SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1058 (24), Tuesday, April 5, 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.