SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1306 (72), Friday, September 14, 2007
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TITLE: Anarchists Freed After One Month
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Two St. Petersburg anarchists, Andrei Kalenov, 29, and Denis Zelenyuk, 22, who were arrested on Aug. 15 in connection with the bombing of a passenger train on its way to St. Petersburg were released from custody Thursday, their lawyers said. 
Both suspects gave a written undertaking not to leave the Novgorod region where they were detained, Kalenov’s lawyer Renat Gusmanov told reporters on Thursday.
The police had also arrested 25-year-old Chechen Khasan Didigov. Nobody has yet been officially charged.
St. Petersburg’s human rights groups have questioned the grounds for the anarchists’ lengthy detention.
Ruslan Linkov, head of the St. Petersburg organization Democratic Russia, accused the police of a vindictive attitude toward the detainees, who allegedly created trouble for themselves by behaving badly during the arrest.
The train, the Nevsky Express, crashed near Burga village in the Novgorod region on Aug. 13. The investigators believe a bomb had been planted under the tracks. The accident left sixty passengers injured.
The blast left a crater 1.5 meters wide and had a force equivalent to 4.5 kilograms of TNT.
Kalenov and Zelenyuk, both activists of the St. Petersburg League of Anarchists, were detained at 7 a.m. on Aug. 15 while walking through a wooded area close to the scene of the explosion.
They could not offer a satisfactory explanation for their presence in the area. 
The men maintained they were traveling to the town of Yaroslavl to attend an anarchist conference and had planned to change trains in Malaya Vishera, but then decided to head for the St. Petersburg-Moscow highway, but the police refused to accept these arguments.
“The two detainees had tried to assert their independence during the arrest, they talked about presumption of innocence, and the lengthy arrest was the price they had to pay,” Linkov said. “Russia’s investigative system is based on the principle of ‘presumption of guilt,’ when everyone is regarded as a potential suspect. Therefore it is assumed that suspects’ lawyers, rather than state investigators should spend time and effort in proving people’s alibis, while law enforcement must concentrate on finding proof for their suspicions.”
Kalenov is a member of the St. Petersburg human rights center Memorial. One of the organization’s leaders, the prominent human rights advocate Yuly Rybakov, defended the activist and testified that during the entire week prior to his arrest Kalenov had spent all his time in the Memorial offices in St. Petersburg.
Kalenov, who insists he has a consistent alibi, held a two-week long hunger strike while in custody in the village of Malaya Vishera to protest his detention. He had hoped that his action would help to speed up the process of checking his alibi but it did not work.
Rybakov complained that the police did not immediately respond to Memorial’s calls and would not come to take down testimonies citing a busy schedule, so the organization for the sake of time resorted to sending their evidence directly to the Northwestern branch of the General Prosecutor’s Office and the city police headquarters.
Human rights advocates are calling for a special investigation to be held on the legitimacy of the anarchists’ month-long detention and the police’s treatment of the detainees.
“If we just forget about it, then the police are likely to apply it more widely, grabbing any activist of the political opposition and placing them behind bars for a month on the basis of suspicions with no facts to back it up,” Linkov said.
During the searches in Kalenov and Zelenyuk’s apartments no suspicious items were found. Upon their arrest, the two anarchists did not possess any explosives or weapons. They also had no traces of explosives on them.
“They apparently just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Linkov said. “The long detention did not help the investigation but caused a lot of suffering to Kalenov, who had been recently hospitalized and treated for tick-borne encephalitis, and has not completely recovered from the illness.”
The incident cost Russian Railways more than 215 million rubles ($8.37 million), including 16 million rubles to restore the tracks, 82 million rubles to repair seven carriages, with five carriages being replaced entirely, and 5 million rubles to cover expenses related to train delays.

TITLE: New PM Hints At Top Job
AUTHOR: By Steve Gutterman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin’s choice for prime minister said Thursday that he would not rule out a run for the presidency, adding to the intrigue following his surprise nomination just months before elections.
Putin nominated Viktor Zubkov on Wednesday after dismissing Mikhail Fradkov, who had headed the Cabinet since 2004. The State Duma, the loyal lower parliament house that often acts as a rubber stamp for Kremlin policies, was expected to approve the choice Friday.
Asked whether he would be president, Zubkov said: “If I achieve something in this position, I do not rule out this scenario.”
Zubkov’s remark deepened the uncertainty Putin created by choosing his little-known ally to replace Fradkov ahead of December parliamentary elections and a March presidential vote in which Putin is barred from seeking a third straight term.
Zubkov, who turns 66 on Saturday, has spent the last six years overseeing investigations into suspicious financial transactions as the head of the agency charged with fighting money-laundering. He was widely praised by members of the dominant pro-Kremlin party United Russia after his nomination was announced.
But while his confirmation is a foregone conclusion, Putin’s nomination of a virtual unknown ahead of crucial elections muddied Russia’s political waters, amplifying questions about the popular leader’s plan for his country and himself.
Putin said Wednesday that he needed to appoint a government better suited to the campaigns for December Duma elections and the March presidential vote, in which he is constitutionally barred from seeking a third straight term, and to “prepare the country” for life after the elections.
The nomination ignited speculation over Zubkov’s role: whether he is Putin’s favored successor or a caretaker prime minister, perhaps to be replaced closer to the presidential vote.
Some saw his appointment as signaling Putin’s intention to retain control over the country even after he steps down, and others speculated that his caretaker role could extend into the presidency, allowing Putin to return in 2012 or sooner.
Putin has strongly suggested that he plans to retain some measure of influence after he leaves office, and has not ruled out a presidential bid in 2012.
“Zubkov is 65. If he does become Putin’s successor, it will likely be for only one term. Then Putin will say, ‘I am ready to return to the presidency,’” Communist lawmaker Viktor Ilyukhin said on Ekho Moskvy radio.
Zubkov’s remark to reporters about the presidency came during a day of closed-door discussions with lawmakers in the State Duma, the lower parliament house, before the vote expected Friday on his confirmation, which is assured.
Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov said his faction, with more than 50 votes, would vote against Zubkov. But a simple majority of 226 votes in the 450-seat chamber is sufficient for approval, and United Russia has about 300 seats. Flamboyant ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whose party backs most Kremlin initiatives, said it would support Zubkov.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Wednesday that the United States is confident it can work with the new prime minister.
In terms of “the development of Russian democracy, we’ve made known in public, quite clearly, our views about that, some of our concerns about it,” he said.
“The upcoming elections we hope will take place in a climate that is free, fair and transparent. That means not just on election day, but in the run-up to election day. I don’t detect that today’s events will affect that one way or the other.”

TITLE: Russia and The World Ask ‘Who is Mr. Zubkov?’
AUTHOR: By Max Delany and Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writers
TEXT: MOSCOW — Like his predecessor, Viktor Zubkov kept a low profile before being propelled to the post of prime minister, but he maintained close personal ties with President Vladimir Putin since their days together in St. Petersburg City Hall.
Zubkov, currently head of the Federal Financial Monitoring Service, served under Putin in St. Petersburg’s foreign relations committee for 10 months, from 1992 to 1993.
“He has very close connections [with Putin] and at that time was responsible for a wide range of foreign economic ties for St. Petersburg,” said Vatanyar Yagya, who was a close adviser to Mayor Anatoly Sobchak at the time.
Like Putin, Zubkov was fond of Sobchak. He attended a memorial service for the former mayor Aug. 10, Yagya said.
Zubkov also is described as having a spotless reputation. 
“Although I know him and his circle ... nothing bad has ever surfaced. He is a careful person,” said Nikolai Andrushenko, a former independent Leningrad and then St. Petersburg city deputy, who worked closely with Sobchak’s office in the 1990s. He called Zubkov “an ideal administrator.”
First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, who had been widely expected to receive the nomination for prime minister, described Zubkov as quiet but capable.
“He is someone whom I know quite well, and he is a man who, as we say in Russian, has worked without making any noise. ... He is perfectly competent,” Ivanov said on NTV television.
When Zubkov worked with Putin in the St. Petersburg administration, Putin used to refer to him using the formal “vy” form, while Zubkov used the more familiar “ty,” said Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst with the Council for National Strategy.
“As a bureaucrat, he taught Putin basic bureaucratic skills,” Belkovsky said. Zubkov’s resume does not have blank spaces or foreign service postings that would suggest he had links to the KGB.
As chief of the Financial Monitoring Service since 2001, Zubkov fought money laundering at a time when Putin began his campaign against the oligarchs, who had made fortunes through controversial deals. 
A highlight of Zubkov’s career was Russia’s removal from the blacklist drawn up by the Financial Action Task Force, an international body that combats money laundering. 
In October 2005, Zubkov said his service had blocked 109 bank accounts that could have been used to finance terrorism.
Zubkov, who turns 66 on Saturday, had been preparing to step down from his agency, apparently because he had passed the retirement age for civil servants, which is 65.
As recently as Monday, rumors swirled that he might get a Federation Council seat from the Leningrad region. In March, United Russia suggested that Zubkov should become a senator representing Omsk. Critics describe the Federation Council as a “featherbed” for retired government officials.
As prime minister, Zubkov would draw on his more recent knowledge of the country’s finances and 18 years of experience managing farms in Soviet times. 
“Viktor Zubkov possesses the deepest knowledge of the financial condition of any Russian company, any organization and any bank,” Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov said, Interfax reported.
Bankers spoke courteously about Zubkov. 
“He is a pleasant, intelligent and thoughtful person who tries to understand anything he does,” said Garegin Tosunyan, head of the Association of Russian Banks.
As a farm manager from 1967 to 1985, Zubkov could bring positive changes to the national agricultural policy, Mironov said.
Zubkov is father-in-law of Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, who is married to his daughter Yulia.
Zubkov’s first job was as a repairman at a factory. He later went on to study as an economist specializing in agriculture. 
After managing state farms around St. Petersburg for 18 years, he joined the city government in 1985. From 1993 to 2001, Zubkov served as a senior federal tax official.
In 1998, he unsuccessfully ran for governor of the Leningrad region. 
His campaign manager was Boris Gryzlov, now speaker of the State Duma.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Online Ticketing</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) —  Eurolines and Rossiya Airlines are to improve their online ticketing services, the companies recently announced.  
The St. Petersburg-based airline opened its online ticket service on its  new website, www.rossiya-airlines.com. 
With the bilingual (English and Rusisan) website it will be possible to choose and buy tickets using a bank card, the company’s press secretary Marina Peshekhonova said on Wednesday.
Eurolines, a bus service from St. Petersburg to Northern and Western Europe is also upgrading its ticketing service. Now “passengers can buy a ticket without leaving their homes,” Yelena Moiseyeva, the deputy director of Eurolines Russia, said.

<b>Road Collapse</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Asphalt collapsed on Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt on Thursday morning, Fontanka.ru reported. No one was injured and the hole was patched up by the afternoon.
Temperature fluctuations and “the extremely complicated soils of the Petrogad Side caused a pipe carrying cold water to burst,” Vodokanal spokeswoman Vera Izmailova told  Fontanka.ru. 

<b>New Terminal</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Pulkovo airport is to announce the winner of its competition to design a new terminal this week. 
After the jury, which includes Norman Foster and Kisho Kurokawa, met on June 8, the number of applicants was shortlisted to Grimshaw & Partners, Skidmore, and Owings & Merrill. 

<b>Woman Killed</b>
MOSCOW (SPT) — A Moldovan woman was found dead at a St. Petersburg market Wednesday morning after apparently receiving deadly blows to the back of the head, Interfax reported.
The woman, who worked as a saleswoman at one of the stalls at the market, was discovered dead on the premises at around 10 a.m. Wednesday, a law enforcement source told Interfax.
“The dead woman, born in 1968, had characteristic injuries on the back of her head,” the source said. 

<b>Sychyov On Party List?</b>
MOSCOW (SPT) — Private Andrei Sychyov, the soldier whose name has become synonymous with the problem of hazing in the armed forces, is attempting to be included on the Union of Right Forces, or SPS, party list for the State Duma elections in December, Interfax reported Wednesday.
Sychyov has informed the party of his desire to join the ticket, his mother, Galina Sychyova, told Interfax.
Party leader Nikita Belykh said he had not yet seen Sychyov’s letter but that the possibility of including him in the list would be discussed, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Iran, Russia Talks Omit Plant Issue
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Iran’s foreign minister met the head of the Federal Atomic Energy Agency in Moscow on Wednesday, but a Russian official said they did not tackle the vexed issue of the Bushehr nuclear plant Moscow is building for Tehran.
Russia’s work on the plant has been drawn into the international dispute over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, with Washington urging Moscow to halt construction.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki and energy agency chief Sergei Kiriyenko were meeting as co-chairs of a Russian-Iranian intergovernmental commission.
A source in the Russian delegation to the commission said Bushehr was not on the agenda for their meeting.
“It was decided to leave this off the agenda because there is a separate working group of experts who are handling this issue,” the source said.
Russian contractors have repeatedly set back the completion date for the power station on the Gulf, provoking tensions between Moscow and Tehran.
Moscow blames financial problems for the delays. But many observers say Russia is stalling because it does not fully trust Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and fears an international backlash if it delivers nuclear fuel to Bushehr.
Last week, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator said an agreement had been struck with Russia on a completion date for Bushehr, but officials in Moscow denied there was any such deal.
The United States and several Western countries believe Iran is using its atomic energy program as a cover to try to build a nuclear weapon. Tehran says it only wants nuclear technology to generate power.
Russia says Bushehr poses no threat of Iran acquiring sensitive technology, but Washington has pressed Moscow to drop the project as part of sanctions on Iran.

TITLE: ‘Father of All Bombs’ Tests Made Public
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Isachenkov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — The military has successfully tested what it described as the world’s most powerful non-nuclear air-delivered bomb, state television reported, the latest show of the nation’s military muscle.
Channel One television said the new ordnance, nicknamed the “Father of All Bombs” is four times more powerful than the U.S. “Mother of All Bombs.”
“The tests have shown that the new air-delivered ordnance is comparable to a nuclear weapon in its efficiency and capability,” Colonel-General Alexander Rukshin, deputy chief of the military’s General Staff, said in televised remarks late Tuesday.
Unlike a nuclear weapon, the bomb does not pose an environmental threat from the release of radiation, he added.
The U.S. Massive Ordnance Air Blast, nicknamed the Mother of All Bombs, a large-yield satellite-guided, air-delivered bomb, had been described as the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in history.
Channel One said that while the Russian bomb contained about 7 tons of high explosives compared with more than 8 tons of explosives in the U.S. bomb, it was four times more powerful because it uses a new, highly efficient type of explosives developed with the use of nanotechnology. The report did not identify the explosives.
While the U.S. bomb is equivalent to 11 tons of TNT, the Russian one is equivalent to 44 tons of regular explosives. The new weapon’s blast radius is 300 meters, twice that of the U.S. design, the report said.
Like its U.S. predecessor, first tested in 2003, the “Father of All Bombs” is a so-called thermobaric weapon that explodes in an intense fireball combined with a devastating blast. It explodes in a terrifying, nuclear bomb-like mushroom cloud and wreaks destruction through a massive shockwave created by the airburst and high temperature.
Channel One said the temperature in the epicenter of the bomb’s explosion was twice as high as that of the U.S. bomb.
The report showed the bomb dropping by parachute from a Tu-160 strategic bomber and exploding in an enormous fireball. It featured the debris of apartment buildings and armored vehicles at a testing range, as well as ground burned by the explosion.
It didn’t give the bomb’s military name or say when it was tested.
Rukshin said the new bomb would allow the military to “protect the nation’s security and confront international terrorism in any situation and any region.”
“We have got a relatively cheap ordnance with a high strike power,” Yury Balyko, department head at the Defense Ministry’s institute in charge of weapons design, said on Channel One.
The report reflected the Kremlin’s efforts to restore the country’s global clout and rebuild its military might. The muscle-flexing comes at a time when ties with Washington and Brussels have become strained over accusations that Russia is backsliding on democracy, Moscow’s vociferous protests against U.S. missile defense plans and rifts over global crises.
Last month, Putin ordered a resumption of regular patrol flights of strategic bombers, which had been suspended after the 1991 Soviet breakup.

TITLE: Russia and Serbia Tell U.S., EU to Back Off Over Kosovo
AUTHOR: By David Brunnstrom and Douglas Hamilton
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BRUSSELS — Russia told the United States on Wednesday to stop backing Kosovo independence while talks continue, and Serbia warned the EU on Wednesday that it would not accept any decision on Kosovo made outside the United Nations.
Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko, Russia’s envoy in the so-called Troika with the European Union and the United States supervising the Kosovo talks, accused Washington of bad faith for declaring support for Kosovo independence to occur later this year.
“I absolutely do not support that kind of attitude and those messages from the United States. I didn’t expect that from the United States at the very moment negotiations began,” he was quoted as saying by Serbia’s daily Vecernje Novosti.
Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica also called on the West not to encourage the breakaway province to declare independence and said Belgrade was being constructive in negotiations to resolve Kosovo’s future by Dec. 10.
He gave no hint of any progress in the talks.
“We do think that the United Nations and the Security Council are the sole institutions in which the problem of the future status of Kosovo should be dealt with,” he said after talks in Brussels with the EU’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana. “Everything else is a sort of violation of international law.”
Efforts to win a Security Council resolution rubber-stamping a UN plan to put Kosovo on the road to independence broke down this year after Russia threatened to veto any such resolution.
Moscow insists that any pact on the province must not be imposed on Belgrade.
Leaders of Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanians say they will declare independence unilaterally if internationally mediated talks that began in Vienna last month do not yield anything.

TITLE: Suspicious Death Probe Called Off
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — The investigation into the mysterious death of Kommersant defense reporter Ivan Safronov, who fell from his apartment building in March, has been halted, Kommersant reported Wednesday.
The case was halted because Safronov died “as a result of his suicidal actions,” Kommersant reported, citing the Central Administrative District branch of the City Prosecutor’s Office.
“If later on we discover any new circumstances surrounding Safronov’s death, we are prepared to resume the investigation,” Anton Serous, head of the investigative team at the central district branch, told Kommersant.
City Prosecutor’s Office spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko said she could not comment because the case had been passed on to the newly formed Investigative Committee, a semi-autonomous body under the auspices of the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Kommersant editor Andrei Vasilyev declined to comment Wednesday.
Safronov plummeted to his death from the fifth story of his apartment building March 2. He was 51.
Kommersant has said Safronov was working on a sensitive story about Russian arms sales when he died.
SPT, Reuters

TITLE: Gazprom Bids to Boost Its Stake in Mosenergo
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Mosenergo said Tuesday that Gazprom had offered to buy out all of the Moscow city utility’s shares that it does not already own in a deal that could be worth as much as $4.7 billion.
By putting a high price on the offer, Gazprom could well boost its Mosenergo stake to 75 percent or more, preventing any minority shareholders from building a blocking stake in the firm.
The apparent intention to achieve unchallenged control of Mosenergo represents another step toward Gazprom’s goal of gaining a commanding position in the country’s electricity market. 
Such an acquisition, however, would hardly change Mosenergo’s investment plans, as Gazprom already owns a majority of the firm’s stock, analysts said.
Gazprom increased its stake in Mosenergo to 49.9 percent in the course of an additional share offering earlier this year. Analysts believe that Gazprom controls a further 4 percent through its subsidiaries.
The utility’s other largest shareholders include national utility Unified Energy System and the Moscow city government. Mosenergo is the city’s main power supplier. 
Gazprom has acted under legislation that requires companies to extend buyout offers if they are in possession of 30 percent of another company.
Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov indicated that the offer was not a formality but an earnest effort to expand its control over the utility. “You can see everything if you look at the price,” he said.
In its offer, Gazprom said it would pay 6.5 rubles (25 cents) for a share. By law, it could set a lower price of 6.15 rubles to 6.25 rubles, which is the average market price over the past six months, analysts said.
“Chances are high that Gazprom, through this offer, will increase its stake to 75 percent,” said Dmitry Skvortsov, an analyst at the Bank of Moscow.
Shareholders have until Nov. 19 to respond to the proposal. 
UES, which holds 36.2 percent in Mosenergo, could agree to sell half of that stake to Gazprom if it decides that the sale will raise more money than a placement on the London Stock Exchange, spokeswoman Margarita Nagoga said. 
“We consider all options as realistic,” she said.
The half that UES could sell to Gazprom belongs to the state, while the other half will pass to UES’s minority shareholders before the company’s liquidation in July.
Moscow city government spokesman Sergei Tsoi was out of the office and unavailable for comment Tuesday. His deputy Stanislav Oganyan, the other official authorized to speak about the city government’s interest in Mosenergo, did not return calls.

TITLE: RBI Plans $500 Million Development
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: RBI holding plans to spend $500 million on acquiring land plots in Russia’s regions during the next two years. By doing so, the company hopes to start its regional expansion and operate on a national level.
So far RBI has focused on development projects in St. Petersburg, selling premium-class premises under the RBI brand and mid-range premises under the Severny Gorod brand.
“Over a five year period we should be able to realize projects of any scale in any location,” Eduard Tikhtinsky, chairman of the board of RBI holding, said at a press conference Wednesday describing the company’s strategic goals.
In the near future RBI will focus on Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Yekaterinburg, Perm, Nizhny Novgorod, Tyumen, Ufa and Alma-Ata. RBI will use its own financial resources as well as those of its business partner Deutsche Bank and shareholder Morgan Stanley.
Besides this regional expansion, RBI will start developing new types of projects in addition to its traditional premium-class and mid-range residential complexes.  These will include business centers, shopping centers and multifunctional complexes that combine commercial and residential areas.
To manage the business on a new level the company has employed new managers who have experience in working in large companies with regional branches.
At the moment about 50 percent of the top management is comprised of newly-appointed staff, Tikhtinsky said. They came from TNK-BP oil company, TGK-1 power company, Struktura Development and Becar real estate agency.
“New market segments and new regions will allow us to find new opportunities. We’re not interested in logistic complexes and hotels. We’ve chosen the market segments that are still underdeveloped. We have been looking for cities with maximum potential for residential real estate, attractive prices and good prospects,” said Mikhail Voziyanov, vice president for strategy and investment at RBI.
Cities with large populations will be equally attractive for the development of business centers, he added.
The company’s managers believe that, with the exception of Moscow, in all other regions their products will be unique for the local markets. Tikhtinsky added that besides acquisition of land plots the company will consider joint ventures with local developers and land owners.
Polina Yakovleva, head of the elite real estate department at Knight Frank St. Petersburg, considered the regions chosen by RBI attractive from an investment prospective, especially the oil production regions.
RBI is unlikely to suffer from competition in the regions, Yakovleva said.
Since 2006 RBI has invested over $100 million into new projects. The company has acquired 40 hectares of land – four land plots in St. Petersburg and one land plot in the Leningrad Oblast. Of these territories RBI will construct 250,000 square meters of residential area and 50,000 square meters of commercial area.

TITLE: Siemens’ Power Machines Stake Bid Rejected by Antimonopoly Agency
AUTHOR: By Maria Kolesnikova and Philipp Grontzki
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s antimonopoly watchdog said it rejected Siemens AG’s bid to buy a controlling stake in Power Machines because the offer threatened competition.
Siemens, which already owns 25 percent of Moscow-based Power Machines, would have controlled about 50 percent of the Russian market for energy equipment if the bid had succeeded, the Federal Antimonopoly Service said in a statement on its web site Wednesday.
Buying Power Machines could limit competition “through the emerging dominance of Siemens AG in the Russian energy equipment market,’’ the regulator said in a statement. Power Machines produces about 37 percent of the country’s energy equipment, while Siemens supplies 13 percent. 
Power Machines will compete for $26 billion of contracts from Russian power utilities as they upgrade and expand generators in the next five years.
Siemens sought approval to bid for the 30 percent Power Machine stake owned by Interros Holding Co., Wolfram Trost, a spokesman for Munich-based Siemens, said by telephone Wednesday. Interros was legally required to offer its stake to Siemens and Unified Energy System, also owner of a 25 percent stake, before selling to any other investors. Unified Energy waived  its right to the stake and is planning to sell its shares to a group of investors for at least 460.9 million.
The antitrust office in August cleared billionaires OlegDeripaska and Alexei Mordashov to bid for Interros’s stake. Deripaska, who owns United Co. Rusal, the world’s largest aluminum producer, has antitrust approval to buy as much as 82 percent of Power Machines. Mordashov, who controls Severstal, Russia’s biggest steelmaker, was cleared to buy 100 percent.

TITLE: Wrigley to Expand Its Local Plant
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company, the world’s largest maker of chewing gum, said Tuesday that it might build a second factory in Russia and acquire local producers to tap “double-digit” growth that is exceeding expectations.
“We’re open to more acquisitions in Russia,’’ said Igor Savelyev, Wrigley’s chief for Eastern and Southern Europe. “There’s huge growth opportunity.”
Savelyev said the company would decide on the plant’s site next year, Interfax reported. He added that the company would also consider growth through acquisition, although it did not have any specific projects in mind.
Savelyev said Wrigley also planned to expand its St. Petersburg plant. The firm will invest $100 million into each project and hopes to receive support from local authorities in gaining access to infrastructure, he said, Interfax reported.
Wrigley, the maker of Doublemint and Big Red gum, entered the domestic market in the early 1990s and has operated a plant in St. Petersburg since 1999.
Bloomberg, MT

TITLE: Russian Banking Faces Slowdown After U.S. Crisis
AUTHOR: By Catrina Stewart
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — After an “excessive growth” in consumer lending, Russia’s banking sector faces a slowdown in the wake of the U.S. subprime crisis, a leading Western banker said this week. 
Yet Russia could be an island of relative calm amid the global instability, Hans Jorg Rudloff, chairman of investment bank Barclays Capital, said in a telephone interview.
The country’s oil- and gas-fueled boom has seen credit mushroom in recent years, with some banks tapping a deep well of international financing to pursue their aggressive expansion plans — while ordinary Russians have rushed to take out consumer loans. 
“The excessive growth of consumer lending in Russia has been unsustainable,” said Rudloff, a longtime ally of Rosneft CEO Sergei Bogdanchikov, who serves on the state oil firm’s supervisory board. “A lot of credit is acting like an afterburn on the economy,” Rudloff said, as it is giving the power to achieve great growth rates. “When less credit is available, growth slows down.” 
The U.S. subprime mortgage crisis has sparked global turmoil, resulting in the bailing out of two German banks while Barclays, the third-largest commercial bank in Britain, took out two emergency loans from the Bank of England in the space of a week. 
In the West, the crisis shows no immediate sign of abating, and a small British mortgage lender said Monday that it was going into administration. 
Yet Russia, Rudloff said, is showing stability in what is otherwise an unsettling crisis globally. “If we return to the easy liquidity and the conditions we had until June, there will be no harm done,” he said.
The country experienced a surge in capital outflows in August, leading to a liquidity squeeze that pushed interbank lending rates to record highs. Yet leading bankers have sought to ease fears that the global credit crunch will do serious damage to Russia’s economy. 
In comments at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Sydney over the weekend, President Vladimir Putin said the government would consider supporting liquidity in the banking system, should it prove necessary.
Central Bank First Deputy Chairman Alexei Ulyukayev offered some reassurance to investors last week, saying the country’s net capital outflow in August would steady at $5.5 billion, considerably less than the previous forecast of $7.6 billion by Economic and Trade Minister German Gref.
Aton brokerage reflected the collective sense of relief among Russian bankers. “The figure suggests that the recent wave of global liquidity crisis has passed at very little cost to Russia,” Aton said in a note to investors.
In further encouraging news, the Central Bank said international reserves grew by $2 billion in the last four days of August, resulting in an overall fall of $1.5 billion for the whole month, a drop of just 0.1 percent.
In contrast to their counterparts in the West, Russian banks have very limited, if any, exposure to subprime paper.
“Go from [the global] level to the biggest financial institutions in Russia, and you find very quickly that none of these banks have the [subprime] type of credit exposure. Perhaps this is because the Russian banking sector is relatively underdeveloped,” said Erik DePoy, strategist at Alfa Bank.
U.S. stock markets tumbled Friday after the U.S. Labor Department said employers cut 4,000 workers from their payrolls in August. This compared to a gain of 68,000 in July. The latest figures have compounded the U.S. economy’s recent woes, prompting fears that it is heading for recession.
Analysts say Russia is well sheltered from the events in the West. “The issue now is the likely slowdown of banking sector growth,” said Natalya Orlova, banking analyst at Alfa Bank. 
Russian banks are vulnerable, however, to the global flight from risk that has prompted international investors to take their money elsewhere. The resulting liquidity problems will force investors to re-evaluate their attitude to risk, which will be felt most keenly by Russian banks borrowing abroad.
The situation is very different from 1998: Three years of high oil prices mean that public debt now accounts for just 10 percent of the gross domestic product, compared with 150 percent nine years ago. GDP grew by 7.8 percent in the second quarter of 2007; and Central Bank reserves have grown to over $400 billion.
The country has a substantial cushion on which to fall back should the credit crunch start to bite. Its banking sector is growing very rapidly, much of that growth sustainable, and its largest banks are well capitalized.
But Russia is not out of the woods yet.
At a meeting with Russian business leaders in Moscow last week, Rudloff warned that global markets had suffered a “heart attack” and that the next four to six weeks would prove critical as investors price up the risks and banks move to cover troubled investment vehicles, the Financial Times reported.
“Are we capable of establishing a new price level for these assets? If we stay stuck, the patient is going to die,” Rudloff said, the newspaper reported.
While Russia is not immune to global shocks, analysts say the banking sector is relatively robust. Yet state spending has been relatively high, and should the oil price fall down toward $50 per barrel, economists say the government could find itself in difficulties.

TITLE: Knowing Who but Not Why
AUTHOR: By Scott Gehlbach and Konstantin Sonin
TEXT: The surprise came a bit late. Usually the Russian political system is upended in August, but this year we had to wait until the second week of September to discover who would replace the inevitably outgoing prime minister, Mikhail Fradkov. But a surprise it was, nonetheless.
Although nobody expected Fradkov to survive the fall, the nature of the replacement had political analysts scrambling late Wednesday to answer a question that has been asked before, only this time with a different name attached: “Who is Zubkov?” The real question, however, is not who, but why?
The Moscow spin doctors will certainly claim that President Vladimir Putin, who is prohibited by the Constitution from serving past March, has no desire to be a lame duck and so has chosen a political unknown to maintain the balance of power among rival camps at the top until the last possible moment.
But the easiest way to maintain the balance of power would simply have been to maintain the status quo. When Fradkov was appointed out of nowhere 3 1/2 years ago, it was the absence of presidential potential and ambitions that seemed to make him such a good candidate for the position of prime minister. What was said then could also be said today.
Others will suggest that Putin intended for First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov to be the prime minister but that Wednesday’s leak to this effect in Vedomosti, necessitated a change in plans so that Putin could retain the political initiative. Unlike his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, however, Putin has demonstrated very little tendency to second-guess decisions already made.
So what is the meaning of Wednesday’s nomination of Viktor Zubkov, the retirement-age (he turns 66 on Sunday) head of a relatively unknown government agency with responsibility for preventing money laundering and the financing of terrorism, to head the government in advance of December’s State Duma elections? One possible answer is that the path of succession has been decided, and that it does not run through the prime minister’s office.
By choosing Zubkov, a figure even less known to the public than Putin himself was when he was nominated as prime minister, the president may be signaling that he expects his successor to be the leader not of the government, but of a party. In this interpretation, an electoral victory by United Russia would pave the way for a successful presidential run in 2008 by whoever is chosen next month to head the party list. That would be not Zubkov, but one of the more obvious successors, like Ivanov or Dmitry Medvedev, the other first deputy prime minister.
Always attuned to the examples of history, the Kremlin may thus be attempting to create the Russian equivalent of Mexico’s Institutionalized Ruling Party or, PRI, an organization that outlives any particular president and keeps political competition within manageable limits. Such a system would be highly stable if it could be created, thus assuring that those close to power have little to fear from constitutionally mandated elections every four years.
Yet it is far from clear that Putin will be able to pull it off, if, in fact, this is what he has in mind. Establishing a precedent for orderly succession requires a careful balancing of interests within the party elite. Whoever is at the top of the pyramid must have more to lose from hanging on than stepping down when his time is up, and those further down must invest in the success of those further up, knowing that their time will also come. Even if Putin is shrewd enough to start the process of institutionalization successfully — and Putin is nothing if not shrewd — it will take another few presidents acting in a similar manner before people know what to expect come August or September and adjust their actions accordingly.
Moreover, the PRI that governed Mexico for seven decades was not merely a “party in government,” in the language of political science, but also a “party in the electorate.” It assured that the president’s handpicked successors would actually win elections by exploiting the party’s deep integration into the electorate and control of pork-barrel spending. United Russia is more of a party today than it was four years ago, but it has a long way to go before it matches the electoral machinery of the PRI.
Yet there is another lesson to be learned from the Mexican experience. In 1880, Porfirio Diaz, having promised to serve no more than one term when assuming the presidency four years before, stepped down to steer the election of his chosen successor — a political unknown. After four years of a weak and corrupt presidency, Diaz was back, and served seven more terms until finally deposed during the Mexican Revolution. It was the subsequent 20 years of civil war that taught Mexican politicians the value of an institutionalized authoritarian regime.
Although Wednesday’s development is hard to interpret, it does clear the horizon. If Ivanov or Medvedev acquires the coveted first place in the United Russia list ahead of parliamentary elections, this will indicate that Putin has opted for the more modern Mexican path, the path toward institutionalized succession. If not, then we may witness a figurehead successor and — probably less than seven, but perhaps still many — future Putin terms.

Scott Gehlbach is assistant professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Konstantin Sonin is assistant professor at the New Economic School/CEFIR.

TITLE: A Disastrous Script to Follow
AUTHOR: By Boris Kagarlitsky
TEXT: Most Hollywood disaster films follow a pretty standard plot line: A scientist identifies some kind of threat to society, typically the result of some kind of government or business activity. Biological experiments and major construction projects are common examples.
Alas, the hero’s warnings go unheeded and business moves forward as usual. For his efforts, the “dissident” hero is ridiculed and shunned. Soon afterward, the first mishap occurs, which raises some initial alarm. Government officials or business leaders begin to have doubts about their own activities. Because the accident was minor and the threat appears to have passed, however, they again become confident and careless.
Our hero, in the meantime, remains convinced that more calamities will follow, and giving up on his futile efforts to convince anyone, makes the necessary arrangements to save himself and those close to him from the catastrophe that soon comes crashing down on everyone else.
This scenario has been repeated in hundreds of films dealing with myriad disasters, including floods, earthquakes, toxic chemicals, asteroids, sharks, aliens, mutants and even avalanches. The only disaster that has yet to be dramatized on celluloid is an economic crisis.
This is strange, as economic crises usually follow this same Hollywood pattern: Specialists critical of official policy issue predictions of impending doom that are systematically ignored or dismissed out of hand. When the first shock waves finally hit the economy, those in power ultimately decide that it is not their policies that are to blame. They find the explanation, instead, in their own hesitation to follow their policies to their full and logical conclusion.The only solution, therefore, is to go full speed ahead.
It should come as no surprise that, instead of averting or alleviating the crisis, this approach only aggravates it in the end.
The current instability in global financial markets corresponds to the early rumblings of impending disaster in Hollywood films. For those who anticipate even more serious troubles, this instability represents only the first of what will soon become a succession of increasingly severe problems. For those grave and solemn people involved in making the world’s economic and political decisions on a daily basis, the recent spate of market instability is nothing more than a chance, isolated incident, that is easy to deal with without recourse to any changes in fundamental course.
Similarly, the current real estate recession in the United States is not, by itself, catastrophic for either the U.S. or global economies. The problem, though, is that these events have deeper causes. They are symptoms of much more serious trouble — a warning sign that basic problems in the economy’s structure that nobody has been willing to confront for years are finally surfacing.
Following the Hollywood formula, we can come up with a rough idea of how things will proceed from here. The U.S. mortgage crisis will be resolved one way or another, and banks will ride out the crisis. But this will mean cutting back on business and individual loans, meaning Americans will buy less, meaning a drop in production where U.S. output is already far below that of Asia, and China in particular. It is difficult to say how the Chinese leadership will respond to a drop in demand for its goods, but jailing or shooting some high-ranking official for allowing the economy to slip wouldn’t come as a surprise. The response from markets is easier to predict: Demand for oil and raw materials will fall.
The flow of petrodollars that today supplies Russia’s stabilization fund, the state budget and corporate accounts will begin to dry up. The world’s free trade economy will have to revert to protectionist measures, reducing the World Trade Organization to a mere club of squabbling nations. This would be followed by major political convulsions.
This could turn into a very scary movie.

Boris Kagarlitsky is the director of the Institute of Globalization Studies.

TITLE: Keep on moving
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Sabot, the San Francisco-formed, Czech Republic-based band has returned to Russia after 15 years. On a Russian tour that started Wednesday in Yekaterinburg, the instrumental jazz-punk duo will also perform in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the cities the band visited in 1991 and 1992, just before and soon after the Soviet Union fell apart.
“First we came to Russia in August [1991], and there had been a putsch and we came to Moscow like, I don’t know, two weeks afterwards, and it was pretty chaotic,” said drummer Hilary Binder by phone from her home in Tabor, Czech Republic this week. When it was in St. Petersburg 15 years ago, Sabot performed at the pioneering alternative, now-defunct TaMtAm club and the short-lived rock bar Nord.
“My strongest memories of both of those tours were that we traveled by train... and the transition of the rather closed society — and being not Russian, not speaking the language ... We’ve only been through Russia one other time since we’d played some concerts in 1992, and it was just in transit in a Moscow airport. We were flying to, I think, to South Korea, and it was a pretty chaotic time at the airport, too, this is about two years ago. I’m excited to see what’s happening there now.”
Sabot, whose other member is bassist Christopher Rankin, is traveling with award-winning Czech film-maker Filip Remunda, who is making a film about the band performing and meeting people in Russia and some other countries.
Remunda is best-known for the 2004 satirical film “Czech Dream” (Cesky Sen), co-directed with Vit Klusak, which documented a fake advertizing campaign for a non-existent new hypermarket in Prague, that included an anthem sung by a schoolchildren’s choir and the hypermarket’s “opening.”
“It’s a very interesting film about a lot of things, about the rush of capitalism in Czech Republic, about the rate of building these hypermarkets in Eastern Europe, about consumerism some 15 years after the Velvet Revolution,” said Binder, who added that some of Remunda’s films would be screened during the tour.
“[Remunda] has decided to make a film more about Sabot’s tours, but also about our connection to this country, and our international arts center. He’s been traveling with us to the States, Japan, South Korea, and he’ll be with us in Russia, and also on the second part of the tour in Serbia in early October.”
Remunda’s involvement with Sabot started with “Chris a Hilary na CESTe,” a short black-and-white documentary about the band’s life in Tabor that he made as a film student in 1999.
Sabot relocated to the South Bohemian town of Tabor in 1993 to take part in establishing CESTA (the Cultural Exchange Station in Tabor), an international not-for-profit center set up to foster cultural understanding and tolerance through the arts. CESTA’s activities include international arts festivals, community projects, group exchanges, residencies, and the development of an informational global network for artists in all fields of artistic expression and cultural production.
“The main reason that we came to the Czech Republic was because this area of the world at that time was very interesting to us in terms of all the social upheaval happening at that time on European soil, and being cultural producers also in the United States but touring as a band around the world we found more possibility to invite people from different countries around the world to a place like the Czech Republic than we were able to achieve in the United States,” said Binder.
“As a musician, I feel much more rewarded here than I ever did pursuing my alternative music career in the States, but that said I was much younger 15 years ago and didn’t have that much experience that I have now. So I don’t know, if I spent another 15 years in the United States, would I have become as rewarded? Not sure. But what I can say is that in the early 1990s when we were still traveling around, we received much more support and we were more rewarded traveling outside the United States, so as a musician I can say I’m much happier here.”
Binder and Rankin formed Sabot in San Francisco 1988 after their previous band, the punk-folk trio Forethought, with guitarist singer Tommy Strange, had split.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Rankin moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1978. He formed his first industrial music group, Problemist, in San Francisco, California in 1981. Originally a saxophone and synthesizer player, he switched to bass guitar when he was still with Problemist. In 1984 he formed Morally Bankrupt, a four-piece progressive punk group, before forming Forethought in 1986.
Binder was born in Washington D.C. She began her musical career at six, studying classical violin and piano. Frustrated by the confines of classical music, she began to teach herself the drums at 15 and formed her first punk group, Death Before School, in 1981. 
Despite the years passed and relocation, Sabot’s music and attitude have not changed much, according to Binder.
“For me, not really, because the fact is the band that I have with Chris, it’s really like one long conversation,” she said.
“So I think as we’ve gotten older, I think we’ve learned how to play instruments better, but I think that the sincerity and emotion in our music is very much the same, it’s just developed over the years as a relationship develops over the years, so we become closer and identify ourselves both as a union, individually developing. 
“Some of our fans have told us that our music has got harder, like we used to  be jazzier, and now we play harder music, and it makes us think this is interesting, because usually they watch people who tend to play softer music like, as they are getting older, and we’re not doing that. But that is just what some fans have told me — I kind of think that we have the similar energy, similar spirit as we’ve always had.”

Sabot performs at The Place on Monday. www.cesta.cz/sabot!.htm

TITLE: Chernov’s
         choice
TEXT: <b>Dutch Punch</b>, an annual celebration of underground music and arts from the Netherlands, kicked off with a party at Revolution club on Tuesday that centered around a huge bowl of Dutch punch. The indie rock band Blues Brother Castro and electronic musician Malorix added to the program.
“Mainstream Dutch music definitely lost its reason for existence during the early 1990s,” wrote Job Willems of <b>Applegarden</b> in an email to the St. Petersburg Times. 
“The last bit of hope for Dutch Rock with international potential faded out when Dutch rock-icon Herman Brood bravely leaped to his death, soon followed by the death of the great Dutch folk-singer Andre Hazes.
“They really had big enough personalities to support their creative profession with big budgets. The bigger acts now are under pressure of this big budget, so much that a good television review of their new fiancee becomes more of an issue than the intrinsic value of their music. And it is really hard for new bands that do get acclaimed to stand up to the hype-ing of their music. Don’t expect anybody that’ll last longer than two albums at the moment, for they’re burned up. On the sofa the audience, craving for new kicks is already sms-voting for the next cute guy, with honest songs.
“As for our homegrown music, I say: Underground is the only ground to stand on. Humor, irony and a lot of anger and general mistrust are compulsory values to stand the shallow tide of time. The only thing musicians can do at the moment is to listen to old records, and witnessed by a few, have odd-shaped erections that point in unexpected directions.”
“So, if the people of St. Petersburg are waiting for the next big band from Holland, they have to have some centuries of patience and bring their own beer. I do know that Dutch Punch will offer them a solid insight of the go-against-the-grain musical energy that ignores, provokes, seduces and — in Russia most surely — escapes the mediocre janitor-state, called Holland.”
Applegarden will perform at Griboyedov on Friday and at Revolution on Saturday. At Revolution it will be joined by <b>Malorix</b>, <b>Deformer</b>, <b>Stoma</b> and <b>Eni-Less</b>.
<b>Jules Deelder</b> will read his poetry (a Russian translation will also be supplied) at Dom Kino at 3 p.m. on Friday and will spin records from his collection of jazz music at City Bar later the same day. Catch Aux Raus at Zoccolo and Stoma at GEZ-21 on Friday, and Deformer at the 2nd Floor on Saturday. Dutch Punch’s film programs will be screened at Dom Kino at 4:40 p.m. and 6 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. 
The festival will end with a DJ set by Eni-Less and music video art program “Impakt: The Music Is You” at The Place on Sunday.

<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: Early rising
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Now in its tenth year, the city’s groundbreaking Early Music Festival returns this week. Every fall, vibrant performances of its refined ensembles evoke, embody and revive the long-lost noble spirit of St. Petersburg.
The event, subtitled this year “Earth And Sky” kicks off on Sunday with a concert by the French ensemble “Le Poeme Harmonique.” The performance at the Glinka Philharmonic — showcasing old French romances — is titled “Aux Marches du Palais” (On the way to the Palace).
Established in 1997 by Vincent Dumestre, this ensemble specializes in 17th century music with an interest in reviving the early 17th-century French and Italian madrigal. The musicians perform on rare instruments, including the theorbo, the lirone, the tiorbino and the arpa tripla.
Early music, embracing everything created between the medieval era through to early classicism, long remained a missing link in repertoires of Russian orchestras. The brainchild of local enthusiasts Marc de Mauny and Andrei Reshetin, the Early Music Festival was originally designed for a narrow circle of the initiated. But interest was instantly sparked, news traveled fast, and the event is now in full blossom.
The festival — which has no equivalents in Russia — has, over the decade of its history, attracted some of the biggest names in early music to St. Petersburg. This year is no exception.
During the more than two weeks of the festival, which ends on Oct. 8 in Moscow with a concert by Italian-Dutch ensemble Concerto Palatino, audiences will be treated to performances by Dutch early music patriarch, harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt, Italy’s Musica Antiqua Roma, France’s Le Poeme Harmonique and Organum Ensemble and Spain’s violinist and conductor Jordi Savall with his ensemble, Hesperion XXI.
The Catherine the Great Orchestra — the first ensemble dedicated to performing early music and baroque works in contemporary Russia — will also be featured in the program.
“Earth And Sky” will be explored simultaneously in three cities — St. Petersburg, Moscow and Yekaterinburg — with some of the guests traveling to all three places.
“This festival is something more sophisticated than a string of decent concerts; we perceive it rather as a musical instrument,” said violinist Andrei Reshetin, artistic director of the Catherine the Great Orchestra, and the festival’s co-organizer. “When in good hands, a musical instrument can produce magical sounds that touch your heart and get under your skin.”
It is the policy of the festival’s godfathers to introduce the ensembles that once formed their own musical tastes and influenced their preferences.
Jordi Savall, one of the biggest names in the field of early music worldwide, whose repertoire spans from Medieval to Baroque music, gained international praise and credit for rescuing the early musical instrument the viola da gamba from undeserved oblivion.
Savall, who has performed at the festival before, appears at the State Academic Cappella on Oct. 4 with a program devoted to early world music, featuring traditional Afghan, Jewish, Breton, Catalan, Greek and Turkish music.
Festival founder de Mauny emphasized he is especially thrilled to welcome Organum Ensemble to St. Petersburg. Organum will give a recital on Sept.18 at the Chapel of the Knights of Malta of the Suvorov Military Academy. The program, “Incarnated Word,” comprises Aquitanian liturgy from the 16th-17th centuries.
“The ensemble represents the spiritual vocal tradition that greatly influenced me personally and I long wanted to share it with the St. Petersburg audiences,” de Mauny said. “The performance may perhaps serve as a bridge between the spiritual traditions of the Catholic and the Orthodox worlds.”
The  Organum Ensemble was founded in 1982 in France’s Sénanque Abbay. The musicians focus on “pre- and para-Gregorian” chant, meaning the chants that preceded, grew from or existed in parallel with Gregorian chant. According to its website, the ensemble “has studied and developed most of the influential European repertoires since the 6th century, with the field of investigation stretching to the last three centuries and highlighting the existence of enduring medieval aesthetics in certain circles until the last decades of the 20th century.”
De Mauny said the festival’s mission has been to break down the stereotypes, which have built up around the early music repertoire and musicians who perform it. 
“Then, we aim to position Earlymusic as being not within the field of classical music at all, but as an alternative to classical music, just as jazz and rock are alternatives,” De Mauny explains. 
“Music as it was composed, played, and performed up to the end of the 18th century has a lot more in common with both jazz and rock than it does with music of the 19th and 20th centuries. I mean this both in terms of the musical material itself, the way the notes are written, the approach it demands, what is required from the musician, and in terms of its place and role in society.”
Despite the festival’s impressive geographical coverage, the selection of local venues this year has slightly shrunk — being limited to Glinka Philharmonic Hall, the State Academic Capella and the Chapel of the Knights of Malta.
 
www.earlymusic.ru

TITLE: Traveling back in time
AUTHOR: By Larisa Doktorow
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg has a huge network of rails set in its roadways and electric wires running overhead to serve electric trams and, although trams may be progressively playing a lesser role in urban transport and lines are being shifted to outlying city districts, they still remain visible on city center streets. 
This autumn, as the city celebrates 100 years of its electric tram service, a refurbished tram museum is being opened in the Vasilievsky Ostrov depot. Inside this historic building, “mobile” and “stationary” exhibits tell the story of trams and other means of public transport.
St. Petersburg tram lovers began collecting and restoring historic trams about ten years ago. Now the museum has 20 “retro” trams in fully serviceable condition, as well as recently added retro-buses and trolley buses. 
St. Petersburg was not the first Russian city to have a tram line. In Kiev, part of the Russian Empire at the time, a tram service was introduced in 1892. However, taking into account the length of the rail lines, number of cars and amount of staff working in city tram depots, it was the imperial capital of St. Petersburg that earned the name of “tram capital of the world” among afficionados. 
St. Petersburg’s first electric tram route connected Nevsky Prospekt with Pokrovskaya (now Turgeneva) Ploshchad and opened on Oct. 26, 1907. This was an important event not only because a new comfortable and cheap means of transport was being introduced but also because it signified the victory of municipal authorities over monopolist private owners of omnibuses and railways. This came a year after the opening of a provisional tram service laid down on ice for winter transport between the city’s islands had attracted great public support. By 1912 the length of tram rails in the city had reached 119 km, with 14 different routes embracing major avenues, squares, railway stations and hospitals. Trams delivered passengers from one island to the another, from Novaya Derevniya to Okhta and even as far as Strelna. 
The two main city depots engaged 6,000 employees, including conductors, electricians and mechanics. The first people hired for driver’s positions had been city coachmen.
The service started daily at 7.30 a.m. and stopped at 11 p.m. The coaches were divided into first and second class compartments and carried a maximum of 34 passengers. The regulations of the day barred admittance to passengers who wore dirty clothes, were drunk or displayed unruly behavior.
During the first 50 years of its existence, the tram network grew rapidly but the opening of the  metro in 1955 challenged its dominance. Nonetheless, expansion of the tram lines continued through the second half of the 20th century as they reached out into new residential districts. What finally changed the outlook for trams has been the dramatic increase in the number of cars on the streets of St. Petersburg over the past few years.
The “mobile” part of the tram museum brings its exhibits to the public. Several times a year the retro-trams leave the depot on Vasilievsky Ostrov and travel around the city. One of those special dates is April 15. This commemorates the day in 1942 during the Siege of Leningrad when the city trams began running again following a break from the first days of the blockade in December 1941. “Memorial” route No. 0 travels along Sadovaya, Nevsky and Turgeneva Ploshchad. 
The museum also rents out its retro-trams for special events such as birthdays, graduation balls, and corporate events. Among the services on offer are table service with waiters, live music and the possibility of getting on and off at any point. 
The “stationary” part of the museum’s collection includes historic photographs, archival documents, the uniforms of tram drivers and conductors, historic ticket machines and models of horse-drawn trams which were predecessors of electric trams, such as the bright blue example in front of the Vasileostrovskaya metro station.
 
The museum is located at 77 Sredny Prospekt, Vasilievsky Ostrov. www.pbti-company.ru

TITLE: Ship discovery
AUTHOR: By Ali Nassor
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg archeologists earlier this month discovered the wreck of a class of ship used in the exploration of the Antarctic in the early 19th century. The shipwreck was found lying in differing depths of between 19 and 29 meters on the seabed of the Gulf of Finland.
The discovery of the wreckage of the Svir, a sister vessel to the famous Mirny frigate, the first to reach the Antarctic coast in 1820, refutes the two-century-old hypothesis reached by marine researchers and historians that the sunken ship was swept to deeper seas away from the Gulf as a result of a storm in October 1824. 
“In fact the vessel went straight to the sea bottom immediately after it was hit by the storm, providing limited time for the 115-member crew to abandon ship,” said Andrei Lukoshkov, who led a six-man team of scholars and divers in a 12-day archeological expedition to the Gulf of Finland. 
The sailors swam to a neighboring islet to be rescued by local fishermen a few days latter. Though the Olymp frigate was sent in a rescue mission following news of the Svir’s disappearance about two weeks later, the fate of the Svir became the subject of mysterious speculation until its discovery this month, said Lukoshkov. 
The find also serves as an eye-opener to the detailed secrets of the technology of the ships sent to the Antarctic, according to Lukoshkov. 
“There’s scant record of shipbuilding technology regarding this class of ship, although both ships were built at the River Svir’s Lodeyny Pol wharf near Lake Ladoga,” he said, adding that “a preliminary study of the remnants has revealed a very limited degree of foreign technology in designing the ship.”
Meanwhile, the archeologists are lobbying for finances to rebuild the Svir to serve as a monument to the history of geographical discoveries by the Russian Navy of the early 19th century.
However, Ilya Kochorov, a film producer with the team is pessimistic about plans to raise the ship without financial backing from the Russian Central Navy Museum, “an organization,” he said “run by military bureaucrats who have no time for history and related sciences.” 
Negotiations are underway to launch a department of marine archeology at the St. Petersburg State University’s Faculty of History, he said.
The recent breakthrough Lukoshkov’s team is the twentieth warship wreck discovered since the “Secrets of the Sunken Ships” project aimed at discovering and studying, among others, the 19th century Russian Imperial Fleet was launched four years ago. 
Other warships on the list include the Gangut, built in 1892, the Oleg frigate that was sent on its maiden voyage in 1860 and the Jigit and Naezdnik boats, both built in 1856.
Lukoshkov and his team have also discovered a total of 39 wrecks including merchant and passenger ships in the Gulf of Finland, River Volkhov and Lake Ladoga in the past four years.
During their latest mission this year, they discovered nine ship wrecks of varying periods and classes, from the Dutch merchant ships of the 17th century to a Finnish patrol boat sunk in 1944.
www.baltic-sunken-ships.ru

TITLE: Telling tales
AUTHOR: By Oliver Ready
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Few contemporary writers have been less overtly contemporary than Tatyana Tolstaya. 
The stories on which her high reputation still largely rests were written some 20 years ago, and they were hardly of their time even then. They evoked some of the sights, smells and inconveniences of late-Soviet life at the urban flat or the country dacha, but they were far more deeply rooted in myth, folklore and literary history. They looked back to the modernist aesthetics of Andrei Bely and Vladimir Nabokov more than they looked forward to the post-Soviet postmodern of Viktor Pelevin or Boris Akunin. 
Above all, they insisted that “forward” and “backward” are in any case secondary notions, whether for literature, for the universe, or for human beings, whose lives are lived not along the illusory tracks of time, but at the whim of memory, fate and oblivion.
To read Tolstaya’s collected stories now, without the pressure felt by some earlier readers to tie her literary breakthrough to the social and political breakthrough of perestroika, is to see how faithful she was to this ambitious approach. 
In its virtual avoidance of history, and in its lush descriptions of water, wind and matter, her prose, translated here by Jamey Gambrell and Antonina W. Bouis, seems designed to illustrate the ancient mantra that “all things flow.” Everything in Tolstaya’s world is transitory, and everything is repeated in similar forms. Human fates are engulfed by never-ending flux, mindless and marvelous, as in the story “Most Beloved”:

Overnight yet another colored pane will fall from the veranda, overnight the grasses will rise still higher, the path we walked in the morning will be swallowed up and our footsteps will vanish; fresh mold will bloom on the front porch, a spider will spin the keyhole shut, and the house will fall asleep for another hundred years — from the underground passages where the Mouse King roams, to the high attic vaults from which the fleshless steeds of our dreams take flight.

Human traces vanish, but fairy tales and dreams persist, scurrying beneath the floorboards or floating up into the rafters. Stories are more vital for Tolstaya’s characters than history, offering a last defense against the chaos outside and the emptiness within. Many of her heroes and heroines model their lives on shopworn romantic fantasies, swapping one for another when their dreams are inevitably disappointed. Others live off the stories they hear from others. Purveyors of tall tales about the origins of a recipe for meat pirozhki or chroniclers of thrilling adventures in distant lands are in great demand, and may even rise to the status of minor god or at least “fakir” (in the story of the same name). An archaic, folkloric culture is recreated in which storytellers live by their wits, their words are invested with magic, and the tales flow one into another in a chain that can be broken only at the cost of total disenchantment. 
As Andrei Sinyavsky wrote in his survey of Russian folk belief, “Ivan the Fool” (newly published in English translation by Glas): “Man surrounds himself with the folktale’s continuousness, as with a fence, and keeps out misfortune.”
A further group of Tolstaya’s characters seek their daily zest in the fictions they invent for others, most strikingly in “Sonya,” in which a circle of friends play a practical joke on the unprepossessing heroine. Sonya is an “utter fool” who recalls the male fools of Russian folklore in her inability to behave appropriately: “‘I saw you yesterday at the concert with a beautiful lady; I wonder, who was she?’ Sonya would ask a bewildered husband as she leaned across his stiffened wife.” Sonya never has any affairs of her own, so the friends, led by Ada Adolfovna, invent a “phantom” suitor for her who is “burdened with a wife and three children, and moved into Ada’s father’s apartment for purposes of correspondence.” With her love of sentimental poetry, Sonya falls for this ruse straightaway, and a passionate correspondence begins that will last far longer than many an affair conducted in the flesh. Ada wishes she had never started it, but is unable to break it off. 
“And so two women in two parts of Leningrad, one in hate, the other in love, wrote letters to each other about a person who had never existed.” 
The invention proves stronger than its creator, and the dreams of the fool more fulfilling than the lives of her mockers.
A kind of poetic justice is thus achieved in “Sonya,” but this is hardly typical of Tolstaya’s work as a whole, where dreams and fairy tales usually peter out, leaving little but toska (which Bouis repeatedly translates, rather too clinically, as “depression”). Sinyavsky and other 20th-century writers often looked to folklore as a way of re-enchanting the world, and as an antidote to the scientific and historical determinism that had gained ascendancy in intellectual culture. For them, the world became more alive and more open when viewed through the lens of earlier, less skeptical cultures, whose ready acceptance of the apparently impossible could even be connected — not without some difficulty — to the Christian faith. Tolstaya also believes that our “new, bleached, laundered and disinfected world” is in need of some magic, but re-enchantment in her work is rarely more than an illusion, a beautiful pattern quickly vanishing against a bleak background. After every punctured flight of her characters’ imaginations, life shows its “empty face, its matted hair and sunken eye sockets.”
Tolstaya may not be a cruel writer, as some of her first Russian critics thought; but she is a rather cynical one. The possibility of love between two living people is all but excluded in her stories, and goodness is deemed uninteresting and irritating. Tolstaya amply demonstrates the skepticism shared by many late 20th-century Russian authors towards the moral concerns that preoccupied their 19th-century forbears, whose preeminent representative was of course Tolstaya’s great-granduncle, Leo Tolstoy. A leitmotif of this skepticism has been its aversion to didacticism in any form. But the widespread turn to irony and bathos in recent decades has itself carried a didactic charge which narrows rather than broadens literature’s possibilities.
Moreover, Tolstaya’s irony can speak in the tones of an unattractive and rather boring disdain, especially when she sets about alerting the reader to the pettiness of her own characters and the gullible ease with which they identify themselves with their own fantasies. Why, Nina wonders in “The Poet and the Muse,” has the man of her dreams not arrived? 
“After all, her soul was growing richer as the years passed, she experienced and understood her own being with ever greater subtlety, and on autumn evenings she felt more and more self-pity: there was no one to whom she could give herself — she, so slim and black-browed.”
Tolstaya can also be very witty, however, and her style is much more varied than her themes. Her elaborate evocations of nature are interspersed with energetic narrative, arresting comparisons (a needle “thinner than a mosquito’s whine”; a cake “dusted with confectionery dandruff”), and a great deal of highly idiomatic reported speech, which provides something of a master-class in educated Russian chatter. 
The result is an opportunity for some virtuoso translation, with Gambrell’s renderings being especially convincing.

Oliver Ready’s translations include “The Zero Train” and “The Prussian Bride,” by Yuri Buida.

Tatyana Tolstaya
Born on May 3, 1951 in Leningrad
Great great uncle: Leo Tolstoy, author
Paternal grandfather: Alexei Nikolayevich Tostoy, author, known as “The Red Count” 
Paternal grandmother: Natalia Krandievskaya Tolstaya, poet. 
Maternal grandfather: Mikhail Lozinsky, literary translator. 
Sister: Natalia Tolstaya, author
Son: Artemy Lebedev, designer

Graduated from the Philogical Faculty of Leningrad State University. 
First published short story: “On a Golden Porch” (1983).
Novels include “The Slynx” (2000)

Co-host of “School for Scandal,” a television discussion program.

Quote: “The best time is always yesterday.”

TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The advertising slogan for STS’s new drama series had an apocalyptic ring to it: “How can you live if you will soon be 30?” But the song playing over the opening scene of “30-Year-Olds” hinted at a resigned approach to the dying of the light. It was Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”
The new show is based on a Chilean series called “Los 30” – although you can’t help suspecting that it’s more fun being 30 in Santiago than in Moscow. At least you can top up your tan while having your midlife crisis. The show tells the story of a group of friends, four couples and one single woman, whose lives have been connected since high school and who are now all part-owners of a restaurant. Obviously, to make things more interesting, they also do a bit of bed-hopping. In the first episode, one husband had sex with three of the women. Although, fair play to him, one of them was his wife.
STS previously had hits with the sitcoms “My Fair Nanny” and “Don’t Be Born Beautiful,” which both told the Cinderella story of a downtrodden woman marrying her wealthy boss. But this show departs from that cozy fantasy and has its characters talking about the essential meaninglessness of their existence, hidden behind the shallow facade of prosperity. That’s between the scenes of sex in restaurant and office bathrooms, on the desk at the office and in the wife’s friend’s apartment, so it’s not all bad.
In strange interludes, each of the characters talks about him- or herself to a psychiatrist, who doesn’t say anything back. In these scenes, they are all dressed in white, and there’s an unearthly glow, so I’m gunning for a surprise ending in which we find out that their BMWs collided as they raced to the sales at Ikea and they’re all speaking from beyond the grave, in “Desperate Housewives” style.
So far, I’m still trying to remember who’s married to whom, and who’s sleeping with whom. But the basic storylines seem to be that the sexy dark-eyed one is sleeping with two of his wife’s friends behind her back, and now one of them is getting married to someone else and he’s not happy. Then the serious boring one’s wife is becoming an alcoholic because he doesn’t sleep with her (unfortunately the sexy dark-eyed one doesn’t, either). And the sexy blue-eyed one is trying to woo back his wife who has left to find herself in a rented khrushchyovka apartment. And the paunchy one is worrying about his debts, while his lawyer wife sleeps with the sexy dark-eyed one — the Casanova of Moscow’s insurance salesmen.
There are some nice lines – the sexy dark-eyed one calls his flings “zigzags of friendship,” and the lawyer wife tells the psychiatrist that “there don’t have to be two personalities in a marriage.” And the series does seem to be slightly more placed on planet reality, rather than planet sitcom, than most STS shows. At one point, the sexy blue-eyed one tells his wife that he can find out her new address from her telephone number by buying a database at a market. Which is, unfortunately, true.
Last week, Bolshoi Gorod magazine printed an interview with the executive producer of STS and the deputy director of trashier rival TNT in which they discussed their love for Western shows, from “Friends” to “The Office.” Revealingly, the TNT man, Alexander Dulerain, said that “everyone here watches ‘The Office,’ but no one even tries to broadcast it here, because it’s obvious that it won’t work.” Of course, by “everyone” he means his educated, well-traveled friends, while the pigs who actually watch TNT are thrown “Dom-2.” So well done to STS for at least making a show that the channel heads might watch.

TITLE: Eastern excellence
AUTHOR: By Matt Brown
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Vostochny Ugolok // 52 Gorokhovaya Ulitsa. Tel: 713 5747 // Open 24 hours. // Menu is Russian and English // Dinner for two 1,296 rubles ($50)

For a small country with a troubled past and a relatively arid climate, Azerbaijan, like its Caucasus neighbors Georgia and Armenia, has a culinary tradition overflowing with intricate and belly-filling taste combinations derived from a number of influences.
This tradition is honored at Vostochny Ugolok, a restaurant in a prominent location where Gorokhovaya Ulitsa crosses the Fontanka river, offering a hearty range of Azeri dishes.
Since Azeri cuisine is partly a cross-pollination of Turkish, Georgian, Iranian, Russian and even “Soviet” methods and ingredients, the menu at Vostochny Ugolok is at once familiar and exotic. It is divided into sections featuring such specialties as kubak (pastry turnovers), dolma (stuffed leaves), pilaf (flavored rice), shashlyk (kebabs), and khatchapuri  (cheese bread) with an imaginatively prepared range of traditional soups, salads and garnishes. And as befits its roots on the Caspian Sea, Vostochny Ugolok’s menu features an unusually large range of fish dishes that would suit vegetarians who otherwise might be put off by the tendency of Caucasian cooking to use parts of sheep — offal, testicles — that European cuisines tend to eschew.
Among the Russian dishes is ukha po-tsarsky (180 rubles, $7), a watery fish soup prepared “Tsar syle” that comes in a pot with a lid that when lifted lets free a cloud of aromatic steam. At Vostochny Ugolok, this standard dish is pepped up with southern spices bathing chunks of white fish. Another traditional Slavic obsession — mushrooms — is given a dose of southern sunshine with Vostochny Ugolok’s mushroom salad (120 rubles, $4.70). Jam packed with marinated forest fungi, the salad has a tangy dressing that gets the juices flowing for bigger dishes at the center of the meal. One of the more Caucasian starters is a rulet baklazhan s orekhovoye nachinkoi (roulade of eggplant with nuts) for 160 rubles ($6.30). This familiar dish of chilled eggplant rolls stuffed with a paste of mashed eggplant flesh and crushed walnuts was accompanied by a satisfying dollop of mayonnaise with chili in it for an extra kick.
Between starters and main courses there’s a chance to try one of the glories of Vostochny Ugolok’s kitchen: its fresh and airy khatchapuri or hot bread stuffed with cheese (150 rubles, $5.90). Sometimes described by dullards as a pizza without the topping, this irresistible classic of Georgian cuisine can be heavy, soggy or stale, dripping with grease and difficult to digest — but not at Vostochny Ugolok where they are so proud of their khatchapuri they serve it on a cake stand and slice it lovingly with a sense of ritual. 
The service was exemplary with professional waiters and waitresses gliding smoothly about attentively but unobtrusively, without a shred of attitude. Details such as complementary bowls of dewy grapes and boiled sweets make for the welcoming atmosphere of a family-run enterprise and Vostochny Ugolok is a large and busy restaurant much in demand — prices are low and quality is high — so it is advisable to book or be prepared to wait to be seated. A recently added year-round pavement terrace indicates that the “little eastern corner” (that’s what “vostochny ugolok” means) has grown in popularity since it opened a couple of years ago. Full of oriental knick-knacks like carpets, coffee pots and wooden ornaments, Vostochny Ugolok’s interior offers interest without overwhelming the center of the dining experience: the food. 
A lamb chop served with boiled potatoes (320 rubles, $12.50), was tender and moist, but a chicken  shashlyk (170 rubles, $6.60) was a bit of a puzzle. Prepared in an explosive garlic and spice marinade and char-grilled to perfection, it was a shame that inferior cuts of chicken were used but the dish was saved by a garnish of cauliflower florets sensationally deep-fried in batter (60 rubles, $2.35). With Vostochny Ugolok’s extensive choice of superlatively prepared dishes, few will leave this corner of St. Petersburg disappointed.

TITLE: Nanny knows best?
AUTHOR: By Stephen Holden
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: A scattershot screen adaptation of Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus’s 2002 satirical beach read, “The Nanny Diaries” has one unassailable asset. As this exposé of the rich and miserable on the Upper East Side wobbles along uncertainly, it rests on the tense, squared shoulders of Laura Linney. Linney defies a screenplay that paints her character, Mrs. X, a Park Avenue socialite, as a monstrous control freak. She is a smart, flexible actress who invests her role, a composite of former employers of the novel’s authors, with enough humanity to arouse some pity.
The movie, like the book, is narrated by Annie Braddock (Scarlett Johansson), a New Jersey-born anthropology student hired by Mrs. X to be the latest in a stream of nannies for her spoiled little boy, Grayer (Nicholas Reese Art). In many ways Mrs. X is as much a slave driver as Miranda Priestly, the fashion editor indelibly played by Meryl Streep in the movie version of the novel “The Devil Wears Prada.”
But Linney’s rich, high-strung snob and Streep’s chilly fashion empress are markedly different personalities. Mrs. X, for all her pretensions of grandeur, must answer to her husband (Paul Giamatti), a crude, ugly, foulmouthed boor who keeps his wife on a tight leash. (In one of his few exchanges with his son Mr. X barks to Grayer that he had better be ready to take over the world next week.) Miranda, however, calls the shots in her life. Where Linney’s Park Avenue mother can be heard screaming at her husband behind closed doors, Streep’s Miranda never, ever raises her voice.
The screen adaptations of these two chick-lit blockbusters follow the same formulaic path from naïveté to shock to disillusionment and ultimately to purification. In both stories the dutiful young acolytes become so caught up in their bosses’ horrid compulsions that their very souls are threatened; friends and family go by the wayside.
Annie lies to her mother, a nurse (Donna Murphy) who has pinched pennies to pay for her daughter’s college education, by telling her she has a trainee job on Wall Street. Her relationship with her childhood best friend (Alicia Keys) also suffers. But just before the big bad wolves — the rich and powerful — are about devour the Little Red Riding Hoods in these books, they see the light and parachute into improbably soft landings.
Because “The Nanny Diaries” is essentially a two-character story whose supporting players are wooden props, it would help if the actors playing the two were evenly matched. But Johansson’s Annie, who narrates the movie in a glum, plodding voice, is a leaden screen presence, devoid of charm and humor. With her heavy-lidded eyes and plump lips, Johansson may smolder invitingly in certain roles, but “The Nanny Diaries” is the latest in a string of films that suggest that this somnolent actress confuses sullen attitudinizing with acting.
Especially at the beginning of “The Nanny Diaries” there are signs that its directing and writing team, Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, had a different movie in mind. The pair, who created “American Splendor,” the quirky portrait of the Cleveland comic-book writer Harvey Pekar, make amusing use of Annie’s anthropology studies. In a sequence at the American Museum of Natural History, Annie, playing tour guide, points to various social types, posed like prehistoric figures in dioramas. In a Mary Poppins-inspired fantasy, she is also shown sailing across the New York skyline under a red umbrella.
But such whimsical touches have no connection with the substance of the movie, which consists mostly of soapsuds. The storytelling is rushed and sloppy. It’s only a matter of days before the boy in Annie’s charge makes a ludicrous U-turn from hellion into little angel.
In books and movies like “The Nanny Diaries,” which play to our voyeuristic schadenfreude regarding the lives of the rich and powerful, it is essential to pile on the juicy inside details that show exactly how these people drive themselves and everyone around them crazy. Although “The Nanny Diaries” has an abundance of such details, the movie is in far too much of a hurry to take a breath and develop them into polished comic set pieces.
There is Mrs. X’s list of house rules: Grayer is encouraged to read the financial press and is directed toward all things French. (At a French-theme birthday party two Marcel Marceau-like mimes present Grayer’s birthday cake with icing that spells “bonne fête.”) Grayer’s diet (including ice cream) is to consist almost entirely of soy products. The West Side is strictly off-limits (socially inferior), as is the subway (too many germs).
At a ghastly costume party with an American-history theme in Mr. X’s office, Annie is forced to dress like Betsy Ross. When Grayer insists on using his father’s private bathroom, Annie stumbles into Mr. X’s inner sanctum to find him canoodling with an assistant. The movie’s most biting sequence is of an obligatory mommy-nanny seminar at which cowering nannies (most from poor countries and with limited English) are encouraged to air their grievances against their employers and achieve harmony.
This rigged group-therapy session, whose facilitator wears a frozen smile and addresses the assembly in the unctuous tones of a grade-school teacher, is the only scene in the movie to hint at the rot under the charade. Nothing is allowed to disturb the fantasy of perfect moms making perfect lives for their perfect children. For an ugly moment, the rock is lifted.

TITLE: England Dashes Russia’s Euro Hopes With 3-0 Win
AUTHOR: By Angus MacKinnon
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — Guus Hiddink admitted Michael Owen had given his side a masterclass in clinical finishing after watching the England striker put the boot into Russia’s chances of reaching Euro 2008.
Owen’s first-half double laid the foundations for an exhilarating 3-0 win at Wembley which has left Steve McClaren’s revitalized squad as favorites to qualify for next year’s finals along with group E leaders Croatia.
Rio Ferdinand’s late strike rounded off McClaren’s best night in charge of England after Russia had squandered a couple of good chances early in the second half.
That left former South Korea and Australia boss Hiddink with no doubt about where the game had been lost.
“You can say the 3-0 score is too high, but it reflects the difference between the two teams,” the Dutchman said.
“We tried to go forward and play attractive football but England were very effective in taking the chances they created.
“We did not have the final pass or touch to make England very frightened. Just after half-time we had one or two occasions. That makes the difference — if we could have made a goal then, they might have started to panic a little bit.
“This Russia team is still in development and it is good to have these games, but it is a tough lesson for them. We were a little bit naive.”
England boss Steve McClaren admitted there had been times when Russia had dominated and acknowledged the extent of his debt to Owen, whose 39th and 40th England goals on his 85th international appearance mean he has scored five in his last four games for club and country.
The Newcastle striker is well on the way to confounding those who said he would never be the same player again after missing virtually all of last season and half the preceding one with serious injuries.
“Never write him off — I said that weeks ago,” McClaren beamed. “He’s now scored in his last four games. He has come back fitter and sharper. It was not just his goals, it was his all-round play, dropping in and linking up. He was working hard and the partnership with [Emile] Heskey has really worked over the last two games.”
Heskey’s performances against Israel and Russia have fully vindicated McClaren’s decision to recall him to the national squad three years after his last appearance for his country.
His physical prowess helped unsettle a Russian defense that was badly at fault on all of England’s goals and it was the Wigan forward’s knock-on that allowed an unmarked Owen to smash in his second goal, just after half an hour.
The first had come after only six minutes, the Russian defense allowing the striker to gather Gareth Barry’s chip unimpeded in the middle of their goalmouth.
Hiddink declined to criticize the referee over what was a finely-balanced decision to disallow what would have been a Russian equalizer shortly after the opener, Konstantin Zyryanov being adjudged to have controlled the ball with the help of his arm.
The Dutchman said: “I want to see the images to have a fair and clear judgment about the referee’s decision. But it was a pity. It would have been a very good reward because we were pressing and they were panicking at that stage. It was key in the game.”
The defeat leaves the Russians in third place in group E, two points adrift of England with three games left to play. But Hiddink insisted that, with England due in Moscow next month, nothing had been decided yet.
“We get them now in Moscow in October and they have to face Croatia as well. It is a tough qualification group and it will be decided at the end, not in September.  We have to win in Moscow, that is for sure. Of course we are confident at home as we were tonight in various parts of the game.”
McClaren was delighted his side had followed up Saturday’s 3-0 defeat of Israel with their best performance since he succeeded Sven-Goran Eriksson after last year’s World Cup.
“We said at the start of the ten days that we wanted six points and I’d have taken two scrappy 1-0 wins,” McClaren said. “But I’m greatly satisfied by the performances. We’ll enjoy this but we know we’ve still got three games to go and we can get better.”
The pattern of the match could have been very different had Russia been able to take their chances.
Their captain Andrei Arshavin failed to capitalize when John Terry gifted him an opening with the score at 1-0 and Dmitry Sychev pulled a close-range chance wide just after the restart.
But England, for the most part, looked comfortable in defending their lead and Ferdinand wrapped things up seven minutes from time.

TITLE: Russia Moves Ahead to Quarterfinals
AUTHOR: By Paul Logothetis
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MADRID — Coach David Blatt has Russia remembering what it feels like to win again. 
Russia breezed into the quarterfinals of the European Basketball Championship with an 83-70 win over Croatia Tuesday, stretching its overall record to 5-1 at the tournament, its sole loss coming at the hands of world champion and favorite Spain. 
The American-Israeli coach’s discipline, on and off the court, is a big reason for the current run. 
“What I’ve tried to instill in this team is that this is not the team of the past and that we’re not going to look to the ghosts of the past,” Blatt said. “We’re in the present, and we have to focus on what’s in the future of this tournament.” 
A former player at Princeton University, halfway between New York City and Philadelphia, Blatt is utilizing the tactics — pressure defense, passing and patience — taught by former Tigers coach Pete Carril to help turn around a program that hasn’t registered any kind of success on the international stage in nearly a decade. 
The former point guard’s “no-nonsense” attitude — just like Carril’s — has transformed the way Russia thinks and plays. 
“First thing I had to overcome was a little bit of egotism and a little bit of quit — guys whose egos were too big and the willing to give in was weak,” he said. 
Before signing on with Russia for the European Championship, Blatt, 48, guided Dynamo St. Petersburg to the EuroCup trophy in 2004 and Benetton of Treviso to the Italian league title a year later. 
In the last four European Championships, the Russians have qualified for the quarterfinals and gone no further, an experience that seems more painful in light of 14 gold medals won by the Soviet team from 1947 to 1985.

TITLE: Top Seed Davydenko Beaten by Cilic in China Open
AUTHOR: By Nick Mulvenney
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BEIJING — World number four and top seed Nikolai Davydenko was bounced out of the second round of the China Open by Croatian teenager Marin Cilic on Thursday, losing 6-3 6-4 in the first upset of the tournament.
Less than a week after his U.S. Open semi-final defeat to Roger Federer, the normally indefatigable Russian looked out of sorts in his first encounter with the latest in a line of tall, big-serving Croatians to hit the ATP circuit.
After a three-hour delay for rain, it was perhaps unsurprising that the first set was a shabby affair with Cilic’s break of Davydenko’s first service game enough to go one up as the Russian littered his game with loose shots.
“I don’t think it was because of the rain but I didn’t play very well,” said the 26-year-old. “I felt very well, I slept for 11 hours and I was fresh... today I just found it tough to hit the ball.”
Davydenko, yet to win a tournament this year after claiming five in 2006, struck back to race to a 3-0 lead in the second set but Cilic also raised his game and gradually started to get the better of some fine rallies.
The 18-year-old won the next five games to turn the match around and, despite needing treatment on his finger before serving for the match, grabbed his first victory over a top 10 player when Davydenko netted on the first match point.
Davydenko will now head back to Russia for next week’s Davis Cup semi-final against Germany before his date with the investigators into betting irregularities surrounding a match he played in Poland at the start of last month.   
Davydenko was playing his 26th tournament of the year. 

Additional reporting by Liu Zhen.