SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1148 (14), Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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TITLE: African Students Promote Racial Awareness
AUTHOR: By Ali Nassor
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Members of St. Petersburg’s African community last week wound up the first 45-day phase of a proactive awareness campaign aimed at fighting racism and xenophobia after five hate murders were committed in the city in less than five months.
The Africans believe the rising wave of hate crimes, which began in September, is due partly to lack of information about Africa and cultures alien to Russia. 
The community leaders visited more than 80 local schools as part of the campaign, exposing about 14,000 senior graders to positive views about Africa.
“Russian racism comes out of the social misconception that we are people from another planet abusing the generosity of the Russian people by turning into criminals and drug dealers,” Aliou Tunkara, head of the St. Petersburg African Union, said.
However, the schools program, which aimed to reveal the bright side of the “dark continent” by telling students about unknown aspects of African history and culture, has been greeted with mixed reactions. 
“When a kid wanted to know if we were cannibals, his teacher appeared to have insisted we really were because Emperor Bokassa [ex-dictator of the Central African Republic] reportedly did eat his political opponents,” Andrei Suberu, one of the Africans who is conducting the awareness lessons, said.
The teacher was echoing a message from local weekly Novy Peterburg’s front-page story of Jan. 26 that branded the campaign as a “promotion of African culture of cannibalism, drugs and the dissemination of infectious diseases among the children.”
“No one doubts the fact that the natives of Africa share a strong tradition of cannibalism to the present day; Emperor Bokassa and his son serve as proof,” the newspaper wrote, adding, “they have infested schools with their Negro jazz-bands… displaying cannibalistic rituals and all kinds of sexual excesses, under the pretext of national tolerance.”
Suberu remembers an incident when he and a group of African dancers were met by a class that was openly hostile, but  afterwards “the boy who appeared to be the ringleader gave me a handshake and apologized for mustering bad attitudes... He wanted to join us.”
“In most cases, teachers and children urge us to return... I had to visit some schools more than once,” Gaston Barrett, a tutor from Burkina Fasso, said.
But while Novy Peterburg called upon city authorities to send African tutors for “veterinary medical check-ups before any contact with schoolchildren,” City Hall has given the campaign the thumbs-up and said it will back a longer-term tolerance program.  
Leonid Ilyushin, Public Relations officer of City Hall’s Education Committee and head of the Department of Educational Reforms and International Cooperation, said his administration has worked out a system of financing similar schemes by non-governmental organizations from April. 
A joint campaign, under the auspices of the St. Petersburg African Union and the Kremlin-backed youth movement Nashi, is also a part of the latter’s “Lesson  for Peace” program to be held by ethnic minorities across Russia and which is due to end March 26 with an anti-fascist rally in Moscow. 
“There was a need to join forces with Nashi as their program coincided with our action plan to wage such a campaign after losing four members of our community in such a short duration,” Desire Deffo, deputy head of the St Petersburg African Union said.
“It didn’t matter to us if Nashi had any other agenda in hand as long as the move met our interests,” Deffo added.
He said this in response to criticism in the media and from other activist groups who speculated that the Africans are being taken for a ride by the youth movement, which is widely seen as a Kremlin political front. 
The next phase of the Africans’ campaign, in conjunction with Nashi, takes place in higher academic institutions. The Africans also plan to participate in an awareness program for schools in the Leningrad Oblast together with human rights group Memorial.

A 33-year-old citizen of Ivory Coast who had been in a coma since he was beaten early Friday regained consciousness Monday and may be able to provide police with details of the attack. 
Desire Da Leko was attacked on Bogartsky Prospekt and taken to hospital with severe brain trauma and blood loss, Aliou Tunkara, chairman of the African Union in St. Petersburg, said.
Da Leko arrived in St. Petersburg just days prior to the attack. The African was to take up an engineering course at a local university.
On Saturday, a friend of Da Leko, alarmed by his absence, contacted the police and discovered that he had been taken to Hospital No. 3 in a coma, Tunkara said.

TITLE: Talks On Iran Hit Barrier
AUTHOR: By Jim Heintz
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia on Monday dampened hopes of a deal with Iran that would ease concerns about its suspected nuclear weapons program, reminding Tehran that it must first freeze its domestic uranium enrichment. 
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the Kremlin proposal to set up a joint uranium enrichment facility on Russian soil was contingent on Iran ending its own enrichment activities — something that Tehran has so far refused to do. 
“Among other components of these efforts, there must be a moratorium on enriching uranium inside Iran until specialists from the International Atomic Energy Agency have clarified all issues concerning the Iranian nuclear program that emerged in the past,” Lavrov told reporters. 
The bilateral talks resume in Moscow on Tuesday, the RIA Novosti news agency reported on Monday, citing an unidentified official in the Russian negotiating team. 
The Russian official, according to RIA Novosti, said the deputy secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Hosseinitash, would lead Tehran’s delegation — as he had last week. 
On Sunday, the Iranian nuclear chief said after talks with his Russian counterpart, who visited Iran, that they had agreed in principle to Moscow’s enrichment plan. 
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Monday said Iran was trying to use its nuclear talks with Russia to break the global consensus. 
“They still want to drive a wedge into the international community, but this will not succeed,” he said. 
A European diplomat in Vienna said there had only been “some agreement on modalities, but not on substance” during the talks in Iran. 
The diplomat, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, added: “Our understanding is that there has been a lot of spin by the Iranian side.” 
“We’ll have to see what the details of any agreement are. Given their history, you can understand why we remain skeptical,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. 
Lavrov stressed that the talks between Russia and Iran had not ended and would continue until the IAEA board of governors’ meeting on Iran set for March 6. That meeting could start a process leading to punishment by the UN Security Council, which has the authority to impose sanctions on Iran. 
Tehran once again rejected calls for a moratorium on its domestic enrichment, with Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki telling his Japanese counterpart that his country has the right to pursue nuclear research and will not stop despite international criticism. 
The Russian offer to host Iran’s uranium enrichment program has been backed by the United States and the European Union as a way to provide more guarantees that Tehran’s production of nuclear fuel cannot be diverted to build weapons. 
Iran insists its nuclear program is only for power generation, but the West fears Iran is aiming to develop atomic bombs. 
Also Monday, Lavrov told Russian President Vladimir Putin that after the Tehran talks, “there is a better understanding of how this idea could be realized in practice,” the ITAR-Tass news agency reported. 
The ITAR-Tass news agency quoted an unnamed member of the Russian delegation in Tehran as saying that the two sides had advanced just “half a step,” and another Russian source as saying Iran continued to insist on limited research and development efforts on enrichment on its own territory.

TITLE: Two Kyrgyz Women Attacked Near Hostel
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A Kazakh woman with Kyrgyz citizenship was stabbed to death by a group of young people on Friday in St. Petersburg in what could have been an ethnically motivated attack, police said Sunday.
Ainur Bulekbayeva, 27, and her friend Ilfuza Babayeva, also a Kyrgyz citizen, were returning to a hostel on Ulitsa Khlopina in the north of the city where the two women shared a room. 
At about 9 p.m. they were attacked by several young people armed with knives, the police said.
“Bulekbayeva was speaking Kazakh on her mobile phone when three young people passed by the women,” the police said Sunday. “In just a couple of minutes the women were attacked.”
The police are closely looking at the possibility that the murder is a hate crime but a racial motive is not the only version being considered by investigators.
Prior to the attack Bulekbayeva had contacted the police about physical abuse and threats at work, the police press office said.
Babayeva, 34, an ethnic Azeri, sustained a series of about twenty wounds in her chest and back, and was taken to the city’s Military Medical Academy hospital, where her condition remains severe.
Both Babayeva and Bulekbayeva worked in street kiosks in northern St. Petersburg. Neither victims’ purses or any valuables were reported to have been stolen from the scene.
“The government just keeps its borders open for all sorts of low lifes, as if we didn’t have enough of our own,” Yury Belyayev, former leader of the nationalist Liberty Party, told The St. Petersburg Times in a telephone interview on Sunday. 
Belyayev’s party was banned in 2004 for inciting ethnic hatred.
He blamed increased immigration, and illegal immigration in particular, for growing xenophobia and the escalation of violence against people from Central Asian states, the Caucasus, Middle East and Africa. 
“When they arrive in town, the immigrants behave without respect to locals and taken root in all sorts of criminal groups. Our city is under Central Asian and Caucasian occupation,” Belyayev said.
City Hall and local police have not yet been able to introduce an efficient mechanism against racism and ethnic and religious intolerance, human rights groups say. 
Human rights advocates blame the authorities for turning a blind eye to the scale of the problem by classifying many of the attacks as ordinary murders or “hooliganism” to create more positive statistics.
St. Petersburg prosecutor Sergei Zaitsev said at a news conference earlier this year that 1.8 percent of crimes in the city are characterized as “extremist.” 
Zaitsev said that 39 foreign citizens were murdered in St. Petersburg in 2005, but only two of those crimes — the murders of Vietnamese citizen Vu An Tuan, a 20-year-old student at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, and Congolese citizen Ronald Epasak, a 29-year-old third-year student at the St. Petersburg Forestry Academy — qualified as hate crimes.

TITLE: Russia To Try To Soothe Eastern European Ties
AUTHOR: By Richard Balmforth
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin makes a sensitive visit to Eastern Europe this week to try to convince countries that suffered most from gas disruptions this year that Russia can be trusted as a supplier. 
Putin will also use his trip to Hungary and the Czech Republic to build bridges with two new European Union members, both former Soviet satellites, to try to counter the high regional profile of Poland, which Moscow views with suspicion, experts said. 
Most of Eastern Europe is dependent on Russian energy supplies and Hungary, where Putin travels on Tuesday, was among the worst-hit countries in January when Moscow’s pricing dispute with Ukraine drastically reduced Russian gas flows to Europe. 
“Of course, this theme will be discussed,” a Kremlin official said, adding that Putin would explain Moscow’s view that problems arose because of syphoning-off of gas by the Ukrainians. 
Presenting itself as a reliable energy supplier is the centrepiece of Russia’s 2006 agenda as president of the G8 club of rich countries. 
“Energy security will be Putin’s key foreign diplomacy message this year and he will definitely focus on it during his visit to Hungary and the Czech Republic,” said Sergei Glazer of Vostok Nafta, a shareholder in gas monopoly Gazprom. 
Putin is expected to champion the interests of Gazprom and might be able to press successfully Moscow’s call for gas storage and distribution rights, particularly in Hungary. 
But strong German competition in the energy sector made this prospect less likely in the Czech Republic, which Putin will visit from Thursday. 
Putin’s visit to Hungary comes at a historically poignant moment for Hungarians — 50 years after the Budapest uprising that was put down by Soviet troops with huge loss of life. 
Putin, a former KGB spy, appalled many in Eastern Europe by saying last year that he saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. 
It was not clear what gesture or comment, if any, Putin would make during his trip on the Budapest events. But Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany, speaking to Reuters, on Monday played down the need for any apology from the Kremlin leader. 
He said Putin had told him in Moscow a year ago that 1956 should never be repeated and former Russian President Boris Yeltsin had apologised in 1992 for what happened. 
“A series of wreath-laying ceremonies are planned at those places which are regarded as necessary from a protocol point of view,” the Kremlin official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said. But he said it was too early to say if Putin would make any specific comment on the 1956 events. 
Moscow has taken steps to improve the atmosphere ahead of the trip by returning an antique book collection seized by Soviet troops during World War Two, ending a decade of negotiations between the two sides. 
“Putin’s visit will send a signal to those countries ... that have grown distant from Russia that Russia is open to building better relations. The return of the books is a gesture in this respect,” said Hungarian foreign policy analyst Tamas Krausz of Eotvos University. 
Other experts said Putin’s trip threw into relief the fact that he was conspicuously staying away from Poland, the largest nation in the region. 
Russia’s relations with Poland have sunk to new post-communist lows since Warsaw backed the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine that led to the ousting of the old pro-Moscow establishment. 
“Russia is making a gesture that is aimed at getting credibility in the West. But ... by not visiting Poland it is showing [Putin] is far from making a serious push for better relations,” said Polish analyst Przemyslaw Zurawski. 
“We have managed to overcome a whole range of problems ... in relations with Hungary and the Czech republic. The problems we have with Poland we definitely do not have with these other countries,” said the Kremlin official.

TITLE: Putin Calls For New Task Force
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered the Cabinet to set up a bird flu task force as the disease continued to spread in the country. 
“I believe that some senior member of the Cabinet should lead such a group,” ITAR-Tass quoted Vladimir Putin as telling a government meeting. Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov suggested one of his two first deputies, Dmitry Medvedev, ITAR-Tass said. 
A southern Russian village was put under quarantine after 10 chickens died on a private farm and veterinarians gave a preliminary diagnosis of the H5 strain of bird flu, the Emergency Situations Ministry said Monday. 
The chickens started dying on Thursday and all other poultry on the farm, in the Adygean village of Northeast Gardens, have been destroyed and a quarantine established, said Vladimir Gerasin, a duty officer in the ministry’s southern regional branch.  
Russia first recorded bird flu, including the H5N1 strain that can kill humans, in Siberia last July, and it has since been registered in other parts of the country. No human deaths from the virus have been reported in Russia. 
Six regions of southern Russia have registered mass bird deaths this year, attributed either to bird flu or to Newcastle Disease. Samples are being tested at various laboratories to pinpoint the cause of the illnesses that have killed some 300,000 birds, said Oleg Grekov, spokesman for the southern district office of the Emergency Situations Ministry. 
The deputy head of the Moscow veterinary department, Vladimir Burkov, said Monday that Russia would start inoculating poultry after March 15, the Interfax news agency reported.

TITLE: Ex-PM Sets Up Political Movement
AUTHOR: By Darya Korsunskaya
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Ex-prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, now a critic of the Kremlin, said on Monday he would set up a new political movement in an attempt to consolidate the splintered opposition. 
Kasyanov’s plan to create a movement, for which he offered no name, follows the scuttling last year of his bid to enter the political mainstream by taking control of a small party. 
Kasyanov, the most senior official to turn publicly against President Vladimir Putin, said the movement would campaign against election cheating and could gather 100,000 members within a year. 
“The association will collect all those who don’t like what is going on the country,” he told reporters. 
The movement would unite “those who would rather have a strong Russia than a strong hierarchical ruling bureaucracy, those who want entrepreneurs to prosper rather than a state-monopolistic feeding frenzy,” he said. 
Kasyanov, 48, said last year he would run for president, setting him on a collision course with the Kremlin, which analysts say is eager to ensure a smooth succession when Putin’s second term ends in 2008. 
The ex-premier, whose popularity rating stands in single digits, will need a strong power base if he is to challenge a successor to Putin in 2008, when the current Kremlin leader will have to step down under the current constitution. 
A bid by Kasyanov to take control of the Democratic Party failed last December when supporters were prevented from attending the party’s congress by unidentified people. 
A political movement is a less attractive option for Kasyanov because under Russian legislation only fully-registered parties can participate in elections. 
Kasyanov said the future movement would take part in parliamentary and presidential elections, though he said the form of participation would be sorted out later. 
Kasyanov first made his name as a foreign debt expert, rising swiftly through the finance ministry in the 1990s. As finance minister, he led negotiations to restructure massive Soviet-era commercial debts, securing a large discount and a reputation as a suave but tough negotiator. 
He served as prime minister for the first four years of Putin’s rule but was not seen as part of the president’s inner circle. He was sacked in February 2004, weeks before Putin was elected to a second term. 
Kasyanov says he has become a target of Kremlin attacks, which he has portrayed as a sign of nervousness that he could become a uniting figure in the opposition. 
But analysts said efforts to unite Russia’s disparate liberal opposition could be in vain. Party leaders routinely call for like-minded groups to unite only to see joint efforts sink into squabbling over who is to be boss. 
The pro-Kremlin United Russia party dominates the lower house of parliament with 308 seats, followed by the Communist Party, which has 46 seats. Liberal parties failed to gain entry to parliament in 2003 elections. 
Members of the new movement will include Irina Khakamada and Ivan Starikov, politicians from the Union of Right-wing Forces, and Nikolai Travkin, a former minister without portfolio under Boris Yeltsin, Kasyanov said. 
Last July he was accused by prosecutors of signing documents in office that helped him acquire a luxury riverside residence.

TITLE: Moscow Market Roof Collapse Kills 66
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova and Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Investigators are focusing on whether a design flaw or poor maintenance caused the roof of the Basmanny food market to collapse in east central Moscow last week, killing at least 66 people, mostly Azeri vendors.
About 150 vendors at the market at 47/1 Ulitsa Baumanskaya were trading at around-the-clock stalls, getting ready for business or sleeping when the roof fell in at 5:27 a.m. Thursday.
The dead included 45 Azeris, eight Georgians, five Tajiks, three Uzbeks, two Russians and one person with dual Russian and Georgian citizenship, Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov told Ekho Moskvy radio on Saturday. Two more bodies remained unidentified.
Twenty-one people were in hospital on Saturday, 12 in critical condition, the city health department said, Interfax reported.
On Friday, police detained the market’s director, Mark Meshiyev, on suspicion of causing death by negligence, Moscow City Prosecutor Anatoly Zuyev said.
Meshiyev had been ordered to improve fire safety at the market two months ago by a Basmanny district prosecutor, Zuyev said, apparently suggesting that the market had a poor maintenance record, Interfax reported.
 The roof’s architect, Nodar Kancheli, who designed the roof of the Transvaal water park which caved in and killed 28 people in February 2004, arrived at the scene two hours after the collapse had reduced the market to a heap of rubble.
Kancheli said the market’s hubcap-shaped, concave roof was unusual because it was supported by a system of steel ropes rather than pillars. The building was completed in 1977, he said.
“The market was built a long time ago, and the organizations that operated it had to check the condition of the ropes,” he said, Interfax reported.
Kancheli said that contrary to the building’s design specifications, many vendors had set up stalls on the mezzanine, which was connected to the roof, RIA-Novosti reported.
Prosecutors interrogated Kancheli as part of the investigation on Thursday, said Sergei Marchenko, a spokesman for the city prosecutor’s office, Interfax reported.
Vyacheslav Glazychev, a professor at the Moscow Architecture Institute, said the design was not to blame for the collapse.
“Poor Kancheli! If a building has been up for 30 years, there can be no talk about a design fault,” he said, Lenta.ru reported. Poor maintenance was a likely cause of the collapse, Glazychev said.
Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who arrived at the site Thursday, did not rule out poor design or maintenance as causes of the collapse, but said the construction materials used for the roof — pre-stressed concrete — could be at fault. Pre-stressed concrete is made by casting concrete over steel strands that are under high tension and therefore are more resistant to downward pressure.
“Such structures apparently require different materials,” Luzhkov said, Interfax reported.
The age of the building could also be a reason why the roof fell, Luzhkov said. The roof was designed to withstand snow as thick as 1.4 meters, but measurements indicated that about 40 centimeters of snow was on the roof when it collapsed, Luzhkov said.
Luzhkov said experts had ruled out a terrorist attack, but the City Prosecutor’s Office said investigators asked them to study if an explosion had taken place before the roof collapsed.
Up to 300 relatives and friends of vendors came to the market shortly after the first television reports of the collapse Thursday morning and anxiously watched the rescue effort from behind a police cordon on the next street, Baumansky Pereulok.
At about 1 p.m., a weeping man with a bruised nose appeared from behind the police cordon and spoke to a crowd of teary relatives and friends in Azeri.
“He said that all our brothers are dead there!” a woman said as she wept.
The man, Oktai Salmanov, who had been selling herbs at the market, said his three sisters, who also worked in the market, had been killed.
“Suddenly, everything collapsed. I was near the entrance, and that was how I managed to get out,” Salmanov said.
A group of about 50 Azeri men attempted to break through the police cordon after an officer refused to allow a man to go identify a dead relative.
As the crowd received news of each increase in the death toll — it grew by 10 in two hours Thursday afternoon — relatives of the victims screamed and burst into tears.
An ambulance medic — one of 50 that the authorities sent to the scene — was nearby with sedative pills, water and injections for injuries.
The injured were rushed to hospitals Nos. 29, 36 and 52 and to the Sklifosovsky First Aid Institute.
Yury Akimov, first deputy head of the Emergency Situations Ministry’s Moscow branch, said people under the debris were calling from their mobile phones, helping to direct rescuers, Interfax reported. Also, sniffer dogs were pointing rescuers to where people might be, he said.
Six cranes were able to approach the debris and clear large concrete slabs only after rescue workers cut the electric tram wires that blocked the way.
Around 5:45 p.m., rescue workers said that there was no hope left of finding anyone alive underneath the collapsed roof. The Emergency Situations Ministry said it stopped looking for survivors on Friday morning.
President Vladimir Putin ordered an investigation into the collapse Thursday. “We will have to conduct a thorough investigation and get objective information about the causes,” he said.

TITLE: Labor Shortage Forcing IT Firms Abroad
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Faced with exhausted supplies in St. Petersburg, a local software outsourcer is looking to other CIS countries for its IT professionals, a trend that many experts expect to continue. In accordance with their strategy of expanding Research and Development in Eastern Europe, StarSoft Development Labs will announce the opening of a new R&D office in the CIS by April. Last year StarSoft opened an office in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine.
“Dnepropetrovsk is a large scientific and technical center with a good engineering and science school. It was important that we’d find qualified and educated professionals there,” StarSoft CEO Nikolai Puntikov explained at the opening of the first CIS office.
Another reason is that Ukraine has become more convenient for foreign clients with a simplified visa regime for European and U.S. residents, as well as its geographic closeness to Europe, he said.
At the moment about 40 specialists are employed at Dnepropetrovsk, running several projects for strategic clients like the Danish subsidiary of CSC, a Swedish IT company and a project on microprocessor development.
StarSoft specializes in web portal and application development. In 2005 company turnover increased by 78 percent up to $10.5 million and managers expect equal growth this year.
“In Dnepropetrovsk we plan to hire as many staff as is necessary depending on the orders we receive. It would not be surprising if we hire 80 to 100 people over the course of this year,” Puntikov said. In St. Petersburg StarSoft employs 400 people.
Julia Rovinskaya, marketing director at Auriga software company, considered hiring specialists in the CIS reasonable considering personnel resources in St. Petersburg and Moscow are very nearly exhausted.
“Opening a development center outside Moscow and St. Petersburg allows you to access cheaper labor while programmers have qualifications similar to those available in the large cities,” Rovinskaya said.
She suggested that opening R&D centers in the CIS could become a mass trend. Auriga itself has opened representative offices in regional centers such as Kazan and Nizhni Novgorod “where IT education is strong.”
Natalya Chisler, senior consultant at ANCOR recruiting company, confirmed the deficit of IT specialists in St. Petersburg, though said that it does not necessarily impede the development of IT business.
“It depends on the technologies used by a particular company and its willingness to hire young specialists and educate them,” Chisler said.
Although Russia’s regions differ in terms of learning opportunities, St. Petersburg “without doubt remains a leader when it comes to high quality education for IT specialists,” she said.
According to ANCOR, demand for IT specialists in the city is very high compared to CIS countries, as active market players continue to expand their staff while small firms try to compensate for personnel lost to the larger companies.
“We receive a lot of CVs from CIS residents looking for a programmer vacancy, which lets us conclude that demand for IT professionals in those countries does not yet exceed the supply of qualified labor,” Chisler said.
Rovinskaya indicated another important factor in the location of an office focused on R&D.
“In private talks clients confess that, besides the quality of development, the cost and human factors, an unstable political situation could prevent them from commissioning projects in a particular country,” Rovinskaya said.
“It’s no secret that programmers in the Ukraine, Belarus and Armenia are cheaper, but the real challenge to Russia only comes from the Ukraine,” she said.

TITLE: Contractors Chosen For Island Port
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The managing company of Morskoi Fasad (Sea Facade) has chosen contractors for the passenger port at Vasilievsky island, the company said last week in a statement.
This year Dutch company VAN Oord and Martin Contractors BV will create land to extend the western part of Vasilievsky island and build a passenger terminal on it.
The Vozrozhdeniye construction firm is responsible for building a dam. Results of the tender for other hydro-technical constructions will be revealed later.
As Interfax reported earlier, about 146 hectares of land will be created at the western part of Vasilievsky island. In order to locate residential, office and shopping areas, as well as social infrastructure, the committee for town planning and architecture suggested generating additional territory around the port that will increase the total area of created land to 450 hectares.
The sea terminal will start operating by 2008, serving ships at three mooring lines and port facilities. By 2011, when construction is fully completed, the port will be capable of serving about 12,000 tourists daily at seven mooring lines.
According to primary estimations, the terminal will annually add over $56 million to the city budget and over $69 million to the federal budget.

TITLE: Strict Rules For Developers Of New Greenfield Sites
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Rent agreements for large-area residential complex development on greenfield sites will be introduced April 1 under a new public tender scheme, City Hall’s Construction Committee announced in a statement last week.
The committee plans to auction plots measuring more than 100 hectares that have no engineering infrastructure and that are exempt from property and legal obligations.
Developers will be invited to tender bids at a starting price within the market averages. The winner will then be obliged to file planning documents for district development within 18 months and create infrastructure that will then be owned by the city.
After meeting these obligations, investors will be granted the exclusive right to buy out residential and commercial areas in the district or rent them for 49 years. The developer can then begin construction or resell the land.
As yet only one residential project on a district scale has been seen in the city. In 2000, Peterburgstroi Skanska began construction of the New Scandinavia complex.
After facing difficulties with connection to heating infrastructure to have been provided by energy monopoly GUP TEK, Skanska invested $500,000 in the construction of its own boilerhouse.
Konstantin Chizhikov, lawyer at OSV consulting firm, said that the process of renting land plots for residential construction will not change after the introduction of the new scheme, however the scheme does have some important differences from previous methods of semi-privatising land.
“‘Complex development’ means that the constructor files projecting and financial documents, gets necessary permits and provides engineering infrastucture links (electricity, water, sewage, heating, gas and telephone) at his expense or at the expense of investors,” Chizhikov said.
Obtaining land through auction, the developer can hand over rights and obligations defined in a rent agreement to a third party that will run the construction, Chizhikov explained.
Chizhikov said requiring the approval of the project and networks by monopolies and state bodies is a disadvantage of the new scheme.
“Construction on this scale is huge, and the requirements are accordingly high. Besides, legal issues concerning common property of multi-apartment houses, especially land ownership, are still unsolved,” he said.
Finding land for residential construction is not easy. In an analytical review released by the St. Petersburg Union of Construction Companies this month the situation is described as a “crisis of landlessness.”
City authorities found only 36 land plots suitable for residential construction in 2005 — a dramatic decrease compared to previous years, the report said.
Eighty percent of those land plots are risky and surveys often result in the construction companies failing to obtain the land. 
“Up to 30 percent of the plots are rejected. In 2005, eight plots were canceled,” Yevgeny Kaplan, deputy director for information and analysis at St. Petersburg Union of Construction Companies, said 
About half of 78 professional constructors operating in the city do not have land that was not already earmarked for construction.
If current trends remain, by 2007 nearly all construction firms will have exhausted their land reserves resulting in a decrease in residential construction, Kaplan said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Stadium Tender
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — City Hall announced a tender for the construction of a new football stadium on Krestovsky island, Interfax reported Monday.
Participants should propose projects for a multifunctional all-season stadium capable of seating over 25,000 spectators, a parking place for 5,000 cars and bus parking.
Gazprom will invest about $200 million into construction of the stadium, which will remain under city ownership.

Nissan Site
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Japanese carmaker Nissan has chosen a location to construct its plant in St. Petersburg, Interfax reported Monday, citing an unofficial source.
Nissan will construct a plant for the production of its Pathfinder, Navara and Murano car brands at a 100 hectare site near the city dam, the source said.
However, Nissan’s press service neither confirmed not denied this information, saying only that it is still studying the Russian market, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Shuttle Traders Face Stringent New Rules
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government on Sunday cracked down on the country’s shuttle traders, drastically cutting the weight limit on goods that can be brought into the country by individuals without paying customs duties.
The tougher rules, which came into effect Sunday, are a major blow to shuttle traders, or chelnoki, who during the 1990s introduced millions of Russians to basic foreign-made goods, including clothes and housewares.
Under the new rules, an individual can bring up to 35 kilograms of goods per month into the country, compared to the previous limit of 50 kilograms per week. 
Trade officials said the new rules could mean drastic price hikes on some goods. “The prices of goods will go up by 30 percent or more,” Galina Balandina, head of the Economic Development and Trade Ministry’s external trade and customs department, said Sunday, commenting on the new rules, Interfax reported.
Shuttle trade represents between 20 percent and 30 percent of clothes and shoes imported to European Russia and between 60 percent and 80 percent of all goods imported to the Far East, Balandina said. 
As from next year, the rules will get even tougher, drastically cutting the value of goods that can be imported by individuals without customs duties, Balandina said.
According to an Economic Development and Trade Ministry proposal, beginning on Jan. 1, 2007, the maximum value of goods allowed into the country without duties will be cut from 65,000 rubles ($2,300) to 15,000 rubles ($530).
The clothes, shoes, toys and small housewares imported by shuttle traders have filled stores and market stalls across the country since the Soviet collapse, giving millions of hard-pressed consumers the option of buying foreign-made goods without the customs mark-up.
Flocks of tired people carrying large woven plastic bags full of goods are still a common sight at the country’s airports, bus and railway stations. And although in recent years much of the shuttle trade has grown into larger businesses, it still booms in many border towns and cities.
The new rules and next year’s proposed change would bring Russian customs regulations closer to those in the United States, where U.S. citizens are allowed to bring in only $200 worth of goods per month.
The government’s main argument behind the restrictions on shuttle trade is that these imports fuel the gray economy and are notoriously hard to control or tax. 
Economists and shuttle traders, however, were skeptical on Sunday whether the new rules would bring more imports out of the gray economy or lead to significantly more customs duties reaching state coffers, implying that the change could lead to more corruption.
“The measure could have a short-term effect, but then people will find other ways to import goods,” said Peter Westin, chief economist at MDM Bank.
Although it is hard to estimate the volume or type of gray imports entering the country, even the import figures provided by the Central Bank and the State Statistics Service tend to be 20 percent higher than those from the Federal Customs Service, Westin said Sunday. 
The success of any attempt to legalize imports would effectively be determined by the level of compliance and detection, Westin said. Procedures for supervising customs officers’ work, however, appear to have been left unchanged.
Customs officers currently have the authority to search any large bags brought into the country and levy duties if the volume or price of goods exceeds legal limits.
“I really doubt that money will be flowing into the budget as a result of this new regulation,” said Dina Krylova, head of the Center for Economic Problems of Firms, a division of Opora, the country’s leading small business organization.
Even in the country’s border regions, where markets are flooded by cheap imports, the new limits are unlikely to help local producers, Krylova said.
“A more complex set of rules has to be applied to help local producers compete,” she said. 
“All that will happen now is that the margins will be cut, the traders will earn less, and inflation will be pushed up in these areas,” she said.
Krylova said she realized that tougher import rules for individuals would be introduced at some point. “But while it is clear who is being hurt by this innovation, it is unclear who exactly will benefit,” she said.
Traders working near Moscow’s Savyolovskaya metro station appeared to be unhappy too.
“It’s wrong, it sounds like they want to strangle small traders,” said Lida, a former teacher who now works at the Stankolit market, selling women’s clothes brought weekly from abroad by a colleague. She refused to give her last name.
Lyubov Kamover, who sells French-made women’s clothes just a few meters down the aisle, also disliked the new rules.
“But a way will be found to get around the new system,” she said.

TITLE: Mining Firm Amur Aims To Raise 10M
AUTHOR: By Yuriy Humber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Mining company Amur Minerals plans to raise $10 million in a London flotation next week to finance a nickel and copper project in the Far East’s Amur region.
Amur Minerals, which was started by a group of mostly British investors in 2004, plans to issue 14 million ordinary shares on the Alternative Investment Market, a London Stock Exchange platform, in early March, CFO David Wood said in a recent telephone interview.
The listing puts a value of roughly $55 million on the company, Wood said. The price of shares was set in a range of between 33 pence (58 cents) and 35 pence last Thursday, with the first day of trading set for March 7.
The listing gives the company financing for the exploration of a 950-square-kilometer greenfield site in Amur, only 5 percent of which has been explored to date. The company also plans to bid for additional mining licenses in the Far East and Kazakhstan and pursue acquisitions, he said.
The company, which is registered in the British Virgin Islands, estimates its Amur site could hold nickel and related metal resources equivalent to one-quarter of Norilsk Nickel’s annual production, Wood said. Norilsk produced 243,000 tons of nickel last year, according to its web site.
Amur plans to upgrade its exploration license for the site to a production license in 2007, Woods said. Looking further ahead, Amur will also bid for new mining licenses in the Far East and selectively pursue acquisitions, Wood said.
Timothy McCutcheon, a metals analyst at Aton brokerage, said companies like Amur Minerals play a valuable role in feeding new projects to major mining companies such as Norilsk Nickel or the U.S.-based Phelps Dodge.
“All of these companies are more of a punt, an idea of getting something big. ... No one is interested in what they are now, but in what they could find,” McCutcheon said. .

TITLE: RTS Index Bursts Past 1,500 Points
AUTHOR: By Yuriy Humber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The RTS Index of the country’s top 50 companies hit a new record on Sunday, bursting through the 1,500-point level for the first time as foreign funds continue to pour money into Russia.
The country’s leading equity benchmark has risen by more than 33 percent since the start of this year, after surging by 82 percent in 2005.
“We shouldn’t get much higher than this during the year. The market just cannot support that,” said Maxim Gulevich, a trader with investment bank UBS.
The RTS Index closed up by 3.7 percent at 1,516 points, led by power monopoly Unified Energy Systems, which gained 7.8 percent in Sunday’s session. Oil majors LUKoil and Surgutneftegaz were also among the gainers, driven by Friday’s rise in global oil prices. 
Russian markets were closed Thursday and Friday due to Defenders of the Fatherland Day.
While analysts agree the surge in the Russian market in the last 12 months has left most stocks overvalued, they say the market continues to be driven by interest from overseas.
The week ending Feb. 22 saw the biggest inflow of foreign fund money into Russia and the CIS since the start of this year, once again indicating “that Russia continues to be a favored destination for international portfolio investors,” Alfa Bank said in a research note on Sunday.
The surge in investor interest has also led to the development of new financial products, including mutual funds, that are linked to the RTS Index. 
One such mutual fund operated by brokerage CIT Finance has attracted $143 million since the end of January, when it was set up. The value of the fund has grown by 7 percent in that period, Vladimir Tsuprov, head of the company’s fund management arm, said Sunday.
“It’s evidence that the market is maturing, and clearly there is a need for new financial products based on the RTS Index. We are also well on course to develop such products,” said Yury Morozov, director of Standard & Poor’s Index Services in Moscow. In the short term, the RTS Index is likely to consolidate around the 1,500 mark, UBS’s Gulevich said. In the mid- to long term, however, brokerages say a correction of the RTS Index is imminent.
The Russian market has become flooded with amateur, speculative investors — and experience shows this often leads to a tumble in share prices, said Vsevolod Malev, head of trading and sales at CIT Finance.
CIT’s Tsuprov warned the Index could lose up to 15 percent before the end of 2006.
The extent of the losses could be tempered by the inclusion of Gazprom and MTS in the RTS Index on March 15, according to a report published Sunday by analytical agency Derivative Export, with both stocks expected to perform strongly this year.
Their inclusion will limit the fall to 1,434 points by the end of 2006, according to the average forecasts from 16 Moscow-based investment banks and brokerages collated by Derivative Export.
Gazprom and MTS will respectively have weightings of 15 percent and 5.7 percent on the index, based on their current share performance, Sergei Golovanyov, the head of RTS’s information and analytical department, said Sunday.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Railway Investment 
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian Railways, the nation’s rail monopoly, plans to invest 8.9 billion rubles ($316 million) by the end of 2006 to upgrade a link to China and increase oil exports.
The company is modernizing its Karymskaya-Zabaikalsk line by expanding stations, adding rail tracks and bridges, the company said Monday in an e-mailed statement. The line can already handle 10 trains a day, each of which can haul 71 rail cars.
Russian Railways may charge oil companies less for transportation across eastern Siberia if they ship more crude by rail, in an effort to compete with a planned $11.5 billion pipeline. Transneft, Russia’s oil pipeline monopoly, is building the link to pump crude to the Pacific Ocean coast for export to China, Japan and other states in Asia.
“How the government plans to ensure coordination” of the pipeline and the rail transport, both state-run operations, remains unclear, Russian Rail Chief Executive Officer Vladimir Yakunin said in the statement.

Money Transfers 
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian central bank said money transfers abroad almost doubled in 2005 as citizens of other former Soviet states working in Russia sent more money home.
A total of $3.6 billion was moved out of the country through money transfer services in 2005, of which $3.2 billion went to other former Soviet states, the bank said in a statement on its web site. In 2004, individuals transferred $2.1 billion from Russia, the bank said in the statement.
Money transfers to Russia totaled $1 billion in 2005, compared with $777 million in 2004, the bank said.
Russia’s $770 billion economy is expected to grow about 6 percent a year through 2008, backed by high prices of oil and gas, the country’s major export commodities. 

Kuwait Budget 
KUWAIT CITY (Bloomberg) — Kuwait, reaping a windfall from record crude oil prices, plans to spend as much  as $400 million this year on foreign oil and gas assets, double what it has spent since 2001, as competition with China and India boosts prices.
State-owned Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration, which pumps the equivalent of 68,000 barrels a day of crude oil and natural gas from fields in countries including Australia, is interested in buying reserves in Russia, Pakistan and West Africa, Bader Al-Khashti, the company’s chairman, said.
“Assets have become more expensive because of competition from India and China, who are willing to pay almost anything,”
Al-Khashti said in an interview in his office in Kuwait City on Feb. 21. Kuwait Foreign, or Kufpec as it’s also known, wants to almost triple reserves to 410 million barrels and raise production 47 percent to 100,000 barrels a day by 2010. 

Sitronics Plans 
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — JSC Concern Sitronics, the technology arm of Russia’s AFK Sistema, will move part of its production to Greece, the Kommersant daily reported, citing Sistema Chairman Vladimir Yevtushenkov.
The move follows this month’s agreement to buy a 51 percent stake in the telecommunications unit of Greece’s Intracom Holdings SA, Yevtushenkov told the newspaper.
Sitronics is also in talks to buy bankrupt Italian electronics maker Finmek SpA. It also plans to bid for Egypt’s third mobile-phone license, Yevtushenkov said. Sistema, one of Russia’s largest financial and industrial groups, is interested in markets including India, China, Indonesia and Pakistan, he said.
Sitronics is one of Sistema’s most dynamic businesses with sales probably reaching about $1 billion last year, up from $60 million four years ago, Yevtushenkov told the newspaper. 

Mair Gain 
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Mair Industrial Group, Russia’s biggest ferrous scrap dealer, forecast a 10 percent gain in sales this year compared with 2005, as it processes more metal.
The company expects 2006 sales to rise to $750 million, from $680 million last year, Mair said Monday in a statement.
Mair collected 2.3 million metric tons of scrap last year, 23 percent less than planned, as weaker steel prices deterred scrapping. The company had forecast the total to be little changed from the 2.97 million tons gathered in 2004. It expects to collect 2.5 million tons this year.
“This year we expect a stable market situation in Russia and Ukraine,” Mair President Viktor Makushin said at a press conference in Moscow. Russia’s export prices for steel dropped 31 percent last year, according to Metal Bulletin Plc data. 

Finansbank Expansion 
ANKARA (Bloomberg) — Finansbank AS, a Turkish lender that’s up for sale, plans to set up a bank in Ukraine as it seeks expansion outside Turkey, Dunya reported, citing Onur Umut, the bank’s head of foreign operations.
Finansbank currently is active in 10 countries outside Turkey, employing 2,500 people in Russia and 1,000 people in Romania, Umut said, according to Dunya. He didn’t give details about the planned operation in Ukraine.
Finansbank’s main owner, Fiba Holding AS, said in November it hired Morgan Stanley to advise on a possible stake sale. 

Czech Debt
PRAGUE (Bloomberg) — The Czech government agreed on settling Russia’s remaining debt with the country, the CTK news agency reported, citing Deputy Finance Minister Tomas Prouza.
The sum stood at $123.3 million at the end of December, CTK said. Russian President Vladimir Putin arrives in Prague on March 1 for a two-day official visit.

Export Rise 
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian exports probably rose more than 31 percent in January from the same month a year ago as the price of oil increased, the Economy Ministry said.
The country’s exports increased to $19.7 billion, while imports increased 17 percent, to $8.2 billion, the ministry said in a report Monday, citing preliminary estimates.
The price of Urals, Russia’s major export blend of oil, averaged $62.24 per barrel in January, compared with $41.18 per barrel in January 2005 and an average $10.25 a barrel in 1998, according to Bloomberg data.
Oil and gas accounted for more than 60 percent of Russia’s export revenue in 2005, according to the ministry. Oil is the country’s major export commodity.

RosUkrEnergo License
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — The Swiss-registered gas trader RosUkrEnergo AG might not start supplying Ukraine with natural gas this week because it hasn’t filed the proper paperwork, the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported.
A RosUkrEnergo unit, Ukraz-Energo, hasn’t been issued a license to sell gas because it hasn’t come up with a $300 million bank guarantee, the newspaper said, citing statements by Ukrainian Prime Minister Yuriy Yekhanurov. Ukraz-Energo is due to begin deliveries to Ukrainian industries on March 1.
RosUkrEnergo became the sole importer of gas to Ukraine after a dispute over prices briefly halted supplies from Russia in January. It is jointly owned by the Russian gas monopoly Gazprom and unidentified investors represented by Austria’s Raiffeisenbank Zentralbank Oesterreich AG. Ukraz-Energo is a venture between RosUkrEnergo and Ukraine’s state oil and gas company, NAK Naftogaz Ukrainy.

TeliaSonera Rejection 
ISTANBUL (Bloomberg) — A Turkish court rejected efforts by TeliaSonera AB to block the sale of a stake in Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri AS, Turkey’s biggest mobile-phone operator, to which the Swedish phone company claims a prior right.
The court rejected TeliaSonera’s lawsuit to halt the sale of a stake in Turkcell to Russia’s Alfa Group, Turkcell said in a filing with the Istanbul Stock Exchange today. The same court last year declined the Nordic company’s application for an injunction halting the sale.
Turkcell’s controlling shareholder, the Cukurova Group, reached a $3.3 billion accord with Alfa last year after pulling out of a plan to sell a controlling stake in Turkcell to TeliaSonera. TeliaSonera has applied to Turkish and Swiss courts to halt the Alfa transaction, arguing that it has the right of first refusal to buy Turkcell shares under its agreement with Cukurova.

TITLE: An Act of Repentance
AUTHOR: By William Taubman
TEXT: Fifty years ago Saturday, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” at the 20th Communist Party Congress changed both his country and the world. By denouncing Stalin, whose god-like status had helped to legitimize communism in the Soviet bloc, Khrushchev began a process of unraveling it that culminated in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This great deed deserves to be celebrated on its anniversary. 
But it is also a good time to ponder this question: What are we to think of a leader whose great deeds do not bring about the consequences intended? It is a question worth consideration by all leaders — particularly Khrushchev’s current heir, Vladimir Putin, who has tried to bring his nation into the 21st century by wielding the autocratic hand of a 19th-century tsar. 
After all, Khrushchev sought to save communism, not to destroy it. By cleansing it of the Stalinist stain, he wanted to re-legitimize it in the eyes of people not just in the Soviet sphere but around the globe. Yet within weeks after the secret speech, at Communist Party meetings called to discuss it, criticism of Stalin rippled way beyond Khrushchev’s, including indictments not just of Stalin himself but of the Soviet system that spawned him. Others sprang to Stalin’s defense, especially in his native Georgia, where at least 20 pro-Stalin demonstrators were killed in clashes with the police. 
In Eastern Europe, the unintended consequences of Khrushchev’s speech were even more shattering. A huge strike in the Polish city of Poznan in June was put down at a cost of at least 53 dead and hundreds wounded. Then, of course, the revolution in Hungary in October was smashed by Soviet forces, leaving more than 20,000 Hungarians dead. 
Khrushchev also used the speech to try to buttress his position in the Kremlin. By attacking Stalin he thought he would burnish his own reputation while blackening those of his rivals for power like Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgi Malenkov and Lazar Kaganovich, who had been closer to Stalin than he had. But instead, he provoked a coup attempt that very nearly ousted him in June 1957. His de-Stalinization campaign was also a prime grievance among those who formed the conspiracy that succeeded in pushing him from power in October 1964. 
Of course, some unintended consequences are inevitable in politics as in sama zhizn, or life itself. Moreover, the secret speech was part of a reform program that included many worthy achievements that Khrushchev did indeed intend. He released and rehabilitated millions of Stalin’s victims. He allowed what became known as the thaw, with its partial rebirth of Russian culture. He revivified Soviet agriculture, which Stalin had ruined, and started a boom in housing construction that permitted hundreds of thousands to move out of overcrowded communal apartments.
In the midst of his ouster in 1964, Khrushchev said to his only remaining ally, Anastas Mikoyan: “I’ve done the main thing. Could anyone have dreamed of telling Stalin that he didn’t suit us anymore and suggesting he retire? Not even a wet spot would have remained where we had been standing. Now everything is different. The fear is gone and we can talk as equals. That’s my contribution.”
Khrushchev was whistling past his own political graveyard. He hadn’t exactly embarked on reform to ease this way for his own exit. But he had meant to end the pattern of bloody purges as the only way to transfer political power.
One should also say that both his drive for reform and its unintended consequences cannot be understood without understanding the communist system that shaped him. Soviet communism had been built on a Stalinist foundation that cried out for drastic change, and Khrushchev learned (or thought he had) from the Bolsheviks’ willingness to revolutionize Soviet society that such change was possible almost overnight.
Khrushchev’s speech didn’t change his country as intended. But it did register a remarkable change in himself. Unlike most of his comrades in Stalin’s inner circle, Khrushchev somehow retained his humanity. He never forgave Stalin for making him an accomplice in terrible crimes. The secret speech was in part motivated by a sense of guilt at his own complicity. As early as 1940, when Khrushchev was Stalin’s viceroy in Ukraine, he told a childhood friend who lamented Stalin’s purges: “Don’t blame me for that. I’m not involved in that.” He went on, using a vulgar pun on Stalin’s name, to say that he would someday “settle” with the dictator “in full.” 
Of course, Khrushchev was involved in “that.” But that is the point. Apart from anything else, the secret speech was an act of repentance. When asked in retirement what he most regretted, he answered: “Most of all the blood. My arms are up to the elbows in blood. That is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul.” 
In his case, it wasn’t the road to hell that was paved with good intentions, but the road from the Stalinist hell in which he had faithfully served, and which he had the courage to try to transcend. 

William Taubman, professor of political science at Amherst College, is the author of “Khrushchev: The Man and His Era,” which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in biography. He contributed this comment to The New York Times, where it first appeared.

TITLE: The Discreet Fears Of the Bourgeoisie
AUTHOR: By Anna Scherbakova
TEXT: ‘Can you imagine — I was at my son’s school for a quarter of an hour and my car disappeared!’ So my friend, a successful businesswoman, related her sad story to me. It wasn’t stolen but towed away by the police. These strange raids by traffic police are occurring at increasingly regular intervals, absolutely anywhere and when one least expects it.
Following the shock of not finding one’s vehicle comes relief that it’s been taken by the police and not by thieves. After hours bustling around the city and paying a fine of around three thousand rubles ($100) you get your property back. Legally, such police acts are based on a violation of the parking rules, but policemen themselves say they can take a car from practically anywhere. And indeed they do. The office which takes your money and informs you about where your car has been impounded is located as far from the latter as it is possible to get within city limits, my friend explained. She claimed that this senseless procedure was an attack on her social status. “I’ve achieved a social position, done something important in my professional life, in other words reached some higher level. But the cops behave as if I have no rights at all,” she claimed. 
Parking in the wrong place is not a particularly serious crime, but even this “sin” is used to make citizens feel deprived of rights. In the 1930s, Stalin imprisoned people for no reason and sentenced them without trial. Without dictatorship, it’s enough to tow your car away to make you feel unsafe. And it’s not only the state that challenges your self-confidence. Last week my credit card was unexpectedly blocked. The card expired on the last day of February so the bank blocked it “in advance.” If I had been abroad without cash or any other card I would probably have died from hunger. The only danger here at home was missing the payment of an insurance premium. After discussions with clerks I got access to my money, and after twice visiting the bank received a new card. Life was again convenient. 
It is property that makes us dependent, weak and easy to manipulate. Driving your own car to your own house, spending your money in boutiques and restaurants, traveling abroad — isn’t this the real bourgeois life our country has missed out on for decades? And we enjoy it until we find hitherto unknown obstacles. A consumer society has its own particular fears such as missing credit card payments, a towed car or a lost PIN-code. I would not be able to explain it to my grandparents if they were alive. Their generation was stronger; they survived Stalin’s terror and World War II. Now the most we risk are our assets. Our middle-class identity is still too fragile, so any cop can question it with plain rudeness. 

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

TITLE: Dagestan Needs More Than a New Leader
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: There was rejoicing last Thursday at government headquarters in Makhachkala. Magomedali Magomedov, who had ruled Dagestan since 1991, was in Moscow to meet with President Vladimir Putin. Immediately after the meeting, Magomedov called to say that he would be staying on as head of the republic.
Rumors of Magomedov’s retirement had been circulating in Dagestan for years, fueled by the leader’s advanced age, the chronic corruption of his regime and the epidemic of murders in the republic, where the body count surpasses that in Chechnya.
In the last few months the retirement rumors had intensified. The biggest players in Dagestani politics began traveling to Moscow with suitcases full of cash to ask for the republic’s top job. Anyone with presidential ambitions sent agents to search the offices of his rivals. Those who didn’t aspire to lead Dagestan feared that their blood enemies would replace Magomedov or acquire greater power under the new regime.
Soon the suitcases stuffed with cash were supplemented with other battle-tested weapons of Dagestani politics. When Kizilyurt district administration chief Abdurakhman Gadzhiyev returned from the hajj in mid-January, he was arrested at the airport in Makhachkala and charged with the attempted murder of Gergebil district chief Makhach Magomedov in December 2005.
Amuchi Amutinov, head of the Dagestani division of the federal pension fund, and regional railways chief Gazi Gaziyev — both potential leaders of the Lak ethnic group — couldn’t settle their differences amicably. As a result, the modest pensions chief with an official salary of a couple hundred dollars per month lost two armored Mercedes, which were blown to smithereens in an assassination attempt.
Five hitmen were hired to whack State Duma deputy Gadzhi Makhachev in Moscow. Rumor has it that the killers decided to blow up a car loaded with explosives outside the VIP lounge at Vnukovo Airport. If this is true, it may have been the last straw for the Kremlin. Gangland-style murders in the streets of Makhachkala are one thing, but at Vnukovo Airport? 
When Magomedali Magomedov phoned from Moscow to say that he was staying put, his people back home were overjoyed. More than political power was at stake, after all. Dagestan receives more in federal funds than just about any region in the country. Half of the officials gorging at the federal trough are Magomedov’s relatives; the other half paid good money for their spots and prefer Kalashnikovs to the Russian language as their lingua franca. For all these people Magomedov’s reappointment meant more than another term in office; it meant another day above ground.
The festive mood lasted until the evening, when Magomedov returned to Makhachkala and announced his retirement. A few days later Mukhu Aliyev, former speaker of the regional parliament, was confirmed as the first president of Dagestan. 
Aliyev lives in a three-room apartment filled with old Soviet furniture. He doesn’t even own a car. In a region where the head of the Pension Fund seems to have a new armored Mercedes every week, Aliyev’s modest lifestyle is almost unheard of.
In the current political context, the Kremlin’s appointment of Aliyev was a sound tactical move. Aliyev didn’t buy the job, for one thing. He doesn’t have that kind of money. And the general discontent in the republic has given way to goldrush fever as the plum jobs are divided up all over again. 
There’s just one problem. In the mountains of Dagestan no one cares who the next president will be. In the mountains road signs have been replaced by green plates bearing the names of Allah. And young people from the villages no longer move to Moscow when they leave home — they join the extremists.
No tactical political appointment can change that now.

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

TITLE: Saudis Foil Al Qaeda Attack on Oil Plant
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi forces on Monday killed five suspected militants believed to be linked to an Al Qaeda attack on the world’s biggest oil processing plant, the Interior Ministry said. 
A shootout erupted at dawn after security forces besieged suspects in a villa in east Riyadh where several Western residential compounds are located.
An official statement said five men were killed and one other suspected militant was arrested elsewhere in the capital.
“Early this morning security forces stormed a building in east Riyadh which a criminal gang was using as a center for attacks and corruption,” it said. “All five were killed after an intense exchange of fire.”
The shootout took place days after Al Qaeda suicide bombers tried to storm the Abqaiq oil facility in the first direct strike on a Saudi energy target since the militant group launched attacks aimed at toppling the U.S.-allied monarchy in 2003. The kingdom is the world’s biggest oil exporter.
The men were hiding in a villa in a newly developed residential district near the al-Hamra area where several Western housing compounds are located, security sources said.
Security sources said police had tracked down the militants after pursuing two vehicles that appeared on the surveillance video of the Abqaiq facility shortly before it was attacked.
One source said the men were also traced through internet monitoring. An internet statement issued at the weekend said Al Qaeda was behind the Abqaiq attack.
Interior Ministry spokesman Mansour al-Turki said police had seized a large cache of explosives at the villa and that the suspected militant was being interrogated. He declined to say if he was on a list of most wanted al Qaeda fugitives.
The Saudi wing of Osama bin Laden’s network has been weakened by a government crackdown in which its leaders have either been killed or arrested.
Witnesses in Riyadh said they heard the sound of heavy gunfire and what appeared to be mortars as security forces surrounded the suburb and sealed it off before dawn.
“Around the time of dawn prayers, we heard the sound of shots and saw the sky light up. Then a short time later there were heavy explosions,” journalist Odwan al-Ahmari, who lives in the area, told Reuters. The clashes trapped about two dozen worshippers in a mosque, he said.
The shootout ended after two hours with the deaths of all of the men inside the building, the security sources said.
The Abqaiq strike was the first major attack by militants opposed to the Saudi monarchy since suicide bombers tried to storm the Interior Ministry in Riyadh in December 2004.
Authorities say two of the bombers were on a list of top wanted al Qaeda-linked Islamic militants issued last year. Al Qaeda had previously identified them in an Internet statement posted on Saturday and vowed more attacks.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Red Ken Suspended
LONDON (Reuters) — London’s outspoken Mayor Ken Livingstone was suspended from his job running the British capital for a month on Friday after being found to have brought his office into disrepute for comparing a Jewish reporter to a concentration camp guard last February.
When the reporter identified himself as working for the Evening Standard, a paper loathed by the mayor, Livingstone asked: “Have you thought of having treatment?” 
He then said: “What did you do? Were you a German war criminal?”
Finegold said he was Jewish and found the remarks offensive, to which Livingstone replied that by pestering him the reporter was acting “like a concentration camp guard — you are just doing it because you are paid to.”
Livingstone has said he will appeal the suspension.

Whisky Galore!
LONDON (AFP) — Following a 17th-century recipe, one of the eight artisanal whisky producers on the tiny Scottish isle of Islay will produce a dozen barrels of 184-proof whisky, the company announced. 
That’s 92 percent alcohol, which is about as strong as whisky can get without being sold in a pharmacy.
“The first taste affects all the members of the body,” a 1695 description of the elixir reads. “Two spoonfuls of this last liquor is a sufficient dose — if any man should exceed this, it would presently stop his breath, and endanger his life.”
The Bruichladdich distillery said it would install webcams so that customers thirsty with anticipation could watch the potentially lethal concoction come into being.
“If the distillery doesn’t explode during the process,” Bruichladdich added.

Art Theft at Mardi Gras
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Taking advantage of the chaos of a Carnival parade, thieves slipped into an art museum and stole paintings valued at tens of millions of dollars, even stripping visitors of cell phones, digital cameras and wallets before fleeing. 
The heist of the high-value art was a brash crime at a celebration known more for its pickpockets.
As a samba band performed outside Friday, the thieves overpowered security guards at the Chacara do Ceu museum and stole Pablo Picasso’s “The Dance,” Salvador Dali’s “The Two Balconies,” Henri Matisse’s “Luxembourg Garden” and Claude Monet’s “Marine.”

Ugandan Jailbreak
KAMPALA (AFP) — More than 400 Ugandan inmates broke out of a regional prison at the weekend as guards celebrated President Yoweri Museveni’s election victory in raucous fashion.
The 408 prisoners broke out of the Arua regional prison, about 600 kilometers (375 miles) northwest of the capital, on Saturday during revelry prompted by the official announcement of Museveni’s win, they said.
“They escaped right after the announcement was made that President Museveni had won and the celebration was noisy,” Ugandan prisons chief Johnson Byabasaija said.
He said laxity among guards and prison administrators allowed more than half of the 716 inmates in the prison at the time to pull down a fence and run en masse to freedom.
The incident was the second-election related jailbreak in Uganda.

TITLE: Winter Games End With Golden Finale
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: TURIN — The Turin Olympics came to a spectacular end on Sunday with a closing ceremony in the form of a carnival celebration marking the finish of 17 days of action at the Winter Games. 
The two-and-a-half hour ceremony, twinning carnival with a circus theme, drew to a close a Games that Olympic chiefs hailed as a success, pushing memories of a doping controversy deep into the background.  
A roar shook the Stadio Olimpico when the last gold medal to be given at the games was placed round the neck of Italy’s Giorgio di Centa whose win in the 50 km cross-country skiing produced a fairytale finale, beating Russia’s Yevgeny Dementyev by less than a second. 
“These were truly magnificent games,” International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge told a cheering crowd. 
Two medal events were staged on the final day. After di Centa’s victory marked the end of the mountain events, Sweden clinched the last gold medal up for grabs in Turin itself by edging Finland 3-2 in the ice hockey final.
Germany won no gold Sunday but topped the Winter Games medal table with a haul of 29, including 11 golds. 
Russia was fourth in the medal standings with 22, including eight gold medals. Canada — which hosts the 2010 Games in Vancouver — had its most successful Winter Olympics ever, with 24 medals, including seven golds, and boasted the most successful athlete in Turin, speedskater Cindy Klassen, who won a gold, two silvers and two bronze medals. 
The games were among the cleanest despite a week-long Austrian doping saga involving night-time raids, police and drugs testers. 
After more than two weeks of competition, more than 800 urine tests and 362 blood samples were taken and only one athlete — Russian biathlon silver medallist Olga Pyleva — failed a drugs test and was expelled. 
Sweden and Finland took part in the most unexpected of ice hockey finals after traditional heavyweights U.S., Russia and champions Canada left empty-handed.
Nicklas Lidstrom settled it with a blistering snapshot early in the third period after Henrik Zetterberg and Niklas Kronwall had scored for Sweden. Kimmo Timonen and Ville Peltonen were the Finnish scorers. Sweden had won the gold once before at Lillehammer in 1994 when two members of this squad, Peter Forsberg and Mats Sundin, helped them to victory.
“This is my last Olympics and it is an amazing way to go out,” the 35-year-old Sundin said.

TITLE: St. Petersburg’s Heros On the March as Local Teams Advance
AUTHOR: By Martin Burlund
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As Russia celebrated its menfolk during the “Defenders of the Fatherland” holiday last week, St. Petersburg sportsmen were victorious in football and basketball. 
FC Zenit St. Petersburg took on Norway’s Rosenborg in a UEFA Cup first round, second leg match Thursday, winning 2-1 in a come-from-behind home victory at Petrogradsky Stadium.
In the first half, Zenit missed opportunities to nail the result after the team’s 2-0 win in Norway in the first leg. But Vidar Riseth set the game alight just before half time by heading the ball past the line for Rosenborg.
Whatever Rosenborg coach Per-Mathias Hœgmo said in the break failed to motivate the Norwegian team. Zenit created artistic chances againt a placid Rosenborg to produce two goals in its favor, sealing a 4-1 aggregate victory. 
Zenit forward Alexander Kerzhakov stood out for his 55th-minute goal and assisting substitute Igor Denisov’s 86th-minute clincher. Safely into the last 16, the St. Petersburg team face Olympique Marseille in the first leg of the second round in France on March 9.
In the Eurocup basketball tournament Friday, Dynamo St. Petersburg hosted Maroussi of Greece at Yubileiny Stadium and sent them packing with a 71-59 loss in the second game of the quarter final. Dynamo also won the first match away earlier in the week for a place in the last four for the second year running.

TITLE: Stars Take Stand Against Racism
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MADRID — Barcelona playmaker Ronaldinho said if his teammate Samuel Eto’o had walked off the pitch on Saturday after being racially abused during their Primera Liga match at Real Zaragoza, he would have gone as well. 
The Cameroon international tried to leave the pitch in the second half, appearing to say that he was fed up with the racial abuse being directed at him by the home fans, but was convinced to stay by players and coach Frank Rijkaard. 
After the game, which Barca won 2-0 to go nine points clear at the top of the table, referee Victor Esquinas Torres detailed the incidents in his match report which was posted on the Spanish Football Federation’s (RFEF) official web site. 
“In the 76th minute, when Eto’o went to take a corner, the crowd behind the goal started to chant repetitively Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh!; clearly imitating the sound of a monkey,” said Esquinas Torres.

TITLE: Which MBA Lecturer Is Best For You?
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Russian professor or foreign theorist, classic academic versus experienced practitioner — when it comes down to getting your MBA who will do the best job? To simplify the choice we asked local business schools and ex-students to highlight some differences.

The Stockholm School of Economics in St. Petersburg acts as “an importer” of European education. As well as offering a European diploma, up to 85 percent of its lecturers are foreign nationals, said Svetlana Rakutina, head of the academic programs department at SSE in St. Petersburg.
It is logical since students on an International EMBA program “need theoretical knowledge and to know how international business is run,” she said.
“However, when we need to portray the reality of business in this country we invite Russian representatives, but also we invite guest speakers from many other countries,” she said. Despite having different backgrounds and experience, they are of equal interest to students.
Sometimes it is hard to say whether a Russian or European way of teaching is better, Rakutina said. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. 
“In the Russian tradition a lecturer starts with a general rule and then explains it with particular cases. The Western approach assumes that a lecturer explains his particular field, stimulating students for independent thought,” Rakutina said.
National adjustment
The International Management Institute in St. Petersburg (IMISP) adopts another approach, offering only Russian language lecturers.
“Some think that English language MBA programs are better. However it can be difficult for people over 40 years of age to take in new information in a foreign language,” said Yelena Sannikova, lecturer on strategic management at IMISP.
IMISP specialists explore foreign theory and practice, adapting it to national reality and adding relevant local examples.
“Laws, cultures and business environments differ dramatically between countries and those features require Russian lecturers to adopt and explain foreign theories,” Sannikova said.
As for qualifications, up to 40 percent of IMISP lecturers are candidates of science. All specialists must combine experience in real business with teaching skills.
“Courses differ from the traditional university scheme of lecturing on theory and then offering students practical problems to solve. Theories and models are explained with practical examples,” Sannikova said.
“I always involve students in a discussion. Being experienced people they have their own view on proposed business models. We discuss the suitability of each concept in particular business spheres. Here the lecturer acts more like a moderator who organizes a discussion presents its conclusions,” she said.
Detailed feedback is ensured by questionnaires offered to students at the end of the course. A lecturer’s salary directly depends on the rank they get from their students.
The Institute for International Business and Communications at Baltiisky State Technical University regards Russian scholars as more efficient lecturers than business practitioners or foreign theorists.
Only one out of 10 lecturers is a foreign specialist. However according to Marina Volkova, head of the MBA department at Voyenmekh, the institute complies to international standards of education, cooperating with the Norwegian School of Management and providing both Russian and European diplomas.
Managers also make up 10 percent of the lecturers. 
“Not all practitioners have the ability to give lectures. And it is not the practice of a particular industry that is important to students. They have practical experience themselves. They want a lecturer to explain how theories could be applied to particular situations,” Volkova said.

It’s people who matter
The School of Management of St. Petersburg State University currently offers two types of MBA programs.
“The Russian language MBA program, run on evenings and at the weekend, is aimed at managers of rapidly growing Russian companies and foreign companies operating in Russia. Accordingly, lecturers should not only be able to explain management theory but also their consulting experience and use both Russian and international case studies,” said Igor Baranov, deputy dean for MBA programs at the School of Management at St. Petersburg State University.
Given that the main task is to develop students’ decision-making ability in a local environment, the same approach as in the U.S. and Europe is adopted with up to 90 percent of lecturers being Russian staff scholars, with the rest invited from various companies.
“The English language International Executive MBA programs are aimed at the top managers of Russian companies that are planning to internationalize their operations,” Baranov said.
This program is run in alliance with four top European business schools, which provide about 80 percent of lecturers, another 20 percent being Russian.
However students may find differences between Western and Russian lecturers, and between theorists and practitioners, quite indistinct, especially when an interactive way of teaching is required.
“The students’ attitude towards a lecturer mainly depends on the lecturer’s personality, on his ability to explain the subject,” Baranov said.
Students are just as likely to give good marks to an academic mathematician running lectures on quantitative methods in decision-making as they are to a retail consultant, he said.

without teachers
The Open Business School does not have traditional lecturers. Instead, acting managers are invited to help students connect theoretical concepts with the reality of particular industries, adapting this knowledge to companies of different scales and cultures.
“The courses themselves are designed by the Open University Business School (U.K.). OUBS specialists select management theories, practical examples, tests, tasks and books taking into account new trends and rapidly changing environments,” said Anna Shkirtil, director for educational programs at the Open Business School in St. Petersburg.
“In St. Petersburg we only select speakers related to particular courses. As a rule, they are selected from the best graduates, successful and willing to share their knowledge,” Shkirtil said.
“We invite only acting managers. Some of them become professional consultants later. But they are not theorists anyway,” she said.
If necessary, OBS provides pedagogical training to help tutors develop their teaching skills. 
“For Russian language programs we invite Russian managers. The final stages of an MBA is always taught in English, and we invite managers from the EU chosen by OUBS,” Shkirtil said.

Finding the right balance
Despite the many differences between lecturers, their significance could yet be open to question.
“Given that world class lecturers are rare and others pretty much alike, students are more interested in a school’s rating and popularity,” said Kirill Vronsky, director for sales engineering at Reksoft, who got an MBA at IMISP and currently is enrolled on an Executive MBA in SSE. Most students value the popularity of the school’s alumni, Vronsky said. 
However he agreed that bright management theorists like Nordstrem, Ridderstrale or Gad offered by SSE, as well as the involvement of real practitioners in the learning process, are a plus, given that they occupy the “right positions in the right companies.”
Business schools should stick to balance. “All practitioners make reference to theory, and a school with bright theorists should invite practitioners to link theory with life,” he said.

TITLE: A Sea of Opportunity
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: How can you choose the right MBA program to support your future career? How can one decide what matters most without getting lost in a maze of information? The St. Petersburg Times talked both to schools and the business community to help you navigate through the sea of MBA opportunities.

First and foremost, decide if you need this program at all given your work experience. The experts say you risk wasting your money, time and effort if you haven’t gained managerial experience beforehand.
“An MBA degree is an elite, in-depth education in management. Therefore it is a necessity only for a relatively limited number of people,” said Sergei Mordovin, rector of the International Management Institute in St. Petersburg, and vice-president of the Russian Association of Business Education (RABO).
Only those managers who have achieved a certain success in their careers and aim to fill top management positions in the next five to seven years should invest their money and time into an MBA program, Mordovin said. 
“If you don’t have managerial experience, you won’t be able to use any of the knowledge gained on the course, as any idea that can’t be applied to one’s previous experience can’t be fully utilized,” Oleg Kuzin, who is working on his MBA dissertation, warned. 
If you still think an MBA is what you need, then you have to make sure you understand what it is exactly that you want to get from your education — useful industry contacts, knowledge or a career boost. 
The quality of business schools, although a rather subjective notion, lies in their ability to satisfy their clients’ demands, Mordovin said.
So if it is theoretical knowledge that potential students require, then schools focused on academic studies will accordingly be of high quality, he said.
“But they may fail to satisfy even the minimal requirements, given the applied expectations of clients,” Mordovin added. 
Margarita Adayeva-Datskaya, communications vice-president at the Swedish School of Economics in Russia, thinks dividing MBA studies into academic and applied ones is “pushing it” and an “unnatural” thing to do. 
“An excessively academic approach is the biggest problem facing business schools and the main subject of criticism,” she said. 
Any good school strives for a balance between its theoretical approach (or a desire to avoid creating templates) and practice (the necessity for such templates), but not every school has found this balance yet, said Adayeva-Datskaya.
Kuzin said that the most important asset of business school education, and where many Russian business schools fail to deliver, is a thorough explanation of theoretical knowledge. 
“The only valuable thing that an MBA student can find on such programs is practical knowledge of people who have managed big companies, but many MBA tutors in Russia don’t have such experience.
“You might as well just simply buy a book, read it and you’ll get a similar effect [as if you were on a program taught by people with no managerial background],” Kuzin said.
“All the information provided on the course has to be explained by professionals with real business experience,” he said. 
According to him, “it’s an extremely difficult task to try to teach people practical business issues if you don’t have a serious managerial background.”
As with many things in life, the truth apparently lies somewhere in the middle.
“Quality business schools have to possess all the necessary resources –— tutors, learning methods, experience, the needed facilities etc. — to build a balanced offer for businesses founded on a strong academic base,” Mordovin said.
Another important aspect to be considered when choosing your MBA program is whether you want to study at a Russian or a foreign business school.
“In many ways this depends on whether you work with foreign partners or are thinking of working abroad,” said Alla Zhavoronkova, head of Begin project and Begin Group education and personnel market research company.
“To get managerial knowledge in foreign schools for future work in Russia is, to a certain degree, nonsense,” said Mordovin of IMISP.
“The same principle applies to Russians receiving MBA education in Russia for a career abroad.”
Mikhail Babushkin, an MBA student at one of the foreign business schools based in St. Petersburg, disagrees.
“I can’t say that the fact that a school is foreign counts as a disadvantage,” Babushkin said. 
“In my opinion, it’s a positive feature, because if we continue to be locked in our own environment, then we won’t see any quality change in our business processes, as we simply won’t know other ways of doing business.”  
Regardless of school origin, experts seem to agree on one point — the best business schools are the ones that are able to take into account the context in which business operates and combine practical training with theoretical studies.

TITLE: The Pros and Cons of Distance Learning
AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: With the incredibly busy schedule of most top managers who are living life in the fast lane, distance learning MBA programs have gained more and more popularity among students all over the world. Nevertheless, such a process of learning remains relatively unfamiliar in Russia – we seek to find out why.
According to Sergei Fedorov, executive director at Open Business School, among 371 programs accredited by AMBA (Association of MBAs), there are only 21 distance learning programs provided in 15 business schools all over the world. In Russia, there are only three schools where distance learning programs, which normally last three to four years, are available; among them only the program at Open University Business School – MIM LINK has an international accreditation. 
Worldwide, the most popular MBA distance learning programs are to be found at the universities of Warwick, Manchester, Henley, Durham and Kingston as well as the Open University. 
Fedorov said that every six months they get about 5000 new applicants, while, according to his estimates, only about 200 Russians study this way at foreign business schools.
Among the possible reasons why the distance learning programs are not that popular in Russia compared with other countries, there is the lack of personal communication and opportunities to make useful connections, said Anna Rubalskaya, head of Educational Organizations Relationship Department at Begin Group. 
“Although distance learning programs are not that well developed in Russia, lately more and more modular MBA and EMBA programs, with elements of distance learning provided between modules, have started to appear. The Russian market is probably just not completely ready for distance learning programs.” 
According to Boris Rizhanovsky, director of the Center of Informational Technologies at the Higher Commercial School in Moscow, distance learning is blessed with many advantages. They include saving time on getting to school, a flexible schedule and a wide choice of courses; as well as the adaptability of the program to the physical and intellectual capabilities of the student and the use of modern informational and telecommunicational technologies.
 “However, technical errors and a lack of personal interaction with the teacher and other students are among its weaknesses,” he said. “Some students digest information better in the classroom, and are less good at dealing with new subjects by themselves,” he said.
A lack of self-organization can become an insuperable obstacle in the distance learning process. 
“It’s more difficult to study on the distance-learning MBA programs than on general programs. On distance learning programs the amount of students who give up studying before graduation is above average,” said Fedorov.
However, some analysts say that distance learning MBA programs are, by their nature, defective. 
“In general, MBA programs are aimed at teaching students to play in a team, to achieve a structural way of thinking and to be able to negotiate with people of different cultures and countries,” said Yan Yanovsky, MBA, MIM, Director Corporate Finance at RosBank.
 “This can’t be provided in the process of distance learning.” 
However, he admitted that with the development of high-speed technology, the process of learning at a distance can be improved.

TITLE: Finding the Time For an MBA
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Management is a rather time-consuming activity. The working day of an average Russian manager, if energetic and highly motivated, can last up to 14 hours, sometimes sacrificing weekends for an important project. How could he possibly find the time to get an MBA degree as well? Local business people give us some clues.

Reasoning behind the time
“Finding the time to complete an MBA program is, of course, one of the crucial factors. You have to persuade colleagues and your family that the time you’d spend on it would be acceptable,” said Mikhail Zavileisky, COO of DataArt local office, currently studying strategic marketing at Stockholm School of Economics in St. Petersburg.
“I think that doing 10 to 12 modules a year, attending classes from Friday till Monday, is the most rational option. Modules running five days a week are almost incompatible with working. If you have modules on the second Friday of each month and weekend, it is hard on the family,” Zavileisky said.
Another ex-student agreed with the decisive role of time.
“I looked for a program with a healthy mixture of in-house seminars and independent study,” said Yury Mikhailov, managing partner at Consort Petersburg.
Mikhailov believes an eighteen-month program at IMISP, which had classes every other Friday or Saturday and a couple of evenings per week, was “the best adjusted.”
“You studied two subjects at the same time by spending fifty plus hours in the classroom and twice as much doing research at home and lots of required reading. You had to independently manage your time and the balance described above turned out to be the best,” Mikhailov said.
Viktor Suschev, director for DocsVision project, considered his scheme of studying at the School of Management of St. Petersburg State University the most suitable for managers unable to interrupt their working schedule.
He studied two or three evenings a week. Once a month he had lectures at the weekend and once every three months a whole week of lectures.
Nikita Pasechnik, COO at Digital Design, by contrast, left the company for one year to get an MBA degree at INSEAD in France.
“We studied from 6 a.m. till 12 p.m. without holidays under serious pressure. Only that way you can get high quality knowledge and skills,” he said.
“To study something deeply you need to be absorbed in the education process completely. Economizing on time always affects the quality of your education. The world’s business schools all offer MBA programs that assume complete separation of students from work,” Pasechnik said. 
Much more important than a timetable, Pasechnik considered the types of student admitted and a school’s lecturers.
“INSEAD offered the world’s best professors, who had experience in the largest companies,” Pasechnik said.

It depends On The Student
Any type of MBA program could prove suitable despite proving time-consuming — it is a matter of who does the program.
“Fussy students should be automatically removed, otherwise they constantly leave lectures for work and meetings. But those with family feel miserable being far away from their loved ones. The more compactly the group lives the shorter the duration of modules should be,” Zavileisky said. A full-time MBA is suitable for people able to take time out, he said.
Business does not always allow study every evening, Mikhailov said. However more convenient module-based programs demand a lot of weekend time while the breaks in the continuity of the curriculum produce irregularities in the MBA workload, he added.
Mikhailov considered year-long MBA programs with day classes the best for people who are thinking about their careers and can afford not to work while module-programs could be an option for senior managers.
Mikhail Korolkov, leading consultant at Siemens Business Services, suggested that managers who need to improve their qualification urgently could choose day studies or studying abroad. 
“Managers with regular working hours should attend courses on evenings and holidays while managers with irregular working hours could choose a mixed MBA program including an optimum proportion of day and evening classes,” he said.
However, some ex-students are categorically against quitting work for the sake of business education, saying the two things should always complement each other.
Anatoly Surkis, financial director of Digital Design, said a two to two-and-a-half year period is the optimum length of course, but maintained that time in itself is not the main issue.
Surkis did an MBA at IMISP, studying two Fridays and Saturdays each month with consultations on some evenings.
“Learning should run parallel to work otherwise it is inefficient. I tried new knowledge in practice and wrote case studies concerning the company’s real situation,” Surkis said.
He said that concentration, the ability to get satisfaction from communicating and getting new knowledge were the main factors that helped reconcile oneself to a tough schedule.
Small tricks
Zavileisky suggested that compromise was needed since it is “unreal to be the best in your work and studies and spend enough time at home.”
He proposed setting clear priorities and “using every opportunity to show one’s endeavor, so as to be able to ask for leniency later.”
“You should not regret things left undone or things you’ve missed, the world is more tolerant and our role is less significant than we used to think,” he said.
A practical option is to use schedule devices in Outlook, GoldMine and other programs and to not be ashamed of taking a laptop to lectures, Zavileisky said.
Korolkov stressed the importance of receiving support from one’s family and senior colleagues at work, the ability to plan your activities and keep to this plan and “to work in any conditions — at the kitchen at home, in a train, in a plane, at the airport.”
Mikhailov confessed that during the first two months of his MBA program he repeatedly asked himself why he’d taken on such a burden and often “felt like a martyr dragging one’s feet along Via Dolorosa.”
“You did have to have a lot of stamina and strength, and make your family and friends understand why you were doing this,” Mikhailov said.
However, with a certain amount of will and self-discipline, he managed to start enjoying his studies. Moreover, in the first three months after graduation he even missed this way of operating.

TITLE: The MBA Experience
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: What benefits can an MBA degree bring to its holder? It seems rather obvious at first. But holding an MBA in Russia may not bring the exact results one might have thought. 
A recent international recruitment and salary survey from TopMBA, the self-proclaimed “world’s leading network for top careers and education,” showed that a growing number of companies all over the world now see an MBA as an essential management qualification even at entry-level. 
“Without an MBA,” warn the survey’s authors, “it is almost impossible to become an analyst at a leading investment bank, or a senior consultant at a top consulting firm.”
But, unlike the experience of MBA graduates in the West, where the degree has the potential of significantly improving its owner’s status in the world of business, Russian employers continue to be skeptical about MBA qualifications.
Unfortunately for the graduates, many local companies are still not impressed by the degree and seem to agree with the view of Alla Bochman, director of the North-Western branch of Rosbank.
“Certainly an MBA degree is a plus, but it’s work experience in the field that counts most. I still think that practical knowledge is the most valuable asset,” Bochman said about the correlation between an MBA and levels of pay. 
“As our experience has shown, owners of MBA degrees happen to have overestimated salary expectations.
“The possession of an MBA [on its own without a candidate having] practical skills... will not affect his/her potential compensation package whatsoever,” she added.
According to the St. Petersburg branch of recruitment company Kelly Services, an MBA degree is essential for only five to seven percent of companies operating in Russia. 
“An MBA is only a degree. It doesn’t provide any advantages if you aren’t able to sell to employers your knowledge and skills gained in the process of training,” Ksenia Sletneva, Kelly’s marketing coordinator, said. 
“Thus, in this case as much as in any other case, a compensation package will solely depend on negotiation skills,” Sletneva said. 
According to Begin Group, which monitors the country’s higher education market, no special research of how having an MBA affects pay levels has yet been carried out in Russia.
Establishing the relationship between MBA-holders and pay levels in Russia is made difficult because not every company officially declares salaries on their books, Lidia Trevish, PR manager at Begin Group, said. 
More positively however, having an MBA has proved to be a rapid self-esteem booster, resulting in a large number of MBA students changing jobs even during their business studies.
Sergei Mordovin, rector of the International Management Institute in St. Petersburg, said up to 20 percent of its MBA students change jobs while studying on the course.
City-based entrepreneur Oleg Kuzin, who has had experience of studying business in St. Petersburg, Moscow and abroad, said he has also spotted the trend. 
Kuzin said that about 30 percent of his fellow students on a St. Petersburg MBA course changed jobs while on the course. He relates this phenomenon to “an automatic boost of self-esteem,” that students experience in the course of studying.
“If before enrolling on to the course [the students] thought that there were no problems within the companies they worked for, after graduation they tend to think they deserve a better place,” Kuzin said. 
A good MBA course can also bring many benefits to those who prioritize knowledge over image. In Russia, knowledge-oriented students often have an entrepreneurial nature — having reached their limits in their companies’ management they are eager to improve their managerial abilities and bring enthusiasm to driven firms on the next level.
Mikhail Babushkin, another city-based entrepreneur and a MBA student at a foreign business school in St. Petersburg, said his expectations were fully met by the program.
“I had two major aims — to gain some knowledge that I lacked due to an absence of special education in the field, and to bring order to my practical skills,” said Babushkin.
And last but not least, an MBA course can fill the student’s address book with lots of useful contacts. 
“On the course you’re being put in an environment where you can meet people working in all kinds of markets. Sometimes you can get some contacts that are useful to your business,” Babushkin said.   
“That came as a surprise and was an unexpected bonus to my MBA degree.”

TITLE: MBA Tour Heads to Moscow
AUTHOR: By Tobin Auber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: As demand for MBA graduates continues to rise, the popular World MBA Tour will be returning to Moscow on Monday, March 13, to give potential Russian applicants, schools and employers a chance to meet, discuss and assess the current state of the market. 
According to Nunzio Quacquarelli, director of the World MBA Tour, the largest international program of MBA information fairs, the rise in earnings for MBA graduates will have a direct and dramatic effect on applicant numbers in 2006. “Last year, the Tour, which is now the primary recruitment tool for the world’s leading business schools, registered a 17 percent uplift in candidate numbers, with over 70,000 MBA applicants meeting 350 business schools in 56 different cities around the world,” he says. 
“In 2006, we expect a further 10-20 percent increase in candidate numbers, as young professionals around the world pursue a qualification they see as opening the door to lucrative careers in financial services, consulting, marketing, financial and general management. That’s why we are adding a whole range of new venues this year, such as Sofia in Bulgaria, Lagos in Nigeria and Johannesburg in South Africa, which will join the established European Spring fairs in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Frankfurt, Lisbon, London, Moscow, Paris and Rome.”
Now in its twelfth year of operation, the World MBA Tour travels with the top international business schools, including most of the U.S. ‘Top 20’, including; Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Michigan, Tuck and Wharton. All of the leading European schools also take part – for example Italy’s SDA Bocconi, France’s HEC and INSEAD, Spain’s IESE, ESADE and IE-Instituto de Empresa, Switzerland’s IMD and St Gallen, and the U.K.’s Cambridge, Cass, Cranfield, Imperial, London, Manchester, and Warwick. At selected locations Executive MBA programs are provided with a special focus area, the ExecMBA Village.
The Tour enables potential candidates to meet face-to-face with admissions directors and to obtain a wide range of information on program content, costs and duration, financial aid and post-qualification career options. Seminars and workshops presented by the Tour organisers cover wide-ranging issues including: choosing between specialist post-graduate courses and an MBA, picking the right school, financing an MBA, taking the GMAT test and preparing a winning application. All visitors to events receive a complimentary copy of the TopMBA.com Global Salary and Recruitment Report and the first 100 attendees at each fair also receive a free copy of a publication for potential students, the Top MBA Career Guide.
Over a million dollars’ worth of MBA scholarships are exclusively available through the Tour from schools including; Wharton, IE-Instituto de Empresa, Politecnico di Milano  and Ashridge and others.

TITLE: Certifying an MBA
AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The reputation of an MBA program is among the most decisive factors in choosing an MBA program for more than 47 percent of the potential applicants, according to a recent survey by Begin Group Company.

Many students consider whether the program is officially accredited as an important part of its image, the survey said. More and more business schools are getting their courses accredited in response.
In Russia, about 30 business schools are allowed to certify their graduates with a diploma developed in 2002 by the Ministry of Education of Russia and the Russian Association of Business Education. 
“Russian state accreditation of MBA programs is like the general academic accreditation for higher educational institutions: it does not consider the results and quality of the graduates,” Sergei Fedorov, executive director at Open Business School, said. Rather, it merely considers criteria such as the syllabus and the type of teachers. 
But there are several international state and independent accreditation organizations that provide accreditation both to a business school as a whole or just to some of its programs. The European and American programs are among the leading trendsetters of MBA accreditation, analysts say.
Among the most popular international programs are AACSB (The Association of Advance Collegiate Schools of Business), AMBA (Association of MBAS), EQUIS (European Quality Improvement System). 
The American AACSB was founded in 1916 in order to improve the quality of the higher education in business administration and management. Although, by now, more than 426 organizations are certified by AACSB, it is considered one of the most “conservative” by analysts.
“The AACSB almost doesn’t certify non-American programs and only about twenty European ones have got its certification,” Fedorov said. 
According to Begin Group, in Russia, an AMBA accreditation was achieved by the Grenoble Ecole de Management program available at the department of computer technology in business at the Academy of National Economy as well as the Open University programs at the International Institute of Management (LINK) in Moscow and Open Business School in St. Petersburg.
The European accreditation organization AMBA was founded thirty years ago in the U.K. as an association of the MBA graduates and aimed to represent the interests of the professional managers. 
It has given accreditation to programs in a hundred schools all over the world among which are joint programs at the Moscow School of the Social and Economic Sciences at the Academy of National Economy and Kingston University, MIRBIS, the Moscow International Higher School of Business, and Sinergia, the Institute of Economy and Finance.
Among the newest and most rapidly developing international accreditation organizations is EQUIS founded by EFMD (European Foundation for Management Development) in Brussels in order to support innovations and development in management as well as researching in business education. 
The programs of the Open University and the Stockholm School of Economics and International Banking Institute also have an EQUIS accreditation.
Among the most popular national programs is the American Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools, whose programs in Russia are provided by the Moscow University of Turo.
Meanwhile, analysts say that MBA accreditation is more a guarantee for students than for employers. 
“The name of the business school, not its accreditation, is what most of Western employers pay attention to,” said Yan Yanovsky, director corporate finance at RosBank, who holds an MBA and a MIM. 
Yanovsky suggested to applicants who want to make the right choice of MBA program, that they “first learn the students’ opinion about a certain program, then find out at different ratings, for example, the Wall Street Journal Rating, what recruiters think about it, and then consider all the other factors.”
However, most managers at recruiting agencies in Russia say that the majority of employers want applicants to have considerable work experience rather than simply to hold an MBA degree. 
Sometimes an MBA can even be a hindrance to job seekers. 
“Some companies do not want to hire specialists with MBA degrees because of the high expectations they may have about work and salary,” Tatiana Grin, marketing manager at Ancor, said.
According to statistics compiled by the internet recruiting portal HeadHunter.ru, only 22 searches of resumes on its site were run using the term “MBA.” 
By comparison, 3,600 searches using the word “accountant” were recorded during the same period.
Of job seekers whose resumes are posted on the site, nearly five percent indicate having or studying for an MBA degree compared to less than one percent two years ago. 
“This probably means that many Russian MBA graduates have absorbed a Western-like culture of accurate self-presentation skills,” Yury Virovets, general director at HeadHunter.ru, said.
With only vague accreditation standards at many MBA programs, a weak tradition of business education in the country and a lack of skilled teachers, analysts can be scornful about MBAs in Russia. 
With lots of Western business schools being blamed for teaching unrealistic old-fashioned models and copying each other from one program to another, “a Russian MBA education is now more like a mutant, a Frankenstein made of carrion, just the worst and senseless copy of its Western analogue,” Alexei Gostev, deputy editor at HeadHunter Magazine said.

TITLE: MBA – What is it Good For ?
AUTHOR: By Tobin Auber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Having co-founded one of Russia’s leading management magazines, Top Manager, and as general director of the Top Manager Publishing House, Irina Shultz felt that an MBA qualification would greatly improve her management skills and recently completed her courses at the St. Petersburg State Museum. The St. Petersburg Times spoke to Irina about fitting her studies into her busy schedule and the advantages that an MBA can give students – many of them readers of her magazine – in the Russian management environment.

What made you decide to do an MBA?
I just had the impression that there was no point in forever reinventing the wheel and inventing all sorts of new methods of management and approaches. Instead, I decided that it was time for me to equip myself with all the knowledge that mankind had already developed – that’s the long and short of it! 

How did you go about deciding which course to do?
It was a hard decision. I was looking for the best management course on the local market, and the best was obviously going to be an MBA, but I was limited by my English language, so I had to choose from among the local Russian-language MBA courses. Once I’d narrowed it down, I really just looked for the course with the strongest reputation, one that had already established a good name for itself and certain traditions: St. Petersburg University. I didn’t have to look any further. 

For those entirely unfamiliar with the field, how would you describe an MBA? 
I would describe it as a basic or “classical” education in management for managers of any level. Engineers have a certain amount of basic studies that they have to complete, or doctors, say. An MBA is exactly the same, but for managers. It gives you the basics of all the disciplines that a manager should possess, from financing to personnel management. It’s the basics – there’s nothing supernatural or out of this world in it, it’s just the basics for management. 

How have you used what you learnt on the MBA program in your work and in the running of your business?
What’s the MBA given me? It gives you a lot more confidence in what you’re doing. It gives you a much broader outlook or view on what you’re doing. When you’re confronted with any task, you immediately have several models and instruments that you can apply to complete that task – it just makes it a lot easier to come up with ideas. 
You understand that if you do one thing, you’ll be following a certain scenario, whereas if you do something different you’ll be following a different scenario. It’s easier to reason things out and easier to put your actions in order, to systematize them. It gave me a foundation on which to make decisions, to think about development – all this means that you work a lot faster, there’s less hesitation, and your ideas become clearer. 
Like any education, it’s just a basic foundation. Having acquired that foundation, you can carry on digging in any sphere you wish – finances, say, or strategic management. The course itself isn’t that deep, especially as you’re doing it in parallel with your job and you can barely keep up with all the demands that the course makes on you. In spite of that, however, you realize what you have to do or where you have to go if you want to go further in your studies. 
Many of the people that we’ve spoken to with MBAs have emphasized the importance of the programs for making contacts and the productive environment that comes with working with other managers. Was that the case for you too? 
It’s a great place to mix and that really is important. When you start studying you come across such a concentration of strong characters and strong people with very clear opinions and it’s all on such a high level that, apart from receiving great pleasure from mixing in that company, you also get a huge amount of use out of it in a host of different ways. 
Your self-esteem improves, because you realize that you’re not the only one being faced by certain problems – you have people to compare yourself with, and you can then judge yourself more objectively. 
It also gives you a much broader view. You immediately have an almost unlimited number of opinions on any problem you’re faced with, and everyone’s prepared to help, it’s all very open – in normal life you just don’t have anyone to discuss these things with. Usually, the manager stands alone on top, but on the course you’re among equals who are prepared to help. The student spirit is something we’ve all forgotten, but it’s a very productive environment – it’s a very warm atmosphere. A lot of my fellow students found new jobs while they were studying, found new business partners and a lot of them started working together professionally. The course is over, but we know that we’re still all there to help each other if need be. 

What was the schedule on your course? How did you manage to combine it with your work?
I was on a modular program – four days of very intensive study, from early morning to late at night, but only once a month. So it was very intensive – from dawn till dusk - but it was entirely possible to combine with a full-time job. 

Do you think students should already have a few years of management under their belts before they do a course, or can they do it fresh out of school or university?
I think there’s no point in doing it straight after you’ve graduated from university. I think you already have to have a lot of experience so that certain questions have already arisen. If you only know about those questions in theory, then that’s not really the same thing. If you already have some experience, then you’ll only have to study what’s really important to you – it really gives you a different approach to your studies. 
There are faculties of management at a lot of higher education establishments for kids just out of university and they teach much the same subjects, but they really don’t give you that much. They just give schematic theory that the students can’t really take on board – it’s like science fiction to them, and the students don’t really understand what they need it for or how to use it. 
Does an MBA improve your chances on the job market in St. Petersburg and in Russia in general? 
There are two sides to every question. While people are doing MBAs their wage expectations go up, and they go up quite a long way. As far as employers go, however, they’re looking at whether someone is a good manager or not. If they are and they’ve got an MBA on top of that, then that will make a difference and the employee will be much more effective in the workplace. If he was a bad manager to begin with but now he’s got an MBA, he’ll still be a bad manager. If you haven’t got the basic qualities required, an MBA won’t help you, and most employers understand that. 

Is the approach provided by MBA studies a purely western approach? How realistically or easily can the skills and knowledge that it provides be applied in Russia?
Well, I’m not sure about there being anything intrinsically western about it. Of course, life’s a lot more complicated than the models that can be used to describe it, but those simplified models allow you to understand what’s going on. It’s clear that those models were created in the West, because the subject is new and quite undeveloped here, but they can all be easily applied here or, in fact, anywhere. You certainly don’t get the impression that all these ideas are from the Wild West and that they could never be applied here in Russia.

TITLE: Finding the Finance for an MBA
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Often it’s companies who sponsor MBA students. Of course some MBA hopefuls sponsor themselves, but what if you represent the not-so-rare breed of ambitious young professional who just can’t afford the prestigious business degree without some help? We look at how MBA students in Russia finance their studies.
According to statistics from Begin Group Company only 20 percent of all MBA students get educated at their companies’ expense. However, companies’ financial participation can fluctuate during the course of study, said Alla Zhavoronkova, head the Begin market research company.
“So if the company sees the positive effect of MBA education, it might start sponsoring it or increase its participation,” Zhavoronkova said. According to her, the big players in the retail and production markets are among the companies most frequently willing to educate their personnel. But some small Russian companies send their staff to business schools too and are eager to splash out on their workers’ education. 
“At first the company’s owner graduates with an MBA and then, after realizing the importance of such an education for the development of a business, welcomes the idea that his or her subordinates desire to apply for such a course,” Zhavoronkova said.
Still, Begin Group reports that the “majority of those enrolling in business administration programs, continue financing their studies themselves or with a help of a loan.”
Admittedly, student loans hardly exist in Russia at present. Antonina Bereznitskaya, head of retail business at Russ-Bank, said she cannot envision high demand for such products but doesn’t rule out the possibility that her bank will develop loans specifically tailored to education.
“There will be no strong growth in the popularity of ‘student’ loans, as many conditions need to be improved beforehand, such as the country’s macroeconomic stability, rates of inflation, standards of living, the general public’s attitudes to the idea of loans and many other factors,” Bereznitskaya said. 
But French Banque Societe Generale Vostok,or BSGV, a pioneer when it comes to offering loans for MBA studies in Russia, thinks that in the near future the product will develop.
“Student loans have all the potential to become one of the most popular financial service products in the future,” said Elena Sheveleva, general director of BSGV’s St. Petersburg branch.
Sheveleva partly traces this trend to the fact that the majority of Russian universities will soon introduce a new system of education consisting of a four-year bachelors degree and a two-year masters. So after they graduate many students will be faced with the problem of finding the means to finance themselves for a masters degree, she said.
In Russia BSVG offers two types of student loan: a non-specific loan for education and an MBA loan. According to the bank, its MBA loan has been developed to cover not only the cost of education in Russia, but also similar studies at foreign schools abroad with the possibility of borrowing up to $50 000 at a rate of interest of 11 to 12 percent. 
According to the daily newspaper “Business,” only ten other banks in Russia offer loans specifically tailored for education.