SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1316 (82), Friday, October 19, 2007
**************************************************************************


TITLE: Putin Stands By Iran At Summit
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin arrived with a message of support Tuesday, when he became the first Kremlin leader to visit Iran since Stalin, pledging to stand by the country’s nuclear program and co-signing a declaration with a thinly veiled warning against U.S. interference.
But while maintaining in an interview with Iranian television that Moscow would honor its commitment to build a nuclear power site near the southwestern port city of Bushehr, Putin refused to set a date for the start of operations at the facility.
In a speech at the meeting of the five Caspian littoral states — Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan — Putin said Russia was the only country that had helped Tehran develop its nuclear program.
“We believe that every country has the right to develop peaceful nuclear energy programs,” he said, Interfax reported.
Washington, meanwhile, has led efforts in the United Nations Security Council to tighten international sanctions against the Islamic republic over its uranium enrichment activities, which the U.S. presidential administration says could be a cover for a weapons program, a claim Iran denies.
Russia, one of five countries that hold a veto on the Security Council, has repeatedly said there is no evidence that Tehran is trying to develop nuclear weapons.
In their final declaration, the littoral states acknowledged the rights of all signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — including Iran — to develop peaceful nuclear energy programs.
The states also declared that they would not allow their territories to be used for an attack on any of the others, in an apparent response to speculation that the United States could resort to military force in its dispute with Iran.
Washington has refused to rule out military action if diplomacy fails to resolve the impasse.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who insists that Tehran will not stop work on its atomic program, praised the declaration as “very strong.”
Putin reinforced the idea that the Caspian nations should not be used in any attack by a third country, a comment that appeared to be directed at Azerbaijan, which has held talks with U.S. military officials over the situation in Iran.
Russian media have speculated that the U.S. military could use Azeri facilities in a possible strike — a suggestion Azeri officials have denied.
“We should not even think of making use of force in this region,” Putin told the meeting.
While there was unity on the issue of Iran, the countries once again failed to reach a deal on how to divide the Caspian basin, which is believed to contain enormous oil and gas reserves.
The legal status of the sea has been in limbo since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, which has led to conflicting claims to seabed deposits.
Another concern for Moscow has been U.S.-backed efforts to build alternative pipelines to deliver Central Asian and Caspian oil and gas to the West, bypassing Russia.
Moscow strongly opposes such plans, and Putin argued in Tehran that they would threaten the environment.
“Projects that may inflict serious environmental damage to the region cannot be implemented without prior discussion by all five Caspian nations,” he said.
Putin arrived in Tehran on Tuesday after shrugging off a news report about a suicide plot to kill him during the trip. While his spokespeople had suggested that he might change his plans, Iran steadfastly dismissed the assassination plot reports.
After the meeting between the five leaders, Putin and Ahmadinejad held two-way talks. Putin said the meeting would touch on the Iran’s disputed nuclear program, but did not elaborate. Later, he was to have dinner with Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In the week leading up to his Tehran visit, Putin held talks with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the subject of Iran’s nuclear program. Putin’s meeting with Ahmadinejad, therefore, was watched closely by countries hoping he would use Russia’s leverage, based on trade and nuclear supply ties, to help address Western concerns.
While the Kremlin has shielded Tehran from a U.S. push for a third round of UN sanctions, Iran has voiced annoyance about Moscow’s foot-dragging in building the $1 billion Bushehr facility.

TITLE: President Criticizes U.S. Campaign in Iraq
AUTHOR: By Mike Eckel
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin, in his latest jab at Washington, suggested Thursday that the U.S. military campaign in Iraq was a “pointless” battle against the Iraqi people, aimed in part at seizing the country’s oil reserves.
Putin has increasingly confronted U.S. foreign policy in recent months, deepening the chill between Washington and Moscow. Among other things, he has questioned U.S. plans for a missile defense system in Europe and the U.S. push for sanctions against Iran for its nuclear programs.
Putin spoke during an annual question-and-answer session with the public. Broadcast live on state-controlled TV channels and radio stations, the event consisted of people from around the country quizzing Putin on issues such as pensions, public workers’ salaries and school funding.
In one question, a mechanic from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk asked the president about comments he said were made some years ago by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who suggested that Siberia had too many natural resources to belong to one country.
“I know that some politicians play with such ideas in their heads,” he said, dismissing the notion as wishful thinking, or “political erotica that ... hardly leads to a positive result.”
“The best example of that are the events in Iraq — a small country that can hardly defend itself and which possesses huge oil reserves. And we see what’s going on there. They’ve learned to shoot there, but they are not managing to bring order,” he said.
“One can wipe off a political map some tyrannical regime ... but it’s absolutely pointless to fight with a people,” he said. “Russia, thank God, isn’t Iraq. It has enough strength and power to defend itself and its interests, both on its territory and in other parts of the world.”
Putin suggested the U.S. campaign was aimed at seizing control of Iraq’s vast oil wealth, and said a concrete date must be set for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
“I believe one of the goals is to establish control of the country’s oil reserves,” he said.
Unless a date for pulling out is set, Putin said, “the Iraqi leadership, feeling (safe) under the reliable American umbrella, will not hurry to develop its own armed and law enforcement forces.”
Putin also reiterated his warning against U.S. efforts to put elements of a missile defense system in eastern Europe.
He said U.S. officials were genuinely considering Russian proposals to resolve the dispute. He added, however, “If a decision is made without taking Russia’s opinion into account, then we will certainly take steps in response, to ensure the security of Russian citizens.”
He did not elaborate on what steps Russia would take.
During the phone-in session, Putin also discussed his recent trip to Iran, which is under increasing Western pressure and scrutiny over its nuclear program.
“Russia is taking steps together with other members of the international negotiations to solve the problem through peaceful means in the interests of the international community and the Iranian people,” Putin said.
Threats against Iran, he said, are “harmful for international relations because dialogue with states ... is always more promising. It is a shorter route toward success than a policy of threats, sanctions and, even less so, armed pressure.”
Putin, who is widely popular among Russians for the stability and relative prosperity of the country during his regime, has sought to use phone-ins along with tightly choreographed, lavish television coverage to project the image of a leader responding directly to voters’ concerns.
He said Thursday that Russia will have a different president next year, reaffirming his plans to step aside but leaving unclear what exact role he might have.
With just two months remaining before crucial parliamentary elections — and five before presidential elections — speculation has mounted about Putin’s plans once his second, consecutive term ends in March.
“In 2008, in the Kremlin there will be a different person,” Putin said. He also said he expected no radical policy changes from his successor, adding that the next president should “keep the stable course of our nation and continuity in realizing the plans that have been devised in recent years.”

TITLE: Charity Calls for Winter Shelters
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A local charity is campaigning to raise funds to install winterized tents with heaters to shelter the city’s homeless people in time for the onset of winter. 
The charity, Nochlezhka, is sponsoring the first tent which will house up to fifty people and is expected to operate through April.
However, activists say much more money is needed to help the city’s thousands of homeless people.
To promote the plan, Nochlezhka on Wednesday placed a large white symbolic tent on Malaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa inviting St. Petersburg residents  to enter and take a step closer to some of the city’s most deprived people. 
The tent — painted by artists from the popular local non-conformist group Mitki, noted for their ironic take on issues such as human happiness, social injustice and problems like alcoholism and poverty — is due to be sold at a charity auction at the Astoria Hotel in December.
Wednesday’s event coincided with the International Day for  the Eradication of Poverty. 
According to a recent poll conducted by the Russian National Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM), 14 percent of Russians describe themselves as “poor.” A further 34 percent said their incomes are “below normal.”
Although Maxim Yegorov, head of Nochlezhka, estimates there are 8,000 homeless people in St. Petersburg, statistics vary dramatically. Arkady Tyurin, editor of the local charity magazine Put Domoi, that translates into English as “the way home,” there are at least 54,000 homeless people living in St. Petersburg.
“Official records usually include those who used to be registered in the city and then lost their housing registration for various reasons,” Tyurin said. “But we have homeless people from other places coming here.”
St. Petersburg’s night shelters can only accommodate about 200 people, Yegorov said. Governor Valentina Matviyenko has promised to encourage the opening of shelters in every neighborhood in the city, but progress has been slow, Yegorov added.
City police do not issue figures on the number of homeless people who freeze to death every year in the streets of St. Petersburg, but according to Nochlezhka, more than 300 died in St. Petersburg from exposure last winter.
Tyurin said that on one occasion in 2006 he managed to get access to the relevant police files and the figures were frightening.
“Only because we know each other personally, a police officer briefly showed me three thick files containing pictures of the unidentified bodies of people who have frozen to death here,” he said. 
“There was a photograph, a date and a brief description on each page. And each file was ten to twelve centimeters thick.”
Many homeless people seek refuge in the basements and attics of the city’s apartment buildings, but the installation of code locks and intercom access is making this more difficult.

TITLE: Legislative Assembly Signs Off On Plans for Gazprom Tower
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly on Wednesday passed the last stage of legislation that gives the go ahead to the construction of Okhta Center — a massive 60 billion-ruble ($2.4 billion) complex with a vast 300-meter skyscraper for energy giant Gazprom at its center, the parliament’s press service said.
The law specifies the project’s financing, with the city paying 24.9 billion rubles ($1 billion), and Gazprom subsidiary Gazpromneft providing 30.6 billion rubles ($1.4 billion) for the construction of the center.  
Initially the city administration was planning to cover the entire cost of the development.
The law also states that Okhta Public and Business Center, a company founded by Gazprom, will own 51 percent of the center with 49 percent belonging to the city.
The amended plan states that Gazprom and its subsidiaries will occupy 16 percent of the complex, 35 percent will be used for public functions, and the rest will be rented to businesses.
Mikhail Amosov, former head of the parliament’s Architecture and City Planning Committee, who is also a member of Yabloko party, said the re-financed scheme was good news for the city.  He said Yabloko made many efforts to change the initial scheme.
“However, I still don’t understand why the city needs to finance the project at all.  It’s not the city’s priority to be involved in the construction of a business center,” Amosov said.
At the same time, Amosov said the parliament should still reconsider the law on the construction of the center regarding the height of the skyscraper. Its height should not exceed 100 meters, Amosov said.
Amosov said Yabloko suggested a bill on height regulation in the city's historical center, but the parliament did not take it up. 
Vatanyar Yagya, a United Russia deputy, said the parliament had passed the last stage of a law and so the architecture of the project would not be changed.
“Okhta Center will not be located in the city’s historical center but at least 500 meters away from it.  When they refer to the tsar’s height rules, it’s about the past,” Yagya said, referring to city ordinances outlawing tall buildings.
“I think, it was the right decision to build a high building. In such big cities as Moscow and St. Petersburg there can be only two ways to go — high up or deep down,” he said.
Plans for construction of a high building for Gazprom in St. Petersburg became known when Governor Valentina Matviyenko and Gazprom head Alexei Miller made an announcement in 2005.
In December 2006, the architectural firm RMJM London proposed a 300 meter-high, flame-shaped building that was selected after an architectural competition.  The complex and the skyscraper are to be built on the opposite bank of the River Neva to one of St. Petersburg’s most beautiful historical sights, the baroque blue and white Smolny Cathedral, causing concern about the architectural integrity of the city.
City residents and architects feared the unusually high modern tower bordering the historical center of St. Petersburg might spoil its unique skyline. Architects also feared it might result in St. Petersburg’s exclusion from the UNESCO list of world heritage sites.
In February, a UNESCO conference on saving historical city centers was held in St. Petersburg where, the director of UNESCO's World Heritage Center, Francesco Bandarin, said the Okhta Center was a cause for concern. 
However, the project’s supporters say that it will redevelop a neglected area of the city, bring billions of dollars in revenues to the city and could actually add to St. Petersburg’s architectural beauty. 
Among the public buildings to be built as part of the complex will be a concert hall, a modern art museum, a stadium, a swimming pool, a complex of sport centers, parks, cafes and restaurants.
Okhta Center is planned to be completed by 2016.

TITLE: Two Dead In Urals Prison Riot
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — A revolt at a prison for minors swelled into a mass uprising that left at least two people dead and buildings gutted before guards and riot police restored control, officials said Wednesday.
The unrest started late Tuesday when a group of inmates tried to break through a fence at the prison in the Sverdlovsk region in the Ural Mountains.
Guards first fired a warning shot but then fired directly at prisoners after coming under attack, said Eduard Petrukhin, deputy director of the Federal Prison Service.
Two people were killed in the riots, Petrukhin said.
Gazeta.ru, however, reported that the riot left 30 people dead — most of them due to a stampede when police stormed the facility — and lasted around 17 hours, beginning at 11:00 a.m. Tuesday. The report cited a source familiar with the investigation.
Six prison officials and 12 inmates were injured in the riots, the source told Gazeta.ru.
Petrukhin said only one prisoner was killed and that a guard also died in the rampage. Thirteen people were injured, including six guards, he said.
Prisoners set several buildings on fire and broke windows, and eventually nearly half the prison’s inmates, some 250 people, took part in the uprising, Petrukhin said.
Twenty prisoners slipped away in the melee, but they were all tracked down, television reports said.
AP, SPT

TITLE: Protesters Mock Plans for Palace Square Rink
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: With both feet strapped to a pair of old skis and without sticks in her hands, Yulia Minutina did not look shaky on the cobblestones of Palace Square in the pouring rain on Thursday. But she admitted looking ridiculous.
“And anyone who comes to Palace Square to do sports is going to look equally ludicrous,” said Minutina, an activist of Living City, an informal movement of local residents united by the idea of preserving St. Petersburg’s historic center in its integrity. 
Minutina was taking part in a protest against City Hall’s plan to construct an ice-rink on the square during the winter. 
“Really, the next logical step would be to play soccer here. The arch of the General Staff Building would be the perfect goal.”
Ten protesters equipped with various sports gear, from tennis rackets to skis to inflatable swimming mattresses went to the square to protest against the ice-rink plan, which is backed by Governor Valentina Matviyenko.
Yelena Minchenok, another activist, compared Matviyenko’s idea with the Soviet-era practice of turning churches into “socially useful” facilities, like warehouses and sport schools.
“St. Peter’s church on Nevsky Prospekt was turned into a swimming pool,” Minchenok said. “Turning the world-famous historic square into a noisy ice-rink would be equally shameful. Overcoming the Soviet legacy has been painful, and we should avoid neglecting spiritual values, like the Soviets often did.”
The idea for a skating rink has been borrowed from Moscow, where the businessman Mikhail Kusnirovich, head of luxury goods retailer Bosco di Ciliegi, organized a skating rink on Moscow’s Red Square last winter. 
The company was also an official sponsor of the  Russian Olympic team at the last Winter Games in Turin, Italy.
In Europe, historic squares and courtyards often serve public purposes. 
The Somerset House Ice Rink is one of London’s favorite skating spots. Somerset House also accommodates the Hermitage Rooms, where St. Petersburg’s premier museum organizes rotating exhibitions.
“Until the Thames freezes over, the beautiful rink erected in the romantic 18th-century courtyard of Somerset House remains London’s best skating spot,” reads an advertisement on the Somerset Houses web site.
But Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky argues that St. Petersburg is a different case. 
“The construction of a semi-permanent rink would demand major construction activities that would disrupt the view of the square,” he said.
The skating rink is slated to welcome its first visitors in December and operate until March 15, said Oleg Vdovin, spokesman for City Hall’s Sports Committee.
Ticket prices will be “minimal,” Matviyenko has said. Free entry has been promised to children under seven, war veterans and other priviliged citizens.
Living City criticized the governor for what they called “a policy of squeezing pennies out of every square centimeter of the city.”
“When the administration can financially benefit, the bureaucrats easily sacrifice the city’s beauty; if it continues, the views of historic St. Petersburg will only be found in old photographs,” Minchenok said.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>City Buys Airport</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Pulkovo Airport has become the property of St. Petersburg, Interfax reported on Thursday. 
Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov signed off on the deal that gives 100 percent of the airport to the St. Petersburg city authorities.
The airport was formerly Russian federal property and the transfer of ownership is in accordance with the city’s reconstruction and redevelopment plan for Pulkovo.

<b>Tin Soldiers on Parade</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — An exhibition of tin soldiers and military dolls opened at the city’s Doll Museum on Thursday, Interfax said.
Visitors will be able to see toy soldiers representing different branches of the Russian Army from the 15th to the 20th centuries.
Among them are Don and Kuban cossacks; the Russian military leader Alexander Suvorov, the navy lieutenant Pyotr Schmidt, and others.
The exhibition also features models of ships and toy figures of navy officers that show the evolution of the Russian navy uniform.

<b>Street Acid Attack</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — An unknown assailant splashed acid into the face of the head of Primorsky District’s State Property Department, Interfax said on Wednesday.
The attacker splashed the acid into the man’s face when the official was walking to the committee’s building on the Chyornaya Rechka embankment.
The official was hospitalized with burns to the eyes, the police said. A criminal case on article 213 of the Russian Criminal Code (hooliganism) was open.

<b>Boy Killed for Teasing</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A 15-year old boy was killed and two friends severely wounded when they teased two deaf and dumb people on Wednesday early morning at Ulitsa Shavrova, Fontanka.ru said on Thursday.
The 15-year old, a 21-year old girl and a 17-year old boy teased the deaf and dumb people who were talking to each other in sign language. 
One of the deaf and dumb men was offended, took a knife and attacked the group of youths.
The youngest in the group was killed. The attacker ran away but the district’s criminal police later detained him.

<b>Kumarin Stays Inside</b>
MOSCOW (SPT) — Moscow’s Basmanny Court has ruled that businessman Vladimir Kumarin, also known as Barsukov, must be detained for four additional months, Fontanka.ru said on Thursday.
The businessman was arrested on Aug. 24 in St. Petersburg on charges of organizing a criminal group, fraud, and money laundering.  Earlier charges included organizing and committing a murder.
Prosecutors said Barsukov and the other members of his group organized the so-called Tambov criminal group in 2004. 
Investigators said members of that group committed hostile raids that ended in murders and attempted murders.
Investigators also believe Barsukov and his group committed fraud against 13 commercial enterprises in St. Petersburg.

TITLE: Border Agency To Get Head
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov said Wednesday that he would soon appoint a candidate to head a federal agency established last week to oversee the development of border-crossing infrastructure.
“We have selected the head of this agency and he will be appointed in the next two or three days,” Zubkov told a meeting of the State Border Commission, which coordinates the activities of government agencies on facilitating cross-border traffic and intercepting illegal crossings.
Zubkov said he had already tasked these agencies with detailing the functions of the Federal Border Development Agency, which President Vladimir Putin created Oct. 10, Interfax reported.
He said the border development agency would “build and reconstruct facilities related to border protection” and called for all the agencies, including the FSB’s Border Service and the Federal Customs Service, to adopt measures to reduce bureaucracy at borders, which often results in long lines.
Border Service chief Vladimir Pronichev welcomed the news in a newspaper interview.

TITLE: Counterfeit Goods No Longer Above Law
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The number of criminal cases over counterfeit goods in St. Petersburg increased by several times over the last few years, which is regarded by experts as a positive sign that far fewer criminals remain unpunished.
In 2005, 320 criminal cases over trademark infringement were opened in St. Petersburg. Last year 800 such cases were registered and 650 cases have been registered so far this year.
Counterfeit goods are often a health and safety hazard. In 2005, seven criminal cases were opened into the production, storage, transportation and sale of products and services that do not meet safety standards. Last year the number of such cases increased to 15, and during the first nine months of 2007 the number of such cases grew to 40.
“The growing number of cases is not a result of increasing criminality. As a matter of fact, criminality is decreasing because of the enhanced control,” Andrei Gurishev, head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in St. Petersburg, said at a press conference Wednesday.
According to statistics, approximately 30 percent of products in Russia are counterfeit, as opposed to five percent in the world.
The largest percent of counterfeit goods (88 percent) can be found in software, followed by DVDs (78 percent), video products (68 percent), audio products (64 percent), perfumes and synthetic cleaners (57 percent), jewelry (50 percent), butter (43 percent), clothes and shoes (40 percent), fish and meat (37 percent), alcohol (30 percent), petrol (25 percent) and medication (12-15 percent).
One lawyer said that poor law enforcement incites criminals to perpetrate illegal activities.
“Sanctions against lawbreakers should correspond to their crimes. Recently, legislature has become stricter in regard to counterfeiting goods, qualifying it as a serious crime. However, courts often let lawbreakers off with insignificant fines or a suspended sentence,” said Oleg Zhukov, partner at Zhukov & Partners law firm.
Zhukov gave the example of the large-scale production of counterfeit coffee, which was carried out at several plants in a number of regions in Russia. In 2005 one of the organizers was sentenced to a fine of 150,000 rubles ($6,000). In 2006 the same person organized even larger counterfeit production.
Officials in charge of investigating, in their turn, blame victims for not cooperating with the police.
“The apathy of consumers does not allow us to react properly. Without a complaint from a victim, we cannot start an investigation,” said Sergei Korotun, acting deputy head of a special task force for investigating crimes on the consumer market in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast.
Despite popular opinion, alcohol is not a record-breaker among the city’s low-quality products.
“The proportion of counterfeit alcohol among exposed low-quality products is decreasing. According to the Quality Control Center, alcohol accounts for 7.8 percent of the condemned products. Fish, meat, milk and salads are a very big problem,” Korotun said.
Gurishev cited a recent example when 500 kilograms of counterfeit meat was confiscated. The products did not meet sanitary standards and contained  viruses dangerous to people’s health.
“The other product category that could harm consumers is medication. However, in St. Petersburg we have not discovered any serious violations in this market recently,” Gurishev said.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Baltika Shares Buy Out</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Baltika brewery shareholders will buy out company shares to decrease its authorized capital stock, Interfax reported Wednesday. 
    On November 22, the board of directors will buy out about 9.9 million ordinary shares and 1.2 million privileged shares. The share price was set at $52 per ordinary share and $35 per privileged share. At present, Baltika’s authorized capital stock is $6.9 million.

<b>Bank Increases Its Assets</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Bank St. Petersburg increased its assets by 55 percent up to 94 billion rubles ($3.78 billion) by October 1, 2007, Interfax reported Wednesday.
By January 1 this year the assets were reported at 60.6 billion rubles ($2.4 billion). 
The main shareholders of Bank St. Petersburg are its managers, the Vozrozhdenie group of companies, Neva-Rus and Sovmestny Kapital.

<b>Airlines Agree On Deal</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Rossiya Airlines and Czech Airlines have signed an agreement on code-sharing on flights between St. Petersburg and Prague, Interfax reported Tuesday.
According to the agreement, the two airlines will be able to exchange  seats on all flights between the two cities.
 
<b>Russia, Iran Seek Trade</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the Islamic Republic and Russia seek to increase their trade 100 times to reach as much as $200 billion a year by 2017. 
Ahmadinejad and Russian President Vladimir Putin during an Oct. 16 meeting “agreed to increase the two nations’ economic and business exchanges to $200 billion within the next 10 years,” the web site of the Iranian president said in a report. 
Iran’s president cited energy, transportation and aerospace as favorable sectors for joint Iranian-Russian investments. Trade between the two countries is about $2 billion now and increasing, Putin told reporters during his one-day visit to the Iranian capital.

TITLE: Sugar Import Tariff Increased
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government said on its web site Wednesday that it would introduce a seasonal raw cane sugar import tariff of $220 to $270 per ton for six months from Dec. 1.
The higher tariff, which will vary within the range in accordance with New York raw sugar prices, would be rescinded should Russia join the World Trade Organization before the term expires on May 31, 2008.
The new import regime will replace the current $140 per ton duty on raw cane sugar imports, which has been in place for nearly two years. Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov signed the order, designed to protect the country’s burgeoning domestic sugar beet industry from excessive raw sugar imports, on Friday.
The lowest $220 per ton duty would apply as long as the average monthly New York raw sugar price was no less than $198.43 per ton. The highest $270 per ton duty would apply when New York prices were no more than $99.21 per ton. Should the average New York raw sugar price exceed $259.99 per ton, the higher duty would be rescinded.
Russia consumes about 5.8 million tons of sugar per year, refining more than half of it from domestically grown beet. Analysts expect the country’s sugar imports to rise to 300,000 to 350,000 tons in October from 121,529 tons in September and 41,000 tons in October 2006 on expectations of the tariff increase.
Analysts expect the country’s beet crop to decline this year, resulting in a drop in output of white beet sugar to 3.1 million to 3.2 million tons from a record 3.3 million tons last year.
An increase in the duty “is bad for sugar, because it will lead to a decrease in imports from Russia, which is such an important buyer” said Eugen Weinberg, an analyst at Commerzbank in Frankfurt.	
Reuters, Bloomberg

TITLE: Mandelson Calls for More Economic Reform
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia must overhaul its economy to attract foreign investment and bolster trade to strengthen ties with the European Union and ease its push for World Trade Organization accession, EU trade chief Peter Mandelson said Wednesday.
“Russia is not really capitalizing on the fact that it is so close to the huge European market,’’ Mandelson said at a conference in Brussels, according to the text of his speech. “In part because it lacks the stimulus of greater trade, the Russian economy is underdiversified.’’
Mandelson also said EU-Russia ties were likely to come under strain over the next year as Russia changes presidents and the Kremlin has the chance to flex its diplomatic muscles over moves by Kosovo for independence and Iran’s nuclear program.
“But what is really striking about the EU-Russia relationship is that political and strategic questions like these still share the same political stage with disputes over timber export taxes and the food export ban that is holding up a ... new EU-Russia bilateral treaty,” he said.
“Regardless of who is right or wrong, issues like these should not be allowed to dominate our relationship,” Mandelson told a conference on EU-Russia ties.
“We should strive to resolve the remaining issues between us ahead of next week’s EU-Russia Summit in Mafra,” Mandelson said, referring to talks in Portugal on Oct. 26.

TITLE: Next Year Could Bring Instability, Warns IMF
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WASHINGTON — High oil prices, capital inflows and productivity gains will help the Russian economy dodge fallout from turbulent global financial markets this year, but it may see an impact in 2008, the IMF said Wednesday.
Forecasting 7 percent growth in 2007, the International Monetary Fund said in its semiannual World Economic Outlook that this pace may moderate to 6.5 percent next year, trimming 0.3 percent from a forecast it made back in July.
“Risks to growth are tilted to the downside, owing to a possible stronger impact of financial market turbulence on the availability of foreign and domestic financing, as well as the impact of slower global growth on commodity prices and export demand,” the IMF said. “If growth were to slow down significantly in Russia, demand for imports from smaller countries in the region [Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, the Kyrgyz Republic, and Tajikistan] and flows of private remittances to these countries are likely to be adversely affected.” 
The IMF noted that strong demand in the Commonwealth of Independent States could also have a downside in terms of inflation, which remained high, and trade balance problems. “Besides pushing up prices, robust demand growth in the region is also weakening the external current account positions, which nonetheless remain in a solid surplus in most energy-exporting countries,” it said.

TITLE: School Of Management To Move to 18th-Century Palace
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Setl City has won an open tender for the reconstruction of Mikhailovskaya Dacha, an ensemble of palaces and parks in Petrodvorets, the company said Tuesday in a statement. After the reconstruction, Mikhailovskaya Dacha, which is an 18th-century architectural monument, will house the Higher School of Management of St. Petersburg State University.
Setl City, which as the general contractor should complete the project by 2010, according to the agreement, will carry out the planning and reconstruction.
“We will reconstruct the buildings of great historical and cultural importance. In addition, we will have to adjust old buildings for their new educational purposes and ensure that they meet all the modern standards of business education. This makes the project considerably more difficult,” said Maxim Shubarev, president of Setl Group, a holding company that owns Setl City.
The parks and palaces at Mikhailovskaya Dacha occupy 104 hectares of land. At present, the total area of the existing buildings is 22,000 square meters. After the reconstruction and construction of new buildings, the total area will increase to about 100,000 square meters. According to the contract, the total cost of the project is about $300 million.
The complex will comprise the main building, a scientific research institute, administrative facilities, dormitories and infrastructure. By the end of 2010, the Business School Center, a hotel and fitness center with a pool will be opened.
A real estate expert suggested that the reconstruction of Mikhailovskaya Dacha will hardly generate any significant profits, and that for Setl City it is a promotional project rather than a commercial venture.
“The project of the so-called ‘St. Petersburg Harvard’ could be compared to the Baltic Pearl, Okhta-Center and new football stadium on Krestovsky Island. It will be of the same importance, not in terms of the total investment or total area of the construction, but in relation to its influence on the image of St. Petersburg,” said Mikhail Vasiliev, head of marketing at Central Real Estate Agency.
“This project will improve the State University’s image around the world,” Vasiliev said.
He pointed out that in 2005, a ‘scientific city’ was established in Petergof, after which authorities announced a project to create a St. Petersburg Silicone Valley.
“A Northwest region educational center is being specially constructed at Petergof, and the new business schools will be located in the same area. These large-scale projects could be followed by the development of residential buildings, and modernization of infrastructure in the nearby districts,” Vasiliev suggested.

TITLE: The World According to Uncle Sam
AUTHOR: By Fyodor Lukyanov
TEXT: When former U.S. President Jimmy Carter visited Stockholm in the early 1980s, he expressed his disappointment to Stig Ramel, then-executive director of the Nobel Foundation, “If you had awarded me this prize in 1978, I would still be in the White House.” Ramel made a helpless gesture and replied, “At the time when the Camp David accords were signed between Israel and Egypt, the list of nominees had already been finalized, and we could not break the rules.” Had Carter won the 1980 U.S. presidential election rather than Ronald Reagan, history might have turned out differently.
But the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee had no qualms about “meddling” in the U.S. presidential election campaign this year. The decision to award Al Gore the prize fueled rumors that he would be returning to politics.
The Nobel prize committee has repeatedly been the subject of international criticism for its bias and political intrigues, but it is a fairly accurate measure of the state of affairs in international relations. Committee members vote for candidates they believe to be promoting worthy causes.
From 1989 to 1992, the peace prize went to the Dalai Lama; Mikhail Gorbachev; Aung San Suu Kyi, a prisoner of conscience and leader of the Myanmar opposition; and Rigoberta Menchu, a Guatemalan human rights activist. During the current period, which is sometimes referred to as “the end of history,” there is widespread hope that totalitarian and dictatorial regimes from Asia to South America will be sent to the trash heap of history.
What is the result? Nothing has changed in Tibet and Myanmar. The Soviet Union collapsed, but many new authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes emerged in its place. South American countries have organized fewer military juntas, but they have embraced socialist demagoguery instead.
From 1993 to 2002, we saw many attempts to transform the world order. Six Nobel Peace Prizes were awarded to individuals who had been instrumental in resolving complex, longstanding conflicts. These included the abolition of apartheid in South Africa, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the bloodless partitioning of East Timor from Indonesia, a peaceful settlement in Ulster, the start of reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula and the peaceful resolution of many other international conflicts, for which Jimmy Carter finally received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
How do those situations stand now? There are two success stories — South Africa and Northern Ireland; one failure — poverty-stricken East Timor, which survives only because it receives charity from international donors; and one not entirely lost cause — reconciliation between North and South Korea. But the nations of the world have not reduced the nuclear threat, nor have they become more humanitarian. More likely, just the opposite has happened.
Now we come to the post-2003 period. The war in Iraq has turned the triumph of the “world according to Uncle Sam” into a failure, and the “new world order,” to which former U.S. President George Bush referred in 1988, has yet to arrive. Awarding the peace prize to the International Atomic Energy Agency — the only organization to receive it in recent years — was an attempt to keep the nuclear nonproliferation process from falling apart at the seams. The remaining laureates are individuals who are laboring to achieve goals that the weakened international institutions are no longer capable of accomplishing.
Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore, who has come to symbolize the fight against climate change, is another sign of this trend. Perhaps the decision by the Norwegian committee will breath new life into not only the environmental movement, but also U.S. politics — and by extension, world politics.
The United States’ failure to achieve primacy in international relations has been analyzed by just about everyone, including the Americans themselves. And there is nearly universal agreement that the world is now moving into a new, multipolar phase. Most people welcome the transition, anticipating that it will usher in a fairer and more equitable global order. Only one question remains: How will it actually function?
The idea of a global system dominated by a few major players is nothing new. Prior to the bipolar U.S.-Russian confrontation of the Cold War, that is how major international politics were structured. The great powers either opposed each other or entered into alliances, whether temporary or long-term.
On the surface, governments often agree that we should all take responsibility for the future of our planet. But when discussions focus on solving a concrete problem in which one or more sides hold a vested interest, mutual understanding often flies out the window. The disagreement over Iran is a vivid example of this.
From the West’s point of view, Russia is obstructing the attempt by the “civilized world” to coerce Tehran into giving up its nuclear program. The U.S. Congress and mass media often accuse the Kremlin of protecting Iran’s belligerent mullahs and their half-witted president. And Moscow’s categorical “nyet” to the deployment of U.S. missile defense systems in Eastern Europe, which Washington claims would help mitigate an Iranian missile threat, further muddies the waters.
Tehran believes that Moscow is exploiting Iran as nothing more than a disposable pawn in its cynical game with the West. Iranian political analysts assert that it has always been unwise to rely on Russia’s word. They point out that Russia has not followed through on its agreement to build a nuclear power plant in Bushehr and supply it with fuel. And Moscow’s offer that the U.S. make joint use of its radar installations in Gabala in Azerbaijan and Armavir in southern Russia to monitor Iranian rockets is a clear affront to Tehran.
To be sure, Moscow is also unsettled about the prospect of a nuclear Iran. In addition, the issue of how the Caspian Sea is shared continues to be a divisive issue between the two nations.
Nevertheless, Russia views Tehran much differently than the West does. Israel, the United States and some European nations believe that Iran is an unpredictable clerical state capable of doing anything for the sake of religious dogma. And Tehran needs nuclear weapons, they believe, so it can spread the “true faith.” Moscow, on the other hand, believes that the modern-day successors of Persia’s imperial past are interested primarily in becoming a regional power, especially in the context of an increasingly multipolar world. This, the Kremlin says, is the most important reason why Tehran wants nuclear weapons and not to launch a nuclear strike against the West.
Russia’s position should not be reduced to a primitive “for” or “against.” The prospect of U.S. military intervention in Iran scares Europeans no less than Russians. The problem is that the political leverage of Russia and other world powers is much less than they think.
At a time of global instability, it is regimes like Iran — and not the major global powers — that come out the winners when the superpowers get bogged down in political power struggles. But the big players refuse to accept this fact. It is more pleasant for them to believe that they are still the ones calling the shots.

Fyodor Lukyanov is editor of Russia in Global Affairs.

TITLE: Averting Assassination Attempts
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: Interfax quoted “a reliable source in the security service” as saying there was a plan to assassinate President Vladimir Putin during his visit to Iran.
With assassination attempts, however, it is the details that are really important. But no details are known in these cases.
And this is not the first time we have heard about the heroic accomplishments of the security services. Federal Security Service chief Nikolai Patrushev shocked everyone when he claimed that his agency thwarted terrorist attacks at the Sochi, St. Petersburg and Samara summits.
This is a bit strange, isn’t it? If terrorist acts had indeed been averted, then those who were planning them should be prosecuted and jailed. But there are no such cases in the courts. Of course, we could assume that there were no court proceedings precisely because the terrorists were captured in top-secret operations and that the offenders were “wiped out in the outhouse” in the dark of night.
Patrushev also claimed that the FSB had prevented 300 terrorist attacks last year — twice the number the agency stopped the previous year. How is this possible? The number of insurgents has been falling as their funding sources dry up. Under such circumstances, it is unlikely that the number of thwarted terrorist plots could increase. At the same time, however, the number of courageous majors and captains from various security services seems to have increased as they uncover explosives and claim, “We averted another terrorist act.”
In addition, the FSB recently thwarted an attempt by Islamic extremists to assassinate St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko. An entire platoon of special forces agents seized a couple of young Muslims after they bought explosives. The apartment where the young guys had been meeting to discuss Muslim principles and condemn gay parades turned out to be stuffed with hidden cameras, strangely enough. But for some reason the heroic FSB agents weren’t able to take the suspects into custody. Nor was the owner of the apartment arrested, even though his conversations with the suspects were caught on video. And, for some reason, the owner looked more frequently at the camera concealed in the wall than at his interlocutors.
Putin is surrounded by people who are inept at running business as well as government. But they do know how to do one thing very well — fight enemies of the state. And when there are no enemies, they invent them. After all, the greater the number of enemies you are able to unmask, the more stars you get to pin on your uniform and — even more important — the more the president will depend upon you because you, and only you, can save him from assassination attempts at summits in St. Petersburg, Sochi, Samara and now Tehran.
By the way, the last time our security services were mentioned in connection with Tehran was when they claimed to know the exact date when the United States would begin military operations against Iran. This was pure disinformation. Nevertheless, the statement had the desired effect: Oil prices rose sharply, and those who were involved in this scheme earned a nice amount of money. Most people are used to treating such security service leaks seriously, and they would find it difficult to believe that a federal security organization would intentionally risk its own reputation so that a few generals could make money on energy futures.
In any event, it is safe to predict that the number of averted assassination attempts on Putin will increase as we approach the March presidential election. And, following the murders of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, it will only take one thwarted attempt on our beloved president’s life — which will be attributed to anti-Kremlin politician Garry Kasparov and, of course, the CIA — for the situation in Russia to become irreversible.

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

TITLE: Hearts and minds
AUTHOR: By John Freedman
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The premiere of Alexei Borodin’s production of Tom Stoppard’s marathon trilogy “The Coast of Utopia” last week took flight in a lovely bucolic scene that distilled everything that makes Stoppard one of the world’s most treasured writers. An intimate foursome with a bit too much time on their hands, a tad too much ambition and ever so slightly too much intelligence for their own good engaged in a multivalent conversation that elegantly flitted among the topics of love, philosophy, sex, art, eroticism and politics. Most of it was mixed up in a frothy brine of nonsense, tomfoolery and light deceit.
The speakers were the exiled Russian revolutionary Alexander Herzen, his wife Natalie, the German poet and revolutionary Georg Herwegh and his wife Emma, all of whom were in the process of slipping into a love quadrangle that ultimately would test each of them in various ways. Led by Ilya Isayev as the cool-headed Herzen and Nelli Uvarova as his fiery and seductive wife, the scene had that Stoppardian feel of hanging in the air like a hummingbird, utterly still and yet internally frantic. It, indeed, was a fine and admirable scene. The problem was that it had taken over five hours to get here. That is a long time to wait in a theater seat.
Two years in the making, the “Utopia” project has enjoyed hands-on participation from Stoppard, who has visited Russia frequently to meet the performers and who was prominently present at third-row center for the 10-hour opening night last Saturday at the Russian National Youth Theater. To my knowledge, there has never been a more thorough collaboration between a Russian theater and a major Western playwright. This association has included readings, rehearsals, trips to the Russian countryside, an educational program run through several Moscow institutes and even a trip to Vorobyovy Gory to clean off a monument to Herzen and his friend Nikolai Ogaryov, another major figure in Stoppard’s play.
“The Coast of Utopia” debuted in London in 2002 and was a hit in New York in 2006 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater. Consisting of three plays running a total of 10 hours and employing some three dozen actors not counting extras, it is a massive, one might say daunting, work. 
It traces several Russian intellectuals over 35 crucial years in Russian history — from the aftermath of the failed Decembrist uprising in 1825 to the aftermath of the freeing of the serfs in 1861.
Using history as a springboard for imagination, Stoppard united such famous Russians as Herzen, the poet and socialist Ogaryov, the radical philosopher Mikhail Bakunin, the refined novelist Ivan Turgenev and the famed literary critic Vissarion Belinsky. Brief appearances are made by the philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev, the radical writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the German theorist Karl Marx and others. The trilogy’s first play, “Voyage,” takes place in the Russian countryside at the Bakunin family estate. Play two, “Shipwreck,” transpires in Germany, France and Italy, where Herzen flees to avoid persecution in his homeland. Play three, “Salvage,” observes Herzen in Britain and Switzerland as he gains fame as a publisher and writer and seeks, with some success, to influence public opinion and political events in Russia.
One can’t help but ask why Stoppard wrote so much about so much. His personal history might have been a factor. Born in Czechoslovakia, he lived as a child in various countries before settling with his mother and new English father in London when he was 9. Perhaps he feels an affinity with Herzen, who lived comfortably in England but never did become English. Or perhaps what caught his ear was the timely topic of exiled activists and philosophers of freedom plotting and dreaming of global justice. Whatever the compulsion, one response seems inevitable: Why so much in such extreme detail?
It would be borderline asinine to suggest that Stoppard miscalculated. If “Utopia” runs for three plays and 10 hours, it is clear this is what the author intended. What is not so clear in Borodin’s production, performed in a Russian translation by brothers Arkady and Sergei Ostrovsky, is what Stoppard was really up to.
The entire first play, running at three hours, seems to be a set-up that could have been handled in 12 minutes. Alexander Bakunin (Viktor Tsymbal) is the patriarch to a family of lively daughters and an impulsive son, Mikhail (Stepan Morozov). Mikhail’s friends, the philosopher Nikolai Stankevich (Alexander Doronin) and Belinsky (Yevgeny Redko), wrangle about in high-minded arguments about transcendentalism, freedom, literature, reality and inner worlds, frequently referencing the German philosopher Hegel as if his name were a mantra. Meanwhile, life at the Bakunin estate goes on, quilted in layers of seemingly petty concerns. Here, Stoppard establishes a synchronicity that will continue throughout all the plays — “serious” philosophical talk is invariably interrupted and undermined by the simplest of human activities. Love and lust invariably subsume even the hottest philosophical debates in their warm and sometimes painful embraces.
Part Two, “Shipwreck,” delivers the richest dividends. Stoppard, Borodin and the cast are at their best as they follow Herzen and his wife into exile. Here the contradictory confluences of human nature, desire and ambition are painted at times with a striking depth of vision. Herzen’s belief in human freedom means he willingly looks the other way as his wife falls in love with Herwegh. Natalie’s capacity for love, life and loyalty means her love for the German in no way tarnishes her love for her husband. This couple’s generosity of spirit, which allows for unorthodox romantic entanglements, is not matched by that of Herwegh (Alexei Vesyolkin) and Emma (Maria Ryshchenkova), the latter of whom suffers terribly even as she struggles to be as big-hearted as the others.
A subsequent encounter between Natalie and Ogaryov’s first wife, Maria (Anna Taratorkina), splits the paradoxical hairs of human nature even more finely. Here is another soaring dialogue in which snippets of witty, well-constructed thoughts about art and philosophy crumble beneath the weight of a complex human relationship that is built primarily on sexual attraction and feminine jealousy.
The final installment, “Salvage,” observes Herzen and his friends as a new historical era overtakes them. They rightly see the print of their work in the abolition of serfdom in Russia. On the other hand, a new generation of radical Russians now scorns Herzen and his naive “liberalism.” Meanwhile, life has taken a cruel toll on his family — his mother and a deaf son died in a shipwreck. Natalie died shortly thereafter in childbirth. Herzen and Ogaryov, also with a new wife but drinking ever more heavily, maintain their wits but are visibly worse for the wear.
The three-hour “Salvage” adds little to what we already gleaned in “Voyage” and “Shipwreck,” although it offers interesting and entertaining nuances. Indeed, the basic territory Stoppard covers has not changed for nearly half a day in real time.
As director, Borodin gives the three plays a dynamic read — actors are brisk in their deliveries and movements — but the performance’s rhythm and tempo vary little over the entire 10 hours. The set designed by Stanislav Benediktov is equally monotonous, made primarily of wooden panels and columns.
Isayev and Uvarova are not the only actors worthy of note in this show, which delivers less than it promises even as it provides many riches. Redko’s comically manic interpretation of Belinsky is the highlight of “Voyage.” And Alexander Ustyugov’s performance of Turgenev shuns the customary portrait of this novelist as weak and indecisive, recreating him as a man of wit and irony with a deep understanding of life’s delicious contradictions.
Isayev turns in a moving performance as Herzen. He succeeds in finding an approach that highlights all the facets of this personality — committed activist, fair judge of character, loyal friend and deeply loving husband and father. Herzen is Stoppard’s keystone, of course. In him, the playwright makes his most fundamental statement — that without humanity, no philosophy has a leg to stand on.

“The Coast of Utopia” (Bereg Utopii) plays Oct. 20 and 27 at the National Youth Theater, located at 2 Teatralnaya Ploshchad in Moscow. Metro Teatralnaya. Tel. 495 692 0069. “Voyage” begins at noon, “Shipwreck” at 3:30 and “Salvage” at 7 p.m.

TITLE: Word’s
         Worth
AUTHOR: By Michelle A. Berdy
TEXT: The pundits say that Russians just don’t trust the messiness of democracy and that they crave a strong hand. 
And they prove it with a folk saying or two. <i>Áåç öàðÿ — çåìëÿ âäîâà.</i> (Without the tsar, the land is widowed.) <i>Ãðîçíî, ñòðàøíî, à áåç öàðÿ íåëüçÿ.</i> (However terrible and horrible, we can’t be without a tsar.) 
Or they dig out a quote from the Primary Chronicle in which the ancient Russians begged the Varangians to come rule them: <i>Çåìëÿ íàøà âåëèêà è îáèëüíà, íî ïîðÿäêà â íåé íåò.</i> (Our land is great and abundant, but there is no order.)
Sounds good. But if you leaf through your pocket guide to Russian folks sayings, you’ll discover that this undemocratic, order-loving nation has about 50 pithy sayings expressing deep distrust for order, like, <i>Îò âåëèêèõ ïîðÿäêîâ áûâàþò âåëèêèå áåñïîðÿäêè.</i> (Great order may beget great disorder.) So which is it?
Judging by Russian folk sayings, it’s both, neither and 300 other truisms. They are totally useless for proving much of anything about the Russian soul. But they are a very handy way of conversing. In fact, with a bit of memorization, you don’t have to know Russian grammar at all. Just rattle off a saying to fit the occasion.
Scene: Moscow apartment. Cast: Expat (E) and Russian Significant Other (RSO). Time: Noon Saturday.
RSO: <i>Êîãäà òû íàêîíåö âñòàíåøü? Òû æå îáåùàë ïî÷èíèòü ñåãîäíÿ êðàí!</i> (When are you getting up? You promised to fix the faucet today!)
E: <i>Ðàáîòà íå âîëê — â ëåñ íå óáåæèò!</i> (Work isn’t a wolf; it won’t run away into the woods!)
RSO: <i>Ìîëîäåö. Âûó÷èë ïîãîâîðêó. À ñëûøàë äðóãóþ — òðóä ÷åëîâåêà êîðìèò, à ëåíü ïîðòèò?</i> (Good boy. You learned a proverb. Have you heard this one: Work feeds a man, while sloth ruins him?)
E: <i>Áîëüøå ñïèøü — ìåíüøå ãðåøèøü!</i> (The more you sleep, the less you sin!)
RSO: <i>Àõ òàê! Êòî ìíîãî ëåæèò, ó òîãî áîê áîëèò!</i> (So that’s the way you’re going to be! He who lies long gets a pain in the side!)
E: (proudly) <i>Îò ðàáîòû íå áóäåøü áîãàò, à áóäåøü ãîðáàò!</i> (Work won’t make you rich, but it will break your back!)
RSO: <i>Ñëóøàé — ïî÷èíè êðàí, à ïîòîì âàëÿéñÿ ñêîëüêî õî÷åøü. Ñäåëàë äåëî — ãóëÿé ñìåëî!</i> (Listen, just fix the faucet and then you can lie around all you want. When the work is done, go have your fun!)
E: (resolve weakening) <i>Ìåøàé äåëî ñ áåçäåëüåì, ïðîæèâåøü âåê ñ âåñåëüåì?</i> (If you mix work with relaxation, will you live your life in jubilation?)
RSO: ÂÑÒÀÍÜ! (GET UP!)
E: (resigned) <i>Æåíà â äîìå ãîëîâà.</i> (The wife is the head of the house.)
RSO: <i>Âîò ýòî òî÷íî.</i> (You got that right.)
You get the idea. <i>Íà âñÿêîãî Åãîðêó åñòü ïîãîâîðêà!</i> (There’s a saying for every occasion!) 

<i>— Sergey Chernov is away</i>

TITLE: Interest in modern art picks up
AUTHOR: By Katya Kazakina
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: Moscow-based plastics magnate Igor Markin arrived promptly at 11 a.m. to the VIP preview of London’s Frieze Art Fair. In just half an hour, he had already bought a 55,000 pound ($112,312) Matthew Barney triptych.
“This is my first acquisition of Western contemporary art,” said Markin, owner of Proplex Group. “Matthew Barney is one of the strongest artists in the world and I am glad to begin with his work.”
Markin, who opened his private museum of Russian contemporary art, “Art4.Ru,” this year in Moscow, is among the newly wealthy Russians who have flocked to London’s biggest art fair. They join collectors looking to buy works of artists such as Richard Prince,  Tracey Emin and Lisa Yuskavage. Frieze opens to the public today.
“I’ve been to many art fairs in the past four-five years and know that the best works sell out immediately,” said Markin at the preview yesterday, after buying the black-and-white photo-based triptych of a shrimp and Asian children dressed in white. He said he spends about $2 million a year on art.
Russian collectors are branching out from Russian art and decorative objects to buy more international works. This month, Gagosian Gallery opens a show of its postwar and contemporary blue-chip stars in a luxury shopping mall outside Moscow.
The interest comes from “a dual situation when one can invest into something that’s intellectual and can be lucrative at some point,” said collector Maria Baibakova, 21, who attended the fair with her father, Oleg Baibakov, a former executive at mining company MMC Norilsk Nickel.
By 2 p.m., Baibakova had yet to make a purchase. She said she was considering a “beautiful Anish Kapoor” at Lisson Gallery’s booth and was discussing the potential purchase of a piece by Mike Kelley with Berlin-based Jablonka Galerie, where the artist currently has a solo show.
Not all Russian visitors are enthusiastic about contemporary art. Russian-American billionaire Len Blavatnik, president and founder of New York-based Access Industries, said he “tolerates” it and leaves the actual acquisitions to his wife. The Blavatniks eyed Tracey Emin’s blue-and-pink neon light installation, spelling “I could have really loved you,” at Gagosian Gallery.
What the Russian collectors share is the eagerness to learn about international contemporary art.
“The goal is not to build a collection of garbage,” said Markin, who wore jeans and a beige sweater to a posh party at Christie’s International yesterday. “You need to know the artist, his place in history and his innovations. Collections based on personal taste are often bad.”
 For New York-based Russian collector Inga Rubenstein, developing her taste is part of the educational process.
“I am learning what I like,” said Rubenstein. “My taste is changing every single day. One year ago, if you told me the name of Francis Bacon, I would never put it in my house. Now, I would totally love it.”
Rubenstein and her husband Keith began collecting less than two years ago. Their first work — a white butterfly painting by Damien Hirst — was Keith’s birthday present to Inga. Now their collection includes a blue plank by John McCracken, Piotr Uklanski’s “Brooklyn Bridge” diptych, and works by Jenny Holzer and Jeff Koons. In the past six months, they spent around $1.7 million on contemporary art. Inga joined the international director’s council of the Guggenheim Museum this past summer.
Did she buy anything at Frieze?
“Unfortunately, I came a little bit late,” she said. “Most of the pieces I wanted were sold.”

TITLE: The savior of the avant-garde
AUTHOR: By Nicolai Ouroussoff
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: 5NEW YORK — On most nights, the Russian Samovar, a dimly lighted restaurant at the edge of the theater district in Midtown Manhattan, is a gloomy blend of new Russian money and faded émigré glamor.
But recently its upstairs dining room was haunted by ghosts from the 1920s and ‘30s, the golden age of the Soviet avant-garde. The grandson of the Constructivist architect Moisei Ginzburg stood in a corner chatting with the daughter of Alexei Dushkin, who once designed subway stations for Stalin. A few steps away, the daughter of the Soviet planner Nikolai Miliutin sipped cranberry vodka with Barry Bergdoll, the Museum of Modern Art’s top architecture curator.
They were all there for a symposium dinner related to “Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922-32,” a show of recent photographs by Richard Pare at the Modern that conveys the fragile state of so many architectural monuments built in that heady era.
Yet the buzz in the room had less to do with Russia’s architectural heritage than with a celebrity who had not yet walked through the door: Sergey Gordeyev, a 34-year-old billionaire developer and Russian senator who helped finance the show at the Modern.
Two years ago, Gordeyev bought a share of the Melnikov House (1927) in Moscow, setting off a panic in the city’s small but tightly knit preservation community. With its cylindrical interlocking forms, a hypnotic blend of Modernist purity and Russian mysticism, the house is considered a landmark of Soviet architecture. Yet it stands on valuable land in the city center.
Preservationists feared that Gordeyev, who made his money in the rough-and-tumble Russian real estate market, might bulldoze the house to make way for the kind of gaudy new development that has become emblematic of the new Russia.
Today, the Melnikov House not only survives but also seems destined to become a museum. And that is mostly, if not all, due to Gordeyev, who has emerged as a white-knight protector of Soviet architecture.
Last year he also bought the Burevestnik Factory Workers Club, another revered building by the architect Melnikov, in suburban Moscow. Gordeyev founded the Russian Avant-Garde Foundation, whose mandate includes fostering innovative new architecture and publishing books on Russian architecture as well as protecting and restoring Soviet-era landmarks.
He recently bought the archives of the architects Ivan Leonidov and Alexei Shchusev, and he plans to make the material available to scholars. He has introduced legislation in the Russian Parliament that would require the removal of advertising billboards from the city’s architectural landmarks. (The bill was recently approved by the upper chamber and is now in the lower chamber.)
“He’s polished up his image,” said Pare, who is negotiating to sell an archive of about 10,000 negatives to Gordeyev. “He’s evolved from this shadowy figure to saint overnight.”
With his fingers in so many pies, it can seem as though Gordeyev’s hands hold the fate of one of the greatest legacies of 20th-century Modernism. And while the preservationists who once feared him now fervently praise him, they privately admit to some disquiet.
Meanwhile, Gordeyev seems to have set his sights on a wider playing field: New York’s cultural institutions. He donated heavily to the Guggenheim Museum last year. And when the Modern was short of financing for the Vanguard show, it was Gordeyev who wrote the check. (That Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Foundation, showed up at a Modern dinner only reinforced a perception that New York institutions are in thrall to Gordeyev, or at least his easy way with donations.)
When Gordeyev finally arrived at the Samovar, he slipped into the crowd as quietly as a cat. A slim, well-built man with windswept hair and piercing blue eyes, he was the picture of casual wealth in his tailored gray suit and open-collared shirt. Although 34, he looks younger, like a skateboarder who had to dress up for a dinner with the grown-ups.
Leaning against a wall near a Russian-style buffet, he chatted enthusiastically about the symposium, where he had spoken that day about his foundation’s mission. He said that the centerpiece of the foundation’s efforts would be the Melnikov House, which he plans to transform into a museum, “like Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye or Sir John Soane’s house in London.”
“I’ve already spent $4 million on the Melnikov House,” he added. “I really think to do preservation in the proper way — government doesn’t have the money for that. I like the situation in America, where preservation has the support of private institutions. This is the right model for Russia, where there are a lot of rich people.”
Yet the next day, over a drink at a Midtown hotel, he seemed warier.
Asked how he had become interested in architecture, Gordeyev was slightly vague. After the borders with the West opened up in the early 1990s, he said, he spent two years drifting around Europe, where he said he fell in love with Gothic churches.
Questioned about his family background, he said he had grown up in Moscow, where his father was a weapons engineer and his mother a biochemist.
Gordeyev added that he was slightly uncomfortable with the amount of attention he had drawn for his preservationist activity. “The real start in preservation in Moscow was organizations like MAPS” — the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society, founded in 2004 — “foreign preservationists who came to Moscow, and people like Dushkina, who sounded the alarm,” he said. (He was referring to Dushkin’s daughter Irina.) “They are volunteers, activists, who are not getting any money. “
While he is quick to share credit with them, many of Gordeyev’s preservationist colleagues fret over whether he will stay the course or is simply using their cause to raise his international reputation. His growing cultural profile serves him well in the Russian political establishment, given that President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin is intent on polishing its own image in the West.
Gordeyev’s critics note that the man he appointed to run his Russian Avant-Garde Foundation, Mikhail Vilkovskiy, is not an architectural historian but a former public relations agent for business tycoons including Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian oil magnate who was jailed for fraud and tax evasion.
And the Burevestnik workers’ club that Gordeyev has promised to preserve is just across the street from a Soviet-era factory that his company plans to tear down to make way for a new business and convention center, stirring speculation that his cultural and business interests are somehow entwined. (Gordeyev said that as a senator, he is no longer involved in his company’s daily operations and was unaware of the deal.)
Yet his preservationist activity so far seems dogged. After leaving New York, he passed through London, where he played host to a meeting of architectural historians to lay the groundwork for his Melnikov House museum. And he recently approached Frank Gehry about designing something for the Russian city of Perm.
One could argue that in embracing the arts, Gordeyev echoes a long American tradition. Tycoons here have long sought a cultural patina for their newly acquired wealth. Yet it took two generations for, say, the Rockefellers to amass their money and transform it into something of cultural value.
Gordeyev is seeking to transform himself from brash capitalist to cultural philanthropist in little more than a decade. What is more, the pell-mell nature of development in Russia makes its architectural legacy particularly vulnerable. For this reason alone, his journey is worth watching.
“Why are Americans afraid of Russians?” he asked. “Because they are unclear of their intentions.”
“These are good changes happening in Russia,” he continued. “I am just a part of it. We all want this heritage to survive, to be accessible to everybody. We need to be part of the world to do this right.”

TITLE: A Deafening silence
AUTHOR: By Peter Baker
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A few weeks after the Beslan school siege in 2004, I returned to the traumatized town in southern Russia to write about how it was faring. The town had turned eerily silent, almost as if the guts had been ripped out of it. Funerals were still being held every day as the remains of the bodies of children were identified, one by one. Like the stench at the morgue, the grief was overpowering.
One night during the trip, I went to an Internet cafe in nearby Vladikavkaz to file a story. All around the room were young children, playing one of those ubiquitous violent video games -- children not much older than those who had been shot and blown up in School No. 1. They were giggling as they shot “terrorists” on the screen. As I peeked over, it dawned on me that the digital setting for this shoot-’em-up game was a burned-out building that looked just like the burned-out school in Beslan.
It was all too haunting. How could this be a game just down the road from the place where terror had intruded on real life in such a horrific way? How could they look at those screens and not find the images too chilling to confront? How could they not be crushed by the same sort of relentless misery that afflicted their fellow Ossetians? And, by extension, how could Russia move on so quickly?
Timothy Phillips grapples with these questions in his gripping account of the siege, “Beslan: The Tragedy of School No. 1.” As a translator with the BBC, he came to Russia after the standoff to help put together a documentary on the world’s worst terrorist attack since Sept. 11, 2001, and expected to see a country coming to terms with its own 9/11. “But this was not what I found,” he writes. “As I traveled between Moscow and Beslan, most of those I met had no opinions about the event at all, as if they had hardly thought about it either at the time or since. It was strange to them that I was asking; some even seemed to resent it.”
Maybe it tells us something about the value of life in a country that has seen so many violent deaths over the centuries. Maybe it tells us something about survival: walling yourself off against the horrors so as to go on with life as if all is normal. Maybe it tells us something about the country President Vladimir Putin has built. Phillips doesn’t have the answers, and perhaps no one does, but at least he’s raising some of the right questions. “Death, which is feared everywhere, is more preoccupying in Russia than in the rest of Europe,” he writes, “because it comes so much sooner.”
“Beslan” traces the events of the first three days of September 2004 through powerful narrative, stitching together the individual horror stories we’ve heard before into a compelling, comprehensive, almost cinematic account. Phillips does justice to the moment, paying tribute to the victims of Beslan by not letting them be forgotten so easily. There’s almost no way to read it without weeping for Beslan and for Russia.
Phillips puts the unfathomable events into historical context, tracing the complex and deeply dysfunctional relationships between Russians, Chechens, Ossetians and Ingush over the centuries and explaining how the deaths of more than 300 men, women and children fit into a pattern of anger and atrocity. What is missing from this rendition, as the author admits at one point, is the current context: what Beslan means in terms of the country Putin has built.
“There is one person whose name is seldom mentioned in Beslan, but whose part in the siege was key,” Phillips writes. “President Putin has remained distant from the events. Indeed, on the basis of what is publicly known, it is hard to justify mentioning him in this book at all.” Phillips notes that Putin appeared only briefly on television and made his post-siege visit in the middle of the night, disappearing again before anyone awoke to realize he was there. “But just the fact of his immense and unrivaled power in Russia means that President Putin must have been involved.”
Alas, the two paragraphs devoted to the president belie the greater connection between Putin and Beslan. Although Phillips does place Beslan in the context of Putin’s war in Chechnya, the rules Putin has imposed on a society trying to find itself in the post-Soviet era are left unexplored. One of the things that made Beslan such a singular event in modern Russian history is that it exposed the broader reality of Putin’s rule — television stations that aired a Brazilian soap opera or a film about a parrot rather than cover the deadly denouement live, a newspaper editor fired for coverage that angered the Kremlin, a radio station that had to rely on CNN to tell its Russian listeners what was happening, investigations that covered up more questions than they answered.
Especially revealing was Putin’s own response. Even as the smoke was clearing to the south, the president invited Western scholars and journalists to his dacha and angrily denounced Europe and the United States for their long insistence that Moscow talk with Chechen leaders to seek an end to the war. “Why don’t you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House, engage in talks, ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace?” Putin fumed. He dismissed Western criticism as Cold War mentality and said that the West wants to “pull the strings so that Russia won’t raise its head.”
A little more than a week later, Putin announced that because of the Beslan siege, he was eliminating the election of governors in Russia’s 89 regions in favor of Kremlin appointment, a move he had sworn repeatedly never to take, as well as eliminating the election of State Duma members by single-mandate districts in favor of easily controlled party lists. How terrorism in the Caucasus required the elimination of gubernatorial elections in, say, Siberia was never clear. But people close to the Kremlin indicated that Putin had long been planning such a move and simply took advantage of the moment to enact it.
Still, Phillips has offered us a worthy history of these three days, giving voice to the anguish of a small town buffeted by forces beyond its ken. And he ably points out the holes in the story that future authors will hopefully answer. “The absence of convincing or honest answers to important questions has caused many survivors to fall back on conspiracy theories,” he writes. “These are a tried and tested solution to many mysteries in a country with a pathological aversion to honesty and openness.”

Peter Baker, a former Moscow co-bureau chief for The Washington Post, is co-author with Susan Glasser of “Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution,” now in paperback.

TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The other weekend, I went to the stand-up show “Comedy Club,” whose televised version has become a big hit on TNT channel. The live show, staged in the unpromising surroundings of Moscow’s Atrium shopping mall, is supposed to be more risque and uninhibited. In other words, it has a lot of jokes about anal sex, although the punchlines sometimes seem a bit lost on the moneyed audience of businessmen and their blonde, slightly reconstructed girlfriends.
As you make your way into the shopping mall for the show, which starts at 1 a.m. — not the most upbeat time to visit a shopping mall — the line starts next to a store selling fur coats. Most people were carrying 3,000 to 4,000 ruble tickets for the show, but a couple of intimidating brunettes were standing at the door and allowing a few aesthetically pleasing people in for free, so that they could stand up at the back without revolting the paying public.
The show first aired on TNT in 2004, but has been running as a live show for five years. Its comedians all started out in KVN, a student comedy league that has its own, torturously long television show on Channel One. KVN is the kind of show where comedians will always start by explaining where the sketch — or miniatyura —is set and who each character is. Usually this is clear enough (at least one character is a traffic policeman), but the participants have to get by with a minimum of props and costumes. Which is nice for Channel One’s budget, but not exactly pushing the boundaries of comedy.
TNT’s show improved the format simply by adding girls in silver bikinis who dance between sketches. But it made other changes, too. Comedians sometimes do monologues, rather than teaming up with 10 college buddies from the Institute of Steel Alloys, and there’s fresher, more slangy language. There’s also a section in which celebrities in the audience get dissed by a mean comedian, Pavel Volya. Although people still explain who is who at the beginning of each sketch — that’s sacred.
Disappointingly, the live show didn’t have the girls in silver bikinis or Volya dissing the celebrities, perhaps because there weren’t many celebrities in an audience dominated by business-types smoking cigars and knocking back the champagne. Frankly, I would think twice before crossing some of them, and Volya did comment on the number of Bentleys in the parking lot, before proposing a little business deal involving a shaverma stand. He complained several times about the audience not laughing and although there was a reason for that — his not being all that funny — it seems a bit strange that this studentish show pulls in an audience of people who look like they last laughed when their Bentley accelerated through a puddle in front of a bus stop.
Volya held together the largely unmemorable show with his sometimes topical monologues. He talked about the Sochi Olympics victory celebration, when pop stars Filipp Kirkorov and Dima Bilan kissed each other — “As if they had to wait to win the Olympics,” he commented on the avowedly straight singers, who are often rumored to be otherwise. He also talked about his colleague Garik Martirosyan winning a Man of the Year award from Russian GQ magazine without actually having the registration that would make him a legal resident in Russia, and described the fights at this summer’s Metallica concert, which, for some reason, he went along to in a shirt and tie.
And then, of course, there were all the buggery jokes. I could repeat them, but someone else might want to tell you the anekdot about the traffic 
policeman.

TITLE: Cream of the crop
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Gelateria-Caffe Venezia // 107 Nevsky Prospect. Tel: +7-906-279-03-46 // Menu in Russian, English and Italian // Dinner for two without alcohol: 880 rubles, $35. // No credit cards

The chocolate one runs out fastest of all. It is bittersweet, smooth and dizzyingly rich, made with a prize-winning chocolate brand. The gooseberry one is tangy, zesty, with a sublime pinkish color and large seeds. The tomato one, with thin bits of peel, has preserved a subtle yet distinct veggie aroma but the taste is delicately sweet.
And, as one of the waitresses told her guests, the most exotic one on offer is fior di latte, or the “flower of milk.”
When I first traveled to Italy to visit a friend in Ravenna a few years ago, they took me on a tour to local ice-cream shops with an eye to teaching me how to avoid places serving artificial concoctions made with colorants.
“Look at the banana ice cream: if it is bright yellow, it means they use chemicals,” they told me. “It needs to be brownish, the sort of color that a real unpeeled banana would be.”
At Venezia, St. Petersburg’s first and only Italian gelateria, you do not need to resort to any such test. A single look is enough to earn your trust.
Venezia occupies a plum spot on Nevsky Prospekt, a stone’s throw from Ploshchad Vosstaniya, and is hugely popular with the local Italian community. The chefs from the city’s premier Italian restaurants have been spotted here on a number of occasions.
When you enter, you face a large glass counter showcasing about twenty different sorts of ice cream. The flavors rotate every day but the most popular ones, including chocolate, creme-brulee, tiramisu, vanilla, forest berries and tomato are almost always present.
You can taste them all, one by one, for free. When you decide which one you want, the smallest portion is a bargain at 70 rubles ($3), and you can get three portions for 100  rubles ($4).
The owners, Lena and Franco, a newly-wed Russian-Italian couple, say their ice-cream making equipment resembles an oversized washing machine. It sounds dull but the result is inspired. Since Venezia opened in early spring, experiments with flavors have continued, including sweet pepper, plum, cinnamon and kiwi, to mention but a few. Do not be deluded by the fruity titles: they are all ice creams, not sorbets, with smooth, luxurious, velvety textures. This cosy gelateria is about indulgence so the house brand, Venezia, is fudgy and infused with caramel syrup.
Apart from ice creams, Venezia serves minestrone soup (90 rubles, $3.60) and several types of pasta (180-250 rubles, $7-10). The choice typically includes tomato, bacon, tuna, carbonara and pepperoni but you need to ask the staff.
Visitors tend to often linger for a couple of hours — some bring their laptops in and stick around for even longer — while the staff seem to linger forever. 
“We open early and close late,” says an announcement at the door, betraying the fact that their opening hours stretch into the night. Newcomers all seem to fall under the impression that most guests know each other or are in some way connected. Italian is among the languages that can be heard at almost all times.
When we dined in Venezia on a Tuesday night, my dining companions, who have frequented Venezia since May, called me a phenomenal disgrace, as, having popped up here about once a week for the last six months, I had never got around to telling the readers of this newspaper about it.
“Or maybe,” they said, “ you are worried that the place will grow so popular that it will become a ‘by-booking-only’ dining experience.” With only seven tables at Venezia’s disposal, we were only half-joking.
It is addictive. It is devilishly good. I am hooked. You have been warned.

TITLE: Indie rom com
AUTHOR: By Matt Zoller Seitz
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: The low-key comedy “Broken English,” about a romance-scarred professional woman named Nora Wilder (Parker Posey) who invigorates her life with help from a handsome, sensitive, fedora-clad Frenchman (Melvil Poupaud), is a textbook example of an Indiewood film: a Hollywood fantasy wrapped in plain brown paper.
Its contradictory message is something like: “Listen up, 30-something single women; there is no Prince Charming. Oh, wait a minute ... Yes, there is!”
Written and directed by the first-time feature filmmaker Zoe Cassavetes, daughter of the pioneering independent director John Cassavetes, “Broken English” seems blithely unaware of the bait-and-switch that it will ultimately pull. In its first half-hour, while it charts Nora’s repetitious life as a hip hotel’s guest relations manager and establishes her serial disappointment in love, it promises a bracing response to Hollywood falseness: a comedy about a woman who realizes that she’s unhappy because what she thought were high standards were actually items on a romantic and sexual shopping list absorbed from a bankrupt popular culture.
The right age? Check. Interesting job? Check. Looks like a catalog model? Check. What are you doing Friday?
As played by Posey, who tamps down the vivacious kookiness that has made her an independent-film darling, Nora is the sort of cute mope that might appear in a screenplay emblazoned with Kate Winslet’s coffee stains.
Her online search for a single man in her age bracket yields no results. She agrees to go on a date set up by her grandchild-obsessed mother (played by Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes’ widow, frequent leading lady and Zoe Cassavetes’s mom), but finds that her prospective suitor (Josh Hamilton, in a note-perfect cameo) is still smitten with his ex-girlfriend.
And a marriage that she has always viewed as ideal — between her best friend, Audrey (Drea de Matteo), and Audrey’s director husband, Mark (Tim Guinee) — is collapsing, thanks to Mark’s fixation on a prospective leading lady who embodies his own romantic fantasies.
The film’s smartest sequence finds Nora flouting her hotel’s no-fraternization policy to go out with a V.I.P. guest, a rising movie star named Nick Gable (Justin Theroux, in the movie’s most complex and surprising performance).
Nick, a man-child with a mohawk that appears to be woven from Sasquatch fur, presents himself as a truth-seeking artist who craves a simple life with a woman who’s not in show business. We quickly deduce a truth that Nora wills herself not to see: Nick is a pure narcissist who sees his date with Nora as an acting challenge — an audition for a one-night stand.
These early, squirm-inducing scenes portend a film that will refute Hollywood romantic comedy’s wish-fulfillment tendencies with a rude dose of reality. Then the hunky, puppy dog Frenchman shows up, and the film’s daring impulses exit stage left.
Poupaud’s Julien is like a dreamboat from HBO’s “Sex and the City” without the inevitable neurotic downsides. Aside from a brief, awkward conversation in which Julien declares skepticism about monogamy and then reverses himself, his only apparent flaw is that he’s going back to Paris soon — which means, of course, that Nora will have to quit her job and go to Paris to find Julien, and herself.
This is a studio executive’s idea of risk taking, in the same questionable spirit as the 1987 hit “Baby Boom,” in which Diane Keaton played a career woman who inherited an infant and gave up her corporate job in exchange for a thriving small business, a gigantic country house and the love of Sam Shepard.
“Broken English” is a well-acted, smartly directed film that’s depressing because it could have amounted to so much more. It departs from the studio-financed romantic-comedy template in just one, unfortunately fatal respect: it makes a point of pride out of rejecting cliché, then swoons into its embrace.

TITLE: Russia Defeats England At Home
AUTHOR: By Kevin O’Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia came back from behind to spectacularly beat England 2-1 at Luzhniki stadium on Wednesday, increasing its chances of reaching the European Championship.
The match unfolded peacefully on the artificial pitch, but the victory, Russia’s most impressive since beating world champion France in 1999, was spoiled by violence before the game. 
England went ahead in the 29th minute with a stunning volley from Wayne Rooney, although he looked suspiciously offside.
England seemed in control of the game, and few believed that Russia could come back. 
Fans sent off flares in the crowd after an hour, even though they usually wait for a goal first. Less than 10 minutes after the flares had been sent off, coach Guus Hiddink’s second-half substitute, Roman Pavlyuchenko, destroyed England with two goals in four minutes.
First, Pavlyuchenko scored from the spot after Konstanin Zyryanov was fouled by Rooney. The foul appeared to have taken place just outside the penalty area, but the Russian team was still awarded a penalty. 
Four minutes later, Pavlyuchenko pounced to score after England goalkeeper Paul Robinson parried a shot by Zyryanov.
Russia is in third place with 21 points. If it wins the next two games against Israel and Andorra, it is guaranteed a trip to the finals in Austria and Switzerland next year. 
Before the game, Russian fans unveiled a gigantic national flag that stretched along most the side of the stadium and featured a bear with sharp claws.
Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, who attended the game, was quick to capitalize on the success, with state-owned Channel One television showing a recording of a meeting he had with players ahead of the game.
“We won the Great Patriotic War and were first to fly to space and, therefore, you must win today too,” Zubkov told the players.
“You must do everything you can,” he said, cutting the air with his right hand. The meeting was highly reminiscent of Soviet times, when Communist bosses met athletes ahead of important games.
Pavlyuchenko told Channel One that the fans were rooting so well that they “have become the 12th player on our team.”
“I devote these goals to my family and all fans who have come to support us,” he said.
Several clashes erupted between Russian and English fans ahead of the game, and police accused the foreigners of getting drunk and stirring up trouble.
“After they arrived they went straight for the pubs and clubs. The English fans are getting drunk and provoking conflicts,” a police spokesman said, Itar-Tass reported. “Police found several English fans on the street in a state of extreme intoxication overnight.”
More than 20 Russian fans broke into a bar on Novy Arbat three hours before the game and attacked a group of foreigners with hockey sticks, chairs and tables before fleeing, Ekho Moskvy radio reported. 
Police, however, denied that any incident had taken place, Interfax reported.
Also Wednesday afternoon, Russian fans wielding flares chased a group of Englishmen across Red Square, said one of the Englishmen, Mark Perryman. “No fan, whatever nationality, should have to put up with that,” he said.
Perryman earlier in the day joined British Ambassador Tony Brenton and other fans in placing a wreath of St. George’s flag at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Police recorded five fights Tuesday night and escorted several drunken fans back to their hotels, the spokesman said.
Among the fights, four Englishmen were beaten near the VDNKh metro station as they made their way back to the Kosmos hotel, where most of the 4,500 fans who flew to Moscow for the game were staying. All four were taken to the Botkin hospital at 4:40 a.m., Interfax reported. 
Also, a 33-year-old Englishman was severely beaten on Novy Arbat near the Praga restaurant and taken to the Botkin hospital with head injuries, Interfax said. A 25-year-old man has been detained in connection with the attack.
Another Englishman, aged 30 and drunk, was attacked near a restaurant, the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois, on Ulitsa Bolshaya Lubyanka, and taken to the hospital, Interfax said.
Meanwhile, Andrei Lugovoi, the former security services officer whom Britain wants to extradite for the poisoning death of Alexander Litvinenko, said Wednesday that he had decided to watch the game from home, even though he had obtained a ticket to the sold-out match. 
Lugovoi, who is running for the State Duma with the Liberal Democratic Party, wished Russia’s team well, RIA-Novosti reported. “Russia’s team has major potential, and if they can realize that, it will be a victory for Russia.”

TITLE: Group B Leader France Set For European Finals
AUTHOR: By Julien Pretot
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NANTES, France — France put itself firmly on course for next year’s European Championship finals with a 2-0 victory over Lithuania on Wednesday, just five weeks after a shock home defeat had almost derailed its campaign. 
Thierry Henry netted his 42nd and 43rd goals late in the match to pass Michel Platini’s French scoring record as Les Bleus took full advantage of Scotland’s 2-0 loss in Georgia to move top of Group B. 
Lying third in the group at the start of the match following a surprise 1-0 defeat to Scotland in Paris last month, France now leads Alex McLeish’s side by one point with Italy a further point adrift in third. 
Scotland hosts Italy at Hampden Park in its final qualifier on Nov. 17, four days before the Italians conclude their campaign at home to the Faroe Islands. 
Les Bleus now need only a draw in Ukraine on Nov. 21 to advance and could travel to Kiev already qualified if Italy beats Scotland. 
“To me, it was obvious we were going to win after creating so many chances,” France coach Raymond Domenech told reporters. 
“Now we’ll go to Ukraine for the win and I don’t care about Scotland or Italy.”
“It’s a great relief,” goalkeeper Mickael Landreau added. 
“But it was the second leg of a three-stage race so we have to stay focused.” 
However, Henry, who broke the deadlock in the 79th minute, said France was worried it would be unable to break Lithuania’s resistance as the contest reached the closing stages still scoreless. 
“At one time, we thought it was not our night but we kept pushing hard and we were eventually rewarded for it,” said Henry, who doubled the tally in the 80th to put the result beyond doubt. 
“But now we still have to qualify. This is the goal we must not forget.”

TITLE: Dramatic Formula One Showdown Expected
AUTHOR: By Alan Baldwin
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SAO PAULO — Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen will fight for the Formula One title in Brazil on Sunday in what promises to be one of the sport’s great showdowns. The final grand prix of an astonishing and controversial season, in a city as crazy about motor racing as Italians are about Ferrari, has all the elements of a three-way thriller. 
Hamilton, 22, is aiming to become the first rookie champion in 58 years. Formula One’s first black driver has 107 points, four more than his estranged Spanish team-mate and double world champion, Alonso. 
Alonso can join a select band of triple champions, as well as becoming the first driver since the late Argentine Juan Manuel Fangio in 1957 to win back-to-back titles with different teams.
Three points behind Alonso is Ferrari’s Raikkonen, who has won more races than the other two but has paid the price for his team’s comparative unreliability. 
If the unflappable Finn were to add the drivers’ title to Ferrari’s constructors’ crown, it would be a remarkable comeback for a man who was 17 points adrift of Hamilton with two races remaining.
Formula One has seen nothing like it since the Australian Grand Prix of 1986, the last time that three drivers entered the final race of the season vying for the title. 
“Motor racing and Formula One has never been more popular than it is just now,” said Britain’s triple champion Jackie Stewart, a big fan of Hamilton’s. “We’ve had a better season than we’ve ever had.”
Raikkonen and Alonso will be going all out to win, while Hamilton can afford a more strategic approach, knowing that third or even fourth place could be all he requires at an unfamiliar and tricky counterclockwise circuit.
The youngster has learned his lesson from the last race in China, where he might have wrapped up the title had he not skidded into a gravel trap at the pit lane entry.
“China was another valuable lesson for me this season, and an incident I will take from and try to develop as a driver,” Hamilton said this week. 
“I moved on from the disappointment pretty quickly and since leaving Shanghai, my sole focus has been on Brazil,” added the Briton, whose boy-hood idol, Ayrton Senna, was born and buried in Sao Paulo.
“Whilst I might be ahead by four points, this championship is still very open. I will do what I can to score the points I need, and the rest is out of our hands,” he added.
While Hamilton must be considered the favorite and will revive local fans’ memories of Senna with his similar yellow helmet, Alonso won both of his titles in Brazil and has experience on his side.
The Spaniard will also have a special scrutineer appointed by the governing body to make sure, despite McLaren’s oft-repeated policy of driver equality, that Hamilton receives no special treatment from the British team.
“We can categorically state that they will be given the exact same opportunity to win the race and the championship,” said McLaren chief executive Martin Whitmarsh.