SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1260 (26), Friday, April 6, 2007
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TITLE: Survey: Torture Unchecked In Russia
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: One in five residents of St. Petersburg say they have been tortured or physically abused by the police or other law enforcement officers at least once in their lives, a new survey has revealed. 
The troubling statistic emerged in a new report by a group of experts from the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Committee Against Torture, a non-governmental organization based in Nizhny Novgorod with branches in six regions of Russia including Chechnya.
The report, which aimed to establish the scale and range of torture used by Russia’s law enforcement authorities, was presented to local media on Monday in the St. Petersburg headquarters of Memorial, a human rights group.
Researchers questioned more than 5,500 people in six regions of Russia, including St. Petersburg, Pskov, Nizhny Novgorod, Chita and the Komi Republic, and interviewed panels of experts in each region. 
Twenty-eight percent of respondents in St. Petersburg said they believe torture is used systematically by the country’s law enforcement agencies, which for the purposes of the survey included the regular police, FSB personel, OMON special forces personel, staff at public prosecutors’ offices, staff at drunk tanks and the traffic police. 
This view is shared by 35.4 percent of repondents in Nizhny Novgorod,  30.9 percent of respondents in Komi Republic, 26.5 percent of respondents in Pskov and 20.8 percent of respondents in Chita.
Between 38 percent and 50 percent of the poll’s participants in the six regions said the problem of torture in Russia gets no coverage at all in the country’s media.
In Chita and Komi researchers also ran the poll among prisoners. 
Thirty-nine percent of prisoners in Komi said they were tortured during pre-trial detention, including 10 percent of respondents who indicated repeated torture. In Chita, 61 percent of inmates reported being tortured. Every fifth respondent reported systematic torture.
Inmates were not asked if they have been tortured in prison to protect them from possible retaliation from prison authorities or other prisoners.
The researchers said they decided against conducting the study in Chechnya.
“Fear rules the republic, and not a single sane respondent would admit to any knowledge of torture going on,” said lawyer Igor Kalyapin, head of the Committee Against Torture. “People are so scared there that an honest answer would bring even more suffering. We are continuing our work in Chechnya — and we are aware of the level of hostilities. This is precisely why we know for a fact it makes no sense to even try to collect credible statistics there.”
Kalyapin said one torture method that had first been tried on Chechen men has now spread to the rest of the country.
“Because of the extreme humiliation this torture involves, there is a zero chance of people reporting it and complaining about it,” he said.
“They undress the man, handcuff him, suspend from the ceiling  and stick a police truncheon in his rectum. They film the process and then threaten to show it around. Very few people are strong enough to take [a complaint about this] to court, which makes it easy for the assailants to escape punishment.”
The range of torture methods that the survey’s authors say is used in Russia includes several common techniques, including running electricity through various body parts, suffocation, suspension, waterboarding, binding, deprivation of water and food, and severe beatings.
Sociologist Valentin Golbert said the survey revealed no typical victim of torture in Russia. 
“People suffer from torture regardless of their age, social class, ethnic origins or professional occupation,” he said. “We have testimonies from children, pensioners, students of physics from the respected Moscow University and even police officers themselves, who have endured torture. Coercion is the main motive behind using physical cruelty, and you are at risk if you are a suspect.” 
One police officer interviewed by the researchers in Nizhny Novgorod on condition of anonymity threw some light on the exessive use of force on suspects.
“Yes, I do beat them,” the officer said. “It would take me about two weeks to solve a crime using the methods they taught me at the police academy, whereas a colleague, who knows nothing about the job would get a confession overnight by beating the hell out of any suspect. And because the bosses demand conviction statistics, no one cares who is  put behind the bars, as long as some semblance of bureaucratic procedure is adhered to.”
Experts said it is essential to stop the practice of demanding statistical targets and introduce new control policies to ensure professional standards and prevent the use of torture methods.
The definition of the word torture in Russia’s Criminal Code is different from the phrasing used by the United Nations Committee Against Torture.
In international law, “torture” means “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for obtaining information or a confession, punishing them for an act they have committed or are suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing them.” 
By contrast, in the Russian penal code torture is merely a form of inflicting pain.
The UN committee has twice advised Russia to amend its law and introduce a definition consistent with the international legal practice as well as incorporate a separate article on the use of torture by law enforcement agencies, but nothing has been changed.
In its report, issued in November 2006, the UN Committee Against Torture urged Russia to amend its legislation and ensure the country conformed to international standards.
The Committee’s experts expressed particular concern about Russia’s “laws and practices obstructing access to lawyers and relatives of suspects” and “the numerous, ongoing and consistent allegations of acts of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment at the hands of law enforcement personnel.”
“The Russian Federation should establish effective and independent oversight mechanisms to ensure prompt, impartial and effective investigations into all allegations, and legal prosecution or punishment of those found guilty,” the report said.
Kalyapin said that even when police officers are investigated in abuse cases, they tend to be brought before the courts on lesser charges. 
“Most officers who get sentenced for carrying out torture, are charged with ‘exceeding professional duties’,” he said.  
The findings of the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Nizhny Novgorod-based Committee Against Torture were released amid growing concern about levels of violence in Russian society. 
Russia has the world’s third highest level of homicides per capita, after Columbia and South Africa, and it suffers from one of the world’s highest suicide rates.
“Brutal hazing in the army, the police use of physical force on opposition protesters, killings of investigative journalists and the high rate of domestic violence are all part of the picture,” said Yakov Gilinsky, a leading crime analyst with the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and head researcher on the new torture survey.

TITLE: Kremlin Installs Kadyrov
AUTHOR: By Musa Sadulayev
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: GUDERMES, Russia — The widely feared strongman Ramzan Kadyrov was inaugurated Thursday as the new president of Chechnya on a blessing from the Kremlin, which has relied on him to stabilize the region after more than a decade of separatist fighting.
Human rights groups allege that security forces under Kadyrov’s control abduct and torture civilians suspected of ties to Chechnya’s separatist rebels. Some suggest he was tied to last year’s murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who had reported extensively on Chechnya’s wars and sufferings. Kadyrov has denied involvement.
Kadyrov, however, is credited with a reconstruction boom that he administered as the region’s prime minister, under which the capital, Grozny, is being transformed from a moonscape of rubble and shattered buildings.
“My main goal is to make Chechnya prosperous and peaceful,” Kadyrov said at the inauguration ceremony.
Kadyrov, 30, is the son of Chechnya’s first pro-Moscow president, Akhmad Kadyrov, who was assassinated in 2004. 
The elder Kadyrov became president in 2003 in a Kremlin-conducted vote aimed at undermining rebels by creating the image of Chechens being allowed a high degree of self-determination.
Kadyrov became acting president in February when Russia’s President Vladimir Putin dismissed his predecessor Alu Alkhanov. The regional parliament quickly sealed the nomination with a near-unanimous vote. Alkhanov was elected, but changes in Russian law called for all regional leaders to be appointed.
The reconstruction program has been at the heart of a Kremlin strategy to crush rebels, but critics say the alleged abuses by Kadyrov’s paramilitary forces and by Russian and Chechen police and soldiers severely undermine attempts to bring order to Chechnya.
Analysts say Putin has entrusted Kadyrov with power in part because he is seen as the only person who can keep large numbers of former rebels under control. Many former rebels now serve in the police and security forces.
But his growing clout is also seen as a risk for the Kremlin, particularly after Putin steps down at the end of his second term next year, because some see his loyalty to Russia as being closely tied to his relationship with Putin.
Two wars over the past dozen years between Russian forces and separatist rebels who increasingly voiced militant Islamic ideology left much of the republic in ruins and its people gripped by fear and resentment. Major offensives died down early this decade, but small clashes continue and rebels attack Russian forces with booby-traps and remote-detonated explosives.

TITLE: Deserters May Have Fled From Hazing
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Three conscripts that were reported missing since Sunday from a military unit stationed near St. Petersburg were found and detained by a military patrol on Wednesday, the army said on Thursday. 
“The military prosecutor’s office has opened a criminal case into their desertion, and the recruits are currently being interrogated by investigators,” Lieutenant General Viktor Ostashko told reporters.
The runaway recruits were seized on Wednesday as they were leaving a local bus not far from Gostilitsy, a village near Lomonosov in the Leningrad Region where their military detachment was based, Interfax reported.
Ostashko said preliminary investigation has not confirmed claims by human rights advocates of hazing in the detachment, but, in the week that the spring draft got underway, Ella Polyakova, head of St. Petersburg-based human rights group Soldiers’ Mothers, said that a list of objects was found in personal belongings of 20-year-old Vasily Sardyko, one of the deserters, was almost certainly connected to extortion by older conscripts. 
“Vasily’s mother found a list of things he owed to and had to get for elder conscripts; there was even a portable computer included,” Polyakova said, adding that the list was passed to the Military Prosecutor’s Office which has launched an investigation into the conscripts’ absense.
The police searched Sardyko’s apartment in St. Petersburg and questioned his mother about his possible whereabouts.
Sardyko and two fellow conscripts have been missing since Sunday.
“We have a reason to believe that it was bullying by elder conscripts that drove Sardyko to flee his detachment,” said Ruslan Linkov, head of Democratic Russia, a human rights organization. “There is evidence of systematic extortion, abuse and humiliation of the conscript.”
Earlier, Pavel Kozyrev, an 18-year-old conscript from the Murmansk region, disappeared from his miliary detachment in Tsarskoye Selo, south of St. Petersburg. Kozyrev was last seen on March 17.
According to estimates by Soldiers’ Mothers, there are more than 40,000 deserters in Russia at any given time. 
New conscripts are often subject to routine abuse by elder conscripts, who force the younger recruits into a year-long system of servitude, forcing them to polish boots and procure food and alcohol, with violent punishments for infractions, real or imagined, against the system which is known as dedovshchina, or the “rule of the grandfathers.” 
The hazing tradition creates a cycle of violence, as recruits who suffered abuse in their first year take revenge on the next generation of conscripts.
Polyakova said hazing patterns are the norm, rather than the exception, in the Russian army. Conscript abuse is a leading cause of desertion, she said. 
“Our office is piled high with desperate letters from recruits, where they tell chilling stories about beatings, humiliation, rape, extortion and being forced to work as free construction workers for friends of officers; it is especially heartbreaking to read about the conscripts contemplating suicide,” Polyakova said. 
“The letters come from all over Russia but the general public only finds out about the brutalities when we manage to make a splash and get a lot of the media interested… Sadly, many people still underestimate the scale of the problem.”
In January and February, the Defense Ministry recorded 21 suicides among conscripts, and rights groups claim hazing is often a factor. 
The Defense Ministry estimates that between 500 to 1,000 recruits die from non-combat-related causes each year. Human rights advocates argue the number is as high as 3,000.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of young men who showed up for the first day of the spring recruitment campaign, which began on Monday, will be the first batch of servicemen to serve 18 months instead of two years. The reduced military service is part of a gradual transition to a one-year service, which begins Jan. 1.
Two-year compulsory military service dates back to a 1967 Soviet law and was later established under Russian law in 1993. 
Several draftees interviewed outside recruitment offices in Moscow on Monday welcomed the reduced stint, but they expressed concern over retribution by resentful older conscripts who are still required to serve two years, The Moscow Times reported.

TITLE: Military Faces Conscript Shortage
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government may soon have to eliminate all exemptions from military service in order to maintain the armed forces at full strength as the number of draft-age men continues to decline, activists said Wednesday.
“2011 will be a bust in terms of conscription,” military affairs journalist Alexander Golts said at the presentation of a report on conscription prepared last year by the interregional Soldiers’ Mothers movement — which is distinct from the Union of Soldiers’ Mothers’ Committees — and 23 other nongovernmental organizations, Interfax reported.
Golts said that in 2011 the military’s conscription quota would be 400,000, with only 712,000 18-year-olds from whom to draw. 
Many will be exempt from the draft unless the government eliminates existing exemptions, such as those for university students, Golts said.

TITLE: Beslan Memorial Barred by Church
AUTHOR: By Christian Lowe
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Plans to build a memorial to the 333 hostages killed three years ago in the Beslan school attack have sparked a conflict between Christians and Muslims in the region.
The local Russian Orthodox diocese says it will build a church in the grounds of Beslan’s school No. 1 to commemorate the victims killed in a clash between insurgents and government troops.
But a leading Muslim cleric has accused the Orthodox church of trying to hijack a tragedy by building a memorial that he said would exclude the more than 20 million Muslims in the country.
“It is not acceptable to present this tragedy as the tragedy of followers of only one religion,” Sheikh Ravil Gainutdin, chairman of the Council of Russian Muftis, said in a statement.

TITLE: TV Producer Held in Blackmail Sting
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — A television producer has been arrested after he accepted $20,000 not to air an embarrassing report about the top executive at a state-owned company, police said Wednesday.
The producer, Alexei Osipov, 41, was arrested in a sting operation on Friday at a restaurant in northern Moscow, said Ruslan Shikhmagomedov, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry’s department to fight organized crime and terrorism.
Shikhmagomedov refused to identify the executive, saying only that he headed a major state-owned enterprise. Osipov has been charged with extortion and could face up to seven years behind bars if convicted.
Police said Osipov, posing as an employee of a state-controlled television channel, called the executive at work several times last month and told him a compromising news report about him would be aired in early April.
Osipov said the report would be broadcast on NTV television if he did not receive $20,000, city prosecutors said in a statement.
Police and prosecutors declined to elaborate on the content of the report.
The executive reported the threat to police, who set up a sting operation at the Twin Pigs restaurant, near the Ostankino television complex. Osipov was arrested after accepting the $20,000 from an undercover police officer, Shikhmagomedov said.
Shikhmagomedov said Osipov had a pass for the Ostankino complex and that he worked for the television company Public Media.
Repeated calls to Public Media went unanswered Wednesday.

TITLE: Protests at Ukraine’s Presidential Office
AUTHOR: By Natasha Lisova
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KIEV, Ukraine — Thousands of supporters of Ukraine’s Russian-leaning prime minister marched to the gates of the pro-Western president’s office on Wednesday, vowing not to back down in a standoff between the two leaders.
Dozens of supporters of President Viktor Yushchenko tried to stop more than 7,000 supporters of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych from coming closer to the presidential office. Police in riot gear separated the sides.
The battle between the premier and the president is the most serious political crisis since the 2004 Orange Revolution mass protests that propelled Yushchenko to the presidency over Yanukovych.
This time, though, the prime minister’s partisans have seized the initiative on the streets — setting up a tent camp, erecting a stage on the capital’s main square and rallying outside the president’s office. 
The defiant Yanukovych vowed that before a court ruling he would not even consider Yushchenko’s order dissolving a parliament increasingly aligned with the prime minister and replacing it in a May 27 election.
The United States and Russia have appealed for calm in Ukraine, which is caught between historic ties to Russia and aspirations of moving closer to Europe. Both Yushchenko and Yanukovych have spent the past two days holding meetings with foreign ambassadors in a bid to win their support.
“We are inclined to have a long-term standoff. We have enough forces for it,” said Transport Minister Mykola Rudkovsky, who led the march to Yushchenko’s office. “The president must understand this.”
The dispute arose after 11 lawmakers joined Yanukovych’s ruling coalition last month, moving it closer to a 300-seat, supermajority in parliament that would be veto-proof and could allow his allies to change the constitution.
Yushchenko called the defections “a revision of the voters’ will,” and illegal, saying the law permits only blocs, not individual lawmakers, to switch sides. His Monday night order dissolving the legislature and calling new elections launched the crisis, during which thousands of Yanukovych supporters have turned out for protests.
They took over Kiev’s Independence Square, forcing police to reroute traffic down one of the city’s main arteries. Elderly people wearing red scarves in support of Yanukovych’s coalition partner, the Communists, danced while younger supporters sat on the edge of fountains and lounged on nearby grass. Yanukovych’s allies also have a tent camp near parliament.
“It is better to protest once than to suffer later,” said Mykola Azero, who traveled from Yanukovych’s eastern hometown of Donetsk to support the premier.
Yushchenko’s backers have kept a comparatively low profile — apparently to avoid clashes, but perhaps also reflecting widespread disappointment in Yushchenko’s failure to work massive reforms in the ex-Soviet state.
The two politicians differ over whether Ukraine should join NATO or more closely tie its fate to Russia. But much of their wrangling has been widely viewed as efforts by their financial backers and behind-the-scene power-brokers seeking to protect business interests.

TITLE: Berezovsky Sets Up Memorial Fund
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Businessman Boris Berezovsky set up a $500,000 foundation in honor of Alexander Litvinenko on Tuesday and called on investigators to do more to find out who killed the former security officer.
Flanked by Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, Berezovsky said the foundation would seek compensation for all those contaminated by polonium-210, the radioactive material that killed Litvinenko, as well as campaigning for justice in the case.
“The U.K. government must uncover this crime or risk being seen as incapable of protecting the residents of this country,” he said. 
“We are ready to do all we can to give the British government our helping hand.”
Litvinenko was poisoned and died in London in November. 
In a letter read out by friends after his death, he blamed President Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin denies the accusation, and the Prosecutor General’s Office has opened its own investigation.
Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service says it asked the police last month to provide more information.
Louise Christian, a human rights lawyer representing Marina Litvinenko, said the case could not be allowed to be brushed aside, especially if it turned out that people no longer in Britain were responsible.
Berezovsky said the $500,000 he provided to set up the foundation would not itself be used to compensate the victims of polonium contamination but to fund what is expected to be a lengthy battle to win them compensation.
Marina Litvinenko was tearful and spoke little at a news conference to unveil the foundation, but said in a statement: “I said in a letter to President Putin that I will not rest until Sasha’s killers are brought to justice. The Litvinenko Justice Foundation will campaign vigorously for that. I also never want to see anyone else lose their husband to such a murder.”

TITLE: AmCham Celebrates 10 Years in Petersburg
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: In honor of the 10th anniversary of the St. Petersburg chapter, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia, Andrew Somers, visited the Northern Capital last week and found a few moments to tell The St. Petersburg Times of his experiences fighting for the rights of Western companies.
According to Somers, the regulation of alcoholic goods was the main challenge the Chamber faced last year. “Russian legislation is well intended, the purpose is good, but it often causes collateral problems,” Somers said.
The new regulation affected not only alcoholic beverages but also products distributed through perfume stores. “It caused billions of dollars worth of damage in lost sales,” Somers noted.
Nevertheless, he claimed that government officials were cooperative. “We worked for several months with the co-chairman of the Duma’s entrepreneurship committee as well as with the deputy minister for Economic Development and Trade. By the end of the year we liberalized 85 percent to 90 percent of this market,” Somers said.
In St. Petersburg, the Chamber cooperated with the local authorities on several issues last year including labor shortage, energy shortages and the lack of local manufacturers. 
The chapter participated in the labor market development program, promoted ideas of competitiveness and innovations and carried out research among chamber members to find out what they expect from local suppliers.
Somers said the Chamber’s top priority was the abolishment of the Jackson-Vanik amendment. He has given himself a mission to educate U.S. congressmen about Russia.
“Many of them don’t even appreciate that the American companies working here are running lots of projects. Nobody quite understands what’s happening here, while there’s all this talk about a resumption of the Cold War, he said.
With Russia poised to join the WTO, foreign companies are becoming increasingly concerned about multilateral agreements, especially the enforcement of intellectual property rights. “The first thing that we have to do is to explain to them that even with these problems the Russian market provides American companies with an excellent opportunity for growth,” Somers said.
In recent years the Russian economy has grown faster than that of Europe or the U.S. The main challenge is to bring Russian legislation up to western standards, he noted.
He cited the law on technical regulation as an example. 
“We believe that this is one of the Russian government’s most progressive laws. Over the last few years many American business groups have been working with the Russian national institute for technical regulations and state committees to come up with world class standards,” Somers said.
Among the benefits of public discussions Somers listed the fact that foreign companies could share their knowledge of the latest high-tech standards of technical regulation, which would make Russian products more competitive and suitable in the world market.
“But now we are facing what we call a counter-reform. There is a movement within the government to stop this public debate,” he said.
To some extent Somers is concerned about the practice of levying back-tax claims on both Russian and foreign companies. However he believes that in the case of tax disputes even in Russia the court system “delivers pretty good results.”
He noted an improvement in tax policy over the last three years. According to him, in Russia the “heavy handed” approach is becoming a thing of the past.
Another widely discussed issue is the Russian state’s increasing interference in the economy.
“The government is less concerned about efficiency and making profits. From an economic point of view it’s not good for Russia,” Somers said.
Some industries of strategic importance should be controlled, he admitted. “Just give us the rules of the game. If foreign companies are allowed to own just 40 percent or 30 percent — tell us. And then it would be a predictable business,” Somers said.
He expects economical and political stability to continue in Russia.
“We do not expect major shifts politically or economically after the presidential election. Russia is set to become a serious player on the political stage, to continue its economic success. The economy is growing. There are a lot of wealthy people here. I don’t think there is a risk of a change of direction in Russia,” Somers said.
“U.S.-Russian political ties are changing dynamically. It’s not good for businesspeople. But it does not hurt them much,” he noted. From the strategic standpoint American companies see Russia as a market that is growing.
Closer cooperation of business and government could be beneficial in several fields, Somers said, public private partnerships and education among them.
“The labor pool is shrinking in Russia, because the market is expanding so fast. A few years ago the leaders of American companies would come to me saying that there is so much talent here. People are educated, smart. Now they say — I can’t achieve my goals. Because people leave for more money after I train them. Salaries are very high, because Russians now have high demands,” Somers said.
He has seen Russian businesspeople become “smarter and richer” over the last 15 years. He indicated a lot of similarities in the way Russian and American businesspeople look at business. Instead of focusing primarily on the Russian market, Russian businesspeople have started to think globally.
Unlike Americans, Russian businesspeople are more concerned with issues involving the state – “what the government will think about a particular deal,” Somers said.
“And foreign companies here are starting to think about it too. It’s just a part of the business landscape,” he concluded.

TITLE: Yukos Assets Bought Up By Italy’s Eni and Enel
AUTHOR: By Miriam Elder
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Italy’s Eni and Enel became the first foreign companies to scoop up the remains of Yukos on Wednesday, casting the winning bid at a bankruptcy auction before promptly announcing plans to pass on the bulk of the assets to Gazprom.
EniNeftegaz, an Eni-Enel consortium, beat out a Rosneft subsidiary and an unknown company with a bid of 151.54 billion rubles ($5.83 billion) for the lot, which includes Yukos’ 20 percent stake in Gazprom Neft and two gas production units.
The Gazprom Neft stake will be entirely transferred to Eni, Italy’s top oil major, which has given Gazprom a call option to buy the stake for $3.7 billion within two years, Eni said in a statement.
State-controlled Gazprom previously said it had no interest in the auction, but analysts believed it would use a proxy firm to scoop up the assets amid fears of legal action.
Gazprom will also likely take control of the two gas producers, ArcticGaz and Urengoil, as EniNeftegaz has given it the option of buying a 51 percent stake in them within two years.
“We will receive at least 51 percent of the assets,” Gazprom deputy head Alexander Medvedev said after the auction, RIA-Novosti reported.
EniNeftegaz faced little competition at the auction, casting a winning bid just 6.77 billion rubles ($261 million) above the starting price of 144.77 billion rubles ($5.57 billion).
The unknown company, Unitex, rumored to be fronting for Gazprom and close to its partner Novatek, dropped out after just two bids, leaving EniNeftegaz and Rosneft subsidiary NeftTradeGroup to battle it out quietly.
Rosneft, through subsidiary RN-Razvitiye, won the first round of Yukos auctions on March 27, buying back a block of its own shares in the face of little resistance from counterbidder TNK-BP. This time it was Rosneft’s turn to cede, holding out for 26 bids before laying down the paddle. “We congratulate the victors,” Rosneft spokesman Nikolai Manvelov said by telephone after the auction.
A spokesman for Yukos’ bankruptcy receiver praised the auction for “running in an organized way.” “The bidding price was expected,” said the spokesman, Nikolai Lashkevich.
Eni holds a 60 percent stake in EniNeftegaz, and Enel has the remaining 40 percent. 
Eni spokeswoman Erika Mandraffino said the subsidiary was set up in July. 
Enel said in a statement that it contributed $852 million to the bid — 40 percent of the lot minus the stake in Gazprom Neft, since it will be entirely transferred to Eni. The Italian utility will not be involved in running ArcticGaz or Urengoil, which are due to be operated through a joint venture between Gazprom and Eni, the Eni statement said.
Yet both Italian companies praised the auction as a significant step toward expanding their business in Russia. The leaders of both countries appeared to bless the move, with Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi phoning President Vladimir Putin on the eve of the sale late Tuesday.
“The transaction, which is in the context of a fruitful ongoing relationship between Italy and Russia, underlines the value of our strategic partnership with Gazprom,” Eni CEO Paolo Scaroni said in a statement.
Market players also praised the sale. “The fact that Italian companies were able to come in and buy into a couple of gas assets is a positive thing,” said Roland Nash, head of research at Renaissance Capital. 
“It makes it very clear that foreign companies can take part in Russian hydrocarbons, but they have to do it according to the rules of the Russian government and its related entities,” he said.
The jailing of former Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the oil company’s subsequent forced bankruptcy have been widely seen as a first step in a Kremlin plan to bring oil and gas resources more under state control.
State-run Rosneft is soon expected to become the country’s largest oil producer — a position once held by privately owned Yukos.
The series of auctions, initiated last week and due to end in May, aims to pay off Yukos’ more than $27 billion in debt to creditors, the largest of which are the Federal Tax Service and Rosneft.
Yukos was initially crippled by the forced sale of its main oil production unit, Yuganskneftegaz, in December 2004. 
Rosneft won that auction through a proxy firm, after Gazprom dropped out following an injunction from a U.S. court.
Tim Osborne, head of Yukos majority shareholder GML, formerly known as Group Menatep, warned that Eni and Enel could be open to lawsuits from shareholders. “They are making a profit from stolen property,” he said.
Seven companies were originally expected to take part in the auction, but only four made down payments, Lashkevich, the receiver’s spokesman, said. 
A place was set — complete with papers and water bottles — in the auction room for the fourth contender, gas trader Trans Nafta, but the company failed to show up.
Analysts called the EniNeftegaz victory “expected” and “predictable.”
“Today Eni made another step toward further cooperation with Gazprom,” said Valery Nesterov, an analyst at Troika Dialog.
Eni and Gazprom signaled their closer cooperation in November, signing a wide-ranging agreement allowing Gazprom to sell gas directly to Italy and extending supply contracts to 2035.
Gazprom said the call option agreements for the 20 percent Gazprom Neft stake and 51 percent stakes in ArcticGaz and Urengoil were concluded as part of that agreement.
The 20 percent stake is a holdover from Yukos’ share in Sibneft, as Gazprom Neft was called when Gazprom bought it from Roman Abramovich in 2005.
“The call option can be exercised as soon as tomorrow, but we don’t have details yet,” a Gazprom spokesman said.

TITLE: New Route
Considered For Pipeline
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — The German-Russian consortium planning the Nord Stream gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea said Wednesday that it would consider altering the route after countries around the sea expressed concern over the environment.
Some Baltic Sea states say the $6.57 billion pipeline to ship natural gas from Russia to Germany could stir up poisonous material on the seabed and disturb unexploded ordnance left there from World War II. 
“Nord Stream has decided to launch additional studies to investigate areas where the route of the ... pipeline through the Baltic Sea can be further optimized in a reasonable way to minimize environmental impacts,” the consortium said.
The consortium is majority-owned by Gazprom. It says the pipeline will provide Russia with an alternative to overland export routes and thereby help protect European customers from supply disruptions. 
The consortium said in a statement that the sections of the route to be reviewed were in the Gulf of Finland off Estonia’s coast, in Swedish waters south of Gotland and near the Danish island of Bornholm. It said the decision to review the route “reconfirms Nord Stream’s commitment to conservation of the Baltic Sea.”

TITLE: City’s First IMAX Cinema To Open at KinoStar City
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg’s very first IMAX cinema will open April 26 in the KinoStar?City entertainment center.?
The five-story high IMAX screen will be inaugurated with a showing of Spiderman III, the entrepreneurs and investors behind the project said Tuesday at a press conference.
KinoStar City will be located in the Piter-Raduga Mall. The concept was proposed by Rising Star Media, a company which already operates several multiplexes in Russia. A joint venture of National Amusements, Inc. and Soquel Ventures, Rising Star Media has also attracted two partners to realize the project — IMAX corporation and Coca-Cola HBC Eurasia.
The Chairman of Soquel Ventures and president of Rising Star Media Paul Bernard Heth said he had been looking for an opportunity to open a cinema in St. Petersburg for several years. This particular building has taken five years to build.
Larry O’Reilly, executive vice president for development of IMAX theaters, indicated that as well as being the world’s biggest cinema screen with a state of the art sound system, the main advantage of IMAX theaters is the 3D effect that makes people “actually feel as if they are in the movie.”
According to his estimations, about one billion people have enjoyed the IMAX experience. The corporation has opened 280 IMAX theaters across 40 countries, 60 percent of them outside the U.S.
“We are big believers that movies should be seen in theaters, and that they should be in IMAX theaters,” O’Reilly said.
Neither Heth nor O’Reilly disclosed the total volume of investment. However, Heth said that in the U.S. one IMAX screen normally needs about $1 million in investment. The 10,000 square meter KinoStar City will have 14 large high-quality screens including one IMAX screen. “This will be the largest investment into cinema in Russia,” Heth said.
Dmitry Zolin, managing partner of LCMC, estimated profitability of the center at 50 percent a year, which means that investment will pay off within a period of just two to three years.
“Given the correct concept, absolutely any multiplex in a mall would be profitable. The mall will also benefit from such a neighbor because a cinema attracts additional crowds,” Zolin said.
The center will have 4,000 seats, 400 of them in IMAX halls. Besides that, the center will house 20 bowling lanes, several restaurants, six karaoke halls and multiple gambling machines. In cooperation with Coca-Cola a special “Red Zone” was created, which offers refreshments, music, karaoke and dance.
“Coca-Cola HBC Eurasia sees great potential in KinoStar City. In many countries this partnership has proved its efficiency. Combining the IMAX technologies with CCHBC efforts will surely result in a synergetic effect,” said Yelena Lavina, External Affairs Manager of Coca-Cola HBC Eurasia in St. Petersburg.
Coca-Cola expects to increase the share of sales in cinemas in Russia through cooperation with industry leaders, Lavina said.
O’Reilly noted that today you should “give the audience an excuse to leave their homes and go to the theater.” He claimed that IMAX increases theater attendances, providing box-office receipts of $170,000 to $200,000 per film.
In Moscow the company has two KinoStar Deluxe centers that are among the three leading moneymakers in Russia. O’Reilly claimed that for several films in particular one IMAX screen provided 35 percent of total box-office sales across Russia.
Heth promised to open another multiplex in St. Petersburg by the end of 2007 in Mega Dybenko mall, which will have 10 screens. The company is negotiating its expansion into the regions. By the end of 2008 about eight multiplexes will operate in Russia, he said.

TITLE: Iranian Missiles and Russian Threats
AUTHOR: By Eckart von Klaeden
TEXT: Europe has long been neglecting the new strategic threats arising from missile proliferation. For some years now, the international community has been devoting a great deal of attention to the Iranian nuclear program. Germany has been playing an active role in the efforts of the international community to dissuade Iran from pursuing its nuclear plans. Tehran’s parallel development of delivery technology in particular would make a nuclear-armed Iran a direct threat to us.
Iran is investing very heavily in the development of long-range missiles. Within five to 10 years it could be capable of building its own medium-range ballistic missiles with a range of 3,000 kilometers. Munich, for example, is 2,760 kilometers from Iran. Although this means that Iranian ballistic missiles do not yet pose a direct threat to Germany, Tehran can already reach Athens or Istanbul with the Shahab III missile, which is an improved version of the North Korean No Dong and was tested in 2004. In other words, Iran already poses a direct threat to Greece, our European Union partner, and Turkey, our NATO ally.
As a matter of urgency, Germany, Europe and NATO must formulate their policy on the basis of a substantiated threat analysis and reach agreement on the need for an anti-missile shield. Given that weapon systems can take up to 10 years to develop, we should actually be taking the first steps already to create an anti-missile capability. Japan, by contrast, is already modernizing its missile defenses around Tokyo. In 1998, North Korea tested a two-stage missile that violated Japanese air space, and parts of it landed in Tokyo Bay. That set alarm bells ringing in Japan and led to the country’s participation in the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense program. Besides land-based surface-to-air launchers, Japan has also introduced Aegis cruisers equipped with the same kind of anti-missile defenses.
Opponents of a defense system for Europe argue that Iran has no interest in threatening the continent. This is naive. The ability to threaten Europe is undoubtedly part of Iran’s strategy of reducing the scope of Western influence in the Middle East. Iran is seeking to become the dominant regional power. To that end, it has an interest in reducing the influence of the United States in the Middle East. The same purpose would be served if it were able to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe by threatening Europe with nuclear arms if it were to engage in operations in the Middle East. This would hold Europe hostage, as Tehran is doing right now in the case of 15 British sailors.
Opponents of active prevention also cite the fierce criticism that President Vladimir Putin has leveled at the U.S. missile-defense plans, which, in his words, would “inevitably lead to an arms race.” This immediately raised the specter in Germany and elsewhere of a new arms race. That’s despite the fact that Putin completely ignored the fact that the planned U.S. system, with only 10 interceptor missiles, would be utterly incapable of neutralizing Russia’s current arsenal of 3,300 deployable nuclear warheads, for which strategic delivery vehicles are available. It also studiously ignores the fact that Russia was well informed about the missile-defense plans, both on a bilateral basis by the United States and through the NATO-Russia Council.
It was disingenuous when Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in an article in a German daily newspaper, sanctimoniously asked whether Europe had actually been consulted, while at the same time the chief of the Russian General Staff and the commander of the Russian Strategic Missile Forces threatened to make the missile-defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic “targets for the strategic missile forces” and declared that Moscow could pull out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
The same attitude was displayed when Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, rejected the British request for a UN Security Council resolution demanding the immediate release of the British soldiers seized by Iran. Russian foreign policy is devoid of credibility when it pretends to be the guardian of European interests on the one hand while supplying Iran with surface-to-air missiles on the other. Moscow should abandon the old zero-sum game from the Cold War era and recognize its own interest in regarding Europe as a common security area. Russia is also a potential target for Iranian missiles. Moscow should give more serious consideration to offers of cooperation from both the United States and Europe than it has in the past.
In this context, the establishment in Europe of some of the components of a comprehensive, globally structured U.S. missile-defense system against new potential threats is in the interests of Europe and in the interests of Russia. This is made all the more valid by the need to avoid recourse to military action against rogue states that possess nuclear arms and ballistic missiles or those that aspire to such capabilities. It is particularly inconsistent of the opponents of an anti-missile shield to accuse the United States of military interventionism while they themselves seek to prevent the creation of an alternative to military action. The credibility of the U.S. nuclear shield, after all, serves to ensure that those allies and other nations whose security is guaranteed by the United States feel no need to develop their own nuclear arms programs. These security guarantees have precluded such programs in the past. The U.S. missile-defense program will serve the same purpose. In this way it does not foment a nuclear arms race but seeks to prevent one.
NATO is the right body to integrate the U.S. missile-defense system into a strategy for European security. The involvement of Russia and its possible participation should be further discussed in the NATO-Russia Council. The Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council also includes those EU member states that are not NATO members. Treating the issue within the EU framework, on the other hand, would be counterproductive, partly because the United States would not be at the table and partly because it could cause a split in the European camp.
It is also in the true interests of Poland that the matter be dealt with in NATO. The project is not suitable for the creation of a special relationship with the United States outside the NATO framework. That would only accentuate existing differences between European NATO allies and play into the hands of those elements in Russia who seek to weaken NATO and sow the seeds of alienation between the United States and Europe.

Eckart von Klaeden is foreign affairs spokesman for the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union parliamentary group in the Bundestag and a member of the CDU executive board. This comment appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

TITLE: Friendship Offered on Tough Terms
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: It occurred soon after reports that the Vostok battalion, a pro-Moscow unit in Chechnya comprised of local recruits, was engaged in a 2005 ethnic cleansing raid in the predominantly ethnic Avar village of Borozdinovskaya. It was there that troops set fire to a car after a local boy, having watched soldiers beat a man in a schoolyard, screamed at them: “If you’re men, then settle it one on one.” They then set fire to a number of homes and, when the smoke cleared, a 78-year-old man was dead and 11 other people were missing. Local residents later filled plastic bags with the charred remains of people who had burned to death in their homes. It was following these incidents that President Vladimir Putin lashed out at those who abused Russian citizens.
But Putin was referring to Poland, where local hooligans had assaulted the children of Russian diplomats and stolen their cell phones.
Putin’s words had an instant effect. Internet sites were soon rife with anti-Polish invective, and two Polish diplomats and a Polish journalist were attacked in Moscow. Then, after the third beating, the violence abruptly ended. Now, with Poland planning to allow anti-missile batteries on its territory, Kremlin officials are wondering to themselves: “What did we do to deserve this?”
Putin’s words also inflamed people’s passions in relation to Georgians. The moment Putin mentioned the need to protect native ethnic groups — meaning Russians — violent incidents against Georgians increased. This is nothing like a war, because true wars are fought against those capable of offering resistance. In this case the people who were being attacked were in no position to fight back. The victims were businessmen, who were deprived of their businesses, and women and children, all of whom are easier to humiliate and harass than an armed combatant.
When Georgia filed a case against Russia to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, Kremlin authorities were sincerely mystified as to the motive.
The most unpleasant aspect of Russian foreign policy is not, however, its inconsistency in applying moral principles. Foreign policy tends to be neither moral nor immoral. It is either successful or unsuccessful. As philosopher Joseph de Maistre once said, the most powerful states behave like the most horrible people. The most objectionable aspect of Russia’s foreign policy is its infantilism.
When the diplomats’ children were attacked in Poland, Putin was truly offended. So offended, in fact, that people started beating Polish diplomats in Moscow. Then Putin made a comment about “non-native nationalities” in Russia, and there was a rush to carry out this indirect call to action. Nobody stopped to consider the strategic consequences of such behavior.
The most ridiculous part of this is that Russia wants to befriend the West — but only on its own terms.
Imagine a school bully who has beaten up one classmate and, in the process of attacking another, is interrupted. Out of frustration, he warns his would-be victim, “If you tell anybody about this, you’re history.” But the student does complain, and the bully is brought before the school principle, where he offers the following explanation:
“I just want to be friends with everyone, but they aren’t interested. True, I don’t much like anybody around here, but all the same, we could be friends if they would just stop complaining about me.”
Don’t believe it. If you read between the lines of the Foreign Ministry’s latest report describing Russia’s desire to establish friendly relations with its “enemies” in the West, you’ll find more than a few clues as to what the ministry really means.

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

TITLE: Risk taker
AUTHOR: By John Freedman
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: VLADIKAVKAZ, North Caucasus —Snipers manned roofs here and battles broke out regularly on the city’s streets in 1991. The terrorist attack on the school in Beslan in 2003 took place just 15 minutes down the road. The conflict in Chechnya continues to rage to the north, while tensions along the Russian-Georgian border to the south also hang in the air. This is Vladikavkaz, heart of the Caucasus region and capital of the republic of North Ossetia.
There is another side to this city, however — one less known, perhaps, but far more meaningful to some people who believe their hometown is ripe for a cultural revival. In a move intended to have symbolic and practical significance, they plan to transform a burned-out conference hall into a multipurpose cultural center. The first step in that transformation began last month, when the Shans, or Chance, Theater unveiled its new production of “The Lieutenant of Inishmore.” It was staged and designed specifically to be performed amid the ruins of a structure that has been abandoned since a fire destroyed it 10 years ago. 
“We have deep traditions here,” said North Ossetian Culture Minister Eduard Galazov. “Our society is very traditional and our theater has rich traditions. The great director Yevgeny Vakhtangov was born here. The world-famous conductor Valery Gergiev was too. Mikhail Bulgakov lived here when he wrote his first three plays, and our drama theater produced all of them. Theater has been an enormous moral force in our society, although that is mostly lost now. We would like to recapture theater’s ability to reach out and grab people.” 
What better way to engage people’s hearts and minds than to throw them a challenge? In a city that knows violence and terrorism only too well, the Chance Theater resolved to take on Martin McDonagh’s dark Irish comedy about terrorists running amuck. Would the audience be offended by the surfeit of shooting and killing? Would they be shocked by the farcical treatment of the topic? Would they be insulted by the cascades of obscenities that McDonagh’s characters spout as they attack and counterattack each other?
“You have to understand our audiences,” explained Izabella Karginova, the artistic director of Chance, which will be the resident theater in the new cultural center. 
“They are very set in their ways. What we hope to do is to draw a whole new audience into our theater.”
Yury Urnov, who was invited from Moscow to direct the show and will be the associate art director at the future center, allowed himself to be pulled aside for a brief interview one hour before the show began. His biggest concern was what the audience would bring into the hall that night. “What we will soon find out is if the spectators are ready for the provocation we prepared for them. There’s no guarantee that they are. In Moscow in 1991 people didn’t want to be provoked. They were tired and unwilling to respond. I have the feeling that the potential for success exists in Vladikavkaz right now. But I don’t know that for sure.”
For the premiere, the theater filled the 150 seats with an audience that would be likely to appreciate the play’s humor and message. Nearly half of the crowd consisted of students from the city’s institutes. Friends, writers, artists and a few dignitaries filled the rest of the seats. All were there by invitation and all were encouraged to stay after the show for a discussion. Nearly two-thirds did. At the outset, one elderly man voiced the criticism everyone knew would be heard sooner or later. “Dirty language is no topic for art,” he said. “And the music and gunshots were much too loud.”
But one after another, speakers began to stand and deliver an entirely different verdict. “I have never been to the theater before,” one young man said, “and I really liked this show.” A young woman, a student, admitted she had reservations about coming when she heard a description of the play. “I am really glad I came,” she added. “There was nothing offensive about this at all. It was so well done.” 
“The Lieutenant of Inishmore” tells the wacky tale of Irish terrorists who also happen to be cat-lovers. When the head terrorist gets word that his cat has been killed, he swears he’ll kill everyone who had anything to do with the deed, including his own father. What he doesn’t know is that his cat’s murder was the doing of a splinter group that is out to get him. But he only learns that when it’s too late. By then he has killed another cat in revenge, setting his own death in motion. 
McDonagh’s play is packed with misfits and clumsy fools. As directed by Urnov and performed by the actors in Vladikavkaz, they are homespun folk, the kind of people you would smile at and say hello to in the morning on your way to work. 
“Every person in Vladikavkaz feels the presence of terrorism,” Urnov explained. “But terrorism is not a concrete act. It is more like a sickness, I think. Why do all the characters in this play go out and fight? Because the conditions where they live give them no other opportunity. They’re high-strung people with no other outlet for their energy.”
As planned, the new cultural center will be an ultra-modern space seating between 150 and 500 spectators. The stage and seating blocks will transform into numerous configurations. Galazov’s assertion that it will be “one of the most functional spaces in Russia” has already been echoed by one producer from the United States.
“Philip Arnoult, the director of the Center for International Theater Development in Baltimore, traveled to Vladikavkaz last week to learn more about the project. Responding to questions by e-mail, Arnoult stated: “There is a powerful convergence going on in Vladikavkaz. It reflects the strong and complementary visions of Bella Karginova and Yury Urnov, the will of the authorities to reclaim and transform an important space in the city center and the commitment to build a young and new audience in the region.”
The plan is to begin reconstructing the center’s mangled roof this summer. With that in place to fend off inclement weather, the Chance Theater plans to add three more shows to its repertoire by September and October. The complete overhaul of the space will take several years to complete, with a projected budget of approximately $400,000. It is further linked to the complete reconstruction of an entire city block that will house a historical and ethnographical museum.
“We need to show potential investors that we are ready to make good on a project like this,” Galazov explained. “That’s why the response to ‘The Lieutenant of Inishmore’ will be so important.”
There are plenty of obstacles to be overcome before the cultural center becomes a reality. But smiles were evident all around when one man, describing himself only as a 44-year-old, stood up during the post-show discussion and declared: “This is the first example of European-style art in our republic.”

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
TEXT: <b>Sonic Youth</b> are to appear live in  Russia — and that includes in St. Petersburg — the band announced last week. 
The New York-based band comes to the city after an 18-year hiatus; its first visit came during a strange, low-profile U.S.S.R. tour, promoted by a Lithuanian indie concert agency in 1989, between its 1988 “Daydream Nation” and 1990 “Goo” albums. 
Sonic Youth was due to perform two concerts at the Palace of Youth and, even though its local promoter disappeared shortly before the gigs, it did perform one of the two.
Although the second concert was canceled by the band itself, saying it “did not like the sound quality,” the newness and power of the first concert was so strong that it changed fans’ idea of rock music, led to the emergence of the ultimately influential TaMtAm music club in the early 1990s and, subsequently, a number of good new local bands.
Sonic Youth will perform at Manezh Kadetskogo Korpusa on June 18.
This week, the Finnish comedy/musical duo <b>La Sega del Canto</b>, which uses the singing saw as its main instrument, will return to St. Petersburg. The band, which performed twice at Platforma in the past couple of years, will perform at a bar called XXXX II on Friday.
A new, surprisingly good club called <b>The Place</b> opened last week with a great concert by Nigel Burch and the Flea-Pit Orchestra. The British band liked being in St. Petersburg so much that it performed a surprise free concert at Fish Fabrique the following night, just before embarking on a night train to Moscow. 
“They were so happy that they kept laughing all the way,” wrote the band’s Moscow promoter in a message. For more information about The Place, see article, page iii. 
Meanwhile, <b>Maina</b>, the ambitious music club launched — with a lot of pomp — last year, continues to fall apart, it appears.
After its artistic director <b>Denis Rubin</b> resigned last week, the club has canceled six concerts, including two by international acts. Maina’s general policy also seems to be changing. 
A reader who went to Maina to see the Moscow-based funk band <b>Miss Is Big</b> last Saturday complained that he was forced to see a strip show instead. 
“I brought four American friends to see the band, to find that the entrance was 500 rubles ($19), as opposed to Maina’s usual 200-250 rubles, then a master of ceremonies came on and announced a ‘fashion strip show,’” the reader complained by phone this week. 
The arrangement turned out to be as much of a surprise to the musicians, who had to flee to get a train to Moscow after playing for about 30 minutes when the strip show eventually ended.
“It looks like I paid for a strip show, rather than a concert,” said the reader.

<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: A tale of two Ivans
AUTHOR: By Olga Sharapova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: With his new play based on Nikolai Gogol’s short story “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich” (1835), which premieres at the Alexandrinsky Theater on Tuesday, renowned director Andrei Moguchy hopes to bring to life the absurd world of Mirgorod, the fictional Ukrainian village where the fable is set.
By bringing “Ivans” to the stage, Moguchy, a founder of the Formal Theater and the holder of a number of awards from Russian and international festivals — the latest was the Grand Prix at the BITEF International Theater Festival in Belgrade in March — shows that he is not willing to rest on his laurels and continues to break new ground. 
Among Moguchy’s recent projects is “Between Dog and Wolf,” based on work by the modern author Sasha Sokolov, “Petersburg,” based on the novel by Andrei Bely and “No Hamlet” based on Vladimir Sorokin’s play “Dismorphomania.” In these productions, audiences are subjected to a strong emotional influence by Moguchy’s drastic approach to working with texts and the unpredictable use of the performance space. Each new production differs radically from the last.
“When I was younger,” Moguchy said, “I was just ashamed of duplicating previous work, because it is so easy to muddle up original language with the rubber stamps in the theater. A new performance is like a journey to a mystery and a step to an unknown experience.”
“But of course,” the director went on to say,” the creative decision depends on an idea that I have to share with theatergoers. I do believe that the ethical side of the performance is a very important part of a work of art. “ 
In “Ivans,” Moguchy’s production of Gogol’s story about two landowners and neighbors from the strange and unreal world of Mirgorod who quarrel at the slightest pretext, the director carries the scenario to the point of absurdity. In this respect, Moguchy’s mentality is close to Gogol’s world.
Perhaps this is best summed up by what the Encyclopedia Britannica says of the 19th century writer’s method: “Characteristic of Gogol is a sense of boundless superfluity that is soon revealed as utter emptiness and a rich comedy that suddenly turns into metaphysical horror.”
Together with artist Alexander Shishkin, composer Alexander Manotskov and co-author of the stage version Denis Shirko, Moguchy tries to create a phantasmagoric world where the “war” between the two Ivans is triggered when one calls the other a goose. 
“You know, it wasn’t my idea to stage Gogol’s novel,” said Moguchy. “It came from Valery Fokin, the artistic director of the Alexandrinsky Theater, but I am very thankful for this proposal.
“Gogol’s story is universal and it has a strong moral message, that really impressed me as a director and a man. The novel shows the absurdities of the situation when people can’t be tolerant and  do not even try to get along with each other.”
During rehearsals this week Moguchy also praised his cast.
“It is also a great honor to work with such brilliant old-school actors as People’s artists of Russia Nikolai Marton (in the role of Ivan Ivanovich), Viktor Smirnov (Ivan Nikiforovich) and Svetlana Smirnova (Woman).” 
The director added: “I would say that the things needed to make a performance really work — the definitive theater space, marvellous actors, a creative team and an ambitious strategy on the part of the theater — are all combined in this work.” 
“Ivans” is performed at the Alexandrinsky Theater on April 10, 11 and 12. <i>Website in English: http://en.alexandrinsky.ru</i>

TITLE: Projecting history
AUTHOR: By Leo Mourzenko
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: On April 30 next year, Lenfilm, Russia’s oldest movie studio, will celebrate its 90th anniversary. However, the director of “Lights in the Stage,” an upcoming film about the St. Petersburg studio, doesn’t want his deeply personal film to get confused with a variety of celebration projects that are due in 2008. Alexander Pozdnyakov, who worked at Lenfilm for quarter of a century, calls his project “a poetic reminiscence.”
In just 25 minutes, the film takes the audience on a journey around the studio, its premises and its history. The trip is formally guided by Leonid Rivman, one of the oldest employees of Lenfilm, who never speaks but opens up the studio’s sound stages to the camera which to date have never been seen by the general public. 
At 98 years old and having worked at the studio throughout his life, Rivman has participated in many of the major productions made at the studio. From the 1934 cult classic “Chapayev” to the beloved 1961 comedy “Polosaty Reis” (“A Lively Voyage”), Rivman was always there to create magic. One of the first Soviet cinematographers and visual effects masters, he also appeared in cameo roles in films such as “Molokh,” Alexander Sokurov’s 1999 study of Adolf Hitler. The director of “Lights in the Stage” refers to Rivman as a cicerone, or guide to antiquities, who pays homage to a studio to which he, as well as Pozdnyakov and the other celebrities who appear in the film, have dedicated their lives.
Those making an appearance include the popular actors Alisa Freindlikh, Semyon Furman, and Anna Kovalchuk, and the renowned director Alexei German to name a few. Pozdnyakov says that they all volunteered to appear in the film. 
The film mixes images of the original studios with a dramatization of the first cinema experiences in St. Petersburg a century ago. Lenfilm is located on land where the Aquarium, the city’s first movie theater, once stood and that association is celebrated in the film. A recreation of the first movie show in the Aquarium takes place in the exact location where the screening actually occurred in 1896. Today, one of Lenfilm’s sound stages stands in this spot.
“For many years, Lenfilm was known as the Russian Hollywood, where big movies which involved multiple costumes and huge sets were shot,” Pozdnyakov said. To illustrate the point, the film tells the story of “The Blue Bird” (1975), a U.S.-Soviet coproduction filmed by Hollywood director George Cukor at Lenfilm with Ava Gardner, Jane Fonda and Elizabeth Taylor. Although a highlight in the history of Lenfilm, the film was beset by numerous technical problems and Vincent Canby in The New York Times accused it of “lumbering tackiness.” 
Lenfilm’s achievements are an essential part of  Russian movie history, but Pozdnyakov’s aim in shooting “Lights in the Stage” wasn’t an educational one. 
“I didn’t want to make a historical movie, along the lines that first there were movies like this, then there were movies like that,” Pozdnyakov said. “This is our chance to speak out our love for these walls, this cradle of Russian cinema.”
The official release of “Lights in the Stage” will happen at the end of April. There will be a few screenings during The Festival of Festivals this summer, while a wider audience will have a chance to see it on TV in the next few months.

TITLE: In The Place to be
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: To get to the new and promising club called The Place, launched last Saturday with a show by the British cabaret-folk-punk band Nigel Burch and the Flea-Pit Orchestra, from Baltiiskaya Metro on the muddy Obvodny Kanal, visitors have to cross an urban wasteland.
Walking down Ulitsa Shkapina, there are decrepit but apparently populated buildings on your left side, and ruins on the right, with the occasional Constructivist monster reaching into the sky. 
Dust from crumbling buildings is lifted by an occasional gust of wind and then gets in the eyes. Strange people lurk in doorways.
Located in a former 1970s Soviet factory-turned-business center, the inside of The Place is in sharp contrast with its exterior surroundings. There is a brand new interior, a concert room with a stage with a balcony on either side, and a verandah bar room next to it.
“This is an art club, whose idea is to gather together as many creative people as possible, regardless whether they deal with music, theater, painting, photography, video art or film, because the rooms provide opportunities for everything,” said The Place’s artistic director Claire Yalakas.
“The walls suit small exhibitions. We can use the monitors in the bar to show some photography, plus we have a good video projector and a good screen. Everything is quite comfortable.”
Before last Saturday’s launch concert began, eight LG monitors in the bar room displayed a slide show of Burch’s drawings, while an amusing short film documenting drunk people falling down, urinating and fighting in the streets of Hamburg, made perhaps in the 1980s, was shown on the screen in the concert room.
The film shown last week was suggested by video artist and photographer Yury Elik, responsible for video at The Place, while the club’s team were thinking about how to present the band. 
According to Yalakas, they were prompted by a quote from late U.S. author Charles Bukowski who once described Burch’s poems as “the best cure for a hangover,” so the evening was conceived as “alcohol-themed.”
The idea of an art club holding arts exhibitions, poetry readings and film screenings as well as live concerts and DJ parties is not new in the city. A similar idea has been promoted by bunker club Griboyedov since its opening in 1996 and was also the aim of the now-defunct club Platforma in 2004/6. 
But Yalakas, who was an artistic director for Red Club from 2001-2004, said the uniqueness of The Place stems from a combination of creative forces behind the club. 
“The unique quality emerges during the working process,” she said. 
“You can announce plenty of things and directions and attempt to mix it all together, and it may work or not. I think it’s like a living organism, and it is personalities that make the place unique.”
The club held a “secret” pre-opening party with the Austrian electronic duo TanzBaby two weeks before Saturday’s public launch. Yalakas said that the club’s music program is set to differ from the other local venues.
“I’d love it if it differs. I want to do this as much as I can, because unfortunately all the clubs face certain restrictions, ” she said. 
“There is a finite number of good bands in the city, and all these good bands play somewhere. It’s awfully boring. Of course, you can go to see Tequilajazzz to one club, then to the other club, but it’s ultimately all the same. At best, they will release a new album and rehearse a new set.”
Yalakas hopes to solve the dilemma by promoting international acts, “not very well-known and not very expensive ones, if possible,” she added. “It’s no revelation if you bring somebody already well-known. I’d like to have some surprises, to have some special projects and unusual combinations.”
“We don’t want it to be commercial, like Markscheider Kunst playing its fabulous concert for the 101st time, even if I like the band a lot — and they will play at the club — but I hope we’ll find a way to make it an unusual concert.”
With J.D. and the Blenders performing on Saturday, the club is planning to turn the show into a special evening, with the soul-funk band’s singer Jennifer Davis spinning her favorite records as DJ Freakadelka, accompanied by videos and photos from the 1960s. Fans wearing 1960s clothes will get a discount on the ticket price.
“I would not call it a ‘party,’ because it’s a well-worn word, but we’d like to create a certain atmosphere, and we want it to have it every time,” said Yalakas.
The Place’s peculiar location itself guarantees every event will be somewhat special, according to Yalakas. “Because of the location, you will not stop by to have a beer on your way from one club to another, it’s always a well-thought-out action; it means you want to go exactly to this club, and I think the public will be special, in the way that it will want some special atmosphere.”
The Place has an egalitarian and friendly approach, with Russian beer costing 60 rubles per 0.5 liter and a fish or meat-based meal costing 180 rubles. There are no humiliating weapon checks on the entrance as is practised by such places as Red Club, but there will be some restrictions.
“If some people ask at the entrance ‘Where’s the strip show tonight?,’ there won’t be any negotiations. It’s just not that kind of club,” said Yalakas.
Designed by Sergei Gusev and Alexei Popov, the club’s interior couldn’t be more different from the devastation of the down-at-heel district where it is located.
“I even like the feeling that when you walk down Ulitsa Shkapina, which is destroyed and absolutely scary, you then later find yourself in a club where everything is totally different,” said Yalakas.

The Place is located at 47 Ul. Marshala Govorova, M.: Narvskaya/Baltiiskaya. Tel.: 331 9631. www.placeclub.ru

TITLE: Queen of Hearts
AUTHOR: By Hugh Barnes
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The popular image of Catherine the Great, a portly nymphomaniac cursed with flatulence and venereal disease, has overshadowed her unique place in Russian history. She was an outsider, a minor German princess whose reign began unpromisingly in 1762 with her likely involvement in the murder of her feckless husband, Tsar Peter III. His grandfather, Peter the Great, had almost single-handedly dragged Russia into modern times, building the new capital of St. Petersburg and touting for Teutonic expertise. Russia’s enlightenment under Catherine was the logical outcome. It was also, strangely, a return to first principles. In the words of Alexander Pushkin’s friend, Pyotr Vyazemsky, “many things in our history can be explained by the fact that a Russian, Peter the Great, sought to make us Germans, while a German, Catherine the Great, wished to make us Russians.”
If not exactly beautiful, Catherine had at least a certain allure, being unpretentious and full of wit, and Virginia Rounding is not the only biographer, to put it mildly, who has succumbed to her charms. The first accounts of Catherine’s life appeared around the time of her death in 1796. Lord Byron titillated readers of “Don Juan” with intimate details of her sex life, which have been a staple of publishers’ lists ever since. Since 1975, eight biographies have been published in English alone, from the scholarly to the prurient. The standard work remains Isabel de Madariaga’s magisterial 1981 biography, although the post-Soviet opening of the archives has produced two wonderful studies by Simon Sebag Montefiore and Simon Dixon, both published in the first year of this century. 
Revisiting his earlier insightful study, Dixon is shortly to publish a long-awaited full-length biography of Catherine. In the meantime we have Rounding’s entertaining version, which is based on already published sources. The subtitle hits the wrong note, or perhaps the right note if you subscribe to a Byronic view of history, and the prose is sometimes too workmanlike. Yet the story itself is fun and familiar, and Rounding is a keen observer of what Vladimir Nabokov called a “brutal and dull world of political intrigue, favoritism, Germanic regimentation, old-fashioned Russian misery, and fat-breasted empresses on despicable thrones.” Love, sex and power indeed!
“Little Figchen” was the nickname of the young German princess Sophie Frederica August of Anhalt-Zerbst before she became Catherine the Great and the subject of lurid jokes. She was plucked from obscurity by Peter the Great’s daughter Elizabeth and betrothed to the Grand Duke Peter in the hope that marriage would cure him of his infantile tendencies. It didn’t. The wedding night was a disaster, and the marriage probably remained unconsummated. Bewildered and lonely after Peter abandoned her at court, while he was off playing soldiers with his Prussian cronies, Catherine sought solace in literature, reading Voltaire and Montesquieu and the other great works of the French Enlightenment. It was the beginning of a remarkable intellectual journey.
One of the strengths of Rounding’s book is its use of Catherine’s own memoirs, letters, notes, memoranda and other scribblings as a source. No tyrant has ever written as much or as well as Catherine, and her own words speak volumes about the overlap between her public and private lives. Sometimes the effect of Catherine’s journalism was to incriminate herself. Within months, even weeks, of Peter’s accession, a conspiracy had begun to form among a hodgepodge of disaffected courtiers. It gathered pace during the first half of 1762 as Peter alienated more and more of his subjects with his unsuitable conduct and ill-advised policies. He refused to declare Catherine’s 7-year-old son Paul his heir because her former lover Sergei Saltykov would not admit that he was the boy’s father, and thus provide Peter with grounds for divorcing his wife. Having seized the throne by colluding in the murder of Peter, the last true Romanov tsar, Catherine silenced the opposition rumormongers. The atmosphere of political repression during the early years of her reign was not favorable to speaking out of turn. Nevertheless the letters between Catherine and her fellow plotters reveal the murderous nature of her coup d’etat.
One of those plotters was the young Grigory Potemkin — the subject of Sebag Montefiore’s book — who later helped Catherine to defeat the Turks, obtain access to the Black Sea and incorporate the vast steppes of present-day southern Ukraine, where the Russians founded the new cities of Odessa, Yekaterinoslav and Kherson. Potemkin also became Catherine’s most celebrated lover, though Rounding hedges her bets on the question of whether they were actually married. “The trouble is that my heart is loath to remain even one hour without love,” Catherine wrote to Potemkin.
Yet love was often deceptive, and may have blinded Catherine to the failure of her policies and to the corruption that surrounded her rule. The very model of an “enlightened despot,” she started out as a reformer and a defender of the serfs, but her intolerance grew in the wake of the battles against the Turks, the suppression of the Pugachev peasant rebellion, and the exile of the dissident writer Alexander Radishchev. These were examples of Catherine’s “power,” as opposed to her “love” or “sex,” though Rounding is understandably more interested in the first two aspects of her subtitle.
The private life overshadows Catherine’s public achievements, not least her patronage of the arts, literature and education, which, inadvertently perhaps, enabled the very idea of the “private” individual to develop in Russia and led to the cultural flowering of the 19th century, to the poetry of Pushkin and the novels of Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy. The empress regarded herself as a “philosopher on the throne” and corresponded with Voltaire until his death in 1778. The French writer praised her as the “Semiramis of the North” (a reference to the legendary Queen of Babylon), but his friends were not so sure. In 1773, after completing his 28-volume Encyclopedie, Denis Diderot found himself without a source of income. “I am responsible for one of the most glorious achievements of the age [of Enlightenment], yet I am quite ruined,” he wrote sourly. In order to relieve Diderot of financial worry, Catherine bought the Frenchman’s library through an agent in Paris. She paid him a librarian’s pension of 1,000 livres a year in a lump-sum advance. 
The following year the 60-year-old philosopher made the arduous trek to Petersburg to thank his fairy godmother for her support. At first Catherine received Diderot with great honor and warmth three afternoons a week. In her private apartments in the Winter Palace she would sit on the imperial sofa, with a piece of needlework in her hands, while the foreigner explained his views on education, politics and the law. Soon, however, she began to consider the philosopher’s ideas too impractical for real life. “You only work on paper, where anything is possible,” she complained, “whereas I, a poor empress, have to work on human skin.” Diderot wrote to his fellow philosophes Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Claude Adrien Helvetius that the fairy godmother had turned into a witch. 

Hugh Barnes’ “The Stolen Prince,” the story of Pushkin’s African great-grandfather, was published last year.

Catherine the Great: Love, Sex, 
and Power
By Virginia Rounding
St. Martin’s Press
592 Pages. $29.95

TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Ivan Dulin is the only gay milling machine operator in the world. But that may be one too many, judging from a kerfuffle reported in Komsomolskaya Pravda this week. The character from a television sketch show called “Our Russia” has had to switch jobs after metalworkers in Chelyabinsk got hot under their blue collars.
The problem is that TNT’s show depicts Dulin as working in Chelyabinsk, and its sketches used to portray him striding through a factory piled with steel pipes. Workers at a real-life pipe plant in the city weren’t amused and contacted the show’s makers, saying, “Why are you telling lies? We don’t have any gays,” the tabloid reported Saturday. To appease them, Dulin has been transferred to a steel mill because there aren’t any in Chelyabinsk, apparently.
Before getting too worked up about this, it’s worth noting that the publication of the story conveniently coincided with the launch of the second season of “Our Russia.” And Dulin the milling machine operator — no, I have no idea what that means — is just a mishmash of every homophobic stereotype going. For instance, he is also a transvestite, which is not the same thing as being gay. Please note, makers of all Russian comedy shows.
Each Dulin sketch begins by introducing him as “the first milling machine operator in the world with a nontraditional sexual orientation,” the Russian euphemism that always sounds a bit odd, as if being gay were some new fad, a bit like buying an iPod.
Dulin is also very reminiscent of a character from the British comedy series “Little Britain,” which “Our Russia” is clearly modeled on. That series has a recurring character who proudly calls himself “the only gay in the 
village,” although there the joke is 
that he clearly isn’t the only one. But that might be a bit too postmodern for Chelyabinsk.
The sketches all show Dulin popping into the office of his boss, Mikhalych, and inappropriately expressing his adoration. He starts with a bunch of red roses and builds up to hiding in a cupboard naked as a birthday surprise. At one point, he comes in dressed in a long fur coat and a strappy pink dress. He also asks Mikhalych to take him on a date for International Women’s Day, so clearly he is a bit confused. 
The comedy comes from the contrast between Dulin’s lovelorn gestures and the macho, old-school metalworker culture. He declares his love while wearing a blue boiler suit and hefty boots, and his boss still has a Lenin banner in his office. There are also plenty of double entendres involving pipes.
Like “Little Britain,” the series has sketches starring recurring characters who live in various parts of the country. There are two migrant workers, Ravshan and Dzhashmud, ineptly remodeling a Moscow apartment; a tiny but brutal football coach from Omsk; a couch potato from Taganrog; and two high-living deputies from the fictional city of Nefteskvazhinsk, or Oil Bore Town.
The best part of the show is the narration, which links the different sketches with mock-serious commentary. The Dulin sketches all begin with footage of the smoking chimneys of Chelyabinsk, which is given such grandiose titles as the “Cast-Iron Florence of Russia.” And the men of the city are described as so tough that they snort vodka and sleep on pillows of iron filings. 
Russia is a country where disposable plates are used not once but many times, the narrator declares proudly, and where hotel cleaners are prettier than the prostitutes. It’s a country whose citizens can reverse the direction of rivers — and electricity meters, too. Best of all, it’s a country where “limited people have unlimited opportunities.”

TITLE: Moscow Meals
TEXT: Looking for a place to eat next time you head to Moscow? 
A monthly look at a selection of restaurants in the capital.

Rybnoye Mesto
1/15 Krasnokholmskaya Nab. Tel: (+8 495) 911 1105. 
Open: noon-midnight. 
Metro: Taganskaya.

Light and breezy with a view of the water — that’s the first impression one gets when visiting Rybnoye Mesto. The sun streams through huge windows facing the Moscow River, bathing the restaurant in daylight. The interior is refreshingly free of over-the-top opulence, with simple wooden floorboards, some blue-and-white tiled walls  and blue-and-white striped chairs. 
Salads range from 190 rubles ($7.15) for a fresh vegetable salad up to 1,100 rubles ($41.50) for a Mediterranean seafood salad seasoned with cognac on a bed of Romano leaves. Cold starters begin at 190 rubles ($7.15) for a modest Russian-style herring and climb to 1,300 rubles ($50) for the a la Stendhal, a duet of black and red caviar with sea bass and salmon carpaccio. Soups are reasonable, starting at 120 rubles ($4.50) for red or white buzara soup; sturgeon ukha is the most expensive at 310 rubles ($11.70). There is also a good range of seafood sold by weight and prepared according to the guest’s wishes.
Van Gogh Cafe
3 Petroverigsky Pereulok. 
Tel: (+8 495) 624-9305
Open: 9 a.m.-11 p.m. 
Metro: Kitai-Gorod.

As the chains take over Ulitsa Maroseika, ruthlessly squeezing out the small players, Kitai-Gorod cafe-goers seeking a cute spot with its own character may find more of interest on the back streets. Take the Van Gogh cafe, for instance.
Located on a quiet alley that winds around behind Maroseika, Van Gogh oozes character. For a start, it is small — even tiny — with only about half a dozen tables. The interior is art-themed and colorful, with original artworks on the walls. The paintings are for sale, as are the arty knickknacks and collectables displayed by the entrance. 
Van Gogh has given many of its dishes annoyingly cutesy and uninformative names, such as “Van Gogh’s Hat,” a hot mushroom salad (280 rubles/$10.50), and “Art Viscera,” a chicken liver dish (280 rubles/$10.50). Pasta options include mushroom spaghetti (220 rubles/$8.30), cream 
of mushroom tagliatelle (250 rubles/$9.45), and two sorts of fettuccini. Fondue costs 700 rubles (26.40). 
Duety
2/62 Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya Ulitsa. Tel: (+8 495) 380 1593,
Open: Noon-8 a.m. 
Metro: Barrikadnaya.

A karaoke bar is unlikely to be the first place you think of when searching for somewhere to eat — especially if you’re after exotic and rare cuisine.
The Duety art club is more than your average karaoke club, however. At first glance, the menu may seem to offer just the standard range of Russian and Japanese dishes, but hidden toward the back is a pocket of exotica — the Yakut section. 
Yakut cuisine is a rarity in Moscow, found in only a couple of restaurants. The selection here may be small, but it lists interesting options if you’re game. Starters include three varieties of stroganina, or thinly sliced, frozen, raw meat, nelma fish (170 rubles/$6.41), horse (210 rubles/$7.90) and horse liver (450 rubles/$17). Hot, meaty mains include the Sakha version of blood sausage (300 rubles/$11.30), horse ribs (500 rubles) and horse shashlik (500 rubles/$19).  
Karaoke kicks off at 8 p.m., after which entrance costs 1,000 rubles ($37.50) but includes unlimited singing.

TITLE: Labor of love
AUTHOR: By A. O. Scott
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: With “Bobby,” Emilio Estevez, writer and director (as well as one of a huge ensemble of actors), sets himself a large and honorable task. It is important to appreciate this in spite of his movie’s evident shortcomings. 
Intentions do count for something, and Estevez’s seem to me entirely admirable. He tries, by means of the familiar technique of weaving together story lines connected only by coincidences of time and place, to produce a feeling of collective life. Beyond that, he tries to link the intimate stories of nearly two dozen characters to a large and consequential public event — the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy — and to capture the heady combination of anxiety, anger, hope and idealism that supposedly characterized the United States in 1968.
All of the action in “Bobby” takes place at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 4, 1968, the day Kennedy, a late entry into the presidential race, won California’s Democratic primary. (It was also the day the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale took the mound to attempt his sixth consecutive shutout, an event that competes with the primary election for the attention of some of the film’s characters.) After midnight, as Kennedy made his way from a ballroom through the hotel’s kitchen, he was fatally shot, a calamity that casts its shadow backward over the more mundane doings of the day. In every scene of Estevez’s film, portent hangs heavy in the air.
The candidate himself is a tangential figure, present mainly through archival news clips and audio recordings, in which he talks, with a quiet eloquence that sounds almost outlandish to present-day ears, about the problems of poverty, prejudice, pollution and war. (The moments before the shooting are filmed, disconcertingly, from his point of view.) His assassin also barely figures in the story. Instead “Bobby” uses both Kennedy’s candidacy and his murder as a kind of prism, through which the aspirations and confusions of a cross section of Americans might be filtered.
Not all their concerns are political. Yes, the Mexican-American kitchen workers (Freddy Rodriguez and Jacob Vargas) argue about social justice with the wise black cook (Laurence Fishburne) and trade scowls with their bigoted boss (Christian Slater). And a young woman (Lindsay Lohan) prepares to marry a young man (Elijah Wood) to keep him out of Vietnam, even though she doesn’t know him very well. But at least as much attention is paid to the vague discontent experienced by a middle-aged couple (Martin Sheen and Helen Hunt), to the mutterings of the hotel’s retired doorman (Anthony Hopkins), and to the adventures of a pair of young campaign workers (Brian Geraghty and Shia LaBeouf), who skip out on their canvassing duties to drop acid for the first time. (They purchased the drug from the Ambassador’s in-house dealer, played by Ashton Kutcher.)
There’s much more. There’s Demi Moore, playing a boozy chantoozy with the kind of manic gusto you expect from drag performers. (She behaves like a cast member in the Wigstock road-show production of “A Woman Under the Influence: The Musical.”) Estevez self-effacingly takes the role of her husband, who minds the lap dog and wears an ascot, sure signs of emasculation. Meanwhile the hotel manager (William H. Macy), married to one of the hairdressers (Sharon Stone), carries on an affair with a young switchboard operator (Heather Graham). A black Kennedy staff member (Nick Cannon) embodies the aspirations of his race. 
And so on. As if to make sure that we understand this movie’s pedigree, Estevez throws in a clumsy reference to “Grand Hotel.” He also nods vigorously in the direction of Robert Altman, stitching his disparate narrative threads together with floating cameras, long, twisty tracking shots and snappy cuts. These techniques give “Bobby” a degree of fluidity and momentum, but the multiple story lines coalesce in a manner more reminiscent of “The Towering Inferno” — or an episode of “Fantasy Island” — than “Nashville.” Each story rises toward an epiphany that is quickly overwhelmed by the gunshots in the kitchen.
The actors seem more like “very special guest stars” than like real, 1968-vintage Americans, and their period-appropriate get-ups — the narrow lapels and skinny ties, the sheath dresses and piled-up hairdos — are more distracting than convincing. (The freshest performances belong to Lohan, Rodriguez and Slater.) Some of the stories feel too obviously melodramatic, while others are vague to the point of inscrutability. In the Vietnam- and drug-related plots, the point is hammered home too hard — it’s the ‘60s, folks! — while other narratives wind toward no discernible point at all.
Nonetheless the ambition behind “Bobby” is large and serious. Along with many other Americans who grew up in the wake of the 1960s — for whom figures like the Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were always more myth than flesh and blood — Estevez, who was 6 years old when Kennedy was shot, seems preoccupied with understanding what it was like to live through some of that decade’s galvanizing events. 
The pulse of history is most audible not in the fictional portions of the movie, but in the moments, especially at the end, when the documentary record takes over. The sound of Kennedy’s voice, even as it takes you out of the movie, throws you into a past that seems both terribly remote and uncannily alive. When you hear his patient, meditative speeches, from which every note of demagoguery or pandering has been purged, you glimpse the film Estevez set out to make — the one you may wish you were watching.

TITLE: Ovechkin’s Two Goals Spur Caps
AUTHOR: By Tarik El-Bashir
PUBLISHER: The Washington Post
TEXT: ATLANTA — The Washington Capitals came here needing two points to match last year’s modest total. And while amassing 70 points may not sound too difficult — 11 teams have 100 or more — it was an important plateau for Coach Glen Hanlon and his players.
Alex Ovechkin, Boyd Gordon and Brent Johnson made sure the team reached that goal Wednesday night at Philips Arena.
Ovechkin scored twice, Gordon had a goal and an assist, and Johnson was steady in the Capitals’ wild, 3-2 victory over the Southeast Division-leading Atlanta Thrashers. It was Washington’s first victory on the road in 10 games.
“We had some small goals, and getting to 70 points or above was one of them,” captain Chris Clark said.
Ovechkin and the Capitals will finish at bottom of the division again, more than 20 points behind the Thrashers. But, for one night at least, the gap didn’t seem nearly that large.
“Today, the Thrashers see a good team — the Capitals,” said Ovechkin, who has scored nine of his 46 goals against Atlanta. “We played for each other.”
Never was that more apparent than in the final minutes. Brooks Laich (delay of game) and Milan Jurcina (slashing) were sent to the penalty box in the final seconds, giving the Thrashers a rare six-on-three advantage for 44 seconds after Atlanta Coach Bob Hartley pulled goaltender Kari Lehtonen in favor of an extra attacker.
But Johnson and the Capitals’ penalty killers kept the Thrashers from getting the equalizer.
“Thank God my father doesn’t have gray hair, or I would certainly be gray now,” Hanlon said.
The defeat was a costly one for Atlanta, which entered the game clinging to a one-point lead over Tampa Bay with two games remaining, including Saturday’s finale against the Lightning, for first place in the division. Hartley benched star winger Ilya Kovalchuk, who scored his 40th goal of the season 1 minute 6 seconds into the game, for all but one shift in the third.
“Ovechkin was by far the best player on the ice tonight and there’s no reason for this,” Hartley said.
The Capitals, meantime, won back-to-back games for only the third time in three months despite playing without Alexander Semin, their second-leading scorer. He aggravated a foot injury in the second period of Tuesday’s 1-0 victory over the Florida Panthers and didn’t travel to Atlanta. He’s questionable for Saturday’s finale against Buffalo.
Johnson made 30 saves to earn his first victory since a 4-2 win in New Jersey on Feb. 24, a span of nine starts.
“I know it’s my last start of the season so it’s so satisfying to end on a high note like that,” he said.
Ovechkin’s first strike came on the power play and put the Capitals ahead 2-1. He fired a wrist shot from the middle of the circle through a screen and over Lehtonen’s glove at 13:35 of the second period. 
Then, with 43 seconds remaining in the period, Ovechkin beat Lehtonen (23 saves) over the blocker to put the Capitals in command, 3-1.
But it almost wasn’t enough. Thrashers defenseman Andy Sutton scored his second goal of the season — short-handed, nonetheless — with 4:28 left to make it a one-goal game.

N?Regular season champion Ak Bars Kazan and Metallurg Magnitogorsk advanced to the Russian Hockey League finals after each defeated their opponents in four games. 
On Monday in Moscow Ak Bars defeated CKSA 2-1, while Metallurg finished off Avangard Omsk 5-2 at home in Magnitogorsk. 
Avangard, who finished the regular season in second place, clinched the 2006-2007 bronze medal for being the semi-finalist loser with the best regular season record.

TITLE: Pelosi Arrives For Talks In Saudi Arabia
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi continued her Mideast tour Thursday, a day after coming under sharp attack from the Bush administration for meeting with Syria’s leader. 
Pelosi arrived in Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally, Wednesday night from Syria, where she defied the White House’s Middle East policy by meeting with President Bashar Assad and insisting “the road to Damascus is a road to peace.”
She met with Saudi King Abdullah when she first arrived in the kingdom Wednesday and was meeting Thursday with several members of the Shura Council, an unelected advisory assembly named by the king.
The Bush administration accuses Syria of backing Hamas and Hezbollah — two groups it deems terrorist organizations — and has rejected direct talks with Damascus until its changes its ways.
“Unfortunately that road is lined with the victims of Hamas and Hezbollah, the victims of terrorists who cross from Syria into Iraq,” said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council of U.S. President George W. Bush. 
“It’s unfortunate that she took this unilateral trip which we only see as counterproductive.”

TITLE: Man United Lose 2-1 to AS Roma
AUTHOR: By Chris Lehourites
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — AS Roma earned a 2-1 win over 10-man Manchester United on Wednesday in the first leg of the Champions League quarterfinals, and Valencia held host Chelsea to a 1-1 tie.
Roma got goals from Rodrigo Taddei in the 44th minute and Mirko Vucinic in the 66th at Rome’s Stadio Olimpico, where Man United fans fought briefly with Italian police. Wayne Rooney scored for United in the 60th.
“We were facing a great club — one that’s used to playing these competitions. The team reacted well, especially after they equalized,” Roma coach Luciano Spalletti said. “It was a big test for us.”
United midfielder Paul Scholes was ejected in the 34th minute after getting his second yellow card, forcing him out of next week’s second leg.
“It was important to score a goal, and we did,” United manager Alex Ferguson said. 
“We knew it was going to be tough and it was tough.”
Didier Drogba scored his 30th goal of the season for Chelsea in the 53rd minute with a header.
“With a draw everything is open,” Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho said. “I believe they believe they are in a better position now because they are at home, but why not go and win in Valencia or get a draw and take it to extra time?”
David Silva had given Valencia the lead in the 30th with a 25-yard shot that left Chelsea goalkeeper Petr Cech no chance.
“We’ve got objective one achieved, which was to take the game into the second leg, so the tie will be decided at the Mestalla,” Valencia coach Enrique Sanchez Flores said.
On Tuesday, Liverpool earned a 3-0 win at PSV Eindhoven and Bayern Munich twice came back to hold AC Milan to a 2-2 tie.
The quarter-final second legs take place next week.

TITLE: British Sailors, Marines Home From Iran
AUTHOR: By Edmund Blair
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — The 15 British military personnel freed by Iran after a two-week diplomatic stand-off arrived back in England on Thursday to cheers and to questions about the incident and its implications. 
As flight BA6634 from Tehran touched down at London’s Heathrow Airport at 12:02 p.m. local time, the group burst into applause.
“These guys have been through a lot. They are just relaxing and having a good flight. They are just winding down,” said one British diplomat accompanying the sailors, who declined to give any media access to them during the journey.
The group disembarked and posed for pictures before transferring to two waiting military helicopters to be flown to a base at Chivenor in Devon, 360 kilometers southwest of London, for a private meeting with their families and debriefing.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a news conference broadcast round the world on Wednesday he had decided to forgive and free the 15 sailors and marines even though Britain was not “brave enough” to admit they had strayed into Iranian waters.
The carefully stage-managed performance was seen by some as trying to soften the former Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s vehemently anti-Western image abroad. But not everyone agreed.
“The bad news for Tehran is that the British people are now more likely to see Iran as the bad guy as a result of this,” said Dan Plesch, author and commentator on nuclear proliferation at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
“Your average Briton now will be much more aware that Iran is a potential threat, despite the way it ended.”
The peaceful end to the stand-off, which began when the world’s fourth largest oil exporter seized the 15 in the northern Gulf on March 23, prompted a drop in oil prices from recent highs.
The aircraft’s business class section was cleared for the sole use of the former captives and those accompanying them.
After the flight left, Iranian television showed more interviews and images of the group, wearing civilian clothing, drinking tea and clutching colorful gift bags.
“The treatment has been great. It will be nice to get back and get home to see my family,” said Faye Turney, the only woman in the group. “Thank you for letting us go. We apologize for our actions,” she added, wearing a headscarf and looking strained.
During the flight they put on military uniform again.
Even before they had touched down, the post-mortem began on what closed-door deals might have been struck and just what it meant for future relations between Iran and the West.

TITLE: Sprinter Loses Doping Appeal
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LAUSANNE, Switzerland — British sprinter Christine Ohuruogu lost her appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport on Wednesday to overturn a one-year doping ban.
Ohuruogu received a maximum one-year sentence from UK Athletics in August after missing three out-of-competition doping tests in 18 months. But Ohuruogu appealed the decision to sport’s highest court in October, saying she missed the tests because of changes in her training schedule.
“The panel considered that the suspension was proportionate and should not be disturbed,” CAS said in a statement.
The ban, imposed in September by UK Athletics, runs through Aug. 6, 2007. However, it was unclear whether she would be able to compete at the 2007 world championships in Osaka, Japan, scheduled from Aug. 25-Sept. 2.
The 22-year-old Ohuruogu has met the International Association of Athletics Federations qualifying standard, so she would be eligible to compete under its rules. But UK Athletics declined to confirm if she would be available for selection to the British team, which will be announced on Aug. 6.
The IAAF qualifying period is from Jan. 1, 2006, until Aug. 13, 2007, and Ohuruogu met the standard when she won the 400 meters at the Commonwealth Games at Melbourne, Australia, last March o running a personal best of 50.28 seconds. The IAAF’s entry standard is 51.50.
“On our side, there is nothing holding her back from competing,” IAAF spokesman Chris Butler said.
UK Athletics said Ohuruogu committed a doping violation, based on IAAF rules, which state athletes must notify drug-testing bodies of their whereabouts and be available for surprise, out-of-competition tests.
The British panel also said Ohuruogu committed a “minor unintentional infraction … due only to forgetfulness.”
The three-member CAS panel considered the IAAF rules “unambiguous.”
“As a consequence, the CAS panel found that Christine Ohuruogu committed a doping offense under the IAAF regulations,” the CAS said.
Ohuruogu also faces a possible lifetime ban from the Olympics. 
According to British Olympic Association rules, any athlete who commits a doping violation is automatically banned from the games.

TITLE: English Fans Beaten by Police in Rome
AUTHOR: By Robin Pomeroy
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: ROME — Manchester United fans and Italian police clashed during the halftime break at the Champions League quarter-final with AS Roma which Manchester United lost 2-1 on Wednesday.
Television pictures from Rome’s Olympic Stadium showed Italian police wading in and flailing at Manchester United fans with batons with several United fans bleeding profusely from head wounds.
The trouble inside the stadium started a minute before halftime, when Rodrigo Taddei put Roma ahead and the rival supporters started to trade insults and throw objects from one section of the ground to the other.
One policeman was shown raining blows on a supporter who was lying motionless on the ground, and the pictures evoked memories of the 1970s and eighties when crowd violence and hooliganism was rife at European club matches.
A Reuters photographer saw one Manchester fan lying on the ground with blood coming from his forehead. The man was led away from police by other supporters.
A Roma fan who was in the stadium said the police made two charges against the English fans apparently in response to the throwing of missiles.
By the start of the second half the violence had calmed down.
An official at San Giacomo hospital in central Rome said one United fan had been admitted with a stab wound to the abdomen.
His condition was not critical but he would have to remain in hospital for at least one day, he told Reuters.
Italian news agency ANSA reported earlier three Manchester fans were later taken in handcuffs to the stadium’s police station.
One of them was described as having a large head wound.
United fans were kept in the stadium for around 90 minutes after the end of the game before being escorted away.
As well as serious trouble at Italian grounds this season which peaked with the death of a policeman in Sicily, there was also trouble when Manchester United fans travelled to France to play Lille at Lens in February.
United had written to their travelling supporters earlier this week warning them to take extra care from Roma’s “ultra” fans while in the Italian capital.

TITLE: England Beaten by Two Runs
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: ST JOHN’S, Antigua — Sri Lanka pulled off a dramatic two-run World Cup victory over England after young batsman Ravi Bopara was dismissed off the last ball having almost snatched the Super Eights game on Wednesday.
Sri Lanka fast bowler Dilhara Fernando bowled Bopara with three runs needed off the final delivery to leave England stranded on 233 for eight chasing Sri Lanka’s 235 all out.
The 21-year-old Bopara smashed 52 off 53 balls in only his fifth appearance for England after a brilliant chase with wicketkeeper Paul Nixon (42), the duo adding 87 runs for the seventh wicket.
Sri Lanka’s second victory in their third Super Eights match gave them six points and left them on the verge of a semi-final berth while England have just two points from two games with four left to play.
“We are just gutted,” said England skipper Michael Vaughan.
“I always thought we would get over the line in that last over,” he said. “It wasn’t to be but the players can be very proud about the way they’ve played today.”
England had looked set for an upset victory over their formidable rivals until a middle-order collapse saw them lose three wickets for seven runs to be reduced to 133 for six.
With 103 still runs needed, the pair attacked with left-hander Nixon reverse-sweeping off spinner Muttiah Muralitharan for six.
Nixon was dismissed with England needing 16 off seven balls.
Bopara took a four, two and a single off three successive deliveries to leave England needing four off the last two. Tail-ender Sajid Mahmood took a leg bye before Fernando ended Bopara’s brave innings.
Sri Lankan bowlers had staged a superb fightback after Kevin Pietersen (58) and Ian Bell put on 90 runs for the third wicket to revive the innings from 11-2.
Bell was run out for 47, failing to ground his bat when bowler Sanath Jayasuriya flicked a Pietersen drive on to the stumps.
Muralitharan then had the aggressive Pietersen caught and bowled to win an intense personal battle before Fernando dismissed Andrew Flintoff (2) and in-form Paul Collingwood (14) in the same over.
England paceman Sajid Mahmood took four for 50 and Flintoff three for 35 to cap a superb England effort on the field in the morning after Vaughan elected to bowl first.
Opener Upul Tharanga top-scored with a patient 62 and added 91 runs for the third wicket with skipper Mahela Jayawardene (56) after early setbacks.
New ball bowlers James Anderson and Mahmood and first change Flintoff tied down scoring as Vaughan rotated his bowlers and set excellent fields.
Mahmood removed dangerous opener Sanath Jayasuriya (25), who played on to the stumps, and had Kumar Sangakkara (17) caught at point with a slow full toss.
The 37-year-old Jayasuriya, winning a one-day record 385th cap had begun aggressively after scoring a match-winning 115 against hosts West Indies in the previous game on Sunday.
Sri Lanka lost the last six wickets for 42 runs before they were all out off the last ball.
The seven-week World Cup tournament ends with the final in Barbados on April 28.

TITLE: Augusta Prepared For Woods and Mickelson
AUTHOR: By Mark Lamport-Stokes
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: AUGUSTA, Georgia — Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson have dominated talk in the build-up to this week’s Masters with fans relishing a possible head-to-head between the Augusta National specialists.
The American duo have won five of the last six titles at Augusta and are odds-on favourites to be in the thick of contention in Sunday’s final round.
World number one Woods is bidding for a fifth green jacket at one of his favourite venues while title-holder Mickelson is gunning for his third.
Although the pair have never previously duelled in the final round of a major championship, that scenario is always more likely on the slick, heavily contoured greens of Augusta where experience is a prized commodity.
“If you look at the course of the history of this event, you start seeing the same guys win this event multiple times,” Woods told reporters as he prepared for Thursday’s opening round.
“I think it’s all about understanding how to play it, where to miss it, shot selections. Once you figure it out, you see the same guys up there at the top of the board.
“Phil has been up there many a times, and once he won a few years ago, all of a sudden it gave him the confidence to do it again last year.”
Woods, hunting his 13th major title, is always tightly focused on his own game but conceded he would enjoy a last-day duel with Mickelson.
“It doesn’t happen that often where we’re both playing well at the same time, the same week, the same event,” the 31-year-old American said. “It’s one of the hard dynamics of the game of golf.

TOP PLAYERS
“But we’ve definitely gone at it here in this event. Any time you get to go at it with any of the top players in a major championship and they are playing well, it’s always fun.”
Mickelson, who clinched his first major title with a gripping one-shot victory over Ernie Els at the 2004 Masters, shares Woods’s love for Augusta.
“I’ve played very well here in the past and it’s certainly a course that I feel comfortable on, whether I’ve played well going in or not,” the left-hander said.
“I remember ‘03 I was playing terrible and was able to finish third. And when I’ve entered it playing well like last year, I’ve been able to win,” added Mickelson, who has produced top-10 finishes in his last 12 starts at Augusta.
Augusta native Charles Howell III, who won his second PGA Tour title at the Nissan Open in February, always expects Woods and Mickelson to shine at the Masters.
“They are pretty good to start with, and you’ve got to look at how many tournaments they have won between themselves,” the 27-year-old said.
“Obviously they come into the majors having won a lot, and the wealth of confidence that that breeds is big. On top of that, I think they have probably the two best short games in golf.

SHORT GAMES
“Major championships, especially at this place, are so demanding around the green. Between their confidence and their short games, I think it’s hard to look much past that.”
Power hitting is also a requisite on the par-72 Augusta National layout which was stretched to a formidable 7,445 yards for last year’s tournament, making it the second longest course in major championship history.
Mickelson, however, respects the course for its all-round challenge.
“I think the Masters tests your full game better than any major,” the world number four said.
“You have to drive it long, but you have to drive it straight. The fairways are tight with all of the trees that have been added.
“And your irons have to be almost perfect with distance control because you have so many elevation changes and so many small sections of the greens to hit to.”
Big-hitting Vijay Singh, the 2000 champion, is another player likely to be a factor after winning twice on the PGA Tour this season in 10 starts.
Also worth monitoring are world number two Jim Furyk, U.S. Open champion Geoff Ogilvy of Australia, Sweden’s Henrik Stenson, winner of last month’s WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship, and Britain’s Paul Casey, who tied for sixth on his Masters debut in 2004.
The pine tree-lined course is expected to run firm and fast during the tournament with cool, dry weather forecast for all four rounds.

TITLE: After Dream Start, Engine Worries Play on Raikkonen’s Mind
AUTHOR: By Alan Baldwin
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Kimi Raikkonen’s hopes of following up his triumphant Ferrari debut with another win in Malaysia this weekend could be dented before qualifying has even started.
The Finn fears his car’s engine was damaged in the Australian season-opener and could need replacing, a change that would incur a 10-place penalty on the starting grid for the second round of the Formula One season.
“There is some concern,” Raikkonen told the Ferrari web site (www.ferrariworld.com) as he prepared to return to the Sepang circuit where he took his first grand prix victory with McLaren in 2003.
“We had a slight leakage of water during the last part of the race [in Melbourne] and the team told me to slow down.
“The engine has since been checked in the works [factory] and they also did some simulations,” he added.
“Obviously we hope that the engine will make it through the whole weekend and that we don’t have to change it before the qualifying.
“In case we have to change it, obviously it would be a bit different for us… then the aim would be to reach a good result, the best one possible.”
Raikkonen will also have to contend with a fired-up Felipe Massa, the Brazilian determined not to be left behind by his new team mate after a gearbox problem ruined his Australian Grand Prix, as well as McLaren rivals Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton.
It remains to be seen also just how much the governing body’s decision to crack down since Melbourne on the use of so-called ‘flexi floors’ in cars will affect the leading teams.
Sepang is one of the toughest challenges of the season, with sweltering conditions that take a toll on drivers — who can lose up to four litres of fluid during the race — and cars.
The weather is also notoriously fickle, with the risk of a sudden torrential downpour during the race.
While Ferrari has the best record at the circuit since the first Malaysian Grand Prix in 1999, champions Renault have dominated the last two races there.
That is likely to change this year.
Melbourne showed that Renault were lagging Ferrari, McLaren and BMW Sauber — and Finnish new boy Heikki Kovalainen made it look worse with a difficult debut — but the team were encouraged by last week’s tests at Sepang.
“We are hoping to show that we have taken a step forward relative to Melbourne,” technical director Bob Bell said in a team preview.
“At this stage, it is unrealistic to talk about catching Ferrari or McLaren - but we need to show that progress has been made, and that we are starting to close down the gap,” he added. “Given our current situation, we will be pushing even harder to introduce new parts as quickly as possible.
“In past seasons, we had to balance our aggression with a degree of caution to avoid compromising our lead in the championship. This year, we have got nothing to lose and that will allow us to be even more aggressive.”
Ferrari’s main rivals will be McLaren, with Alonso winning in Malaysia in 2005 and taking the first pole position of his career there in 2003. He was runner-up to Raikkonen in Australia.
Briton Hamilton, who finished third in Melbourne to become the first rookie since Canadian Jacques Villeneuve in 1996 to stand on the podium in his debut race, will be looking to build on that stunning start.
He still has plenty to learn, however.
“It was a dream start for me in Australia, but I am realistic that motorsport is unpredictable,” the 22-year-old said.