SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1328 (94), Friday, November 30, 2007
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TITLE: Dissidents Fear Soviet Comeback
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: There was talk of gulags, hunting down dissidents and the Stalinist junta at an opposition meeting on Pionerskaya Square on Wednesday as liberal politicians, veteran dissidents and human rights advocates spoke out against what they see as a tragic return to authoritarian rule and even a Soviet-style police state. 
The event, organized by the Union of Right Forces, a liberal party, drew more than 1,000 participants.
One speaker at the meeting, a Soviet-era dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who plans to run against pro-Kremlin candidates in the presidential election in March next year, drew a parallel with resistance in the days of the U.S.S.R.  
He addressed the apathy of some of his potential supporters who he said might stay at home on polling day on the grounds that they felt that “the authorities are too strong and the opposition too weak and fragmented, and hence there is no sense fighting for a cause that has already been lost.”
Bukovsky, who now lives in the U.K., asked such people to take a more optimistic view.  
“Back in the Soviet years, the state was much stronger and the dissident movement much smaller,” Bukovsky said. “But now the U.S.S.R. does not exist and dissidents are still alive and well. There is no reason for a hands-off attitude.”
Bukovsky stressed that it is a matter of self-respect. 
“If you conform to a regime you deeply disagree with and which you find oppressive, and if you betray what you stand for, you will not be able to look your children in the eye, such will be the shame such a compromising attitude will inflict on you.”
Leonid Gozman, one of the leaders of the Union of the Right Forces, also warned against political apathy and stressed that widespread public inertia creates a breeding ground for corruption.
“If ordinary Russians do not show resistance to what has become a suffocating reminder of Soviet-style ‘absolute content,’ then the situation will soon become impossible to reverse,” he said. “Political life is rapidly turning into a humiliating and never-ending round of applause for whatever the head of state does, and that is extremely dangerous.”
Yury Vdovin, deputy chairman of the St. Petersburg branch of the human rights group Citizens’ Watch alleged that the “brainwashing” of TV viewers in the Putin era has outdone Soviet propaganda in both scale and quality.
“Television presenters tell people that life is becoming better every day, but the truth is that life is getting depressing,” Vdovin said. 
“What has been increasing is the wealth gap, rather than ordinary people’s income. Affordable housing is still nothing more than a myth. All Russia can boast of is the Bulava missile, and even that does not even have a specific target.”
The meeting was held under heavy police surveillance, with many officers of the special police task force (OMON) present, plus Interior Ministry troops and riot police. All participants were required to pass through metal detectors and had their belongings searched by the police. The area was sealed off by metal barriers.
Former political prisoners who attended the meeting said that the environment at the meeting was reminiscent of the camps where they had once served their sentences.
Participants at the meeting condemned police actions against unarmed peaceful protesters during last weekend’s Dissenters’ Marches in Moscow and St. Petersburg, which resulted in hundreds of people being detained and beaten. 
Among those arrested was the former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, head of the United Civil Front and one of the leaders of the opposition alliance, The Other Russia. He was charged with resisting arrest and organizing an unauthorised public protest after Saturday’s rally in Moscow. Kasparov was sentenced to five days in prison. A crowd at Wednesday’s meeting chanted “Freedom for Garry Kasparov!”
Olga Kurnosova, St. Petersburg coordinator of Garry Kasparov’s United Civil Front, said she counted thirty armor-plated riot police vehicles in the immediate vicinity of the meeting place. 
“When ordinary people hear about the police beating protesters they become scared and think they would be safer if they stay at home and do not join,” she said. “But the paradox is that the authorities are much more scared of the citizens, and this is the main reason why they deploy such massive force against small groups of harmless protesters.”
The meeting lasted just under an hour and broke up peacefully.

TITLE: Putin: Vote For United Russia
AUTHOR: By Michael Stott
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin told voters on Thursday to support his party in Sunday’s parliamentary election, hours before one of his most vocal critics warned Russia was heading for dictatorship.
Putin’s United Russia party is set to win a large majority of the votes in the poll, which opponents say is unfair.
“I ask you to turn out for the elections on Dec. 2 and vote for United Russia,” Putin said in a brief, pre-recorded television address broadcast to the nation.
Putin, running as No. 1 on United Russia’s election list, said by voting for the party citizens would opt for “stability and continuity” rather than the chaos of the 1990s.
“We cannot allow the return to power of those who once tried but failed to rule the country,” he said in a clear reference to his political opponents from liberal parties.
Putin has repeatedly said he will not try to find legal loopholes to stay in power for a third four-year term, which is banned by the constitution.
But he has also said he sees Sunday’s election as a nationwide vote of confidence in him, and that a landslide for United Russia would give him a “moral right” to influence Russia’s political life after his term ends.
Putin’s critics accused him of abusing his presidential post by openly campaigning for United Russia but Vladimir Churov, head of Russia’s election commission, defended his speech.
“Beside being a president, he is also a candidate included in one of the federal party lists,” he told a news briefing.
“A candidate who is on a federal list of candidates has the right to publicly campaign for his list.”
A few hours after Putin’s speech, former chess world champion and opposition leader Garry Kasparov left prison. 
Kasparov had served a five-day sentence for staging a protest outside the central election commission headquarters.
“I hope people around the world can see what happens to opposition activists in Russia,” he said, standing in freezing temperatures outside his apartment block in an expensive Moscow street.
“This regime is entering a dangerous phase of becoming a dictatorship.”
Kasparov said he had been tried by a “kangaroo” court whose mission was to scare the Other Russia opposition into ditching protest plans. Other Russia is a loose coalition of Kremlin opponents who say Putin has crushed human rights and freedom of speech since he rose to power.
The authorities say Other Russia, which attracts only marginal support and is not running for parliament, is using illegal techniques to disrupt the election.
Putin is credited with restoring order in Russia after the chaotic 1990s as well as presiding over an economic boom, fuelled mainly by oil and gas revenues.
Golos, a coalition of non-governmental groups (NGOs) monitoring for election violations said two of its offices in central Russia had been shut down by officials in what it described as a campaign to pressurize it to close down.
Lilia Shibanova, Executive Director of Golos, said the state agency that registers NGOs had been investigating the Samara offices and on November 22 sent a letter ordering their closure for six months, citing violations in the registration procedure.
“We believe this is pressure ... it is simply an attempt to stop organizations working on the elections,” Shibanova told Reuters.

TITLE: Strikes Going Up Alongside Rises in Cost of Living
AUTHOR: By Tai Adelaja
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Sergei Guzev, a train driver from the Vladimir region, said he had always been against the idea of going on strike — until rising inflation made it difficult for him to meet basic family expenses.
“As a father of two, I can hardly keep up with day-care costs and school bills,” Guzev said. “What’s the whole point of working if my family cannot subsist on my so-called above-average salary?” In his hometown of Petushki, prices for basic foodstuffs have now risen to the level of those in Moscow, 120 kilometers away, he said.
Earning a monthly salary of 27,000 rubles ($1,100) — twice the national average — for a 60-hour week, Guzev, 35, should by rights be seeing some of the benefits of the country’s oil-fueled boom trickling down his way. Instead, he is one of a growing number of workers turning to grassroots labor unions as a wave of strikes — some unofficial — spreads across the country.
On Wednesday, members of Guzev’s union used unorthodox methods to hold a work-to-rule, a few days after a court declared their strike action illegal.
In the Vologda region, about 120 train drivers purportedly feigned sickness to back the union’s demand for a 50 percent increase on their basic salary. Meanwhile, in Sverdlovsk and the Moscow region, “many train wagons developed technical problems simultaneously,” said Lenov Sergeyevich, who heads the union’s Moscow region branch.
The railway workers’ dispute is far less well-known than that of workers at U.S. carmaker Ford’s plant near St. Petersburg. Workers there went on strike Nov. 21, demanding a 30 percent wage increase and a shorter night shift. On Wednesday, Ford said it had restarted production as more than half the employees had gone back to work, but the union insisted the strike would continue.
That dispute has made headlines internationally, yet away from the glare of media publicity, estimating the rise in labor activism is difficult, as most cases of industrial action go unreported and unregistered by officials.
This year, Russian workers have staged about 25 strikes in various forms, said Carine Clement, a French sociologist who heads the Institute of Collective Action, a left-leaning nonprofit group.
But on its web site, the State Statistics Service records only two strikes happening this year.
Recorded strike activity has been very low during President Vladimir Putin’s time in office, as the economy has rebounded from the nightmare of the 1990s, when millions of workers often went for months without being paid.
The latest wave of strikes has swept from eastern Siberia to the Caucasus, with strikes recorded in workplaces as diverse as a construction site in Chechnya, a timber factory in Novgorod, a hospital in the far eastern Chita region, a housing maintenance office in Saratov and at fast-food kiosks in Irkutsk, Clement’s institute said.
In the last month, dockers in St. Petersburg have gone on strike, demanding a salary increase of 30 percent, while Russian Post workers struck for their fourth time since 2001.
At Russian Railways, a state-owned monopoly run by Vladimir Yakunin, a close ally of Putin’s, Guzev’s independent union, which represents some 2,600 train drivers, is threatening the first strike on the railways since 1988.
On Friday, the company obtained a court ruling declaring the action illegal, but Yevgeny Kulikov, the union’s leader, said members would organize a limited work-to-rule Wednesday.
Sergei Khramov, chairman of SotsProf, a group of independent labor unions, said the media largely ignored strikes unless a well-known company such as Ford was involved.
“One reason why the extent of workers’ dissatisfaction is not fully appreciated is the conspiracy of silence created by the state-controlled media,” Khramov said.
For example, while the state-controlled media “fumed and fretted” about a small strike at the AvtoVAZ car plant in Tolyatti in August, it ignored a bigger strike at the same time at a steel plant in Karelia, Khramov said.
At Ford’s factory Wednesday, some 1,300 workers have agreed to operate one shift daily, company spokeswoman Yekaterina Kulinenko said.
However, Alexei Etmanov, leader of the 1,500-strong union at the plant, said the cars produced would not pass the company’s quality tests as the technicians in that department were still on strike.
Tempers flared outside the plant Wednesday morning after striking worker Alexander Filippov, 25, was hit by a car driven by a police official, Etmanov said.
Police blamed the strikers for provoking the incident, while Etmanov said the police had refused to record the incident, in which Filippov was hospitalized.
Experts and activists see varying causes behind the strikes, from a looser fiscal policy by the government to corporate greed to organizers’ political motivations.
“Month after month, workers see their monthly take-home pay eaten away by high prices for goods and services,” said Khramov, the union chairman. “Workers cannot be expected to resign themselves to their fate if the reward of their daily toil is worth nothing in the market.”
“One reason is the complacency of company directors who have not yet learned to share the huge windfall with their workers,” said Clement, who is the author of a book on trade unions in Russia. “Workers see around them evidence of the luxurious lifestyle of company directors and top managers, while most of them can hardly afford three square meals.”
Oleg Neterebsky, deputy head of the pro-government Federation of Independent Trade Unions, or FNPR, did not rule out a political motivation behind the strikes.
“There is a hidden pattern to all these strike actions,” Neterebsky said. “Organizers of strikes are hoping to capitalize on the tranquility before elections to turn the spotlight on themselves.”
But Pyotr Zolotaryov, head of the independent Yedinstvo union at carmaker AvtoVAZ, said there was a smear campaign afoot to discredit strikers by associating them with politicians.
“Workers are striking because of frustration and helplessness,” Zolotaryov said. “Their demands are purely economic and in no way connected with politics.”
Laws making it difficult to legally organize a strike exacerbate the situation by bottling up legitimate grievances, Neterebsky said. Calling a strike, he said, involves five stages, including making formal demands, setting up dispute committees with the approval of 50 percent of workers, and appointing a mediator.
Another problem is the lack of consensus within the labor movement, Clement said.
“The pro-government unions present in every workplace prefer not go into conflict with the employer, while the independent unions are always ready to struggle for the rights of workers,” she said.
“It is a paradox that the strongest opponent of the workers’ movement is the FNPR,” said Khramov. “The wave of strikes is also a signal that workers are tired of the FNPR being imposed on them.”
For the factories and other workplaces involved, the economic losses from strikes have been significant.
Etmanov estimated that each day of strike action was costing Ford 300 unassembled cars, or $5 million, while Alexander Moiseyenko, chairman of the St. Petersburg dockers’ union, said turnover at the port had fallen by as much as 70 percent as a result of dockers not loading or offloading cargoes.
Natalya Orlova, chief economist at Alfa Bank, dismissed recent labor disputes as being only of local significance and said they would not dent the country’s economic progress.
“Most of the strike actions are limited to an individual plant, enterprise or region, and each has particular local demands,” she said.
Yet Anton Struchenevsky, a senior economist at Troika Dialog, warned that the strikes could damage the country seriously, given its demographic crisis.
“The rapid growth in militancy among trade unions is expected to increase in the future and may weaken the economic fabric by turning investors away,” Struchenevsky said.
“On the one hand, the population is decreasing and with it, the number of active workers. On the other, the economic boom is boosting the role of trade unions by creating higher demand for labor.”

TITLE: Correction
TEXT: In an article headlined “Ford Workers Stay on Strike Amid Deadlock” published on Tuesday, Nov. 27, Ford spokeswoman Yekaterina Kulinenko was misquoted when she discussed the effect on production a strike was having at its plant in Vsevolozhsk in the Leningrad Oblast.
What Kulinenko said was that orders for cars would be delayed by the number of days of the strike. We apologize to Ford and its customers for any misunderstanding caused by this editing error.

TITLE: Parties Strike Deal In Ukraine
AUTHOR: By Anya Tsukanova
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: KIEV — The two parties that led Ukraine’s Orange Revolution on Thursday reached a coaliton deal, setting the stage for pro-Western Yulia Tymoshenko to return as prime minister.
The party of President Viktor Yushchenko and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc signed an agreement on forming the new government, interim speaker Roman Zvarych told parliament.
Applause broke out in the parliament chamber and some deputies presented Tymoshenko with a large bouquet of blue and yellow flowers representing Ukraine’s national colours.
“I believe that we will succeed in forming an effective government and provide hope for systematic and deep reforms in the country,” said Tymoshenko, wearing her characteristic blonde braids.
Tymoshenko was Yushchenko’s ally in the Orange Revolution, when hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets in November 2004 for 17 days to protest rigged elections that handed victory to a pro-Moscow candidate.
But relations between them broke down just months after Yushchenko come to power in 2005, and critics took her to task as prime minister for a series of populist economic measures.
Tymoshenko became Ukraine’s first female prime minister in February 2005 but was sacked in September amid bitter rivalry with Yushchenko.
A total of 227 deputies in the 450-seat Rada, or parliament, signed the coalition deal, paving the way for the appointment of a prime minister at a parliament session set for Tuesday.
But a key member of Yushchenko’s party, Ivan Plyushch, refused to endorse the accord, underscoring the fragility of the deal that was backed by a slim majority in parliament.
Communist official Petro Tsybenko commented that the coalition endorsed by only 227 deputies “will not be viable. Every vote will be difficult.”
The appointment of 47-year-old Tymoshenko as prime minister provides a first test for the coalition, with lawmakers close to Yushchenko reportedly reluctant to endorse her candidacy.
Ukrainian media have reported that Yushchenko’s allies fear that Tymoshenko’s return as prime minister could bolster her already strong popularity and turn her into a potential rival for the presidency.
Some pro-Yushchenko lawmakers have said that Tymoshenko should pledge not to stand in the 2010 presidential vote as a condition for her nomination as prime minister.
Since Yushchenko came to power in 2005, three governments have been in office, as the country’s political elites are torn by infighting.
Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian politican who was Yushchenko’s rival in the Orange Revolution standoff, resigned as prime minister on Friday after 15 months in office.

TITLE: Russian Art Auction Raises $81 Million
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: Christie’s International in London held the highest-grossing Russian art auction Wednesday, raising $81 million, exceeding the $80 million raised by Russian art sales at Sotheby’s on Monday and Tuesday this week. Christie’s top presale estimate for the day was $64 million, commission not included. There were 413 lots and seven lots went for more than $2 million each.
“There were many fine works on sale, the results were strong, but there’s still potential for prices to go higher,” said Sergei Tabalov, a collector and dealer from Kiev, Ukraine, who at past auctions has gone home with top lots. “Prices for Russian art have risen at least 750 percent over the past decade.”
The day’s most expensive lot was a gold and enamel Faberge Egg owned by the Rothschild family of bankers. It fetched $18.5 million including commission, the most ever paid for a Russian art object. The buyer was Alexander Ivanov, director of the Russian National Museum, a private gallery in Moscow.
Early 20th-century paintings dominated the top 10 lots, led by Yury Annenkov’s “Portrait of Alexander Tikhonov” (1922), which sold for $4.68 million, almost twice its top estimate, and an auction record for the artist. The cubist work is mixed media, including oil, collage, glass, and plaster. Its European seller bought the work at Christie’s in 1989 for 110,000 pounds, about $228,000 at today’s exchange rate.
Boris Grigoriev’s “The Harlot of Marseille” (1923) sold for $2.6 million on a top estimate of $1.6 million, also a record at auction for the artist. It was bought by a Russian emigre from New York sitting in the fifth row.
Natalia Goncharova’s “Lilacs in a Vase” (1905) sold to a phone bidder for $3.29 million pounds on a top estimate of $1.8 million.
At Sotheby’s on Monday, Goncharova’s “Bluebells” (circa 1909), was the top lot, selling for $6.2 million, just at its low estimate. This work came from the Schreiber Collection in New York and is a brightly colored floral still life inspired by Matisse’s Fauvism.
At Christie’s on Wednesday, 52 lots in a collection of Konstantin Somov works owned by a French family sold amid fierce and protracted bidding. The final tally for the collection was $13 million, triple the presale estimate.
Four Somov works finished among the top 10 most expensive lots at Christie’s, and were led by “The Romantic Pursuit” (1935), which sold for $3.2 million, more than five times its top estimate. Somov and Goncharova have been the most expensive Russian artists at auction over the past year.
Nearly all the lots in the auction came from private European and American collections, while about 90 percent of buyers were from Russia and the former Soviet Union, Christie’s said.
The price paid for the Faberge egg easily beat the $9.6 million paid for a Faberge egg in New York in 2002, Christie’s said.
“[Faberge] holds an amazing fascination for just about everybody, from James Bond onwards as far as I remember,” said Anthony Philips, Christie’s Russian art specialist. “It’s just a magic name. The quality is fantastic. There’s a romantic association with the Russian Revolution. They’re of stunning workmanship.”
Prices for Russian art have escalated as the country’s increased wealth makes its way on to the international art market. Sales of Russian art at Christie’s rose from $27 million in 2004 to $79 million in 2006, and were on track to raise millions more this year, spokesman Matthew Patton said.
Tsar Alexander III commissioned the first of the elaborate eggs from craftsman Peter Carl Faberge as an Easter gift for his wife, Empress Maria Fedorovna.
The empress was so enamored of that 1885 piece — an enameled egg with a gold yolk, gold hen, miniature diamond crown and ruby egg inside — that the tsar commissioned a new egg every Easter.
This story was based on Bloomberg reports, written by John Varoli, and material from The Associated Press.
(Bloomberg, AP)

TITLE: Berezovsky Convicted 
In Absentia
AUTHOR: By Steve Gutterman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Tycoon and Kremlin critic Boris Berezovsky was convicted in absentia Thursday of embezzling millions of dollars from the national airline, Aeroflot, and reportedly sentenced to six years in prison.
Berezovsky, a former Kremlin insider who fled to Britain and has become one of President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal foes, said the charges were part of a politically motivated campaign against him.
“This was not a trial but pure farce,” he told The Associated Press by telephone.
Reading the verdict in footage on NTV television, a Moscow district court judge said Berezovsky was found guilty of embezzling money from Aeroflot through fraud. He was charged with embezzling 214 million rubles — nearly $9 million at the current exchange rate — in the 1990s.
The court later sentenced Berezovsky to six years in prison, Russian news agencies reported, but Britain has rejected Russian requests for his extradition.
Russia will again appeal to Britain to hand Berezovsky over, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported, citing Russian prosecutors.
Berezovsky said he would consider the six years or so that he has spent in Britain, unable to return to his homeland because he faces prosecution in 11 criminal cases, as punishment.
A court-appointed attorney defended Berezovsky, who told his lawyers to steer clear of the trial.

TITLE: Kudrin Says Arrest Hurts Talks
AUTHOR: By Miriam Elder
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin warned on Wednesday that the arrest of his deputy Sergei Storchak on embezzlement charges was starting to harm the ministry’s activities.
Kudrin also said he had requested a meeting with Storchak, who was arrested two weeks ago while Kudrin was attending an international conference. Storchak was charged on Friday with attempting to embezzle $43 million from the state budget.
“I need this meeting, and I need it urgently,” Kudrin said in remarks broadcast by all the state television channels on their evening news programs.
After his detention on Nov. 15, FSB officers raided Storchak’s home and offices, seizing key documents, Kudrin said. “The delay of the meeting is beginning to negatively affect the negotiating process ... as Storchak had up-to-date information on several issues,” he said. As deputy finance minister, Storchak is chief debt negotiator and overseer of the $148 billion oil stabilization fund.
Kudrin and State Duma Deputy Alexander Lebedev have asked the Investigative Committee, which carried out the arrest, to release Storchak. He is being held in pretrial detention at Lefortovo prison, which is controlled by the Federal Security Service.
“By law, we should get an answer within three days,” said Storchak’s lawyer, Igor Pastukhov. The Moscow City Court is to consider an appeal Monday against Storchak’s arrest, he said.
A spokesman for the Investigative Committee, which was created in September and answers directly to President Vladimir Putin, declined to comment on Kudrin’s remarks.
“We do not comment on what other people say or do,” spokesman Vladimir Markin said. “It does not concern us whether a minister says this or that.”
Storchak, who was detained along with a businessman and a banker, is accused of planning to embezzle $43 million by manipulating the settlement of part of Algeria’s Soviet-era debt to Russia. He denies wrongdoing and faces up to 10 years in jail if convicted.
Lebedev, the billionaire Duma deputy, defended Storchak in a telephone interview. “He has got an excellent reputation, and he’s not subject to corruption,” Lebedev said. “The procedures in government with which he was involved are very tightly regulated.”
Corruption remains widespread in Russia, and Transparency International ranks Russia 143rd out of 179 countries on its corruption perception ranking.
Storchak’s case has fueled speculation of pre-election infighting within the Kremlin. Storchak was a close aide to Kudrin, who was promoted to deputy prime minister in a Cabinet reshuffle in September and won praise from Putin for settling the country’s Paris Club debt ahead of schedule.

TITLE: New Administrative Center Plans Selected
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Plans drawn up by Russian and German architectural studios Yevgeny Gerasimov & Partners and NPS Tchoban Voss have won the tender for the construction of a new administrative center to be known as Nevskaya Ratusha, the press service for the St. Petersburg governor said Wednesday in a statement.
By 2010-2011, the multifunctional business center will be constructed in the Central District, between Novgorodskaya Ulitsa, Ulitsa Moiseyenko and Degtyarny Pereulok, on land that was formerly a tram park. The center will house committees of the St. Petersburg administration, which were previously located in 30 separate buildings in different parts of the city, and private tenants.
Governor Valentina Matviyenko emphasized that this project “is a good example of a public private partnership and cooperation between authorities and business,” in the statement.
Vneshtorgbank will invest about $800 million in the project, expecting to return the investment over nine to 11 years. The bank, which registered in St. Petersburg two years ago, plans to establish an office in Nevskaya Ratusha.
The complex will include commercial, office and public areas, a hotel and a fitness center. Of the total area of 400,000 square meters, the St. Petersburg administration will occupy 100,000 square meters, commercial, office and communal areas — about 200,000 square meters and a two-level underground car park — 100,000 square meters.
The St. Petersburg administration building will occupy the central area being constructed of glass and chromium-plated metal. 
The facades will be covered with natural stone.
The plans were chosen from five plans designed by Russian, German and Finnish architects.
“A well designed and located building for the city administration was the main reason for success of this plan. It offers effective zoning of commercial areas, simple and convenient logistics, spacious parking and public areas,” said Oleg Barkov, general director of Knight Frank, a consultant for the Nevskaya Ratusha project.
“The business areas have been made fairly flexible. Specific buildings can be replanned later, which important for investors,” Barkov said.
He added that Nevskaya Ratusha will feature a panoramic elevator and a covered panoramic restaurant on the top floor.
According to Knight Frank, by 2010 about two million square meters of A-class and B-class office areas will be in operation in St. Petersburg.
“This project is ready for construction, which is an advantage compared to other projects for large business centers. Unless the project is hit by delays, it will be the first world class office center to open in St. Petersburg. For some time it will have no competitors,” Barkov said.
Until now, the neighborhood has been viewed as down market. However, Barkov indicated, in the near future Nevskaya Ratusha would become a part of a larger developed neighborhood running along the Sinopskaya Embankment. 
After reconstruction of the embankment in 2007 and the launch of the Orlovsky Tunnel in 2011, transport accessibility for the area will improve, he added.
“I’m convinced that in 10 to 15 years’ time it will be quite a different district in comparison with its present condition,” Barkov said.

TITLE: Sberbank Elects Gref As President
AUTHOR: By Catrina Stewart
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Sberbank’s board of directors overwhelmingly voted in German Gref, the former economic development and trade minister, as the state-owned bank’s new president Wednesday.
Gref, the sole candidate for the post, received 96.9 percent of the vote at an extraordinary general meeting in Moscow. Ever since Gref accepted his nomination in early November, the vote has been viewed as a formality.
Gref takes over from Andrei Kazmin, who steps down after 12 years at the helm of the country’s largest lender. Kazmin is to head up Russian Post.
Gref’s arrival has been broadly welcomed by investors and analysts. After seven years in government, the former minister has earned a reputation as a liberal reformer and is popular with the Western business community. He is credited with overseeing the country’s impressive economic growth in recent years.
Speaking to shareholders at Wednesday’s meeting, Gref said a major part of the bank’s future strategy would be focused on entering international markets, Interfax and RIA-Novosti reported.
“I see the key strategy goal here in entering the international markets, primarily the CIS,” Gref said, noting the need to spread the bank’s risks.
Sberbank has a subsidiary in Kazakhstan and is currently eyeing opportunities in Ukraine. But analysts cautioned against a major push overseas.
Analysts said they expected Sberbank to maintain its current strategy given its size and role as Russia’s major lender.

TITLE: Volkswagen Opens Kaluga Plant
AUTHOR: By Chad Thomas and Denis Maternovsky
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: KALUGA — Volkswagen, Europe’s largest carmaker, opened a factory in Russia on Wednesday as it seeks to triple its share of the country’s market over the next three years and joins rivals Ford and Renault in beginning production in one of the fastest growing car markets.
“By 2010, 45 million Russian households will be able to afford an automobile,” chief executive Martin Winterkorn said at the factory’s inauguration in Kaluga, 160 kilometers southwest of Moscow. This country “has huge potential, and we are going to use it.”
Volkswagen, based in Wolfsburg, Germany, plans to increase its share of the Russian market to 10 percent in 2010 from 3 percent currently. The country is an important growth market for automakers as Russians spent a record $16 billion on new foreign cars in the first half as rising incomes fueled demand, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“Local production should help Volkswagen gain more market share, primarily because avoiding the 25 percent import tariff will make it more price competitive,” said Michael Tyndall, an industry analyst with Nomura Securities in London who has a “buy” rating on Volkswagen shares. Volkswagen’s market share in Russia is “too low given its share of the global market.”
Ten-month foreign car sales in Russia surged 64 percent to 1.31 million vehicles. Ford, the world’s third-largest carmaker, is spending $100 million to expand capacity at a St. Petersburg plant by almost 75 percent over the next two years. Renault, France’s second-largest automaker, opened a $250 million Moscow plant in 2005.

TITLE: BSGV Touts New Service For Its Corporate Clients
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Bank Societe General Vostok (BSGV) unveiled a new service for its corporate clients this week — financial institution loan servicing. BSGV managers expect this new service to be popular among financial institutions that lack a regional distribution network and among companies that do not have a license to issue loans to individual borrowers.
The service was tailored to the Russian financial market and its specific characteristics. It is aimed at organizations that offer consumer loans, including the expanding car loan market. Besides the opportunity to use a regional chain of BSGV offices, clients will not have to get a license to provide credit to individuals.
“Our new service will be useful for any company that plans to create its own financial institution without spending heavily on infrastructure,” Marc-Emmanuel Vives, President and General Director of Bank Societe General Vostok, said Wednesday in a statement.
Signing an agreement on loan servicing with BSGV, the financial institution can automatically transfer its credit resources to BSGV current accounts. BSGV guarantees that the funds will be used for the purposes specified by the firm and that it will control commissions and credit repayments.
Banking subsidiaries of car-manufacturing giants are entering the Russian market and Vives expects them to economize on infrastructure and use regional office chains of existing banks. At the moment, BSGV operates 43 offices in Russia.
Toyota Bank has already signed an agreement with BSGV. “We chose BSGV as a strategic partner because of its wide regional chain which keeps growing and because of its high standards of servicing. It is important that BSGV has the necessary technologies to implements projects of this kind,” said Gennady Belyukin, Director for credit operations at Toyota Bank.
An additional advantage for borrowers is that they get access to the services of two banks at the same time, Vives said. The options include access to the BSGV distance banking system, special currency rates and special offers.
BSGV is a subsidiary of French group Societe General. The bank operates in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Rostov-on-Don, Samara, Vladivostok, Krasnodar and Tolyatti servicing over 100,000 individual clients and 2,500 corporate clients.
By October, the assets of the bank amounted to $2.7 billion and capital — to $238.6 million.

TITLE: Gazprom Plans To Construct Largest Storage Unit in Europe
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: FRANKFURT — Gazprom, the world’s biggest natural gas exporter, plans to build Europe’s largest storage facility for the fuel to supply a new pipeline under the Baltic Sea.
The facility in Hinrichshagen, northeastern Germany, will hold as much as 5 billion cubic meters of natural gas, Burkhard Woelki, spokesman for Gazprom’s German unit, said by telephone Wednesday from Berlin. Construction will start in 2009 and cost 420 million euros ($620 million), he said.
Gazprom’s Nord Stream pipeline is scheduled to start carrying natural gas 1,200 kilometers under the Baltic to Germany in 2010 as the Russian exporter seeks to avoid transit countries like Belarus and Ukraine. Gazprom, which feeds one-quarter of Europe’s gas demand, wants to plug directly into markets in northwestern Europe and raise export capacity by one-third.
The Wingas storage facility in Rehden, northern Germany, can hold 4.2 billion cubic meters of gas.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Ford Back to Work</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Ford Motor Company resumed production at its plant in Vsevolozhsk on a one-shift basis Wednesday. The majority of employees (80 percent) are not on strike, Ford said Wednesday in a statement.
On Wednesday the plant produced 66 cars as compared to 300 cars a day in normal working conditions. On Thursday the plant continued operating on a one-shift basis.

<b>Over-Land Express</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Construction of the Over-Land Express in St. Petersburg will start in July 2009, Interfax reported Thursday. At the end of December a tender will be announced.
Applications will be accepted until May 7, 2008, from consortiums unifying construction and planning companies, subcontractors and management firms. A concession agreement will be signed on June 30, 2009. The city administration is negotiating with the leading producers of carriages — Siemens, Bombardier, Skoda, Mitsui, Dedal and Alstom.

<b>Vodokanal Rebuild</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Vodokanal, a local water supply company, has completed reconstruction of a water purification plant in Repino, near St. Petersburg, Interfax reported Thursday.
Total investment in modernization amounted to 420 million rubles ($17.2 million). German, Austrian, Swiss and Czech producers — Flottweg, Rehau, Flygt, Huber, Fontana and Lutos — supplied equipment for the plant.

<b>Rautakesko Store</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Rautakesko will open its eighth K-Rauta supermarket in St. Petersburg on Saturday, Interfax reported Thursday.
The new supermarket will open in the Kalininsky district. The total shopping area will be 14,000 square meters. In 2008 Rautakesko plans to open two new supermarkets in the city.

<b>$157Bln Oil Fund</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — The country’s oil fund will rise to $157.1 billion by the end of the year, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said at a news conference broadcast on Vesti-24.
The stabilization fund will total 3.84 trillion rubles as of Jan. 1, Kudrin said, 5 percent higher than the 3.65 trillion rubles reported by the ministry at the end of October. 

<b>SUEK Worth $8Bln</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Siberian Coal Energy is worth $6 billion to $8 billion, Kommersant reported Wednesday, citing a Deloitte & Touche valuation.

TITLE: Twenty Years After a Cultural Revolution
AUTHOR: By Leon Aron
TEXT: Twenty years after Mikhail Gorbachev initiated glasnost, it is clear that, like every fateful “tipping point” in human history, the change has furnished enough material for scholars to plumb for many years. It may be too early to appreciate what glasnost has contributed, its depth, its passions and, yes, even its significance. But we can try.
Glasnost, or openness, goes at least as far back as 1841, when Russia’s first great liberal reformer, Count Mikhail Speransky, invoked this word among his recommendations for the “governing of Siberia” in an article published two years after his death.
What was this phenomenon — entirely nonviolent but so deadly for the Soviet regime — all about in 1987? Lines around the block for newspapers and magazines? People signing up on waiting lists in libraries for books and article reprints? The printouts and subscriptions to the most daring publications — Moskovskiye Novosti, Ogonyok, Literaturnaya Gazeta, Izvestia, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Argumenty i Fakty — doubling, quadrupling and doubling again? The country literally coming to a standstill as an estimated 70 percent of the adult population watched the Congress of People’s Deputies sessions in June 1989, the first uncensored and public political debate in 72 years?
Yet glasnost was more than the exhilarating ability to read, write, tell and listen to the truth. It was an astounding act of the spiritual self-liberation of a great nation. It was also a merciless national introspection of astounding breadth and intensity, an attempt at the self-awareness, repentance and cleansing necessary to create a better, more honorable and moral individual and nation.
In slightly more than four years, glasnost forced the country to re-apprise some of the deepest, most fundamental aspects of its political and economic system, its relations between civil society and state, and its behavior in the world. It was, as poet Andrei Voznesensky wrote in 1987, not a cultural revolution but a revolution by culture.
What were the troubadours of glasnost seeking? What ideas moved them, what ideals inspired them?
First came the diagnosis: a deeply, perhaps mortally, wounded society in need of most urgent political, economic and, most important, spiritual regeneration. Mikhail Antonov, in an article published in the August 1987 issue of Oktyabr and titled “So What is Happening to Us?” wrote, “Today we must save the people — not from external dangers, but most of all from itself, from the consequences of those demoralizing processes that kill the noblest human qualities.”
Then came the realization that a morally healthy society is impossible without the truth about itself. To become suitable for the job of citizenship, Russians can no longer be poisoned by the moral cancer of Stalinism and the unacknowledged horrors it visited on society. They must be recognized in shame and remorse, shuddered and wailed over, forever and unequivocally condemned and, finally, expiated by the creation of a state and society that would never again allow the country to be ruled by repression and mass murder. Hence, the preoccupation with Stalinism during the first two years of glasnost, which quickly led to a much broader recovery of the country’s real history. “We must understand how we have become nonfree,” wrote Ogonyok in the winter of 1988.
With inevitable overlaps and intermingling, glasnost went through three distinctive phases. Each of them could be labeled with one of the “cursed” question of Russian literature: Who are we? (from 1987 to 1989); Who is to blame? (from 1989 to 1990) and What is to be done? (from 1990 to 1991). The first two quests have brought about devastating revelations about the country’s present and the past: its enormous inequities, unimaginable waste of human and natural resources and its daily indignities — all increasingly traced to the core attributes of totalitarian socialism.
It is at this stage that the key legitimizing, founding myths of the Soviet state were overwhelmed by facts and meditations so lethal that in the end they left behind only empty, burnt-out shells. The last phase contained the discovery and passionate advocacy of political and economic conditions for a more dignified and prosperous life: personal liberty, private property, human and political rights, democracy, a limited state subjugated to civil society, de-militarization of state, economy and society and the end of an imperial and messianic foreign policy.
Yet, in the end, the most fascinating and daring component of glasnost, the leitmotif that shone through most of its finest oeuvre, was an effort at what might be called re-moralization of the nation. Years later, the man who was perhaps most responsible for implementing glasnost, Alexander Yakovlev, called it “an attempt to end the immorality of the regime.” Of course, at the time the glasnost authors could not rise to this level of self-awareness and generalization, but that is in essence what they tried to accomplish.
The restoration of a moral man was recognized as the first — and most important — step toward creating a citizen out of the Homo Sovieticus — a term of contempt invented by glasnost to denote a “serf” who bore no responsibility for himself or the country, a scared conformist and shoddy executor of his master’s orders. “We must understand, finally, that only the person who is incapable of being a police informer, of betraying and of lying, no matter in whose or what name, can save us from [the re-emergence] of a totalitarian state,” Ogonyok wrote in February 1989.
What the glasnost pamphleteers called the “tragedy” and “catastrophe” of Soviet history were increasingly deduced from the destruction of the sovereign, dignified and, most of all, free individual — the sole and sovereign owner of his choices and his property, even if this consists solely of one’s two working hands, as one of glasnost’s finest essayists, Vasily Selyunin, put it. Within a few short years, the radical intelligentsia established and powerfully publicized the connection between liberty and virtue by tracing human dignity to its ultimate foundation in freedom, both political and economic.
Thus the recovery of political and economic liberty became more than just a political condition of national revival. It was found to be a sine qua non of the creation of this moral man from the detritus of a Stalinist state. “The regeneration of the [Soviet] society is possible only on a [new] moral foundation,” Andrei Sakharov said in 1989. “There have been tragic deformation of our people because of the terror and the many years of living in lies and hypocrisy. But I believe that morality is always alive in people ... We are talking not so much of a renaissance, but about a moral force that is present in every generation, that is capable of growth and that must be given a chance to develop.”
It was the urgency of this task and the call for national awakening needed for its completion that more than any other impulse seemed to inform the spiritual and intellectual revolution — and inspired and shaped the political one as well.

Leon Aron, resident scholar and director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of “Russia’s Revolution: Essays 1989-2006.”

TITLE: Trumped by Traffic Jams
AUTHOR: By Georgy Bovt
TEXT: None of my friends knows what to do about the upcoming State Duma elections. Some think that it would be wrong to vote for United Russia since it has turned the campaign into a Soviet-style farce. Others understand that the ruling party’s platform is vague, but they believe that the policies of other parties are even worse. Almost all of my friends who previously voted for Yabloko or the Union of Right Forces are now disappointed by those parties’ leaders and consider them to be marginalized or outright clowns. Some want to vote for Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party, either because they are entertained by his scandalous statements or simply because they want to avoid voting for United Russia. Many die-hard anti-Communists are even planning to vote for the Communist Party as a protest vote against United Russia. Still others are planning to deface their ballots or tear them up.
Many people are sick of the elections, perhaps even nauseous. And these are not the people who are typically apolitical in other countries — the poorest and least educated segment of society. In Russia, political indifference is widespread and even fashionable among wealthy people as well as the so-called middle class.
During my call-in radio show, I often wonder whether it makes sense to talk with callers about the elections and politics in general. They find politics boring no matter how it is presented. I have reached the conclusion that they don’t want to hear anything at all except updates on traffic jams.
I think that the sociological phenomenon of Russia’s voting patterns is worth studying because it overturns many assumptions. For example, according to various surveys, about 60 percent of voters believe that the Duma elections will not be conducted fairly, but about the same percentage of people nevertheless plan to vote — despite knowing almost nothing about the platforms of the major parties. Voters don’t know what Putin’s Plan is, nor do they want to find out more about it. As expected, few people found the campaign’s televised political debates interesting.
Even though it has been 15 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it would seem that Russians don’t react negatively to modern-day versions of Soviet propaganda. Nobody gets upset when local authorities round people up to participate in pro-government meetings or when students — usually known for their love of freedom and independence — attend mass rallies to avoid getting bad grades from their professors.
It is as if the last 15 years have had no impact whatsoever on the country. The old Soviet mentality is alive and well, and people are returning to their former ways. They believe this is what constitutes the much longed-for “stability” that the authorities constantly claim has arrived. They refuse to see the connection between the fact that they spend hours stuck in horrendous traffic jams and their complete indifference to the political process and elections.
These traffic jams and the vast problems of everyday life all stem from the fact that Russia is badly managed and that governmental institutions do not function properly.
Yet, Russians are unable to acknowledge their own responsibility for the country’s poor governance — that governmental institutions are substandard because the people themselves allow them to be so bad. To make matters worse, many Russians take pride in their lack of interest in politics. Perhaps there is some truth to the much-quoted saying that every nation deserves the type of government that it has.
There is another expression that is pertinent to this issue: “If you don’t take an interest in politics, politics will take an interest in you.” It was true back then and it is true today.

Georgy Bovt is a political analyst and hosts a radio program on City FM.

TITLE: Rock on
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: One of the world’s greatest rock and roll bands is back and will come to St. Petersburg for one show this week.
New York Dolls, a rhythm and blues-rooted, protopunk band, has influenced generations of bands, even if its original career was extremely brief. Its first two albums, released in the early 1970s, are now seen as absolute classics and the band is cherished by musicians from The Clash’s Mick Jones to The Smiths’ Morrissey. 
When first formed in 1971, New York Dolls grasped audiences with its raw, high-energy rock and roll and a radical image that featured women’s dresses and a lot of lipstick. At one point, the band’s lead singer, David Johansen, was arrested on stage in Texas for “female impersonation.” The band spawned such rock-and-roll gems as “Personality Crisis,” “Looking for a Kiss” and “Trash,” and British glam-rock figures such as David Bowie were frequently spotted at its concerts. 
It was Morrissey who was instrumental in bringing the band back together in 2004. The British singer, who had been the president of a New York Dolls fan club as a high-school student, was given carte blanche to put together the lineup of Meltdown Festival in London. He immediately called Johansen and asked him to reform the band.
The first concert sold out, so a second show was added, and after that New York Dolls found itself overwhelmed with requests to perform. 
Sometimes referred to as the unluckiest band in the history of rock music, the six-member band now features only two original players: Johansen and guitarist Sylvain Sylvain. New York Dolls’ four other original members died prematurely, some from drug-related causes.
Original drummer Billy Murcia died of an accidental suffocation at a party in 1972; guitarist Johnny Thunders, who split from the band with drummer Jerry Nolan to continue as The Heartbreakers, died in unclear circumstances in 1991; Nolan died of meningitis the following year; and bass player Arthur Kane, who took part in the reformed New York Dolls concerts in London in 2004, died of leukemia soon after.
After a couple of years of playing concerts, the reformed New York Dolls followed its classic albums, “New York Dolls” (1973) and “Too Much Too Soon” (1974), with a new record, “One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This,” in 2006. Despite the sad irony in its title, the album, which featured backing vocals from friends Iggy Pop and R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe proved to be very convincing and received rave reviews.
<i>David Johansen spoke to The St. Petersburg Times by phone from his home in New York last Friday.</i>
<b><i>Have you ever been to Russia? Is it a regular tour? You’ve never been here as a tourist?</i></b>
No, we’ve never been there before, we’re very excited to come to Russia. Well, Sergey, we’ve been on tour since we got back together again a couple of years ago, so we just played music all the time.
<b><i>So your life has changed since you reformed?</i></b>
Well, yes and no. I mean, you know, I’ve always been playing music with somebody, so it’s different, but yeah, it’s the same, you know. It’s hard to explain it, but what I’m saying is that I’m always playing music, even before this band, I was still playing music with other bands.
<b><i>Please may I ask you about the band’s new members? Bass player Sami Yaffa played with Hanoi Rocks, a band which itself had been inspired by New York Dolls. What about the other musicians? </i></b>
Well, Steve Conte, he plays guitar, where he’s from, I don’t know... he’s from New Jersey. When we were first organized, we were going only to play one show, and we had a lot of fun doing it, so we kept playing, but originally we just were going to do one show. So we got a band together, I would say, you know, instinctually, and without really getting too neurotic about it, and luckily everything worked out the way it was supposed to.
<b><i>What’s the difference between this band and the 1970s band, has the sound changed and how much?</i></b>
I suppose I can tell you, you know, now I’ve been in all kinds of bands, and there’s two kinds of bands you can be in: you can be in a band where you kind of make... one makes all the decisions and chooses the music and kind of tells the band what to play, and I’ve been in bands like that; and then there’s this band where everybody essentially just plays what they want to play. You know, it’s kind of a different kind of soup, because everybody knows what they’re supposed to do, and we get a lot of joy out of playing with each other. It’s not like a job. It’s more like play.
<b><i>The album that you released last year was New York Dolls’ first in 30 years — but it does not sound like an average comeback album. What was the approach? </i></b>
Like I was saying before, we just got together really to play one show and then we had so much fun and we started getting asked to play more shows, so we decided, “OK, let’s play more shows,” because this is fun. And we kept doing that for a while, I guess almost a year, and then we decided, “You know, we should make a record, because, let’s face it, we’re a band, you know, this is what we’re doing now.” 
But it kind of just occurred, you know, like organically, it wasn’t a plan, it was just something that like kind of came together naturally, so after an amount of time, I think a year, we decided, “We should make a record.” So we just started writing songs and there really wasn’t an approach, we just wrote a bunch of songs and recorded them, and then we took the ones that we liked the best and finished them. And the record came out, but there wasn’t like a lot of intellectualizing about it, you know. 
<b><i>There’s a sad irony in its title, “One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This.”</i></b>
I guess it’s ironic. I think it’s a quote from the idea that people always think that their memories are better than what they have or something, it’s just something to make people aware of their present circumstances.
<b><i>What was Iggy Pop’s contribution?</i></b>
He just came by one day and sang on a song. He’s an old friend of ours, so sometimes when we were recording someone would come by to watch us record, and then we would say, “Well, don’t just watch, why don’t you come and play with us,” so he just came by one day and we got him involved, and he did some singing with me.
<b><i>What about Michael Stipe?</i></b>
Michael Stipe did singing, too, yeah. He’s an old friend of ours, too, so he just came by. He wanted to see how we do it, you know what I mean? I think certain people think like, “I wonder how these guys do it, because they’re obviously idiots. How can they make this great music.” So they come by to see and then we say, “Well, why don’t you just come and join us and we’ll have some fun.”
<b><i>The band’s new lease of life started with a call from Morrissey.</i></b>
Right. We were just going to do one show for some program that Morrissey was presenting in London.
<b><i>And you did two.</i></b>
Yeah, the [first one] sold out, so they put on another one. So that was all that we were really going to do, and then we started getting calls... asking us to play in other places, so we decided to do that. We didn’t have a plan to continue, we just kind of continued by “happenstance,” as they say.
<b><i>How did Morrissey manage to persuade you to do this show?</i></b>
Well, I think he just asked on a good day, and we thought it would be fun, and it was even more fun than we’d thought it would be. We decided, “Let’s go into this and do this show and have as much fun as we can have.” And then we had more fun than we even imagined.
<b><i>New York Dolls first appeared in 1971 when rock music was getting serious and boring. Did you see yourselves an alternative to bands like Yes or Pink Floyd?</i></b>
Well, I would imagine. I mean, I guess every band thinks they’re an alternative, but I don’t know if it ever crossed our minds. But what we just wanted to do was to make a proper rock and roll band.
<b><i>At one point you were compared to the Rolling Stones — was it just superficial because you were rooted in rhythm and blues and there were five of you?</i></b>
I guess because we had the same kind of lineup, you know, we had bass, two guitars and drums and a lead singer, so it had something to do with that archetype.
<b><i>New York Dolls were a big influence on punk rock, but I understand you don’t like punk rock in general, calling it “whiny” in an interview.</i></b>
Well, I just don’t like to categorize anything. I mean there are a lot of great rock and roll bands that they call punk bands. People call The Clash a punk band, you know, to me it’s not a punk band, it’s a great rock and roll band. 
I just don’t like those bands that don’t swing, you know. A lot of bands sound like military music or something, I don’t like that kind of music so much. 
I like music that swings and has some fun in it and can be subversive but yet has a knowing wink about it. Something of, er, a purposeful unsophistication, I think, I don’t know, it just doesn’t appeal to me.
But there’s a lot of bands that they call punk bands, you know. I just think punk... Anybody who says, “Oh, I’m a punk” or “My band is a punk band,” that’s not really a punk band, it’s just some kind of an advertisement.
<b><i>What inspired you to start the band in the beginning?</i></b>
The Dolls? Well, we all just wanted to play rock and roll music and then met each other and everybody had a similar idea about how really good rock and roll music should be, so we all got together and did it together, it was pretty much our inspiration. It was just to play rock and roll music.
<b><i>Was there any cross-influence with the U.K. glam rock scene, people like David Bowie?</i></b>
You know, David Bowie used to come to our shows all the time and watched us, but he didn’t influence us. His music, I think, is more like pop music or something, you know. I’m not crazy about his music.
He sounds like Anthony Newley. Do you know Anthony Newley? He’s some old-time singer. David Bowie sounds like him. You know, this guy sings [imitates Anthony Newley singing his hit song] “What kind of fool am I..?” So he sounds like that to me.
<b><i>Where did this “cross-dressing” thing come from?</i></b>
Well, when we started in New York, there was like this whole liberation movement going on of different aspects of society, so what we were doing we didn’t think was cross-dressing. But, you know, we were in East Village in New York and it was a very bohemian atmosphere and everybody dressed however they wanted to.
When we started going to the other parts of the country, where they were more provincial, [cross-dressing is] how they described it.
<b><i>I read you were even arrested on stage for “female impersonation” in Texas.</i></b>
Say you are living in a situation where things were advanced and intellectual and yet also humorous and fun at the same time, and all the people in your community were fairly sophisticated and had progressive ideas about society and the role of an individual in that society, and you were raised in that kind of an atmosphere, and then all of a sudden you are taken out of that atmosphere and put in some kind of more, let’s say, unintellectual province, you would perhaps appear to be alien to them.
So I mean, you know, a lot of people say “Oh, you’re provocative?” or whatever, and you say to them, “No, I am just me.”
<b><i>They say your records sold poorly at that time...</i></b>
They sold alright. I mean we weren’t, you know, like some kind of a band that was created for commercial exploitation, we were a self-created band, who were making the music we wanted to hear ourselves. You know, we were not creating music to fit into some kind of demographic and some kind of commercial machine. We were making pure music for ourselves, you know what I’m saying? 
We don’t really consider trying to fit into some kind of prefabricated demographic that music business has created... 
You know that most people, I think, are told what they should like, and they have their peer pressure of what they should like, and then there are certain people who think for themselves, and then they say, “Well, I’m going to like what I like, no matter what anybody says.” That’s the kind of music that we play.
And the people say, “Ah, you’re not commercial,” so I say, “That’s good we’re not commercial.” Or “You don’t fit in.” That’s good we don’t fit in, because why should we fit in when everybody else sounds the same already? Why should we have another band that sounds the same as everybody else. You might as well have one band that’s good. They don’t all have to suck.
<b><i>Apart from the band you’re doing a radio show. Is it music you like or there’s some other idea behind it?</i></b>
Eh, I got a radio show, [on] satellite. I just play music, you know, I play whatever I like. There are lots of music that I like, I think there’s so much music on this planet that you don’t even have time to listen to one song from each genre. I always dug the music since I was a baby, and there is a lot of music that I like, that’s from different parts from the world, different genres.
New York Dolls performs at Port on Thursday. www.nydolls.org

TITLE: Chernov’s
         choice
TEXT: <b>Rock and roll</b> is becoming relevant again in Russia, says rock historian <b>Andrei Burlaka</b>.
“Judging from what happens in this country’s internal politics, somebody (and it’s clear who) wants to revive the Soviet Union — I don’t mean outward pressure, but rather inward pressure on Russia’s own population; they want to bring back the ‘like-mindedness’ that already proved unworkable,” said Burlaka.
“That’s why rock and roll, which has always implied freedom, both internal and external, can become the banner, the tool, the unifying factor that would help all people, even those who perhaps do not share our music aesthetic, to unite and oppose the evil that is now embodied in the United Russia party and the failed spy Putin who has sided with it.”
The third and final volume of Burlaka’s “Rock Encyclopedia. Popular Music in Leningrad-St. Petersburg 1965-2005” was published by Amphora Publisher this week.
“On the web and personally I ask everybody not to let the bureaucrats get back in power. It’s a party of impotents who neither sow nor reap but only permit, forbid and redistribute. These former second-rate Communists are like a plastic film that sticks to your face and doesn’t let you breathe,” he said. 
“If they come to power, we’ll be back in the Soviet Union.”
<b>New York Dolls</b>, one of the world’s greatest rock and roll bands, is back and will come to play one concert in St. Petersburg. See David Johansen interview, page i and ii. New York Dolls will perform at Port on Thursday.
<b>Belgrad</b>, a punk bar launched by Dva Samaliota members Anton Belyankin and Andrei Gradovich earlier this year, has changed its repertoire policy, according to the club’s former art director.
“The choice of bands for concerts will be conducted directly by Anton Belyankin,” said Belgrad’s Livejournal.com page created to publish the club’s schedule, adding that most of the concerts due in November and December have been canceled by the management.
It also contained apologies to the bands whose concerts have been canceled.
“There was an art director but I fired him,” said co-owner Belyankin by phone this week. 
“Now we have concerts on Fridays and Saturdays and fun parties. There’s less trash or horror, less rubbish. We don’t let bands that we don’t like play there anymore. Subjective taste had started to dominate at some point.”
Although Belgrad has acquired a reputation as a punk-friendly venue in the past, Belyankin said the genre will continue to be represented.
“There will not be less punk, there will be less bad punk,” he said.
“There will be fewer bad bands that can’t play.”

<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: A chip off the old block
AUTHOR: By Brian Droitcour
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Until a few years ago, Russian artists used to complain that Moscow didn’t have a museum of contemporary art — even though the Moscow Museum of Modern Art opened in 1999. The museum was either politely ignored or openly derided, and that wasn’t only because of hostile feelings toward its founder, the controversial Georgian-born sculptor Zurab Tsereteli. Critics of the young museum also pointed to the museum’s failure to tell a coherent story about art in the 20th century, to the spotty quality of the works on view and to the lack of a clear acquisitions policy. Even the museum’s executive director Vasily Tsereteli — Zurab’s grandson — readily concedes his institution’s initial shortcomings. “When we opened, the exhibition was horrible,” he said in a recent interview. “I had an idea of what a modern or contemporary museum was, and it was not that.”
Recently, though, attitudes have changed. Vasily Tsereteli, who took control of the museum five years ago at the tender age of 24, has pursued ambitious exhibition and acquisition programs. The results have won the admiration of colleagues. This year, beyond his duties at MMOMA, he served as commissar of the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, a prestigious exhibition where artists represent their countries in an international competition.
Vasily Tsereteli’s knack for arts management is not the only factor behind the rise of MMOMA. Officially a municipal institution, the museum has been buoyed by support from the Moscow City Committee for Culture, which provides funds that the State Center of Contemporary Art and the Tretyakov Gallery — both under federal auspices — can only dream of. That has put it ahead in the competition for buying better works and hiring better employees. 
Yet for all its recent successes and advantages, MMOMA still has obstacles to overcome. The achievements of pioneering exhibitions such as the current “History of Russian Video Art: Vol. 2” are negated by dumbed-down fare like September’s “New Angelarium” — an insipid show of art about angels. MMOMA aspires to international prominence; this spring it will host a retrospective of Turner Prize nominees from Britain’s Tate Gallery. But its hierarchy, with three generations of the Tsereteli family holding key positions (Zurab Tsereteli’s daughter Yelena is a deputy director) smacks of Caucasian clannishness. MMOMA provides an important service to the Moscow art community by organizing solo exhibitions for important veteran artists, like Oleg Kulik and Viktor Pivovarov. But the use of the courtyard at 25 Petrovka as a junkyard for the founding director’s bronze monstrosities indicates Zurab Tsereteli’s brazen egoism.
For now, Vasily Tsereteli is concerned with other problems. He wants to find a facility more suitable for displaying contemporary art than its current 18th-century building (which Zurab Tsereteli obtained through a barter with the Defense Ministry in exchange for his monuments at Poklonnaya Gora war memorial), to invest in the art world’s future by creating a school of contemporary art, and to find ways to build a solid collection in the current booming art market — something even the richest institutions strain to do.
As he discussed the museum’s growth and challenges, Vasily Tsereteli demonstrated a gravitas and an ease with his leadership position that belie his 29 years — maybe because he was groomed for the job since birth. Zurab is Vasily’s maternal grandfather, but in order to have a male heir he legally adopted the boy and took an active role in his upbringing. (Vasily even uses the patronymic Zurabovich.) He enrolled Vasily in a Tbilisi art school and took him along when exhibiting abroad.
When the elder Tsereteli installed his “Good Defeats Evil” monument at the United Nations’ New York headquarters in 1990, Vasily Tsereteli enrolled in the organization’s international school there. After graduation, he continued his studies at Parsons design school and at the School of Visual Arts. But Vasily said he did not pursue an education at New York art schools because of personal ambition. Rather, he stayed in New York to take care of his ailing grandmother and to work on what he called “international relations” for his grandfather’s museum, which was already taking shape in Moscow. “I always understood that I would have to go back to Russia to work,” he said. “When the museum opened in 1999, I was working on building the collection, even as I was studying.” Acquisitions he made at that time include works on paper by Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali and Keith Haring. They augmented the international section of MMOMA’s cornerstone collection of 300 mostly Russian works — formerly the personal collection of Zurab Tsereteli.
The 73-year old sculptor spent decades building his collection with the future MMOMA in mind. In a preface to a catalogue of the museum’s collection, he recalls a 1959 meeting with the culture minister, who said Nikita Khrushchev returned from his tour of the United States wanting a museum of modern art for the Soviet Union. But, Tsereteli writes, the ideological conflict was insurmountable, and the project was shelved indefinitely. Tsereteli was approached by the minister even though he was only 25 because he — as his grandson would later — held a responsible position at a precocious age. He was the head artist at the Institute of Ethnography and Geography, and had curated an exhibition in Paris called “Man and Nature,” featuring ancient stone carvings excavated in Georgia. As a member of the privileged Soviet art elite, Tsereteli was able to travel abroad and meet luminaries such as Picasso and Marc Chagall, and purchase works by Russian emigre artists.
Zurab Tsereteli’s interest in folk art and ancient art largely determined the nature of MMOMA’s original collection, and Vasily Tsereteli seems to have been thinking of his grandfather when setting a course for acquisitions of modernist art. “The core of the collection is primitivism, works that refer to folk art or naive art,” he said.
Nevertheless, the bulk of new acquisitions are Russian contemporary art, including works that incorporate video and digital technologies or are otherwise distant from “primitivism.” Overall, MMOMA has shifted its focus away from modernism in favor of showcasing the Moscow contemporary art scene — a commitment that has been supported by vigorous exhibition activity. A new building for temporary exhibitions opened in 2004 on Yermolayevsky Pereulok, although it was not until after the first Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2005 that Vasily Tsereteli rethought the museum’s position and mission in the Russian art world. “We were not an institution participating in the [Biennale], we were a space,” he said. “Moscow as a city was not recognized; the event was seen as a federal program.”
That moved Vasily Tsereteli to take a more active role in the second Moscow Biennale, when MMOMA organized two surveys of contemporary Russian art: the popular “I Believe” and the subtler “Urban Formalism.” Outside major events, the building on Yermolayevsky has become the place where every Russian artist wants to have a retrospective. “The museum offers Russian contemporary artists their own space to show how they see the world, their approach, their vision,” Tsereteli said. “That is not done by any other museum in Moscow.”
Vasily Tsereteli deliberately mentioned that his grandfather shares the responsibility for these initiatives. “People say that he doesn’t like contemporary art, that he represents the Academy [of which he is president],” he said. “That’s not true. He loves contemporary art and supports it.”
But one of the museum’s deputy directors, Lyudmila Andreyeva, gives more credit to the younger Tsereteli. “Once Vasily came, things changed,” she said in an interview at 25, a cafe in the museum’s basement that Tsereteli hopes will become popular with artists. “We started to collect contemporary art to a greater degree than art of the past. ... The museum is gradually changing from ‘modern’ to ‘contemporary.’”
Vasily Tsereteli, she said, set the pace for the rest. “Vasily very quickly took shape as a leader,” Andreyeva said. “When the museum was purchasing works at [Moscow auction house] Gelos from the collection of Inkombank, people were very impressed by him, by the precision with which he bid.”

TITLE: Starvation on the Steppe
AUTHOR: By Robert Rosenberg
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Early in “The Silent Steppe,” Mukhamet Shayakhmetov’s remarkable memoir of growing up in Kazakhstan in the 1930s, the narrator is sent alone, on horseback, on a 60-kilometer mission to save his family from hunger. 
His father and uncles have been arrested as “kulaks” — wealthy peasants — thus class enemies of Stalin’s state. His mother and aunt have been left alone with their young children. Shayakhmetov is now “the only man in the two families on whom they could totally rely.” 
He is nine years old.
To find a mill where he might grind the family’s grain, the child rides alone through a haunted landscape. For his entire boyhood, this wide valley had been filled with the yurts and temporary villages of his extensive nomadic family, who lived so close together that there had once been “arguments over whose livestock had the right to graze where.” 
Now, in 1931, the valley is empty, and “eerily silent.” 
The nomads have been collectivized in state-run farms, arrested and scattered. The livestock that sustained a way of life for hundreds of years has been confiscated. Alone on the deserted steppe, Shayakhmetov fears that his sack of grain will fall off the horse, or that wolves, bears or the feral male camels that go mad during mating season might attack. 
Still, he rides on until a lone horseman across the valley spots him and begins to approach. It might be a hungry thief, or a zealous party official, and the reader is suddenly riding on that horse with Shayakhmetov, fearing for the fate of that critical grain — and for the boy’s safety.
“The Silent Steppe” is a horror story told in three acts: cultural genocide, famine and war. But it is a horror story infused with such empathy, modesty, humor and love for the landscape that the atrocities recounted by Shayakhmetov, and his family’s abilities to weather them, carry the weight of true literature.
Shayakhmetov opens his memoir with idyllic images of the timeless nomadic customs of his family. Meat was critical to the Kazakh diet, and to sustain their animals, his family was always on the move between pastures. They grazed sheep, camels, oxen and horses high in the mountains in the summer, then went back down into semi-permanent villages on the steppe for the winter. In 90 minutes — less time than today’s suburban family needs to stuff its Subaru for an overnight jaunt to Grandma’s — they could pack their worldly possessions onto a camel. Each move to new pastures was celebrated like a festival, with children playing along the way, singing songs and picking flowers.
It is the collapse of this way of life that forms the backdrop of the tragedies to come. 
The Soviet authorities began dispossessing peasant holdings in 1928, confiscating livestock and deporting owners and families from their traditional homes. 
“It was obvious that everything was designed to speed up the destruction of the well-off holdings in the villages with a total disregard for logic or the law.” 
Shayakhmetov dramatizes the Kafkaesque sham-trials, the fleecing of the peasants and the taxation of a people that had never dealt in cash. Everything his family owns is stolen by the state. Worse still, his father — a peaceful man accustomed like his people “since time immemorial to a life of freedom and to the fresh air of the vast open spaces” — is imprisoned.
The father is sent to work in a far-off mine, where he and the family must endure conditions reminiscent (in ways that resonate ironically later in the memoir) of a Nazi concentration camp. Before the dangerous winter arrives, the wife and children manage to escape, but Shayakhmetov’s father, delayed, never catches up to them. Word reaches them only months later that he has died; no one is certain how.
Without means of support, the family watches its personal disaster spiral into still larger tragedies. 
In 1932 a drought and failed harvest lead to a terrible famine affecting large swaths of the Soviet Union. The situation in Kazakhstan is exacerbated by the collectivization of the nomads, who simply do not yet have the skills to run state farms. 
During the following two years, 1.2 million Kazakhs, from a previous population of 4 million, will die of starvation. In exhaustive detail reminiscent of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” Shayakhmetov chronicles his family’s efforts to find shelter and their next bite to eat. Once again theirs is a nomadic existence — yet this is the wandering not of the stockbreeder, but of the starving and dispossessed. 
Because they are the family of a “class enemy,” and in shocking contrast to the traditions of hospitality that long characterized the Kazakh people, nobody, not even their own relatives, can risk taking them in. Such inhumanity belies the lofty promises of socialism. 
For two years Shayakhmetov, his brother and his mother survive by their wits, scrounging the dirt for scraps of wheat grain and corn.
Shayakhmetov reminds us, nevertheless, that they were the lucky ones. Around him starving hordes wander the steppe like zombies. 
One day Shayakhmetov, lying sick in a hut, witnesses a man stealing the family’s meager bag of grain. He chases this man outside, yelling “Put the bag down!” When the boy pushes the man with one frail hand, the starving thief falls over and dies. Such childhood horrors have clearly haunted Shayakhmetov, and this disquieting memoir at times feels like an exorcism, through storytelling, of personal demons.
Before the family can fully recover from the years of hardship, a new and larger tragedy consumes the nation: World War II. The 19-year-old Shayakhmetov is conscripted, and soon finds himself on the front lines defending Stalingrad from the Germans. 
Shayakhmetov’s precise memory for details (a bullet strikes him like “an agonizing blow across the spine with a thick club”) and his instinctive storytelling abilities serve him well here, as he analyzes the theater of war from a young Kazakh’s perspective. 
We relive, through his memory, the Army’s initial discrimination against Kazakhs, his own missions as a scout across enemy lines, and the costly logistical delays that hampered the Soviet reinforcement of Stalingrad. It says everything about the power of “The Silent Steppe” that we quickly realize how the suffering of Shayakhmetov’s early years has prepared him perfectly for the brutality of war. 
“You can get used to anything,” he writes, “even being constantly in mortal danger.”
One hopes that, when he is finally discharged from the Army, the wounded war hero might simply return to the Kazakhstan he longs to see. But in a harrowing sequence, echoing his perilous journeys as a nine-year-old, our Central Asian Odysseus nearly dies returning to his village. He must first weather deadly winter storms and navigate a terrain brutalized by politics, famine, and the privations of war: a terrain in which people refuse to feed or house an injured veteran. On this final journey home nobody is shooting at Shayakhmetov, but bearing witness to the life that was lost is its own private hell.

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

TITLE: In The Spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Last week, the Zhizn tabloid broke a story about threatening phonecalls that were made to Yana Rudkovskaya, the producer of pop star Dima Bilan. The caller said he had photographic evidence exposing the clean-cut Eurovision runner-up as a gay drug user, and demanded “big money” not to publish. Rudkovskaya recorded the calls and made them available to the police, and also to Zhizn readers, who were able to download them from the paper’s web site. At least theoretically — the site crashed continually.
The anonymous caller told Rudkovskaya he had compromising photos of Bilan where “you can allegedly see that he is interested not only in girls, and that he allegedly uses banned substances,” Zhizn wrote, carefully. Disappointingly, the transcripts in the paper didn’t give any detail on the photographs, but showed Bilan’s producer pluckily defending her protege. “Yanochka, hello, my little girl,” the caller began, before saying that Bilan is “not of the orientation that people try to make it seem” and that “you will have to pay money so we don’t reveal the dirty trick.”
Yana hit back, saying “Well, even if he is gay, he won’t sing any less well.” Then things just got ridiculous. “We have information that he’s been castrated,” the caller said, apparently not seeing a contradiction with his earlier statement. At that point, you stopped taking the gay blackmail attempt seriously. 
In case anyone’s worried about this, Secrets of the Stars magazine recently published snaps of the singer stripped down to his Y-fronts for no particular reason, which suggested that he’s still all man.
The crank caller also outlined some torture techniques he would like to try out on Yana, including filming her naked. “Or do you only do that in front of him?” the caller went on to ask, making even less sense. “It’s nasty what you’re doing,” Yana said. “Of course it’s nasty. It’s nasty to be afraid of your car being bombed, too,” he replied. “Are you threatening me?” she asked. “No,” he said.
The crank calls sound pretty disturbing, but it’s strange that Rudkovskaya has gone public. The article hints at a connection with a long-running legal dispute over rights to the Dima Bilan brand, which have been contested by the widow of his late producer, Yury Aizenshpis. The wrangle is about whether the singer can continue to perform under the stage name Dima Bilan, which is not his real name — he is called Viktor Belan. The widow argues that he is contractually barred from using it under new management.
“It’s possible to surmise that these threats are linked to the court case that Dima and his producer have got bogged down in,” the paper writes opaquely, going on to voice its support for Bilan’s side. The only evidence for this in the transcripts is that the caller calls himself a “legal entity.”
Presumably Rudkovskaya went public to cast a shadow on her opponents, but it’s a high-risk strategy, since bringing up the gay allegations could be quite damaging to Bilan’s career as a cuddly heartthrob. While members of boybands traditionally claim to be single, Bilan is upfront about having a girlfriend, the model Yelena Kuletskaya, who has appeared in his videos. The couple doesn’t live together, though, and shots released to the press look posed — although to be fair, she is a model.
The gay rumor has cropped up fairly regularly during his career, but he has always denied it. He even boasted to Komsomolskaya Pravda that he turned down $200,000 to do an erotic photoshoot for Britain’s Gay Times. Just to make things crystal clear, the interview was headlined “I Only Like Girls.”

TITLE: Surprise, surprise
AUTHOR: By Matt Brown
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Krokodil // 46 Kazanskaya Ulitsa. Tel: 570 4240 // Open from 12 a.m. through 12 p.m. // Menu in Russian // Dinner for two 1,535 rubles ($63)

Diners are in for a few mild surprises at Krokodil on Kazanskaya Ulitsa. The restaurant occupies the corner with Stolyarny Pereulok and one side has the character of a bar done out in a haphazardly jungle theme, while the other is a small non-smoking dining room that somebody has decided would look good with mock half-timbered walls, crookedly hung pictures resembling “The Laughing Cavalier” and a neon-lit tank of tropical fish. Five tables are crammed in this weird little room but a non-smoking space in St. Petersburg will be welcomed by many. 
This Krododil — not to be confused with its cousin on Galernaya Ulitsa — seems to have been cobbled together from neighboring places and navigating its doorways and passages, some adorned with curtains, waterfalls, potted plants, mirrors and illogical lighting, resembles a trip to the fun house.
The menu offers live trout to be fished from a tank and smoked, and also a fair selection of Russian dishes prepared with an Asian approach. Unfortunately portions are not overly generous. For example, a Thai soup (180 rubles, $7.30), a thin broth of coconut milk with chicken, shrimps and herbs, was bland and served in a small pot. Similarly, a standard Russian cabbage soup or shchi, (100 rubles, $4) served in the same sized dish will fail to satisfy appetites used to homemade soups served by the bucketful. 
Better are the salads on offer, including a page of unusual tyopliye saladi — warm salads — such as steak and mushroom salad, hot seafood salad and roasted vegetable salad. The latter (160 rubles, $6.50) is a thrilling mix of slices of bell pepper, zucchini, green beans and eggplant, lightly roasted and dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, piled high on lollo rosso red and green lettuce leaves. It was served on a trendy square plate with a serving of herby yoghurt.
A side order of chicken wings (190 rubles, $7.80) was served, rather mysteriously with one of the chef’s favorite “Asian” touches — lemon wedges with an edge dipped in spices. To further orientalize the American classic, barbecue sauce was replaced with soy sauce, and the wings were rolled in sesame seeds and served on chopped leek.
This attempt to add elements of Asian cuisine ultimately comes off as trendy rather than well-thought out and quite incongruous in the mock-Tudor-stroke-jungle interior at Krokodil, but the place is nothing if not unpredictable. 
However for main courses, a good beefsteak — served medium rare as ordered, again with a lemon wedge — for 210 rubles ($8.60), and a classic Beef Stroganoff for 220 rubles ($9) were reliably made, if lacking in flair. 
Washed down with a glass of Chilean Merlot (160 rubles, $6.50) and a couple of glasses of Sokol domestic beer (60 rubles, $2.45, per half liter), a meal at Krokodil is a pleasant if slightly odd experience. 
For instance, the toilet has a soundtrack all its own, very different to the generic pop played in the rest of the place. Opinion will be divided as to whether the sounds of tropical birds add to or detract from a trip to the restroom. Someone happily brings a dog into the dining room and no one seems to mind. And not smoking in the non-smoking area, it seems, is something of a voluntary gesture since by the end of the evening guests puff away. Well, rules are made to be broken, and in this, at least, Krokodil excels.

TITLE: Crouching lust, hidden caution
AUTHOR: By Manohla Dargis
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: “Lust, Caution” — a truer title would be “Caution: Lust” — is a sleepy, musty period drama about wartime maneuvers and bedroom calisthenics, and the misguided use of a solid director. Based on a short story about Japanese-occupied Shanghai and Hong Kong, it was directed by Ang Lee, the Taiwanese-born, Hollywood-cultivated filmmaker who brought “Brokeback Mountain” to the screen. In that earlier romance, the love between two male sheepherders can scarcely speak its name, much less easily drop its jeans; by contrast, there’s little left to the imagination in “Lust, Caution,” other than the inspiration for Lee’s newfound flirtation with kink.
And flirtation is the word, despite the shoving and hitting, a few harsh lashes and geometric configurations that put me in mind of high school geometry more than it did the Kama Sutra. The Motion Picture Association of America, that tireless, cheerless band of Comstocks who regulate all things sexual and few things violent on behalf of the major studios, has saddled the film with an NC-17 rating — no one 17 and under admitted, even with an adult — because of “some explicit sexuality.” The horrors of female nudity (unshaven armpits!) and the vigorous pantomime of coitus apparently offended the sensibilities of the M.P.A.A., which routinely bestows R ratings to movies in which characters are tortured to death for kicks.
Me, I blushed at the grimly determined image of the Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, the great, grave, soulful heart of Wong Kar-wai films like “In the Mood for Love” and “2046,” bunching up the sheets as this new film’s resident villain and cad. As Mr. Yee, a Chinese official getting his hands bloody working for the Japanese occupiers, the actor slinks around the shadows like a specter of evil. (A fine Joan Chen flexes her red claws as his wife.) Yee is meant to be a bad, bad man, but mostly he comes across as a sad, sad man with flexible limbs and a taste for rough. He knocks rather than sweeps women off their feet, and his latest playmate, Mrs. Mak (Tang Wei), likes it that way.
Or maybe not. One of the film’s anemic conceits is that this playmate is really a drama club member, named Wong, swept up in a preposterous conspiracy against Yee. See, she’s playing a role. But her imitation of life has its limits, perhaps because the filmmakers have tried to squeeze an epic out of an exceedingly slender short story. However evocative, the transformation of this virginal creature — who looks most plausible (and all of 15) in long braids and no visible makeup — into a lethally minded femme fatale, a Mata Hari in a cheongsam, fails to convince. And it fails to convince at a ludicrous 158 minutes.
Like too many films that try to put a human face on history without really engaging with it, “Lust, Caution” feels at once overpadded and underdeveloped: it’s all production design and not enough content. The screenwriters James Schamus and Wang Hui Ling, who last collaborated on Lee’s lavish martial arts entertainment “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” have puffed up and sexed up Eileen Chang’s original story without adding any psychological depth or sociopolitical heft. (Oddly, the story line echoes Paul Verhoeven’s equally absurd, if livelier and more lurid, World War II-era romp, “Black Book.”) That’s particularly hard on Tang Wei, whose pretty bow mouth and gentle, hothouse manner feel terribly ill suited to a role that calls for cunning, for the emotional violence of sacrifice, betrayal, fanaticism, lust.
Her seasoned co-star fares better, even if he’s playing more of a conceit than a character. A poet of hurt, Leung suggests worlds of pain with his melancholic eyes — few actors convey desire as beautifully or with such reserve. In his best films, including “In the Mood for Love,” Leung doesn’t do much talking: he looks, he conquers. This makes him seem like a perfect match for Lee, who has a way of giving lyrical expression to mute desire. He can turn a sigh into a declaration of love, but he can’t turn minor soft-core shocks into poetry.

TITLE: ‘Teddy’ Teacher In Court
AUTHOR: By Jennie Matthew
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: KHARTOUM — A British teacher appeared before a heavily guarded Sudanese court on Thursday charged with insulting Islam and inciting religious hatred by allowing pupils to name a teddy bear Mohammed.
Gillian Gibbons, 54, went into a closed hearing at Khartoum’s criminal court wearing loose fitting dark clothes and looking well despite facing possible conviction that could see her jailed, flogged in public and fined.
Riot police deployed around the complex as the mother of two, her lawyer and the prosecution assembled in the second-floor courtroom for a case that has sparked a diplomatic row with Britain, the former colonial rulers in Sudan.
Police briefly detained four local photographers and cameramen, then ordered them to leave, banning journalists from the hearing and from taking pictures of Gibbons, who was driven into the complex in a prison van, witnesses said.
In a brewing diplomatic row, Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Gibbons had made an “innocent mistake” and called for “common sense” to prevail as the Sudanese ambassador to London was summoned to the Foreign Office.
Officials said Gibbons could face an immediate trial or the court will set a date for later proceedings.
General Abideen Tahar, who heads Khartoum’s criminal investigation unit, said Gibbons was well treated, had spent two hours with her lawyer on Wednesday and that the judgement would be fair.
“We expect the judgement to be fair, the defendent was treated well because she is a woman and a teacher,” he told reporters.
“Police have full control of the security around the court and are ready to contain any security breach,” Tahar added.
The sentence for breaching Article 125 of the penal code — publicly insulting or degrading any religion, its rites, beliefs and sacred items or humiliating its believers — is up to six months in jail, 40 lashes and a fine.
Sudanese officials say a judge will determine the severity of the sentence.
Gibbons was arrested on Sunday after parents at the private English school where she had taught for less than a term, complained that in allowing primary school children to name a cuddly toy Mohammed, she had insulted Muslims.
The teacher has told British consular officials that she has been well treated and that she never meant to cause offence in the incident in September.
“The Sudanese legal system has to take its course but common sense has to prevail,” Miliband told reporters before meeting Sudan’s ambassador to London.

TITLE: French Ice Dancers On Course For Victory
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SENDAI, Japan — European champions Isabelle Delobel and Olivier Schoenfelder of France took the lead in the ice dance event Thursday as the NHK Trophy began to determine the final berths in the Grand Prix final.
In the pairs short program, another set of European champions, Aliona Savchenko and Robin Szolkowy of Germany, had a big lead.
Delobel and Schoenfelder, who won the French leg of the International Skating Union’s Grand Prix series two weeks ago, skated a smooth Argentine Tango to open up lead of more than four points after the compulsory dance. They scored 38.96 points while Canada’s Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir were second with 34.67.
In third were Russia’s Jana Kohkhlova and Sergei Novitski with 34.23. They beat Delobel and Schoenfelder in the free dance in Paris.
In the pairs Savchenko and Szolkowy, using a Bollywood movie soundtrack, dominated the competition combining unusual entries and exits into difficult technical feats, such as a spread eagle into a lift. Their interweaving straight-line footwork was intricate and imaginative and helped them earn 70.32 points, a personal best.
“We were better than we did at the Cup of Russia but there were a few mistakes in some elements,” Szolkowy said.
“The main elements were correct,” said their coach, Ingo Steuer. “But their things such as the spins were just a little off and just a level two.”
In the new judging system, four is the most difficult and couples are marked down in lower levels.
The Germans were second last week in the Cup of Russia and this is a non-scoring event for them.
In a surprise second were Ukraine’s Tatiana Volosozhar and Stanislav Morozov with 60.14 points. Skating relatively clean to “The Feeling Begins” by Peter Gabriel, they were ahead of Canadians Jessica Dube and Bryce Davison with 58.16, and Americans Keauna McLaughlin and Rockne Brubaker, whose routines were marked by falls.
McLaughlin and Brubaker, who were unbeaten in the junior ranks last year, had a huge triple twist lift with her completing the revolutions well above the ice. However she stumbled out of the triple salchow and fell on a throw move.
The ice dance continued Friday with the original dance.
The women’s event began Friday with world champion Miki Ando looking to secure a berth in the Grand Prix final in Turin, Italy in December.
Ando captured the 2006-07 world title in Tokyo in March, succeeding American Kimmie Meissner, who won in 2005-06 but was fourth in 2007. Last year, when Meissner was the world champion, she failed to qualify and Ando is hoping to avoid the same fate.
Ando will take on the European gold and silver medalists, Carolina Kostner of Italy and Sarah Meier of Switzerland.
The men’s short program will be on Saturday. Japan’s Daisuke Takahashi, coming off a victory at Skate America, needs to do well to clinch a spot in Turin, where the top six scorers of the six-event series in each of the four events will compete. Two Americans, Johnny Weir and Evan Lysacek, are already set for the men’s event in the GP final.
Takahashi will meet Russian Andrei Griazev, who came in third in last week’s Cup of Russia behind Weir. Stephen Carriere, who won the world junior title last year, is also entered and has an outside chance to make it three Americans in the GP final with a good finish in Japan.

TITLE: Musharaff Sworn in as Pakistani President
AUTHOR: By Sadaqat Jan
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pervez Musharraf embarked on a new five-year term as Pakistan’s civilian president Thursday, but he gave no indication of when emergency rule will be lifted — a key demand of both his domestic rivals and the United States.
The inauguration ceremony came a day after he ended a four-decade military career as part of his long-delayed pledge not to serve as both president and army chief.
Chief Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar administered the oath to a solemn-looking Musharraf, dressed in long black tunic adorned only with a pin of Pakistan’s green and white flag.
“This is a milestone in the transition of Pakistan to the complete essence of democracy,” Musharraf told an audience of government officials, foreign diplomats and military generals at the state palace in Islamabad.
He welcomed as “good” for political reconciliation the return from exile of his old foes, former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. “I only hope that they will ... move forward toward a conciliatory, civilized, democratic and political environment in the future,” he said.
Neither was present at the ceremony, and it remained unclear whether the changeover would defuse the threat of a boycott of upcoming parliamentary elections. Such a move would undercut Musharraf’s effort to legitimize his rule through a democratic ballot.
A day after blinking back tears as he ended his military career, Musharraf appeared to be back to his usual bullish self.
“Anyone who is talking of any boycotts should hear this out: Come hell or high water, elections will be held on Jan. 8. Nobody derails it.”
Opposition politicians urged Musharraf to immediately lift emergency rule, restore the constitution and reverse his decision to oust chief justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry and other independent-minded judges.
Musharraf sought to justify the emergency imposed on Nov. 3, during which he purged the Supreme Court just as it was about to issue a verdict on the legality of his continued rule. The retooled court last week gave its stamp of approval.
He also lashed out at Western diplomats, giving them a stinging rebuttal of their criticisms.
“I personally feel that there is an unrealistic and maybe an impractical or impracticable obsession with your form of democracy, with your form of human rights, civil liberties,” Musharraf said, claiming to speak for developing countries everywhere.
Pakistan wanted to attain those goals, but would need time and support to reach standards that others had built over centuries, he said.
“We will do it our way as we understand our society, our environment better than anyone in the West,” he said.
Musharraf also said that stepped-up military action had “broken the back of the spread of terrorism” in the northwest.
Still, a military spokesman said five soldiers died and four were injured in the region Thursday when a roadside bomb exploded next to a passing convoy.
In the eastern city of Lahore, street clashes broke out between police and lawyers protesting against Musharraf’s inauguration. Four lawyers and three officers were injured, police said.
About 200 demonstrators — chanting “Go, Musharraf, go!” and “Friends of Musharraf are traitors” — flung bricks and sticks at policemen who blocked their path as they tried to march from one court complex to another, according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene.
Musharraf was the Pakistani army’s commander in chief when he seized power from Sharif in a bloodless coup in 1999. He retained the post for the past eight years and the army has remained his main power base throughout.
On Wednesday, he finally ceded command to a hand-picked loyalist, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani.
“I am sure Pakistan will grow stronger with me as civilian president and Gen. Kayani as army chief,” Musharraf said.
Sadique al-Farooq, a senior leader of Nawaz Sharif’s party, said he hoped that Gen. Kayani would “learn lessons from the mistakes of Musharraf, and will never think of indulging in politics.”
Fazalur Rehman, another opposition leader, said the country’s opposition parties were still undecided on whether to contest the upcoming parliamentary elections. “We are consulting other opposition parties on this issue and a final decision about it is expected soon,” he said.
In Washington, President Bush praised Musharraf for keeping his word and relinquishing his military post, calling it a “strong first step” toward enhancing democracy in Pakistan.
“It is something that a lot of people doubted would ever happen,” Bush said in an interview Wednesday on CNN’s “The Situation Room.”
But Bush added that “in order to get Pakistan back on the road to democracy, he’s got to suspend the emergency law before elections.”

TITLE: O.J. Back In Court
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LAS VEGAS — The “Special Event” signs placed around courthouse parking lots suggesting O.J. Simpson’s court appearance might cause a frenzy of activity were hardly necessary.
The arraignment of the former football star and two co-defendants on armed robbery and kidnapping charges lasted barely a half hour Wednesday. Simpson was gone almost as quickly as he could say “not guilty.”
There were no surprises and no traffic, and the crowds that attended a preliminary hearing two weeks ago were missing from the subdued scene that saw only a half-full courtroom.
“It was expected that it was going to be a short hearing and the outcome was a foregone conclusion,” said Peter Shaplen, a former TV news producer who is coordinating electronic media coverage of the case.
Simpson stood before Clark County District Judge Jackie Glass and firmly spoke a phrase he has uttered in other courtrooms in the past: “Not guilty.”
His co-defendants, Charles “Charlie” Ehrlich, 53, and Clarence “C.J.” Stewart, 53, also entered not guilty pleas, and Clark County District Judge Jackie Glass set trial for all three men on April 7.
The charges stem from a Sept. 13 confrontation in a Las Vegas hotel room where Simpson has said he went to retrieve items that belonged to him from a group of memorabilia peddlers.
Simpson, Ehrlich and Stewart are not accused of wielding firearms. Simpson has said he was unaware that guns were present, though conflicting testimony suggested Simpson may have wanted his group armed.
Attorney Gabriel Grasso, who is co-counsel for Simpson, said all three defendants will likely file petitions known as writs of habeas corpus challenging the legality of the charges against them. Defense attorneys for the men have suggested the case is being overcharged because of Simpson’s notoriety.
Each man faces 11 felony charges, including kidnapping, armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary, conspiracy and coercion. Each also faces one gross misdemeanor, conspiracy to commit a crime.
A kidnapping conviction could bring a life sentence with the possibility of parole. A conviction for armed robbery carries a mandatory two- to 15-year prison sentence plus a possible one to 15 years for use of a weapon.
Among the questions hanging over the proceedings is where to find an impartial jury to judge a man who has become a lightning rod for divided public opinion. His 1995 acquittal in the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman still rankles many.

TITLE: UN Fears For Health in Iraq
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: BAGHDAD — The United Nations on Thursday said it feared an outbreak of cholera in Baghdad where at least 101 cases have been reported in the past three weeks.
“While national caseloads are declining, we are increasingly concerned about a possible outbreak in Baghdad,” said the United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF) quoting data from the World Health Organisation (WHO).
“The capital accounts for 79 percent of all new cases and is now up to 101 cases, the vast majority reported in the past three weeks,” UNICEF said.
Sadr City, Madaien and Baladiyat are among the Baghdad neighbourhoods most affected by the bacterial disease, it said.
“UNICEF is working with WHO to try to limit the spread in the capital and treat the sick as Iraq’s rainy season sets in,” the agency added.
The Iraqi health ministry recently reported the deaths of two children in a Baghdad orphanage due to cholera, while six others were also reported sick.

TITLE: Olmert Says Palestinian State is Crucial
AUTHOR: By Josef Federman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published Thursday that creation of a Palestinian state is a vital Israeli interest, and that failure to reach a peace agreement could plunge Israel into a South African-style apartheid struggle.
Such a scenario, he said, would mean “the state of Israel is finished.”
While Olmert has long said that the region’s demography is working against Israel, the comments published in Haaretz were among his strongest as he prepares a skeptical public for the renewed peace talks launched at this week’s conference in Annapolis, Md.
His reference to apartheid was particularly explosive because Israeli officials have long rejected any comparison to the racist system once in place in South Africa.
Olmert was en route back to Israel at midday Thursday, and his office could not immediately confirm the veracity of the published comments in Haaretz.
The Palestinians want to form an independent state in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and east Jerusalem — areas that Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.
Many Israeli demographers believe that with their higher birthrate, the Arab population of these areas, combined with Israel’s own Arab population, could soon exceed the Jewish population in Israel.
Jews are a solid majority inside Israel proper, comprising roughly 80 percent of the population of 7 million. However, if the West Bank and Gaza are included, Arabs already comprise nearly half the population of the region.
To ensure that Israel can maintain its character as a democracy with a solid Jewish majority, Olmert supports a large withdrawal from the West Bank and parts of east Jerusalem, following Israel’s pullout in 2005 from Gaza.
“The day will come when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights,” Olmert told Haaretz. “As soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.”
Israel’s 1.5 million Arab citizens have the right to vote. But the estimated 3.9 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza do not have Israeli citizenship.
In the interview, Olmert warned that Israel risks losing the support of influential American Jewish groups if it retains control of the Palestinians.
“The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us,” he said, “because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents.”
Olmert, a hard-liner early in his career, in recent years has repeatedly warned that Israel cannot remain both Jewish and democratic if it holds on to the West Bank and Gaza. 
But he has never used the South African analogy in public, though officials say he recently made the same argument in a closed meeting with lawmakers.
At the U.S. peace conference in Annapolis, Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas formally relaunched peace talks, which broke down in violence seven years ago, and pledged to reach an agreement next year.

TITLE: Liverpool Smash Porto 4-1, Prepare to Battle Marseille
AUTHOR: By Martyn Herman
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard is happy that a win will almost certainly be required in Marseille to reach the last 16 of the Champions League.
A flattering 4-1 victory over Porto on Wednesday left Liverpool in third place in Group A behind the Portuguese and Marseille but the momentum has swung towards the Premier League side after a terrible start to their campaign.
Should Besiktas pull off an unlikely win in Porto in two weeks Liverpool could progress with a draw in the French port city, a scenario rejected by Gerrard.
“It’s better to know you have to win,” Gerrard, whose penalty on Wednesday equalled Michael Owen’s European scoring record for the club, said on Liverpool’s Web site (www.liverpoolfc.tv).
“Sometimes when you know you only need a draw it can play on your mind and affect the performance.
“We know what we have to do now and that’s go over there and win. But we’re feeling confident, we’re in good form and we’re confident we can do what’s needed.”
Gerrard was speaking from bitter experience as the last time he was in a position where a draw was sufficient England lost 3-2 to Croatia at Wembley to miss out on Euro 2008.
Goalkeeper Pepe Reina described the clash in the Stade Velodrome as “a final” bit believes Liverpool’s season is coming together just at the right moment.
“The team is in a really good place at the moment and we are confident we will get through,” said Reina.
“A draw will not be good enough — we have to go there to win. But we are in very good form away, so hopefully this will continue.”
Saturday’s 3-0 away victory over Newcastle United in the Premier league and the defeat of Porto has also taken the spotlight off manager Rafael Benitez and his relationship with the club’s American owners.
The Anfield fans gave Benitez a tremendous reception on Wednesday and Reina said the players are fully behind the Spaniard.
“All that we know is that we are really together and really tight for each other. Our commitment to Liverpool and to our manager is deep,” he said.

TITLE: U.S. Tackles Russia With Hope, Home Advantage
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PORTLAND, Oregon — Andy Roddick expects some boisterous patriotic spirit when the United States hosts Russia this weekend for the Davis Cup.
The United State has not hosted the final in the international team tennis competition since 1992.
“I think we’re expecting a rowdy crowd just based solely on the fact that it sold out in about 17 minutes,” Roddick said. “That shows us people here want to be here and they’re excited about being here. And so are we.”
The Davis Cup, which gets under way on Friday, sold out in less than 30 minutes when tickets went on sale. Additional tickets went on sale this week after the hardcourt was installed at Memorial Coliseum and more seating was created.
The U.S. team, under captain Patrick McEnroe, includes sixth-ranked Roddick, 13th-ranked James Blake, and the top-ranked doubles team of Bob and Mike Bryan. They’ll be vying for the Davis Cup against Nikolai Davydenko, ranked No. 4 in the world, as well as Igor Andreyev, Dmitry Tursunov and Mikhail Yuzhny. Shamil Tarpischev is the captain of the team.
“I think people get excited about an opportunity to cheer for America, whether it’s the women’s World Cup when they had so much success years ago, even the men’s World Cup last year. It’s exciting to cheer and get patriotic like that,” Blake said. “I think Davis Cup is a perfect opportunity.”
Local officials on Wednesday estimated the event would bring at least $7.1 million in visitor spending to the state, through expenses including lodging, restaurants and transportation.
More than 60 percent of the ticket buyers were from outside Oregon, according to the Oregon Sports Authority, which released the estimate on Wednesday.
“It’s a phenomenal figure, by far the highest percentage of out-of-state spectators we’ve ever seen for an event,” said Drew Mahalic, chairman of the Oregon Sports Authority.
The once-dominant United States has 31 Davis Cup titles but none in 12 years, the longest span without an American victory. Pete Sampras last led the team to victory over Russia on clay in Moscow in 1995.
The United States last hosted the Davis Cup Final in 1992, in Fort Worth, Texas.