SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1100 (66), Tuesday, August 30, 2005
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TITLE: Senators Receive Apology
AUTHOR: By Mara D. Bellaby
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KIEV, Ukraine — Russia on Monday apologized to two U.S. senators who were detained for three hours in a Russian airport while officials refused to let their U.S. military flight take off. 
Senators Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Barack Obama, a Democrat from Illinois, arrived in the Ukrainian capital three hours later than expected after being delayed by border guards at an airport in the Ural Mountains city of Perm on Sunday night. 
The guards had demanded to be allowed to inspect the U.S. plane, but were refused by the Americans, U.S. officials said. After the military flight’s diplomatic status was verified, the senators were allowed to leave. 
“We regret the misunderstanding that arose and caused an inconvenience to the senators,” a Russian Foreign Ministry statement said. 
The Foreign Ministry said that the delay, which it said “was incorrectly called a detention,” arose because of questions over whether the international flight en route to Kiev had undergone the necessary procedures. 
Earlier Monday, Lugar, a Republican from the state of Indiana, told journalists in the Ukrainian parliament that he had received no explanation for the Russian government’s actions but was pleased his flight was allowed eventually to take off for neighboring Ukraine. 
“We are not certain as to why or the particular activity that caused that delay,” Lugar said. “We are pleased that our flight was able to continue to Kiev, albeit three hours later.” 
The Federal Security Service defended the plane’s delay, saying it was because the Perm airport isn’t part of an Open Skies Agreement, which allows certain planes to bypass inspections, RIA Novosti and Itar-Tass reported. 
The FSB, which is the main successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, said it could comment on the report within a week’s time. 
U.S. Embassy officials said the flight was a U.S. military flight, and therefore should have had diplomatic status. 
The senators and their aides spent three days in Russia visiting sites where warheads are stored before destruction under the U.S.-funded Comprehensive Threat Reduction program. 
However, another U.S. Senator, Chuck Hagel, said he had no problems leaving Russia, his spokesman said Sunday. 
A U.S. embassy spokesperson in Moscow, speaking on the condition of anonymity, had said Hagel was delayed in departing from a Russian airport because of documentation problems. 
“I talked to him, and they got out five minutes late — regular airport stuff,” Hagel spokesman Mike Buttry said Sunday afternoon. 
Hagel flew from Irkutsk, to Bulgaria on a U.S. military plane, Buttry said. 
Hagel returns Tuesday from a 10-day trip to Russia and three other European countries. Hagel met with senior Russian officials and American business leaders in Moscow. He also toured natural gas deposits in Irkutsk. 
Alexander Golts, a defense analyst with the online magazine Yezhednelny Zhurnal, said Moscow should be highly interested in Lugar’s program, which provides hundreds of millions of dollars a year to help Russia destroy weapons of mass destruction.
“If this is our strange way of ending or discrediting a program that is crucial to us, it is really silly,” Golts told Ekho Moskvy radio. 
“It is also silly if this is our strange and rude way of sending Lugar a note that his statements regarding Yukos and problems with democracy in Russia ... don’t suit the Kremlin,” he added. 
Earlier this year, Lugar criticized Russia for its alleged retreat from democracy, warning that a positive relationship with Moscow was complicated because “basic freedoms are being violated in Russia.” The Kremlin has also faced criticism for the dismemberment of the Yukos oil company and the jailing of its founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. 
Mikhail Margelov, head of the Russian upper house of parliament’s foreign relations committee, questioned whether the detention of the senators’ flight “was a right and useful thing to do” but also said he didn’t expect it to lead to a major fallout between the two nations. 
Lugar and Obama met on Monday with Ukraine’s Parliament Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn and President Viktor Yushchenko, a Western-leaning reformer who came to power after massive street protests last year.

TITLE: New Book: Hitler Didn’t Want to Take Leningrad
AUTHOR: By Manuela Muhm
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Hitler did not want to capture besieged Leningrad during World War II, but intended to starve its citizens to death, a new book by a German historian says.
St. Petersburg was known as Leningrad during the war.
Released in Germany this summer, the book “Das Belagerte Leningrad” by JÚrg Ganzenmßller challenges the Soviet view of the Siege of Leningrad that the city was not taken because of heroic resistance by citizens and the Red Army. That view still dominates in Russia today.
Ganzenmßller set out to provide an unbiased and balanced picture of the genocide committed against the people of Leningrad, saying that German silence over the horrors committed in its name and Soviet propaganda have distorted the reality about the siege.
On Sept. 8, 1941, Leningrad seemed about to fall. German troops captured Schlßsselburg and closed their ring around Leningrad. 
The city was cut off from all land access. German armies had advanced toward Leningrad from the south while their Finnish allies approached from the north. In the east and west Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland formed natural obstacles.
Yet, at that point Hitler issued the command to stop short. What followed was one of the cruelest chapters in the history of the World War II: German troops laid siege to Leningrad, at that time with 3.2 million inhabitants the second-largest city of the Soviet Union. Almost 900 days, from Sept. 8 1941 to Jan. 27, 1944, Leningrad was in the grip of Nazi Germany. Hundreds of thousands of citizens — some say 1 million people — fell victim to starvation, disease exposure and enemy action.
Why did Hitler hold the German troops back to take Leningrad? Why did Hitler turn down the military and political triumph of conquering the city of the October revolution?
Ganzenmßller looked into these and other questions. 
As early as in April 1941, two months before Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Third Reich’s Food Ministry reported that “the problem of supplying Leningrad with an appropriate amount of food cannot be solved, should it fall into our hands.”
Two months later, Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels wrote in his war diary:  “It is impossible to say what will happen to these people in the near future. I am anticipating a catastrophe the dimensions of which are entirely unpredictable”.
Ganzenmßller makes the case that Hitler and his generals were not interested in capturing Leningrad. The Nazi policy of expansion was directed toward capturing territory, but made no considerations about the people living there. 
The Nazis’ Generalplan Ost of 1942 envisaged the massive relocation and extermination of peoples west of the Urals and the Germanization of these territories with “Aryan” settlers. It was assumed that Leningrad, or Ingermanland as it was then be called, would be the residence for 200,000 German settlers in 1942. It made no mention of the fate of the 3 million Leningraders.
However, Hitler’s invasion of Soviet Russia did not go according to plan. In the fall of 1941, Operation Barbarossa — the code name for Nazi German’s invasion of Russia — had stalled and the food supply for the German troops was getting short as winter approached. For Nazi Germany, Leningrad’s civilian population presented a concrete problem that needed to be solved.
On Sept. 29, 1941, Hitler announced his solution: “Requests from the city to surrender will be rejected because the problem of the remaining presence and nourishment of the population cannot and should not be solved by us. We have no interest in caring for even part of the population in this struggle for existence.” He later added that “a capitulation of Leningrad or later Moscow is not to be accepted, even if offered by the opposite side. ... No German soldier should enter these cities.”

ARMY WAS MORE IMPORTANT
Stalin was determined to hold the city at all costs. Though he first had inwardly written off the city, he regained hope after the Soviet front stabilized. Leningrad had too great a strategic significance to be sacrificed easily. 
“[Stalin] regarded the situation as disastrous,” leading Soviet military strategist Georgy Zhukov said after a meeting with the dictator in September 1941. “He said that Leningrad would obviously fall within the next days. If Leningrad fell, however, the Germans would unite with the Finns and there would emerge a highly dangerous arrangement, creating a menace even to Moscow.”
Zhukov, who would in 1945 deliver the deathblow to the Nazi beast in its lair in Berlin, was dispatched to galvanize Leningrad’s demoralized defenders. The Red Army made several unsuccessful counterattacks.
The Soviet leadership assumed that the German troops would attempt to storm Leningrad as soon as possible. Therefore, when the ring closed around the city, the Soviets continued evacuating industrial plants and factories. 
The priorities during the evacuation reflected clearly the maxim of Soviet valuation: machinery and raw materials were more important than human beings.
In order to avert the impending humanitarian catastrophe, the Soviets changed their strategy. 
On Jan. 17, 1942, the decision was made to start evacuating large numbers of people quickly. This meant that skilled workers and their families were taken out of the besieged city first; refugees and wounded soldiers were the last to be evacuated.
Contrary to the heroic descriptions of Soviet propaganda, the evacuation went off in a highly chaotic and disorganized way. 
As the Soviet leadership had failed to work out a strategy for evacuating the population of Leningrad, improvisations led to fatal mistakes that Soviet historians were eager to cover up after the war. 
The first children moved out of Leningrad were sent in the wrong direction, toward the advancing German troops.
Ganzenmßller estimates that between 1.3 million and 1.75 million people were evacuated during the siege. Those remaining in the besieged city had to endure the nightmare conditions of a daily fight against famine and death.

Trapped in Leningrad
After the German troops had closed their ring around Leningrad, the only access to the city was across the Lake Ladoga, later dubbed the Road of Life. Yet in the early stages of the siege the Red Army had neither sufficient transport capacities nor logistic know-how to supply enough food to the starving inhabitants of Leningrad. What is more, the winter of 1941-42 was the harshest in decades. People were dying in appalling numbers.
“Whenever we walked somewhere we just stepped over corpses on our way and by this time we were numb to this,” Ganzenmßller quotes Nina Volodina, who was 10 years old in 1941, as saying.
The distribution of food rations was based on the same system as in the Soviet urban centers in the 1930s. In other words, workers got higher portions than white-collar staff and workers of significant factories more than workers of less significant ones. In addition, workers had access to canteens and special shops and often received additional food cards.
The food rations provided by the city were barely enough for survival, especially for people not employed at a local factory. Thus, individual strategies for survival were developed, often with fatal consequences. “They boiled leather belts, made soup from joiner’s glue or scratched glue from wallpapers  ... . Pancakes made of mustard seeds were so extremely hot that they ate away your bowels,” Ganzenmßller writes.
People also used semi-illegal and illegal methods to obtain something edible. During the first war winter, 818 people were arrested for theft, 586 of whom were soldiers. Some factories registered “dead souls”  to get more food. At the Stalin Factories, for example, 729 workers were registered — but 124 of these were dead, another 107 had been evacuated from Leningrad, 70 served in the army and 21 were in police custody.
The loss or theft of the daily bread ration was a tragedy because the city council would not make good the losses.  
“At 6 a.m. we were all running for bread. I arrived at the bakery and what should I see? — a fight. ... . They were kicking a boy who had snatched away someone’s bread. And I started kicking him, too — ‘how could you?’ we had not had bread for three days! And guess what, I do not know how but I got hold of his bread, I put it into my mouth and — it is beyond comprehension — I kept kicking him,” one boy recalled.
Unbearable hunger drove some people to eat cats, dogs and even human beings. During the 900-day siege, 1,500 people were convicted of cannibalism — a fact often covered up by Soviet propaganda.
The then 16-year-old Yura Ryabinkin remembered the days of the great famine in Leningrad in his diary.  “I ate a cat, stole food out of Anfisa Nikolayevna’s pots, stole every spare bread crumb from Mom and Irina — I cheated both of them — cursed and fought at the entrances to shops to get in and buy 100 grams of butter.”

EVERYTHING FOR THE FRONT
After the war, Soviet propaganda never tired of depicting the heroic defensive battle of the besieged city in the brightest colors. According to Soviet historiography, the people of Leningrad did everything possible to support the front and arms production never ceased. Yet the reality diverged to a great extent from the myth created by the Soviet leadership.
In the winter of 1941/42, there was no electricity and the productivity of the city fell almost to zero. “We wanted to work but there was no electricity. Our boss said:  ‘Sit down and wait.’ At first, we sat there for several hours [each day], but the electricity was not on ... . We went more and more rarely to work; we were working only intermittently,” Ganzenmßller quotes one worker as saying.
Due to the constant shortage of food many people were too weak to show up at their work places.  “Nobody was running, everyone was walking slowly and could barely lift their legs. Someone with a healthy and young body can hardly imagine such debility,” a young man wrote in his diary.
Another diary entry by a worker at the Izhora factories said:  “21.1.42. We are sitting here and are starving. 22.1.42. the same ... . 1.2.42. I have recovered some strength and started working though I am only able to walk slowly and with a stick.”
As men had to serve in the army and skilled workers had been evacuated, factories soon faced a labor shortage. Most workers were adolescents and women. The lack of qualified and trained workers led to great losses and the army’s needs were barely fulfilled.

Lifting the siege
After the disastrous winter of 1941/42  Hitler and his supporters planned to draw the ring tighter around the besieged city, which would have killed many more civilians. But they failed and the Red Army forced the German troops more and more onto the defensive.
Finally, in January 1943, the Red Army forced open a small corridor at Schluesselburg. From then on, the inhabitants could be supplied with food and everyday goods. Soon, food rations were raised to above survival level and life in the city normalized.
The siege would drag on for another year until on Jan. 27, 1944, when Leningrad celebrated the lifting with artillery salutes.
Ganzenmßller writes that while in Germany the 900-day siege remained a chapter hardly ever opened by historians and politicians, the Soviet Union transformed the siege into a glorified myth of heroism and patriotism. 
While survivors remember the siege as a time of famine, plight and struggle for survival, the Soviet leadership depicted it as a heroic epic. Under Brezhnev, the siege was promoted as a cult and monumental memorials to the heroes of the siege were erected all over the country.
In post-communist Russia, little has changed. In historical interpretations the Soviet version of a Red Army forcing the German troops to a halt in front of the city and their heroic defense battles prevail.  
These interpretations, however, are blind to the fact that Hitler and his generals were not eager to capture Leningrad but intended to starve the city.
A glorified myth on the one side and an ignored chapter on the other side: in neither version is the 900-day Siege of Leningrad depicted as what it actually was: a cruel genocide against hundreds of thousands of people, Ganzenmßller concludes.

TITLE: Historians Split on Siege View
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg historians are divided over a new book that rejects the Soviet portrayal of the Siege of Leningrad as a heroic defensive battle. 
In his book, “Das Belagerte Leningrad,” German historian JÚrg Ganzenmßller says the view is wrong because Hitler did not want to capture the city, but he did want to starve its population to death.
St. Petersburg was known as Leningrad during World War II.
One St. Petersburg historian said Ganzenmßller has misinterpreted the siege while another applauded him for revealing the truth that Soviet propaganda hid for years. 
“The people who found themselves locked in by the blockade were heroic,” Tatyana Shmakova, head of the Museum for St. Petersburg History, said Friday in a telephone interview.
“I haven spoken to people who lived here at that time,” she added. “One of them told me that all of his classmates went from school to defend this city and only two out of 30 of them remained alive. He told me how he once saw an explosion rip off the head of one of his schoolmates.”
Shmakova said she did not even want to think about Ganzenmßller’s arguments because they were incongruent with the official point of view.
“There wasn’t any sort of genocide,” she said. “Hitler wanted to conquer Leningrad and it was only thanks to the heroism of people who lived here that the city was not taken. I was born in 1950, five years after the war ended and I remember these people who survived this nightmare in the city. This theory of Hitler’s that the city would just eat itself is nothing more than propaganda.” 
However, Lev Lurye, another St. Petersburg historian, said that propaganda was what the Soviet people had been fed when they were told a heroic interpretation of events linked to the siege.
“What is written in the book is the absolute truth,” Lurye said Friday in a telephone interview Friday.
“Hitler issued an order before September 1941 saying that Leningrad should not be taken,” Lurye said. “In this light, the activity of [commander Georgy] Zhukov is seen as rather strange, because he believed the German troops would storm the city. It looked like the intelligence service did not work that well.”
“Instead of trying to lift the siege in the spot where it was broken in 1943 — near the town of Volkhov — Soviet troops were sent to different places around the city, with tragic consequences,” Lurye said. 
“The fact was that Stalin was ready to give up the city, but Hitler didn’t want to take it,” the historian said.
“There were cases such as when a German general asked his commanders if he could feed mothers and children on Swedish turnips if some managed to escape from the siege. The answer came back that he should not get involved in any sort of fantasies because the Swedish turnips were needed for other purposes,” he said.
“Basically the city wasn’t needed by anyone and this thought is finally coming into people’s minds,” Lurye added.  “There has already been a documentary on Channel 5 in which this argument was one of the main themes. There are lots of books being published on this topic at the moment, so in some time everything will be put in its rightful place.”

TITLE: Putin Agrees to Meet Beslan Mothers During Anniversary
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin confirmed Monday that he would meet mothers who lost their children in the Beslan hostage seizure, satisfying a demand first made by the bereaved mothers almost a year ago. 
His words confirmed comments by the Beslan Mothers Committee, which said Sunday that Putin had suggested a Kremlin meeting on Friday — mid-way through the anniversary of last year’s Sept. 1-3 seizure. 
“I know about their request. I am ready to meet them,” Putin said after talks with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Sochi, Interfax reported.
He said he had asked Dmitry Kozak, his envoy to the Southern Federal District, to arrange the meeting. 
“We will ask questions and demand an answer,” said Susanna Dudiyeva, head of pressure group the Beslan Mother’s Committee, whose 12-year-old son Zaurbek was among the dead. 
“We have questions about why they did not save our children, about why the investigation is not objective... why this happened and why our authorities abdicated their responsibility for saving the hostages,” she said. 
Some of the parents oppose the trip, saying its timing was inappropriate, but most felt it was a chance to speak their mind, she added.
 The mothers say Putin and other officials are guilty of failing to prevent the hostage crisis, which began when attackers seized a school with 1,200 hostages. At least 331 people, 186 of them children, died. 
The mothers’ group also blames security forces for the escalation of the crisis, and have long demanded a meeting with Putin to pass on their demands that officials face punishment.
The Kremlin has rejected calls to punish officials over the Beslan siege, saying that must wait until a parliamentary commission publishes its report. 
But the report will not be ready until after the anniversary, and as the date approaches there has been mounting pressure on the Kremlin to provide answers. 
The Beslan Mothers’ Committee, which started out as an informal support group where the women could share their grief, has turned into an influential lobby and is spearheading the campaign for action over official failings. 
Last week, about 15 Beslan mothers occupied a courtroom where the Chechen man thought to be the only militant to survive the siege is on trial. 
The women said their protest was not against Nurpashi Kulayev, who went on trial in May for his alleged part in the hostage-taking, but against the inadequacy of the inquiry. 
Russian media reported last week that Putin himself was dissatisfied with the progress of the commission’s probe. 
Gunmen seized school No.1 on Sept. 1 as children and their parents arrived for the first day of the new term. The standoff ended on Sept. 3 when security forces stormed the school. 
Putin announced tough measures to crack down on Chechen militants soon after the Beslan bloodshed, and since then there have been no large-scale attacks. But there has been an upsurge of violence in the week before the anniversary.

TITLE: Kasyanov Returns to His Work
AUTHOR: By Dmitry Zhdannikov
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov returned to work in Moscow on Monday after a long holiday in Europe, dashing rumors he might stay abroad while prosecutors investigate his purchase of a luxury villa. 
But he was immediately quoted as saying his consultancy firm was now being investigated by tax inspectors and he suggested the probe was the latest episode in what he has called a Kremlin campaign to destroy him as a political rival. 
Prosecutors are already looking into allegations Kasyanov, a Kremlin critic who has hinted he may run for president in 2008, pulled strings when in office to acquire the riverside villa on prime real estate outside Moscow. 
Some analysts had suggested he might not return to Russia from his holiday to avoid arrest, but his spokeswoman said he had been back in Moscow since late last week. 
Kasyanov, who denies the charges against him, said the firm he set up earlier this year, MK-Analytica, had been notified by the local tax inspection office it was to be audited. 
The tax inspectorate could not immediately be reached for comment and it was not clear if the tax probe was linked to the villa investigation. 
“They are going to check the legality of our tax payments,” Interfax quoted Kasyanov as saying. 
“It is obvious this is being done with one simple aim: to get information on our clients ... in order to put pressure on our business partners,” Interfax quoted him as saying. 
Kasyanov was prime minister for about four years until President Vladimir Putin abruptly sacked him in 2004. 
He returned to Russia for a few days in July, soon after the launch of the real estate investigation, but quickly left the country again. 
In July, he issued a statement saying the villa probe was consistent with a Kremlin policy of using compliant prosecutors and judges to destroy all political opposition. 
Though Putin, under the constitution, must step down in 2008, analysts say he wants to ensure the election of a hand-picked heir rather than a rival like Kasyanov. 
Some observers have expressed doubts that the cautious Kasyanov is prepared to set himself up in opposition to the powerful Kremlin. 
But he signalled his defiance Monday, saying he planned to take part in local and national elections over the next three years, Interfax reported. 
He did not though, specify what form that participation would take.

TITLE: Adamov Accepts Extradition
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BERN, Switzerland — Former Russian nuclear minister Yevgeny Adamov, accused by the United States of stealing money intended to improve Russia’s nuclear security, has agreed to be extradited to Russia but must remain in Swiss detention pending a final decision on a competing U.S. bid, a Swiss official said Monday. 
“He has declared himself willing to be prosecuted by Russian officials for the crimes that the United States accuses him of,” said Folco Galli, spokesman for the Swiss Federal Ministry of Justice. 
Galli said that based on Adamov’s decision, the ministry decided last week to approve the extradition to Russia and asked U.S. officials whether they would accept that decision. Swiss officials are awaiting a U.S. answer, he said. 
Adamov has been held in Switzerland since he was arrested on a U.S. request May 2 while visiting his daughter in Bern. 
He has since been indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on charges of conspiracy to transfer stolen money and securities, conspiracy to defraud the United States, money laundering and tax evasion. 
In the case of a continued dispute between the United States and Russia, Switzerland will have to decide where to extradite Adamov.

TITLE: Prosecutors Ponder Probe of Activist
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Andrei Savelyev, a leader of the Rodina faction in the State Duma, has asked the St. Petersburg Prosecutor General’s Office to open a defamation case against human rights campaigner Ruslan Linkov.
Linkov, the head of the St. Petersburg branch of the Democratic Russia party, said Friday that the deputy told the office that an article Linkov wrote in June contained untruths about him.
The article, which was printed by several media outlets, including The St. Petersburg Times, said that Russia was in danger or lurching toward radical nationalism. It named Savelyev as the author and editor of nationalistic publications.
“It is interesting that this spring I approached the Prosecutor General’s Office with a demand to initiate a criminal case in relation to the authors and publishers of a range of books under one name, the Library of the Racial Thought. An introduction to a book Racial Study, which incites racial hatred was written by the deputy Andrei Savelyev,” Linkov said Friday in a telephone interview. “So far there has been no response to the request by human rights advocates.”
“It’s clear that Savelyev sent his request about the weeks ago and here we are. The prosecutor’s office acts quite fast in this case,” Linkov said.
On Friday, Linkov received a phone call from a deputy prosecutor, who asked him to appear at the City Prosecutor’s Office on Tuesday to explain his position on Savelyev’s complaint, he said.
The City Prosecutor’s Office could not be reached for a comment.
In his article, Linkov had written: “One of the leaders of the Rodina parliamentary faction, deputy Andrei Savelyev not only edits racists literature (he edited the book Racial Meaning of the Russian Idea, issued by the Moscow publishing house Beliye Alvy), but actually writes racist articles himself, such as his preface to V. B. Avdeyev’s ‘Racial Studies.’” 
Savelyev had describing Racial Studies as a “remarkable” and “impressive work on the history of racial studies and racial thought,” since “Russians represent a racially pure, homogeneous, primarily Nordic branch of the Europoid race… And this legacy must be protected from being destroyed by floods of migrants … ,” Linkov wrote
Savelyev could not reached for comment Monday.
Linkov’s fellow human rights campaigner Yury Vdovin said prosecutors should not act on Savelyev’s complaint.
“Consciously there is no lie in Linkov’s article, but just sorrow and pain in relation to the situation with racial hatred in Russia,” Vdovin, co-chair of the city branch of Citizen’s Watch. “The distribution of literature that incites racial hatred is proceeding in Russia on an unprecedented scale. It is impossible to find so many books with this type of content in any other country.” 
“It’s not possible to be absolutely sure that the prosecutors won’t start fighting those people who are fighting racial hatred in Russia,” he said.

TITLE: Troubled Leopard Gulya Gets Reprieve
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Gulya, a one-year-old snow leopard, who had a difficult start to life after her mother rejected her at birth, is to stay another year in St. Petersburg’s Leningrad Zoo before being sent to Kazan as a gift from the city.
A winged snow leopard is the symbol of Kazan and appears on the city’s coat of arms, so it was fitting that St. Petersburg governor Valentina Matviyenko signed over Gulya to Kazan when it celebrated its 1000th anniversary last week. 
But Gulya was not strong enough mentally or physically to make the trip.
She is devoted to Galina Afanasyeva, the zoo’s academic secretary, who took the cub home and saved the cat’s life from illnesses that plagued her in her first few weeks.
Gulya was afraid of the lions’ roars when she returned to the zoo. Afanasyeva slept the first 10 nights in the cub’s cage so as to reassure her.
“Because she was deprived of her mother’s milk, Gulya has had some health problems,” Afanasyeva said Friday. “She recently went through a complete health check, which shows she is doing very well but the baby still needs to recover from a lung problem and a trauma: this spring she broke a paw.”
The snow leopard will travel to Kazan next year, where two young male snow leopards will keep her company. It is hoped that they will produce their own cubs
Afanasyeva said she is confident that Gulya will be fully ready for the move next year but worried that the cub isn’t fit to travel yet.
St. Petersburg, which boasts a large Muslim community, has been generous to Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan.
 Its presents for the anniversary have included a new street with full infrastructure and architectural style resembling St. Petersburg, a massive exhibition of the treasures of the Golden Horde from St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum and dozens of smaller offerings. Gulya is part of the package.
When Matviyenko presented Tatarstan’s leader Mintimer Shaimiyev with the gift of the cub, he welcomed it.
“Several decades ago [during the World War II Siege of Leningrad], we sent cats to the Hermitage to save the museum from rats,” Shaimiyev smiled. “Now the cats are coming back in the form of snow leopards.”

TITLE: Finland Free of Dangerous Flu
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: HELSINKI — Finland’s Agriculture Ministry said Saturday that Europe was not yet suffering the highly pathogenic strain of bird flu that has killed people in Asia after the country discovered a possible outbreak in seagulls.
“Increased surveillance shows it very clearly, we do not have in Europe the dangerous H5N1 avian influenza affecting Asia at present,” Matti Aho, chief veterinary officer of Finland, said in a statement on the ministry’s web site.
“Many different types of low pathogenic influenza viruses are circulating in the wild bird population everywhere around the world, and this finding in Finland demonstrates it once more,” he added.
The ministry said on Friday laboratory tests had identified a possible strain of bird flu in sick and dead seagulls found in a park in the northern town of Oulu, but it was not clear how many of them were carrying the disease or how serious a strain of flu it might be.
Final test results are due in three weeks, a ministry official said on Friday, and added it was likely that if the birds did suffer from bird flu it was a low pathogenic strand of the virus.
Low-pathogenic bird flu can be found in as many as 30 percent of wild birds, experts say. But monitoring is increasing as fears of a global outbreak grow.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: More Non-City Students 
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The portion of students from outside St. Petersburg that have been accepted by St. Petersburg universities and institutes this year 2005 has grown to 50 percent from 49 percent last year, Interfax reported Friday quoting City Hall. 
“Practically all of the universities and institutes in St. Petersburg have completed the process of accepting students for education departments that receive subsidies from the state,” Interfax cited Alexander Viktorov, head of City Hall Science and Higher Education Committee as saying at a briefing Friday.
“A total of 38,530 people have been accepted, including 29,026 to the budgetary subsidized departments,” he said. 
About 51 percent of new students are men and 49 percent are women, according to City Hall’s statistics.

City Police on Alert
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — City police have boosted security in preparation for the start of the academic year Thursday, Interfax reported Saturday. 
“All police staff has been rostered to work 12-hour days and all schools that have been checked during last two weeks for their security are handed over to the police protection,” Interfax cited the city police press-service as saying. 
A thousand police employees will be protecting schools Thursday and some private security guards will also be on duty, the police said.  

Oblast Appointment 
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A new vice governor responsible for cooperation with law enforcement was appointed to the Leningrad Oblast government last week, Interfax reported Saturday.
Andrei Burlakov, a former state security serviceman, was appointed to head the position by a decree signed by Leningrad Oblast governor Valery Serdyukov. 
Vladimir Kirillov, who was formerly responsible for the cooperation with law enforcement, will be overseeing activity of youth and sports committees as well as the committee to cooperate with regional administrations of Leningrad Oblast. 

Teacher Shortage Falls
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The shortage of teachers in St. Petersburg schools has shrunk by a third compared to 2003 and today totals 885 people, Interfax reported Monday, quoting the city governor Valentina Matviyenko. 
The number of young teachers has increased, Matviyenko said. 
“A number of teachers with working experience up to 3 years has grown from 9 to 15 percent,” Interfax cited the governor as saying. 
One of the main problems for the local education system is teaching of young school students with bad behavior, Matviyenko said. 

Ring Section to Open
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A new part of the ring road around St. Petersburg is scheduled to open in the city Tuesday, Regnum reported Monday. 
The road will be opened by Governor Valentina Matviyenko and Igor Letvin, the transportation and communication minister, who will visit the city to inspect several projects, including the road to connect Pulkovo airport with the satellite town of Strelna and a new runway at the airport. 
The new section will connect the junctions of Moskovskoye Shosse and Oktyabrskaya Embankment.

TITLE: Ekho Moskvy Celebrates 15 Years of Free Speaking
AUTHOR: By Francesca Mereu and Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — As Ekho Moskvy radio turned 15 last week, the country’s most prominent independent-minded station was inundated with plaudits for its professionalism and dedication to freedom of speech from across the political spectrum.
“Ekho Moskvy fulfills the function of the only objective radio station that says what is really happening in the country,” said Oleg Panfilov, director of the Center for Extreme Journalism. “It’s difficult to find better journalists who report the news as promptly and without censorship.”
As well as being the country’s largest private news-based station, Ekho Moskvy was also the first to adopt a talk-radio format.
Although majority-owned by Gazprom-Media since 2001, the station remains one of the country’s last independent broadcast media, with its journalists retaining editorial independence through their blocking 34 percent stake in the company.
Sergei Korzun, one of the station’s founders and a former editor, said that the station grew out of perestroika-era frustrations at government restrictions shared by a group of young journalists at Gosteleradio.
“The idea was born in the late ’80s, when I was working at the French service of Gosteleradio. I would go to various countries and borrow their ideas,” said Korzun, who left Ekho Moskvy in 1996.
In the station’s first day on the air, Aug. 22, 1990, a two-hour news program included an interview with politician Sergei Stankevich and the Beatles hit “All My Loving.”
The station soon became a forum for open political debate, fielding on-air telephone calls from listeners and offering an alternative voice at a time when the airwaves were still dominated by state-owned stations.
“At first, our listeners were very cautious before speaking on air. Some would accuse us of encouraging them to speak freely. Some would say, ‘You’re recording what we say to give it to the KGB.’ This was the first reaction, but then people started to like it,” said Korzun, who is now Radio Liberty’s chief correspondent in Moscow.
During the bumpy transition from Soviet rule, Ekho Moskvy’s journalists distinguished themselves by free and professional reporting.
Ekho Moskvy was the first Russian radio station to report from the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, on Jan. 13, 1991, that Soviet troops had opened fire and tanks had run over protesters.
The station also broadcast extensively during the attempted coup of Aug. 19-21, 1991, when a dozen senior hard-line Communists, calling themselves the State Committee for a State of Emergency, or GKChP, attempted to seize power from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev by placing him under house arrest and sending hundreds of armored vehicles onto Moscow’s streets.
More recently, Ekho Moskvy was the only Russian radio station that questioned the authorities’ initial count of 354 hostages in last September’s Beslan school raid, Panfilov said. Editor Alexei Venediktov called the Education and Science Ministry and found out the possible number of students, and then estimated how many parents and guests there could be, Panfilov said. 
Ekho Moskvy then said that terrorists were holding more than 800 hostages, Panfilov said, an estimate a lot closer to the real total of about 1,300.
The station now combines strong news reporting with lighter informational fare. Analysts are invited to comment on current affairs shows such as “Osoboye Mneniye,” or “Individual Opinion,” while a variety of consumer and lifestyle programs offer everything from tips on car care to untangling grammatical complexities.
One of the station’s most high-profile functions, which makes it an indispensable source for Russia-watchers, is its live interviews with prominent political leaders, domestic and foreign.
For visiting dignitaries, a turn in the interview hot seat at Ekho Moskvy’s offices has become almost a required part of the Moscow itinerary. U.S. President Bill Clinton was quizzed by Venediktov in 2000 and German Chancellor Gerhard SchrÚder answered listeners’ questions live in 2001, while U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice showed her knowledge of Russian at the station inMay. 
The station has, on occasion, carried its commitment to freedom of speech further than even some of its staunchest supporters would wish.
Panfilov said he regretted that the station’s editors offered a platform to nationalist leaders such as the Liberal Democratic Party’s Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Rodina’s Dmitry Rogozin. These and other “quite odious figures” incited ethnic hatred, Panfilov said. 
Referring to speculation that some interviews with businesspeople on the station appeared to be advertisements, Panfilov said that staff told him that companies paid for such interviews, a practice he said he did not approve of but understood. Without such revenues, “it would be impossible for an independent radio station to survive,” Panfilov said.
Venediktov insisted, however, that commercial broadcasts always began and ended with a jingle or an announcement.
Speaking on his show “Direct Speech” on Aug. 21, Venediktov defended the station’s airing of diverse opinions. “We will continue to encourage the diverse opinions expressed by journalists and guest contributors on ‘Individual Opinion.’ I can tell you this for sure,” Venediktov told a caller. 
One pro-Kremlin commentator, Mikhail Leontyev, who often trashes the country’s liberal opposition on his show “Odnako,” or “However,” on Channel One state television, said he liked to make weekly appearances on “Individual Opinion,” where people from across the political spectrum share their thoughts on current affairs. “It’s the only well-established news talk radio at the moment, and we like it to talk,” he said. 
Leontyev said he was opposed to the station’s liberal stance, but said he respected its professionalism and openness to divergent views. Ekho Moskvy “is able to digest everything, including me, and still look good,” Leontyev said.
Leontyev also said that the station’s existence was something the Kremlin could point to if accused of stifling media freedoms. “Ekho Moskvy is proof of the authorities’ vegetarianism,” he said.
Ekho Moskvy, which broadcasts on 91.2, is the capital’s top FM news and current-affairs radio station, with 688,000 Muscovites — 7.3 percent of the city’s total radio audience — tuning in daily in July, according to the Comcon Media market research agency. 
In St. Petersburg, where the station has only a few hours a day of local broadcasting with the remainder being the program Muscovites receive, the same agency ranks Ekho Moskvy as the city’s No. 19 broadcaster with 4.5 percent of the city’s audience.
Gazprom-Media acquired the station in 2001 after seizing a packet of shares from oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky. In what was seen as a Kremlin-inspired bid to curb independent media, a court ruled that 25 percent of several Media-MOST outlets, including Ekho Moskvy, be handed to Gazprom in lieu of debts.
Liberal journalist Viktor Shenderovich, who used to host a satirical show on Gusinsky’s NTV television before the channel was taken over by Gazprom, said Ekho Moskvy was the only media outlet nowadays that would offer space to his shows.
“Journalists who haven’t found a place in other media are always given space on Ekho,” he said. “In another country, Ekho would be the best democratic radio, but in Russia it is the only democratic radio we have.” 
As part of its 15th anniversary celebrations, Ekho Moskvy will throw a party at the end of September for the guests of its shows, and a concert in October for its listeners and some of the people who influenced its spirit, such as Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, singer Andrei Makarevich and science-fiction writer Boris Strugatsky, Venediktov said.

TITLE: Jaguar Revs Up Russian Sales, Dealerships
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Just eight months after completing another year of slow sales, Jaguar may be the latest foreign brand to cash in on Russia’s love for international cars.
The number of official Jaguar dealerships in Russia has rapidly escalated, from three in 2004 to seven, while still more are waiting in line for official status.
In St. Petersburg alone, local media reported that three companies are applying to Jaguar Land Rover Russia for official status, to add to the existing two dealerships operating in the city. Should all the applicants get the nod, St. Petersburg will have more Jaguar car dealers than Paris and Berlin combined.
Jaguar Land Rover Russia said that between mid-March and mid-August, over 300 Jaguar models were sold in Russia, three times the brand’s total sales figure in 2004. Sergei Gurdzhian, marketing manager of Jaguar Land Rover Russia, expects that figure to reach 500 by the end of 2005.
“The market shows good potential,” Gurdzhian said Monday in a telephone interview from Moscow. Last year, 80,000 new foreign cars were sold in the country, nearly twice the number in 2003, according to Industry and Energy Ministry figures.
In 2004, Jaguar operated just two dealerships in Moscow and one in St. Petersburg. This year, two new centers received official status in Yekaterinburg, one in Novosibirsk, and recently another in St. Petersburg.
Local retailer Gregory’s Cars became the second St. Petersburg dealership recognized by the U.K.-based automaker, joining Neva Automotive Company on the city’s market.
Three more local companies — Eurosib, Autoprime and Arabika — are said to be looking to follow suit, business daily Delovoi Petersburg reported Monday.
Mikhail Sverdlov, spokesman for Eurosib, confirmed Monday that next year the company plans to open its Premium Automotive Group center to trade in Land Rover, Volvo and Jaguar brands. 
Eurosib has a licence to sell all the brands except Jaguar, for which the negotiations are in progress, Sverdlov said.
Industry experts note that the newly ignited interest in one of the U.K.’s oldest brands, has much to do with a 10 percent to 15 percent reduction in prices after Jaguar Land Rover Russia started directly importing the vehicles from Britain. Previously, Jaguars arrived in Russian showrooms through Finland.
“Recently Jaguar prices have become more realistic and competitive against closest rivals BMW and Mercedes,” said Maxim Skudar, head of Neva Automotive Company.
Skudar added that the carmaker’s Russian office has especially pushed to widen the sales distribution chain according to instructions from London headquarters.
However, the expansion may have gone too far, Skudar said, seeing the possibility of five city car dealers trading in Jaguar vehicles as unworkable.
“At the moment, one dealer for St. Petersburg is more than enough,” he said.
 “To get a dealership is one thing but to make it profitable is quite another. If proposed dealers were to quit the market soon after getting official dealership status, it might spoil the image of the car brand, just like Veho’s withdrawal raised doubts about Mercedes,” Skudar said.
For the moment, Jaguar Land Rover Russia’s Gurdzhian says the limit on the number of dealerships has not yet been decided, although it is most likely to be set at three.
Meanwhile, one of the city’s applicants said it plans to trade in Jaguars one way or another, whatever the decision. “We are in discussions with the official arm of Jaguar. However, if we don’t reach an agreement, we will work [with Jaguars] on the second-hand car market,” Andrei Golubkov, director of Arabika, told Delovoi Petersburg.
Jaguar Land Rover Russia plans to launch two new car models in Russia in the near future: the Daimler Super 8 in November and Jaguar XK in March.

TITLE: Putin Helps Gazprom Win in Italy
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin asked Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Monday to let gas giant Gazprom invest more heavily in Italy as it prepares to expand in Europe’s liberalizing gas markets. 
“It is in our interest that our companies, including Gazprom, are allowed to invest extra money in Italy’s energy sector, including in gas distribution network,” RIA Novosti news agency quoted Putin as saying.
Putin also said Italian firms were prepared to expand in Russia to catch up with German peers, such as E.ON’s Ruhrgas or BASF’s Wintershall, which already have a number of joint projects with Gazprom. 
Gazprom has been actively trying to get direct access to end-consumers in Europe after Putin criticized the monopoly for selling the gas to its major European partners at a third of retail prices.
Italy’s energy group ENI is Gazprom’s biggest single client, but the Russian firm is trying to clinch separate deals with other Italian energy firms. In July, it agreed with ENI that Gazprom would market independently more than 10 percent of its exports to Italy.
Gazprom started selling small volumes of gas to new clients such as energy group Enel, Edison and EGL.

TITLE: Fish Plant Aims to Make Eco-Friends
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Possibly the world’s most eco-friendly fish processing plant will start construction in the Leningrad Oblast this fall. A local company, Laplandia-Gatchina, will invest over 80 percent of the $12 million project budget into special ecological solutions that will accompany the Gatchina district factory, the oblast’s press service said Friday.
Industry specials, however, said it is impossible to construct a modern processing plant with the investment amount Laplandia-Gatchina will have left over after paying for the ecology works.
At a public hearing at the end of last week, Laplandia-Gatchina vowed to pour $10 million into water treatment facilities and waste recycling around the planned four-hectare production complex.
The processing plant, called Rybitsa, will accommodate an 8-ton refrigerator and several houses, which will be built by 2007. Fresh fish material will be delivered to the plant by railway and in trucks, to be processed into ready-made food such as fillet, steak, and minced products.
Laplandia-Gatchina plans to produce an assortment of 24 kinds of frozen food, which will be distributed through nearby trading outlets and canteens, oblast authorities said in a press statement. The company expects the plant to earn about 65 million rubles ($2.3 million) annually.
Some industry experts warned that the figures did not quite add up.
Musheg Mamikonyan, president of Russian Meat Union, considered Laplandia-Gatchina’s chosen location to be advantageous. Similar production complexes already operate along the route from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod.
However, Mamikonyan questioned the project’s “moderate” investment amount, saying that entry into the fish market costs much more than $12 million. 
“It’s impossible to spend only $2 million on technological equipment if we speak about modern large scale production process,” Mamikonyan said.
He suggested that the declared investment figures reflect only the first part of the project, as they did not seem to leave any resources for promotion of the plant’s products.
Yury Shcherbakov, vice-president of Parnas meat processing plant, said the investment set aside for ecological works may be reasonable, since the oblast runs a strict policy in this regard. What’s more, companies hoping to export to European Union countries face strict environmental protection requirements, “making protection concerns an up-to-date question.”
“It’s up to the investors to assess project profitability,” Shcherbakov said. He added, however, that few Russian companies would be able to absorb such “extra” costs.
Consumption of meat and fish in Russia has seen substantial growth in the last three years, with the trend expected to continue, according to Russian Meat Union figures.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Grain Forecasts Up
ST PETERSBURG (Reuters) — The Agriculture Ministry maintained on Monday its forecast for this year’s grain crop at 76-78 million tons, close to last year’s 78 million, although some analysts say the crop may be larger.
“We are not changing our [grain crop] forecast,” minister Alexei Gordeyev told a news briefing. 
Gordeyev said Russia might be able to export 8-10 million tons of grain in the current agricultural year, which started on July 1, compared to around 9 million tons in the previous 2004/05 season. 
Analysts said the actual volume of grain exports will depend on grain purchase interventions, which started Monday. The government has allocated 6.2 billion rubles ($217.9 million) this year to buy grain from domestic producers. 

CIT Adds Capital
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — CIT Finans, the country’s largest mutual fund manager, said Friday it will increase its base capital by 50 million rubles ($1.78 million), a 50 percent increase on the present amount.
The company, 100 percent owned by Web-Invest Bank, will register the increase through an ordinary share emission on Russian bourses, CIT Finans said in a statement. The company manages 13 mutual funds, the value of which top 6.5 billion rubles ($232 million).
“The increase in the base capital mirrors the growth of our business. The extra capital will go towards necessary investments and new markets,” said Vladimir Kirillov, head of CIT Finans.

Klimov Wins $17M Deal
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Klimov military hardware factory signed preliminary contracts to deliver 40 new engines worth $17 million to helicopter-making companies by the end of next year, the factory said Monday in a statement.
The deal, struck at this month’s MAKS international air show in Moscow, will lead to further cooperation with domestic aviation giant MiG, which uses the factory’s engines for its MiG 29 fighters, the company said.

TITLE: Pharma Firms Find Drugs Bill Not to Taste
AUTHOR: By Maria Levitov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — A controversial bill that the State Duma is set to pass after it reconvenes next month would prohibit doctors from prescribing specific, brand-name drugs.
Supporters of the measure, which passed a first reading in July, say that requiring doctors to use the international nonproprietary name, or INN, instead of a drug’s brand name would cut consumers’ pharmacy bills. If signed into law, this bill would give consumers greater freedom to choose from lower-priced generic drugs and their brand-name equivalents, the measure’s supporters say.
Most medicines in Russia are purchased by consumers themselves and are paid for out of pocket.
The measure’s opponents say that consumers’ savings would come at the expense of their health. They warn that shortfalls in doctors’ familiarity with INNs, as well as lax government controls over the quality of drugs, make the bill a potential health hazard.
“This piece of legislation affects everyone in this country because it deals with health care,” said Sergei Boboshko, executive director of the Association of International Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, or AIPM.
In addition to influencing consumers, the new bill also steps on the toes of producers of brand-name drugs. AIPM, whose member companies account for 80 percent of pharmaceuticals produced globally, staunchly opposes the measure.
“This is a very political issue, as it touches on financial interests. There is a lot of lobbying on both sides,” said Nina Sautenkova, a pharmaceuticals expert at the World Health Organization.
While Russia’s $6.35 billion pharmaceuticals market is small by international standards — global giant Pfizer spent $7.9 billion just on new drugs research last year —- it is expanding.
The market, 88 percent of which is dominated by generic drugs, is poised to reach $8.65 billion by the end of the year, according to Pharmexpert research.
However, generic drugs can be sold under many trademarks. For example, a painkiller with the INN diclofenac is sold under the brand name Voltaren and other trademarks.
If the new bill becomes law, sales of branded generics could drop by as much as 20 percent, Pharmexpert senior analyst David Melik-Guseynov said.
This would be a painful blow to foreign producers, which account for 78 percent of the country’s pharmaceuticals market by retail sales and produce about 85 percent of the country’s branded generics, according to Pharmexpert.
The law’s influence on consumers, however, is less straightforward.
“In theory, this is a good law for consumers,” the WHO’s Sautenkova said. The WHO promotes the use of generic names in prescriptions as a policy key to making medicines more affordable to consumers. In addition, consumers would be less confused by advertising.
Advertisements often market traditional medicines under a brand name, causing them to sound like innovative treatments, said Marat Mikhailov, sales director at Bryntsalov A, a local generic drugs manufacturer.
Pharmaceutical distribution companies would also have less influence over medical decisions, unless they turn to influencing the pharmacists instead of doctors, since pharmacists would now be advising consumers on the differences between comparable drugs.
“It is dangerous to give pharmacists greater authority in recommending one brand of medicine over another. They are less qualified to do so than doctors,” said Oleg Feldman, general director of Comcon Pharma, a research firm.

TITLE: Rosneftgaz Agrees On Record Loan Deal
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — State holding Rosneftegaz has agreed terms with its bankers on a record $7.5 billion syndicated loan, which its board should approve this week, Interfax reported Monday. 
Interfax’s report, based on an unnamed official, was confirmed by a second source familiar with negotiations on the biggest ever loan taken out by a Russian company. 
“The long and the short of it is that it appears to have moved forward and the banks are on board,” said the source, who requested anonymity, adding a final loan deal should be signed “shortly”.
The loan is a key element in a Kremlin plan to assert its authority over the energy sector by regaining direct control over gas monopoly Gazprom and boosting oil firm Rosneft with assets seized from fallen oil major Yukos.
The bridging loan will go to Rosneftegaz, the special purpose vehicle set up to finance the state buyback of a 10.7 percent stake in Gazprom, which will in turn pave the way for trade in Gazprom stock to be liberalized. 
Interfax reported the one-year loan would mature in December 2006. It would be used to pay down the outstanding balance on the $7.15 billion Gazprom share buyback after the government made a $570 million down payment in July.
Banks in the loan syndicate are Morgan Stanley, ABN Amro, JP Morgan Chase, Barclays, BNP Paribas and Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Interfax said. 
No official comment was available from the banks, or from the State Property Fund, Rosneft or the Economy Ministry. 
The loan will be priced at 1.55 percent over LIBOR, with banks taking a commission of 0.5 percent, and it will be secured “exclusively” on Rosneft shares, Interfax quoted the official as saying.
Media have reported that a 49 percent stake in Rosneft was being put up as collateral. The company plans an initial public offering of a minority stake in 2006, proceeds of which would be used to repay the loan.

TITLE: Actor Swaps Hollywood for Russian Tex-Mex Diner
AUTHOR: By Uilleam Blacker
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Few of Malibu Foods’ customers will be aware that the taco on the plate in front of them is not just your average, run-of-the-mill fast food snack.
The recipes are in fact based on genuine Mexican cooking, passed down for generations in the family of owner Adam Campos, who together with business partners Sergei Nikitin and Steve Wachtel, decided to bring a taste of Mexico to the plates of St. Petersburg earlier this year, when Malibu Foods opened on Vasilyevsky Island.
“Before I came out here I asked my grandmother: ‘Do you have a good recipes for beans, for rice?’ things like that. Most of the recipes come from her and from the part of Mexico where she was raised,” Campos said.
Although the recipes may have Mexican roots, the concept behind Malibu Foods is more complex. It draws much from the Tex-Mex fast food format that is found all over the U.S.
Sergei Nikitin, with whom the concept for the restaurant originated, was impressed by the way Mexican food was adapted for the fast food market in the U.S., where he studied together with Campos and Wachtel at U.C.L.A.
“In America these types of Tex-Mex restaurants are extremely popular,” Nikitin said. Which is why the decor of the place owes more to California cool than Mexican heat, with not a cactus in sight.
Currently, there are only five places serving Mexican food in St. Petersburg, but Nikitin says he is “confident it will soon be among the top five cuisines [in the city].” The business partners are already considering opening more branches.
A third part of the Malibu concept is the attempt to take that Californian version of Mexican food and transform it to cater for Russian dining tastes.
“It’s a little bit of a hybrid,” Campos said. “We wanted fast-food prices, but also a cafÎ feel. Eating out is a different experience here.  In America people are on the go, they don’t have time to sit down and enjoy a place. We realized that most Russians want a dining experience.”
To that experience, however, Campos aims to add American-style service with a smile.
“Service in Russia can be horrible.  One of the first things in our customer handbook is that the customer comes first, and I stress that you never argue with a customer,” Campos said.
“About 70 percent of our target audience have never tried this food before. They look at the menu and they don’t know what these things are. So if our staff don’t do their job people just walk out,” he said.
Service is not the only area in which Campos and his American partner have discovered cultural rifts between the U.S. and Russia. Doing business in Russia requires a specific approach, and it is not one that only the foreigners find problematic.
“Doing business in Russia can be frustrating, things operate more slowly, people are often not responsible, you have to deal with different permits and so on,” Nikitin said. “It can be just as frustrating for me as for my partners.”
That is not to say that Campos came to the Russian business environment unprepared. As a student, he worked in a bank in Mexico for six months, and to his surprise found that the Mexican and Russian ways of thinking were very similar.
“In America, business is results-oriented and time-sensitive. In Mexico things take a lot longer, there are many more formalities, and Russia in many ways is similar,” he said.
Wachtel does not, however, see the slower tempo as a major obstacle for the young entrepreneurs. “I definitely admire what Adam’s done with moving out here and setting up the business in Russia — it’s not the easiest thing to do. All the rules are different here,” Wachtel said.
Although Campos and Wachtel admit to being surprised at not encountering any particular problems with bureaucracy and corruption — as they had feared — they have found the Russian mindset a little difficult to understand.
“People are not as reliable,” Campos said. “I can’t tell you how many times we’ve hired people and at the last minute they just didn’t show up. It’s frustrating because you can’t plan. You never know who is going to be functional and responsible.”
What’s more, business in Russia is closely tied to politics, a factor that cannot but caution, Campos said. “This is a pretty high risk venture, and you can never be sure whether the economy is going to tank. Sometimes I wonder how safe it is here, how a lot of the political happenings will affect me or our business.”
In spite of how drastic the downfalls sound, Campos says he thoroughly enjoys the restaurant venture. And he has never been one to shirk challenges.
“Some people have a problem with no knowing what they want to do with their lives. My problem is the opposite — I want to do too many things,” he said. 
Campos’ resume tells a kaleidoscopic story. After graduation, Campos wanted to work in Los Angeles’ sensational movie industry.  Starting off as a production assistant, he went on to work in a talent agency, where his clientele included Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts, and the writers of Matrix and American Pie.
Next, Campos decided to take to the big screen himself. A role in hit hospital series E.R. and being unceremoniously cut from Tim Burton’s “Planet of the Apes” stick in his mind, although he admits to having lost track of exactly in which films he has appeared.
Campos’ next ventures, first a t-shirt business in Los Angeles, and now Malibu Foods, have diverted him away from the silver screen, although he has never left it completely.
As a sideline, Campos still pursues screenplay writing. One script has already been sold. The next project is an action flick based in St Petersburg. After all, whatever the risks of doing business in Russia, they are sure to make a good story.

TITLE: Aeroflot Looks West for Planes
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Aeroflot is negotiating a temporary lease of Western long-haul jets to make up for a shortfall in capacity after the Transportation Ministry grounded the country’s fleet of Ilyushin 96-300s for safety reasons last week.
“We are in talks with charter operators to lease a number of long-haul aircraft for the time that the Il-96s are grounded,” Aeroflot deputy general director Lev Koshlyakov said in a telephone interview. He declined to provide details.
Aeroflot, which flies six of the 13 Il-96s operated in Russia, had to make significant changes to its schedule after authorities grounded the plane on Monday because of problems with its braking system.
Aeroflot scrambled to use other airplanes, canceled its two weekly flights to Hanoi, reduced the frequency of service to Washington and delayed departures on Toronto-bound flights by one hour. 
Aeroflot has suspended flights to Hanoi until Sept. 5, either refunding the full fare or redirecting passengers to other airlines, Aeroflot spokeswoman Irina Dannenberg said.
Il-96s make up 40 percent of Aeroflot’s long-haul fleet.
Russia’s No. 4 airline, KrasAir, which flies two Il-96s and operates three more on behalf of Domodedovo Airlines, is considering filing a lawsuit against manufacturers for damages once it finishes tallying losses, said spokeswoman Olga Trapeznikova.
The companies had been deprived of jets in the peak season and KrasAir was using its entire fleet to be able to meet demand, she said.
The unprecedented grounding comes after technical problems forced President Vladimir Putin to switch from his Il-96 to a back-up Il-62 during a visit to Finland earlier this month.
The Transportation Ministry said last Monday that a faulty part in the jet’s braking system was reported in several incidents earlier this month. The defect arose because manufacturers did not adhere to the original design, the ministry said.
The Federal Industry Agency said on Tuesday that by the end of the week it would come up with a plan to fix the problem.
It is not clear when the aircraft will be back in service. Aeroflot has said that if the Il-96 is not returned to operation by year’s end, the airline is set to lose $30 million — roughly the price of a Russian-made Tupolev 204.
Both KrasAir and Aeroflot said that besides the problems in the braking system, other malfunctions have occurred in the aircraft’s operation.
“There are about 24 components —not critical for safety but that complicate the aircraft’s operation — that need to be fixed, and this list has not been reduced over the past three to four years,” Koshlyakov said.
“Aeroflot received this underdeveloped aircraft in 1993 and has invested $70 million of its own money [into improvements], which should have been done by the industry,” he added.
Il-96, the last big achievement of the Soviet aviation industry, was designed in 1979 and entered operation in 1993. The plane seats up 300 passengers and has a range of 11,000 kilometers.

TITLE: Irkut to Supply Components For New Airbus 350 Liners
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: ZHUKOVSKY, Moscow Region — Irkut Corp., the manufacturer of Sukhoi fighter jets, will supply components to Airbus for its new A350 passenger liner, the two companies said this month.
The lucrative contract was among a number of deals sealed at the Seventh Moscow Aviation and Space Show, MAKS 2005, including the first order for a Russian Regional Jet and an order by Jordan for two Ilyushin transport planes.
The preliminary agreement between the European aviation giant and Irkut puts the Russian aviation company in line to reap more than $3 billion over the 30-year life span of the new Airbus. 
“Russian industry enters the program on the basis of risk and revenue sharing,” Christian Scherer, senior vice president for transactions and control at Airbus, said at the signing ceremony.
The A350, Airbus’s answer to Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, is set to test fly in 2009 and go into mass production in 2010. 
Boeing, which is also active in Russia, reacted coolly to the deal.
“It is good news for Russia, but this project hasn’t even been launched yet,” said Sergei Kravchenko, president of Boeing in Russia. “For the 787, we’ve already cut metal — Russian metal.”
Boeing is also consulting Sukhoi’s civilian aircraft division on its new Russian Regional Jet, a family of short-and medium-range passenger planes set to enter the market in 2008.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Mobiles Change Tack
MOSCOW (SPT) — Russia’s largest mobile phone retailer, Euroset, plans to start directly importing phones before the end of 2005, company spokes-woman Tatyana Guliayeva said Thursday.
Its decision to cut out intermediaries soon after authorities made several raids on two major electronics smuggling rings, causing panic on the country’s $4 billion mobile phone market. Cell phone prices have risen sharply since authorities made the haul, experts say.
Euroset Logistik, currently in charge of logistics for more than 1,800 Euroset stores in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, is set to import about 1 million cell phones monthly, Guliayeva said. “This [volume] will fulfill our own demand,” she said, “but we may also start selling phones to other retailers if they show interest.”
Around 5 percent of phones brought into Russia enter illegally. Last year, some 1.4 million cell phones were smuggled into the country, out of 25.7 million total imports, according to Mobile Research Group’s estimates.

MeatLand Eyes Logistics
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — MeatLand Logistics & Distribution will focus more of its business on logistics and increase sales volumes by 25 percent this year, the firm said in a statement.
MeatLand controls about 18 percent of St. Petersburg’s retail meat market. Last year the company’s distribution volume reached 60,000 tons, with turnover hitting $160 million.
“Today’s market dictates that quality distribution processes cannot work without a strong logistics operation,” the company said in a statement.

TITLE: State to Hike Up Oil Export Duty 25 Percent
AUTHOR: By Dmitry Zhdannikov
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: Russia will raise oil export duty by a quarter in October following a rise in global prices, further boosting its ability to repay foreign debt but tilting the economics of exports in favor of refined products.
Record high export duties in recent months have prompted Russian firms to limit crude exports and refine more oil to sell gasoline at home and export more products, as they are subject to lower duties. 
Alexander Sakovich, the Finance Ministry official in charge of monitoring prices and setting duties, said Monday sharp rises in duties had changed the oil export picture, but told oil firms to refrain from complaining about a squeeze on profits.
“All recent spikes in export duties have taken place in a rising market. Despite record duties oil firms have been earning at least $100 on each ton,” he said.
Russian crude and refined products export duties are changed every two months based on fluctuations of Russia’s mainstay crude brand Urals Export Blend. Duties get steeper the higher are Urals prices.
Sakovich said the new crude oil export duty will hit a record of $179 per ton and come into force from Oct. 1. The current crude oil export duty is $140 per ton.
The duty on refined products will be set at $133 per ton for light products, such as gas oil and gasoline, compared to the current $106.6. Heavy products such as fuel oil will be subject to a duty of $71.6 per ton compared to the current $57.4.
The refined products duties will come into force at the end of October, but Sakovich said officials may meet on Sept. 9 to discuss a plan to further cut duties on fuel oil and raise levies on lighter products.
Oil firms have been boosting refining and cutting crude exports since the end of the first quarter of 2005 and traders said on Monday the new duty will only strengthen the trend.
“Even [pipeline monopoly] Transneft’s export capacities are currently under-used. If someone told me about it a couple of years ago I would say it is a foolish thought,” said a trader with a Russian major.
Russia has used alternative export routes, such as rail and river, to bypass crowded pipelines in recent years and the number of big and small ports specializing in crude shipments to global markets has tripled to over 30.
But as those routes become less and less profitable for crude exports most traders are switching to products shipments.
Russia’s No.1 oil firm LUKoil has said it will stop exporting crude oil from its Baltic Sea port of Vysotsk, built mainly for crude exports, and instead increase shipments of gas oil and possibly fuel oil.
Leading Russian shipper, Novoship, said last week river-borne exports have fallen six-fold this year, badly hitting its operations.
A key factor in helping the oil firms to transform export logistics and boost runs is the rise in domestic gasoline prices, pushed by booming demand for modern cars amid rising personal income.
Revenues from oil exports at prices above $27 per barrel do not go to the state budget but can be channeled only to the so-called stabilization fund and be used to repay state debt.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: CNPC All Smiles
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — China National Petroleum Corp. received congratulatory messages from senior Kazakhstan officials for its plan to buy PetroKazakhstan, signaling eventual completion of the deal, the Asian Wall Street Journal said.
Congratulatory messages were offered by the officials, who are “of the rank of minister and higher,” the report said, citing a CNPC spokesman it didn’t identify. Government approval of the Chinese offer would dim the chances of a bid backed by India’s Oil & Natural Gas Corp., the newspaper said.
Any formal endorsement from the Kazakhstan government may end the Indian oil producer’s pursuit of PetroKazakhstan, the report said, citing an Oil & Natural Gas spokesman it didn’t identify
.
Belarus Delays Ruble
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Belarus will delay the introduction of the Russian ruble as its currency, the former Soviet state’s central bank said, Interfax reported.
Belarus can’t meet the Jan. 1 date for the introduction because of technical reasons, central bank Chairman Pyotr Prokopovich said at a conference in Minsk on Monday.
The delay is at least the second since the two countries agreed to the undertaking. The Russian ruble was initially planned for Jan. 1, 2005, the news agency said.

Alrosa Diamond Quota
MOSCOW (Prime-Tass) — Alrosa-Nyurba, a subsidiary of uncut diamond monopoly Alrosa, has received its own quota for diamond exports for this year, Kommersant business daily reported Monday, citing sources with the Finance Ministry and Alrosa. 
The source in the ministry told Kommersant that last week the government approved the draft ruling on diamond export quotas for Alrosa-Nyurba. A total of five drafts of the ruling had been consequentially submitted to the government. 
The first time the draft was submitted to the government in September 2004 with the following year’s quotas set in December. However, each time the drafts have been blocked by the Kremlin, or the president administration, and its legal department, Kommersant said. 

Novolipetsk Priced
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) —Novolipetsk Iron and Steel Corp. and AK Steel Corp. of the U.S. will sell electrical steel in the European Union at higher prices to avoid tariffs that protect Germany’s ThyssenKrupp from cheaper imports.
The EU on Aug. 19 decided to impose five-year “anti- dumping” duties of up to 37.8 percent on silicon-electrical steel — used by power-transformer makers such as France’s Areva — from the U.S. and Russia. AK Steel faced a 31.5 percent duty and Novolipetsk, an 11.5 percent levy.
The two companies will now be exempted because they “offered to sell the product concerned at or above price levels that eliminate the injurious effect of dumping,” the European Commission said.

Ufaley Nickel Output
MOSCOW (Reuters) — Ufaleynickel plant produced 2,450 tons of nickel in the second quarter of this year, up from 1,636 tons in the first and from just 470 tons in April-June 2004, the plant said on Monday.
Its cobalt output was 591.7 tons in the second quarter, compared to 573 tons in the first quarter and 555.6 tons in the second quarter of 2004, Ufaleynickel said in its quarterly report.
Ufaleynickel, in the Ural Mountains, is Russia’s No.3 nickel producer and No.2 cobalt producer. It halted nickel output twice last year due to high coking coal prices — for about a week in March and from May to August.

Apatit Posts Loss 
MOSCOW (Prime-Tass) — Leading producer of apatite concentrate Apatit posted a 3.007 billion ruble ($105.7 million) uncovered loss in January to June after a net profit of 795.814 million rubles ($28.4 million) in the same period last year, the company said in its financial report Monday. 
The figures were calculated under Russian Accounting Standards. The loss was due to the payment of back taxes in the second quarter.
In April-June the company’s uncovered loss was at 3.965 billion rubles after a net profit of 958.09 million rubles in January-March. 

AFK Sistema Dividends 
MOSCOW (Prime-Tass) — Holding AFK Sistema has paid 245.75 million rubles ($8.64 million) out of 250.9 million rubles slated for 2004 dividends, the company said in a report Monday. The dividend payments are at 26 rubles ($0.9) per common share. 
AFK Sistema paid out 18.5 rubles per share in dividends for 2003, for a total of 149.85 million rubles. 
AFK Sistema’s net profit fell to 50.86 billion rubles ($1.79 billion) in 2004 from 67.62 billion rubles in 2003, as calculated under Russian Accounting Standards.
AFK Sistema’s major shareholders are Russian billionaire Vladimir Yevtushenkov, with a 63.127% stake, and Deutsche Bank, which nominally holds an 18.98 percent stake.

TITLE: Of Cosmic Pork and Military Chic
AUTHOR: By Georgy Bovt
TEXT: State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov has apparently been spending a lot of time recently with former Federation Council Senator Valery Goreglyad, either as part of a small group or one on one. But don’t get the wrong idea. The men are meeting to discuss professional matters, though naturally they can’t help but have friendly feelings toward one another. 
The Duma speaker realized only recently just how important the process of putting together the federal budget is, and Goreglyad happens to be an auditor at the Audit Chamber. Gryzlov, as a fairly experienced politician, has a skeptical attitude toward the budget-writing and analytical skills of the current Duma majority, the pro-government United Russia party. Because of this, he is naturally disinclined to turn to his fellow deputies when in need of some expert advice. They are fully capable of voting obediently on command, even when it makes little sense, but they aren’t required to think. They have never developed this particular skill. Thus, Goreglyad, as someone who is a capable thinker by current standards, is acting as Gryzlov’s tutor on budget issues.
So, what exactly are these two dignified gentlemen discussing, these statesmen who, by the will of the president, have wound up in posts requiring them to solve complicated economic problems of the kind they never learned to address professionally?
People say that the main topic of their intimate talks is how to spend the money currently in the stabilization fund. This fund, where the proceeds from oil exports above a certain price land, has long exceeded the “untouchable” level. Above this level, by law, the fund can be spent with legislative approval on whatever the government deems necessary. This is why the Duma speaker is so caught up in the issue. But no one seems to know exactly what to spend the money on.
The stabilization fund seems to give the Russian political establishment a funny feeling.
The feeling is that Russia — in contrast to, say, Norway, which also has a state fund thanks to high oil profits — needs to start spending its money as fast as it can, not to save it for future generations. At least, this is what most of the political elite seems to think. The leftists among them are increasingly insistent that the money go toward raising the salaries of employees on the state payroll, pensions and economic assistance for those in need. Another group within the elite, which includes a significant portion of United Russia, says that the “extra money” should go toward some big infrastructure project like building roads. 
But there is only one group speaking stubbornly, bravely and pragmatically against both of these points of view: the Finance Ministry, headed by Alexei Kudrin. Kudrin has firmly stated that injecting such a huge amount of money into the Russian economy could fire inflation, first of all, and that, second of all, this money would not do all that much good because most of it would be stolen. In response to the next logical question, “And what if we tried to monitor the process so that it wouldn’t be stolen?” the inevitable answer is that this is completely impossible in Russia today. This is easy to believe, of course. There is nothing in practice contradicting this conclusion. We all know that the money would disappear. 
Kudrin would prefer to use the stabilization fund to pay off Russia’s sovereign foreign debt little by little. If you settle things with the Paris Club, for example, no one will steal the money and inflation won’t rise.
Meanwhile, in the course of their conversations, Gryzlov and his tutor Goreglyad have examined a third possibility, potentially the most powerful direction in Russian political thought about what to do with the stabilization fund. 
They say that as they were talking, they came up with an idea which, according to several sources inside the Duma, originally belonged to Gryzlov. The idea is to set up a global satellite surveillance system. In its own strange way, the idea is fashionable: It’s an answer to the United States and its Star Wars program; it has some vague tie to fighting terrorism; and it coincides with the dominant government line at the moment and its desire to control everyone and everything. Gryzlov and Goreglyad basically want to launch the stabilization fund into outer space, far from any spending oversight.
The second possible way to spend the money that Gryzlov and Goreglyad have discussed is related to the first — providing generous financing to the defense industry to build new weapons systems, new missiles and a fifth generation of fighter jets. 
All this resonates with the brave image of President Vladimir Putin decked out in some kind of military uniform as he flashed across our television screens recently. One minute, he was flying a Tu-160 strategic bomber and personally launching a cruise missile at some abandoned house of culture in some abandoned village. The next, he was leading the large-scale war games of the Northern Fleet dressed in a sailor suit. And then, there he was again, this time commenting on the Cabinet while wearing a flight helmet.
Compared to this version of Putin, pallid Kudrin, who keeps harping on how improper it would be to start pouring money into the economy without adequate means to make sure it’s being spent efficiently, looks ridiculous. 
The Russian political elite is increasingly obsessed with military chic, it seems, which explains the calls to spend the stabilization fund on defense. Military chic makes sense to the elite. In the minds of the current ruling class, it’s patriotic. It symbolizes strength. 
The first day of school, Sept. 1, also called the Day of Knowledge, is fast approaching. On this day, it would be good to remember that education should be a priority for state spending, and not the defense budget. The armed forces’ budget will receive yet another hike of 20 percent next year. This increase has practically become a tradition in recent years. Education, however, is a lot less interesting for the current leadership. This is why we are unlikely to see any major increase in state spending for education, or even a single high-ranking official going to a class of first- or second-graders and actually teaching them something — and no, just dropping by for an official ceremonial visit doesn’t count. 
Not even for the president, though he would gladly don a helmet to appeal to school kids and voters.

Georgy Bovt is editor of Profil.

TITLE: Russia Needs More Than One Plane to Fly Proud
AUTHOR: By Maria Golovnina
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: Russia’s once-mighty civil aviation industry is starting to recover from a post-Soviet slump with the planned launch of the Russian Regional Jet. But it will take more than one new plane to transform its fortunes.
The Russian Regional Jet (RRJ) is the biggest venture in domestic aviation and lies at the centre of President Vladimir Putin’s ambition to breathe new life into the moribund industry.
“It’s too early to talk about full recovery ... The RRJ won’t be launched until 2008-2009. After that another 10 years will pass before we see anything new on the Russian market. So we are talking about the very, very distant future,” said Yelena Sakhnova, an aviation analyst at United Financial Group.
“But it’s important to get started. And the RRJ has a good chance to become a competitive plane and enter global markets.”
The project got a boost last week during Moscow’s MAKS airshow when airlines signed up to buy the short-haul planes and global aerospace majors praised its design.
Aviation experts say the challenge for Russia is technology still haunted by a post-Soviet image and funding problems as it looks to take on global heavyweights like Boeing and Airbus.
Putin is trying to revitalize Russia’s aerospace industry by uniting all big players — from MiG to Ilyushin — into a single holding company and making it cooperate more closely with foreign majors.
The success of this year’s Moscow air show, which attracted a record number of visitors and yielded up to $4 billion in contracts, has shown that the once-secretive industry is slowly beginning to open up.
The decision by Alenia Aeronautica, part of Italian aerospace company Finmeccanica, to buy up to 25 percent of the Sukhoi-led RRJ venture gave the project global recognition.
Also at the airshow, the announcement by EADS that it would buy 10 percent of Russian aerospace company Irkut highlighted its interest in grabbing a slice of Unified Aircraft Corp., which is to be set up over coming years.
On top of that, Alenia and another Finmeccanica company plan to broaden ties with Irkut and Yakovlev to jointly develop new Yak-130 models.
FROM FIGHTERS TO AIRLINERS
Sukhoi makes Russia’s flagship SU fighter jets and is one of the country’s top arms exporters. Its financial recovery in the 1990s boosted Russia’s position on the world defence market.
Now it sees marketing RRJs as a way to diversify and become strong in both civil and military aircraft markets.
The RRJ family, being developed with Franco-Russian engines, comprises the 98-seat RRJ 95, which will be the first version launched, followed by the 78-seat RRJ 75.
A source in Sukhoi’s civil aircraft division said the firm was preparing to sell flag carrier Aeroflot up to 30 RRJs. Analysts had expected Aeroflot to buy at least 50.
“They want to buy 30 aircraft at this stage. ... The decision will be announced very soon,” said the source, adding Aeroflot might buy more planes in the future.
Separately, Sukhoi will sell a domestic leasing company 10 RRJs for $262 million in 2008 and 2009 and may sign a similar deal with it to sell another 10 aircraft in the coming weeks.
Sukhoi’s senior sales official, Anatoly Mezhevov, said on the sidelines of the air show that the company was also in talks with at least one major Western airline to sell RRJs.
“These early-days contracts are very positive for Sukhoi, especially given that they haven’t actually started producing the planes,” said Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Centre for Strategic and Technological Analysis.
“We are finally beginning to see real money pouring into the project... If RRJ goes ahead and becomes a success story, then I am sure many other similar projects would follow,” he said.
Still, some analysts have criticized Sukhoi for not being aggressive enough and clinching more binding RRJ deals.
“But that’s understandable. Airlines need solid guarantees about production timings. They need the airplane now, not in 2008,” UFG’s Sakhnova said.
RRJ’s main rivals on the global market are planes manufactured by Bombardier Inc. and Embraer. Sukhoi has been developing the plane with advice from Boeing.
Analysts said Boeing, which has not invested directly in the project, held an important key to RRJ’s future.
“Its intentions are unclear,” Sakhnova said. “Boeing insists that it’s part of the project. But what they are really saying here is that ‘you won’t see any money from us before you start receiving solid orders’.”

TITLE: Climbing Out From Under Corruption
AUTHOR: By Vlad Ivanenko
TEXT: Russia’s chairmanship of the next meeting of the Group of Eight in St. Petersburg raises a rather awkward dilemma. While this prestigious position requires Russia to show global leadership, many observers wonder how Russia can deliver on its global promises if the quality of its domestic institutions is closer to the standards of states that survive on foreign aid rather than its G8 peers. Indeed, some evidence suggests that Russia is behind competitors China, India and Brazil — countries that the G8 is expected to consider granting membership to in the next round. How serious, then, is the Russian claim to G8 leadership?
This situation offers an excellent opportunity to review Russian progress toward developing a decent system of public governance. True, Russia inherited a system that was extremely inflexible and unreceptive to public concerns. However, more than a decade of transition has given the country ample time to improve one of the system’s worst aspects, corruption.
Recent debate surrounding the infrastructure fund is a case in point. Most Russians agree that the state should start rebuilding decaying roads and ports and investing in health care and science. 
Yet, many express doubt that the state is up to the task. The reason is simple: They believe that allocated money will be siphoned off by corrupt politicians and bureaucrats. 
Such expectations are well-founded. Russia ranks a miserable 85th among 104 countries in government favoritism in procurement, according to the Global Competitiveness Report. Clearly, it has some room for improvement to catch up with G8 outsiders such as Brazil (47). 
Other international observers back up the report’s findings. For example, Transparency International, which monitors corruption worldwide, ranks Russia 95th among 146 countries. However, the validity of this result is questionable. The study combines the results of 15 incompatible reports that use various definitions of corruption and cover various countries.
Recently, Georgy Satarov, the president of Indem, an anti-corruption think tank, presented more detailed and provocative numbers on the incidence of corruption. It estimated that the aggregate market for business corruption amounted to a staggering $316 billion. Given that the average nominal wage of a public servant is 6,000 rubles ($210) per month and that there are 1.2 million bureaucrats, the Indem results suggest that official salaries account for a mere 1 percent of the total income that civil servants receive. Moreover, the report implies that more than 1.3 million out of the 1.9 million operating enterprises listed in the state registry have turned to corrupt state officials. If this is true, the integrity of the public sector in Russia is indeed in critical condition.
Indem does not provide data to verify its findings in more detail, but there are some inconsistencies. Most Russian companies simply do not generate enough income to pay $240,000 each in bribes annually. For example, the average revenue of a trading company is $150,000 per year. 
Apparently, Indem found that the largest enterprises pay — or pretend to pay — huge amounts of money for undisclosed services, whereas small firms report making occasional petty payments for minor misdemeanors.
This conclusion makes sense. The study reports that corruption has shifted toward large enterprises. While they prefer not to disclose what they pay for, the dynamics of their responses is telling. Officials at tax and customs agencies are depicted by big business as the main beneficiaries of increased “donations” to state officials. 
The shift is clearly good news. A greater concentration in bribery could make it easier to identify corrupt officials and to bring them to justice — if, of course, the political will exists.
Indem noted a number of other encouraging developments. It found that respondents are taking a firmer stance against bribes. The number of people who refuse to bribe is on the rise. Importantly, a more robust public engagement reveals a divide among public servants. The total number of bureaucrats who consider bribes to be a “legitimate” source of income has decreased. 
The untapped potential of mounting social pressure as an anti-corruption measure is significant. Three-quarters of people who pay bribes do so without being prompted. 
Some of them, perhaps the more affluent, appear to circumvent the law deliberately — avoiding the military draft tops the list of civil corruption — but many others may simply have a poor understanding of bureaucratic procedures. In these cases, greater transparency of public regulations would be a cost-effective method to combat petty bribes.
The problem of commercial corruption is different, with people essentially knowing who pays whom. 
However, as long as the governing elite remains fractious on both national and regional levels, evidence of corrupt activities will remain a secret weapon to be used against potential friends turned enemies and not facts that should be disclosed to the media or prosecutors. 
The last consideration suggests that President Vladimir Putin’s administration may have a point in insisting that power, and therefore the political elite, be centralized. 
However, measures to improve public oversight over the executive branch should complement this authoritarian push if centralization is to succeed. After all, commercial corruption is predominantly concentrated in the executive branch, and its officials are unlikely to abandon this practice without additional prodding.
Public fraud is a challenge that Russia should address if it wants to assert its status as a G8 power. Public demand for anti-corruption measures is growing. Many voters who longed for stability — the main achievement of the Putin administration — expect the state to play an active role in public investment, combating poverty and providing social support. To do this and to improve Russia’s international standing, Putin and whoever succeeds him must tackle the unenviable task of restoring the integrity of the Russian public sector.

Vlad Ivanenko is a visiting researcher at the Bank of Finland Institute for Economies in Transition. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.

TITLE: Dacha Lovers More Boon Than Burden
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Gryaznevich
TEXT: From 1.5 million to 2 million St. Petersburgers drive out to their dachas in the Leningrad Oblast every summer. The oblast government seems to think that these holidaymakers are merely a headache because of the huge amount of trash they produce and their demand for medical and other services.
However, all these grizzles fade in the light of the huge advantages that the streams of St. Petersburgers bring to the oblast. The city dwellers who travel regularly to the oblast bring their money with them and this by itself is a huge cash input in the oblast economy. 
St. Petersburgers’ disposable income is roughly twice that of permanent residents of the oblast. From May to October they are virtually permanent residents in the oblast during which time they spend much more than the locals on consumer goods. In many places there are twice as many of them as locals and in some settlements 10 times as many.
It is important to note that the demands on the oblast’s social systems by St. Petersburgers are relatively small — they don’t need jobs, schools or kindergartens. They rarely use public transportation and if they get sick they seek treatment in St. Petersburg. They receive practically no social subsidies or need any communal services. In this way, despite the concerns of the oblast’s bureaucrats, the demands of the city dwellers on the oblast’s social services are much less than those of locals. But they leave much more money than do the locals.
We also need to consider another category of city dwellers — well-off people who want to relax and entertain themselves on the weekend and sometimes for longer. They live in hotels in the oblast and visit restaurants. In winter they visit ski resorts and behave like ordinary tourists. However, their numbers are much greater than those of traditional tourists and they visit the hinterland around St. Petersburg regularly. It’s rather easy to do — they just get in their cars and in half an hour they are already in a green area.
Practically all the money that the city dwellers spend goes to small and medium-sized businesses, which receive a powerful stimulus to develop. Thanks to this, the Leningrad Oblast (together with the Moscow region) has a unique chance to become one of the first Russian administrative regions to have a decent gross regional product and budget based, as in developed countries, on the contributions of small and medium-sized businesses.
Many analysts say that this unique opportunity is not being seized in full. The municipal governments in the oblast regard St. Petersburgers as cash cows that can be milked to resolve the region’s infrastructure problems. For instance, in Sosnovo in the Priozersky district the water supply is being renewed. Old rusty steel pipes are being replaced with plastic ones. However, the links to individual houses must be paid for by the house owners. That might not be so bad except that the reach of the main artery of the water supply — which is paid for by the municipal budget — is being shrunk, making the distance as far as the homes grow considerably. In addition, the price that St. Petersburgers have to pay for the works is twice what locals pay. The authorities say: “You are rich, so you should pay. Some of our citizens cannot pay, even the low prices we put before them, so that in the end we have to pay for swapping of their pipes from the budget.” Thus the city dwellers pay for themselves and “the other fellow,” which leaves a bad taste.
And yet, instead of running what amounts to a government racketeering scheme, the Leningrad Oblast government could reap a lot more from St. Petersburg by offering them more goods and services at normal prices. To do so would require developing those sectors that are extremely underdeveloped — set up conditions so that St. Petersburgers would not need to bring their own groceries, building materials, fertilizers and so on from the city. Make those goods available in the oblast.
Hundreds of thousands of St. Petersburgers regularly leave the city to swim in the lakes, but the number of well-equipped beaches can be counted on the fingers of one hand. And the beach business could really bring the oblast large amounts of money, as could the hotel business. According to the Finnish Tourist Industry Association, the oblast’s hotels have a potential revenue of $300 million a year, yet at the moment do not earn a third of this sum. The oblast government recognizes that the recreational infrastructure could be much better and that the demand for it is not being met.
More effort by the oblast government in all these sectors could have no less an effect on its development than lusting after industrial investments. And maybe it would have a greater effect. 

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: The Fire Sermon
AUTHOR: By Chris Floyd
TEXT: In his inaugural speech last January, President George W. Bush repeatedly invoked images of unbridled, ravaging destruction as the emblem of his crusade for “freedom.” Fire was his symbol, his word of power, his incantation of holy war. Mirroring the rhetoric of his fundamentalist enemies, Bush moved the conflict from the political to the spiritual, from the outer world to the inner soul, claiming that he had lit “a fire in the minds of men.”
But words are recalcitrant things; they have their own magic, and they will often find their own meanings, outside the intentions of those who use them. Bush has indeed inflamed the minds of men — and women — with his military crusade. But it is not the “untamed fire of freedom” that scorches them: It is the fire of grief and outrage at the lies that have consumed the bodies of their loved ones. This bitter flame burns in the rubble of blasted houses in Iraq and in the quiet, leafy suburbs of America, where the dead are mourned and the mutilated are left as the enduring legacy of Bush’s cruel, wilful and unnecessary war.
This “fire in the mind” has now found its own symbol in the unlikely figure of Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a slain American soldier. Here again, Bush’s war-rousing words have gotten away from him. Sheehan’s campaign — which began as a lonely vigil outside Bush’s vacation ranch and has now spread across the country — centers on a single, simple request: that Bush explain to her what he means when he describes the war as “a noble cause.” 
Sheehan is no professional activist, no savvy insider or political junkie. She’s an ordinary citizen whose unadorned speech has none of the sweep and grandeur of Bush’s expensively tailored rhetoric. But she has one thing that his professional scripters can never put in the presidential mouth: truth. 
They must labor in the service of a lie, but Sheehan has read the Downing Street memos, the Duelfer WMD report, the September 2000 manifesto of a group led by Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld calling for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the top-level revelations by Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill, Seymour Hersh and many others. She knows the mountain of freely available, credible evidence that shows unequivocally that Bush and his minions sought this war of aggression from their first day in power; that they openly longed for “a new Pearl Harbor” to use as justification for their plans; that they deliberately manipulated, “stove-piped” and fabricated intelligence to concoct a false case for war; that they used UN diplomacy as a cynical sham to mask their military intentions and then invaded before the weapons inspection process, which they themselves had insisted upon, was even halfway complete.
Every housewife and truck driver, every Wal-Mart clerk and office worker in the United States has access to this information, these established facts. The death of her son drove Sheehan to throw off the torpor that has afflicted so many of her compatriots for so many years and look reality in the face. There she has seen Iraqi civilians and American soldiers being shredded, gutted and burned alive by the fire of Bush’s death-dealing lies. As New York Times columnist Frank Rich notes, she and other war survivors have watched Bush turn the search for WMD — the ostensible reason for the sacrifice of their children — into a comedy routine, a filmed skit for sycophantic journalists, showing the president of the United States goofily searching under desks and behind curtains, then shrugging with a dullard’s grin: “No weapons here!” 
Bush’s audience, the highly paid cream of the national media, roared with laughter at the Leader’s barbaric wit. Now these same blind guides are struggling to comprehend the fire of dissent that Cindy Sheehan has lit with her vigil in the Crawford scrublands. Many of them have mocked and vilified her, trumpeting the lies that the Bush machine began pumping out like bilgewater the moment her campaign found resonance with the wider public. Others have dismissed it as a flash in the pan, a copy-filler for the August doldrums, a minor blip soon to be swept away by the president’s proven mastery of the national agenda.
Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps this too shall pass, just as every other scandal and tourbillion that has momentarily shaken the Bush regime — from Enron to Abu Ghraib and beyond — has fallen by the wayside. It’s true that the polls show that Bush is now deeply unpopular, mistrusted by more than half the electorate, who say, as Sheehan says, that he misled the nation into a pointless war. But by hook and crook, with fear and lies, he and his faction have gathered all the reins of power into their hands. With a complaisant media, a feckless opposition, unprecedented control over the nation’s electoral machinery — and the full backing of the corporate oligarchy they have enriched beyond all measuring — the Bush elitists are not much concerned with the “consent of the governed” anymore. They will wade on through the swamp of blood they have created, generating more terrorism, sacrificing more sons and daughters, engendering more hatred, anguish and death.
But what if the form that Sheehan has somehow given to the nation’s growing sense of betrayal does not simply fade at summer’s end? What if that spark takes hold in the Texas scrub and sets off “an untamed fire of freedom” from the murderous lies that have led America into crime and disgrace? We might yet see Bush undone by his own incantation — and truth become the new word of power.

For annotational references, see Opinion at www.sptimesrussia.com

TITLE: A Cottage Industry
AUTHOR: By David Holley
PUBLISHER: The Los Angeles Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — It wasn’t an easy way to find a nice spot for a country home, but it worked.
During the Nazi assault on Moscow, three Soviet airmen were shot down 40 kilometers north of the city. After parachuting to safety, they hiked out through a riverside forest of birch, pine and fir and rejoined the fight.
At war’s end, the men were invited to a victory celebration with Josef Stalin, who asked them, “Guys, what do you want?” according to economist Gennady Lisichkin, who first heard the story a quarter of a century ago. “They said that in 1941 they were shot down and fell here,” Lisichkin continued. “They said, ‘If you could allow us, we’d like to build our summer dachas there.’ So Stalin issued an order, and many famous pilots built dachas here.”
Thus was born the Test Pilot compound, where Lisichkin has had a summer home for 25 years — scored through his father-in-law, a well-connected pilot — and counts five ex-cosmonauts as neighbors.
In Stalin’s time, as in the time of the 18th-century tsars when the tradition began, the dacha was a privilege granted to the elite, a reward for loyalty and service. In fact, the name was derived from dat, the Russian verb “to give.” Later, ordinary Russians got a piece of the action, building dachas of their own.
Today, the beloved retreats are more sought after than ever by city folk across Russia. For many urban dwellers, they’re the key to a treasured rural way of life reflecting the true Russian soul.
For others, old-timers mutter darkly, they’re status symbols that have more to do with the high life than the simple life, as evidenced by the surging construction of dachas around this booming capital, with its rapidly growing middle class and wealthy upper crust.
The classic dacha, kept in the family for generations, was a place to escape the city’s summer heat, to hunt mushrooms in the forest, to enjoy family life and to socialize with neighboring dachniki across picket fences or along dirt roads. Those on tight budgets grew large quantities of potatoes, onions and cucumbers and also canned pickles, jam and fruit for the long winter ahead.
A dacha can be a rough-hewn log cabin. It can resemble a peasant’s home, displaying intricately carved decorative motifs from village architecture. It can be little more than a shack made of wood or brick leftovers from construction sites. Leaders such as Stalin or Nikita Khrushchev used spacious dachas, typically built of wood, that boasted elegance inside but still showed some respect for rustic traditions.
These days, some so-called New Russians build palatial three-story dachas surrounded by high brick walls with corner watchtowers, more medieval fortress than cozy cabin.
The ostentatiously rich are decidedly unpopular with old-timers.
“Nobody knows who they are. There’s nothing to talk about with them,” Lisichkin said dismissively of a family that built a fancy brick mansion on a lot it bought in the Test Pilot compound.
A luxury dacha even plays the starring role in the biggest political drama this summer: Prosecutors have accused former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, a potential opposition presidential candidate, of illegally privatizing a heavily wooded lakefront villa that was once government property.
Prosecutors deny any political motivation, but critics say authorities decided to go after Kasyanov to ensure that he would not enter the 2008 race.
Another drama also has made headlines in these peak-of-summer days as authorities engage in high-profile confrontations with dozens of dacha owners to enforce court rulings against alleged illegal construction in nature protection zones. 
From his vantage point as a renter in Peredelkino, a Soviet-era dacha compound for writers nestled in a forest at the southwestern edge of Moscow, poet Yury Kublanovsky sees how the dacha world is changing.
Kublanovsky, 58, a onetime dissident who spent 1982 to 1990 in exile working for U.S.-funded Radio Liberty in Paris and Munich, Germany, has been renting his dacha since 1992. But recently, he said, two-thirds of his once-spacious yard was turned over to two millionaires, who built fancy villas on the land.
Asked how he felt about that, this man who had worked to bring down Soviet communism replied with a straight face and apparent sincerity, “I have a feeling of class hatred.”
Kublanovsky, who heads the poetry section of the Novy Mir literary journal, may be disappointed in what capitalism has meant for Russia, but that doesn’t mean he’s nostalgic for the Soviet system.
In the old days, the writers’ dachas at Peredelkino were part of “a system of sticks and carrots” that enforced loyalty to the Soviet regime, he said. “There were various forms of encouragement and reward for lackey writers — awards, state prizes with big money, travel abroad and, most of all, a dacha in Peredelkino.”
Elite dachas were not only a reward but also a potential punishment, because a writer, government official, army general or other favored recipient could always be disciplined by having the dacha taken away. Less posh dachas came from employers or professional organizations, so just like the vaunted test pilots, people with similar jobs often ended up in the same compounds.
These days, getting a dacha is straightforward: You simply need enough money to buy or rent one. Major highways leading away from Moscow are festooned with billboards advertising new dacha developments. Flying into any of Moscow’s three main airports, one sees innumerable old and new dacha developments carved into the forests and fields surrounding the city.
The great majority of these homes, both old and new, are still used as weekend or holiday retreats rather than the owners’ main residences.
“Older generations got their dacha land plots from factories or the companies they worked for. They generally got small land plots free of charge, and they built dachas from the material they could find at the time,” said Sergei Ispiryan, project manager at a construction site 40 kilometers northwest of Moscow where second homes sell for about $150,000. “Mostly they built dachas to grow vegetables for food.”
But the company managers and professionals buying this project’s new concrete-and-brick dachas, which resemble suburban American homes, “love to grow flowers, make lawns, design landscaping,” Ispiryan said. “I don’t think people will be growing potatoes in these land plots.”
Alexander Trashchenko, 50, a mechanical engineer, is among the new breed of owners.
“This is my place of rest, where I pass my time with pleasure,” said Trashchenko, wearing only brown shorts and sandals as he sat on a terrace at his two-story red brick dacha. “Moscow is a place where you sleep between working days. Here, if it’s winter, we cross-country ski, use the sauna and enjoy pleasant company. In summer, I cultivate my garden, and if the weather is good we go down to the Istra River to swim.”
Trashchenko added that his garden “is not for food but for pleasure.” “Of course I have apple trees and raspberry bushes, but it’s just for fun,” he said. “We grow lettuce, cucumbers, melons. Tomatoes are too much work.”
Biologist Nina Roslyakova, 71, has more of the soul of a traditional dacha-lover: She loves growing tomatoes. “I just like the idea — to take it from a seed and grow it into a plant that bears fruits,” she said.
Roslyakova is also an almost mystical mushroom hunter.
“You know how I go mushroom picking?” she said. “I go into the woods, and I start walking, and then I realize that I’m not looking at the ground. I’m looking inside myself. I’m a bad mushroom picker, but I adore it.”
Roslyakova tried to explain what she meant by recalling a scene in Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago,” in which Lara, the protagonist’s lover, is heading to a dacha.
“It totally described my own feelings,” she said. “People’s fates are crushed, Russia is breaking down, everything is broken, and Lara disembarks from the train and she’s walking along a path — I don’t remember the exact quote — but with every step she feels united with those tall pine trees, and with every step her problems leave her. She suddenly begins to feel that the nature around her is more dear to her even than her mother, her relatives, anything in the world. Life straightens out for her when she walks in the woods.”
Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in 1958, the year after “Doctor Zhivago” was published, but the novel also marked him as a political dissident. He had been granted a Peredelkino dacha in 1939 and managed to hang on to it until his death in 1960. After coming to prominence as a young poet, he avoided Stalin’s wrath for many years by focusing on translations of works such as Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and Goethe’s “Faust.”
His masterpiece, which reflects the horrors of World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War that followed, was published abroad after Stalin’s death. Although Soviet authorities were angered by the book, his fame helped protect him from losing his beloved dacha.
That dacha, now a museum, looks out across a field romanticized in his poetry. Today, the field is being torn up to build fancy new dachas despite an effort by old-timers to block the development.
Pasternak was buried in a cemetery at the far side of the field, and the site became a favored place for his admirers to gather and read his poetry aloud.
Some years ago, lightning struck a pine tree near Pasternak’s grave, said Tatyana Neshumova, a guide at the Pasternak dacha museum. “The tree broke down, and when people came to remove it, they found a wire that ran down the pine tree and led to the bench opposite the grave of Pasternak, where a KGB bug was found,” she said. “Their logic was that people who would come to the grave of Pasternak were unreliable people who didn’t feel much sympathy with Soviet power.”
Even today, groundskeepers at the museum keep up the dacha tradition of a vegetable patch. But pine trees towering behind the two-story brown wooden structure and a long driveway lined with birch and maple trees give the place an enduring elegance.
In the decades after Stalin’s 1953 death, his successors encouraged the distribution of standardized land plots of 0.06 of a hectare for ordinary Russians to build modest dachas and grow vegetables.
Klavdia Khlebnikova, 63, and her husband, Vasily Khlebnikov, 70, still treat their dacha in the classic style of the millions who were granted such plots: Every year they grow about 600 kilograms of potatoes, 450 kilograms of tomatoes, 100 kilograms of cucumbers and lesser quantities of beets, carrots, onions and garlic.
“The dacha is everything for me,” Khlebnikov said. “You work here with all your heart, and you have a rest here with all your heart. And when you harvest all these things, you realize it’s the fruit of your own labor.”
The lure of the dacha is so strong that well-to-do Russians who don’t own one often rent for a few weeks, for a season or sometimes for years.
Yelena Topnikova, 32, and her husband, who works at a literary journal, have rented out their 40-square-meter Moscow apartment to move into a rented 90-square-meter dacha. They have two boys, a 4-year-old and a baby, and they plan to live at the dacha “for the sake of the children” until the older boy, Gosha, starts school in two years, she said.
In Soviet times, people such as Topnikova and her husband could have hoped to be allocated a dacha plot by one of their employers, but in today’s world they doubt they’ll ever be dacha owners. “Even if you sell your apartment in Moscow, I’m not sure that would generate enough money to buy a dacha near Moscow,” she said.
However fancy some new country places may be, it is still rare for people to give up a Moscow apartment and move into a dacha as if it were simply a suburban home. That is partly because roads leading from Moscow’s outskirts to downtown are so clogged at rush hour that a two-hour commute is a distinct possibility.
But there’s a more spiritual reason. After all, a dacha should be a dacha — a retreat.
“For me, it’s very important,” said Larisa Vishnyakova, 55, an airline employee who has enjoyed the same family dacha for 40 years. “You come here, you dig in the garden, and you feel happy.”

TITLE: Polish Leader Recalls Solidarity Movement
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WARSAW — Poland’s leading conservative presidential candidate Lech Kaczynski wants to complete the Solidarity revolution which successfully toppled communism in Poland but failed to bring social justice, he said Sunday.
Kaczynski, locked in a three way race for the presidential palace ahead of the Oct. 9 poll, said Polish leaders had lost touch with working people and betrayed those who 25 years ago created the Solidarity union and stood up to communist rulers.
“There is no Solidarity without justice,” Kaczynski told 7,000 party faithful at a congress held days before celebrations marking the 25th anniversary of the Solidarity movement.
“What did people who in 1980 raised their heads in the middle of the evil empire want — a worthy and just Poland. We have independence and perhaps an imperfect democracy…but we have still not delivered justice.” European Union member Poland is set to tilt to the political right in general elections on Sept. 25 and the presidential polls, with voters angry about high unemployment and an unprecedented amount of sleaze during four years of leftist rule.
“We must turn the country around, to face its citizens. The scale of repair will be so large that Poland will become a new republic,” said Kaczynski, 56, the popular mayor of Warsaw.
Aides say Sunday’s convention marked a big turn in Kaczynski’s campaign, which will focus on television and billboard ads challenging his rivals, centre-right liberal Donald Tusk and moderate leftist Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz.
If no candidate wins 50 per cent of the vote, as opinion surveys show, a run-off between the top two candidates will be held on October 23. Financial markets are concerned a Kaczynski-Tusk run-off would hurt their parties attempts to form a coalition government and quickly tackle needed budget reforms.
A new television ad aired at the convention played up on the theme of Solidarity, showing pictures of Kaczynski with the movement’s charismatic leader Lech Walesa.
Kaczynski and his identical twin brother Jaroslaw held senior posts under Walesa when he served as Poland’s president in the early 1990s, but soon fell out with the Solidarity chief and other leaders of the historic anti-communist movement.
Those battles gave the Kaczynski twins a reputation as trouble-makers and effectively pushed them to the political sidelines until Lech gained popularity as a tough-on-crime justice minister in a right-wing cabinet five years ago.
“It took a long time to get a real conservative party in Poland. We had to learn to campaign by seeing how elections are won in Britain and the United States,” said Michal Kaminski, an EU parliament deputy running Kaczynski’s campaign.

TITLE: Iraq Faces Crisis As Factions Disagree
AUTHOR: By Robert H. Reid
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD — Iraqi negotiators finished the new constitution Sunday and referred it to the voters but without the endorsement of Sunni Arabs, a major setback for the U.S. strategy to lure Sunnis away from the insurgency and hasten the day U.S. troops can go home. 
The absence of Sunni Arab endorsement, after more than two months of intensive negotiations, raised fears of more violence and set the stage for a bitter political fight ahead of an Oct. 15 nationwide referendum on the document.
A political battle along religious and ethnic lines threatened to sharpen communal divisions at a time when relations among the Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds appear to be worsening.
Sunni negotiators delivered their rejection in a joint statement shortly after the draft was submitted to parliament. They branded the final version as “illegitimate” and asked the Arab League, the United Nations and “international organizations” to intervene against the document.
Intervention is unlikely, however, and no further amendments to the draft are possible under the law, said a legal expert on the drafting committee, Hussein Addab.
“I think if this constitution passes as it is, it will worsen everything in the country,” said Saleh al-Mutlaq, a Sunni negotiator.
President Bush expressed disappointment that the Sunnis did not sign on but pinned his hopes on the referendum, saying it was a chance for Iraqis to “set the foundation for a permanent Iraqi government.”
But the depth of disillusionment over the charter in the Sunni establishment extended beyond the 15 negotiators, who were appointed to the constitutional committee in June under U.S. pressure.
The country’s Sunni vice president, Ghazi al-Yawer, did not show up at a Sunday ceremony marking completion of the document. When President Jalal Talabani said that al-Yawer was ill, senior government officials including Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi howled with laughter.
“The constitution is left to our people to approve or reject it,” said Talabani, a Kurd. “I hope that our people will accept it despite some flaws.”
A top Sunni who did attend the ceremony, parliament speaker Hajim al-Hassani, said he thought the final document contained “too much religion” and too little protection of womens’ rights. 
Despite last-minute concessions from the majority Shiites and Kurds, the Sunnis said the document threatened the unity of Iraq and its place in the Arab world.
Ibrahim al-Shammari, spokesman of a leading insurgent group, the Islamic Army in Iraq, said on Al-Jazeera television that the constitution “drafted under the supervision of the occupiers” would divide Iraq and benefit Israel.
Major deal-breaker issues included federalism, Iraq’s identity in the Arab world and references to Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated Baath Party.
Sunnis fear federalism would lead to the breakup of the country into a Kurdish north and Shiite south, deprive Sunnis of Iraq’s vast oil wealth concentrated at the opposite ends of the country, and open the door to Iranian influence in the Shiite south.

TITLE: Bush Unmoved by Anti-War Protest
AUTHOR: By Angela K. Brown
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CRAWFORD, Texas — Cindy Sheehan hasn’t achieved a meeting with the president during her three-week war protest, but she met a man who plays one on TV. Martin Sheen, who portrays the president on NBC’s “The West Wing,” visited Sheehan’s makeshift campsite Sunday. 
“At least you’ve got the acting president of the United States,” Sheen said as the crowd of more than 300 people cheered. “I think you know what I do for a living, but this is what I do to stay alive.”
Sheehan arrived in President George W. Bush’s adopted hometown Aug. 6 and promised to stay until she could question Bush about the war that has claimed more than 1,870 U.S. soldiers’ lives — including her son Casey. Bush’s vacation ends Friday.
She was among a group of grieving families who met President Bush about two months after her son died last year, before she became a vocal opponent of the war. Bush has said she has the right to protest and he sympathizes with her, but his aides have said there are no plans to change his schedule to meet with her again.
Earlier Sunday, the Reverend Al Sharpton spoke at an interfaith service at the camp, saying he was compelled to meet Sheehan.
“I feel that it is our moral obligation to stand and to be courageous with these families, and particularly Cindy, that have become the conscience of this nation,” said Sharpton, a former Democratic presidential candidate.
During the service, several cars with pro-Bush signs drove slowly down the road by the protest campsite. Later, one man who had been walking down the street was arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault for allegedly shoving an anti-war demonstrator, McLennan County sheriff’s deputies said.
Amid all the comings and goings around Camp Casey on Sunday, peace activists Genevieve Van Cleve and Peter Ravella got married.
The aisle was strewn with hay, and the crowd hummed “Here Comes the Bride.”
“This is meaningful. This has substance,” said Van Cleve, 34, of Austin. “We completely support what they’re doing, and we just wanted to add whatever love, fidelity, loyalty and honor that we could.”
After the war protest ends and Sheehan packs up camp, the anti-war group plans to spread its message on a bus tour, with the first stop likely in the southeast Texas district of U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

TITLE: Bomb Threat to British Mission Deemed Safe
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: JAKARTA — The British embassy in Indonesia was evacuated Monday after a suspicious item was mailed to the mission, but police said it was only a personal package that contained a disc player and biscuits.
Militants linked to al-Qaida have carried out several major bombings against Western targets in the past few years in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation. The government has warned that militants were planning more attacks.
Adjutant Commissioner Gatot Kristianto, head of police security for foreign embassies, said the package was mailed from central Java to a local employee at the mission.
“When it was scanned, security guards saw a cable so they suspected it was an explosive device. After the bomb squad checked it, they found no explosives. It contained a Walkman, biscuits and some cashew nuts,” said Kristianto.
British embassy press officer Faye Belnis said the mission had been evacuated as a precaution. It was unclear if staff had returned to work.
Security is tight at most Western embassies in Jakarta, especially in the wake of a suicide bomb attack last September outside the Australian embassy that killed 10 people.
Police have blamed the shadowy group Jemaah Islamiah for that bombing, as well as other attacks. Jemaah Islamiah is seen as the Southeast Asian arm of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network.

TITLE: Huge Storm Hits New Orleans
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — Hurricane Katrina plowed into below-sea-level New Orleans on Monday with howling, 230-kilometer winds and blinding rain that flooded some homes to the ceilings and ripped away part of the roof of the Superdome sports stadium, where thousands of people had taken shelter. 
Katrina weakened overnight to a Category 4 storm and turned slightly eastward before hitting land about 6:10 a.m. local time east of Grand Isle near the bayou town of Buras, providing some hope that vulnerable New Orleans would be spared the storm’s full fury.
But National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield warned that New Orleans would be pounded throughout the day and that Katrina’s potential 4.6-meter storm surge, down from a feared 8.5 meters, was still substantial enough to cause extensive flooding.
“I’m not doing too good right now,” Chris Robinson said via cellphone from his home east of the city’s downtown. “The water’s rising pretty fast. I got a hammer and an ax and a crowbar, but I’m holding off on breaking through the roof until the last minute. Tell someone to come get me please. I want to live.”
Along the Gulf Coast, the storm hurled boats onto land in Mississippi, lashed street lamps and flooded roads in Alabama, and swamped highway bridges and knocked out power to 28,000 people in the Florida Panhandle. New Orleans, which was in particular peril because it is so low-lying, was ordered evacuated over the weekend, and an estimated 80 percent of its 480,000 residents complied.
At the Superdome, home to 9,000 storm refugees, wind peeled pieces of metal from the golden roof, leaving two holes that let water drip in. People inside were moved out of the way.
Others stayed and watched as sheets of metal flapped and rumbled loudly. Outside, a concrete clock pylon near the Superdome blew over. 
Scores of windows were blown out at some of New Orleans’ hotels. At the Windsor Court Hotel, guests were told to go into the interior hallways with blankets and pillows and to keep the doors closed to the rooms to avoid flying glass.
Katrina was a terrifying, Category 5 behemoth — the most powerful category on the scale — before weakening.
In Mississippi, a major coastal route that is home to the state’s casinos, sailboats were washed onto the highway.
“This is a devastating hit — we’ve got boats that have gone into buildings,” Gulfport Fire Chief Pat Sullivan said as he maneuvered around downed trees in the city. “What you’re looking at is Camille II.”
In 1969, Hurricane Camille, a Category 5 storm, killed 256 people in Mississippi and Louisiana. 
In Gulf Shores, Alabama, which nearly a year ago was Ground Zero for Hurricane Ivan’s destruction, waves crashed over the seawalls and street lights danced in the howling winds.
About 370,000 customers in southeastern Louisiana were without power, said Chenel Lagarde, spokesman for Entergy Corporation, the main energy power company in the region.
In New Orleans’ French Quarter, where the power went out at 6:35 a.m., hotel residents huddled inside in the midmorning darkness as winds howled, a horizontal rain pinged against the windows, and slate roof tiles tore off. 
Terry Ebbert, New Orleans director of homeland security, said more than 4,000 National Guardsmen were mobilizing in Memphis and would help police New Orleans streets. 
The head of Jefferson Parish, which includes major suburbs and juts all the way to the storm-vulnerable coast, said some residents who stayed would be fortunate to survive. 
“I’m expecting that some people who are die-hards will die hard,” parish council President Aaron Broussard said. 
Katrina hit the southern tip of Florida as a much weaker storm last Thursday and was lamed for nine deaths. It left miles of streets and homes flooded and knocked out power to 1.45 million customers. It was the sixth hurricane to hit Florida in just over a year.

TITLE: Howard Slams Aussies Caught With Drugs
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CANBERRA, Australia — A lingerie model and an English teacher are the latest Australians arrested by police in Asia and charged with drug offenses. They’d better not expect any sympathy from their prime minister back home. 
“It’s beyond belief that any Australian could be so stupid as to carry drugs into any country in Asia,” John Howard told the Nine Network television this week.
His comment is a clear signal that Canberra is losing patience with its citizens being involved in drug busts overseas following a string of high-profile cases.
“We have told Australians — young Australians — again and again, don’t take drugs out of this country, don’t take them into Asian countries because you can’t expect any mercy,” he added.
Compared with many Asian countries where drug offenses carry the death penalty, Australia’s laws are more liberal — few are prosecuted for possession of small amounts, and although there are tough sentences for major traffickers, the country has no death penalty.
The issue of Australians and drugs arose again this week after 24-year-old model Michelle Leslie was arrested Saturday at a dance party in Bali for allegedly carrying two Ecstasy tablets in her Gucci bag.
The same day, Graham Clifford Payne, an Australian teaching English on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, was arrested while allegedly in possession of heroin and crystal meth. He faces up to 15 years in prison.
Another nine Australians are in a Bali jail awaiting trial on heroin smuggling charges that could see them sentenced to death.

TITLE: Oil Price Hits $70 a Barrel
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: HOUSTON, Texas — U.S. Gulf of Mexico energy companies were contemplating their worst fears Sunday as Hurricane Katrina, a potentially catastrophic storm, charged through offshore production areas toward southeast Louisiana. 
At least 42 percent of daily Gulf of Mexico oil production, 20 percent of its daily natural gas output and 8.5 percent of national refining capacity was shut Sunday, producers and refiners said.
The Gulf accounts for about one-quarter of U.S. oil and natural gas production.
U.S. oil futures shot up by $3.81 to $69.94 a barrel Sunday after briefly hitting a record high $70.80 in Asian trade. Unleaded gasoline futures spiked by 22 cents a gallon to a record high $2.15.
Likewise, heating oil futures shot to $2.0060, up 16.74 cents from Friday’s close. 
At least 633,000 barrels of daily crude production out of an daily average of 1.5 million barrels was shut Sunday, although the total likely was higher.

TITLE: Jesse Jackson Tries to Patch Up U.S.-Venezuela Relationship
AUTHOR: By Christopher Toothaker
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CARACAS, Venezuela — The Reverend Jesse Jackson offered support for President Hugo Chavez on Sunday, saying a call for his assassination by a U.S. religious broadcaster was a criminal act and that Washington and Venezuela  should work out their differences through diplomacy. 
The U.S. civil rights leader condemned last week’s suggestion by Pat Robertson that American agents should kill the leftist Venezuelan leader, calling the conservative commentator’s statements “immoral” and “illegal.”
Jackson urged U.S. authorities to take action, and said the U.S. government must choose “diplomacy over any threats of sabotage or isolation or assassination.”
“We must choose a civilized policy of rational conversation,” he told reporters at a news conference.
Chavez, a self-styled “revolutionary,” has repeatedly accused President Bush’s government of planning to overthrow him. He warned Friday that some American leaders have considered killing him. 
U.S. officials have repeatedly denied such claims.
Robertson’s comments last week have increased already tense relations between Caracas and Washington. He called for Chavez’s assassination on his TV show “The 700 Club,”  saying the United States should “take him out” because the Venezuelan leader poses a danger to the region.
Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition of America and a supporter of Bush’s re-election bid, later apologized. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission “must prohibit such threats on the airwaves,” said Jackson, who arrived Saturday for a visit along with members of his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.
“I hope the FCC does not remain silent regarding what Robertson said,” Jackson added.
Representatives of the U.S. government have expressed concern that Chavez and his close ally, Cuban leader  Fidel Castro, are fomenting instability in Latin America. Chavez and Castro deny it, instead blaming the United States for meddling in the affairs of Latin nations.
In a speech to Venezuela’s National Assembly, Jackson said every country has a right to self-determination, and touched on subjects from poverty to Martin Luther King Jr.’s role in the civil rights struggle of American blacks.
“Though our histories are burdensome with pain and often bitter memories, we must have the strength to get ahead and not just get even,” Jackson said to a rousing applause from Venezuelan lawmakers.
Jackson later met and shook hands with Chavez during the Venezuelan leader’s weekly radio and television program.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Diets Don’t Prolong Life
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Starving, officially known as caloric restriction, may make worms and mice live up to 50 percent longer but it will not help humans live super-long lives, two biologists argued Sunday. 
They said their mathematical model showed that a lifetime of low-calorie dieting would only extend human life span by about 7 percent, unlike smaller animals, whose life spans are affected more by the effects of starvation.
This is because restricting calories only indirectly affects life span, said John Phelan of the University of California Los Angeles and Michael Rose of the University of California Irvine.
Researchers at various universities and the National Institutes of Health are testing the theories but there are groups already cutting calories by up to a third in the hope they can live to be 120 or 125, while staying healthy.
“Our message is that suffering years of misery to remain super-skinny is not going to have a big payoff in terms of a longer life,” said Phelan, an evolutionary biologist, in a statement.

Fuel Thieves Set Alight
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (Reuters) — Three men trying to steal fuel from a New Zealand farm Monday ended up setting fire to their own car. Police said the trio had siphoned diesel into a petrol-driven vehicle. When their car would not start, they examined the fuel pipe using a cigarette lighter. One click, a boom and the car burst into flames.
“It wasn’t a major whodunnit,” senior sergeant Ross Gilbert said, from the small North Island town of Waipukurau, about 230 kilometers  northeast of Wellington.
“Fortunately for them, there is no criminal charge for stupidity.”
The men, aged 18 to 19, escaped injury but were charged with theft.

Bulls Injure Onlookers 
MADRID (Reuters) — A herd of charging bulls injured 63 people, two of them severely, when the animals dashed into a crowd at a Madrid bull-running festival Sunday, emergency officials said.
The crowd of about 7,000 had run ahead of the bulls all the way to a stadium where the chase was to end, but then a bottleneck developed at the entrance and the bulls caught up with them, local media said.
Emergency services said 63 people were treated for injuries. 17 people were sent to hospital, with two of them gored severely — one in the face and neck and the other in the leg.
The bull run in Madrid’s San Sebastian de los Reyes district is known as “little Pamplona”, as it resembles the July San Fermin bull-running festival there.
The Pamplona run, immortalised by writer Ernest Hemingway, attracts more than a million tourists every year.

Postcard Takes 50 Years
VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — Peter Symons noticed something odd about a postcard he received in the mail from Florida.
“When I looked at it, I saw it had 4 cents in stamps and I said, ‘Well, that’s sort of strange,’” he said.
Then he noticed the postmark: Nov. 7, 1955.
The card, which he received Thursday, showed an aerial view of the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach.
It bore a pair of 2-cent stamps with the image of Thomas Jefferson and was addressed to “Mrs. Harry McGee, 1-1135 Davie St., Vancouver 5, B.C., Canada.”
Symons said the card is in good shape with just a couple of bends on one end.
Bob Taylor, a spokesman for Canada Post, said the delivery truly was a fluke. Because of insufficient postage, he said, the postcard should have been returned to sender.

TITLE: Low-Profile Kuznetsova Defends U.S. Open Title
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — St. Petersburg tennis star Svetlana Kuznetsova was shopping for shirts the other day when several people stopped her, asking if she was the defending U.S. Open champion. 
So what if most didn’t know her last name? At least they recognized her. 
Kuznetsova has been largely overlooked in the buildup to the U.S. Open, with all the attention centered on Lindsay Davenport, Maria Sharapova and Kim Clijsters. Her first-round match, against fellow Russian Yekaterina Bychkova on Monday morning, wasn’t even one of those featured on center court. 
“There’s lots of good players to play on the center court here,” Kuznetsova said Sunday, shrugging. “I am playing. I think I will play there also [sometime.] So I don’t mind.” 
Kuznetsova may not be as glamorous as some of the other Russians, but her star power hasn’t been helped by her recent play. Though she’s ranked fifth in the world, she’s 27-14 in 20 tournaments this year, and is still looking for her first title. 
She did make the quarterfinals at both the Australian Open and Wimbledon, and lost to Justine Henin-Hardenne in the finals in Warsaw, Poland. But she hasn’t gotten past the third round since Wimbledon, and was bothered by a back injury in her loss in Toronto two weeks ago. 
“I think I’ve been going pretty fast ... these few years,” she said. “This year I was not improving so much because I am already in the top 10 and it’s much harder to stay there and to go higher.”
“Last year was a big breakthrough, and this year I couldn’t make it so good also,” she added. “So I am expecting it still to be better.” 
With her back healthy again, there’s no better place for her to make a run than the U.S. Open. 
Kuznetsova overwhelmed Yelena Dementyeva in straight sets for her first Grand Slam title. She was the third Russian in a row to win a Grand Slam, joining Anastasia Myskina (French) and Sharapova (Wimbledon). 
“I was not that satisfied, not that happy with [this] year,” Kuznetsova said. “Coming here, it just changes everything. I just forget all the tournaments that have been before, I forget all what’s behind me and I just remember the memories and want to do good here. I want to play my best tennis and don’t think what happened before it.”

TITLE: Roddick Hopes For Home Crowd Boost
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW YORK — Andy Roddick is not happy playing second fiddle to anyone, especially at his home grand slam. 
So it is no surprise the American bristles at the suggestion that the runners-up cheque is the best he can aim for with Roger Federer in the Flushing Meadows singles. 
“No, you can’t think like that,” said Roddick, the 2003 champion and fourth seed who takes on Luxembourg’s Gilles Muller in the first round. “He’s lost in two out of three slams this year. So it’s possible. I want to win, that’s what I want to do. That’s what I’m here for, that’s what I’m shooting for.” 
Roddick was well beaten in the Wimbledon final and the Cincinnati Masters final in the past two months by world number one Federer and at times appears almost in awe of his Swiss rival. 
“I don’t know if it’s [that I am] psyched out,” Roddick said. “Obviously he deserves a lot of respect. 
“I’m not scared to lose to Roger. But if I do get a victory, it will be a sweet one. 
“I feel like I can do it. I don’t feel like I’ve served well against him when I’ve played him. That’s put the momentum in his court.” 
Roddick is hoping his world record serve and the backing of the noisy Flushing Meadows crowd can help him emulate his 2003 triumph in New York, his only grand slam title. 
“I love the energy that surrounds this tournament,” said the 22-year-old. 
“Obviously I’ve had amazing crowd support here over the years. I have great memories, so it all bodes well.”

TITLE: Safin Pulls Out With Bad Knee
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW —  Fifth seed Marat Safin has withdrawn from the U.S. Open which started Monday because the knee injury which sidelined the Russian for seven weeks earlier this year is still troubling him. 
The Australian Open champion had been due to play German Alexander Popp in the first round.
Safin, 25, admitted two weeks ago that he had returned to the tour against doctors’ advice to try to prepare for the U.S. Open, one of his favourite events. He won his first grand slam title at Flushing Meadows in New York in 2000. 
“Although Marat wanted more than anything to play and has tried whatever he could to be ready, as a professional tennis player he has had to admit his body is saying it is too soon,” said a statement on Safin’s personal website. 
“He has made the decision after discussions with all those around him. He is not depressed because he realises this is the right thing to do.” 
The statement said Safin would return for treatment in Italy where he previously had keyhole surgery on the knee. It was not clear how long he would be out of action. 
“This time he will make sure he does not rush into returning. Marat still wants to play his tennis and he will be back,” added the statement. 
After winning the Australian Open in January, Safin struggled to regain form and concentration as his knee began to affect him. 
He lost in the third round of Wimbledon and then missed seven weeks of competition when he underwent surgery to repair a knee ligament tear. 
Safin missed Russia’s 3-2 Davis Cup quarter-final win over France in July.

TITLE: Resurgent Zenit Chases Lokomotiv
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: FC Zenit St. Petersburg beat Krylya Sovietov Samara in a 4-1 rout Sunday at Petrovsky Stadium to claim second place in the Premier League. 
First half goals by Alexander Anyukov and Igor Denisov put the visitors on the defensive but Zenit pressed its advantage in the 56th minute with a goal from Olexander Spivak. Ghana international Baba Adamu got one back for Krylya in the 72nd minute but Macedonian midfielder Velice Sumulikoski secured St. Petersburg’s victory in the last minute of the match. 
Premier League champion Lokomotiv Moscow edged closer to retaining its title with a dramatic 4-3 triumph at Amkar Perm on Sunday.
With eight matches remaining in the March-November season, Lokomotiv appears set to clinch its third championship in four years after retrieving a 3-0 deficit.
Diniyar Bilyaletdinov converted two second-half penalties, Marat Ismaylov rifled in the equalizer and Igor Lebedenko netted an injury-time winner for Lokomotiv.
Zenit’s Premier League victory came after it squeaked past Austria’s SV Pasching on the away-goals rule in the second leg match of the qualifying round of the UEFA Cup last Thursday. 
The 1-1 result at Petrovsky Stadium produced a 3-3 aggregate score, but Zenit advances because it scored two goals playing away from home in the first leg.
Zenit next play Greek side AEK on Sept. 15 at home in the first leg of the final round of the qualifying stage of the Europe-wide club competition.
(SPT, Reuters)