SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1312 (78), Friday, October 5, 2007
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TITLE: Yushchenko Hints At Broad Coalition
AUTHOR: By Maria Danilova
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KIEV, Ukraine — President Viktor Yushchenko urged allies and foes Wednesday to cooperate in a government after Ukraine’s close parliamentary vote, in a call for unity that could alienate his political partner and prompt further turmoil.
As near-final returns pointed to a slim majority for Yushchenko and his 2004 Orange Revolution ally Yulia Tymoshenko over backers of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, a Russian threat to cut natural gas supplies added to the tension.
With all votes counted except for a half a percent of the precincts, Yanukovych’s party had 34.3 percent of the vote, followed by Tymoshenko’s bloc with 30.8 percent. The pro-Yushchenko party was third, with 14.2 percent.
Two smaller parties also cleared the 3 percent barrier needed to win seats but a third party likely to side with Yanukovych looked likely to fall short, almost certainly giving the parties of Tymoshenko and Yushchenko the majority of 226 they would need to form the government.
Instead of declaring victory for the Orange team and tapping Tymoshenko as premier, Yushchenko called for unity.
“I have one goal: Ukraine must emerge united following the elections; there must not be two Ukraines,” Yushchenko said in a televised speech. He called on all parties winning seats to engage in coalition talks.
Speaking later in Berlin, Yushchenko suggested that if his party and Tymoshenko’s secure a majority in parliament, they should consider giving the opposition — Yanukovuych’s forces — Cabinet posts, the Interfax news agency reported.
Yushchenko’s approach appeared driven by concerns of instability if a country polarized by regional, historical and linguistic divisions is ruled only by one side of the political divide.
But it was likely to anger the charismatic Orange Revolution heroine, Tymoshenko, who has ruled out a coalition including the Party of Regions.
Yanukovych was quick to embrace Yushchenko’s proposal. “We don’t need to look for enemies, we need to look for allies,” he said.
In a statement on her web site, Tymoshenko warned she would move into opposition if Yanukovych and Yushchenko unite. “Posts are worth nothing to us if we have to give up Ukraine’s independence and national interests for their sake,” she said.
Yushchenko may have been reluctant to invest too much power in Tymoshenko, his chief partner in the Orange Revolution that ushered him to power — but a potential rival for the presidency in 2009.
Yushchenko and Tymoshenko were the linchpins of the peaceful political upheaval, when hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets of Kiev claiming fraud in the 2004 presidential election, in which Yanukovych was initially declared the winner.
Yushchenko won a new vote after a court threw out the initial results, and he named Tymoshenko as his prime minister. But he fired her after seven months; their bickering helped bring Yanukovych back to power as prime minister last year.
Yanukovych, who was backed by Moscow in 2004, has taken a more neutral stance since then, pledging to integrate more closely into Europe, but is still seen as more Russia-friendly.
But the postelection maneuvering has been complicated by a Russian threat to decrease natural gas supplies to Ukraine — a move many saw as Kremlin meddling. 
Russia’s natural gas monopoly Gazprom said it would decrease supplies to Ukraine unless it is paid $1.3 billion in debt this month.
“Russia is trying to warn the next premier — whoever it is — that one should not touch ... the established energy schemes,” said analyst Oleksiy Haran. “The Kremlin is trying to protect itself from an Orange, pro-European government.”

TITLE: Flood Barrier Gets Extra 6 Billion Rubles
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: An additional 6 billion rubles ($2.4 million) has been allocated by the government to fund the construction of St. Petersburg’s Flood Protection Barrier in order to meet a 2008 deadline set by President Vladimir Putin.
The funding will come through Rosstroi, which comprises the Federal Construction Agency and the Communal and Housing Services, its head Sergei Kruglik told reporters Thursday.
Vladimir Kogan, Deputy Head of Rosstroi, said work on the dam will be finished as early as April 7 2008. That date is also the birthday of Governor Valentina Matviyenko.
“Work on the project is going ahead at full steam, and looks set to meet the deadline set by the president,” Kogan said.
The construction of the Flood Protection Barrier has been dragging on for 27 years. Work on the dam began in 1980 but construction was suspended in 1987 after a series of mass protests, with environmental activists saying that it would cause catastrophic environmental damage to the Neva Delta and the Gulf of Finland — which would ultimately turn into a swamp. 
Construction was resumed in 2003.
By then, infrastructure had been destroyed and the new team had to take into account new technology. 
According to Vladimir Blank, Deputy Head of Rosstroi, the St. Petersburg dam is the biggest construction project in Europe. Last year, Rosstroi approved completion of the dam project, which is costing 55 billion rubles ($2.2 billion). 
While recent years saw no mass public protest against construction of the dam, activists at the local headquarters of Greenpeace said the dam is still surrounded by an ocean of environmental problems.
“To begin with, the construction is illegal,” said Dmitry Artamonov, head of the St. Petersburg branch of Greenpeace, citing the Russian law on environmental expert examinations, which stipulates that when construction is resumed following a suspension, a new environmental examination is required. “The construction is still using the outdated initial examination, which is no longer relevant.”
Environmentalists also say large quantities of construction waste are being discharged into the water, including toxins.
Additionally, the dam has dramatically reduced natural flows, by as much as 80 percent according to some calculations, turning the Neva Bay from a self-filtering water reservoir into a storage tank, ecologists said. 
“The stagnation has caused ecocide, genetic changes and cancer in aquatic flora and fauna,” Artamonov said. 
Many locals have complained that they have lost their favorite beaches due to water stagnation caused by the dam.
After work on the dam is complete, Rosstroi will substantially cut its spending in the city during the next few years to focus on infrastructure projects.
“This year Rosstroi will spend over 12 percent of its budget on St. Petersburg,” Blank said at a news conference in St. Petersburg in June.
Kogan said in 2006, Rosstroi spent 11.4 billion rubles on local projects, with this year’s funding totalling 28 billion rubles, including the 6 billion cash injection. 
In 2002, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development commissioned an international research and analysis project on economic and flood vulnerability, which included a section on St. Petersburg.
Located only 3 to 4 meters above sea level, St. Petersburg is extremely vulnerable to regular flooding, and there are indications that the flood frequency is increasing, the report said.
The most devastating floods in the history of the city occurred in 1824 and 1924, when waters from the Gulf of Finland and Neva Bay flowed into streets and canals to destroy roads, damage bridges and embankments, and flood low-lying buildings in the city center. 
If it were to be repeated, such a flood would destroy the metro system, lead to an overflow in sewage facilities and a collapse of public infrastructure, the report claimed.

TITLE: Putin Plan Draws Mixed Reactions
AUTHOR: By Douglas Birch
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — The mere suggestion that Vladimir Putin has found a way to stay in power in Russia has assuaged markets, reassured diplomats and quieted the fears of his subordinates — many of them veterans of the KGB or other security services for whom stability is an imperative.
But his gambit to run for parliament and perhaps become prime minister may also fulfill the fears of critics, who have warned for years that the Russian president’s long-range goal was to dismantle Russia’s vestigial democracy and end its uncertain experiment in political pluralism.
The political sleight of hand was so deft it has raised barely a whisper of opposition within Russia and muted responses from abroad.
The U.S. State Department, a frequent critic of the Putin era’s stifling of opposition groups and non-governmental organizations, put on a poker face in response to the announcement he was not retiring from politics — at least not yet.
“That’s certainly his choice, and that’s an internal Russian political matter,” State Department spokesman Tom Casey said.
For months, Russians have been expecting Putin to come up with some plausible mechanism for remaining in power — even though no one was sure what strategy he would chose.
Analysts friendly to the Kremlin hailed the decision as the answer to Russia’s prayers. Many liberal political analysts, however, warned the stability Putin achieves will be short-lived, because, they argued, an authoritarian state quickly grows deaf to the voices of discontent and blind to the signs of dissent.
“A new epoch has now come...which is in essence a return to 20 years ago, to the Soviet past,” Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion who leads the opposition Other Russia movement, said on his web site.
Under the constitution, the president is head of state and wields near complete control. But if Putin assumes the prime minister’s post, it is almost certain that he will — either formally or informally — wind up controlling the levers of power.
More than two-thirds of Russians said they wanted the constitution changed to permit Putin a third consecutive term, but he refrained from such a move, which would have consigned him to the company of the world’s strongmen and presidents for life.
As prime minister, he could run the country as long as he likes — with no fear of stigma.
Monday’s announcement opens up several options for Putin.
Under one scenario, Prime Minister Putin would formally or informally assume most of the powers of the president.
Under another, the president’s powers would not change. But whoever is elected in March would step down after a decent interval. As prime minister, Putin would become president under the constitution. This is how Putin, then prime minister, became Russia’s president in the waning hours of 1999.
It seems doubtful, though, that Putin would permit others to run Russia, even for a short period.
Despite Putin’s sometimes harsh criticism of the West, U.S. and European leaders have responded with restraint and reticence. Partly, there is the perception that criticism only provokes more hostility from the Kremlin. And international leaders may also fear Putin’s successor could be even more difficult to deal with.
Sergei Ivanov, the former defense minister many thought was being groomed as Putin’s successor, worries the West with his hawkish statements. Another possible successor, newly appointed Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, is a largely unknown figure even within Russia.
“There’s a strong disposition in the European policy-maker for the status quo,” said Michael Emerson of the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels.
If Putin remains Russia’s leader after December, as now seems likely, he will hold an unprecedented degree of power in the post-Soviet period.
First, electoral reforms have made it almost impossible for opposition candidates to win seats in the Duma, or lower house of parliament.
The dominant United Russia party, the party most closely associated with Putin, was expected to gain at least half of the vote. But now that Putin has agreed to appear at the top of United Russia’s ticket, it is poised to sweep away all of the competition.
“He practically guaranteed United Russia a smashing victory” in the December elections, the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda commented Tuesday.
Putin’s popularity ratings have soared as high as 80 percent, and his appearance on the slate of United Russia is likely to give the party a lock on the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament.
What he will do with that power is another matter.
Despite Russia’s oil-fueled economic boom, the nation only recently approached the gross domestic product it enjoyed just prior to the Soviet collapse in 1991. It still faces the herculean task of rebuilding its industries, revitalizing its rural areas, improving education and health, and reversing its demographic decline.
Over the past year, the Kremlin has focused on reviving Soviet symbols: by planting a Russian flag at the north pole, restoring patrols by strategic aircraft and through belligerent rhetoric in international forums — all applauded by Russians, who felt humiliated in the wake of the Soviet collapse.
But in the next decade, Russia faces the challenges of globalization without having the advantages of strong property rights, the rule of law or, it seems, a robust democracy. The world will be watching what Vladimir Putin does next.

TITLE: Army Ready for Switch To 12 Months, Says Serdyukov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov told the State Duma on Wednesday that the armed forces were prepared for the switch from compulsory service terms of 18 months to 12 months next year.
“I think we are ready for this transition,” Serdyukov said, Interfax reported. The address was Serdyukov’s first before the Duma since President Vladimir Putin appointed the former furniture store manager turned taxman to head the Defense Ministry in February.
The ministry has only just completed the transition from a system in which conscripts served for 24 months to the current 18 months. The changes are part of ongoing reforms aimed at turning the armed forces into a more professional and better-armed body.
Serdyukov said the reduction in length of service would require improving training for specialists in the ranks. Currently, conscripts spend six months training to acquire a specialization.
One element of the reform would see some men of conscription age undergoing vocational training before being called up, said Viktor Zavarzin, chairman of the Duma’s Defense Committee.
Following the address, Serdyukov remained for a discussion which included a proposal from Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov to transfer the Navy’s headquarters from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Gryzlov also promised the defense minister that the Duma would pass legislation ensuring that enough apartments would be built to provide housing for all armed forces officers by 2012.

TITLE: Workers Find 34 Bodies In 19th Century House
AUTHOR: By Mike Eckel
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Workers rebuilding a 19th century Moscow house dug up the remains of nearly three dozen people, and investigators were trying to determine their identities, a city police official said Thursday.
Police also found a rusted pistol in the estate where the remains of an estimated 34 people were found, said Moscow city police spokesman Yevgeny Gildeyev. The property was owned by a famous tsarist-era noble family, the Sheremyetevs.
Some of the remains, which were found Wednesday under a basement of a house on the estate, had gunshot wounds to the skull and appeared to date back to the 1930s, and it was possible that more corpses would be found, he said.
The buildings are located in downtown Moscow, about midway between Red Square and Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB, where political prisoners were interrogated and executions carried out.
The Soviet Union in the 1930s experienced a wave of politically motivated killings and purges of the government and Communist Party orchestrated by Josef Stalin’s secret police. The killings reached their apex in 1937 during what came to be known as the Great Terror.
An estimated 1.7 million people were arrested in 1937-38 by the security services alone, and at least 818,000 of them were shot.
Tamara Chakravadze, an elderly Moscow resident, said upon hearing news reports of the discovery, she immediately went to the site since her own relatives were victims of Stalin.
She said her father told her that the estate used to be the site of a prison where people were held before being sent to labor and mining camps as far away, for example, as Kolyma, the Arctic region thousands of miles east of Moscow that was home to a huge network of Gulag camps.
“My grandfather was killed and my father served an 8-year prison term in Kolyma when I was just a baby,” she told AP Television News. “That is why for me these bones are sacred, and there is no forgiveness for those who have not repented even today.”

TITLE: Rights Groups Decry Putin Power Move
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Human rights are likely to suffer if President Vladimir Putin cements his grip on power by becoming prime minister next year, activists told reporters in Brussels on Wednesday.
If Putin takes the position, it would represent a shift back to a single-party Soviet system, the activists said at the news conference, commemorating the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya on Oct. 7 last year.
“With Putin’s announcement ... the presidential elections lost whatever meaning they could have possibly had,” said Tanya Lokshina, of the rights group Demos, referring to the March vote.
“The Russian Federation will not vote for a president, it will vote for an assistant to Mr. Putin who will remain the boss,” she said. “The negative tendencies that we have witnessed over the years of Putin’s rule are only going to be reinforced.”
Putin said at a United Russia conference Monday that he might become prime minister after Duma elections.  
(Reuters, SPT)

TITLE: Call for Navy HQ To Return to City
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The headquarters of the Russian navy could return to its historic home of St. Petersburg if an idea from the Speaker of the Russian State Duma, Boris Gryzlov, comes to fruition.
“St. Petersburg is the cradle of Russia’s navy glory, and today as the might of our navy is being revived, such a move would be symbolic and correct,” Gryzlov said during a meeting of Duma deputies with defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov, Interfax reported.
Gryzlov said the planned relocation would become an important part of “St. Petersburg: Naval Capital of Russia,” an initiative designed to boost the city’s seafaring profile. 
He suggested that the headquarters could be housed in the city’s historical Admiralty building where the Russian Imperial navy command was based in the 18th century.
Experts, however, have poured cold water on Gryzlov’s idea, RBC news said.
“The transfer will cost at least five billion dollars,” military expert Nikolai Baranets said. “That’s the cost of five submarines.”
Baranets said such a decision would disrupt the work of Russian navy officers, 80 percent of whom live and work in Moscow and who are unwilling to move to St. Petersburg.
Andrei Golovatyuk, a member of the Duma’s Defense Committee, also spurned the idea, saying the Russian navy had many other problems, RBC said.
“We need to raise people’s salary, give them apartments, modernize the equipment. If the move begins they will as usual forget about all these social needs,” Golovatyuk said.
“Besides, one should not forget that navy officers control Russia’s nuclear capacity, and they should not be far away from the Kremlin,” he said.
Gennady Ozerov, vice speaker of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, said the Admiralty building would need to be vacated and so the headquarters of Leningrad navy base would need to move to the city suburb of Kronshtadt.  However, in general Ozerov was positive about the idea, RBC said.
Meanwhile, veterans of the Russian navy were split over Gryzlov’s idea. 
Vasily Poroshin, vice president of the International Submariners Organization of CIS and Baltic countries, said the move “would be great but under one important condition.”
“The idea should be well-thought out, and big money should be allocated for developing the needed infrastructure,” Poroshin said, Interfax said.
Igor Kurdin, head of St. Petersburg Submariners’ Club, told The St. Petersburg Times on Thursday he was in two minds about the idea.
“On the one hand, St. Petersburg is indeed the navy capital of Russia and it would be prestigious to have the navy headquarters here. However, I think there would be too many complications,” Kurdin said.
He said it would be hard to move all the headquarters’ officers to St. Petersburg and give them apartments. At the same time, he said that “all important questions still get solved in Moscow, and a special train would be needed  to take navy officers back and forth between the two cities.”
Yury Alexandrov, president of the Northern Convoy, supported the idea.
“St. Petersburg was built to serve as the country’s navy capital, and everything connected to the sea should be here. It would restore historical justice,” Alexandrov said.
However, the naval historian Konstantin Shopotov was against the move. 
“Two moves are known to be equal to a fire,” he said, meaning that relocating headquarters to St. Petersburg would be counterproductive.

TITLE: U.S., Russia Join Forces For Space Missions
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian and U.S. space chiefs signed agreements Wednesday to cooperate on unmanned missions that would search for potential water deposits beneath the surface of the moon and Mars.
The agreements signed by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin and Russian Space Agency chief Anatoly Perminov deal with putting Russian instruments on board NASA probes that would be sent to the moon and Mars.
“These two projects demonstrate the commitment by our countries to continue to look for opportunities where it’s mutually beneficial to cooperate,” Griffin said. “When these opportunities happen it’s our intent to work together to bring them to fruition.”
The first Russian instrument, called LEND, will be mounted on an unmanned NASA probe called Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, which is to be launched in October 2008.

TITLE: Coca-Cola Boosts Local Output Capacity
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Coca-Cola HBC Eurasia launched the third production line at its St. Petersburg plant Wednesday. It will produce soft drinks, the press service for the Committee for Economic Development, Industrial Policy and Trade (CEDIPT) at City Hall said Wednesday in a statement.
“Investment into the project, including construction of the third production line and new warehouse and office areas accounted for about $28.2 million,” Sergei Fiveisky, deputy chairman of CEDIPT, was cited as saying.
“As a result of the increase in production, by 2010 the plant will offer over 300 new jobs for qualified specialists, increasing the total number of employees in the Northwest branch of the company to 1,800 people,” Fiveisky said.
With the new line in operation, the total production volume of the St. Petersburg plant will increase to 400 million liters a year.
“The Russian soft drinks market is one of the largest in the world and one of the most dynamic. The increased production capacity of the St. Petersburg plant will satisfy the growing demand for soft drinks in the Northwest region,” said Nicolaos Kalaitzidakis, general manager of Coca Cola HBC Eurasia for the Northwest region of Russia.

TITLE: Timber Firm Thrives Despite Poor Market
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Northwest Timber Company has invested $150 million into the modernization of its production facilities, and another $300 million is to be invested in the near future. Managers believe that by making the production process more efficient, they will compensate for the unfavorable market environment.
The modernization program was started in 2004 and is planned for completion in 12 years time. The Northwest Timber Company, which consists of Kamenogorskaya Offset Paper Plant in the Leningrad Oblast and Nemansky Pulp and Paper Plant in the Kaliningrad Oblast, has managed to normalize operations at enterprises which were close to bankruptcy.
“In Russia, timber companies tend to  produce products with low added value. Infrastructure is underdeveloped, which leads to large transportation expenses,” Irina Bitkova, chairwoman of the board of the Northwest Timber Company, said Wednesday at a press conference.
European consumers are switching to timber from southern countries that benefit from low production costs compared to Russia and offer cheaper products.
“We have to focus on more sophisticated methods of processing timber and produce paper with a higher added value,” Bitkova said.
Last year the company launched a new paper production line, investing $60 million into construction and equipment. At the end of this month a new gas-distribution station, which cost $2.5 million, and a new paper works, which cost around $8 million, will be launched at the Nemansky Pulp and Paper Plant. The new production line will produce 6,500 tons of paper a month in addition to the 2,000 tons that are currently produced at the plant.
Over the next two years, the Northwest Timber Company plans to build a new paper plant at its Nemansky plant, which will produce 120,000 tons of products, and to introduce a new production line at the Kamenogorskaya plant. The company will also invest in energy saving technologies and purifying systems.
Since the early 1990s, production of pulp and paper in Russia has decreased by 20 percent.
In the last six months, production has decreased by 2.4 percent, Bitkova said, while the price of timber has increased by 43 percent, the price of gas by 60 percent, and price of energy by 13 percent.
Denis Sokolov, executive director of the Northwest Confederation of Timber Enterprises, indicated that 86 percent of equipment in the Russian pulp and paper industry is depreciated and requires significant investment. He called for the approval of a special law supporting strategic investment projects in the industry.
Vladimir Yegorov, member of the board of the Northwest Timber Company and former governor of the Kaliningrad Oblast, indicated that tax exemptions as well as the support of regional authorities helped the company to improve its performance.

TITLE: Car Sales Prompt Expansion
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Inchcape Plc, a U.K. chain of global car dealerships, has bought Audi and Peugeot outlets in St. Petersburg for $43 million to tap surging auto purchases in the city.
Inchcape acquired a 75.1 percent stake in Orgtekhstroy, which sells Audi AG cars, and Concord, the largest Peugeot dealership in Europe, the London-based company said in a statement Thursday. It will also spend $26 million to relocate and expand two Toyota and Lexus dealers.
The U.K. company is expanding into countries like Russia amid declining demand in more mature markets. Russia’s car market is experiencing “rapid” growth, the company said, with Audi and Peugeot sales growing 69 percent and 58 percent in the first seven months.
Inchcape will relocate its Rustavelli Toyota operation in St. Petersburg onto new land adjacent to the existing site.

TITLE: New Gas Dispute Won’t Increase Price
AUTHOR: By Paul Dobson
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: A cut in natural-gas supplies by Gazprom to Ukraine wouldn’t raise European prices because Ukraine’s state oil company has sufficient stocks without tapping cross-country fuel shipments, Eclipse Energy Group AS said.
Gazprom, the supplier of a quarter of Europe’s gas, said Tuesday it may curtail exports to Ukraine because of a $1.3 billion debt. The Moscow-based company said Wednesday Ukraine would settle the debt by Nov. 1 to avert a cut.
“The storage volume in Ukraine is at a very high level,” said Viktor Balyberdin, a senior analyst at Stavanger, Norway-based Eclipse, which analyzes European and Russian gas markets.
“The crisis will be solved pretty quickly. It shouldn’t affect prices in the European market.”
Russia halted exports of gas to Ukraine in January 2006 during negotiations to secure a higher price for the fuel. The supply cut reduced deliveries in Poland, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Italy and France, triggering an increase in costs for the fuel. Gazprom said gas bound for western Europe was being siphoned off; Ukraine denied the charge.
Naftogaz Ukrayny, Ukraine’s state oil producer, had 11.2 billion cubic meters of gas in underground inventories at the end of August, compared with 4.2 billion at the same time last year, Balyberdin said, citing company data. He reckons that is enough for Naftogaz Ukrayny to survive for a month without gas imports, meaning transit flows through Ukraine would be able to continue uninterrupted.
Naftogaz is among gas-trading companies stockpiling supplies in Ukraine to avoid a shortfall in the heating season — the fourth and first quarters.
Natural-gas storage volumes in Ukraine are at a record high and the country remains “fully committed to its obligations to transit Russian gas to Europe,’’ its mission to the European Union said today in an e-mailed statement.
Neither Ukraine nor Gazprom wants its reputation as a reliable source of gas supplies to be tarnished, Balyberdin said. That makes a reduction in deliveries to western Europe unlikely.
“Ukraine’s trying to be as reliable as possible toward the European Union,’’ he said. “No one is interested in being an unreliable supplier or transport country.’’

TITLE: Investors Optimistic At Putin Staying On
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko and Miriam Elder
PUBLISHER: Staff Writers
TEXT: President Vladimir Putin’s clear signals that he intends to hold on to the reins of power may be calming investors’ nerves and sending stocks climbing, but that strategy might not bode well for the country in the long term, economists and analysts said Tuesday.
Putin agreed Monday to top United Russia’s federal party list for State Duma elections and indicated that he might become prime minister after he leaves office next year.
On Tuesday, the RTS index rose to a record high, jumping 3 percent to 2,108.57 points, as investors broadly praised the news as providing continuity to a country that witnessed huge political and economic fluctuations in the 1990s.
“In the short term, it will settle lots of nerves,” said a Western economist who has studied Russia for 15 years. 
But Putin’s hint that he may cling to power as prime minister could have fairly bad repercussions in the long run, said the economist, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on Russian politics. “Everything hangs on this one man,” he said.
“You can’t have a free economy and a tightly controlled state,” said a Western banker, who asked not to be identified, citing the sensitivity of the matter. 
“Corruption is the oil that keeps things going,” he said.
Sergei Ulatov, an economist with the World Bank, said the latest announcements could easily turn conservative economists from countries such as Japan and Germany off Russia. “What is happening with Putin is not entirely good” because it further complicates decision making for investors who are looking to invest into Russia for 10 or more years, Ulatov said.
Russia-watchers are putting a positive spin on recent events, arguing that Putin would at least ensure continuity, but those considering investing in the country increasingly need assistance in explaining where the country is heading. 
“Investors are meeting me more often,” Ulatov said.
Ulatov said a further concentration of power and increased state control over the economy were real concerns around the country.
“Unfortunately, the concentration of power in one person’s hands in Russia tends to crowd out everything else,” he said. Putin has overseen the consolidation of industry into state-run corporations, from arms sales to aviation to nanotechnology.
“All functions, both political and financial, have been gradually taken from state institutions [and given to] private state companies, which are controlled by Putin’s buddies,” said Garry Kasparov, who on Sunday was selected as the presidential candidate of opposition group The Other Russia.
Kasparov criticized Western bankers for failing to register the long-term effects of Putin’s potential transition from president to prime minister.
“In the short term, the benefits can be significant, but in the long term the country is going to be destroyed,” Kasparov said. “Western bankers are looking for a profit, we’re looking [out] for the country’s future.”
Western analysts said Putin’s relations with his successor could become very complicated as a new president consolidated his position.
The prime minister’s role is currently limited and many commentators expect Putin to amend the Constitution to make the post more powerful, as a means of keeping control. The ultimate power is vested in the office of the president, who is also the commander in chief.
With his popularity ratings hovering above 75 percent, Putin would likely be able to push through the constitutional changes easily, analysts said.
For now, investors are calm.
“That means stability and relative certainty. Everybody has a more or less clear idea of what scenarios will be playing out,” said Alexander Ivlev, a partner at Ernst & Young who coordinates the Foreign Investment Advisory Council, a group that represents foreign investors in the country. 
“Business learned how to operate even during more radical changes than we see now,” he added.
“[Putin’s] administration has been very good for foreign business and foreign investment. It has provided stability and a transition to the market economy,” said Andrew Somers, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia.
Foreign investment has skyrocketed since Putin acceded to the presidency Dec. 31, 1999.

TITLE: Usmanov Eyes Larger Stake
AUTHOR: By Catrina Stewart
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Alisher Usmanov, the owner of a 23 percent stake in Arsenal football club, insisted Tuesday he would not make a takeover bid for the English Premier League team in the near future but said it remained his long-term ambition to own the club. 
“We want a large stake ... up to 25 percent,” said Usmanov, speaking just days after he and his partner in investment firm Red and White Holdings, Farhad Moshiri, assured the Arsenal board that they would not launch a hostile takeover for the club. 
In a briefing to reporters peppered with jokes at Metalloinvest’s plush offices in central Moscow, Usmanov and Moshiri said they would look at the possibility of increasing their stake in the future but were unable to do so at present. 
“This is business. Something you can’t do today, you can do tomorrow,” Usmanov said. 
Since August, Red and White Holdings has paid out $245 million to accumulate a 23 percent stake in Arsenal, making the company the largest shareholder after Danny Fiszman, who has 24 percent. 
Noting that the other major shareholders have declared their intentions not to sell, Usmanov said, “I do not accept any limits other than those the other Arsenal shareholders have set.” 
“We have nothing but great respect for the rest of the shareholders, and we appreciate their nervousness, although the nature of their nervousness was sometimes immoderate,” he said.
Using the opportunity to rebut what he termed libelous slurs in the Western media regarding his past, Usmanov said he was tired of defending his name. 
“I’ve been accused of being a gangster and a racketeer, but I tell you my parents couldn’t have brought up such a person,” he said. “It’s [beneath] my dignity to respond to all the allegations.”
Usmanov’s career has come under increasing scrutiny in the Western media since his foray into Arsenal. 
Usmanov said he would try to persuade David Dein, the former vice chairman of Arsenal who sold Red and White his 14.6 percent stake in August, to moderate his stance toward the current board.
“From our side, we will try to convince Dein to be less hostile to the board,” Usmanov said. “We don’t want to be held hostage to any hostilities that may exist between him and the [directors].”

TITLE: Remaking History in a Kiev Museum
AUTHOR: By Dmitry Shlapentokh
TEXT: Constructing a new national identity often requires a new vision of the past. In Ukraine, this phenomenon can be seen in several of Kiev’s museums.
Exhibits at the Museum of the Army of Ukraine show the Ukrainians as European people who enjoyed monolithic unity while busily liberating themselves from the “Asiatic” Russians.
Ukrainian history has emerged differently in the other major national museum, the Museum of Ukrainian History. Russia is still seen as a major problem, but the flavor of the museum is distinctly different. Russians often disappear from sight, and Ukraine’s conflicts with everybody else are also downplayed. In fact, Ukrainians are presented as self-sustained, peaceful people who preserve their distinct lifestyles despite being incorporated into a foreign empire. It seems this image of Ukraine’s past — and implicitly, its present — is what Ukrainian authorities have tried to develop and inculcate.
The arrangement of the displays in the Museum of Ukrainian History was markedly different from what I saw in my youth. There weren’t many changes in the hall dedicated to the Stone and Bronze Ages, but later periods had gaping omissions. Events that were prominent in Soviet days disappeared or were marginalized. There was practically nothing about the Mongols, presumably because featuring the Mongol invasion and Mongol yoke would require elaborating on Russia’s positive role in fighting the invaders.
The Treaty of Pereyaslav in 1654 — the lynchpin of Ukrainian history that ultimately led to Ukraine’s incorporation into Russia — was reduced to a marginal episode. The famous painting depicting this event that had hung prominently in the museum in Soviet times was taken away. A small note informed visitors that there was no Ukrainian-Russian unification as such, but rather a Russian “protectorate” in which Ukraine preserved independence — or some sort of autonomy that was close to independence.
The reign of Peter the Great and his fight with the Swedes on Ukrainian territory also posed a big dilemma for the exhibition organizers. Celebrating Peter’s victories was out of the question. One option for the museum was to stress the glory of Ivan Mazepa, the Ukrainian noble who took the Swedish side in the battle and tried to save his people from the rule of the brutal Asiatics. The other option was to ignore the event entirely, which is precisely what the organizers did. As a result, Peter the Great and the Battle of Poltava disappeared from the exhibit.
In addition, the big hall dedicated to the War of 1812 with Napoleon, an epic event in European history, also disappeared. Information about the war was reduced to a picture of Russian general Mikhail Kutuzov and a few artifacts.
When those who organized the museum moved to the 20th century, they faced another problem — how to reconcile revolutionary violence with the theory of national unity, the major premise of the political philosophy of Ukraine’s elite. In fact, there was no information whatsoever about the revolutionary movement. The 1905 Revolution was ignored even though Ukraine was one of the epicenters of the revolution, especially in cities like Odessa and Sevastopol. The February and October Revolutions of 1917 also disappeared. A typical visitor to the museum might leave with the impression that the conflict was not between the Whites and Reds at all but between an independent, nationalistic Ukraine and the Russian state.
World War II was also marginalized, and nothing was displayed about postwar Soviet history, implying that the war helped strengthen Ukraine’s incorporation into a foreign empire — that is, the Soviet Union.
The 2004 Orange Revolution, however, was prominently displayed, suggesting that it brought Ukraine closer to Europe — its historical destiny. Incorporation into the European family implied the sacred notion of “multiculturalism” and ethnic and religious tolerance.
The exhibit pointed out that Ukraine is populated not just by Ukrainians but also by Tatars and Jews, and all nationalities live in apparent harmony. There was no information about the Holocaust, possibly because it would require elaboration on the unpleasant role many Ukrainians played in the “final solution of the Jewish question.”
The vision of history as science was also quite different from what I encountered in other museums. The Ukrainian officials all claimed that they had presented history accurately, and they angrily rejected any notion that history was arranged to suit current political needs. The representatives of the Museum of Ukrainian History were much more open in their views of history as the servant of political necessity. I talked with an elderly woman who sat in the hall and watched over the visitors, sharing my amazement at how displays of Ukrainian history had changed radically since my last visit, more than 30 years ago. The woman took note of my ironical smile and responded that I had a wrong view of history. In my view, history is fixed. This is not the case, she said, because history should follow the lead of current politics. I told her that what she stated fit the postmodernist vision, which says that there is no objective truth but just a construction of history, and that there are only politically correct or politically incorrect views. She responded that she had never heard of postmodernism or political correctness, but she fully supported the idea nonetheless.
The presentation of Ukrainian history in the Museum of Ukrainian History seems to be the image that the Ukrainian elite is trying to spread. It involves emphasizing Ukraine as an independent political force and ignoring or minimizing all events where Russia played a prominent and positive role.
I found the same version of history in the Museum of National Art. At one exhibition dealing with modern art, the curator explained that after 1991, the paintings dealing with the Great Patriotic War — which were used by Moscow during the Soviet period to emphasize the unity of Ukrainians and Russians — had been removed. Instead, there was a big painting that displayed the entry into Kiev of Bogdan Khmelnytsky, one of Ukraine’s greatest national heroes.
After my visit of Kiev’s museums, I became even more convinced of the validity of the quote attributed to Gregory Bateson, the British anthropologist, social scientist and linguist: “History is as unpredictable as the future.”

Dmitry Shlapentokh is a professor of history at Indiana University South Bend.

TITLE: Keeping Zubkov in Line
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: President Vladimir Putin agreed to run as the top candidate on United Russia’s ticket and did not rule out serving as prime minister after the presidential election in March.
Putin was probably confident that United Russia would remain the “party of power” that would willingly lick the boots of the next president — whoever that turned out to be. Putin’s hidden message was: “I am free to manipulate the party as I see fit and certainly not the other way around.”
The Kremlin is not worried about the State Duma election campaign or about how to form a government after those elections. It is worried about just one thing — who will become the next president in 2008.
The problem is simple: How can Putin hold onto authority without degenerating into an autocrat like Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko? Or, how can Putin “lease out” the presidency in such a way that the temporary owner would return the president’s chair upon Putin’s first request?
It appears that Putin has opted for the approach suggested by Vladislav Surkov, a Kremlin deputy chief of staff. In this scenario, Viktor Zubkov is appointed prime minister and then becomes president to reserve this post for Putin. Then Putin slides down a notch to prime minister.
The only problem with this is that Putin has diminished the role of the prime minister. After all, he changed prime ministers at the snap of his fingers by simply rubbing out the “Frad” in Fradkov and writing in “Zub” for Zubkov. The post of prime minister is clearly not the place for someone with Putin’s ambitions.
According to the scenario, Zubkov would at some point abandon the post of president for “health reasons,” and Putin would step in to execute his duties until the next presidential election.
Another, more complicated, possibility is that President-elect Zubkov would suggest changing the Constitution to extend the presidential term to seven years and then call for new elections.
Will either of these scenarios play out? It is difficult to say.
Putin has constructed his vertical power structure to ensure that enormous power is concentrated in one man — the president. Whoever happens to sit in that chair will automatically undergo a transformation, not unlike a Hobbit who finds the Great Ring of Power. Once he puts the ring on his finger, he will never want to let it go.
Putin is not a charasmatic dictator or a bloody tyrant. His friends trick him and use him for their own needs. The only thing Putin has is his Great Ring of Power. Once it falls into someone else’s hands, however, there is nothing to stop the next president from doing exactly what Anna Ivanovna did when she ruled the Russian Empire from 1730 to 1740: She simply tore up the agreed-upon conditions that would have made her a figurehead in the government and proceeded instead to rule as an autocrat. Putin’s future job as prime minister and his decision to run on the United Russia ticket look very much like an attempt to impose similar “conditions” on the next president.
The other requirement is that the successor must be compliant and he must lack ambition. Twice during the last two years, Putin was about to remove Zubkov from his job as head of the Federal Financial Monitoring Service and send him into “retirement” in the Federation Council. In retrospect, it seems those were “trial runs” to see how easily Zubkov could come to terms with being out of power. As it turned out, he was quite willing to step down without any fuss.
In the remaining months before the presidential election, Putin will watch to see whether being a potential presidential successor makes Zubkov’s head spin and whether his political rise whets his appetite for more power — more than it would if Sergei Ivanov were in this spot.
Zubkov has passed the first test, but will he pass the next one?

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

TITLE: A master’s hands
AUTHOR: By Jessica Bachman
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: One of St. Petersburg’s most beloved sculptors from the second half of the 20th century, Mikhail Konstantinovich Anikushin, who died aged 80 in 1997, is being honored this month at the Russian Academy of Arts Museum. 
A rich exhibit dedicated to his life and work can be seen until Oct. 24 at the museum at 17 Universitetskaya Naberezhnaya on Wednesdays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The show opened on Tuesday, in honor of what would have been Anikushin’s 90th birthday.
Displays include working models and studies of some of his most famous St. Petersburg masterpieces — the statue of Alexander Pushkin (1957) on Arts Square and the sculptural portions of the monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad 1941-1945 on Ploshchad Pobedy — as well as less  known portraits of distinguished scientists, artists, composers and writers, family members and friends. 
Curator Yelena Litovchenka said that despite the scope of the new show, it was not difficult to mount.
“It didn’t take long for us to put the exhibit together because we knew where everything was,” Litovchenka said. “The Russian Museum was happy to lend us their two sculptures, the portrait he did of his mother and the Egyptian portrait. The State Museum of City Sculpture gave us six pieces and the others were from his family’s collection.” 
On the morning of the official opening day on Tuesday, a solemn crowd of about 30 people — many carrying red roses and carnations —gathered outside of the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture’s master-sculptor’s studio, where Anikushin served as director.
Revealing a white marble memorial plaque to Anikushin, mounted to the left of the studio’s front door, the rector of the Repin Institute, Albert Charkin, called out to the crowd, “three cheers for Mikhail Konstaninovich Anikushin.”
Three energetic “hoorahs” dissipated in the cold morning air. 
Present at the memorial plaque dedication were Anikushin’s friends, students, colleagues and family members. Grigory Yastrebenetsky, a long time friend and colleague of Anikushin’s, pointed out esteemed members of the Russian Academy of Arts in the crowd.
Yastrebenetsky said these members of the Academy, to which Anikushin was elected to in 1962, “came to St. Petersburg from Moscow for this opening. They came to pay their respects to this great artist.” 
Anikushin and Yastrebenetsky met in 1946, when Anikushin was in his last year of studies and Yastrebenetsky, in his first.
“We lived on the same floor and our studios were right next to each other,” said Yastrebenetsky, who now directs the sculpture department’s master-sculptor studio. 
 “He was a great friend. And this [plaque] is a sign of our remembrance. We remember him as a wonderful sculptor, a wonderful teacher and as one who always helped, no matter what the circumstances.”
Anikushin began teaching at the institute in 1947 and became a professor in 1960.  He was the chairman of the Leningrad Department of the Union of Artists from 1962 to 1972 and from 1986 to 1990. Yastrebenetsky served as vice chairman. 
Yastrebenetsky was only one of many of Anikushin’s former students and colleagues in attendance who took turns remembering him Tuesday morning.  
Svetlana Alexandrovna, an archivist at the academy library, specifically addressed the young artists at the memorial service. 
“One day I overheard Mikhail Konstantinovich [Anikushin] talking to his students,” she said. 
“They were getting ready to present and defend their senior theses. He asked them, ‘Why don’t you believe in yourselves? Well? What’s the problem? Look, every morning when I get out of bed I go up to the mirror. I rub my head and say to myself: Misha, you are smart, Misha you are talented.’”
“This is how he related to himself and to his work,” Alexandrovna said. “And I hope others, especially these young artists, will begin to follow his example and relate to themselves and their work like he did.”
The sculptures on display at the exhibition certainly show the fruit of Anikushin’s daily self-encouragement ritual.
The classic Pushkin archetype greets you at the center of the exhibit hall.
Deriving its form from the collective Russian mind, this model of Anikushin’s Arts Square monument to Pushkin, which won the Lenin Prize in 1958, stands out in poetic glory. Here Pushkin is none other than the triumphant, charming and expressive master of the modern Russian literary language
“Everyone forgets that it was done in the 20th century. It looks completely natural outside the Russian Museum,” remarked Litovchenka, the exhibition’s curator. 
But in other monumental forms and smaller portrait sculptures Anikushin captures the darker, gloomier sides of Russia’s most revered poet.
A tragic, fatal Pushkin appears in the 1982 working model of Anikushin’s monument to Pushkin at Chyornaya Rechka metro station.
A bronze portrait sculpture from 1964 reveals a mournful Pushkin. His head is tilted low to one side and thick romantic whips of hair nearly cover his downcast eyes. 
“But you see Pushkin, [Anikushin] understood” said Litovchenka, “Chekhov, on the other hand, forever remained a mystery to him.” 
Numerous working models and plaster castings of monuments to author Anton Chekhov are at the exhibition. Because it never became a monument, on of the most notable and interesting of Anikushin’s Chekhovs is his 1961 sculpture study “Chekhov and Levitan” of the writer and 19th Century landscape painter and contemporary Isaac Levitan.
Portrait sculptures of Anikushin’s mother and father are also on display. 
“You see his mother,” said Litovchenka, pointing to a 1948 portrait. “She looks like an old lady. She had lots of children and the times weren’t easy. She is pretty here, but you can see how she quickly she aged.”
Models of the many graveside monuments he sculpted, including that for the actor Nikolai Cherkasov dating from 1974 in the Cemetery of Masters at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in St. Petersburg, constitute a good portion of the show.  
But according to Litovchenka, one of the exhibit’s most exciting pieces is the model of his Park Pobedy sculpture portrait of the Bolshoi and Mariinksky Theaters’ world-famous prima ballerina, Galina Ulanova.
“When [Anikushin] first came to Leningrad to study, everyone was going to see her dance at the Mariinsky. He often went with his friends from the institute. He admired her deeply,” she said. 
In 1980 Ulanova was named a Hero of Socialist Labor for the second time — the first time was in 1974 — and following the traditions of this distinction, the state commissioned a sculpture. 
When Anikushin received the commission, he considered it “the highest honor.”
And although the sculpture had to be a bust, Anikushin was determined to find a way to work in Ulanova’s hands, which he considered the most beautiful and expressive part of her dance, said Litovchenka.
During a sitting with the sculptor, a kitten happened to crawl up Ulanova’s skirt and onto her chest where she delicately held it in place. Her fingers were slightly spread apart, one hand  was just under the collar bone, the other, in the center of her chest.
Anikushin found the pose he was looking for. 

“Mikhail Anikushin” is showing at the Academy of Arts Museum, 17 Universnetskaya Nab. Tel. 323-6496, 323-3578, through Oct. 24.

TITLE: Word’s Worth
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: I have been told that there is one phrase that makes all economists want to scream. “I’m not an economist, but...” After that “but,” the noneconomist goes on to spout total economic nonsense with the sublime confidence that only comes from total ignorance.
In Russian, this kind of person is a <i>ïðîôàí</i> (an ignoramus). In English, economists might consider his utterances “profane,” but they are more likely to use profanity to describe him.
So how did two words, profane and <i>ïðîôàí</i>, with the same Latin root, diverge in meaning? Both Russian and English etymological dictionaries tell you that the words come from the Latin pro- (before) and fanum (temple), and they meant people standing in front of the temple — the uninitiated. 
This meaning still exists in English, but the word “profane” is more commonly used to mean something or someone contemptuous of what goes on in the temple, and “profanity” is most commonly used to mean “bad words” (these were once words that used the Lord’s name in vain). Russian stuck with the notion of “the uninitiated,” and now the word is used to describe anyone who knows nothing about a particular field. <i>Îíà ñîáèðàåòñÿ êóïèòü íîâóþ ìàøèíó è ïîèíòåðåñîâàëàñü ìîèì ìíåíèåì, íî ÿ â ýòîì äåëå ïîëíûé ïðîôàí.</i> (She wants to buy a new car and asked my opinion. But I don’t know the first thing about cars.)
<i>Íåâåæåñòâî</i> is ignorance of any sort, although it often seems to mean what I call Ignorance-with-a-capital-I: a state of unenlightenment that can be cured only by religion or education. <i>Èç-çà ñâîåãî íåâåæåñòâà, ëþäè ñòàâÿò ìàòåðèàëüíûå èíòåðåñû âûøå äóõîâíûõ.</i> (In their ignorance people value their material needs more than spiritual ones.) 
But <i>íåâåæåñòâî<i> can be down-to-earth, too: <i>Ïî ñâîåìó íåâåæåñòâó, âëàäåëåö ãàëåðåè íå ïðèäàë ýòîìó ïîëîòíó íèêàêîãî çíà÷åíèÿ, à ïîòîì âûÿñíèëîñü, ÷òî êàðòèíà ïðèíàäëåæèò êèñòè Ðåìáðàíäòà.</i> (In his ignorance, the gallery owner overlooked the canvas, but later it turned out that the painting was done by Rembrandt.)
In the case of the incompetent gallery owner, you might sneer: <i>Äèëåòàíò!</i> (Dilettante!) <i>Äèëåòàíò</i> and <i>äèëåòàíòèçì</i> (dilettantism) are good words to bandy about when there is a clear lack of professionalism.
When someone is not brilliant, but not totally stupid, you can say: <i>çâåçä ñ íåáà íå õâàòàåò</i> (literally, they don’t have all the stars from the heavens.) <i>Îí íåïëîõîé ó÷åíèê, íî çâåçä ñ íåáà íå õâàòàåò.</i> (He’s not a bad student, but not the sharpest pencil in the box.)
If you’ve abandoned politesse, you can resort to simple insults like ãëóïåö (dolt) or äóðàê (idiot). You might add the word <i>êðóãëûé</i> (literally, “round”) as an intensifier: <i>êðóãëûé äóðàê</i> is a total idiot.

Sergey Chernov is away.

TITLE: Art for sale
AUTHOR: By Katya Kazakina
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: Gagosian Gallery, the art world’s leader in exhibition space, is heading to Moscow to woo wealthy Russians with some 40 artworks by Willem de Kooning, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and contemporary artists from its blue-chip stable.
The gallery’s 10-day exhibition, “Insight?’’ will open to the public on Oct. 19 (after a private viewing on Oct. 18). It will run at Barvikha Luxury Village, a high-end shopping mall outside Moscow where Lamborghinis and Ferraris are sold alongside Prada bags and Tiffany baubles.
“We are going to Russia because there is a growing group of very serious collectors who are buying contemporary art,’’ Victoria Gelfand, the Gagosian director who organized the show, said in an e-mail. “It benefits the artists we represent to expose them to this market. Not to do so would be very provincial and not good business.’’
One of the wealthiest Moscow suburbs, Barvikha was once home to Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin. Now its streets are dotted with mansions of the country’s mega-rich who will have a chance to pick through paintings, drawings, sculpture, photographs and limited-edition furniture by 30 artists.
Treating art as a luxury commodity is not new for Gagosian.
Last month, the dealer had his Chelsea gallery transformed into a runway fashion show for a Levi Strauss & Co. collection co- designed by Damien Hirst.
In Russia, Hirst is represented by a ubiquitous “dot’’painting, according to the gallery’s web site. Sculptor Richard Serra, whose monumental retrospective just ended at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, has a drawing. There’s a laminate-looking chair by designer Marc Newson. Many works by the younger artists were created in 2007.
Russia, now in its ninth year of economic growth, is the world’s second-biggest oil exporter. The number of Russian billionaires jumped to 53 in 2007 from seven in 2002, according to Forbes magazine, which estimated the group’s collective worth at $282 billion.
Acquiring the works by contemporary artists is a recent phenomenon in Russia, where collectors have focused mostly on Russian art and decorative objects.
“Russians have a conservative taste,’’ said Vladimir Ovcharenko, the owner of Moscow’s Regina gallery, who’s been stocking up on works by Jack Pierson, Tracy Emin and Barbara Kruger. “Everyone wants something cozy. People like figurative painting, landscapes and still-life.’’
Those who collect international contemporary art are “typically under 40, bankers and lawyers, who speak two or three languages,’’ said Gary Tatintsian, whose gallery in Moscow is a leading venue for international contemporary art. It showed artists such as Tal R and Peter Halley and will open a Vik Muniz exhibition on Nov. 1. “They are very goal-oriented, ambitious and competitive. They bring this competitive rush to their businesses and now also to art collecting.’’

TITLE: Lowlifes in London
AUTHOR: By Roland Elliott Brown
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: London has long been thought of as a magnet for malign foreign influences. In 1888, some Londoners maintained that Jack the Ripper wasn’t an Englishman, but in fact a Chinese opium fiend or one of the American Indians performing in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Modern-day villains from the East, more real and more vicious, menace London in David Cronenberg’s new film “Eastern Promises.” 
The movie won the audience prize for best film at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival and has been warmly received by critics. 
“Eastern Promises” begins with weary Russian midwife Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts), a woman grieving for her father, a relationship and a miscarried baby. She finds her own misfortunes mirrored more severely by those of Tatyana, a 14-year-old girl from Novokuznetsk who comes into her care at a London hospital and dies while giving birth to a daughter. The girl leaves behind a diary of the cruelties she has suffered. Feeling herself “buried under the soil of Russia” after her father died, she fled Siberia for London, and fell victim to brutal Russian criminals who raped her, coerced her into prostitution, and forcibly addicted her to heroin.
Hoping to find the baby’s relatives, Anna becomes entangled with members of a Russian criminal gang who run a London restaurant called the Trans-Siberian. Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), the restaurant’s owner, appears to be kind and helpful but is suspiciously eager to get his hands on the diary. Semyon’s son, Kirill (Vincent Cassel), is vulgar and mean, entirely without his father’s charms. Semyon’s enigmatic limo driver, Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), is a picture of exotic menace and a human tapestry of Russian prison tattoos.
Semyon and his circle, we learn, are sex traffickers, and members of the vory v zakone, or criminals in law. This Russian criminal group became established in Stalin-era prisons and had to compete for influence against a new generation of Russian mafia following the collapse of the Soviet Union — hence, perhaps, the group’s presence in London. According to the “law” by which they live, a member’s status is encoded in elaborate designs on his skin.
Nikolai and his tattoos are seemingly meant to embody Westerners’ worst fears about Russia, and also the country’s fabled mysteriousness. He is presented from the outset as the ultimate hard case — he cuts the fingers off a corpse before dumping it into the River Thames, and puts out a cigar with his tongue. 
None of the Russians in “Eastern Promises” is portrayed by a Russian actor, with an American, a Frenchman and a German in the lead roles. Although they all manage to speak Russian fairly competently, if sporadically, the sum of their efforts is a composite Russianness that will convince English-speaking audiences, but which risks causing real Russians to laugh in the aisles.
The exception is Viggo Mortensen, who, he has said, traveled alone through the Ural Mountains before filming began. He immersed himself in Russian music and television and decorated his trailer on the film set with icons. Mortensen also gives Nikolai a convincingly Russian, dark sense of humor.

TITLE: A tyrant’s softer side
AUTHOR: By Alastair Gee
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Genghis Khan, according to one popular view, was a scourge who pillaged and raped his way to creating the second-biggest empire the world has ever seen. But in Sergei Bodrov Sr.’s new film, “Mongol. Part One,” which was released last week, he is benevolent and as calm as a Zen monk. He gambols in fields with his wife. He’s a doting dad.
“In the West, he has a reputation as a tyrant,” the respected Russian director said Wednesday from Astana, Kazakhstan, where the film just opened. “In the East, in Asia, he’s a hero, and sometimes a god.”
Genghis Khan was born in 1162 in central Mongolia and by his death in 1227 had forged a Central Asian empire that stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Caspian Sea. His successors extended it as far as present-day Bulgaria and Ukraine, though it began to disintegrate in the 13th century. It was the largest contiguous empire in history, and only the British Empire covered more land.
With a budget of approximately $20 million, “Mongol” is a historical epic along the lines of “Spartacus” or “Braveheart.” The film was edited by Hollywood’s Zach Staenberg, who previously won an Oscar for his work on “The Matrix.” Bodrov’s drama aims to deconstruct the notion of Genghis Khan as a bloodthirsty murderer, and focuses on his early years of poverty and slavery instead of his later transcontinental conquests. An all-consuming love affair between Genghis Khan and his first wife, Borte, also features heavily. “Genghis Khan is not a popular man in Russia; his name is not well loved,” Bodrov said. “I’m telling a story and saying: ‘Look how it happened. Don’t believe what’s written in the old school textbooks. He abolished torture — not so many people know about that,” the director added. “And Mongolians used to keep slaves — he said no to that.”
Bodrov began directing in the 1970s and won an Oscar nomination for the 1996 film “Prisoner of the Mountains,” based on a short story set in the Caucasus by Leo Tolstoy. “Nomad,” Bodrov’s 2006 drama set in 18th-century Kazakhstan, had a $40 million budget and was the most expensive Kazakh film ever made, although it fared poorly with critics.
“Mongol” was shot over two years in farflung locations in Mongolia, northern China and Kazakhstan. The film is in Mongolian, which the actors playing Genghis Khan and his best friend, Japan’s Tadanobu Asano and Sun Hong-Lei from China, had to learn. Forty interpreters traveled with the film crew, translating between Chinese, Mongolian, Kazakh, Korean, Japanese, Uighur, Russian and English.
Bodrov said he didn’t think twice when choosing a non-Mongolian for the lead role. “I was looking for the best actor. It didn’t matter to me whether he was Mongolian. He had to be Asian, and he had to be the best.”

TITLE: Space odyssey
AUTHOR: By Asif Siddiqi
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: It is hard to imagine that a metal ball about the size of a basketball could throw the United States into panic. But 50 years ago, on Oct. 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite into orbit, Americans went into collective shock. To them, the Soviet Union embodied a nation of collective farms, drab cities and household appliances that rarely worked. Sputnik’s success completely altered this view, as the Soviets took the first baby steps into the final frontier of outer space. Beyond its political and scientific importance, the success of Sputnik also underscored the vulnerability of the United States: After all, if the Soviets could launch a satellite that flew around the world, they could also deliver an atomic bomb to the enemy.
Matthew Brzezinski provides an absorbing account of these “hidden rivalries that ignited the space age” in “Red Moon Rising,” an expansive work full of colorful characters worthy of a great Cold War novel. Although Brzezinski, a former Moscow correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, often glosses over the messy complexities of history, he displays a particular talent for capturing the human essence of this epic battle — the small detail of a scene, the odd biographical factoid, the cultural fashions of the day that distinguish his book from the many generic works on the early history of the space program.
The central personality in Brzezinski’s narrative is the famous Chief Designer of the Soviet space program, Sergei Korolyov. A childhood aviation enthusiast who later in life was attracted to space travel, Korolyov started his career in the 1930s as a rocket engineer before being sent to the gulag on trumped-up charges. Six years in the camps left him deeply scarred, but he never fully lost his faith in Josef Stalin. After the war, Korolyov rose rapidly in the missile program and gained a reputation as a hardheaded manager. His gruff personality, stubbornness and managerial genius were indispensable in convincing uninterested Communist Party and military leaders to commit resources to a satellite project. Brzezinski gives a fascinating account of Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to Korolyov’s design bureau in 1956, during which the Chief Designer extracted a verbal commitment from the Soviet leader to back the launching of a satellite. Khrushchev and his fellow Politburo members were more bewildered than bedazzled when Korolyov showed them a full-scale model of the R-7, the first Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM.
To Soviet leaders, developing an ICBM was a matter of life and death. The Soviet Union was literally surrounded by U.S. military bases, where squadrons of bombers waited for orders to deliver their deadly nuclear weapons to the Soviet landmass. By the middle of the 1950s, the U.S. nuclear arsenal was five times bigger than the Soviet one. Desperate to counter this juggernaut, Soviet industrial leaders invested enormous resources in developing nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles for sending them across oceans. But Korolyov and his colleagues knew that an ICBM could also lob a small object into orbit around the Earth. It was this marriage of military imperative and utopian dreaming that Korolyov exploited. The Soviet military enthusiastically supported the ICBM project, while Korolyov surreptitiously made plans to use it for a goal whose importance few understood. As Brzezinski shows, the road to launching Sputnik was littered with wrong turns, serendipitous events and brushes with failure. Korolyov came out ahead by barely a hair’s breadth. 
In the United States, there were many with similar ambitions, including the handsome and erudite German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, widely considered to be Korolyov’s Western doppelganger. To his credit, Brzezinski foregoes that well-trod ground and instead touts Major General John Bruce Medaris, the commander of the Army’s ballistic rocket efforts and von Braun’s superior, as a more worthy parallel to Korolyov. Brzezinski convincingly argues that “it was really Medaris’ iron will and stubborn refusal to yield to bureaucratic setbacks” that eventually facilitated an American foothold in space.
U.S. efforts to reach the high frontier were bogged down by fierce inter-service rivalry, major missteps, ill-advised decisions and just plain bad luck. From 1955, Medaris, a veteran of two world wars, consistently advanced von Braun’s idea of using a Redstone long-range rocket to lob a U.S. satellite into space. These entreaties fell on deaf ears, as senior Defense Department officials were interested in neither ICBMs nor satellites. Instead, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration funded a parallel civilian project known as Vanguard. In the aftershock of Sputnik, when Vanguard was launched, it exploded in full view of a television audience of millions. With newspaper headlines screaming “Flopnik!,” Medaris finally extracted permission to go ahead with von Braun’s project. Less than two months later, in January 1958, Medaris and von Braun finally had a satellite, Explorer-1, in orbit.
Brzezinski devotes much attention to domestic crises in the Soviet Union and United States, underscoring that it was thanks to these distractions that Korolyov and Medaris were able to push their own agenda. This overarching argument would have been more convincing had Brzezinski not simplified some of the history. His account of the prelude to Sputnik rests on the assumption that the U.S. military and the Eisenhower Administration were uninterested in ICBMs and satellites until it was too late. Yet, as many historians have shown, the United States had a crash program from about 1954 to develop an ICBM known as Atlas, a rocket Brzezinski hardly mentions; many officials also recognized the need to launch satellites. The U.S. failure to preempt the Soviets had less to do with lack of foresight than with a complex set of factors, including the belief that work on a satellite might distract from the more important job of creating new generations of effective nuclear-tipped missiles. Most surprisingly, Brzezinski devotes only cursory attention to the legal gymnastics behind the selection in 1955 of Vanguard as the first U.S. satellite project, or to the CIA and Air Force’s interest in developing satellites that could spy on the Soviet Union. These critical factors warrant more detail since they effectively ensured that the United States would take second place in the race to space.
There are other simplifications or errors in Brzezinski’s book, some more serious than others. Documents declassified from Russian archives last year show that when Eisenhower’s press secretary announced on July 29, 1955, that the Americans would soon launch a satellite into space, the Politburo held a meeting to discuss the question just 10 days later. To Korolyov’s delight, Khrushchev approved the idea. This meeting, and not the later visit by Khrushchev to Korolyov that Brzezinski describes, was the turning point in Korolyov’s dreams of space. Like many areas of Soviet history, the history of Sputnik continues to evolve. But if Brzezinski falls short in telling the whole story, he does know how to tell a good one. Easy to read and hard to put down, his book provides a quick entry point into one of the most important episodes of the Cold War.

Asif Siddiqi is an assistant professor of history at Fordham University and the author of a forthcoming book on the social and cultural roots of Russian space exploration.

TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: TNT’s new comedy spoof series, “Show News,” has the slogan, “For people who are sick of watching the news.” It’s a takeoff of a news broadcast with an anchor, reporters and even a weather girl, although the jokes so far don’t touch a hair on the head of Russia’s most popular anchor, Channel One’s Yekaterina Andreyeva.
In the first show on Sunday, the presenter, Sergei Netiyevsky, boasted that his team is “up to the elbows in news” and that “we are the only ones who combine a lack of principle and incompetence.” The lead news item was about a polluted river downstream from a chemical plant and the reporter was shown pocketing dollars before claiming that the fish were all killed by cats. “Look at those beastly faces,” he said, as the camera zoomed in on a black-and-white kitten.
The pocketing dollars theme came up repeatedly in the show: At one point, the host gave an aside about using $20 bills as bribes, since “they don’t get marked or forged.” Later, he claimed, “We don’t do made-to-order news items - without money,” and held up cards with made-up brandnames as he spoke.
The most political sketch was set in the future and showed the results of a new program advocated by President Vladimir Putin in which parents get a lump sum of 250,000 rubles for a second child born from January 2007. At a kindergarten, one boy was dressed in gray rags and played with a plastic bottle, while another looked like a miniature stockbroker in a wool vest and played with an electronic keyboard. The punchline was that both had the same mother, who bundled them into her jeep at the end - but the pre-2007 boy had to sit in the trunk.
The show also had some news briefs, such as one about China declaring condoms to be weapons of mass destruction, and mildly ribbed Russian celebrities including pop diva Alla Puchachyova - whose school reunion was shown as a crowd of wrinkled babushkas - and pop youngster Dima Bilan, whose performance at Eurovision was contrasted with what purported to be a “before he was famous” shot of the Chinese furry man, Yu Zhenhuan, in a similar white singlet.
Unlike other newsroom comedies, such as the British sitcom “Drop the Dead Donkey,” this show doesn’t go behind the scenes to flesh out the journalists’ bitchy repartee, and none of the characters come close to that show’s war reporter, Damien, who used to toss a teddy bear onto the rubble after bomb blasts to rack up the pathos factor.
Some items seemed to parody the ghoulish investigative reporting found in shows such as NTV’s “Program Maximum.” One was about people stealing from a factory producing hydrochloric acid - cue shots of steaming wellington boots and a worker melting into the floor as he spoke on camera. Standing in the middle of a muddy road, the reporter said, “And now we go to the hospital.” He then yelled at someone passing by, “Where is the hospital?” Turning back to the camera, he said, “No, that doesn’t work. Let’s cut to me already there.”
The host closed the show with the line, “all good things must come to an end, just like second presidential terms,” which suggests that biting satire about the Putin regime won’t be on the menu. It would be nice if the show did make fun of the Channel One style of news, with all those shots of Putin’s hideous malachite executive desk set and the moments when, seemingly fired with sudden inspiration, the anchor launches into a monologue about the burning issue du jour. But somehow, I don’t think that’s going to happen.

TITLE: A talent to amuse
AUTHOR: By Jessica Bachman
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Globus Gourmet // Varshavsky Express Shopping Center, Obvodny Canal // Tel: 333-1123 // Open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. // Menu is in Russian and English // Visa and Mastercard accepted // Dinner for two, 1,900 rubles ($78)

The new shopping mall on Obvodny Canal, Varshavsky Express, near the Baltiskaya metro station, is proof that fine dining establishments and gourmet grocers are now able to live under the same roof as arcades and Cineplexes.
Inside the mall, which was once the Warsaw train station, a posh Japanese-Euro fusion restaurant sits very much at ease next its noisy, disco-crazed neighbor: a miniature indoor ice-skating rink. 
This restaurant is part of Globus Gourmet, a palatial and very pricey organic-style supermarket that carries items impossible to find in other Russian supermarkets, such as nori (dried seaweed), lychee fruits, tofu and fresh mozzarella. 
Sparkling red wine glasses, white art-deco soy-sauce containers and austere egg-shaped stone flower vases mark its posh interior.
But being sectioned off from the store by unobtrusive, low-lying partitions instead of walls, Globus Gourmet’s in-house restaurant has a relaxed, outdoor feel to it. And the supermarket’s expansive wall space and lofty ceilings are shared by both diners and shoppers. 
Warm, fresh wheat bread and herb butter are brought to the table after you place your order in addition to a complementary amuse bouche, or, amusement for the mouth.  
Last Saturday’s amuse bouche was a spoonful of teriyaki dressed rice noodles topped with a small slice of chicken. While it didn’t warm up my palate as a good amuse should, it was certainly a nice gesture. 
The thick, dictionary-like menu looks intimidating at first. But because each kind seafood and meat is given its own page on the menu, with no more than three dish options per page, even those with chronic indecisiveness can quickly and painlessly settle on a dish.
The dishes on the shrimp page include shrimp tempura (260 rubles, $10.60), Teppanyaki king shrimp in an orange-ginger sauce (380 rubles, $15.60) and king shrimp Teppan with fresh lime and basil (1,100 rubles, $45.20).
The second option, which I ordered as an entrée, was a let down. It featured a small, nondescript salad and a semi-circle of seven king shrimp which were more comparable to pawns than prawns. The shrimp were not grilled, as the Teppanyaki description led me to believe and the sauce tasted of sesame and teriyaki instead of a orange and ginger.
Although perch, foie gras, veal, oysters, eel, scallops and many more types of meat, animal products and seafood each had its own page on the menu, vegetables were not given the same degree of attention. The only three vegetarian options on the menu (220-230 rubles, $9-$9.40) are listed on the all-encompassing “vegetables” page. 
The lack of creativity in Globus Gourmet’s vegetarian department is also reflected in the kitchen’s usage of    sauces and spices. 
Ginger, teriyaki and sake are the kitchen’s default ingredients, present in dishes such as Teppanyaki crab legs in a ginger sauce (450 rubles, $18.50), Thai perch filet stewed in butter, sake and ginger juice served with avocado and teriyaki sauce (410 rubles, $16.90) and baked fillet mignon of lamb in a ginger-cream sauce with couscous (500 rubles, $25.50). 
There are, however, several meat dishes that do not include these Japanese-cuisine stereotypes. One of the three pork options is a pork fillet mignon baked with Grana Padano cheese, served over potato circles with porcini and champignon sauce (350 rubles, $14.40) and a veal fillet is served in a mushroom and demiglass cream sauce (420 rubles, $17.30).

TITLE: Austen powers
AUTHOR: By Stephen Holden
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: How do you explain the Jane Austen bandwagon, which rolls on full steam with “Becoming Jane,” an imitation screen adaptation of an Austen-like novel that imagines the author’s romantic life at 20? Austen’s refined language, which Sarah Williams and Kevin Hood’s screenplay does a reasonably good job of capturing, is part of the charm. In the age of “whatever,” who doesn’t relish receiving a scrupulously considered, grammatically correct answer to a question?
Austen’s reassuring brand of sense and sensibility, grounded in wit and sound moral judgment, is another attraction. To literate Anglophiles, Austen and everything she represents looms as a symbolic bulwark against the values of today’s babelicious Babylon. The premarital meat market of her era was reassuringly prim.
“Tainted by suspicion” is the nastiest description applied by one woman to another in this film, which plays as a fanciful, scenic (but not too opulent) prequel to “Pride and Prejudice.” That slur is directed at Jane by the wealthy and snobbish Lady Gresham (Maggie Smith), whose beloved nephew Mr. Wisley (Laurence Fox) is dissuaded from marrying Jane after she considers, then reconsiders, eloping with her true love.
Like a modern chick-lit heroine, Jane has no interest in marrying a juiceless man, rich or poor, who has the imagination and charisma of a stick. An aspiring novelist in a rigid social order in which women of conspicuous intelligence are frowned upon, she is willing to take her chances. At its most hardheaded the film makes clear that when Jane forfeits her best opportunity for a financially advantageous match it is no laughing matter.
These imagined Austens live in genteel poverty. Jane’s father (James Cromwell), is a parish preacher, and the family’s hopes for a comfortable future depend on its daughters landing rich husbands. As Jane’s fussbudget mother (Julie Walters) observes, “Affection is desirable; money is absolutely indispensable.”
Jane, however, is determined to marry for love or not all. When Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy), a rakish young Irish lawyer-in-training, comes along, it is him or nothing. Tom gives her a copy of Henry Fielding’s “History of Tom Jones, a Foundling” to educate her about sex.
Austen, as we know, never married. And the movie implies that Tom was the real Mr. Darcy, minus his fortune; hence, no marriage. “Becoming Jane,” directed by Julian Jarrold, whose previous movie was the garish comedy “Kinky Boots,” drives home the painfully limited options facing British women of limited means in the late-18th and early-19th centuries.
At country dances and balls grown-ups scrutinize the behavior of blushing young women on the marriage block. Fun may be had, but the festivities are fraught with anxiety and calculation.
“Becoming Jane” is a triumph for Anne Hathaway, who brings to the young Jane the same jittery wide-eyed intensity she displayed in “The Devil Wears Prada” along with a secure British accent. She and Mr. McAvoy inject a keen intelligence into the couple’s verbal jousts, along with romantic chemistry.
While Jane struggles to assert some independence, Tom squirms under the iron thumb of his humorless authoritarian uncle, Judge Langlois (Ian Richardson, in his last film role), who wields the purse strings. Everything about Jane, but especially her irony, offends this grim hanging judge, who hands out death sentences with a thunderous righteousness.
Hathaway , who is almost too pretty for the role, recalls the young Judy Garland, with her panicky stare and cherry lips. McAvoy’s sexy, good-bad boy, especially in profile, resembles Bob Dylan in his early troubadour mode. With his taste for booze, bare-knuckle boxing and the occasional prostitute, Tom also suggests a whippet version of the young Albert Finney in “Tom Jones.”
Not much is known about the actual Austen-Lefroy relationship except that they met at a ball in 1795 around the time she had begun an early novel that was later reworked as “Sense and Sensibility” and that she described him in a letter to her sister, Cassandra (Anna Maxwell Martin), as “a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man.” At a ball they apparently caused tongues to wag by sharing three dances instead of the regulation two.
The real-life Lefroy eventually married a wealthy Irish woman with whom he sired seven children and became a successful lawyer. The fanciful coda to “Becoming Jane” imagines a reunion between the grown-up Jane and Tom, now both slightly graying.
The screenplay’s pseudo-Austen tone is so consistent that its lapses into modern romance-novel fantasy threaten to derail the film. A scene suggesting oral sex between Jane’s parents is one. (Ugh!) And after Jane and Tom’s first kiss, when Jane coyly inquires about her osculatory technique, you may want to howl.

TITLE: 2,000 Miners Saved In South Africa
AUTHOR: By Michelle Faul
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CARLETONVILLE, South Africa — More than 2,000 trapped gold miners were rescued in a dramatic all-night operation, and efforts gathered speed Thursday to bring hundreds more to the surface.
There were no casualties when a pressurized air pipe snapped at the mine near Johannesburg and tumbled down a shaft Wednesday, causing extensive damage to an elevator and stranding more than 3,000 miners more than a mile underground.
The mine owner and South Africa’s minerals and energy minister vowed to improve safety in one of the country’s most important industries.
The accident prompted allegations of the industry cutting safety corners in the name of profit — and accusations from the government that mine owner Harmony Gold Mining Co. did not bother to inform it of the potentially devastating crisis.
Minerals and Energy Minister Buyelwa Sonjica complained that she found out from the late evening news about the accident, which happened just after 6 a.m. She said President Thabo Mbeki also found out from the news bulletin.
Sonjica said during a visit to the Elandsrand mine at Carletonville near Johannesburg — that health and safety legislation would be “tightened up.”
Last year, 199 mineworkers died in accidents, mostly rock falls, the government Mine Health and Safety Council reported in September. One worker was killed last week in a mine adjacent to Elandsrand.
“We have to recommit ourselves to refocus on safety in this country; our safety record both as a company and an industry leave much to be desired,” Harmony Gold Mining Co. chairman Patrice Motsepe said according to the South African Press Association, as union officials accused the industry of taking short cuts on safety in the interest of profit.

TITLE: Hamilton’s Victory In Japan Under Scrutiny
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: SHANGHAI — Formula One world championship leader Lewis Hamilton is under investigation amid allegations of dangerous driving in his victory at the Japanese Grand Prix, an FIA spokeswoman said Thursday.
Race officials are reviewing video evidence suggesting that Hamilton's driving behind the safety car at the rain-lashed Fuji Speedway on Sunday led to a crash that ended the race for Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel. 
“New evidence has been brought to the stewards’ attention and they are currently looking into the matter,” said the spokeswoman for the International Motoring Federation (FIA), the sport’s governing body.
Hamilton was expected to meet with Formula One stewards on Friday.
The British rookie, who drives for McLaren-Mercedes, leads the race for the world championship by 12 points, with two races left. 
Hamilton could clinch the title with a win at the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai this weekend. But if found guilty of improper driving, his points from Japan could be erased.
The incident was missed by official TV coverage, but a clip posted on the YouTube video sharing website shows Hamilton slowing dramatically and veering to the right of the track just before Vettel rear-ended Webber.
Vettel has been penalised 10 grid positions at the Chinese Grand Prix for his role in the crash, and Hamilton could expect a similar punishment if found to be in breach of Formula One safety car regulations. Webber, who drives for Red Bull, and Vettel of Toro Rosso both have since been critical of Hamilton's performance.
Speaking to reporters in Shanghai ahead of this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix, Webber said he thought Hamilton had done a bad job behind the safety car.
“It definitely contributed to Sebastian hitting me up the back,” Webber said.
“He spoke in the drivers’ briefing about what a good job he was going to do and then he did the opposite.
“He was not doing what he should have been doing, the rhythm was not there,” Webber said.
“I was challenging for a win but it was taken away and not in a racing incident but behind the safety car. It’s hard to swallow but you can’t get it back. I have to concentrate on the next race, that's all we can control.”
Vettel added: “In the end it was my fault. I am not here to blame anybody but I think it is clear the rhythm was not there.
“We are all sitting in the same boat. At that point I was distracted, looking to the right.
“I was sure he (Hamilton) was retiring, he seemed to have no power any longer, but by the time I looked back I was already in Mark's rear end.”

TITLE: Two Koreas Sign Declaration at Summit
AUTHOR: By Jae-Soon Chang
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEOUL, South Korea — The leaders of North and South Korea pledged Thursday to seek a peace treaty to replace the Korean War’s 1953 cease-fire and expand projects to reduce tension across the world’s last Cold War frontier.
The pact came a day after a deal at China-hosted arms talks among North Korea, the U.S. and other regional powers, in which Pyongyang promised to disable its main nuclear facilities and fully declare its nuclear programs by Dec. 31.
The move would be the biggest step North Korea has taken to scale back its nuclear ambitions after decades of seeking to develop the world’s deadliest weapons. President Bush hailed it as a key for “peace and prosperity” in northeast Asia.
It was followed by the bilateral agreement capping three days of meetings in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, between North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun. The two men “agreed to closely cooperate to end military hostility and ensure peace and easing of tension on the Korean peninsula,” according to a joint statement.
Substantive progress on any peace treaty would require the participation of the U.S. and China, which also fought in the conflict. South Korea never signed the 1953 armistice ending the war.
After signing the deal Kim and Roh shook hands and posed for cameras. Roh then took Kim’s right hand in his left and raised both their arms in the air like champion prizefighters before the two shared a champagne toast.
“The South and North shared the view that they should end the current armistice regime and establish a permanent peace regime,” the pact said.
They also “agreed to cooperate to push for the issue of declaring the end” of the Korean War by staging a meeting of the “three or four heads of related states.”
Bush said last month that he is willing to formally end the Korean War, but insisted that it could only happen after Pyongyang’s total nuclear disarmament.
Pyongyang shut down its sole operating reactor at Yongbyon in July after the U.S. reversed its hard-line policy against the regime, the first concrete progress from years of talks that also include China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.
The fast progress in the nuclear standoff has prompted Roh to push forward on peace efforts. But the Koreas accord Thursday cited the nuclear issue in a single sentence, saying the North and South would make “joint efforts to ensure the smooth implementation” of previous accords from the six-nation arms talks “for the solution of the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula.”

TITLE: Safin Set To Return in Kremlin Cup
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Marat Safin will make his return to tennis at next week’s Kremlin Cup, ending a self-imposed two-month layoff, tournament organisers said on Wednesday. 
The former world number one, who has not played since losing in the second round of the U.S. Open, was given a wild card by the organisers of the $1 million indoor tournament, which starts in Moscow on Monday. 
The Russian has struggled with form and injuries since winning his last title at the 2005 Australian Open. 
He took a break from the game to refresh himself and was scaling mountains in the Himalayas last month. 
“I felt like I needed to take my mind off tennis for a while,” the 27-year-old Muscovite, who has yet to triumph at his hometown tournament, told reporters. 
“Hopefully this will be my year, although I can’t make any promises,” said the 27th-ranked Safin, who lost to his Davis Cup team mate Nikolay Davydenko in last year’s Kremlin Cup final. 
The Russians are hoping Safin will be fit to lead them in the Davis Cup final against the United States to be played in Portland, Oregon from Nov. 30 to Dec. 2.

TITLE: Marseille Has Promising Start
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PARIS — Olympique Marseille is not getting carried away despite its stunning 1-0 win over Liverpool at Anfield in the Champions League on Wednesday. 
A second-half strike from Mathieu Valbuena saw Marseille become the first French side to win at Liverpool and gave the Ligue 1 team top spot in Group A. 
Marseille has a maximum of six points from two matches while Liverpool, who played two of the last three finals in Europe’s premium club competition, is third with one point. 
“We were well organised, we have followed the coach’s instructions,” midfielder Benoit Cheyrou told the club’s web site Thursday. 
“It’s a good result for the rest of the season. But we must not get carried away,” added Cheyrou. 
New coach Eric Gerets, who took over from the sacked Albert Emon last week following poor performances in Ligue 1, could not dream of a better start. 
Goalkeeper Steve Mandanda, deputising for the injured Cedric Carasso, said Marseille was off to a good start but there was work still to be done. 
“We have had a perfect start with six points from two games but we have not qualified yet,” he added.  
Marseille next plays FC Porto, who snatched a 1-0 victory at Besikats on Wednesday.

TITLE: Myanmar Leadership Tightens Screws on Protestors
AUTHOR: By Aung Hla Tun
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: YANGON — Despite gradually easing its iron grip on Myanmar’s main city on Thursday, the junta continued to round up scores of people and grill hundreds more arrested during and after a ruthless crackdown on pro-democracy marches.
Although most are too terrified to talk, the monks and civilians slowly being freed from a makeshift interrogation center in north Yangon are giving a glimpse of the mechanics of the generals’ dreaded internal security apparatus.
A relative of three women released said detainees were being divided into four categories: passers-by, those who watched, those who clapped and those who joined in. 
“They’re looking for the people who led the demonstrations. The people clapping will only get a minimal punishment — maybe two to five years,” said Win Min, who fled to Thailand during a crackdown on a student-led uprising in 1988.
Leaders could be looking at up to 20 years behind bars, he said.
The reports of verbal and physical abuse suggest junta chief Than Shwe is paying scant regard to the calls for restraint delivered by UN special envoy Ibrahim Gambari, now flying back to New York to brief his boss, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
“That is one of the top concerns of the international community,” said Ban, due to attend a meeting of the 15-member Security Council on Friday to discuss the crackdown in a country now under military rule for an unbroken 45 years.

TITLE: Farrell Out Of England’s QF With Oz
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: MARSEILLE, France — England center Andy Farrell has been ruled out of the World Cup quarter-final against Australia here on Saturday, with a right calf strain, the Rugby Football Union (RFU) said in a statement Thursday.
“Andy Farrell’s right calf suffered a reaction after training yesterday (Wednesday),” the statement said.
“A clinical review and MRI scan this morning confirmed a strain and the Saracens center is now being rehablitated by the England medical team.”
The statement added England head coach Brian Ashton would announce Farrell’s replacement at a news conference at the team hotel in Marseille on Friday.
Former Great Britain rugby league captain Farrell was due to start at inside center against the Wallabies having forced his way in ahead of the likes of 2003 World Cup winner Mike Catt and Olly Barkley.
Ashton, when announcing his side on Wednesday, made it clear just how much England would be relying on Farrell against Australia.
“For this game, we need the direct approach that Andy Farrell brings to the game.”
Barkley or Leicester midfielder Danny Hipkiss, both initially named on the bench by Ashton, appear to be in line for a promotion to the starting side, as well as the more experienced Catt.