SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1129 (95), Friday, December 9, 2005
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TITLE: Environmentalists Picket Major Fur Auction
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Environmentalists have called for Russia to ban fur sales and the use of animal traps at a protest outside the only surviving annual fur event in the country. 
Members of the Alliance for the Protection of Animal Rights gathered outside the 167th Soyuzpushnina fur auction at 98 Moskovskaya Ulitsa on Wednesday. 
They held a banner, which branded the event a “death auction.” Semyon Simonov, one of the group’s leaders, said that they aimed not only to stop the auction, but also to shut down the entire fur industry.  
Protester Irina Agamirova, who came from Moscow to take part, handed out flyers which read: “My Life or Your Coat”. She said:
“I see expressions change on people’s faces when they read it. I can see that they start thinking about the real price of their coats, and I know that my efforts are not in vain. If only people knew more about the cruelties of the fur industry, I am sure many would reconsider buying fur items.”
According to the statistics collected by the Alliance for the Protection of Animals’ Rights, four million animals are killed annually in Russia by foot traps which are banned in 88 countries, including Finland, Austria, Belguim, Cuba, France, Greece, Italy and Great Britain.
“Animals bleed to death in these traps,” Agamirova said. 
“Several days may pass until the poor animal finally dies, and hunters won’t even shoot them because they don’t want to spoil the fur. Fur farms are no less merciless to their animals: they kill them by running lethally high-voltage electricity through their orifices or even give them a gas attack, something only the fascist gestapo would do.”
Russia’s largest fur auction, Soyuzpushnina has been a nationwide monopoly since 1931. The auction ranks within the world’s top eight major fur auctions, including events in Copenhagen, Helsinki and Seattle. This year, a total of 487,000 pelts of mink, sable, fox, squirrel, polecat and blue fox are going on sale at the auction.  Mink pelts traditionally dominate the sales. This year, about 250,000 pelts are set to go under the hammer.
Natalya Chirkova, head of PR for Soyuzpushnina, said that sales are highly unlikely to be affected by the meeting, but admitted that the presence of protesters creates a certain emotional tension among staff.
“Of course, it is better for these young people to stay outside our office holding banners than indulge in drinking or drugs, but they have to realize this is just not serious,” Chirkova said. “The fur industry is an established international business.” 
Soyuzpushnina’s business is doing well. Last year, the auction took $6 million, an increase from $4.25 million in 2003.
In the Soviet era, Russia boasted about 100 fur farms, all of which were run by the state. But the industry has declined during the post-communist era as government subsidies have dried up. The number of fur farms has halved since the start of Perestroika.
The meeting on Wednesday was the first event in a series of five days of protests, which will culminate with an event on Vladimirskaya Square on Sunday afternoon.
Simyonov said he hopes Russian celebrities will join the campaign, just as Paul McCartney, Brigitte Bardot or Pamela Anderson have done in their countries, in order to garner the issue more recognition.

TITLE: Suspects Charged Following Petition
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Three people have been charged and a further two are being detained in connection with the murder of 20-year-old student Timur Kacharava, the St. Petersburg prosecutor’s office said Thursday.
The men were all arrested on Monday. Four of the five detainees have admitted to having been among the gang which attacked and killed the student outside a Ligovsky Prospekt bookstore on Nov. 13. However, all deny fatally stabbing the victim, according to official sources. The detainees are all aged between 16 and 18.  
“Three detainees have been charged, and the other two teenagers — both aged 16 — will be kept in custody for a further 72 hours,” Yelena Ordynskaya, senior aide to the city prosecutor, said on Thursday. “The investigation continues to move forward but we can’t give out more information on the exact numbers of people involved.”
The arrests came on the same day that a 3,000-signature petition, which attacked local law enforcement for inertia and procrastination, was sent to President Vladimir Putin and Governor Valentina Matviyenko. Matviyenko had already requested that the murder investigation be put under her personal supervision prior to the sending of the petition, which also urged Putin to take charge of the case.
Several local media sources have speculated on the timeliness of the arrests, coming so soon after the presentation of the petition. However, Irina Flige, from the St. Petersburg human rights group Memorial, does not believe that the authorities are merely seeking to satisfy public demands. 
“What we have been witnessing on a nationwide level is quite the opposite: a blatant disregard for public opinion,” Flige said. She drew attention to the banning of an anti-fascist march in Moscow last month as an example of institutional prejudice.
“Several thousand fascists who paraded through Moscow were given all necessary permissions. The problem is that, deep at heart, the mentality of those in power in Russia is very close to the extreme nationalists.”
In Flige’s opinion, the crucial issue is the punishment that will be given to those convicted of hate crimes. 
“It’s not a question of whether or not the investigation finds the real skinheads; in fact, we are never going to know this for sure. In most cases, criminals are given laughable sentences, and verdicts are disappointing,” she said. “As many people as possible are tried for hooliganism rather than for more serious crimes, like ethnic hatred or murder on political grounds.”
In March of 2004, three local teenage skinheads on trial for the murder of an Azeri man in 2002 received mild sentences from the St. Petersburg City Court.
Watermelon vendor and father of eight Mamed Mamedov, 53, was beaten to death by a gang of skinheads next to his stand on Ulitsa Aviakonstruktorov in the Primorsky district on Sept. 13, 2002. His attackers filmed the murder. Despite the fact that the film implicated about twenty assailants, only three were convicted.
One of the men involved, Alexei Lykin, 18, was released immediately after the verdict was given on the grounds that he had already served enough time in detention during the trial to cover the crimes for which he had been convicted. 
Fellow assailants Maxim Firsov, 17 and Vyacheslav Prokofiyev, 17 were sentenced to 4 and 7 years in prison respectively. All three had pleaded not guilty.

TITLE: Eight Jailed, 31 Released Over NBP Protest
AUTHOR: By Maria Danilova
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Moscow court ruled Thursday that 39 radical party activists who briefly seized a presidential administration building were guilty of organizing mass unrest and sentenced eight of them to prison terms ranging from 1 1/2 to 3 1/2 years. 
Thirty-one defiant members of the National Bolshevik Party, a small but vocal opposition group that has faced growing pressure from Russian authorities, walked free after receiving suspended sentences. 
Outside the courthouse, their fellow activists showered them with champagne, threw them into the air and shouted “Glory to heroes!” Prosecutors had asked for up to 5 year terms for the defendants, all in their late teens or early 20s, and analysts said the sentences were milder than expected. 
The Kremlin is already facing a tide of Western criticism over plans to impose strict curbs on foreign non-governmental organizations and observers suggested Russian authorities were anxious to avoid turning the activists into martyrs. 
The National Bolsheviks, led by the irreverent novelist Eduard Limonov, claim a total of about 17,000 members and are known for demonstrations and protest acts, such as hanging banners decrying President Vladimir Putin from the window of a hotel off Red Square. 
Authorities have increasingly cast the party as an extremist force and the group was banned by Russia’s Supreme Court last month. Analysts say in the absence of any other strong opposition groups, the National Bolsheviks are seen by authorities as a threat. 
“Why have [the authorities] put them in jail? Because they want to destroy opponents,” said Margarita Merkusheva, mother of 18-year-old Yegor Merkushev, who was set free after the verdict was announced. “But they are only demonstrating their weakness.” 
During the December 2004 protest for which they were standing trial, the activists broke into an office of the presidential administration, held up red-and-white, hammer-and-sickle flags and a black banner reading “Putin, Quit Your Job” and threw portraits of officials out the windows of the building before being arrested. 
“Innocent people spent a year in jail and only now are they letting them out,” Limonov said after the verdict was announced. “This is absolute lawlessness.” All of the 39 defendants had been held in pretrial detention since their arrest last December. 
“I am satisfied that innocent people have been kept in jail for a year,” defense lawyer Dmitry Agranovsky said with irony. “In our times, it could have been even more.” 
Alexei Makarkin, an analyst with the Center for Political Technologies, said that harsher sentences would have angered Western rights activists and led to further criticism of Russia as well as making martyrs of the young activists. 
“They don’t want to make [the National Bolsheviks] into real martyrs, because this can inspire fellow activists,” Makarkin said. 
Relatives of those released Thursday were ecstatic, bursting into applause and tears. 
After spending a year in jail, many activists said they would continue political activity. 
Sergei Ryzhykov, 18, said his time in prison was “wonderful,” that he wouldn’t renounce his political beliefs and would keep on protesting. The party, whose members wear hammer-and-sickle armbands, says it strives for social and national justice, but also promotes nationalist ideas.

TITLE: Kremlin Says Ukraine Can Afford Gas Prices
AUTHOR: By Alex Nicholson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NOVO-OGARYOVO, Russia — Russian President Vladimir Putin struck a hard line Thursday in a dispute with neighboring Ukraine over natural gas supplies, saying that the former Soviet republic can afford to pay the market price for Russian gas. 
Cabinet officials reported to Putin that Russia and Ukraine had failed to strike a deal on Russian natural gas supplies to Ukraine next year. 
“Difficult work is under way and no solution has been found yet,” Industry Minister Viktor Khristenko said. 
Putin said that Ukraine’s economy had seen fast growth this year, and added that the Ukrainian government had gotten substantial privatization revenues and Western loans. 
“They (the loans) total billions of dollars, and this is quite sufficient for buying the necessary amount of gas from Russia at the market price,” Putin said during a meeting with Cabinet officials at his country residence in Novo-Ogaryovo, just outside Moscow. 
Ukraine has rejected Moscow’s attempts to more than triple the price of gas from the current $50  to $160 per 1,000 cubic meters. 
The dispute could jeopardize supplies of Russian gas to the European Union, which gets almost half of its gas imports from Russia, with most being piped through Ukraine. 
Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, who returned from a trip to Brussels, told Putin that the EU was following the issue “very attentively, with great interest.” 
European Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs said Thursday he doesn’t expect the gas row between Russia and Ukraine to affect gas supplies to the EU. 
There will be “no difficulty with gas transit from Russia to the European Union ... I don’t know of any case (in the past) where Ukraine hasn’t fulfilled its obligations,” Piebalgs told journalists after a meeting with Ukraine’s Energy Minister Ivan Plachkov, according to Dow Jones Newswires. 
Plachkov said a deal with Russia could be negotiated in the next several days, the Interfax news agency reported. 
Expectations of a resolution to the dispute had risen Wednesday after the Kremlin said that Putin had discussed the issue with his Ukrainian counterpart Viktor Yushchenko. 
Putin added a softer note to his harsh statement Thursday, saying that the dispute “must not hurt the development of intergovernmental links between Russia and Ukraine.” 
Relations between the two former Soviet neighbors soured after Western-leaning Yushchenko won a hotly disputed election last December against a Kremlin-backed rival. 
Moscow also has demanded that other Western-oriented former Soviet nations of Georgia and Moldova pay higher gas rates. On the other hand, Belarus, whose autocratic President Alexander Lukashenko is on good terms with Moscow, also enjoys subsidized gas rates, but these are not being renegotiated. 
Belarus’ Prime Minister Sergei Sidorsky said Thursday that his nation next year will be getting Russian gas at the price of $47 per 1,000 cubic meters.

TITLE: Poll: Majority of Citizens In Favor of New Festival
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The vast majority of St. Petersburgers support holding outdoor mass entertainment events, and believe the city’s historic Palace Square to be the most appropriate location to host such events, according to a new survey conducted by the Agency for Social Information over the past two weeks.
Forty-four percent of respondents said they support such events regardless, and a further 38 percent said they support them on the condition that the necessary security and organizational requirements are observed.
Fifty-five percent of respondents said they would definitely attend the St. Petersburg International Film Festival, scheduled to take place on Palace Square in July of next year. Aimed at becoming the world’s first and only event devoted entirely to European films, the festival will rival international festivals in Berlin, Venice and Cannes in terms of the quality of films shown and celebrities attracted, its organizers claim. 
Roman Mogilevsky, head of the Agency for Social Information, said over 80 percent of locals aged between 18 and 34 gave their full support to the festival, though the older the respondents, the less enthusiasm they showed. The tolerance was at its minimum in the category of people aged 65 and over.
Over 25 percent of local citizens are over the age of 60, according to official statistics. The festival’s main target audience is people under 40 years of age.
The idea of holding the St. Petersburg International Film Festival on Palace Square, which received official blessing from Governor Valentina Matviyenko at the end of August, has been facing tough opposition from Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage Museum located on Palace Square, who claims that such large-scale, popular entertainment projects aren’t suitable for the historic square.
Mark Rudinshtein, the festival’s director and a prominent Russian film producer, said at the press conference that the festival is keen to amend its designs to reach a consensus with the Hermitage and soothe the worries of those who oppose the plan. 
“Following recommendations from Mikhail Piotrovsky, we have decided to place the biggest cinema pavilion in the area near Pevchesky Bridge, and not next to the General Staff Building,” Rudinshtein said. “That way, the view of the square won’t be blocked. The nearby Cappella will be used for meetings and discussions of the festival’s participants, guests and the media.”
Rudinshtein said, however, that it has been impossible for him or  the festival’s management to reach Piotrovsky and speak to him directly over the past month and a half. “His secretaries keep fobbing me off in a rude manner,” Rudinshtein said.
Piotrovsky didn’t attend the presentation at Rosbalt, citing his busy schedule. The Hermitage director held his own news conference on the same day touching on various aspects related to the museum, including the festival. 
“We are not against the festival as such and not against any festivities related to the event, but we are certainly against the appearance of any construction on Palace Square,” Piotrovsky told reporters at a news conference on Wednesday. “Besides, during any large-scale entertainment events [on the square] all third parties have to be protected against potential damage.”

TITLE: Chechen Case Starts in Europe
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: STRASBOURG — The European Court of Human Rights on Thursday heard that Russian forces allegedly detained and killed a young man while capturing a Chechen village, in the first disappearance case from the southern Russian republic to be dealt with by the court. 
Fatima Bazorkina filed the complaint at the court in 2001, after she saw television footage of a Russian officer interrogating her son as troops were taking over the village of Alkhan-Kala. 
The officer orders soldiers to shoot and “finish off” her son, Khadzhi-Murat Yandiyev, at the end of the footage, her lawyers said. 
Bazorkina’s son disappeared six years ago and she saw the footage in February 2000, the court heard. Her visits to prisons and detention centers and a criminal investigation into his disappearance, which closed in 2004, were fruitless. 
Bazorkina is suing the Russian government for violating the European Convention on Human Rights, a treaty that is legally binding for all European countries. She accuses Russian forces of killing her son and said his disappearance caused her anguish and emotional distress. 
The court could take months to reach a ruling, with another 200 similar cases pending, court spokeswoman Stephanie Klein said. 
Last month, Alu Alkhanov, Chechnya’s Kremlin-backed president, said that 2,500 people had been registered as kidnapped or missing in Chechnya. 
Russian forces have been battling separatists in Chechnya since 1999, the start of the second war there in a decade. It was not established at Thursday’s hearing whether Yandiyev had joined the separatist movement and fought for an independent Chechnya, Klein said.

TITLE: MTS Makes Bid on Turkish Market
AUTHOR: By Maria Levitov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Russia’s leading mobile operator, Mobile TeleSystems, has submitted a bid for Turkey’s No. 2 cell phone company, Telsim. 
Sistema Telekomunikasyon Anonim Sirketi, a company created by MTS majority stakeholder AFK Sistema to participate in next week’s Telsim tender, submitted its bid Monday, AFK Sistema spokeswoman Irina Potekhina said Tuesday.
Analysts expressed restrained enthusiasm for the prospective expansion, warning against overspending to court new subscribers. Focusing on existing subscribers is key if MTS is to keep its top spot in the market, they said.
“We are very interested in entering fast-growing markets, and Turkey is one of them,” Potekhina said, adding that MTS, Sistema Telekomunikasyon’s current owner, would manage the business in Turkey if Sistema acquired Telsim. 
Sistema will compete for the Turkish company with such heavyweights as Britain’s Vodafone, Egypt’s Orascom and four other telecommunications giants, with an estimated starting bid price of $2.8 billion, news agencies reported Tuesday.
Russia’s mobile operators are expanding into other emerging markets, where opportunities to snap up new subscribers are still ripe. 
By the end of 2005, cell phone penetration levels are set to reach 90 percent in Russia, compared to no more than 60 percent in Turkey, said Anton Pogrebinsky, a telecoms analyst at consultancy firm AC&M.
“While [Turkey’s] penetration level is fairly high, the ceiling is still far off,” Sistema’s Potekhina said.
Earlier this year, Alfa Telecom, the major shareholder of Russia’s No. 2 mobile operator, VimpelCom, bought a 13 percent stake in Turkey’s largest mobile operator, Turkcell, via a $3.3 billion financing deal with Turkcell’s majority owner, Cukurova. 
Despite Turkey’s attractiveness however, analysts warned MTS not to pour excessive resources into Telsim, as telecoms investors are becoming increasingly weary of big-ticket spending abroad, with changing market conditions in Russia.
International telecoms giants are likely to push up Telsim’s starting price of about $300 per subscriber to double or more, given that Turkey is one of the few remaining growth markets, said Yelena Bazhenova, telecoms analyst at Aton brokerage. “It will be hard for MTS to bid against such giants as Vodafone.”
Instead of shelling out excessive amounts on assets abroad, MTS should think about extracting more revenues from existing subscribers, for instance by promoting mobile Internet connections, industry watchers said.
“Making increasingly more money on existing subscribers will be the key success factor [for Russia’s mobile operators], given current mobile market trends,” said Yevgeny Golossnoy, an analyst at Troika Dialog.
In 2006, for the first time, the total number of new subscribers is expected to fall below the previous year’s record, he said. Russian operators are set to gain 45 million new subscribers in 2005, an increase of 7 million from 2004.

TITLE: Multiplex For Petersburg
AUTHOR: By Yevgenya Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Moscow-based Cinema Park is due to open what will be St. Petersburg’s largest cinema, a nine-screen $13 million multiplex, the company said Thursday. Located in the Grand Canyon shopping center, north of the city, the cinema will show its first film December 14 and will hold 2346 people.
Cinema Park, which aims to capture up to 20 percent of the cinema market in the country, said that after opening it will be the second biggest player in the local market, after Kronverk Cinema. As part of its ambitious plans, Cinema Park said they are targeting those who currently don’t go to the cinema to make up a large part of their audience.
“This will lead to an expansion in regular cinema goers,” said Alina Sigacheva, Cinema Park’s head of marketing, in an emailed statement.
“We will not push anyone out of the market. We will attract our own audience,” said Sigacheva. Representatives of Kronverk Cinema, the city’s market leader in terms of number of screens, were not available for comment Thursday.
Meanwhile, experts believe that the city’s cinema market is far from reaching saturation point. A representative from one of the city’s film distribution companies, who wished to remain anonymous, said the new cinema has  the potential to be a successful project as “the local film distribution market is in a phase of active development.”
Alexander Pozdnyakov, the president of the St. Petersburg Film Press Association,  said the mass opening of multiplexes in the city is a “long awaited” event.
“St. Petersburg is at last getting filled with high-tech multiplexes where every film-lover will be able to find a film according to his or her taste — not only Hollywood blockbusters, but also Russian films, new European films, movies from Asia, and of course art house films,” Pozdnyakov said. Cinema Park has confirmed their intention to cater for different audiences, including art house fans.
“Although we will not have a screen solely dedicated to art house projects, we will definitely show such films,” said Sigacheva. “But as in any multiplex, we will screen the films that generate most profit,” she added.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: UES Unit Flotation
ST. PETERSBURG (Reuters) — Electricity monopoly Unified Energy Systems plans to float stocks worth between $700 million and $800 million in each of its three newly created power generating units — OGK-3, OGK-5 and TGK-3 — UES chief executive Anatoly Chubais said on Wednesday.
“If the government supports us, we are going to proceed with the IPOs and new share issues in 2006,” Chubais told reporters.

Mortgage Ambition
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Investment bank Kit Finance plans to issue $500 million to $600 million worth of mortgages in 2006, a bank representative, Alexander Vinokurov, said Thursday. According to him, next year the bank will issue 20,000 credits worth $25,000 to $30,000 each.
“This is what we would like to give out independently. It’s possible it will be too ambitious,” Vinokurov said, adding that the bank could issue mortgage bonds, create a mortgage investment fund, and also sell some of its mortgages to other banks.

Ford Focus Import
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Ford will import 2,000 of its Ford Focus models, assembled in Europe, to Russia, the company’s press service was quoted by Interfax as saying Thursday. The company said that demand for Ford Focus has outstripped the production at its St. Petersburg plant. Around 30,000 buyers are currently awaiting delivery of the company’s latest model.

Skylink Investment
CHELAYABINSK (SPT) — Over the next two to three years mobile operator Skylink plans to invest $300 million to $350 million in the development of the mobile network of standard IMT-MC-450 in the Russian provinces, the president of one of Skylink’s shareholders, RDTC, Stanley Crampton, said at a meeting with Chelayabinsk Oblast’s governor, Petr Sumin, Interfax reported Wednesday.

Power Machines Deal
ST. PETERSBURG (Reuters) — Unified Energy Systems said on Wednesday that it had completed its purchase of 22.4 percent in Power Machines, taking majority control over the turbine maker.
“We closed the deal three hours ago,” said UES chief executive Anatoly Chubais. Including shares owned by its Lenenergo unit, the deal gives UES a 55.4 percent stake in Power Machines.

Railway Approach
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — By the end of 2005 Russian Railways will invest 175 million rubles ($6 million) in an approach to the port of Ust-Luga, Interfax reported Thursday. “This is one of the most important of Russian Railway’s projects in the Leningrad Oblast.  It will lead to fuller exploitation of the coal and container transportation terminal, allowing an increase in the volume of long distance cargo,”  a company press release said.

TITLE: Deripaska Calls Time On The Proud Volga
AUTHOR: By Stephen Boykewich and Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The ailing domestic auto industry looked set to undergo a major overhaul as the government hinted Wednesday at pumping oil money into the sector and the maker of the Volga announced the end of the line for one of the enduring symbols of Soviet pride.
“It looks unlikely that we’re going to continue its production in the near future,” RusPromAvto powertrain division director Igor Kulgan said at an automotive conference Wednesday, speaking of the car that had been synonymous with the Communist Party elite and the KGB secret police since its debut in 1956.
At the same conference, Andrei Klepach, head of forecasting at the Economic Development and Trade Ministry, hinted that the country’s carmakers, including AvtoVAZ, the maker of Ladas, could be buoyed by windfall oil revenue.
While businesses should not count on easy access to the investment fund, car production is “a key sector of Russian machine building” and as such can “make a claim for the state investment fund’s money,” Klepach said.
“The purpose of the investment fund is to launch projects that would not offer a return on investment without state money,” Klepach said.
The fund, which is due to become operational next year, will offer around $2.47 billion to all qualified investors, including municipal governments and foreign companies.
Klepach’s comments reflected yet another shift in policy after the state slashed import tariffs on key car parts and rolled out the red carpet to foreign carmakers earlier this year.
When asked whether AvtoVAZ, the country’s top carmaker and the only one that appears to have a real chance of surviving, could count on money from the state fund, Klepach declined to give a definite answer, though he noted that AvtoVAZ was the only domestic carmaker that has recently produced a new model, the Kalina.
For those hoping to receive the much-sought-after funding, however, “there is a need to learn how to submit well thought-out proposals,” he said.
Domestic car sales have dropped precipitously since the arrival of foreign models in the 1990s. Japanese brands overtook the lower-end Ladas, and bureaucrats and businessmen abandoned the once-prestigious Volga in favor of Mercedes and BMWs. 
Sales of domestic cars dropped 14 percent in the first half of 2005, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.
RusPromAvto’s move to drop Volga production reflects the companyâs desire to capitalize on competitive advantages, as an ongoing restructuring of assets by owner Oleg Deripaska highlighted the model’s lack of profitability, Kulgan said.
Deripaska himself announced the end of the line for the Volga on Tuesday in a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
“In the long term, the factory will focus on the production of commercial vehicles — GAZelle, Sobols, trucks and buses,” Deripaska said, Prime-Tass reported.
Analysts called RusPromAvto a rare example of a financially sound domestic automotive company. The company is among the world’s top three bus makers and is the seventh-largest maker of light commercial vehicles, or LCVs, worldwide, according to Kulgan.
Economic considerations aside, RusPromAvto is being driven in part by a desire to escape the shadow of the past. Likely to vanish along with the Volga is the name of the company that brought the Soviet automobile industry into being in 1932. 
“Most likely we will abandon the name GAZ, probably in March,” Kulgan said. “GAZ is associated with the Volga, and we all know what the Volga is associated with.”
RusPromAvto’s restructuring comes as the state is tightening its grip on AvtoVAZ. Senior officials at state arms dealer Rosoboronexport have taken advantage of close relations with President Vladimir Putin to pitch members to AvtoVAZ’s new board of directors, to be elected on Dec. 22. Rosoboronexport confirmed last month it had nominated deputy general director Vladimir Artyakov and another senior official, Igor Yesipovsky, to the board of AvtoVAZ.
Car experts had mixed reactions to the possibility of state support for AvtoVAZ. 
Franz Josef Marx, a car analyst at Boston Consulting Group, doubted that the state would tap the fund for carmakers because it would fuel inflation and be “counterproductive” without an upgrade of carmakers’ managerial capabilities.
Stanley Root, a Moscow-based car analyst at PricewaterhouseCoopers, supported the idea, but said that car makers using state money had to become more receptive to new ideas. “There is a lot of pride among Russian engineers in the quality of their skills, and some skepticism that they have anything to learn from foreign specialists,” Root said.
To encourage new thinking, the Economic Development and Trade Ministry and the Education Ministry are planning a program that would retrain Russian car workers abroad and bring foreign automotive gurus to Russia, Klepach said.
AvtoVAZ’s new Kalina may be a sign of things to come. Nikolai Sorokin, a deputy director at the Industry and Energy Ministry, called the car “a world-class automobile as far as the quality is concerned.”
Which was just what they used to say about the Volga.
When the model debuted in 1956, it was seen as a triumph of the Soviet automotive industry. The car borrowed from contemporary Fords in both styling and engineering — little surprise given that Ford helped found GAZ in 1932 — but was built for Russian roads that would have crippled the Volga’s U.S. counterparts.

TITLE: Germany’s Dresdner To Buy Into Gazprom’s Bank
AUTHOR: By Catherine Belton
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Germany’s Dresdner Bank is to buy one-third of Gazprombank, the subsidiary bank of Russia’s powerful state-controlled gas giant, for $800 million in the second major German-Russian financial deal this week.
Gazprombank said Wednesday that its board of directors had agreed to sell 6.67 million new shares to Dresdner for at least 23.2 billion rubles in a deal expected to go ahead in early 2006. The bank, Russia’s third-largest, said the tie-up was aimed at improving its business and increasing its capital ahead of a possible initial public offering of its shares in London.
The deal will further solidify a longtime partnership between Gazprom and the German bank, whose investment-banking arm in October advised Gazprom on its $13 billion purchase of Roman Abramovich’s Sibneft.
It will also likely strengthen ties between Dresdner and the Kremlin. Dresdner has played a key role in helping the Kremlin tighten its hold over the energy sector, and President Vladimir Putin is reported to have ties to the head of Dresdner’s Moscow division, Mattias Warnig, that go back to his days as a KGB agent in Soviet-controlled East Germany. The Wall Street Journal earlier this year cited documents from East Germany’s Stasi secret police and former colleagues of Warnig’s as saying that he previously worked as a Stasi agent and helped Putin recruit spies in the West.Warnig has denied the report. 
The announcement of Dresdner’s tie-up with Gazprombank came after Deutsche Bank said earlier this week that it had bought the remaining 60 percent of shares in investment bank United Financial Group. The deal was thought to be worth about $400 million.
The two German deals are the latest in a series of investments by Western banks, which are rushing to invest in Russia’s booming banking market. Other recent deals include loans by Morgan Stanley and Citibank to the Rosneft state oil company ahead of planned IPO in London. 
But while the UFG deal appeared aimed at securing a major role for Deutsche Bank in the country’s upcoming stream of expected IPOs, Dresdner’s acquisition of a blocking stake in Gazprombank appeared more likely to be a short term financial investment ahead of the Russian bank’s IPO.
With assets of $15 billion as of Sept. 30, the bank is often seen as Gazprom’s treasury department. It has acted on Gazprom’s behalf in acquiring significant stakes in electricity monopoly Unified Energy Systems and also holds the gas giant’s vast media assets, including NTV television and the Izvestia daily newspaper. “This is a much bigger fish than UFG,” one banker said on condition of anonymity.
Gazprombank’s chairman, Andrei Akimov, the low-profile former head of the Central Bank’s foreign subsidiary, Donau Bank in Austria, counts among his aides Alexander Ivanov, the son of Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov.  
“Gazprom wants to expand the role of Gazprombank from being a proxy for the treasury department to become a more broad-based bank to compete with … Vneshtorgbank and Alfa Bank,” said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at Alfa Bank. “This is consistent with the government’s overall objective for state companies to take a dominant role in strategic industries, and it is another sign of how lucrative the Russian banking sector appears to foreign banks.”

TITLE: Arbat Looks To IPO Cash
AUTHOR: By Maria Levitov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Leading cosmetics retailer Arbat Prestige is gearing up for an initial public offering next fall, to raise cash for tapping booming consumer demand outside Moscow.
The beauty products chain aims to raise $75 million to $80 million for up to 20 percent of its shares in a 2006 IPO, Svetlana Ivanova, a spokeswoman for Arbat Prestige, said Wednesday.
“We are interested in Russian cities with a population of at least 1 million people,” Ivanova said, adding that Ukraine and Kazahstan also “look like they have good potential.” 
Arbat Prestige, majority-owned by founder and general director Vladimir Nekrasov, has 20 stores in Moscow and the surrounding region, one outlet in Kazan and five in St. Petersburg. Two more stores are also set to open in the northern capital later this month.
Russia’s cosmetics and perfume market is set to expand by $800 million this year, to reach $7 billion by 2006, according to the Staraya Krepost industry research firm. The IPO should help Arbat Prestige bankroll further expansion but the success of the share placement — one of the many planned by Russian companies next year — will largely depend on the retailer’s asking price and its ability to demonstrate solid growth, analysts said.
Russian companies are expected to raise about $16 billion in around 25 IPOs in 2006, approximately $11 billion more than in 2005, UFG CEO Charles Ryan said Tuesday, Reuters reported. Arbat Prestige reported a 2004 turnover of $234 million and expects it to rise to $500 million in 2006. However, the retailer recently had to lower its ambitious growth targets for this year.
“The company recently indicated that it wanted to double sales in 2006, after saying earlier that it wanted to double turnover in 2005 — but in fact they haven’t this year,” said Kim Iskyan, head of research at MDM Bank.
“To grow aggressively, [the chain] would need to make hefty capital investments,” Iskyan said.

TITLE: Winners & Losers in the Moscow Elections
AUTHOR: By Nikolai Petrov
TEXT: The great importance placed on Moscow’s City Duma elections owed to four factors: These were the first elections held after the completion of a major electoral reform, testing both its innovations and the adjusted strategies of the political forces.
Given the rapidly changing political landscape, this was an important “interim finish line” for all the main political forces in the country, a venue for the parties to demonstrate just how alive and how powerful they were.
Moscow is important as a commanding heights location on the political battlefield, and in the case of the upcoming change of mayors, these elections could be seen as a battle for the approach to these heights.
And finally, with the participation of not only all the main political parties but many national-level political figures as well, models for conducting the elections to the State Duma two years from now could be worked out here and now. 
Judging by what we have just seen in Moscow, however, the new electoral system was not as bad as the experts had been saying — it was much worse. 
I will offer here only a few fleeting examples: two new and promising political forces — the Pensioners’ Party and Rodina — were for different reasons kept out of the election. Saying that dirty pool takes place in Moscow elections will surprise no one. But this time, with so much attention lavished on them, the dirty pool was both public and demonstrable. Workers from the local housing boards were carted around from one precinct to another, voting multiple times with their registration cards; and by the end of the day practically all the precincts of the Tverskoi district had seen their observers removed. 
Commenting on this information, many publications hastened to point out the relatively small number of ballots that could be tossed into the count this way, given that there were 2 million Moscow votes cast. But the problem is that that these kinds of dirty tricks are used first and foremost to secure the victories of the “necessary” candidates running in single-mandate districts — and in single-mandate districts a few thousand additional votes can be decisive. In this instance, the candidates of United Russia and the mayor were victorious in all 15 districts.
The great popularity of Mayor Yury Luzhkov brought about the United Russia victory, and the tricks pulled off with the registration of the Pensioners’ Party and the removal of Rodina from the race raised the results of the Communist Party, Yabloko and the Liberal Democratic Party, or LDPR. For the Communists it was enough to significantly better their normal Moscow popularity rating, drawing a quarter of the party-list seats; for Yabloko it was enough to put them over the minimum 10 percent qualification barrier; and for the LDPR it was enough to draw them close to that line, as they made their best showing in Moscow ever. 
Among the other parties that made significant noises in this election was Sergei Mironov’s Party of Life, which polled almost 5 percent — although it did so, admittedly, at the price of enormous campaign expenditures.
Given that the Moscow City Duma will be voting for a mayor, and given the fact that this body is so small (only 35 deputies), the size of the prize, in terms of both team and individual scoring, was great indeed. In fact, it was greater than in the State Duma elections. Fighting for a place in the legislative branch, all the political forces had in mind the possibility of influencing the executive branch. Yet practically no one among the political parties nominated either a candidate for mayor or made demands to retain the present one. This was done in a way by Luzhkov’s United Russia, which announced its intention of proposing to the president the current mayor as a candidate, though not particularly forcefully — just enough to point out one more time that United Russia is behind the Mayor’s Office, but without taking responsibility for it.
In any event, the result achieved by the team of United Russia and the mayor, which views the city’s flourishing economic growth as its creation, can be considered extremely inspiring for the Kremlin. Winning almost half the votes cast without any particular platform and practically without an ideology, all simply on the basis of the popularity of an outgoing mayor — is this not a model for United Russia’s 2007 national campaign? If United Russia could not define a program for itself at its recent convention in Krasnoyarsk, then now it has even less reason to try to do so.
Generally speaking, the content side of this election was empty, as usual. Apart from the exploitation of the distaste of a sizeable chunk of Moscow’s citizenry for immigrants and newcomers — a dislike cultivated by practically all the political forces — there simply was no serious political agenda in these elections. And it wasn’t even the fact that the elections were not so much about real power as about proximity to it, which meant that no political party could realistically propose an action agenda for the future. 
It was more that Moscow, to a greater extent than Russia overall, can allow itself, given the blessings of gas and oil revenue, not to think about problems except in the context of: “As long as you have your health, you can buy anything else you need.” As a result of this, the role of elections in society’s discussion of key problems of the city’s development — problems that are critically important to Muscovites — was minimal. The key questions were not formulated or even recognized.
On the positive side of the ledger, a precedent was set for uniting different democratic parties on one party list. Yet the success of the democrats should not be exaggerateed: this success consists mainly in avoiding defeat and remaining at least potentially important players on the political battlefield. 
What, if anything, did the election change for the democrats? Yabloko had two deputies before and will have two now. The head of the Yabloko party list, Ivan Novitsky, was already in the City Duma anyway. But a personal factor may turn out to be important here. If Yabloko’s Sergei Mitrokhin comes in third in his district, then scandals and perhaps investigations into various election violations are guaranteed. 
Beyond this, the large Communist faction will become a new factor, and one represented on the federal level by well-known politicians. It may come to pass that in struggling against Rodina, the Kremlin and the Moscow mayor have created for themselves a much more serious problem for the future. 
On the whole, however, one can say that this election was more an event of a day gone by than of one ahead. The future will show us whether this formulation holds true on a national scale in 2007.

Nikolai Petrov is scholar in residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

TITLE: Kesayev Report Points a Finger in Beslan
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: Last week, the results of a North Ossetian parliamentary investigation into the terrorist attack in Beslan were made public. The report went largely unnoticed. The pro-government media shied away from a number of awkward conclusions, while the opposition was dissatisfied with the level of invective directed at the government of President Vladimir Putin. 
There is no question that the parliamentary commission, headed by Stanislav Kesayev, deputy speaker of the North Ossetian legislature, came under enormous pressure. A good deal was also clearly cut out of the report in order to preserve the main point — to determine who and what caused the first explosion in the school gymnasium, after which government troops stormed the school.
Three scenarios were in circulation before the report came out. The first, advanced by the prosecutors, held that the terrorists set off the bomb. The second version was offered by Nurpashi Kulayev, the lone suspected terrorist in federal custody: The explosion occurred after a sniper took out the terrorist who had his foot on the detonator. This is also what terrorist ringleader Ruslan Khuchbarov told authorities by telephone immediately after the explosion. According to the third version, the terrorists designated one man to blow everything up if things went wrong. This version says that on Sept. 3, 2004, at 1:03 p.m., that’s exactly what he did.
None of these versions was ever substantiated. Khuchbarov’s statement doesn’t count for much. That’s exactly what you would expect him to say in the heat of the moment even if he had detonated the bomb himself. As for the sniper, there was no place for him to hide. In order to get a clean shot he would have been exposed in an open area with no cover apart from a small outbuilding.
More importantly, none of these versions explains why only a single bomb went off. If the bombs were wired together, they should all have gone off at once. The Kesayev report concluded that there were three explosions, not one: two small explosions at 1:03 p.m. and 1:05 p.m., followed by a large blast — the actual bomb — at 1:29 p.m.
So what exploded at 1:03 p.m. and 1:05 p.m.? Something blew a hole in the ceiling, through which the hostages “saw the sky.” A column of dust and smoke can be seen on video footage rising to a height of some 15 meters above the roof, indicating an explosion on the roof itself, not inside the gym. The sound of a grenade launcher firing can be heard on audiotape. A second shot quickly followed, blowing a hole in the north wall of the gym. Hostages then began to jump through the windows and the shooting started. Only 26 minutes after the rooftop explosion did the terrorists’ bomb go off.
The report also questioned the role of two deputies to Federal Security Service director Nikolai Patrushev in the counterterrorist operation. The commission had been able to establish what all of the command centers in Beslan had been up to during the siege, with one exception: the team led by Vladimir Pronichev and Vladimir Anisimov.
The upshot is that one of the command centers in Beslan set out to eliminate the terrorists, not to free the hostages. For this group, it would have been very convenient if the hostages were removed from the equation. Troops could then move in and wipe out the bad guys, and civilian deaths could be blamed on a miscue by the terrorists.
The simplest way to accomplish this would be to set off the terrorists’ own bomb. But here they ran into a little problem: The snipers couldn’t get a clear shot at the terrorist with his foot on the detonator.
This problem was resolved with the help of a grenade launcher. Did the feds have the plans for the school? Yes. Did the plans indicate where the basketball hoop was attached to the wall? Yes. Did they know the bomb was hung up in the hoop? Yes.
The snipers needed a clear shot. A soldier with a grenade launcher could fire from the roof of any nearby apartment building.

Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.

TITLE: Warhol the classicist
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Andy Warhol exhibition that opens at the Russian Museum’s Marble Palace this week aims at putting the Prince of Pop’s work in a classical context. Entitled “Andy Warhol: Artist of Modern Life,” it refers to Charles Baudelaire’s 1863 critical essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” in which the French poet urged artists to turn to modernity from tired academic subjects.
“The premise that we took was trying to make the point, especially in a place like St. Petersburg, that you have great collections of the past and we want to show how [Warhol’s] wealth fits into the history of art,” said Thomas Sokolowski, the director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, who spoke to The St. Petersburg Times by telephone this week. 
“So we took the premise of the very famous essay by Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life.’ We want to see exactly how he viewed artists as being the most appropriate [observers], making art about subjects of modern life, dealing with activities of modern life, things in society, criticizing  modern life, when he talked about Constantin Guys, [Edouard] Manet and people like that — though those can all be applicable to Andy Warhol. 
“And then, in fact, the main subject matter of Warhol’s art was things like portraiture, which is very traditional after all, as well as still-life and object painting which Warhol did in his Campbell soup paintings and others. So, in a certain way we ask the audience to consider Warhol as a traditionalist as well as a modernist.”
The exhibition, which was shown in Moscow in the fall and will conclude its tour in Samara in the spring, was put together by the Andy Warhol Museum exclusively for Russia, but there are less of the hammers and sickles, Soviet maps or crowds with red flags that were featured at an earlier Warhol exhibition at the State Hermitage in 2000.
“There’s actually one painting that we included, a painting of a hammer and sickle, but we are just presenting as much as possible, in a retrospective way, all of the major subject matter that Warhol dealt with,” said Sokolowski. 
Sokolowski, who was in Moscow for the opening at the Tretyakov Gallery in September and in both Moscow and St. Petersburg for the first Warhol exhibition in 2000, said the Russian audiences demonstrated a good understanding of the painter’s work. 
“People understood the art quite well, even though before that exhibition five years ago people really had not seen much Warhol work on actual display,” he said.
“There was a symposium at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow five years ago, and the questions were terribly sophisticated; people, I thought, were obviously very aware of Warhol’s films, partly because films are much easier to see and bring over to places far away, like Russia.”
However, even then the Russian media response appeared misinformed, according to the Moscow-based art critic Yekaterina Dyogot. 
In her analysis, Dyogot wrote that many Russian critics misunderstood Warhol’s work, seeing it as a celebration of capitalism and of consumer society. Sokolowski said Warhol’s work was much more complex.
“On the one hand he was not praising consumerism in itself, but he was saying that the subject matter of art is daily life — if, in the 19th century, it was about going to the Folies-Bergere or something like that, those were the things that many middle-class people did.  If you compare Warhol to [Edgar] Degas or someone like that in the 19th century, an artist who was painting still lifes of fish, cheese, or bottles of wine that comprised a person’s lunch, that was not necessarily a celebration of food or a celebration of opulence, it was something that was quite everyday and commonplace. 
“On the other hand, when Warhol was doing an image of a tuna fish can, a few years after he did the Campbell soup, it was called ‘Tuna Fish Disaster.’ He showed the other side of the American Dream, if you will. Many people took jobs because of mass production, many people were able to eat foods that were nutritious and good value, but at the time poisons could get into the food and be passed on — four women were killed eating tinned food, and that was the first time that had happened in America. Since then there have been many other instances.”
“He was looking at both sides. There was a complicated response of good and bad, but it was certainly not just a viscious, negative view of consumerism. I think that wasn’t true at all.”
In Moscow, the Tretyakov Gallery accompanied the Warhol exhibition with a show of Russian pop art. 
“It was very interesting. I saw there were a number of young artists imitating Warhol, one person had done Campbell soup art, for example,” Sokolowski said. 
“I said someone had missed the point, because if one has to do that in Moscow, one would perhaps want to show a bottle of kvass, or maybe a bottle of vodka, because it would be an object that everyday Russians would use. Campbell soup was perhaps more exotic. So you really need something that was a staple.
“One image that I heard of subsequently was very interesting. There was a large amount of criticism from the Orthodox Church — it was an image of an icon that was sort of reproduced with caviar on it, or something like that. But it was still obviously something religious, and it had a great significance to these religious people and that is the kind of thing Warhol would have done. He would have taken something that was very obvious and very well integrated into our culture and questioned it  — and perhaps in that questioning,  some problems are created.”
According to Sokolowski, Warhol’s work always had an interesting social position, and Russia’s Sots Art (the 1970s dissident version of pop art that mocked the Soviet mythology and socialist realism), with artists such as Komar and Melamid, and Ilya Kabakov, is close in its approach to Warhol.
Though Warhol used communist images from China and the Soviet Union in his work, his interest in them came from the fact that they were present in everyday American life, rather than from what was actually happening behind the Iron Curtain, according to Sokolowski.
“He did, for example, the hammer and sickle, because it was a great symbol of Soviet times. He also did a famous image of Lenin, although I don’t think that is in the exhibition. He did a big series of images of Mao Tse-Tung, and he was following that because at that time the Great Cultural Revolution was happening, so you didn’t have to be in China to see what was happening with Mao. That image of him, and the posters and the Little Red Book, as it was called, were just so omnipresent.
“And I think that was partly the thing with Warhol. In all of his work, all of the images that he chose were already potent images in culture, particularly the picture of Mao Tse-Tung. The fact that Mao’s image is so omnipresent — to a greater extent than any other political figure’s, certainly to a greater extent than any American I can think of, and to an even greater extent than Stalin —you could not not deal with it.
“And Andy Warhol was sort of saying, ‘Here’s this image that’s almost become like a religious icon and is mass produced over and over again, well that’s something I want to think about.’ Or images of Campbell soup, or images of cars that were so present in American culture in the 1960s or 1970s. Or images of pop musicians  —they were just things that were in society that were taken for granted. He was saying ‘Let’s look at these images again and what do they tell us about the good and the not-so-good in our society.’
“For example, if you look at one of the beautiful movie stars, Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor, we can say, “They are beautiful, aren’t they popular, doesn’t everyone admire them,” and at the same point Marilyn Monroe ended up dying of a drug overdose, Elizabeth Taylor had problems with drugs and many many husbands. A number of stars he depicted finished in a very tragic way. So, being a movie  star may look good on the outside to those of us who aren’t movie stars, but their lives had pressures and difficulties and maybe they cannot live up to the expectations that we have of them.”
Featuring around 125 works, the local show, due to limited space, is a scaled-down version of the Moscow exhibition that had over 300 items , the Russian Museum’s press office said. The exhibition will be on show until February when it will head for its final destination in Samara.

Thomas Sokolowski will read a public lecture called “Andy Warhol: The Artist of the American Dream” at the lecture hall of the Russian Museum’s Mikhailovsky Zamok at 4 p.m. on Friday. 
 
“Andy Warhol: Artist of Modern Life” opens at the Russian Museum’s Marble Palace on Friday. www.rusmuseum.ru, www.warhol.org

TITLE: An eclectic fairytale
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Sainkho Namtchylak, the Tuva-born, Vienna-based vocalist, who started out as a folk singer, but later encompassed avant-jazz, rock and electronic music influences in her act, seems to return to her ethnic roots with a new release.
Her forthcoming CD,  “Arjaana,” is a fairytale that Namtchylak wrote in 1983. According to the news release, she wrote it for her small daughter who was taken by her parents to Tuva while Namtchylak was in Moscow, studying traditional music and singing at a music school. It was first published in 1987 in the literary magazine Ulug-Hem, in Tuva.
Recorded in St. Petersburg with a bunch of local rock musicians, and the addition of avant-jazz players Yevelina Petrova on accordion and the Moscow-based saxophonist Sergei Letov, it features Namtchylak’s soft narrative in Russian and music mainly based on old Central Asian traditions.
According to Namtchylak’s web site, the record is intended for children and accompanied with a small book illustrated by the singer herself.
“I only managed to get the chance to blend together my singing , writing and drawings 22 years on. Now I am a grandmother and I am writing poems, music and songs. But that’s another story...” wrote Namtchylak on her web site.
In concert, Namtchylak will be backed by Vladimir Kudryavtsev on double bass, Sholban Mongush of the Tuvan rock band Yat-Kha on igil, Nail Kadyrov on guitars and Alexei Petrov on drums.

Sainkho Namtchylak performs at Estrada Theater on Wednesday. Arjaana is out on ASiA Plus label. www.sainkho.com

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: An Andy Warhol exhibition touring three major Russian cities, is finally arriving in St. Petersburg. Opening at the Russian Museum’s Marble Palace on Friday, the show is called “Andy Warhol: Artist of Modern Life.”
Warhol had a link to the St. Petersburg underground art and music scene via Joanna Stingray, the then-aspiring U.S. singer and frequent visitor to the city in the 1980s. It was her idea to bring Campbell tomato soup cans signed by Warhol to local artists and musicians, including Akvarium’s Boris Grebenshchikov and Kino’s Viktor Tsoi. 
“I got soup cans and he signed them for all my friends,” said Stingray in a telephone interview with The St. Petersburg Times in 2000. “I told him everybody’s name and he signed them himself, and I brought them to Leningrad and everybody loved it.”
“The funniest thing about that soup is I remember giving everybody those signed cans from Warhol, and my friends could not believe it, but then when I got back to St. Petersburg two months later, some of the people that Andy had signed cans for had actually opened them and eaten the soup.” See article, previous page.
The U.S.-based alternative/industrial band KMFDM arrives to perform as part of a tour in support of its most recent album. Called “Hau Ruck,” the CD is plugged as the “most powerful and innovative album that KMFDM has ever created” in the band’s news release.
The band, which describes its sound as “ultraheavy beat,” performed in the city last year, promoting its previous album “WWIII.” The group was formed in Paris by vocalist Sascha Konietzko (Sascha K. in the band’s promo materials) and German painter and multi-media-performer Udo Sturm, in February 1984. 
In a telephone interview with this newspaper last year, he described the band’s credo:
“KMFDM is waging war against everything. Against every government, against all religions, against everything that organizes people into a stupid mass of nothing. If we had a message, it would be: Think for Yourself and Don’t Believe the Bullshit.”
KMFDM performs at PORT on Saturday.
So-called “rock legends” keep coming to the city, this week in the form of Carl Palmer. Reputed as a good drummer, Palmer, who was with The Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Atomic Rooster in the 1960s, had the misfortune to play with one of the most pompous bands in the history of rock, Emerson, Lake and Palmer. On his own, Palmer was mocked by the British music press when he formed his own band, P.M., in the late 1970s.
Here he comes as BPS, a bizarre combination of Palmer, Italian guitarist Andrea Braido, whose credits include backing Italian pop singers Adriano Celentano and Eros Ramazzotti, billed by promoters as “Italy’s Jimi Hendrix,” and self-described “heavy metal funk” American bassist/vocalist T.M. Stevens.
BPS will perform at the Modern Art Center, also known as the Priboi film theater, on Sunday.

TITLE: Surrealism at the Hermitage
AUTHOR: By Andrei Vorobei
TEXT: A new exhibition at the Hermitage showcases three paintings by Max Ernst from the Northern Rhine-Westphalia collection (Dßsseldorf). Ernst (1891-1976), a German-born French artist, was the pioneer of the ‘frottage’ surrealist technique. The three selected paintings demonstrate the artist’s development of his unique and groundbreaking style. They include “Carmagnole of Love” (1926), “After Us – Maternity” (1927) and the supremely hallucinogenic “Landscape with Sprouting Grain” (1936), which was produced in the years when surrealism gained a widespread, international following.
During World War I Ernst served in the German army.  After the war, filled with new ideas from the horrors he had witnessed, he formed the Cologne-based branch of the German Dadaist group along with French artist Jean Arp and German poet, artist and social activist Alfred Grßnwald. The group rejected the prevailing, traditional standards of art by expressing nihilism, deliberate irrationality and cynicism in their poetry, theater and graphic design. 
However, two years later, in 1921, Ernst returned to the artistic community in Montparnasse, Paris, where he would become one of the most prominent figures of the surrealist art movement.
Originally spearheaded by Andre Breton and Luis Aragon, surrealism actually began with language and texts. Its philosophy was opposed to traditional literature. A key principle was that of automatism, which dictated that works of art should only be created as “spontaneous writing, drawing or such practice without conscious aesthetic or moral self-censorship”.
However, such a code also planted seeds of doubt among surrealist painters, including Breton, that their artistic philosophy, due to the developmental work in the painting process, was impossible to put into practice. Ernst was the one who dispelled their apprehensions.
In 1925 he invented frottage, a technique that involves making a “rubbing” over a textured surface with a pencil or other drawing tool. The result can then be left as it is or used as a basis for further refinement. The next year he collaborated with Joan Mir× on designs for the Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev.
As the exhibition and the works of other artists show, surrealist painting was somewhere in between the tangible and the abstract, a kind of synthesis or specific syntax which blends the two opposites on canvas. The paintings remain figurative while being inspired by pure psychic automatism.
Surrealism was not considered as an alternative or opposition to reality; on the contrary, it expanded reality at the expense of the unconscious world. The most common inspirations came from dreams, a certain childish outlook, and the emotional candor of mentally ill people. 
One of the pieces exhibited “After Us – Maternity” carries out an anthropomorphic transformation in which the figure of the Blessed Virgin is interpreted in the form of birds.
The exhibition booklet explains that this substitution of the human figure with birds can be attributed to childhood trauma suffered by the artist. Such Freudian psychoanalysis is a common explanation of the creative mysteries behind surrealist art. 

“Three pictures of Max Ernst” runs through 19 February 2006 at the Hermitage, room 334 (third floor). 

Links: www.hermitage.ru

TITLE: A winter feast of music
AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva
TEXT: An ambitious new initiative aimed at attracting a million more winter tourists to St Petersburg has been launched. “White Days” is a program involving the city’s leading cultural institutions, hotels, private sponsors and local government. 
The enigmatic and romantic Russian winter immortalized in Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” could annually attract up to one million more tourists annually to St. Petersburg, bringing a 200 million dollar profit to the city, said Thomas Noll, general manager at the Grand Hotel Europe. “The “White days” program is still in the beginning but there is so much potential. With banks, boutiques, oil companies involved into the project, along with the hotels and the cultural institutions, the city can get more taxes and more money for its development,” he said.
This year the “White Days” program will include a number of concerts, shows, festivals, balls, and exhibitions held around the city.
Musical events in the city abound throughout the winter. The 2005-2006 season at the Marinsky theater, dedicated to Nikolai Gogol, presents the works of the Russian classic author in operas, ballets and symphonic programs. The theatre is also to stage a gala-show on New Year’s Eve, as well as a “Shrovetide Week” festival, which starts in February 2006.
The VII International “Arts Square” festival will take place at the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the Russian Museum, and the Yusupovsky Palace, and features a number of concerts by the legendary conductor and “Arts Square” director Yury Temirkanov. The St. Petersburg Philharmonic will also host a gala concert dedicated to the 70 anniversary of the birth of conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky.
“The Nutcracker”, the first International Christmas Festival in honor of the 165th anniversary of the birth of Piotr Tchaikovsky, will showcase different performances of the ballet by Russian and Estonian theaters at the State Opera and Ballet Theater of the St. Petersburg Conservatoire.
Further attractions include an ice sculpture festival at the Peter and Paul Fortress and the reconstruction of the Empress Anna’s Ice Palace at Palace Square. 
The ice palace will be an imitation of the original, which was erected onPalace Square in 1740 in celebration of the treaty of Nissa, which ended the war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire a year earlier.
The display will include two ice elephant sculptures, and open classes will allow anyone who has ever dreamed of chiseling a masterpiece the chance to contribute to yet more sculptures. Parties and even wedding ceremonies are scheduled to take place in the completed palace.
Ded Moroz (Father Christmas) will be welcomed to the city at Konstantinovsky Palace, where young residents will be able to meet him and deliver their requests.
In addition there will be several new exhibitions at the Russian and State Hermitage museums.

TITLE: The Secret Admirer
AUTHOR: By Frederick P. Hitz
TEXT: In 1999, former KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin and Cambridge University historian Christopher Andrew published to great acclaim an account of the relations between Soviet intelligence and the West from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The book was based on a compilation of notes and documents from the archives of the KGB that Mitrokhin had lifted without authorization for over a decade beginning in 1972, as these archives were being moved to a new headquarters outside Moscow. Mitrokhin had stored the documents under his dacha floor until he finally defected to Britain in 1992, bringing them with him. The book was an international bestseller and made a significant contribution to Western knowledge of the KGB’s successes and weaknesses.
Mitrokhin did not live to see the publication of “The World Was Going Our Way,” a second volume detailing KGB operations in the Third World, but Andrew writes that the majority of the work was completed together. As it turns out, the second volume is more valuable for the sum of its observations of the KGB’s efforts and influence upon the Politburo than for any of the discrete espionage matters it reveals and discusses. Apart from the highly desirable effect of elaborating on major operations that have already been uncovered elsewhere, there is little of flashing newness in Andrew and Mitrokhin’s account. For example, it is important to confirm that the KGB — and not Andrei Gromyko’s Foreign Ministry — took the lead in Soviet attempts to steer diplomatic relations with target countries in Latin America, but that situation was reversed in the Middle East, where the Soviet Union had a longer history of involvement and more tangible interests at stake. Likewise, it is highly useful to underscore the observable fact that Fidel Castro, although claiming to be a lifelong Marxist-Leninist, was as much a grasping gadfly and unwelcome irritant to a series of Soviet premiers as he was a loyal ally.
Early in the Cold War, the KGB succeeded in convincing the Politburo that Marxism-Leninism would ultimately triumph through the successful wooing of the Third World. In this effort, the KGB was to play a critical if not dominant role. Its techniques were relatively consistent across Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa: it sought to exploit anti-Americanism by emphasizing the misdeeds and weaknesses of the Main Adversary through covert propaganda, “active measures” and “confidential contacts” with Third World officials at the top of their political hierarchies. The KGB was also enormously successful in cracking the diplomatic codes of many Third World regimes, which helped make its intervention more timely and effective.
In Latin America, the KGB most effectively targeted Cuba, Nicaragua and Chile. In the Middle East, Andrew and Mitrokhin note, it was Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and then Syria. The Soviets made little headway in China, North Korea, Vietnam or Japan, expending much effort but failing for historical and cultural reasons. India was a different story, however, as the KGB enjoyed great success in penetrating its Foreign Ministry and cultivating Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. This culminated, in 1971, in the Indian-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation, with the Soviet Union firmly backing India against Pakistan for leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement and in the Indo-Pakistani War. The understanding lasted through the Gandhi era and beyond, but as with so much of Soviet foreign policy, it was inalterably changed by the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev. 
In microcosm, the “special relationship” between the Soviet Union and India embodied the weaknesses of all Soviet involvements with Third World clients. Beyond its role as a strategic counterweight to Pakistan and China in the 1980s, the Soviet Union offered India little. The authors capture this conundrum well: “The Soviet forward policy in the Third World, however, was held back not merely by the low level of local ‘productive forces, culture and social consciousness’, but also by the catastrophic failure, whose scale [Yury] Andropov could not bring himself to acknowledge, of the Soviet economy.”
The authors seek to answer the perplexing question of KGB involvement in terrorism by confirming the general consensus that, with the exception of some dabbling with the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel, the intelligence service stayed out of it. Apparently, the KGB at first supported Wadi Haddad of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine only to step back after finding itself unable to control him or Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Andrew and Mitrokhin address the issue of Israel and Zionism mainly as a vehicle to demonstrate how the virulent anti-Semitism of Josef Stalin and the KGB undercut the Soviet Union’s initial decision to recognize Israel in 1948. The KGB had no success in penetrating Israeli intelligence through the Russian-Jewish emigre flow.
On the African continent, which, with its flock of newly independent states, offered the Soviets their cleanest opportunity to start the mating dance afresh, the KGB failed miserably. Though the KGB successfully exploited ex-colonial hostility within several former British and French satellites, it had no way to capitalize on the opportunity, given the Soviet Union’s own racism toward sub-Saharan Africans and lack of economic appeal. Ironically, the KGB seems to have reaped most reward in South Africa, helped by some long-time Afrikaner communist stalwarts and long-established ties with the African National Congress. Once again, the authors note, these efforts came to naught after apartheid collapsed and the Soviets refused the fledgling ANC government assistance in building a modern economy.
Andrew and Mitrokhin save for last the strongest contribution of both volumes of the Mitrokhin Archive. They note that the KGB’s role in keeping alive a climate of fear toward the West undermined the Soviet leadership’s ability to understand its own failings. Every setback they suffered was blamed on Western meddling. To that end, KGB intelligence was invariably biased, keyed to the specific prejudices of Politburo members and tailored to Marxist-Leninist doctrine. This Soviet form of political correctness did not help the leadership make the transition to the modern world, and the war in Afghanistan only added to the burden: “The KGB’s grand strategy failed chiefly because the Soviet system failed. Though good intelligence can sometimes act as a ‘force-multiplier’, magnifying the diplomatic and military strength of those states which use it effectively, it cannot compensate for the weaknesses of a system as fundamentally flawed as that of the Soviet Union.” 
Western intelligence historians and Sovietologists are greatly indebted to Mitrokhin and Andrew for these two extraordinary volumes on the KGB’s role in the Cold War — Mitrokhin for his courage and audacity in bringing out the archive and Andrew for his diligence and wisdom in presenting it to us in an organized and readable form. The reader’s patience with the scope and detail of the work is amply rewarded.

A U.S. intelligence officer, Frederick P. Hitz served as the CIA’s first presidentially appointed inspector general from 1990 to 1998. He now lectures at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and is the author of “The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage.”

TITLE: Iraqi Kidnappers Extend Deadline by 2 Days
AUTHOR: By Chris Tomlinson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD — Kidnappers extended a deadline until Saturday in their threat to kill four captive peace activists and posted a video of two of the hostages wearing orange jumpsuits and shackled with chains. 
The original deadline set by the group calling itself the Swords of Righteousness was Thursday. The extension was announced in a statement that accompanied Wednesday’s video, according to Al-Jazeera and IntelCenter, a government contractor that does support work for the U.S. intelligence community.
Norman Kember, 74, of London, Tom Fox, 54, of Clear Brook, Virginia, and the Canadians James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, were taken hostage in Baghdad two weeks ago.
They were working for the Christian Peacemaker Teams, an anti-war group, and are among seven Westerners who have been abducted in Iraq since Nov. 25. The other hostages are an American, a German and a Frenchman.
The other American in captivity was shown Tuesday on a separate insurgent video broadcast on Al-Jazeera. On Wednesday, his brother in the United States identified the captive as Ronald Schulz, 40, an industrial electrician from Alaska.
“I don’t want to get my brother killed,” Ed Schulz said. “But the fact that he has blond hair and blue eyes might get him killed.”
Videotape of the Christian peace activists showed two men, who were blindfolded and shackled. The men were not identified, but still photos from IntelCenter showed they were Fox and Kember. The two other hostages were not shown.
Unlike the civilian clothing they were wearing in two earlier videos, this time the hostages were wearing orange jumpsuits.
A brief excerpt from the videotape also was transmitted on Wednesday by al-Jazeera but did not show faces of the two shackled figures.
The two captives made statements condemning the U.S. and British presence in Iraq. Both men were instructed to give their statements twice, which they did without reading a text because they were blindfolded. As a result, each man’s second statement was slightly different from his first.
“I’d like to offer my plea to the people of America, not the government of America, a plea for my release from captivity and also a plea for a release from captivity of all the people of Iraq who are also suffering the same fate,” Fox said. “And that is the occupation of the American troops and the British troops which has brought me to this condition and has brought the Iraqi people to the condition they’re in.”
“So I would ask the American people to do what they can to free us all from this captivity,” he added.
In his statement, Kember appealed to British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
“I ask Mr. Blair, the British government and the British people to work both for my release and for the release of the Iraqi people from oppression,” he said.
A senior Iraqi official said Wednesday that “intelligence and security efforts” were under way to win the release of the Western hostages,
Major General Hussein Ali Kamal, deputy interior minister for intelligence, said efforts were “aiming and hoping for the release of those people who came to Iraq to provide humanitarian services.”
Religious and political leaders abroad — including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder — called for the hostages’ release.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw also called for the captives’ release. 
“These four men are all campaigners for peace, dedicated to the helping of others, and we ask for their release,” he said in a statement. “The message of this latest statement is not clear. If the kidnappers want to get in touch, we want to hear what they have to say.” 
Jackson, who has been involved in negotiating freedom for hostages in Iraq, Syria and Cuba, told CNN that he was appealing for the peace activists’ freedom. 
“Those four men are not soldiers. They’re not spies. They do not have guns,” Jackson said. “They should not be used as trophies and killed in the process.” 
Jackson said he has not had any response to his efforts to make contact with the kidnappers. 
“We are working through religious channels, and we hope that those channels will have an effect,” he said. 
Schroeder made an appeal on behalf of German hostage Susanne Osthoff and her Iraqi driver, who were seized last week.

TITLE: Saddam Stays Away From ‘Illegal’ Trial
AUTHOR: By Hamza Hendawi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD — Saddam Hussein followed through on his threat to boycott his trial Wednesday, and gunmen kidnapped the 8-year-old son of a judge’s bodyguard. 
One of Saddam’s seven co-defendants lashed out at the conditions of his own detention, saying guards offered only “the worst brands” of cigarettes.
Barazan Ibrahim’s outburst came a day after Saddam warned that he would not return to the “unjust” court to protest the conditions of his detention. The group is on trial for the deaths of more than 140 Shiite Muslims following a 1982 assassination attempt against him.
The court convened Wednesday after four hours of behind-the-scenes consultations failed to resolve the standoff. After hearing from two more witnesses, Chief Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin adjourned the hearings until Dec. 21 following next week’s national elections.
Court official Raid Juhi insisted that the court “decided [Saddam] should be removed” after the closed-door consultations. Juhi said Saddam would be in court Dec. 21.
However, a statement released in Amman, Jordan, by Saddam’s legal team said the former president stayed away to protest alleged mistreatment by an “illegal” court.

TITLE: Red Devils Crash Out of European League
AUTHOR: By Barry Hatton
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — Manchester United is out of Europe for the first time in a decade, and coach Alex Ferguson may soon be out of a job.
United’s early exit from European competitions Wednesday after losing 2-1 at Benfica in the Champions League was the latest blow in a troubled season for the Red Devils and their manager.
Manchester United, one of the richest clubs in the world, finished last of the four teams in Group D after the round-ending game in the Portuguese capital. Villareal also went through as group winner, while Lille placed third.
Thirteen other teams qualified for the final 16 knockout stage: AC Milan, PSV Eindhoven, Lyon, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Juventus, Arsenal, Ajax, Liverpool, Chelsea, Inter Milan, Rangers and Barcelona.
United was last ousted from the group stage in 1994-95. It didn’t even qualify for the UEFA Cup, granted to the group’s third-place finisher.
The Red Devils recorded just one win and scored only three goals in its six Champions League group games.
“It’s not the best moment for the club,” Ferguson said. “It’s a big challenge to rise above it.”
Ferguson had to win at the packed Stadium of Light, but his young team was unable to hold onto its lead, which came in the 6th minute on Paul Scholes’ goal. Geovanni tied it, and Beto put Benfica ahead before the break.
Benfica was a two-time champion of Europe in the 1960s, but its glory has faded and the team now struggles to compete on the continent. It also had five key players missing through injury.
“We were desperate to win this match. That brings anxiety,” Ferguson said. “Maybe we lacked a bit of composure.”
Ferguson was hoping for a European revival in Lisbon after four straight wins in the English Premiership pushed it into second place following a patchy start to the season.
But the outcome just heaped further pressure on him and could now weigh on the team’s performance in domestic competitions. Supporters have already been angered by American billionaire Malcolm Glazer’s takeover, which turned the club from one of the world’s richest into one heavily in debt.
Longtime captain Roy Keane, who helped the Red Devils dominate English soccer throughout the 1990s, left the club last month after 12 years at Old Trafford.
Ferguson, though, said he’s committed to his task of returning United to the dominance it enjoyed at home and abroad in the 1990s.
“I’ve got a job to do at this club, rebuilding. I’ll carry on with that,” Ferguson said, adding that he may buy new players during the January transfer window.
“It’s a blow and what you have to do is regroup,” he said. “This club in history has always risen from difficult situations and will do so again.”

TITLE: New Jersey Nets Score 1000 Wins
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW YORK – Vince Carter scored 23 points and the New Jersey Nets picked up their 1,000th victory in franchise history, defeating the Charlotte Bobcats 97-84 in National Basketball Association play on Wednesday in Charlotte.
Carter was playing despite a sore ankle and knee that he picked up in New Jersey’s 95-82 loss to the woeful Toronto Raptors in New Jersey on Saturday.
But he managed seven rebounds and five assists and played 38 minutes, shooting 10-for-21 to help the Nets rebound from the embarrassing loss on Saturday and snap a two-game losing streak.
“Everybody just wanted to do better,” Carter told reporters after the game.
“The last game we didn’t play well. The attitude in our locker room is still positive.”
Carter had 16 of his points at the half, as the Bobcats never recovered after trailing early and lost their fifth straight game.
Richard Jefferson added 21 points and seven rebounds for the Nets, while Nenad Krstic contributed 17 points and eight rebounds.
Jason Kidd had 11 points, 11 rebounds and eight assists for the Nets, who led 45-37 at the half.
Kidd’s points included a key 3-pointer with seven minutes to play after the Bobcats went on a run to close to within 79-74. Charlotte never got any closer than that the rest of the way.
Brevin Knight led the Bobcats with 23 points, while Primoz Brezec added 11 points.
In Toronto, Lamar Odom scored 19 points as the Los Angeles Lakers beat the hapless Raptors 102-91.
Smush Parker added 15 points for the Lakers.
Chris Bosh scored 22 points and had 10 rebounds and Morris Peterson added 14 for the Raptors, who are now 3-17.
In Orlando, Jannero Pargo scored 23 points as the Chicago Bulls beat the Magic 102-93.
Luol Deng added 22 points and had 10 rebounds for the Bulls.
Dwight Howard scored 17 points and had 16 rebounds and Steve Francis scored 16 points for the Magic.
In Philadelphia, Michael Redd scored 24 points as the Milwaukee Bucks beat the 76ers 88-85.
Mo Williams added 16 points for the Bucks. 
Allen Iverson scored 23 points and Samuel Dalembert added 13 points and had 12 rebounds for the 76ers. 
In Oklahoma City, Paul Pierce scored 28 points and had 12 rebounds as the Boston Celtics beat the New Orleans Hornets 101-87. 
In Salt Lake City, Matt Harpring scored 30 points as the Utah Jazz beat the Atlanta Hawks 95-83. 
In San Antonio, Tim Duncan scored 28 points and had 16 rebounds as the Spurs beat the Miami Heat 98-84. 
In Portland, Kevin Garnett had 16 points and 14 rebounds as the Minnesota Timberwolves beat the Trail Blazers 84-74. 
In Los Angeles, Elton Brand had 24 points and 11 rebounds as the Clippers edged the New York Knicks 84-79.

TITLE: Tanguay Excels, Kolesnik Is Solid in League Debut
AUTHOR: By John Marshall
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: Alex Tanguay waited and waited, holding the puck as he skated across the crease. Boston goalie Andrew Raycroft stayed with the Colorado forward as he dragged the puck along, seemingly ready to stuff his shot — just as he had a few minutes earlier.
This time, Tanguay held the puck an extra second longer and got Raycroft to fall to the ice, then flipped a shot over the prone goalie’s skate.
When you have the kind of talent that Tanguay has, even moves that didn’t work before can come through later.
Tanguay had a goal for the third straight game and added two assists, lifting the Avalanche to a 4-1 victory over the struggling Bruins on Wednesday night.
“I think he is in a real nice stretch here,” Colorado coach Joel Quenneville said. 
“His passing ability is up there with anyone in the league, but the patience he showed on that goal today was amazing.”
In other NHL games, it was: Nashville 5, Washington 2; Calgary 4, New Jersey 1; Chicago 2, the New York Rangers 1 in overtime; and Dallas 4, Florida 3.
Colorado’s top line made a winner out of Vitaly Kolesnik in his league debut.
The 26-year-old player from Kazakhstan was solid, keeping good position in the crease, knocking down some tough chances through traffic and controlling rebounds.
“The three-goalie system is not something we want long term,” Quenneville said. “This is a short-term situation.”
Boston got a spark after trading Joe Thornton to San Jose for Marco Sturm, Wayne Primeau and Brad Stuart last week, winning two of its first three games without its former captain.
It didn’t last long. The Bruins went back to their inconsistent ways against the Avalanche, giving away too many pucks in their own zone, losing the battles along the boards and taking penalties to lose for the 11th time in 14 games.
Sturm scored for the third time in four games.
“We didn’t give ourselves a chance all night,” Bruins coach Mike Sullivan said.  
At Washington, Marek Zidlicky and Scott Sullivan scored two goals apiece to lead Nashville. 
Zidlicky had two power-play goals in the first period and assisted on Sullivan’s second-period score. Sullivan added a power-play goal in the third period. Scott Hartnell added an empty-netter.