SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1093 (59), Friday, August 5, 2005
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TITLE: ABC Spat Bodes Ill For Press
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Foreign Ministry’s decision not to extend the accreditation of ABC television journalists appears to be meant as a reminder to all foreign journalists not to cross a line when writing about Chechnya and especially rebel leaders.
But it is unlikely to change foreign media coverage about Russia or even have much effect on ABC.
Journalists, including Russian nationals employed by foreign media organizations, cannot work legally in Russia without accreditation.
The Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that this was the violation committed by Andrei Babitsky, the journalist with Prague-based Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who interviewed warlord Shamil Basayev in Chechnya in June.
A ministry official said Babitsky was required by law to obtain two forms of accreditation: one from the Foreign Ministry and the other from the Interior Ministry, which is responsible for areas that are designated as zones of counterterrorism operations, Interfax reported.
Babitsky, who said he obtained the interview on his own time, offered it to ABC, which broadcast it despite Russian objections on Thursday last week.
A Foreign Ministry official said by telephone Wednesday that the ministry believed ABC itself violated a 1976 United Nations pact by airing the interview. 
The official, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the issue, said Articles 19 and 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights set limits on freedom of speech when it comes to protecting state security and public order and also bans propaganda for war.
The last time the ministry denied accreditation to a foreign journalist was in early 2000, when Frank Hoefling, a German reporter with N24 television, “falsified news reports from Chechnya,” ministry spokesman Boris Malakhov said Wednesday.
Authorities accused Hoefling of stealing graphic photographs and a film depicting dead bodies in Chechnya that had been taken by Russian journalists and presenting them on N24 as evidence of the brutality of federal troops against Chechen civilians.
The ministry official said several foreign journalists had been denied accreditation or not had their accreditation extended in recent years, but refused to elaborate.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, a media freedom watchdog, said that the latest case was on July 6, 2003, when the ministry denied accreditation to Ali Astamirov, a journalist working for Agence France Presse. Astamirov, who had applied for accreditation the previous December, was abducted in Ingushetia on the same day that his accreditation was denied, and he has not been seen since.
CPJ representative Alex Lupis called the case “an example where denial of accreditation was used to ensure that a journalist remained legally vulnerable to harassment by government officials.”
Several foreign reporters interviewed for this report acknowledged that they had traveled to Chechnya without obtaining Interior Ministry accreditation, which would have immediately restricted their movements to officially approved routes and limited the independence of their reporting.
By doing this, reporters put themselves at risk of losing their Foreign Ministry accreditation and permission to continue working in Russia.
While most earlier denials were done quietly, the ABC decision is a warning to foreign and Russian journalists to curb their professional zeal when writing about Chechnya and terrorism, said Boris Makarenko, an analyst with the Center for Political Technologies. “It is clearly a demonstrative action,” he said.
Recalling that authorities have issued several warnings to the Kommersant newspaper for publishing interviews with Chechen rebel leaders over the past several years, Makarenko said they were forced to some extent to react harshly to ABC to prevent Russian media from being able to accuse them of double standards.
The big problem with the ABC report was that it gave a voice to Basayev, who has a $10 million bounty on his head but continues to elude federal forces, said Mark Franchetti, a journalist for Britain’s The Sunday Times who has reported extensively from Chechnya and was the only journalist allowed into Moscow’s Dubrovka theater during the 2002 crisis to interview the attackers’ leader. Basayev has claimed responsibility for the attack, which ended with 129 hostages dead. “They viewed this broadcast as a provocation, as giving a tribune to terrorists,” Franchetti said.
Basayev’s appearance on U.S. television enraged Russian officials, especially the military and security officials in the Kremlin siloviki, because he is a living reminder of their failure to deliver on their promises to “waste terrorists in the outhouse,” said Boris Timoshenko, a media analyst with the Glasnost Defense Foundation, a Moscow-based media freedom watchdog.
Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov on Sunday demanded that ABC be punished, saying he had barred military personnel from speaking with the network.
Dmitry Orlov, an analyst with the Agency for Political and Economic Communications, said authorities were overreacting in an attempt to show the Russian public how strong Russia is in its dealings with the Americans.
“In fact, it is clear to everyone that this whole brouhaha will most likely pass unnoticed by most Americans,” he said.
Makarenko said it was only a matter of time before the Foreign Ministry allowed new ABC reporters to work in Russia, noting that the ministry had left open the door to the possibility that it will issue accreditation to any ABC journalists who replace the current staff.
“It is not a question of giving or not giving accreditation to ABC; it is a question of doing it a year or two from now,” he said.
The accreditation of ABC’s Moscow chief bureau, Tomasz Rolski, expires in November, and the accreditation of the office’s 10 staffers expires in the coming months.
Journalists have long faced problems in Russia and the Soviet Union. In 1982, ABC bureau chief Anne Garrels was expelled when a pedestrian died after being struck by a car she drove in Moscow. Prior to the accident, Garrels had received a warning from the Foreign Ministry for visiting a family of dissidents and had been criticized in a Soviet magazine. Garrels reports for National Public Radio from Baghdad, where she has been stationed since the start of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
In 1986, Nicholas Daniloff of U.S. News and World Report was arrested and charged with espionage before being expelled. The Russian government in 1995 revoked the visa of Steve LeVine, a correspondent for Newsweek and The Washington Post, citing a technicality involving the revoking of his visa in Uzbekistan. Petra Prochazkova, a Czech journalist who reported from both sides during the first Chechen war, was denied visa in 2001.

TITLE: German Tourist Killed In Bus Crash
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A German woman was killed and 22 people were hospitalized after a bus crashed with a garbage truck at a notorious accident blackspot near St. Petersburg on Thursday morning.
Earlier, eleven people, including six German citizens, died in another crash between a bus and a Volvo truck on the road between Kurgan and Chelyabinsk in south central Russia.  At least 23 people were hospitalized as a result of the crash, Interfax reported.
Among the people injured in the accident near St. Petersburg were two Russian drivers, one of whom was in  critical condition, and a Russian tour guide. The rest were foreign tourists, a spokesman for St. Petersburg’s emergency services said.
There were 23 German tourists from different regions of Germany and two tourists from the Netherlands in the bus, the German Consulate in St. Petersburg said Thursday.
None of them was in critical condition, a consular official said.
The driver of the garbage truck received medical help at the scene of the accident.
By Thursday afternoon seven of the injured people had left the hospitals and 15 remained hospitalized, the press service of the city’s Health Committee said.
The accident took place when the tourist bus turned off the Pulkovskoye Shosse to take the road to Pushkin, a place tourists often visit to see the famed Catherine Palace and the Amber Room.
The truck, which was coming down a hill on the highway crashed into the right side of the bus, which was making the turn.
The spot is notoriously dangerous and a floral wreath from a previous, unknown accident was observed at the scene. 
The city’s road police said the driver of the bus was to blame for the accident because he didn’t yield to the truck, which was driving along the main road, Rossiya TV channel said.
St. Petersburg’s Transport Prosecutor’s Office opened a criminal case under article 264, part 2, of the Russian Criminal Code (violation of traffic rules and driving a vehicle which by carelessness causes the death of a person), Interfax reported.
Half of the staff of the German Consulate in St. Petersburg were visiting German tourists and taking care of the case on Thursday, the consular official said. They were also answering calls from the tourists’ relatives from Germany.
“The General Consulate keeps in constant contact with the leaders of the tourist group and doctors,” official said, adding that the tourists were on a river cruise vacation from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
The consulate could not release the name of the dead woman, the official said but confirmed she was aged 69.
In the other fatal accident Thursday 10 passengers, including three children, and a bus driver died.  Among the victims were six German citizens, including a teenager.
The accident took place in thick fog. A Volvo truck collided with the bus, which was carrying 34 passengers and two drivers.
The bus was traveling from Moscow to Novosibirsk. The truck was traveling from Krasnoyarsk to Moscow, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Inventor Wins Suit Against Siemens
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A St. Petersburg inventor won a court case against German industrial giant Siemens on Tuesday this week, in which he claimed that the company used his invention in its mobile phones.
Victor Petrov originally went to court in 2003 claiming that Siemens uses a method of forming psycho-emotional conditions — in other words, smiley-face icons — in its telephones, which he said he invented in 1999.
“When somebody wants to inform another person about his mood, he sends a smiley icon by SMS to his friend’s phone. When he sees the message the recipient’s mood is affected,” Petrov said trying to explain his invention in an interview on Wednesday. 
“In 2001, technology of this kind was used for the first time in Nokia phones that are on sale in Russia. 
Then in 2002 I saw the same stuff on Samsung phones. In 2003, I bought a Siemens 545 phone, conducted official research and filed the law suit,” Petrov said. 
“Why Siemens? Because I trusted what President [Vladimir] Putin was saying about Germans — that they are respectable people,” Petrov said.
“I thought they would give me an apology and start to cooperate with me,” he added. 
“But they didn’t. They’ve been constantly dragging on the court case by not showing up to the hearings.”
The court has settled the suit in Petrov’s favor and obligated Siemens to stop using “the invention of Petrov Victor Alexandrovich according to  patent No. 2160608 on the territory of Russian Federation.”
The patent was originally registered by Petrov on Dec. 12, 2000 with author rights determined to be in effect from April 22, 1999. 
Petrov expects to get  financial compensation from Siemens, although, he said, he has not totted up how much he wants from the German company. 
“Now that the Seimens case is resolved I am going to go against Nokia. I heard Finns are respectable people, so, who knows, they might would want to cooperate,” Petrov said. 
Siemens’ branch office in Moscow suggested that Petrov had won a Pyrrhic victory by suing the telephone manufacturer for selling mobile phones. 
“The decision of the court says that the joint stock company Siemens has no right to sell the phones that contain the invention of Mr. Petrov,” said Alexei Daranov, a representative of Siemens judicial department in a telephone interview from Moscow on Thursday.
“Certain conclusions should be made [by the public] on grounds of the fact that the company has never sold phones, including phones containing Petrov’s invention,” Daranov added. 
Independent retailers sell Siemens’ phones, not the company itself.
Daranov declined to comment on possible compensation for Petrov and didn’t mention any figures. 
Sales of Siemens’ phones account for 16.9 percent of the mobile phone market in Russia, according to the Mobile Research Group, an industry body that monitors the mobile phone market. 
Sales of mobile phones in Russia have dropped 10.7 percent in the second quarter of 2005 compared to the first quarter, the research said.

TITLE: Mock WTO Case Tests Students
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Law students from 14 European countries are in St. Petersburg to take part in the annual meeting of the European Law Students’ Association (ELSA) that convened Wednesday and runs through Sunday. 
 “This is the first ELSA meeting organized in Russia and opens the new era of ELSA in Russia,” Oksana Bebko, president of ELSA St. Petersburg and the organizer of the meeting, said Thursday.
ELSA is the world’s largest independent, non-political and non-profit law student association with more than 25,000 members — students and recent graduates who are interested in law and have demonstrated commitment to international issues. 
ELSA operates through local groups in more than 200 universities in 37 European countries. 
The International President’s Meeting is held to discuss topical issues related to the further development of the association, its expansion and different issues concerning sponsorship. 
A significant part of the gathering for Russian students is the ELSA Moot Court Competition on WTO Law, which is to be held for the forth time in the 2005–2006 academic year. 
“We took part in the Final Oral Round in the Competition in Geneva in 2003-2004 and our team was one of the most successful,” Alexei Morozov, a member of the team, said Thursday.
The competition is based on a mock trial between complainant and respondent in a case between fictional World Trade Organization Member States. Law students plead for complainant and respondent and try to convince judges the other WTO Member State has violated the rules of the organization. 
“This competition teaches law students to defend the trade interests of their country before the WTO Appellate Body.  This is especially important for Russian law students since Russia aims to join the WTO,” Leo Vojcik ELSA, vice president, Academic Activities, said Thursday.
Russia has been in negotiations to join the global trade regulating body since 1995. Four issues have become sticking points: access to the goods, agricultural issues, access of foreign service suppliers to the Russian market and differences in Russian and WTO legislation. But despite a decade of talks, no date for Russia’s entry to the WTO has been set. 
“There are no specialists on WTO Law in Russia, so it’ll be a serious problem when Russia becomes WTO member. ELSA helps a lot in the preparation and in teaching the rules of the WTO,” Maria Mognilnaya, ELSA’s U.K. director for seminars and conferences, said.
ELSA workshops are being  held at the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg State University, and trips to Peterhof and the State Hermitage Museum have been organized for international delegates. 
“This side of the meeting is also important. If you have a problem, it’s always better to call somebody you know. You’re lucky when you have a chance to get international contacts, to get in touch with different cultures,” Ilya Nikiforov, managing partner of  Yegorov, Puginsky, Afanasiyev & Partners and adjunct professor of the Law Faculty of the St. Petersburg State University, said on Thursday.

TITLE: Luxury Train Makes Tracks From Moscow
AUTHOR: By Alexander Duncan
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Grand Express, Russia’s first privately owned and operated luxury passenger train, was launched Wednesday, offering a daily overnight service between St. Petersburg and Moscow.
A one-way ticket starts at 3,150 rubles ($110) to travel in a shared sleeping compartment, after which prices are for a private space. The most expensive ticket costs 12,500 rubles ($437) for a compartment with an en-suite bathroom, DVD player and Internet access.
The new train is operated by Grand Service Express, which invested 1.2 billion rubles ($41.96 million) in the venture, said Andrei Kudryavtsev, the company’s general director.
Grand Service Express will use Russian Railways, or RZD, infrastructure. Neither party disclosed how much is being paid.
“We hope that more private trains like this will enter the market. This is an exclusive way of traveling, a five-star hotel on wheels,” said Transportation Minister Igor Levitin at the launch of the service at Moscow’s Leningradsky Station.
Grand Service Express says it offers a higher standard of accommodation than existing trains operated by RZD. In comparison, on the Nikolayevsky Express, an overnight train from Moscow to St. Petersburg, the most luxurious option is a berth in a two-person compartment, costing 3,300 rubles one-way. 
Founded in 2002, Grand Service Express started out building wagons for other trains. It already owns and operates a number of wagons on the Nikolayevsky Express and other RZD-owned services. 
At the event, RZD also showed off a new depot, which will house Grand Express and RZD wagons. RZD built the depot at a cost of $45.45 million.

TITLE: Tsereteli Trumpets Grandiose Park Scheme
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Notorious Moscow-based sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, who is frequently slammed for the elephantine scale of his works, announced this week he has developed a concept for a park in St. Petersburg and has even produced several dozen sculptures to fill it with.
“Seventy-four life-size busts of Russian tsars and princes as well as two fountains and sculptures symbolizing force and justice have already been made,” the sculptor told reporters Wednesday.
Tsereteli said his concept for the St. Petersburg 300th anniversary park occupying 90 hectares in the Primorsky district of the city, will feature three alleys leading to a central point.
“Busts of the tsars and princes should frame the main alley, and each pedestal must bear an engraving explaining what the particular nobleman did for their country,” Tsereteli said. Another alley would be devoted to Catherine the Great and the arts, while the third alley should reflect modern Russia, the sculptor said.
The focal point of the park, in Tsereteli’s eyes, would be a monument to Peter the Great featuring a golden angel behind the ruler’s back. The angel is to hold a golden brick.
The idea for the park was first voiced in 2003. The city’s chief artist Albert Charkin had then called the project a marvel. But a number of art critics in Moscow and St. Petersburg shrugged their shoulders at the prospect of the park.
Olesya Turkina, a modern art curator with the Newest Trends Department of the State Russian Museum, expressed relief that the park will not be located in the city center.
“[Tsereteli’s] enormous statue of Peter the Great on the steps of Manezh exhibition hall made this fine building look like a dog’s kennel,” Turkina said. 
St. Petersburg’s historical center retained its integrity through political regimes from Stalin to Brezhnev, who were unable to destroy it, the critic added.
“There has never been enough money here to destroy crumbling old mansions and replace them with new penthouses,” Turkina said. “With all the support he is enjoying from authorities on all levels, I wonder how far Tsereteli would get trying to alter the face of the city.”
Moscow’s art critics are traditionally even more outspoken when it comes to judging the artist. They branded his 94-meter high bronze monument to Peter the Great, installed on the Yakimanskaya embankment in 1997, “Moscow’s Godzilla.”
But Turkina said many of city’s elderly citizens are likely to accept and even welcome Tsereteli’s monumental aesthetics.
“Those generations are used to seeing oversized plaster pioneers, discus-throwers and girls holding an oar, so Tsereteli’s Soviet aesthetics are very familiar to them,” Turkina said. “The style is really the same, only the characters have changed.”   
Just like Tsereteli’s other project, the 300th Anniversary Park is a costly enterprise, requiring $15 million in funding according to plans announced in 2003, the year the anniversary was celebrated. No information was available this week as to how much money has been collected. The city is yet to give the project its official blessing.
“We haven’t discussed the issue with [Governor] Valentina Matviyenko,” Ttsereteli said Wednesday. “But if the city makes it clear it wants this park, I will do it.”

TITLE: Explorers Blame Kursk Sinking on WWII Mine
AUTHOR: By Ali Nassor
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: With the fifth anniversary of the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk to be marked next week, a group of St. Petersburg marine explorers have cast doubt on the official explanation for the loss of the vessel and its 118-member crew in the Barents Sea 
“[The Barents Sea] is a traditional undersea graveyard left unattended,” said retired captain Yury Alexandrov, head of the Polar Convoy organization that conducted a ten-day expedition, Northern Convoy 2005, last month.
Alexander Sorokin, the group’s spokesman, cast doubt on the official version of the sinking of the Kursk, saying that the real cause of the disaster might have been that the submarine hit a World War II era mine. 
“There are thousands of unexploded mines under the sea, mostly planted by the Soviet Navy to trap German submarines,” he said. 
“It goes without saying that nuclear submarines were involved in other incidents that went unreported due to the Soviet government’s culture of secrecy.” 
The Northern Convoy expedition to the Arctic region researched conditions for vessels in the Barents Sea.
“Our mission was aimed at looking for ways to make the Barents Sea safer,” Alexandrov told journalists at the St. Petersburg Regional Press Institute last week where he challenged the authorities to allow the the region to be researched to avoid catastrophes similar to the Kursk. 
“It’s a military zone off-limits to non-Russian researchers and to which local explorers have limited access,” he said.
The first expedition to the region was held in 2003, nearly six decades after World War II and two years following the Kursk tragedy that provoked a debate over the causes of the disaster.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, on Aug. 12, 2000, the Russian government and naval authorities appeared reluctant to reveal information about the incident. This prompted newspapers to expose a series of Soviet submarine disasters that were once considered secret.
“This is our second mission to find out about everything artificial, including sunken vessels and weapons, on the Barents seabed during and after World War II,” said Vyacheslav Solodov, head of the 46-member expedition team that included six marine specialists from Moscow and St Petersburg, two World War II navy veterans from Iceland and two from Russia. 
Findings from the area covered by the team have revealed that at least the remains of at least 8,000 Americans, Britons and Russians who died aboard about 100 battleships and supply ships during WWII. The seabed is also the resting place for about 40 German submarines sunk by Allied forces.
Sorokin said the expedition located an “almost undamaged” American ocean liner, the “Thomas Donaldson,” which will be included for inspection on the group’s next mission in July 2006. 
Sorokin said that during its next expedition the group will begin to identify the remains of the war dead which will, he said, be a historical breakthrough.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Overhauling Oil Taxes
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — The government will unveil proposals to overhaul taxes on the oil industry by Oct. 1, Interfax reported, citing Economy Minister German Gref.
Officials have agreed to lower taxes for some companies to stimulate development of certain fields and will invite oil executives to discuss the plan, Gref said, Interfax reported.
Companies have pledged to rein in prices for oil products, such as gasoline, on the domestic market, the news service said.
The government will propose a differentiated tax on extraction, based on how expensive it is to develop fields, and will reduce export duties on oil products, Interfax reported.
Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov suggested moving from bimonthly to monthly reviews of export duties.

JV From the Big Two
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Gazprom and LUKoil, Russia’s largest natural gas and oil producers respectively, agreed to examine a joint project to produce a petrochemical component used to make plastics, fiber and synthetic rubber.
Sibur, a unit of Gazprom, and LUKoil-Neftekhim will set up a working group to complete the research on the possible joint activities by Dec. 1, Sibur said Thursday in an e-mailed statement. The two companies plan to produce propylene and polypropylene, which both are made from petroleum refining.

36.6 Shares Go Global
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Pharmacy Chain 36.6, Russia’s largest drugstore group by sales, received permission from the nation’s market regulator to have 20 percent of its shares trade in the form of depositary receipts.
36.6 can have 1.6 million of its common shares trade as global depository receipts, the Federal Financial Markets Service said in a statement. The company has 5.28 million shares outstanding.

Baturina’s New Interests
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Yelena Baturina, wife of Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and Russia’s only female billionaire, bought shares in Gazprom and Sberbank with some of the $800 million she got from selling her cement company in April, Vedomosti said.
The assets of Baturina’s holding company, Inteko, grew in value by 13.6 billion rubles ($477 million) in the second quarter after it bought shares in the two state-controlled companies, the company said without specifying how many shares it bought, the newspaper reported.

TITLE: City Proves Economic Mettle, Cash Flows In
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: Investments in St. Petersburg have increased by almost a fifth in the first six months of 2005, while the total amount poured into the city by businesses could hit 120 billion rubles ($4.2 billion) by the year’s end, a top city official said this week.
Vladimir Blank, chairman of the committee for economic development, industrial policy and trade said that investments into fixed assets between January and June this year reached 38.4 billion rubles ($1.3 billion), a rise of 18.5 percent on the same period last year.
“This year’s investment growth inspires optimism for attracting foreign investment to the city and stimulating a total investment increase,” Blank said Tuesday at a government meeting, Interfax reported.
The optimism has already been marked by two rating agencies, as earlier this year Fitch followed the example of Moody’s Interfax to give St. Petersburg the top investment grade.
When contacted Wednesday, Blank explained that the city’s fortunes had been down to “a positive budget policy and low debt levels.”
Despite the generally positive trend, in the first quarter of 2005 foreign investment decreased by 14.3 percent to $180.3 million.
Blank noted the decrease as a temporary drop, “caused by objective short-term factors.”
“A large number of investment projects, most of which will come to fruition by the end of 2005, allow us to expect a 15 percent rise in total investment and a 12 percent rise in foreign investment,” Blank said via e-mail.
Analysts agreed with the city’s positive outlook. Comparing St. Petersburg’s investment appeal with that of other European cities, Alexander Ivlev, partner at Ernst & Young Russia, said the northern capital performed the stronger.
The situation in St. Petersburg reflects a general improvement in the Russian business environment, Ivlev said. According to a report by the Foreign Investment Advisory Council, 80 percent of foreign companies in Russia consider their business successful, with 78 percent planning expansion.
“The sum of 120 billion rubles ($4.2 billion) is a very attractive figure. If the city collects that sum, it will be a very good year for St. Petersburg,” Ivlev said. The annual direct foreign investment figure for the whole country is estimated at only $9 billion to $10 billion, he said.
The most attractive sector for foreign investors has so far been manufacturing, with 21 percent of last year’s total investments going into industry. About 16 percent fell to telecoms, 15 percent to housing and communal services, and 12.5 percent went into transport, Blank said.
The most notable projects this year  have included The Baltic Pearl residential development and Toyota Motors’ planned car assembly plant in the southwest of the city.
The city also cites the Sea Passenger Port, the High-Speed Diameter route and New Holland Island developments as major strategic investments.
The growing infrastructure network will be of particular value for a city well-positioned geographically to bridge Russia with northern European countries, Ivlev said.
Vladimir Sklyarevsky, deputy director of investment fund AVK Tsenniye Bumagi, said the city’s investment targets were “quite reasonable.”
“Foreign investment grew 41.6 percent in 2004. So we think there is a good opportunity for foreign investment growth, especially in construction and transport,” he said.
Slyarevsky pointed out that the city’s investment climate will be further boosted as the federal government looks to prepare St. Petersburg to host next year’s G8 summit.
“In 2004-2005 the city targeted private investment, amending investment legislation and offering full or partial tax privileges,” he said. “However, much still depends on personal agreements and guaranties from [City Governor] Valentina Matviyenko,” Sklyarevsky added.

TITLE: Pulkovo to Be Lifted to Global Levels
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: In preparation for next June’s G8 summit that will take place in the city, the federal government has allocated nearly 3 billion rubles ($105 million) for the reconstruction of St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo II airport.
Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov signed a decree on Friday that promised to introduce hasty measures to renovate the international airport. 
Most of the works will involve replacing the cover of the second landing strip, plus adjacent tracks, as well as new lighting, signals, and radio equipment, Interfax said. The federal budget will allocate 1.8 billion rubles for the project this year and another 1 billion rubles in 2006. The work will be carried out by Transstroi construction firm.
The Russian Aviation Agency said the unusually high investments have been provided in order to upgrade Pulkovo II’s landing strip to the III ICAO category, a standard rated by the International Civil Aviation Organization as reliable for receiving airplanes in complicated weather conditions.
The upgrade will furthermore allow all types of airplanes, including latest models Airbus 380 and Boeing 787, to land at the airport. At the moment, no Russian airport can receive the new airplanes, which are about to be launched worldwide. 
Meanwhile, only one lane at the Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow is classified as meeting the III ICAO standard, whereas the capital’s Domodedovo airport plans to be granted the qualification by the beginning of next year.
This September, Pulkovo airline will separate from the airport and become an independent company. It will later amalgamate with state-owned Rossiya air carrier, according to government plans.
In 2004, Pulkovo served 4.3 million passengers, becoming the country’s third-busiest airport after Sheremetyevo and Domodedovo. The air enterprise earned 250 million rubles ($8.7 million) in profit last year.

TITLE: Nokian Tyres to Tie Its Future to Russia
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Finning producer Nokian Tyres is starting to feel quite at home in Russia.
The country accounted for 14 percent of Nokian’s global sales and this year will become the tire-maker’s biggest customer overtaking the firm’s native Finland, said Andrei Pantyukhov, general director of Nokian Tyres Russia.
By 2008, the firm’s Vsevolozhsk plant, 10 kilometers east of St. Petersburg, will produce 4 millions tires a year — half the factory’s capacity. Since Nokian’s Finnish plant can increase the annual capacity by only 1 million above the current 6.5 millions production level, the company’s future seems Russia-bound.
“Nokian Tyres has shown strong growth in Russia for several years,” said Gairat Salimov, an analyst with Troika Dialog brokkerage.
The main problem for the Finns, however, has been low production volume, insufficient to cope with the dynamic Russian market and expanding exports to North America, he said.
It’s not surprising then that Nokian plans to invest 140 million euros ($172 million) in its Vsevolozhsk project, 50 million euros of which has been spent this year. Russia gives the company a chance to save 30 and 40 percent on production costs compared to Finland, Salimov said.
According to Economic Development Ministry data, the average salary in Russia is $300, while an average Finnish wage exceeds $2000, said Lidia Treivish, public relations manager for Begin Group.
“The advantage in Russian production facilities for foreign companies come not only from low wages, however. They economize on property rent, transport, electricity and other things,” Treivish said.
This fall Nokian Tyres will start the construction of a second production line in Vsevolozhsk. The plant, occupying 21,000 square meters, will eventually have four production lines, making 1 million tires a year each.
Next, Nokian intends to build an identical second plant near the first one, Pantyukhov said. Russian operations will give the firm growth opportunities for the next 15 years, he said.
The Russian tire market grows annually by about 10 percent to 15 percent, boosted by ever-increasing sales of foreign brand cars. Growth in the premium segment climbed to 30 percent last year, and Pantyukhov says that Nokian Tyres occupies 20 percent of that market. 
The director named Michelin, Goodier, Continental and Pirelly as main rivals. Salimov adds Amtel, which has three Russian plants.
However, the competition may not have a strong effect on Nokian.
“The market is growing fast. It will swallow 4 millions tires without much difficulty,” Salimov said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Belarus to Use Baltic 
LONDON (Bloomberg) — Belarus Railways plans to start this month transporting crude oil from Russia to Baltic Sea ports to allow exporters to increase shipments amid high oil prices.
Belarus Railways will ship crude in rail cars from the station of Zhecha in the the Bryansk region, which has a capacity of 5 million tons a year, the company said Wednesday on its web site. Transneft, Russia’s oil pipeline monopoly, will supply crude to Zhecha.
Belarus Railways plans to ship crude to the Baltic Sea ports of Kaliningrad, Ventspils in Latvia, and to the Lithuanian ports of Klaipeda, Butinge and to the Mazeikiu Nafta refinery in Lithuania, according to the transport company statement. Yukos operates Butinge and Mazeikiu.

Shell Opens Station
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) – Dutch oil major Shell will open a 24-hour gas station on Narodnaya Ulitsa in November, general contractor STEP said Wednesday in a statement.
Shell paid about $1 million for the 600 square meter site in August 2004. The firm’s 10th gas station in the city will also run a 24-hour shop and cafe.

TITLE: Notes From Dead Center
AUTHOR: By Alexei Bayer
TEXT: In the early 1960s, when I was about 6 years old, my nanny took me to stay with her cousins in the town of Kostroma. The news of a Muscovite visitor spread quickly around the neighborhood, so that when I was sent down to play in the courtyard, I found myself surrounded by a sizeable group of local kids. 
“So, you’re from Moscow,” said an older boy, clearly a ringleader. 
I nodded warily, expecting to be beaten up. But instead he inquired with great interest: “What is the Lenin Mausoleum like?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I shrugged. “I’ve never been inside.”
“Really?” he asked in amazement. “If I lived in Moscow, I’d visit the mausoleum every day.”
In retrospect, I assume he didn’t mean it as some kind of anti-Soviet statement, though Kostroma is where the Romanovs originally hailed from, and the city’s native son might conceivably enjoy seeing the regicide dead and (sort of) buried on a daily basis. 
Be that as it may, the boy was quite perspicacious in identifying Lenin’s tomb as the most important place in Moscow. Indeed, it was the center of the entire Soviet empire. The dead center, as it were.
The only structure ever built on Red Square by the communists, the mausoleum was never meant to stand there all by itself but was supposed to have a long line of visitors snaking from its doors along the Kremlin Wall and into Alexander’s Garden. I don’t know how this feat was accomplished, but for 65 years there was always an impressive line of people patiently waiting to get a glimpse of the leader of the world proletariat. Or at least his preserved remains.
Since waiting in line for everything from laundry soap to Yugoslav shoes was the national sport in the country he created, it was only fitting that it was reflected in his monument.
The long balcony atop the mausoleum was where Soviet leaders stood during the celebrations of the two most important communist holidays, May Day and the Nov. 7 anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover. On those occasions, the average Soviet citizen presented his leaders with their own portraits, and in turn his leaders presented themselves in what was the only time he could see them in the flesh.
That the Soviet leaders of the day literally stood on Lenin’s dead body was equally symbolic. Throughout Soviet history, every new leader claimed to be going back to pure Leninist principles, while labeling his predecessor a deviationist. To allow for this sort of continuity, the mausoleum’s only other occupant, Josef Stalin, was unceremoniously tossed out in 1961.
Those holidays also gave Western Kremlinologists an opportunity to take a guess at what was going on in the Byzantine corridors of Soviet power — by noting who stood next to whom and how close to the boss. The strict hierarchy atop the mausoleum was matched by the strict hierarchy in the makeshift cemetery behind Lenin’s tomb — the most prestigious place to be buried in the Soviet Union. There, some rated a bust, but most were merely immured in the Kremlin wall.
And perhaps the mausoleum’s greatest significance lies in what it revealed about the Soviet attitude toward death. In many ways communism was a religion — if only by default. Having rejected all other religions as so much idolatry, it had to propose to its followers some kind of interpretation of what life and death are ultimately about. 
It must be admitted that communism offered a rather dismal answer to those weighty questions, especially compared with other world religions. It denied the existence of the soul, so that its promise of eternal life was limited to the body. For only one body, to be exact, that of the great leader. The display of Lenin’s preserved remains is an evocation of the miracles of the Christian church, in which the earthly remains of some saints refused to succumb to putrefaction. Except instead of being a miracle, Lenin’s body was kept intact by the lugubrious application of the mortuary science. 
Like a queen bee, Lenin’s mummy was placed at the center of the Soviet Union. The drones were interred in the Kremlin Wall, while the hordes of nameless workers — whose lives were dedicated to the task of making honey, defending the hive and keeping it cool by fanning their wings — were laid to rest in cookie-cutter cemeteries elsewhere.
While I lived in the Soviet Union I never actually got to the mausoleum. But I made up for this omission as a visitor from the United States in the 1990s. In fact, for a while it became one of my favorite places in Moscow. Back then, during the now-reviled Yeltsin era, the guards were lax and you could linger on for a while in the burial vault, studying Lenin’s face and overhearing provincial parents tell some amazing things about Lenin and the history of the Soviet Union to their offspring. The place was seriously down at the heel, with marble panels starting to pull apart and the cadaverous blue-green firs along the Kremlin wall turning brown from some ailment.
Writer Sergei Dovlatov once wrote that the source of so much of the stench in the Soviet Union was the fact that the country’s main corpse had never been buried. In the late 1990s, the mausoleum itself was starting to smell of decay. There was talk of it being closed down and Lenin’s much-abused body, at last, put to rest.
Things changed with the advent of the Putin government. President Vladimir Putin has been trying to revive a number of symbolic and not-so-symbolic vestiges of the Soviet Union. He has already been seen atop the mausoleum and has put Stalingrad on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. 
Last time I visited Lenin’s tomb was in 2001, with my 6-year-old. As a world-weary New Yorker, my son Sam was less than awed by Moscow — until I told him that the unprepossessing marble building on Red Square housed a real-life mummy. 
Visiting Lenin in the age of Putin was a much more serious experience. The crowd of visitors was still very thin and consisted mostly of curiosity seekers, but bags were searched thoroughly and many items — including somebody’s metal hair comb — were not allowed. Inside, the guards were no longer lounging about with a bored air but stood at attention next to the body.
“You’re about to see the most important man in all of Russia,” I told Sam.
But Sam, completely missing Lenin in his glass casket, began to circle one of the immobile men of the honor guard, trying to poke his leg.
“Not this one,” I tried to whisper to him desperately. “This is not the mummy.”
“No talking,” another guard said harshly. “Keep on moving, citizens, do not stop.”
And so it happened that Sam came away thinking that the most important man in Russia wears a military hat, epaulets and a gray uniform. He may well be right.

Alexei Bayer, a regular contributor to Vedomosti, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.

TITLE: Dangerous Drivers Don’t Respect Human Life
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
TEXT: While having fun in Zelenogorsk last weekend, my friends from Canada, the U.S. and Britain came up with an idea for a new game that could be played by pedestrians on the streets of St. Petersburg and Moscow.
They called the game “New Russian Roulette” and the rules are simple. Just cross the street on a green light without looking left and right — and survive.
Ironically enough, according to Russian law, the pedestrian is correct in any situation and always has the right of way when crossing the street.
“The driver is obliged to yield the way to a pedestrian at a crossing with no traffic lights,” the Article No. 14.1 of the official Russian traffic rules says. If you tried to follow this law at the crossing of Malaya Morskaya and St. Isaac’s Square, for instance, you might come to a sticky end.
There is a famous Russian aphorism that explains the problem perfectly: the pedestrian is always right — but only as long as he is alive.
A dead pedestrian is a wrong pedestrian.
Unfortunately, there is no credible statistics on traffic accidents involving pedestrians in St. Petersburg. 
As for Moscow, in the first four months of 2005 there were 3,075 car accidents registered by the police in the city, including 1,998 cases of vehicles hitting people crossing the street. How many of them died is a mystery. For some reason the police avoid giving out this number or simply aren’t bothered to record it.
The other day I noticed that St. Petersburg’s City Hall has made an effort to improve the traffic in the city by painting new road markings in the city center, including at pedestrian “zebra” crossings. In some parts of the city, the road markings are pretty bright and difficult to miss. I used to think that the absence of perfect road markings and street signs was one reason why drivers ignore the rights of pedestrians.
But now it’s rather clear that I was mistaken. Drivers do not even think about slowing down at pedestrian crossings, even when they see people waiting to cross.
The reason Russian drivers behave recklessly has, in my view,  roots deep in Soviet history.
Look at a picture of Nevsky Prospekt taken at the beginning of the 1970s at rush hour, for instance. The scene is amazing — there are almost no cars, and mostly buses and trolleys traverse the city’s main street. The same can be seen in documentaries about Moscow shot at the same time — there are a few more cars, but the streets are pretty empty compared to today.
A car in the Soviet Union was most of all a sign of wealth. This may also have been true to a certain extent in Western Europe and North America though a car there was always just a means of transportation. For this reason the West’s perception of traffic rules is different from Russia’s. In the West when a driver looks at a pedestrian, he unconsciously understands that the next day or on the same evening he could be in the same position, crossing the road on his way to the nearest store. 
But in the Soviet Union, a driver, even if he drove a small Lada, felt like he was the coolest person in the world — until a black Volga cut him off. Meanwhile, a pedestrian would have been interpreted by a Soviet person as a loser in the social hierarchy. For that reason he was not respected.
There’s an interesting tendency, however, in Kaliningrad, Russia’s exclave squeezed between Poland and Lithuania. There, surprisingly enough, drivers often yield to pedestrians even on busy streets with no traffic lights. 
This seems unbelievable given that drivers there follow the same legislation as people do in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and speak the same language. So why would they behave so differently? 
I guess the only answer is that European influence and territorial conditions pretty much determine the behavior of the local population.
Europe makes “New Russian Roulette” spin more slowly in Kaliningrad and almost stops it, but what can we do about drivers in the rest of Russia? 
I don’t know the answer.

TITLE: A grand finale
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A sparkling rendition of Rossini’s 1825 opera “Il Viaggio a Reims” saluted the finale of the Mariinsky Theater’s 222nd season Saturday like a triumphant glass of champagne.
The opera’s festive yet naughty spirit is at its apogee when performed in Alain Maratrat’s lively new interpretation of this splendid party-piece. The staging is unconventional and spactacular, using the full scope of the Mariinsky’s auditorium. Glamorous guests traveling to the coronation of the French king Charles X ooze excitement and anticipation and hurry to the Golden Lily Hotel, the setting for the opera, over a high platform bisecting the stalls. Onlookers whistle and nearly fall out of the theater’s boxes, and suitcases get passed to their owners over the heads of the stunned audience. 
Maratrat fuses Rossini’s subtle comedy with genuine French delicacy and impeccable taste. The entire theater is skillfully used as a performance space, and even the orchestra moves out of its traditional pit to be seated on stage. The production, performed entirely by the brightest soloists of the Mariinsky’s Academy for Young Singers, who clearly thrive portraying this opera’s motley crew of characters, was the season’s grandest operatic highlight.
Designed for a chorus of bel canto singers, the opera, where the roles are equally important and there is no single lead character, requires excellent team work, and the academists demonstrated admirable rapport in the opera’s challenging ensembles.
The radiant and charming soprano Larisa Yudina as Contessa di Foleville soared over sophisticated bel canto passages with confidence, and her high notes were impeccable. 
Tenor Daniil Shtoda brought a tasteful note of parody and the required touch of madness to his interpretation of the hot-tempered Russian general Libenskov, while tenor Dmitry Voropayev was excellent as the tender yet frivolous French officer Cavalier Belfiore.
Pure voices, well-rehearsed vocals, sparkling eyes, a huge amount of drive, vivality and inspiration: the young singers deserve the highest praise.
Rossini’s peripatetic opera will no doubt put the company in mind of its own relocation plans. The next season, which opens on Sept. 20 and lasts more than a month longer than usual, will be the last before the company’s famous theater closes for two years of extensive renovations. 
In the meantime, the assymmetrical golden sheath of Dominique Perrault’s new Mariinsky II are scheduled to be completed in 2008. That means two years of wandering for the internationally established troupe, and a temporary local venue for the Mariinsky has yet to be selected. The theater’s spacious former warehouse on Ulitsa Pisareva is currently being rebuilt to be made into a concert hall with seating for 1,000 people.
The 222nd season was a hit-and-miss affair. Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” a long-standing audience favorite, received languid treatment by Italian director Walter Le Moli, whose interpretation of the opera premiered on May 6 and 7. A constrained and inanimate production, it was surprisingly static. Minimalist, constructive, limited to black, silvery grey and red colors, the sets by Tiziano Santi could have been used with more imagination. 
Dmitry Chernyakov’s modern-dress version of Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde,” the most eagerly anticipated and heavily promoted event of the season, which premiered in May, lived up to high critical expectations but, unlike Maratrat’s production, it failed to become an undisputed hit. 
Chernyakov, who locked the main characters in a claustrophobic boat cabin and armed Isolde with a modern gun instead of an archaic sword, was blamed for dessicating the Wagnerian epic. The Mariinsky’s cerebral staging alludes to psychoanalysis, dope, mafia  and submission, rather than evoking romantic feelings and ancient myths.
The highlight of the ballet season was David Dawson’s specially commissioned new work “Reverence,” which premiered March 24 during the Fifth International Mariinsky Ballet Festival. This abstract work, set to Gavin Bryars’ String Quartet No.3, captures the company’s signature style — its elegant regal grace — yet puts the Mariinsky’s traditional port de bras in the context of modern dance. Dawson wrapped the entire stage in black to create a mysterious, spooky but not at all gloomy atmosphere. The ballet creates a floating, ethereal world with no boundaries, and dancers emerge from and disappear into the sides of the black box.
Unfortunately, the Mariinsky’s other offering, Donvena Pandurski’s bland take on “The Magic Nut,” first shown in May, didn’t suit the company as beautifully. The production, mostly memorable for artist Mikhail Shemyakin’s sumptuous and gaudy designs, rather than for cutting-edge bold new choreography, showcased a perplexing mixture of Faberge’s courtly kitsch and the cartoonish monstrosity of animated ogre Shrek.
There was hardly any specific feature in the ballet that would suggest a connection to the company’s history, tradition and classical training. Worse than that, the choreography itself was faceless, lacking in ideas and merely suggesting a more or less structured order of classical dance elements. Regrettably, Pandurski’s work turned out to be a series of classical cliches.
Shemyakin dressed the performers in heavy costumes hampering and limiting dancers’ moves. Giant ornate masks and large decorated hats made it even more difficult for them to move around. But, least understandable of all, the Hoffmanesque feel, which has always been so close to Shemyakin, suddenly evaporated. Dark humour was bizarrely replaced with cartoonish, lollipop aesthetics. 
The venerable local musical critic Leonid Gakkel, a deputy director at the Mariinsky, defended the notorious production in a televised interview this week. 
“While the papers write about a major failure, the production regularly plays to a full house,” Gakkel told reporters. “You can even hear the spectators humming and singing the tunes from this modern opera. You don’t really encounter that very often these days.”
Critics from several respected St. Petersburg publications, however, contested that judgement in reviews suggesting composer Sergei Slonimsky’s score bears the audible influence of classical composers of the past, from Tchaikovsky to Shostakovich.
The Mariinsky’s ballet company, still known abroad by its Soviet-era name the Kirov, found respite in London, where its summer tour won rave reviews in the British press.
“[Star ballerina Diana Vishnyova] has an exceptionally pretty technique and a generous spirit, while  the  breadth  of  her  dancing  is exhilarating. Her beautiful, tender, resilient performance gives the story weight and meaning,” wrote Debra Craine in The Times  on July 25 about a performance of “Romeo and Juliet” at London Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. “Her Juliet  is  a  splendid  belle  of  the ballet; an ecstatic, tremulous lover,  an  angry,  rebellious  daughter  and a gravely stricken wife. [Male lead dancer Andrian] Fadeyev  is  a  sweet  and  dreamy  Romeo  whose  dancing is lush with starstruck passion for his Juliet.” 
The Mariinsky’s London tour juxtaposed long-standing favorites such as “Swan Lake” with one of the newest additions to its repertoire, a series of one-act ballets by William Forsythe.
“What  dancers!  What  dancing!” admired Clement Crisp in his review in The Financial Times on July 26.  “The Kirov dons these essays  in [Forsythe’s] developed classic manner, and they fit supremely well. Kirov style, that   elegance of means, that bred-in-the-bone aristocracy,  shows  off  Forsythe’s  sometimes  aggressive shifts in ballet’s traditional  language with the surest sense of their potential.”
“The intense involvement of the Kirov casts with the choreography,  their  heart-whole, whole-bodied  identification with every last  impulse and tension of Forsythe’s language, tell us that they claim  these  ballets  for  their  own,” Crisp continues. “The  Kirov  Ballet  is invincible.” 
The company was wise indeed not to have taken “The Magic Nut” to London.

TITLE: Show me the money!
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A British booking agency that worked on two Russian concerts by the band Chumbawamba that were abruptly canceled said this week that the Russian promoter was responsible for losses incurred have not been paid to either the agency and the band.
Chumbawamba was due to perform in Moscow and St. Petersburg in early June. The British anarcho-pop band was to headline a festival also featuring Germany’s 17 Hippies and Romania’s Spitalul de Urgenta to launch StarZ, which was planned as a large new venue in Moscow linked to the popular St. Petersburg club Platforma, and then to perform a smaller concert at Platforma itself afterward. 
Nick Hobbs, whose agency Charmenko has been instrumental in organizing many concerts by Western artists including Kraftwerk and Nick Cave in Russia, claimed that Platforma failed to wire the agreed fee and expenses on time and then did not pay the cancellation fees and expenses after the shows were canceled on short notice.
“Under the terms of the agreement with the Artist (and also as is standard practice when working with new promoters in ‘difficult’ territories), Platforma/StarZ were to wire the fee and the visa costs in advance; this undertaking was a legally-binding part of the agreement,” wrote Hobbs in an e-mail interview with The St. Petersburg Times this week.
Hobbs that he was dealing with Denis Rubin, the art director of Platforma. Local musician Seva Gakkel represented Charmenko in St. Petersburg.
“The money didn’t arrive and Denis made various excuses and apologies, and then about a week before the band was due to arrive in St. Petersburg he said they had problems with the money, but not to worry, the band (and Charmenko) would be paid,” wrote Hobbs.
“Given that there was hardly any time for a bank transfer to arrive, I proposed that they give the cash to Seva (whom I trust completely) and that once Seva had the cash we would give the green light to the band to fly [to Russia].
“Seva never received a penny and the band, on my and their management’s advice, did not fly; obviously we had warned Denis that if Seva didn’t receive the money then this would be the consequence.” 
A band such as Chumbawamba is paid about $5,000 for one concert, plus visa, travel and accommodation costs. Charmenko had not worked with Platforma before.
“The project seemed reasonable to me (not too ambitious, not unrealistic) and I contacted Chumbawamba’s management (I’ve had the pleasure of working with Chumbawamba quite a few times); we agreed terms (fee plus flights plus Russian-end costs) which I consider were reasonable for both the artist and the clubs,” wrote Hobbs.
Rubin of Platforma admitted that the club failed to pay the agreed fees on time. Speaking by phone this week, Rubin referred to a “number of circumstances” that led to the cancellation of the concerts. He said the most crucial problem was a ban that the mayor’s office in Moscow put on the open-air festival which, in turn, led to its sponsor’s withdrawal. Chumbawamba’s Moscow concert was then moved into the Tinkoff beer restaurant. 
Rubin said Platforma continued to seek funds, hoping to put the concerts together, until the very last day.
“Judging from the public’s excitement, media coverage and tickets sold, we were sure that we could at least break even just from ticket sales, even without sponsorship,” said Rubin, adding that about 80 tickets costing 800 rubles ($28) each for the Platforma show were sold in advance.
“We warned the band honestly in 10 days or a week before the concerts and they agreed to wait, but the situation didn’t change. We failed to find the money by June 3 [the day before Chumbawamba’s scheduled concert in Moscow].”
Hobbs wrote the band could not afford to take risks and come to Russia without money in hand.
“If a promoter confirms an agreement to pay the artist’s fee in advance and then doesn’t, despite the artist waiting till the last possible moment, then the artist would be mad to fly as the chances are they’re not going to get paid and may find themselves in the middle of a real mess if they do fly (no hotels, no equipment and no local transport for example); Chumbawamba are exceptionally willing to work with promoters,” he wrote.
“If the promoter has problems, but if the band (and we) are consistently promised that the money will be paid ‘tomorrow’ and tomorrow never comes, then clearly we’re no longer able to trust the promoter and without that trust an artist should not fly.”
According to Hobbs, both his and the band’s cancellation fees and expenses have not been reimbursed by the promoter. 
“Charmenko also paid $1,200 in visa costs (the band couldn’t arrive in Russia without Russian visas and we believed Denis when he said he was about to pay, so we went ahead and paid for the visas out of our own money rather than have the concerts be cancelled because the band didn’t have visas),” he wrote.
According to Hobbs, even though the promoter’s fault is obvious, he had not considered taking legal action.
“I think there is no question [the promoters] are at fault; suing a promoter at club level in Russia for the sums involved would be pretty mad; suing in this case is not a realistic option,” he wrote.
Rubin admitted the debts but said Platforma’s failure to pay was the fault of its former general director.
“The band and Nick Hobbs expected us to pay the sum as soon as possible after the cancellations, but it hasn’t happened so far because of the wrong economic policy on the part of the club’s former director,” he said.
“That’s why we still owe the sum to Chumbawamba and Nick Hobbs’ agency. In any case, we admit that we must cover it and are working toward paying it, hopefully in late August or in September.” 
Hobbs wrote that such situations are not typical, even for Russia where responsible show business is a relatively new concept.
“This can happen anywhere, including ‘the West’; we’re quite cautious when starting to work with new promoters and usually this caution is enough to avoid this kind of story, but if someone makes convincing promises and apologies, it’s very hard to tell that the promises have no substance until it’s clear that the money isn’t going to arrive,” he wrote.
“But of course we work on many concerts in Russia every year and this is the only such instance, so it’s a rare event.”
Though Platforma abruptly closed, with its web site going off-line, last month, Rubin said the venue would reopen on August 15.

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
TEXT: An upcoming single from Supergrass (out on Aug. 8) is called “St. Petersburg.” 
“Set sail for St. Petersburg/Making use of my time/Cos in three days I’ll be out of here/And it’s not a day too soon,” croon the veteran Brit-pop band.  The single features  a picture of The Bronze Horseman, the city’s most obvious icon, on its cover.
St. Petersburg has inspired a number of Western bands who refer to the city in song, either as Leningrad (as it was called between 1924 and 1991) or St. Petersburg.
“When he calls you as he may do/Don’t be frightened, red white and blue/Just be thankful you don’t live in Leningrad,” sang Elvis Presley in Ben Weisman and Sid Wayne’s 1967 Vietnam-era ode to Uncle Sam. The song rhymes “Leningrad” with “dad.”
In their Chuck Berry parody, “Back in the U.S.S.R.” The Beatles mentioned Moscow, rather than St. Petersburg, but The Rolling Stones namechecked the city in “Sympathy for the Devil.”
Inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita,” which Mick Jagger read on advice from his then girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, the song refers to the Russian Revolution and Satan. 
“I stuck around St. Petersburg/When I saw it was a time for a change/Killed the tsar and his ministers/Anastasia screamed in vain,” goes the song.
The former Eagles guitarist/vocalist Glenn Frey refers to Leningrad in his 1984 song “Better in the U.S.A.,” again comparing the two countries. 
“I hear the same propaganda/Day after day/It’s gettin’ so hip to knock the U.S.A./ If we’re so awful and we’re so bad/You oughta check the night life/In Leningrad.” 
There was no night life in Leningrad in 1984.
For Mark E. Smith of The Fall, St. Petersburg appeared to be a particularly dark place, as described in “No Bulbs”: “You need light even in the morning/Compared to this, St. Petersburg was nothing.”
U.S. singer/songwriter Billy Joel offered a new, more human view of the Soviet Union in his song “Leningrad,” written after a series of concerts in Russia in 1987.  
British leftist singer/songwriter Billy Bragg visited  Leningrad twice in the late 1980s, on the height of glasnost and perestroika. He sings that people he met in Leningrad who opened his eyes to Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms.
“In Leningrad the people say/Perestroika can be explained this way/The people who told us/That two and two is ten/Are now trying to tell us/That two and two is five,” sang the Barking Bard in “North Sea Bubble.”
“Now Leningrad is Petersburg and Petersburg’s hell/For a card-carrying monkey with a story to tell,” American folk singer/songwriter John Prine sang in his song “Space Monkey,” dealing with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its space programs.
With their new song “St. Petersburg,” Supergrass have revived the good old rock and roll tradition. We are waiting for more.

TITLE: The shock of the moo
AUTHOR: By Romilly Eveleigh
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — In a parking garage in eastern Moscow, two levels underground, a group of graffiti artists were hard at work recently, putting the finishing touches on their designs. But the youths weren’t defacing walls or spray-painting cars; rather, they were helping to decorate a herd of life-size fiberglass cows.
For the past several weeks, the subterranean site had been transformed into a makeshift cow production line. Artists and designers from around the city ventured there to apply handmade patterns to dozens of animals, ready to be placed on the streets of the capital.
The action was all part of the run-up to the Moscow CowParade, a festival that started Monday and will eventually see about 100 of the life-size replicas go on display. Most are to be in place until early October.
Stepan Krasnov, 21, who said he was more used to painting subway cars than cows, showed off an animal he had covered in Styrofoam fried eggs. What was the impetus behind the artwork? “It’s just cool,” he mused. “A fresh idea.”
Other sculptures in the event range from intricately detailed personal statements to cows decorated with flowers, woven baskets and pastoral landscapes. Some designs reflect more modern Russian concerns — such as the “VIP Cow,” a sleek black beast customized to look like a stretch limousine.
With the colorful creations occupying public spaces such as Old Arbat and the historic GUM shopping center, or appearing in the vicinity of landmarks such as the Bolshoi Theater, the event’s organizers are hoping that Moscow will soon be going mad for all things bovine.
At least that’s the plan. So far, CowParades have taken place in two dozen cities around the world. The first was in Zurich in 1998, while this year alone, others are happening in Geneva, Warsaw and Bratislava.
The initiative is financed by private companies, who select designs from a list of entries sent in by artists and members of the public. 
The companies then pay for the sculptures to be created and mounted. After going on display, the cows are auctioned off one by one, with the proceeds of the sales going to charity.
“It’s all about fun, art and helping kids,” said Irina Prokhorova, head of the Moscow festival’s organizing committee, during a recent interview. While some of the cows — produced at a factory in Poland — were taken to the parking garage for their makeovers, she said, others are being decorated by schoolchildren and company staff at homes and in offices.
And it’s not just unknowns who are taking part. Many of Russia’s leading contemporary artists have come up with their own unique contributions too — including Vladimir Dubosarsky and Alexander Vinogradov, a duo best known for their faux Socialist Realist canvases, and Sergei Shutov, a representative of Russia at the 2001 Venice Biennale. These were among the 15 personalities who painted their creations live, as journalists and visitors looked on, during the annual Art Moskva fair in May.
Shutov was one of many who used the opportunity to unleash their trademark styles onto the sides of the standing three-dimensional blanks. His cow depicted a luminous pine forest in nuclear greens and orange, glowing beneath a crimson sky. Rock singer Andrei Makarevich also got in on the act, saddling up his cow like a trusty steed.
Although support for the Moscow event has been unwaveringly high-profile, with major companies such as Aeroflot and Troika Dialog on its list of sponsors, CowParades elsewhere have not always been met with universal praise. Indeed, recent festivals have increasingly been marred with vandalism. At the recent event in Switzerland, for example, two cows ended up unceremoniously dumped in Lake Geneva.
Some of the most vocal criticisms of CowParades past have come from artists themselves. Their reactions have ranged from accusing the endeavor of being overly commercial to calling it a poor substitute for alternative, independent, large-scale art events. Others have complained that with companies choosing the designs, any of the more controversial entries are vetoed from the start.
In Sweden last year, a group calling themselves “Stockholm’s Militant Graffiti Artists” even took a cow hostage and released a video with a threat to “sacrifice” the sculpture — unless the organizers declared it “non-art.” Meanwhile, one online commentator wrote that asking local artists to decorate the animals was “like giving Picasso a coloring book.”
Organizers in Moscow are taking the issue seriously enough that they have prepared a special “Cow Ambulance” to be on standby at all times. The custom-made vehicle will be equipped with everything from paint and spare heads, and it will be staffed by “those who know how to deal with a cow,” Prokhorova said.
Back in the garage, Krasnov expressed his belief that any such cow abuse would be unlikely. Many pieces, including those in the GUM shopping center, will “have security,” he said. What sort of response the herds will receive elsewhere, though, remains to be seen. Enlisting a few enthusiastic street-taggers on the side of the festival could turn out to be a smart move.

TITLE: Baltic dream
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Artists sometimes consider staying demonstratively apathetic and detached when it comes to politics. Nothing could be further from the case with the founders of the Baltic Sea Festival starting Tuesday with classical concerts in Tallinn (Estonia), Gdansk (Poland), Helsinki (Finland) and Stockholm (Sweden), as well as on ferries traveling in between these towns.
The event, launched in Stockholm in 2003 and now in its third year, is the brainchild of Finnish-born conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, director of Stockholm’s Berwaldhallen Michael Tyden and St. Petersburg’s own Valery Gergiev, the artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater. 
The three musicians weren’t afraid to dip their artistic and political toes into the water of the Baltic Sea, which is contaminated both by pollutants and international wrangling about what to do about it. In short, the festival has a pro-Baltic cultural, political and environmental agenda. 
Musicians and singers from across the region, including the Mariinsky Theater, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir, the Helsinki Philharmonic, the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, the Estonian National Male Voice Choir and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra bring not only their musical talent but goodwill and energy to help resolve the plight of the Baltic Sea, arguably the most polluted on the planet.
The festival’s artistic director Esa-Pekka Salonen, also music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, feels the event is measuring up to what once seemed an unrealizable task. 
Salonen originally wanted to present prominent musicians from the Baltic Sea area in an event that emphasized the cultural richness and enormous diversity of the region. But, owing to restricted funding, the first two festival’s didn’t expand beyond Stockholm.
Now, in its third time around, the festival’s international element has flourished.
This year’s festival consists of two parts: a week-long cruise between Tallinn, Gdansk and Helsinki and subsequent full week of performances in Stockholm with concerts at the Berwaldhallen, the Opera, the Oscarskyrkan and the Gustav Vasa church.
During the Stockholm week the Mariinsky will give two performances of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” at the Royal Swedish Opera and a concert of works by Shostakovich in Berwaldhallen. 
The Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra will play “The Little Mermaid,” a piece by Bernt SÚrensen inspired by prose of Hans Christian Andersen. The festival will also showcase new names, including the world premiere of Rolf Martinsson’s piece “Open Mind,” commissioned for the festival.
“The festival is now beginning to bring us close to the crazy dream we had on a late June night in St. Petersburg in 1999,” Salonen recalls. “It was a kind of Utopia we started developing. The idea of lots of musicians, composers, orchestras and choirs building bridges, with the performers moving about freely. That would prove — in both practical and symbolic terms — that the Baltic has now once again become an area that shares a common culture.”
As the maestro points out, the Baltic countries, which have been through periods of tranquillity and turbulence, have now developed a political relationship in which the exchange of ideas is easy to establish and maintain. “We just felt that it is the moment to manifest it through classical music,” he said. 
The Baltic Sea is abundant with dangerous toxic algae, especially in the coastal area. The region’s ecological rescue requires a consistent joint effort from all countries of the region, but not all of the coastal states are taking part in environmental clean-up and revival projects. Russia, the country responsible for the lion’s share of the pollution, has shown little enthusiasm for combatting the consequences. 
Salonen often points out he isn’t naive enough to think that classical musicians can save the environment of a whole sea but stresses that, as the saying goes, water hollows out a stone.
“I really do think that if we bring the ideas into the minds of the people with this ecological theme running through the festival, we have a better chance to improve the situation in the future,” the conductor said.
www.sr.se/berwaldhallen/baltic

TITLE: Golden oldies
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Janos Koos sounds a bit uncertain as he sings the words of Chuck Berry: “My baby does the hanky panky, yeah.” The Hungarian vocalist recorded the song at Melodiya in 1970, a year when the authorities were cracking down on music that didn’t fit the official format. After all, the country was about to celebrate Lenin’s 100th birthday.
Nevertheless, the song, recently re-released by Melodiya, is definitive proof that rock ‘n’ roll existed in the Soviet Union. To get this message across, Andrei Troshin, the record label’s chief editor, has issued a series of compilation discs called “The True History of Russian Light Music.”
Packaged in brightly colored sleeves, the albums are aimed at a young audience. “We don’t want to do retro,” Troshin said during a recent interview. He defined his ideal listener as someone who wouldn’t be seen dead buying an album by current Russian pop acts, but who wants to discover something to be proud of in the country’s musical past. 
 “It’s light music for intellectually developed people,” the editor said. “That segment of the market is free at the moment.”
The albums are a chance to branch out for Melodiya, a label that is world-famous for its classical output, but which also preserves a unique archive of light, or estrada music. After losing almost all of its premises and staff after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the state-owned enterprise has experienced something of a renaissance under new management.
Troshin gave the interview in the columned hall of Melodiya’s headquarters on Tverskoi Bulvar, a building whose oldest part dates back to before Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. The label’s most valuable possession is housed elsewhere: an archive of around 60,000 items — no one knows the exact figure — including the master tapes of popular music that was taken off the airwaves for ideological reasons. 
The golden age of Russian rock ‘n’ roll began in 1957, the editor said. That was the year of the Moscow International Festival of Youth and Students, when American bands arrived and played real rock ‘n’ roll — although for decency’s sake, it was called jazz. When they left, it was usually without their instruments, which were snapped up by Russian musicians.
“The professional level [of Russian bands] went up very rapidly because they had professional equipment for the first time,” Troshin said. When compiling the latest disc in the Real History series, titled “Love by Post,” he chose songs from the 1960s that were “clearly pro-Western.” Along with the Chuck Berry track, there are songs in Italian and French, and a Russian translation of The Coasters’ 1959 hit “Charlie Brown.”
Only one of the songs on the album would be familiar to most Russian listeners: “Black Cat” by Tamara Miansarova, a 1964 hit that still gets a lot of airplay. In other cases, the artists might be famous, but the material is not. On one track, the smooth-voiced crooner Muslim Magomayev sings an Italian dance tune with Elektron — a band that played electric instruments, which has been called Russia’s answer to Britain’s Shadows.
“Magomayev used to do things that had nothing to do with his image,” Troshin said. “He once sang [the Animals’ 1964 chart-topper] ‘House of the Rising Sun’ with a rock group.”
Many of the tracks date back to the late 1960s. At the time, Melodiya was in a rush to release material, as its staff sensed a change in the political climate, with clubs being shut down and jazz bands being evicted from restaurants. Sure enough, a 1969 resolution by the Council of Ministers called for certain estrada groups to be broken up and for some of Melodiya’s master tapes to be erased.
One of the victims of the freeze was an album called “From Palanga to Gurzuf,” which was recently re-released by Melodiya in association with the hip record label Lyogkiye. The feel-good, largely instrumental numbers include tracks by Elektron and Rokoko, a band founded by the composer Anatoly Bykanov, who now teaches at the Moscow Conservatory.
Named after beach resorts in Lithuania and the Crimea, the album was recorded in two versions: a lower-quality mono version for Russian audiences and a high-quality stereo version for export, meant to be released abroad in association with Intourist. But the summery tracks were out of step with preparations for the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birth in April 1970, and the order went out to destroy the master tape.
The album survived, however, thanks to quick-witted Melodiya staff members. It was hidden in a box labeled “A concert by the participants of the All-Russian Show of Rural Amateur Talents,” where it lay undisturbed until last winter, when restorers transferring the label’s archive onto digital tape listened to the album and realized they had found something unique.
In a bid to increase awareness of the album, Melodiya teamed up with Snegiri Muzyka, a small independent record company, to release the album on Lyogkiye, a label that specializes in lounge and electronica. The reason was simple: Melodiya is seen as “sovok,” or Soviet in all the worst senses of the word, Troshin admitted.
The CD sells at a higher price than those in the “Real History” series, and it has more sophisticated packaging and liner notes. It was presented last month with a party at the Moscow club Keks.
“Of course we are trying to hook young people and, in a sense, those with patriotic views,” Troshin said. “Because you can put this on, listen to it and realize that there’s nothing embarrassing about it. You don’t have to feel ashamed by these musicians.”
The media reaction to the releases has been largely favorable. “I just can’t believe that in the mid-1960s people played and recorded this kind of music in our country,” a critic wrote in Izvestia earlier this month, referring to the “Real History” series. A music journalist in Vremya Novostei was more circumspect about “From Palanga.” It made him feel “childlike pleasure” the first time he listened to it, but “maybe a single injection of nostalgia is enough,” he wrote.
Founded in 1964, Melodiya held a monopoly on recorded music in the Soviet Union, employing tens of thousands. It even had a representative office in Samoa, Troshin commented, although “that was connected with spying.” Now the factories and shops are gone, and the label only has about 60 employees.
Yet Melodiya has undergone something of a revival in recent years, the chief editor said, describing it as a “former corpse.” Still owned by the state, the enterprise makes a small “kopek profit,” he said, and last year it won an award in Belgium for a recording of symphonic and vocal music by the 20th-century composer Boris Arapov.
Its main tasks now are to digitize the archive, which badly needs new premises — it is currently housed in an apartment building — and to find a replacement for the label’s recording studio, a church building on Voznesensky Pereulok, which has been handed back to the Anglican community, although Melodiya still intermittently records there.
Troshin joined Melodiya two years ago. Previously, he edited a magazine on Orthodox art and worked in the art business. He joined the company along with a new general director, Kirill Bashirov. As a non-classical music specialist, he is in charge of the estrada releases, and it’s a job that fits his own tastes.
Among his personal favorites are the Armenian singer Lola Khomyants and the Georgian Gyuli Chokheli. “I like women with low, sultry voices,” he said. Khomyants died last December, just a week before the first “Real History” album came out with one of her songs as the first track. 
“It was very sad and frustrating,” he recalled.

TITLE: Italian surprise
TEXT: Pompei
15/17 Ulitsa Rubinshteina
Tel: 571 2551
Open daily for lunch and dinner
Menu in Italian, Russian and English. 
Cash payment only.
Dinner for two with wine approximately 2,000 rubles ($70.00)
By Michael Coppejans
Special to The St. Petersburg Times
Pompei — the word itself brings up visions of destruction and a frozen image of the Roman past in Italy. The city that was covered in hot volcanic ash now has a new trattoria named after it in St. Petersburg. Located on Ulitsa Rubinsteina, not far from Nevsky Prospekt, Pompei is a hidden treasure on the restaurant scene. Although it opened only two months or so ago, it is already jam-packed on the weekends and does good business during the week.  
The interior stays close to the Roman theme, with fresco-style paintings depicting nymphs and Roman warriors in a variety of poses lining the walls, books on Italy and bottles of Italian wine displayed. The color scheme is red and gold, including the curtains and tablecloths. The table presentation is that of any high-end restaurant and there is Italian pop music played lightly in the background. 
The restaurant is small with one dining room composed of seven tables and seats around twenty-five to thirty people. It has a single unisex bathroom located right off of the kitchen/bar area. Pompei is a tiny, intimate restaurant that has very personable and friendly atmosphere.
The menu is designed around a traditional Italian meal of seven courses. Fresh pasta, cold dishes, meat, fish, and even a Russian specialities section to satiate the cravings of locals, are available, and this section offers a serving of black caviar for around 2,100 rubles ($72.41). 
But the heart of the menu is  Italian cuisine, with dishes ranging from standard spaghetti to elaborate meat dishes like Beef Fiorentino for 980 rubles for two ($33.80). Dishes average 500 rubles ($17.24) and it is certainly not the cheapest Italian food in town. Soups and salads range from 125 rubles to 280 rubles ($4.31 to $9.66) and include a classic minestrone. 
The wide selection and the fact that our menus had discrepancies between them made it difficult to deciding what to eat.  
Not only did my friend’s menu have more items than mine, but after asking about certain items we discovered that they did not have everything available at the time. Another drawback to the menu was its shoddy holder of yellow plastic and its photocopied pages. Perhaps this is because the restaurant is fairly new and what it offers is still not set in stone. However, in an expensive restaurant, the quality of the menu itself should be much higher, especially for the price you pay.
Our waitress was extremely helpful and kind and was very patient considering it took us quiet some time to figure out what exactly we wanted. She answered our questions in English and when there were difficulties in describing certain pastas she brought out a plate to show us literally what it was. We decided to have eggplant parmesan for 350 rubles ($12.07) for our starter which came out very quickly after ordering. For the main course, my vegetarian companion ordered gnocchi with tomatoes and ricotta cheese for 350 rubles ($12.07) and I selected a house specialty — beef filet Pompei or tagliata di manzo for 420 rubles ($14.48). Again, our courses came out quickly but there was a slight mix-up in our order. The gnocchi came only with tomatoes and sauce and without the ricotta cheese. The eggplant parmesan and gnocchi were standard Italian fare and there was nothing striking about either dish. 
The beef filet “Pompei,” however, was excellent. The seven strips of lean beef placed on a bed of romaine lettuce with turnips and cherry tomatoes were juicy and cooked just right. 
For dessert, we opted for the classic Italian cake, tiramisu for 210 rubles ($7.24). It also was disappointing and was too saturated in espresso, which drowned out any other flavors that might have been hidden within.  
The presence of mosquitoes and flies was a nuisance and it came to fruition when a mosquito was discovered in one of our wine glasses. In an elite restaurant this could not be tolerated. Our waitress dealt with it very graciously and quickly took the glass away and returned with a full glass of wine and a 10 percent discount. This incident topped off a fairly uneventful meal and the food was not everything we had hoped for. 
But despite the overpriced and uninspired food, the ambience of Pompei makes you want to return. What makes Pompei so unique is its affable and very Italian owner, Giuseppe Perna. 
Perna comes out to greet the majority of his clients, speaking a mix of Italian and Russian, and makes you feel right at home. After our problems, Perna came over to our table and offered us a glass of Sambucca on the house. This sweet anise-flavored liquor is an Italian after-dinner favorite, and Perna was kind enough to describe how it should be drunk. His interaction with the other clients lent the restaurant a jovial atmosphere that is undeniable.  
As the evening waned and more and more people came in, the restaurant lit up with conversation and laughter, and the desire to stay and drink and be merry was very powerful. Pompei is a place that you cannot help but like.