inning against Wells, and Martinez received two huge ovations in his first game in pinstripes since 2001.
"Who wouldn't like this?" he said.
Since New York moved within three outs of sweeping the Red Sox in the American League championship series last October, the Red Sox had won eight straight, becoming the first major league team to overcome a 3-0 postseason deficit, then blowing out St. Louis in the World Series.
But following an offseason of joy in New England, the Red Sox started with a thud, pitching poorly, making a pair of errors and losing their fifth straight season opener. New York had 15 hits off Wells and six relievers.
"It's the first game we won since Game 3," Yankees manager Joe Torre said. "It was a long winter waiting to get on the field again."
The usual swells and celebrities were on hand to watch the Yankees extend their winning streak in home openers to eight. A sign in left field expressed the hope of New York fans - "1918-2004-2090" - referring to the years of Boston's last two Series titles and projected date of its next.
"The crowd was ready," Damon said.
Johnson was a model of quiet focus hours before the game, putting on a black undershirt, then a gray sweat shirt before sitting in front of his new locker near Torre's office and looking ahead, gathering his thoughts.
Hitting Johnson is, well, a tall order - the New Yorker's playful front-page cartoon of him on the mound cut off at the neck.
He opened with a 93 miles-per-hour pitch to Damon, and struck out Renteria and Manny Ramirez looking in the first, the latter on a smoking 97 m.p.h. heater. He got in trouble in the second, when Matsui grabbed Millar's fly ball and Jay Payton singled in the season's first run.
Johnson and Red Sox manager Terry Francona called Matsui's catch the turning point.
"They don't play much basketball in Japan," Jeter said playfully. "I didn't know he could jump that high."
At Yankee Stadium, flags were at half-staff and a moment of silence was observed one day after the death of Pope John Paul II, who celebrated mass there in 1979.