SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1310 (76), Friday, September 28, 2007
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TITLE: Governor To Back Ruling Party
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Governor Valentina Matviyenko’s decision to join the United Russia regional party list for December elections to the State Duma has provoked a sour response from both liberal politicians and human rights advocates.
“This means that even more government resources will be invested in the United Russia election campaign,” said Boris Vishnevsky, a political analyst and member of the political council of the local branch of democratic party Yabloko. 
He argues that the party has made a mistake by including Matviyenko on the list. “The governor has recently become strongly associated with the things most hated in this city, such as in-fill construction, the shortage of medicines, the stifling of small business and corruption. These ailments are now widespread in St. Petersburg.”
Talking to reporters this week, Governor Matviyenko admitted that she has no plans to become an MP. 
“I have agreed to be on the party lists entirely and purely in an effort to convince as many people as possible to take part in the elections,” the governor said, adding that she is not planning to join United Russia.
Russian legislation allows political parties to include a modest percentage of non-party members on their election lists. 
In local political jargon Matviyenko will, by agreeing to be placed on a party list, be regarded as a “steamer” — a prominent person used to draw voters to the polls for the duration of the election, like a railway engine drawing carriages and then retiring to the sidings.  
Boris Pustyntsev, chairman of the St. Petersburg branch of the human rights group Citizens’ Watch, sees Matviyenko’s direct involvement as an attempt to entice apathetic elderly voters to the ballot box.
“There is still a large group of conservative and rather inert voters who believe in a paternalistic state of the kind many of them experienced during the Soviet years. And they would take Matviyenko’s intervention as a signal to act,” said Pustyntsev. “Put simply, the respect for the ruler is so great, that if the ruler calls, they will obey.”  
Matviyenko plans to remain in office as governor for the duration of the election campaign. 
In 2002 the State Duma passed a measure, proposed by democratic party Yabloko, which stipulated that governors and other top-ranking officials who are placed on a party list must take a break from their duties for the duration of an election campaign. The amendment sought to prevent the government machine and state resources being used in support of party aims.
But two years ago the pro-Putin United Russia party, which holds an overwhelming majority in the Russian parliament, nullified the amendment. Critics allege this move gave a green light to the “steamer” strategy, which they believe encourages political corruption.
Russia’s place on the annual Corruption Perception Index published Wednesday by the campaign group Transparency International, has dropped from 127th to 145th place. The ranking puts Russia alongside Gambia, Indonesia and Togo in its level of corruption.
“Political corruption is the most cynical form of graft as it undermines the faith of citizens in justice and people’s rights,” said Vishnevsky, analysing the use of “administrative resources.”
“When we say ‘administrative resource’ it doesn’t only mean state privileges like cars, drivers and dachas, it means unlimited power to push decisions benefiting a narrow circle in the political elite and the ability to limitlessly brainwash the Russian people through nationwide television channels, all of which are now under state control.” 
According to Georgy Satarov, head of the Moscow-based anti-corruption think-tank INDEM, the phrase “administrative resources” means the use by state executives of the government machine to support political allies. 
Meanwhile United Russia leader Boris Gryzlov’s welcome to Matviyenko was low-key and matter-of fact.
“The decision was essentially a formalization of the governor’s relations with the party,” Gryzlov said.
But then the politician went on to praise the governor for her support. 
“I think that the work that was being done during the March 11 regional elections was implemented with the active participation of Valentina Matviyenko,” Gryzlov said.
His words were not consistent with the formally independent position that Matviyenko had been maintaining. Matviyenko is one of the very few Russian governors who has refrained from joining United Russia, or its pro-Kremlin rival, Just Russia. She follows the footsteps of her close ally, president Vladimit Putin, who admits having helped set up United Russia but has never expressed a desire to become a member.
Despite repeated statements that her position is to “remain above the fight,” Matviyenko’s close ties with the ruling party have always been an open secret.  
The most notorious example of what was widely regarded as lending a helping hand to United Russia was during the elections to the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly earlier this year when the city was flooded with billboards showing Matviyenko shaking hands with Vadim Tyulpanov, the local United Russia leader under the slogan “Together We Can Do Everything.”
Another breed of posters with picturesque views of St. Petersburg said: “Our president is Vladimir Putin, our governor is Valentina Matviyenko, our party is United Russia.”
Although the posters could have been confused with political campaigning, United Russia officials defended it as “social advertising.” 
While state executives are forbidden from endorsing any party during election campaigns in the media, any public statement they may make referring to a party could be seen as a passing reference, as long as officials do not directly call for voters to support a specific party. 
A popular tool is to organize a televised discussion, where state executives discuss the strengths and weaknesses of various political forces. 
“The law is riddled with holes: it restricts campaigning for political parties but does not say a world about supporting individual politicians,” Satarov said. “The legislation is like muddy water.”
As Yabloko’s Vishnevsky points out, Russia’s frequently changing and loosely written legislation leaves everything to interpretation. 
“Naturally, the courts, incorporated into the so-called ‘vertical of power’ system, will predictably rule in favor of the ruling clan,” the expert said.

TITLE: New PM Shines 
In Penza
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — New Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov made the first investment in his popularity Wednesday by buying chocolate for a pensioner and kindergarteners in Penza.
Zubkov visited Penza on his maiden trip as prime minister, and he said such visits would become standard during his time in office. If Wednesday’s visit was any indication, Zubkov could soon approach the popularity of his first deputy prime ministers and possible presidential contenders Sergei Ivanov and Dmitry Medvedev in opinion polls.
Before visiting the kindergarten, Zubkov stopped by a small grocery store and bought two bars and three boxes of chocolate, paying with 700 rubles from his pocket. He gave one bar to a retired woman standing near the counter and gave the other one to accompanying Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev, instructing him to give it to the woman as a gift. Gordeyev complied.
The slim, gray-haired woman burst into a smile and said: “May God give you health! Good luck to you. That was so kind,” in footage shown on Channel One television. She kissed both Zubkov and Gordeyev on the cheek.
At the kindergarten, Zubkov picked up a small girl and told her that he and Penza Governor Vasily Bochkaryov had brought some candies. There will be more of them because the governor has a lot of money, Zubkov said, RIA-Novosti reported.
Zubkov was not promoting chocolate but inspecting Penza before hearing a report on the regional economy from Bochkaryov at a Cabinet meeting Thursday. He also said he would distribute powers among his five deputy prime ministers in the next two days and that there was no need to make any further changes to the government’s structure.
At the kindergarten, he asked Bochkaryov to help the children, which the governor promised to do by buying new windows for a start.
Kicking off his visit, Zubkov traveled to a dairy farm outside Penza, 700 kilometers southeast of Moscow, living up to expectations that he will give agriculture a priority. Zubkov spent 18 years managing Soviet farms in a planned economy before moving on to a career as a Communist Party boss and later a federal financial officer.
In the middle of a cornfield in the village of Konstantinovka, he told Regional Development Minister Dmitry Kozak and Gordeyev to replace imports with domestic farm produce where possible.
“Everything needs to be planned, and you must see that the regions don’t import what we can produce ourselves,” Zubkov said, Interfax reported.
But Zubkov warned against a ban on foreign-grown produce.
He assured managers of the farm, called Konstantinovo, that milk prices were unlikely to fall and showed off his knowledge about milk production. When farm director Pavel Kozlov said his 5,000 cows produce 5,700 liters of milk every day, Zubkov observed that his farm yielded 7,500 liters in 1978. It was unclear, however, how large his farm was at the time.
Zubkov lamented low wages at the farm, where a milkmaid makes 5,000 rubles ($200) per month. “If a milkmaid were to get paid 30,000 rubles to 40,000 rubles, we would solve all the problems of milk production and supplies to the domestic market,” he said.
In an unusual order, Zubkov later told the farm director to provide free dental services to combine drivers right on farm premises. In making the order at a meeting with regional business leaders and officials, he said he had noticed at the farm that many drivers had steel crowns.
Hours later, Zubkov told reporters that the pension system had to undergo urgent changes to help retirees meet rising costs.
The televised remarks are likely to go down well with pensioners, who have long complained about their meager income, and boost Zubkov’s popularity. A political unknown when Putin named him prime minister two weeks ago, Zubkov scored 4 percent in a nationwide poll of possible presidential candidates released Friday.

TITLE: Hermitage Chief Slams Rink Plans
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The State Hermitage Museum and St. Petersburg authorities have clashed over plans for the construction of a skating rink this winter on the city’s central Palace Square.
“We will suffer moral damage and St. Petersburg’s reputation as an intellectual city will be lost,” Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage, told Gorod magazine in response to plans to put an ice rink in front of the world famous museum.
“To have a skating rink covered with advertisement banners for four months [of the year] is against the cultural spirit of St. Petersburg,” Piotrovsky said.
However, Governor Valentina Matviyenko said it was a good idea and that “public squares work for people” all over the world, Interfax said.
“Let’s cover Palace Square with a glass roof and not let anyone in there at all.  Then we won’t have any problems,” Matviyenko said cuttingly of criticism of the plan. “One must understand that Palace Square is not a square for individual people or heads of some institutions. This is a square for people. ”
Matviyenko added that the skating rink would be a temporary stucture allowing people to “relax and skate in the middle of such beauty.”
The skating rink is due to open in December and to operate for 120 days, Oleg Vdovin, spokesman for City Hall’s Sports Committee, said. Ticket prices will be “minimal,” Matviyenko said ,with children under seven, war veterans and other priviliged citizens will be able to use it for free. Two hours of skating will cost 100 rubles for students.
The idea for a skating rink, which will be located in the center of the square around the Alexander Column, came from the Sports Committee and the businessman Mikhail Kusnirovich, head of luxury goods retailer Bosco di Ciliegi, Fontanka.ru said.  
Kusnirovich organized a skating rink on Moscow’s Red Square last winter, and was also an official sponsor of the Russian Olympic team at the last Winter Games in Turin, Italy.
“It was very hard for us to find a company to back the project,” Matviyenko said.
Sports Committee chairman Vyacheslav Chazov, reacting to Piotrovsky’s criticism of the plan, said that Palace Square should not be “conserved,” Fontanka.ru reported.
“Palace Square lives. It’s for people.  Many events, including sporting events, take place there.  Besides, we don’t see anything bad in having people skate or have a cup of coffee in little pavilions,” Chazov said. Special cleaning machines, toilets and other infrustructure will be installed, he said.
Sports Committee spokesman Vdovin said he was sure “not a speck of dust, not a gram of stucco at the Hermitage will be damaged by the project.”
Piotrovsky said that he didn’t object the idea of installing a skating rink on the square for three or four days to host performances by leading figure skaters. However, he said he was against the construction of a semi-permanent rink because it would also demand big construction activities that would disrupt the view of the square. 
Piotrovsky suggested instead that St. Petersburg could use its rivers and canals, which are frozen in winter, for skating.
“There’s a great idea… why not use our rivers and canals for the purpose.  It will attract tourists during the dead season,” Piotrovsky told Gorod magazine.
Piotrovsky has often objected to public events on Palace Square, including film festivals and concerts, saying loud sounds could cause damage to the museum’s collection and also spoil the image of the city’s main square. 
However, in recent years the square still hosted music stars such as Paul McCartney and Rolling Stones, as well as beer festivals.
City residents are divided about the skating rink, although some have expressed excitement about it.
“I’d love to skate on Palace Square!” said Vera Vorobyova, 30, an interpretor on Thursday. “It would be so great to enjoy skating and the grandious view of Palace Square.”
Ivan Safronov, 33, said he saw no problems in having a skating rink at the square.
“I don’t see how the skating rink can spoil the view of Palace Square in winter.  I’d skate there with pleasure, too. My only concern is where to park a car there when I come with skates and my family. The metro station is also quite far away from there,” he said.

TITLE: Georgia and Russia Clash During Speeches at UN
AUTHOR: By Lily Hindy
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: UNITED NATIONS — Georgia’s president told world leaders Wednesday that Russia continues to interfere in its domestic politics and engage in “reckless and dangerous” behavior, the latest in a series of conflicts between the two countries.
In his speech to the UN General Assembly, President Mikhail Saakashvili accused Russia of trying to skew reports of an incident last week in the breakaway region of Abkhazia in which Georgian forces killed two Russian military officials.
Saakashvili, who has vowed to bring the region back under Georgian control and accuses Russians of backing the separatists, said claims by a senior Russian official that the men killed were innocent were “unconstructive, unsubstantiated and wholly untrue.”
“One has to wonder — what was a vice colonel of the Russian military doing in the Georgian forests, organizing and leading a group of armed insurgents on a mission of terror?” the Georgian leader said.
Immediately following Saakashvili’s speech, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, told reporters that the men were instructors at an “anti-terrorist training center” and were killed Sept. 20 by knife wounds and gunshots to the head. Churkin said he had raised the matter in Security Council consultations earlier Wednesday.
“This to us is another manifestation of the course of action which regrettably the Georgian authorities have taken lately ... They have been doing everything to aggravate tensions,” Churkin said.
Relations between the countries have been strained since Saakashvili came to power following the 2003 Rose Revolution, vowing to take Georgia out of Russia’s orbit. 
Russia opposes Saakashvili’s repeatedly stated determination to bring the former Soviet republic into NATO and the European Union, while Georgia accuses Russia of trying to interfere in its internal affairs.
In August, Georgia said two Russian planes entered its airspace, one of which dropped a missile that did not explode. 
Russia denied both claims, although two groups of independent experts that investigated the incident agreed that Georgian airspace was violated three times that day by aircraft flying from Russian airspace.
Russia has rejected the reports.
In Saakashvili’s speech Wednesday, he said his country would not “lash out angrily” at Russia.
“My government is committed to addressing this subject through diplomatic means, in partnership with the international community. ... Look at how Georgia has responded to the many provocations we have faced in the past year,” he said.

TITLE: 7.75 Kilogram Baby Born in Altai
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BARNAUL — An east Siberian woman who gave birth to her 12th child — doing more than her fair share to stem Russia’s population decline — was stunned to find that little Nadya weighed in at a massive 7.75 kilograms.
Nadya was delivered by Caesarean section in a local maternity hospital in the Altai region on Sept. 17, joining eight sisters and three brothers, a local reporter said.
“We were all simply in shock,” said Nadya’s mother, Tatyana Barabanova, 43.
“What did the father say? He couldn’t say a thing — he just stood there blinking.”
“I ate everything, we don’t have the money for special foods so I just ate potatoes, noodles and tomatoes,” she told the reporter, adding that all her previous babies had weighed more than 5 kilograms.
Guinness World Records lists a 10.2 kilogram baby boy born in Italy in 1955, and a 10.8 kilogram baby boy who was born in the United States in 1879 but died 11 hours later.
The average weight for healthy newborn babies is around 3.2 kilograms, according to World Health Organization figures.

TITLE: Sto Rebrands  as 100TV, Unveils New Approach
AUTHOR: By Evgenia Ivanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Local television channel Sto is to be relaunched under the name 100TV, the channel announced Tuesday. 
Following in the footsteps of another St. Petersburg-based TV station, Channel Five, which has been broadcasting nationally since last year, the channel will increase its news and analysis programming in its new season beginning Monday. 
“The entertainment component as such has left the channel. We’re focused on giving our viewers information and analysis,” 100TV spokeswoman Alla Maslovskaya told the St. Petersburg Times on Thursday. 
“Of course, all TV is entertaining in its essence, but our strategy is to make our viewers not only receive information, but also motivate them to think, analyze and get involved — we want to build a dialogue with them,”  Maslovskaya said. 
“At present we have 10 news programs a day: what other channel can boast of that?” Maslovskaya said.
“100TV is ready to become the most comprehensive and up-to-date news portal in our city and its surrounding area,” the channel said in a statement.
With plans to be on the air around the clock, the channel, whose new motto can be roughly translated as “No one is neglected,” says it begins the new season with “clear concept,” catering to all ages. 
 Some experts say the concept is far from being clear.
“To try and broadcast more news is not a concept at all, news programming makes up for only a couple of hours a day, and you have to fill in the rest of the time — and how the channel is going to do that is unclear,” Kirill Nikolayev, the head of Nikolayev e:Consulting, told The St. Petersburg Times. 
While 100TV’s general producer Ilya Lazarev includes everyone “from 6 to 96” in his potential viewer base, Nikolayev says such an approach is “absurd.”
“[100 TV’s] biggest problem is that they don’t see their audience. To cater for every age given the highly competitive and segmented TV market in Russia is suicide,” he said in a telephone interview on Thursday. 
Maslovskaya said news programming will attract viewers to watch 100TV. 
“If you are interested in every news event in the city, naturally you turn to our channel,” she said. 
Formerly known as Sto, which means “one hundred” in Russian, the channel decided to change direction after it changed its owner last year, and its then management team including the channel’s head, Viktoria Korkhina, its general producer, Andrei Maksimkov, and its financial director, Ilya Krylov, resigned.

TITLE: New Cabinet Seen as Bolstering Putin’s Power
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev and Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: Staff Writers
TEXT: MOSCOW — Far from being just a cosmetic makeover, President Vladimir Putin’s government reshuffle has further cemented the Kremlin’s power ahead of crucial elections by packing the Cabinet with loyalists, politicians and analysts said Tuesday.
The new government, announced late Monday, has just three new faces amid a minor reorganization of ministerial responsibilities.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that the president’s political clout had risen with the new government, stressing that Putin’s influence was strong but constitutional.
“The influence of the president on the Cabinet is at a very high level but always appropriate,” Peskov said, adding that Putin would naturally expect “energetic work” from the government.
But the reshuffle boosts the number of Putin loyalists in the government, said Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist with the Russian Academy of Sciences who tracks Russian elites.
“In authoritarian Russia, the transition of power is an inevitable crisis, and Putin needs a united and mobilized team in the Cabinet,” Kryshtanovskaya said.
This explains the replacement of Regional Development Minister Vladimir Yakovlev with Dmitry Kozak, Kryshtanovskaya said. While Kozak is a longtime Putin ally, Yakovlev had been a bitter rival of former St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, Putin’s patron in St. Petersburg City Hall in the 1990s.
Health and Social Development Minister Mikhail Zurabov, the third Cabinet member to lose his job, was a convenient scapegoat to boost Putin’s image before upcoming State Duma and presidential elections, Duma deputies said.
Communist Duma Deputy Viktor Ilyukhin said Zurabov had long been under fire for ongoing shortages of prescription drugs that hit the country’s elderly and poor especially hard.
“The Communists had demanded Zurabov’s removal for more than a year,” Ilyukhin said. “The president could have done it long ago, but he waited for this opportunity.”
Earlier this year, pro-Kremlin party United Russia joined the Communists in criticizing Zurabov, grilling the minister during a Duma session in May.
“It is very important that those who were unpopular and whose work was questioned by the parliamentary majority have been replaced by more professional and better-prepared people,” Duma Deputy Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, of United Russia, said in a statement Tuesday.
Duma Deputy Alexander Lebedev of the pro-Kremlin A Just Russia party called Zurabov a “public irritant” who had to be removed before Duma elections in December.
Ousted Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref was another weak card for Putin, analysts said.
Gref had already attempted to resign this year, Kryshtanovskaya said. Lebedev said the minister had hinted that he wanted to give up politics for business.
“Gref also often acted as a market ideologist, but what Putin wants in his Cabinet members now are quiet executioners of his own strategies,” said Yury Korgunyuk, an analyst with the Indem think tank.
This may explain why Putin chose women to replace Gref and Zurabov, Korgunyuk said.
Tatyana Golikova, wife of Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko, replaced Zurabov, while Gref was replaced by his former deputy, Elvira Nabiullina.
“Women are traditionally more industrious and punctual, thus Putin is establishing a rather technical role for the heads of these important ministries,” Korgunyuk said. 
St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko said the promotion of two women to Cabinet posts was very important. “Previously everybody said we did not have enough qualified women to work in the government. But they exist,” Matviyenko said, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Cabinet Shuffle Means Economic Continuity
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: The cabinet shake-up earlier this week resulted in some changes in the economic sphere.  Former Economy Minister German Gref, who oversaw seven years of economic expansion, was replaced by Elvira Nabiullina, 43, an economist who headed the Moscow-based Center for Strategic Development think tank from 2003 until 2005. Nabiullina served as a deputy economy minister from 1997 until 1998, returning to the post from 2000 until 2003.
Nabiullina is seen as a “liberal and an able reformer,’’ who will continue Gref’s policies, said Al Breach, head of research at UBS AG bank in Moscow. She is “competent’’ and will provide a smooth transition after Gref’s departure, which was widely expected, Breach said by telephone Tuesday.  Nabiullina’s appointment is “good news’’ as she has worked alongside Gref and will continue his work, Breach said.
Gref, 43, initiated major changes in the economy, including the breakup of the power industry, and worked to boost automotive production and other manufacturing to decrease Russia’s dependence on revenue from oil and gas, the nation’s biggest exports.
“As long as we have President Putin, the economic policy vectors are unlikely to change,’’ Gref said on Sept. 21 after meeting with the president and Russia’s business and government representatives in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.
Meanwhile, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, who was named deputy prime minister, will remain head of the Finance Ministry.
Kudrin, 46, led the push for improving Russia’s fiscal planning and resisted political pressure to spend the nation’s multibillion dollar oil fund on social needs, saying the move would fuel inflation and leave the world’s biggest energy exporter vulnerable to falling crude prices.
Since his appointment as Russia’s first deputy finance minister in 1997, Kudrin helped the country increase its foreign currency and gold reserves to more than $410 billion from $12 billion in 1998. Kudrin, head of the ministry since 2004, also oversaw the creation of the Stabilization Fund, which accumulated 3.41 trillion rubles ($130 billion) by September.
“The macroeconomic course will stay the same because it has proven its effectiveness,’’ Kudrin said on Sept. 12 after Putin dismissed the Cabinet and nominated Zubkov as prime minister.
 Russia adopted for the first time this year a budget that outlines government spending for the next three years in an attempt to better manage windfall oil and gas revenues. Kudrin has called the legislation “a budget for stability of the state.’’ 
“This is the most liberal government we’ve had since the Yukos affair,” said Breach.
Finally, the Russian Economy Ministry will lose oversight of the nation’s multi-billion dollar Investment Fund. Russia’s Regional Development Ministry will take the role of approving funding from the State Investment Fund, Kudrin said Tuesday.
The presidential envoy to the southern federal district, Dmitry Kozak, was named regional development minister in the new Cabinet.
The Fund, created to boost spending on roads, power generation and other infrastructure, together with private investors already finances projects worth more than 1 trillion rubles ($40 billion), First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said on Sept. 21.

(Bloomberg, SPT)

TITLE: Opel Made at St. Petersburg Plant
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: General Motors, the world’s largest automotive company, has started assembling its Opel Antara model in St. Petersburg and plans to produce 2,500 units next year, the company’s press service said this week in a statement.
Production has already started at the Arsenal plant in St. Petersburg, and General Motors is also constructing its own assembly plant in the Shushary area of the Leningrad Oblast. Meanwhile, GM production specialists and regional managers are based at the headquarters of the Arsenal plant, where GM has opened a training center.
“We are completely satisfied with our success in the Russian market. During the first eight months of this year about 39,820 Opel cars were sold in Russia. Sales increased by 278 percent compared to the same period last year,” said Alain Visser, Opel’s managing director.
Visser claimed that Opel is the most dynamic brand on the Russian market, while Russia is the fifth largest car market in Europe.
“In accordance with GM principles, we are producing cars in the countries where they are distributed. The Opel Antara was a natural choice for production in Russia,” Visser said.
The new plant in Shushary will start operating by the end of 2008, producing up to 70,000 cars a year. The plant will employ 900 people.
The company will produce two models of the Opel Antara – a 2.4-liter engine and a 3.2-liter engine. These models will complete the wide range of SUV (Sport Utility Vehicles) distributed by General Motors in Russia.
“Considering the growing popularity of SUV models, which account for 19 percent of the Russian car market, we are confident that the Antara will be a success in this country,” said Jacek Gorski, managing director of General Motors in Russia.
GM produces a number of SUV models in Russia, including the Chevy Niva at a joint venture with AvtoVAZ in Toliatti as well as the Chevrolet Tahoe and Trailblazer in Kaliningrad. Last year GM started producing the Chevrolet Captiva, also at St. Petersburg’s Arsenal plant.
“In our estimation Russia could become the second largest automobile market in Europe by 2010. Today almost all the largest overseas market players either manufacture their automobiles in Russia or are in the process of building manufacturing plants here,” said Stanley Root, head of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ automotive practice.
“Already the existing sales volume of two million units per year has brought the Russian market up to the level of the leading European markets, such as Italy, France and Great Britain,” he said.
Sales of Opel cars in Russia are growing faster than the average growth of the booming car market.
According to estimations by PricewaterhouseCoopers, last year was a record year for car market growth in Russia. Sales of foreign models increased by 280,000 units in 2006, which represents a 100 percent increase on sales in 2005.
In monetary terms, sales of Russian automobiles in 2006 amounted to $5.8 billion and sales of foreign models amounted to $4.4 billion. Sales of new imported cars totaled $18.2 billion and sales of used imported cars totaled $3.6 billion.
Overall sales of automobiles in all categories exceeded the two million car mark for the first time ever in 2006 — 20 percent more than in 2005.
Last year General Motors sold about 9.1 million cars across the world. Its brand portfolio includes Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, GM Daewoo, Holden, HUMMER, Opel, Pontiac, Saab, Saturn and Vauxhall.
GM operates ten production and assembly plants in seven European countries. The company employs 284,000 people and produces cars and trucks in 33 countries.

TITLE: RusRating to Pay Russky Standart Damages
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Basmanny Arbitration Court sent a strong signal to the investment community Wednesday, after ordering RusRating, an independent ratings agency, to pay damages to Russky Standart bank for harming its reputation.
In her ruling on the case, which has raised concerns about the ability of rating agencies to operate independently and objectively, the judge ordered RusRating to pay $800 in compensation for comments made by one of its analysts in December. 
Russky Standart, which sued for $10 million against Western-owned RusRating and a further $10 million from the analyst, expressed satisfaction with the ruling.
RusRating’s lawyers said they were disappointed at the result and would consider an appeal “on a point of principle.”
In December, RusRating downgraded its rating for Russky Standart from B+ to B. Among comments made to Profil magazine a week later regarding the downgrade, RusRating analyst Yulia Arkhipova said, “Once a client uses Russky Standart’s services, they won’t come back to them again.”
Russky Standart said the comments were one-sided and without basis.
RusRating’s defense hinged on the argument that its analyst was expressing an opinion and not stating a fact. 
The judge said she would issue a more detailed explanation of her ruling in five days.

TITLE: SEB to Open 10 Branches
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Swedish financial group SEB plans to increase its presence in the Northwest region of Russia by opening ten new branches of SEB Bank over the next two years. Before the end of 2007, SEB Group will complete the rebranding of Petroenergobank, a local bank which the group acquired last year, and plans to increase the bank’s capital and its credit portfolio.
“Last year we acquired 100 percent of Petroenergobank. Now we are ready for the next step,” Mats Kjaer, chairman of the board of SEB Bank, said at a press conference Wednesday.
In September 2007 Petroenergobank was renamed SEB Bank, and soon after the acquisition SEB introduced its operational and quality standards to the bank.
SEB is focusing on Russia because of the country’s economic potential and the increasing interest of the group’s Swedish clients in Russia, Kjaer said. Out of around five million individual SEB Group clients, 1.7 million have dealings in Eastern Europe.
Since 1997, SEB has acquired a number of banks in the Baltic States, Poland, Denmark, Ukraine and Norway. The acquisition of Petroenergobank in Russia allows SEB to effectively cover 20 countries around the Baltic Sea. According to Kjaer, trade turnover between these countries has steadily increased over the last few years, and currently Eastern Europe provides about 20 percent of the operational profit of SEB.
Petroenergobank operated 20 offices in retail outlets of local power distributor Petroelectrosbyt, but SEB Group had to shut down these offices because they did not meet the group’s standards.
Investment into each of the ten new branches of SEB Bank is estimated at up to $10 million. At the moment SEB Group has a central office in St. Petersburg as well as two retail offices.
“We do not plan to cover all the territory of Russia. We will focus on St. Petersburg and the Northwest region,” said Yury Pavlov, member of the board of SEB Bank.
Vladimir Sergievsky, an analyst at FINAM investment holding, estimated that SEB Group could have spent $10 million to $12 million on the acquisition of Petroenergobank.
“The acquisition of the local bank made entering the market easier for SEB Group. It was not about economizing on expenses and taking a definite market share — it was more about quick penetration into the market. Competition in the region is quite strong, and any delay could decrease the group’s competitiveness,” Sergievsky said.
Sergievsky suggested that SEB Group could invest over two billion rubles to three billion rubles into development in Russia. Kjaer estimated the total financing of the Russian subsidiaries of SEB Group at about 700 million euros. SEB Group operates a representative branch in Moscow, SEB Bank and SEB Leasing companies.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Banks to Increase Rates</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian banks will increase mortgage-lending rates and some may temporarily stop issuing home loans because of the rise in borrowing costs, the deputy chairman of Russia’s central bank said.
Russian banks rely on foreign funding to finance some lending to domestic consumers and will curb mortgage lending after the collapse of the U.S. subprime mortgage market boosted global borrowing costs, Alexei Ulyukayev said in an interview published Thursday in Russia’s official state newspaper, Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
Russky Standart Bank, the lender owned by billionaire Rustam Tariko, has stopped making mortgage loans to consumers amid soaring refinancing costs. 
The halt by Russky Standart Bank, which has a cash lending portfolio of $300 million compared with $4 billion in credit-card loans, applies until October.

<b>Finns May Shut Border</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Finnish Customs proposed temporarily closing border crossings with Russia for traffic entering Finland as queues of trucks going to Russia hit a seasonal high on Wednesday, the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reported.
Queues at the southern border crossing in Vaalimaa were 56 kilometers long, with long lines also forming in Nuijamaa and Imatra, Helsinki-based Helsingin Sanomat said Thursday. Queues form due to delays at Russian customs. 
Closing the border would be a last resort, Helsingin Sanomat reported, citing Tommi Kivilaakso from the Eastern Customs District. The closure would mean truck queues form in Russia, forcing them to deal with the problem. Closing the crossings would require a political decision, the paper added.
Queues at the border have been a problem for several years. Records were set in December 2006, when the queues exceeded 65 kilometers.

<b>Neste Weighs Up Offer</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Neste Oil Oyj, Finland’s only petroleum refiner, will study an invitation from St. Petersburg to help build a container terminal.
“We want to follow this, but it’s a complicated project and a decision is very much in the future,” Ingmar Dahlblom, vice president of oil retail for the Baltic Rim, said Thursday. 
The city contacted potential investors in the container terminal focused on consumer goods, he said. It’s too early to talk about costs or capacity, he said.
“I don’t see any profitability for only an oil products terminal,” he said. Road, rail and sea transportation would also need to be put in place for the project, he said.
Neste has a gasoline-storage terminal in the St. Petersburg area it uses to supply 45 petrol stations in northwest Russia.

TITLE: Russia’s New Sukhoi SuperJet Rolled Out
AUTHOR: By Lyubov Pronina and Bradley Cook
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia rolled out the first new passenger jet since the collapse of the Soviet Union, marking a milestone in President Vladimir Putin’s drive to revive an aircraft industry that was once one of the world’s most prolific.
Sukhoi Aviation Holding Co.’s 95-seat SuperJet was unveiled before more than 1,000 foreign and domestic officials and executives in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, eight hours east of Moscow. Hungarian airline Malev Zrt. may order 15 of the aircraft, becoming the third foreign customer, it said at a ceremony on Wednesday.
Sukhoi, better known for warplanes including the 1,600-mile-an-hour Su-27 Flanker, yesterday doubled its sales forecast for the $28 million SuperJet to 1,800 over 20 years and said it will build a larger version to compete with Airbus SAS and Boeing Co. The bigger variant will hold 120 passengers.
“This marks Russia’s re-entry into the global pool of commercial aircraft makers,” Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko said at the SuperJet plant in Komsomolsk, the former closed city built by Stalin near the northeast tip of China in the 1930s.
Russia is spending $1.4 billion on the SuperJet in an effort to make its aviation industry internationally competitive. Sukhoi and Italian partner Finmeccanica SpA have received 73 firm orders, plus 39 options, Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said at the factory Thursday.
While smaller variants already unveiled will compete with planes from Canada’s Bombardier Inc. and Empresa Brasileira de Aeronautica SA of Brazil, the larger aircraft announced Wednesday may take sales away from the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 series. Cargo and executive models are also planned, Moscow-based Sukhoi said.
     “We have every right to call it a super jet,” said Ivanov, a former defense minister and potential Putin successor. “Over the past 16 years, Russia hasn’t produced a modern commercial aircraft that meets all world standards,” he said.
Budapest-based Malev may order aircraft next year, its Russian billionaire owner, Boris Abramovich, told reporters at the rollout ceremony. The only foreign customers to date are Italy’s ItAli, with 10 orders, and Armavia of Armenia, with two.
While Air France-KLM Group, Europe’s biggest airline company, has “no immediate intention” to order the SuperJet, the model “will be a candidate airplane in the future,” the Paris-based carrier’s regional fleet director, Hubert Huguenot, said at Wednesday’s ceremony. Air France is an adviser on the project.
     Aeroflot, eastern Europe’s largest airline, is the SuperJet’s initial customer, with the first delivery due in November next year. The Moscow-based carrier may create a joint venture in Cuba to employ the plane on flights from Havana to destinations in the Caribbean and Central America, Valery Okulov, its chief executive officer, said at the rollout. Six SuperJets will be built this year and six will be delivered to customers including Aeroflot next year, Sukhoi Chief Executive Officer Mikhail Pogosyan said. 
The Komsomolsk plant employs 14,000 people, 400 of whom will be directly employed in assembling the SuperJet.
Finmeccanica’s general manager, Giorgio Zappa, said the Rome-based company’s Alenia Aeronautica SpA unit has an option to take a 40 percent stake in Sukhoi Civil Aircraft, which is building the SuperJet. Alenia, which will help market the plane, has an agreement to become a Sukhoi investor next year with an initial holding of 25 percent plus one share, he said.
Zappa said the SuperJet program is on schedule and that Alenia might in the future make composite components for the plane, possibly wing parts.

TITLE: Turkmen Talks Are ‘Strained’
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Turkmenistan’s talks with Russia on energy are “strained,” President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov said in New York, as the U.S. vies with Russia over natural-gas export plans for the central Asian country.
The two former Soviet states are discussing a new link through Kazakhstan to Russia along the north shore of the Caspian Sea. The U.S. favors a different route that would bring gas to Western consumers via Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, bypassing Russia.
“I won’t hide that negotiations on gas prices, on the new project, on existing agreements, are strained,” Berdymukhammedov said Sept. 24, according to a transcript of a speech posted Tuesday on a Turkmen state-controlled web site.
The president, who is opening his energy-rich country to international investment after years of isolation, met with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday to discuss opportunities for U.S. companies in Turkmenistan.
The country aims to produce 250 billion cubic meters of gas a year by 2030, enough to supply the U.S. for almost five months at current consumption levels, the president said. Turkmenistan is targeting oil output of as much as 2 million barrels a day by that time, he said.
The government is also eyeing new gas pipelines through Afghanistan into Pakistan and across the Caspian into the Caucasus, as favored by the U.S. Each link would have a capacity of about 30 billion cubic meters of gas, Berdymukhammedov said.

TITLE: Investors In Favor of Putin
AUTHOR: By Henry Meyer
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Investors are already casting their votes on who will wield power after Russian President Vladimir Putin steps down next year. The winner: Vladimir Putin.
Russia’s benchmark Micex Index has risen 6.7 percent since Sept. 12, the day the president unexpectedly named Viktor Zubkov prime minister. The move instantly made Zubkov a potential successor when Putin’s term expires in March — while convincing many observers that the 54-year-old incumbent intends to keep a guiding role from behind the scenes.
The prospect pleases the financial community, which is still haunted by memories of the economic and political chaos under Boris Yeltsin.
“The most successful economic transitions have happened in countries with stability and strong leaders who have remained for 20 years, not two terms,” said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at UralSib Financial Corp. in Moscow. 
Putin, who is overseeing an economic boom now in its ninth year, scores popularity ratings above 80 percent in public-opinion polls. While the constitution bars him from running for a third consecutive four-year term, he has hinted he might seek re-election in 2012.
He might also try to return earlier by getting the new president to resign, triggering snap elections, according to Yury Korgunyuk, an analyst from the Moscow-based INDEM research organization.
Investors have seen the value of publicly traded Russian stocks increase by $1 trillion since Putin came to power, and want him to stay around, said Roland Nash, head of research at Renaissance Capital in Moscow.
“Putin is seen as a guarantor of the status quo,” Nash said in an interview.
The scenario of a strong Putin behind a weak president gained more currency on Sept. 14, two days after the Zubkov appointment, when the president told a group of Western experts on Russia that he would retain “influence” after 2008. 
A poll published Sept. 19 by the Levada Center in Moscow showed that 85 percent of Russians hadn’t heard of Zubkov,  and only 14 percent believed he would be an “independent politician.” An August survey found that 64 percent of Russians would re-elect Putin if he ran for a third term.
The Russian leader has earned his reputation by creating “a spectacular renaissance in the country and an enormous degree of stability,” said Kingsmill Bond, chief strategist at Moscow-based brokerage Troika Dialog. 
Zubkov’s rise appears to have come at the expense of would-be Putin successors such as First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, the front-runner in most polls. 
Ivanov, who is in charge of diversifying Russia’s economy away from oil and gas, has been featured almost daily in state-media news broadcasts. Weafer said in a telephone interview that his ambition may work against him: “Ivanov is less likely to want to move aside for Putin and more likely to want to determine his own course.” Ivanov has said he was unaware of Putin’s plan to appoint Zubkov. Even some investors who acknowledge the economic benefits of a still-powerful Putin say there are risks in the system’s lack of transparency.
Mattias Westman, who manages about $4.5 billion in Russian equities at Prosperity Capital Management in London, said that “it’s good for stability, for sure” if Putin remains in an effective leadership role. Still, there’s “a question if it’s good for the political environment to have someone who’s not president making decisions for the country.”

TITLE: Politkovskaya Puzzles
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: A few weeks ago, Prosecutor General Yury Chaika announced a breakthrough in the search for the killers of slain Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya. According to information leaked to the press, the murder was committed by two hired assassins — the Chechen Makhmudov brothers. Politkovskaya’s address was first obtained from Federal Security Service files, and then confirmed with the help of police surveillance. Moreover, as Chaika disclosed, “There were two surveillance teams. While one group followed the journalist, the second group was monitoring the first.”
Many simply laughed at the allegation, viewing the whole investigation as an attempt by authorities to hang the murder on anti-Kremlin tycoon Boris Berezovsky.
So far, two things are known with near certainty. First, investigators discovered the car used in the crime at a mechanic’s shop awaiting repair. (The killers were apparently too poor to simply dispose of the vehicle.) Second, FSB Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Ryaguzov looked up Politkovskaya’s address in FSB files one month before her murder. Ryaguzov then called Shamil Burayev, the former head of the Achkoi-Martan district of Chechnya.
These facts lead to a few questions.
Would it really have been so difficult for contract killers to ascertain Politkovskaya’s address? They could have simply written a letter to the editor of Novaya Gazeta saying, “My name is Akhmed, and I want to relate how the authorities tortured my brother in Khankala.” The rest is simple: “Akhmed” meets with Politkovskaya at a cafe and follows her home afterward. Two hours of work and complete anonymity.
Instead, for some strange reason, the ringleaders apparently looked up Politkovskaya’s address in the FSB database. But the address turned out to be old, so they started tailing her. This is also quite odd. Why would those same Makhmudov brothers — who were too poor to dump the murder vehicle — hire professionals to track Politkovskaya to the tune of $100 per hour?
But there is more. Chaika also said there were two teams trailing Politkovskaya. That is really hard to believe. If the first team of hired tails were the police, then who was the second group? And what kind of killers fork out the cash to finance two surveillance teams yet can’t afford the to get rid of the car used in the killing? Why was it necessary for a second group to check the work of the first — did they have to report to their chief? And what kind of criminals would risk involving so many law enforcement personnel in the murder plot?
It gets worse. According to Ryaguzov’s testimony, he was just a pawn who was used by the authorities without his knowledge. But one fact appears to be indisputable here: Ryaguzov found her address in the FSB database and called Burayev soon after. We can only guess if he called those who ordered the murder or contacted the killers directly.
I do not think that while President Vladimir Putin is in office we will ever find out who ordered Politkovskaya’s murder. At the same time, I have no doubt that if the case goes to court, the accused will gladly point the finger at Berezovsky or reputed Chechen crime boss Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev.
The manner in which the surveillance teams tracked Politkovskaya is absolutely not the style of hired killers; it is much more the modus operandi of a government law enforcement agency. And when Chaika mentioned the existence of two surveillance teams, he did not realize that he had put his foot in his mouth. But Chaika is accustomed to police looking up information in the FSB database as part of routine investigations. He apparently forgot that organizers of contract killings act much differently when they pass information to their hired hands.

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

TITLE: An Economy At Risk
AUTHOR: By Marshall I. Goldman
TEXT: While most Russians have nothing but praise for what President Vladimir Putin has accomplished, the way he has handled the recent Cabinet shuffle raises the question as to who benefits more from this exercise, Putin or Russia?
Whether correct or not, it is easy to conclude that Putin is reluctant to yield power to a successor until the very last minute. Granted, he could easily have arranged to stay on for a full third term, so at least we should give him credit for insisting that it is best for Russia that he leave office after two terms as specified by the Constitution. Yet, the way he is handling the transition process and the personnel changes he has executed suggest a reluctance to become a lame duck any earlier than necessary. He seems more interested in keeping the public and his potential successors off balance than in doing what is best for the country.
As others have noted, it took Putin 10 days to make up his mind on the composition of this Cabinet, whereas with his earlier reorganizations he needed only three days to pick Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov’s Cabinet and then four days to pick the Cabinet of the rather colorless Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov.
The irony, of course, is that one of Putin’s stated reasons for making the shake-up now is that Fradkov’s Cabinet has become less efficient, evidently distracted by the forthcoming State Duma and presidential elections. The extra time Putin needed to make the most recent changes suggests that Putin himself has also become distracted and less efficient — thus, the need for more time.
There is no doubt that Putin has been good for Russia, at least for its economy. That is why his removal of German Gref as economic development and trade minister does seem to indicate a lack of gratitude. After all, Gref not only helped shepherd the economy to the solid 6 percent annual growth of Russia’s gross domestic product since 1999, he also helped to lead the transition team for Putin when he took over as president in 2000. True, Fradkov recently criticized Gref for some shortcomings, including his failure to win admission into the World Trade Organization.
Even more, Putin may have concluded that the country’s economic success is not so much due to Gref’s or anyone else’s efforts, but is almost entirely a result of the increase in oil and other commodity prices after 1999. If Boris Yeltsin had not left office on Dec. 31, 1999, when oil prices were $10 per barrel, and if he had the luxury of today’s $80 per barrel oil prices, even he would have looked like an economic genius. So it appears that Gref — like Putin — looks like a good economic manager thanks to fortuitous timing, not because of economic insight.
This is largely true, but it is not entirely fair — at least to Gref. While the spike in oil prices account for most of Russia’s recent economic success, it also must be said that Gref, along with Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin and the all-but-forgotten Andrei Illarionov, former adviser to Putin, do deserve credit, not so much for stimulating the economy, but for restraining it. All three, by insisting that most of the onrush of oil and gas export earnings be set aside for a rainy day in a stabilization fund, prevented an inflationary spiral that would have crippled the country’s monetary and fiscal system and would have led to an unrestrained money fight for pork and power.
This insistence on restraint required determination and self-confidence against a horde of politicians who were eager to win friends and votes and build public works monuments in their honor. On occasion, the three fiscal conservatives may have been too unyielding, but it is easy to see that if they had not taken a consistent stand against raiding the state treasury, a trickle of spending would have turned into a torrent. In other words, Russia’s economic recovery depended on fiscal restraint almost as much as it depended on the high price of oil and gas.
The question is what comes next, not just in the months between now and the election but afterward as well. There is no doubt that the new president will make further personnel changes. Even if Kudrin remains the sole survivor from the team of economic liberals in the new government, he will have a hard time maintaining fiscal restraint. It is one thing to hold back fiscal raiders when you have backup from supporters like Gref and Illarionov, but now they both are gone.
Even if Kudrin remains a deputy prime minister, it will be harder to continue this policy of restraint without that chorus — even a small one — echoing his words. Elvira Nabiullina’s promotion to Gref’s position as economic development and trade minister may help, but previous women ministers in Russia (with the exception of Catherine the Great) have not had much impact on government decision-making.
So by removing Gref — the most visible of those removed from the Cabinet — Putin may have put the country’s economic stability at risk. Orderly growth in the future may well depend on whether Kudrin can singlehandedly prevent his fellow ministers from raiding the treasury. If not, Russians will come to understand that Gref played a more important role in the country’s recovery than it may have seemed at the time.

Marshall I. Goldman is professor of economics, Emeritus at Wellesley College and senior scholar at Harvard’s Davis Center. His new book, “The Rise of the Petrostate: Putin, Power and the New Russia,” will be published in April.

TITLE: Giving Kudrin Deserved Credit
TEXT: President Vladimir Putin’s Cabinet announcement Monday was thin on changes and even thinner on surprises.
Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref had made it known in recent months that he wanted out, and Mikhail Zurabov seemed to lurch from one fiasco to the next as health and social development minister.
There was bad blood between Putin and Regional Development Minister Vladimir Yakovlev stretching back to their days in the St. Petersburg city government, while Yakovlev’s replacement, Dmitry Kozak, is close to the president.
The only real surprise was Alexei Kudrin’s elevation to the post of deputy prime minister.
Kudrin has maintained economic and fiscal stability while significantly improving the country’s foreign debt position over the last seven years.
He oversaw the establishment of the stabilization fund in early 2004, thus helping minimize the negative macroeconomic effects posed by a steep hike in import revenues from oil and gas exports.
Establishing the fund was the easy part. More difficult has been the rearguard action he has been forced to fight to keep the money from being hijacked by an endless stream of spending proposals.
Kudrin has spent the last three years working under Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, who handed him a trio of economic objectives set by Putin when Fradkov took office: doubling the country’s economy in 10 years, reducing inflation and preventing a serious rise in the value of the ruble.
Most economists pointed out that the three objectives were mutually exclusive given conditions at the time, and Kudrin himself regularly complained that foot-dragging on economic reforms was making his job even more difficult.
Most famously, he leveled the charge at Fradkov in an August 2004 Cabinet meeting after the prime minister had complained that economic growth was too slow. The rare open confrontation within the government was only resolved when Kudrin flew to Sochi to plead his case to Putin. The results have been pretty impressive.
The ruble has, indeed, appreciated against the dollar — just like every other currency in the world. But its value against the euro remains unchanged.
Russia has not met inflation targets, but with reforms stalled, corruption rife and economic growth at about 7 percent, coming close is a victory.
Increasing state ownership and interference in vital economic sectors has drawn increasing criticism from many economists, businesspeople and investors in recent years, but none of these issues is under Kudrin’s control.
In his areas of authority and responsibility, the results have been good, if not excellent.
Kudrin deserves the promotion.

This comment first appeared in The Moscow Times.

TITLE: Laying down the law
AUTHOR: By Alastair Gee
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Except for a few scenes, Sidney Lumet’s celebrated 1957 film “12 Angry Men” takes place entirely in a cramped, stuffy jury room. Twelve sweating jurors debate whether to send a teenager to the electric chair for stabbing his father. Eleven vote yes. One, played by a serene Henry Fonda, disagrees. Lumet’s focus isn’t on the accused, the victim or where they come from — he concentrates on the jurors as doubt creeps over them.
That’s not the case in the 2007 remake by internationally renowned Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov, who won a Special Lion award for Overall Work at the Venice International Film Festival earlier this month. His film switches back and forth between the jury room and war-torn Chechnya, the accused’s home, to visceral and devastating effect. Mikhalkov’s film is not just a Russian-accented copy, but a movie that also drives home the terrible brutality of the Chechen wars.
In this new version, a Chechen boy is taken to Moscow by a soldier — a family friend — after his parents are killed during the murderous conflict between Russia and Chechen separatists in the 1990s.
The soldier is stabbed in his apartment, while a neighbor hears someone cry, “I’ll kill you!” and says he saw the boy running away. Images of a hellish, muddy Grozny, the Chechen capital, intersperse the jury’s deliberations. Contorted dead bodies litter streets that run between ruined buildings. In one scene, the boy implores his Chechen-speaking mother to use Russian. Later, she is shown with a bullet in her head, her husband knifed in the back, their home set on fire. Like a mantra, one shot is repeated over and over. A dog runs down a rain-streaked road carrying an unidentifiable object in its mouth. Mikhalkov finally, awfully, reveals what it is at the end of the film. Mikhalkov, whose “Burnt By the Sun” won the 1994 Oscar for Best Foreign Film, explained that his movie is a criticism of former President Boris Yeltsin’s readiness to wage war in Chechnya — and drew parallels with U.S. President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.
“I think that it was a tragic mistake. It was based on incompetence, on a lack of culture, on the idea that in two days, the war would be over,” he said at a recent news conference. “They had no understanding of where they’d ended up, that it was a completely different situation. It’s a mistake on the same level that the world is today making in Iraq.” Mikhalkov comes from a distinguished family. He is the younger brother of director Andrei Konchalovsky, known for Hollywood movies, including “Tango and Cash.” His father, children’s author Sergei Mikhalkov, wrote the words of the Soviet national anthem and the new Russian one. Mikhalkov makes much of his aristocratic roots; he is descended from the Golitsyns, a family of Russian nobles.
While still at school, Mikhalkov began acting in movies, including the 1963 “I Walk Around Moscow,” famous for a relaxed style typical of Khrushchev’s thaw, and his brother’s 1969 dramatization of Ivan Turgenev’s “A Nest of Gentry.” He attended Moscow’s prestigious VGIK film school, and in 1974 directed and starred in his first feature, a Red Western titled “At Home Among Strangers, Stranger at Home.” Mikhalkov increasingly gained an international reputation, and his 1976 “A Slave of Love,” which follows a film crew as they try to make a silent movie in a resort town as the Revolution rages around them, won acclaim in the United States. 
Konchalovsky’s five–hour epic “Sibiriade,” with Mikhalkov in the main role, received a Special Grand Jury Prize at Cannes.
After directing a clutch of notable films, Mikhalkov returned to acting in the 1980s. He played Henry Baskerville in the television drama “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” capitalizing on the Soviet craze for the Sherlock Holmes stories.
For directing 1992’s “Urga,” also known as “Close to Eden” and set in a yurt in Inner Mongolia, he received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. His most famous movie is “Burnt by the Sun,” starring Mikhalkov himself as a colonel decorated for his role in the 1917 revolution who becomes caught up in Stalin’s 1937 purges.
Buoyed by the picture’s success, Mikhalkov went on to make his biggest-budget film, 1998’s $45 million “The Barber of Siberia.” It starred Julia Ormond and Oleg Menshikov as lovers in Moscow in the 1880s, and takes it name from an experimental tree-cutting machine that a character has created. But despite its lavish costumes and scenes, including dancing bears and duels, its reception was mixed, with many critics calling the three-hour movie rambling.
After a nine-year break from directing, Mikhalkov is currently filming “Burnt by the Sun 2,” due to be released in early 2008. “12” was shot in two months during a break in filming. 
“It’s not a remake,” Mikhalkov argued in Time Out. “That film is about the triumph of American law and about the importance of finding truth in the most complicated life circumstances. Our picture is about how a Russian person can’t live according to the law.” While the fashion-oriented film “Gloss,” made recently by Mikhalkov’s brother, seemed to be portraying the high-rolling Russia of the 1990s, “12” is more of the moment. The jury’s deliberations take place in a school gymnasium, eerily evoking the gym in which 334 civilians died during the Beslan hostage crisis in September 2004. The 12 jurors are mostly identifiable Russian types, including a wealthy New Russian, a poisonous nationalist and an elderly Jewish member of the intelligentsia. They gradually reveal the decisive parts of their histories that lead them to act, and vote on the accused, in the way they do. Sergei Garmash, as the racist, tells of his disorientation in modern-day Moscow, with its Bentleys and hosts of immigrants. Though the film is an hour longer than “12 Angry Men” and at times seems in danger of dragging, Mikhalkov livens the narrative with rich cinematography and sound effects absent in its black-and-white predecessor.
The cavernous jury room is flooded with intense crimson light as the sun sets, and thick shadows later lengthen across it. Trains and pipes softly clink in the background, and, after a bird flies in, heavy silences are punctured by the atmospheric whirr of its wings. Critics have, on the whole, responded positively to the film.
Mikhalkov hopes the film will become a talking point. “This picture came out of our life, and I’d like it to return to our life,” he said at the news conference.
“I think this film is important for the whole country. Maybe I’m mistaken.”

TITLE: Chernov’s
         choice
TEXT: This year’s Aposition Forum, an annual avant-garde music event, launched by local musician and promoter Alexei Plyusnin in October 2005, opened with the Beth Custer Ensemble on Thursday.
On through Monday, Aposition draws artists from many countries, including New York-based minimalist composer and filmmaker <b>Phill Niblock</b>, composer, performer and installation artist <b>Michael J. Schumacher</b>,  also from New York, and British avant-garde guitarist <b>Keith Rowe</b>.
Schumacher and Niblock will perform at the Music Hall on Friday, alongside Japan’s <b>Store House Company></b>, U.S. musician Al Margolis in duo with Canadian video artist <b>Katherine Liberovskaya</b> and local musician <b>Dmitry Kakhovsky</b>.
The Music Hall will host the Forum’s other night on Sunday. Headlined by Rowe, the concert also features U.S. flute player <b>Demetrius Spaneas</b>, U.S. band <b>Odd Appetite</b>, and the Netherlands’ <b>Ernst Reijseger</b>. Plyusnin will perform himself in duo with Turkish musician <b>Saadet Turkoz</b> on that day.
The festival’s other two events will happen at The Place on Saturday and Monday. Saturday’s concert will feature Russian acts <b>Mutselium</b>, <b>Bardoseneticcube</b> and <b>Bimka</b>, Austrian musician <b>Lars Stigler</b>, Belgium’s <b>Onde></b> and the joint Russian-U.S. project <b>Silence Corporation</b>.
The Aposition Forum will close with a concert by Austria’s Charmant Rouge, Singapore’s Tom Waits for Nobody and locally based British drummer Marcus Godwyn’s band The Noise of Time.
Aposition is a creative partnership formed by Plyusnin in 2000, and its name refers to both innovative U.S. jazz composer and musician Sun Ra’s Arkestra and Rock in Opposition (RIO), a movement of “progressive” bands launched by the British band Henry Cow in 1978. Plyusnin also promotes “Share,” a free improvisation night at The Place every Monday. <b>Share</b>, this time broadcast via the web, will conclude Monday’s concert of Aposition Forum.
Plyusnin, who was an art-director at SKIF, or the Sergei Kuryokhin International Festival, St. Petersburg’s massive annual experimental music event held in April, started Aposition Forum as a means to express entirely different ideas.
“It’s the total opposite [of SKIF]. It’s anti-egalitarian, anti-hippie. It’s a bold idea and a weapon of a different kind,” he said in an interview with The St. Petersburg Times shortly before the first event in October 2005.
 “I had hoped [with SKIF] that we would strike a spark that would bring an avalanche of new music into the city and into the country. It didn’t happen. Some new names emerged, but not enough. Now we are trying a different method.”
Friday will also see concerts by urban-folk band <b>La Minor</b> at Belgrad, folk-punk all-women band <b>Iva Nova</b> at The Place and punk band <b>PTVP</b> at Orlandina.

<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: Natalya Pivovarova (1963-2007)
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Natalya Pivovarova, the founder of St. Petersburg’s seminal indie pop band Kolibri and the singer with her band S.O.U.S., died in a car crash near Koktebel, Ukraine, on Monday. She was 44.
Born in Novgorod on July 17, 1963, Pivovarova formed Kolibri in 1989, but she came up with the idea of an all-women vocal group a year earlier when she organized a one-shot theatrical/musical troupe to perform on International Women’s Day (March 8) at the Leningrad Rock Club in March 1988.
By that time she was already a well-known face on Leningrad’s rock scene due to her appearances as a dancer with Sergei Kuryokhin’s flexible avant-pop ensemble Popular Mechanics.
Pivovarova described herself as a “person of the theater.” 
She studied with the Litsedei clown troupe’s studio and conceived Kolibri (Russian for “hummingbirds”) as a theatrical project — “a mix of music, poetry and show” — which later developed into a music group. “Then we were carried by different undercurrents and it turned into a musical project. I didn’t like it too much because I think on a wider scale,” she said in an interview with The St. Petersburg Times in March 2000.
Kolibri’s classic lineup was Pivovarova, Yelena Yudanova, Inna Volkova and Irina Sharovatova. The band’s debut album was “The Manner of Behavior” (Manera Povedeniya) in 1990.
Pivovarova left Kolibri in 1998 after 10 years and six albums and formed a new band called S.O.U.S. the following year, having changed her music style drastically. Performing pop grunge with a band of male musicians, she hoped to warm up for Courtney Love’s Hole on the U.S. band’s planned Russian tour, but the tour never happened.
“I left Kolibri, but I wasn’t going to quit singing,” she said. “I left because I was bursting out of my own energy and I felt that I tended to take too much onto myself, there was not enough space for me within the limits of what I once started.”
“That’s why I wanted to create something different, something of my own — on the same principles of musical eclecticism. It was my personal decision, and now, 12 months on, I see it was right. I feel I’ve really started moving forward.”
In March 2000 Pivovarova made her debut as a theater director presenting her graduation work for the Institute of Culture at Litsedei’s Chaplin Club.
From 2002 Pivovarova was a director and an actress with Takoi Theater. She also had several theatrical and music projects with her husband Alexander Lushin, the singer with the pop-rock band Prepinaki.
She is survived by daughter Ada and son Yakov.

People wishing to assist Pivovarova’s family financially are invited to call Olga at +7 921 643 2944 or Irina at +7 911 212 5402. A civil ceremony will be held at Na Liteinom theater (Theater on Liteiny) at 10 a.m. on Friday. A church ceremony will start at 1 p.m. at a church on Konyushennaya Ploshchad (Khram Spasa Nerukotvornogo Obraza). Pivovarova will be buried at Bogoslovskoye cemetery.

TITLE: Beautiful Basel
AUTHOR: By Gail Joiner
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: BASEL, Switzerland — At the center of the “three-countries region” where Switzerland, France and Germany meet, Basel thrives on its tri-national location. Europe feels at its most snug and cozy here as Basel residents travel by tram to dine in French restaurants in Alsace (tram no. 10) or wander in Germany’s hilly Black Forest (tram no. 6), all visible from the wall surrounding Basel’s Romanesque cathedral. These journeys take minutes.
Basel’s charming medieval Old Town, with its narrow and steep cobblestone streets, is one of the best-preserved in Europe. With its red sandstone walls, multicolored roof tiles and twin towers, the Cathedral is a dominant feature of the city. Many tourists pay pilgrimage to the tomb of Erasmus of Rotterdam located in its crypt.
Like most cities with centuries-long histories, Basel has a mythical protector. Called the basilisk, this winged, dragon-like creature, can be seen in dozens of incarnations in ornaments adorning the city’s fountains, roofs, gates and mansions. The city’s past fuses beautifully with modern art in one of Jonathan Borofsky’s Hammering Man sculptures. Basel’s carnival, Fassnacht, rivals those of Venice and Rio de Janeiro.
A castle overlooking the Schifflande quay is now Basel’s unrivaled lodging option. The hotel where Napoleon and Goethe once stayed has a fittingly aristocratic title — Les Trois Rois.

Art and Soul
Basel is synonymous with art and the city is home to more than forty museums and galleries. Every year in June, the city plays host to ArtBasel, one of the world’s most respected art fairs. The elegant, spacious Foundation Beyeler, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, makes home for a tremendous collection of art.
Founded by the prominent Swiss art connoisseur, Ernst Beyeler, it comprises more than 200 works by some of the finest 20th century artists, of the likes of Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, Henry Rousseau, Jackson Pollock, Max Ernst and Francis Bacon. A special feature is a permanent display of work by Mark Rothko. A visit to the museum devoted to the late sculptor Jean Tinguely is an absolute must. Tinguely’s engaging sculptural machines are shown alongside works by his wife, Niki de Saint Phalle, who was also one of Switzerland’s most admired artists. 
The striking contrast between the artistic styles of Tinguely and Saint Phalle serves as perfect illustration of the expression “opposites attract.” Tinguely’s “kinetic art” — rusty, scrappy and squeaky machines — seem antagonistic to the bubbly, rotund shapes of Saint Phalle’s brightly colored creatures, painted with sparse use of red, yellow and blue.

Alpine Trip
Basel is also an excellent base for a day trip to Interlaken, a marvellous  scenic valley town in the Bernese Oberland, located between two lakes, the Thun and the Brienz, at the heart of the Alps. A renowned Alpine mecca, Interlaken has one of the most sumptuous spa-hotels in Europe, the Victoria-Jungfrau. The town makes a perfect take-off point for Alpine hikes to two of Switzerland’s most famous peaks, Jungfrau (4,158 meters) and Schilthorn. The latter is famous for having served as location for the James Bond flick “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” The 360-degree panorama that can be observed from the revolving restaurant Piz Gloria is breathtaking if the weather is fine. 
Both the Brienz and the Thun are warm enough to swim in the summer but the Thun is generally warmer. Insiders advise to head to Burgseeli, a gorgeous nature reserve in Ringgenberg-Goldswil in the vicinity of Interlaken, where water temperatures may reach plus 27 Celsius, and there are birds and water-lillies for swimming companions.

<i>— With thanks to Switzerland Tourism</i>

TRAVELLER’S TIPS 

HOW TO GET THERE:
There are no direct flights to Switzerland from St. Petersburg. Swiss International Airlines (www.swiss.com) flies daily from Moscow to Geneva and twice daily from Moscow to Zurich. Lufthansa offers a convenient connection to Zurich via Munich.
Within Switzerland, the public transport system is legendarily efficient, and provides an amazingly easy way to get around the country. For train travel within the country, you can save up to 70 percent with a Swiss Pass, which provides unlimited rail transport for 4, 8, 15 or 22 days, or 1 month. The passes are valid on all of Switzerland’s fabled scenic routes, and are also good for the public transport systems of 35 Swiss cities. Swiss Pass holders also receive many discounts on mountain excursions and other services.
Another option is the Swiss Flexi Pass, which is ideal for anyone not planning to travel every day. It is valid for a certain number of days within one month, which do not have to be consecutive. On travel days, Swiss Flexi Pass holders enjoy the same advantages as Swiss Pass holders. Trains between Switzerland’s main towns depart every 30 minutes. All the schedules and other information are on the web site www.rail.ch
WHERE TO STAY:
Les Trois Rois. Blumenrain 8, 4001 Basel. Tel. +41 61 260 50 50. www.lestroisrois.com
Grand Hotel Victoria-Jungfrau. Hoheweg 41, Interlaken CH-3800. Tel. +41 33 828 28 28. www.victoria-jungfrau.ch

USEFUL LINKS
www.MySwitzerland.ru
www.basel.com
www.baselmuseums.ch
www.tourismtrirhena.com
www.tinguely.ch 
www.beyeler.com 
www.interlaken.ch
www.schilthorn.ch

TITLE: Troubled water
AUTHOR: By Robert Rosenberg
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Trivia hounds the world over can identify Lake Baikal as the largest and deepest fresh-water lake on the planet. But few would be able to describe the lake’s other myriad wonders. That Baikal’s waters are among the purest on Earth. That Baikal holds a fifth of the planet’s liquid fresh water: enough to supply three liters to every living person for 3,000 years. That Baikal reaches more than 1 1/2 kilometers deep — and up to 9 1/2 kilometers through sediment to bedrock, a rift approaching the world’s deepest abyss, the Pacific’s Mariana Trench. That, while most of the Earth’s other deep lakes support life to 250 meters, there are living things squirming in Baikal 1,600 meters below the surface. That Baikal is home to 1,750 unique organisms, including the world’s only fresh-water seal, the nerpa. The list of Baikal’s wonders grows larger to this day, yet your average citizen of the world hardly knows Baikal at all.
Peter Thomson’s “Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal” might help rectify the situation. Thomson, an environmental journalist, was the founding producer and editor of National Public Radio’s “Living on Earth” program. In July of 2000, after a bruising divorce, Thomson set out on a life-altering trip with his younger brother James. The pair would travel by land and sea from Boston to Siberia, where they would explore Baikal before continuing around the world to the United States. 
“I’ve come to Baikal to try to take some kind of measure of the place,” Thomson writes, “to find some kind of truth about it and lessons for other places, and myself.”
Thomson’s book is padded with the emotional and logistical baggage of his journey circumnavigating the globe. A bizarre decision to narrate events out of chronological order creates a problem of focus, with clumsy flashbacks, letters home and unnecessary passages of stream-of-consciousness. Thomson is an introvert who worries himself silly about visa issues and often admits to hating his journey. 
He does not speak Russian, and spends his time on trains fearful of leaving his berth. As a writer, he rarely dramatizes conversations, relying instead on summary, so the cast of potentially colorful characters he meets never entirely comes to life. It is not, then, for the pleasures of armchair travel that one should approach “Sacred Sea.”
Rather, the jewels in this important book are the chapters focusing on Baikal. When Thomson is contemplating the lake, imagining a nerpa’s dive or weighing Baikal’s myths versus its science, his writing is energized and confident, and “Sacred Sea” accumulates the power of a fair-minded but impassioned essay. 
To what extent is Baikal being damaged by humans? How can it best be protected? These are the questions Thomson spends the bulk of his journey investigating. 
It’s difficult to believe that humans have any effect on a lake of Baikal’s size and reputation. Many Russians still buy into the myth of Siberia’s inexhaustibility, of its “endless forests, uncountable numbers of fur-bearing animals, mines that yield 4,000 pounds of gold a year, an unfathomable lake that makes pollution disappear.” 
And much of this is true. As Thomson skillfully explains, Baikal does pull off a unique miracle of self-purification — through its miniature shrimp, the Epischura baicalensis. These animals strain pollution from the water like “a tiny vacuum cleaner about the size of a poppy seed.” 
Baikal’s zillions of shrimp filter “the lake’s entire volume every twenty-three years.” Thus “Baikal is in a perfect state!” one scientist announces. “It is huge, it is rich, it is healthy, it is wise, and it is not similar to any phenomena in the world!” 
Thomson is wary. “Baikal is perfect,” he thinks. “It’s a wonderful, soothing story, which exalts the lake even as it frees humans from their responsibility to care for it.” 
Indeed, many others warn Thomson that “waste from factories, farms, and human settlements is testing the limits of Baikal’s delicate ecology.” Siberian industry helped spearhead the nation’s economic and technological achievements of the 1960s and 1970s. Three dams on the Angara River produced electricity for aluminum, petrochemical and airplane factories — all within 50 kilometers of Baikal. 
The result is a “contaminated hot zone.” The region has been deemed “irreparably damaged” by the Rand Corporation. A Soviet government study found that in 1988 the city of Angarsk produced more harmful air pollution than all of Moscow, and the government recently admitted that Irkutsk and nearby cities have some of the poorest air quality in the nation.
Among the worst culprits is the Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill, whose red-and-white striped smokestacks “rise above the lakeshore at the edge of town like candy canes laced with strychnine.” 
The plant was built in the 1950s as a source of cellulose fiber for military aircraft tires, to be produced using Baikal’s “super-pure water.” Nikita Khrushchev supposedly said, “Baikal, too, must work.” Today the plant produces newsprint and bleached cellulose pulp, sending sulfates, phenols, heavy metals, E. coli and air pollutants into and over the lake.
The head of the Baikalsk plant’s Department of Nature Protection insists that none of this is doing any damage. To prove it, she invites the Thomsons to drink water at the spot where the factory’s spillway rushes into Baikal. “The treated water meets all the standards of drinking water in the Russian Federation,” she promises. The brothers decline.
While the lake’s shrimp do cleanse pollution, unfortunately, that is just the beginning of the story. Epischura are at the bottom of the food chain, and predators at the top — seals, raptors, bears and humans — are at risk of larger effects of contamination. The process, known as biomagnification, means that concentrations of pollutants “jump by several orders of magnitude from one link in the food chain to the next.” So marine mammals like the nerpy, which accumulate enormous concentrations of toxic chemicals, are dying off. And humans, who eat the fish that eat the epischura, might likewise be in danger of grave health risks. Thomson muses on the “nasty irony in Baikal’s stupendous self-cleansing act: extraordinarily pure water, extraordinarily contaminated animals.”
Still, what the effects of the pollutants are and where they come from (there is a penchant to blame Mongolia) are fiercely debated. As the world has seen so often in the United States’ own recent environmental record, it is far too easy for a government to raise doubts about science long enough to kick the environmental can to some future generation. After intense discussions with Yevgenia Tarasova at Irkutsk State University, who has spent her life studying the lake, Thomson concludes, “Until or unless scientists can draw an unbroken line of pollution from specific sources through Baikal’s water and fish to specific health problems in nerpas and humans — the people with the power to make decisive changes may remain unconvinced of the need to do so.”
So while the rich and powerful discuss harebrained schemes, like marketing Baikal drinking water to China, grassroots activists rally international support for conservation efforts and eco-friendly development. A critical race to save the lake is on, and Thomson’s travelogue will help the effort. 
“If there were several Lake Baikals in the world, maybe the concern would not be that high,” Tarasova says. “Unfortunately, there is only one Lake Baikal.”

Robert Rosenberg is the author of the novel “This Is Not Civilization.” He teaches writing at Bucknell University.

TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Roman Abramovich is in the news again as the Mail on Sunday published a story about plans to stage a musical based on his life. Oh, and I hear something happened at his football club, too. So the lyricists are probably doing frantic rewrites as we speak, scratching their heads over what could possibly rhyme with Mourinho.
The story about an Abramovich musical, bizarre as it sounds, isn’t a new one. In 2004, the British tabloid The Sun printed a story headlined “Red Rom: The Musical” about plans to turn an unauthorized biography of the oligarch into an all-singing, all-dancing show. And that was before the divorce and Darya Zhukova — it’s almost as if Abramovich decided to give the librettists a helping hand.
In the latest story, the Mail on Sunday reports that the “big-budget extravaganza” will begin rehearsals at Moscow’s Kremlin Palace in December (which sounds slightly dubious — they will have to fit it round all the low-budget extravaganzas that the concert hall lays on for New Year’s). The show will be “loosely based” on an unofficial biography “Abramovich: The Billionaire From Nowhere” by Chris Hutchins and Dominic Midgley, the tabloid says, and Hutchins is taking part in writing the script.
The show’s characters will include Boris Berezovsky, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, the newspaper reports. Berezovsky will have them dancing in the aisles with songs including “Who Needs A Goil [girl] When You Got Oil?” and “I’m Thinkin’ Of Shootin’ Putin.”
Although, I would question the likelihood of anyone singing “I’m Thinkin’ of Shootin’ Putin” within earshot of his Kremlin office. And it seems strange that the songs are in English if the musical is going to play in Russia.
The article also says Abramovich’s first and second wives, Olga and Irina, will sing a duet titled “All This Was Nearly Mine, All This Is Really Mine.” Which is cute, but what about Darya? She doesn’t even get a mention. Instead, the story promises a chorus of footballers played by women and a host of oligarchs singing lyrics such as “Only Fools Go Russian In.” And there’s even talk of a movie version, possibly starring George Clooney and Celine Dion — again no word on a Dasha character. Perhaps Katie Holmes would be interested.
All this sounds highly unlikely, but if it does happen, I want a front-row seat. Possibly Abramovich himself doesn’t feel the same, though. His spokesman told both the Mail on Sunday and AFP that he isn’t interested in investing in the musical, and his representative hasn’t met the show’s makers. This contradicts a statement in the Mail on Sunday saying the oligarch was preparing to put $170 million into the show. This information presumably comes from producer Tony Cartwright — the story’s only attributed source.
Cartwright assured the tabloid that Abramovich is simply keeping his involvement in the dark. “Money’s not a problem,” he said, modestly understating the level of Red Rom’s bank balance. “If anything, he’s prepared to put more money in.”
Cartwright is a former manager of crooner Engelbert Humperdinck, the article says. That white-tuxedoed balladeer is best known for a cover of the Elvis hit “Please Release Me,” which could be slipped into the show as Abramovich splits up with his second wife Irina, followed by another Humperdinck hit, “There Goes My Everything.”
It may be a bit of a problem breathing life into the oligarch — who, let’s face it, doesn’t say much — but it sounds as if the lyricists are going for the Sun punning-headline school of songwriting. And if things go well, as that tabloid would put it, there may be rubles ahead.

TITLE: Pop your cork
AUTHOR: By Jessica Bachman
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Probka // 5 Ulitsa Belinskogo, Tel: 273 4904 // Open from 1 p.m. to 1a.m. // Menu in Russian and English // Visa and MasterCard accepted // Dinner for two and two glasses of wine 2,460 rubles ($98)

It is unlikely that associative bonds between wine bars, bacchanalia and snobbery will be broken anytime soon. 
But prices aside, Probka, a viny bar on Ulitsa Belinskogo — a five-minute walk across the Fontanka from the circus — does a good job at challenging familiar sterotypes about wine and establishments that specialize in serving it. 
From the street, Probka, which in Russian means “cork,” looks no different than what you would expect from a wine bar; discrete tea lights, small wooden tables and the fragmented, intermittent gleaming of glass stemware mystify a dark interior. On both the first and second floors, large, door-like glass windows that can open out to the street form the bar’s façade. Through them couples can be seen swishing deep purples, reds and pinks round and round in deep, wide-bowl glasses.
The interior of Probka, however, paints another picture entirely. The sandy, golden-toned walls of the first floor are a far cry from intimidating and pretentious. The palms and Italian churches painted upon them seem to have especially rubbed off on the Russian clientele, whose unaffected laughter and playful banter had a Southern European ring to it.
The second floor, with its chrome and white frosted glass decorations, was darker, smokier and more modern looking than the downstairs. 
Large paper menus doubling as a placemats are preset on the tables. Red, white and rose wines from Europe, South America, the United States, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand are all offered. But the menu also includes an assortment of dessert wines, champagne, spirits and Italian-inspired light fare from the bar’s open kitchen. 
There are many soups, salads, pasta, meat and seafood dishes to choose from on Probka’s “bar menu,” but don’t expect to spend less than 300 rubles ($12) on an appetizer. A small Caesar salad costs 333 rubles ($13.20) and a Caprese salad with fresh buffalo mozzarella costs 650 rubles ($25.80).
Although the wine selection is decent, it is certainly less extensive than it is expensive. Bottle prices range from 900 to 4,360 rubles ($35.70 to $173) while the least expensive bottle of French wine on the menu, a Domaine Sainte Claire white Chablis, is priced at 1,710 rubles ($67.85). 
All wine by the glass costs exactly a quarter of the price of the bottle, putting the cheapest glass, a Chilean Sauvignon Blanc, at 225 rubles ($8.90) and the priciest, an Allende Blanco Spanish white, at 600 rubles ($23.80). 
The Spanish Rioja, La Montesa, (430 roubles, $17.10 a glass) has a powerful zing to it. But since its force and sharpness do not make it heavy, it would go well with the many heavy pasta dishes on the menu. It certainly complemented the creamy, porcini-mushroom infused Gnocchi (543 rubles, $21.50). 
The Pinotage red, from Swartland, South Africa (490 rubles, $19.44 a glass) was smooth, heavy and fragrant. But once paired with the veal steak (590 rubles, $23.4) its distinctiveness was lost. Unlike the exceptionally flavorful — and in season — mushroom Gnocchi, the veal was nothing special. Had the server not brought over a pepper grinder, it would have been a complete let down. 
Of the seven desserts featured on the menu, the torta de la nonna (222 rubles, $8.80) takes the cake. The pine nuts hidden in this light Tuscan ricotta cheesecake give it an original foresty flavor that blends perfectly with the accompanying  chocolate and caramel sauce. 
If you are ready to spend the money, Probka is an excellent place for friends to get together.

TITLE: Teenage kicks
AUTHOR: By Manohla Dargis
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: Horny is as horny does in the sweetly absurd high school comedy “Superbad.” A tickly, funny tale of three teenage boys revved up by their surging, churning, flooding hormones, the movie joins the tumescent ranks of similarly themed works about male sexual desire — consider “Portnoy’s Complaint,” think “Porky’s” — and its somatic epiphanies, treacherous secretions, anguished lessons and apparently limitless storehouse of embarrassments. Behold the man (well, boy): fully sexed and wholly, touchingly virginal.
Written by Seth Rogen, last seen scoring in “Knocked Up,” and his childhood friend Evan Goldberg, “Superbad” follows two high school seniors — also named Seth and Evan — who together set off on a long night’s journey into the soul. Actually, what they do is try to booze up and party down with some school hotties during a nighttime adventure in missed opportunities and unexpected revelations. Time is short: summer looms, as does the fall, when Evan (Michael Cera, excellent) will depart for Dartmouth alongside his classmate Fogell (the newcomer Christopher Mintz-Plasse), leaving behind his academically challenged best friend, Seth (Jonah Hill). The future holds promise, even for Seth, yet also threatens the worst, especially if they don’t become some girl’s morning-after headache.
“We could be that mistake!” insists Seth, his voice shrill with hope and panic.
If the penis is puzzled in “Portnoy’s Complaint,” as Alexander Portnoy’s shrink believes, in “Superbad” it is thoroughly, stunningly clueless and as violently tremulous as a divining rod at Hoover Dam. Along with Fogell, a walking irritant with mad skills (he procures a fake ID), Seth and Evan prowl their high school in search of — what, precisely? From their bawdy language, filled with vivid anatomical notes and gaudily colorful phrasing, the three would very much like to bed some “ladies,” as Fogell insists on calling them in a tragicomic bid at Kanye West suavity. The tearful joke being that these yapping pups wouldn’t know what to do with any woman, much less the bosomy babes of their whipped-cream and dirty dreams.
The divide between what a man says — and what he thinks he should say, especially to other men — and how he really feels inside largely defines the comedic ethos of Judd Apatow, one of the movie’s producers and its spiritual laughing light. Much like “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up,” both of which Apatow directed and either wrote or helped write, “Superbad” largely works not because the jokes are funny, which they generally are, even on the spitometer. It works because no matter how unapologetically vulgar their words, no matter how single-mindedly priapic their preoccupations, these men and boys are good and decent and tender and true. They never take cruel or callous advantage. They call. They love. They marry.
Apatow traffics in such a cute, cuddly vision of modern masculinity that it seems rude to wonder if it’s honestly felt (which is what I think), self-flattering (ditto) or cunningly opportunistic (nah). Certainly it’s testosterone-heavy, if not exactly macho. And, indeed, part of what’s fascinating about Apatow’s ascendancy, and why the comedy moment belongs to him more than it does either to the Farrelly brothers or to Ben Stiller and his mob, is how he has created — and come close to perfecting — a masculine variation on aspirational wish-fulfillment movies like “Legally Blonde.” Except instead of perky, pretty women reaching up, up, up, Apatow offers freaks and geeks aching to be worthy of those same women.
And if these guys aren’t especially worthy, well, such is the way of the wish-fulfillment fantasy. Apatow shamelessly stacks the deck in favor of his underdogs — the future doctors, lawyers and Hollywood hitmakers of America, no doubt — but his intentions are generally righteous and his humor doesn’t depend too heavily on flatulence or sadism. Or filmmaking.
Given Apatow’s tendencies, it’s no surprise that the director of “Superbad,” Greg Mottola, doesn’t leave much of an imprint. Mottola, whose first and last big-screen effort was the fine 1996 comedy “The Daytrippers,” has spent much of the last decade working in network television (sometimes with Apatow) and it shows. In “Superbad,” his setups and camerawork serve the characters unobtrusively, as do the homey production design and costumes.
It’s a nice homeyness, lived-in and honest. Much like Rogen, who alongside Bill Hader puts in an unfortunately overextended appearance in “Superbad” as a dangerously juvenile cop, the young male actors in “Superbad” look as pleasantly, sympathetically real as they behave. They’re at a total and happy remove from the musclebound cartoons of prime-time and action-flick reveries.
Long and lanky, Cera moves like one of those teenagers whose body hasn’t yet fully caught up to his newly reached height. With his wide-open face and smile, he looks absolutely amazed by what he can see from a higher elevation (the world!). But of course he looks surprised: he’s the top half of the exclamation point to the spherical Hill’s rolling big dot.

TITLE: Spector Case Declared 
A Mistrial
AUTHOR: By Leslie Simmons
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LOS ANGELES — The specter of Phil Spector will haunt Hollywood well into 2008. On Wednesday, the judge presiding over the legendary “Wall of Sound” producer’s murder trial declared a mistrial after jurors indicated they were hopelessly deadlocked, 10-2, in favor of convicting Spector on charges that he killed actress Lana Clarkson more than four years ago.
After the decision, the district attorney’s office indicated it would retry Spector.
“We will seek the court’s permission to retry the case and begin immediately to prepare for a retrial,” District Attorney Steve Cooley said in a statement. A hearing in the case was set for Wednesday, October 3.
Los Angeles criminal defense attorney James Blatt said he was not surprised by the district attorney’s decision.
“The DA’s office didn’t receive the result they worked for, what they were hoping for,” Blatt said. 
The mistrial came after months of a trial in which jurors had to decide who pulled the trigger of a revolver — leaving no fingerprints — that went off in Clarkson’s mouth early February 3, 2003. The jury met for about 44 hours over 12 days after getting the case September 10.

TITLE: All Blacks Ready For Romanian Challenge
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — New Zealand will have little problem stepping up a gear for the knockout phase of the World Cup after a string of easy victories in the pool games, according to loose forward Jerry Collins.
The 26-year-old, who has been one of the team’s most impressive performers in the tournament, said the knowledge that a bad performance could mean elimination was more than enough incentive for the team to improve.
“It is not a concern,” Collins told reporters at the team’s training base in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence. “After this week it could all be over the following week and you might be talking about us going home.
“So for me after Saturday it’s a question of who gets it right on the day... You can have the best form leading into the playoffs, but they are one-off games.
“You can be the worst performing team going into the quarter-finals... and end up playing three good games and that’s all that matters.
“You can be the best all year, but if you lose the one game that counts you have to wait another four years to get a shot.”
The All Blacks have won all three of their pool games with considerable ease, crushing a much-fancied Italy side 76-14 in their opening match, racking up one of the highest scores in World Cup history with their 108-13 win over Portugal and then inflicting a 40-0 whitewash on Scotland at Murrayfield.
Collins said the team would be using its final pool game against Romania on Saturday to iron out some of the uncharacteristic errors against Scotland last weekend. “We are trying to play some footie and at the moment the little things are letting us down.
“But I’d say this Saturday will be much better than last Saturday. We really need to start kicking into gear and start working towards a quarter-final. Saturday is a big test for us.”

TITLE: Alonso Still Focused And Happy
AUTHOR: By Alan Baldwin
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: FUJI, Japan — Formula One champion Fernando Alonso will do his talking on the track now that McLaren team boss Ron Dennis has revealed they are barely on speaking terms, the Spaniard said on Thursday.
Meeting reporters at the Japanese Grand Prix, Alonso shrugged aside media criticism of his role in a spying controversy with Ferrari that cost his McLaren team a record $100 million fine as well as the constructors’ title.
Alonso, chasing his third title in a row, is two points behind British rookie team mate Lewis Hamilton with races in Japan, China and Brazil remaining.
“About the spying I have nothing to say...I will try to speak on the track and try to do my job,” he said at the Fuji circuit.
“I really think that many of the things that have been said about the spying and about me are totally wrong and not the truth.
“But these things happen and I will not answer every day what they have been saying about me and about anything, I will not lose time on that.
“I cannot be every day and every week answering rumors and telling my point of view or my version or my truth to anyone,” added Alonso.
“So at the moment...I am completely focused on the last three races and that is the truth.”
Dennis said at a hearing of the governing body in Paris into the spy saga this month that he and his driver, whom he described as a ‘remarkable recluse’, had not been on speaking terms since the beginning of August.
Alonso said he was surprised to hear that as they had chatted briefly while checking in at their hotel on the Friday before the Belgian Grand Prix — the day after the team boss made the remark.
The undoubtedly frosty relations were triggered by a row between the two on the morning of the Hungarian Grand Prix in August, during which Alonso revealed the existence of incriminating e-mails about leaked Ferrari data that helped seal McLaren’s punishment.
The British media have accused Alonso of threatening McLaren in an attempt to force the team into giving him number one status over the sensational Hamilton, who has led the championship since April.
Recent media reports in Spain and Britain have also suggested that Alonso wants to escape his McLaren contract and return to Renault or move to Ferrari, but the driver presented a different reality.
“For next year I have a contract with this team and I don’t see any problem on that,” he said.
“I have been working with the engineers, with the mechanics, with everybody from the beginning of the season, until now with the same relationship,” he added.
“They are all very professional, very focused on doing the best we can and we are achieving good results. I won four races, I make some good podiums and I am fighting for the world championship so everything is going quite well for me and I am happy.”

TITLE: Myanmar Soldiers Fire Weapons Into Crowd
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: YANGON, Myanmar — Soldiers fired automatic weapons into a crowd of anti-government protesters Thursday as tens of thousands defied the ruling military junta’s crackdown with a 10th straight day of demonstrations.
A Japanese Foreign Ministry official told The Associated Press that several people, including a Japanese national, were found dead following Thursday’s protests.
The information was transmitted by Myanmar’s Foreign Ministry to the Japanese Embassy in Yangon, the official said on condition of anonymity citing protocol.
The chaos came a day after the government launched a crackdown in Yangon that it said killed at least one man. Dissidents outside Myanmar reported receiving news of up to eight deaths Wednesday.
Some reports said the dead included Buddhist monks, who are widely revered in Myanmar, and the emergence of such martyrs could stoke public anger against the regime and escalate the violence.
As part of the crackdown, monasteries were raided overnight by pro-junta forces in which monks were reportedly beaten and more than 100 were arrested.
The monks have spearheaded the largest challenge to the military junta in the isolated Southeast Asian nation since a failed uprising in 1988. In that crisis, soldiers shot into crowds of peaceful demonstrators, killing some 3,000 people.
Witnesses told the AP that five men were arrested and severely beaten Thursday after soldiers fired into a crowd near a bridge across the Pazundaung River on the east side of downtown Yangon.
Shots were fired after several thousand protesters on the west side of the river ignored orders to disband.
In other parts of the city, some protesters shouted “Give us freedom, give us freedom!” at soldiers. Thousands ran through the streets after warning shots were fired into crowds that had swollen to 70,000. Bloody sandals were left lying in the road.
As the stiffest challenge to the generals in two decades, the crisis that began Aug. 19 with protests of a fuel price increase has drawn increasing international pressure on the regime, especially from its chief ally, China.
“China hopes that all parties in Myanmar exercise restraint and properly handle the current issue so as to ensure the situation there does not escalate and get complicated,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said Thursday at a twice-weekly media briefing.
European Union diplomats agreed to consider imposing more economic sanctions on Myanmar.

TITLE: Russia-U.S. Final in Oregon
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW YORK — The United States-Russia Davis Cup Final will be held at the Memorial Coliseum in Portland, Oregon, the U.S. Tennis Association announced on Wednesday.
The November 30-December 2 competition at the Coliseum, site of U.S. semi-final wins over Australia in 1981 and 1984, marks the first Davis Cup Final in the United States in 15 years.
The U.S., led by Andy Roddick, James Blake and the doubles team of Bob and Mike Bryan, advanced to the final with a 4-1 victory over Sweden last weekend in Gothenburg.
Holders Russia rallied on the final day against Germany in Moscow to win their semi-final 3-2.
The U.S., 2-1 overall against Russia in the team competition, are seeking their first Davis Cup title since 1995 when they beat Russia in the final in Moscow.
“The stage is set for a memorable event — a classic match-up between our top American team and the defending Davis Cup champions from Russia,” Arlen Kantarian, the USTA’s head of professional tennis, said in a statement.
“We expect a pumped up and patriotic capacity crowd in the great city of Portland — one of the most passionate sports cities in the country.”
The United States last hosted the Cup final in 1992 in Ft. Worth, Texas, where Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, Pete Sampras and John McEnroe combined to defeat Switzerland. A 10-year-old Roddick was among the spectators.
“It changed my life,” Roddick said of the 1992 final. “It changed the way I viewed tennis, especially the way I viewed Davis Cup.
“It just blew my mind, to see the team that we had there. To be able to see that in that type of setting as a little kid, it definitely made a bit of an impression.”

TITLE: Russia Coach Invited To Manage Mighty Chelsea
PUBLISHER: Agence France Press
TEXT: LONDON — Russia coach Guus Hiddink revealed on Thursday that Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich has asked him to take over as manager of the Premiership giant.
Dutch national coach Marco van Basten and former Germany boss Jurgen Klinsmann have both been linked with the job which Avram Grant currently holds, leading Chelsea to issue a statement on Wednesday insisting no one had been offered the job to replace Jose Mourinho.
But Hiddink said the club’s Russian billionaire owner asked him if he wanted to return to club management.
Hiddink, 60, said in the Daily Express: “Abramovich asked me ‘What do you want?’ I told him that right now I want to do nothing else except concentrate on Russia. “I want to see this through now and then see what happens. We like living in Moscow and they seem to like us,” said Hiddink.
Hiddink could be available in November when Russia’s Euro 2008 campaign comes to an end, but with the side looking good for qualification, Abramovich, who pays half of Hiddink’s $2.4 million-a-year wage, may have to wait until after next summer’s finals.
“We have started a project here with this team and they want us to stay for another two years after the European Championships,” added the Dutchman.
Hiddink’s coaching career includes stints at Spanish sides Real Madrid, Valencia and Real Betis, Dutch club PSV Eindhoven and Turkish side Fenerbahce.
He guided South Korea to the 2002 World Cup semi-finals, before taking over Russia in July 2006.