SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1356 (20), Friday, March 14, 2008
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TITLE: Opposition Party Evicted From Local Headquarters
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The local branch of the liberal party Yabloko has announced it is being evicted from its headquarters in central St. Petersburg and must move out by June 1.
The building is to be handed over to the city government and turned into a Museum of Entrepreneurship. Yabloko has rented offices there for the past 15 years.
News of the eviction came in the wake of Yabloko’s St. Petersburg leader Maxim Reznik being jailed for the duration of an investigation against him on charges of verbally and physically assaulting a policeman, a charge that he and his colleagues argue has been fabricated for political reasons. 
The city prosecutor’s office is also investigating whether Yabloko’s activities can be considered “extremist” under the law. 
“In the letter informing us about this forthcoming investigation we were asked to prepare our charter, financial documentation, full files on all our members and all publications sponsored by Yabloko,” said Alexander Shurshev, a spokesman for the local branch of Yabloko.
The first signs that Yabloko could lose its building came in May 2007. 
Party representatives said that City Hall’s Property Committee, which terminated the rental agreement with Yabloko, had been ignoring its attempts to prolong the deal for almost a year, leaving all letters and enquiries unanswered.
Yabloko’s previous 10-year contract with City Hall had expired in May 2006. 
The party’s local offices are located at 46 Ulitsa Mayakovskogo in the historical city center.
Boris Vishnevsky, a member of Yabloko’s political council said the party sees the hand of Governor Valentina Matviyenko in the rental issue and sees the eviction as a political act to exert pressure on the party, which has been critical of Matviyenko’s pro-Kremlin United Russia party. 
“We have always paid our rent on time, and been careful tenants, so the authorities simply cannot fault us in this respect,” he said. “But what annoys City Hall is that our headquarters are among less than a handful of remaining venues where the opposition and people whose activities challenge the authorities can gather.”
The St. Petersburg branch of Yabloko had in 2007 called for a city-wide referendum on the construction of a controversial new skyscraper for the headquarters of Gazprom, Russia’s energy giant. 
In December 2006, a group of Yabloko lawmakers from the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly sent a letter of protest to the General Prosecutor’s Office, asking that the legitimacy of the architectural contest held to select the plan for the tower and the deal between the city and Gazprom be investigated. According to the law, the  Prosecutor’s Office is obliged to answer a parliamentary inquiry within  a month but no reply has been sent from Russia’s Prosecutor General Yury Chaika or his office.
Yabloko was one of the key organizers of the March for the Preservation of the Historical Center of St. Petersburg, a rally against City Hall’s town-planning policies that activists say are threatening the city’s integrity and risk disfiguring the architectural landscape.
These initiatives have irked City Hall and Matviyenko, who has thrown her weight behind the ambitious Gazprom tower project and other controversial construction plans.
A group of St. Petersburg politicians, human rights advocates, writers and scientists sent an open letter to Matviyenko, calling the decision to evict Yabloko from its premises “an act of utmost disregard to more than 100,000 citizens who voted for the party during the State Duma elections in December 2007.”
If the eviction happens, the letter continues, it would seriously damage the activities of the civil society in the city.
“We are convinced that finding a home for the House of Entrepreneurs does not need to come at such a devastating price,” reads the letter, signed by writer Boris Strugatsky, lawyer Yury Schmidt, sociologist Boris Dubin and a group of thirteen lawmakers from the city’s Legislative Assembly. “The eviction of Yabloko is a truly unacceptable move.”
Matviyenko has not responded to the letter.
The planners behind the Museum of Entrepreneurs have tried to take some steam out of the eviction controversy.  
“The display will focus on the industrial achievements of local companies throughout the city’s history,” said Sergei Fyodorov, head of the Public Council on the Development of Small Enterprises at a news briefing Thursday. “Our organization will appeal to City Hall to provide Yabloko with an alternative space for their headquarters to avoid any speculation about a biased decision against the party and any prejudice.”

TITLE: Russia Slams U.S. Report as ‘Foreign Policy Tool’
AUTHOR: By Steve Gutterman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Year after year, the U.S. issues a troubling assessment of human rights in Russia.
Year after year, Russia lashes back, accusing the U.S. State Department’s annual report on human rights practices around the world of twisting reality and warning that Washington has no right to preach.
With relations at what could be a post-Cold War low, it is no different this time around.
In a sometimes bitter, sometimes sarcastic statement Wednesday, the Foreign Ministry said the portrayal of Russia in the 2007 report was prejudiced, mistaken, poorly sourced and counterproductive.
The ministry said the report reflected the “double standards” of a country it claimed uses human rights as a “foreign policy tool” while balking at scrutiny of its own actions.
“How else can one explain that the United States — which has essentially legalized torture, applies capital punishment to minors, denies responsibility for war crimes and massive human rights violations in Iraq and Afghanistan, refuses to join a series of treaties in the sphere of human rights — distortedly comments on the situation in other countries?” it said.
“Meanwhile, the U.S. uses the struggle to spread democracy and the defense of human rights as a cover, with no regard to systemic problems within its own country,” it said.
The U.S. report, released Tuesday, said that centralization of power in President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, corruption, selective law enforcement and onerous restrictions on aid groups and the media were among factors that “continued to erode the government’s accountability to its citizens” in Russia. It also noted human rights abuses in war-scarred Chechnya.
The Foreign Ministry said “the State Department’s latest opus” contained a “hackneyed collection of claims” about human rights in Russia.
“The document, unfortunately, abounds in groundless accusations, citations of unverified and deliberately biased sources, mistakes and juggling of facts,” the statement said. It did not offer specifics.
It said that “many passages were copied from previous reports: One gets the impression that the State Department just selected material to fit conclusions formed in advance.”
Russia took issue with the report’s reference to problematic elections and to a leading international observer group’s criticism of its December parliamentary elections. It accused the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s vote-monitoring body of “politicized approaches” and the U.S. of resisting reform.
Through eight years as president of an assertive country enjoying largely energy-fueled economic growth, Putin has made a point of shrugging off growing Western accusations of backtracking on democracy, and warned the U.S. against interfering in Russia’s affairs.
The Foreign Ministry criticized what it called the “mentorish tone” of the U.S. State Department report.
“We are convinced that politicizing the rights-protection issue and distorting the human rights situation in various countries will lead not to the resolution of existing problems, but to the devaluation of the principles and goals of international cooperation in this area,” it said.

TITLE: Barriers Going Up All Over Europe
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Despite booming investment, lawmakers both in Russia and Europe are preparing to raise barriers for foreign investors.
Germany, Russia’s biggest trade partner, wants to expand the government’s right to veto foreign investments in strategic sectors.
The State Duma is considering a bill that would require investors in a number of strategic sectors to seek official permission. The bill, in the making since 2005, is expected to be approved in a crucial second reading this week.
Other European countries have similar laws in place, notably France, where a 2005 bill stipulates that foreign investments into 11 sectors, including armaments, need ministerial permission. In the United States, the president can veto any deal perceived to threaten national security.
While some companies warn that growing protectionism will jeopardize trade, others say these laws are not only normal but could increase transparency for investors.
“Debates in Germany and other European countries ... have a strong populist ring,” said Michael Harms, head of the German Economic Delegation to Russia.
Open access on both sides is vital, and investors should be welcome regardless of the sources of their money, he said in a recent interview in his office in Moscow.
Foreign policymakers have raised the alarm about sovereign wealth funds, like the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and China’s State Foreign Exchange Investment Corp, which bundle their countries’ rapidly growing capital. But when it comes to Russia, Gazprom has also been at the center of the debate.
Even in traditionally free-market Britain, rumors that Gazprom could bid for Centrica, the country’s biggest gas distributor, triggered an outcry last summer.
In Germany, which is heavily dependent on Russian energy, Gazprom sparked a minor panic when it cut supplies to Ukraine and Belarus in recent years. Germany’s bill granting veto rights to the government was initiated last summer after politicians from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union warned that the country could be “bought up” by foreign states.
A draft of the bill, a copy of which was obtained by The St. Petersburg Times, says existing veto powers would be extended from the defense industry to include the energy and telecommunications sectors. A buyer would need to seek permission to acquire 25 percent or more of a firm if the acquisition threatened “law and order or national security.” As an example of a national security threat, the bill identifies a possible energy-supply cut.
Like the Duma bill, the German legislation is being held up by competing interests within the government. Negotiations are still ongoing, Charlotte Lauer, a spokeswoman for German Economics Minister Michael Glos, said by telephone from Berlin. She explained that the Labor Ministry was demanding a greater say in the procedures. “Everybody agrees in principle but not on procedures,” she said.
Proponents argue, however, that it is only logical to implement such measures.
“In a free market economy, there should be competition among private owners,” said Godelieve Quisthoudt-Rowohl, a European Parliament deputy for the German Christian Democrats. If a state-owned company from a former Marxist economy buys a stake in a privatized utility, this overturns the rules of competition and might amount to a renationalization, she said in a telephone interview from Berlin.
The European Parliament is pushing for a directive to protect public sectors like utilities from foreign buyers. In a reference to Gazprom, EU Single Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy said last month that he did not see any difference between a state-owned enterprise and a sovereign wealth fund, Britain’s Guardian reported.
“The guiding principle is not to bar investment but to enhance transparency,” Quisthoudt-Rowohl said, adding that European laws are quite moderate in comparison with those in the United States.
Her comments were echoed by Richard Nowinski, a London-based barrister and experienced international lawyer. “The law proposed by the Duma is not exceptional and generally consistent with international law,” he said by telephone.
“This is less an attempt to prevent investment and more one to regulate it,” Nowinski said.
The difficulty, he said, lies in the complexity of defining the width of each strategic sector. “This will be an administrative challenge,” he said.
The Duma legislation was recently extended to include 43 strategic sectors. The inclusion of telecoms, fishing, publishing and the Internet has raised concerns that the definition of what is strategic is being stretched too far.
Nowinski played down such fears, arguing that Western countries also frequently worried about their national champions ending up in foreign hands. He recalled the outcry in France in 2005 when rumors emerged that U.S. food giant PepsiCo wanted to take over local dairy producer Danone.
Although PepsiCo’s ambitions were never officially acknowledged, the affair triggered the French strategic sectors bill, dubbed the Danone law. “You could say that France declared yogurt a strategic industry,” Nowinski said.
Dorothea Schoefer, a financial-markets analyst with the German Institute for Economic Research, said European fears were partly justified because sovereign funds have expanded worldwide, and Gazprom has openly used its monopoly power in recent price disputes with Ukraine and Belarus. “There is concern that its market power will be strengthened,” she said.
Schoefer offered a different solution: Instead of barring investors, they should be required to put their money in private equity funds. “By forcing investment into an intermediary institution, it gets more difficult to exert direct leverage,” she said.
She added, however, that the principle of reciprocity must be observed: “If [German energy giant] E.On can buy a Russian utility, then Russian energy firms must be able to do the same,” she said.
E.On last October bought generating company OGK-4 for $6 billion.
But even if reciprocity is achieved, Russian business is facing image problems in the West that, by all accounts, are not matched by the image of Western investors in Russia. “There is endless prejudice here. People think that Russians always have coffers full of dirty money,” said Dimitry Pilschikov, a Russian-born lawyer based in Augsburg, Germany, who advises fellow countrymen wishing to buy company assets.
Investors should expect “a thousand suspicious questions” to be asked both by authorities and prospective partners, he said.

TITLE: Serbia, Russia Call For UN To Block the EU in Kosovo
AUTHOR: By Edith Lederer
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: UNITED NATIONS — Serbia and Russia have demanded that the UN administration in Kosovo halt the transfer of authority to the European Union, calling a handover illegal and declaring they will never recognize the independence of the Serb province.
But the United States and Britain, who were among the first countries to recognize Kosovo after its Feb. 17 declaration of independence, said debates over whether Kosovo should have seceded are over and it’s now time to address the future of an independent Kosovo.
The EU is expected to take over UN administration of Kosovo and has sent a mission to implement Kosovo’s pledges under a UN-drafted plan for supervised independence. The plan was never approved by the Security Council because of Russian opposition, but it is supported by Washington and key EU nations.
Kosovo came under UN and NATO administration after a NATO-led air war halted former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic’s crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists in 1999.
Serbia, which considers the territory its historic and religious heartland, has rejected Kosovo’s statehood as illegal. Russia has backed Serbia, its traditional ally.
Serbia asked to address the Security Council Tuesday to discuss what its foreign minister, Vuk Jeremic, called “the dangerous consequences of the unilateral, illegal and illegitimate declaration of independence.”
He reiterated that Serbia “will employ all legal, diplomatic and political means at our disposal to continue asserting our core sovereign rights.” But he again ruled out military action and an economic embargo, which he said would hurt Serbia’s goal of a peaceful and prosperous Kosovo.
“Let me be clear: It is not that the EU is unwelcome in our southern province. For we do welcome, as a matter of principle, any demonstration of Europe’s deepening commitment to our country, including Kosovo,” he said. “But there has to be a clear legal mandate for any such commitment — and this can only be achieved by getting the approval of the Security Council.”
But the Security Council remains hopelessly divided over Kosovo.
A draft statement circulated Tuesday by Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin was almost immediately rejected by the U.S. and British envoys. 
It calls for the preservation of Serbia’s territorial integrity and for a settlement acceptable to both parties.
“It’s based on a premise which is now overtaken,” Britain’s UN Ambassador John Sawers said of the Russian statement.
Sawers said the EU’s role in Kosovo is not illegal. The 27-member bloc has always been part of the UN Mission in Kosovo and it is now a larger part than it was before, he said.
U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said Serbia and Kosovo must talk to each other and “come to an understanding based on the new reality — they are new neighbors with a lot of common interests.”
“Anything that focuses on how to help Kosovo consolidate its independence ... and work toward cooperation between Serbia and Kosovo ... we are certainly going to look at,” Khalilzad said.

TITLE: Car Thieves Plague Petersburg Drivers
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A car is stolen every 53 minutes in St. Petersburg, according to figures released by the city’s traffic police on Wednesday. A total of 8, 514 cars were stolen in the city in 2007, although this was 187 fewer than in 2006, the figures indicate. 
The most attractive mid-priced cars for thieves are the Toyota Corolla, Mitsubishi Lancer, Ford Focus, Mercedes, Mazda 6 and VAZ models, Andrei Marunich, head of the security department at the Northwestern regional office of RESO Guarantee insurance company, said at a news conference on car theft held to coincide with the release of the new figures.
“The situation with car theft has definitely changed since 2005-2006,” Marunich said. “If at that time thieves mainly hunted for premium class cars costing more than $50,000, then in 2007 they turned to mid-priced vehicles,” he said.
Marunich said that the Mazda 6 didn’t used to be “interesting” for thieves and that RESO registered only five cases of it being stolen in 2006. However, 30 cases of the Mazda 6 being stolen were recorded in 2007.
Marunich said that in 2007 RESO dealt with 400 cases of car theft and paid out $10 million in insurance claims.
“Each day thieves steal more than one car insured by the company,” he said.
Marunich said that, according to its figures, the most frequently stolen premium class cars are the Land Cruiser and the Toyota Lexus. 
Cars are most frequently stolen in the city’s Vyborgsky, Moskovsky, Krasnogvardeisky and Kalininsky districts.
At the same time the most popular places for car theft are parking lots located near big supermarkets and malls, especially those that are close to the ring road, Marunich said.
Marunich said insurance against car theft accounts for five to 10 percent of the cost of the vehicle.  RESO insists that car owners install an anti-theft alarm system on the vehicle.
Anna Talyanova, commercial director of Persei security systems company, said the most vulnerable cars are new cars that have not yet had anti-theft alarms fitted.
“However, now and then thieves also manage to steal cars equipped with radio and satellite navigation systems,” Talyanova said.
Talyanova said the most effective anti-theft systems combine both mechanical and electronic equipment.
“It’s well known that the thief will give up if it takes him more than 10 minutes. Car owners should do everything possible to make it difficult to steal their vehicle,” Talyanova said.
Talyanova said Persei has developed a new search system that can help find a stolen car even three years after it has been stolen.
“This device is very small and hard to find. It could become the panacea against the theft of mid-priced cars,” she said.
At the same time, Talyanova said that in 70 percent of cases when a car is equipped with an anti-theft alarm but still gets stolen, the owner is to blame.
“It happens when the owner doesn’t treat the alarm signal seriously enough. There are false alarms when a cat jumps on the car or it is towed. We let our clients know about the alarm every time it goes off, even in the middle of the night. But some people just don’t react,” she said. Talyanova said most car thefts happen at night, but are also common between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m.
Yury Lobanov, development director of the Northwestern branch of ARKAN alarm systems group, said car owners should also be careful when their anti-theft alarm systems are installed at a car service station. The manufacturer of the system is better placed to check that it has been properly installed. Lobanov said he had registered cases when anti-theft systems were not installed correctly — sometimes deliberately.
Marunich said RESO also restricted its list of car service centers to include only reliable partners.
Meanwhile, experts said car thieves are inventing more and more exotic ways to steal cars. They have even been known to tie an empty can to the car.  When the driver starts up the car, the can rattles and the driver gets out to see what is wrong. Thieves then jump in the driver’s seat and in a matter of seconds the car is gone, Lobanov said.
Marunich said there are also cases of so-called “winter car theft” when drivers start up the car and then get out to dust off the snow from it. At that moment the thief jumps in and steals the car.

TITLE: Protestant Group Calls for Closure of 2x2
AUTHOR: By Matt Siegel
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Protestant groups on Wednesday urged Prosecutor General Yury Chaika to shut down the cartoon channel 2x2 for broadcasting shows they claim promote homosexuality and religious intolerance.
It is the second time in a week that the network, owned by Vladimir Potanin’s Prof-Media Group, has come under fire for its content.
The Consultative Council of the Heads of Protestant Churches in Russia sent a letter to Chaika on Wednesday, accusing 2x2 of promoting “cruelty, violence, homosexual propaganda, religious hatred and intolerance” by airing cartoons such as “South Park,” said Vitaly Vlasenko, a spokesman for the group, which unites several Protestant denominations.
A spokeswoman for the Prosecutor General’s Office would not confirm whether prosecutors had received the letter.
Last week 2x2 pulled two of its shows — “Happy Tree Friends” and “The Adventures of Big Jeff” — after a receiving a warning from the government media watchdog that the shows promoted “a cult of violence and brutality.”
Under Russian law, a second warning letter could result in the loss of the channel’s broadcasting license.
Yekaterina Doglosheyeva, head of corporate affairs for Prof-Media, brushed off the criticism from the religious group.
“The Federal Culture and Cinematography Agency may be able to control the activities of our channel, but the Protestants cannot,” Doglosheyeva said.
While 2x2, which broadcasts Western cartoons largely aimed at adults, is hardly a media giant, it has managed to build something of a following since going on the air last year. The network had a 1.9 percent audience share last month, according to the most recent TNS-Gallup ratings. By comparison, MTV, which is also owned by Prof-Media and broadcasts over a considerably greater area, only had a 1 percent audience share in the same period.
Nor is 2x2 the only channel in Russia to broadcast similar cartoons. MTV also broadcasts South Park but has received no similar criticism from the Protestant group.
“We’ve only seen these types of programs on 2x2,” Vlasenko said. “If they’re also playing on MTV, then we’ll send a letter about them too.”
While a Moscow Patriarchate spokesman was quoted in Kommersant on Wednesday as saying that the Russian Orthodox Church supports the right of all citizens to “protest wickedness” by legal means, at least one Orthodox priest said not all cartoons on 2x2 are unfit for Christians.
“They also show ‘The Simpsons’, which, for example, I really love,” Father Mikhail Prokopenko said Wednesday, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Incendiary Blogger’s Case Is Sent to Court
AUTHOR: By Mike Eckel
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prosecutors have charged a Russian blogger who wrote on a popular Internet site that police should be publicly incinerated in what is believed to be the country’s first such case against a blogger.
Savva Terentyev said Wednesday he was charged with inciting hatred in a court in the northern city of Syktyvkar. The charges filed Tuesday stemmed from his posting on a Web forum in February 2007 that criticized police in the wake of a raid on an opposition newspaper.
“They’re trash — and those that become cops are simply trash, dumb, uneducated representatives of the animal world,” he wrote. “It would be good if in the center of every town in Russia ... an oven was built, like at Auschwitz, in which ceremonially, every day, and better yet, twice a day ... the infidel cops were burnt. This would be the first step toward cleaning society of these cop-hoodlum scum.”
The case comes at a time of growing concerns in Russia that authorities have begun to tighten control over the Internet.
Web logs, online newspapers, chat rooms and other Internet sites have emerged as a vibrant source of critical news and commentary in Russia, compared with much of the national media.
During outgoing President Vladimir Putin’s eight years in office, much of the once-critical mainstream media has been brought to heel. Major television stations have been taken over by the state, or by state-owned corporations. Reporters often resort to self-censorship fearing retribution by officials.
The RIA-Novosti news agency said Terentyev could face a $12,600 fine if convicted.
Internet experts say Terentyev’s case is the first time criminal charges have been brought against a blogger.
The Internet’s unfettered nature and people using it to challenge the government has long worried the Kremlin. Though access is still relatively uncommon in the country, Russians have quickly taken to using the Internet for sharing often biting commentary, or even to organize political demonstrations.
As a result, Russian lawmakers and authorities are discussing ways to tame the Web. Galina Kozhevnikova, an expert at the SOVA center which studies hate crimes in Russia, said Terentyev’s prosecution stemmed directly from new legislation on allegedly extremist literature, which she said was seriously flawed.
“To prosecute a person for a private commentary written on a not-very-popular blog that no one takes seriously in any way whatsoever — this is clearly an abuse of the law and discredit to the law,” she said. “This is clearly a signal to the blogosphere, which in Russia people now read like the free press, for real information.”
Parliament’s upper house is considering legislation that would make Web sites with more than 1,000 readers daily subject to the same regulations as print media.

TITLE: Baltika to Produce Asahi Premium Beer
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Baltika Brewery has signed a license agreement with Asahi, the largest Japanese brewery, by which Baltika will be the exclusive producer and distributor of Asahi Super Dry beer in European Russia and the CIS until 2012, the company said Thursday in a statement.
“A new super premium brand in our product portfolio will strengthen our position in the growing segment of top end licensed beer. Until now we have only distributed the Kronenbourg 1664 brand in this market segment. Despite the small sales volume, this brand is one of the most profitable in our portfolio,” said Anton Artemyev, president of Baltika Brewery.
“In 2008 we expect sales of Asahi Super Dry to grow at a high rate, much faster than the average growth of the licensed beer market,” Artemiev said.
Baltika claims that by the end of 2007 it held the largest share of the licensed beer market in Russia (27.6 percent). The brewery produces four licensed brands - Tuborg, Carlsberg, Foster’s and Kronenbourg 1664.
Sales of Kronenbourg 1664 increased by a record 132 percent last year, while Tuborg sales increased by 70 percent, Foster’s by 63 percent, and Carlsberg by 34 percent.
According to Business Analytica marketing agency, licensed brands are becoming more popular in Russia, their share in the beer market increasing from 17.3 percent in 2006 to 20.2 percent last year.
“Small amounts of Asahi beer have been imported to Russia for a long time now. With the licensing agreement and Baltika’s resources for distribution and advertisement, the brand has good chances of taking a significant part of the market,” said Snezhana Ravlyuk, head of the Ad Hoc department at Business Analytica.
Among the most popular licensed brands, Ravlyuk listed Tuborg (15.4 percent of the market), Miller (11.5 percent), Holsten (7.6 percent), Velkopopovicky Kozel (6.8 percent) and Heineken (5.5 percent).
“Like in many other consumer markets, in the beer market there is growing demand for premium brands, which are being heavily promoted,” said Tatyana Bobrovskaya, analyst for consumer markets at BrokerCreditService.
Bobrovskaya indicated that as well as the impressive sales dynamics, licensed brands are more profitable than low- and middle-priced beer brands.
“Baltika will expand its range with this new brand, which is good for the brewery’s image. The production volume of this brand will not be enormous, but after the initial trial period, production volume could be increased. Baltika has the necessary production facilities,” Bobrovskaya said.
According to COMCON data, the proportion of beer consumers in Russia has gradually decreased from 51 percent of the population in 2005 to 47 percent last year. However, the number of consumers of Baltika licensed brands has gradually increased.
Last year 20.5 percent of the population regularly consumed Tuborg, Carlsberg, Foster’s and Kronenbourg 1664, as opposed to 17 percent in 2006, according to COMCON.
However, licensed brands are still less popular than Russian brands. Tuborg is consumed by 13.2 percent of the population, while Baltika is consumed by 43.1 percent and Klinskoye by 23.7 percent. Tuborg’s closest competitor among the licensed brands, Miller, is consumed by 15 percent of Russians.
From June 2008, Baltika will start producing Asahi Super Dry in 0.33-liter bottles and 0.5-liter aluminum cans, while it will be available in restaurants from April. By the end of 2008, Baltika will supply Asahi Super Dry to the CIS countries.
Last year Asahi Breweries sold 19,000 hectoliters of beer in Russia, including 2,700 hectoliters in the European part of the country.
Asahi Breweries exports beer to 50 countries, and has licenses to produce in China, Thailand, the Czech Republic, Great Britain and Canada.

TITLE: Russia, Ukraine To Scrap Intermediaries
AUTHOR: By Dmitry Zhdannikov
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia and Ukraine will remove all middlemen in their gas trade, Russia’s gas export monopoly said on Thursday, ending years of opaque schemes which caused tensions between the two neighbors and alarmed investors. 
“There is no need for them now after we agreed to supply some volumes to Ukraine’s industrial consumers directly and given the upcoming rise in the 
Central Asian gas price,” Gazprom’s spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov told Reuters. 
The move is likely to be hailed by Ukraine’s Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who has demanded Moscow axe all intermediaries saying their role was unclear and led only to gas price increases for Ukraine. 
Her tough stance and Ukraine’s debt for previous supplies of gas were the main reasons behind a new round of tensions between Moscow and Kiev, which prompted Gazprom to briefly halve supplies to Ukraine earlier this month. 
Russia supplies a quarter of Europe’s gas needs and most of that passes through Ukrainian territory. 
European governments are wary of a repeat of the disruptions to Russian supplies to the continent in the winter of 2006, which came after a similar row between Gazprom and Kiev. 
This year, the two sides argued about Ukraine’s debts of between $600 million and $1.5 billion for supplies in 2007 and 2008. They were also at odds over the new contract for 2008 and the role of middlemen. 
A breakthrough seemed very close after Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s leader Viktor Yushchenko met in February and blessed a new deal between Gazprom and Ukraine’s state energy firm Naftogaz. 
Under that deal Gazprom and Naftogaz had been due to set up two joint ventures to sell gas to Ukraine and to consumers inside the country, but Tymoshenko said the scheme was no different from the current use of other middlemen. 
In past years, Gazprom has been selling gas it imports from Central Asia to RosUkrEnergo, an intermediary it co-owns with two Ukrainian businessmen on a 50/50 basis. 
RosUkrEnergo was then selling the gas to UkrGasEnergo, a 50/50 venture between RosUkrEnergo and Naftogaz, for re-sale in Ukraine. 
Gazprom’s minority shareholders have repeatedly criticized the role of both RosUkrEnergo and UkrGasEnergo, saying it lacks transparency. 
Kupriyanov said that under the new deal, reached by Gazprom’s chief executive Alexei Miller and Naftogaz’s head Oleg Dubyna on Thursday after two days of talks, there will be no intermediaries at all, including joint ventures between state firms. 
“This is a scheme similar to those we use in European countries, such as Italy for example,” he said.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Tekhnosila to Expand</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Tekhno-sila retail chain will open 12 new electronics supermarkets in St. Petersburg by 2011, investing $25 million into expansion, Interfax reported Tuesday.
Tekhnosila currently operates five supermarkets in St. Petersburg and a total of 206 supermarkets across Russia, estimating its share in the Russian electronics market at nine percent. Tekhnosila’s turnover increased to $1.4 billion last year.

<b>Russia Attracts Banks</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Foreign banks are keen to enter Russia, undeterred by turbulence on global financial markets, a central bank member said.
“I don’t see that the turbulence on global financial markets would influence the desire to come to the Russian market,” Mikhail Sukhov, head of the central bank’s licensing department, told reporters during a break in a meeting Thursday with bankers in Prokhorovo, near Moscow. “I haven’t heard of any banks recalling their petitions.”
The central bank is now reviewing “several” petitions by foreign banks seeking to open businesses in Russia, Sukhov said.

<b>Strict Emissions Policy</b>
MOSCOW (Reuters) — Russia will be strict when approaching proposals to reduce carbon dioxide emissions under the Kyoto protocol, a senior official said on Thursday. 
“We are working according to a principle of rejection,” Deputy Economy Minister Vsevolod Gavrilov told a news conference. 
Gavrilov valued Russia’s market for carbon credits at 100-500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

<b>Olympic Vodka Seized</b>
MOSCOW (AFP) — Russian prosecutors have confiscated thousands of bottles of illegal Olympic vodka, six years before the Winter Olympic Games come to Russia, an official said Wednesday. 
Close to 14,000 bottles of vodka that used the Olympic name without permission were confiscated last month, according to a statement on the website for the prosecutor’s office in the southern province of Krasnodar. 
“It’s the first such case” involving vodka production in the run-up to the winter Olympics to be held in Sochi in 2014, Yelena Kozyr, a spokesman for the Krasnodar prosecutors said Wednesday.

TITLE: Medvedev’s Ally Put Forward For Rosneft
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — A close ally of Russian president-elect Dmitry Medvedev has been nominated for the board of state oil giant Rosneft, a first signal that Medvedev is seeking to install his people in key posts.
Russia’s state property fund has proposed its head Yury Petrov, Medvedev’s former teacher at Leningrad State University, to the board of Russia’s largest oil producer, a property fund spokesman and Rosneft said.
A Kremlin source told Reuters the nomination was intended “to put his name on the map ... so one should not exclude he would go much higher.”
Rosneft is chaired by Putin’s close ally, the deputy head of the Kremlin administration Igor Sechin. Sechin is a highly influential figure and the informal leader of a hardliner faction of ex-KGB officers within the government.
This faction has clashed with the more liberal camp within the Kremlin, in which Medvedev has been a leading light. Sechin is expected to leave the presidential administration when Medvedev takes over but keep his Rosneft role.
The business daily Vedemosti reported on Thursday that Petrov had been nominated specifically as Medvedev’s counterweight to Sechin’s power within Rosneft.
Current President Vladimir Putin, Medvedev’s political mentor, will become prime minister after May 7, when Medvedev is sworn in, and will govern alongside his protege.
Political analysts and government sources say the two men are already working on how to split their responsibilities with Medvedev being keen to bring in some of his allies.
Putin and Medvedev say they will work harmoniously and respect the constitutional division of powers between president and prime minister.
Political analysts and Kremlin watchers are eager for any news about Sechin’s role after May as they say it would provide guidance whether Putin is in fact ceding power or whether Medvedev will stay in his shadow.

TITLE: Russia Needs 921 New Planes
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Airbus SAS, the world’s largest commercial aircraft maker, said Russian airlines will need to add 921 new airplanes by 2026 to replace their aging fleets and to meet growing demand for passenger air travel.
Russian carriers, led by state-controlled Aeroflot, will need 793 single-aisle and 128 twin-aisle airplanes worth a combined $78.7 billion over the next 18 years, Airbus said Wednesday in a presentation in Moscow. That will make Russia the No. 6 market, after the U.S., China, Britain, Germany and India.
Russia’s 160 airlines carried 18 percent more passengers last year, or 45 million travelers, according to preliminary results released by the Transportation Ministry. Russian carriers increasingly rely on foreign-made jets as the domestic industry is unable to build aircraft in sufficient numbers following the post-Soviet decline.

TITLE: Rogachyov Seeks Buyer For X5 Stake
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Billionaire Andrei Rogachyov said Wednesday that he had hired Morgan Stanley to find a buyer for the 21 percent stake in retailer X5 Retail Group that he owns jointly with three partners. 
Rogachyov, whose personal stake in X5 is around 12 percent, wants to sell the holding in the country’s largest food retailer to focus on real estate investment, he said. On Wednesday X5 shares fell the most in more than three months. 
“There is no particular need for money,” said Rogachyov, the co-founder of food retailer Pyatyorochka, which merged with the Perekryostok supermarket chain to form X5 in 2006. “If a good price is offered, then we would sell.” 
X5 slid $1.87, or 5.6 percent, to $31.75 in London, where the stock is listed. That was the steepest percentage drop since Nov. 27. The 21 percent holding is worth about $1.44 billion, based on X5’s current market value. 
The buyer “could be a large portfolio investor or several institutional funds, like Middle Eastern funds or sovereign funds,” said Brady Martin, an analyst at Alfa Bank. “It’s less attractive for a strategic investor because it’s still a minority stake.” 
Rogachyov said he had no “preferences” about the type of investor that will acquire the stake or the method of sale, adding that “everything depends on the price.” A sale on the market is unlikely as the stock would probably fall after an offering of that size, Martin said. 
Other holders of the 21 percent stake include Pyatyorochka co-founders Alexander Girda, Tatyana Franus and Igor Vidyayev, Rogachyov said. 
The billionaire said he would spend funds from the sale on his Terra On company, which invests in early-stage development projects. 
Rogachyov has spent $1 billion on the company and is raising additional funds from other investors.

TITLE: HSBC Appoints New CEO In Russia, Ready to Expand
AUTHOR: By Max Delany
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Europe’s largest bank, HSBC, is looking to ratchet up its Russia presence by pumping $200 million into its operation in the country and appointing a new Russia CEO, the bank announced Wednesday. 
The plans at HSBC, which calls itself “the world’s local bank,” will see the global brand plunge into retail banking and open up branches in Russia as early as this year. 
“We plan to become a very visible brand on the Russian market in the near future,” said Stuart Lawson, who has been appointed CEO of the Russian subsidiary, HSBC Bank (RR), pending Central Bank approval. 
The announcement is just the latest from an international banking major trying to crack into the Russian retail sector. 
While British banks like HSBC and Barclays have appeared slow to latch onto the growing potential of the Russian market, continental European rivals like Austria’s Raiffeisen International and France’s Societe Generale have made strides into the country’s booming retail banking sector. 
“One could debate when the right time to enter the market is — clearly today the Russian middle class is entrenched and very strong,” said Lawson, a Russia veteran, who previously headed Citibank’s operations in the country. 
“It is not too late to enter the market, and there might even be opportunities now that were not evident some years ago,” Lawson said. 
Although HSBC would be putting the $200 million dollars of equity toward stimulating “organic growth,” Lawson did not rule out the acquisition of a Russian bank. The injection of new capital still has to be approved by the Central Bank, HSBC said. 
“The right price for the right bank with the right business would be something we could review,” Lawson said. “But so far nothing concrete has been envisaged.” 
There are currently approximately 1,200 banks working in Russia and, although many of them do not offer the full range of standard services, there would still be a broad range of options if HSBC decided to buy. 
Analysts say that if HSBC is serious about Russia, it will be better off buying its way in, rather than relying on natural development. 
“It’s much easier to break into the Russian market by buying something,” said Svetlana Kovalskaya, a banking analyst at Renaissance Capital. 
Whereas Raiffeisen and Societe Generale have both bought Russian banks, Impex Bank and Rosbank respectively, Citibank’s attempts to start from scratch in Russia have met with limited success, Kovalskaya said. 
“It would seem that it is easier and faster to buy in than to do it greenfield,” Kovalskaya said. 
Although HSBC intends to offer its full range of retail services to clients in Russia, Kovalskaya said some areas offer far greater opportunities than others. 
“The market is very far from saturation, especially the retail and mortgage sectors,” she said. She also singled out the credit card sector as one with untapped potential. 
As proof of its expansionist intentions, HSBC has leased a 2,600-square-meter Moscow office site to house its back-office staff, call center, IT operation and training center.

TITLE: Let Russians Be Russians
AUTHOR: By Rodric Braithwaite
TEXT: Having listened to all the speculation about what kind of president Dmitry Medvedev will become, we should look more closely at a much more contested question: Are the Russians even capable of democracy?
Many people — both in Russia and abroad — argue that Russians have no democratic tradition, that they prefer the iron hand of the autocrat and that the country is too big, too heterogenous and too disorderly to be ruled any other way.
President Vladimir Putin is more subtle. He believes that Russians are not yet ready for democracy, that they need to be brought to it by a managed process, lest everything collapse in chaos. He reminds one of the British, who argued that Indian independence must be postponed until the natives were capable of governing themselves.
Given the chance, the Russians — like the Afghans, the Iraqis, the Pakistanis and others — turn out in large numbers to express their views through the ballot box. That is not enough, of course, to establish a working democracy in any country. But the result may well be a genuine expression of the popular view.
Most ordinary Russians, thoroughly inoculated against the Western model by the chaos, humiliation, poverty and corruption of the Yeltsin years and angered by endless hectoring and ill-conceived advice from the West, are willing to pay a price in democracy for the stability and growing prosperity that have accompanied the Putin years. So in the recent parliamentary and presidential elections, they twice voted heavily for a continuation of the “Putin system.” In the circumstances, that was a rational choice.
The Russian government manipulated the electoral process — outrageously — to get the right result. This is a curious sign of Putin’s weakness, not his strength, since no one doubted that most people would vote the way the government wanted, for their own good reasons. Nevertheless, both elections had a certain legitimacy despite the obvious flaws. The voters were offered a choice on March 2, and many of them took it. One in five voted for veteran Communist Party head Gennady Zyuganov — nearly twice as many as predicted. One in 10 voted for Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky. We may not like these results, but this is very different from what happened in Kazakhstan in 2006, when President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who had been in power for 17 years, was re-elected for another seven by 95 percent of the voters.
Democracy is about throwing the rascals out, and most Russians are reconciled to their current rascals. It was different in March 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev organized the first contested elections in any Warsaw Pact country, under an electoral system of mind-boggling complexity designed to preserve the Communist Party’s monopoly power. But the voters recognized the rascals all right. They voted tactically and with great sophistication to throw out the bosses of Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, a quarter of the regional party secretaries, a heap of generals and many other unpleasant people.
This remarkable democratic experiment then went wrong for a number of reasons: the sense of national humiliation that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ensuing poverty, the inability of the liberal intelligentsia — the self-styled “conscience of the nation” — to agree on any effective course of action, the determination of the hard men in the army and the party to get their own back.
That does not mean that Russians are “genetically” incapable of democracy. Their history and their culture have not been propitious. The country has indeed for most of its history been a closed and imperial autocracy. But here, too, the Indian example is instructive. A country with a far larger population, an even more heterogenous culture and an unbroken history of autocratic and imperial rule has run a remarkably successful democracy for the past 60 years.
Although Russians today do not enjoy a Western kind of democracy, they do enjoy an unprecedented, if precarious, degree of personal prosperity, of access to information, of freedom to travel and even — within limits — to express their views. To argue that they cannot go on to construct their own version of democracy is a kind of racism. It may take decades, even generations; the construction of democracy always does. But if the Indians can do it, so can the Russians.
George Kennan, that great Russia-watcher and U.S. diplomat and historian, got it right when he wrote in 1951, at the height of the Cold War: “When Soviet power has run its course ... let us not hover nervously over the people who come after, applying litmus papers daily to their political complexions to find out whether they answer to our concept of ‘democrats.’ Give them time; let them be Russians; let them work out their internal problems in their own manner. The ways by which people advance towards dignity and enlightenment in government are things that constitute the deepest and most intimate processes of national life. There is nothing less understandable to foreigners, nothing in which foreign influence can do less good.”
It is the wisest advice, but it is blissfully ignored by our policymakers who, like latter-day Christian missionaries, believe that we have a duty to spread the gospel of democracy — by military force, if necessary. Russians are not the only ones who find that proposition distinctly suspect.

Sir Rodric Braithwaite, British ambassador to the Soviet Union and Russia from 1988 to 1992, is author of “Moscow 1941: A City and its People at War.” This comment appeared in the Financial Times.

TITLE: No Internet Thaw Under Dima
AUTHOR: By Georgy Bovt
TEXT: The Russian blogosphere showed a lot of activity during the presidential election campaign. The only part of the pre-election televised debates to generate universal interest among bloggers was when Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky scuffled with a representative of rival candidate Andrei Bogdanov. If it were not for this heated exchange, most bloggers might never have known that there were debates at all.
Medvedev’s victory inspired a great many jokes and caricatures — some good-natured and others not. The most popular was a redub of a scene from the popular Soviet-era comedy “Prisoner of the Caucasus, or the New Adventures of Shurik.” In this classic film, there is a scene in a restaurant in which a Caucasus local convinces the naive Shurik, a Muscovite college student on vacation in the region, to take part in the “ancient custom of stealing the bride.”
In the Internet redub, young Shurik is “Dima” (Medvedev). The schemer convinces Dima to take part in the “ancient custom” of selecting the next president in which Dima will play the main role. Dima, who is told that he was selected by Putin himself to become the next leader of the country, is introduced to the three other spoof candidates and is told that they have absolutely no chance of winning. It seemed as if everyone on the Internet in Russia saw the clip within a day of its appearance.
Russia’s blogs increasingly serve as alternative sources of information to the mainstream media, which is becoming more restricted in what they can say or write about the Kremlin.
But the media crackdown has also been extended to the blogosphere as well. For example, authorities have already initiated criminal proceedings against several bloggers in a town in the Komi republic and other regional cities on grounds of inciting interethnic or racial hatred or of extremism, which is defined and interpreted very broadly by law enforcement officials. New legislation makes it possible to label any critical commentary of federal or regional authorities as extremism.
The Russian blogosphere is truly becoming more courageous, offering its own take on events as an alternative to the official line. In other words, it is becoming a political liability. More than 20 million Russians actively use the Internet, and of those, 3.5 million actively participate in blogs — 2.6 times more than last year. Russia’s blogosphere is more concentrated than in other countries, with 75 percent of all blogs located on one of five web sites: LiveJournal.com, LiveInternet.ru, Diary.ru, Blogs@Mail.ru and LovePlanet.ru. LiveInternet.ru hosts the most blogs, but no more than 20 percent are updated regularly. More than 7,000 new blogs and 210,000 entries appear on the Russian Internet every day.
It is not surprising, then, that politicians are considering plans to regulate the Internet. This involves more than simply filing criminal charges of extremism against individual bloggers as a scare tactic and a warning to others. It means direct regulation. A bill was recently drawn up that would have required every blog with more than 1,000 visitors per day to register with the authorities. Officials later shelved that bill due to technical flaws, but the concept is still popular in the Kremlin and among State Duma deputies.
The Kremlin seems to be moving toward the Chinese model, in which the government denies citizens access to anything other than officially approved web sites. This trend is bound to continue unless Medvedev decides to reverse its course. 
Personally, I do not anticipate such a thaw in the Kremlin’s cold attitude toward the Internet, if for no other reason than because Medvedev has always paid close attention to the Internet, and he has never underestimated its ability to mobilize citizens against the ruling elite.

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

TITLE: Brothers under the skin
AUTHOR: By Roland Elliott Brown
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A man stands in a darkened room, shirtless, his body all muscles and ink. His left shoulder is adorned with an arc of onion domes and an icon. On his lower torso is a Russian Orthodox priest. His tattoos mark him as a former zek, or prisoner, and an “honest thief.”
The man is one of the subjects of Canadian photographer Donald Weber, who has immersed himself in the world of Russian and Ukrainian ex-cons, visiting them at their homes and documenting their elaborate tattoos.
“What intrigues me about the zeks is that their life is very rich in nuance and consciously layered with meaning,” Weber said in a recent telephone interview from Kiev. “Russian criminals take their tattooing very seriously, because whatever’s on their body defines who they are or what they are going to be. They can never escape it.
Russian prisoners apply tattoos to each other’s bodies using improvised tools and inks. The designs describe their criminal histories as well as their social and sexual status within the prison. This tradition has been practised among career criminals — or ‘honest thieves’ — at least since the 1920s.
Weber aims to produce a book about ex-prisoners, prostitutes, and the subculture to which they belong. He describes the project, titled “Zek: In the Prison of the East,” as a work of art, rather than conventional photojournalism.
“I try not to say I’m a journalist at times because I’m not just factually documenting what I’m seeing [in Russia and Ukraine]. It’s more about my ideas and my perception of the place,” he said.
“My basic premise is that Russia is a prison society,” he said. “And that is deep in its history, in its historical bones. That probably goes back to Kievan Rus.”
Based in Toronto until recently, Weber has published his work in magazines including Time and Newsweek. He also takes assignments from nongovernmental organizations such as Medecins Sans Frontieres. Since 2005, he has concentrated on documenting the lives of people dwelling on the gloomy peripheries of the former Soviet Union.
For his 2005 photo essay, “The Underclass and its Bosses: Ukraine,” Weber tagged along with east Ukrainian vice cops as they busted down doors and roughed up suspects. 
He juxtaposed the handful of violent scenes he witnessed with shots depicting the domestic lives of criminals and drug addicts. In his 2006 series “Bastard Eden: Chernobyl at 20,” he captured Ukrainians trying to scratch out a living in and around the contaminated zone.
While photographing the “Underclass” series, Weber was introduced by his fixer to a number of heavily tattooed former prisoners, an encounter that provided the starting point for his current project.
“Being in that world and meeting those people was the genesis of an idea, not specifically about cons and tattoos, but about that world and how it reflects modern-day Russia,” Weber said. “In 2005, I had no idea where all this was leading, but as I get more involved with the people I’ve been photographing, I’ve come to understand [them].”
In 2007, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Weber a substantial grant, which allowed him to relocate to Moscow and Kiev — cities between which he now divides his time — and develop his Russia and Ukraine focus in situ.
In the “Zek” series, Weber depicts Russian and Ukrainian former prisoners in domestic settings. His pictures of the zeks are starkly lit and often show the men appearing to emerge out of the darkness. In the backgrounds are recurring household objects: soft toys, carpets hung on walls, icons and landscape prints.
“Sometimes they’re living with their families, or maybe a guy got out of prison and he’s living with his brother and his wife, or with nephews or nieces,” Weber said. “You’ll go into a three-room apartment, and three of those rooms plus the kitchen are full of different families, or a bunch of single guys, or a couple of ex-zeks and a couple of prostitutes.”
“I wanted to keep it as domestic as possible and keep it consistent. I wanted to let their bodies speak for themselves. I also like the contrast of them being in domestic situations,” he said.
The men’s bodies bear recurring motifs: Orthodox and communist themes, cats, snakes, elaborate military-style epaulettes, Nazi symbols and women. “I found them to be like preening peacocks; they were very proud of their tattoos, and they wanted to show them off to me and to the other guys,” Weber said.
He has set himself the task of learning the symbolism of his subjects’ tattoos, although some still baffle him.
“The easiest one is the Orthodox cross on the finger: It means you’re a thief,” he said. He is quick to point out that the Orthodox and communist themes are by no means intended to signify any kind of religious or ideological piety.
“I’ve heard that with the communist symbols, like the Lenins and Marxes, it’s a way of saying, ‘You may try to stick me with communism, but I’m not going to live in your system.’ One guy told me that he put a Lenin on himself because he knew that he was going to be imprisoned, and he wanted to bring Lenin into prison with him. It’s all about rebellion; it’s basically about taking these sacred symbols and subverting them,” he said.
“There’s another guy I met (he’s in one of my favourite photographs), he’s got angels and bells on him. He’s a Christian now, but he was a badass dude — he was in prison three or four times,” Weber said. “He became a Christian in prison, and I asked him, ‘Well, are your tattoos all about you being a Christian and finding God?’ He said, ‘No, I got all that before.’ He basically said that any religious or communist or Nazi symbol is just about subverting authority.”
“You see a lot of Nazi symbology: eagles, swastikas, a ton of Iron Crosses. It’s a way of saying that you’ll never kneel down for authority,” Weber said.
“One guy said to me, ‘Do you know what I have? I have the quality sign on my dick.’ I asked what that meant and was told that this was the most hardcore tattoo any zek will ever have. So I said, ‘OK, let’s see.’ On the head of his penis, there was a pentagon with a little star inside that said U.S.S.R., a stamp that was put on all goods in the Soviet Union, signifying market quality.” That tattoo meant that the prisoner had raped a prison officer or policeman, he added.
“It’s essentially what my whole project is about: What is the brutality and the oppression and the quest to crush that just seems built into the Slavic psyche?” Weber said.
His theme of domination has inspired him to document the zeks’ relationships with women, and he aims to produce a parallel portrait series focusing on women associated with the men. Together, they will make up a collection titled “Zek i Natasha,” or Zek and Natasha.
“Talking with a lot of these guys, they told me about how a prostitute is their natural lover or companion. I found that very fascinating. That’s when I started photographing the ‘Natashas,’” Weber said.
“The interesting thing about Natasha is that she’s the companion to these guys who are supposedly as manly as they come, and yet I found some of the pictures of [the men] effeminate and delicate, [showing them] spread out on beds, lounging with their shirts off. The women were quite the opposite: With them, it’s all about steely reserve,” he said.
“With the Natashas, it was about trying to maintain their authority even though they didn’t really have any. Natasha is the money-maker. Zek doesn’t make any money, but Zek controls,” he said. “I find that in Russian culture everything comes down to power: public demonstrations of power and private demonstrations of power. You walk across a street here, and there is a guy in his car who is literally going to accelerate to run you down,” Weber said. “I find it much more explicit here than anywhere else I’ve been.”
Zek culture is simply a more extreme manifestation of wider society, Weber believes.
“I had one zek say to me, ‘There’s a big zone [the slang for prison] and a small zone. One is prison, one is the outside world, but which is which?’ And he added, ‘One is slightly more humane than the other.’ I said, ‘Which one?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know: You tell me.’”

“Zek: In the Prison of the East” can be viewed at www.donaldweber.com.

TITLE: Chernov’s
         choice
TEXT: <b>Bob Dylan</b> will perform a one-off concert in Russia, and it will be in St. Petersburg, the local promoter Planeta Plus revealed this week. The legend, who is now on tour in South America, is due to play the Ice Palace on June 3.
There is a long and difficult relationship between the singer and this country. When Bob Dylan was a star in the West, his status in the Soviet Union was strangely ambivalent — due to the country’s insularity and poor knowledge of English that came with it.
Dylan received wide coverage in the Soviet press which developed his image as a protest singer and oponent of the Vietnam war, but the music itself was never really available either on Soviet records or on the radio. One 30-minute program which accidentally broadcast on local Leningrad radio in the late 1970s was an exception.
On top of that, rock fans tended to despise whatever was praised in the official Soviet press, so the articles hardly brought Dylan many new followers. 
“You know you need a whole new beginning / Don’t have to go to Russia or Iran / Just surrender to God and He’ll move you right here where you stand, and Ye shall be changed, ye shall be changed,” sang Dylan in “Ye Shall Be Changed,” the song that he wrote in 1979 when he was exploring his new-born Christianity.
He did come to Russia in 1985, when it was still the Soviet Union, and Mikhail Gorbachev had been leader for just two months. Little information is available, but the reports have it that he came to Moscow’s First International Poetry Festival following an invitation from Andrei Voznesensky.
According to reports, Dylan did perform but the concert was not advertised (of course) and the public was a selected bunch brought in on buses. Allegedly, the room was half-empty, the public was indifferent, and Dylan stopped after 30 minutes, deeply upset. He could be glimpsed on television news reports, however.
The second coming was advertised by posters all around the city in 1988, when perestroika was approaching its height, but, closer to the date, the show scheduled at the Sports and Concert Complex was canceled, with no explanation provided. Reportedly, it was due to low ticket sales. The Novosibirsk-based rock magazine ENsk even reported the number of tickets sold as 4.
The Ice Palace is an indoor stadium that can hold up to 11,700 fans. Whether Dylan’s popularity in Russia soared in the past nine years remains a big question.
The upcoming concert is shrouded in mystery. The promoter’s press officer has not given any additional details about the concert, except for the date and place, while a tour schedule on Dylan’s official site does not beyond Thursday, when he is due to perform in Punta Del Este, Uruguay. 

<i>— Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: The second coming
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas and Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writers
TEXT: Pop star Dima Bilan will represent Russia at the Eurovision Song Contest in Belgrade in May after capturing the nomination for a second time.
Viewers and a professional jury chose Bilan’s English-language ballad “Believe” over 26 other entries in the competition, which was broadcast live Sunday evening on Rossia television.  Bilan’s fellow competitors included participants from TV shows such as “People’s Artist” and “Become A Star.”
A tearful Bilan was shown sitting with his head in his hands after hearing he had won.
“Justice exists — in a small way I am proof of that,” Bilan said in an emotional acceptance speech. “I hope that the confidence you showed making your decision today will be rewarded.”
Bilan also represented Russia at Eurovision in Athens in 2006, finishing second with the song “Never Let You Go.” He was edged out by Finnish band Lordi, which dresses as monsters.
Bilan, famous for his trend-setting mullet haircut, is currently involved in a legal dispute with the widow of his former producer, Yury Aizenshpis, over the rights to his music and his stage name. Bilan’s real name is Viktor Belan.
“We don’t see any obstacles to him going to Eurovision,” Bilan’s international manager, Sasha Tityanko, said Monday. Bilan recorded “Believe,” written by Philadelphia-based songwriter Jim Beanz, 10 days ago in Miami, Florida, Tityanko said.
Viktor Baturin, the millionaire husband of Bilan’s current producer, Yana Rudkovskaya, said last week that he had paid for the rights to all Bilan’s songs and could bar him from taking part in Eurovision. “Baturin doesn’t bar him simply as a good-will gesture,” he told the Vzglyad newspaper, referring to himself in the third person.
Baturin has criticized Bilan for recording an English-language album with renowned U.S. producer Timbaland. He called Bilan “the chief black man in Russia” in October. 
Baturin’s wife, however, was ecstatic at the latest news. 
“Our team is determined enough, strong enough and courageous enough to bring Eurovision to Moscow,” Rudkovskaya said. “The idea for the music video and for the performance in Belgrade will surpass everybody’s expectations. Dima’s wonderful voice, his desire for and faith in victory, and his amazing charisma will once again make the impossible possible!”
Bilan is not the first performer to represent his country more than once at Eurovision.  Cliff Richard represented Britain at the competition in 1968 and 1973 — though victory eluded him both times. “Each time I just needed one more point to win!” recalled the singer, according to Metro newspaper.
Bilan will be hoping he can finally bring the competition to Russia with “Believe,” whose lyrics mirror his producer’s optimism: “I can do it all  / Open every door / Turn unthinkable to reality / You see / I can do it all and more!”
Russia has never won the Eurovision Song Contest, though prior to Bilan the singer Alsu also took second place in 2000 and duo t.A.T.u. came third in 2003.
The man with the mullet: Dima Bilan
Dima Bilan was born on 24 December 1981 in Karachayevo-Cherkessia in the Stavropol region.
He attended a college of music, where he studied classical singing.
He made his debut in 2002 at the New Wave amateur festival, in which he was awarded fourth place.
Bilan’s first album, entitled “Nighttime Hooligan” was released on 31 October 2003.

TITLE: French fun
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The International Day of Francophonie will be celebrated around the globe on Thursday, and there seems to be no better choice for a soundtrack to a day celebrating the French language than The Krolls, the French-language indie pop band from St. Petersburg who will join the festivities by performing at the recently opened A2 club. 
Influenced by ska and French lounge music from the 1960s and 1970s, The Krolls are a combination of innocence and provocation. The band’s best-known song so far is called “Le Cocaine, Le Chocolat.”
“In fact, it was a big joke,” the childish-voiced singer and lyricist Masha Andreichikova said in a recent interview. She added that the song’s title was coined by the band’s composer, Anton Tulsky.
“When Anton suggested calling it ‘Le Cocaine, Le Chocolat,’ I teased him for two weeks or so,” she said. “I was asking him, ‘Why not ‘Heroin and Marshmallow? Where’s the link?’ But in the end it worked.”
“Le Cocaine, Le Chocolat” is the opening track on the band’s debut album, “FrenchElectroAlcoPop,” which was released on the Misteriya Zvuka label in November.
The Krolls got together early last year when Tulsky split with the vocalist of his previous French-language lounge band, Le Jonathan, and offered university student Andreichikova the chance to try out his songs in a studio.
Apart from 34-year old Tulsky, who composes the music and plays samples from a computer onstage, the band’s members are in their early 20s. Andreichikova is 21, trombone player Sergei Ganjet is 20 and bassist Viktor Sankov is 24. 
The Krolls made its debut in April at the cramp premises of Stirka, a combination of an indie bar and a launderette.
“They offered us the chance to play there and we thought that before performing at a normal club with a good sound system, you should perform at ten clubs with lousy P.A. systems,” said Andreichikova.
In the band’s own mythology, The Krolls are a cross between rabbits (kroliki in Russian) and trolls. The members are drawn as four rabbit-like characters on the band’s posters and on the album cover. The band’s designer, Vadim Chyorny, has also drawn a logo with the two ls in Krolls forming rabbit’s ears.
“When I first met [Tulsky], I frequently wore a Bugs Bunny T-shirt, and he said, ‘Hey, a rabbit! And you look like a rabbit, too,’” Andreichikova said.
“The rabbit image fits us very well. What do we do? We drink, we promote alcohol in every possible way and call our style ‘FrenchElectroAlcoPop.’ It’s all about fun, madness, love, sex and rock ‘n’ roll.”
Andreichikova is training to be a teacher of Russian as a foreign language at St. Petersburg State University. She writes lyrics in English and emails them to a French friend, who translates them into French. “She also sends different versions of phrases or words that could be used, with explanations, and I choose from them,” Andreichikova said.
One of the band’s songs is an unlikely, easy-listening cover of Nirvana’s “Rape Me.” Dubbed “Viole Moi” in French, it was not included in the album for copyright reasons.
“We first did it at a party where bands played cover versions,” said Andreichikova.“I wanted to depart from my semi-childish, good-girl image, so we wanted something outrageous, brutal and rough. But it turned out very strangely, not sounding at all like Nirvana, because Anton hadn’t heared the original.”
Andreichikova cited French singer and actress Charlotte Gainsbourg and U.S. band Shivaree as influences.
“I don’t like Russian rock,” she said. “When I’m told that DDT is a great band, I say, ‘But what about the music?’ They say, ‘But they have good lyrics.’ So read the lyrics as poetry - but the funny thing is, they don’t read like poetry.”
“The most important thing is harmony, rather than profundity. If you want to read some profound philosophical thought, it’s better to read a book than listen to music,” she said.
The Krolls will preview some of its latest songs at an intimate acoustic concert at launderette-bar Stirka on Friday (be warned, the place is tiny!). The acoustic set is also due to be added to the band's usual repertoire at A2 on Thursday.

The Krolls perform on Thursday at 9 p.m. at A2, located at 12 Razyezzhaya Ulitsa, Metro: Vladimirskaya/Dostoyevskaya. Tel.: 984-3690. 
www.myspace.com/krollband

TITLE: Afro positive
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: With racist violence on the rise in St. Petersburg, a city with a tragic record of hate crimes — a student from Ghana was hospitalized after being attacked and stabbed on Wednesday night — an African Charity Concert celebrating African music, dance and cuisine planned for this weekend, is both first-class entertainment and an important statement about tolerance.
Promoted by Icumbi, a non-profit organization whose goal is to help African refugees in St. Petersburg, with the support of the IWC (International Women’s Club), the charity concert aims to collect money to support the organization’s different activities.
According to director Valence Maniragena, Icumbi’s activities include advocacy services for refugees and asylum seekers, mostly from Africa, and assisting them to integrate and adapt to Russian life. The organization also provides assistance to students. 
Maniragena, a native of Rwanda based in St. Petersburg, moved to Russia following the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Maniragena, who studied in the Soviet Union, works as an information technology lecturer at the St. Petersburg State Electro-Technical University (LETI) and leads the African dance troupe Intore.
Icumbi was created back in 1996 by Rwandan refugees, but today its members include Russians, Rwandans and Burundians as well as people from other countries, said Maniragena.
Beside humanitarian assistance to refugees and asylum seekers, Icumbi manages projects to help integrate refugees in the Pskov region, and the School of Tolerance and Human Rights. The aim of this last project is the humanization of society and the promotion of  peace and tolerance.
African rhythms will be provided by Simba Vibration, a band formed by singer and musician Seraphim, who found fame on St. Petersburg’s underground music scene with Markscheider Kunst, the band that he performed with until to 2003.
“It has a direct connection to me, because I can call the people who formed this organization, Icumbi, my compatriots, because Rwanda and my country are almost the same place,” said Democratic Republic of Congo-born Seraphim, who writes songs and sings in Russian, Swahili, Lingala, French and English.
“When I was a young boy, I travelled with my parents across Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and I have relatives there,” he said.
Seraphim, whose full name is Seraphim Selenge Makangila, studied at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute and started out in music in 1991 when he formed a band called M’Bond Art with fellow students who came from Congo (Brazzaville), Benin and Guinea. In 1995 he started his own band, Motema Pembe and in 2004 he formed Simba Vibration, upon parting ways with Markscheider Kunst.
“I perform in an African style, so it can be called ‘Afro rock.’ But I prefer ‘Afro positive,’ because it’s about what a person feels, not what it is called.”
J.D. and the Blenders, the soul-funk band formed by St. Petersburg-based American vocalist Jennifer Davis and the former members of the local ska band Froglegs in 2005, will be the other band to take part.
“I’ve been trying to make contacts with the African community here for a while,” said Davis this week.
“Although we don’t play African music, we do play African-American music from the ‘60s and my hope is to attract a diverse, positive, friendly audience to our shows where everyone feels welcome and comfortable. 
“When I met Valence through a friend a few months ago, I immediately suggested doing some sort of joint project together. Many African students (and other minorities from abroad) are afraid to go out to clubs and concerts in the evenings due to the ever-increasing number of racially-motivated attacks in St. Petersburg. We wanted to organize an event that would be safe and fun, where people from various communities could meet and make contacts and friends.”
Dancing will be supplied by Intore, a dance troupe whose members come from Rwanda, Burundi, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Tanzania. Formed by Maniragena in 1996, the ensemble features eight to 16 dancers wearing traditional clothes and makeup, and carrying spears. The troupe has become an effective presence on the St. Petersburg scene as the only local dance act performing traditional African dances. Tickets cost 300 rubles ($12.60) and 500 rubles ($21).
<i>African Charity Concert , with Simba Vibration, J.D. and the Blenders and Intore, will be held at  the concert hall of Petrogradsky District’s administration, located at 19 Bolshaya Monetnaya Ulitsa, at 6:30 p.m. on Friday. (M: Gorkovskaya, Petrogradskaya). Tel.: 8 (911) 900-9067 (Valence).</i> www.icumbi2007.narod.ru

TITLE: Cultural chronical
AUTHOR: By Martin Rubin
PUBLISHER: The Los Angeles Times
TEXT: As its subtitle suggests, this engaging book, translated from its author’s mother tongue, Russian, into clear, elegant English, is sweeping in its scope.
Clearly someone unafraid of biting off a lot, Solomon Volkov has done justice to his subject. 
Readers of his passionate study, “Shostakovich and Stalin,” will not be surprised at the enormously high level of engagement he brings to this latest enterprise. 
The good news for them is that, four years on, he has shed some of the hothouse, insiderish manner that at times rendered the earlier book somewhat inaccessible to those less informed than he is about all things Russian. 
“The Magical Chorus” is an ideal guide, clear but still subtle and nuanced, to the rich complexity of Russian culture, its splendors, controversies, achievements and tragedies throughout the 20th century.
In its first decade, Leo Tolstoy, perhaps the greatest European novelist, was still active, a glorious iconoclast questioning not only Russian autocracy but also the very way people lived their lives. 
Anton Chekhov was writing groundbreaking plays until his premature death in 1904, and Konstantin Stanislavsky was producing them (and many others) at his Moscow Art Theater, perhaps the most avant-garde venue in Europe. 
Idealist philosophy dominated Russian culture: Individualism was the order of the day. Volkov evokes the excitement of that far-off time with compelling immediacy.
The tsarist regime, though brutal, was less interested in stifling cultural expression than political heresy. By contrast, the leaders of the Soviet Union, especially Lenin and Stalin, were keenly aware of the uses of culture and the dangers it posed to a collectivist dictatorship. Lenin exiled the nation’s best and brightest intellectuals. Under Stalin, terror, backed up by firing squads and the Gulag, minimized dissent. 
This dictator was highly opinionated when it came to culture, imposing his own tastes — ironically, rather conservative and anti-modernist — on his nation. 
Volkov reports that as early as 1929 Stalin argued that “without making the entire population literate and ‘cultured’ they [would] not be able to raise the level of agriculture, industry, or defense.”
But he had more sinister motives for harnessing culture, as Volkov notes with characteristic pithiness: “Stalin regarded Soviet culture as a huge hose for brainwashing his subjects before what he considered the inevitable Third World War, in the course of which Communism would at last conquer the whole world.”
Born and raised in the Soviet Union, Volkov, who now lives in New York, powerfully depicts the contradictory emotions the regime engendered. 
He recalls as a boy “the fear and horror I felt when on the dark and damp morning of March 6 [1953] as I was getting ready for school I heard the radio announcer speak slowly and with bathos” of Stalin’s death.
He continues: 
“I did not know then that on the same day, and also from brain hemorrhage, Prokofiev had died. The composer was weak and the tension that was in the air in the last days of Stalin’s life had apparently hastened his end.” Volkov uses the coincidence as a telling cultural symbol, but he also adds little details forgotten (or never known) except by those who were there: “[I]t was difficult to scrape up flowers for [Prokofiev’s] coffin because all the flowers and wreaths in Moscow had been requisitioned for Stalin’s funeral.” 
There was a baleful side to the treatment of even those artists the regime favored: When they were told to play at Stalin’s funeral, pianist Svyatoslav Richter and violinist David Oistrakh “and the other musicians were not allowed to leave the Hall of Columns for several days and nights, kept there on dry rations.” Details like this enliven the book.
Volkov’s vast and intimate knowledge of his subject and beyond is displayed throughout, whether he’s discussing the effects of Prokofiev’s devotion to Christian Science or the current Russian version of imperialism: “Contemporary Eurasianists call for the creation of a new empire on the ruins of the Soviet Union, with Russia at its center. 
The United States is the great Satan for the neo-Eurasianists, and they see the mission of the Russian people as stopping the American-sponsored expansion of the Western liberal model of economic and cultural development. 
They propose creating new geopolitical axes: Moscow-Beijing, Moscow-Delhi, and Moscow-Tehran, and also uniting with the Arab world. Consequently, they argue, Russia’s cultural priorities must be Eastern, not Western.”
In Russia, the intertwining of culture and politics is supercharged, as Volkov shows in his tour d’horizon of this corner of the world’s turbulent preceding century. 
He ends on a somber note: 
“Once again, as it was at the start of the twentieth century, Russia — anxious, brooding, enigmatic — is at a crossroads, choosing its way.”
No one reading “The Magical Chorus” will doubt which way Volkov hopes it will choose. 
His experiences of his beloved nation under the iron heel of Marxism-Leninism have taught him the necessity for freedom of expression and action. 
And his book celebrates liberty, idealism and humanism — all that is most valuable in Russian culture.

Martin Rubin is a critic and the author of “Sarah Gertrude Millin: A South African Life.”

TITLE: Erotic dreams and one-liners
AUTHOR: By Kevin O’Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Few people had heard of former KGB officer Vladimir Putin when he became prime minister in 1999. But with his taciturn, slightly intimidating face, one thing seemed certain: He didn’t look like a comedian.
While “fun” is not a word widely associated with Putin, his eight-year run as Russia’s shortest president — so far — has seen its share of the absurd.
“Who is Mr. Putin?” a journalist asked in 2000. Since no one knew for sure, they made up the answers.
Putin was depicted as James Bond with a heart, the red-blooded leader of a G8 country who bites Shamil Basayev to death in the 2002 novel “President” by Latvian author Alexander Olbik.
In the novel, a badly wounded Putin knocks Basayev to the ground and sinks his teeth into his throat. “‘It seems I have the grip of a bulldog,’ was the sick thought that came into [Putin’s] head, and he squeezed his teeth tighter,” Oblik wrote. “He savaged the vein until his tongue and palate could taste the salty blood, which was thick like oil.”
In between killing Chechens, Putin reads the Roman stoic poet Seneca and is doted on by his wife, Lyudmila, who serves up borshch.
There were plenty of other Putin prototypes as well. There was Dobby, the oily, self-effacing elf in the Harry Potter films whose thin nose, large ears and pleading eyes looked remarkably like Putin. Rumors that the Kremlin suspected a deliberate attempt to mock Putin only made Dobby further resemble the president.
Other Putin sightings seemed to pick up on the chameleon-like air about him. In a 15th-century painting by the Dutch artist Jan van Eyck, Italian merchant Giovanni Arnolfini looks eerily like Putin.

Putinmania
Not that Putinmania began in the 15th century. It started in 2000, when he was elected to his first term.
Then-Moscow Times columnist Anna Badkhen was not alone in having erotic dreams about that firmest of presidential jaw lines, while a young man in St. Petersburg had a portrait of the firm-jawed one tattooed on his arm. Another man walked 2,000 kilometers to show his support for Putin’s presidential bid.
The ingratiation was a mixture of earnest admiration, base careerist toadying and mercantile branding.
You could turn on the television for a morning dose of Putin news or listen to a girl pop band on the radio singing “I Want Someone Like Putin,” extolling the sex appeal of the man in the Kremlin. The song’s catchy chorus lovingly listed the qualities that a girl sees in the president: “Someone like Putin, full of strength / Someone like Putin, who doesn’t drink / Someone like Putin, who doesn’t hurt me / Someone like Putin, who won’t run away.”
Stuffed animals singing the tune were subsequently unleashed on the public.
There were Putin calendars and a book about the Putin family dog — Connie — to flip through while munching on a portrait of the president made out of chocolate.
To wind down in the evening — or to get a morning buzz going — there was Putin vodka to chase with Putin pickles, stray bits of which could be mined from mouths using Putin toothpicks.
Putin has maintained that he opposes citizens’ urges to name things after him — including United Russia’s political platform, Putin’s Plan. It remains unclear whether this prompted Novosibirsk officials to force a local watering hole, the Putin Bar, to change its name in 2002.
When Putin turned 50 in 2003, he was inundated with gifts and praise from the political establishment. The most original present was from the former deputy prime minister of Bashkortostan, Gabit Sabitov: three pages of text addressed to Putin made up only of words beginning with the letter P.
For obvious reasons, the president was only referred to by his surname in the three sections, Proshloye Putina, Prazdniki Prezidenta Putina and Perspektivy Prezidenta Putina, or The Past of Putin, The Holidays of President Putin and President Putin’s Prospects. The text finishes with the sentence, “Po Planete postavyat pamyatniki Pervomy Prezidentu Planety Putinu” or “All around the planet they will put up monuments to the first president of the planet, Putin.”
A list of fantastic, hyperbolic descriptions of Putin’s abilities also made its way onto the Internet. Examples include:
• When Putin smiles, a child is born in Russia. If the smile is wider than usual, expect twins.
• A fork that Putin ate from can slay a vampire with one stab.
• Putin helps the Russian economy by filling the Earth with oil from his personal reserves.
Putin himself was not unaware of the excessive zeal that had seized those around him. He was showered with praised by then-Primorye Governor Yevgeny Nazdratenko during a meeting early in his presidency, said journalist Grigory Pasko, who attended the meeting. “Come now, Yevgeny Ivanovich, you’re praising me like I’m already dead!” Putin said, according to an account posted by Pasko on the web site of Robert Amsterdam, a lawyer for Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Puppet Regime
Public perception of Putin might have been different if NTV television’s scathing political puppet program “Kukly,” or “Puppets,” had not been brought to heel and ultimately axed.
The show was merciless in its satire of the political elite during President Boris Yeltsin’s reign, and it initially pulled no punches with Putin. Ahead of the 2000 election, it portrayed Putin as a playboy picking up high-class prostitutes in the guise of leading politicians, including Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov and Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
“Political Kama Sutra! Top class,” the Zhirinovsky puppet said.
Then addressing the Putin puppet in a hushed tone, he said: “I’ll bend over so far backward that you’ll forget yourself. Well? Want to play, darling? We can play at the victory of democracy.”
Putin hated the show, NTV insiders said at the time, especially when he was portrayed as a dwarf from a German fairy tale. The show dropped the Putin puppet but was finally canned for good when state energy giant Gazprom took over NTV.
Jokes about Putin’s height — he is 170 centimeters, tops, while Yeltsin was pushing 190 centimeters — rarely raised their head after that. And it looks like they will be comparably rare when the mantle of Russia’s shortest-ever president is assumed by Dmitry Medvedev, who by some accounts is a full 10 centimeters shorter than Putin.
But Putin did not disappear from the country’s joke landscape. There were still Putin jokes going around, many of which were compiled in a small book published in 2001. Jokes in the book, appropriately titled “Jokes About Putin,” play on claims by Putin’s critics that he is an autocrat to the bone:
Stalin appears to Putin in a dream and asks: “Can I do anything to help you?”
Putin says: “Why is everything here so bad — the economy is falling to pieces, and so on. What am I to do?”
Stalin, without pausing for thought, answers: “Execute the entire government and paint the walls of the Kremlin blue.”
“Why blue?” Putin asks.
Stalin replies: “I had a feeling you would only want to discuss the second part.”
Perhaps the most enduringly popular satire of Putin during his presidency has come from Maxim Kononenko, whose web site, Vladimir.Vladimirovich.ru, casts Putin as a bemused president who uses criminal slang and has robots for deputies.
In a recent joke, Putin asks Prosecutor General Yury Chaika whether former Yukos vice president Vasily Aleksanyan, who claims that he was denied treatment for AIDS-related lymphoma while in jail, is infected with polonium-210 as well. Chaika advises Putin to keep Aleksanyan jailed so they can see what other illnesses he has. “I read the latest news in the morning like a soap opera,” Chaika says.
“You’re a cruel man,” Putin replies. “I was right to name you prosecutor.”
Yevgeny Petrosyan, a comedian who pulled no punches while mocking Yeltsin in the 1990s, bristled in a 2005 interview when asked whether he would be as harsh on Putin. “Don’t be naive. You are aware that people in power are criticized less today. You want me to be a hero, but one can say the same thing about journalists. We’re in the same boat, but you’re asking me, ‘Why aren’t you swimming?’ I’m not swimming because I’m not [Andrei] Sakharov,” said Petrosyan, referring to the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was sent to internal exile for his protests against the Soviet regime.
Indeed, one satirical news show’s idea of a Putin joke last year was to say: “All good things must come to an end, just like second presidential terms.”
As Connie, Putin’s black Labrador retriever, says in the children’s book “Connie’s Stories”: “I don’t want my master to be angry or displeased with me. I like it when he’s pleased with me. Bow wow!”
It would be difficult to say Putin provided no material for satirists. What, for example, would “Kukly” have done with one of Putin’s most bizarre public moments: his decision to lift the shirt of a young boy and kiss his stomach in front of television cameras?
“He seemed to me very independent, sure of himself and at the same time defenseless, as a child always is, an innocent boy and a very nice little boy,” Putin later explained, adding that he “just wanted to touch him like a kitten.”
Not long after the kissing incident, Vladimir.Vladimirovich.ru published a joke about a Putin-sponsored plot to have self-exiled businessman Boris Berezovsky killed by an assassin accompanied by a child. Berezovsky dismisses the warning from his security detail, the joke goes, until he learns that the killer has a child in tow.

Putin’s One-Liners
Putin himself has often displayed a dark sense of humor. But it’s not clear whether his family even thinks he’s funny.
His wife, Lyudmila, once said rather mournfully that she preferred simple, ordinary humor. “It is hard for me to understand black humor and irony,” she said in 2005. “I like simple and kind humor, although I cannot say that we have only this kind of humor in our family.”
There is a Wikipedia entry devoted to Putinisms, although, unlike Bushisms, most of Putin’s famous utterances are characterized by menacing precision rather than a blundering command of his native tongue.
Putin is indeed adept at one-liners, though sometimes they are far from funny. When CNN’s Larry King asked Putin in 2000 what happened to the Kursk submarine, Putin replied with an eerie smile, “It sank.”
In a markedly lighter moment, Putin responded to U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s criticism of Russia by recalling an incident in which Cheney accidentally peppered a hunting partner with buckshot fired from his shotgun. Cheney’s statements, Putin said, are “the same as an unsuccessful hunting shot.”
U.S. President George W. Bush got the same treatment for criticizing democracy in Russia. “We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, I will tell you quite honestly,” Putin told Bush.
Bush was less creative in his response. “Just wait,” he said.
Bawdiness has also been a hallmark of Putin’s humor. In 2002, Putin suggested that a foreign reporter pressing him on the war in Chechnya have his foreskin removed. “If you want to completely become an Islamic radical and are ready to have a circumcision, then I invite you to Moscow,” Putin told the reporter in Brussels. “We have a multicultural country and have specialists even on this issue. And I will recommend that he perform this surgery in such a way that nothing would grow out of you again.”
Putin’s attempts at male jocularity backfired spectacularly, however, during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert while Israeli President Moshe Katsav was being investigated for the purported rape and sexual harassment of 10 female subordinates. “He raped 10 women,” Putin was cited by Kommersant reporter Andrei Kolesnikov as saying at the meeting. “I never expected it from him. He surprised all of us. We envy him.”
Putin’s penchant for criminal jargon has also produced some peculiar moments. As prime minister, he famously promised to “waste the criminals, even in the outhouse” at the start of the second Chechen war.
In early 2000, when he was still acting president, he bewildered a translator at a joint news conference with then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair by complaining that the Chechens were calling Russians kozly — an offensive term most people wouldn’t use in front of their mothers, let alone Blair.
The translator simply gave the literal translation, “goats,” to a crowd of mystified journalists.
Eight years on, Putin is leaving office but not really going anywhere. Some shops have slashed prices on portraits of the outgoing president, the kind that hang on bureaucrats’ office walls. It might be an opportunity for investors willing to hold onto them until 2012.
<hr>
MOSCOW — He’s driven trains, sailed on a submarine, flown a fighter jet and holds a black-belt in judo. Now Russian President Vladimir Putin is dabbling in a new area — theater criticism.
The outgoing president and wife, Lyudmila, paid a surprise visit to a Moscow theater last Sunday to view a production of the popular 19th-century Russian comedy “Woe from Wit,” which satirizes Moscow society after the Napoleonic wars.
The president and the first lady received a standing ovation before the curtain rose, state-run TV reported. Afterward, Putin chatted with the lead actors over tea and cookies and offered them pointers.
“Why did you at the very beginning show [the main character] crying? One gets the impression of him as a weak person. He’s a strong man. He withstands everything that’s there. You showed him sniveling,” he asked the cast.
“You’re correct and I’m just glad that the actor has heard this,” the play’s director, Rimas Tuminas, responded.
Putin corrected him, saying: “The actor has nothing to do with this. He’s done what you told him.”
The Russian leader said the play still has relevance after 150 years. In one scene, the lead character criticizes fellow Russians who fall all over themselves to adopt Western customs.
“This is a particular lesson for the new members of the European Union,” Putin said to laughter. “I’m joking, I’m joking.”
The newest EU member nations are mostly from Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics.
State-run TV was quick to add after Putin’s critical commentary: “His review was neither good nor bad, but was just very interesting for Putin because the production produced many emotions for him.”
— The Associated Press

TITLE: La lluvia en Sevilla
AUTHOR: By Tobin Auber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Sevilla // 4 Birzhevoi Pereulok // Tel: 335 2200 // Open daily from 7 a.m. until 12 a.m. // Menu in English and Russian // Dinner for two without alcohol 2,635 rubles ($110)
In a narrow alley, tucked behind the old stock exchange building on the spit of Vasilievsky Island, there’s something going on. The city’s long-established five-star hotels may not yet be quaking in their boots, but they must be looking on with a wary sense of alarm as the Holiday Club hotel prepares to shift up a gear from “soft opening” to full-blown open for business. The promised scale is impressive - there’s a very large spa and swimming pool, due to open in the autumn, and we’re told that eventually there will be six restaurants to choose from on the premises. 
First off the blocks is Sevilla, a cavernous, bare-brick interior with arched ceilings. The restaurant and the Holiday Club hotel itself are housed in a former warehouse belonging to the Yeliseyev brothers, 19th century merchants who owned a large “emporium” at 56 Nevsky Prospekt and were early importers of Spanish wines.
What first strikes you on entering is the imaginative way in which the architecture of the original building has been worked into the new renovation, and the hotel lobby is particularly impressive — a high-ceilinged, very light area with wooden bridges and a stylish lobby bar leading over open cellars. The building may be deeply rooted in St. Petersburg’s history, but immediately we felt we were a world away from the gray, drizzly March weather we’d left outside.
Inside, Sevilla is more somber, with open-brickwork, dark woods and deep red upholstered furniture. Not being experts on Spanish cuisine, we had to rely on the advice of the waiter, who was helpful and seemed to know his subject well.
We started with fisherman’s tapas (540 rubles, $23), comprising scampi, cuttlefish, salmon and chili-marinated shrimps accompanied with an excellent basket of tomato bread. The portion was very freshly prepared and extremely generous, with large potato cakes, leaving us to struggle with our main courses. The chorizo sausage and romescu sauce tapas (160 rubles, $7) was much smaller, although the sausage was excellent. 
The chorizo and bacon pasta with Mahon cheese in a creamy sauce (670 rubles, $28) was another vast portion (we were forced to ask it to be wrapped up and are still enjoying it two days later) made with excellent pipe rigate pasta. In comparison, the Pimiento pork fillet (560 rubles, $23.50) with patatas bravas (traditional tapas potatoes spiced up with a touch of paprika and chili) was something of a disappointment and lacked the pasta’s delicate tastes, although the meat was very fresh.
We rounded off with crema catalana (185 rubles, $7.50), a Spanish crème caramel flavored with cinnamon and lemon. It came with a wealth of fresh fruit and was just light enough for us to manage in view of the copious amounts we had already eaten.
A welcome addition to St. Petersburg’s dining scene, then, and good prospects for the future, with the Sokos hotel chain — the Finnish muscle behind Sevilla and Holiday Club — yet to unleash another five eateries at the same location, among which will be a wine bar and a pub in the building’s cellars.

TITLE: Two sisters
AUTHOR: By Kenneth Turan
PUBLISHER: The Los Angeles Times
TEXT: Like the sibling rivals whose romantic lives it lovingly details, “The Other Boleyn Girl” has ideas above its station. Not content to be a mildly diverting royal bodice-ripper, it spirals out of control into the kind of overwrought dramaturgy that’s out of its league.
Not, of course, that there was much room for choice in how the plot went. “The Other Boleyn Girl” is based on Philippa Gregory’s hugely popular, 1-million-copies-in-print novel, which in turn is taken from the history of 16th century Tudor England and the reign of King Henry VIII and his second queen, Anne Boleyn.
If that all sounds familiar, it may be because of 1969’s movie on the same subject, “Anne of the Thousand Days,” starring Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold. The breathless ad line for the first film sets the tone for this one as well: “He was King. She was barely 18. And in their thousand days they played out the most passionate and shocking love story in history!”
What’s different about this version of the tale, however, is its emphasis on Anne’s sister Mary being the first of the two Boleyn women to, as they say, share the king’s bed. How all that happened, and the various melodramatic ways that sisterly rivalry played out, is the bait that lured the film’s prestigious writer, director and stars.
It’s dark-haired Natalie Portman in for Bujold as the flirtatious vamp Anne, given to saying cheeky things such as “Betrothed is not married.” Playing kinder, gentler Mary — a simple, uncomplicated girl unburdened by ambition — is Scarlett Johansson. And Eric Bana exercises his divine right to be a smoldering hunk as the king who came between them, the man who simply has to whisper the word “tonight” to get women lining up for a time share in that royal bed.
Adapting Gregory’s novel is Peter Morgan, Oscar-nominated for writing “The Queen” for Helen Mirren and an earlier, Emmy-winning “Henry VIII” for Ray Winstone and is apparently the go-to guy for royal-intensive scripts. The director is British TV veteran Justin Chadwick, whose adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House” was a recent hit.
Initially “The Other Boleyn Girl” is good, genteelly trashy fun. It shows the two sisters as pawns in the family pursuit of wealth and position, masterminded by their father (Mark Rylance) and their nasty uncle the Duke of Norfolk (a snarky David Morrissey) in order to catch the eye of a king desperate for a male heir.
Even a currently married monarch, the ladies are carefully instructed, “sometimes seeks comfort elsewhere.” So despite spoilsport grousing by their mother (the always effective Kristin Scott Thomas) about women being “traded like cattle for the advancement and entertainment of men,” that’s exactly what happens.
With rich costumes by two-time Oscar-winner Sandy Powell and vivid production design by John-Paul Kelly, “The Other Boleyn Girl” gets points for color and pageantry, with lots of pounding hoofbeats, flying banners and royal striding through stately halls.
Given that Mary is already married, it’s supposed to be Anne who attracts the king’s attention first. But the stresses of his job - “I’m lied to 100 times a day,” he says, making monarchy sound like training for a career in Hollywood - draw him to the sincere-to-a-fault Mary, a turn of events which irks Anne no end.
But wouldn’t you know it, complications keep Mary from closing the deal and Anne has to be brought in from the bullpen (actually the royal court in France, where she’s been learning “the art of being a woman”) to keep the king interested in the family. A picture of brunette ambition, ultimate schemer Anne thinks she knows how to get her man. And she does, up to a point.
The same can be said about the entertainment value of “The Other Boleyn Girl,” which is OK as far as it goes, which is not far enough. Morgan’s dialogue, rife with lines such as “Would a smile be too much to ask?” and the ever-popular “It costs a fortune to get this house ready for a royal visit,” sounds too modern too often. And though the cast does adequate work, director Chadwick has not been able to get them to do anything better than that.
Just when “The Other Boleyn Girl” should be picking up steam, when the plot thickens and the tale gets darker, the storytelling style turns off-putting and glum. Yes, there is that bright moment when Anne reports having to “resort to degrading techniques” to hold the king’s romantic interest, but it’s a false alarm. By the time her fed-up sister tells her, “I’ve seen enough,” we have as well.

TITLE: Racism Mars Zenit Victory Over Marseille
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: Two goals from Zenit St. Petersburg’s Pavel Pogrebnyak earned the Russian champions a 2-0 victory over Marseille to book a quarter-final berth in the UEFA Cup on Wednesday.
Marseille’s conceded away goal in the 3-1 first leg victory in France proved the deciding factor as the team went out of Europe’s second-tier club competition on away goals after a 3-3 aggregate scoreline.
“I was really impressed by my players who showed a great quality of play on a difficult pitch,” said Zenit’s Dutch coach Dick Advocaat. “The away goal was the good news of this tie.”
The defeat ended France’s participation in this season’s club competitions.
“We weren’t able to produce Marseille’s game of the past few weeks. It’s our first blow of the year,” said coach Eric Gerets. “Even if we could have scored one or two more goals in the first leg we had some chances this evening.
“Unfortunately, collectively and individually it wasn’t there. I felt we didn’t have what it took to fight to the death on the pitch.”
Andrei Arshavin started the move for the first goal in the 38th minute.
Cisse could have got an equalizer four minutes later but the former top scorer in the French league, set on his way by Valbuena, fired straight at keeper Viacheslav Malafeyev.
The second and decisive goal came in the 77th minute when Fatih Tekke got a touch to feed Pogrebnyak for his second strike, and, despite a late flurry from Niang and Cisse, it was the home crowd which celebrated victory.
The defeat was even more bitter for the French as Marseille defender Ronald Zubar complained of racist chants by some Russian fans directed against him and black teammates Charles Kabore and Andre Ayew.
“They threw a banana at us and made monkey sounds,” complained the player from the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.
“That makes the defeat worse, while they had everything to celebrate. We would have preferred the match to be stopped and the individuals removed.”

TITLE: Flu Shuts Schools In Asia
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HONG KONG — Hong Kong ordered more than half a million primary and kindergarten students Wednesday to stay home for two weeks because of a flu outbreak in one of the world’s most densely populated cities. 
The government also asked one of its top scientists to investigate the deaths of three children. But the World Health Organization said only two of the children tested positive for the flu, and both had other diseases as well.
The outbreak has not been linked to bird flu, which was detected in birds in Hong Kong. Bird flu remains difficult for humans to catch, but scientists fear the virus that causes it could eventually mutate into a form that spreads easily among humans.
The government has ordered all kindergartens, primary and special education schools closed for two weeks starting Thursday, Health Secretary York Chow said. School children — along with teachers and parents — wore masks Wednesday as they walked outside.
The schools had been expected to start their Easter Holiday in a little over a week, though the date varies with each school. Chow said bringing the holiday forward would help reduce cross infection among school children and calm public fears.
The closure will affect nearly 560,000 students at 1,745 schools, according to enrollment figures from the 2006-2007 academic year.
Since March 6, health officials have recorded nine flu outbreaks, mostly at schools, affecting 532 people in the territory of nearly 7 million.

TITLE: Spitzer Resigns Amid Call-Girl Scandal
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: NEW YORK — New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned yesterday amid allegations that he patronized prostitutes, is now in a legal fight to avoid criminal charges.
Spitzer, 48, stepped down after the New York Times reported he was “Client 9’’ of an international call-girl ring whose operators were charged with crimes last week. Spitzer’s lawyers need to persuade the U.S. government not to file related charges against him because he allegedly summoned prostitutes to Washington and paid them secretly, former prosecutors said.
Prosecutors are more likely to consider going after Spitzer, a Democrat, for money laundering or misusing his office than for prostitution because customers of call girls are rarely pursued by federal authorities, the lawyers and ex-prosecutors said.
“Given the rarity of federal prosecutions of this kind of conduct, the motives of the prosecutors might be called into question,’’ said Steven Peikin, a former U.S. prosecutor in Manhattan. “The facts that are not well known are those surrounding the financial transactions. That would be an area of greater concern.’’
U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia in New York declined to say after the resignation if he’s investigating Spitzer. He said only that “no agreement’’ has been reached with the governor.
The assistant prosecutor handling the case against the prostitution ring is chief of Garcia’s public corruption unit, formerly headed by Spitzer’s lead lawyer Michele Hirshman.
Spitzer’s defense team also includes Theodore Wells, who unsuccessfully defended former vice presidential aide Lewis “Scooter’’ Libby last year for lying about the leak of the identity of a U.S. intelligence agent, and Mark Pomerantz, who won a reversal of an obstruction conviction in 2006 of former Credit Suisse banker Frank Quattrone.
The resignation of Spitzer, who was elected governor in November 2006, followed a criminal investigation of payments made to what prosecutors said was an international prostitution and money-laundering ring called the “Emperors Club VIP.’’
On March 6, prosecutors said they charged four people for operating the business. Client 9, not identified in the criminal complaint, paid $4,300 for sex with a prostitute named “Kristen’’ at a Washington hotel in February. The club accepted payments through front companies, according to the complaint.
Client 9 summoned Kristen from New York to Washington and made secret payments to her, according to an FBI affidavit supporting the complaint.
The New York Times, citing unidentified sources, identified Client 9 as Spitzer and said investigators suspected he may have wanted to conceal the source and recipients of his money. Spitzer didn’t admit the conduct in resigning. He apologized for what he called “a private matter.’’
Kristen, identified by the New York Times yesterday as Ashley Dupre, 22, of Manhattan, appeared before a grand jury March 10, according to the newspaper. She testified in the case against the club’s operators, the newspaper said. Her lawyer, Don Buchwald, didn’t return a call for comment.
Spitzer may be open to charges that he violated the Mann Act, which makes it a crime to transport someone across state lines for prostitution, lawyers said.
He could also be charged with wire fraud, if he made false statements about the source or destination of his funds; structuring, if he made payments to avoid U.S. requirements on reporting cash transactions of more than $10,000; or money laundering, if he knew the ring was using front companies to move money illegally, the lawyers said.
Spitzer’s attorneys, who declined to discuss the case, probably will press numerous arguments to persuade prosecutors not to bring charges, the defense lawyers said.
“I’d approach it by saying to the U.S. Attorney’s Office that if you prosecute me, you’ve got to prosecute’’ Clients 1-8, said William Mateja, who formerly helped oversee the Justice Department’s Corporate Crime Task Force. “They don’t want to be accused of selective prosecution,’’ a potential legal defense.
The other eight clients mentioned in the criminal complaint haven’t been identified by prosecutors.
Bradley Simon, a former federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, said the facts in the complaint could support a charge of violating the Mann Act because Client 9 is “inducing and persuading a woman to cross state lines for sex.’’ That law is normally used in conjunction with other violations and usually when it involves a minor, he said.
The law “is typically reserved for people who operate prostitution rings,’’ said Peikin, who’s now at the Sullivan & Cromwell firm in New York. “I would be arguing that the spirit here is not intended to reach this kind of conduct.’’

TITLE: League To Kick Off  In Grozny
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Russian league season kicks off on Friday with a testing fixture for the away side: they are playing in a city that just a few years ago was a war zone.
Last year’s runners-up Spartak Moscow visit champions Zenit St. Petersburg in a high-profile clash on Sunday, but it is a match in the Chechen capital Grozny, where Premier League newcomers Terek host Krylya Sovietov Samara in Friday’s opener, that has attracted the most attention.
It will be the first professional match in the region’s capital for 14 years. The small south Caucasus republic was devastated by two separatist wars since the mid-1990s.
The Russian Football Union (RFU) granted Terek permission to play their matches at their reconstructed 10,200-seat stadium in Grozny after receiving personal safety guarantees from Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov.
“We can guarantee 100 percent safety here ... the situation in the republic is the quietest in Russia,” said Kadyrov, the son of the former president Akhmad Kadyrov, who was killed in a bomb explosion in the old stadium in May 2004.
Kadyrov also called on the Grozny residents to show “true Chechen hospitality” to the visiting fans.
Still, some insiders say the decision was made following heavy lobbying from a Kremlin that is keen to showcase Chechnya’s return to normal life after Moscow’s forces in collaboration with Kadyrov quelled the separatist rebellion.
Samara coach Leonid Slutsky said he did not mind going to Grozny.
“If the RFU decided that Terek should play their home games in Grozny, then so be it,” said Slutsky, who was named Samara coach at the end of last year after being sacked by FC Moscow despite leading them to fourth place, their best finish.
“I just hope they (the RFU) don’t change their mind a few weeks later and we would be the only ones who had played in Grozny.”
The first true test of Grozny’s credentials to host big matches should come in the fourth week of the season on April 5 when they entertain former champions CSKA Moscow.
While Terek will hope to avoid relegation in their first season in the top flight since 2005, powerful Moscow clubs Spartak, CSKA and Lokomotiv are expected once again to challenge big spenders Zenit for the title.
Spartak, the country’s most successful and popular club having claimed nine domestic titles since 1992, are especially eager to return to the top after coming a close second for three years in a row.
CSKA, who take on another premier league newcomer Shinnik Yaroslavl in their opening match on Saturday, also want to improve on their third-place finish last year after winning the title the two previous seasons.
Lokomotiv would love to redeem themselves this year after enduring the most disappointing season in their recent history that cost coach Anatoly Byshovets his job.

TITLE: Rockets Defeat Hawks in 20-Game Winning Streak
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ATLANTA, Georgia — The Houston Rockets’ 20th straight win was far from pretty, but coach Rick Adelman was still impressed with his team.
The Rockets were held to their lowest first-half total of the season but pulled away late to become the third team in NBA history to win 20 consecutive games, tying for the league’s second-longest winning streak with an 83-75 victory over the Atlanta Hawks on Wednesday night.
“It may be the ugliest thing we’ve done, but it might have been the best one,” Adelman said, “the way we fought through it.”
The Rockets joined the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers (33 straight) and 1970-71 Milwaukee Bucks (20) as the only teams to win 20 or more in a row.
“We did enough to win,” Adelman said.
Tracy McGrady scored 21 of his 28 points in the second half for Houston, which led only 71-70 with 5 minutes remaining. McGrady then scored five points in Houston’s 10-0 run to take control.
“We’re really happy with this win because we didn’t play well in the first half,” McGrady said. “This is a pretty ugly game tonight. We didn’t shoot well and it was one of those games that our defense really had to win for us.”
The Rockets are 20-0 since their last loss on Jan. 27 against Utah, including 7-0 since losing Yao Ming to a foot injury on Feb. 26. The Hawks have 16 losses in that same period.
A basket by Atlanta’s Marvin Williams with 5 seconds left in the game ended the Rockets’ streak of 10 straight wins by 10 or more points. Joe Johnson led the Hawks with 28 points, and Josh Smith had 16 points and a career-high 22 rebounds.
The Rockets pulled within one game of the Lakers for the best record in the Western Conference. Even so, many observers continue to focus on the Lakers and Spurs and other teams in the conference.
“It’s unbelievable,” McGrady said. “For me to be on this team that has accomplished 20 straight wins, that has got to be right up there with the most gratifying things I’ve accomplished in this league. ... You look at the Bulls that were 72-10, they didn’t even do it. So this is pretty remarkable.”
Added Adelman: “You could see the guys, it really means something to get this and just keep not only the streak going, but keep moving in the right direction.”
Shane Battier had 15 points as Houston struggled to preserve its winning streak despite trailing 33-32 at halftime.
“Houston makes you play that way,” Johnson said. “They are not a fast-paced team.”
Houston led 59-57 at the end of the third quarter, but Atlanta’s Zaza Pachulia opened the fourth with two free throws. Minutes later, he was called for a technical foul after arguing an offensive foul. Battier made the free throw to give the Rockets a 66-62 lead.
Atlanta closed to 71-70 when Chuck Hayes and Luis Scola scored on back-to-back baskets. After Smith was denied inside, McGrady stretched the lead to 77-70 with a jumper which bounced twice on the rim before falling through the net. McGrady added a 3-pointer with 1:53 left for an 81-70 lead to cap the 10-0 run.
The Hawks have lost six of seven, but remain in contention to end the league’s longest streak without a playoff appearance. They fell one-half game behind New Jersey for the eighth spot in the Eastern Conference.
“It’s been tough,” Johnson said. “Everytime we get in a position to move up, we take a step back.”
Houston allowed only 89.3 points per game during its 19 straight wins and set a low scoring pace against the Hawks.
McGrady made only two of 10 shots from the field and three of six free throws in the first half as the Rockets shot only 27.9 percent from the field.
Despite a combined 31 rebounds by Smith and Al Horford, the Rockets held a 56-52 edge on the boards and an 18-15 advantage in second-chance points.