SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1120 (86), Tuesday, November 8, 2005
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TITLE: Communists, Democrats Take to the Streets
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Over a thousand local communists took part in a demonstration on Monday to commemorate the 88th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. While some of the demonstrators shouted provocative slogans calling for the return of Stalin’s iron rule and the reintroduction of the GULAG prison camp system, the march took place without major incident.
Members of the left-wing opposition also laid wreaths at the Lenin monument close to Smolny, despite the fact that City Hall had previously refused to give them permission to pay this tribute.
“Their decision, signed by Leonid Bogdanov, head of Smolny’s Security and Law Enforcement Committee, is sheer nonsense,” Vladimir Soloveichik, co-head of St. Petersburg’s Citizens’ Initiative movement and one of the leaders of the Regional Communist Party, told The St. Petersburg Times on Monday. 
“We did it all the same, and the guards had to allow a small delegation in, in order to avoid an open confrontation,” he said
Polls held across Russia in the run up to the Nov. 7 anniversary, formerly marked in the official state calendar as Revolution Day and recently renamed as the “Day of Reconciliation,” showed that many in the country have yet to come to terms with their country’s turbulent history.
Research carried out by the Moscow-based agency Bashkirova and Partners said that 54.5 percent of the respondents see Lenin in a positive light, while 28.7 percent of the focus group were damning in their views on the revolutionary leader.
The same survey showed that almost half of the respondents, 45.8 percent, demonstrated a high regard for Dzherzhinsky and his work as head of the All-Russian Emergency Commission, the predecessor of the KGB and FSB security bodies. Thirty-seven percent of those polled viewed Stalin positively, while 45.5 percent said they despised the former leader.
Vladimir Fyodorov, head of the local branch of the Communist Party of Russia (KPRF), said in an interview with Interfax News Agency that the relevance of the revolutionary anniversary is on the rise. 
“These days, most Russians have to fight for their rights with the same vigor that they had to show before the 1917 revolution,” Fyodorov said.
The “March Against Hatred”, organized by local democrats on Sunday, drew much less enthusiasm from the general public. According to various estimates, between 400 and 700 people — mostly members of local human rights organizations and democratic political movements — marched from Sportivnaya metro station to Sakharov Square to express their growing concern about the rise in extremism in Russia. They were joined by about 30 members of the African Unity association. 
The event was organized in memory of the late Nikolai Girenko, Russia’s leading ethnographist and expert on ethnically motivated crimes, who was gunned down at the doorway of his apartment on June 19, 2004. The murder has not been solved.
The expert and his philosophy figured prominently in the march and the subsequent meeting on Sakharov Square. The March’s participants held portraits of Girenko and bold slogans reading “Shame on a city that murders its guests,” “Russia without fascism”, “Fascists get out” and “Smack the fascist in the forehead, send him straight to the coffin.”
The signs held by African students were less aggressive: “Treat us as equals,” one of them read.
Sergei Popov, an independent deputy of the State Russian Duma who led the demonstration on Sunday, said the low turnout is a compelling illustration of the fact that the issues of racism, ethnic intolerance and extremism are neglected in St. Petersburg, with citizens remaining indifferent with regard to issues that they don’t believe personally concern them.
“Nevertheless, this protest demonstration, despite its modest turnout, is very important,” Popov said in his speech at the meeting. 
“It shows that civil society does exist in St. Petersburg, that it manifests itself and is ready to tackle society’s painful problems. The civil society is here to develop a response to the challenges thrown by nationalists,” he said.
Participants in the meeting urged local citizens to be more supportive, sympathetic and cooperative with regard to victims of abuse and violence. Members of the Citizen’s Watch and Memorial human rights groups said they were calling for St. Petersburgers to stand up to racism, be more outspoken in public about their views, and to intervene if they see violent acts being committed on grounds of race or ethnicity.

TITLE: Chechen Authorities Host Rock Roadshow
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: The Kremlin-backed administration in Chechnya sponsored a rock festival on Monday as part of efforts by authorities to show that the region is stabilizing despite persistent violence and daily clashes between rebels and federal forces.	
Several prominent Russian rock bands played for five hours at the “Phoenix: Return to Life” festival in Chechnya’s second-largest city, Gudermes, east of Grozny.
“We wanted to show the world that Chechnya is a calm region where large-scale music concerts could be held,” Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s first deputy prime minister, said, Interfax reported. Kadyrov’s father, the first Moscow-backed president of Chechnya, was killed in a bomb blast in May 2004.
Most of the 15,000 people at the concert were students from across Chechnya. Some of them danced around an outdoor arena as about 3,000 police and security officers stood guard.
Chechen Prime Minister Sergei Abramov also attended, Interfax said.
Half of the tickets were given away for free.
The concert went on for about five hours, and no incidents were reported.
Performers included well-known Russian bands such as SerGa and Nochnye Snaipery, or Night Snipers, NTV reported. They were joined by a new Chechen band called President.
The festival was initially planned for July 5, but was postponed for security reasons. The next date, Sept. 27, was also moved back because of Ramadan, a holy month in Islam, which ended on Nov. 3.
Chechen authorities said last summer that the concert’s sponsors included state-owned oil company Rosneft, cellular provider MegaFon and the Akhmad Kadyrov Charity Fund, and would cost $300,000.
Federal forces have been battling separatist rebels in mostly Muslim Chechnya since 1999, the second war in a decade. Despite officials’ claims that the region is returning to normalcy, the militants target federal troops and local police and security forces in daily raids.
(SPT, AP)

TITLE: U.S. Congress Considers Bill To Protect Mail Order Brides
AUTHOR: By Deepa Babington
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW YORK — It took Natasha a day trip to Moscow to find the American husband she had dreamed of. It took the next six years to get out of the nightmare that followed. 
A music teacher from central Russia, she was one of 200 Russian women who patiently lined up at a Moscow restaurant to meet 10 American men at a gathering hosted by a mail-order bride agency. 
She spoke no English but immediately caught the eye of one of the men, 16 years her senior. He was handsome and said he wanted the same things she did: a loving family and children. They went to museums and the theater with an interpreter, and he started the paperwork to bring her to the United States as his wife. 
The fairy tale ended eight months later. Natasha, who would only be identified using a pseudonym, had barely set foot in the United States when her new husband began to abuse her sexually, disappeared for weeks at a stretch, threatened anyone who tried to befriend her and forced her to sign a post-nuptial agreement. 
Thrown out of their house after two years of abuse, Natasha was left to fend for herself in an unfamiliar country with minimal English skills and no legal documents to work. 
“He told me I was the most expensive toy he ever bought,” said Natasha, who has since divorced and had her immigration case reopened with the help of a women’s group after gaining official status as an abused spouse. 
Womens’ rights advocates say Natasha’s case is hardly unique in the world of mail-order brides. Indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests it is becoming increasingly common. Three mail-order brides have even been killed by their husbands in the last 10 years in the United States. 
Once the domain of those unlucky in love, mail-order bride websites are now increasingly being prowled by predatory abusers and serial rapists, says Layli Miller-Muro, of the Virginia-based Tahirih Justice Center which represents several abused brides. A survey by the group found that 50 percent of 175 U.S. legal-aid groups had been approached by abused mail-order brides, she said. 
As more cases of battered brides come to light, a small but growing movement to curb such abuse is gathering momentum. 
Spurred by the deaths of two brides in Washington state, a new bill aimed at giving foreign brides more legal rights is now before Congress. It will require that the brides be informed of their spouse’s criminal record and prevent American men from applying for several fiancee visas at the same time — ending a loophole that critics say currently allows a “wife lottery.” 
“The statistics will show that many of these marriages work out great,” said U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen from Washington state, where two of the three women were murdered. “The problem is when things go wrong, they go horribly wrong.” 
Last year, Natalya Fox, a bride who was beaten by her husband while breast-feeding their child, sued and won the first lawsuit against an Internet bride agency. That agency offered a satisfaction guarantee for men: If the first wife didn’t work out, the next one was free, says Miller-Muro. 
“The way international marriage brokers operate currently, they make themselves an easy conduit for predatory abusers to find their next victim,” says Miller-Muro. 
Mail order bride agencies balk at the suggestion that it’s their responsibility to help prevent abuse. 
“Just like when you go on a date in America, how do you know this person isn’t a (Charles) Manson?” said Craig Jay Rich, who married a Russian woman and founded A Volga Girl, which pairs clients with Russian women. 
In six years, only two couples who met through the agency have divorced, he says. 
All this comes as the mail-order bride business continues to grow, fueled largely by the Internet. 
In 1999, an Immigration and Naturalization Service study found over 200 agencies that paired 4,000 to 6,000 American men each year with foreign women, mostly from Eastern Europe and Asia. Two years ago, that had mushroomed to over 500 agencies. 
Though some critics believe the business is just a few steps short of trafficking in women, most agree that many men who use them are sincere in their efforts to find a soulmate. 
Many who turn to the agencies want a traditional and loyal woman. 
That’s partly what drove Chris Testa to a mail-order bride. After eye problems nearly cost him his vision and several dates led to nothing, he forked out $90 to search for women on the Volga Girl Web site. 
He soon began writing to a demure girl called Elena Zharkova from Togliatti, a town 600 miles south of Moscow. 
Testa finally made his way to Russia to meet Zharkova and two other prospective brides. Eight days later, after an excursion on a tugboat, he had made his choice. 
“She was the only one who wanted to meet me at the airport and she took a week off from work,” said Testa, a tall New Jerseyan with a moustache, who spent $16,000 to find her. 
The couple married this summer. Zharkova says she is happy. 
“I always knew he was the one for me,” she said in halting English at a Manhattan diner, holding on to Testa’s arm as she sipped tea. 
“I have a feeling now like I was born here.”

TITLE: Russia To Pay $15 Bln Debt
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia aims to pay down a second tranche of debt to the Paris Club of creditor nations at the start of next year, the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak as saying Monday. 
Soaring revenues from Russia’s oil exports have offered Moscow the chance to improve its balance sheet and pay off foreign debt. In May, Russia reached a deal to pay down $15 billion of the $43 billion it owed using money from its so called Stabilization Fund, formed from windfall oil revenues, to pay back debts to the Paris Club. 
Speaking at a meeting of the upper house of parliament’s budget committee, Storchak noted that the cabinet would have to give permission to retire the debt early, while several creditor countries were asking for Russia to pay a premium to compensate them for lost interest payments. 
A spokeswoman for the Finance Ministry said that negotiations on repaying the debt were continuing. 
In September, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said that Russia wanted to repay up to $15 billion in foreign debt ahead of schedule in 2006. Kudrin said that Russia was ready to settle the entire remaining Paris Club debt but was not certain that creditor nations would agree.

TITLE: Illegal Alcohol Takes 25 Lives
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW (Reuters) — A batch of illegal alcohol has killed 25 people in Russia’s Far East over the last week, media reported on Monday, and police warned residents to avoid the deadly brew. 
Interfax news agency quoted prosecutors in the Magadan region as saying the 25 people, most of them unemployed alcoholics, had bought drinks contaminated with methanol, a form of alcohol which can cause blindness or kill. 
“Information about cases of lethal poisoning has been published in the local media with a warning about consuming alcohol drinks of unknown origin,” a spokesman told the agency. 
He said police had detained four women for distributing the toxic spirits and were hunting two other people. 
Alcohol poisoning killed 39,000 Russians — more than 100 a day — last year.Although vodka is cheap compared to most European countries, many alcoholics buy fake products or home-made vodka known as “samogon” to save money.

TITLE: Putin Calls For Unity As Nationalists Stage Demo
AUTHOR: By Kevin O’Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin celebrated the new national holiday, People’s Unity Day, by speaking about the unity of all Russian people on Red Square, yet disunity was visible just a few hundred meters away as scores of young people denounced ethnic non-Russians at an officially approved march.
“Liberation came specifically as a result of the unification of peoples. And as long as we feel this unity inside of us, Russia will be invincible,” Putin said Friday in comments shown on Channel One television after laying the flowers at the monument to Prince Dmitry Pozharsky and Kuzma Minin on Red Square. The Kremlin says the new holiday is in commemoration of Pozharsky and Minin driving Polish invaders out of Moscow in 1612. 
“Foreign invaders” of a different sort were bothering 3,000 neo-nationalists in Kitai-Gorod on the other side of the Kremlin, where they rallied after marching through the center of Moscow in the biggest nationalist march in at least a decade.
The marchers carried banners reading “Moscow Against Occupiers” and “The Russians Are Coming,” and they chanted “Russia for Russians,” “‘Moscow for Muscovites,” “Sieg Heil,” and the old Stalinist slogan “Death to the Enemies.”
The march, organized by a half-dozen ultranationalist groups including the Movement Against Illegal Immigration and Pamyat, started outside the Chistiye Prudy metro station and followed a route through the city center that passed people the organizers considered enemies: immigrants, Jews and other ethnic non-Russians. 
Shouting “Get out of here,” the marchers slowly swept down Ulitsa Solyanka, passing migrant construction workers standing on scaffolding and a street leading to Moscow’s oldest synagogue.
“I came because we are patriotic fighters for the survival of the nation,” said Eduard, 18. “Sixty percent of crime is from illegal immigrants. They spread drugs, and they turn cities into a dirty garbage dump.”
Asked if his grandfather knew he was making Nazi salutes, Eduard said that lots of World War II veterans supported him and that the salute was an old Aryan tradition. 
Most of the marchers were under 20 and male, although a number of teenage girls marched as well. Few had shaven heads, but many dressed in skinhead fashion: large hobnailed boots and bomber jackets. A sense of bravado was not exactly on display, with more than 100 marchers hiding their faces with a mixture of scarves, surgical masks and balaclavas.
“I’ve got a cold — a cold from the police,” said a young man with a green balaclava, explaining that the police were taking pictures of the marchers.
It was the first time that the ultranationalist groups — which are usually more inclined toward internecine arguing — had joined forces, although they still argued to the last minute about who would lead the march. Even though one of the many cries was “Russian, Nation, Order,” the march was distinctly chaotic and disorganized. It began an hour late, and organizers continually had to shout at the marchers to get in the right line. 
Human rights activists, including Lyudmila Alexeyeva of the Moscow Helsinki Group, had warned of a possible pogrom if the march took place, but there were only a few scuffles. 
Protesters from Oborona, a youth organization affiliated with the liberal Union of Right Forces, tried to interrupt the march, shouting anti-fascist phrases and throwing condoms filled with water. Anti-fascist slogans such as “Fascism is shit” were daubed on posters and walls along the route.
“It’s like the 1930s in Germany,” said businessman Mikhail, 46, after police stopped him from confronting the marchers. 
“They’re fascists,” said a bystander, who identified himself as an undercover policeman, as he watched the rally on Kitai-Gorod’s Slavyanskaya Ploshchad with an ethnic Georgian colleague. “They’re the imbeciles who attack natives of the Caucasus every other week here.”
The march came just a month before the Moscow City Duma elections and at a time when racial tensions are growing in Moscow and across the country. 
Last month, a Peruvian student was killed in Voronezh in what was believed to be a racial attack. Sova Center, which monitors extremist activity, said it had detected an increase in racial attacks. 
Nationalism has become more politically mainstream as major political parties compete for votes in the City Duma elections, said Alexei Makarkin, an analyst at the Center for Political Technologies.
And although most of those taking part in the march were marginal groups, the event also showed that large political parties were positioning themselves even further to the right.
Among the speakers at the gathering was Liberal Democratic Party Deputy Nikolai Kuryanovich, who is campaigning to have the law against inciting racial hatred removed from the Criminal Code because he believes only Russians are being prosecuted.
The Rodina party did not officially take part in the march, but its new election leaflet is called “Moscow for Muscovites” and contains themes that echo those of the march’s organizers. 
Rodina leader Dmitry Rogozin said in an interview posted on Ekho Moskvy radio’s web site Sunday that Moscow would burn like Paris unless illegal immigration was curbed. Rogozin said there were 3 million illegal immigrants in Moscow. 
None of the state-controlled television channels reported the march in their main news programs, Sova Center said. NTV restricted itself to a report on its daytime news bulletin. 
Two march organizers were arrested after the event because more people showed up than they had expected, Sova reported. They were fined 500 rubles ($17). 

Staff Writer Carl Schreck contributed to this report.

TITLE: Ex-Pats Attacked in Voronezh
AUTHOR: By Maria Danilova
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VORONEZH — Just a week after Alexander Navarro Ayala arrived from Peru to study medicine in Voronezh, he was attacked.
A group of young men assaulted the teenager and another Peruvian student in broad daylight, kicking and beating them with clubs and broken bottles, and sending Ayala to hospital with cuts, bruises and a concussion.
Ayala, a shy 18-year-old with thick dark hair, considers himself lucky — his friend did not survive.
As Russia celebrated a new holiday extolling national unity, rights advocates complained that the country was neither united nor tolerant. They pointed to the scores of nationalists who marched down Moscow’s streets Friday, calling for the ouster of migrants and foreigners.
In Voronezh, racial tensions run especially high. This impoverished city of about 1 million has nearly two dozen colleges and universities, with some 1,500 students from African, Asian and Latin American countries coming to study there each year, a tradition dating back to the Soviet era.
The October stabbing death of Ayala’s friend, 18-year-old Enrique Arturo Angeles Hurtado, was the second killing of a foreigner in the past two years.
Ayala, who said his entire family saved money for years to send him to Russia, said he planned to move to another Russian city to study. A Spanish student who was attacked along with the two Peruvians has already left.
“Why do Russians treat foreigners this way? Why don’t they do something against fascism?” Ayala asked.
Fazal Wahab Khan, a 23-year-old medical student from Pakistan who has been studying in Voronezh for seven years, says nearly every foreign student has been physically attacked. He said one foreign student lost an eye in an attack; another lost a kidney.
“When I walk out of the dorm in the morning, the first thing I do is look around to see that they aren’t anywhere near,” Khan said, referring to teenagers who he said moved in large groups and attacked foreigners walking alone.
Foreign students are also regularly subjected to racial insults from residents, said Mohamed Khamal, 32, who heads an informal foreign students’ association.
“You ride a bus and they call you a monkey,” Khamal said.

TITLE: Voloshin Denies Oil-for-Food Links
AUTHOR: By Alex Nicholson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — A former Kremlin chief of staff whose name has been linked to alleged Russian abuse of the UN oil-for-food program denied any connection to the program, saying his signature had apparently been forged on faxes and letters cited as evidence against him.
Alexander Voloshin said the mention of his name in a report by investigators on the corruption-plagued humanitarian program took him by surprise.
“It’s clear that some impostors used my name,” he said on Friday. He also said, “I’ve never even seen a single living Iraqi.”
The report by the Independent Inquiry Committee, led by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, accused more than 2,200 companies and prominent politicians of colluding with Saddam Hussein’s regime to bilk the program — meant to ease the impact of UN sanctions on Iraqis by allowing oil sales — of $1.8 billion in kickbacks and illicit fees.
It said Russian companies received almost one-third of oil sales under the program, worth about $19 billion. It also alleged that between March 2001 and December 2002, Russian companies made $52 million in illicit payments to Saddam’s government.
In May, Volcker’s committee had unveiled documents and other evidence detailing alleged violations of the program. They included faxes and letters that appeared to be signed by Voloshin and suggested that 4.3 million barrels of Iraqi oil had been allocated in his name through a Russian company called Impexoil.
But in a voluminous report released last week with a final analysis of the evidence, the committee acknowledged that Voloshin’s signature was substantially different from the one on the documents, and concluded that investigators could not find evidence incriminating him.
Other Russian companies and officials have seized upon the suggestion of forgery in Voloshin’s case to question the veracity of all the documents cited as evidence.
Voloshin insisted that he bore no grudge against the committee, saying its members were simply doing their job. He said he agreed with Volcker’s assertion that law enforcement bodies should follow up the investigation in their individual countries.
A one-time business partner of tycoon Boris Berezovsky, a close Kremlin insider during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, Voloshin was appointed head of Yeltsin’s administration in March 1999.

TITLE: Russia To Aid Ex-Pats
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Foreign Ministry is setting up a department to support Russian expatriates in what appears to be an attempt to win back millions living abroad.
Supporting Russian expatriates is a “priority of Russian foreign policy and is vital and timely,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement Thursday.
This year, the ministry plans to channel more than 300 million rubles ($10.5 million) into lending Russian expatriates legal, economic, cultural and spiritual support, the statement said.
More than 25 million Russians reside abroad, of whom some 17 million live in the Commonwealth of Independent States, the ministry said.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians have been leaving the country in droves, many seeking a better life in the West. Among wealthy Russians, London, which is jokingly called Moscow on the Thames, has become a favorite destination.
In its Russian Economic Report released last week, the World Bank said Russia was in the midst of a “severe demographic crisis,” with aging and depopulation likely to continue for decades. 
Asked whether the newly created department would be enticing Russians to come back home, Mikhail Troyansky, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said the department would be dealing with a “wide range of issues” including this one, but declined to elaborate.
The World Bank said Russia would need to seriously reconsider its immigration policy to attract not only Russians but also “a huge potential migrant pool of millions of skilled Russian-speaking residents in former Soviet countries.”
“It’s time to introduce a point-based system” for the evaluation of potential migrants, the World Bank’s chief economist for Russia, John Litwack, said at the report’s presentation last week.
The country’s shrinking work force has led to predictions of future economic losses.
The problem will become particularly acute in 2007 and Russia will need an annual inflow of 1 million immigrants to keep the economy going, the World Bank report said.
In his state-of-the-nation address in April, President Vladimir Putin said that Russia was “interested in an influx of qualified legal workers” and that immigration policy reform should be a national priority.

TITLE: Liberal Voice Otto Latsis Dies in Car Crash
AUTHOR: By Yuriy Humber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Otto Latsis, a political and economic commentator who was forced out of journalism in the early 1970s and returned with perestroika to become a quiet but uncompromising voice of liberalism, died last week. He was 71.
Latsis died Thursday in a Moscow hospital after struggling to recover from injuries he suffered in a car accident in September, Interfax reported, citing Igor Yakovenko, head of the Russian Union of Journalists.
Latsis had undergone several operations in the past two months after suffering a fractured second vertebra and a hematoma in the car crash, which occurred on the Kaluzhskoye Shosse outside Moscow, Interfax said. His grandson also was injured.
Two years ago, he was hospitalized after being knocked unconscious in an attack that left him with a concussion.
“While Tolstoy was alive, so was literature. You could say the same about Latsis and journalism,” said Olga Timofeyeva, acting editor of Moskovskiye Novosti, the last of several newspapers to publish his columns. 
“He wrote about complicated things simply. The aim was always to carry the sense of the situation to the reader, not worry so much about the delicacy of style,” she said. 
Yakovenko put Latsis in the same category as Yegor Yakovlev, the editor of Moskovskiye Novosti during the perestroika years, who died in September. 
“The death of Latsis and the death of Yegor Yakovlev mark a stone that ends a period in Russian journalism that was based on morality and self-knowledge,” he said, Interfax reported.
Latsis was born in Moscow on June 22, 1934. After graduating from Moscow State University with a degree in journalism, he went to work for Sovetsky Sakhalin and Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta and in 1964 moved to Izvestia, where he became a special correspondent and economic observer.
His journalism career came to a temporary halt in 1971 after the KGB searched the apartment of Len Karpinsky and found an anti-Stalinist manuscript written by Latsis. He was brought before the Communist Party and had a severe warning entered into his record.
Forced to leave Izvestia, he took up a post in Prague as editor-consultant at the international journal Problems of the World and Socialism. After four years, he asked to return to Russia. 
Still barred from journalism, he spent the next 11 years at the Institute of Economics for the World Socialist System, serving as a senior member in the East European department. 
Later, in a 2001 article in the journal Vestnik Yevropy, Latsis wrote that “the problem with socialism is rather complicated in that, essentially, no one knows what it is.”
Latsis began to make his name in the mid-1980s, as perestroika made it possible for independent opinions to be heard. He re-entered journalism in 1986 as first deputy editor at Kommunist magazine, moving in September 1991 to become a political observer at Izvestia, the paper with which he is most associated.
Despite having joined the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1990, Latsis became an open and vociferous critic of the Party.
Mikhail Fedotov, the press minister from 1992 to 1993, said Latsis testified against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Constitutional Court in 1992. The court was considering a complaint by the Communists against President Boris Yeltsin’s ban on the Party. Latsis, who had earned a doctorate in economics, testified that the Party’s rule had ruined the Russian economy, Fedotov said.
Latsis was respected for his deep knowledge of the issues he chose to write about, whether economic or political, Fedotov said.
“He wrote only about those things that he had studied thoroughly and stated only things that he was absolutely sure about,” Fedotov said. “No one could say that Latsis wrote on someone’s orders.”
After a spat at Izvestia over control of the newspaper, Latsis was part of the team of journalists that left with editor Igor Golembiovsky in 1997 and founded Noviye Izvestia. The same year, the Union of Journalists awarded Latsis the Golden Pen of Russia award.
Golembiovsky quit Noviye Izvestia in early 2003, saying he could not publish what he wanted, and again Latsis followed him as he started a new newspaper, Russky Kuryer, in May of that year.
“This man didn’t know the word ‘compromise,’” Fedotov said. 
On Nov. 10, 2003, Latsis was attacked in the elevator in his Moscow apartment building. The attacker, who punched him in the face, took his mobile phone, notebook and business cards, leaving behind car keys and a wallet with $300 inside, Latsis said in a 2004 interview with the journal Vestnik.
“All this undoubtedly means that the motivation for the attack was not to steal something; the goal was political,” he said. He spelled out three theories of who might have ordered the hit, but said he had no proof to pin it on anyone specific. 
Latsis said the punch, which felt “professional,” knocked him unconscious and he had amnesia for about two weeks. Interfax reported that he was hospitalized with a concussion.
“He changed a lot” after the attack, Timofeyeva said. Never very chatty, Latsis became much more withdrawn, she said.
Latsis stayed with Russky Kuryer until the newspaper folded this spring. His column was then published by Moskovskiye Novosti.
A memorial service for Latsis will be held at the Central House of Journalists on Wednesday from noon to 2 p.m., Yakovenko said, Interfax reported. 
Latsis is survived by a son, Alexei; a daughter, Alexandra; and three grandchildren. 

Staff Writer Anatoly Medetsky contributed to this report.

TITLE: Russia, Iran Eye Deal On Nuclear Power Program
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia is in talks with Iran to set up a nuclear fuel joint venture over the next few years, a plan seen as a possible solution to a deadlock over Tehran’s nuclear program, officials said.
Under the plan, Russia and Iran would jointly make enriched uranium and sell it around the world through a 50-50 commercial joint venture, a Federal Atomic Energy Agency official said Thursday.
“It’s a very, very tentative plan. It was first raised this summer, and we’ve been discussing it,” said the official, who asked not to be identified. 
“If it happens, it would take years to set it up. Russia believes it could be quite promising. ... But all sides have to be convinced — Iran, the European Union and others.”
The official said that under the latest plan Iran would be in charge of an initial step of making uranium hexafluoride, or UF6, gas in Isfahan that would then be shipped to Russia for enrichment.
One EU diplomat said the Russian plan largely fitted in with a proposal by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, that nuclear fuel production facilities be run as multinational joint ventures.
“The South Africans are also involved in the talks,” said the diplomat, adding that the Russian plan was meant to combine previous Russian and South African proposals aimed at resolving the long-running standoff over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
Another EU official involved in the Iran issue said Tehran would not have a share in the ownership of any enrichment technology in the Russian project. “Only personnel, which would, however, enable them to develop know-how,” the official said.
Iran confirmed on Sunday that it had allowed UN nuclear inspectors to visit a military complex as part of its efforts to counter U.S. accusations that it is secretly developing nuclear arms.
“We opened the doors of Parchin again to the inspectors. The site had been visited in the past,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told a weekly news conference.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Gergiev Takes Prize
STOCKHOLM, Sweden — British rock band Led Zeppelin and Russian conductor Valery Gergiev on Monday were named winners of the 2006 Polar Music Prize. 
The award was created in 1989 by Stig Anderson, manager of Swedish pop group ABBA, through a donation to The Royal Swedish Academy of Music. 
Describing the heavy rock band Led Zeppelin as “one of the great pioneers of rock,” the academy said the group’s “playful and experimental music combined with highly eclectic elements has two essential themes: Mysticism and primal energy.”
Gergiev was cited “for the way his unique electrifying musical skills have deepened and renewed our relationship with the grand tradition; and for how he has managed to develop and amplify the importance of artistic music in these modern changing times.”

Education in the U.S.
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Educational opportunities in different regions of the U.S. will be the focus of monthly presentations at the American Corner cultural center starting Thursday.
Terrence Graham, director of the American Councils on International Education, will lead the November event with an introduction to the first region in the spotlight, the Pacific Northwest.
Information about colleges and universities in the region will be available.
The talk begins at 5 p.m. at the American Corner in the Mayakovsky Public Library at 46 Naberezhnaya Reki Fontanki.

Suspects Go On Trial
SAKHALIN (SPT) — Two men will go on trial on Sakhalin Island for the death of a French citizen in July, the Prosecutor General’s Office said Thursday.
Sakhalin prosecutors believe Alexei Gorkovenko killed Luc van de Kershov while robbing the Frenchman’s rented apartment in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Gorshkov is accused of aiding and abetting the crime by helping Gorkovenko destroy evidence and sell items stolen from the apartment.
Authorities have identified Van de Kershov as the manager of Starstroi, an oil services company involved in laying the main trunk pipeline in the Sakhalin-2 offshore gas project, which is led by Royal Dutch Shell. 

Cherkess See Genocide
CHERKESSK (AP) — Members of a North Caucasus minority group are demanding that the Russian government recognize mass deportations and killings that occurred during tsarist-era wars as genocide. 
In a letter sent to President Vladimir Putin late last month, members of the Cherkess minority said the decades-long wars fought as tsarist armies conquered the Caucasus destroyed the Cherkess people.

China Treats Victims
BEIJING (AP) — The Chinese government said it would give medical treatment to children who survived the Beslan hostage-taking in 2004. 
The pledge came in an agreement signed Thursday during a visit to Beijing by Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov. 
The Chinese government said it would send doctors to Russia and provide free treatment in China.

TITLE: RusAl Bids for Petersburg Port
TEXT: The Moscow Times 
Russian Aluminum, or RusAl, has bid for a 48.79 percent stake in the St. Petersburg Sea Port, the country’s second-largest port, Seanews industry web site reported Thursday. 
RusAl head Alexander Bultygin signed a deposit agreement worth 160.5 million rubles ($5.61 million) on Wednesday, marking the intention by the country’s biggest aluminum producer to enter the bidding for the port, Seanews said. The auction is scheduled for Thursday.
Neither RusAl nor the port authority could be reached for comment Sunday.
If RusAl’s bid is accepted, the port will be wholly owned by metals companies, with the remainder already owned by Novolipetsk Metallurgical Plant.
Novolipetsk bought a controlling 51 percent in the port in June 2004, with Danish metallurgical company Jysk Stalindustri operating as its agent in the deal.
Neither company disclosed how much Novolipetsk paid former owner Nasdor Anstalt, an offshore firm, for the 51 percent stake. A newspaper report at the time put a value of $100 million on the stake, citing analysts. 
The stake in the St. Petersburg Sea Port up for sale is currently 29 percent-owned by the local government and 20 percent-owned by federal authorities.
City authorities have been calling for the sale of the government’s stake for several years. “The state is a bad owner, and the sooner the state gets rid of its shares, the better,” city Deputy Governor Mikhail Oseyevsky said in 2004. 

MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — AFK Sistema will sell Kamov-Holding, a maker of helicopters, for $11.8 million.
Sistema, based in Moscow, will sell Kamov to Oboronprom, an industrial and investment group, it said in a statement on Businesswire today. Oboronprom will also acquire 120 million rubles ($4.2 million) of debt and become the guarantor for loans given to Kamov by the Moscow Bank for Reconstruction and Development, it said.

TITLE: Baltic Leaders Express Fears Over Proposed Pipe Route
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: RIGA — The Presidents of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia called on Thursday for broader European Union involvement in a Baltic gas pipeline, which they said posed a potentially catastrophic environmental threat to their region.
The three Baltic leaders, meeting in Estonia, said at a news conference that the Russia-to-Germany pipeline would be built upon a seabed that had been littered with tons of dumped chemical weapons, Baltic News Service reported.
Any mistakes made during construction could release the chemicals with drastic consequences, they said.
“The construction of the gas supply pipeline is of vital importance to the countries of the region; however, we must draw the attention of the EU and the Scandinavian countries to the potential threats such construction is posing,” BNS quoted Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus as saying.
Estonian President Arnold Ruutel said the Baltic Sea was already polluted, BNS reported.
“An extensive area in the south of the Baltic Sea is polluted with chemical weapons,” he said.
“Some of them were simply sunk together with the ships after the end of World War II.
“In this respect, most of the danger lies in the strip of some 1,200 kilometers near the Swedish and the Lithuanian coast where the pipeline is to be constructed.”
Ruutel stressed that Brussels and the Baltic states must be closely involved in the construction.
“The public must be given an opportunity to keep a close watch. ... There should be scientists involved,” Ruutel said. 
“The project must have the participation of the Baltic and EU countries.”
In September, then-German Chancellor Gerhard SchrÚder rejected criticism by the Polish president of the pipeline deal, worth over 4 billion euros ($4.82 billion), after he and President Vladimir Putin gave it their blessing.
The pipeline, which will ship Siberian gas from Russia to Germany, bypassing Poland and the Baltic states, will be run by a joint venture of state gas monopoly Gazprom, German utility E.ON and Wintershall, a unit of German chemical maker BASF.
While the project cements Berlin’s energy ties to Moscow, the Baltic states and Poland fear it leaves them vulnerable to the whims of the Kremlin, which could cut off their gas supply if it chose to.
Adamkus emphasized on Thursday that it was “important to secure our economic interests in this project.”

TITLE: Oil Cash To Fund Pensions
AUTHOR: By Gleb Bryanski
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: Money from Russia’s growing oil windfall fund can help pay pensions for future generations, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said in an interview published in the government’s Rossiyskaya Gazeta on Monday. 
“Spending this money would be harmful because it is not backed up by anything. In the future, when the economy is growing, this money could save a whole generation,” Kudrin said. 
Russia’s pension fund, based on a Soviet-style pay-as-you-go system, expects to run a deficit of 94 billion rubles ($3.29 billion) in 2006 and its problems could steadily worsen as the active population goes into decline. 
A fully-funded pensions system is gradually being phased in. 
Monthly pensions averaged 2,325 rubles ($81.35) in June 2005, roughly one-third of an average salary and only 26 percent higher than the minimum subsistence level. 
Russia’s stabilization fund, which collects revenues from windfall oil taxes, reached 1,094.5 billion rubles ($38.3 billion) as of Nov. 1. 
State pensions remain the main source of income for 29 million elderly people in Russia where the first few private pension funds have appeared only recently and have not yet won over the trust of the public. 
Meanwhile, the government has barred people born before 1967 from participating in a pension savings scheme it runs under a pension reform plan initiated in 2002. Many middle aged people who are still working are trapped in the old system. 
The state only guarantees a basic pension of 450 rubles. 
“Since we do not have enough money for pensioners now, it would not have been fair to say: ‘Let’s better save for younger ones,’ Kudrin said. “Therefore we had to give in, but the problem of younger people remains,” he said. 
Kudrin said Russia had four choices — to raise employer tax, promote mandatory or voluntary pension saving schemes or use stabilization fund money. 
“I think the correct choice is between the third one – voluntary saving schemes, and the fourth – using stabilization fund money,” Kudrin said but did not explain exactly how he envisaged the money being used to shore up pensions. 
However, with most Russians struggling to make ends meet and very little money to put aside, voluntary schemes are unlikely to prove very popular. “The majority ekes out a living from one pay check to another, and our stabilization fund could thus be made to work for future pensions,” Kudrin said. 
Earlier this year the government faced popular protests  after a law replaced various benefits in kind such as free public transport with small cash handouts for many vulnerable social groups including pensioners and war veterans. 
Russia’s population has been shrinking since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.  
The World Bank said in its report published last week that the decline of the working age population will be especially visible after 2007, a result of low birth rates during the turbulent reform years in the 1990s. 
The World Bank urged Russia to put some of its oil riches aside for future generations.

TITLE: Business Gives Sport $30 Million Boost
AUTHOR: By Steve Gutterman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: Russian companies have donated $30 million so far into an athletes’ fund to try and boost their country’s performance in Olympics and world championships. 
Business chiefs joined sports officials in reporting to President Vladimir Putin on the initiative in a Kremlin meeting broadcast on state-run television on Thursday. 
“We remember how disappointed everybody was with the results of the Summer Olympics in Athens,” said tycoon Vladimir Yevtushenkov, president of The Sistema Corp., the parent company of Russia’s largest mobile phone operator. 
Russia was third in the standings in Athens, with 27 golds and 92 medals overall. The United States led with 35 golds and an overall tally of 103, while China was second with 32 golds and 63 medals. 
The Soviet Union often dominated the Olympic standings, and Russia has struggled since the Soviet collapse to live up to expectations and match the United States on the medals tables — with the Cold War rivalry still as strong as ever in sports. 
“I am counting on it that sports fans in Russia can be certain the money is going to a good cause — to the development of Russian sports and conquering new heights in world and Olympic championships,” Putin said. 
Russian Olympic Committee chief Leonid Tyagachev said the fund was “really a stimulus ahead of the [February 2006] Winter Olympics in Turin and the [2008] Summer Olympics in Beijing.” He said at the moment 705 athletes and coaches were qualified to benefit. 
Vladimir Lisin, chairman of the board of Novolipetsk Steel, said the fund would provide monetary awards for winning athletes, including monthly payments of up to 150,000 rubles (about $5,200) for Olympic and world champions. 
With donations from its rich companies, Russia has paid bonuses to medalists at recent Olympics, but former NHL star Vyacheslav Fetisov, head of the Federal Physical Culture and Sports Agency, said this was the first time an organized fund had been established for the purpose. 
Putin, a judo and alpine skiing enthusiast who has a reputation for clean living and called for Russians to participate in sports to help make the nation stronger, thanked the tycoons for what Putin’s chief of staff, Dmitry Medvedev, insisted was their initiative — not the Kremlin’s. 
But company heads enriched by Russia’s natural resources are under pressure to toe the Kremlin line and to share their wealth, including in sports. After tycoon Roman Abramovich faced criticism for buying English soccer club Chelsea, his company Sibneft signed a deal with Russia’s CSKA. 
Along with Sistema and Novolipetsk, the companies that established the fund include oil companies Sibneft, Lukoil, Surgutneftegaz and TNK-BP, as well as steelmaker Yevrazholding, Russian Aluminum, the Alfa Group, Interros and the St. Petersburg Banking House, Medvedev said.

TITLE: Gazprom To Overhaul Gas Prices for Poland
AUTHOR: By Kuba Kurasz
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WARSAW — Gazprom wants to renegotiate its long-term gas delivery contract with Poland, reigniting worries about energy security in the European Union newcomer.
Poland’s state-controlled gas group PGNiG said Thursday that it had received a letter from the gas giant on the issue but saw no reason to change the terms of the 1996 deal.
Newly appointed Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz said it was hard to understand why Gazprom — Poland’s main supplier, accounting for 42 percent of its gas — wanted to renegotiate.
“It’s hard to understand this step. We need to look at it in the context of overall energy policy,” he said.
Poland imports about two-thirds of its gas from the former Soviet Union, either from Russia or via pipelines that run through Russia.
Energy security has become a concern after Warsaw’s former chief spy said Russia was trying to use its near monopoly on energy supplies to reassert its communist-era dominance in Central Europe. 
Poland protested earlier this year when Russia and Germany decided to bypass it by building a pipeline under the Baltic Sea, fearing it would lose lucrative transit fees and be left at Russia’s mercy if Moscow decided to cut off supplies.
A Gazprom official said the request for renegotiation was nothing unusual.
“Holding regular talks to revise pricing conditions of gas supplies is a widespread business practice,” the official said, adding that the company’s contracts both with Poland and with other long-term buyers included provisions for talks.
“Alongside the pricing formula, this allows us to fix mutually acceptable pricing levels depending on the short-term market situation,” the official said. But some Polish analysts were skeptical.
“We cannot rule out  political motives. There’s huge money in play,” said Ryszard Rusak, fund manager at Union Investments in Warsaw.
Under the deal, Gazprom supplied 5.75 billion cubic meters of gas last year. PGNiG gave no details on the long-term contract, which expires in 2022, but said in its issue prospectus ahead of September’s bourse listing that renegotiations were possible.
In a bid to diversify from Russian supplies, PGNiG wants to invest in a new pipeline from Iran and build a liquefied natural gas terminal on the Baltic coast.

TITLE: Firms May Leave Corrupt Russia
TEXT: MOSCOW (SPT) — Two large European companies may withdraw from the Russian market as a result of local corruption, Yelena Panfilova, head of Transparency International a corruption inquiry center in Russia, told a press conference in Moscow, Interfax reports Thursday.
“One of the companies has invested $18 billion in Russia. The other company is smaller, but its investments average several billion dollars,” she said. 
“These companies represent a speedily developing non-energy sector,” Panfilova said.
The expert refused to give the names of the companies but said she had met with their high-ranking executives who told her “they might decide to leave the Russian market this year.”
“I cannot speak on their behalf, but I am sure you will learn about that soon,” she added.
Meanwhile, chairman of the National Anti-Corruption Committee Kirill Kabanov told the press conference about the cost of high-ranking positions  in Russia. “The cost of a senatorial seat in Russia reaches $6 million,” Kabanov said. “A high-ranking position in the Moscow police department costs from $500,000,” he said. “A ministerial position costs $10 million, and a top customs position also costs millions. A district judge position costs $300,000.”

TITLE: Bendukidze Ditches 42% Stake in OMZ
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Georgian minister Kakha Bendukidze and his business partners sold their 42 percent stake in heavy machinery manufacturer OMZ to a group of Russian investors last week, sparking speculation Gazprom may be behind the purchase. 
The deal was completed in a matter of days last week, said brokerage United Financial Group, which organized the deal. It refused to name the buyers or say how much was paid. Gazprom denied it bought the OMZ stake, which analysts say is worth around $77 million.
Bendukidze, who founded OMZ and is now Georgia’s minister for reforms coordination, declined to comment on the deal, his spokeswoman said by telephone from Tbilisi. Bendukidze’s only remaining asset in Russia is a 67 percent stake in Moskva Re insurance company, said Marina Nacheva, head of investor relations at OMZ. She also declined to identify OMZ’s new shareholders.
UFG’s confirmation of the sale comes after Vedomosti reported in September that Gazprom unit Gazprombank was interested in buying OMZ as part of a government attempt to bring key strategic assets under its control. OMZ is one of the country’s biggest heavy industrial companies, producing parts for nuclear power plants and equipment used in mining.
“We believe the likely buyers of the stake to be Gazprom or its affiliates,” MDM Bank said about the OMZ deal.
If Gazprom is behind the purchase of the Bendukidze stake, the purchase could give the gas giant control of OMZ, as it already owns some 15 percent of OMZ through its pension fund Gazfund, MDM said.
OMZ may become part of the nuclear business developed by Gazprom after it acquired Atomstroiexport, Russia’s main contractor for nuclear power plant construction abroad, said Yelena Sakhnova, an analyst at UFG. Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov said that neither the company nor its affiliates took part in the OMZ purchase, as did a spokesman for its lending arm, Gazprombank.
Billionaire Oleg Deripaska’s holding company Basic Element is another possible candidate, analysts said.
Basic Element, which recently set up the new division Russkiye Mashiny, or Russian Machines, was the first to vent the idea of merging Russia’s major power engineering assets into a single holding. Russkiye Mashiny spokesman Pavel Yerasov said that his company was not involved in the OMZ purchase. 
Earlier this year, Basic Element received approval from the Federal AntiMonopoly Service to purchase a controlling stake in turbine maker Power Machines from Interros. No talks took place, however, between Basic Element and Interros. Instead, Interros agreed to sell 22.4 percent in the company to utility Unified Energy Systems.
“If Gazprom is the OMZ buyer, it could later negotiate with UES to merge the assets, which would not be a bad option,” said Andrei Zubkov, vice president of investment bank Trust.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Nickel To Sail Away
NORILSK (Bloomberg) — Norilsk Nickel, the world’s biggest nickel producer, plans to spend $546 million to build a port and buy ships to become self-reliant in transporting the metal, Interfax reported Thursday, citing the Norilsk press office.
Some $40 million may be used to build a port in the Russian Arctic city of Murmansk, the news agency reported. Moscow-based company Norilsk plans to buy five or six ships with steel reinforcements, which allow them to sail in the icy waters of the Arctic, at a cost of about 70 million euros ($84.4 million) each, Interfax said.
Norilsk Nickel is aiming to cover its transport needs using its own ships from mid-2008, Interfax said. The company has estimated that using its own ships would cut transport costs by as much as 30 percent, Interfax reported.

Gazprom Into Syria
MOSCOW (Bloomberg)— Stroitransgaz, a unit of Gazprom, Russia’s state-run natural-gas producer, plans to build an oil refinery in Syria, Syrian state-owned newspaper Ath-Thawra said Monday, citing Petroleum Minister Ibrahim Haddad.
Moscow-based Stroitransgaz has offered to build a complex consisting of a refinery that can process 140,000 barrels of crude oil a day and a petrochemical plant at a total cost of $2 billion, the Damascus-based daily reported.
The government has approved the plan and asked the Russian company to contribute to the financing of works to upgrade one of Syria’s two existing refineries, in the northern region of Banias, the newspaper said.

Alfa Gets Huge Loan
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Alfa Bank, the Russian lender controlled by billionaire Mikhail Fridman, has agreed to borrow $275 million from a group of 38 Asian and European banks in what Alfa called the largest-ever loan to an independent Russian financial institution.
The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Ltd., Commerzbank AG, HSBC Holdings Plc and WestLB AG helped arrange the loan, said Max Topper, head of Alfa’s international department, Monday. Alfa, based in Moscow, will pay 1 percentage point above the London interbank offered rate for the loan, which can be extended by a year.
“Russia’s trade is growing across the world, and we have to follow our clients,” Topper said via telephone. Alfa had originally sought $250 million, or at least to equal a $230 million loan agreed last May, Topper said.

Power Machine Loss
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Silovye Machiny (Power Machines) industrial construction company reported a net loss of $1,027 million in the first half of this year, instead of the $8,067 million net profit the company earned in the same period of last year, Interfax reported Monday.

TITLE: Boats, Berries, Hangover Cures and Health from U.S. Investor
AUTHOR: By Yevgenya  Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg-based businessman Kurt Stahl has done everything from selling berries to building hydrofoils but unlike many expats, it was never his ambition to come to Russia. 
And yet it is perhaps random opportunities that lets this American thrive in all his effervescence — he certainly had no hesitation in settling down, finding his own niche, both personally and in business. 
In February 2000, the day after his birthday, Kurt is not entirely happy with his boss’s “present” — a decision to move him to yet another country. He found himself on the plane coming to Russia, knowing little about the country and still working on his Chinese with “the sole intention of getting back to Asia as quickly as possible”.
“I had spent a lot of time in Asia and thought I am going to stay there for many years to come without ever thinking about coming to Russia or anywhere else in Eastern Europe,” Stahl says.
“I just freaked out at the thought [of coming to Russia],” Stahl recalls.
As executive marketing director, Stahl was sent to Russia by Global Doctor, a company at that time considering a merger with a Russian clinic.
Later, when Global Doctor decided against the merger and Stahl, having   completely fulfilled his work obligations, could easily have gone home back to the United States, he decided he didn’t want to move.
 “I really liked Russia  — it was different enough from the United States to be interesting, but Russians were very similar [to Americans] in their behavior and mentality, in how they interact with each other on a personal and business level. Thus I could feel comfortable here,” says Stahl.
Like the folks back home, he has found Russians very direct, “saying what they  mean and meaning what they say,” he adds.
For someone who came from a blue-collar family and grew up in Chicago, Stahl says, “direct people” are so much easier to interact with [compared to Asian people].
Clearly, there are many differences between Russia and the United States in business, in mentality, in lifestyles. “But there’s still enough of a mental connection and enough understanding of each other,”says Stahl.
“He liked the European atmosphere, it was not like in America where everything was the same everyday,” James Beatty, a fellow businessman who is now a partner at EMG, a St. Petersburg-based accounting firm, suggests as a reason Stahl stayed in Russia.
Being a man of action and adopting Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan as his life’s moto, Stahl throws himself head on into every opportunity.
First it was opening a clinic, then making money from a unique hangover remedy, called “KGB,” alongside renovating hydrofoils and exporting Russian berries — and at the same time managing to start a family.
Although not every one of his projects has worked out (he recently sold his share in the clinic), Stahl was never afraid to take action. According to him, this behavior has brought him success. 
Making his way through life, Stahl never forgets what one of his early bosses used to say:
 “I would much rather have somebody who has a number one action and a number two plan, then a number one plan, and a number two action”.
Armed with this approach from early on, Stahl outsmarted many “more organized and more professional looking” colleagues, who “planned and planned and planned till they lost their jobs”.
At 22 he was already earning enough to pay for a nice house, a nice car and a year of traveling.
“If you just sit back and think about your goal and how wonderful it could be, but never do anything, you’d never get there. The only way to do it is to just do it,” Stahl says.
Talking about his recent and quite spontaneous involvement in the hydrofoil business, Stahl explained that initially he and his partners had no idea of how to realize the project. However, they went through with it, and sold one of their boats to a Danish businessman.
“ We just did a lot of things: a lot of them we had to correct, we wasted some money, bought some tools that didn’t work, but we made the boat. And now we’ve learnt some lessons, and the next of our boats will be done with less money and more quality.”
Working in parallel on a project to sell Russian berries, Stahl had to make more things happen — he flew to Germany and approached thousands of participants at a local convention, coping with much rejection and trying not to take it personally. As a result of his persistence his firm was able to agree to sign contracts for up to 1700 tons of berries.
“All I did to get this rolling was spend four days walking up to every one of a thousand stalls and offering our products,” says Stahl, as if anyone could do it.  
“Kurt is an extremely optimistic and hard-working person, who never gives up.
If he has an idea and he works on his projects, he just attacks it…once he starts doing something, he gives it everything,” Beatty says.

TITLE: Personal Mortgages Still Out of Reach For Most
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Next year Sberbank Northwest will double the number of mortgages it lends for acquiring residential real estate in the region, the company said last Tuesday. While financiers predict an increase in the total volume of mortgages for private individuals, other experts foresee pitfalls in the scheme.
At the end of September Sberbank Northwest, part of the State savings bank, started granting long-term loans of up to 15 years to RBI construction company clients. By the end of October, having received 29 loans worth a total of $1 million to acquire mid-price flats, the RBI clients filed another 75 applications.
“Today we can say that the program has started well. The figures will increase further as the real estate market increases,” said Leonid Shats, chairman of Sberbank Northwest.
RBI expects to increase the number of such borrowers among its clients to 30 percent and plans to launch a similar mortgage scheme for elite residential projects to stimulate buyers’ activity.
“According to our estimation, 10 to 15 percent of the population could afford mortgages. I believe in the success of the program. I’m sure that in one year the amount of loans will exceed $17.5 million and will tend towards $35 million,” said Eduard Tiktinsky, general director of RBI. 
Northwest bank has agreements with six construction companies. At the moment residential loans provide 12 percent of the public’s credit portfolio, which is valued at $874 million in the Northwest region.
Sberbank Northwest this year increased the amount it lent in mortgages 6.5 times compared to 2004, a total of $42 million in St. Petersburg, and $105 million in the whole region.
This is in line with the general trend. At a conference organized by ABN news agency last month experts said that the number of St.Petersburg mortgages increased by 21.4 percent this year, reaching 1,700.
Other figures are less optimistic. About 26,000 flats were sold in St. Petersburg last year, while the number of mortgages did not exceed 1,400. Only 200 loans were used to buy flats in the primary market.
“Because of their low income most citizens could not apply for a mortgage. Introducing loans as a mass practice is hampered by dubious property assessment schemes,” St. Petersburg legislative assembly deputy Vladimir Kucherenko said at a conference.
He also criticized the high interest rates, sometimes upto 20 percent, found in Russian banks, compared to the United States, where rates vary between three and four percent.
Other experts agreed. “At the moment only 10 percent of citizens can afford mortgages. Only two percent of real estate deals in Russia include taking out a loan,” Interfax quoted Igor Zhigunov, head of the St. Petersburg office of City mortgage bank as saying.
Zhigunov did not rule out lowering interest rates in the years ahead, and forecast an increase in the total volume of Russian mortgages, reaching up to $2 million next year. Another concern associated with mortgages is their effect on the real estate market.
“If plans for lending 5,000 mortgages in the city come true, it would not improve the situation in the market. It would only increase real estate prices,” said Pavel Sozinov, a representative of the Construction complex company in St. Petersburg.
Tiktinsky forecast a 15 percent increase in real estate prices in St. Petersburg next year, while buyers will acquire between 1.6 million and 1.7 million square meters of residential real estate, which is significantly less than official figures suggested.
St. Petersburg governor Valentina Matviyenko had said that 3 million square meters of residential real estate would be sold in the city next year.

TITLE: O’kay faces Murmansk protests
AUTHOR: Andrei Musatov, Anatoli Tyemkin
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: The fate of a proposed O’kay supermarket in Murmansk is in the balance after protests from ecologists. Dorinda Holding, the founder and developer of the St.Petersburg-based chain is facing opposition from an organisation campaigning for a park in its place. 
Dorinda won a tender for developing a vacant lot in the center of Murmansk in 2003 and at the beginning of this year was given permission by the city authorities to begin exploration works.
According to a Dorinda source the company planned to build a multi-functional center with the 40,000 square meter space, a third of which will be occupied by O’kay, with the remaining area set aside for an entertainment center and aqua-park. 
Such plans faced opposition, however, from the ecological organisations “Gaia,” and the Murmansk branch of the All-Russian Society of Nature Conservation. spoke out against the project. They believe a park should be laid out  on the vacant lot instead of a supermarket. 
An official from the city’s administration said that the groups have organized protest meetings, demanding an appraisal for an alternative project.
This summer ecologists tried to contest the company’s actions through the courts, on the grounds of a violation of public rights to information about the project, but the court did not uphold the claims, the Dorinda source confirmed.
“Legally there is nothing to stop us from continuing work, but we are facing a strong public reaction,” a source told Vedomosti. According to him, this is connected to opposition from local retail market figures within the company. “We have suspicions that there is some kind of commitment on the part of the protesting ecologists,” he said.
The representatives of ecological organisations were unavailable for comment, but, according to an official in the Murmansk administration, a public hearing held on October 8 recommended that Dorinda be given permission to build the supermarket.
Nevertheless, the official affirmed that up until now the mayor of Murmansk, Mikhail Savchenko has not made a final decision.
The public, meanwhile, are demanding a referendum. The chairman of the town electoral committee, Vladimir Shulaev, said that on September 30 a request for a referendum concerning the development was submitted by a group but was turned down. Citizens handed in the request again on October 17, Shulaev said, and it is going to be examined next week. 
Although public opinion is generally taken into account during the working out of investment conditions for a project, discontent with this project is unlikely to become a reason for closing it down, said a partner in the law firm Baker and McKenzie, Maxim Kalinin.
Nevertheless, appeal through a referendum is still a theoretical possibility the lawyer said.

TITLE: Axa SA Eyes Investment In Western Europe
TEXT: NEW YORK Bloomberg) — Axa SA’s real estate investment management unit has raised 700 million euros ($836 million) to invest in retail parks, warehouses, and supermarkets in Europe.
European Retail Income Venture raised 280 million euros in equity from institutional investors mainly in France, Scandinavia and the Netherlands at the first closing date. The remaining 420 million euros is in loans. The unit plans to raise a further 300 million euros in equity and debt to create a 1 billion-euro fund.
Planning controls limiting new retail parks have pushed up prices across Europe at the same time as investors seek to diversify from stocks and bonds.
“We see great value in European markets,” John Osborn, strategy asset manager at Axa Real Estate Investment Managers, said in an interview. “How quickly we raise the extra money depends on how quickly we can get properties into the fund.’’
The fund, which will have a seven-year life with an option for a further two years for disposals, has already agreed to buy a hypermarket in Portugal for 18 million euros and a supermarket in Belgium for 7 million euros, he said.
The fund will invest across western, central and northern Europe. It won’t invest in the U.K. or Russia, he said.

TITLE: Big Investment Projects Arouse Public Anger
AUTHOR: By Alexander Filatov and Andrei Musatov
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Strategic investors in St. Petersburg have unexpectedly hit upon hurdles, despite concluding lucrative agreements with the city’s authorities. Two major development projects have aroused waves of public discontent and anger from those already leasing space on the sites for future construction project locations. The protests have not stopped a single project as yet, experts noted. And only one leasee on the “project” land has had a positive result.
In March 2005, the city administration took a decision to give the status of a “strategic” investment to those projects that were worth more than $100 million. Three such projects won the status this year.
Japanese car-maker Toyota’s factory in Shushary had earmarked $150 million in investments. The Baltic Pearl housing project, being carried out by the Shanghai Overseas Investment Company, has a $1.5 billion tag on it. And this summer, the Sea FaÍade St. Petersburg development firm won the contract to build a seaport on the west coast of Vasilyevsky Island. The project’s total investment is around $1 billion, of which $138 million will come from the federal budget.
Meeting and protests against major construction projects bubbled up at the start of the year. The first target had been the Baltic Pearl, with protestors partly complaining that the project would “lead to an inflow of immigrants.”
Meanwhile, citizens of Vasilyevsky Island formed an association called “We’ll Defend Vasilyevsky Island,” which in Russian forms the acronym ZOV, meaning “a call.” The public organization has backing from the opposition political party Yabloko, and wants to stop plans to build several ship terminals on 400 hectares of silted territory. It demands that the project be stopped due to “air pollution” and transferred elsewhere.
The city’s Legislative Deputies aim to add some corrections to the general plan for St. Petersburg to deal with this situation, said Sergei Indenok, deputy head of Yabloko’s Vasilyevsky Island branch.
“The citizens’ discontent is understandable. Who would want a building site outside their window?” said the press secretary for the Sea FaÍade, Tatiana Yuriyeva. However, she said that 90 percent of the protestors belonged to various political parties which had hijacked the issue for their own purposes.
Speaking out against the Baltic Pearl, in addition to local citizens,  was the management of Batiyets yacht club, which lies on the territory set aside for the new district.
Wan Li, the spokesman for the Chinese company, said that the city had taken upon itself all negotiations with local protestors. As a result, the yacht club, which had previously enjoyed a 7.3-hectare spot transferred to a 27 hectare plot at the expense of the city, a spokeman for Baltiyets, Vladimir Klimbek.
The public protests have not been answered and in the Legislative Assembly in May there were demands to call a referendum on the Pearl project, said government official Dmitry Kranyansky.
The assembly has still not come to a decision on whether to follow up this request and one of the deputies, Sergei Andreyev, said he will go to the courts to get an order that will force the assembly to review the possibility of a referendum. In May he put in a court appeal, incited by the fact that the Chinese investor had received the land without a tender being conducted.
The court confirmed that the appeal had been received, but said no date to review the case has been set.
Whole land plots are given out in cases where it is assumed that there will be no other competitors for the site, said Nikolai Asaul, deputy director of the committee for investments and strategic projects.
“There is no other company in the city which could invest $1 billion into developing 186 hectares or reclaim 146 hectares of land from the sea surrounding Vasilyevsky Island,” he said.
The existence of the protest groups goes to show that the higher the stakes, the more attention the project receives. Minor political factions are happy to jump on board with a few complaints solely to exploit their own desires and win free publicity, Asaul said.
He added that the courts did not receive any appeals again the construction of major projects.
It is only possible to slow down a development project if it is seen as unlawful said Alexander Girgoriyev, from Grigoriev and Partners law firm. Then it’s possible to make life difficult for the investor for a while through the courts. However, the lawyer could not remember a case when citizens were successful in stopping investments. The public voice could only gain influence if it can affect the politicians directly, he said.
Disaffection of citizens is unlikely to close down any investment project, but their “views could be taken into account when forming the conditions of the project,” said Maxim Kalinin, partner at the Baker & McKenzie law firm in St. Petersburg.
Theoretically a referendum could stop the project. To force a referendum, however, the protesters need to gather 90,000 supporting signatures, or 2 percent of St. Petersburg’s population.
A referendum is there to solve problems that affect the general mass. “It is hard for me to imagine an investment project that touches every citizen,” Kalinin said.
The only project not to have caused protest is the Toyota factory. Unlike the other two, it is located away from residential housing.

TITLE: State Hermitage Goes Dutch
TEXT: ST.PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, which has one of the world’s largest collections of art, announced a 39-million-euro ($46.5 million) expansion of its small branch in downtown Amsterdam.
The Hermitage will occupy the rest of the Amstelhof building, built in the 1680s by the Dutch Reformed Church as a home for the elderly. After the last residents are moved out at the end of 2006, the Hermitage will increase its space in the Amstelhof tenfold to almost 10,000 square meters.
The announcement of the expansion was timed with President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Amsterdam on Nov. 1 and 2, the first by a Russian head of state since Peter the Great in 1697. Trade between the Netherlands and Russia totaled $15 billion in the first seven months of 2005.
The branch, which may attract as many as 300,000 visitors annually, will be self-financing, the Hermitage said.
It is expected to earn 50 percent of its approximate 5- million-euro annual budget through ticket and concession sales and the other half from private sponsors. Exhibitions will rotate every six months and entry costs six euros.

TITLE: Nevsky Will Surprise And Entertain
AUTHOR: Anna Shcherbakova
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Nothing compares to Nevsky Prospect, at least in St. Petersburg, exclaimed Russian writer Nikolay Gogol. According to him Nevsky was the capital’s line of communication, somewhere you meet friends you haven’t seen for years. Almost two centuries later “almighty Nevsky” remains the heart of St.Petersburg. For me it’s impossible to walk along Nevsky without meeting someone I know or discovering a new shop, restaurant or cafÎ. The city’s main street was made to surprise and entertain.
The new economy has revolutionized not only our consumer habits but also the entire landscape of the city. Many premises have changed owners and functions several times over the last fifteen years. For instance, a former post office near my home became a supermarket and now serves as a fashion boutique. 
On Nevsky such transformations are even faster and sometimes more cruel. In the mid-nineties only a certain select bunch of retailers and caterers could dwell there. An informal club called Nevsky prospect was in control and the city’s main artery was effectively closed to newcomers. Even the landlords could not put their “golden property,” which was often gained automatically during privatization, on the market. 
With many of these players now gone, often out of business or simply shot dead, commercial property on Nevsky is routinely traded. For many retail chains it even seems to have become a call of duty to open boutiques on Nevsky, for even if it’s pricey, top-managers explain, the costs can be covered by other shops elsewhere. New players include banks, several of which opened their retail or representative offices on the prospect. Rents are high, and increasing, but Nevsky has its own secrets. 
The city-government recently stepped in to stop meat-producer Parnas from selling its leasehold of the state-owned Yeliseyevsky delicatessen-shop to a perfume chain. Has Smolny found a richer tenant for the famous place? Parnas, in any case, found another property fit to sell perfume.
 Another question – who will occupy what used to be the House of Books? A real estate company has started renovations having purchased a leasehold for the building. The bookstore remains on Nevsky, but although the new site is spacious, it is without the age-old atmosphere and has no metro station close by. Nevertheless, it is difficult to see the shop returning to its historic home after restoration. With rents and demand increasing it is more likely that a new retailer will move in to sell luxury goods. 
This summer several stores on Nevsky were shut down. I do not mean those retailers that remove their sign after a few months when their revenues can’t cover the huge rent landlords are charging for a prime location. There are also other shops whose staff acquired ownership during the privatization of the early to mid-nineties. Although the owners kept their shares in the shop and resisted changing its function, they are now succumbing to the growing competition, and finally shutting shop. Real estate advisors are circling around these juicy premises suddenly up for grabs, but the mysterious new owners as yet remain unmoved. 

Anna Shcherbakova is the St.Petersburg bureau chief of business daily Vedomosti.

TITLE: Azerbaijan Looks Ahead To Oil Windfall
AUTHOR: By Todd Prince
TEXT: Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, who took the helm of this oil-exporting U.S. ally from his father in 2003, faced the first public test of his leadership Sunday in a parliamentary election opponents have criticized as unfair. 
Aliyev, 43, who along with his father and former president Heidar, opened the economy to Western oil companies such as BP Plc and ExxonMobil, is seeking to retain control of the 125- member parliament before standing for re-election in 2008. The main competitors of his New Azerbaijan party, which has 74 seats in the outgoing chamber, will be the Freedom Bloc, which unites three opposition parties, and independents. 
The new parliament will take office as the ex-Soviet republic of 8.5 million located between Russia and Iran stands on the cusp of an oil-fuelled economic boom. The state predicts it will receive about $143 billion in oil revenue from 2006 to 2024 based on $45-a-barrel oil. The economy is forecast to expand 19 percent this year and 27 percent in 2006, according to the International Monetary Fund. 
“In the last two years, I have seen positive changes in the Azerbaijan economy,” said Haciaga Nuri, chairman of the Islamic Party, who forecasts a victory for Aliyev’s party. “There is a program for development.” 
Nardaran, a village outside the capital city, Baku, “exploded socially” in 2002 due to a lack of jobs, gas and electricity, forcing the government to send in about 5,000 troops, said Nuri, who resides there. The town of 8,000 now has uninterrupted electricity, a new road and has been promised gas in 2007, he said. There are still no jobs, Nuri said.  
As in previous Azerbaijan elections, campaigning was marred by intimidation and media bias in the government’s favor, the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe said last month. School directors and heads of state-owned enterprises reportedly have pressured employees to vote for specific candidates, the OSCE said. Opposition parties were prevented from holding some rallies in Baku, it said. 
Sunday’s election, in which 1,557 candidates are standing, is the first in the nation since revolutions brought down regimes in three post-Soviet nations, including neighboring Georgia. All three were sparked by fraudulent elections. 
On Oct. 25, Aliyev gave in to Western pressure to fingerprint voters and allow foreign-financed, non-government organizations to monitor the election. More than 1,500 international monitors were likely to be present, “an unprecedented number,” Aliyev said last month in an interview. Mitofsky International and Edison Media Research will conduct exit polls in all 125 constituencies. 
The elections are the fairest the nation has held, Elin Suleymanov, an adviser to the president’s foreign relations department, said in an interview today. “Democracy takes a certain effort to develop. It’s inevitable that frictions and tension will appear.”
Aliyev’s Yeni Azerbaijan party has a majority in the current parliament with 74 deputies. Thirty-one seats are held by independents and about four are held by Freedom Bloc parties. More than 4.5 million Azeris are registered to vote. Official results are to be announced tomorrow. The OSCE will present its monitoring results then too. 
The Aliyevs, between Ilham and his father, have presided over Azerbaijan for 12 years. 
“The people now see stability as a gift from Aliyev’s family,” said Sergei Markov, director of the Moscow-based Institute of Political Studies and an election observer in Baku. 
The Freedom Bloc, which combines the People’s Front Party, Musavat and the Azerbaijan Democratic Party, will call people to protest if the elections are deemed fraudulent, Ali Kerimli, chairman of People’s Front, said Thursday at a press conference. 
Job creation, higher wages, improved living conditions and lower corruption are the main concerns of many Azeris, according to a poll conducted by the International Republican Institute in June. About 40 percent of the nation lives in poverty, with the average employee earning about $130 a month. 
Half of the nation is dissatisfied with the parliament while a majority said their local economy and living conditions aren’t good, according to the IRI poll. Still, more people said they were better off financially than two years before, than those who said they were worse off, according to the poll. 
Aliyev has taken advantage of economic growth to pass on more money to citizens. Earlier this year, he raised salaries of police officials to as high as $750 a month and policemen to $450. Last week he promised to boost wages of health care workers 30 percent as of Jan. 1. 
Azerbaijan’s oil production is likely to rise by more than a million barrels a day before the end of the decade from about 319,000 last year as a BP-led consortium develops three fields in the nation’s Caspian Sea waters that may hold almost 7 billion barrels. The 1-million barrel a day Baku-Tbilisi-Cehyan oil pipeline to Turkey will begin filling tankers by as early as the end of this year while a gas pipeline from Baku to Turkey is scheduled for completion next year. 
The Aliyev family has failed to diversify the economy outside the oil sector, generate regional growth, distribute the nation’s wealth effectively among the population and tame corruption, opposition politicians say. 
Azerbaijan ranked 137 out of 159 nations in a corruption perception report published last month by Berlin-based Transparency International. Nine of the nation’s 10 richest citizens are officials or former officials, according to local weekly Hesabat. 
The gross domestic product totaled $8.5 billion last year, less than Estonia, another former Soviet nation, whose population is less than one-sixth that of Azerbaijan’s. More than half of that wealth is concentrated in Baku. 
“You can’t say we have a normal economy just because we have a few new buildings and some Mercedes,” said Elshad Nuriyev, assistant chairman of the Popular Front Party. “If Aliyev continues to dominate, if the opposition will be marginalized, we will just have stagnation.”

TITLE: Energy Minister: We Will Regulate Investment
AUTHOR: William C. Mann
TEXT: Russia is using U.S. laws as a guide to drafting new measures to regulate investment in energy companies, but will set its own rules to specify what constitutes a national security risk, Russia’s energy minister said.
In a session October 24 with a small group of American reporters, Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko was asked how Russia would react to a move by a Chinese or Indian company to purchase a Russian oil company, in light of the furor that erupted in the United States over a move by China’s  third-largest oil firm to buy Unocal Corp.
Sometimes it’s been said “in a kind of reproach, that we put too many limitations on some deals,” Khristenko said. “The situation with Unocal is a shining example that there is nothing unique for Russia in this situation. So here I think we are only learning.”
China’s CNOOC Corp. dropped its bid for Unocal in August after months of attacks by U.S. lawmakers and others that Chinese ownership of a major American oil company would jeopardize national security.
“It seems that every president of the United States knows what (national security) is, and he determines in his time in the office what’s the priority which is at the basis of national security,” Khristenko said through an interpreter.
“In our bill, we were not able to afford such a thing. So we approached it more formally, and instead of single-term national security, we tried to kind of precisely determine it by describing sectors where such deals should be approved.”
Khristenko, who is also Russia’s industry minister, was in Washington on Monday for meetings with government officials and private business executives to drum up business for Russia. President George W. Bush dropped by Khristenko’s meeting with Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman and Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez in the Executive Office Building, next to the White House.
The Russian minister said a priority for him is to come up with changes in tax laws that will make Russia more attractive for investments to explore and exploit the world’s sixth largest crude oil reserves and largest reserves of natural gas. Khristenko’s proposals include tax holidays and other tax incentives
However, the Finance Ministry has opposed some of the proposals.”None of the bills submitted by the government (can) survive if there is no consensus,” Khristenko said. “Therefore my colleagues and I have definitely got to get into hot discussions to find an acceptable ... formula.”
Khristenko expressed hope that President Vladimir Putin would help forge an agreement on changes in the law on energy investment.
One crucial question facing Russia’s energy industry is the identity of companies that will join Gazprom, the state-controlled natural gas megacompany, in exploiting the mammoth Stockman field in the Barents Sea. Three American companies are in the running: ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil USA.
Asked whether the sums concerned would give an advantage to Conoco or Chevron, Khristenko said, “It’s difficult to say yes or no. It’s not the quantity or quality of my knowledge about ConocoPhillips or Chevron. It’s rather because this is a commercial operation in the discussions that are going on now between Gazprom and its partners, and they need neither help nor hindrance from outside.”
He said a decision is due by the end of 2006.
As for the future, Khristenko said production could reach more than 500 million tons of oil a day as early as 2008, but more likely that target will not be met until 2010.
He said Bodman, the U.S. energy secretary, offered him an appropriate quote at their meeting, from former New York Yankee baseball player Yogi Berra: “Forecasts are very difficult to make,” Berra once said, “especially if they deal with the future.”

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Menatep Sells Sibintek Unit
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Group Menatep has sold Sibintek, which designs automated services for oil companies, to Russian holding company Rus for an undisclosed sum, Kommersant reported Monday, citing Menatep Managing Director Tim Osborne.
Rus bought Sibintek in part because of the real estate it owns in Moscow, the newspaper said, citing a source close to Rus who it didn’t identify.
Sibintek had sales of 1.7 billion rubles ($59 million) last year, more than 70 percent of which came from Menatep’s Yukos, Kommersant said.

S&P Raises Bank Ratings
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Nine Russian banks, including International Moscow Bank and Vneshtorgbank, had their ratings raised by Standard & Poor’s, which cited the growing economy that’s helping improve their creditworthiness.
“Russian banks continue to benefit from positive macroeconomic trends, the government’s strong financial position and the economy’s high liquidity level,” S&P analyst Irina Penkina said in a statement on the ratings service’s newswire. 

Milan Barred To Aeroflot
MOSCOW (AP) —Italian aviation authorities have barred flag carrier Aeroflot from flying to Milan as of Nov. 1 in a dispute over flights on the route, Aeroflot said Monday. 
The Italian side took the measure after the Russian authorities refused to give Italian airline Alitalia a convenient early morning slot for flights from Moscow to Milan, saying the slot is a prerogative of the local carrier. 
Aeroflot spokeswoman Irina Dannenberg said the company was in talks on the issue and hopes it will be resolved soon. She said similar disputes with other countries have been resolved quickly. 
Meanwhile, Aeroflot is offering to fly its passengers who bought tickets to Milan to Rome or Venice instead. 

Bird Flu In Kazakhstan
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) —The Emergency Ministry quarantined three villages near Kazakhstan after a deadly strain of avian influenza was confirmed among the local bird population, Interfax reported Monday.
More than 200 birds died from the virus in the Sosnovka, Sunaly and Shatrovo villages in the Chelyabinsk region and more than 330 where destroyed, the news service reported. The government will pay cash to owners of culled birds when the quarantine is lifted, Interfax said, without saying how much.

Sugar Beet Harvest
MOSCOW (Reuters) —Russia has harvested 21.1 million tons of sugar beet so far from 0.76 million hectares, or 94 percent of the harvest area, which is 0.8 million tons more than at the same date in 2004, the Agriculture Ministry said on Monday.
Average yields rose by 1.05 tons per hectare from a year ago to 27.6 tons, a ministry statement said.
Analysts expect the country to refine over 2.4 million tons of sugar from domestic beet, a new record high volume after last year’s 2.24 million.

Ukraine Grain Exports
KIEV (Reuters) — Ukraine almost tripled its grain exports in August to 1.216 million tons from 493,800 in July and 673,500 in June, analysts said on Monday, quoting official data.
ProAgro agriculture consultancy said Ukraine had exported 585,700 tons of wheat, 550,300 of barley, 44,200 of maize and 36,100 of other cereals in August.
The country exported 285,300 tons of wheat, 46,300 of barley, 139,600 of maize and 22,600 of other cereals in July.
ProAgro said Ukraine’s grain exports could fall to about 10 million tons in 2005/06, including five million tons of wheat, four million of barley and about 900,000 of maize.

2005 Inflation Figures
MOSCOW (Reuters) —The country’s inflation will reach between 11.0 and 11.5 percent in 2005, after data for October showed retail prices rose by 9.2 percent in the first 10 months of the year, Economy Minister German Gref said on Monday. 
“We will slightly exceed our target,” Gref was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying at a meeting with President Vladimir Putin. 
The government had to raise its inflation target twice this year from an initial 8.5 percent planned in the 2005 budget.

Bank of Moscow Bond
LONDON (Bloomberg)— Bank of Moscow, a lender controlled by the city’s government, hired Barclays and Merrill Lynch to manage an international bond sale, according to a statement from Merrill Lynch.
The bonds will count as lower Tier II, the statement said. Lower Tier II is a form of capital that regulators require banks to hold to cushion depositors from losses.
The statement did not say how big, or in which currency, the bond sale would be. 
The bonds will be sold after meetings with investors starting on Nov. 10 in Asia, the statement said.

Petersburg Port Strike
ST PETERSBURG (Reuters) — Tugboat workers in the port of St Petersburg said on Monday they would go on strike over pay from Thursday despite a court ruling that has declared the protest illegal.
Gennady Zaitsev, an official at the port’s trade unit, said the tugboat workers planned to appeal Monday’s ruling by a St Petersburg court and go ahead with the strike which may affect metals and oil exports.
“We have our right to appeal. There is still time to appeal before Nov. 10, that’s why the strike will definitely take place,” he said. Zaitsev said last week that even if the strike went ahead, oil product exports would be unaffected.
Earlier this year, the port was at the centre of a separate industrial action by dockers.

OGK-5 Mulls ‘06 Share Sale
MOSCOW (Reuters) —OGK-5, the first power generating company to be spun off from electricity monopoly Unified Energy System under industry reforms, is considering an additional share issue in 2006 to finance expansion, General Director Anatoly Bushin said on Monday.
The planned issue would lower the holding of UES in the company from 90 percent now to 75 percent, Bushin said.
OGK-5, the first tangible product of the reforms that investors can trade, made a market debut in September, and its shares were quoted at high of 1.71 rubles on Monday.
Its global depositary receipts were also placed in London and Frankfurt in September.

Poles To Diversify Gas 
WARSAW (Bloomberg) — Polskie Gornictwo Naftowe i Gazownictwo SA, the Polish gas monopoly, plans to meet Gaz de France SA representatives today to discuss a joint investment in a liquefied natural gas terminal in an effort to diversify Poland’s gas supply, Puls Biznesu reported.
The total cost of the LNG terminal would be between 200 million ($237 million) and 600 million euros, the newspaper said.

Kazakhstan GSM Tender
ASTANA (Reuters) — Kazakhstan will tender a GSM-standard frequency next year, hoping that a third mobile telephone firm would boost competition on the fast-growing local telecoms market, Prime Minister Danial Akhmetov said on Monday.
“We plan to put up for sale the 1800 (megahertz) frequency on the telecoms services market to create a tougher and more competitive environment for mobile phone operators. We plan to do so next year,” Akhmetov said.
The number of mobile phones users has reached 3 million in the Central Asian nation of 15 million, outstripping its 2.5 million fixed-line users.
GSM Kazakhstan, majority owned by Nordic telecoms firm TeliaSonera and Turkey’s Turkcell, dominates the mobile phone market with 2 million subscribers.

TITLE: Torture: It’s the American Way
AUTHOR: By Rosa Brooks
TEXT: “We will bury you,” Nikita Khrushchev told U.S. diplomats in 1956. The conventional wisdom is that Khrushchev got it wrong: The repressive Soviet state collapsed under the weight of its own cruelties and lies while democratic America went from strength to strength, buoyed by its national commitment to liberty and justice for all.
But with last week’s report of secret CIA detention facilities in Eastern Europe, cynics may be pardoned for wondering who really won the Cold War.
According to Dana Priest, The Washington Post investigative reporter who broke the story, it all started on Sept. 17, 2001, when U.S. President George W. Bush signed a secret executive order authorizing the CIA to kill, capture or detain al-Qaida operatives. 
There was only one problem: The CIA didn’t know where to put the people it detained. Those detainees thought to be of “high value” needed to be kept somewhere special, because these high-value prisoners — so-called ghost detainees — were going to be subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
That’s Orwell-speak for what’s known in English as torture. The list of techniques is classified but reportedly includes such old favorites as “waterboarding” (feigned drowning) and feigned suffocation. 
It was this enhancement that preceded the death of Manadel Jamadi, an Iraqi who died in CIA custody at Abu Ghraib in November 2003, according to government investigative reports. When Jamadi was lowered to the ground, blood gushed from his mouth as if “a faucet had turned on,” said Tony Diaz, an MP who witnessed his torture. Later, other guards posed with Jamadi’s battered corpse, and the leaked photos shocked the world.
That’s not the kind of publicity a freedom-loving democracy needs, so the CIA reportedly opted for secret “black sites.” It’s not as easy as you might think to find a spot where you can torture people in peace. Abu Ghraib is full of camera-clicking reservists, and the Marquis de Sade’s castle lies in ruins. The Tower of London’s dungeons still boast an excellent range of enhanced interrogation equipment, but they attract too many giggling children.
CIA operatives apparently considered uninhabited islands near Zambia’s Lake Kariba, but interrogators didn’t much like the idea of catching one of those nasty local diseases so prevalent in Central Africa. Marburg hemorrhagic fever? No thanks.
Thailand worked for a while, but the Thai government got cold feet when press reports outed the existence of a local CIA site. And Guantanamo’s CIA interrogation facility had to be closed when the U.S. Supreme Court pointed out that Guantanamo is not a law-free zone.
Remember the flap last spring when Amnesty International called Guantanamo an American “gulag”? Maybe that’s what gave the CIA the idea of locating some black sites in Eastern Europe. (“Hmm, gulag, gulag — that reminds me of something. Hey! Maybe there are some leftover Soviet-era detention facilities we can use for our enhanced interrogations!”)
At the request of “senior U.S. officials,” The Washington Post declined to identify the locations of the black sites. But Marc Garlasco, a military analyst at Human Rights Watch, says that host countries may include Poland and Romania. 
Human Rights Watch examined flight records showing that on Sept. 22, 2003, for instance, around the same time several high-value al-Qaida detainees were transferred out of CIA facilities in Afghanistan, a CIA-linked Boeing 737 flew from Kabul to Szymany Airport in Poland. The next day, it landed  in Romania. Released Guantanamo detainees have corroborated the use of this plane as a prisoner transport, and rights groups and journalists say witnesses also have reported seeing hooded prisoners being loaded and unloaded from the same plane at various other locations.
During the Cold War, Americans thought they knew what distinguished them from their Soviet bloc enemies. They did not have a gulag; they did not imprison and torture their enemies. But the war on terror has distorted those national values. The Soviet Union’s legacy of terror lives on, its tactics embraced by some of America’s leaders. Vice President Dick Cheney continues to insist that the McCain amendment, which prohibits U.S. personnel from cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners, should not be applicable to the CIA.
Somewhere in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery, Khrushchev may be laughing inside his grave.

Rosa Brooks is a columnist at the Los Angeles Times, where this comment first appeared.

TITLE: Looking Back On Lessons Of The Revolution
AUTHOR: By Richard Lourie
TEXT: There are very few Russians still alive who remember the Revolution. Soon it will pass entirely from experience into history. Yet what Chou En Lai said about the French Revolution holds for the Russian as well: Too soon to judge. 
Still, you have to wonder: Could things have been different? Recently rereading some stories by Isaac Babel from the early 1920s I was reminded that Soviet literature had gotten off to a flying start before it was hijacked by Socialist Realism. I also recalled the words of the chairman of a successful collective farm in Kazakhstan: “The kibbutzes worked in Israel because they were voluntary and the kolkhozes might have worked here too if people hadn’t been forced to join.” Soviet intellectuals used to play a “What if?” game. How many fewer people would have been killed if Trotsky, not Stalin, had succeeded Lenin? 
But maybe things could not have turned out that differently. All the other major social/political experiments of the 20th century were colossal failures. The societies that justified their violence by claiming that the ends justified the means did not come anywhere near the ends they posited. The 1,000-year Reich did not last even 15 years, China was hardly a workers’ paradise. 
In some ways, Russia may be better off than China because it rid itself of communism in both politics and economics in one fell swoop. Unleashing capitalism but retaining control of political power, the Chinese Communist Party derived new legitimacy from the successes of the economy and looked smarter in the short run. But a day of reckoning may yet come: We may see a great battle pitting the new monied and middle classes against the entrenched communist bureaucrats. 
In other ways Russia is worse off. The Russian Revolution came 32 years before China’s, and so Russia suffered longer from its ill effects on infrastructure, ecology, and the trust and confidence that make for normal social relations. Cynicism was rampant. The state was the enemy, to rip it off was a right, a duty, an honor. Everyone pilfered and connived, a pre-Soviet mindset that outlived the U.S.S.R. The difference between workers filching lumber from a work site and the oligarchs pocketing entire industries was primarily one of scale.
Issues of justice aside, the Mikhail Khodorkovsky affair contains clues to the direction that Russia is now taking. Gas and oil are too important to be left in suspect private hands. Those viewed as challenging the state will be persecuted and prosecuted by the security apparatus — as they ever have been, from Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniki to Putin’s FSB. Russia will continue to produce rebels and martyrs, a tradition that goes back to Avakuum the Old Believer, philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev (who predicted that Russia would teach the world one great lesson then vanish from history’s stage) and Soviet-era figures such as Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky. In fact, Khodorkovsky has openly associated himself with the Decembrists. On Oct. 27, the former dissident Sharansky took up Khodorkovsky’s cause in The Washington Post. A billionaire Decembrist defended in the American press by a dissident Soviet Jew who became an Israeli official — good thing Lenin’s not alive to witness the 88th anniversary of his revolution!
Khodorkovsky, we know, is considering converting to Russian Orthodoxy. That makes sense for someone facing the bleakness of eight years in prison. The church’s beauty has been a solace and source of continuity for centuries. For many Jews conversion alleviates their alienation from Russianness, allowing them to merge into the communal warmth of the nation. It could also be a smart move for someone seeking political office in the future. 
Though the shape of the new Russia remains murky and dim, certain elements will no doubt persevere — Russian Orthodoxy, oil and gas, state security. Who knows, they may all yet merge into one gigantic entity to be called PravoslavNefteGazBezopas — or, for short, Russia.

Richard Lourie is the author of “The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin” and “Sakharov: A Biography.”

TITLE: A Strategy for Preservation
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Gryaznevich
TEXT: Last week, on Nov. 1, the St. Petersburg government adopted a document entitled “the St. Petersburg strategy for the preservation of heritage,” prepared by the Committee for the State Protection of Monuments (KGIOP). 
The strategy can be read on the official site of the St. Petersburg Administration, and I will limit myself to just a few observations. 
Our magazine, Expert Severo-Zapad, has been taking an interest in this issue of late. We’ve interviewed a number of authoritative experts on the subject, so I would argue that we are fairly well-informed on it. I mention this as I would like to go on record as saying that the Strategy is good. If it does have one defect, it is that it needs a reality check. 
The document does a good job of describing what it is that we want to protect. On top of that, the basic concept is excellent: We shouldn’t just preserve monuments, we should also preserve the environment which they inhabit. Petersburg is valued not so much for monuments, which can be found in other cities, as for its unique environment, which comprises historic landscapes, open spaces, wonderful views of the city, and certain characteristics of humbler buildings in the central neighborhoods of the city — the background, for want of a better way of putting it. 
That background offsets the city’s architectural masterpieces and characteristic views of the city. It is these more mundane constructions that create the conditions for the unique Petersburg environment. Monuments are only threatened by natural deterioration and poor restoration, and they are protected by KGIOP. There is far less control over the background,  and this is where the real danger lies. 
The Strategy fails to give an adequate analysis of this danger. The text includes numerous references to certain actions being unacceptable in construction and restoration works, but there is little that is concrete in all this. 
In order to preserve something, we have to have a precise understanding of the dangers. The main threats should be identified and analyzed, and measures to cope with them should be proposed. The Strategy doesn’t give these specifics. In fact, it even manages to confuse the issue. This can even be seen, for example, in a chapter specifically dedicated to the subject (Article 7: “Threats and risks of physical destruction of the architectural heritage of St. Petersburg”), which tells us that “Threats of physical destruction of heritage sites relate to the natural process of aging.” It goes on to list factors that can speed up that aging process: climactic conditions, natural accidents, atmospheric pollution, uncontrolled urbanization, traffic, improper use of buildings, and the like. 
The above-mentioned aging process isn’t the real problem, however. The main threat to cultural heritage comes from fast-developing business interests which are affecting “background” construction. 
Walk through the central neighborhoods of the city and take a look around. You’ll see a fair number of new buildings, both completed and in the process of being constructed. If you look closely, you’ll see that a number of them tower over the historic “background”, clearly distorting the city’s historic views. 
It is buildings such as these that spoil the architectural and spatial environment in St. Petersburg. The initiative and motivation for their construction comes from business. They cost a lot of money, and investors manage to find a way to implement their plans. It seems that the threat that they create brought about the appearance of the above-mentioned Strategy. But as the adopted document doesn’t clearly set out this problem, the measures to deal with the issue as set out in chapter 8 are inadequate. What those measures should be, in the opinion of the experts, I’ll outline in next week’s issue. 

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: Philosopher’s Stone
AUTHOR: By Chris Floyd
TEXT: Last week, a legal thunderbolt struck at the heart of the grubby conspiracy that led the United States and Britain into an illegal war of aggression against Iraq. But this searing blow didn’t fall in Washington, where a media frenzy raged over a White House indictment, but in southern England, in a military courtroom, where a lone soldier stood against the full force of the great war-crime enterprise, armed only with a single, rusty, obsolete weapon: the law.
While Potomac courtiers were reading the entrails of the cooked goose of Scooter Libby — the first Bushist honcho caught in the slow-grinding gears of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation — in Wiltshire, Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith faced a court martial after declaring that the Iraq war was illegal and refusing to return for his third tour of duty there, The Guardian reports. 
He has been charged with four counts of “disobeying a lawful command.” But Kendall-Smith, a decorated medical officer in the Royal Air Force, says that his study of the recently revealed evidence about the lies, distortions and manipulations used to justify the invasion has convinced him that both the war and the occupation are “manifestly illegal.” Thus any order arising from this criminal action is itself an “unlawful command,” The Sunday Times reports. In fact, the RAF’s own manual of law compels him to refuse such illegal orders, Kendall-Smith insists.
The flight lieutenant is no ordinary war protester, and no shirker of combat — unlike, say, the pair of prissy cowards at the head of the U.S.-British “coalition.” Kendall-Smith, who has dual New Zealand-British citizenship — and a pair of university degrees in medicine and Kantian moral philosophy — has served three tours at the front in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is not claiming any conscientious objections against war in general, nor do religious scruples play any part in his stance. It is based solely on the law.
Central to his case are the sinister backroom legal dealings between London and Washington in the days before the invasion. Less than two weeks before the initial “shock and awe” bombings began slaughtering civilians across Iraq, Lord Goldsmith, the British attorney general, gave Prime Minister Tony Blair a detailed briefing full of doubts and equivocations about the legality of the coming war, adding that Britain’s participation in an attack unsanctioned by the United Nations would “likely” lead to “close scrutiny” by the International Criminal Court for potential war crimes charges, The Observer reports. 
But Blair and Goldsmith withheld this report from Parliament, the Cabinet and British military brass, who were demanding a clear-cut legal sanction for the impending action. Then, just three days before the bloodletting began, Goldsmith suddenly produced another paper, this time for public consumption: a brief, clear, unequivocal statement that the invasion would be legal. This statement was almost certainly crafted in Washington, where Goldsmith had recently been “tutored” by the Bush gang’s consiglieres, including the legal advisers to Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice.
Leading this pack of war-baying legal beagles was George W. Bush’s top counsel, Alberto Gonzales, who had overseen the White House’s own efforts to weasel out of potential war crimes charges by declaring — without any basis in Anglo-American jurisprudence or the U.S. Constitution — that Bush was not bound by any law whatsoever in any military action he undertook: a blank check for aggression, murder and torture that Bush has gleefully cashed over and over. Alberto and the boys leaned hard on Goldsmith, who finally caved in and replicated the Americans’ contorted and specious legal arguments for launching the attack.
Of course, Kendall-Smith knew none of this during his first two tours in Iraq: Goldsmith’s Bush-induced backflip was only divulged in April 2005. Nor did he know then of the “Downing Street Memos,” the “smoking gun” minutes that record Blair’s inner circle dutifully lining up behind Bush’s hell-bent drive for war — as far back as 2002 — and their conspiracy with the Bush gang to manipulate their countries into war. The memos, which emerged in May 2005 and have never been denied or repudiated by the British government, show Blair’s slavish acquiescence in Bush’s criminal scheme to “fix the facts and the intelligence around the policy” of unprovoked military aggression. Confronted with this new evidence — and revelations about the mountain of doubts expressed by U.S. intelligence before the invasion but deliberately ignored by the Bushist war party — Kendall-Smith took the only honorable course for a soldier who has been duped into serving an evil cause.
The moral rigor of his defiance has sent tremors through the British military establishment, already shaken by the strange, unexplained shooting deaths of two military inspectors investigating atrocity allegations in Iraq, The Guardian reports. 
British brass are panicky about the Goldsmith revelations; indeed, the leader of the British invasion force, Admiral Michael Boyce, said that he now believed his country’s military did not have “the legal cover necessary to avoid prosecution for war crimes,” The Observer reports. Boyce added that if he and his officers were eventually put on trial for waging aggressive war, he’d make sure that Blair and Goldsmith were in the dock beside them.
Bush, Blair and their minions have committed a monstrous crime, and they know it — hence all the convolutions, before the war and after, to inoculate themselves from prosecution. But with Kendall-Smith and Fitzgerald, the long-moribund figure of the law is re-awakening. 
It’s weak, it’s bleary, it certainly might fail. But now the conspirators will have to live cowering in its shadow for the rest of their days.

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

TITLE: Vladimir Kolesnikov: the Prosecutor in the Spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — If a crime grabs the national spotlight, Deputy Prosecutor General Vladimir Kolesnikov is almost always put on the case. 
The burly prosecutor rushes to the scene and appears on television sputtering angrily about suspects and witnesses, as if to reassure the nation that the guilty will be punished and order will be restored.
Kolesnikov first made the news when he led the team of police detectives that caught one of the world’s most notorious serial killers, Andrei Chikatilo, in 1990. Since then, he has rarely been out of the public eye for long, first as an Interior Ministry official rising rapidly through the ranks and since 2000 as a high-profile mouthpiece for the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Most recently, he was dispatched to Nalchik on Oct. 13 when armed Islamist militants launched coordinated attacks on the town. In September, he was appointed by President Vladimir Putin to spearhead a special investigation into the Beslan school attack.
Some former colleagues praise Kolesnikov as a dedicated professional, while critics say he often creates an impression of activity to head off public discontent, or serves as a tool for the Kremlin to attack its foes.
In contrast to his high PR impact, Kolesnikov’s track record in solving big cases has been patchy.
Since his appointment as a deputy to Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov in 2002, Kolesnikov has overseen the investigations into some of the country’s most sensational killings, such as the brazen murder of Magadan Governor Valentin Tsvetkov in central Moscow and the killings of two newspaper editors in Tolyatti. In none of these cases has the investigation led to a successful conviction. 
Kolesnikov has also unleashed his fury against former powerful insiders who have fallen out with the Kremlin, such as Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and most recently former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who is being investigated over his acquisition of a government villa near Moscow.
Kolesnikov has denied that political motives lie behind his intervention.
“At every trifle they say: politics, politics. One shouldn’t steal and there will be no politics,” Kolesnikov said in July, referring to the Kasyanov investigation.

Targeting Khodorkovsky
It was Kolesnikov who heralded the arrest of Khodorkovsky with another homily on theft, just four days before the head of Yukos was seized at gunpoint on a Siberian runway and charged with fraud and tax evasion.
“I personally don’t want Khodorkovsky to be behind bars, ... but there’s no need for cheating and stealing — you have to answer for everything,” Kolesnikov said at an Oct. 21, 2003 news conference.
Three weeks later, speaking to a group of ultranationalist LDPR State Duma deputies, Kolesnikov dropped any display of reticence.
“Sadly, it is impossible to give him a longer term,” he said, referring to the maximum 10-year sentence his office was demanding. After a trial that lasted nearly a year, Khodorkovsky was given a nine-year sentence, which was reduced to eight years on appeal. 
In September 2002, Kolesnikov set his sights on getting Berezovsky extradited from Britain, accusing him of stealing 2,000 cars worth $13 million through his auto dealership in the 1990s. Judges in Britain rejected the Russian prosecutors’ demand and later granted Berezovsky political asylum, saying they feared he would not receive a fair trial in Russia.
Kolesnikov has also attempted to whip up populist fears, as when he warned of a risk of accidents at energy facilities after Moscow’s power outage in May, and has railed against what he said were illegal adoptions by foreigners.
Last year, he controversially called for followers of the Wahhabi strain of Islam to be jailed, saying it prompted youths to take up arms in a jihad, or holy war. 
Alexei Mukhin, director of the Center for Political Information, said Kolesnikov’s role was often to rush to the scene of a crime and create the appearance of activity with a flurry of bold statements.
“He has a penchant for public relations,” Mukhin said. “His unofficial tasks include reassuring the public and saying that everything is under control.”

Damage Control
The new investigation he led into Beslan appeared to be intended more as a damage-control exercise after a group of victims’ relatives led by Beslan Mothers’ Committee head Susanna Dudiyeva complained to Putin that investigators had ignored testimony from some of the witnesses.
On Sept. 30, Kolesnikov said his team had questioned all the witnesses named by Dudiyeva, and that their testimony had disproved claims that the militants hid weapons in the school before the attack and that a security forces sniper could have set off the gunfight at the school.
Wrapping up his work in October, Kolesnikov said he agreed with the conclusions of the previous investigation. The statement prompted members of the Beslan Mothers’ Committee to picket the Prosecutor General’s Office last week to demand Kolesnikov’s resignation. Dudiyeva said Kolesnikov did not want to know the truth. 
In September, he had said that prosecutors would question Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev and Federal Security Service director Nikolai Patrushev — two of the Moscow officials whom Beslan residents blame for the tragedy, in which 331 people died. There have been no reports about either of them having been questioned.
“That should have been done at the very beginning of the investigation,” said Yury Skuratov, a former prosecutor general who was fired in 1999 after investigating allegations of high-level corruption. “We still don’t know who was in charge there and who should be held responsible.
“In our time, we questioned Chernomyrdin,” he said, referring to then-Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. “Now, the prosecutor’s office has sunk to such a position that questioning a minister is only in one’s wildest dream.”
There was nothing unusual about Kolesnikov’s inclination to reassure the public that criminals will be caught and punished, Skuratov said. “When he arrives, everybody expects results from him. He won’t say that the case will never be solved, will he? And he sincerely believes that it will.”
Skuratov said that Kolesnikov’s exact duties at the prosecutor’s office appeared hazy, but that his background as a police detective and Interior Ministry official meant he was well suited to heading up investigations.

The Tolyatti Killings
The investigations into the killings of the two editors in Tolyatti could be viewed as among Kolesnikov’s most notable failures.
Valery Ivanov, the editor of Tolyatti Review, was killed in April 2002, and his successor, Alexei Sidorov, was killed in October 2003. Kolesnikov investigated both murders, stating after the first one, “We know the names of the killers, but we cannot make them public yet.”
Two suspects in Ivanov’s murder were released without charge, and another died in detention during the investigation, said Alexei Simonov, head of the Glasnost Defense Foundation, a free speech watchdog.
A welder at a Tolyatti factory was arrested in the Sidorov case, but acquitted in court. The murders remain unsolved.
It was widely believed that the killings were acts of revenge over the newspaper’s quest to expose corruption and organized crime in the city, a center of the national auto industry.
Kolesnikov, however, blamed Sidorov’s death on a drunken brawl. 
Sidorov’s father, Vladimir, sent Kolesnikov a scathing letter, made public in February 2004, which claimed his son’s death was being used “to create the illusion that the prosecutors are working effectively.”
Simonov used stronger words to describe Kolesnikov. “He’s a liar,” Simonov said by telephone. “He lied twice and he wasn’t punished.”
Kolesnikov declined requests made through his office for an interview.
Other cases that Kolesnikov supervised have also run into trouble in court, such as a 2003 case against four doctors charged with attempting to murder a seriously ill patient by planning to remove his kidney for a transplant.
The Moscow City Court acquitted the doctors in March of this year, but the Supreme Court overturned the ruling after an appeal from the prosecutors and sent the case back for a retrial. The doctors went on trial for a second time in August, and a verdict is expected on Wednesday.
Skuratov said it was not fair to blame the failures solely on Kolesnikov. “It’s the result of poor work by the teams of investigators and experts,” he said. “Anyone would have failures in his place.”
In the investigation into the 1998 killing of liberal Duma Deputy Galina Starovoitova, Kolesnikov has been uncharacteristically quiet.
Immediately after his appointment as deputy prosecutor general, he said he would supervise the investigation. But Starovoitova’s sister Olga said that nothing had changed after Kolesnikov had gotten involved in the case, and that although investigators had successfully brought some of the suspects to justice, Kolesnikov had appeared to have played no part in their work.
A St. Petersburg court in June convicted two suspects in the killing, and the local FSB branch said that it would soon open a case against two more. But the investigation has yet to identify who put out the hit on Starovoitova, or bring to trial three suspects who remain at large.
Cases ending in successful convictions after Kolesnikov got involved are few and far between.
In one such case, a deputy head of the Federal Fisheries Agency and an official in the Far East port of Magadan were convicted in 2004 of illegally catching and selling $6 million worth of crab and other shellfish. But even then, the two officials got away with suspended sentences after an appeal to the Supreme Court. 
The case came to light while prosecutors were investigating the killing of Tsvetkov, the Magadan governor, in October 2002, an investigation in which Kolesnikov was involved.
Three suspects were arrested in Tsvetkov’s killing, the latest in December 2004, but there have been no reports of any trial scheduled. Police have identified six other suspects, who are still at large, but law enforcement agencies have yet to identify who was behind the killing.

Fast-Track Career
Kolesnikov, 57, was born in Abkhazia and began his career as a police investigator in Rostov-on-Don in 1972. He moved to Moscow to study at the Soviet Interior Ministry’s academy from 1988 to 1990, returning to Rostov as deputy head of the regional police.
In 1990, he headed the police task force that arrested Chikatilo, Russia’s most infamous serial killer who was responsible for 52 deaths. The case brought Kolesnikov nationwide prominence and put him on a fast track to advancement. 
He moved back to Moscow the same year to become deputy head of criminal investigations at the Russian Interior Ministry, and he rose rapidly through the ranks to become first deputy interior minister in 1995.
Over the next five years, Kolesnikov dealt with several high-profile cases, including the 1996 Kotlyakovskoye Cemetery explosion in southeastern Moscow and investigations into terrorist attacks in Dagestan in the late 1990s.
One of three suspects in the cemetery explosion, which killed 14 people and appeared to be part of a turf war over the profitable business of the Fund for Afghan War Invalids, was convicted in May 2003, and another died in a traffic accident.
In Dagestan, Kolesnikov pressed fraud charges against dozens of senior regional officials in the fall of 1998, but investigations all but stopped after he left the republic to take up another case.
Dagestan’s long-serving leader, Magomedali Magomedov, has been accused of using the Interior Ministry to quash opposition.
Skuratov, however, said Kolesnikov had worked professionally in the cemetery and Dagestan investigations.
It was during the trips to Dagestan that Kolesnikov met Ustinov, who was then deputy prosecutor general responsible for the North Caucasus.
In 2000, Kolesnikov left the ministry after a disagreement with then-Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo and became an aide to Ustinov at the Prosecutor General’s Office. In 2002, he was appointed one of Ustinov’s deputies.

Peacemaking Role
In a change of role, Kolesnikov was sent last year to mediate a solution to the political crisis in his native Abkhazia. The breakaway Georgian province was split by a standoff between rival presidential candidates Sergei Bagapsh, representing the opposition, and Raul Khadzhimba, favored by Moscow, following a disputed election last October.
As the dispute threatened to slide into civil war, Moscow sent Kolesnikov to support Khadzhimba, while nationalist Duma Deputy Sergei Baburin intervened to press Bagapsh’s cause.
Unflinching as ever, Kolesnikov initially refused to yield any ground, which fueled the already high tensions in the province, Baburin said.
The standoff was settled after Moscow threatened to impose economic sanctions on Abkhazia if Bagapsh did not give up his claim of victory. Bagapsh agreed to hold a rerun election, and was elected president on a joint ticket with Khadzhimba as his vice president.
Despite Kolesnikov’s tough stance in the negotiations, Baburin spoke highly of his ability to compromise.
“Diplomacy isn’t always about licking your ... opponent. Sometimes it’s about making clear statements,” he said. 
“And also, he’s capable of compromise. He did apply strong pressure, but a settlement would have been impossible without him.”

TITLE: Not Yet a Full House, But Poker Striking Gold on Russian Internet
AUTHOR: By Carl Schreck
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Kirill Gerasimov alternately wiped his sunglasses and checked his watch as midnight approached, fidgety behavior for a guy who makes his living by staying cool. 
Finally, Gerasimov, who bears an uncanny resemblance to U.S. actor Matt Damon, pushed the remainder of his dwindling chips to the center of the table, sliding them past his pair of 10s resting face up on the red felt.
Onlookers began muttering “all in,” a reference to Gerasimov’s do-or-die bet, prompting players from neighboring tables to abandon their games momentarily to watch the action. 
Unfortunately for Gerasimov, his two 10s proved insufficient as the dealer revealed the final card — and just like that, Russia’s most accomplished professional poker player was done for the night and $2,000 poorer for his efforts.
“Good luck, everyone,” Gerasimov said, although, perhaps thanks to the stoicism that serves him so well in poker, it was hard to tell if he was being ironic. 
He stood up and walked briskly out of the second-floor game room at the Korona Casino while 23 other players continued to battle it out at the 2005 Russian Poker Championships. With 48 players and a $2,000 entry fee, the Texas No Limit Hold’em tournament was the culmination of the 11-day event, which ended Oct. 19. 
Five hours after Gerasimov’s exit, Valery Ilikyan, a cigar-chomping, trash-talking Armenian businessman from Tbilisi with a habit of yelling at waitresses for slow service, took home around $29,000 for his first-place finish, bringing his total winnings in the final two days to around $44,000. 
While Ilikyan was the big winner of the championship, Gerasimov, a 34-year-old Muscovite, remains by far Russia’s most distinguished poker pro, and his early departure from the tournament’s main event could easily be chalked up to the bane of all gamblers: bad luck.
But Gerasimov could be facing increasingly stiff competition from his countrymen in the coming years. The game’s global boom has begun to resonate in Russia, creating a small but growing class of players who earn their daily bread by heeding the advice of country singer Kenny Rogers’ most famous protagonist.
Fueled by Internet game rooms and television coverage of tournaments, poker has experienced an unprecedented spike in worldwide popularity in recent years.
The website PokerPulse.com, which tracks the online poker industry, estimated that in May there were more than 1.8 million active online players betting $200 million every day, a tenfold jump since televised poker began to take off in early 2003.
While poker was once the domain of flamboyant, hardened gamblers and rich businessmen looking to blow off steam with other high-rollers in backrooms and casinos, the surge in the game’s popularity has created a new generation of young poker pros, relative rookies, honing their craft — and padding their wallets — on the Internet before testing their skills in major tournaments.
Online and casino poker in Russia is still in an embryonic stage. There are currently around 100 players in Russia, the majority of them in Moscow and St. Petersburg, whose income depends primarily on their success at the poker table, said Dmitry Lesnoi, publisher of the monthly magazine Casino Games and a ubiquitous figure on the Moscow poker scene.
Despite the relatively small numbers compared with the West, Lesnoi, who is also president of the Russian League of Intellectual Games, said poker’s popularity had grown exponentially in recent years.
“Five years ago, there was a total of 200 people playing poker regularly in Moscow, and now there are thousands of players playing on the Internet and in casinos,” Lesnoi said.
Vlad Shushkovsky, a burly hockey agent who emigrated with his parents to Canada from Soviet Ukraine in 1979, has also noted a surge in popularity in Russian online poker. Shushkovsky, 38, created the web site RedStarPoker.com after he saw a gap in the burgeoning online poker market.
“There are a lot of Internet poker players all over the world, but there were no Russia-specific sites,” Shushkovsky said.
Shushkovsky estimates that a year ago there were around 1,000 Russians regularly playing poker at popular sites such as PartyPoker.com. Red Star Poker, which went online in June, currently has around 5,300 registered accounts.
“Given that some players register under more than one nickname, we probably have around 3,500 players registered at any given time,” he said.
Shushkovsky predicted that the number of online poker players in Russia would grow along with the increasing number of Internet users.
“Poker is the perfect game for Russians,” Shushkovsky said. “They love intellectual games, and they love to gamble.”
Rhys Jones, a poker operations manager for the Gibraltar-based online gaming company Mansion, put the number even higher, estimating that Moscow alone has tens of thousands of online poker players.
Jones, a New Zealand native who beat out Ilikyan for the $25,000 first prize in the Texas No Limit Hold’em tournament held on the penultimate day of the Russian Poker Championships, is currently exploring investment opportunities related to poker in Russia, and he is confident Russia will catch up with the global poker boom.
“With exposure on television and as Internet access becomes easier, it’s inevitable,” Jones said.
Poker has a relatively short history in Russia, with most Soviet citizens experiencing the game vicariously through Jack London novels, Lesnoi said. “When I was young, it wasn’t very popular,” he said. “It wasn’t played in public, and there were no tournaments of course. Some people played it in the kitchen with their friends, but the only game they knew was five-card draw.”
Card games like durak and seka, a three-card game that rewards the same combinations as poker, were more popular, Lesnoi said, but with the onset of perestroika and more freedom to travel, Soviet citizens got a taste of the game by frequenting U.S. and European casinos. 
Moscow’s first poker clubs opened up in the late 1990s at local casinos, and interest in the game has steadily grown, said Vince Conte, poker club operator at Casino de Paris.
On any given night, there are around 100 poker players competing in Moscow casinos such as Korona, Shangri La, the Cosmos Casino, Casino de Paris and the Jazz Town Casino, Conte said.
While the ranks of professional players in North America and Western Europe have been flooded in recent years with gamblers who got their start online, Russia’s pros are primarily a mix of gamblers and ex-card dealers who happened to discover the game in the casinos they haunted.
Vyacheslav Karpov, 27, said he worked six years as a dealer at the Cosmos Casino before quitting to make his money playing poker and backgammon.
“You have total freedom as a professional player,” said Karpov, who was one hand away from making the final table on the last day of the Russian Poker Championships. “You don’t have to go to work. You’re your own boss. That’s the most important thing.”
Gerasimov, who began playing poker four years ago after learning the game by hanging out at Moscow casinos, is by far the most successful Russian pro on the international scene. 
Known for his aggressive style, Gerasimov has won more than $1 million in prize money in Russian, European and U.S. tournaments, according to the Hendon Mob Poker Database, a web site that tracks players’ winnings. 
Named Rookie of the Year at the 2002 European Poker Awards and dubbed the Red Square Rumbler by U.S. television poker commentators, Gerasimov’s most impressive performance was a second-place finish at the World Poker Tour championship at the Bellagio in Las Vegas in April 2003, which earned him $506,625 in prize money. 
Gerasimov, like most Russian players, is hesitant to talk about how much money he makes on poker. “The more important question is how much I lose,” he said in an interview in August.
He has said most of his income comes from playing online and at Moscow casinos.
While money-wise Gerasimov is clearly Russia’s leading tournament player, several of his peers have earned their reputations by toiling away in relative anonymity in high-stakes cash games.
Kirill Rabtsov, a former Cosmos dealer, is known in Moscow poker circles as one of the most formidable opponents in cash games, which, unlike tournament play, allow a player to keep purchasing chips until he runs out of money or loans.
While Gerasimov says he is a purist, concerned more about playing well and letting the chips fall where they may, the clean-cut, high-strung Rabtsov has a decidedly unromantic take on his profession.
“I don’t care about playing well,” Rabtsov, 28, said. “I just play for the money.”
Rabtsov is equally pragmatic about his reputation. “Everyone is bad at poker, but some are worse than others,” he said. 
“And those players lose to the players that aren’t as bad as they are.”
Other Russian poker players strive to make waves on the international scene, but they face the problem of many Russians trying to travel abroad: visas.
Alexander Kravchenko, a regular at Moscow poker tables, has earned more than $180,000 in Russian and European tournaments over the past five years, according to the Hendon Mob Poker Database.
But big-money U.S. tournaments, such as the annual World Series of Poker Main Event in Las Vegas, which Australia’s Joe Hachem won in July, earning $7.5 million, have been off-limits to Kravchenko.
“I can’t get a visa to the United States,” Kravchenko, 34, said in an interview in the Shangri La VIP room, which regularly hosts cash games with a $7,000 buy-in for Moscow’s elite players.
Trouble obtaining a U.S. visa, however, is of little relevance to Russia’s biggest celebrity poker player: former world No. 1 tennis player Yevgeny Kafelnikov. (Other international celebrity players include Hollywood stars Ben Affleck, James Woods and Toby Maguire, all of whom have competed in the U.S. television tournament Celebrity Poker Showdown.)
Gerasimov may be Russia’s most accomplished player, but Kafelnikov is clearly Russian poker’s most prominent export, even if he’s more famous for serving aces than drawing them.
Kafelnikov announced in November that he was giving up tennis for good to become a poker pro, and he can often be found honing his new craft in local cash games.
Kafelnikov, who has beefed up considerably since his tennis days, was on hand during the Russian Poker Championships, though he spurned the final days in favor of the big-money cash games in one of Korona’s VIP rooms, emerging occasionally to lend moral support to his friend Ilikyan.
Kafelnikov declined to be interviewed for this article, and he painstakingly avoided being photographed, jumping out of the way whenever a camera was pointed in his direction.
But in an interview with London’s The Independent in November, Kafelnikov said his success in tennis had helped prepare him for the poker table. 
“You need guts in poker, as in tennis,” Kafelnikov was quoted as saying. “And if you don’t believe in your ability, you don’t win. In tennis I believed in myself, that’s why I had so much success.”
He said he found poker “exciting ... because you win not with the cards but with your skills. With body language you can win a game, but also you can lose a game.”
Kafelnikov has already had some success in tournament poker, having won around $47,000 in Russian and U.S. tournaments over the past 12 months.
But don’t look for big names like Kafelnikov to emerge as leading Russian players in the near future, said Karpov, the former Cosmos dealer. The next generation of Russian poker pros will emerge from behind nicknames on Internet poker sites, he said.
“There are a lot of young people playing online now, and they want to dedicate their lives to playing,” Karpov said. “Poker has a big future in Russia. No doubt about it.”
Gerasimov and Kravchenko were more tempered in their assessments, saying that the game’s growth here would depend largely on continuing economic stability in the country and popularization through television and the Internet.
Lesnoi preferred to wax historic, saying that poker perfectly suited the social and economic climate of contemporary Russia.
“Every epoch has a game that reflects life in that period. During the reign of Catherine the Great, the entire ruling elite played shtoss,” Lesnoi said, referring to a simple but risky game characterized by large all-or-nothing bets. 
“It was a time when anything could happen: A soldier could be appointed general on a whim, or an old general could be forced to become a soldier.”
Poker suits the current attitudes of Russians eschewing the practice of storing money under the mattress in favor of banks, Lesnoi said, using an analogy that, in the immediate aftermath of the 1998 default, might have done little to popularize the game. 
“When you take your money to a bank, it’s like betting in poker: You expect to earn some small interest while waiting for bigger profits,” he said. “And an experienced player makes good bets.”

TITLE: French Riots Hit 300 Towns, 1 Man Dead
AUTHOR: By Angela Doland
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PARIS — Rioting by French youths spread to 300 towns overnight and a man hurt in the violence died of his wounds, the first fatality in 11 days of unrest that has shocked the country, police said Monday. 
As urban unrest spread to neighboring Belgium and looked likely to spread to Germany, the French government faced growing criticism for its inability to stop the violence, despite massive police deployment and continued calls for calm.
On Sunday night, vandals burned more than 1,400 vehicles, and clashes around the country left 36 police injured, setting a new high for overnight arson and violence since rioting started Oct. 27, Michel Gaudin told a news conference.
Australia, Austria, Britain, Germany and Hungary advised their citizens to exercise care in France, joining the United States and Russia in warning tourists to stay away from violence-hit areas.
Alain Rahmouni, a national police spokesman, said the man who was beaten died at a hospital from injuries sustained in the attack, but he had no immediate details of the victim’s age or his attacker.
The man was caught by surprise by an attacker after rushing out of his apartment building to put out a trash can fire, Rahmouni said.
Apparent copycat attacks spread outside France for the first time, with five cars torched outside Brussels’ main train station, police in the Belgian capital said.
The mayhem started as an outburst of anger in suburban Paris housing projects and has fanned out nationwide among disaffected youths, mostly of Muslim or African origin, to become France’s worst civil unrest in over a decade.
Attacks overnight Sunday to Monday were reported in 274 towns, and police made 395 arrests, Gaudin said.
“This spread, with a sort of shock wave spreading across the country, shows up in the number of towns affected,” Gaudin said, noting that the violence appeared to be sliding away from its flash point in the Parisian suburbs and worsening elsewhere.
It was the first time police had been injured by weapons’ fire and there were signs that rioters were deliberately seeking out clashes with police, officials said.
Among the injured police, 10 were hurt by youths firing fine-grain birdshot in a late-night clash in the southern Paris suburb of Grigny, national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said. Two were hospitalized, but their lives were not considered to be in danger. One was wounded in the neck, the other in the legs.
The unrest began Oct. 27 in the low-income Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, after the deaths of two teenagers of Mauritanian and Tunisian origin. The youths were accidentally electrocuted as they hid from police in a power substation. 
They apparently thought they were being chased.
All told, 4,700 cars have been burned in France since the rioting began and 1,200 suspects were detained at least temporarily, Gaudin said.
The growing violence is forcing France to confront long-simmering anger in its suburbs, where many Africans and their French-born children live on society’s margins, struggling with high unemployment, racial discrimination and despair — fertile terrain for crime of all sorts as well as for Muslim extremists offering frustrated youths a way out.
France, with some 5 million Muslims, has the largest Islamic population in Western Europe.
President Jacques Chirac, whose government is under intense pressure to halt the violence, promised stern punishment for those behind the attacks, making his first public comments Sunday since the riots started.
“The law must have the last word,” Chirac said Sunday after a security meeting with top ministers. France is determined “to be stronger than those who want to sow violence or fear, and they will be arrested, judged and punished.” 
France’s biggest Muslim fundamentalist organization, the Union for Islamic Organizations of France, issued a fatwa, or religious decree. It forbade all those “who seek divine grace from taking part in any action that blindly strikes private or public property or can harm others.” 
Arsonists burned two schools and a bus in the central city of Saint-Etienne and its suburbs, and two people were injured in the bus attack. Churches were set ablaze in northern Lens and southern Sete, he said. 
In Colombes in suburban Paris, youths pelted a bus with rocks, sending a 13-month-old child to the hospital with a head injury, Hamon said, while a daycare center was burned in Saint-Maurice, another Paris suburb. 
Much of the youths’ anger has focused on law-and-order Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, whose reference to the troublemakers as “scum” appeared to inflame passions.

TITLE: OSCE: Azeri Poll Was Flawed
AUTHOR: By Christian Lowe
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BAKU — Azerbaijan’s parliamentary election did not meet international standards for democracy, Western observers said on Monday as the defeated opposition prepared mass protests against what it said was widespread fraud. 
“The shortcomings that were observed, particularly during election day, have led us to conclude that the election [on Sunday] did not meet Azerbaijan’s international commitments on elections,” said Alcee L. Hastings, head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s election observation mission.
Opposition leaders said from Tuesday they would take to the streets in Azerbaijan, an oil-producing Muslim state, to protest the results, which gave a massive majority to supporters of President Ilham Aliyev.
“It pains me to report that progress noted in the pre-election period was undermined by significant deficiencies in the count,” Hastings told a news briefing. The OSCE statement did point to some improvements in the way the vote was run.
The main opposition Azadlyq bloc got 5 seats, according to the Central Election Commission. The country’s first lady, Mehriban Aliyeva, made her political debut by winning her seat with 92.12 percent of the vote.
A U.S. government-funded exit poll confirmed the ruling party’s decisive win, with only minor discrepancies between it and the official result.
Western governments were closely watching the vote and its aftermath in the ex-Soviet country. Hungry for Azerbaijan’s oil exports, they say democratic rule is the best guarantee of stability in the turbulent South Caucasus region.
Aliyev runs a country of 8 million Muslims wedged between Russia and Iran. Corruption is endemic and the country has yet to hold an election judged free and fair by the West.
Election Commission Chairman Mazahir Panahov dismissed opposition charges of fraud. “There was nothing during the election that was especially alarming,” he said.
The defeated opposition bloc chose orange as their campaign color in imitation of Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution,” when a disputed election ignited a wave of protests which led to a rerun of the vote that the opposition won. Analysts said the Ukrainian events were unlikely to be repeated in Azerbaijan.
Some observers feared violence between opposition protesters and police, who have said they will stamp out any disorder. The opposition says its protests will be strictly within the law.
After official results from 92 percent of polling stations had been counted, the ruling Yeni Azerbaijan Party had 63 of 125 parliamentary seats, with most of the rest going to smaller parties.
Ali Kerimli, a joint leader of the Azadlyq bloc, said there had been widespread fraud and police intimidation. Candidates from his bloc who had won seats would probably boycott the parliament, he said.
He said the Baku Mayor’s office had granted permission for a rally on Tuesday afternoon in a suburban square.
“We will start a peaceful protest ... tomorrow,” Kerimli told Reuters on Monday. “It will be the start of continual protests until the election is overturned.” 
The ruling party claimed victory soon after polling stations closed on Sunday.

TITLE: Peru’s Fugitive Ex-President Arrested by Chilean Authorities
TEXT: AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE
SANTIAGO — Fugitive former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, wanted at home on corruption and human rights charges, was arrested just hours after his stunning unannounced arrival in Chile, police said. 
Fujimori was detained on an arrest warrant issued by judge Orlando Alvarez, who was told by Chile’s Supreme Court to consider Lima’s request for Fujimori’s extradition lodged hours earlier.
Police picked up the former president at the Marriott Hotel here, and he gave no resistance, police sources said.
Fujimori, 67, arrived Sunday unannounced in Chile to defiantly press on in a fresh bid for the Peruvian presidency.
“I plan a temporary stay in Chile as part of a return to Peru to keep a promise with a large part of the people of Peru that has called me to participate as a candidate for the presidency of Peru in the 2006 election,” Fujimori said in a statement before his arrest.
Police said Fujimori would be held pending a decision on the Peruvian extradition request. After his private plane from Tokyo made a brief stopover in Mexico, Fujimori arrived with a tourist visa and headed for a Marriott Hotel in Santiago.
Japan has refused to extradite him to Lima because Fujimori, the son of Japanese emigrants to Peru, holds Japanese nationality. Chilean presidential frontrunner Michelle Bachelet said: “I am wondering like all Chileans what has this gentleman come to Chile for? I think he ought to be arrested as soon as possible because there is an international arrest warrant out for him.”
In Lima, President Alejandro Toledo convened an emergency meeting of the cabinet to discuss the situation. “One cannot put it any other way: the government is concerned,” said Gustavo Pacheco, chairman of the congressional Foreign Relations Commission.
Peru’s ambassador in Santiago, Jose Antonio Meyer, had swiftly delivered an official note to the Chilean government seeking “the detention and eventual extradition of fugitive from Peruvian justice Alberto Fujimori,” Peru’s chief of staff Pedro Pablo Kuczynski announced in Lima.
Some 1,500 people rallied in support of Fujimori in Lima; a video played at the event also made clear Fujimori’s desire to seek reelection. But outside the Chilean ambassador’s residence anti-Fujimori demonstrators chanted “Chilean brothers, hand over the thief” and “Toss out the rat.”
Fujimori was Peru’s president from 1990 until 2000, when he fled the country under a massive cloud of scandal and resigned by fax from a Tokyo hotel. He has lived in Japan since.
He arrived in Chile at a sensitive moment as the two countries haggle over a common maritime border dispute.
On Friday, Peru’s legislature passed a bill claiming a larger part of rich Pacific Ocean fishing waters as its own, and Toledo signed it into law, to take effect over the weekend.
Chile has expressed its opposition to losing some 35,000 square kilometers of prime fishing waters and said its military would continue to patrol the area.
“Fujimori’s lawyers suggested he enter through Chile to take advantage of a conflict between the two countries,” said Peruvian legislator Alcides Chamorro, speaking in Lima.

TITLE: U.S. Faith in Bush Falls to All-Time Low
AUTHOR: By Caren Bohan
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WASHINGTON — A poll showing rising doubts among Americans about President George W. Bush’s integrity has raised a new hurdle to the fresh start he is seeking after the indictment of a senior White House aide and other political woes. 
A week after vice presidential aide Lewis Libby resigned and was indicted on charges related to the leaking of a CIA operative’s identity, an ABC News/Washington Post poll showed that fewer than half of Americans viewed Bush as trustworthy and honest. The president’s overall approval rating dropped to a new low of 39 percent.
“That’s a very ominous sign for Bush,” Ross Baker, professor of political science at Rutgers University, said of the integrity rating. Bush ran for office in 2000 with a pledge to uphold “honor and dignity” in the presidency after former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment scandal.
A CBS poll on Wednesday put Bush’s job approval rating at 35 percent, his lowest since taking office in 2001.
Baker said such numbers could portend difficulties for Republican congressional candidates in the 2006 mid-term elections as well as for Bush’s effectiveness in pushing his second-term agenda.
Virginia’s Republican candidate for governor, Jerry Kilgore, refused to attend a speech by Bush in his state last week, but the White House said Bush would make an election-eve stop next Monday in the tight race seen as a potential national bellwether.
The ingredients to what some White House allies view as a “perfect storm” for Bush include the CIA-leak probe, a bungled government response to Hurricane Katrina, U.S. military deaths in Iraq, high gasoline prices and conservative anger over the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination.
Some Republicans believe that the widely praised nomination of Ben Bernanke to the Federal Reserve and the replacement of Miers — who withdrew her nomination last week — with appeals court Judge Samuel Alito as the nominee to the Supreme Court were a sign Bush is starting to regain his footing.
Bush’s choice of Alito has been a unifying force for Bush’s conservative base.
Bush has also moved to mend fences with conservatives upset over a big rise in spending on his watch. He has begun to emphasize spending restraint in his speeches and last week rolled out a plan to block spending on a list of items for which money had been allocated but not yet spent.
But Bush, on a five-day trip to Latin America, was dogged by questions about the leak investigation. He refused to say on Friday whether longtime aide Karl Rove — who remains under investigation — would keep his job.
Two Republicans with close ties to the White House said morale among the White House staff has plummeted and many aides were feeling the strain of years of long hours and stress.
“They’re burned out,” said one Republican, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Another Republican said, “I do think there need to be some staff changes. People have been working at a torrid pace. It’s difficult not to get burned out.”
Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman and Ed Gillespie, a former RNC chairman, are among those frequently mentioned as possible new additions to the White House team.
One of the Republican sources said Treasury Secretary John Snow may leave in January or February, and former Bush economic adviser Glenn Hubbard may be a possible replacement.
Rumors have circulated that White House chief of staff Andy Card might seek the Treasury job or leave the administration. 
Republican political strategist Charles Black dismissed the prospect of a big White House shake-up. “I don’t believe it’s going to happen. They’ve got a very successful team there. It’s well suited to this president,” he said.

TITLE: Malaysia Downplays Al-Qaeda Connection
TEXT: AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE
BANGKOK — Thailand has ruled out any form of autonomy for its Muslim-majority south and said there was no evidence that foreign terror groups linked to Al-Qaeda were involved in the region’s unrest. 
In an interview on Monday, Foreign Minister Kantathi Suphamongkhon rejected an appeal for self-rule made last week by the separatist Islamic group the Patani United Liberation Organization (PULO).
“We’re not a federal system. Autonomy in that sense is something that is not part of our system,” he said.
“It’s a unified system that we have. We don’t have the concept of autonomy within our constitution,” Kantathi said.
Asked if any foreign extremists from Indonesia, Malaysia or elsewhere with links to Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network were involved in the unrest, the minister said: “We have no indication so far.”
“Of course, people know one another sometimes. But there is no indication of any foreign terrorism involvement in the situation,” he said, adding that the trouble in the south was “an internal problem in Thailand.”
“There have been attempts by certain people to use violence and then try to bring religion down as justification. But what is clear is that it’s not a problem of religion. It’s a problem of certain groups of people using violence and then getting people confused by bringing religion.”
Violence in the three Muslim-majority provinces of mainly Buddhist Thailand has killed more than 1,000 people since January 2004 and has proved to be one of the toughest challenges for Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
Thaksin on Monday ordered local officials to instal sirens at Buddhist temples throughout the south to help protect monks as he made a two-day visit there.
“All Buddhist monks as well as abbots can use the signal to alert security forces to any emergency. Monks and laymen at temples will also be allowed to carry walkie talkies,” he told some 3,000 devotees in Narathiwat.
Authorities blame the almost daily attacks in Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala provinces on Islamic separatist militants, organised criminals and local corruption.
“The situation in the southern part of Thailand has been with us actually for a long time. Sometimes it’s warm, sometimes it’s a bit hot and sometimes it’s calm. There is a separatist movement,” the foreign minister said.
Critics say Thaksin’s heavy-handed approach is making the 22-month conflict harder to resolve but Kantathi said the government must maintain law and order.
A military solution in the south is “not a number one option,” the foreign minister insisted.
But “there are certain groups of people using violence. When they use violence, of course like any society, police and military must protect people so they have to maintain law and order.”
Last week the Islamic militant group PULO said the conflict could turn into a war between religions unless Bangkok grants the region self-government.
PULO was active in the 1970s but had splintered and largely disintegrated by the mid-1990s. Some of its remaining leaders live in exile in Europe.
Muslims in Thailand make up just four percent of the population of 63.5 million and live mostly in the three southernmost provinces bordering Malaysia.

TITLE: Tehran Offers Olive Branch
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: TEHRAN — Iran, whose president has called for Israel’s destruction, said on Monday it will submit a proposal to the United Nations for a peaceful solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. 
The Islamic Republic does not acknowledge Israel’s right to exist and is known to support militant Palestinian groups.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called in a speech last month for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” sparking international condemnation and Israeli calls for Iran to be thrown out of the United Nations.
Iranian officials have said his remarks were merely a re-statement of the Islamic state’s pro-Palestinian policy and did not represent an actual threat of violence against Israel.
“To restore peace in the Middle East, Iran will submit a proposal to the UN based on what the Supreme Leader has said,” Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told a conference on Central Asia in Tehran.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on all state matters, said Friday that Palestinian refugees should be allowed to join all residents of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza in taking part in a referendum on how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

TITLE: China Takes Action Against Bird Flu
AUTHOR: By Stephanie Hoo
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING — Authorities ordered all live poultry markets in China’s capital to close immediately and went door-to-door seizing chickens and ducks from private homes, as the government dramatically stepped up its fight against bird flu on Monday. 
Beijing also announced that 6 million birds had been slaughtered around the site of China’s most recent bird flu outbreak, and the World Health Organization said it had been asked to help in the reopened investigation of the country’s possible first human cases of the virus.
The escalation of anti-bird flu measures in the world’s most populous country came as a meeting of hundreds of international experts in Geneva opened with warnings that a global human flu pandemic is inevitable and could cost the global economy at least US$800 billion.
“It is only a matter of time before an avian flu virus ... acquires the ability to be transmitted from human to human, sparking the outbreak of human pandemic influenza,” WHO director general Lee Jong-wook told the gathering.
Experts fear the bird flu virus that is sweeping through Asia and has entered Europe could mutate into a form that is easily passed between humans, producing a pandemic that could kill millions.
The virulent H5N1 strain of the virus has killed at least 62 people in Asia since 2003, and resulted in the death or destruction of millions of birds.
Beijing on Sunday reopened an investigation into whether bird flu killed a 12-year-old girl and made two people ill last month in cases originally ruled not to be H5N1.
Roy Wadia, a WHO spokesman in Beijing, said on Monday discussions were underway with Chinese officials about what role the agency could play in the investigation, and a decision was likely within days.
China has had no confirmed human infections. But it has imposed increasingly strict measures following warnings that a human case is inevitable if China can’t prevent outbreaks among its 5.2 billion chickens, ducks and other poultry.
Experts are especially worried about China because of the vast scale of its poultry industry and because major migration routes for wild birds pass over it.
After China’s latest outbreak, in Liaoning province, east of Beijing, authorities destroyed 6 million poultry in 15 villages near the site, where the disease killed 8,940 chickens, the Xinhua News Agency said on Monday.
The culling was unusually large by Chinese standards. Xinhua said rules required the destruction of all birds within three kilometers of an infection site.
Authorities closed all of Beijing’s 168 live poultry markets as a precaution against the possible spread of the virus in the city, state television reported.
In Shanghai, China’s largest city, sales of live ducks, quail and other birds have been banned, officials said.
In Vietnam, a leading European health official conceded the European Union should have acted earlier to help Asian nations fight bird flu and pledged $35.7 million to help the region combat the virus.
“The EU should have reacted more quickly to help Southeast Asia to tackle the problem,” Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou said. “It’s better late than never.”
Also Monday, Swiss drugmaker Roche said it would increase production of the anti-viral drug Tamiflu tenfold to try to cope with international demand, which has skyrocketed because it is believed to be the best known treatment against a possible pandemic.
Roche said it would increase production of Tamiflu to make 300 million treatments by 2007 to try to meet government orders. 
At the Geneva meeting, the World Bank’s lead economist for the East Asia and the Pacific, Milan Brahmbhatt, warned that “panic and disruption” caused by a global human flu pandemic could cause world gross domestic product to drop by 2 percent or more — amounting to about $800 billion over one year. 
The three possible Chinese bird flu victims lived in or near Wantang village in central Hunan province where 545 chickens and ducks died of bird flu last month. 
The girl, He Yin, who came into “close contact with sick birds,” died last month after developing a high fever, Xinhua said. Her 9-year-old brother was hospitalized with similar symptoms but recovered. The third suspected case was a 36-year-old middle school teacher who reportedly fell ill after chopping raw chicken while suffering from a minor injury to his hand, Xinhua said. He also was recovering. 
All three initially tested negative for H5N1. But Wadia said it was not unusual for initial tests for a virus such as H5N1 to be wrong. Final results could take weeks.

TITLE: After 40 Games, Chelsea Lose to Man U
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Jose Mourinho is in the unaccustomed position of having to put on a brave face after a fortnight of reverses culminated in Chelsea’s first league defeat in 41 games. 
The super-confident Portuguese boss pronounced himself “not afraid of the future” following Manchester United’s 1-0 victory at Old Trafford which came hard on the heels of Chelsea’s Champions League defeat at Real Betis. 
Mourinho and his Roman Abramovich-bankrolled squad of top international talent are treading on unfamiliar ground, however. Chelsea had notched nine victories in a row from the start of the season before bottom club Everton held them to a 1-1 draw at Goodison Park on Oct. 23. There followed an ignominious penalties exit at home to Charlton from the League Cup, a trophy they won last season. 
Three days later, their much vaunted defence, backed by Petr Cech between the posts and which broke records for its impregnability last season, conceded two goals for the first time since December last year against Arsenal. 
They went on to beat Blackburn Rovers 4-2 but, on Nov. 1, went down 1-0 in Seville to a Spanish side they had trounced 4-0 only two weeks before. 
A fortnight ago many thought Chelsea’s progression to the knockout stages of the Champions League a formality. Today they find themselves in a three-horse race in their group with Liverpool and Betis, and needing points from their last two games. 
It is only the second time since Mourinho arrived at Chelsea after winning the Champions League with Porto, that they have lost two games on the trot. The last time was in February when they stumbled 1-0 in the FA Cup at Newcastle before losing the first leg of a Champions League tie that they went on to win against Barcelona. 
Their previous league defeat dates back to Oct. 16 2004 at Manchester City and Chelsea went on to win the championship by a margin of 12 points last season. 
Mourinho, the self-styled “special one,” has suffered two defeats in a row on four occasions in his five-year managerial career the other two were with Uniao Leiria in 2001 and Porto in 2002. 
He has never lost twice in succession in the league. 
The rest of the Premier League may have sighed collectively with relief at Chelsea and Mourinho’s, recent fallibility. 
There have even been mutterings in the British press of unrest in the London side’s tight ranks, with reports of tension between Mourinho and injury prone winger Arjen Robben as well as unsettled Argentine striker Hernan Crespo. 
Mourinho will doubtless use all his famous psychology and motivational skills over the next few games, though his attempts to reinforce an esprit de corps will be delayed this week by international fixtures with most of his multi-national squad dispersed. 
He has started already, talking up his side’s performance immediately after the game at Old Trafford, saying he was proud of his players who would stay calm and confident. 
“This was a game we did not deserve to lose,” he said “I hope [United] can realise why Chelsea are champions, top of the league and I believe will be champions again.” 
A six-point cushion over surprise second-placed Wigan could be reduced to three if the promoted side win their game in hand. United in third are still 10 points adrift and Arsenal lie a point behind, both with an extra game to play. 
While few would bet against Chelsea winning the title again, the Londoners’ blip will give their rivals heart. 
It is Mourinho’s job to quash such hopes and he insisted others would eagerly swap places with Chelsea given the chance. 
“We are not under pressure now,” he said.

TITLE: Kenyan Wins NY Marathon Less Than a Second Ahead
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW YORK — World record holder Paul Tergat pushed ahead in the final few meters to defeat defending champion Hendrick Ramaala of South Africa in a thrilling finish to the New York City Marathon on Sunday. 
The Kenyan, five-times world cross country champion, and Ramaala ran side by side over the last 100 meters in Central Park, trading the lead in a sprint that the Kenyan won by less than a third of a second as Ramaala collapsed after crossing the line. 
Tergat, competing in his first New York Marathon, clocked two hours nine minutes and 29.90 seconds with Ramaala at two hours nine minutes and 30.22 seconds in the closest finish in the 36-year history of the race. 
“I had to give all that I had at the end,” said Tergat, who needed a last surge in the final 20 meters to win. “It was very hard.” 
A disappointed Ramaala said: “I was beaten by a great champion. He’s one of the greatest runners ever.” 
Third place went to 2004 runner-up and Olympic silver medalist Meb Keflezighi of the United States in 2:09:50. 
The women’s race, like the men’s, began with a large pack of lead runners bunched together on a warm, humid day, but boiled down to a duel between Jelena Prokopcuka of Latvia and Kenya’s Susan Chepkemei, with the Latvian pulling away. 
Prokopcuka, who finished fifth last year, overcame a pain in her right side that caused her to drop back before a late charge brought her victory with a time of 2:24:41 and made her the first Latvian winner of the New York race. 
“New York is a very important, huge marathon,” said Prokopcuka, who won her first major marathon after claiming victory this year in Osaka. “Now maybe I want to win in Chicago, Boston and London.” 
Kenya’s Chepkemei, also runner-up last year just three seconds behind Briton Paula Radcliffe, finished 14 seconds back in second place. 
The Kenyan was struggling physically towards the end, vomiting as she fought to hold her lead after Prokopcuka charged up to challenge her. 
Twice Olympic 10,000 meters champion Derartu Tulu of Ethiopia finished third in 2:25:21. 
Tergat, 36, received $100,000 for his victory, while Prokopcuka collected $130,000 — the highest guaranteed purse in marathon history thanks to an added $30,000 for the women’s winner put in by the sponsor.

TITLE: CSKA Beat Lokomotiv To ’05 Title
AUTHOR: By Gennady Fyodorov
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — CSKA beat Dynamo 2-1 in a heated Moscow derby on Sunday to clinch their second Russian premier league title in three years with a game to spare. 
CSKA defender Alexei Berezutsky opened the scoring from close range in the 55th minute and Brazilian playmaker Daniel Carvalho added the second 18 minutes later. 
Defender Denis Kolodin pulled one back for Dynamo in the seventh minute of added time but it was too little too late to prevent the army side from celebrating a deserved victory. 
The win gave UEFA Cup holders CSKA an insurmountable four-point lead over last year’s champions Lokomotiv and their Moscow rivals Spartak with one round of matches remaining. 
Lokomotiv crushed already relegated Terek Grozny 3-0 while Spartak captain Yegor Titov scored midway through the second half to give his side a 1-0 win over Saturn Ramenskoye. 
Spartak and Lokomotiv, who each have 55 points from 29 matches, meet in the season’s finale on Nov. 19 to decide second place which also guarantees a spot in Champions League qualifiers next year. 
CSKA dominated for most of their match, which had to be stopped for almost five minutes after Berezutsky’s goal when supporters of the army side began throwing firecrackers onto the pitch. 
Carvalho, undoubtedly CSKA’s best player this season, then beat Dynamo’s Portuguese keeper Nuno with a neat lob to make sure of the win. 
CSKA coach Valery Gazzayev said: “It has been a fantastic year for us. Thanks largely to our fans we have achieved the maximum result this year.” 
CSKA won the league and cup double this year and in May also became the first Russian club to lift a European trophy when they beat Portugal’s Sporting 3-1 in the UEFA Cup final. 
Sunday’s victory, however, was marred by CSKA supporters clashing with riot police following the match. 
Russian news agencies reported that hundreds of fans had tried to invade the pitch following the final whistle but were pushed back by the police. 
More than 70 CSKA fans have been arrested. “Ten fans were detained for throwing firecrackers, the others for being drunk,” a police spokesman was quoted by Russian media as saying. 
At the other end of the table, Alania Vladikavkaz, who won the Russian title in 1995 and finished second the following year, suffered a 2-1 home defeat by Tom Tomsk to join Terek among the relegation casualties.