SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1332 (98), Friday, December 14, 2007
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TITLE: British Council Pressured
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The conflict over Russia’s demand that the regional offices of the British Council be closed down has escalated with the intervention of the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown who called the decision “totally unacceptable.”
Speaking in London before a group of British parliamentarians Thursday, Brown stressed that the British Council “does a tremendous job both in Russia and in every part of the world”.
“We wish this action to be desisted from immediately,” Brown said. “We are making our views known to the Russian government.”
Despite orders from the Russian government to close down its regional offices, including its St. Petersburg branch, The British Council looks set to continue its activities, said the organization’s press officers in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
“The British Council does not intend to close down, and will carry on with its operations,” Stanislav Smirnov, communications manager at the British Council in St. Petersburg, told The St. Petersburg Times on Thursday.
Earlier this month the Russian government ordered the temporary closure of all British Council offices outside of Moscow as of January 1st, 2008, on the grounds that the branches had been operating illegally.
The Russian authorities have made contradictory statements on the issue. Russia has denied any political motivation and maintained that the step was dictated solely by judicial issues. The Russian government argued that the operations do not comply with Russian and international law under the Vienna Convention and the 1994 bilateral agreement between Britain and Russia.
In the meantime, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the BBC News that the moves were a “retaliation” for the British government’s expelling of several Russian diplomats from the U.K. in July 2007, while Mikhail Kamynin, spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, claimed that the move against the British Council followed “as a result of unfriendly actions towards the Russian Federation taken by the British side this July”.
Yury Vdovin, deputy chairman of the St. Petersburg branch of the human rights group Citizens’ Watch, perceives the move against the British Council as yet another step leading Russia towards political and cultural isolation. The human rights advocate branded the decision politically motivated and condemned it as “a restoration of the Iron Curtain.”
“The Russian authorities have been putting every effort into narrowing the flow of unbiased, independent information reaching the Russian people,” Vdovin said. “Radio Liberty and the BBC have lost their regional partners and are no longer widely accessible; more than 95 percent of the media in the country is under some form of state control; and the contents of internet forums and blogs have become highly scrutinized by the security services. The move against the British Council — an organization that offered access to diverse sources of information — fits very well into this picture.”
His words were echoed by Lyudmila Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, who accused the Russian authorities of “biting the hand that feeds.”
“The British Council is a very useful educational institution that benefits many Russian people,” Alexeyeva said. “Instead of encouragement and gratitude, it has been treated disgracefully.”
Many partners of the British Council spoke with regret about the Russian government’s decision.
Maria Zhevlakova of the St.Petersburg-based environmental group Organization for Social Environmental Education (OSEKO), said that her organization has cooperated with the British Council since 1996 on a series of educational environmental projects.
“We are entirely apolitical, and all projects that we have implemented over that time dealt with educational programs for both students and teachers,” Zhevlakova said. “It has been very useful, both in terms of exchanges of ideas and practical results, and it would be a tremendous loss if the British Council closes down.”
Anna Sharogradskaya, head of the Regional Press Institute, a St.Petersburg NGO, said that the main victim of Russia’s negative stance on the British Council would be, first and foremost, the Russian people.
“It is both shallow and short-sighted to attack an organization so useful to ordinary Russians, the people who use the library of the British Council, its language courses, training and professional exchange programs,” Sharogradskaya said. “The intended closure targets thinking people who want to see beyond the brainwash and get a fuller, more diverse and balanced picture of events both in Russia and abroad.”

TITLE: Polish Meat Ban To Be Removed
AUTHOR: By Max Delany
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government will lift an import ban on Polish meat next week, bringing to an end a damaging two-year dispute that has prevented Russia from starting talks on a broader cooperation agreement with the European Union.
The announcement came after talks in Moscow between Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev and his Polish counterpart, Marek Sawicki.
Representatives from the veterinary services of Russia and Poland will meet next week in Kaliningrad to sign a definitive agreement, Gordeyev told reporters Wednesday.
“The temporary limitations on the import of meat products from Poland will be lifted,” he said.
The agreement will ensure that only high-quality meat will be brought into Russia from Poland and that it will not include meat originating from third countries, Gordeyev said. He said, however, that import restrictions would still be imposed on poultry and eggs from Poland, following a recent outbreak of bird flu in that country.
Citing sanitary grounds, Russia imposed a blanket ban on meat imports from Poland in November 2005. The move, which was widely seen as being politically motivated, provoked the ire of the Polish government and led to the country exercising its right to veto the start of Russian-EU talks for a new Partnership and Cooperation Agreement.
The agreement, which runs out at the end of this year, provides the basic framework for all Russian-EU relations.
During former Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s time in office, from July 2006 until last month, Poland’s relations with Russia steadily deteriorated. The situation changed after Kaczynski’s conservative Law and Justice Party lost parliamentary elections in late October. Kaczynski was replaced as prime minister by liberal politician Donald Tusk, who leads the pro-European Civic Platform party.
Tusk immediately pledged to make improving ties with Russia a priority.
Two days after Tusk became prime minister, Russia and Poland struck a deal to allow Russian veterinary officials to inspect Polish production plants.
The recent Polish-Russian talks were the first such high-level discussions to be held between the two agriculture ministries throughout the period of the ban, a spokeswoman for the Russian Agriculture Ministry said.
The countries’ agriculture ministers will meet again in Berlin early next year to assess the results of lifting the ban, the spokeswoman said. The ministers could also discuss lifting a Russian import ban on some plant products at the meeting, an unidentified ministry source said, Reuters reported.
Polish government officials welcomed the announcement as good news for Polish meat producers and appeared to suggest that the veto on talks on the Russia-EU agreement could be lifted.
“This is a real chance for our companies,” Polish Economic Minister Waldemar Pawlak said at a news conference in Warsaw, Interfax reported Wednesday.
“We have to show pragmatism and be practical in our relations with our neighbors,” he said. He added that the latest moves were a victory for the EU.
A spokeswoman for the Polish government was unavailable for further comment Wednesday.
From January through October, Russia imported just over 2 million tons of meat and poultry at a combined value of almost $3.5 billion, according to figures from the Federal Customs Service.
EU officials welcomed news of the agreement Wednesday, but were hesitant to comment before the European Commission had received official notification of the decision.
“If this is confirmed, then it is clearly very good news,” Peter Power, a spokesman for the EU trade commissioner, said by telephone from Brussels.
The decision would have positive implications for the wider EU-Russian relations as well as Russian-Polish relations, Power said.
Russian lawmakers insisted that Poland should reciprocate by quickly lifting its veto of talks on the Russian-EU negotiations.
“After the resolution of the problems with meat imports from Poland, there is no basis for the veto on the start of negotiations,” said Vasily Likhachyov, deputy head of the Federation Council’s International Affairs Committee, Interfax reported.
“An optimistic forecast is that a decision will be made before the end of December when a meeting of EU heads of state will take place,” Likhachyov said.
European business and political representatives welcomed the announcement and called on Russia and the EU to push on with negotiations for a new partnership agreement.
“On the wider stage of EU-Russian relations, we expect that this move will also provide a much-needed impetus to beginning negotiations on the new strategic partnership agreement,” Frank Schauff, chief executive of the Association of European Businesses in Russia, said in a statement.
The agreement currently in place is outdated and does not reflect the realities of contemporary economic ties between Russia and the EU, the AEB statement said.

TITLE: Medvedev Gets Thumbs Up From Hometown School
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The atmosphere in St. Petersburg’s School No. 305, from which Russian presidential candidate Dmitry Medvedev graduated 25 years ago, is elated. Both teachers and students of the school feel excited and proud that it was none other than a graduate from their school who was nominated for the presidency.
“Congratulations! Dmitry Medvedev, class of 1982, was nominated for the position of Russian president. Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!” reads the sign on an announcement board downstairs that the school’s administration hurried to design upon hearing the news.  The sign is accompanied by autographed pictures of Medvedev, presented when he visited the school on Sept. 1 last year.
“We were very happy to hear the news of Dmitry’s candidature for presidential elections,” said Nina Muzykantova, the school’s director.  “We believed he would be the one, and now we will go to vote for him with special feelings,” she said.
Muzykantova said that when the news of Medvedev’s candidature reached the school, the students all cheered. 
Medvedev was born into a family of professors in St. Petersburg in 1965. His father, Anatoly Medvedev, was a professor at the city’s prestigious Leningrad Technological University, while his mother Yulia taught at another well-known St. Petersburg university, the Herzen State Pedagogical Institute.  However, despite their respected status, the family lived in an ordinary apartment block on the outskirts of the city.
The school that Medvedev attended was also one of many regular Russian schools with no prestigious English or Math specialization. The school’s gray building still offers no luxury inside; only narrow corridors and typical classrooms. However, the current atmosphere in the school gives it a special flavor. 
Irina Grigorovskaya, who taught Math to Medvedev when he was at school, said he was “a conscientious and industrious pupil”.
“He had good grades in my subject, but at the same time he was obviously more inclined to humanitarian subjects. I remember even when he was still just a boy, he already used to say that Math was not his priority because he wanted to be a lawyer and he wouldn’t need Math a lot for that,” Grigorovskaya said.
Grigorovskaya said that the last time she had seen Medvedev was when his class celebrated the 25th anniversary of their graduation.  At that time, Medvedev already worked as a vice-president.
“We were all a bit afraid how it would all go, with him having such a high ranking position. However, our worries were in vain as there was no pomposity on his side and communication was great,” she said.
Grigorovskaya said she was very proud of her former pupil’s nomination for presidency.
The school was also where Medvedev met his future wife Svetlana Linnik, whom he married in 1989 and with whom he has a 12-year-old son, Ilya. Grigorovskaya, who also taught Svetlana, said that she was a good student and a pretty girl.
In 1982 Medvedev entered one of the country’s most prestigious higher education institutions — St. Petersburg State University. There he studied in the faculty of law, which was also famed for the tough competition to gain a place there and for its excellent teaching.  Russia’s current president Vladimir Putin graduated from the same faculty several years earlier.
Marina Lavrikova, who studied and later worked together with Medvedev at the law faculty, said she remembered him as “a highly honest, wise and rather reserved person”.
“He was very serious even when he was 17-18 years old, calm and discreet. I would say he was one of those people who can be called decent. But you know such features were rather characteristic of many students of the law faculty, which disciplined people a lot.  We wouldn’t have any really wild student life there.  We knew our future profession required us to stay within certain limits,” Lavrikova said.
“Dmitry was also successful and showed great potential,” she said.
Lavrikova said as students they all went to work at Soviet collective farms in the fields, and that Medvedev was always there together with the others, digging potatoes and doing other hard work. 
At the law faculty, Medvedev concentrated on studying civil law, which was taught by Anatoly Sobchak, who was later mayor of St. Petersburg and also taught Putin. After completing post-graduate studies at the department, Medvedev himself taught at the faculty.  He was one of the authors of a textbook on civil law that many specialists in the sphere called “brilliant,” Lavrikova said.
Medvedev’s students respected him a lot, she said.
“You know, the students of our department are traditionally rather demanding, but Dmitry Anatolyevich, though he was rather young for a teacher at that time, earned their respect,” she said.
Lavrikova said the students and staff of the law faculty were also glad and proud of Medvedev’s nomination.
“At the same time, I’d say it’s not a completely new feeling for us, as we’ve been having a similar experience over recent years,” she said, referring to the fact that current Russian president Putin also studied there.
Ruslan Linkov, St. Petersburg’s human rights advocate who met Medvedev in 1990 when Medvedev worked on the Leningrad Council together with Sobchak, said he remembered Medvedev as a “quiet, calm and polite man” who also produced an impression of “a reformer”.  Linkov said that when he met Medvedev after the latter’s career had developed in Moscow, he didn’t notice any big changes in him.
“He was as usual extremely polite, and did not exceed the limits of his competence,” Linkov said.
“I know that from the times of working on the democratic Leningrad Council Medvedev knew the basis of democratic procedures and this gives us hope,” Linkov said.
Medvedev and Putin first met in 1989 at Sobchak’s city mayor election headquarters where they both worked. When Sobchak was elected mayor of St. Petersburg, he invited Medvedev to work as his advisor and as an expert on the foreign affairs committee that was then headed by Putin.  When Sobchak lost the gubernatorial elections in 1996, Putin left for Moscow, and Medvedev went into business, until in 1999 Putin invited Medvedev to work in Moscow.

TITLE: Putin May Decide Later on PM Posting
AUTHOR: By Steve Gutterman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin is unlikely to respond swiftly to a proposal that he become prime minister after Russia’s presidential election in March, a senior government official and close Putin ally said Wednesday.
Putin said Monday that he supported a longtime protege, Dmitry Medvedev, to become Russia’s next president — an endorsement almost certain to clinch an election victory for Medvedev in the March 2 vote. On Tuesday, Medvedev returned the favor, asking that Putin be his prime minister.
Putin, due to step down in May, has not commented publicly on the offer.
“This is a very interesting proposal, but the president himself will decide whether or not to accept it, and probably (he will do so) later,” First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said in remarks broadcast on state-run television.
Putin said in October that he would consider becoming prime minister if the dominant United Russia party won a convincing victory in Dec. 2 parliamentary elections and if Russians elect a president he could work well with in March. United Russia won 70 percent of seats in parliament, and Medvedev — who has worked under him for nearly two decades — clearly fits the bill.
Putin says the continuation of his policies is crucial for Russia and suggested he wants to maintain strong influence after leaving the Kremlin.
Becoming prime minister would allow Putin to retain a strong measure of power without violating or changing the constitution, which prohibits presidents from serving more than two consecutive terms.
But as he has maneuvered before the end of his term, Putin has been careful to keep his options open and keep Russians guessing about his plans.
A Kremlin-connected political analyst, Gleb Pavlovsky, said that while Putin was likely to accept the proposal, he would not make his decision public for some time.
“Putin will have to think twice because such consent will constrain his maneuvers in the future, which he doesn’t like,” Interfax quoted Pavlovsky as saying.
Along with Medvedev, Ivanov had also been long considered a leading candidate for anointment by Putin as his favored successor. But Ivanov praised Medvedev on Tuesday and said his election would ensure continuity of the policies Putin has pursued.
On Wednesday, Ivanov said Medvedev’s proposal was “aimed at preserving the continuity of power, the continuity of the course implemented over the past eight years.”

TITLE: Rice Offers Praise For Medvedev
AUTHOR: Reuters, AP
TEXT: WASHINGTON — U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that Dmitry Medvedev, named by President Vladimir Putin as his preferred successor, was “of another generation” of Russian leaders, USA Today reported Wednesday.
In an interview posted on the newspaper’s web site, Rice said that after meeting Medvedev several times, she found him “a very intelligent person. He is of another generation.”
She said that Medvedev has been attempting to diversify the Russian economy and work “with the regions on efforts to wire the country with the Internet.”
Rice told the newspaper she hoped the election would be “really contested.”

TITLE: Russia, Iran Reach Nuclear Plant Deal
AUTHOR: By Jim Heintz
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia and Iran reached agreement Thursday on a schedule for finishing construction of a nuclear power plant that plays a central role in the international tensions over Iran’s atomic program, Russian news agencies reported.
The reports cited the head of plant contractor Atomstroiexport, Sergei Shmatko, as saying details of the timetable for completing the facility in the southern Iranian city of Bushehr would be released later this month.
The United States and other critics have long protested construction of the $1 billion plant, saying it would give Iran cover for developing a nuclear weapons program.
Construction at the plant has been sporadically delayed amid disputes between Iran and Russia over payment, fuel delivery and other issues. But Russia has remained opposed to a U.S.-led push for international sanctions against Iran for allegedly seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
“The difficulties with the Iranian customer have been settled,” Shmatko was quoted as saying by the ITAR-Tass news agency. He did not give details of the completion plans, but said that fuel would be delivered to Iran about half a year before the plant launches operations, the agency reported.
Although Russia has resisted drives to impose sanctions on Iran, it also repeatedly has urged Tehran to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency to resolve concerns over the nuclear program.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov underlined that position later Thursday after a meeting in Moscow with his Iranian counterpart Manouchehr Mottaki.
Lavrov said resolving the controversy is possible “solely on the basis of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, IAEA rules and principles and, certainly, with Iran proving its right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy,” according to the Interfax news agency.
Lavrov spoke by phone Thursday with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about “the continuation of diplomatic efforts on resolving the Iranian nuclear issue,” as well as Kosovo, the Foreign Ministry said.
Shmatko raised the prospect of creating a Russian-Iranian joint venture “to ensure security” at the Bushehr plant, according to the RIA-Novosti agency.
That could indicate Russian interest in ensuring that enriched uranium at the plant is not stolen or diverted. Depleted fuel rods also could be reprocessed into plutonium.

TITLE: Putin Goes to Belarus for Talks on Union
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Isachenkov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin could become the leader of a land even larger than Russia — a development that may hinge on talks that began on Thursday in neighboring Belarus.
Putin has unexpectedly revived efforts to create a single state from the two former Soviet republics — a merger that would expand his options for exercising power after he steps down from the Russian presidency next year.
Putin headed to the Belarusian capital, Minsk, on Thursday for discussions on a framework for the long-debated union, fleshing out an existing agreement that has meant little in practice.
A merger of Russia and Belarus could allow Putin to leave the Russian presidency as promised in May yet still remain a chief of state.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin tries to speed up a union with Belarus ... to become the president of the unified state,” said Gennady Zyuganov, Russia’s Communist Party chief.
Putin, who has indicated he will seek to retain significant influence after term limits force him from the Kremlin, does have at least one other option.
If the two countries can agree, it would mark the first merger of a former Soviet state with Russia since the Soviet Union split apart in 1991 — a step that would make many Russians proud.
But the move could damage Russia’s relations with the West, especially if Moscow is seen as using pipelines that supply Belarus with natural gas to force the smaller country into an agreement.
Ahead of Putin’s visit, Belarus’ beleaguered Western-oriented political opposition was already fighting the idea of a merger. Police on Wednesday forced some 200 protesters from a Minsk square where they waved flags and chanted “No union with imperial Russia!”
One of the leaders of the opposition Young Front was knocked off his feet and stomped on by riot police. He was bundled into an ambulance, unconscious.
Some analysts doubt a deal can be reached, because Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko — a Soviet-style leader dubbed Europe’s last dictator by the West — is unlikely to cede power.
Lukashenko’s office said last week the talks between Putin, Lukashenko and other ranking officials would focus on a draft constitution of a union.
Russia’s Ekho Moskvy radio quoted unidentified members of the Lukashenko administration as saying Moscow and Minsk had struck a deal: Putin, the sources said, would become president of a Russia-Belarus union while Lukashenko would become the speaker of its parliament.
Officials in Moscow and Minsk have denied the report, but politicians and commentators in both countries agree that Putin’s trip signals a renewed interest in the merger.
When Medvedev proposed that Putin become prime minister, many analysts saw the move as the Kremlin’s preferred plan to maintain his influence. But some said Putin would never accept what would amount to a demotion.
Pavel Borodin, secretary of the existing Russian-Belarusian executive body, said Wednesday that drafts of the constitution being considered would give the president of a new unified country the power to rule over the current national governments.
He said the new constitution would be subject to approval by each nation’s parliament and would be put to voters in national referendums.
Putin could find it difficult to persuade the Belarusian leader to relinquish his country’s independence. And Lukashenko seems to lack the leverage needed to win an agreement that favors Belarus, which has a population of just 9.7 million compared to Russia’s 141.4 million.
“Putin and Lukashenko have sought to outmaneuver and cheat one another over the past few years,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor of Russia in Global Affairs magazine.
Russia and Belarus signed a union agreement in 1996 that envisaged close political, economic and military ties, but efforts to achieve a full merger have foundered.

TITLE: Kasparov Won’t Run For Russian President
AUTHOR: By Mike Eckel
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Opposition leader Garry Kasparov said Thursday the Kremlin has stopped him from running for president by preventing his supporters from meeting to nominate him.
Members of the Other Russia coalition, which Kasparov heads, say they had been unable to rent a Moscow auditorium, which they needed for a legally required vote to endorse the former chess champion’s presidential bid.
Judging by the response organizers were getting from venue owners, authorities had been instructed to stop his group from meeting, Kasparov said.
Under Russian law, independent candidates can run for president only if an “initiative group” of at least 500 people meets formally to vote on the nomination. The deadline for informing the Central Election Commission of such a meeting was Thursday.
“This prohibition is apparently very strict because ... they are categorically refusing us,” Kasparov told Ekho Moskvy radio.
Kasparov’s spokeswoman Marina Litvinovich accused the government of pressuring the owners of Moscow auditoriums and meeting halls.
“Authorities put up as many obstacles as possible to stop us,” she told The Associated Press.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the accusation absurd.
“The Kremlin isn’t involved in renting out halls, and blaming the Kremlin in any way in this case would be considered incorrect,” he said.
Since retiring from chess, Kasparov has become a prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin, who is barred by law from seeking a third consecutive term in the March election. Kasparov helped form Other Russia, a coalition of nationalists, left-wingers and liberals.
Also Thursday, Litvinovich said, buses carrying dozens of Other Russia supporters were halted by police on the outskirts of Moscow as they were headed for a wake for 22-year-old Yuri Chervochkin, who died earlier this month after allegedly being beaten by police during a November protest.
The group was later released, arriving at the service escorted by policemen, said activist Sergei Aksenov. The mourners included Kasparov and the nationalist author Eduard Limonov, leader of the opposition National Bolshevik Party,
“One can talk about a systematic, harsh, physical persecution of my supporters in Russia,” Limonov told Ekho Moskvy.
Denis Bilunov, an activist with the United Civil Front, which is part of the Other Russia coalition, said the wake was very tense, as riot police stood by, smirking and talking, while people mourned Chervochkin.
“It was absolutely a disgrace the way they acted,” Bilunov said.
Even had he been able to run for president, Kasparov would have had little chance of winning in March, given the Kremlin’s control of broadcast media, law enforcement agencies and the nation’s court system.
Still, the Kremlin has worked hard to thwart efforts to build any independent opposition movement.
Police have violently dispersed several opposition rallies organized by Kasparov’s group in the past year, and Kasparov was jailed for five days after a Moscow rally last month.

TITLE: Forum, Funds Help Small Enterprises
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Small Enterprise Forum opened at the Lenexpo exhibition complex Thursday and will continue through December 14, while simultaneously, an exhibition of small enterprises has opened aimed at finding clients for small enterprises, attracting financial institutions interested in financing SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) and stimulating cooperation between small and large companies.
This is the fifth Small Enterprise Forum in a row. Last year, about 1,500 people visited the event.
“The atmosphere which I saw at the forum and the determination of progressive local officials to support small businesses prove that they are really concerned about this issue,” Sergei Borisov, president of the Opora Rossii business association, said at a press conference at Rosbalt news agency Thursday.
He listed St. Petersburg, Yamalo-Nenetsky district and Tatarstan as the three most favorable regions for small enterprises in Russia. St. Petersburg has the largest number of small enterprises per 1,000 residents out of all of the regions, and the gross turnover of small enterprises increased by 40 percent this year, accounting for 28 percent of the city’s economy.
Borisov praised the initiatives of the committee for economic development, industrial policy and trade (CEDIPT). CEDIPT and the governor’s council for the support of SMEs developed a program for state support of small enterprises for 2008-2011, for which investment is planned at over $110 million.
The city has already decreased unified profit tax for small enterprises, and by 2011, 11 business incubators will operate, rendering consulting and advisory services to small enterprises. The first business incubator opened in April this year, and houses 40 small enterprises.
A venture fund for investment into small high-tech enterprises started operating in November, while a loans fund for SMEs starts working this month.
“The financial resources are already accumulated. We’ve selected several banks. From December 13 the fund will provide financial guarantees to commercial banks that issue loans to small enterprises lacking collateral,” Dmitry Bykov, deputy chairman of CEDIPT, said in a statement released Thursday.
The St. Petersburg budget and federal budget have supplied $13.66 million to the fund, whose guarantees will cover up to 70 percent of the loans and leasing agreements for small high-tech and production companies and up to 50 percent for other small enterprises.
Guarantees to each enterprise will not exceed $600,000, and the fund’s commission will be 1.75 percent. The fund is already cooperating with 12 banks.
“The procedure of taking out a loan will take seven to ten days,” Bykov said.
Guarantees will be granted only to stable enterprises that have a good credit history, no tax debts and have not been subject to bankruptcy or license suspending procedures over the last two years.
Borisov said that retail still dominates small business, accounting for over 50 percent of the small enterprises in the city, while the service industry accounts for 28 percent.
Among the main problems faced by SMEs, Borisov indicated a lack of space for rent and high rent rates. In St. Petersburg, the two most frequent complaints from small enterprises are about the illegal takeover of their land and premature termination of rent agreements, and about unjustified investigations carried out by law enforcement officials.
According to Borisov’s estimations, small enterprises spend 9.6 percent of their gross turnover on red tape.
“I think that the city government’s support of large retail chains is a mistake. The chains control about 80 percent of retail, which is too much. It’s extremely difficult for new brands to enter this market. The existing binding terms limit competition in the market and increase prices,” Borisov said.
Besides the problems of small enterprises, forum participants discussed innovative opportunities, international cooperation between SMEs and youth entrepreneurship.
During the forum, master-classes on entrepreneurship and management were also held by Dmitry Bykov and the chairman of the governor’s public council for the development of small business, Sergei Fyodorov.

TITLE: Gazprom Sells Izvestia to Bank Rossiya
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — Gazprom-Media has agreed to sell its stake in newspaper Izvestia to Bank Rossiya, according to a source within Gazprom.
Gazprom’s media unit will sell 51 percent of the holding that controls Izvestia and its office building in central Moscow to Bank Rossiya’s insurance unit, Sogaz, Kommersant cited an unidentified Gazprom official as saying.
Bank Rossiya’s majority shareholder, Yury Kovalchuk, is a close ally of President Vladimir Putin. 
The deal will be implemented via the Sogaz insurance company under an option agreement with Gazprom-Media that ends in the middle of 2008, Kommersant said. Sogaz could acquire the daily for $25 million, the price Gazprom-Media paid for it in 2005, Kommersant said. The deal could be completed by February, a source inside Gazprom-Media said, the newspaper reported. Izvestia general director Pyotr Godlevsky declined to comment, referring questions to shareholders, Kommersant reported.
Far outstripping the value of the newspaper, however, is the Izvestia office on Pushkin Square, which is estimated to be worth more than $150 million.
(Bloomberg, SPT)

TITLE: Reports Suggest Bird Flu To Blame For Poultry Deaths
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Agriculture Ministry’s animal and plant health watchdog is investigating whether the death of 35,000 poultry in the Rostov region was caused by the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, a spokesman said Wednesday.
Preliminary data from the Gulyai-Borisovskaya poultry farm in the Rostov region shows that the deaths, which began at the end of November, were caused by the virus, said Alexei Alexeyenko, a spokesman for the agency.
“There is suspicion that it is H5N1,” Alexeyenko said. “We will have the results in about two days, maybe earlier. There are preliminary data but they need to be confirmed.”
The outbreak, if confirmed, would be the country’s fourth major instance of bird flu this year. The most recent case occurred in Krasnodar region, which borders Rostov, in September. Several hundred birds died or were culled as a result.
Krasnodar region was also the site of an outbreak of the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of bird flu in January, which was followed a month later by several cases in towns in the Moscow region that were traced to the capital’s best-known pet market.
In each case, authorities enforced strict quarantine measures to prevent the spread of the virus. Itar-Tass reported that all 500,000 birds at the poultry farm in the Rostov region would be culled as a precautionary measure. Russia has never had a human case of bird flu, which has killed more than 200 people worldwide since 2003. Health experts fear that the constantly mutating virus could change into a form easily transmitted from person to person.

TITLE: Atomic Assets Combined Into State Giant
AUTHOR: By Guy Faulconbridge
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia is back as a major player on the world nuclear market as President Vladimir Putin crafts a state behemoth to consolidate the country’s atomic assets after the chaos that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union. 
The Kremlin is folding all civilian nuclear assets — ranging from uranium mines and nuclear fuel enrichment plants to atomic power stations — into one giant state corporation, Rosatom. 
Atomenergoprom, the company that will be at the center of the new state corporation, now has annual sales of about $8 billion, but revenues are set to mushroom as the firm builds the dozens of reactors at home and seeks to break into world markets. 
“Atomenergoprom was created to compete on the global market and boost nuclear power generation within the country,” said Sergei Kiriyenko, the head of the Federal Atomic Energy Agency. “We consider our competitors to be the transnational giants.
“It will be a company encompassing the full cycle — from mining uranium to the generation of electricity at atomic stations and decommissioning them,” said Kiriyenko, the man behind the creation of the corporation. 
Kiriyenko said the main competitors were the nuclear partnership between France’s Areva and Germany’s Siemens; Japan’s Toshiba, which owns U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric; and GE Hitachi, which is the nuclear venture of General Electric and Japan’s Hitachi. 
Kremlin officials say the company is part of a plan to boost the country’s international clout in sectors where it can compete such as gas, oil, weapons and nuclear materials. 
They see it as an atomic version of gas giant Gazprom, the world’s biggest gas company by reserves, which has flexed its muscles by demanding access to European energy markets. 
After the alliances formed by major players on the world market, Russia could play a key role in building the biggest player, nuclear officials said. 
“If Russia forms a strategic partnership, then that partnership will become the leader of the world atomic market,” said Kirill Komarov, deputy director of Atomenergoprom. 
Russia has plans to construct two reactors a year starting in 2012 as part of a drive to almost double the share of atomic energy production to 25 percent to 30 percent by 2030 from 16 percent now. 
Russia, one of the world’s biggest sellers of enrichment services, has been trying to break into the prosperous nuclear markets of the United States and European Union.
Russia now sells only uranium from dismantled Russian nuclear weapons to the United States under a program known as megatons to megawatts. Sales are made through USEC. 
No other Russian uranium exports are made to the United States because anti-dumping tariffs make them prohibitively expensive. 
But that could change over the next five years. 
Officials from both countries made a preliminary agreement this month to allow limited imports of Russian uranium. Exports will be small until 2013, when the USEC contract expires, but then it will soar, according to a copy of the agreement. 
“All the U.S. utilities are fighting for access to more Russian supply,” said Kevin Smith, director of Uranium Trading at Traxys Group in New York. 
“If this deal is approved then sometime next year it could be legal for U.S. and European utilities to contract for additional quantities with the Russians for the post 2013,” he said. 
“That will bring a lot more supply onto the market.” 
But while boosting low enriched uranium, or LEU, supply, it could absorb more raw uranium from the market, as the country’s enrichment firm, Techsnabexport, seeks to enrich uranium rather than dilute weapons-grade fuel, analysts say. 
“Russian companies are likely to prefer to export low enriched uranium derived from natural uranium rather than from down blending HEU [highly enriched uranium],” said Max Layton, a London-based analyst for Macquarie Capital Securities. 
“Although this would, ceteris paribus, increase the demand for natural uranium in 2014, the rise is likely to be small considering that Russian enrichment facilities are generally more efficient than western facilities,” he said.

TITLE: Kiriyenko To Head New Corp
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday appointed Atomenergoprom chief Sergei Kiriyenko as the head of the country’s new state-run nuclear corporation, Rosatom.
The state-run giant will incorporate Atomenergoprom, as well as all civilian and military nuclear facilities, research institutes and all organizations working in the field of nuclear security, the Kremlin said in a statement.
Putin signed a law creating Rosatom on Dec. 3, basing the new structure on the Federal Atomic Energy Agency, also known as RosAtom and headed by Kiriyenko. Putin named Kremlin chief of staff Sergei Sobyanin as chairman of the state-run corporation’s board.
Also on the board are Deputy Economic Development and Trade Minister Andrei Belousov; chief military-industrial adviser Igor Borovkov; deputy head of the FSB’s economic security department Alexander Bortnikov; presidential aides Larisa Brycheva, Sergei Prikhodko and Igor Shuvalov; and Defense Ministry official Vladimir Verkhovtsev.
Russia plans to increase its dependence on nuclear power to 25 percent of its total electricity needs by 2030, freeing more gas for export. The formation of the new Rosatom allows the government to reorganize its atomic sector, which has been mostly run by state enterprises that are not joint-stock companies, into simpler, corporate structures.
Kiriyenko has said he wants all nuclear activities to be self-sufficient and run like businesses.
(SPT, Bloomberg)

TITLE: Falling Dollar Rejected For Euros
AUTHOR: By Maria Levitov
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russians increasingly favor euros over dollars when exchanging money or withdrawing foreign currency from bank accounts, the central bank said.
The demand for euros from individuals, measured by transactions at foreign currency exchange outlets and banks, increased 62 percent in October from the same month last year, the Moscow-based central bank said in a statement on its web site Thursday. Russians’ demand for U.S. dollars declined 19 percent in the same period, it said.
There is a “further change in people’s preferences in foreign currency purchases because of a continued drop in the rate of the U.S. dollar,’’ the statement said.
Russians are enjoying a ninth consecutive year of wage growth as the economy continues to expand, boosted by revenue from oil and gas sales. Wages increased at an annual rate of more than 10 percent every month this year to a monthly average of 13,540 rubles ($553.76) in October. “The monthly volume of purchases’’ of the euro surpassed 1 billion euros ($1.47 billion) for the first time in October, the central bank said.
The euro strengthened 11 percent against the dollar this year through Dec. 13, according to Bloomberg data. The ruble strengthened 7.7 percent against the dollar.
Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil producer, said Thursday it was considering switching crude sales to rubles from dollars as the U.S. currency weakens, following similar statements by domestic rivals Gazprom and Lukoil.
In October, Russians exchanged other currencies for euros worth $1.9 billion in foreign exchange outlets, an increase of $642 million from the month before, the central bank said.

TITLE: First Kazakh Smelter Opens
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PAVLODAR, Kazakhstan — Kazakh metals major Eurasian Natural Resources opened a $900 million aluminum smelter on Wednesday, the country’s first, which it expects will hit full capacity of 250,000 tons per year by 2011.
ENRC, with a market capitalization of $13.8 billion, is one of Kazakhstan’s largest companies, accounting for about 4 percent of the Central Asian country’s gross domestic product.
The official opening of Kazakhstan Aluminum Smelter two years after the first brick was laid is part of the country’s efforts to diversify its economy away from oil and gas.
“We are not only producing and selling raw materials. We are turning into a country which makes competitive products,” Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said at the smelter’s opening ceremony in the city of Pavlodar.
ENRC, which raised more than $2.7 billion this month floating about 20 percent of its stock in London, says most of the aluminum produced at the smelter will be exported.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Baltika Exports Expand</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Baltika Brewery has started exporting beer in plastic bottles to Germany. Baltika is the first Russian company to obtain permission from Deutsche Pfandsystem GmbH, which controls turnover of disposable containers, Baltika said Tuesday in a statement.
Baltika will export one-liter bottles of Baltika3 to Germany. The company controls over 70 percent of Russian beer exports, delivering beer to 45 countries.

<b>More Rossia Passengers</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Rossia Airlines increased passenger turnover by eight percent over the 11 months of this year compared to the same period last year, Interfax reported Tuesday.
In January-November 2007, Rossia served over three million passengers, including about 1.5 million passengers in internal flights and 1.5 million passengers in international flights.

<b>Technosila Sales Boost</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Technosila, an electronics and household appliances retailer, expects sales to exceed $2 billion next year, Interfax reported Tuesday.
The sales increase is expected due to operating SAP ERP 6.0, an enterprise resources planning system. This year sales are expected to reach $1.4 billion — a 40 percent increase on 2005 figures. Technosila spent $7 million on the ERP system, and maintenance costs are expected to be $1 million a year.
In 2008, Technosila will open 30-40 wholly-owned stores and increase the number of its franchise stores up to 230. Currently the company operates 176 stores.

<b>M.Video, Elecom Agree</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — M.Video retail chain signed an agreement with Elecom, the largest Japanese producer of computer accessories, the company said Tuesday in a statement.
M.Video will be the exclusive distributor of Elecom in Russia among national retail chains. The agreement will be in force until December 31, 2009.

<b>Tractors On The Move</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Kirovsky Plant will supply 100 Kirovets tractors to the Amurskaya Oblast. The state company Agro ordered machines worth 440 million rubles ($18 million), the company said Tuesday in a statement.
The tractors will be delivered in several lots from February through June next year, and will be equipped with Mercedes engines.

<b>Finn Flare Set to Spread</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Finn Flare, a Russian-Finnish enterprise, will develop its retail chain in St. Petersburg, Interfax reported Thursday.
In December the company opened its first store in the city, at Mega Dybenko shopping center. The second store is to open at the end of the month at Komendantsky Prospekt.
Finn Flare operates 17 wholly-owned stores in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and about 245 franchise stores operate across Russia’s regions and Kazakhstan. Last year Finn Flare’s global turnover accounted for over $80 million.

<b>VTB To Raise Dividend</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — VTB Group, the Russian bank that held this year’s biggest initial public offering, will raise its dividend for 2007 “substantially,’’ RIA Novosti reported, citing Chief Executive Officer Andrei Kostin.
Kostin said it would be “reasonable’’ for VTB to raise its dividend to the level of other European banks, according to the news service. State-run VTB will decide how much to pay out for 2007 at a shareholder meeting next year, RIA said.
The bank paid out 20 percent of its net income, or 0.066 kopek a share, last year, RIA said. VTB shares climbed 1.5 percent to 12.39 kopeks on the Micex Stock Exchange at 1:50 p.m. in Moscow on Wednesday.

<b>Prices Continue to Rise</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian consumer prices rose 0.2 percent in the first week of December, Interfax reported, citing central bank Chairman Sergey Ignatiev.
The central bank hasn’t formally revised its 2007 forecast for inflation of an annual 8 percent. It may reach at least 11.5 percent this year, after consumer prices increased 10.6 percent in the year through October, the Economy Ministry said.
Ignatiev also said the central bank is considering raising the refinancing rate, Interfax reported. 
Central bank First Deputy Chairman Alexei Ulyukayev said last month that the bank will probably revise the refinancing rate in December. The rate, which formally acts as a ceiling for borrowing money and is used for taxation purposes, currently stands at 10 percent.

TITLE: Putin the Master Manipulator
AUTHOR: The Times
TEXT: President Vladimir Putin has a master manipulator’s talent for keeping his country guessing. Speculation about his successor, to be chosen in the presidential election in March, has for months been gathering intensity, but when the future seems clear, Putin utters another Delphic remark that throws everything awry. On Monday, he told state television that he “completely and fully” endorsed the candidacy of Dmitry Medvedev. 
Medvedev, who has experience in international business and the outside world, is seen as a consensus-builder. He once said his foreign policy views were “European”; this is not perfect, but it is an improvement.
 Putin’s apparent endorsement could be another ruse to ensure that he is not seen as a lame duck before he leaves office. He already threw most observers a curve ball when he appointed the elderly and little-known Viktor Zubkov as prime minister in September, a move that seemed to dash First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov’s hopes for early anointment. A month later, he hinted that he would himself take the job of prime minister, triggering speculation that the next president would be only a figurehead, with Putin returning midterm. Now he seems to have confirmed Medvedev in the lead, although next week he could also approve an Ivanov candidacy to give Russia a “choice.” 

The Boston Globe 
Among President Vladimir Putin’s likely successors, Dmitry Medvedev may be the most pragmatic. His public statements and past deeds point toward a belief in free markets, a desire to tackle the corruption that infects Russian government at nearly all levels and an interest in improving the people’s living conditions at the bottom of the economic ladder. 
Kremlin-controlled television has created a tsar-like aura around Putin, burnishing Medvedev’s reputation as dispenser to the common people of the country’s energy windfall. So there is little doubt that voters will dutifully do Putin’s will in March and confirm his choice of a successor. 
Medvedev will benefit from the Kremlin’s deft cultivation of public assent to Putin’s conception of what Russia most needs: a strong state. The image Putin has molded of a leader who concentrates all power in his own hands, purging disloyal media moguls and energy barons while standing up to meddlesome Western countries, has fostered an idolatry of the state and its master. In this political climate, a vote against the master’s chosen successor becomes an act of disloyalty to the government that has made Russia rich and powerful. If Putin has anything to worry about, it is that Medvedev will now have all the power accrued to the boss of Kremlin bosses. Tsars and godfathers don’t share power willingly. 
In the Machiavellian world of Kremlin politics, however, what matters most are connections. Medvedev has no power base apart from Putin, thus confirming his continued influence — a scenario Putin himself and most of the country seem to prefer. It may be, in this murky world, that Putin in fact is less able to appoint his successor than is commonly assumed. But a Medvedev presidency should allow Russia to get over the increasingly strident nationalism of the Putin era and exercise a more responsible role on the global stage. 

Financial Times 
In a country of many secrets, none provoked so much speculation in Russia as the identity of President Vladimir Putin’s successor. But, inside the administration, Putin shares power with his top officials, particularly with the past siloviki. They include Putin but not Medvedev, a soft-spoken lawyer. It seems likely that Medvedev’s nomination emerged from a Kremlin power struggle rather than from a preordained Putin plan. 
Putin may have favored Medvedev because he thinks he can trust a loyal protege and fellow St. Petersburg native. It may be that the siloviki accepted the choice precisely because Medvedev does not himself have a security background. A silovik as president could be a threat to other siloviki. With a non-silovik in office, everyone sleeps easier. 
But this may be wishful thinking. Medvedev will face pressures to stick to the Kremlin’s current line: promoting the state’s power at home and asserting its influence abroad, especially over its neighbors. The nationalism that Putin has encouraged, not least in the parliamentary elections, will not fade away. Nor will the voracious greed driving bureaucrats to seize control of companies, further undermining the free market. 
The Daily Telegraph 
In many ways, President Vladimir Putin’s choice is astute. Dmitry Medvedev is the least unappealing of a pretty unattractive bunch of contenders. 
Pro-Western with liberal leanings, he knows about economics and, as chairman of Gazprom, he knows about markets. He has also been charged by Putin with spending some of the country’s immense oil and gas wealth on big social and infrastructure projects. 
The president has wisely resisted the temptation to change the Constitution to allow him to serve more than the allotted two consecutive terms in office. Can he now resist the temptation to tweak it to ensure that, when he steps down, real power still attaches to him rather than to the new president? 
That seems unlikely, given Putin’s track record of utter contempt for the democratic niceties. We may soon discover whether Medvedev, in addition to his other attributes, has a backbone. 

The Wall Street Journal 
We still don’t know who will really rule the world’s largest country come spring, or how, beyond the assumption that President Vladimir Putin will have a big say. In announcing his succession plan, the president said Dmitry Medvedev would assure continuity. Investors who want the good times to roll on agree, sending Russian stocks up on Monday. Look closer at the damage from eight years of Putinism to the country’s institutions and freedoms, however, and the outlook dims. 
The generous interpretation of his reluctance to step aside for good is that Putin wants a smooth transition to secure his legacy. A less generous one is that he’s worried about his hide. In leaving the Kremlin, Putin becomes vulnerable, even if the successor is a trusted aide. Recall that Putin, upon his own coronation in 2000, was seen by former President Boris Yeltsin’s inner circle as young, politically weak and loyal. Those were the main credentials for the job then, too. As Kremlin boss, Putin put his tsar-like prerogatives to bear against many of the Yeltsin men who got him there. 
The centralization of power also endangers an economic revival driven by an oil price that went up from $15 to $90 per barrel in Putin’s term in office. Corruption, public services, red tape are all worsening problems. Despite its great natural wealth, Russia’s recovery lags behind other East European countries. 
Contrary to the hype about restoring order and prosperity after the tumultuous 1990s, Putinism has sown the seeds of instability. Medvedev’s emergence doesn’t resolve the fundamental uncertainty about the country’s near and long-term future. It merely accentuates it.

TITLE: Keeping Medvedev on a Short Leash
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: Russia’s presidential election was held Monday. President Vladimir Putin voted for First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to become the new president.
Why did the president wait so long in announcing his decision?
Over the course of Putin’s two terms in office, we have seen how he has strengthened presidential authority. At the same time, the independence of governors, the Prosecutor General’s Office, the courts and the State Duma have all been significantly weakened, if not eliminated entirely. Moreover, uncooperative oligarchs were imprisoned or driven out of the country, while the more cooperative oligarchs were strong-armed into making deals with the president. The presidential post has become Aladdin’s lamp: If you rub it, your wish will be granted.
Putin had two strategies to preserve his authority. One was to change the Constitution to permit a third term. The other was to name a successor who would be completely subservient to his control. According to the second strategy, his successor holds Aladdin’s lamp, gives it a rub, and the genie pops out and asks, “What is your wish, master?” The new president responds, “I don’t know — ask Putin what he wants.”
It’s clear this system would not hold up for long, because even the most timid and obedient successor would quickly figure out that the privileges that come with the lamp are now his to enjoy exclusively.
This is not a question of politics, but of psychology. How long will it take Medvedev to realize that he really isn’t bound to Putin? Considering, however, that Medvedev has never been known for his audacity or decisiveness, he probably won’t be feeling independent too quickly.
The fact that Medvedev is in charge of the national projects, including health care and education, is a big asset for the president, but if Medvedev were actually successful in implementing these huge projects, this would then become a liability because the young protege’s authority would be strengthened along with his success. In his capacity as head of the national projects, Medvedev has access to huge sums of money, administrative resources and a personal mandate from the president. Therefore, Putin’s best bet is to make sure that his president-to-be is bogged down in the national projects. In this way, once Aladdin’s lamp is handed over to Medvedev, it would just sit in the corner gathering dust, and this would leave Putin free to keep the genie firmly on a leash.
But there is another, purely economic reason why Putin hesitated in naming a successor. To a large extent, control of the economy is concentrated in the hands of Putin’s friends. For example, following the dismantling of Yukos, most of its oil is now exported through the foreign trading company Gunvor, which was co-founded by Gennady Timchenko, a close friend of Putin’s. Gunvor is earning astronomical profits as a result, and its capitalization is nearly $20 billion.
But when Putin leaves his presidential post in May, it is very possible that Timchenko and all of the other people Putin helped strike it rich will no longer feel the need to be subservient to him.
Considering Medvedev’s docile character, Putin’s choice lowers his political risk to a minimum, but the economic risks of such a move are extremely high.
There will be no need for Medvedev to take due ownership of Aladdin’s lamp and to turn on the person who gave it to him. To fill Putin’s spot, he needs do nothing more than wait until Putin’s friends, who became billionaires through his help, quickly ignore Putin’s orders and even stop answering his calls.
Will Medvedev ever betray Putin? The answer is no. Medvedev will never get to him in time because Putin’s friends will devour him so quickly that nothing will be left for Medvedev to even pick at.

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

TITLE: Putting faces to names
AUTHOR: By Marina Kamenev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — At the age of 16, Albert Popkov left his high school to make money. He was interested in working with computers, but sold batteries on market stalls to earn his first cash.
Now if Popkov’s school friends looked for him on the hit web site Odnoklassniki.ru, a Russian version of Facebook, they would find a photo of him clutching a gold trophy and a link to an article in Kommersant’s financial magazine, Kommersant Dengi, and learn that his fate took an interesting turn.
Popkov is the founder of Odnoklassniki.ru, a site that reunites classmates from schools and universities and also people who met at work places and holiday destinations. Its membership has doubled to 6 million in the last three months, and anyone who’s anyone, including pop star Filipp Kirkorov, the camp singer Boris Moiseyev, and the girls from t.A.T.u, is on it. 
Popkov came up with the idea for the web site and registered the name in 2000. “I worked as a computer programmer in a company that made directories, and essentially this is just a directory but for people who have not been in touch for a long time,” he said in a recent interview, his arms folded under a halo-shaped lamp in his converted warehouse office.
The web site was launched properly in March 2006, and the company, which started with just Popkov, now has 20 staff and is expected to double in size within a year.
Popkov wouldn’t say how much the web site is worth or how big his stake in it is. He said that all the figures that have appeared in the press are incorrect. In November, Kommersant newspaper published estimates on the value of the site that ranged from $7 million to $500 million. That’s not much compared with Facebook, which is worth an estimated $15 billion, but it’s still a huge sum for a company that is just over one year old. 
Odnoklassniki works in a similar way to Facebook. After registering, you can search for friends by name, school, workplace or even army base. You can then post messages and see when friends are online. Unlike Facebook, most members’ profiles can be seen by anyone who has registered, and everyone has access to photographs. You can also send instant messages to friends, and see who has looked at your profile and how many times.
One member, Khatuna Kobiashvili, started using Odnoklassniki three months ago, because her cousin showed her a mutual cousin whom she had found in the United States. “I really liked it when I first joined,” Kobiashvili said. “What bothers me the most is that there are more than 80 friends on my list. I went to university eight years ago and people that said hi to me two times have added me to their list,” she said.
“I would only feel comfortable using the web site to communicate with about 20 of the people that are advertised as my friends,” she said. 
Kobiashvili has had some surprises on the web site. “Some guys have gotten married and had children; some of my old girlfriends have moved to Spain.” She even met up with people that she had lost contact with for several years. “Two friends and their husbands came to my 30th birthday. With other people, we plan and plan but never seem to be able to meet up.”
Natalya Smirnova, 42, had a distinct goal for using the web site. “I went to a Young Pioneer camp called Orlyonok 26 years ago with people from all around Russia. My 19-year-old daughter was trying to convince me to join Odnoklassniki, and I finally did, with the intention of finding these people from the camp,” she said. 
“I looked up someone’s name, there was no photo, but I knew it was him,” she said. “So I e-mailed him and said ‘Kolya, if this is you, get back to me.’ We finally got in touch and a small group of us had a mini-reunion.”
Unlike Kobiashvili, Smirnova only has people whom she considers true friends on her list. “I can see that there is a competitive element to it — seeing who has the most friends — but I think it is a genuinely useful tool. There are still people I haven’t found, but I have hopes of finding them,” she said.
While Smirnova went on the site to contact friends from the distant past, most users are young women who recently left high school or university. “We are unique because our members are mostly female, which is unusual for social networking sites,” Popkov said. “The peak age of use is for women who are 21 to 25 years old.” 
In Moscow, Popkov said, one-third of 12- to 50-year-olds are on the site.
“There are lots of Russian web sites like Odnoklassniki.ru, but only Vkontakte.ru [a site that cloned the layout of Facebook] comes remotely close as a competitor,” Popkov said. “We are ahead of them in every field.”
Vitaly Kupeyev, a telecoms analyst from Alfabank, has a slightly different opinion. “Russian Internet is still in its early days — only 7 percent of the population has broadband — so these social networking sites are trying to tap in to this blossoming market,” he said. “Odnoklassniki is the leader, but Vkontakte.ru already has 3 million members, and it has been around only for a few months. Their server is better. I think they will catch up quite quickly.”
Odnoklassniki is not just for ordinary mortals; it also has a number of celebrity members. Alexander Panaiotov, a 23-year-old pop singer who took part in “The People’s Artist,” a Russian version of “American Idol,” joined the site half a year ago. He complained that people add him to his list of friends all the time. “I have people declaring their love for me, women and men,” scoffed the singer in a telephone interview. “I have a rule that I don’t communicate with anyone I don’t know.”
Panaiotov joined the web site to find old friends but has not found many. “I don’t really see the point of it. I use it more to communicate with my friends — whose phone numbers I have in any case — than to reunite with people.” He is an active member, however, using the web site every day. 
Panaiotov has reunited with three friends from his high school in Zaporozhye, Ukraine, whom he had not seen for five years. “I am not very popular with people in my class. They are jealous of my success,” he said. “If they wanted to be friends with me, I would be more than happy to see them.”
The site is popular with Russian celebrities, Popkov said. “I usually know about the famous people that use the web site because they contact me about getting abusive messages or people pretending to be them.”
Listed are five “Vladimir Putins,” who graduated from St Petersburg school No. 193 from 1968 to 1973. One of them posted the photograph of Putin topless on a fishing trip.
Such abuse has encouraged Popkov to create a special web site called Celebrities on Odnoklassniki.ru, which he says will be online shortly. “Celebrities will be able to communicate with each other and have more privacy if they wish,” he said. “Alternatively, they can use it as a way to blog and keep in touch with their fans, a little bit like myspace.”
Popkov will have a specialist on staff who will determine if someone is famous enough to get membership and a joining fee will be required. “We will use tactics to maintain our brand reputation. Our celebrity brand web site won’t being polluted with just ordinary names,” he said.
Panaiotov agreed with the concept. “My face is definitely recognizable enough,” he said. “I have not heard of this site, but will use it when it is working. I think it will be very useful.”

TITLE: Chernov’s
         choice
TEXT: “People are so friendly,”  said <b>Terry Hall</b>, The Specials’ former frontman, after performing at U.K. Flavours, the <b>British Council</b>-promoted outdoor event in July, soon after diplomats had been expelled as a reaction to Russia’s refusal to cooperate with the investigators of Alexander Litvinenko’s murder in London.
Fans were friendly indeed, dancing to music by the likes of Lily Allen, waving Union Jacks and demonstrating they could not care less about the anti-British rhetoric in the Russian media, a response that Hall found surprising.
According to NCA, the agency that co-promoted the concert at the Peter and Paul Fortress beach, next year’s event was supposed to be even more massive and include some more big names, but with this week’s ban on the British Council in all regions of the country except for Moscow imposed by the Russian government, it might never happen. Still more valuable will be the memories of the positive mood and great music from last summer.
<b>New York Dolls</b> finally made it to St. Petersburg last week, playing a set of songs that included such classics as “Lookin’ for a Kiss,” “Trash” and “Pills,” with a cover of “Piece of My Heart,” most famously performed by Janis Joplin in 1968. There could probably have been a bigger crowd than an estimated 400 fans, almost half of them Western foreigners, but it went very well indeed with two encores from the band.
This week, the scarce supply of major international acts that this city receives includes <b>50 Cent</b>, a New York rapper with a criminal past and nine bullet wounds in his body. 
50 Cent, who has recently released a new album called “Curtis,” will perform at the Ice Palace on Wednesday.
In an interview with Spin magazine, 50 cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson and who is best-known for his best-selling albums “Get Rich or Die Tryin’” (2003) and “The Massacre” (2005), told how the 2000 shooting affected his voice and career.
“My voice was completely different,” he was quoted as saying.
“I had my teeth knocked out of the whole side of my mouth, and my tongue got bullet fragments in it. But it’s funny — this is the voice that everyone enjoys now.
“It’s made me think that maybe it was God’s plan, maybe I was supposed to be shot, because after that, I signed a publishing deal [with EMI] on my hospital bed. They gave me a $100,000 advance. But then they dropped me because they didn’t realize I’d been shot in the face and might not physically be able to perform.”
This week’s club schedule includes <b>J.D. and the Blenders</b> (Zoccolo, Saturday), <b>Auktyon</b> (Orlandina, Sunday) and <b>PTVP</b> (Zoccolo, Thursday).

<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: Making waves
AUTHOR: By Jorg von Uthmann
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: NEW YORK — An exhibition of contemporary Russian art in France is causing a stir. The 160 exhibits on show are drawing less attention than the two dozen that Alexander Sokolov, the Russian culture minister, prevented from traveling to Paris: He calls them a disgrace for Russia.
One of the embargoed items is “The Era of Mercy,” showing two policemen kissing and caressing each other. The censorship produced the opposite effect to that desired — the photo by the Blue Noses (a.k.a. Slava Mizin and Alexander Shaburov), was published by newspapers all over the world.
Not content with the travel ban, some superpatriots and pious zealots have brought charges of un-Russian activities and blasphemy against Andrei Yerofeyev, who is curating the “Sots Art” (Socialist Art) show at the Maison Rouge.
Valentin Rodionov, the director of the state-run Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, where the show originated, hit back by suing the culture minister for defamation.
The row proves that even in Russia, with its deep-rooted authoritarianism, censorship is the ideal breeding ground for the counterculture it tries to suppress. This is the point of the exhibition.
“Sots Art” was invented in 1972 by another tandem, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, as a parody of the officially sanctioned Socialist Realism. Instead of consumerism and popular culture that inspired western Pop Art, they mock the heroic and sentimental imagery of Soviet and post-Soviet propaganda.
An apartment at the entrance of the show reminds the visitor of the difficulties the artists faced: Before perestroika made life easier, they could exhibit their works only within their own four walls.
Some artists were sent to labor camps, others to mental institutions. Komar and Melamid emigrated first to Israel, then to New York.
It would be futile to pretend that each of the 60 participants is a great artist. It seems that, for the curator, the political message mattered more than the talent of the messenger. Quite a few works betray a juvenile, rather coarse sense of humor.
Some of the jokes — such as Alexander Kossolapov’s “St. Sebastian,” a half-naked, bound youngster under hammer and sickle — are hard to decipher. Vagrich Bakhchanyan’s design for a cover of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” showing Lenin lifting a young girl, is wittier.
One of the funniest works in the show is Vladimir Dubosarsky’s huge canvas “Yeltsin and Lebed,” depicting the two politicians in a fairy-tale landscape, surrounded by deer, rabbits and children: It’s a perfect parody of Arkadi Plastov, one of the grand masters of Soviet kitsch.
Dmitry Vrubel’s no less gigantic painting “God, help me survive this fatal love!” is based on a photograph of Leonid Brezhnev kissing Erich Honecker, East Germany’s last leader. It first appeared on the Berlin Wall.

La Maison Rouge is at 10 Boulevard de la Bastille. “Sots Art — Art Politique en Russie de 1972 a Aujourd’hui” runs through Jan.20, 2008.

TITLE: A new ice age
AUTHOR: By Cori Weiner
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: While figure skating may be a traditional sport in Russia, lessons for adults haven’t always been accessible to the general public. Olympic skaters willing to train for countless hours per day have been and continue to be appreciated and supported.  But for the average person to suddenly decide to pick up figure skating as a form of exercise or artistic expression is relatively new. 
Quite possibly, it was last year’s television show “ Stars on the Ice” followed by this year’s version, “The Ice Age” which is responsible for such a phenomenon, as viewers watch movie stars perform on the ice rather than at the mercy of a director. The fans have come to realize that figure skating is not only a sport for Olympic athletes, but for anyone who possesses the coordination and will to try. “As soon as this show went on the air, we started getting letters asking why there were no groups for adults,” says Olga Shiryaeva of Leader Figure Skating School in St. Petersburg.  In response, Leader School set up classes for adults. Starting with four last year; the number of groups has increased by nearly 400 percent to 15 groups this year.  Considering Leader School has catered to groups of children since its conception in1954, this development is particularly encouraging.
In addition, the Olympic Hope Figure Skating School came into existence, with its director, Tatiana Tarasenkova, similarly attributing the demand for classes to the television shows.  However, she adds that many of the participants on the shows skated in their childhood, as well as putting in hours and hours of practice each day.  Attaining their level in a short period of time is harder than it looks.  Tarasenkova also notes that the increase in the number of skating rinks has allowed people more opportunities to train.
There are other factors contributing to the increase in popularity of figure skating as a recreational sport. Generally speaking, to be considered a success in society, it has become imperative to do some sort of exercise, feels Shiryaeva of Leader School.  “In the past few years, people have started going to fitness centers and taken up jogging. Maybe not to the same extent as in America, but it’s a growing phenomenon.” Figure skating is just another manifestation of this growing trend.
Svetlana Ryabinkova, PR manager for the Russian Federation of Figure Skating in St. Petersburg, adds that 2006’s success in the Olympics with one gold and four bronze medals, brought about increasing interest in the sport. 
Whether the connection between television, changes in lifestyle and today’s interest in figure skating can be proven or not, the desire to be fit is certainly a good thing, says Shiryaeva.  “In our city, there are more people dying than are being born.  Staying healthy is good for the well-being of the public.”
But in the case of figure skating, staying in shape comes with a risk.  With more and more people on rinks, one serious concern is the need for insurance in case of an accident. In St. Petersburg, people often receive lessons from a private trainer during public skating hours.  This means during a lesson you could conceivably end up in a messy accident with skaters passing by, and compensation for the injury could entail a lawsuit with uncertain results.  In addition to an on-site doctor, Shiryaeva prides herself on the solid insurance that her school provides for her skaters.  “If the necessary institution determines that the accident is the school’s fault, we can respond in a responsible manner, and we are insured.  Baker and Mackenzie, aided us in writing up the contract.”  
Tarasenkova of Olympic Hope notes that one of the attributes of her school is that in order to become an instructor, the applicant must have achieved success as a figure skater and obtained a bachelor’s degree in physical education.  She feels that being a superb athlete is not enough; effective methodology is also necessary.
The adults in the classes at Olympic Hope run the gamut in terms of age range, and interestingly, many parents of the children in the classes, inspired by watching their little ones, have decided to give figure skating a try themselves.  Tarasenkova is particularly proud of these skaters for summoning up the courage to learn how to skate as adults.
In terms of the classes themselves, Leader provides 45 minutes of figure skating plus 45 minutes of a dance and exercise class that reinforces the positions and muscle development practiced on the ice.  Olympic Hope first provides the exercise class, and then the figure skating class.   
If you’re looking for a way to improve your Russian or your figure skating, either school will do the trick!

Leader School: http://lider-spb.ru
Olympic Hope: 232 0008

TITLE: Art shopaholics
AUTHOR: By Katya Kazakina
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: NEW YORK — Moscow-based collectors Oxana and Alexander Tarakanov arrived at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair with a wish list that included works by Neo Rauch, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Philip Guston and Ilya Kabakov.
By last Thursday night, they were the proud owners of a small 1998 painting by Rauch, the German founder of the Leipzig school. It will join their growing collection of Russian contemporary art, which includes pieces by Kabakov, Timur Novikov and Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov.
“We’ve been looking at contemporary Western artists for a while,’’ said Oxana Tarakanov, 37. “And now we are ready to start acquiring serious works.’’
The Tarakanovs are among hundreds of Russian collectors, curators, artists, dealers and real-estate developers who flocked to Miami this week to see art, make deals, network and party.
“We always go to Art Basel and Frieze,’’ said Oxana Tarakanov. “This year we decided to add Miami. We wanted to go to the beach, drink champagne and look at the art.’’ She arrived at the opening Thursday night of “Russia Miami 2007’’ — a group show organized by New York firm  RIGroup — clad in a light-green Stella McCartney gown and orange Chanel stilettos.
International contemporary art is becoming more popular among the wealthy in the former Soviet Union. Ukrainian steel billionaire Victor Pinchuk’s multimillion-dollar art collection includes works by Hirst, Jeff Koons and Andreas Gursky. In October, the world’s leading art dealer, Larry Gagosian, organized an exhibition in a luxury mall outside Moscow. The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg recently kicked off its new contemporary-art initiative with a “USA Today’’ exhibition, featuring 21 artists from Charles Saatchi’s collection.
“More and more Russian collectors, who were limited before to Russian contemporary art, are turning to Western contemporary art,’’ said Nicolas V. Iljine, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s director of corporate development in Europe and the Middle East. “They have fancy cars, pretty jewels, big houses. Now they need to fill them.’’
“There are a lot of rich Russians who want to use their money to support their personal cultural interests,’’ said Karl Schweizer, managing director of UBS AG’s art banking division.
“They are often among the top bidders at auctions.’’
Western dealers and auction houses now aggressively court potential Russian clients. Both Christie’s International and Sotheby’s routinely preview their prized trophies in Russia, and Sotheby’s opened a representative office in Moscow in May.
In Miami, Sotheby’s Loic Gouzer and Alexander Rotter showed up at a small party on Wednesday at the Setai hotel hosted by Vladimir Ovcharenko, owner of Regina Gallery in Moscow. Sipping Ruinart Rose and munching on tandoori chicken, they mingled with the guests including collectors Maria Baibakova and Luziah Hennessy, curator of “Russia Miami 2007’’ Julie Sylvester, photographer Sergey Bratkov, artist and gallery owner Aidan Salakhova and fashion designer Denis Simachev.
“I came because I am interested in Russian art and I am a friend of Masha,’’ said Gouzer, referring to Baibakova, whose father, Oleg Baibakov, is a former executive at the mining company MMC Norilsk Nickel.
The overlap between East and West was even more pronounced at the opening of “Russia Miami 2007.’’
Simon de Pury, the chairman of auctioners Phillips de Pury & Co., rubbed shoulders with Iljine. The actor Dennis Hopper chuckled as he watched Bratkov’s video about the bogus health benefits of a mud spa near the Black Sea.
New York dealers Jeffrey Deitch, Rachel Lehmann and Paul Judelson looked at a sleigh installation by Sergey Bugaev (aka “Africa’’). Victoria Gelfand, a Gagosian director, arrived with Baibakova and the collector Inga Rubenstein. Blackstone Group’s Stephen A. Schwarzman was seen passing through the show, as was Dmitry Logvin, director of the Pinchuk Foundation.
“This show is tremendous,’’ said New York collector Tatiana Platt, who wore a skin-tight black Gucci dress and open-toe Manolo Blahniks. “I don’t think many people think of Russia today as being a center of contemporary art. But this show has some strong examples of younger artists reflecting their world and doing it in all types of media.’’
Showing that contemporary art is alive and well in Russia was exactly the point of the exhibition, said its sponsor Janna Bullock, founder and president of RIGroup.
“We wanted to raise the profile of the Russian artists,’’ said the New York-based real-estate developer and collector. 
“There are many aggressive Western dealers who are courting Russian collectors. I wanted to change the energy. Let them court Russian artists and introduce them to the West.’’

TITLE: The winds of change
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Vladimir Bukovsky, a legendary Soviet dissident residing in the U.K. and a possible candidate in the upcoming presidential elections, spent a week in St. Petersburg late last month on a book-promoting trip — visiting the city for the first time since his confinement in a special mental institution here in the early 1960s, and finding himself in the midst of turmoil, with lectures and book-signing sessions being cancelled and the police putting him and his supporters under pressure in the street.
“The changes in our schedule, the cancellation of many events, is quite ridiculous, of course — to get so scared; well, I am not so scary, I speak rather quietly and there’s no fighting [in the audience],” said Bukovsky at a public meeting hastily arranged at the office of the human rights organization Citizens’ Watch on November 30 — after two venues pulled out at a short notice. The Russian National Library referred to “technical problems” in a fax, while Dom Knigi bookstore’s manager admitted there had been “strong pressure” put on the shop, according to the organizers.
“I don’t know why the bookstore got so scared by these threats. And for a bookstore to refuse to sell books is a little strange — it’s its business. There’s a strange fear that I don’t really understand. Either it has something to do with St. Petersburg, because there was nothing like that in Moscow, or there’s a growth in hysteria as the elections approach, or it’s connected to the Dissenters’ March and its being broken up here by the police. It’s hard for me to say what it’s about, but there were no cancellations in Moscow.”
Officially, Bukovsky, who has accepted an invitation to run for the Russian presidency from a group of activists, in what looks like a hopeless battle with a Kremlin-appointed candidate, was promoting the new Russian edition of his best-known book, the autobiographical novel “And the Wind Returns…” 
The book is about the struggle of an individual against a state that easily violates its own laws. Bukovsky, who wrote the book when he was 36, spent a total of 12 years in prisons, labor camps and mental institutions for organizing unsanctioned poetry readings, demonstrations, reporting human rights violations and distributing uncensored literature, all punishable activities under the Communist rule.
Strictly forbidden in the Soviet Union, the book, with the English-language title of “To Build a Castle — My Life as a Dissenter,” was first published in the West in 1978, less than two years after Bukovsky had been suddenly taken from his cell in the high-security Vladimir Prison and, in an astonishing and absurd move, flown to Zurich and exchanged for Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalan, fresh from Augusto Pinochet’s prison, in December 1976. 
His sentence, he was told by a KGB guard, remained in force. “And they insist that their laws should be taken seriously! They don’t ever know either how to jail or release you properly. A jolly country, never a dull moment,” Bukovsky wrote in the book.
Based in Cambridge since 1976, Bukovsky resumed his scientific studies and worked in neurophysiology, but kept writing books and political essays. Now, at 64, he lives on book royalties, he said.
Bukovsky returned to Moscow in 1992 on the invitation of the then Russian President Boris Yeltsin as an expert at the trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union by the Constitutional Court. The trial resulted in halff-measures, but the position gave him access to the secret archives, enabling him to publish around 7,000 documents as “Soviet Archives” on the Internet and in his 1995 book, “Judgment in Moscow” (Moskovsky Protsess). 
The Soviet archives have not been reopened since, and Bukovsky was denied a Russian visa until August of this year, when he was reissued his Russian passport so he could visit Moscow in October.
“And the Wind Returns…” which was finally published in the U.S.S.R. at the peak of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika in 1990, was not reissued until recently. The timing looks right as Bukovsky’s sees President Vladimir Putin’s take on the freedom of speech and civil liberties as an attempt to restore the Soviet Union.
“He hadn’t even been elected president, but we knew, it’s the KGB coming, it’s the clan coming — the corporation will come to the power and start to do what? Restore the Soviet Union,” said Bukovsky, whose manifesto is called “Russia on the Chekist Hook,” referring to the KGB men’s romanticized self-name.
“Because they have nothing else in their heads, Mr. Putin has no other plan except ‘Back to the U.S.S.R.’ — this is his program.”
Bukovsky believes that the current situation stems from the early 1990s, when the Yeltsin-led government missed an opportunity to deal with the Soviet legacy.
“By 1993 I already realized that nothing came out of it. That they hadn’t gone the way they should have. They needed to kill the Soviet system, to rake out all the debris, to take the system to court, preferably with a trial with the Nuremberg Trials’ status, to expose their crimes, to remove the nomenklatura from all the power and administrative positions, and then we would have had at least a chance to do something,” he said.
“I tried to persuade the whole of Yeltsin’s circle that it must be done. Actually, I did persuade almost everybody but Yeltsin. He got stubborn and said no. […] I was told, he said only one phrase, ‘Don’t rock the boat.’”
Bukovsky is aware that his chances of winning the presidential race are minimal and that he might not even gain registration as a candidate, but he hopes that his involvement could help in structuring the opposition. His views are close to those of The Other Russia, the organization set up by chess champion Garry Kasparov and author Eduard Limonov to unite diverse oppositional groups. 
“I know that your activities are not approved by many,” he said in an address to The Other Russia’s conference in July.
“These people are forgetting that democracy is always born in the streets, and only then is carried to parliaments. The Other Russia movement and the Dissenters’ Marches continue our tradition of demonstrations of the 1960s. […] In a situation where there is no government and opposition, dissenters are called dissidents.
“We never asked about the political views of our colleagues. We didn’t belong either to the right-wing or left-wing camps. And in the concentration camp where we all come from, both left-wingers and right-wingers were given one and the same prison soup.”
Bukovsky’s St. Petersburg schedule included meetings with former political prisoners, leaders from the Yabloko and SPS opposition parties, a speech at the SPS’ rally “Against Putin’s Personality Cult,” a poetry reading on the embankment in memory of the Communist regime’s victims and a walk to the mental institution where Bukovsky was held in 1963-65.
On their way to the destination, Bukovsky and around 15 supporters were stopped by the police but after a passport check and phone negotiations with police headquarters were allowed to continue, albeit accompanied by policemen. Bukovsky said he even made friends with the colonel who was in command and lectured him on how the police are independent from the political authorities in the U.K.
“In the end, after we’d lit the candles and done what we wanted, he came to shake my hand and wished me success,” he said.
“So, a non-political citizen of St. Petersburg showed some sympathy, I think.”
But at Citizens’ Watch, Bukovsky was promptly informed by a listener that it was the same colonel who had been making arrests of peaceful activists near the Yabloko office on the day of the recent Dissenters’ March.
Commenting on the authorities’ nervous reaction to his visit to St. Petersburg, Bukovsky said that the city was seen as subversive in his times, as well.
“St. Petersburg was traditionally considered to be a hotbed of revolt, it was purged especially cruelly under the Soviets, they even gave a little longer prison terms here, than in Moscow — perhaps this tradition has persisted,” he said.
“But it’s very strange. And very silly. Because such actions cause more stir, more publicity, cause laughter. It hardly benefits a regime that is trying to establish itself for so many years into the future.”
After driving Bukovsky to the apartment where he was staying, a group of his supporters were detained by the police on the grounds that it was suspected that the car had been stolen. Then it was changed into the possession of “forbidden literature” (Bukovsky’s books) and, finally, into a violation of the rules of pre-election campaigning. Having spent several hours at a police station, all were released without a protocol having been made out.
www.bukovsky2008.org, www.bukovsky-archives.net

TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — In the reality show “Temptation Island,” participants at least got a nice tan on a tropical beach while they discovered that their partners were cheating love rats who would chase anything in a bikini. Sadly, Muz-TV can’t run to those sort of expenses, so the channel’s equivalent show, “Fidelity Test,” involves doubting partners sitting in a backroom of a strip club, which probably smells of old G-strings, watching their other halves being propositioned by the club’s hardworking professionals.
It’s easy to get on this show — all you have to do is send an e-mail to the address vernost@muz-tv.ru with the details of the person you want to set up. Oh, and remember not to tell him or her about it, the channel’s web site warns its slower viewers. The harder thing must be the slightly strained conversation over the breakfast table the next day as your partner comes to terms with the shame of appearing on Muz-TV. At least the channel has very, very low ratings. 
In this week’s show, Artyom, a slight dark-haired man in a flowery shirt, was having nagging doubts about his blonde wife, Sasha, that could only be eradicated by seeing her up close and personal with a muscly stripper called Zhenya. At the beginning, presenter Lera Kudryavtseva asked him what he would do if his suspicions were confirmed. He’d “have a row” with his wife, he said limply. He was introduced to Zhenya, although the pair failed to exchange firm handshakes and a hearty “may the best man win.” 
It was all a bit like the German film “The Lives of Others,” although the Stazi seemed to have better picture quality on their hidden cameras. We watched Sasha as she sat in the club with her “friend” Nadya, who was in on the secret. The club looked surprisingly flouncy and had a tiny dance floor where the talent slow-danced with the customers. Zhenya came up and chatted with the girls; Nadya seemed to be having a whale of a time, but Sasha looked very uncomfortable. 
Things looked pretty good for Artyom and Sasha’s marriage prospects as Zhenya dragged Sasha onto the dance floor for a few awkward turns. But then everything went terribly wrong.
Zhenya offered Sasha a free session in a private room, and she told her friend that if she went, “I think it would be divorce.” However, she seemed more concerned that Zhenya might hand her an astronomical bill. The presenter commented that the items on the club’s “crazy menu” cost 6,000 rubles for half an hour. But the stripper gave her the old chestnut that today was his day off and he was just doing it for fun. “I’m worried that I will have to pay for all this in the end,” Sasha said presciently.
Soon afterward, Sasha and Zhenya were deep in a session of what presenter Lera delicately called “lya-lya topolya,” or “blah, blah,” although Artyom was still clinging to straws and wondering if Zhenya was kissing her or vice-versa. Lera swiftly called a halt, saying the show wouldn’t allow things to go any further, and asked Artyom what he was going to do. The “only justification” would be if the stripper had talked her into it, he said.
At the end, pink-cheeked Sasha was confronted by her husband in the corridor and Lera gave her a big bouquet, although she didn’t seem to be particularly grateful. “I think you should work it out between yourselves,” Lera said with the satisfaction of a job well done.
It was left to Zhenya, like a Greek oracle in collar and cuffs and not much else, to pronounce the final word. “The girl’s very young,” he said. “She wants a bit of variety.”

TITLE: Meat is murder
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Botanika // 7 Ulitsa Pestelya // Tel: 2727091 // Open 12p.m. through 11.30p.m. // Menu in Russian and English // Dinner for two: 1,110 rubles ($45)

If the vast majority of restaurants in western Europe, regardless of the kind of cuisine on offer, now include a vegetarian section in their menus making it easy for everyone other than the strictest vegans to eat out, in Russia it is a different story.  Those who don’t eat meat, for whatever reasons, can consider themselves blessed if they find just one meat-free main course on the average menu.  This makes the existence of specialist vegetarian restaurants rather welcome and indeed necessary. St. Petersburg’s meat-free dining scene has a new addition in the form of Café Botanika, located a few steps from the beautiful Mukhinskoye Arts Institute.  
But before rejoicing, local and visiting vegetarians should be aware that Botanika falls into the category of vegetarian restaurants which seem to assume that if you don’t want any meat in your meal, nor do you want a glass of wine or anything stronger with it, heaven forbid a post-prandial cigarette.  If you are Hare Krishna, pregnant, or merely detoxing, Botanika may be an ideal dining spot for you. If you are part of a more typically Russian crowd, take solace in the fact that beer isn’t classed as alcohol in Russia (in the same way that chicken isn’t classed as something that vegetarians don’t eat by your average Russian dinner lady) and enjoy a bottle of Mexican Sol for 100 rubles ($4).
Principles aside, our purpose was to silence our growling stomachs.  From the starter menu, the hummus at 100 rubles ($4) complete with batons of red pepper, cucumber and celery, was a little more nutty than usual, while a rucola salad served with pine nuts, cherry tomatoes and parmesan in a balsamic sauce (150 rubles, $6) was divine, though there was not much of it.  An even more tiny portion of tabouleh (a Middle Eastern wheat salad) for 50 rubles, $2, was rather disappointing, not only due to the quantity — for twice the price you can have, presumably, two tablespoons of the dish rather than one — but due to its flavoring, which lacked the zest of a good tabouleh, and was overpowered by one unidentifiable herb. 
Diners with children may appreciate Botanika, as a curtained-off area leading to the toilets conceals a cheerful two-story play area, complete with painted walls and numerous forms of entertainment for boisterous younger diners. This is in contrast to the rest of the restaurant’s interior, which is predominantly green and rather calming.  The walls are painted pale green, the chairs and benches are covered in dark green velvet, and numerous plants and flowers adorn the windowsills, bar and chipboard floor.  The restaurant’s one room is not very large, and the proximity of the tables, relatively bright lighting and relaxing music playing softly in the background are not very conducive to privacy. 
Unfortunately, on our visit it was not overly warm inside the café.  To warm ourselves up, we ordered soup, which turned out to be the highlight of the meal.  Tomato soup with cream and basil (130 rubles, $5.20) was thick and enjoyable, though once again, the portion was on the small side. A bowl of dal (Indian lentil soup) was hearty, spiced to perfection and thoroughly warming, and was at least twice the size of the tomato soup.  After such a treat, the falafel we ordered for 200 rubles ($8) was bound to disappoint, and unfortunately it did. It was beautifully served, as indeed were all the dishes we ordered, wrapped in flat bread and accompanied by three dips.  It was described as a hot dish on the menu, yet was barely warm, and despite the dips, was too dry to be enjoyable.  It also had rather more grated apple inside than entirely necessary, in our opinion.  The homemade Greek yogurt we had for dessert at 80 rubles ($3.20) needed all the raspberry coulis and honey served with it to offset its bitter taste, but rounded our meal off well enough.
Café Botanike may not be perfect, but potential diners should not be disheartened.  Prices are very modest, the staff are polite, and both constant herbivores and experimenting omnivores alike may bask smugly in the moral approval of such figures as Lev Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, Mahatma Gandhi and Franz Kafka, from whom encouraging and amusing quotes on vegetarianism adorn the last page of the menu.

TITLE: Gangsters’ paradise
AUTHOR: By Manohla Dargis
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: Greatness hovers just outside “American Gangster,” knocking, angling to be let in. Based in rough outline on the flashy rise and fall of a powerful 1970s New York drug lord, Frank Lucas, the film has been built for importance, with a brand-name director, Ridley Scott, and two major stars, Denzel Washington as Lucas, and Russell Crowe as Richie Roberts, the New Jersey cop who brings him down. It’s a seductive package, crammed with all the on-screen and off-screen talent that big-studio money can buy, and filled with old soul and remixed funk that evoke the city back in the day, when heroin turned poor streets white and sometimes red.
This being an American story, as its title announces and Steven Zaillian’s screenplay occasionally trumpets, there’s plenty of blue in the mix too, worn by some of New York’s very un-finest. Lucas was among the city’s most notorious underworld hustlers, but one of the film’s points (at times you could call it a message) is that he was just doing what everyone with ambition, flair and old-fashioned American entrepreneurial spirit was doing, including cops: getting a piece of the action. His piece just happened to be bigger than most, stretching across Harlem and snaking into other neighborhoods, into alleys and apartments where someone with ready cash and a hungry vein was always aching to get high.
You see a few of those veins, popping, all but jumping in anticipation of another hit. Sometimes the needle slides into a clean arm, though every so often the camera comes uncomfortably close as a spike jabs into a suppurating wound. You could call these images metaphoric, something about the oozing, bleeding body of the exploited underclass, but mostly they’re just graphic evidence of the damage done. Despite the intermittent nod to someone nodding out and even dying, this isn’t about the suffering of addicts or of those forced to watch their neighborhoods perish alongside them. It’s about good guys and bad, a classic story of white hats and black squaring off at the corral at 116th Street and Eighth Avenue.
Crowe, his jaw thrust forward as aggressively as his pelvis, wears the white hat, while the silky, smooth-moving, smooth-talking Washington wears the black. They’re irresistible, though neither possesses the movie because each occupies a separate if parallel story line. Washington has the more developed and dynamic role, which he inhabits easily, whether flashing his wolfish grin or draining the affect from Lucas’s face to show the soulless operator beneath the swagger and suit. Lucas’s rival, Nicky Barnes (Cuba Gooding Jr.), wore the pimp threads and fedoras the size of manhole covers (he also read Machiavelli). Lucas dressed like the businessman he believed himself to be and was.
Formally, the plot takes the shape of a simple braid, with Lucas’s and Roberts’s stories serving as individual narrative strands that become more and more tightly plaited. Complicating this simple, at times overly mechanical back-and-forth design is a third player with a smaller strand, a corrupt New York detective, Trupo (Josh Brolin in a knockout performance), who shakes down Lucas and other larcenous types. The baddest bad man in town, a thug’s thug, Trupo wears his power as confidently as the long black leather coat he whips on for battle. He hassles Lucas and openly indulges his contempt for Roberts because the other cop is honest, which means he’s a threat to Trupo and his kind.
It’s hard not to fall for these men pumping like pistons across the screen, which is as much part of the movie’s allure as its problem. Scott doesn’t escape the contradiction that bedevils almost every Hollywood movie about gangsters, which cry shame, shame, as they parade their stars, crank the soul and showcase the foxy ladies, the swank digs and rides. Washington obviously enjoys sinking into villainy, but he never finds the lower depths. There’s little of the frightening menace the actor brought to “Training Day,” where you see the pleasure his character derives from his sadism. Even when Lucas goes ballistic, beating a man to pulp, the film tosses in a laugh about the proper way to clean a bloodied rug.
By rights this story should be a tragedy, and you can almost feel Scott trying to coax the material away from its generic trappings toward something rarefied, something like Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 definitive American story, “The Godfather.” He comes closest to that goal with the suggestion that the lethal pursuit of the American dream is not restricted to one or two families — the Corleones, say, or the Sopranos — but located in a network of warring tribes that help to obscure the larger war of all against all.
The America in this film isn’t a melting or even a boiling pot; it’s a bitter object lesson about the logic of market-driven radical individualism, wherein a self-styled Horatio Alger type, thwarted by racial prejudice and born into poverty in North Carolina, grows up to become a captain of the illegal-drug industry. Lucas pulls himself up by his bootstraps, a gun tucked into his belt, and becomes a folk hero (and a pop culture idol) who doles out free turkeys to the very community he helps enslave with narcotics, fear and despair. He gathers his relatives around to help him, modeling himself after the Mafia families with whom he does business. He builds a gang, but only so it can serve his personal desires.
The bottom line of what a Frank Lucas does — to people, to neighborhoods — doesn’t make for entertainment. And so, despite Scott’s talent for trouble and shadows (the cinematographer Harris Savides bleeds all the bright color from this world), he soon loosens his grip on Lucas. He lingers over the surfaces and violence, and the locales where Lucas found a steady supply of pure heroin. He quotes “Super Fly,” fires up Bobby Womack, samples Richard M. Nixon and tosses in a pinch of black power rhetoric to mask the rot. He distracts and entertains until the divide between his seriousness of purpose and the false glamour that wafts around American gangsters, and invariably trivializes their brutality, becomes too wide to breach.

TITLE: Rice Keeps ‘Axis of Evil’ On Agenda
AUTHOR: By Matthew Lee
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, the rocky resumption of the Middle East peace process, instability in Lebanon and uncertainty in Iraq will dominate Bush administration foreign policy concerns during its final year.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press in her State Department office, Rice said Wednesday that Iran and North Korea, two of the three charter members of President Bush’s “axis of evil,” have a long way to go before shedding that tag despite recent developments.
“They are clearly still states about which there are significant proliferation concerns,” Rice said. “It would be irresponsible not to deal with those dangers.”
Her comments follow the release of new U.S. intelligence that finds Tehran stopped nuclear weapons development in 2003 and apparent progress in efforts to get Pyongyang to abandon its atomic arms program.
“This is not a regime that the United States is prepared to engage broadly,” she said. “If we are going to engage it broadly, it’s clear in the program that we have laid out how that would happen, after denuclearization,” she said.

TITLE: Jones
Stripped Of Medals
AUTHOR: By Stephen Wilson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LAUSANNE, Switzerland — The IOC formally stripped Marion Jones of her five Olympic medals Wednesday, wiping her name from the record books following her admission that she was a drug cheat.
The International Olympic Committee also banned the disgraced American athlete from attending next year’s Beijing Olympics in any capacity and said it could bar her from all future games.
Jones had already handed back the three gold medals and two bronze she won at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
Last month, the International Association of Athletics Federations erased all of Jones’ results dating to September 2000, but it was up to the IOC to formally disqualify her and erase her Olympic medals.
The decision was announced by IOC president Jacques Rogge at the end of a three-day executive board meeting.
Jones won gold medals in the 100 meters, 200 meters and 1,600-meter relay in Sydney, and bronze in the long jump and 100-meter relay. She was the first female track and field athlete to win five medals at a single Olympics.
In addition to those medals, the IOC also disqualified Jones from her 7th-place finish in the long jump at the 2004 Athens Olympics.
The IOC postponed a decision on redistributing her medals, including whether to strip her American relay teammates and whether to upgrade doping-tainted Greek sprinter Katerina Thanou to gold in the 100.
After long denying she ever had used performance-enhancing drugs, Jones admitted in federal court in October that she started using steroids before the Sydney Games. She said she’d used the designer steroid “the clear” from September 2000 to July 2001.
The executive board declared Jones ineligible for the Beijing Games “not only as an athlete but also in any other capacity.”

TITLE: Capello Prepares For Job
AUTHOR: By Angus MacKinnon
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: LONDON —David Beckham looks a good bet to win the 100th cap he craves but Fabio Capello’s appointment as England manager may not be good news for some of the other big names in the national squad.
Capello, who was expected to be confirmed as Steve McClaren’s successor on Thursday following “extremely positive” talks with the English Football Association, has earned the opportunity to become the best-paid coach in world football over the course of 16 years in charge of four of the world’s biggest clubs.
In that time, the Italian has earned a reputation for displaying steel-plated stubborness when it comes to putting the needs of his team ahead of superstar egos.
Beckham and Ronaldo at Real Madrid, Alessandro del Piero at Juventus, Edgar Davids at Milan and Francesco Totti at AS Roma: you could put together a formidable team of players that have found themselves sitting on the bench after lighting Capello’s notoriously short fuse.
Amongst England’s current crop of allegedy world class performers, Frank Lampard would appear to be the most vulnerable to the Capello chop.
Ever since Marcel Desailly anchored AC Milan to their famous 4-0 demolition of Barcelona in the 1994 Champions League final, all of the 61-year-old’s club teams have been constructed around a midfield player deployed essentially as a shield for the back four.
High-tempo pressing has also been a recurring theme in Capello’s tactics, so it would appear highly unlikely that he will persist with the dysfunctional Lampard-Steven Gerrard partnership that England have been struggling with for the last five years.
There are also rumours that Capello is no great fan of the current England captain, John Terry, while a player like Shaun Wright-Phillips, championed for his pace under the old regime, may find himself a victim of the new manager’s insistence that the ability to retain possession is the primary qualification for international football.
That should play in favour of Beckham. The former England captain was axed by Capello after he agreed to leave Real Madrid for LA Galaxy last season, but he won the Italian’s admiration for refusing to sulk, fighting his way back into the side and playing a key role in helping to secure the Spanish league title.
Barring injury, Beckham, who won his 99th cap as a substitute in the 3-2 defeat by Croatia that ensured England missed out on Euro 2008, is certain to be in Capello’s first squad, which will be assembled for a friendly against Switzerland at Wembley in February.
But Claudio Ranieri believes his compatriot will not shy away from axing some big names if he believes it necessary to construct a team capable of challenging for glory in South Africa.
“Capello picks players who play together well. It sounds easy and obvious but not everyone can do it,” hesaid.

TITLE: EU Leaders Sign Treaty to Reform Bloc
AUTHOR: By Edouard Pons
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: LISBON — Leaders of the 27-nation European Union signed a landmark treaty Thursday to revitalize the bloc’s decision-making, hailing it as a way to strengthen European unity while maintaining national identities.
“History will remember this day as a day when new paths of hope were opened to the European ideal,” Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates said ahead of the signing ceremony with EU leaders and foreign ministers.
He insisted that the treaty — which replaces a draft EU constitution scuppered by French and Dutch referendums held in 2005 — is not a threat to the national sovereignty of member states.
“The European project does not eliminate nor minimize national identities,” he said. “It offers a multilateral framework of regulation from which benefits can be drawn for the whole and for each of the parts that participate in the project.”
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was a notable absentee from the ceremony at Lisbon’s Jeronimos Monastery, and Foreign Secretary David Miliband signed on his behalf.
Brown was appearing before a parliamentary committee in London and was to join his fellow EU leaders to sign the 250-page text later in the day.
The treaty must yet be ratified in each EU member state before it can come into effect, as planned, in 2009.
Only Ireland is constitutionally bound to hold the kind of national referendum which doomed the constitution in 2005 and sparked the EU’s worst ever political crisis.
EU Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said the Treaty of Lisbon “will reinforce the Union’s capacity to act and the ability to achieve those goals in an effective way. As such, it will help the Union to deliver better results to European citizens.”
“It makes Europe, united in its diversity, better equipped to promote its interests and values in the world,” he added.
The text was agreed in October after long and often heated negotiations between supporters and opponents of closer EU integration.

TITLE: Roger Clemens Reportedly Named in Mitchell Report
AUTHOR: By Ronald Blum
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — Judgment day arrived for baseball’s steroids era, with the Mitchell report set to be released and posted on the Internet for all to see. The first name to emerge Thursday was seven-time Cy Young Award winner Roger Clemens.
ESPN.com reported that Brian McNamee, a former trainer for the Yankees and Clemens, said information he gave Mitchell on supplying the pitcher with steroids is in the report. The Web site, citing an unidentified source close to the trainer, said McNamee told investigators he supplied Clemens with steroids.
Randy Hendricks, Clemens’ agent, did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
Mitchell’s report exposes a “serious drug culture within baseball, from top to bottom,” fingers MVPs and All-Stars and calls for beefed-up testing by an outside agency to clean up the game, The Associated Press learned.
The report by former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell will include names of 60 to 80 players linked to performance-enhancing substances and plenty more information that exposes “deep problems” afflicting the sport, one of two sources with knowledge of the findings said. Both sources said the report would not address amphetamines.
The two sources were familiar with discussions that led to the final draft but did not want to be identified because it was confidential until its scheduled release. They said the full report, which they had not read, totaled 304 pages plus exhibits.
One person familiar with the final version would only speak anonymously but described it as “a very thorough treatment of the subject” and said some aspects were surprising. He said the report assigns blame to both the commissioner’s office and the players’ union.
MLB’s “not going to love it, the union’s not going to love it,” he said.
One source said that while the report will cite problems “top to bottom,” it also will expose “deep problems, the number of players, high-level MVPs and All-Stars,” as well as clubhouse personnel who allowed steroids and other banned substances in clubhouses or knew about it and didn’t say anything.
The rest of the report, the sources said, focuses on recommendations that include enhanced year-round testing and hiring a drug-testing company that uses the highest standards of independence and transparency. Baseball’s program currently is overseen by a joint management-union Health Policy Advisory Committee, with an independent administrator approved by both sides.
Mitchell, a Boston Red Sox director, planned to release his report at 2 p.m. Thursday during a news conference in New York City. Baseball commissioner Bud Selig was to hold his own news conference a few blocks away 2 1/2 hours later.
The report comes at the end of a year when San Francisco Giants outfielder Barry Bonds broke the career home run record, only to be indicted 100 days later on charges of lying to a federal grand jury about steroid use.
It also was expected to recommend that baseball develop a credible program to handle cases with evidence of athletes receiving or taking drugs but not testing positive for them.
Just last week, Kansas City’s Jose Guillen and Baltimore’s Jay Gibbons were suspended for the first 15 days of next season, and media reports said they had obtained human growth hormone in 2005, after baseball banned it.