SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1159 (25), Friday, April 7, 2006
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TITLE: City Ranks 174th For Expatriates
AUTHOR: By Martin Burlund
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Pollution, crime and the climate are just a few of the factors that make St. Petersburg one of the least attractive cities in the world for expatriates to live in, according to a new report.
In a new survey by ECA International, a human resources organization, based on 257 cities worldwide, St. Petersburg is placed in the bottom third in terms of being a desirable city to live, work and have a family for foreigners coming from abroad.
The city’s high pollution, high crime rate and harsh northern climate are cited as factors that have put St. Petersburg at 174th on the list among Western European expatriates, 182nd among North Americans and 225th among Asians.
Four Russian cities, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk are all in the bottom half of the 257 cities evaluated in all three regional categories.
Moscow is the most desirable Russian location for Asian, Americans and Europeans. While St. Petersburg ranks second among Americans and Europeans, Yushno-Sakhalinsk is more attractive to Asians than St. Petersburg.
For Asian expatriates, the fact that Yushno-Sakhalinsk is closer to home contributed to its popularity.
According to the ECA report, the reason for Moscow being the most desirable city is because of its larger expatriate community, wider availability of goods and services, better recreation facilities, and higher number of international schools than in other Russian cities.
“When people from another country come to St. Petersburg to live, they have a fairytale idea of the city because of all the beautiful architecture,” said an expatriate lawyer who has been living in the city for a year and who preferred to remain anonymous.
“But this isn’t the case. There are few fairytales to be found here in the everyday life.”
The highest rank for a Russian city was recorded by European expatriates, for whom Moscow is ranked 147th of the 257 cities worldwide.
“Moscow has more on offer culturally and the expatriate community is very small in St. Petersburg,” said the expatriate, who has also lived four years in Moscow. He also said that the infrastructure in St. Petersburg is very poor and that this can be seen in the daily traffic jams and bumpy roads.
Elmar Greif, former General Manager of the Grand Hotel Europe and now foreign investment adviser at Bank Rossiya believes that preconceptions that many foreigners have are an obstacle to their enjoyment of the city. “I’ve lived and worked in about 15 different countries, but [St. Petersburg] is a very warm city, so I didn’t hesitate about coming back to work here,” Greif said.
“Most expats come here with the wrong attitude,” he said. “If you come here realizing that you are a guest, the locals will receive you as such and give you a very warm reception.”
Scott Antel of DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary lived in St. Petersburg from 1999 and 2001 and now lives and works in Moscow. His impression of the capital ran counter to the findings of the research.
“Since 2001 the economic climate in [St. Petersburg] has improved: shopping, restaurants, cleaner streets,” Antel said. 
“Now it’s really a nice place to live. Back in 1999-2001 I would have preferred to be in Moscow, but now I would prefer to live and work in St. Petersburg,” he said.
Kurt Stahl, a St. Petersburg inhabitant since 2002 and marketing director with Jensen Group expressed surprise that St. Petersburg had ranked so low. “If you can stand the climate, St. Petersburg has a lot to offer,” Stahl said. 
“I’ve lived in Beijing, Shanghai, China, Jakarta, Indonesia, Bangkok, Taipei and Taiwan,” he said. “Frankly, I would rank St. Petersburg just as high or higher than any of these cities for cultural richness, entertainment value and the physical beauty of the city.”
“Despite the fact that St. Petersburg is one of the largest cities in Europe, it also has a small town feeling in a very good way,” he said.
“I love it here,” said Douglas Pullar, an expat from New York who has been living and working in St. Petersburg for years. “I came here for 18 months and I’m still here 12 years later.”
“It’s a friendly city, considering its size, and the range of products available is much better than it used to be — you can get almost anything now,” he said. 
“I don’t feel homesick about New York, but when I’m away from St. Petersburg I start feeling homesick for the city.”
The factors used to calculate the survey include climate, health facilities, transportation, accommodation standards and crime. Culture and proximity to an expatriate’s home country also impact the score.
Despite the low Russian rankings, the two largest Russian cities have made an improvement on 2000, where Moscow was 171st and St. Petersburg 189th among European expatriates.

TITLE: Cult Head Detained For Fraud
AUTHOR: By Carl Schreck
TEXT: MOSCOW — A cult leader who promised to resurrect children killed in the Beslan school attack has been detained on suspicion of fraudulently obtaining money from parents of the victims, Moscow prosecutors said Thursday.
Police detained Grigory Grabovoi during a seance Wednesday evening at the Kosmos Hotel in northeast Moscow. Around 30 followers tried to prevent the police from taking him away, but police were able to take him out through a back entrance, NTV television reported.
Igor Pavlov, head of the central Moscow branch of the City Prosecutor’s Office, said a criminal case was opened after a complaint from deceived Beslan parents, Interfax reported. He said Grabovoi was talking to investigators and might be charged with fraud in the coming days, Interfax reported. 
If charged and convicted, Grabovoi faces up to three years in prison.
Prosecutors opened an initial inquiry into Grabovoi’s activities in September, after receiving complaints from several Beslan residents. Grabovoi said that month that he had signed agreements promising to resurrect  some of the 186 children who perished in the September 2004 school hostage-taking. A total of 331 hostages died in the attack.
At least 11 Beslan mothers attended a meeting with Grabovoi at the Kosmos Hotel on Sept. 17, including the head of the Beslan Mothers Committee, Susanna Dudiyeva, a vocal critic of the federal investigation into the school attack. 
Other Beslan mothers, expressing concern that authorities were using Grabovoi to discredit their cause, sought to distance themselves from him. They were among the people who complained to prosecutors last year.
Dudiyeva was in Moscow on Thursday but could not be reached on her cell phone for comment. 
But a member of the Beslan Mothers Committee said at a news conference in Beslan that her group had never seen “anything but goodwill” from Grabovoi.
“He did not bring any harm to us whatsoever,” said the member, Aneta Gadiyeva, Interfax reported. “He didn’t take any money from us, he never summoned us and didn’t pressure us at all. We can’t accuse him of anything. In a certain respect, perhaps, he even helped us.”
Ella Kesayeva, head of Voice of Beslan, another group of former hostages and their relatives, said by telephone from Beslan that Grabovoi should have been arrested long ago.
“We appealed to Prosecutor General [Vladimir] Ustinov in September, asking him to investigate Grabavoi’s activities because what he was doing was pure fraud,” Kesayeva said. “All of these claims of eternal life were just absurd.”
Grabovoi has denied accusations that he was seeking personal gain from the mothers’ grief and has said he was rendering his services to them for free. For others, he had been charging 1,000 rubles ($35) per person for group meetings and up to 40,000 rubles ($1,350) for one-on-one interviews.
Grabovoi, a 43-year-old native of Kazakhstan, began offering faith healing in the 1990s. “It was then that he began exploiting the feelings and spiritual condition of the people, and by 2004, 2005 he had legally registered his activities,” said Pavlov, the prosecutor.
Grabovoi — who says he would ban death if he were elected president — claims he can use his mind to cure AIDS and even pinpoint mechanical problems on airplanes. His followers have said on television that they believe he can help them to live forever.
Tamara Timofeyeva, head of the Volgograd chapter of Grabovoi’s cult, said Thursday that his followers in the region were collecting signatures in his support.
“I think this is all a specially planned action against us,” Timofeyeva said, Regnum.ru reported.

TITLE: Zenit Goes Down Fighting as Dream Ends
AUTHOR: By David Nowak
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Zenit St. Petersburg gave Sevilla a fright in the UEFA Cup  quarterfinal second-leg tie on Thursday night, but could not do enough to overturn the 4-1 loss suffered in Spain a week ago.
The Spaniards were certainly made to work for their 1-1 draw on a night of pelting snow that also saw each side have a player sent off and a Sevilla penalty clawed away.
Zenit barely gave Seville space to move in a packed midfield during the first half, and only three minutes had passed before Oleg Vlasov had the first effort on goal. 
But Zenit never managed to make their huge possession advantage count in the final third of the match, missing chance after chance in front of the Sevilla goal.
Whatever Zenit coach Vlastimil Petrzela said during half-time seemed to work  as Zenit’s South Korean international Hyun Young Min fired the ball into the corner from 5 yards out after a penalty box scramble five minutes into the second half. 
The packed stadium sensed an improbable fightback was on the cards, and the crowd had reason to, with Zenit committing players forward at every opportunity.
But that left it vulnerable at the back. After a Zenit corner came to nothing, a quick pass forward to Seville winger  Daniel Alves down the right drew the Zenit defense across, leaving Seville substitute Kepa Blanco unmarked. 
A well timed pass from Alves left Blanco with the simplest of finishes and with that, Zenit’s most successful European campaign was over.
Blanco was sent off just seconds after his goal for appearing to spit at a Zenit player.
But Zenit’s Ivica Krezanac soon followed him down the tunnel for scything down Vincenzo Maresca in the middle of the park.
“We played really well, you could say super. I’m really satisfied with the performance. We just didn’t make it,” Petrzela told local television.
Alves was denied a goal from the spot after Zenit keeper Vyacheslav Malefeyev made a stunning save to deflect the ball over the bar after 70 minutes.
The result dashed any hopes of a Russian club retaining the trophy, with CSKA Moscow, which crashed out in the group stage earlier this season, the current holder.
n Across the street from the soccer action at Petrovsky Stadium the Czech Republic and Finland qualified for the playoff the Bolshoi Priz junior ice hockey tournament two thirds into the qualifying round. 
Both teams are 2-0 in the tournament taking place at Yubileiny Stadium with wins over group B rivals, the St. Petersburg team and Slovakia. Everything is still up in the air for group A where all four teams can still qualify for the playoffs. 
Sweden won it’s opener against Belarus 2-1, and Belarus bounced back with a 5-1 win over Canada. The all-Russia team tied both Canada and Sweden 4-4 and 1-1 respectively and is due to play its final preliminary game against Belarus on Friday.
The winner of that match and the winner of the Sweden-Canada game would clinch places in the playoff round. 
Playoff games will be held Saturday 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., sandwiching an exhibition match featuring the legends of Soviet hockey including Sergei Makarov and Vyacheslav Fetisov at 5p.m. On Sunday the bronze and gold medal games are scheduled for 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. respectively.

TITLE: Chechen Jury Trials Ruled Out
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Constitutional Court on Thursday ruled that grave crimes committed by the military in Chechnya would be tried by military tribunals until the use of juries is introduced in the southern republic, Chechen and Russian officials said. 
Chechen President Alu Alkhanov said the ruling should help advance “justice and objectivity.” 
The decision came after juries in the nearby Rostov region twice acquitted four members of an elite military intelligence unit charged with killing six civilians in Chechnya, sparking outrage among Chechen civilians and their leaders. 
The acquittals in the case of Captain Eduard Ulman and three subordinates reinforced the impression among rights advocates and many Chechens that federal soldiers and Chechen security forces frequently act with brutal impunity, including killing, abducting and intimidating civilians in Chechnya. 
“The Constitutional Court ruled that such cases should be tried by three professional judges, underlining meanwhile the impossibility of imposing the death penalty,” said Yury Sharandin, the Federation Council’s representative at the court, Interfax reported. 
Thursday’s ruling came in response to Alkhanov’s appeal for a Constitutional Court opinion on the Ulman case. 
Alkhanov complained military officers could be tried by jury, but ordinary Chechens could not. He also suggested that cases of crimes committed in Chechnya should be heard by Chechen jury members. 
(AP, SPT)

TITLE: EU Prepares Ban For Lukashenko, Officials
AUTHOR: By Jeff Mason
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: STRASBOURG, France — The European Union vowed on Wednesday to keep up pressure on Belarus to open up to democracy and free activists, as EU lawmakers gave a warm reception to the country’s opposition leader. 
The EU is set next Monday to ban President Alexander Lukashenko and about 30 other officials from entering the bloc after a March 19 presidential election it condemned as rigged, and the arrests of hundreds of opposition protesters. 
Belarus defended the election and the arrests, saying about 600 people had been sentenced to up to 15 days in jail for breaking the law and taking part in banned opposition rallies. 
And Russia showed its support by renewing accusations that the EU is trying to isolate Belarus. 
Alexander Milinkevich, a distant second to Lukashenko in the election, urged the EU to ban hundreds of people from entering the bloc, but he also repeated opposition to economic sanctions. 
“Our view here is that economic sanctions tend to hit the people in the street rather than the regime, and they’re not very effective,” he said at a news conference. 
Welcomed by some lawmakers wearing red-and-white scarves with the logo “Solidarity With Belarus,” he also called on the West not to recognize Lukashenko’s administration. 
Spectators in parliament wore Santa Claus outfits in a show of support. Red and white were the colors of the former Belarus national flag banned by Lukashenko during a drive in the 1990s to reinstate Soviet-era symbols. 
EU President Wolfgang Schuessel agreed that the bloc needed to keep up the pressure on Belarus. 
“The main issue in Belarus now is that of freeing prisoners, taking a position on the manipulation of the elections, working for civil society, democracy and freedom for people to choose their own destiny,” he told reporters. 
Lukashenko is to be inaugurated on Saturday after the ceremony was postponed, prompting speculation that the protests, unprecedented in the tightly run country, had rattled him. 
Minsk authorities defended the sentencing of about 600 people to up to 15 days in jail after Lukashenko’s victory. 
“The prosecutors’ position was clear — all lawbreakers must be held responsible for their actions and mass events during the election campaign must be conducted with strict respect of the law,” the presidential press service said. 
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reaffirmed Moscow’s backing for Lukashenko despite apparent Kremlin distaste for the latter. 
“Our basis is the necessity to apply unified standards in all cases, and the EU is not always successful in this,” Lavrov told a news conference in the Slovak capital, Bratislava. 
In an address to the Belarussian people posted on his web site Wednesday, Milinkevich called for tens of thousands of Belarussian volunteers to educate their compatriots about freedom, and said that free elections, free speech and free education would be the main planks in the opposition program, The Associated Press reported.

TITLE: Defense Minister: Army Should Police Itself
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Wednesday that the military should be empowered to investigate itself, in an effort to shield the armed forces from outside prosecutors investigating high-profile hazing incidents. 
Ivanov has been accused by prosecutors of failing to put an end to hazing in the military. The issue has gained resonance in the wake of the hazing of Andrei Sychyov, who had his legs and genitals amputated after being repeatedly beaten by fellow servicemen.
“I am referring to preliminary investigations, searches and detentions of servicemen,” Ivanov said during a meeting in Moscow with officers from across the country. “In these cases, it would be expedient to recruit from existing commandant offices and create interagency bodies with their staff.” 
Ivanov said his ministry’s lawyers were drafting a bill that would transfer the power to conduct preliminary investigations from prosecutors who report to the General Prosecutor’s Office to commandants who report, ultimately, to him.
In his remarks, Ivanov did not mention any prosecutors by name, but it was clear he was responding to public remarks made by Alexander Savenkov, the chief military prosecutor, criticizing the Defense Ministry for not curbing hazing.
Ivanov, who is vying to be Russia’s next president, downplayed the prevalence of hazing in the military, suggesting that recent trends indicated it was a shrinking problem.
In 2004, Ivanov said, there were 2,960 hazing complaints filed by servicemen and 29 soldiers died; in 2005, there were 2,798 complaints and 16 dead. These 16 cases, Ivanov said, accounted for 1.5 percent of military casualties in 2005.
Ivanov added that 276 servicemen committed suicide last year, a 10 percent drop from 2004. Critics contend that suicide is often the direct result of intense hazing.
While the army has avoided making that connection, Ivanov on Wednesday conceded that suicide and hazing were sometimes related.
“There are cases when a young man, driven to despair by barrack hooligans, decides to kill himself,” said Ivanov.
The minister also proposed a change to the Criminal Procedure Code that would allow the military to run its own disciplinary courts. Prosecutors would be permitted to oversee these courts only from afar.
Alexei Makarkin, a political analyst with the Center for Political Technologies, said Ivanov, who never served in the military, was simply trying to curry favor with servicemen by making the case that he is protecting them from bothersome, external investigators.
Makarkin added that Ivanov’s political fate pivoted, to a large degree, on how he handles the hazing problem.
“To convince the Kremlin that he can be an effective president, Ivanov needs first to become an authoritative leader of the military corporation,” Makarkin said.
Also, Ivanov announced that the military would increase its procurement budget by 50 percent in 2006.
And he took issue with a law that would set guidelines for priests ministering to military units, saying that the army’s relations with religious officials “should ripen in a natural way and not under orders.”
The hazing imbroglio highlights the chasm separating lower- and middle-rank officers on the one hand, and the military elite on the other, said Ivan Safranchuk, head of the Moscow office of the Center for Defense Information.
Alexander Golts, an independent military analyst, was skeptical that Ivanov would make any headway in winning over the support of the rank and file by making high profile statements like the one Wednesday.

TITLE: Envoys: Abolish Death Penalties
AUTHOR: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Two Council of Europe envoys on Wednesday urged Russia to fulfill its pledge to abolish the death penalty as it prepares to take over the rotating presidency in the continent’s top human rights body. 
Belgian Senate member Luc Van den Brande and Theodoros Pangalos of Greece, who monitor Russia’s compliance with its commitments to the council, told reporters Russia’s failure to abolish capital punishment was a concern. 
Russia has maintained a moratorium on the death penalty since 1996.
Pangalos said Russia’s chairmanship of the Council’s Committee of Ministers from May to November was not conditional on Moscow banning the death penalty, but that “Russia, being the president, should give an example.”
But Konstantin Kosachyov, chairman of the State Duma’s International Affairs Committee, indicated there was no chance for a quick solution. “It’s hardly possible, because there is no stable majority in parliament in favor of abolishing capital punishment,” he said.

TITLE: Local Constructors Missing Out
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Local construction companies face an imminent crisis if they continue to be overlooked in the lucrative market of foreign-investment projects, industry experts said Wednesday at a press conference at Rosbalt news agency.
To support local firms in their bid to win contracts, City Hall and professionals from the construction industry have proposed introducing voluntary accreditation that would provide foreign investors with reliable information about local firms.
Last year 2.3 million square meters of new production and civil facilities were built in St. Petersburg, which is comparable to construction in the residential and commercial sectors, experts said.
“Unfortunately, we focused on residential construction and land plots, and thus missed production and civil construction,” said Lev Kaplan, vice president of the St. Petersburg Union of Construction Companies.
Foreign companies invested about $1.5 billion into the St. Petersburg economy last year, and 25 percent to 30 percent of this investment was in industrial construction.
Most projects were realized by foreign contractors. Russian companies were generally employed only as subcontractors and never as general contractors for large projects such as the Coca-Cola or Wrigley plants. Toyota employed Finnish workers to perform excavation work on its construction site, and foreign firms were invited by Chinese investors to carry out engineering and construction works for the Baltic Pearl project, Kaplan said.
At the same time, the local construction industry faces crisis, he said. According to the Union data, the number of construction companies decreased by 20 percent last year. About 15,000 people (eight percent of industry employees) lost their jobs. The total volume of work last year amounted only to 90 percent of that carried out in 2004. Profitability decreased from 12 percent in 2004 to 6.9 percent last year.
Both investors and local companies are lacking information, the experts said.
“Companies like Bosch, Alcan or Toyota choose contractors through international tenders and thus fail to take into account the particularities of the national market,” said Alexei Sorokin, head of the industrial investment department at the Committee for Economic Development, Industrial Policy and Trade.
Foreign firms unfamiliar with local particularities spend longer on getting the necessary approvals from authorities, and their projects get delayed. City Hall has to spend time “educating” foreigners, which “distracts the authorities from other projects,” Sorokin said.
A list of certified contractors would let the committee offer their services to foreign investors, he said, while finishing projects earlier would increase investor numbers.
The Union will start voluntary certification as of April 10. Certification standards include company image, technical opportunities, production volume, business solvency and rating according to international quality standards.
Local businesspeople were at one in seeing lack of information as the main problem.
“Major investors — foreign companies — face difficulties orientating themselves in the local market and look mainly at brands such as Skanska, Enka and Renaissance. We do not have such companies,” said Viktor Putro, director for development at ITM Group.
Valery Klimov, CEO of Pulkovo industrial construction company, said that both the city and investors would benefit from “comfortable market conditions.”
He suggested disassociating small engineering companies from solid contractors, because any problems might spoil the investment climate.
Klimov indicated an example of a large foreign automotive company, which had been constructing a service center for four years, constantly in the throe of problems with the land plot and engineering infrastructure, and then, when the project was due for completion, several floors in the building collapsed.
In addition to accreditation, Kaplan proposed defining an amount of work that foreign investors would have to reserve for local contractors.

TITLE: Local Innovator Plans to Process Waste With Technopark Project
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Local innovator, Mekhanobr-Tekhnika, is to use a waste-recycling plant as the basis for a new technopark for small and medium-sized companies, the company announced in a statement Tuesday. 
The technopark, to be located in the Yanino district of the Leningrad Oblast, will be comprised of several production lines for the processing of wood, glass, plastic, rubber and metal extracted from solid domestic wastes. Mekhanobr-Tekhnika will provide both the raw materials and equipment.
“This is a pilot project. We are planning to develop technoparks on the basis of existing recycling plants in other regions in the future,” said the general director of Mekhanobr-Tekhnika, Leonid Vaisberg.
Mekhanobr-Tekhnika will be a co-investor of the project and a co-founder of the managing company that will own the techno-park’s assets. Total estimated investment is $15 million.
Georgy Bardashov, deputy head of City Hall’s Housing Committee, which is supervising the project, said that reconstruction of the recycling plant will increase production and improve the quality of the end-product — compost — which at the moment does not meet many standards. 
As a result of the redevelopment, due for completion by the middle of May, the volume of processed garbage will increase from 600,000 cubic meters to 900,000 cubic meters a year. Once the plant is fully operational in 2008, it will process as much as 1.8 million cubic meters annually.
The plant will supply 75 percent of the technopark’s raw materials. Between five percent and ten percent of materials will come from separate garbage collections, which have already been started in several city districts; about 20 percent should be supplied by rubbish collecting companies.
Garbage sorting should increase the profitability of recycling waste from its current level of 10 percent up to 25 percent, Vaisberg said.
“The cost of production with secondary raw materials is 2.5 times lower: if one ton of a basic type of rubber costs $800, one ton of rubber produced with waste costs $300, and there is no limit to its uses,” Vaisberg said.
Lidia Lazareva, PR specialist at Mekhanobr-Tekhnika, indicated Elast, Plastpolimer and Khetek as likely technopark tenants.
“The project was created specially for small and medium companies. They will receive grants, the equipment will be paid off within a year to a year and a half, which, for small firms, is important,” she said.
Those companies registered in the technopark will pay low rents and  have the opportunity to buy equipment using leasing schemes offered by the Industry and Construction Bank, Vaisberg said.
Yury Shevchuk, chairman of Green Cross, a St. Petersburg-based ecological organization, said that St. Petersburg produces about six million cubic meters of domestic waste and about four million cubic meters of industrial waste annually.
“Bio-composting technology can only help with the recycling of domestic waste — its application is limited,” he said.
According to Shevchuk, recycling all the city’s domestic waste would require plants with a production capacity of 4.5 million cubic meters. It would be achieved only with the Yanino plant working at full capacity and if production at the existing plant in Gorelovo was increased from its current level of 1.1 million cubic meters to 2.5 million cubic meters per year, he said.
Shevchuk also suggested creating a small plant in Kolpino to avoid transporting waste over a long-distance.
According to statistics, only 20 percent of garbage in St. Petersburg is recycled, while 80 percent is buried in random tips — about 250 such sites can be found in the Leningrad Oblast.
For comparison, in industrially-developed Europe only about 10 percent of waste is buried, 40 percent is recycled, while 50 percent is burnt. In Russia in general only three percent of waste is recycled.
To solve the problem of illegal dumping, Shevchuk suggested that transporters of rubbish should only be paid after delivery to the recycling plant and not before, as is currently the case.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: VolgaTelecom Bond 
ST. PETERSBURG (Reuters) —Regional fixed-line operator VolgaTelecom plans to issue a seven-year 3 billion ruble ($108.9 million) bond this summer, a company source said on Thursday. 
“The company plans to place the bonds this summer depending on the current climate of Russia’s ruble bond market,” the source told Reuters. 
The bonds would have a maturity of up to seven years while expected yield guidance was about 8 percent, the source said. He also said the bonds will have a put option, but did not elaborate.  “The main purpose of the issue is the restructuring of our credit portfolio and financing an investment program,” VolgaTelecom said in a statement. 

Yukos Arrest 
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Vasily Aleksanyan, an executive vice president of Yukos Oil, was arrested in Moscow on Thursday, Interfax reported.
Aleksanyan, who this week was appointed to coordinate Yukos operations with external bankruptcy managers, is being questioned by investigators, Interfax said, citing Gevorg Davgyan, his lawyer. No charges had been announced, Davgyan said.

TITLE: Angry Vintners Rebuff Allegations
AUTHOR: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Moldovan and Georgian officials on Wednesday denied Russian allegations that they produce poor-quality wine and questioned the validity of Russia’s March 27 ban on wine imports from their countries.
Russian distributors of banned wines also expressed outrage and threatened to take to court chief epidemiologist Gennady Onishchenko, who recommended the sanctions.
Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin said Wednesday that the ban could not be justified because Moldovan wine does not contain pesticides and heavy metals, as Russian health officials have alleged. 
The ban broke international trade rules and Moldova will use all legal international measures to get it lifted, Voronin said in a statement.
Moldovan analysts say the wine ban was retaliation for new customs rules in Moldova and Ukraine that affect the exports of a pro-Russian separatist province in Moldova.
Also on Wednesday, Georgian Prime Minister Zurab Nogaideli said the “decision to ban Georgian wine imports in Russia is a political and unfriendly gesture toward Georgia.”
Over the next month, Georgia plans to focus its efforts on returning its wines to the Russian markets and increasing exports to Ukraine and Kazakhstan, Nogaideli told reporters in Tbilisi.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili showed support for producers Wednesday by traveling to his country’s main wine producing region, Kakheti.
“The government will be helping you to find new export markets,” Saakashvili said at a plant where he sipped Georgian wine.
Moldova and Georgia are not the only ones suffering losses due to the ban, since 65 percent of the wine businesses in those countries is controlled by Russian companies, according to Russia’s National Union of Alcohol Market Participants.
The sanctions may also cost Russian distributors as much as $600 million and put 240,000 people who process Moldovan wine materials in Russia out of work, according to predictions announced Wednesday during a round table in Moscow organized by the union.
During the round table, distributors of Moldovan and Georgian wines announced plans to sue Onishchenko unless they received some answers from Russian authorities by April 15.
The distributors said they had sent letters to various ministries and agencies, asking them to provide evidence of harmful substances in wines and to clarify other issues related to the ban.
The threat comes the day after Onishchenko sent a letter to the Federal Customs Service requesting a halt on import of cognacs and champagne from Moldova and Georgia in addition to wine and wine products.
Wine accounted for 11 percent to 12 percent of Georgia’s exports last year, bringing in about $90 million. In Moldova, wine exports, worth $313 million last year, make up about 30 percent of the gross domestic product.

(AP, Reuters, SPT)

TITLE: The Real Chemical Threat
AUTHOR: By Paul F. Walker and Jonathan B. Tucker
TEXT: This American television season, the Fox TV hit series “24” revolves around the threat of chemical terrorism. Thus far, a gang of Russian separatists has stolen pressurized canisters from the U.S. military containing “Sentox” nerve gas (presumably sarin) and planted them in the ventilation systems of a shopping mall and the Los Angeles office of the (fictional U.S. government) Counter-Terrorist Unit. The gang then triggered them by remote control, killing several dozen people. 
Now the terrorists have stashed 17 canisters of Sentox in a natural gas distribution facility in downtown L.A. and are planning to kill thousands — unless “24’s” hero, Special Agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), can foil the plot in time.
Beyond a few technical quibbles, such as the fact that U.S. nerve agents are not stored in pressurized canisters with cipher locks but rather in rockets, bombs and artillery shells, the show seems all too plausible. Osama bin Laden has openly declared al-Qaida’s intention to obtain weapons of mass destruction, of which chemical agents would be the easiest to acquire and use.
Nevertheless, the plot of “24” is misleading in one important respect: the source of the chemical weapons. The script has the terrorists stealing nerve-gas canisters that were secretly produced for the U.S. military and stored in an airport hangar. In fact, since 9/11, the Cold War stocks of chemical rockets, bombs and shells awaiting destruction at seven U.S. Army depots across the country have been well secured, most in heavily protected concrete bunkers.
At much greater risk of theft are chemicals in depots in Russia, which has the world’s largest stockpile of chemical weapons — about 40,000 metric tons. And Russia is also far behind on the timetable for eliminating them under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which the United States and Russia have signed and ratified.
To date, the United States, Canada and European Union countries have committed about $2 billion to help Russia destroy its chemical weapons, but the program has suffered repeated delays. Although the Russian government claims that all of the weapons will be eliminated by 2012, that date is probably unrealistic.
Only the smallest of Russia’s stockpiles — 1,143 metric tons of the blister agents lewisite and mustard at Gorny — has been destroyed. A second blister agent destruction facility at Kambarka began operation recently.
Two other storage sites, at Shchuchye on the Kazakhstan border and at Kizner, about 1,000 kilometers east of Moscow, contain millions of munitions filled with nerve agents. Destruction of those chemical weapons won’t begin until December 2008 at the earliest.
According to U.S. Senator Richard Lugar, some of the artillery shells stored at Shchuchye are small enough to smuggle out in a suitcase. Although the United States has spent $20 million on security upgrades at the two sites, it hasn’t conducted routine follow-up inspections to ensure that they stay secure.
Security also used to be seriously inadequate at Russia’s other depots, where about 28,000 tons of munitions filled with deadly blister and nerve agents were stored aboveground in decrepit warehouses with rusty perimeter fences. These weapons could be a bonanza for terrorists or criminal gangs.
Moscow says these problems have been corrected — but it hasn’t let any Westerners in to verify that claim.
Helping Russia eliminate its vast chemical weapons stockpile is critical for U.S. homeland security and counterterrorism, yet Washington’s commitment to the effort appears to be winding down, even though the job isn’t done. Congress should spend more to fund security upgrades at Russia’s vulnerable chemical weapons depots and at a nerve agent destruction facility in Kizner.
Viewers of the U.S. television show can rest assured that by the end of the series, Bauer likely will save Los Angeles from a devastating chemical attack. In real life, however, the best way to make sure it doesn’t happen is to lock up Russia’s chemical weapons stockpiles and destroy them as quickly and safely as possible.

Paul F. Walker follows Russian environmental and security threats at Global Green USA. Jonathan B. Tucker is a senior fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies and the author of “War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaida.” They contributed this comment to the Los Angeles Times.

TITLE: No Place for a Future President
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: Several months have passed since former presidential chief of staff Dmitry Medvedev was picked to head up the government’s new national projects program.  At the time the move was widely interpreted as an attempt by President Vladimir Putin to groom a possible successor.
Just what these national projects are remains something of a mystery. The most you can say is that the national projects program is what Medvedev was put in charge of, and that Medvedev is the one in charge of the national projects program.
The government announced that $4.6 billion has been allocated to fund projects in the areas of health care, education, housing and agriculture. We rarely get wind of anything more specific, however, and what we do hear is less than encouraging: in education, $250 million to build a new business school in St. Petersburg; in agriculture, a proposal to increase the charter capital of Rosselkhozbank.
What they don’t tell us is why the government should be spending taxpayer rubles — much less such an outrageous sum — to build a business school, when such schools are generally both private and highly profitable.
When Medvedev was named first deputy prime minister, the relevant government web sites contained little information about the national projects program, but a whole lot of Putin’s speeches and broad statements about the need to improve health care and education.
Lately they have added Medvedev’s complaints about the bureaucracy, which is preventing him from moving forward with his top-priority projects. And then on March 29, Medvedev met with major players in the banking industry and hit them up for loans to fund national projects in housing and agriculture.
I may not know what a national project is, but I know it doesn’t involve securing loans from private banks.
Someone seems to have misinformed Medvedev. He’s been in charge of the national projects program for several months already, and he still doesn’t understand that the program is designed to soak up money from the budget. He apparently believes that the program allows the state to tell banks how to invest their money.
The hoopla surrounding national projects was meant to replace the government’s previous mantra about doubling GDP in 10 years. But no matter how much the Kremlin wanted to do something nice for the voters in the run-up to the elections in 2007 and 2008, this is structurally impossible. Government officials believe that the wealth of the country belongs to them, including the cash in your wallet. Therefore it’s ridiculous to assume that they will put the extra money in the budget allocated for national projects to use for the good of the people. 
In part the national projects program calls for raising wages, but this doesn’t really require the attention of a first deputy prime minister. The rest of the money will be divided up by the bureaucrats, and will never be spent on projects to improve the lives of average Russians. 
Medvedev’s fate was sealed when he took this job, but not because Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, who learned of Medvedev’s appointment just 40 minutes before the Cabinet meeting at which it was announced, lost his cool and apparently blurted out before numerous witnesses something to the effect of, “We’ll stick him with all the social programs, and he’ll be out in six months.” Medvedev’s fate was sealed because of the basic economic rule of the current regime: If there’s money up for grabs in the budget, someone’s going to grab it.
For this reason the post of first deputy prime minister in charge of national projects is no place for a future president. This post is only good for eliminating a potential successor. Whether this was the planned outcome or not is hard to say. 
In any case, the members of Putin’s inner circle will be able to come to the president in early 2008 and say: “Comrade President, you did your level best to groom a successor, but things didn’t work out. One made a mess of military reform, and the other couldn’t make a go of the national projects program. You’re the only man for the job.” 

Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy.

TITLE: Electric pioneer
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Yury Mukhin, the first electric guitar player in the Soviet Union, once rubbed shoulders with the nation’s elite. Then he fell into obscurity — until a sudden change of fortune last year.
He was more into melodies and musicianship than the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, which is probably why Yury Mukhin is still around to talk about being the Soviet Union’s first electric guitarist, charming his KGB minders and sleeping on the balcony of cosmonaut Yury Gagarin.
Now retired, the 72-year-old musician earns a meager income by teaching children to play the guitar. Last year, however, he was contacted out of the blue by the venerable record company Melodiya. They had found his archived recordings and wanted to release an album — his first ever on compact disc. 
Rather than going for the granny market, Melodiya put out the album together with the cutting-edge Lyogkiye label. Unexpectedly, the guitarist found his gentle, virtuoso instrumentals reviewed in Rolling Stone. Now, Melodiya wants to release a second album, this time with new recordings by Mukhin.
The guitarist braved a snowstorm to turn up for an interview at Lyogkiye’s Moscow office, where he got out his pipe to pose for photographs, grumbling about fire regulations. He held it in his hands as he recounted anecdotes from his eventful life in a resonant baritone voice.
It all began with a phone booth. As a teenager in the 1940s, Mukhin bought an acoustic guitar, and some of his friends, who were engineers, offered to make it into an electric one. The only problem was that they needed a special kind of magnet, only to be found in public telephones. “Well, I took apart a telephone, and they made the guitar,” he recalled. “Then they perfected it and perfected it.”
Nevertheless, that first instrument, pictured in the liner notes of his new album, had a “disgusting” sound, Mukhin said. He used to travel 60 kilometers outside Moscow to play it and sing at an outdoor dance floor called Voronok, located beside the railroad tracks. Since public dance floors were banned in the capital, the joint was jumping. “All of Moscow was there,” he remembered.
Strictly speaking, Mukhin is an engineer, specializing in hydraulics. That’s what he studied at a Moscow institute, graduating with top marks. He was immediately assigned to work in Kazakhstan, but managed to wriggle his way out of it. 
“Having a head on my shoulders, I didn’t take the money issued by the state for my tickets,” he said. “I didn’t sign anything, but I did go there, and when I came back, they had no claims on me.”
The guitarist got his first professional job with a Moscow jazz orchestra, and he took part in the 1957 International Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow, backing the singer Maya Kristalinskaya. As for many Muscovites, the festival was a life-changing experience for Mukhin, giving him the chance to hear jazz played by American bands and, most importantly, to acquire his first real electric guitar, a Framus.
The members of an American guitar and saxophone band, whose name Mukhin has forgotten, started talking to the Soviet musician, and eventually offered to let him have a guitar and amplifier at the end of the festival — for $1,000. That was approximately 5,000 rubles, he recollected. By comparison, a Volga car cost about 4,500 rubles.
Luckily, Mukhin said, he had saved the money from his Voronok gigs and by “not eating.” The remaining problem was how to exchange rubles into dollars — an illegal operation — and get in and out of the Metropol hotel to collect the guitar. “God spared me, because they could have put me in prison, and that would have been it.”
Soon afterward, Mukhin quit his orchestra job and began accompanying top singers such as Mark Bernes and Kapitalina Lazarenko. He also made his first recording, of a piece he had composed called “First Steps.” It was accompanied by an early music video, which showed him playing the piece’s four different guitar tracks at the same time, a bit like the video for Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but with only one person. It was shown on television only once or twice, Mukhin said with regret. He doubts that the film has survived.
After Yury Gagarin returned from his successful space flight in 1961, Mukhin took part in a closed concert at the Kremlin with an audience of just Gagarin, Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet leader’s daughter and son-in-law. The musician became friendly with Gagarin and met the other early cosmonauts, even attending the wedding of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.
One night, after a concert at the Star City cosmonaut training center, Mukhin and an accordion player ended up at Gagarin’s apartment. “We sat and drank and so on, and then it was 3 a.m. He said, ‘Where could you go? Stay and sleep at my place.’ But where? He had a one-room flat and a wife, and it was winter.”
Gagarin came up with an unusual solution. “He said, ‘I’ll make you beds on the balcony.’ There was lots of snow. He gave us two sleeping bags and covered us up.” Both musicians were “alive and well” in the morning, Mukhin said.
In order to tour abroad with singers such as Iosif Kobzon, now a State Duma deputy, Mukhin had to take a course in Marxism-Leninism, but he never became a member of the Communist Party. Like all musicians, he was accompanied on tour by KGB officials whose job was to check on his movements. 
While on tour in Paris with a group of musicians and dancers, Mukhin found that he could placate the delegation’s 10 KGB chaperones and get permission to walk freely around the city by singing the blatniye pesni, or criminal underworld songs, that they loved. “They started saying to me, ‘Come here, here’s a bottle of vodka, sing ‘Murka,’” he said, referring to a popular song about a female thief. “So I didn’t have any problems.”
Mukhin was never a stilyaga, one of the Soviet hipsters who regularly got beaten up by police and Komsomol brigades, he said. “Everything was rational, everything came second to the music.” And his music wasn’t the raucous kind, he said. “It was mainstream, real music. I only did that kind.”
While Mukhin praises Jimi Hendrix — “he is still the best of them all” — he doesn’t have much time for the Beatles. “I will speak honestly,” he said. “I am a guitarist, and they do not know how to play the guitar.” His greatest heroes are American jazz guitarists such as Les Paul, Wes Montgomery and George Benson.
If Mukhin had a vice, it was women, he admitted. When he was on tour with Kobzon, he would be away from his home and his wife for eight months of the year. “When you come home, everything is fine with you together, but when you go away...” he said, trailing off. “Life was like that for approximately 20 years.”
While the new album is the guitarist’s first CD release, he made some recordings for Melodiya in the 1960s, including an album of gypsy songs. This never saw the light of day, however, due to an ideological purge linked to the 1970 centenary of Vladimir Lenin’s birth.
Some of those tracks are on the new album, which was released last October with the broken English title of “Yuri Muhin: The First Electroguitar in USSR.” Melodiya, the successor to the Soviet-era recording monopoly, hopes to find more of Mukhin’s recordings for another album, the company’s chief editor, Andrei Troshin, said Monday. “We want to do a second album with Yury Nikolayevich, to gather more of his surviving recordings from the 1950s and ’60s, and to ask him to write new ones.” The guitarist is “in good form,” Troshin said, adding that he hopes the next album will come out this year.
But Troshin was pessimistic about the appeal of old-style music. “There isn’t wide demand for that kind of culture, due to its rather high quality,” he said drily. 
For Mukhin, who earns 2,000 rubles ($70) per month teaching children to play the guitar at a music club, the new wave of interest gives him hope that he might achieve one dream: gaining the official state title of Honored Artist. “They wanted to do it in their time, then somehow it didn’t work out,” he said. “I have thought that maybe this album will play some kind of role.” 

“Yuri Muhin: The First Electroguitar in USSR” is released by Melodiya/Lyogkiye.

TITLE: Global view
AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: An outdoor exhibition, “Geography,” running through May 3, on the wall of the Twelve Collegia Building and at the winter garden gallery of the St. Petersburg State University chemistry faculty presents paintings by Leonid Yatsenko. 
The show is running in association with the Youth Summit 2006: Forming Global Responsibility, an event held this weekend ahead of the G8 heads of government summit that takes place in St. Petersburg in the beginning of July.
Among the pictures on display are laminated replicas of Yatsenko’s World Maps series of paintings. Yatsenko is an icon painter who combines icons and church painting with the creation of artisticly rendered maps.
As for Yatsenko, everybody’s cognition is determined by the geographical landscapes of the countries they live in. “Being confident of world unity and continuity, I assumed that if you look at a country’s geographical outlines, the territory occupied by the people of one disposition, culture and myth, it would be possible to see a collective image corresponding to the very essence of that people,” Yatsenko said. 
The exhibition opens with a painting of Pangea, the name given to the the supercontinent that consequently broke apart and formed today’s continents. Within its outline Yatsenko depicts Pangea as a girl. 
The different images of humans and animals correspond with each other and combine in a world map where “not the political but the general world mental image is personified,” Yatsenko said.
In the variety of the countries despicted there is the familiar Italian boot, the African continent painted as a skull with a diamond tooth indicating a diamond-field, an elephant’s head for the Indian subcontinent, the British Isles shown as an old lady in a red dress and Iraq painted as the Earth’s heart.
Apart from the world maps which Yatsenko will later to combine into one geographical atlas or a calendar, he has started working on a series of city maps with a picture of a tired soldier symbolizing St. Petersburg. Yatsenko said that he wants to create maps of Moscow, New York, London and Paris.
Although Yatsenko’s paintings have a global theme, he said that he belongs neither to the globalisation nor the anti-globalisation movement. 
“I tried to show in my paintings that the mosaic of the world can consist of totally different parts but, be integral as a whole,” he said.

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
TEXT: Chumbawamba performed in St. Petersburg last week after last year’s no-show, turning up with something that local music fans have rarely experience — a minimum of instruments (guitar, accordion and sparsely used trumpet) and five voices, the good half of the concert being a cappella.
The British agit-pop band, which  opened the gig with “Timebomb,” used the show to praise antiglobalism (“Bella Ciao”) as well as to criticize Margaret Thatcher (“a very bad woman”) and Queen Elizabeth II, expressing their views on her in the reworked Beatles song “Her Majesty” (“She’s pretty much obsolete”), but keeping the packed Platforma club (estimated 350 fans) attentive and listening during the whole show. 
When introducing the anti-church song “Walking into Battle with the Lord,” a member of the audience asked “What church?” and singer/ guitarist Boff Whalley promptly replied, “St. Peter Kropotkin Church,” referring to the early 20th century anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin, and at another occasion introduced bassist Neil Ferguson as “Mikhail Bakunin,” another famous Russian anarchist.
Local promoter Planeta Plus revealed details about the forthcoming concert by The Rolling Stones in St. Petersburg. Scheduled to be held at Kirov Stadium on June 13, the show is the veteran band’s only stop in Russia on its A Bigger Bang World Tour.
Meanwhile, the Stones arrived in Shanghai for their first ever concert in China. As the San Francisco Chronicle revealed, the famous band found itself the subject of Chinese censorship, as the Ministry of Culture reportedly is forbidding the Stones from playing “Brown Sugar,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and “Beast of Burden.” 
The newspaper wrote that the Chinese Ministry of Culture now has a regimented approval process for acts that want to play China, citing Jonathan Krane, CEO of Emma Entertainment, the company promoting the Stones’ Shanghai show. 
Krane explained to the Chronicle that promoters submit biographies and photos of the performers along with a proposed set list and full lyrics. About six weeks later government officials approve or nix content. 
The Chinese Ministry of Culture appears to take The Rolling Stones seriously, but Oasis’ Noel Gallagher certainly does not.
“Well, you’re old age pensioners,” Gallagher was quoted as saying to Maxim magazine. “By all means make records and go on tour, because if people want to see you, fine, but don’t expect to be taken seriously. Your best work is behind you.”
This week’s club entertainment includes the Polish folk ensemble Warsaw Village Band, or Kapela ze wsi Warszawa, performing on Sunday, a New York grouping called  Gary Lucas and Gods & Monsters featuring former and current members of Talking Heads, Modern Lovers and Televizion, on Wednesday and New York songstress Nina Nastasia (see interview, page iii) on Thursday. All at Platforma.

TITLE: Le jazz hot
AUTHOR: By Yelena Andreyeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A concert by French jazz musicians takes place at the Music Hall on Sunday as part of the second “Le Jazz” program of concerts to be held in Russia. 
Headlining the program is accordionist Richard Galliano and his Tangaria Quartet. The group’s performances combine French chanson with swing, tango, and African-American music with renderings of ballads by Bill Evans, improvisations by Keith Jarett, and classical pieces by Clause Debussy and Maurice Ravel. 
St. Petersburg is the final stop in a series of concerts that began in Khanty-Mansisk on Wednesday and continued in Moscow with two further concerts. 
Supported by ArtMania and the French Embassy in Russia, the concert program, by tradition, presents improvised jazz combining different national rhythms and musical styles as well as typically French tunes.
Also appearing is Jean-Michel Pilc, a contemporary jazz pianist, of whom the Chicago Tribune wrote that he is “among today’s titans of the instrument.” 
The Belmondo Quintet, with brothers Stephan Belmondo on trumpet and Lionel Belmondo on saxophone, play contemporary jazz to critical success. 
Completing the quintet is Bojan Z, named a Chevalier of Arts and Letters of the French Legion of Honor, and saxophonist Julien Lourau. The teamwork between jazz master Bojan Z and Lourau, “one of the most promising names of the modern improvisatory European music” according to critics, is a part of the quintet’s appeal.
Vocalist Elizabeth Kontomanou, the only woman in the program, is a queen of scat singing who is said to make the audience cry even when she is singing the words from a phone directory.

TITLE: Mixing it up
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Experimental singer and songwriter Nina Nastasia on tour in St. Petersburg
Nina Nastasia, an interesting New York-based singer and songwriter who puts her unusual, strangely mesmerizing songs into sometimes bold experimental arrangements, was one of the favorite artists of the late British DJ and music guru John Peel in the last several years. 
Peel, who was reputed for his ear for good, off-beat, innovative music, used the word “astonishing” to describe her sound. Living in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, Nina grew up in Los Angeles and moved to New York after living for a year in Seattle.
She did not start performing until 1990, when she was already living in New York. After stints at various underground venues in New York she recorded “Dogs,” her debut record, there in 1999.
“I actually don’t think about it,” said Nina about her songwriting by phone from her home in New York this week.
“A lot of stuff is kind of made up, and other things are definitely things I experienced one way or another. I can also pick those subjects and make things up around something I understand.”
Sound engineer/musician Steve Albini, legendary for his production work with Nirvana, the Pixies and PG Harvey, among many others, recorded Nina’s debut effort. Nina and her partner/manager Kennan Gudjonsson established a tiny record label called Socialist Records to release a limited number of copies of “Dogs” that quickly sold out.
Peel discovered Nina, when Albini sent him a copy of “Dogs,” and he put songs from it into heavy rotation on his show.
Between 2002 and 2004 Nina did five “John Peel sessions” including three at Peel Acres, his home outside of London — a considerable privilege for any contemporary musician.
“Oh, it was really one of the best experiences I’ve had in music, absolutely,” said Nina.
“He did sessions at his house, Peel Acres, and it was a really great atmosphere each day. Sheila, his wife, cooked dinner and we drank a lot of wine and ate dinner, and then after we got drunk, we did the session in his, like, den at his house. It was just incredibly relaxed. They are  just good people, it was really fun to hang out with them. It was a lot of fun.”
Last year Nina contributed a song called “Bird of Cuzco” to “John Peel: A Tribute,” a two-CD collection of the influential DJ’s favorite songs released to commemorate the first anniversary of his death.
Albini also produced the follow-up albums, “The Blackened Air” in 2001 and “Run to Ruin” in 2003, both on Touch & Go Records. Touch & Go re-released “Dogs” in 2004. Nina is now signed to FatCat for her next two records, which have already been recorded with Albini.
Nina seems to like intricate, avant-garde arrangements, with a stress on strings, and is open to experimentation such as including two throat singers/igil players from the Tuvan band Huun-Huur-Tu in her touring band in 2004. 
“Two of the members of Huun-Huur-Tu played at some shows,” she said. 
“We did a U.K. tour, we had a lot of fun. Yeah, it was good. It kind of came together really quickly. Well, I think it would have been great to have a little more time to really develop it, but it was fun.” Although her songs stand up when performed with just her voice and a guitar, Nina said she likes to have many musicians with her on stage.
“Performing, I like to have a lot of instruments, it’s a lot of fun, all those instruments,” she said.
“I don’t know, it takes a lot of responsibility [laughs] on stage the more people I have with me. But I really love to record. It’s my favorite thing in the whole process.”
In Russia, Nina will be backed by drummer Jim White of Dirty Three and viola player Dylan Willemsa, who have both played on her records.
“I kind of mix it up a little bit,” she said. “I use different instruments sometimes, I use different people, but there’s a kind of core group of people that I use again and again, so it’s a funny thing in a way, it’s like having a band and in another way just sort of... just depends on instrumentation, how many people I use each time.”
Nina hesitates when asked about her musical influences or tastes. 
“I don’t know. I don’t really collect music… or rarely even go out to hear music that much. I mean I do have friends that are in bands and stuff, certain ones I see every now and again. I am not a real music collector, like kind on top of the scene. I listen to all different kinds of music but a lot of it has to do with what been played next to me.”
After the St. Petersburg concert Nina goes to Moscow where she will perform three shows between April 14 and 19. Her brief tour is part of the musical program of the Golden Mask theater festival that also includes performances by Poland’s Warsaw Village Band (Sunday) and the U.S. band Gary Lucas and Gods & Monsters (Wednesday), all at Platforma.

Nina Nastasia performs at Platforma on Thursday. www.socialistrecords.com

TITLE: Remembrance of things past
AUTHOR: By Gillian Slovo
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The latest in a slew of novels written by women in English about the Siege of Leningrad, Debra Dean’s debut is a lyrical account of a Siege survivor and her later battle with Alzheimer’s Disease set in the Hermitage during World War II and modern-day Seattle.
The onset of the new millennium inevitably prompted a new urgency to the examination of the 20th century and the events that marked it, most notably the two world wars. As the last generation to have survived the worst excesses of World War II begins to die out, there has been revived interest in nonfiction accounts of that terrible period of history, and, in particular, of the Holocaust. This is a trend that has also been carried into fiction, the changing of the centuries spurring English-speaking novelists to seek inspiration in the events of the century just gone, and, in particular, its most dramatic (and inevitably traumatic) events. 
The Siege of Leningrad, with its heroism, sacrifices, loss of life and dramatic survivals, has become one such focus. The siege, and the events that surrounded it, have so far prompted in the English language Paullina Simons’ “The Bronze Horseman,” Helen Dunmore’s “The Siege,” my own “Ice Road” and now Debra Dean’s “The Madonnas of Leningrad.” Interesting that it seems to be women novelists who are so drawn to writing inside a siege. While, for example, the two Sebastians — Barry and Faulks — set their war novels in the trenches, us women have used the city of Leningrad as our trench: a way, perhaps, of exploring fictional issues of war and its effects without having to resort to the more macho world of arms. 
“The Madonnas of Leningrad” is a short, sweet story of memory and survival. Its protagonist, Marina Anatolyevna, is the daughter of two purged and disappeared parents who was brought up by a dutiful, rather than loving uncle, the apparatchik Viktor Alekseyevich. A guide at the Hermitage in the 1930s, Marina finds herself, like millions of others, trapped in Leningrad by the German encirclement. At war’s end, she happens (in a manner never entirely satisfactorily explained) upon her fiance, who is father to her siege-born son, and the family ends up (again without much explanation) in Seattle. There a new life is established, and a daughter, Helen, also born to the couple. The novel follows Marina into old age as she sinks slowly into an Alzheimer’s delirium so profound that she no longer recognizes Helen. Thus is the scene set for a narrative that dances around the melding of memory and reality, of lived events and of an imagination so vivid it can almost survive forgetting. 
Two time periods frame the action of the book. In the first we are with Marina as she battles for survival in the Hermitage cellars, initially helping to pack up Russia’s treasures for safe storage, and, after that, devoting herself to the remembrance of images, and, in particular, of the Madonnas that once adorned the gallery walls. In the second time period, the reader travels with Marina into the confusion of her waning mind as she is taken by her devoted husband, Dmitry, and the unrecognized Helen to the wedding of a granddaughter. 
Inside Marina’s psyche we are led on a journey into a life where memory, which had once actually helped sustain life, is beginning to replace reality. The ellipses, the sudden slips from one time period to the next, the “disappearing for a few moments at a time, like a switch being turned off” have been skillfully crafted by Dean so that the path we most elegantly travel is less about Leningrad’s past than about what it is to slip into Alzheimer’s. The best of Dean’s writing resides in the simplicity of her language and in her ability to evoke images. She has set herself quite a challenge. Marina is determined to build a memory palace — keeping the disappeared works alive by conjuring them up in her mind. For this to be believable, the writer must perform the same trick on her reader, and Dean succeeds, in the main, when describing paintings as diverse as Fragonard’s “Stolen Kiss” or Rembrandt’s “Danae.” The details, too, of the impact of starvation on the human body, and of the heroism of young women who crawl alone into bomb craters to defuse German-dropped delayed explosives — “Judiths going into single combat” — speak legions about the siege. 
Where the book rings less true is in its portrayal of a journey that was meant to be rooted in real history. Although the picture of the Hermitage, first in all its grandeur and then as it endures the impact of wartime destruction, is beautifully rendered, I was not as convinced by some of the character arcs of those trapped under the Hermitage’s failing roof. The dutiful but desiccated Uncle Viktor, “a man who believes that there is always a single truth, which can be arrived at by reason, and when one arrives, he will be there waiting,” and who continues to write his mind-numbing history of the lost civilization of Urartu almost up to the point of his death, is convincingly evoked. But the babushka Anya, the originator of the idea of the memory palace, who somewhat mysteriously survives the siege, seems less a real person than a mythical old Russian peasant whose task in the book is to help out our doubtful heroine. In the same way, the young Marina vacillates between the naive girl who believes the Stalinist propaganda of a war that will last only two weeks, and a more skeptical woman whose thoughts about how her country is being run sound more like the repository of an authorial voice, or a history lesson, than the character she is meant to be. The challenge of situating a novel inside a real history is to not let hindsight of history’s outcome run too thoroughly through the book’s veins; in this Dean is not always completely successful. 
As for the American family, I was intrigued by the character of the daughter, Helen, and by the huge gulfs in her understanding. She doesn’t know, in the beginning, that her mother has Alzheimer’s — something that is credibly and subtly portrayed. What is less easy to believe is how little she knows about her mother’s past and about the historical past. Hearing her mother talking about Uncle Viktor, she asks: “Why would a famous archaeologist live in a cellar?” as if she has never heard of the siege. And it’s not only she who is so ignorant. Her sister-in-law, when hearing later in the book about the cellar, says: “I don’t know how much credence you want to give to everything [Marina] says,” as if her husband, Marina’s son, hadn’t himself been born during the siege. What I suspect the reader is experiencing at this point is not so much the trajectory of real Russian characters, but an ignorance of world events that seems to be rooted in the American suburb. It’s unclear to me whether this same ignorance is shared by Dean or whether she is instead trying to explore the possibility that post-World War II newcomers like Marina chose, as many Holocaust survivors did, to forget their pasts. If this was part of her project, she should perhaps have spent a little more time examining such a phenomenon. 
That said, Dean has produced a lyrical, readable book and a central character whose descent into the twilight world of uncertainty and the shifting sands of time that might characterize Alzheimer’s is all too believable. 

Gillian Slovo’s latest novel is “Ice Road.” She is also co-author of the play “Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom,” which was staged in Chicago last month.

TITLE: $100 Million Pledged to Clean Up L.A.’s Skid Row
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LOS ANGELES, California  — A controversial plan to clean up downtown’s Skid Row by building a network of regional homeless shelters in the suburbs has won county approval. 
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 on Tuesday in favor of the $100 million plan, which parallels a push by city and state officials to tackle crime and blight in the downtown district.
Skid Row has for decades had one of the nation’s largest concentrations of homeless people, in part because it has a cluster of shelters and services to help them. Hospitals and law enforcement have recently come under fire for dumping the homeless in the area.
Under the new plan, one “regional stabilization center” would be built in each of the county’s five supervisorial districts at sites yet to be named. The centers would be 24-hour drop-off points where hospitals, police and care providers could leave people in need of housing.
Each facility would offer at least 30 short-term beds and would try to find long-term housing for the people it serves. A dedicated center for homeless families would be built downtown.
About $80 million would also be placed in a trust fund to help build emergency and permanent housing and to provide rent subsidies.
“This plan allows us to go after the most vulnerable in our homeless population — kids,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. “It drives me nuts to think that young children will be sleeping on the streets of L.A. tonight.”
Nearly 90,000 people — including 10,000 children — are homeless in the county on any given night, according to estimates by the city-county Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
“I am so excited when I hear you doing this,” said Jeff Davis of Eagle Rock who said he homeless until recently. “It’s about shifting people’s paradigm and having them think they’re valuable when they don’t think that they are valuable.”

TITLE: Nepal Rocked by Strikes, Maoist Guerrilla Attacks
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: KATHMANDU, Nepal — A fierce attack on a town by Maoist guerrillas left 22 people dead in Nepal, hours before a general strike against the king’s grip on power shut down the Himalayan nation on Thursday, authorities said.
The leftist rebels, who have been fighting for the last decade to topple the monarchy, struck Malangwa, a town 350 kilometers southeast of Kathmandu, late on Wednesday.
They fired at soldiers guarding government offices and security posts and attacked a jail, freeing more than 100 inmates — among them some of their comrades — before fleeing.
Six policemen, six guerrillas and two civilians were killed in the fighting, police said.
“The body of a Maoist in combat dress is lying in front of my house,” Yadav Subedi, a Malangwa resident, told Reuters by phone.
Some policemen and senior bureaucrats were missing after the fighting, Subedi and local journalist Rajesh Mishra said.
A Russian-built Mi-17 army helicopter sent to the area with troops crashed near Malangwa, killing eight of the 10 soldiers on board, an army officer said. The other two men were missing.
The Maoists, making their first such claim, said rebels had shot down the helicopter but the army said the cause was being investigated.
“I saw the helicopter broken into three pieces in a field. Many government buildings are on fire or are smouldering. Unexploded bombs are strewn around,” Mishra said.
“People are terror-struck. No one has come out.”
News of the raid came as a four-day nationwide strike called by opponents of King Gyanendra shut the Hindu kingdom down.
Nepal’s seven main political parties, which called the strike, have vowed to defy a government ban on protests to launch what they expect to be a decisive campaign for democracy.
Although the guerrillas, who are fighting to establish a communist state, are supporting the political groups as part of a pact against the king, they are not participating in the protests and the rallies are expected to be largely peaceful.
Roads across the country of 26 million people were deserted as the strike began. 
Businesses and schools were shut despite the government’s call on people not to heed the strike call.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Hamas Official Freed
GAZA (Reuters) — Israeli security forces took a member of the new Hamas-led Palestinian cabinet into custody on Thursday at a roadblock on the outskirts of Jerusalem and released him five hours later. 
The Israeli army said Khaled Abu Arafa was detained because he is barred from the area. The incident was another sign of Israel’s tough line toward the Islamic militant group dedicated to its destruction. 
“The Hamas minister was detained at about 9 a.m. He was not questioned at any point and was released at 2 p.m.,” an army spokesman said.

Policeman Kills 8
KAGISO, South Africa (Reuters) — A South African detective shot dead eight people including four fellow officers and a one-year-old baby before police killed him, a spokeswoman for the force said on Tuesday.
The killing spree in Kagiso township west of Johannesburg was shocking even by the standards of South Africa, which has one of the world’s highest rates of violent crime.
“We are still trying to establish a motive,” said police spokeswoman Mary Martins-Engelbrecht.
She said the detective killed three women and the infant baby on Monday night. He then went to his police station in Kagiso where he pumped bullets into four of his colleagues.

Believers Live Longer
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A new study finds people who attend religious services weekly live longer, LiveScience.com reports.
“Religious attendance is not a mode of medical therapy,” said study leader Daniel Hall, a resident in general surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “While this study was not intended for use in clinical decision making, these findings tell us that there is something to examine further.”
Hall is also an Episcopal priest.
“The significance of this finding may prove to be controversial,” he said. “But at the very least, it shows that further research into the associations between religion and health might have implications for medical practice.”

Saudi Sex Changes
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) — Tired of playing second fiddle to men in conservative Saudi Arabia, five women decided if you can’t beat them, join them. 
Al Watan newspaper said the five women underwent sex change surgery abroad over the past 12 months after they developed a “psychological complex” due to male domination.
Women in Saudi Arabia, which adheres to an austere interpretation of Islam, are not allowed to drive or even go to public places unaccompanied by a male relative.

HIV Soldiers On Hold
KAMPALA, Uganda (Reuters) — The Ugandan army will halt training for HIV-positive soldiers for fear it could worsen their condition, a military spokesman said on Tuesday.
“We do not want to put any more stress on our brothers who are already suffering. This move was made out of our concern for their health,” Major Felix Kulayigye told Reuters.
The east African country has been praised for running the continent’s most successful fight against the disease, cutting infection rates to around six percent today from more than 30 percent in its worst affected districts in the 1990s.

TITLE: Arsenal Cool in Defence, Advance to Semis
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: TURIN, Italy — Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger praised the way his team controlled their goalless Champions League quarterfinal second-leg against Juventus on Wednesday to book their first semi-final appearance. 
“I felt that overall we controlled the game well and as long as Juventus didn’t score the game was not on for us,” said the Frenchman, whose team face Spain’s Villarreal in the last four. 
Arsenal’s young defence produced a record eighth successive clean-sheet in the competition. 
“I wanted us to come out at them but I think it was in our subconscious to protect our lead,” added Wenger. 
“There were turning points — when they hadn’t scored after 15 minutes and then after half an hour but the big turning point came when [Pavel] Nedved was sent off — then the game was over.” 
Nedved was dismissed in the 77th minute for a second yellow card leaving Juventus down to 10 men at a stage in the game when they might have raised a late rally. 
Fabio Capello’s Juve showed surprisingly little ambition or creativity going forward and Wenger said that his side’s impressive attacking play in the first leg may have frightened the Italian champions. 
“I think that was a hangover from the first game. They went for the long ball and we were quite comfortable with that and dealt with it well. 
“We knew that on the second ball the penetration from Nedved could hurt us but we controlled that well,” he said. 
Wenger noted that Arsenal had finally broken through into the last four of Europe’s elite club competition in a season when few had fancied their chances. 
“I am very happy for the club, every year we were expected to do something in the Champions League and we weren’t able to. This year no-one expected it from us and we are there in the semi-final,” he said, adding that the absence of real pressure from a title challenge in England may have helped. 
Asked whether he thought that the victory of his team, which did not include a single English player in their starting line-up, could be considered a victory for English football, Wenger said: “It is difficult to say it is a victory for English football. It is a victory for a team who like to play football. I feel I represent English football.”

TITLE: NY Mets Go Back to the Future With Nostalgic Ballpark Plans
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK, New York — New York Mets officials stirred up the past on Thursday when they unveiled a stadium design reminiscent of Ebbets Field, the storied home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. 
One day after the city council approved several key aspects of an $800 million stadium for the Yankees, Governor George Pataki, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Mets owner Fred Wilpon announced plans at Shea Stadium for a new Mets home to be built in the parking lot of the existing ballpark. 
Wilpon, a Brooklyn native, has long desired a new home for his team that evokes memories of the glory days of the Dodgers, who moved to Los Angeles in 1958. Eight years ago, Wilpon unveiled a design for an Ebbets Field-type ballpark for the Mets, but it wasn’t until last summer that city officials and the team agreed on a plan to replace Shea Stadium. 
“This is a historic and rather emotional occasion,” Wilpon said as he recalled visiting Ebbets Field with his father as a young boy. He said predicted the new facility would be a “world class ballpark that, through its unique design, links the past and the future.” 
Although the planned stadium still requires regulatory approval, Mets officials hope to put their team on a new field by 2009 — the same year the Yankees expect to be in a new home in the Bronx. 
The new ballpark in Queens will have a capacity of 45,000, down from the current 57,333. The seats will be a little wider and provide more leg room. Also, there will be more luxury suites, rest rooms and restaurants.

TITLE: Golf Heavyweights Gather to Contest ’06 U.S. Masters at Augusta National
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: AUGUSTA, Georgia — One by one, players trudged up the hill leading to the clubhouse at Augusta National, then paused and gazed back at a course that by now they should know all too well. But this Masters seems to contain more mystery than ever. 
Part of that is the sheer length. The tees were pushed back on six holes, stretching the course to 7,445 yards, the second-longest course in major championship history behind Whistling Straits (7,514 yards) two years ago at the PGA Championship. 
The par-3 fourth hole now is 240 yards, requiring most players to hit fairway metal, and some players to hit a driver. The par-4 11th is 505 yards, with trees to the right of the landing area and a pond to the left of the green ready to swallow up any mistake.
Masters chairman Hootie Johnson vigorously defended the changes Wednesday, especially at No. 11, pointing out that Bobby Jones intended the second shot to be played with a 3-iron or more.
“He [Jones] probably was hitting into a green that ran at 2 on the Stimpmeter,” said Retief Goosen. “The condition of the greens now are different than they were in the 1900s. You hit a 3-iron on the front of that green, it rolls off into the water.”
And then there’s the weather.
Azaleas and dogwoods are blazing even brighter under a warm sun. The tightly mown grass beneath the feet is firm, not slippery. 
Not since 2001 has the Masters been contested over four days in relatively dry, fast conditions. That’s a significant date, because serious expansion at Augusta National didn’t start until the next year.
“We haven’t really played many Masters with dry conditions yet,” Ernie Els said. “We might find out this week.”
The final day of practice revealed some potential problems, with wedge shots bouncing hard off the green, then crawling endlessly until they were off the putting surface. And it doesn’t take much to make a mistake around here.