SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1348 (12), Friday, February 15, 2008
**************************************************************************
TITLE: Oligarch’s Death In Britain ‘Suspicious’
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev and David Nowak
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Arkady Patarkatsishvili, who had claimed that the Georgian government had planned to kill him, died in his mansion in Surrey, southwest of London late Tuesday, age 52.
The Georgian billionaire, whose close associate self-exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky said he had complained of feeling “unwell,” died late in the evening, presumably of a heart attack, his spokesman Guga Kvitashvili told journalists in Tbilisi on Wednesday, Interfax reported.
A spokeswoman for Surrey Police said by telephone Wednesday that Patarkatsishvili’s death was being “treated as suspicious, as with all unexpected deaths.”
An autopsy was to be performed later Wednesday to establish the cause of death, the spokeswoman added.
Patarkatsishvili said in December that he was in possession of a recording in which an official in the Georgian Interior Ministry asked a Chechen warlord to murder him while he was in London.
Widely known simply as “Badri,” Patarkatsishvili began his career as a small-time Komsomol official in Soviet Georgia in the 1970s and is said to have built a fortune of $12 billion.
He is also believed to have had close ties with top politicians in both Tbilisi and Moscow, including President Vladimir Putin.
In an interview in December, former Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze said he recalled a discussion he once had with Putin in which he mentioned Patarkatsishvili.
“‘Ah, Badri,’ Putin said, ‘Badri is not a bad guy, he is good,’” Shevardnadze told RIA-Novosti.
Patarkatsishvili had been living in Britain since December, having left Georgia after playing a central role in large anti-government protests in Tbilisi. He was later charged with plotting the overthrow of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.
Almost five years before, in early 2002, Patarkatsishvili had fled Russia, where he is still wanted on fraud charges related to the theft of cars at AvtoVAZ, then controlled by Berezovsky.
The Prosecutor General’s Office also issued an international warrant for his arrest for planning the escape from jail of Nikolai Glushkov, Berezovsky’s business partner and a senior Aeroflot official who had been accused of embezzlement and money laundering.
A spokesman for the Prosecutor General’s Office said Wednesday that it was considering closing the cases against Patarkatsishvili as a result of his death.
Berezovsky, who also lives in London and is wanted on fraud charges in Russia, called the death a “terrible tragedy.”
“I have lost my closest friend,” Berezovsky said in a statement through Tim Bell, who handles his public relations. Bell said Berezovsky would not comment on the possible cause of death.
On Tuesday, Bell said, Patarkatsishvili held two meetings with Berezovsky. The first was at an unspecified location and the second was in Berezovsky’s central London office.
During the course of the day, Patarkatsishvili had complained of feeling unwell, Bell said.
“He didn’t feel gravely ill, he just complained of feeling slightly unwell,” Bell said.
Nonna Gaprindashvili, a five-time world chess champion and a co-leader of Patarkatsishvili’s Our Georgia party, said, “Badri was never ill before,” RIA-Novosti reported.
Patarkatsishvili’s private doctor, Zaur Kirtikadze, was quoted by the Novosti-Gruzia news agency as saying his patient had no history of heart trouble.
Andrei Lugovoi, a State Duma deputy who spent 14 months in jail for helping Glushkov escape in 2001, said Wednesday that events in Georgia might have caused the heart attack.
“I was shocked to learn of Badri’s death, I knew him for many years, and he was never ill,” Lugovoi said in a statement relayed by his press secretary. “Maybe events in Georgia were the cause ... He has always been a patriot.”
Lugovoi, who once worked as a private guard for Berezovsky, is wanted in Britain on suspicion of murdering Alexander Litvinenko, a former security service officer also on Berezovsky’s payroll and a vocal critic of Putin.
Patarkatsishvili ran against the incumbent Saakashvili in a snap presidential election in Georgia on Jan. 5, polling just over 7 percent of the vote.
In September, former Georgian Defense Minister Irakli Okruashvili accused Saakashvili of plotting to kill Patarkatsishvili, only to retract the charge later.
TITLE: Curtain Call For President
AUTHOR: By Michael Stott
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday he intended to become a powerful and long-serving prime minister after leaving the Kremlin but rejected suggestions he would dictate orders to his likely successor.
Putin, giving his last annual news conference before his second term ends in May, said he fully trusted the Kremlin’s candidate for president, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, and would have no problems working with him.
Medvedev enjoys blanket coverage on state-controlled media and is widely expected to win a big poll victory next month.
“Dmitry Anatolyevich [Medvedev] and I have worked together for 15 years and I would never have deigned to support a candidate for president if he needed coddling and advice on how to behave,” Putin told hundreds of reporters at the Kremlin in a marathon event lasting a record 4 hours and 40 minutes.
Political analysts have questioned how Medvedev would occupy Russia’s all-powerful presidency and work effectively with his former boss as a subordinate.
Putin will become prime minister because his United Russia party won a huge parliamentary majority in elections on December 2 and controls the lower house of parliament.
Russia’s constitution assigns the prime minister a largely economic role, with all key security and power ministries reporting directly to the president.
Putin, 55, said he and Medvedev would “divide our responsibilities and I can assure you that there will be no problem here.”
“The highest executive power in the country is the government of the Russian Federation headed by the Prime Minister,” he added.
Asked how long he would be premier, Putin said the post “cannot be transitional. As long as Medvedev was in the Kremlin and Putin was achieving his goals, “I would work as long as possible.”
Putin also addressed for the first time Western news reports that he had amassed a huge personal fortune while in power, dismissing the claims as “rubbish.”
Using typically colorful language, he said the reports were “just excavated from someone’s nose and then spread on those bits of paper.”
On foreign policy, the Kremlin leader repeated warnings that Moscow would target Russian missiles at NATO countries which hosted parts of a planned U.S. missile defence shield and would strongly oppose independence for the Serb province of Kosovo.
But overall, he struck a less aggressive tone than before, saying Moscow was more interested in dealing with social and economic problems at home than in pursuing a new Cold War arms race.
“To suppose that we aspire to return to the times of the Cold War is just too bold a supposition,” Putin said.
Russia was willing to work “towards the construction of a positive dialogue” with whoever won the U.S. presidential election and did not intend to target any country with its nuclear missiles except in “extreme necessity,” he said.
Speaking on a raised platform in front of a background decorated with Russia’s national colors and flanked either side by two giant television screens, Putin began the news conference by reeling off statistics on Russia’s economic boom, which has lasted throughout his eight years in the presidency.
Real incomes, pensions and living standards had all risen dramatically, he said, though close attention needed to be paid to inflation, now running at around 12 percent a year.
“I do not see any serious failures,” Putin told a questioner. “All the tasks we set ourselves have been achieved.”
Officials said that a record 1,364 journalists were accredited for the news conference, which was carried live on state television across Russia.
At four hours and 40 minutes, Thursday’s news conference easily beat last year’s three hours 32 minutes. Russian news agencies said Putin this year fielded 100 questions.
TITLE: Hazing Death Highlights Horrors of Army Conscription
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Months of humiliation, beatings, and bullying. Despair and a suicide attempt. A final punch in the stomach that was nearly a deathblow. Contradictory medical records, secrecy, and a suspended sentence for the attacker.
The case of St. Petersburg conscript Roman Rudakov seems to incorporate every worst-case scenario that serving in the Russian army can possibly involve. The story has come to a tragic end this week.
Rudakov, 21, died at Moscow’s Burdenko hospital on Wednesday. He had been awaiting a partial intestine transplant since mid-January, 2007.
Rudakov was kept in the emergency ward of military hospital No. 442 in St. Petersburg after doctors removed his small intestine on Sept. 30, 2006, following a severe beating to the abdominal area.
The Defense Ministry estimates that between 500 to 1,000 recruits die from non-combat-related causes each year in Russia.
Speaking to reporters in Moscow on Thursday, Vladimir Shappo, head of the Chief Military Medical Board of the Defense Ministry of Russia, said 410 recruits and officers died from non-combat causes in 2007. Suicide accounts for more than half of the deaths, he added.
Human rights groups contest the official statistics and claim actual numbers are much higher.
“The Rudakov case is a compelling illustration of how corrupt and lacking transparency the Russian army is,” said Ella Polyakova, chairwoman of St. Petersburg-based human rights group Soldiers’ Mothers. “His medical files were censored over the course of his treatment, with the information about a severe beating in the abdominal area — which ultimately led to his death — being at some stage whitewashed from the case.”
On top of that, relatives of the conscript and human rights advocates complained about receiving contradictory or contrived reports from the military authorities about the state of his health, the need for a donor and possibilities of an operation, Polyakova added
A rapid investigation into Rudakov’s case established that fellow recruit Maxim Lomonin was responsible for the beating. He received a three-year suspended sentence in the resulting trial.
However, no officer was punished or reprimanded in the case. No investigation was held into the alleged manipulation of Rudakov’s medical records.
Ruslan Linkov, head of the liberal political organization Democratic Russia, accused the military of being scared of publicity.
“They typically try to hush things up and therefore avoid, whenever possible, dealing with civil doctors because it would bring to light mishaps in treating and handling patients,” he said.
“Germany, France and Israel offered to help with Rudakov’s operation but Russia rejected all the offers.”
Linkov also emphasized that no officers were brought to account in the Rudakov case. He said that the military authorities often try to “make a scapegoat of another recruit.”
“Look at all recent hazing scandals and you will see that officers routinely escape punishment,” he said. “It has become a trend. Recruits are more vulnerable and deprived than the officers and burdening them with full responsibility kills two birds with one stone: the corrupt system is protected, while the human rights groups and the relatives are presented with a nominal figure to blame.”
A native of the town of Velikiye Luki in the Pskov region, Rudakov was drafted to serve in the Leningrad Oblast in 2004.
“In his letters home, Roman even contemplated suicide; he considered slitting his wrists, so bad had the bullying become,” Polyakova said. “Food rations were so meager that in one of the letters Roman recalled finding a biscuit in the garbage and eating it.”
Rudakov’s story is not unique. His case received nationwide publicity, but hundreds of other instances of soldiers being mistreated cruelly and even being driven to suicide remain hidden from the public. Half of the soldiers who contact Soldier’s Mothers say they have tried to commit suicide. Stricken mothers listen to their sons confiding that they once tried to slit their wrists, throw themselves from windows, or hang themselves using their own shirts.
“Three people deserted from our platoon, and one other guy ran away from another platoon,” Roman recounts in a letter dated May 28, 2005. “His father brought him back but the guy deserted again three days later.[...] I am in despair. I haven’t slept for two nights because we are being forced to work on a construction site at night.”
In his annual report on human rights, released Thursday, Russia’s ombudsman Vladimir Lukin accused the state of “being unable to protect recruits from either the arbitrariness and waywardness of their commanders, or hazing and bullying by senior conscripts.”
Lukin linked the hazing problem with the general underfunding of the army on all levels from housing for the officers to food rations and equipment.
TITLE: New Firm Lies at Crux of Ukraine Gas Deal
AUTHOR: By Miriam Elder
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — RosUkrEnergo, the murky gas-trading vehicle half-owned by Gazprom, will continue to handle sales from Russia to Ukraine until a replacement can be set up, company officials said Wednesday.
The new firm, to be 50-50 owned by Gazprom and Ukraine’s state-owned Naftogaz, has little of more substance than a political blessing, and past failures at trying to bring the handling of gas sales to Ukraine above board cast doubt on the chances of success this time.
Spokespeople for Gazprom, Naftogaz and RosUkrEnergo said they could not divulge details of the deal, as none had yet been decided.
Top officials from Gazprom and Naftogaz were due to meet in Moscow on Thursday, as part of a working group to set up the new company that will, in theory, initiate direct gas sales from Russia to Ukraine.
Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov declined to comment on a timeline, saying only, “We’ll try to do it the quickest way possible.”
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko lauded the decision to do away with RosUkrEnergo, as part of the deal announced on Tuesday after two days of talks between top Russian and Ukrainian officials to avert a gas cutoff over Ukraine’s billion-dollar debt to Gazprom.
The deal was announced after talks between President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko.
“The gas talks were a great victory for the democratic team,” Tymoshenko told a Cabinet meeting, Reuters reported from Kiev. “This is another step toward establishing order in the gas market; another step toward eliminating corruption and shadow schemes in the energy sector.”
Tymoshenko, who built her fortune in the 1990s gas trade, had made RosUkrEnergo’s removal a personal mission since returning as prime minister in December.
“There are elements of trying to show they have left [the 1990s] behind and that [Tymoshenko] has also moved past that phase,” said Chris Weafer, chief analyst at UralSib.
Tymoshenko has pushed for Ukraine, which was accepted into the World Trade Organization earlier this month, to develop closer ties with the European Union.
TITLE: Churov Takes Calls From Voters
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Central Elections Commission chief Vladimir Churov is not only the country’s top election official. Apparently, he’s the man to call for anyone who has a problem.
Churov answered around 20 telephone calls and several e-mails from voters at a news conference Wednesday. And while many of them called in to criticize the country’s elections, some wanted a helping hand in life.
A Voronezh woman asked Churov to help her get paid for a meat delivery, a Samara woman asked him to look into the burglary of her apartment, and yet another Samara woman asked why certain social benefits for disabled people were abolished.
Churov promised to personally talk to the Voronezh governor about the missing meat payment and that he would find out what happened with the abolished benefits. He told the burglary victim to contact local election officials for assistance and promised to speak with the Samara governor.
Other callers were more interested in elections. Alexander, a Moscow region resident, complained that he received a call from teachers at his daughter’s school who ordered him to vote for pro-Kremlin party United Russia or risk her expulsion. Svetlana, from Murmansk, said her friend’s employer demanded that employees take absentee ballots for the presidential election and vote as they are told. Churov called such pressure “wrong” and promised to “take care” of the incidents.
TITLE: Pentagon Is Assessing Flyover by Bomber
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is trying to assess whether a low-level flight by a Russian bomber over U.S. warships in the Pacific Ocean last weekend was a sign that Moscow is returning to a worrisome “Cold War mind-set,” a top defense official told Congress.
General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said officials want to know why a Tu-95 “Bear” bomber flew over the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and other U.S. vessels in international waters near Japan.
The flight came at a time when the Russian Air Force has begun reinstating the kind of long-range bomber patrols it conducted routinely during the Cold War.
“We’re just trying to go back now and look at what message was intended by this overflight,” Cartwright told the U.S. Senate Budget Committee on Tuesday. “What are the implications of that activity and how do we best address that?”
The Russian bomber and three others that accompanied it were intercepted by U.S. F-18 fighter jets and escorted as they flew over the U.S. aircraft carrier group, in keeping with normal procedures. Cartwright said the bombers did nothing “unprofessional” and noted that they were in “free and international airspace” at all times.
Admiral Gary Roughead, the chief of U.S. naval operations, said Tuesday that the bombers had given no warning of their intent to fly over the U.S. warships and said that in his view it was “not prudent” to fly over an aircraft carrier.
But he said he did not regard the patrol as provocative. “I know I’m not playing this up very much, but that’s the way I see it,” he said.
In Moscow, an Air Force spokesman said he does not understand the reason for U.S. concerns. “We are surprised by all the clamor this has raised,” said the spokesman, Colonel Alexander Drobyshevsky, RIA-Novosti reported.
As the Russians have resumed air patrols in recent months, their aircraft have been intercepted and escorted at various points by British, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Canadian and Japanese fighters. Last Saturday, Japanese officials issued a protest to Moscow over what they said was a Russian bomber’s violation of Japanese airspace over an island south of Tokyo.
At the U.S. State Department, spokesman Sean McCormack said Tuesday that the Russian bomber flights were not seen as a threat.
“I don’t think we view it as a particular threat. It is something that we watch closely, and I’m sure folks over at the Pentagon watch it as well,” he said.
Any U.S. expressions of concern would probably be carried out through military channels, McCormack said.
Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat who raised the bomber flyover during the Senate hearing, said the maneuver “sounds pretty provocative to me.” He said the Armed Services Committee, of which he is a member, would look into the issue.
In light of Russia’s renewed military buildup, some U.S. military officials in Europe have cautioned the Pentagon against its planned withdrawal of two divisions from Europe. But other defense officials, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a longtime expert on Soviet issues, have played down the threat, interpreting it only as a sign of Russia’s desire to reassert its importance on the world stage.
At the Senate Budget Committee hearing, Republican Senator Pete Domenici said he was worried about the threat and concerned that U.S. spending to contain militant Islam would siphon funds needed to deal with a possible return of problems with Russia. “Confrontations between us and Russia that didn’t exist before are real today,” Domenici said. Asked about U.S. preparations for a potential Russian threat, Cartwright called it “one of the things that would keep me up at night.”
The Senate discussion was the latest sign of U.S. concern about friction with Moscow over issues such as U.S. plans for an anti-missile system in Eastern Europe, looming Kosovo independence and Washington’s strengthened relations with Ukraine and Georgia.
LAT, Reuters
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Russia With Love
MOSCOW (SPT) — More than half of Russians think they are in love, Interfax reported on Thursday, citing survey results published on St. Valentine’s Day.
The survey results claim that 54 percent of Russian people consider themselves in love, 35 percent said they are not in love, while 11 percent were not sure, Interfax said on Thursday.
Surprisingly, there are more men in love, at 60 percent of those questioned, than women, 49 percent of whom said they were in love.
Most of those in love were people younger than 45 years old. The feeling was especially characteristic for people from 18 to 34 years old.
At the same time, 43 percent of Russians said they have been in love at least once in their life, 17 percent said they had been in love twice, and nine percent said it had happened to them more than three times.
Heart Sickness
MOSCOW (SPT) — About 100,000 Russians of working age die annually from heart and blood vessel illnesses, Interfax reported Thursday, while in general a million Russians die from those illnesses every year.
The death rate from heart and blood vessel illnesses in Russia is one of the highest in the world, the Russian Health Ministry said.
The Ministry said in order to lower the rate of those illnesses it plans to expand the introduction of keyhole surgery methods.
“Those methods allow to provide essential medical help to patients in the first hours of the illness development and to prevent death and serious health complications,” the Ministry said.
The government will spend more than 8 billion rubles ($324 million) on the program for 2008-2010.
Mammoth Clone?
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Russian scientists hope to decipher the DNA from a fine example of a baby mammoth specimen being stored in St. Petersburg, but they think cloning is impossible, Interfax reported Wednesday.
The baby mammoth, named Lyuba, arrived in St. Petersburg from Japan after tomography scans had been performed on its body, which was found well-preserved in the permafrost of Siberia in 2007.
Aleksei Tikhonov, deputy head of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Science, where the research is to be done, said the mammoth’s DNA will be deciphered in the near future but he said it would be impossible to clone Lyuba using known technology.
Freezing Weekend
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Freezing conditions are expected in St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast from Thursday through Sunday, Interfax said on Wednesday.
On Friday strong winds are expected.
On Saturday the wind is to become weaker and the temperature in St. Petersburg is to drop down to minus 8 to minus 10 Deg C both during the day and night.
TITLE: High-Speed Light Railway Attracts Investors
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Top managers from around 180 companies attended a presentation of the Nadzemny Express (Nadex) project, which a delegation of St. Petersburg officials hosted in London on February 7-8. City Hall claims that potential investors “are increasingly interested” in the construction of this new light railway.
As a result of the presentation, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development announced that it would provide a loan for 18 years either in rubles or in a foreign currency to the company that wins the tender. Vnesheconombank also stated that it is ready to finance the project.
“We consider this presentation to be a success. We are waiting for applications to select participants who satisfy the requirements,” Maxim Sokolov, chairman of City Hall’s Committee for Investment and Strategic Projects, said Tuesday in a statement.
In December last year, City Hall announced a tender for the construction of the 30-kilometer high-speed railway. The route will start from two western points — the Congress Center at Strelna and the Baltic Pearl development site — and pass through five districts of the city as far as Obukhovo.
The new railway will intersect with the metro and suburban railway stations, and in the future lines to Pulkovo airport and Peterhof could be added. Experts forecast that the railway will serve 180,000 people a day.
Nadex is scheduled to open in 2010. However, the winning company will have to focus not only on the deadline, but also on the reliable operation of the railway, since the winner will operate it for 30 years.
The proportion of funding that the bidder is ready to provide and the proportion that it requires from the city budget will be one of the main criteria for bid evaluation.
Organizers of the tender insist that bidding consortiums should include construction companies, equipment producers and transportation professionals. In addition, there are also requirements concerning ecological safety, noise levels and the reliability of the railway’s operation.
The city government will approve ticket prices for Nadex, while the railway operator will provide a fare collection system. The operator will give the revenues from ticket sales to the city budget, minus an agreed commission fee.
Without specifying any particular names, Sokolov said that several leading transportation companies were negotiating with St. Petersburg officials on the project.
“The meeting in London was representative enough,” said Pavel Brusser of Grant Thornton audit and consulting company.
Brusser suggested that technological companies like Bombardier, Siemens and Mitsubishi would be interested in the Nadex project. “Companies producing light railway carriages will obviously be interested,” he said.
From a technical point of view, construction of the railway by 2010 is realistic, Brusser said, but there could be delays in getting state funding. “Much will depend on whether the project is realized in accordance with the federal Law on Concessions or the St. Petersburg law,” Brusser said.
He suggested that the government would approve a ticket price corresponding to the average ticket price for public transport in the city. The price could be slightly higher, due to increased speed and comfort.
“I think this project should attract investors. No similar projects have been realized in Russia, and this project could be replicated in other cities, for example in Sochi,” Brusser said.
However, there are a number of risks associated with the project. One of them, Brusser indicated, is that some parts of the railway will pass through narrow streets like those located near Prospekt Veteranov metro station.
“The local population is always wary. But there is a standard procedure of public hearings to deal with possible disputes,” Brusser said.
The tender committee will start examining bids in May this year, and the results of the tender are due to be announced in December.
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Petmol, UniMilk Merge
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Shareholders of Petmol open joint-stock company have approved a merger with UniMilk, Petmol said Tuesday in a statement. Shareholders also approved a guarantee contract for a loan of 600 million rubles ($24.3 million). Nomos-Bank will issue the loan to UniMilk with a maximum annual interest rate of 11.7 percent. The loan should be repaid by Nov. 1, 2011.
NT Seeks 35% Increase
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Northwest Telecom plans to increase revenue by 35.6 percent up to 32 billion rubles ($1.3 billion) by 2012 from 23.6 billion rubles ($958 million) earned last year, Interfax reported Tuesday.
Broadband is expected to generate revenues of eight billion rubles ($324.8 million) in 2012. Lat year it accounted for three billion rubles ($121.8 million). The number of subscribers should increase from 310,000 people to one million.
Insurance Payments Up
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Russkiy Mir group increased its insurance premiums by 40 percent last year up to 8.11 billion rubles ($329.3 million), Interfax reported Wednesday.
Insurance payments increased by 40.4 percent in 2007 up to 4.76 billion rubles ($193.2 million).
VTB Reduces Stock Lot
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — VTB Bank has decreased its share in the authorized capital stock of VTB Bank Northwest to 71.5 percent, the bank said Tuesday in a statement.
It resulted from the execution of a repurchase agreement with a company not affiliated with VTB Group.
Nokian Doubles Profit
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Nokian Tyres increased its net profit by 57.4 percent last year up to $246.6 million, the company said Wednesday in a statement.
Earnings from operations increased by 52.8 percent up to $341.6 million and earnings before taxes by 53.5 percent up to $180.7 million. Global sales increased by 22.6 percent up to $1.5 billion. Sales in Scandinavia increased 11.1 percent, in Russia and the CIS by 56.9 percent and in Eastern Europe by 44.4 percent.
Gazprom Eyes Peterhof
ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Gazprom plans to spend $150 million on building country residences outside St. Petersburg, Delovoi Peterburg reported Wednesday, citing an unidentified local government official.
Unit Mezhregiongaz will construct 570 houses by 2010 over 300 hectares near the town of Peterhof, the newpaper reported.
The settlement will accommodate 3,000 people, and the developer plans to recoup the investments in two years, the newspaper said, citing Valery Yeremeyev, president of project manager Lenoblzem.
Lenta Sales Booming
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Lenta, Russia’s third-biggest food retailer, increased sales 53 percent last year as spending on food and other consumer goods increased.
Sales reached $1.56 billion, Chief Executive Officer Vladimir Senkin said Wednesday at a press conference in Moscow. The company also aims to maintain annual sales growth of at least 50 percent as it plans 12 store openings this year, the same number as in 2007.
TITLE: Medvedev Calls For Farming Channel
AUTHOR: By Tai Adelaja
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Presidential candidate Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday called for a 24-hour television channel on farming in an apparent bid to win support from the country’s farmers ahead of next month’s presidential vote.
“I have proposed launching a specialized agricultural television channel,” Medvedev told a national agricultural assembly in Barnaul on Wednesday, Interfax reported. “Information featuring rural life is limited and scanty, and is aired at a time inconvenient for farmers.”
Medvedev, a first deputy prime minister and President Vladimir Putin’s preferred successor, said the new channel should tap into “technical innovations being developed in Russia.”
Yevgeny Kiselyov, a former general director of NTV, when the channel was privately owned, said that while it was standard practice to have specialized cable channels in developed countries, Medvedev’s proposals could run into problems.
“Where would they get the frequency for an agricultural channel that could reach the nooks and crannies of Russia?” Kiselyov said. “Most of the present channels are not accessible in rural areas because of the technical constraints inherited from the Soviet Union.”
If an agricultural channel was aimed at helping people in remote areas, such money “could be well spent on other pressing issues, such as upgrading provincial hospitals and helping poverty-stricken pensioners,” Kiselyov said.
Last month, Medvedev backed the launch of a new 24-hour channel on legal issues, called Zakon TV, to be initially funded by Gazprom Media-owned NTV. In 2005, then-Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov backed the launch of Zvezda, a channel dedicated to the military.
TITLE: Putin Confident On Russia’s Economy
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia will have no problem weathering the current global financial troubles, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday, boasting of Russia’s economic transformation in his eight years in power.
At his annual marathon news conference, Putin barked out a series of figures to illustrate the country’s economic progress, and then with equal insistence laid out an array of problems for his successor to address.
When Putin took Russia’s helm on New Year’s Eve 1999, the country was tens of billions of dollars in debt, afflicted by widespread poverty and using a currency that had collapsed the previous year. Now it runs a huge budget surplus and its economy is so strong that Putin predicted it would not be affected by the current international financial troubles.
“It will be quite easy for Russian banks to get through the liquidity crisis,” he told the gathering of hundreds of reporters at a Kremlin auditorium.
“We have restored the fundamental principles of Russian economy on an absolutely new market base, and we are surely changing into one of the economic leaders” of the world, Putin said.
Putin’s tone was bluff, even truculent, apparently reflecting both his pride in Russia’s accomplishments and Russia’s belief that its achievements are given short shrift by other countries.
“In 2000, we calculated that more than 30 percent of the population was below the poverty line ...(now) that’s less than 14 percent,” Putin said.
“The stock index rose 20 percent” in 2007, he said. “Twenty percent — that’s not bad as an indicator.”
Russia’s overall economy is now the world’s seventh-largest, he claimed.
But much of Russia’s growth has been driven by record high prices for oil and gas, and its other natural resources sectors are substantial contributors. Without a strong manufacturing base as a balance, Russia’s economy is potentially highly vulnerable to commodity price fluctuations.
Putin acknowledged the problem.
“Technologically, we are at a pretty low level in many areas,” he said.
“There are a minimum of two huge problems that have to be solved. These are diversification of the economy and conferring on it an innovative development character,” as well as improving the general level of leadership in the country, he said.
In that regard, “it’s obligatory for us to adopt an anti-corruption law. There’s no kind of pill to fight corruption that you take and then get healthy, there has to be a system of measures,” he said.
Putin also admitted that his government had been unable to get inflation under control, noting that the 11.9-percent inflation of 2007 was significantly above the government’s expectation of an already-high 7-8 percent.
He made it clear he expected the next government to take care of the problems. And he clearly intends to be a part of those efforts.
TITLE: Foster Chosen To Design City Housing
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: Norman Foster, the U.K. architect of the Moscow skyscraper that will be Europe’s tallest, has been selected to design a $220 million complex in St. Petersburg, his first foray into elite housing in Russia.
The construction of 77,000 square meters (830,000 square feet) of homes and hotels will be financed by Evraz Capital, said Knight Frank LLC, the main adviser on the project.
The new complex will be north of the center of Russia’s second-biggest city, near Dynamo Stadium on Krestovsky Island, Knight Frank consultant Polina Yakovleva said in an e-mailed statement Wednesday.
Russian investors including Oleg Deripaska, the second-richest, are moving into St. Petersburg real estate as competition in the more-developed Moscow market intensifies. Deripaska’s Glavstroi won a competition last month to help finance and develop a section of St. Petersburg’s historic city center with the municipal government. Glavstroi’s bid trumped one designed by Foster and proposed by billionaire Chalva Tchigirinski.
Apartments in Foster’s Krestovsky Island will cost as much as $17,500 per square meter, or $1.75 million for every 100 square meters, Yakovleva said. Foster will present several versions of the complex, which is slated to be completed by 2012.
The Krestovsky Island project is Foster’s fourth in St. Petersburg, including the redevelopment of New Holland Island. Foster previously designed the ‘Gherkin’ building in London.
TITLE: Bootleg Sales Keep Falling
PUBLISHER: For The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Fewer Russians are choosing bootlegged spirits and industrial alcohol over legally produced vodka and liquor, Pavel Shapkin, the president of the National Alcohol Association, said Wednesday.
“Bootleg sales continue to dip,” Shapkin said. “Last year alone, they dropped to 28 percent, even though the volume of legally produced vodka and liquor has remained the same since 2005.”
The bootleg sector, which is calculated as the difference between total retail sales of vodka and other spirits and the volume of legal production, imports and exports, fell 14 percent last year, down from 42 percent in 2006.
Excise duties from production and turnover of ethyl alcohol as well as other alcohol products in 2007 rose 21 percent to 84.3 billion rubles, indicating a growing preference for legally produced spirits.
Russians also appeared to have cultivated a taste for more refined beverages, such as cognac and whisky, at the expense of vodka, the national drink, Shapkin said.
“There is a paradigm shift in the market, affecting tastes and preferences,” Shapkin said. “While vodka remains the mainstream beverage for Russians, brandy and whisky are fast replacing it.”
Compared with 2006, consumption of whisky grew 78 percent, making it the country’s fastest-growing tipple of choice, he said.
TITLE: Lebanon Split as Day Marks Two Deaths
AUTHOR: By Sam F. Ghattas
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIRUT, Lebanon — Throngs of Lebanese came out Thursday for two opposing gatherings: Hezbollah backers for the funeral of a slain militant suspected in hundreds of American deaths, and their pro-Western opponents to mark the assassination of an anti-Syrian former prime minister.
It was a showcase of Lebanon’s divided soul, and it raised fears of violence between the two sides, prompting authorities to deploy thousands of troops and block major roads.
Hezbollah urged crowds to south Beirut to march behind the coffin of Imad Mughniyeh, the group’s former security chief who was killed in a car bombing in Syria on Tuesday night. The funeral was expected to fully be underway in the early afternoon as the downtown Beirut rally marking the third anniversary of former premier Rafik Hariri’s killing wound down.
Mughniyeh was a long-sought fugitive suspected in a series of attacks against the U.S. and Israel, including the bombings of the U.S. Marines barracks and two embassy compounds in Beirut in 1983-84 that killed about 260 Americans. He was also the suspected mastermind behind the kidnappings of Americans and other Westerners in Beirut in the 1980s, including former Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson.
“Let us make our voice heard by all the enemies and murderers that we will be victorious, no matter the sacrifices,” said a Hezbollah statement aired on the militant group’s Al-Manar TV.
Hezbollah and its top ally, Iran, have accused Israel of Mughniyeh’s slaying. Israel denied any involvement, but officials made no effort to conceal their approval of his death. The United States welcomed it.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah — himself in hiding because of fears of assassination since the 2006 summer war with Israel — was expected to address mourners through a video broadcast over a giant screen.
Mughniyeh’s death from a bomb that blew up his SUV in Damascus could raise tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, as well as with the militants’ allies, Syria and Iran. Some Lebanese figures close to the Shiite group called Wednesday for attacks against Israel.
In Israel, officials instructed embassies and Jewish institutions around the world to go on alert Thursday for fear of revenge attacks, and the army raised its awareness on its border with Lebanon and in the Palestinian territories.
Mughniyeh’s slaying also could stir up more domestic turmoil in deeply divided Lebanon, where the Hezbollah-led opposition is locked in a bitter power struggle with the Western-backed government.
By midmorning, thousands poured into Beirut’s main Martyrs’ Square for the third anniversary of Hariri’s assassination, braving the rain and the cold, waving Lebanese flags and carrying pictures of the slain leader.
Crowds paid respects at Hariri’s gravesite next to the downtown square as his brother, Shafik, unveiled a statue of him at the spot where he was killed, a few hundred yards away on a seaside boulevard. A flame was lit and a taped message broadcast from Hariri’s widow, Nazek, who lives in Paris, urging against “falling into hatred” and calling on “unity to save the country.”
The anti-Syrian parliamentary majority had hoped a massive show of popular support, perhaps by hundreds of thousands, on the Hariri anniversary would force the Hezbollah-led opposition to compromise in a 15-month political stalemate that has paralyzed the country.
The anniversary rally also meant to send a message to Syria to stay out of Lebanese politics. Billboards on major highways called for supporters to attend: “Come down, so they don’t come back.”
Hariri’s supporters blame Syria for killing the prominent politician in a massive suicide truck bombing in Beirut three years ago and for a series of bombings and assassinations since. Hariri’s assassination ignited mass protests and international pressure that forced Syria to withdraw its army from Lebanon after 29 years of control.
But statements from government coalition leaders offering condolences in the wake of Mughniyeh’s killing indicated that majority leaders were toning down their sharp rhetoric, dominant in recent days, so as not to further inflame tensions with the opposition.
Authorities deployed some 8,000 troops and policemen to protect the Hariri rally and leading roads. Armored carriers took up positions on major intersections, and additional razor wire was brought in to separate the two sides on rain-drenched streets.
The U.S. Embassy encouraged American citizens in Lebanon to limit all but essential travel Thursday. Across Beirut, businesses and shops put off popular Valentine’s Day celebrations for later in the week.
Mughniyeh’s body was brought to south Beirut from Syria on Wednesday and laid in a refrigerated coffin, wrapped in Hezbollah’s yellow flag.
His father — Fayez, a south Lebanese farmer — as well as Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Sheik Naim Kassem, and other Hezbollah officials received condolences inside a hall from allied Lebanese politicians and representatives of militant Palestinian factions.
Mughniyeh was also on the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists, and the State Department had offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction.
TITLE: Obama’s Wave Hits Hillary
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton’s crushing losses in Maryland and Virginia highlight an erosion in what had been solid advantages among women, whites and older and working-class voters.
While this week’s results can be explained by those states’ relatively large numbers of blacks and well-educated residents — who tend to be Barack Obama supporters — her presidential campaign could be doomed if the trends continue.
Clinton is holding onto some of her supporters who are largely defined by race and often by level of education, such as low-income white workers and older white women, exit polls of voters show. She’s been losing other blocs, again stamped by personal characteristics, such as blacks, men and young people both black and white, and better-educated whites.
The latest defeats have slowed the one-time favorite’s political momentum at a bad time. With Obama winning eight straight contests and easily outdistancing her in money raising, she must now endure three weeks until primaries in Texas and Ohio that she hopes will resurrect her campaign.
Clinton’s losses have also enabled Obama to take a slight lead in their crucial fight for convention delegates. With 2,025 needed to clinch the nomination at the party’s Denver gathering in August, Obama has 1,275 delegates to Clinton’s 1,220, according to the latest count by The Associated Press.
Before this year’s presidential contests began, Obama was running consistently behind his rival in the polls. The Illinois senator was mostly attracting upper-echelon whites, young people and about half of black voters — resembling the coalitions that sealed defeat for past non-establishment Democratic candidates such as Gary Hart and Bill Bradley.
Things have changed since the voting has started, especially after bitter exchanges during the Clinton-Obama contest in South Carolina highlighted their racial differences.
Now, virtually all blacks support Obama, significant since they make up about a fifth of Democratic voters overall.
And while last year’s polls showed Clinton leading among men, Obama now leads her among males by 11 percentage points, according to exit polls of voters in 20 competitive Democratic primaries.
Before Tuesday’s voting, the two were even among white males this year. Obama defeated her among that group by 18 percentage points in Virginia — his first win with white men in a Southern state
TITLE: Failed Assassination Attempts Leave East Timor Traumatized
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DILI, East Timor — The rebels jumped from two cars, firing machine guns as they stormed the compound of President Jose Ramos-Horta. “Traitor! Traitor!” they shouted, hunting for the Nobel Peace Prize winner.
In one of the most detailed accounts yet of Monday’s assassination attempt, a guard described how he killed fugitive rebel commander Alfredo Reinado before the president returned from an early morning walk on the beach.
“I shouted Alfredo’s name and then opened fire at his head with my machine gun because he was wearing a bulletproof vest,” the guard told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is prohibited from talking to the media about the attack.
“I fired many times, I don’t know how many times,” said the guard, who was back on duty Tuesday in his uniform.
But gunmen lying in a ditch then shot the president in the chest and stomach.
Along with a separate strike against the prime minister an hour later, the events plunged East Timor into fresh crisis just six years after it voted to break free from decades of brutal Indonesian rule.
Doctors said Thursday that Ramos-Horta — who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent campaign against the 24-year Indonesian occupation — was stable and recovering well from his gunshot wounds in an Australian hospital. They have previously said they expect him to make a full recovery.
Parliament extended a 48-hour state of emergency by 10 days until Feb. 23 due to concerns about more unrest. Funerals for the rebels will be held Thursday and plans were under way to arrest warrants for 18 suspects in the shootings.
Early Thursday, Australian troops and helicopters along with UN police officers and armored personnel carriers began hunting for the suspects in an operation in a jungled area on the outskirts of Dili, according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene.
UN spokesman Alison Cooper confirmed “anti-insurgency” operations had begun.
The attack on Ramos-Horta was led by Reinado, who was wanted on murder charges for his role in a 2006 surge of violence that left dozens dead. A raid on his mountain base by Australian troops killed five of his supporters, but Reinado escaped.
Reinado enjoyed folk hero status among some disenchanted youth and people from the west of the country who complain that the central government discriminates against them.
Early Thursday afternoon, hundreds of people attended funeral services for Reinado, who was to be buried behind his home in a poor seaside neighborhood in Dili. Mourners hung a banner saying, “Hero Alfredo, you may be dead but your spirit will be with us forever.”
Last month, he threatened to march on the capital with his men if the government ignored demands to reinstate hundreds of mutinous soldiers.
“Alfredo Reinado was a traitor and I will gladly go hunt down and fight the others responsible for this attack,” said the guard who detailed how he fatally shot the fugitive rebel commander. Two other guards interviewed by the AP on Tuesday corroborated the account.
A friend of Ramos-Horta’s who spoke on condition of anonymity because the shooting is under investigation, said Monday’s battle raged for around 30 minutes before the president heard shots. Making his way inland, he refused a ride from a passing vehicle and walked up the public road to the house escorted by two bodyguards with pistols, the friend said.
A phone call reporting an exchange of fire came into the nearest police station at 6:59 a.m.; two police units arrived about 15 minutes later.
No UN police or foreign troops intervened in the shootout, because Ramos-Horta had said he only wanted protection from Timorese forces, said the UN’s deputy country head, Finn Reske-Nielsen.
The shots that hit Ramos-Horta were fired by men laying in wait across from the main entrance to the residence, after Reinado and his bodyguard Leopoldinho da Costa, had been shot dead, the guard said.
During the shooting, an East Timor soldier arrived by car and drove into the line of fire to protect Ramos-Horta, crashing into a signpost and a wooden fence before he too was critically injured.
The attack — in which rebel forces slipped into the capital, Dili, using cars with government license places — has raised questions about who was responsible for protecting the president and why more than 2,000 foreign police and soldiers could not prevent it.
Ramos-Horta has proudly called himself a man of the people who never wanted or needed a heavy security detail and has never shied away from taking risks.
He personally intervened in 2006 when rival gangs roamed the streets looting, burning and attacking people with machetes. He has told stories about driving around the capital, day and night, without any protection.
“President Jose Ramos-Horta was found lying on the ground,” said UN deputy police Chief Hermanprit.
TITLE: The Return of the Torture Chambers
AUTHOR: By Bret Stephens
TEXT: The protest began after OMON had been brought to Correctional Colony No. 5 and started massive beatings of the prisoners. People in camouflage and masks were beating with batons inmates taken outside unclothed in the freezing cold. ... As a protest, 39 prisoners immediately cut their veins open.
“Next day, on Jan 17, the ‘special operation’ was repeated in an even more humiliating and massive form. At that time, about 700 inmates cut their veins open.”
This description comes from a report received by the Moscow-based Foundation for Defense of Prisoners’ Rights. This is not Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Russia. It’s President Vladimir Putin’s and the year is 2008. And Correctional Colony No. 5, located not far from the Manchurian border, located in the Takhtamygda village in the Amur region, does not even make the list of the worst penal colonies in the country.
That distinction belongs to the newly revived institution of pytochniye kolony, or torture colonies. After all but disappearing in the 1990s under the liberal regime of President Boris Yeltsin, there are now about 50 pytochniye kolony among the roughly 700 colonies that house the bulk of Russia’s convict population, according to the foundation’s co-founder Lev Ponomarev. And while they cannot be compared to the Soviet gulag in terms of scope or the percentage of prisoners who are innocent of any real crime, they are fast approaching it in terms of sheer cruelty.
The cruelty to prisoners often begins prior to their actual sentencing. “When people are transported from prisons to courts to attend their hearings, they are jammed in a tiny room where they can barely stand. There’s no toilet. If they have to relieve themselves, it has to be right there,” said Ponomarev. “Then they are put on trucks. It’s extremely cold in winter, extremely hot in summer, no ventilation, no heating. These are basically metal containers. They have to be there for hours. Healthy people are held together with people with tuberculosis, creating a breeding ground for the disease.”
Once sentenced, prisoners are transported in packed train wagons to distant correctional colonies that, under Russian law, range from relatively lax “general regime” colonies to “strict,” “special,” and — most terrifying of all — “medical” colonies. Arrival in the camps is particularly harrowing. According to prisoner testimonies collected by Ponomarev, in the winter of 2005 convicts from one torture colony in Karelia, near the Finnish border, were shipped to the IK-1 torture colony near the village of Yagul, in the Udmurtia republic, about 800 kilometers east of Moscow.
At IK-1, a prisoner with a broken leg named Zurab Baroyan made the mistake of testifying to conditions at the colony to a staff representative of the human rights ombudsman. “After this,” Baroyan reported, the commandant of the colony” threatened to let me rot in the dungeon. They did not finish treating me in the hospital. My leg festered [and] pus ran from the bandage. ... Then the festering crossed over to the second leg.”
Not surprisingly, suicide attempts at these colonies are common. One convict, named Mishchikin, sought to commit suicide by swallowing “a wire and nails tied together crosswise.” As punishment, he was denied medical assistance for 12 days. Another convict, named Fargiyev, was held in handcuffs for 52 days after stabbing himself; he never fully recovered motor function in his hands.
Even the smallest of prisoner infractions can be met with savage reprisals. In one case, authorities noticed the smell of cigarette smoke in a “penalty isolation” cell where seven convicts were being held. “A fire engine was called in. ... The entire cell, including the convicts and their personal things, was flooded with cold water.” The convicts were left in wet clothes in temperatures of 10 degree Celsius for a week.
As a legal matter, the torture colonies don’t even exist, and Ponomarev doubts that there has ever been an explicit directive from Putin ordering the kind of treatment they meet. Rather, for the most part the standards of punishment are determined at the whim of colony commandants, often in areas where the traditions of the gulag never went away.
That doesn’t excuse the Kremlin, however. Under Yeltsin, the prison system operated under a sunshine policy, as part of a larger effort to distance Russia from its Soviet past. “But when Putin came to power, a new tone was set,” Ponomarev said. “The sadists who had previously been ‘behaving’ simply stopped behaving.”
Now reports of torture are systematically ignored or suppressed while regional governments refuse to act on evidence of abuse. Commandants at “general regime” colonies can always threaten misbehaving convicts with transfer to a torture colony — a useful way of keeping them in line. The Kremlin, too, benefits from the implied threat. “The correct word for this is ‘gulag,’ even if it’s on a smaller scale,” warned Ponomarev. “This is the reappearance of totalitarianism in the state. Unless we eradicate it, it will spread throughout the entire country.”
Readers interested in a closer look at what is described above may do a YouTube search for” Yekaterinburg Prison Camp.” The short video, apparently filmed by a prison guard and delivered anonymously to Ponomarev’s organization, is a modern-day version of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” It isn’t easy to watch.
But it is an invaluable window on what Russia has become in the Age of Putin, Person of the Year.
Bret Stephens is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, where this comment appeared.
TITLE: Punching the Monitor for Rotten Elections
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: In mid-January, India refused to accept its Sindhuvijay submarine after it was refitted with Russian Klub cruise missiles at a shipyard near St. Petersburg. The reason for the refusal is that the Klub missiles failed to hit their target in six consecutive test firings.
The Kremlin, which did not want to be outdone by the snooty Indians, quickly retaliated with the single remaining strategic weapon in its arsenal — the Agriculture Ministry’s Federal Service for Veterinarian and Vegetation Sanitary Supervision.
The agency immediately announced that it had discovered Khapra beetles in some sesame seeds that were shipped in from India; this served as Moscow’s justification for banning Indian tea imports. The only problem was that these insects do not infest tea — or sesame seeds for that matter.
Unlike when Moscow banned imports of Georgian wine on the grounds that it did not meet health standards, this time Russia faced the real threat of a multibillion-dollar recriminatory lawsuit from New Delhi for its strong-arm interference in international trade.
As soon as the Kremlin learned of the litigation threat, the Khapra beetles vanished from Indian sesame and nothing more was heard about it — not from Federal Consumer Protection Service head Gennady Onishchenko, from state environmental inspector Oleg Mitvol or from any other agency that typically uses scare tactics in the name of protecting Russia’s sovereign democracy.
In Moscow’s response to India, it behaved like a salesclerk in a supermarket who, when told the fish is rotten, punches out the shopper rather than bringing fresh fish to replace it. Attacking the customer, of course, doesn’t help convince anybody that the fish is fresh.
Russia must have been a little confused when it decided to fire these diplomatic shots from the big guns of the unsinkable dreadnought Onishchenko. The Kremlin apparently doesn’t understand that India has long ago ceased being the type of Third World country that eagerly accepts Moscow’s obsolescent technologies.
Now the opposite is true: The booming Indian and Chinese economies are locomotives of global economic development.
Besides the Sindhuvijay fiasco, Russia was four years behind schedule in its contract with India to retrofit the Admiral Gorshkov warship. To add insult to injury, Moscow asked New Delhi last year for another $1.2 billion to finish the job.
Why do I mention this?
There have been a few major foreign policy events this past month. Russia has been excluded from the international negotiations over Kosovo. Moreover, the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly quietly sidelined Senator Mikhail Margelov. He had been slated to become the next president of the Strasbourg-based assembly, but the parliament’s members had strong reservations about Russia’s human rights record.
But what foreign policy events have the Russian media been covering lately? Most reports have focused on whether or not international election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s democracy watchdog, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, will monitor the presidential election on March 2.
The question of whether Russian elections are democratic is certainly relevant, but the Kremlin is preoccupied with the less relevant question of whether the OSCE will insult Russia by criticizing the election.
This issue has nothing to do with whether the OSCE has the right to pass judgment on Russian internal affairs, but whether the elections stand on their own as objectively free and fair.
Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.
TITLE: The meaning of Minayev
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The author and businessman Sergei Minayev rose to fame in 2006 when “Dukhless,” his cynical novel about thirtysomething Russians, hit the nations kiosks and was proclaimed a bestseller. A compound word using Russian and English, “Dukhless” translates as “soulless” and was called “an epitaph for his generation” in a recent New York Times profile of Minayev, comparing the book to Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City” (1984).
Minayev, 33, who was described in the New York Times profile as having “a perpetual 5 o’ clock shadow, a penchant for Paul Smith suits and a partnership in a company that imports high-end spirits and fine wines” has since become something of a celebrity. “The picture of post-Soviet success.”
Minayev’s second book, “Media Sapiens,” followed in 2007 and took on PR, propaganda and the upcoming presidential election, again applying a hard-edged nihilism to contemporary Russian elites.
Internet savvy, with a Live Journal blog (http://amigo095.livejournal.com) and an active social networking site profile, Minayev initially exploited the web to publish his writing. But his third book, “The Tyolki” (The Chicks) is being more traditionally promoted with a book tour that brought Minayev to St. Petersburg last week.
“The Tyolki” is a sarcastic portrait of big city Russians in their 20s who lead easy lives without embarrassment. It is a landscape of alcohol, parties, entertainment, and sex. The characters play fast with life and love, and hurt people on the way.
Minayev’s implicit criticism of Western influences on modern Russia and heartfelt call for a return to spirituality and Russian values — not to mention praise for the leadership of President Vladimir Putin and unflattering references to the political opposition — has led to suspicions that he works at the Kremlin’s behest.
Meanwhile, the New York Times pointed to the low esteem accorded to Minayev’s work by some sections of the Russian intelligentsia — “crass, stream-of-consciousness, Internet prose” — as well as more appreciative voices.
Q: What is your new book about? Is it reminiscent of your previous novels?
A: The book is about love, actually so-called love. My goal was to write about a younger generation. However, it is still a return to the dynamics of “Dukhless,” to its format. Yet “The Tyolki” has a different plot: the characters are younger; there is intrigue [and it has the elements of a] thriller.
Q: Why did you decide to write about a younger generation this time?
A: It was interesting for me. “Dukhless” was a book about people in their 30s and has become that generation’s cult book. I wanted to explore a younger generation this time. I got an account on [the Russian version of the social networking site Facebook] VKontakte and communicated with these people. I’d say the younger generation doesn’t differ much from my generation. However, they are more dynamic, more advanced in some topics, but also lazier. I’d say they’ve got to a different philosophy to a certain extent.
Q: How is their philosophy different?
A: Our generation was more inclined to reflection. They are faster, and they have a rather simple understanding of things. It’s more important to them to be successful today rather than in life in general... It’s important what brand of watch you have and not what you are. In this way, modern young people are less deep and more superficial.
Q: Why is that the case?
A: Because the consumer machine cannot work differently. In other words, it’s hard to sell Hegel and Dostoevsky, but it’s easier to sell beer and sandwiches. So, when you need to sell to people you need to talk a simple language: “do this and you’ll be that.”
Q: Is this bad?
A: It’s very bad. It’s dictated by the policy of many states because it’s better if a person is a fan of brands rather than a fan of some left-wing party. In other words, pushing society to supermarkets is a way of distracting them from social problems. In this respect it’s good because it’s better if people just buy things rather than go to war. On the other hand, man becomes completely stupid. Nothing is really interesting to him. Just look how quickly brands change. Some of them only last for months. So the consumer is already waiting for something new all the time.
Q: What can change this?
A: Nothing. It’s a world of simple things now — fast food, quick love. Everything is so fast there’s no time to think. Then you don’t want to think deeply yourself. You just need to make quick decisions. Meanwhile, quick decisions are not always deep and often are wrong.
Q: What is the message of your book? What did you want to say with it?
A: My task is to make people stop and think. I don’t give them instructions on how they should live but I tell them how they definitely shouldn’t live.
Q: Have your books made people think?
A: I receive a lot of response from my readers who say that my books have changed their lives. For instance, one of my readers wrote that he led a life like that of my main character from “Dukhless.” After he read the book he decided to stop that behavior. Another reader had a wife and a mistress but after reading “Dukhless” he went to live at a monastery to find himself.
Q: Why do you use a lot of English words in your books?
A: It’s logical. The main character in “Dukhless” makes fun of this English-Russian mixture in the speech of modern Russian office employees. As for the main character of “The Tyolki,” he has lived for seven years in America, and he is playing an American with one of his girlfriends. Unfortunately, we are not yet done with that golden dream of many Russian girls in the 1990s to marry a foreigner and leave this country.
Q: Why there is still so much worship for everything foreign in Russia?
A: There is always a split in our society for Slavophiles and Westerners. So cosmopolitan-style people say that everything in Russia is bad and we should do things like they do in Sweden, or some other European country. Others say “no, we don’t want to do that, we should go our own way.” This is the collision of ideas.
Q: Do you think Russia should go its own way?
A: Russia is a very complicated country. We’ll always have a symbiosis of Eastern and Western ideas. In the 21st century, when the world has become so global, it’s hard to talk about “one’s own way.” We go our own way in small things, such as liking black bread. However, to say that we can go our own way in business or some other serious things is impossible. There are standard rules that were born by human logic.
Q: Today some people think that the West is trying to convince Russia to become a Western-style democracy. Do you think Russia should become that?
A: The notion of democracy has changed a lot since it was invented in Ancient Greece. Today democracy is largely hypocritical. The United States and United Kingdom do not behave in a democratic way outside their countries. There they stand for their national interests in a rather tough way. Democracy is an unconditional institution of human values that acts in the framework of a certain county. And that democracy is in the interests of that state. Therefore we build our own democracy, too.
You know, Russia is a country where if there is too much freedom people will look toward authoritarianism. If there is an authoritarian regime people will want anarchy. However, we still have too much from the East. We need a strong hand, a strong leader. In fact, our problem is absence of civil self-consciousness. We’re still under the pressure of the habit that someone higher up will decide things for us.
Q: Why have your books become so popular?
A: I don’t have a formula for that. Each time I worry if the audience will like the book. Of course, I approximately know what strings to pull. For instance, people are always inspired to read about love, hate, faithlessness, betrayal. These topics have remained since the time of Shakespeare, only the scenery has changed.
Q: Is your popularity the result of hype and an advertising blitz?
A: No, that’s a myth made up by the media. My books have become known through the Internet, a “people’s radio.” The best advertising is word-of-mouth. In summer 2006, the only question people were asking was “Have you read ‘Dukhless’?” As for advertising, no advertising can be effective if the book itself doesn’t touch people’s souls.
Q: Some critics say you’ve written an “anti-glamour” novel, and compare it with the “pro-glamour” books of Oksana Robsky.
A: I never positioned my books like that. However, Robsky likes that side of life and I hate it. If she celebrates that part of society, I sneer at it.
Q: Can we say that the characters of “Dukhless” and “The Tyolki” are “heroes of our time?”
A: It’s 100-percent true. They are characters from that certain social circle that lives in big cities, was born in 1970s, had a good career by their 30s, lived through the break up of the Soviet Union, and are now having a spiritual crisis. There are many people like that. However, half of people that age are not like that. They didn’t go to nightclubs; and they didn’t have such a crisis — because they just needed to survive.
I’d say also that my books are not that much about “glamour” or “anti-glamour.” They are about a big spiritual crisis and the deep depression of the generation.
Q: You have been accused of being a “Kremlin project,” a stooge for its ideology. Why?
A: Some people think this is explanation for my success, because they can’t understand how I came from nowhere and sold two books by the million. They thought, “Well, maybe he is supported by the Kremlin?”
I always say that if the four federal TV channels work for the state, it doesn’t make sense for it to order books to promote its ideology. But then again, is the ideology of glamour the ideology of the Kremlin?
TITLE: Chernov’s
choice
TEXT: The rumors turned out to be true. British rock band Deep Purple did perform at the Kremlin for Gazprom and Dmitry Medvedev — as seen from a photo showing the Russian energy behemoth’s head and Kremlin-backed presidential candidate smiling in the company of the freaky-looking old men of rock.
But some fans saw their once favorite band as the next great rock and roll swindle. While Tina Turner, who also took part, sang “I am a private dancer, a dancer for money” in her 1984 hit about a prostitute, fans appear to have expected more integrity from Deep Purple, even if the international press appears to be somewhat amused and touched at the same time by reports about Russian leaders rubbing shoulders with aging Western rock musicians.
“What’s next? Playing for Osama somewhere in Afghanistan, in a cave with hundreds of Jihad warriors dancing like mad to [“Smoke on the Water”]? As long as the pay is good... It leaves a bad taste in my mouth!” wrote a fan who calls himself Stefan in a rowdy discussion on Deep Purple’s fan website, The Highway Star.
The band has declined elsewhere into semi-obscurity since its 1970s heyday, although in Russia it remains a big hit and Medvedev’s favorite band, for some reason. But in taking the Kremlin’s 30 pieces of silver, Deep Purple has lost more fans than it acquired, it appears.
“As a life-long fan who also has all of their albums, I don’t think I’ll buy any more music from them,” wrote Iain. “The whole appeal to me was that they didn’t play games, which lent credibility to Gillan’s lyrics. This is disappointing.”
“I’ve been a fan of the band since 1986 and I think that it’s ridiculous what they’ve done,” wrote Rost. “To play for the KGB — that’s what money can do. They are not my idols any more.”
Some fans tried to defend the band, if sometimes a little awkwardly. “They are just a musical act... even Queen performed in South Africa during apartheid,” wrote III Reitchie.
“Just because you’re an artist it doesn’t prevent you from having principles or a moral code!” Stefan responded. “By playing in Russia for the elite who have, to say the least, an odd view of democracy, is to me pure prostitution! Money doesn’t smell?”
A fan called Ted suggested the show was part of the band’s strategy in view of its upcoming Russian tour.
“Now, in a country like Russia, I would think that it would be a lot easier to plan a tour if you are on the good side of the president as opposed to saying ‘no’ to him,” he or she wrote.
Deep Purple’s official site has chosen not to mention the Kremlin concert at all.
— By Sergey Chernov
TITLE: Thumbs up to Deep Purple!
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: Deep Purple and Tina Turner performed at Gazprom’s 15th birthday party in the Kremlin on Monday night, watched by 6,000 people, including company chairman and presidential front-runner Dmitry Medvedev.
“This is simply surreal,” Medvedev said on NTV television after the concert. “I started listening to Deep Purple when I was 13. At that time their music was banned. I never would have imagined meeting the famous group in the Kremlin Palace.”
President Vladimir Putin opened the celebration, thanking Gazprom, which grew out of the Soviet Gas Ministry, for providing one-fifth of the federal budget and congratulating it on becoming Europe’s largest company by market value, which he put at $350 billion.
The five-hour celebration took place after a threat by state-run Gazprom to cut supplies to Ukraine, the main transit route for its gas shipments to Europe, over an unpaid debt.
CEO Alexei Miller left talks with Ukraine’s state energy company Naftogaz Ukrainy to attend the extravaganza, extending the deadline for resolving the debt issue by eight hours to 6 p.m. on Tuesday.
Putin sat between Miller and Medvedev during the first part of the celebration, which featured domestic stars.
“It’s a great celebration. Gazprom has come of age, and they’re throwing their coming-out party as a global energy company,’’ Ian MacDonald, the head of Chevron’s Russian operations, said during a break.
Deep Purple came on following the second intermission, after the “Gazprom” sign over the stage had been removed. As they belted out some of their 1960s and 1970s classics, including their signature hit “Smoke on the Water,” the audience, mostly made up of middle-aged managers from Gazprom’s Moscow headquarters, sat impassively in suits and ties, with only the odd shake of the head to indicate they were listening.
Attempts by lead singer Ian Gillan, who sang barefoot, to encourage audience participation led to the kind of slow, steady handclap that used to reverberate around the wood-paneled hall during Communist Party congresses. It was left to a small group of students and young executives sitting at the sides of the hall to wave their hands above their heads and give the odd whistle or shout.
Turner flew to Moscow directly from Los Angeles, where she had appeared with Beyonce at the Grammy Awards the previous night. Together with two back-up singers and three dancers, Turner sang nine hits. When she asked the audience, “Is everybody all right?” her question was met with silence.
Opera singer Dmitri Hvorostovsky opened the party. Pop diva Alla Pugachyova, 58, took the stage later, luring First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov and then Medvedev to dance in front of the stage.
Bloomberg, Reuters
TITLE: Blast from the past
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: As Jethro Tull prepares for its 40th Anniversary U.K. tour in April, the veteran art-rock band returns to St. Petersburg to perform a concert at Oktyabrsky Concert Hall on Thursday, before going to Moscow and then Odessa, Ukraine.
This time, the British band that toured Russia in 2003 and 2006 comes to the country when the British-Russian relationship is at its nadir, after Alexander Litvinenko’s murder, a tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats and, most recently, the shutting down of the British Council. But Jethro Tull vocalist and flute player Ian Anderson, who formed the band in 1968, objects to the Cold War comparisons.
“The current situation would seem to suggest a lot of tension that is growing and there’s a lot of talk about things sliding back to the Cold War tensions of the 1970s and 1980s,” said Anderson, who was awarded with an MBE (Member of the British Empire) medal in December, speaking by phone from his home recently.
“I think that’s exaggerated, I think that your Mr. Putin is a clever guy. He knows what he wants out of life, and oil and gas money are on the priority for himself as well as for the country.”
In Anderson’s opinion, things will not get much worse between the two countries, because Putin is pragmatic.
“He’s a pretty clever guy,” he said.
“I don’t think he will be making the mistake of dragging Russia back into the Stone Age relationship that it had before, but nonetheless he’s a strong leader, and pragmatism would suggest he’s probably still the best guy to be running your country. It does require a strong hand, and Russian democracy is different to Western democracy, it’s different to the democracy of the U.K. or the U.S.A.”
Anderson, who first came to St. Petersburg in the late 1980s and once posted a photo on Jethro Tull’s website showing him with Putin when the Russian president was an aide to the late St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak, said democracy in Russia has a long way to develop.
“We have to compare things on a like-for-like basis, you got to compare apples with apples and pears with pears, and the Russian situation is still different, it’s still an emerging country in terms of political and social organization, it is still facing a new beginning,” he said.
“It’s not that long, really. It’s 15 years since the fall of the Communist regime, and I think it’s still pretty early in the new Russia for there to be a complete easy stability from the perspective of the West. It’s still something that is taking shape. Sometimes things will look better for a while, sometimes it’ll slide backwards for a while.
“I don’t think we are looking at an ongoing decline in the relationships, I think we’re just looking at Russia, the Russian leadership flexing its muscles and showing that it’s a strong country, a proud country, a country that has its place in the world and it wants to demonstrate it’s not going to be a subsidiary country or a mere ally of America.”
The March 2 presidential elections in Russia might be all set up in order not to let anybody but the Kremlin’s candidate Dmitry Medvedev win, but, according to Anderson, it is the U.S. presidential election in November that will make a difference to the world — including Russia.
“I think it’ll be very interesting to follow the next American election to see how the next American administration develops its relationship with the Russian leadership as it will be at that time,” he said.
“Presumably Mr. Putin will no longer be on the face of it, in charge of the country. So it’s interesting times, but I don’t think it’s as bad as some people say of the relationship between Britain and Russia. Clearly it’s a testing time but I wouldn’t put it on the same level or even anywhere close to the same level as it was back in the 1970s.”
As the U.S. elections go, Anderson’s sympathies lie with the Democrats’ candidate Barack Obama.
“I would guess that most people outside the U.S.A., if by some miraculous chance we could vote in the U.S. elections, would rather see Barack Obama heading the administration than any of the alternatives.
“I think outside the U.S.A. Barack Obama would have the popular vote of the rest of the world. And Senator McCain would certainly not. He’d be right at the back.
“There will be the awful reality, if McCain got in to power and we’ll have another Republican administration with McCain in charge, we would be taking some big steps backwards in terms of relationships between the U.S. and the increasingly hostile remainder of Planet Earth.”
Jethro Tull performs at Oktyabrsky Concert Hall on Thursday. www.jethrotull.com
TITLE: Summer loving
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Markscheider Kunst, one of Russia’s highly reputed live bands, has released a new album — its first studio outing that it is not ashamed of, it claims. Called “Cafe Babalu,” the album will be at Modern Art Center on Saturday.
“‘Cafe Babalu’ is a romantic, nostalgic song about summer, about a good summertime mood, about kind, warm places,” said frontman Sergei “Yefr” Yefremenko about the title track that sets the mood for the album.
“In reality, it is all about the Crimea, about such towns as Meganom and Sudak.”
“Cafe Babalu” is the St. Petersburg-based, Latin-influenced eight-member band’s first album of new material since 2003’s “Na Svyazi” (In Touch).
Between the two, the band unearthed “St. Petersburg-Kinshasa Transit,” its 1998 album that had failed to receive a proper release at the time, and released it in 2004. It also put out a new CD single called “Ryba” (Fish) in 2006.
“This album stands out because we like it ourselves, both performance and recording,” said Yefremenko.
“Usually the concert is always better than the record. We didn’t like any of our recordings. We didn’t really want to record because we would fail to come up with anything good. We didn’t know how to work in a studio, it just didn’t work. This time we like it. We are not ashamed of it. This is the main difference from our previous work.”
Unlike Markscheider Kunst’s other works, “Cafe Babalu” is heavy on instrumentals. “We included more instrumental tracks in this album, so there should be a greater amount of collective work,” said Yefremenko, the band’s lyricist and co-composer.
“It’s not only the songs that I have written (I am responsible for all the songs with lyrics), but also music that had been composed by everybody. So it’s essentially a collective work.”
Although having started out as a rhythm and blues trio in St. Petersburg in 1992, Markscheider Kunst has become famous for its eclectic blend of ska, funk, reggae, Brazilian rhythms and salsa.
“As always, we wanted to make a highly diverse and interesting record,” said Yefremenko. “I don’t like records made in one style myself, and I don’t think anybody is able to listen to ska or salsa or rumba for a long time by itself, unless they are a die-hard fan of it. Diversity, eclecticism is what we like. This is what we wanted and what we achieved.”
Markscheider Kunst’s lineup has undergone some changes over the past few years. Trombone player Ramil Shamsutdinov, who formed the basis of the band’s brass section, quit in 2002, to be followed, later, by long-time drummer Sergei “Yegor” Yegorov last year. According to Yefremenko, the search for replacements has delayed work on the album, which was recorded in three sessions with long pauses in between.
“Cafe Babalu” is also the band’s first album without vocalist Seraphim Selengi Makangila, who quit in late 2003.
The Democratic Republic of Congo-born Makangila, who studied with Markscheider Kunst’s founding members at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute and originally performed with the short-lived all-African band M’Bond Art, joined in 1995, bringing his native Soukuss rhythms and the Lingala language to the band’s work.
The African rhythms have gone with Makangila, who now leads his own band, Simba Vibration.
“Soukuss is African music that we’re capable of playing but it should only be sung by an African,” said Yefremenko.
Since 2000, Yefremenko has also been the frontman of Tres Muchachos, Markcheider Kunst’s spin-off band that performs an early-to-mid-20th century Cuban repertoire. With Tres Muchachos he plays the tres, the three-string Cuban guitar.
“Tres Muchachos is not stylized or [an expression of] eclecticism but pure style. We take the pieces that almost go unperformed now, and play them by the old rules, how it was done there and then — authentically,” he said.
“But Markscheider Kunst is our music, our arrangements and, therefore, the complete freedom of fantasy. All irreverence, provocations and jokes are possible.”
Markscheider Kunst performs Saturday at 8 p.m. at at Modern Art Center located at 93 Sredny Pr. (Vasilyevsky Ostrov). Tel. 322-4223. www.mkunst.ru
TITLE: Farewell kiss?
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Out on DVD for St. Valentine’s Day across Russia is a heartwarming drama about a man and a woman who love each other and their country — and who bear an uncanny resemblance to President Vladimir Putin and his wife, Lyudmila.
Just when it seemed like Putin’s public image had been burnished to a spotless shine by state television, along comes a film that appears to cast the steely former spy in a softer light — as smitten suitor, loving husband and dedicated dad.
While acknowledging “many similarities” with Putin, producer Anatoly Voropayev coyly claims the lead character in “Potselui Ne Dlya Pressy” (“A Kiss Off the Record”) is based on a “collective image,” not the president himself.
“We believe that since today we are not ashamed of our leader, why not make heroes who are like him?” Voropayev told The Associated Press.
The film appears designed to fill a gap in the hagiography of the popular president by providing an inspirational backstory for his rise to the Kremlin.
Its straight-to-DVD release on Thursday came 17 days before the election of his successor, at a time of uncertainty about Putin’s future role.
“It’s a film about the life of a politician, about love, about people in general and the human relationships every person has,” Voropayev told Ekho Moskvy radio last week.
Few people, however, have so much in common with Putin.
Like Putin, the main character courts his wife-to-be in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, and moves with her to Cold War East Germany — where Putin was a KGB officer. He then returns home for a stint in St. Petersburg and scales the heights of power in Moscow.
The character, Alexander Alexandrovich Platov, has more hair than Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, but the style is the same. Seen from behind on the promotional poster, the actor playing Platov is a dead ringer for the Russian president.
Another giveaway: Platov, like Putin, is always late.
Few of the people who packed a special screening at a central Moscow movie house Monday night were in doubt about the subject of the film, which will not be released in cinemas.
Natalia Serebrovskaya, who attended the showing, knew Putin from his days in St. Petersburg and said that she recognized the president’s speech and gait.
Some opposition activists disrupted the viewing with shouts of “Putin’s an executioner!” and unfurled a banner from the balcony that read: “Putin is a criminal.” Film critics alternately lambasted it as crude propaganda and sniffed that it is so bad it couldn’t have been commissioned by the Kremlin because it is too embarrassing.
During the past eight years, the Kremlin has spent a lot of effort promoting images of Putin in his public role as a decisive, stalwart and indomitable leader. Television viewers see him almost every night — flying in a jet fighter, speaking in ornate Kremlin halls, chewing out Cabinet ministers.
But little is known of his private life. He seems to talk about his dog more than about his family. His daughters’ lives are nearly invisible.
First lady Lyudmila Putin is rarely seen, even more rarely heard. Putin often travels without her, and she appears uncomfortable in front of cameras.
“A Kiss Off the Record” changes all that. The daughters are prominent, and Platov’s wife, Tatyana, is in focus as much if not more than her husband.
As a family man, the hero is a mixture of regular guy and miracle worker.
He sometimes has trouble juggling his family obligations and the demands of his high-pressure job. But he’s always there when it counts, helping his wife walk again after a car crash and rescuing the girls from a burning dacha.
There’s even a bedroom scene. And Platov appears faithful: When the limping Tatyana sits up one night fearing the worst, he returns with flowers and a cane that he spent hours seeking out.
“My view of the president has changed,” said Galina Makarova, a film company employee, after attending the showing. “It shows a new side of our president.”
The film’s timing has raised eyebrows. Shot in 2002 and 2003, it is being released ahead of the March 2 election, when Russia is expected to ratify Putin’s choice of a successor, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.
Putin must step down in May, but has said he would accept Medvedev’s offer to serve as prime minister — a switch that would leave him in the thick of politics and poised for a return to the presidency.
Voropayev told The Associated Press that he neither sought nor received Kremlin approval for the release — a statement few government critics would believe. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin’s administration “had nothing to do with the film.”
Denis Fadeyev, a 30-year-old businessman, liked the movie. But he said that if it was meant to benefit Putin, it was too late.
“We’re more interested in Medvedev now,” he said.
TITLE: All the world’s a stage
AUTHOR: By Olga Sharapova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Fifth International Musical Hermitage Festival which is organized by the State Hermitage Museum and the Hermitage Music Academy promises a host of festive and unusual cultural events during the last month of winter. For a week beginning Sunday, music lovers will enjoy concerts presenting various styles and epochs.
Among the most interesting performances is the first of the festival at the Hermitage Theater with French violinist Pierre Amoyal playing a Stradivarius which once belonged to Tsar Nicholas II. The event is not only a classical concert but also a detective story that will tell the adventures of the great violin.
On Wednesday, Israeli musician Yair Dalal performs an experimental program in which Arabian music meets classical, while more contemporary ethno-fusion will be performed by legendary Tuvan throat-singer Sainkho Namchylak on Saturday, Feb. 23.
“With her shaved head and seven-octave range, Sainkho Namtchylak would stand out on any stage. Add her particular mix of Tuvan throat-singing and avant-garde improvisation, and she becomes an unforgettable figure,” wrote the All Music Guide.
By tradition, the Musical Hermitage Festival includes an all-star jazz performance this year with such stars as Andrei Kondakov, Igor Butman, Eddie Gomes and Lenny White. The jazz session takes place at the State Capella Hall on Thursday, Feb. 21.
Roland Pirmez, president of Heineken Russia, an official partner of the Musical Hermitage events, said the company is pleased to support the festival.
“We are absolutely convinced that business and culture can and should work together to support revival and maintenance of distinguished traditions for future generations,” Pirmez said. “St.Petersburg is called the cultural capital of Russia and I am sure it is true. I am very lucky to have been working in St.Petersburg for six years now. Cultural life here has always been rich for exciting and exclusive events. The Musical Hermitage Festival is a great example of a high class cultural performance where one can always enjoy meeting world famous names.”
This year’s festival is dedicated to the centenary of the late Boris Piotrovsky, a former director of the Hermitage Museum and father of its current director Mikhail Piotrovsky.
www.hermitagemuseum.org
TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: This week Russian celebrities have been turning their minds to spiritual matters, albeit with a photographer in tow. This week, actor Konstantin Kryukov bagged five pages of Hello! magazine with the christening of his baby in a Moscow church. Meanwhile, Zhizn tabloid filled two pages with pictures of pop singer Nikolai Baskov praying in a church in Greece. He was shown — in seven photographs — kissing an icon and filling a bottle with holy water. The story even merited a front page teaser, “Lord, forgive my sins!” although this was juxtaposed with a picture of reality show star Zhanna Friske in her bikini.
Kryukov is the nephew of film director Fyodor Bondarchuk, whose wife, Svetlana, is the editor-in-chief of the Russian edition of Hello! and so presumably approved the “exclusive” shoot. She doesn’t appear in the photographs of family and friends holding candles as a priest blesses the child, but her husband is shown in several shots.
There’s something slightly odd about inviting a glossy magazine to a church ceremony like this, especially since the baby is unlikely to provide a cute smile for the photographers. In Kryukov’s case, the baby’s face was pixellated out anyway.
He’s not the first parent to agree to such a photo opportunity. Pictures of pop star Glyukoza at her baby’s christening appeared in 7 Dnei magazine, and Hello! filled a page with the christening of ballerina Anastasia Volochkova’s daughter, although she didn’t allow photographers inside the church.
For its story on Baskov this week, Zhizn clearly took pictures of the crossover singer in a church with his permission. It also printed a plug for his role in a “stunning” opera premiere in Greece and a short interview. He talked of praying for help as he experiences “the most difficult stage of his life” — he recently separated from his wife amid a torrent of tabloid coverage.
The Russian tabloids quite often write stories about people’s faith, although they can sit uneasily with their other staples of topless women and gruesome crimes. Tvoi Den last year covered the case of a man with three brain tumors who said an icon had cured him. Even Komsomolskaya Pravda, its communist ideology long gone, sometimes writes about weeping icons and people who believe they have been cured by miracles.
The images of Baskov kneeling in prayer were reminiscent of flamboyant pop star Filipp Kirkorov’s rehabilitation after he caused a huge scandal in 2004 by swearing and making insulting comments to a journalist at a news conference. He disappeared for a while and then told KP that he had been living in a monastery in Tibet. He spoke of his gratitude to the victim of his tirade, a journalist who infuriated him by asking why he sang so many cover versions.
“If it weren’t for her, I would have exhausted myself, but this way I got the chance to stop, get my breath back and look around,” he said.
Last year, Kirkorov went to visit the Dalai Lama in India just before embarking on a series of gala concerts in Moscow. He told Zhizn all about it. “Even when he landed in Delhi, Kirkorov couldn’t believe that he was about to meet the Dalai Lama,” the tabloid wrote breathlessly. “After all, the wise man had only received internationally famous stars who follow Buddhism: Richard Gere, Steven Seagal and Sharon Stone.”
Kirkorov even provided the paper with some slightly surreal pictures of him shaking hands with the Dalai Lama and pushing a prayer wheel while wearing a blazer and striped tie — perhaps the only understated outfit he possesses. The Dalai Lama gave him some prayer beads, but the singer didn’t mention whether he reciprocated with a ticket to his show.
TITLE: Retro chic
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Leningrad Restaurant // 11A Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt // Tel: 6444446 // Open daily from 12 p.m. until 1 a.m. // Menu in Russian and English // Dinner for two with alcohol 2,900 rubles ($116)
In a St. Petersburg that is being visibly transformed every day from a faded former Imperial capital into a renovated and fast-developing modern metropolis, some residents may be experiencing nostalgia for the old Leningrad.
Those feeling wistful for a bygone age might think that the opening last week of a restaurant named Leningrad symbolized hope for their longings for the Soviet Union. On the other hand, frequenters of Eduard Muradyan’s other projects, such as Decadance nightclub and Korova Bar steak restaurant, will know that there is very little that is Soviet about their glamorous décor and often pretentious clientele.
In his new project, Muradyan has taken an impressively pragmatic approach. The menu has two pages, entitled “Russian” and “New Russian.” The former offers such classics as Egg Mayonnaise and home-made meat, cabbage and mushroom pies (tasty but small at 50 rubles, $2 apiece), along with that old favorite, Herring in a Fur Coat, for starters. They are followed by a selection of traditional soups such as borshch and solyanka for 250 rubles ($10). Main meals also comprise a full spectrum of traditional Russian dishes such as pelmeni, blini, mushroom julienne (without which no Russian feast would be complete) and inevitably, Beef Stroganoff.
There are some equally traditional drinks available including kvas, mors and medovukha (honey beer, highly recommended) all of which are home-made and cost 450 rubles ($18) per liter.
However, the menu is not the only aspect of Leningrad that is reminiscent of Soviet times. The restaurant is housed in a former factory close to Lenfilm film studios on the Petrograd Side and in keeping with its premises, the dining hall is one large room with high ceilings. Proletarian metal pillars supporting the ceiling contrast with the pristine tablecloths. The stairs leading up to a small mezzanine level also have a distinctly retro air about them, while another Soviet touch is the presence of a stage on which a quartet perform a mixture of jazz, blues and Soviet pop and film theme tunes from the 60s-80s.
However, times have changed, and history has demonstrated that it is never possible to faithfully recreate the past. Even if the entertainment was more authentic and the band performed the raucous numbers by Boney M, Smokie and Abba that were popular a quarter-century ago, perhaps diners would find it incongruous with the luxurious armchairs and immaculate wait staff. Sadly, there is no dance-floor in front of the restaurant’s stage, as was popular in the Soviet Union, but if there had been, the band would surely demand more than a collective whip-round of ten rubles to keep on playing these days. Diners nostalgic for traditional Leningrad toilets (it takes all sorts) may well be disappointed by the pristine, black marble haven concealed by an equally spotless mirrored door.
Progressive types, however, should be able to find all the pleasures of modern life on the New Russian half of the menu, comprised of more international and contemporary gastronomic treats such as snails, foie gras, miso soup, steak and lasagne.
Ultimately however, as with Muradyan’s other ventures, the food is not the main attraction here. The “Yeralash” salad (250 rubles, $10) from the New Russian menu was pleasant enough, as were the miso soup (200 rubles, $8) and fettuccine in a cheese and mushroom sauce (450 rubles, $18), but there was very little that was special about them.
TITLE: The Dutch Student Orchestra
TEXT: The Dutch Student Orchestra (Nederlands Studenten Orkest, NSO) has established the tradition of ending its national tour each year with an international concert date.
This year it has chosen to visit St. Petersburg — and added an extra performance — to perform two classical pieces and a new work by a young Dutch composer.
This year’s pieces are: Johannes Brahms’ Double Concerto for violin and cello (Opus 102), the German composer’s last work for orchestra, composed in 1887; Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7, the Austrian composer’s popular work from the mid-1880s; and Joey Roukens’ intriguing new work called “From Funeral to Funfair (and Back...).”
The NSO is a unique symphony orchestra that is newly formed each year out of talented amateur musicians who study at Dutch universities.
Since it was formed in 1952 a substantial part of the profits of each tour has been donated to disabled students and refugee students.
The orchestra will be conducted this year by Micha Hamel, a young and successful professional conductor, while soloists include Birthe Blom on the violin and Joris van der Berg on the cello.
— Matt Brown
Thursday, Feb. 21: NSO Tour at the Hermitage Theater
Saturday, Feb. 23: NSO Tour at the Grand Throne Room of Peterhof Palace (6 p.m.).
www.nso.nl
TITLE: Three-hanky weepie
AUTHOR: By Manohla Dargis
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: It would be easy to dismiss “P.S. I Love You,” about the agonies visited on a young married couple, as the big-screen equivalent of a paperback romance. Certainly the refined critical mind understands that this is the kind of artful emotion machine that the movies have been making since the very first tear slid down an actress’s face, the droplet seen — and experienced — around the world by audiences who answered that bead of dew with a grateful flood of their own. Cry us a river, Mary Pickford!
Movies that make you bawl were sometimes called five-hankie weepies, a sneery label calculated to insult the film and the teary filmgoer alike. There aren’t a lot of these made anymore in America, mainly because most of our movies now are about men and not women. Even so, there are plenty of covert male weepies, films that transform emotions into actions, including acts of violence. “Michael Clayton” is a male weepy, as is “American Gangster,” which turns a duel between tough guys into a veritable drum circle of two. “P.S. I Love You” is more obviously a weepy, but because it leavens sorrow with laughter, it probably requires no more than three hankies. I wouldn’t know: I just used the back of my hand.
The film stars Hilary Swank, a square-jawed beauty at once angular and bosomy, vaguely masculine and unequivocally feminine, whose greatest roles — in “Boys Don’t Cry” and in particular “Million Dollar Baby” — have exploited her ambiguous physicality to enormous advantage. Like some of the greatest sob sisters of the big screen — think of Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford — she has a kind of working-class toughness bordering on hardness that makes the eventual cracks in her armature all the more effective. Unlike Stanwyck and Crawford, though, Swank can come across as intensely, almost desperately eager to please, which invests her with tremulous pathos or makes you feel embarrassed on her behalf. Stanwyck would have booted her offscreen. Crawford would have eaten her for breakfast.
Perhaps because of this masculine-feminine ambiguity, Swank has not often been cast as a romantic foil opposite men. She wooed another woman beautifully in “Boys Don’t Cry,” and in “Million Dollar Baby” played the adoring daughter to a surrogate father, a symbolic romance conducted principally inside the confines of a boxing ring. One reason she was so good in Brian De Palma’s convoluted noir “The Black Dahlia,” in which she crept around like poison ivy, is that her performance as a femme fatale is set inside quotation marks. She didn’t register as a toxically dangerous woman but as an idea of that irresistible sexist cliché. She filled out her character’s snug gown as a drag queen would.
“P.S. I Love You” looks squeaky clean and utterly straight and very much removed from the shadow worlds in which Swank has done her best work. Yet as directed by Richard LaGravenese, who shares screenwriting credit with Steven Rogers, it has a curious morbid quality. Swank plays Holly Kennedy, a 29-year-old New Yorker who, shortly after the story takes off, becomes a widow. Her husband, Gerry (Gerard Butler), however, doesn’t fully disappear. Instead he visibly lingers in her apartment — he seems less like a ghost than like a manifestation of mad grief — and in the letters he left behind. These letters are full of bossy instructions for Holly on how to grieve and live. They are, in essence, a primer on how to be a widow.
LaGravenese, who last directed Swank in the sympathetic drama “Freedom Writers,” is in sync with his star from the get-go. He puts her in the middle of the frame and in a succession of mostly flattering outfits, and smartly surrounds her with well-ripened second bananas, notably Kathy Bates, as Holly’s protective mother, and Lisa Kudrow and Gina Gershon, as her best friends. Harry Connick Jr. swings in and out as a possible love interest, as does the temperature-raiser Jeffrey Dean Morgan, a television actor (“Grey’s Anatomy,” “Weeds”) who bears a striking physical resemblance to Javier Bardem. Morgan’s appearance in “P. S. I Love You” finishes off Butler (last seen slaughtering Persians in “300”) far more effectively than does Gerry’s terminal illness.
“P. S. I Love You” won’t win any awards; it isn’t the sort of work that flatters a critic’s taste. It’s preposterous in big and small matters (Holly complains about a Lower East Side apartment that any sane New Yorker would kill for), and there are several cringe-worthy set pieces, some involving Butler and a guitar. The film is not a beautiful object or a memorable cultural one, and yet it charms, however awkwardly. Swank’s ardent sincerity and naked emotionalism dovetail nicely with LaGravenese’s melodramatic excesses: Together the director and his star create a swell of feeling that helps blunt your reservations about being played as an easy mark, a sap or, worse, a girl, even if that’s exactly what you are.
TITLE: Ronaldo Leg Injury May Lead to Retirement
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: ROME — Ronaldo ruptured a tendon in his right knee during AC Milan’s 1-1 draw at home to Livorno on Wednesday and faces nine months on the sidelines, according to Gazetta dello Sport.
AC Milan confirmed the extent of Ronaldo’s injury on their website, which he suffered just minutes after entering the fray as a second-half substitute and was taken to hospital.
Gazetta claimed the former three-time world player of the year’s career could be over as well.
“It’s an injury that could end the career of ‘Il Fenomeno’,” it said on its website.
“The recovery time is dramatic: from nine months to a year.”
Milan coach Carlo Ancelotti refused to call time on Ronaldo’s career, though.
“We’re all very sorry and worried about what happened to Ronaldo, I don’t want to say it’s the end of his career because only time can decide whether it is or not,” he said.
“From our part all we can do is stand by him and let him recover. Our players all left the stadium in a hurry to go to the hospital to check on his condition, I think that’s the right way to stand by a player who’s suffering.”
Ronaldo was taken to hospital from where Milan’s Brazilian scout Leonardo, said the striker had all but confirmed those worst fears.
“Ronaldo said it was exactly the same thing as last time,” said Leonardo, referring to the time when Ronaldo ruptured the tendon in his right knee in November 1999.
Ronaldo fell awkwardly just three minutes after replacing Alberto Gilardino in the second half on Wednesday.
He was challenging for a ball in the air with Jose Vidigal, although the move resulted in a penalty to Milan which Andrea Pirlo converted to level the scores.
“I heard a horrible sound, like a bang, it was a strange sound,” said Livorno goalkeeper Marco Amelia, who was close by when Ronaldo fell to the ground.
Milan vice-president Adriano Galliani said later he thought the problem was serious.
“Ronnie has a problem with the tendon in his left knee, it’s not the one he has already had operated on but it’s a serious problem.”
The last time Ronaldo suffered the same injury he managed to make his comeback in April 2000 but lasted only seven minutes before reinjuring his knee.
It was 20 months before he made a proper comeback for the 2002 World Cup, during which he finished as top scorer as he guided Brazil to a record fifth triumph.
However Ronaldo is now 31 and his contract at Milan runs out at the end of the season.
He has also been battling an expanding waistline and fitness problems for years and it is doubtful whether or not, having won everything there is to win in football — except the Champions League — he will have the motivation to make a comeback after his 32nd birthday.
TITLE: Zenit Kick Off With Win In The UEFA Cup
AUTHOR: By Gareth Arnison
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Third-place Spanish premier division team Villarreal CF took on FC Zenit St. Petersburg at Petrovsky Stadium on Wednesday in the last 32 of the UEFA Cup, but left without the result they were hoping for. The Russian champions dominated for 90 minutes in difficult conditions, and advance to the second leg with a 1-0 advantage.
The match began with early efforts as both goalkeepers were tested in the first 10 minutes with free kicks on target.
Vyacheslav Malafeyev stopped Villareal striker Nihat Kahveci’s effort and Diego López did well to save Anatoly Tymoschuk’s bobbling free kick. In the 21st minute Kahveci linked with a ball played through a gaping gap in the Zenit defense, but goalkeeper Malafeyev remained strong and deflected the shot. Its only chance squandered, Villarreal seemed unable to adapt to the strong wind, freezing cold and bumpy terrain, and the home side piled on the pressure.
Pavel Pogrebnyak scored in the 63rd minute as keeper Lopez attempted to clear an Andrei Arshavin pass into the box but missed the ball completely, giving Pogrebnyak an easy slot into an open goal. Pogrebnyak, who appeared in very good form, had a chance to increase Zenit’s lead shortly after, but had his shot blocked.
Zenit coach Dick Advocaat said he was “fairly happy with how the team played,” but was quick to point out that they will have to do the same next week.
Villarreal manager Manuel Pellegrini also looked ahead to the second leg of the tie.
“The weather was not the main reason for [our] defeat,” he said, adding, “I am sure that in Spain it will be a completely different game.”
Before the match Advocaat has expressed his disappointment at Zenit’s unwillingness to invest in new players.
“To tell the truth, I thought that after [winning] the Championship, Zenit would have invested in more than two players,” Advocaat told reporters on Tuesday.
But Zenit proved Wednesday that it is capable of playing competitively in the UEFA Cup, and that it is not content with exiting the contest at this stage.
The return leg will be played in at Villarreal’s El Madrigal stadium on Thursday, Feb. 21.
TITLE: Dismay Greets Ex-Drug Cheat’s Return to Track
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Sprinter Dwain Chambers has hit back at those criticizing his selection for Britain’s indoor world championship team, saying he is being made to feel like a leper.
Chambers was named in the team for next month’s event in Valencia on Tuesday after emphatically winning the British trials but UK Athletics said the selection committee was unanimous in its desire not to include him and did so only because they felt there was no alternative.
Chambers served a two-year ban after testing positive for the banned steroid THB in 2003 and, after an initial comeback was curtailed by a move to American football, returned to the sport last year.
UK Athletics wanted to ban him from the British trials because they said he had not undergone regular drug testing but the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) overruled them.
“I’m being made to feel like a leper,” Chambers told the Sun newspaper on Wednesday.
“A terrible stigma has been attached to me but people need to know I am clean. Yes, I did something wrong. I did the crime — but I’ve done my time and now I’ve moved on.
“Every morning I wake up knowing I have not fulfilled my potential, and that’s all I’m trying to do now. I believe I have two more years ahead of me,” said the 29-year-old.
“Other people are allowed to get on with their lives once they have served a punishment, so why can’t I get on with mine? At the moment, I am doing everything on my own. I am training from a local park, without a coach. Imagine what times I could do if I was back on the tracks, with a proper trainer and support.
“I respect people have opinions about me and they are entitled to those. I’m not going to get into a slanging match with them. But they should remember I’m only doing what I’m legally entitled to do. If the law forbade me from running, I wouldn’t be doing it.”
Legal or not, Chambers’ comeback was greeted with dismay by many former athletes, including Sebastian Coe, chairman of Britain’s 2012 Olympic committee.
“I don’t think you reach redemption by being selected for the next available championships,” said Coe, a double Olympic 1,500 meters champion.
“You have to put a bit back in. I would have had more sympathy with the rehabilitation argument a few years ago but now there is no ambiguity about this.
“If we’re not careful people will vote with their feet. Parents will not want kids going into a sport that they think is remotely ambivalent about the subject of doping.”
Former 400 meters Olympic silver medalist Roger Black said: “He is now a shining example of ‘give it a go, if you get caught, it doesn’t matter, you can come back’. You know the score as an athlete. If you cross the line, you should walk away. If you risk it and you cheat, you shouldn’t be back.”
The organizers of this weekend’s indoor grand prix meeting in Birmingham have announced that Chambers will not be invited.
“This is not a personal matter with regards to Dwain Chambers but a view taken as part of our responsibility towards protecting the image of the sport,” said former hurdler John Ridgeon, now managing director of Fast Track.