SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1308 (74), Friday, September 21, 2007
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TITLE: Gorbachev
Opens New Hospital
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A new children’s hospital dedicated to the memory of the late wife of Mikhail Gorbachev was opened by the former president of the Soviet Union himself in St. Petersburg on Thursday.
The Raisa Gorbachev Center for Children Hematology and Transplantology will treat children with certain forms of cancers such as leukemia.
“The families who have children suffering leukemia are in a particularly hard situation. This illness requires high professionalism and a lot of money,” Gorbachev said at the opening ceremony.
Raisa Gorbachev, who during her lifetime campaigned for child cancer treatments, herself died of leukemia eight years ago to the day Thursday, on Sept. 20, 1999, in a German clinic.
Former President Gorbachev thanked all people and organizations, including those from Germany and America, who provided financial support to the construction of the center.
Sergei Mironov, head of the Russian Federation Council, said that “the Institute has become the best monument to Gorbachyova,” using the Russian form of her name.
Nikolai Yaitsky, head of the St. Petersburg Pavlov Medical University that the center is allied to, said many parents and their children have been waiting for such center to be built.  
“At the moment, the waiting list of patients is already registered for up to six months ahead,” Yaitsky said.
Gorbachev in his turn promised that his Gorbachev Fund will continue its support to the center.
“Leukemia treatment is very expensive, and most parents just can’t afford to do it by themselves,” Gorbachev said.
The center may also gather an international forum of hematologists to discuss the problems of blood-related diseases, Gorbachev suggested.
Meanwhile, one of the biggest tasks of the new center is to provide expensive transplant operations for ill children. 
 The center is to have close coordination with a world bank of donors.
Experts say 70 percent of people who suffer leukemia who need transplants don’t have a family member matching as a donor.  Therefore, the database of 12 million donors living in Central Europe and North America will be very helpful for the new center, they say.
Leonid Roshal, a famed Russian pediatrician, said that the state needs to focus on child health.
“This center is only one drop of what’s needed for Russian children but I wish there would be more ‘drops’ like this all over the country,” Roshal said, adding that Moscow’s Children Cancer Center has been under construction for 20 years and is still not completed.
The Raisa Gorbachev Center’s new blue glass, 12-story building is intended to treat leukemia for all children living in the North-West of Russia.  
Currently about 100 children and teenagers underthe age of 15 suffer from leukemia each year in St. Petersburg. 
In Russia as a whole, before the age of 18, 5,000 new cases of leukemia are registered every year. 
The new 5,500 square-meter center is equipped with the most modern medical and engineering equipment. 
The institute includes a polyclinic, hospital, transfusion department; children’s wards with a sterile climate located on four stories of the building; school classes and computer classes, a play room, and an art therapy room.
Construction of the institute began in 2002. The project also received the support of the Russian federal authorities, and in 2005 the government began to provide the basic financing of the project.

TITLE: New PM Shows Strength
AUTHOR: By Darya Korsunskaya
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW – Russia’s new Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov displayed a tough Soviet style of management at his first government meeting on Thursday, barking orders at underperforming ministers and calling one of them “comrade.”
President Vladimir Putin surprised Russians last week by appointing the little-known Zubkov, a 66-year-old former collective farm boss, to lead the government in the run-up to parliamentary and presidential elections.
Zubkov, who formerly headed an anti-money laundering watchdog, was tasked by the Kremlin leader with ensuring that the cabinet “ticks like a Swiss watch.”
Looking confident at Thursday’s meeting, Zubkov made clear he would not tolerate any slacking in the government.
“In some areas we have managed to move ahead, while in others the work has slowed down or halted completely,” the grim-looking premier told silent ministers.
“I want to remind you about your personal responsibility.”
Zubkov met Putin earlier this week to discuss changes to the cabinet. Newspapers have speculated that Economy Minister German Gref may be among the casualties but Zubkov gave no hint on Thursday of what changes he planned.
Boris Gryzlov, leader of the United Russia party patronized by Putin, said the party’s four members in government were “likely to keep their posts.”
He told reporters during a visit to southern Russia that they were Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov, Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev, Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu and Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev.
Indicating another likely cabinet survivor, Putin met First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov later on Thursday.
Russian news agencies said Ivanov briefed Putin, who is now on holiday in his Black Sea residence, on the government meeting — a demonstration of Ivanov’s special status in the cabinet.
Ivanov has for months been favorite in the opinion polls to succeed Putin as president. Analysts said after Zubkov’s surprise appointment that the odds on Ivanov had lengthened, but that he remained a contender.

WHO DARED?
Living up to his reputation for loyalty to Putin, the new premier made clear he would not tolerate any deviation from the Kremlin line. “Who dared make changes to the presidential orders?” he asked influential transport minister Yuri Levitin when discussing amendments made to draft laws on Russian sea ports.
“Who is there from the financial department?” he barked after mentioning a failure to deliver timely aid to victims of an earthquake on the remote Sakhalin island.
Attempts by department head Anton Drozdov to explain himself were rejected. “I ask you to arrange a business trip to Sakhalin for comrade Drozdov and keep him there until people get their money,” Zubkov told Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Naryshkin.
Analysts have interpreted Zubkov’s appointment as an attempt by Putin to keep a tight grip on power by picking a reliable, low-profile ally to run the government while keeping everyone guessing about who might succeed him as president.
Putin has added to the riddle saying that Zubkov, who has strong personal links with him since they worked together in St. Petersburg City Hall in the 1990s, was among people he thought could run for president in March.
Another option analysts are mulling is that Zubkov could keep the prime minister’s job well after the March polls to make sure the next president does not deviate from Putin’s line.

TITLE: Zubkov’s Rating Rise After a Week
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The news that Viktor Zubkov had been promoted to the job of prime minister caught kremlinologists by surprise. But according to a recent poll, the former head of the Federal Financial Monitoring Service who was hitherto an obscure figure to most ordinary Russians, is already enjoying a staggering approval rating. Forty percent of St. Petersburgers polled by the Agency for Social Information on Sept.14-16 said they trusted Zubkov. By comparison, Sergei Mironov, head of the Council of Federation, is trusted by 36.9 percent of respondents, and State Duma speaker Boris Gryzlov enjoys a 41.1 percent trust rating.
The same poll shows that 53 percent of those questioned hold a positive opinion about the efficiency of former prime minister Mikhail Fradkov’s government. At the same time, 50.3 percent of respondents reacted positively to Viktor Zubkov’s appointment as the new prime minister. Only 12 percent of those polled were negative about Zubkov’s promotion.
“The high trust in Zubkov demonstrated by so many people was not built on any knowledge about his activities,” said Roman Mogilevsky, head of the Agency for Social Information. “Rather, it is a sign of how impressive is the trust in President Putin, the man behind the appointment. The high rating really refers to the mechanism of appointment itself.”
Maria Matskevich, a senior researcher with the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said embarrassment among political analysts and pundits over Zubkov’s appointment was enormous.
“Not a single kremlinologist had ever mentioned his name in any forecasts. Putin’s move shows that decision-making process in Russia is not the slightest bit transparent,” Matskevich said. “The analysts do not have enough information about those who govern us to be able to predict their next possible steps. Those forecasts we do get are rapidly losing their credibility.”
But what some analysts find frustrating, their counterpart Valentin Bianki, a researcher in political psychology at St. Petersburg State University, attempts to interpret as Putin’s “political flexibility.”
“When Putin appointed Anatoly Serdyukov as Russian Defense Minister six months ago, the president apparently had not thought of putting [Serdyukov’s father-in law] Viktor Zubkov forward as prime minister; it would not have been logical,” Bianki said. “Yes, the figure of Zubkov seems to destroy the popular theory of some sort of secret plot to transfer power and indicates that important decisions can be made spontaneously in Russia. But this can only be a positive symptom.”
Zubkov’s sky-high ratings have prompted some critics to recall a sarcastic 2003 event mounted during the gubernatorial election campaign in St. Petersburg. Pedestrians crossing Anichkov Bridge, which has statues of men straining to hold prancing horses on its four corners, were asked whether they would elect a horse if the president so requested it. They were invited to vote by putting an orange ball into one of two transparent containers. The container marked “yes” ended up twice as full as the one marked “no.”
That performance alluded to ancient Roman history. Roman Emperor Caligula is said to have entered the Senate on his favorite racehorse, Incitatus, and made every senator give a deep bow to honor the animal. The despotic emperor is said to have even considered making the horse a consul.
The street demo also alluded to a televised meeting between President Vladimir Putin and Valentina Matviyenko, who was at the time his envoy in the Northwest Federal District, and the frontrunner for governor. At the meeting the president gave Matviyenko his blessing in the election.
Matskevich points out that Putin’s 70-percent approval rating, as well suggesting high approval for his government reshuffles, shows that the vast majority of Russians are happy with the existing ruling system.
“Everyone had to swallow the fact that nobody except for the president knows what is going to happen, and the president’s mind is inscrutable,” she said. “The problem is that this situation does not have anything to do with democracy. Worse, this is not a problem with Vladimir Putin personally, it has to do with people’s attitude, a predominant public inertia, when the majority finds it comfortable not to burden themselves with responsibility for political decisions that would affect their lives.” 
A series of recent nationwide polls have shown that over one third of Russians intend not to take part in the forthcoming parliamentary elections in December. Between 60 and 80 percent of respondents, depending on their region of residence feel that their vote “is not going to influence anything.”
But political analyst Boris Vishnevsky, a member of the political council of the local branch of opposition party Yabloko, argues that although many people are hiding behind that phrase, there is no need for such a feeling in Russia.
“Just look twenty years back, and you will see that ordinary Russians are perfectly capable of changing things,” he said.

TITLE: Teen Caught Digging to EU
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: A Russian teenager has been detained for trying to use a metal cup to burrow under the border between Belarus and the European Union, Belarussian border guards said.
The 19-year-old was detained by border guards as he embarked on his escape to Poland by digging under the border.
“The man tried to tunnel under the security system, and at this fun moment was detained by border guards,” a spokesman for the border guards said Tuesday.
“He would have had to tunnel for about a kilometer to get to Poland,” the spokesman said. It was unclear why the man was using a cup to dig his tunnel. He also had army rations, camouflage, maps and a textbook on survival.
The man, who faces a fine of about $300, said he was heading for Germany to see his girlfriend, but border guards suspect he wanted to go to France to join the Foreign Legion.
The teenager is not the first Russian to employ this method.
In late 2000, Yevgeny Pechonkin crawled through an 85-meter tunnel he dug to break out of prison in Novosibirsk. A construction engineer by training, he had been made foreman of the prison’s building works and had access to the necessary equipment. 
(Reuters, MT)

TITLE: U.S. ‘Sex Tourist’ Doctor Jailed in Child Porn Case
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: A U.S. doctor arrested in 2004 for suspected child sex offences allegedly committed against Russian boys in a St. Petersburg hotel, has been sentenced to 35 years in a federal jail by a court in Atlanta, Georgia, on different charges of producing, receiving and possessing child pornography.
Gregory Kapordelis, 46, was convicted in May of six counts of downloading child pornography and using boys to produce pornographic pictures between 2001 and 2004.
He was acquitted of a seventh charge of making a video of himself having sex with a person under 18.
Kapordelis, who was arrested after landing at a New York airport in 2004, had acknowledged traveling to the Czech Republic -— where the age of sexual consent is 15 — to have sex with teenage boys and spending time with teenagers both overseas and at his home.
U.S. Attorney David Nahmias told the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution  that he was “heartened” by the sentence, saying it would keep Kapordelis from “harming young boys again.”
The doctor’s lawyer, Don Samuel, said he would appeal.
The counts that prosecutors were able to convict Kapordelis on represent a significantly watered-down case compared with the allegations leveled against him three years ago, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Kapordelis was originally charged with traveling to a hotel in St. Petersburg to have sex with children. It was reportedly one of the first arrests made under a new U.S. sex tourism law.
The sex tourism charges were eventually dropped, and the current charges stemmed from images the government says were found during a search of his home after the arrest. 
Prosecutors showed jurors what they said was a private file on Kapordelis’ computer that contained images of young-looking males in sexual positions and activity on an online newsgroup called “Pretty Boys.”
The doctor said he wanted to be tried on the case built in Russia, saying it was so fraught with error that jurors would begin to question the current case, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. He accused agents of committing perjury, hotel employees of extorting him and witnesses of changing their stories, the newspaper wrote.
“For three years, right up until the time of sentencing, the court and the government refused to consider any of the evidence from Russia that unequivocally disproved the allegations that spawned this prosecution,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution quoted Samuel saying on Tuesday.
(SPT, AP)

TITLE: Internet Photography in Focus
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: At a time when virtual reality seems increasingly to replace real life, the 12th International St. Petersburg PhotoFair brings photographs from cyberspace back into real world, as the “Unknown Petersburg” exhibition, to be held for the first time on Oct. 4-7 in the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall, focuses on photographs that have been published in weblogs. 
A jury has chosen 50 of the best works out of thousands sent for selection by LiveJournal (LJ) bloggers. 
“LJ is still a very closed community. This is an opportunity for LJ’s photographers, many of whom are amateurs and have only displayed their work on the internet, to show them in the real world and to real photographers,” Kirill Kirillov, the PhotoFair’s head said in an interview with The St. Petersburg Times. 
Unusual angles and views were the main criteria behind the jury’s decisions, jury member Alexei Vasiliyev told the St. Petersburg Times on Thursday. 
“If for example, an image of a piece of architecture reflecting in a canal can make Muscovites scream with delight, we [in St. Petersburg] think it’s commonplace,” he said, adding that many of the bloggers who took part in the competition were not from St. Petersburg. “So we tried to include only truly unusual photographs,” Vasiliyev said.”
Kirillov described the exhibition as an “unexpected, untraditional view on Petersburg, without ceremonial gilt and tourist twirls.” 
The display is painfully recognizable to city residents. It features sketches of St. Petersburg’s kolodets courtyards and staircases, quirky faces of passersby, and lots of disposal dumps. Many images are presented in black and white. 
“I don’t know why, but around one third of all the photographs send for the consideration were of dumps,” Kirillov said, who called it an element of the so-called “St. Petersburg aesthetics.”  
 “You will be surprised, but in Russia a huge number of people in their 30s and older, even if they say they use the Internet won’t know a blog from an email — for them it’s all just internet,” Kirillov said.

TITLE: Kasparov Gets Danish Prize
AUTHOR: By Martin Burlund
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: COPENHAGEN - Former chess world champion Garry Kasparov won the newly established Pundik Peace Prize in Copenhagen on Wednesday.
The prize is given to a person, “who courageously and with a straight back takes responsibility in the fight for fundamental liberty and human rights,” and comes with 100,000 Danish Crowns ($20,000).
“I am honored to receive this prize, and I did not hesitate to accept it. This is a rare sign of solidarity with the liberation fight in Russia,” Kasparov told 300 spectators in Copenhagen. 
Kasparov’s so-called “liberation fight” is a strike against the President Vladimir Putin, whom the former chess champion compares to the ruthless German leader during the World War II, Adolf Hitler. 
“I think Hitler operated completely within the laws of German land, but I do not think that this made his regime more legitimate in the eyes of history,” Kasparov said in a television interview with Danish media. 
In an effort to secure wider possibilities to speak to Russian voters, Kasparov is touring Western countries to warn against friendly relations with Russia. He lashed out against the lack of freedom of speech in Russia, as he is sure that he will not get the same kind of media attention in Russia that he gets campaigning outside Russia.
“I am now in Denmark and that is why I can speak with Danish television. In Russia the opposition is banned to speak in television,” Kasparov told in a television interview with Danish media.

TITLE: Ryanair Could Expand to Russia
AUTHOR: By Tracy Alloway
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: LONDON — Ryanair Holdings Plc, Europe’s biggest discount airline, may add flights outside the region if countries enter into bilateral agreements with the European Union, the carrier’s head of route development said.
Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Russia and Ukraine will probably sign so-called open-skies agreements liberalizing air travel with the EU, Bernard Berger said Thursday in an interview. Dublin-based Ryanair, whose only non-EU destination is Morocco, would add flights to those countries if airport charges were acceptable, the executive said.
Ryanair has a strategy of reducing costs by flying to less costly, secondary terminals such as Brussels Charleroi and Frankfurt Hahn. The airline may also expand by linking up current European bases with more routes, Berger said in the interview at the World Low Cost Airline Congress in London.
“If you add those up there’s a good few years growth in that alone,’’ he said. “But there are going to be new countries as well, so the steam certainly hasn’t run out and will not run out for the foreseeable future.’’
Shares of Ryanair rose 3.7 percent to 5.12 euros, paring declines this year to 1.9 percent and valuing the company at 7.74 billion euros ($11 billion).
Ryanair, Europe’s most profitable airline, has a network of about 500 routes. Flying to non-European countries would not necessarily increase operating costs, Berger said, citing the carrier’s 25-minute turn-around time in Morocco, which helps offset the cost of the greater distances involved.
“Tunisia, for instance, is not very far from Italy, it’s not very far from France,’’ he said. “So in terms of aircraft utilization it doesn’t necessarily have a negative impact. We keep our eyes open to the possibilities and then evaluate what the economic factors are.’’
The route director said in an address at the conference that Ryanair’s flights may be increasingly skewed toward the summer season as external costs jeopardize the viability of some services in winter, when demand is lower.
Higher oil prices and interest rates and the doubling of the U.K.’s air-passenger-duty flight tax has made some routes unprofitable outside the summer months, he said.
“There are some things you can do in scenario A and some of these things you can no longer do in scenario B,’’ Berger said. Given current economic factors, Ryanair “recognizes the need to work with seasonality in a way we didn’t need to do previously,’’ he said.
Ryanair said July 31 that it would ground seven planes at Stansted airport, its main London hub, this winter. The carrier said the decision was based on declining fares from a low-cost price war and the doubling of airport charges.

TITLE: 40 Local Land Plots Up For Sale, Development
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The St. Petersburg government plans to auction off over 40 large land plots in several of the city’s districts starting from January next year. City officials expect investors to redevelop the territories, replacing dilapidated buildings with new ones.
According to the draft law approved by the city government on Tuesday, residents of the demolished buildings will receive new apartments at the expense of the investment companies.
“We will observe the rights of every person. All families without exception will receive improved living conditions, moving to new and comfortable apartments,” Valentina Matviyenko, the St. Petersburg governor, was cited as saying in a statement released by the governor’s press service Tuesday.
City officials claim that the redevelopment of the residential districts will solve two problems: local residents will receive improved housing, while construction companies will be able to build new developments on the land plots, of which there is a deficit.
City Hall expects investors to provide residents of the demolished buildings with accommodation that is the same size or larger than their previous homes, located in apartment buildings in the same district. Alternatively, private owners will be offered compensation equal to the market cost of their old apartment.
The deputies listed 44 land plots in the Nevsky, Krasnogvardeisky, Admiralteisky, Frunzensky, Kalininsky, Moskovsky, Kirovsky, Kolpinsky, Krasnoselsky, Kronshtadtsky, Kurortny and Petrodvortsovy districts that are due for renovation.
“If this scheme is realized, it will be the best solution for dilapidated buildings. However, we doubt whether investors will be interested in all of these plots. Resettling the residents of just one building could take two years and consume considerable financial resources,” said Irina Khondozhko, deputy head of the residential real estate department at Central Real Estate Agency.
Khondozhko suggested that land plots in the Moskovsky, Frunzensky and Kalininsky districts would be most in demand. Due to additional expenses, the price of apartments in the new buildings could be 10 percent to 15 percent higher compared to the normal market price for similar premises, she said.
“Renovation may be profitable only in the districts that are not densely populated, in the districts where investors will be able to construct more buildings than they demolish,” said Yevgeny Kaplan, deputy director of Souzpetrostroi, a St. Petersburg association of construction companies.
Kaplan considered the requirement to provide people with new apartments in the same district as socially fair, but economically unreasonable. Apartments which cost $1,500 per square meter on the city’s outskirts could cost $3,000 per square meter in central districts, he said.

TITLE: $1 Trillion Planned for Infrastructure
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s government, flush with oil cash, expects to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure through 2020 together with investors, Economy Minister German Gref said.
Parliament will pass legislation this year granting tax breaks and other incentives to invest in “special economic zones’’ around the country’s main ports, Gref said Thursday at a Russia-China investment conference in Sochi. So-called state monopolies including Gazprom, Unified Energy System and Russian Railways all plan to spend tens of billions of dollars in the coming decade to upgrade Soviet-era infrastructure and increase capacity.
The government plans to spend 400 billion rubles ($15.6 billion) on roads, rail links and other infrastructure in the sparsely populated Far East alone in the next five years. This spending is part of a drive by Russia to develop areas outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

TITLE: Ruble Rises to Eight-Year High Against U.S. Dollar
AUTHOR: By Tai Adelaja
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The ruble soared 0.6 percent to an eight-year high against the dollar Wednesday amid heavy dollar selling.
The currency strengthened to 25.2 against the dollar by Wednesday evening, a level at which it last traded in October 1999. The dollar started trading 15 kopeks higher than the Central Bank official exchange rate by 10.30 a.m., as news of a cut in U.S. interest rates began to make its impact felt on the market.
The U.S. Federal Reserve on Tuesday reduced interest rates to 4.75 percent from 5.25 percent — the biggest reduction in four years. 
The cut, widely expected among Russian analysts to be 0.25 percent, was made against the backdrop of the U.S. subprime crisis and is geared at reducing the cost of lending and helping to revitalize the U.S. economy by encouraging spending.
News of the interest rate reduction brought the dollar rate down in markets in Europe and Asia, and led to local currencies appreciating against the U.S. currency in many countries.
Traders in Russia said the market’s reaction was in keeping with expectations, adding that the trend would likely continue in the weeks ahead.
There will be “huge demand for rubles because the [Federal Reserve’s] cut coincides with the time when companies must file tax returns in Russia,” said Alexander Karpov, a currency dealer at Zenit Bank.
Currently, the trend on the market is to offload dollars, which may stretch right to the end of September, Karpov said.
Alexei Guryayev, a senior economist with the Center for Economic and Financial Research in Moscow, said that although the declared aim of the Federal Reserve was to prevent a housing market downturn, it actually made the dollar less attractive to industry.
But with the dollar tumbling, Russia will be in a good position to pursue its objective of tightening the economy and reducing inflation, Guryayev said. Ruble appreciation is not threatening to slow or halt the growth of industrial output, he said. 
Olga Naidenova, a banking analyst with Alfa Bank, said the Federal Reserve’s cut had pushed up demand for ruble-designated assets and created high demand for rubles. She added that the Central Bank was unlikely to allow a dollar freefall after President Vladimir Putin last week told members of the Valdai Discussion Club, a group of Russian and foreign academics and journalists, that the tight inflation target for 2007 could be loosened. 
But concern about a strong ruble stifling extended growth is misplaced, said Andrei Kuznetsov, an economist with Troika Dialog.
The main consequences of ruble appreciation are lower profits for natural resource exporters, but this would not affect industrial output, Kuznetsov said.
“Nothing unexpected has happened,” Kuznetsov said. “[Today’s events] fall neatly within the ruble volatility scale of the past three months.”
On Thursday the ruble had decreased slightly to 25.1 against the dollar.

TITLE: EU Moves to Tackle Gazprom
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: BRUSSELS — The European Commission took on Russia and dominant European power giants Wednesday in a new move to open gas and electricity markets to more competition while limiting foreign ownership of EU assets.
The European Union executive adopted hard-fought energy proposals aimed at forcing big utilities such as Germany’s E.On and Electricite de France to separate power generation from their distribution networks.
Under the plan, generators will be forced to sell their transmission networks or hand over control to an independent operator, which the Commission argues will boost investment in infrastructure and allow new entrants into the sector.
But gas monopoly Gazprom, which supplies about one-fourth of the 27-nation bloc’s gas, and Algeria’s state-owned Sonatrach will not have free rein to buy pipelines and power grids.
In a statement issued before the proposals were published, Gazprom stressed that it was a reliable gas supplier to the EU and wanted a say in future regulation.
“Gazprom has an important contribution to make to the debate about regulation of the energy sector in Europe and feels certain that its voice will be heard,” company spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov said.
The new rules will bar foreign firms from controlling European energy networks unless they play by EU rules and their home country reaches an agreement with Brussels, Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said.
“In practice, third-country individuals and companies should not be able to acquire control over Community transmission networks unless there is agreement between the Community and their country of origin,” he said.
A Commission statement said Brussels could intervene when a potential purchaser “cannot demonstrate both its direct and indirect independence from supply and generation activities.”
The Commission argued over details of the package up to the last minute in a sign of their political sensitivity.
Reuters, Bloomberg

TITLE: A Perfect Soviet 
Candidate
AUTHOR: By Georgy Bovt
TEXT: Is it possible to use the Kremlin’s administrative, media and public relations resources so that an unknown such as Viktor Zubkov can be elected president in March 2008? After surprising everybody by appointing the former head of the Federal Financial Monitoring Service as prime minister, President Vladimir Putin said last week that Zubkov could not be ruled out as a presidential contender. 
Skeptics claim that six months is not enough time to turn a relative unknown into a real presidential candidate. One week ago, 90 percent of the public had never heard of Zubkov. It is true that former President Boris Yeltsin appointed the then-unknown Putin as prime minister in the summer of 1999, but it required a special media campaign and the wars in Dagestan and Chechnya to boost Putin’s ratings.
The Kremlin today, however, has much more control over the mass media than it did under Yeltsin. Once Putin finally selects his successor, the public will be bombarded with glowing television reports showing the candidate’s amazing talents and attributes. The people will become so infatuated with the man Putin selected that they will wonder how they ever got along without him. 
Putin has an amazing intuitive ability to sense exactly what the public wants and needs. He has an excellent understanding of Russians’ fondness for social welfare and egalitarianism as well as their relatively low appreciation of individualism and democracy.
According to a recent poll by VTsIOM, most Russians want to continue and even strengthen the Kremlin’s conservative policies.  Fifty-six percent said they supported the government taking a greater role in the economy. Only 30 percent of respondents supported democratization of the political system, free elections and an independent media. 
Putin needs to find a presidential candidate who will cater to the public’s great desire for a strong, paternalistic leader and who will show concern for the sick and poor. With his quintessential Soviet profile, Zubkov fits the bill nicely. He has a very attractive and successful “proletarian” biography: As a child he lived in a crude shack without plumbing, he raised himself up by his bootstraps, worked as a repairman and a collective farm manager. 
In general, Zubkov was an exemplary “leader of the Soviet people.” He harvested hay with his subordinates, pulled weeds, assigned apartments to people in need, helped out young families, was simple in speech and was not above drinking with the common folk.     
The next president needs to be a person who will push for a stronger state role in all spheres, especially in the fight against corruption. The public will probably want a leader who can accomplish more than Putin did in the moral sphere, specifically in the fight against alcoholism and drug abuse. The next president will probably need to take a stronger stand against what many consider to be the decadent influence of Western popular culture and the overall moral decline of young people. All of that should be accompanied by healthy patriotism as long as it doesn’t escalate into nationalism.
Finally, the president’s successor must maintain the status quo among the members of Putin’s inner circle by leaving their current ownership and control of key assets intact. 
The next president must guarantee the continuation of Putin’s political legacy by allowing him to maintain de facto control of the country. But it is not entirely clear exactly how Putin will achieve this.

Georgy Bovt is a Moscow-based 
political analyst

TITLE: Reforms Before Family
AUTHOR: By Pavel Felgenhauer
TEXT: The newly appointed prime minister, Viktor Zubkov, told journalists in Sochi on Tuesday that acting Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov had submitted a letter of resignation to President Vladimir Putin. Zubkov said he discussed the matter with Serdyukov, who is his son-in-law, and they decided it would be appropriate for him to resign.
In Soviet times, close relatives were strictly forbidden to be in direct subordination to each other on all levels of Communist Party and government administration. There was a special term — semeistvennost, or nepotism. The restriction was established as the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, and it was aimed at preventing the formation of family clans within the system. It also was a political rebuke of the practices of imperial Russia, in which members of the ruling Romanov dynasty and a handful of other aristocratic families occupied high positions in the military and civil administration of the country, forming circles of kin relationships.
Of course, the sons of high Communist officials were appointed anyway to important positions within the Soviet Union. There was a line that was never crossed, however — direct subordination. It was acceptable if there was at least one other official in the line of command between father and son. 
Zubkov is an old Communist hand and knows all the rules of the game. It’s possible that powerful Kremlin clans were pressing for Serdyukov’s resignation. If Zubkov and Serdyukov were allowed to remain in their respective positions, this would have constituted a powerful clan in and of itself, while Zubkov on his own is a lonely figure who will need time to establish a constituency.
It is not guaranteed, however, that Serdyukov will indeed leave his post. He was appointed defense minister in February to fulfill a specific mission that Putin believes to be of utmost national importance: to fight massive graft in the Defense Ministry. 
Under Putin, the defense budget has multiplied as petrodollars poured into the country. In 2000, it was 146 billion rubles ($5.8 billion); this year, it is 870 billion rubles ($34 billion). But it is unclear where all this money is going. Contract soldiers today get on average only 8,000 rubles ($315) a month; officers get 12,000 ($470) to 15,000 ($590). Moreover, service conditions in the military continue to be appalling and the ranks are full of discontent. This year’s procurement budget for new weapons is some 300 billion rubles ($11.8 billion), but the only procurement to speak of consists of 30 new tanks, several helicopters, missiles and other small items.
Under Sergei Ivanov, who was defense minister from 2001 to 2007, billions of defense rubles were apparently going into a bottomless pit. Ivanov, who is Putin’s old-time buddy, was promoted to first deputy prime minister, while Serdyukov was told to clean up the Defense Ministry. A number of Ivanov’s appointees in the Defense Ministry have been replaced. Vedomosti reported last week that Lyubov Kudelina, the budget chief of the Defense Ministry, might lose her post. In addition, Interfax said Monday that the chief of the General Staff, Yury Baluyevsky, who had an extremely good relationship with Ivanov, might be on his way to a speedy retirement.
Serdyukov’s reforms in the Defense Ministry have been put in full swing, but the mission has a very long way to go before it is fulfilled. Replacing Serdyukov now with anyone else would mean that there is no time left before the presidential election in March to achieve any real progress in fighting graft in the Ministry. Putin may not like this outcome.
Putin is a divine figure who can bend any rule in any direction. He can simply order Serdyukov to continue carrying on his duties without any particular clarification. If necessary, justifications can be easily found for this. Under the Constitution, the defense minister, like other so-called “power ministers,” reports directly to the president, not the prime minister. Serdyukov could, for example, temporarily divorce Zubkov’s daughter, and Moscow’s Basmanny District Court may legalize the divorce in a split second, if the Kremlin orders. Or Putin may in fact replace Serdyukov with someone else.
The speaker of the Federation Council, Sergei Mironov, has praised Serdyukov for doing the right thing and resigning, but he told journalists that Putin might not accept the resignation. Mironov also said the new Cabinet would be named within a week. In short, Mironov has no clue, just like everyone else in Moscow. Putin keeps his cards close to his chest.

Pavel Felgenhauer is a defense analyst 
at Novaya Gazeta

TITLE: Fighting Corruption
TEXT: Anatoly Serdyukov has resigned as defense minister for the right reason. His father-in-law is the new prime minister. The appearance of nepotism is never good, but it threatens to be lethal when the relatives involved are anti-corruption campaigners. Serdyukov had been cleaning house at the Defense Ministry, while his father-in-law, Viktor Zubkov, had been fighting money laundering on a government task force. Zubkov, whose anti-corruption credentials probably played a major role in his promotion last week, would have had zero credibility in any future crackdown on government corruption if Serdyukov had stayed on.
It is curious that it took six full days for Serdyukov to submit his resignation. President Vladimir Putin certainly has known about the two men’s ties for some time. And Serdyukov and Zubkov, as anti-corruption campaigners, surely must have felt uncomfortable for the past week. Yet no one uttered a word about any conflict of interest.
In announcing Serdyukov’s resignation Tuesday, Zubkov linked it to their family ties. A Kremlin spokesman went on to explain that the law prohibits close relatives from working together.
With Serdyukov, the government is sending a clear signal that it is taking the high road, and this should be applauded. The government now should go a step further and take the high road in other possible conflicts of interest. It probably would be unfair to make a big deal out of the marriage of Justice Minister Vladimir Ustinov’s son to the daughter of Kremlin deputy chief of staff Igor Sechin. But the mere fact that Zubkov and Serdyukov, a former Federal Tax Service chief, headed federal agencies for years does raise a myriad of ethical questions.
Moving beyond the upper tiers of government, the issue becomes a bit more gray — especially when the worlds of politics and business collide. Dyachenko is married to Aeroflot CEO Valery Okulov. The children of many prominent officials also seem to have it made. The sons of acting First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov work in banks: Sergei, is a vice president at Gazprombank, while Alexander works at Vneshekonombank. The list in fact is endless. But hires that combine business and politics take place all over the world. Let’s face it, Tim Brenton, the son of Britain’s ambassador to Russia, works at Renaissance Capital.

This first appeared as an editorial in 
The Moscow Times.

TITLE: Curtain up
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The renowned Mariinsky Theater which began its 225th season on Sunday with a performance of Mikhail Glinka’s opera “A Life for the Tsar,” has revived its system of selling season tickets that offer discounted packages of seats to five shows over the course of the year. 
Valery Gergiev, the Mariinsky’s artstic director, feels the innovation will generate much interest from the public. 
“These programs have been tailored to both dedicated musical theater audiences and those who may even not have heard much classical music,” Gergiev said. 
The new season offers much to tempt a broad audience. Tenor Vladimir Galuzin and soprano Maria Guleghina star in Puccini’s “Tosca” on Sept. 21 with Valery Gergiev conducting. Galuzin then appears as Alexei in Prokofiev’s “The Gambler” on Sept. 25. 
Bass Yevgeny Nikitin is due to sing Figaro in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” on Sept. 30 and bass Sergei Aleksashkin performs the role of Ivan Susanin in Glinka’s “A Life for the Tsar” on Sept. 28.
The Mariinsky’s new concert hall is also going to be busy in the new season. On Sept. 26, Japanese pianists Mutsuko Dohi and Ayeni Manon Janke, and violinist Juki Manuela Janke will perform alongside the Mariinsky symphony orchestra in a program of Mussorgsky, Shostakovich, Mozart and Akira Ifukube.
On Sept. 27 the venue hosts a recital of renowned Danish violinist Nikolai Znaider with a program of Mendelsohn, Smetana and Dvorak.
Contemporary Russian and British classical music will take center stage at a new festival, Jewel of Russia, that kicks off at the Mariinsky concert hall on Oct. 27 and showcases works by Stravinsky, Britten, Tishchenko, Igor Slonimsky, John Barry and other modern composers. The program of the event, which runs through Oct. 31, features the Russian premiere of Kiev-born minimalist composer Valentin Silvestrov’s Sixth Symphony as well as the first performances in Russia of British composer Thomas Ades’s opera “Powder Her Face,” his violin concerto and symphonic work “Asyla.”
For the current season the Mariinsky has developed eight thematic series of season tickets. A program titled “The World of Tchaikovsky,” includes performances of “Swan Lake,” “The Nutcracker,” “Eugene Onegin,” “Sleeping Beauty” and “The Enchantress,” while one of the most tempting options,  “Three Centuries of Musical Theater” features Puccini’s “Turandot,” Petipa’s “Don Quixote,” Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” Bizet’s “Carmen,” and Richard Strauss’s “Elektra.”
“The season ticket, which entitles the holder to visit five performances, is a good bargain: depending on the type of seat, the price varies from 1,900 rubles ($76) to 5,900 rubles ($236),” said the Mariinsky’s press officer Oksana Tokranova.
“Apart from the clear financial benefit, the new offer provides an opportunity to see the shows that normally sell out very quickly, like, for instance ‘Swan Lake’ or ‘Eugene Onegin.’”
Some of the programs are devoted exclusively to opera. The “Great Operas” collection features Verdi’s “La Traviata,” Janacek’s “Jenufa,” Puccini’s “Turandot,” “Tosca” and “Madame Butterfly.”
One of the programs focuses on 20th century music and includes Balanchine’s “Jewels,” Grigorovich’s “The Legend of Love,” Prokofiev’s “The Gambler,” Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw” and Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” choreographed by Lavrovsky.
November sees the first operatic premiere of the Mariinsky’s 2007/08 season.
Vasily Barkhatov, an up-and-coming director from Moscow, will produce his interpretation of Verdi’s “Otello.” Known for his experimental productions at Moscow’s Helicon Opera, Barkhatov will be making his second collaboration with the Mariinsky. The director staged a cerebral interpretation of Janacek’s dark psychological drama ‘Jenufa’ in April 2007, which gained high critical praise.
The Mariinsky’s impressive stock of Verdi operas already includes Kirill Serebrennikov’s “Falstaff,” Dmitry Bertman’s “Nabucco,” Walter Le Moli’s “Rigoletto,” Andrei Konchalovsky’s “Un Ballo in Maschera, Charles Roubaud’s “La Traviata,” Elijah Moshinski’s “La Forza del Destino,” Yury Alexandrov’s “Don Carlos,” David McVicar’s “Macbeth” and Alexei Stepanyuk’s “Aida.” 
Most of the shows from that list have been mounted over the past four years. Barkhatov’s show is intended to replace Yury Alexandrov’s infamous production that was branded “racist” by one British reviewer when on tour in London in 2001. The critic was outraged by the director presenting the Russian singer playing Othello in blackface.
In 2001, which UNESCO declared the year of Verdi to mark the 100th anniversary of the composer’s death, the Mariinsky produced an avalanche of operas from his repertoire. This resulted in a patchy selection of shows, which London critics panned at a Verdi Festival later that year. 
Among the definite events, the audiences can also expect Mozart’s “Die Zauberflote” (The Magic Flute), which is due to be staged for the Mariinsky’s new state-of-the-art concert hall in December. The production will be directed by Frenchman Alain Maratrat who staged acclaimed award-winning productions of “The Love for Three Oranges” and “Il Viaggio A Rheims” in previous seasons. 
British director Ian Judge, responsible for a romantic impressionist rendition of Puccini’s  “La Boheme” comes back to the Mariinsky to try his hand at Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman.” The premiere is scheduled for February. 
With his 2001 production of “La Boheme” for the Mariinsky, Judge had avoided a sophisticated conceptual staging yet he created a masterful backdrop for the young Mariinsky singers. Judge’s show — where he moved the heroes of Henry Murger’s “Scenes From Bohemian Life” novel from 1830s to 1930s Paris — did not aim for a particularly original approach, concentrating instead on achieving a harmonious performance.
The International Mariinsky Ballet Festival will also be held in the spring followed by the company’s world-famous event, “The Stars of the White Nights” festival.

www.mariinsky.ru

TITLE: Chernov’s
         choice
TEXT: What Morrissey dreamed of might become reality in St. Petersburg. Well, they won’t start hanging DJs immediately, but the word “squares” has already been pronounced, as Governor Valentina Matviyenko attacked certain local nightclubs for drug trafficking.
“There is a whole series of clubs where mass drug trafficking is under way. The managers of these enterprises should be taken to squares and put on trial,” Matviyenko said at a session of the St. Petersburg government in City Hall, according to Regnum news agency.
Regnum said Matviyenko singled out the techno club <b>Tunnel</b>. “Close this outrageous club!” Matviyenko added, warming to her theme. “And let them dare to try to sue us!” 
This week, the authorities’ attention will also be concentrated on <b>Vspyshka</b> (Flash), a massive annual techno event taking place at Yubileiny Sports Palace on Saturday.
Apart from DJs, ravers will be treated to anti-drug video clips and posters, while certain anti-drug “volunteer teams” will be roaming through the crowd looking for drug dealers and takers, according to the local news website Saint-Petersburg.ru.
During DJ sets, doctors and narc police officers will be working in and outside the Sports Palace as well as a mobile laboratory that will be used by narcs to find young people who have taken drugs, the website wrote.
<b>The St. Petersburg Ska-Jazz Review</b> will perform to celebrate the release of its full-length concert DVD “The St. Petersburg Ska-Jazz Review Live at Red Club” at Achtung Baby on Friday. The concert will start some time between 10 p.m. and 11:30 p.m., according to the band and the club’s management.
The Ska-Jazz Review’s sister, ska-punk band <b>Spitfire</b> is also performing this weekend, at Orlandina on Saturday.
From Finland comes klezmer band <b>Doina Klezmer</b> (The Place, Friday) along with experimental electronica bands <b>Luomo</b> and <b>Islaja</b> who will perform as part of the music series <b>Sounds Like Suomi</b> (The Place, Saturday).
Meanwhile, <b>Mod</b> bar will be celebrating its first anniversary on Sunday, and <b>Dunes</b>, the beach-like summer open cafe located amid industrial slums with a great view of the Church on the Spilt Blood near to Mod, has announced farewell parties with sets from DJs and movies on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
The <b>Beth Custer Ensemble</b> will open <b>Aposition Forum</b>, an annual avant-garde music event, at Rodina film theater on Thursday.
The San Francisco-based band will accompany an old Soviet silent film with music composed by composer, bandleader and clarinet player Beth Custer.
Called “My Grandmother,” the film was made by Georgian director Kote Mikaberidze (1896-1973) in 1929 and was banned almost immediately for its satire of Soviet bureaucracy.

<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: The tsar’s gift
AUTHOR: By Nora FitzGerald
PUBLISHER: The Washington Post
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Russian art collection of the late cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, is going home.
Steel magnate Alisher Usmanov preempted a Sotheby’s auction by buying the collection, reportedly for more than the $40 million it was expected to fetch. He said he will turn over the entire purchase to the state.
Russians have developed a passion for collecting, but it has also become a political gesture that can burnish the reputation of the country’s wealthiest with the Kremlin. Art sales here have in a few years grown into an opera-size spectacle, full of fever pitch, intrigue and most recently, patriotic gestures for the motherland.
Usmanov acted after the Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography informed him and other tycoons that the collection of paintings and porcelain would be auctioned at Sotheby’s in London.
There was no auction. About 60 collectors and dealers arrived to buy a least part of the collection, but Usmanov, who also owns the Kommersant publishing house and a piece of the London soccer club Arsenal, had made the deal a day before the works were to go on the block.
“This experience was absolutely unique,” said Lord Mark Poltimore, deputy chairman of Sotheby’s Europe. “I’ve been in this process for 30 years. Then again, Russia is unique. I’ve never had to do anything so last-minute.”
For an undisclosed amount, but more than $40 million, Usmanov bought works by some of Russia’s most renowned painters, including Boris Grigoriyev and Ilya Repin.
“Russia’s oligarchs are starting to feel socially responsible,” said Mikhail Kamensky, the head of Sotheby’s new Russia office. “Some of our wealthy people are like giraffes: It takes them time to lift their heads and realize what’s happening. But if Usmanov’s deal had not gone through, there were many buyers in line behind him to buy this collection with the condition that it come home to Russia.”
It’s a very different scene from when Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya started collecting 30 years ago. The world-renowned cellist and his wife had left the Soviet Union in 1974 under fire for their support of dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn; they were living in Paris but planned to return. In 1978, their citizenship was revoked. But in a major reversal, President Mikhail Gorbachev restored it in 1990 and Russia once again embraced the famed musician. Rostropovich died in April at age 80.
“It was our desire to create a Russian home during our separation from the motherland,” Vishnevskaya wrote in the collection catalogue. “We never intended to leave Russia, we were simply exiled and I wanted to have my little piece of Russia, a personal St. Petersburg.”
Patriotic art purchases like Usmanov’s began in earnest a few years ago when oil and metals oligarch Viktor Vekselberg bought the world-acclaimed 180-piece Forbes collection of Faberge eggs for $100 million in another pre-auction bid from Sotheby’s. He brought the eggs home to Russia.
Some art observers at the time said he bought the collection to please President Vladimir Putin, a gift from a rich merchant to his tsar. Since then, the magnate has put the cherished Faberge eggs, once the bejeweled, dazzling toys of the czars, on exhibit. He now plans to open private museums in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Christie’s International says it will open its first office in Russia by the end of the year, following Sotheby’s, which opened a Moscow service office in May. In the first half of 2007, Christie’s International auction house sold $69 million worth of Russian art worldwide, about the same amount it sold in all of 2006. Sotheby’s sold $153 million worth of Russian art worldwide in 2006, and has already sold more than $100 million in the first half of this year.

TITLE: Still married, with children
AUTHOR: By Clifford J. Levy
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: MOSCOW – Turn on the sitcom that is the hottest television show in Russia, and it all seems so familiar. Moored to his living room couch is a shoe salesman who is more interested in watching sports than conjugal relations. His wife has shocking hair and an even more shocking mouth. A couple of ne’er-do-well teenagers round out this bawdy, bickering bunch.
In fact, the show is an authorized copy of the American sitcom “Married With Children,” with a Russian cast and dialogue but scripts that hew closely to those of the original. This knockoff is such a sensation, especially among younger viewers, that its actors have become household names, and advertisements for its new season are plastered around Moscow.
A drumbeat of anti-Americanism may be coming from the Kremlin these days, but across Russia people are embracing that quintessentially American genre, the television sitcom, not to mention one of its brassiest examples. And curiously enough, it is the Russian government that has effectively brought “Married With Children” to this land, which somehow made it through the latter half of the 20th century without the benefit of the laugh track.
The show’s success says something not only about changing tastes here but also about Russia’s standing. Sitcoms are typically grounded in middle-class life and poke fun at it. The popularity of Russian versions of “Married With Children” and other adaptations of American sitcoms suggests that Russia has gained enough stability and wealth in recent years that these jokes resonate with viewers.
“ ‘Married With Children,’ with its satire on the American middle class, fits the style of our channel well,” said Dmitri Troitsky, a senior executive at the Russian channel TNT, a Gazprom-owned network whose programming bent is roughly similar to that of the Fox network in the United States. “It seemed interesting and topical for us to do a parody on the Russian middle class.”
These days, American visitors in Russia could be forgiven for thinking they had stumbled upon some bizarre realm of reruns. Adaptations of two other shows, “Who’s the Boss?” and “The Nanny,” are also popular here.
All three programs are distributed by Sony Pictures Television International, which has created versions of them and other American programs around the world, often in partnership with local producers. “The Nanny,” which was first broadcast here in 2004, was such a hit that after running out of episodes to copy, some of the show’s original American writers were commissioned to create 25 more episodes, said Ron Sato, a Sony spokesman.
“Married With Children,” which ran from 1987 to 1997 in the United States, has been renamed “Schastlivy Vmeste,” or “Happy Together.” Its setting has been moved from the Chicago area to Russia’s heartland metropolis of Yekaterinburg. The sniping couple, Al and Peg Bundy, have become Gena and Dasha Bukin.
The thrust is the same: sending up family life as outrageously — or as vulgarly, depending upon your point of view — as possible.
A typical bit: In the living room, Gena suddenly tells Dasha to take off her clothes. Dasha is elated that Gena finally wants to have sex, and then Gena says, “No, Dasha, I’m simply dying of hunger, and hope that that will take away my appetite.”
Natalya Bulgakova, a spokeswoman for TNT, said the show, which had its debut last year, is now the most popular scripted series among Russians ages 18 to 30. (Older Russians typically roll their eyes at mention of “Schastlivy Vmeste,” as if they briefly wonder whether life under Communism was not so bad after all.)
TNT is owned by Gazprom-Media, which is controlled by Gazprom, the Russian national resources behemoth that is controlled by the government. Asked about the show, Gazprom-Media said in a statement that it did not interfere in its stations’ programming decisions.
While even Americans who do not speak Russian could discern the American roots in “Schastlivy Vmeste,” it is fair to say that many Russian viewers might not. But even Russians who do would seem unlikely to be bothered by the show’s origins.
Russian television has come a long way from the staid, politically tinged fare of Communist times, and these days there are many channels offering a steady diet of movies, dramas, game shows, soap operas and reality shows — some locally produced, some imported and dubbed.
News programs, which are tightly overseen by President Vladimir V. Putin’s administration, are another story. As in Soviet days, they rarely divert from the Kremlin’s point of view. Barbed political satire, which thrived after the fall of the Soviet Union, has been suppressed.
Sitcoms were first broadcast in Russia in the 1990s, when the country was on the brink of economic collapse, but both original sitcoms and copies of American ones achieved poor ratings. People were struggling and seemingly not in the mood for breezy jokes about the lives of the comfortable. Unable to identify with the sitcoms’ characters, Russians instead flocked to dubbed Latin American soap operas.
Only recently, with the economic upturn, has the sitcom taken hold.
“This is probably the last television genre to be adopted in Russia,” said Elena Prokhorova, who studies Russian television and is a visiting professor at the College of William and Mary, in Virginia. They did not work before, she said, because “sitcoms require a very stable social life.”
The producers and actors of “Schastlivy Vmeste” said that while the Russian scripts followed the outlines of the American ones, they had made changes for a Russian audience, fashioning plots around Russian holidays and using sets that better resemble interiors in Russia. Viktor Loginov, who plays Gena Bukin, looks younger than Ed O’Neill, who played Al Bundy, in part because the show is geared toward younger audiences.
They also insisted that the humor was more Russian. “We try to capture the so-called Russian soul so that it will be accepted by our Russian audience, so the character becomes a guy from the street,” said Mr. Loginov, a classically trained actor.
Still, the feel of “Schastlivy Vmeste” seems far more American than Russian. Classic Russian humor tends more toward narrative satire than slapstick.
Though “Married With Children” was something of a shock when it first appeared in the United States, provoking advertiser boycotts, two decades later the Russian version has not stirred a similar reaction. Russian television critics note that, as in much of the world, television here has become home for a lot of relatively coarse fare.
Daniil B. Dondurei, editor in chief of Cinema Art magazine, said he saw a darker significance in the success of shows like “Schastlivy Vmeste.”
“Today, people are becoming accustomed to not thinking about life,” he said. “The television is training them to not think about which party is in Parliament, about which laws are being passed, about who will be in charge tomorrow. People have become accustomed to living like children, in the family of a very strong and powerful father. Everything is decided for them.”

TITLE: Gorbachev’s coup
AUTHOR: By Rodric Braithwaite
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: These days Mikhail Gorbachev is being airbrushed out of history. When Boris Yeltsin died a few months ago, Western obituarists rushed to hail him as the man who ended the Cold War, dismantled the Soviet Union and introduced democracy into the New Russia. In fact, Yeltsin did none of these things. But few of the commentators bothered to recall the Gorby-mania that swept the West in the dying years of the Soviet Union: If they mentioned Gorbachev at all, it was to deride him for trying to remain true to his communist past, for bungling economic reform, for shoring up a Soviet Union that was clearly doomed.
Archie Brown is the dean of Gorbachev experts, and in his latest collection of essays, “Seven Years That Changed the World,” he points out that these judgments are as crude as they are superficial. Many of the essays have appeared before; they are now supplemented with the fruits of his mature thinking and new archival material, and set out, systematically and persuasively, the case for a more sober perspective.
The trouble is that sobriety is very difficult to achieve. The events are too recent and still arouse too much emotion, above all inside Russia itself. The debate will continue for a very long time to come: after all, we are still arguing about the reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. But the questions are clear enough. Why did the Soviet Union collapse when it did? Could it have been reformed? Could it have long survived in its unreformed state? Its disappearance was a cataclysmic event, both for Russia and for the rest of the world: Why did it happen with so little expenditure of blood?
The roots of the Soviet collapse go back well before Gorbachev was anywhere near the top of the system. In the early 1960s, the Soviet Union was already in serious trouble. The economy was faltering, growth rates were down and the government was forced to turn for grain to its Cold War enemy. Nikita Khrushchev tried a variety of ingenious expedients to jumpstart the system. These harebrained schemes, as his enemies in the Politburo rightly called them, were a failure, and he lost his job.
His successors were equally unable to devise effective remedies. At a loss as to what to do next, they allowed the country to bumble along, spending vast sums on a military machine which was itself losing its way despite a glittering array of new weapons squeezed out of a national economy that could not afford it. There was a small margin to spare for the ordinary Soviet consumer, enough to give people the feeling that things were getting better. There was political repression, too. But it was no longer on a mass scale, and so did not affect most people, who rather liked the political stability that seemed to come with it.
But the successive deaths of the Three Old Men — Leonid Brezhnev, Yury Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko - forced the survivors to realize that things could no longer go on that way. They elected as general secretary Gorbachev — young, energetic, imaginative, from the right peasant background, with a wealth of practical experience and a good Party member to boot. Gorbachev identified three main problems: nuclear confrontation, imperial overstretch of the Soviet Union and a stagnant economy. His remedies were unprecedented.
Little more than a year before Gorbachev became general secretary, a foolishly ill-judged NATO exercise (“Able Archer”) simulated a nuclear strike so convincingly that the Soviets began to gear themselves up for retaliation. Appalled at the prospect of nuclear war by accident, Gorbachev took his courage in both hands, and sought a negotiation with Ronald Reagan, the archpriest of anti-communism. Luckily for him, Reagan turned out to share his intense dislike of the nuclear weapon - to the dismay of both men’s professional advisers.
But once the process of dismantling the Soviet Union’s military and imperial positions had begun — under constant political and economic pressure from the Americans — it would have been hard to stop. Nuclear disarmament led to conventional disarmament. Withdrawal from outposts in distant continents led to withdrawal from Germany and Eastern Europe. The Army came home. There was nowhere for it to live. Not surprisingly, the senior officers turned against Gorbachev. Many were involved in the attempted coup against him in August 1991.
Gorbachev saw that the gray stagnation of the Soviet economy, its inability to match the vitality and inventiveness of Western capitalism, was not only due to the burden of empire and a bloated war machine. A stodgy political system inhibited imagination and enterprise. Gorbachev believed that the inventiveness of a talented nation could only be unleashed by letting ordinary people take more control of their lives through some form of democracy. He freed the media and then organized the first contested elections to be held anywhere in the Warsaw Pact. In March 1989, Soviet voters threw out Party bosses all over the country, and transformed the nation’s politics.
Without the freedoms that Gorbachev introduced, Yeltsin might have remained an unconventional but authoritarian provincial Party boss. Gorbachev’s new politics made it possible for Yeltsin to mount his tank and to defy the men who made the putsch. But it was Yeltsin — not Gorbachev — who four months later announced, without consulting the people, that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist; and who reached naturally for the gun to resolve his political problems with the unruly Russian parliament in 1993, and with the Chechens in 1994. The Soviet Union may well have been doomed, even if Gorbachev had not tried to reform it. But as Brown persuasively argues, its demise could have been much more protracted. It could have been much more bloody, too, and spilled over into an incalculable international confrontation. It was in significant measure thanks to Gorbachev that a terrible threat was lifted from a world that had skirted nuclear annihilation for four decades. That is something for which we should be profoundly grateful.
So should Gorbachev’s countrymen. But for very many of them he is the incompetent, vacillating and pusillanimous traitor who fatally undermined a great power, and who drove them into poverty and near-starvation in the winter of 1991-92. The simultaneous collapse of the Soviet state, its political and economic system, its military power and its international prestige, to the undisguised satisfaction of its rivals and enemies, was a humiliation that few Russians could forget or forgive. They made Gorbachev the obvious scapegoat and turned to the more authoritarian Vladimir Putin to restore their self-respect.
But it is implausible to attribute the whole historical process to one man, whether you like him or not. Gorbachev could not have single-handedly brought down an otherwise healthy superpower. But he did, in Bismarck’s words, “hear God’s footsteps marching through history, and... catch on to His coattails as He marches past.” Although he made serious mistakes, his political courage and ingenuity began the process of transforming the Soviet Union into a modern country at ease with itself and the outside world. The transformation can only come to fruition over many decades, and then only with luck and with many fits and starts. But that is the historical perspective against which Gorbachev will eventually be judged.

Rodric Braithwaite was British ambassador in Moscow from 1988 to 1992 and is the author, most recently, 
of “Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War.”

TITLE: Halfway Houses
AUTHOR: By Irina Reyn
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In Ellen Litman’s touching debut story collection, “The Last Chicken in America,” bewildered Russian-Jewish immigrants in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, feel their way around brand-new lives in an unfamiliar culture. Permanently severed from a country that thwarted a sense of Jewish belonging, they are now forced to navigate a new outsider position as immigrants. In bringing their stories to life, Litman tenderly balances pathos and humor, and the result is a deeply sympathetic look at a community struggling to understand its hyphenated identity.
Each story is told from the viewpoint of a different Russian immigrant, with a few characters making repeat appearances. Masha, the recent arrival at the center of the title story, does not feel entirely in tune with her parents, who argue over the price of frozen chicken; with her fellow female classmates in English-language class, who compete for available boys; or in the arms of a gangly Russian immigrant named Alick, who may or may not have a girlfriend in another city. Litman, who emigrated from Moscow in 1992, beautifully captures the numb disorientation of that pocket of time after immigration when survival may simply mean that “it’s better to say nothing. It’s better to be invisible.” Masha’s little family eventually rallies together, but one senses that the fissure between the generations will only deepen with time.
In the book’s most ambitious story, “About Kamyshinskiy,” Litman weaves between the lives of several households. We meet the widower Alyosha Kamyshinskiy, who lies to his daughters about the reason behind his frequent trips to Chicago; Kostya Kogan, who reluctantly leaves his wife for a belly-dancer from a Russian restaurant; and Seryozha Rodkin, who is struggling with his wife’s cancer diagnosis. Seryozha can’t help but internalize the unsettled lives of his two friends, Alyosha and Kostya, and wonder if America is to blame for their fates or if “it’s not America. It’s them. America just gave them space.” 
“They were tall, good-looking and careless,” begins “Dancers,” a story about a pair of ballet dancers who crash at the apartment of newlyweds Tanya and Petya. The dancers’ glamorous presence only highlights the lack of excitement in Tanya’s life, and their sexual passion reminds her that marrying sensible, unimaginative Petya (his nickname for her is starushka, or “old lady”) was little more than an attempt to ward off solitude. Tanya begins to wonder if life with the male dancer would have been more vibrant. While the loveless marriage is well-trod literary territory, Litman manages to surprise us with the story’s conclusion. Can immigrants afford to fantasize about excitement when the pleasures of routine were so hard-won? 
Another story, “What Do You Dream Of, Cruiser Aurora?,” highlights the challenges elderly immigrants face. Liberman is convinced to leave St. Petersburg for Pittsburgh to be near his daughter and grandson. What he finds is hardly the easy life — the elderly line up for free lunches at the Jewish Community Center, go for checkups to the one Russian doctor in town, and eventually die slowly in a foreign country where their sole personal connections are harried children and recent acquaintances. As the formerly healthy Liberman grows weaker, it’s hard not to wonder if it is his illness or the impossibility of assimilation that is killing him.
Litman’s Russian immigrants are befuddled and meek, depressed but quietly rebellious. They take solace in the small American treats that feel overwhelmingly precious: Klondike bars, Chinese food, trips to the Monroeville Mall. Their various emotional and physical hungers are overwhelming and insatiable. But they are also pursued by the sensation of incompleteness, of living ghostly, alternate lives. “This is what’s wrong with immigration,” Masha thinks. “Those who could be your friends at home here become cautious competitors. Parents envy their children. Sisters become dangerous — all that private information they can unleash at a strategically chosen moment. It’s about surviving. Immigration distorts people. We walk around distorted.” 
If no one character bursts vividly from the page, it is the city of Pittsburgh, and particularly the bustling neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, that takes center stage in the collection. This is where the small daily dramas of Russian immigration unfold: at the Jewish Community Center, the Giant Eagle supermarket, the Three Bears store. Litman’s characters wander up and down Squirrel Hill’s two major streets — Murray and Forbes. As a landscape, Pittsburgh is both claustrophobic and liberating — a small town where one can easily bump into one’s own parents on the street, but also a city that affords avenues to larger worlds: intellectual, cultural and, most of all, American.

Irina Reyn teaches fiction at the University of Pittsburgh. Her first novel, “What Happened to Anna K.,” will be published next summer.

TITLE: In The Spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: While one powers his way through the waters of the Caspian, slaying Russia’s marine resources with a single blow of his spear, the other lolls in a jacuzzi sprinkled with rose petals, his attention equally divided between a porn channel and a lissome brunette.
That was the picture painted by the Zhizn tabloid on last week as it compared the lotus-eating lifestyle of Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov with the manly pursuits of the country’s head boy, Vladimir Putin.
The swines at Zhizn got hold of Zyuganov’s hotel bill after he stayed at a “foreign sanatorium” whose mud baths he is unlikely to patronize again. Although Zhizn’s subhead makes much of the party leader’s treachery in going abroad on vacation, the word “sanatorium” and the fact that the bill is in Russian give the game away - Zyuganov just nipped across the border to Ukraine. Though he did stay in the presidential suite, the nerve of him.
Zhizn writes that Zyuganov paid $800 per night to stay in the suite and also left a tip of $50 in the restaurant, which the tabloid emphasizes is “half the pension of the average Russian pensioner.” But the main attack is on Zyuganov’s sexual proclivities. The tabloid helpfully blows up the part of the bill that indicates he paid 700 hryvnas (presumably - the currency isn’t given) for a cable channel called Sex View TV. And it juxtaposes this with a photo of Zyuganov with a girl in shorts and a sleeveless top. He has his arm around her shoulders, although their awkward stance doesn’t exactly scream that they engaged in illicit activities on the presidential king-size bed.
Zhizn also prints a picture of the suite’s jacuzzi, which looks onto the Black Sea and has rose petals scattered round it. Presumably, they were red for this would-be communist president. But it doesn’t give any concrete evidence, and the bill doesn’t indicate double occupation of the suite.
Personally, I doubt that a man who voluntarily goes on vacation to a sanatorium and also - according to the bill published by the tabloid - pays for a 5-day “medical tour” called Diagnosis and Relaxation, would know wild vice if it hit him on the head. With their stern staff, terrifying treatments and compulsory diet of meat and potatoes, sanatoriums would be a strange choice for a dirty weekend, unless it’s mud baths you’re after.
Meanwhile, Putin has taken up a far more wholesome hobby than flicking through porn channels, the tabloid points out on Page 2. The article, which is yet another excuse to roll out the topless Putin-as-Rambo photos, quotes “sources in the presidential administration” as saying that Putin has taken up diving and underwater spearfishing.
Putin began diving seriously in the Seychelles this year, Zhizn’s sources reveal. And doubtless, he found a nice budget hotel with absolutely no porn channels on offer. It quotes some unidentified British zoologists as saying that the area around an island called Praslin was cordoned off so Putin could do his stuff without some crazed scientist or maverick spear-fisher mistaking him for a prawn.
The best part of the article is a piece of purple prose about why Putin prefers spearfishing to idly admiring marine life with a snorkel. “Obviously, aimless underwater swimming and looking at the beauties of seas and oceans don’t tempt the Russian leader,” it gushes.
Apparently Putin’s new hobby has encouraged him to support the building of new diving centers in Sochi and the Far East, the paper writes, quoting those presidential administration sources again. And one of the presidential candidates, Sergei Ivanov, has quite coincidentally also developed an enthusiasm for the sport, Zhizn writes.
“In order to dive, admire the sea, nature, sea urchins and crabs, you don’t need to go to Egypt,” the paper quotes Ivanov waxing lyrically. “You can go to the Far East [of Russia].” Or indeed, to the Seychelles. But give Ukraine a wide berth. There be Zhizn reporters.

TITLE: Peter’s burger
AUTHOR: By Matt Brown
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Carl’s Jr // New branch: 8 Malaya Sadovaya Ulitsa (from Friday, Sept. 28) // Other branches include: 47 Liteiny Prospekt, Rodeo Drive Mall, and Piter Mall // Fast food/burger meal: approximately 200 rubles ($8)

Remember the fuss that was made when McDonalds opened its first restaurant in Russia on Moscow’s Pushkin Square in 17 years ago? 
As a symbol of the abandonment of the command economy and the apparent triumph of the U.S. over its Cold War foe, it was hard to beat. McDonalds says that its Pushkin Square spearhead remains its busiest restaurant in the world, and now there are more than 100 McDonalds restaurants throughout Russia.
Always a vessel in which to pour anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-globalist and anti-burger sentiment — as much as in, say, France, as in Russia — McDonalds nevertheless marches relentlessly forward and has changed the way the world thinks about grabbing a bite to eat. 
Following a similarly American dreamlike narrative as McDonalds, Carl’s Jr started as a mom-and-pop enterprise in California in 1941 with a single hot dog stand. 
With an expanding network in mainly the western United States, the hamburger restaurant chain got going internationally long after its big yellow rival but has now got some 3000 restaurants in Asia and South America. Two years ago, under franchisee Yarkaya Zvezda, Carl’s Jr announced plans to open some 50 restaurants in Russia. Actually something of a minnow in the global fast-food pond, Carl’s Jr clearly thinks it has spotted an opportunity in Russia.
To its handful of St. Petersburg branches, Carl’s Jr is adding an outlet on Malaya Sadovaya Ulitsa that is set to open on Friday Sept. 28. 
There’ll be a gala opening with executives from Carl Karcher Restaurants, the corporation that owns Carl’s Jr, visiting from the U.S., a barman show, DJs, and entertainment from local comedians. Organizers say the event will have the feel of a beach party. 
And judging by earlier visits to its location on Liteiny Prospekt, Carl’s Jr is right to feel confident it can take on rival fast food outlets on and around Nevsky Prospekt.
Those with anti-burger sympathies won’t find much to tempt them here, and Carl’s Jr proudly markets itself as a no-nonsense supplier of food to “hungry young men.” 
In the past its U.S. marketing has made use of Paris Hilton and such slogans as “Don’t Bother Me — I’m eating.” 
The restaurant recently got into hot water with an ad campaign for a Patty Melt featuring rappers opining about “flat buns” — their teacher’s, not necessarily the sandwhich’s. This not-very-subtle approach to food, sex and masculinity should go down a storm in Russia. 
So to burger lovers however items such as the Double Western Bacon Cheeseburger — two char-grilled all-beef patties, two strips of bacon, melted cheese, crispy onion rings and tangy barbecue sauce — and the Chicken Club Sandwich — char-grilled chicken breast, two strips of bacon, Swiss cheese, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise in a honey wheat bun — should prove irresistible. 
Connoisseurs will spot that bacon and char grilling differentiate Carl’s Jr from McDonalds and these give the food at Carl’s Jr the taste of something that’s been made and cooked like real food rather something that’s been created with chemicals in a lab. 
Another outlandishly refreshing touch at Carl’s Jr is partial table service. You pay for your food at the counter but take a number by which a waitress — inevitably a waitress — locates your table and delivers the meal. They also serve beer. Woo-hoo!

TITLE: The west revisited
AUTHOR: By A. O. Scott
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: Russell Crowe, who wears the black hat in “3:10 to Yuma,” is a native of New Zealand. Christian Bale, the good guy, was born in Wales. Lou Dobbs and other commentators who have lately been sounding the alarm about outsourcing, immigration and the globalization of the labor market may want to take note. The hero and the villain in a cowboy movie: are we going to stand by and let foreigners steal these jobs? Are no Americans willing to do them?
Of course the western is a universal genre — one of the best recent examples, “The Proposition,” comes from Australia — and it must be said that Crowe and Bale both do excellent work. They and a fine, all-American supporting cast, including Gretchen Mol, Ben Foster, Dallas Roberts and a surpassingly grizzled Peter Fonda, are the main reasons to see “3:10 to Yuma,” a serviceable addition to the current western revival.
Directed by James Mangold from a script by Halsted Welles, Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, “3:10 to Yuma” remakes a 1957 film of the same title (based on the same Elmore Leonard story), which starred Glenn Ford as the charming baddie and Van Heflin as the rancher who risks everything to escort him to a rendezvous with justice.
The original, directed by Delmer Daves, is a lean and satisfying specimen, a western more concerned with the psychology of its characters than with the mythology of the frontier. Mangold’s new version, though it expands the story and cranks up the brutality, does its best to honor the unpretentious spirit of the original.
It is a lesser movie — more likely to be recalled as a moderately satisfying entertainment than remembered as a classic that may be a sign of the times. The best of the old westerns were dense with psychosexual implication and political subtext. Often dismissed, then and now, as naïve celebrations of dubious ideals, they were in many ways more sophisticated than their self-consciously critical (or “revisionist”) heirs. And the new “3:10 to Yuma,” even in its efforts to stick to the old ways (apart from some obligatory post-“Deadwood” cussing), is neither spare nor suggestive enough. It lacks the confidence to distinguish between touchstones and cliches.
But the principal actors are nonetheless able to refresh their somewhat shopworn roles. Dan Evans, Bale’s character, is a former sharpshooter in the Union Army trying to survive bad weather and predatory capitalism in the post-Civil War Arizona territory. Bale is one of the few screen actors who can convincingly shed the trappings of modernity. Dan is much more than a movie star in costume: with his gaunt, haggard face and wide, awe-struck eyes, he seems to have stepped out of a daguerreotype or a murder ballad.
Ben Wade, the prodigious robber played by Crowe, is a more familiar creature: a sociopath whose twinkly charm masks both his ruthlessness and his perverse integrity. Ben is better-humored than Dan, and he certainly looks better fed. He sweet-talks Dan’s wife (Mol) and impresses Dan’s older son (Logan Lerman), who regards his father’s ineffectual uprightness with open contempt.
Dan signs on with the ragged, righteous entourage whose job is to take Ben over the mountains and put him on the train that gives the movie its title. It’s not an easy commute. Ben’s gang, led by his sadistic sidekick, Charlie Prince (Foster), is lying in wait, and there are plenty of other enemies as well, from angry Apaches to rival railroad tycoons. The West here is a Hobbesian realm where any two men will have at least three reasons to kill each other.
But Ben and Dan discover an unlikely bond, or at least some common enemies, and Bale’s haunted reticence plays well against Crowe’s roguish relish. Their characters open up a bit too much toward the end, in confessional moments that soften the clean, hard contours of the story and bring to the surface themes that would have been more interesting if they had been left half-buried.
Mangold, whose previous films include “Girl, Interrupted” and “Walk the Line,” is not the kind of director who indulges in stylistic showboating. The action sequences in “3:10 to Yuma” are effective and coherent, but it is ultimately the actors who carry the movie. The destination may be as familiar as the journey, but there are still some sights worth seeing along the way.

TITLE: Mourinho Leaves Chelsea FC ‘By Mutual Consent’
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: LONDON — Jose Mourinho’s three-year reign at Chelsea came to an abrupt end on Thursday as the Portuguese manager’s fraught relationship with the club’s Russian owner, Roman Abramovich, finally reached breaking point.
An announcement that sent shockwaves through English and European football came in the early hours of Thursday morning with Chelsea claiming that Mourinho had left “by mutual consent.”
A terse statement posted on the London club’s website stated: “Chelsea Football Club and Jose Mourinho have agreed to part company today (Thursday) by mutual consent.”
Mourinho had reportedly informed Frank Lampard and other senior players that he was on his way out on Wednesday evening and late-night talks at Stamford Bridge concluded with confirmation of his departure.
If he wants to go straight into another job, Mourinho will not be short of offers.
The Portuguese manager, who made his reputation by guiding FC Porto to Champions League glory in 2004, has transformed the English football landscape since taking over at Stamford Bridge in June 2004, winning two Premier League titles in his first two years in charge, the FA Cup last season and the League Cup in 2005 and 2007.
Of the 185 games he has been in charge, Chelsea have won 124, drawn 40 and lost 21, a record that includes a 60-match unbeaten run in Premier League matches at Stamford Bridge.
The statistics go some way towards justifying Mourinho’s famous description of himself as “a special one.”
That comment was made in his first press conference in England and it is a judgement that few Chelsea fans would dispute after three years which saw the club end its 50-year wait to be crowned champions and establish itself as one of the most feared teams in Europe.
But the success has failed to seduce Abramovich and the Russian’s relationship with his most outspoken employee turned sour last season when he refused to come up with the funds Mourinho required to land his January transfer targets — a stance the Portuguese believes contributed to Chelsea conceding the Premier League title to Manchester United.
On the other side of the feud, Abramovich has grown increasingly impatient with the fact that, after investing nearly 500 million pounds (one billion dollars) in the club, Chelsea have failed to conquer Europe and continue to lag behind the likes of Arsenal, Barcelona and Manchester United in terms of entertainment value.
Tuesday’s disappointing 1-1 Champions League draw with Norwegian side Rosenberg — watched by fewer than 25,000 fans — appears to have brought simmering tensions to the boil, and, with hindsight, Mourinho’s pre-match comments about the need to buy the best eggs to make the best omelette offered a hint that things were not going smoothly behind the scenes.
Mourinho and Abramovich appeared to have agreed to bury their differences over the summer and the manager had started this campaign pledging that he would be a much more “chilled” figure than in his first two seasons in England.
But the strain of Chelsea’s poor recent form was evident on Saturday, when Mourinho tossed a flat-screen television set to the ground in frustration over a disallowed goal in his side’s 0-0 draw with Blackburn.
Mourinho has also clashed with the Russian owner over backroom appointments, notably the May 2005 recruitment of Dutchman Frank Arnesen as the club’s youth/scouting supremo and the appointment of former Israel coach Avram Grant as director of football.
Grant on Thursday was put in charge of Chelsea’s first team. He will take charge along with Mourinho’s former assistant Steve Clarke.
It was not clear if Grant, a close friend of Abramovich, will be given the manager’s job on a long-term basis, but the Israeli will be in charge when Chelsea face champions Manchester United at Old Trafford on Sunday.
The 51-year-old’s promotion came hours after Mourinho’s announcement that he would leave. 
Mourinho came close to being ousted last season when Abramovich failed in an attempt to persuade former Germany coach Jurgen Klinsmann to succeed the Portuguese.
Although Grant has been put in the hot-seat now, a fresh move to lure Klinsmann, who is based in California, back to Europe cannot be ruled out.
Russia manager Guus Hiddink, who knows Abramovich well, and the former Monaco and Juventus boss Didier Deschamps, who briefly played for Chelsea towards the end of his illustrious career, have also been touted as possible long-term successors to Mourinho along with Sevilla’s highly-rated Juande Ramos.
Grant’s introduction to the backroom staff, initially resisted by Mourinho, had apparently been accepted by the Portuguese as part of a summer truce between him and the club owner.
Grant was recruited from Portsmouth partly with the aim of improving the performances of Andriy Shevchenko, whose presence in the Chelsea squad was a running sore in the the relationship between Abramovich and Mourinho.
The manager had never made any secret at his frustration with the Ukrainian striker’s failure to make an impact in the English game following his 60 million dollar move from AC Milan at the start of last season.

TITLE: Norway, Australia in Quarterfinals
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TIANJIN, China — Norway and Australia reached the Women’s World Cup quarterfinals on Thursday, leaving only two spots to be filled.
Norway hammered Ghana 7-2 in Hangzhou, leaving the Africans with three losses in three games. Australia rallied to draw Canada 2-2 on an extra-time equalizer by Cheryl Salisbury. Australia needed only a draw to advance, with Canada needing a victory in its final Group C game in the southwestern city of Chengdu.
Quarterfinal matchups between the No. 1-ranked United States and England, and defending champion Germany and North Korea were decided on Tuesday as Group A and B finished play. The four quarterfinals are set for Saturday and Sunday.
Norway, the winner of Group C, is likely to face China in the final eight. The Chinese faced New Zealand later Thursday in a Group D game in Tianjin and were heavily favored.
Australia is likely to face Brazil, which played Denmark later in Group D in Hangzhou.
“I think if we are at our best, we can go to the semifinals,” Norway coach Bjarne Berntsen said. “We were very casual in defense at times. We have to be much better defensively in the quarterfinals.”
Ragnhild Gulbrandsen scored three goals — one in the first half and two in the second — to give her five for the tournament. Lene Storlokken, Ane Stangeland Horpestad, Isabell Herlovsen and Lise Klaveness also scored for Norway.
Adjoa Bayor and Florence Okoe scored for Ghana.
In Chengdu, Salisbury’s extra-time equalizer gave Australia a 2-2 draw and put the Aussies into their first quarterfinals in the Women’s World Cup. Salisbury scored in the second minute of extra time to answer Canada’s 85th-minute goal by captain Christine Sinclair.
Had that goal stood, Canada would have reached the quarterfinals instead of Australia.
In a thrilling match, Canada went ahead 1-0 on the second-fastest goal in Women’s World Cup history by Melissa Tancredi before Colette McCallum tied it for Australia early in the 53rd.
Tancredi scored on a volley 32 seconds into the match to beat goalkeeper Melissa Barbieri.

TITLE: Davenport Moves Up in China Open
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BEIJING — Lindsay Davenport continued her remarkable return to tennis by beating Greek Eleni Daniilidou 7-5 6-3 to reach the quarter-finals of the China Open on Thursday.
The former world number one needed to show some grit, however, coming back from 1-3 down in both sets to set up a last eight meeting with Russian fourth seed Elena Dementieva, a 6-2 6-0 winner over Austria’s Tamira Paszek.
Davenport, who has her three-month old son Jagger with her in Beijing, has now won seven matches out of seven since coming out of retirement with a tournament win in Bali last week.
“She mixed it up a lot on me today,” said Davenport, whose last match before taking 12 months off was at last year’s China Open.
“I got off to a slow start but in the end I was able to make fewer errors and force her to make errors that she wasn’t making at the beginning.
“I don’t know why it’s been going so well, it has felt easy but I think that’s more to do with the fact that it’s been fun and I’ve enjoyed it.”