SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1366 (30), Friday, April 18, 2008
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TITLE: Set Back For Tower Opponents
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The crusade by opposition party Yabloko against the construction of the controversial Okhta Center — formerly known as the Gazprom Tower — suffered another setback Wednesday when the St. Petersburg City Court threw out a suit claiming that the project’s funding scheme is illegitimate.
Yabloko argued that City Hall, which has agreed to cover 49 percent of the project’s costs, is investing in the project illegitimately, and asked for the funding to be excluded from the city budget for this year. 
The rest of the project’s costs are to be met by the energy giant Gazprom which intends to use part of the massive development for its new headquarters.
Yabloko said that Governor Valentina Matviyenko had inked the 2008 budget — including the part allocating 2.9 billion rubles ($123 million) for the construction of Okhta Center this year — before any technical summaries, a land agreement, or the actual contract between City Hall and Gazprom were ready. 
“The governor thus decided to spend taxpayers’ money on a project that did not at the time even exist on paper,” Boris Vishnevsky, head of Yabloko’s political council, said.
“The verdict delivered by the City Court was not based on law, and the judge simply turned a blind eye to it,” he added. 
“It is just as absurd as if, say, the traffic police had fined someone last year for violating a rule that was only introduced this year.”
Plans for the Okhta Center include the new Gazprom building that at 396 meters is almost eight times higher than the current official limit for new buildings in the city’s historic center. It will stand near where the Okhta River flows into the Neva across from the famous blue-and-white Smolny Cathedral on the opposite bank.
The tower is to be the new headquarters for Gazprom Neft, a subsidiary of the national energy monopoly. Its opponents are now pitched against a gargantuan corporate enemy. 
The structure is expected to cost 60 billion rubles ($2.56 billion). City officials say that St. Petersburg’s contribution would be compensated for by the taxes that will be generated by the move to the city of such a large business and all the staff involved. 
Yabloko had earlier called for a citywide referendum on the project but this move was defeated on a technicality in the city legislative body. Yabloko also asked the General Prosecutor’s Office to investigate the legality of the funding agreement between Gazprom and the city government but the appeal went nowhere. 
Many St. Petersburg residents and members of the city’s cultural elite have been blunt in their condemnation of the planned Gazprom tower. 
Renowned actor Oleg Basilashvili said its construction would be “spitting in the face” of Peter the Great, the tsar who founded the city in 1703.
Nicknames for the tower have proliferated, including Gazochlen (referring to its phallic shape), Gazoscryob (Gas-scraper), and Matviyenko’s Cucumber in honor of its chief advocate. 
Reports aimed at establishing the level of public support for the tower have been conflicting. 
In March this year, St. Petersburg’s Agency for Social Information released the results of a survey that suggested that 46.5 percent of respondents supported the plan to build the tower, and just 29.5 percent of them were against the plan. 
In April, however, Kommersant newspaper published strikingly different results of another poll conducted by the Megapolis sociological research center. The survey said 40.4 percent of respondents opposed the skyscraper, with only 18.5 percent of the poll’s participants viewing it favorably. 
Meanwhile, a series of television advertisements resembling news reports with citizens and celebrities claiming support for the tower has been running on local television channels. 
St. Petersburg architect Dmitry Butyrin, who heads the Council for the Protection of the Architectural Legacy of St. Petersburg, believes the planned Gazprom building is a critical test of the city’s ability to protect its architectural integrity.
“Height regulations are being violated blatantly, and it is happening more and more often,” Butyrin said. “If we swallow the Gazprom plan, more towers will quickly follow. We have nothing against Gazprom but we strongly suggest that an alternative location should be found.”

TITLE: President Warms to Separatist Provinces
AUTHOR: By Matt Siegel
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin has ordered the government to establish closer ties with the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the Foreign Ministry said Wednesday, prompting sharp criticism from Georgia and the West.
Putin’s order calls for increased economic cooperation but stops short of formally recognizing the republics, which have enjoyed de facto independence since a series of separatist wars rocked the region in the early 1990s.
Putin told the government to “cooperate with the de facto authorities in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, including the organization of trade, economic, social and scientific cooperation,” according to a statement posted Wednesday on the Foreign Ministry’s web site.
The order is aimed at strengthening security and stability in the Caucasus and does “not mean that Russia is making a choice in favor of confrontation with Georgia,” the statement said.
But Georgian officials criticized the order as a violation of international law, and the country’s pro-Western president, Mikheil Saakashvili, convened an emergency session of his national security council.
Georgian Reintegration Minister Temur Iakobashvili, the official in charge of relations with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, said Putin’s decision was part of the “creeping annexation” of his country’s territories by Russia.
Iakobashvili called on the international community to help mediate the dispute. “I think that we should still rely on our international friends and exploit that opportunity first, and then we’ll see,” he said, speaking by telephone from London.
Previously, Iakobashvili said Georgia would use military force to regain control of the regions if Moscow recognized their independence.
“If the Russian government recognizes the regions, we would move to regain control by other means,” he said during an interview with The Moscow Times in March. “Military means.”
Following the security council meeting, Georgian Foreign Minister David Bakradze called the Russian decision illegal in an interview with Reuters.
“That is against all the norms of international law, and the Georgian side will do whatever it can do in order to bring diplomatic, political and legal response to this policy,” he was quoted as saying.
Georgia received support from the United States and Europe.
“Our commitment to Georgia’s territorial integrity and sovereignty is unshakable,” U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters in Washington.
Saakashvili also reached out to Europe for support, placing an emergency call to European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, said Cristina Gallach, a spokeswoman for Solana.
“Mr. Solana is concerned,” Gallach said by telephone from Brussels. “Of course, the concern is the unilateral nature of the decision. Mr. Solana’s position is that the EU has repeatedly stated that territorial integrity is important and he feels that such issues should be solved through dialogue.”
In South Ossetia, a spokeswoman for the separatist government welcomed Putin’s move, saying it would ease economic hardships in the stagnating region.
“As for Georgia, we don’t care about their reaction any more. The main thing is to avoid any armed clashes,” Irina Gagloyeva said by telephone from Tskhinvali, Reuters reported.
Abkhazia and South Ossetia maintain close ties to Russia. 
Some two-thirds of Abkhazia’s residents have Russian citizenship, although Georgia considers it an integral part of the country and has attempted to lure it back with a combination of threats and incentives.
Late last month, Georgia’s United Nations ambassador, Irakli Alasania, offered Abkhazia “unlimited autonomy” within its borders, The Associated Press reported.
Relations between Russia and Georgia hit a crisis point in October 2006, when Tbilisi arrested and expelled four Russian military officers whom it accused of spying, and Moscow responded by severing road and air links with Georgia.
Tensions between the countries seemed to ease in recent months. After Saakashvili met with Putin in Moscow in February, road and air links were reopened. 
Since Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in March, however, Russia has been holding out the possibility of recognizing the rebel governments. 
Moscow fiercely opposed the decision to recognize Kosovo’s independence by the United States and some other Western countries. Russian officials have said that if Kosovo has its independence recognized, then so should Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Russian lawmakers have backed the two breakaway republics. In a nonbinding vote in March, the State Duma voted 440-0 to recognize their independence. The Federation Council is set to vote on the matter April 25, Interfax reported Wednesday.

TITLE: Governor Pushes for Merger With Leningrad Oblast
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko said she will again propose the administrative unification of the city and the Leningrad Oblast that surrounds it in coming weeks.
Matviyenko said she would raise the matter when a new federal government is formed after the installation of Dmitry Medvedev as president in May.
“Of course, not all of my colleagues share this view but this proposal is based on an economic analysis and will allow for the development of energy policy, roads and infrastructure, as well as the effective distribution of the workforce, capital and investment,” Matviyenko told reporters at a congress of the ruling United Russia party in Moscow on Tuesday, Interfax reported.
The governor said that she is “a strong adherent” of the unification plan.
Vadim Tyulpanov, speaker of the city parliament, said he also considered the unification of the city and the Leningrad Oblast as “conditioned” by economics.
“My attitude to the idea is very positive,” Tyulpanov said on Wednesday.
Tyulpanov said that some factories located in the center of St. Petersburg which have a negative effect on the environment could be moved to the region and residential buildings built in their place.
“It is impossible now because we have different regions and different authorities,” Tyulpanov said.
Tyulpanov said such questions should be put to the public by referendum.
However, Valery Serdyukov, governor of the Leningrad Oblast, said he didn’t see economic expediency in the unification of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast.
“Nothing is hindering the economic development of the Leningrad Oblast and St. Petersburg today because it’s a market economy. The unification won’t contribute anything to the economic development of the city and the region,” Serdyukov said on Wednesday, Interfax reported.
Boris Vishnevsky, a political analyst and member of the opposition Yabloko party, said he didn’t see any sense in the merger.
“St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast are two different entities with different conditions and problems,” Vishnevsky said.
 “There’d be zero advantage from the merger. Instead it would need changes to the legislation that would also lead to a certain level of chaos and the expansion of bureaucratic structures,” he said.
Vishnevsky said all recent St. Petersburg governors have dreamed of uniting with the Leningrad Oblast.
“They have wanted to do so because the more territory one controls, the more profit and preference it gives, and therefore the better life one can have,” he said, hinting that those in power are corrupt and motivated by personal enrichment.
Vatanyar Yagya, a Untied Russia city parliament deputy, said he was also against unification.
“If the merger happens St. Petersburg will become a regular municipal city.  It will damage the city’s image,” Yagya said.
“As for all the talk of the economic advisability of such a merger, I don’t see anything that is hindering business either in St. Petersburg or in the Leningrad Oblast now they are separate,” he said.
Maria Matskevich, senior sociologist at the Sociology Institute of the Russian Academy of Science, said that there has not been any recent public opinion research conducted on the issue. However, she said that several years ago such research showed that a significant part of the population, especially in St. Petersburg, favored the idea.
“However, it was noticeable that people didn’t have any serious background knowledge about the issue,” Matskevich said.
The idea of unifying St. Petersburg and the Lenigrad Oblast has been mooted several times in recent years, including when former St. Petersburg governor Vladimir Yakovlev called for a referendum on the matter. 
However, the merger has never had the support of the Leningrad Oblast authorities.

TITLE: German Linked to Spy Flap
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
TEXT: MOSCOW — A German man charged with selling sensitive technology information to Russia is a key figure in a mysterious spy case involving a former Federal Space Agency official that jarred Russian-Austrian relations last year. 
German prosecutors said in a statement last week that they had charged a 44-year-old native of Bavaria with passing sensitive documents to “a member of a Russian intelligence service.” 
The statement gave few specifics, but interviews with officials familiar with the case made it clear that the Russian intelligence officer referred to by German prosecutors is former Federal Space Agency official Vladimir Vozhzhov, who was arrested on spy charges in Austria last year and released after it turned out he had diplomatic immunity. 
Vozhzhov’s arrest in June disrupted otherwise cordial ties between Vienna and Moscow, prompting the Foreign Ministry to accuse Austria of violating international law. At the time of his arrest for purportedly trying to buy classified information, Vozhzhov was in Vienna for a United Nations conference on the peaceful use of outer space. He was released and allowed to return to Moscow a week later after a UN inquiry found he had diplomatic status. 
While German prosecutors identified the suspect only as Werner G., a member of the Austrian parliament said the accused is Werner Greipl, a former employee of Eurocopter, the helicopter subsidiary of European aerospace giant EADS. 
Sonja Heine, a spokeswoman for Germany’s Federal Prosecutor’s Office, said by telephone from Karlsruhe that the Austrian case and the recent spy charges “are part of the same investigation complex.” She refused to elaborate. 
But Austrian lawmaker Manfred Haimbuchner said Greipl had known Vozhzhov since 1997, when they met at Eurocopter’s factory outside Munich during Vozhzhov’s visit together with Austrian military officials. Haimbuchner said he had been briefed on the case by a “reliable” source in the Austrian military. 
German prosecutors said in the statement that the accused German had met the Russian agent several times in Germany and abroad and that communication between the two had been conducted mainly via anonymous e-mail accounts, “a common practice in intelligence circles.” The documents obtained by the Russian could be used both for civilian and military purposes, the statement said. 
According to media reports, Vozhzhov purchased classified information about the French-German combat helicopter Tiger, produced by Eurocopter. He paid up to 20,000 euros ($26,600) for information at each meeting with his contact, the Austrian magazine Profil reported in January. 
“Greipl approached the Russian because he planned to set up his own business selling civilian helicopters,” Haimbuchner said. 
Greipl, a helicopter pilot and engineer, was detained by German police in April 2007, admitting to divulging company documents, Profil reported. Reached on his cell phone Wednesday in Germany, Greipl refused to comment. 
Haimbuchner, a member of the right-wing Freedom Party, said Greipl’s statements to police were crucial in leading Austrian authorities to Vozhzhov, suggesting that the Russian official’s arrest at the Salzburg train station in June was a sting operation.

TITLE: Value-Added Agency Wins Award for Polling
AUTHOR: By Alexander Osipovich
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Central Elections Committee handed out awards Wednesday to the polling agencies that made the most accurate forecasts of the March presidential election.
But one victorious pollster said the science of political forecasting in Russia involves guessing the degree of manipulation by authorities.
In a statement on its web site, the elections committee called the March 2 presidential vote a triumph for the science of polling in Russia.
“On the whole, forecasting of the results of the 2008 Russian presidential elections can be called highly accurate,” the statement said. “Most of the research centers participating in the survey successfully fulfilled the task.”
One winner, the Moscow-based Center for Political Technologies, took the prize for predicting voter turnout. Its prediction of 69 percent was less than one percentage point away from the final, official turnout figure of 69.8 percent.
“All the agencies are competing, trying to sense what the turnout is supposed to be,” CPT director Igor Bunin said by telephone Wednesday.
To predict turnout, CPT conducts voter surveys and then estimates how many votes will be added through government pressure, said Bunin, whose center won a similar award last year after it made a nearly dead-on prediction of voter turnout in the State Duma elections.
“We predict a certain turnout, and then we add in administrative resources,” Bunin said. “This is usually about 4 percent.”
The term “administrative resources” describes a range of ways in which authorities can influence the outcome of an election.

TITLE: Tensions In Chechnya Boil Over
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The standoff between Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov and an influential Chechen clan entered its third day Wednesday as both sides traded accusations of murder and abuse of power. 
There were conflicting reports regarding the number of casualties suffered by the two sides since a collision Monday near the Chechen town of Argun between Kadyrov’s motorcade and vehicles transporting serviceman from the Defense Ministry’s elite Vostok battalion.
Regardless of casualties, the confrontation is a clear sign of the ongoing power struggle in the often violent world of Chechen politics, which Kadyrov is trying to monopolize.
The conflict has pitted Kadyrov against brothers Sulim, Ruslan and Badruddi Yamadayev, former Chechen rebels who lead a powerful clan based in Gudermes, Chechnya’s second largest city.
“This standoff, and the fact that the Yamadayevs are not giving ground easily, is a signal to Kadyrov that he should not think he is the only one calling the shots in the republic,” said Alexei Malashenko, senior expert on the Caucasus at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “There are powerful people in [federal] power agencies that do not like the way he runs things, and they will side with the Yamadayevs.”
Ousting Sulim Yamadayev from the Vostok battalion, which he commands, would allow Kadyrov to complete his consolidation of power in the republic by putting his loyalists in charge of all local police and the Defense and Interior ministries’ local commando units, which are manned primarily by ethnic Chechens. 
Such a takeover has been resisted by top commanders in Moscow, who do not trust the former rebels that have fought alongside their troops in Chechnya, according to national media reports.
Their suspicions are shared by hard-line policymakers who fear that giving complete control of Chechnya to former rebels could allow the republic to slip out of Moscow’s hands should a national crisis arise.
Kadyrov’s goal is to make himself irreplaceable after his chief backer, President Vladimir Putin, leaves office next month, experts said. The president has the power to hire and fire regional leaders.
The Yamadayevs clearly enjoy support of top military brass, who do not want Kadyrov to install his own people in Interior and Defense ministry units, which answer to Moscow.
With the exception of Vostok, Kadyrov’s men call the shots in all of the Defense and Interior ministries’ local commando units, including the Yug and Sever commando battalions, which report to the Interior Ministry, and the Zapad battalion, which reports to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff. 
Kadyrov, himself a former rebel, has managed to oust the head of the special Operational and Search Bureau No. 2, which answers directly to the Interior Ministry’s main headquarters, and arrange the disbanding of the elite Gorets commando unit, which had answered to the Federal Security Service.
The former commander of the Gorets unit, Movladi Baisarov, was charged with kidnappings and killings and subsequently shot and killed in Moscow last year by Chechen police officers from Grozny.
Following Monday’s car collisions, Kadyrov made similar allegations against the Yamadayev brothers and the Vostok battalion, accusing them of murders, kidnappings and torture.
Vostok, which answers to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, is the only Chechen-manned unit in the republic not headed by a Kadyrov loyalist. Sulim Yamadayev is the battalion’s commander, while Ruslan Yamadayev is a former State Duma deputy representing Chechnya.
Badruddi Yamadayev is a platoon commander in the Vostok battalion.
Kadyrov arranged for Ruslan Yamadayev to be replaced on the ticket of pro-Kremlin party United Russia in the Dec. 2 State Duma elections in an effort to further sideline the Yamadayev clan.
As for the Vostok battalion, several of its platoons were ordered by Chechen authorities to vacate the premises they were occupying, Kommersant reported Wednesday.
The Monday car collision set off a chain of events that could lead to complete marginalization of the Yamadayev clan should Kadyrov succeed in convincing the Kremlin to have Sulim Yamadayev either fired or reassigned and Yamadayev loyalists removed from the Vostok battalion.
In interviews with national media, Vostok servicemen blamed Kadyrov for the collision. Video footage of Kadyrov’s motorcade posted on YouTube last month showed some 50 luxury cars traveling at very high speed.
After the collision, the two sides exchanged gunfire before the Vostok convoy, led by platoon commander Badruddi Yamadayev, finally ceded to Kadyrov’s motorcade. 
Kadyrov subsequently ordered police and his loyalists in the Yug and Sever battalions to surround Vostok’s base in Gudermes and set up checkpoints, Kommersant reported. 
Local prosecutors then opened a case against Badruddi Yamadayev, charging him with preventing a public official from carrying out his duties, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

TITLE: New Tower Planned
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Hungarian property developer TriGranit Development will invest $2-3 billion into new premises in St. Petersburg, Interfax reported Tuesday, citing Sandor Demjan, chairman of the company's board of directors. TriGranit will begin several development projects in the city, including the construction of a new shopping and exhibition complex.
The complex will be built on the site of the former Badaevskie warehouses — wooden buildings dating from the beginning of the 20th century located on Kievskaya Ulitsa in the Moskovsky district. In recent years the Badaevskie warehouses have caught fire several times and have been largely destroyed.
TriGranit Development plans to complete construction within four years of obtaining the required permits from the city authorities, Demjan told Interfax.
The Badaevskie warehouses occupy 28 hectares of land in an industrial area. TriGranit plans to construct 900,000 square meters of premises, including a 1,500-room hotel that will be 140 meters high, Demjan said, as well as a congress and exhibition complex with a 60,000-person capacity. 
One local real estate expert was positive about this project.
“The location is very advantageous. The complex will be located near Moskovsky Prospekt, which is close to the airport and the center of the city. As for traffic jams and parking spaces, this problem is universal for St. Petersburg. The Moskovsky district is in a better position compared to the city center,” said Igor Luchkov, director of the assessment and analysis department at Becar Commercial Property SPb.
"In terms of available conference and exhibition space, St. Petersburg is inferior to Moscow. At the moment the city does not have a modern complex for hosting large-scale conferences and forums," Luchkov said.
He said the planned complex would benefit from its proximity to main transport hubs, the airport and city center.
“It will be possible to offer sightseeing tours to business people. As well as the exhibition complex, the project will include office areas, a hotel and shops, which should make it more attractive,” Luchkov said.
Luchkov said that the St. Petersburg town-planning requirements do not permit the construction of buildings as tall as the planned hotel. But there are exceptions, namely the Okhta Center, which will be 300 meters tall despite being located opposite the landmark of Smolny Cathedral, he added.
“Some disputes could arise over this building. But the Moskovsky district, which has a lot of vacant space, is more promising in this regard. With some assistance from the authorities, this problem could be solved,” Luchkov said.
TriGranit Development's second project planned for St. Petersburg is the construction of a media production complex titled Telefabrika on Vasiliyevsky Island. Construction should be completed within two-and-a-half years.
TriGranit will invest about $600-700  million into Telefabrika, which will provide film production facilities.
TriGranit is also negotiating with Russian Railways over the construction of a new shopping and entertainment center close to Vitebsky railway station.

TITLE: More Hotel Chains to Open in City
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Two new international hotel operators, InterContinental Hotels & Resorts and Domina Hotel Group, plan to open hotels in St. Petersburg during the next two years, Interfax reported Wednesday, citing Maxim Sokolov, chairman of City Hall's Committee for Investment and Strategic Projects.
“Domina Hotel Group will open its first hotel in the city center on Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa, and InterContinental will open a large Holiday Inn hotel on Moskovsky Prospekt,” Interfax cited Maxim Sokolov as saying at a local government meeting Tuesday.
InterContinental had already announced plans to open a Crowne Plaza hotel in the center of St. Petersburg in early 2009.
In addition, during the next two years a number of new hotels are due to open in the city, including Four Seasons, Reval Hotels and Sokos. Marriott will open a Courtyard hotel and Starwood will open both a W hotel and a Le Meridien hotel.
According to a statement released by the city governor’s press service Wednesday, 371 hotels currently operate in St. Petersburg and 172 new hotels are being planned and constructed.
Recent hotel projects are being realized outside the city center, in outlying districts such as Lomonosov, Pushkin, Pavlovsk, Kronshtadt and Zelenogorsk.
Nine new hotels are due to open in the city by the end of this year, followed by another 16 in 2009, the statement said.
Sokolov estimated that St. Petersburg currently lacks about 10,400 hotel rooms, which is about half of the existing hotel stock.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Russian Railways, the operator of the world’s longest train network, will restrict train service through St. Petersburg this month as it upgrades the rail link between Moscow and Russia's second-largest city.
A total of 77 trains will be canceled from Friday April 18 until April 25 and the schedules of 47 other trains running from April 21 to 25 will be changed, the rail operator’s Oktyabrskaya division said Monday in an e-mailed statement.
Canceled connections include trains from St. Petersburg to Moscow and other Russian cities, the Azeri capital Baku and cities in Ukraine.

ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Metso Oyj’s Valmet Automotive unit, which assembles Boxster sports cars for Porsche AG, may build a Russian assembly plant near St. Petersburg to supply Europe’s fastest-growing car market, a local government spokesman said.
Valmet plans to spend about $16 million during the first three years on building the plant.
<b>Bank Profits Increase</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — St. Petersburg Bank's net profit increased by 67.6 percent last year up to two billion rubles ($85.6 million), Interfax reported Tuesday.
Assets doubled, reaching 126.7 billion rubles ($5.42 billion), while capital tripled to 15 billion rubles ($642.47 million) by the end of 2007. Profitability of shareholder capital was reported at 20.6 percent, according to the IFRS.
Net interests increased by 72 percent up to 4.667 billion rubles ($200 million), and credit portfolio increased by 133 percent to 92.3 billion rubles ($3.9 billion).

<b>Gas Stations Grow</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Lukoil-Northwest-Oilproduct will increase investment by 35 percent this year, Interfax reported Tuesday.
The company will invest 1.823 billion rubles ($78 million), mainly in the construction of new gas stations. This year the company will construct 27 new gas stations in St. Petersburg, 14 stations in the Leningrad Oblast, four in the Pskov Oblast and three in Karelia. 

<b>Pulkovo Bids Open</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — On Monday the St. Petersburg government will announce a tender for the reconstruction of Pulkovo airport, Interfax reported Wednesday.
Applications will be accepted until July 31, but the tender committee will not accept applications from air carriers, companies that operate airports located within 800 kilometers from St. Petersburg, or companies owning or operating airports in Helsinki, Stockholm, Riga, Tallinn, Vilnius, Minsk and Moscow. The 30-year concession agreement should be signed by July 30, 2009. The total cost of the project is estimated at $1.4 billion.

TITLE: Russia Writes Off Libyan Debt
AUTHOR: By Oleg Shchedrov
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: TRIPOLI — Russia agreed on Thursday to write off $4.5 billion worth of Libya's Cold War-era debt in return for military and civilian contracts between the north African country and Russian companies, officials said. 
The deal was one of 10 trade, investment and political agreements reached during a visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin, the first by a Kremlin leader to the OPEC member since 1985. 
"I am satisfied by the way we have solved the debt problem," Putin told reporters. "I am convinced we found a scheme which will benefit both the Russian and Libyan economies and the Russian and Libyan people." 
"The deal will not only employ Russian defense enterprises but will also help strengthen Libya's defenses." 
Libya, whose oil and gas industries earned it more than $40 billion in 2007, is being wooed by Western companies seeking contracts for involvement in big state infrastructure projects. 
Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said the debt would be cancelled once payments for the new contracts arrived in the bank accounts of Russian companies. 
Analysts say the debt was built up during the Cold War, much of it as a result of Soviet arms supplies to Libya. 
The largest single commercial deal signed during Putin's trip was a 2.2 billion euro ($3.48 billion) contract for state-controlled Russian Railways to build a stretch of line from the cities of Sirte to Benghazi. 
Putin said the railways deal would help Libya solve its infrastructure problems. 
A defence source said that in the next few days the two countries would also sign a contract worth several hundred million dollars under which Russia would modernize some weaponry sold previously to Libya. 
Russia's Interfax news agency said on Monday Moscow hoped to sell Tripoli anti-aircraft systems, jet fighters, helicopters and warships worth 2.5 billion euros. 
The two countries also signed agreements on investor protection and the handling of confidential information. 
Russia, Libya's traditional weapons supplier, is seeking to revive its role as a global power, which diminished after the Soviet Union collapsed. 
It is also keen to deepen energy ties with Libya, conscious that western and Asian companies have snapped up the bulk of oil and gas ventures in the country in recent years. 
Libya's ties to the West have warmed since it abandoned its weapons of mass destruction programs in 2003, prompting the removal of most international sanctions. 
Russia's trade with Libya is worth about $200 million a year now, a fraction of the $1 billion in the Soviet era, but energy firms are already laying the basis for further expansion.

TITLE: Banks Borrow Just 8% Of Available Funds at Auction
AUTHOR: By Alex Nicholson
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia's biggest banks borrowed less than analysts expected in a special auction held by the Finance Ministry on Thursday to inject money into the banking system.
Banks received 23.6 billion rubles ($1.6 billion) at an average interest rate of 7.31 percent, the Moscow-based ministry said on its web site. That was 8 percent of the maximum 300 billion rubles in government funds offered to ensure banks have the money to pay about $21 billion in value-added taxes due next week.
The results "show that this instrument is not currently in demand with banks, which is evidence that there is no deficit of liquidity," Pyotr Kazakevich, deputy director of the ministry's international financial relations department, said in an e-mailed statement.
Natalya Orlova, a banking analyst with Moscow-based Alfa Bank, said Wednesday she expected banks to apply for between 100 billion and 150 billion rubles at the auction.
"This is a very small amount," Orlova said by telephone. "Either the banks that had access to the auction don't have a problem" or there will be a surge in demand at next week's auction, when 500 billion rubles in value-added tax payments are due, she said.
"Everyone was expecting far more to be taken," Gordon Latimir, the head of financial service at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Moscow, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Thursday.
The auction comes after the European Central Bank and the Bank of England boosted liquidity in the interbank market following the collapse of the U.S. subprime mortgage market. Russia will hold a series of auctions offering as much as 600 billion rubles, Deputy Finance Minister Dmitry Pankin said on Monday.
The Interfax news service cited an unnamed source in the Central Bank saying that the next auction would be held on next week on April 24, and that five to 10 banks had participated in Thursday's auction.
Lenders enrolling with the central bank to participate in the auctions need to have capital of at least 5 billion rubles, a suitable credit rating and be part of the deposit insurance system, according to the auction terms posted on the ministry's Web site.
Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said an auction would be held every week for two to three weeks and as required after that, the Interfax news agency reported on Tuesday.

TITLE: Rethinking Spheres of Influence
AUTHOR: By Gideon Rachman
TEXT: In Winston Churchill’s memoirs, he records a meeting with Josef Stalin in October 1944: “The moment was apt for business, so I said ‘Let us settle our affairs in the Balkans. ... So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have 90 percent predominance in Romania, for us to have 90 percent of the say in Greece and go 50-50 about Yugoslavia?’ While this was being translated, I wrote out the percentages on a half sheet of paper. I pushed this across to Stalin. ... There was a slight pause. Then he took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it and passed it back to us. It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down.” 
I was in Georgia — Stalin’s birthplace — last week. The country regained its independence in 1991, but its leaders fear that they may yet be subject to a modern version of the Churchill-Stalin percentages deal, in which the West casually assigns Georgia into Moscow’s “sphere of influence.” 
Georgian fears have been stoked by NATO’s failure to give Georgia and Ukraine the green light for the Membership Action Plan at the alliance’s Bucharest summit. It is true that the summit communique asserted that the two countries would eventually join NATO. But it is clear that some members of the alliance harbor deep misgivings. French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said, “We are opposed to the entry of Georgia and Ukraine because we think it is not the right response to the balance of power in Europe and between Europe and Russia.” 
Such language is greeted with dismay in Georgia. President Mikheil Saakashvili told me last week that Fillon’s comments were “clearly about spheres of influence, which is bizarre to say the least. ... What we are talking about is appeasement. And today it might be Georgia and tomorrow Estonia — and then, hypothetically, Finland. Finland was also in Moscow’s sphere of influence. It was part of the Russian empire.” 
To Saakashvili, spheres of influence belong to the bad old days. U.S. President George W. Bush agrees. He has denounced the Yalta agreement of 1945 — which recognized Eastern Europe as a Soviet sphere of influence — as “one of the greatest wrongs of history.” 
The arguments against informal recognition of a Russian sphere of influence are powerful. As one Western diplomat puts it, “Either the ex-Soviet countries are independent states or they are not.” As independent countries, Georgia and Ukraine should be free to make their own decisions about their security. As an alliance of free countries, NATO should not allow Russia a veto on who joins the club. In any case, NATO has already let parts of the former Soviet Union — the three Baltic states — into the alliance. Russia has had to live with this decision. 
But the counterarguments should not be airily dismissed. For all of Bush’s impatience with the concept, unstated spheres of influence do still exist in the modern world. There is a powerful moral case for recognizing an independent Taiwan. Yet Bush has leaned heavily on Taiwan not to declare independence, because China is so implacable on the issue. Taiwan is, de facto, recognized as part of a Chinese sphere of influence. 
Georgia and Ukraine are also harder cases than Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Russian culture has deep roots in Ukraine, and opinion polls suggest that the Ukrainian population is divided about NATO membership. Support for NATO membership is much less equivocal in Georgia, but Georgia is locked into territorial disputes with the Kremlin and its geographical position would make it harder to defend than the Baltic states. Yet, under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, all NATO members would be committed to defending Georgia — a country of fewer than 5 million people — in the event of a Russian attack. 
Russia is also stronger and angrier than it was a few years ago, when NATO let in the Baltic countries. And Moscow’s concerns are not obviously unreasonable. I was in Georgia at a conference organized by the Brookings Institution. One of the U.S. participants mused, “If the Russians were concluding military alliances with Mexico and Canada, I think we might have some concerns.” 
The official U.S. response is less understanding. The Bush administration argues that NATO is a defensive alliance and that Russian concerns are irrational and outmoded. As Bush put it as his recent summit with President Vladimir Putin, “The Cold War is over.” 
But many, including liberals, in Russia are not reassured. On my last visit to Moscow, Grigory Yavlinsky, head of the liberal Yabloko party, explained to me that NATO’s military intervention in Kosovo had made it much harder for the country’s liberals to make a pro-Western case. Yes, Yavlinsky said, NATO might have intervened on human rights grounds, but Russians know that its own army has committed human rights abuses in Chechnya. If NATO could bomb Belgrade in a war over human rights, why could it not bomb Moscow? 
Yavlinsky said the people had concluded that the only difference was that their country was too strong and frightening to take on. So the only response to NATO expansion was to be even more assertive. 
It would be nice to believe that the argument about extending NATO membership to Georgia and Ukraine was purely about principle. But, in reality, it is also about power. 
If NATO ultimately decides to admit these two countries to the alliance, it will be taking a calculated risk. The risk may be a small one. But it is not unreasonable to do a little more calculation before taking it. 

Gideon Rachman is a columnist for the Financial Times, where this comment appeared.

TITLE: Making a Killing by Selling Weapons
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: We liberals have been wrongfully slandering the state for its attacks on various businesses. Last week, Moscow stepped in to protect the rights of an upstanding Russian businessman who was arrested overseas. I am speaking of Victor Bout, who is being held in Thailand on suspicion of plotting to sell Russian-made Igla shoulder-fired missiles to Columbian drug cartels. Bout was poised to sell a mere 100 of these missiles to drug barons, who had been planning to use them to shoot down U.S. helicopters foolish enough to fly over their plantations. 
To his credit, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said in a statement on Friday that the country would take all necessary measures to ensure that Bout’s rights are not violated. 
Bout was arrested on March 6 — more than a month ago — but Moscow’s offer to help the international arms dealer came last week. In the age of instantaneous communications, such a slow response could only mean that some other method was used to establish a connection with authorities — money, for example. When the problem of a Russian citizen arrested abroad can be resolved by a phone call, the result is seen right away. But when these issues are decided with cash payments, this is a more complicated process. Negotiations are delicate, and you have to work out how the money will be transferred. All of this takes a lot of time. 
And the juiciest part of the Foreign Ministry’s statement is that Russia has no plans to press charges against Bout. The power ministries have to account for all Igla missiles in their stock, and state arms exporter Rosoboronexport has a strict monopoly on the trade of Igla and similar weaponry. This system of tight control was instituted to prevent black market sales to terrorists. 
I would recommend that United Russia immediately introduce a bill in the State Duma granting Columbian drug lords the status of freedom fighters struggling against U.S. imperialists. Duma deputies could also stipulate in the bill that cocaine, which is used by the drug dealers to settle their accounts, could be used as a legitimate form of international currency. 
Bout has been accused of selling weapons to the Hutu militants who carried out a monstrous genocide campaign, killing more than 1 million people in Rwanda in 1994. He has allegedly sold arms to other bloodthirsty dictators in Sierra Leone and Liberia and equipped the Taliban. After the United Nations listed Bout as one of the world’s most dangerous criminals, he decided to settle down in Russia. Apparently, for Bout, even the African regimes were not as safe as Putin’s Russia. 
The government is engaged in a heroic crusade against all those bad businessmen who break the law. It has imprisoned former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Yukos vice president Vasily Aleksanyan. Authorities have also charged with various violations the owners of titanium producer VSMPO-Avisma, Domodedovo Airport operator East Line, electronics retailer Eldorado and the Arbat Prestige perfume chain. They have taken aim at oil companies, retail chains, pharmacies and veterinarians that give anesthesia injections to cats. 
As part of its ongoing war against fascism, the Prosecutor General’s Office in Samara recently put a halt to retailer Yevroset’s sale of cell phone bags displaying swastikas. In Novosibirsk, the Prosecutor General’s Office has initiated an investigation into Vyacheslav Verevochkin, an engineer, for restoring World War II German army tanks, embellished with swastikas. Of course, he should have painted French royal lilies on them instead. 
In short, the Russian government has it out for everybody — from billionaire Khodorkovsky to simple country folk who reconstruct World War II battle tanks. But it is not opposed to a Russian businessman offering surface-to-air missiles to Columbian drug lords. 

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

TITLE: Lost in translation
AUTHOR: By Marina Kamenev
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: There are some voices that are suited to their foreign roles. “National Lampoon’s Pledge This!” a movie starring Paris Hilton, is dubbed by Russia’s own socialite bimbo, Ksenia Sobchak. And Pamela Anderson and Denise Richards in “Blonde and Blonder” are dubbed, most appropriately, by blonde Ukrainian pop star Olya Polyakova and by the blonder and more surgically enhanced television presenter Masha Malinovskaya.
Those, however, look like rare examples of when dubbing gets it right in a country where dubbing on illegal DVDs ranges from the incomprehensible to the inaudible. Often, all the characters —male and female, young and old — speak in the same monotonous voice of a middle-aged man.
The combination of amateur translating and dubbing can lead to perplexing moments on screen. One expat recalled how, in the cult U.S. series “Lost,” the heroine, Kate, was telling another character that she was wanted. “Ya khochu [I want],” said the person reading over the film.
But some studios and actors insist that dubbing can be done properly. Sergei Kazakov and Stanislav Strelkov both trained as actors and have been dubbing films for over 15 years.
Kazakov, who has played everyone from Sylvester Stallone in “Rocky” to Robert De Niro in “The Godfather Part II,” said that films are mostly dubbed because Russia does not have a culture of subtitles. “It’s a well-read nation. People read so many books that when they come to the cinema, they want to switch off.”
Kazakov and Strelkov work with official studios and agree that the industry has changed over the last two decades. “Then [in 1991], dubbing had more significance. Before you even had a microphone in front of you, you would be assigned your role and watch the film. They would say, ‘You are Stanley, you are Harold, you are Stella,’ and then we would watch the film knowing who we were playing, go home, practice our lines and then perform them later.”
In the early ‘90s, new releases hardly made their way into Russia, and most of the films they dubbed were already well known. Today, for many actors, the first time they see the film is when their voice is already being recorded, which makes it more difficult.
“You have to judge the personality and adjust your voice from a piece of paper,” said Kazakov. Which means that even if movies are professionally dubbed, there is a lot of room for error.
There are two ways of translating films from their original: voiceover, where the actors talk over the script, and the original language is still audible; and dubbing, where — if it’s done right — the actors appear to be speaking in Russian.
“Dubbing is much harder,” said Kazakov. “You have to read the script and determine the character’s personality, their intonation, try and imagine the way they speak, their every cough. Everything has to be perfect,” he said.
Voiceovers are done slightly differently. “There are usually three people that do the voiceover for one film, two males and a female,” said Strelkov, because there are more male roles in most films.
“To be good at voiceovers, you have to be able to read quickly, have a good, clear voice, with a lot of range and have very good timing,” Strelkov said.
Actors have to differentiate their voice when they are responsible for the sound of more than one character. “Sometimes it sounds like there are twenty people in the studio, and not three,” said Kazakov.
When dubbing, the film can be paused to fit the sentence in with the actors’ words, but there is no such possibility with voiceovers, where the film has to play at its original speed while the voices are recorded.
“You don’t need to act as much in voiceovers, because you already have a sense of the original actor — the way they act, the way they sound,” said Strelkov.
Translating voiceovers, however, is much more difficult, and it’s a process that involves editing. “You have to translate the words not only so they make sense but so that they fit in and take up the exact amount of space as the original text,” said Gennady Maksimov, an expert in the field of film translations.
“With dubbing you can be creative, but the rules and parameters for voiceovers are much stricter.”
Maksimov usually works with French translations, but has also translated “The Godfather” into Russian.
“It’s very difficult because its not just translating words: You have to make sure that things make sense culturally. Taking something that is American and making sure that every aspect of it will translate to a Russian audience is the real challenge.”
Russia’s most famous film translator is Dmitry Puchkov, known as Goblin. He is notorious for not toning down the bad language from the original films, ranging from Guy Ritchie’s “Snatch” to “The Big Lebowski.” His aim, he said in an email interview, is to make the translation as authentic as possible.
Puchkov said that a good translation requires expertise in a variety of fields, from medicine, to law, to astronomy. “The issue is not so much knowing English, as knowing everything that allows you to understand the original adequately enough to translate it into Russian.”
Puchkov said one of the reasons that dubbing is so awful is that the people doing it often don’t care enough about the finished product. “It’s obvious to everyone that American films are stupid. Any idiot can translate them, and in fact idiots are hired to do so. To this you can add the work of the actors who do the dubbing and don’t care about the films, and the sound director, who decides how it should sound. As a result you end up with a totally different film, with different dialogues, different intonations, and different accents.”
Puchkov has a set method of translating. First he watches the film for understanding, then he consults a dictionary. “Where before you had a shelf of books, now you have the web.” He then looks at specific clauses that may not be understood in Russia. “How to quickly explain what a famous company does ... what’s funny about the last name of a comic character, what kind of details you need for translating jokes.” If there are things that Puchkov does not understand, he asks the author of the text. “I have never encountered a refusal for help.”
If a direct translation does not work, then Puchkov will work something different into the film. “Most jokes are a play on words, so translating them word for word is impossible. You have to make your own joke up, or insert an analogy,” he said.
While there are a lot of fans of Puchkov on Internet forums, not everyone is a Goblin follower. “I think only young people can possibly like his translations, because they are fascinated by the swearing, but it caters to the lowest possible audience,” said Maksimov. “It’s butchery. It’s like taking Pushkin and interpreting it with some kind of modern, vulgar voice.”
Maksimov recalled trying to watch the Sopranos on NTV3. “The series said that it was a professional translation by Goblin, which I thought was the height of rudeness,” he said. “It was insulting to the actors and to the profession of translating.”
The fact that there is no professional training in the field of dubbing is, perhaps, the source of these conflicting ideas. This is a problem that Kazakov and Strelkov hope to solve next year — by opening Russia’s first school to teach trained actors how to dub.

TITLE: Chernov's Choice
TEXT: It isn’t bad news that <b>Ali Campbell</b> is due to perform in town but it is a shame how the concert has been advertized. 
Posters (especially the early versions of them) for the ex-singer with British band UB40 were designed in such a way that the public could be easily fooled into thinking that it is not just Campbell, but his internationally famous former band that is coming to St. Petersburg (the largest possible type for “UB40” and the smallest for “Ali Campbell”). 
The very first version also said “For the First Time in Russia,” even though Campbell performed in St. Petersburg with UB40 in 1986. Campbell, who played his farewell concert with UB40 in Uganda in February before leaving the band, will perform solo at Oktyabrsky Concert Hall on Wednesday.
However, the local promoter’s news release, headlined “Kings of Reggae Return. The Only Concert in Honor of the Band’s 30th Anniversary” and sent out on Thursday, did not mention that Campbell has left UB40.
“Kings of reggae, one of the best-known British projects, UB40 return to Russia,” the trickily worded announcement reads, complete with a UB40 photo. 
“Their songs, in honor of the band’s 30th anniversary will be sung by its continuous lead guitarist, founder and golden voice of the band over the last 30 years, Ali Campbell.” 
The concert’s Russian promoter is a local company called EM Concert that specializes, according to its website, in organizing “weddings, anniversaries, corporate parties and concerts.”
Speaking of nostalgia, the state clamped down on punks and other types of youths, just for how they look — something it has not done since, well, 1986. 
Arrests, police harassment and beating have been reported continuously from Moscow over the past few weeks, where the “anti-punk” police operation is still raging. According to reports, punks, goths, emo fans and other unconventionally looking teenagers have been deliberately picked on by the police, reports said.
A meeting against police violence in Moscow last Friday was reported to have been dispersed violently by the police, prompting a group of human right activists to appeal to the European Union. A second meeting is due on Bolotnaya Ploshchad in Moscow at 6 p.m. on Friday.
For some reason, the operation has not yet reached St. Petersburg, but this city had it’s own anti-youth crackdown when OMON police arrested 74 teenagers in order to prevent a march in memory of the late punk icon, Yegor Letov, on Feb. 24. 
Meanwhile, kings of corporate parties, foul-mouthed ska punk band <b>Leningrad</b> will perform its now rare public concert, advertized as a joint production with an established theater director, at Yubileiny Sports Palace on Friday. 
Its once-iconoclastic leader Sergei Shnurov has been seen lately as a presenter of a documentary war series on television and on ads for a brand of boots in shops. 
<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: Trading up
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: NEW YORK — Jeff Koons’s eight-legged steel caterpillar and Richard Prince’s “Millionaire Nurse” painting are headed to an upscale Moscow shopping mall next week.
They are among some 30 contemporary artworks, worth more than $30 million, that Sotheby’s is previewing there in an effort to woo rich, young Russian collectors to bid at its May auctions in New York.
In the past year, Sotheby’s has previewed Russian and modern art in Moscow. This show is the first time Sotheby’s is targeting its current and potential Russian clients solely with works from contemporary-art sales.
The exhibition of works by Koons, Prince, Andy Warhol, Takashi Murakami and other blue-chip artists will take place at the Barvikha Luxury Village from April 23 to 27. The shopping mall — where wealthy patrons can pick up a Lamborghini or Ferrari — was also the site of a contemporary show by New York’s Gagosian Gallery six months ago.
To attract the younger crowd, whose emissaries have been turning up at biennials and art fairs in Venice, London and Miami, Sotheby’s is sending a selection of art from both its May 14 evening auction and its lower-priced day sales on May 15.
“Russians have been traveling more and have seen what’s out there,” said art dealer Luba Mosionzhnik, who has galleries in New York and Moscow. “Everyone wants to be part of the Rat Pack.”
Koons’s colorful caterpillar sculpture is the priciest piece in the preview, with a high estimate of $6.5 million. The creature, resembling an inflatable toy, hangs in midair on eight red chains.
There’s a self-portrait by Warhol in which the pop artist’s yellow, gaunt face is set against a black background. The work is expected to fetch between $2 million and $3 million in May.
Prince’s “Millionaire Nurse” is estimated to fetch as much as $4.5 million.
In the past year, Moscovites have seen a surge of contemporary art shows in the capital. U.K. stars Jake and Dinos Chapman showed at Triumph Gallery in December. Berlin-based dealer Volker Diehl is opening a Moscow branch this week with an exhibition by U.S. conceptual artist Jenny Holzer.
Dealer Mosionzhnik is organizing an exhibition of abstract expressionist art later this month, with paintings by Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko as well as living artists Brice Marden and Bill Jensen. New York painter George Condo will make his Moscow debut at Gary Tatintsian Gallery in May.
While Sotheby’s rivals Christie’s International and Phillips de Pury & Co. also have been actively pursuing Russian buyers, Sotheby’s has taken the lead role in the Russian market, dealers and collectors said.
In 1988, it held its first auction of contemporary Russian art in Moscow. Recently, it has become the biggest seller of Russian art, with annual sales increasing to $190.9 million in 2007 from $6.03 million in 2000.
Like the Gagosian show last year, Sotheby’s preview is co- sponsored by Russia’s Alfa Bank, a subsidiary of Alfa Group Consortium, whose principal founder, Mikhail Fridman, is known to collect contemporary Western art.

TITLE: Berlin blues
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Twenty-eight years since the pioneering German  industrial/noise band Einsturzende Neubauten (Collapsing New Buildings) was formed, the band returns to St. Petersburg with yet another album, “Alles Wieder Offen,” (Everything Open Again) self-described as “possibly [its] most fully and perfectly realized album yet.” 
Reputed as the ultimate Berlin band, Einsturzende Neubauten’s origins are said to lie with the notorious wall erected by the Communists in the city in 1961 to prevent East Germans from defecting to the west. 
“The [Berlin] Wall was of crucial importance [to] the founding of Einsturzende Neubauten,” the band’s press notes read. “The Wall encircling West Berlin transformed that city into a state-subsidized near-paradisiacal freak-enclave for artists and the maladjusted of every sort.”
The wall was eventually dismantled by popular revolt in 1989 and Germany was reunified in 1990. 
Einsturzende Neubauten’s “Kollapse” (1981), its radical, avant-garde, noise album using jackhammers and drills, was in a way a reaction to the abnormality of living in the divided city. Symbolically, that era ended in 2004 when the band performed at the Palast der Republik, the former headquarters of the power apparatus of the fallen German Democratic Republic, which was in the process of being demolished.
Alexander Hacke, the band’s bassist, spoke to The St. Petersburg Times by telephone from his home studio.

<b>How did the Berlin Wall influence your work?</b>
I was born and raised in a city that doesn’t exist anymore. The name of this city was West Berlin. Now I live in a city called Berlin, which is also a capital of Germany, but that’s a completely different place from the place I grew up in. 
And it’s true that the West Berlin really influenced early Neubauten, because of its situation. West Berlin was an island, it was a little elitist village. Dropouts from the west of Germany would go to West Berlin in order not have to go to the army. 
The atmosphere was very different. You would know everyone in the scene; the scene was very small. 
Now it is the capital of the country, and there is business here, there is security here, because the politicians are here, and basically it’s a lot harder for the underground in a city like this than what Berlin was before.
Now it is the city with suburbs, and it’s a completely different setup. It’s not as subsidized as West Berlin was for art, there’s a lot of struggle.
I don’t find Berlin as it is now very inspiring artistically. The rents are cheap, it’s a good place to live and work, but it is not very inspiring. I get my inspirations elsewhere, if I get inspired by a city at all.

<b>How did you feel about playing at Palast der Republik?</b>
We were happy to be among the last people to appear in that building before it got torn down.
For me, that building didn’t have a very big impact on my life, on my history, because, as you know, I’m from the West. I was never confined to the country of East Germany, I could travel, and I have never been part of that system.
That building represented the system that doesn’t exist anymore, therefore it’s interesting for us, but it was not the system that influenced me personally. For me it was much different than for many members of the audience.

<b>There have been a lot of films about life in East Germany lately, so it must be interesting for the audiences.</b>
It is very predictable. By the time the Wall fell you could expect this nostalgia to come out. No matter how bad the system was, there were always things of sentimental value and I suppose you can say this about your own country as well [Russia]. Even if a lot of things have changed for the better, there will be things that you have fond memories of and that you remember even if they are not there anymore.
For example, for a lot of people from East Germany there was a great sense of solidarity and great warmth among these people. The way they treated each other, the way they communicated with each other was very different from the habits of the western world. A lot of East Germans miss it now, living in the capitalist world. They miss this solidarity and the warmth of their former communities.

<b>There’s a lot of Russians in Berlin now, is their presence felt in art or music?</b>
There’s one guy in particular, his name is Vladimir Kaminer, he’s a writer and entrepreneur. He organizes quite a few events, there’s Russendisko and stuff like that. Quite a scene has developed around him, which is interesting. And the Russendisko parties, they’re just fantastic.

<b>One song on the “Alles Wieder Offen” album has to do with the former Soviet Union.</b>
“Nagorny Karabakh,” yes. Very important information is that none of us has ever been to Nagorny Karabakh. It is a metaphor for a state of mind. And also it is an inside Neubauten reference, because one of the most important pieces from 1983, from [the album] “Zeichnungen des Patienten O. T.,” is called “Armenia.” And back then we really related to the history of the Armenian people. 
The history is quite tragic, really, and pretty bad, and therefore also in their folk music — they don’t have a single happy dance tune in their folk music, which is quite amazing. It’s all really sad music. We sort of relate to that.
And Blixa [Bargeld] picked the word  “Nagorny Karabakh” for one reason, for its beautiful sound.  He enjoys saying this word, Nagorny Karabakh. [Nagorno-Karabakh is a disputed republic in Azerbaijan claimed by Armenia].

<b>There was a terrible war there.</b>
Yes, and still is. It’s a metaphor. 
A metaphor for a state of mind.

<i>Einsturzende Neubauten performs at Manezh Kadetskogo Korpusa on Wednesday.</i> www.neubauten.org

TITLE: Book tour
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: LONDON — Russian publishers, critics and award-winning writers joined forces to promote contemporary Russian literature at the London Book Fair this week. Nearly 100 delegates arrived in the U.K. capital to attend the 1st Week of Russian Language and Literature that kicked off Monday in Earl’s Court and will run through Sunday.
Russia this year debuted at the prestigious fair — a respected international event that attracted over 23,000 industry professionals — but the country’s stand was a mixed bag of literary periodicals and almanacs, arts albums, guidebooks and anthologies of contemporary prose.
A major disadvantage of the Russian stand, compared to the vast majority of other participants at the fair, was the fact that most of the editions were in Russian. 
The only English-language offers at the Russian display came from the State Russian Museum, which presented luxuriously printed arts albums and catalogues. A large proportion of the stand was devoted to serious Russian-language literary periodicals, but whether there is a market for them in the U.K. remains unclear.
The program of the Russian week was varied, but somewhat chaotic, with a series of discussions, film screenings, the launch of grants for translators and a forum for teachers. 
Literary evenings had award-winning writer Orlando Figes, prize-winning journalist James Meek and prominent historian Dominic Lieven among the speakers. However, the organizers seem to have spread the program too thinly and lacked an obvious target, making it unclear if their key audience was the U.K. Russian-language community, literary experts and translators, British publishers or the general public.
Nevertheless, the organizers were successful in inviting some of Russia’s brightest literary stars including Dmitry Bykov, winner of the Big Book Prize 2007 and Alexander Ilichevsky, winner of the Russian Booker Prize 2007. On Friday, a book launch and discussion in Waterstone’s Piccadilly, one of London’s biggest book stores, takes place and Ilichevsky and Bykov joined British translator Oliver Ready in the presentation of the anthology of contemporary Russian writing that features both authors.
Regrettably, new writing itself was missing at the stand.
Apparently, one of the core goals of Russian Literature Week is to give potential publishers and audiences an idea of where to look for contemporary Russian literary talent. Shortlists of Russia’s three most respected literary awards — the National Bestseller, the Big Book and the Russian Booker — give a fair picture of the country’s literary landscape, reflecting change and rarely missing a gifted newcomer, so it would have made sense over the course of the event to feature some of the most intriguing shortlisted books.
Almost none of these books have been translated and perhaps a presentation would have helped get British translators and publishers interested.
Since the plan was to give the British publishers a generous scoop of what contemporary Russia has to offer, then a display of a selection of prize-winning books — perhaps with a short English-language promotion leaflet — could have been provided. It was frustrating to see none of the shortlisted books on the stand but apparently the publishers that printed the winning novels had not expressed sufficient interest. 
Russian participation at the fair had tremendous potential. The London Book Fair showed that interest in Russia and its culture is great. 
Biographies of Russian composers Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky, and chronicles of the Battle of Borodino and the Siege of Leningrad featured prominently in the stands of international publishers at the fair. Bykov’s excellent biography of poet Boris Pasternak that won him the 2006 National Bestseller prize and highest critical acclaim in Russia would have been a jewel on the Russian stand.
However, Bykov spoke about his book and Pasternak’s life in Stalin’s Russia at a presentation at the Royal Society of Literature on Monday.
The event is organized by Academia Rossica, a London based non-profit cultural organization, created with the aim to boost cultural and intellectual links between Britain and Russia. The Week is supported by the Moscow-based Yeltsin Foundation, the Russky Mir foundation, the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications and the Russian Embassy in London. 
Foreign journalists who attended a news conference of the Russian delegation on Monday were more interested in politics than culture. 
Questions revolved around the issues like censorship, government pressure and risks for the writers that publish revealing documentaries or investigations. Works by the National Bolshevik leader Eduard Limonov and late investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya featured prominently in the questions.
“Censorhsip and pressure occur in the sphere of mass media; the books of Edurad Limonov and Anna Politkovskaya are published and sold freely in Russia,” said Vladimir Grigoriev, Deputy Head of the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications, head of Vagrius publishing house and the founder of the Big Book Prize, the second-largest cash award, after the Nobel prize, responding to the worries expressed by the British journalists about the dangers faced by Russian politicians and journalists that publish politically charged critical books.
While the Russian delegation handled all questions openly and honestly, speakers clearly sought to refrain from taking a political line. 
But some say that it is precisely because Russia’s current political life is in a state of lethargy that has led to politics seeking refuge in literature.
As art critic Artemy Troitsky puts it, “when politics is in comatose condition, more and more people open up to the written form as a substitution for political standoffs, battles and controversy.”

TITLE: Panic attack
AUTHOR: By Kate Brown
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: When I first arrived in the Soviet Union in 1987, I suffered from that sinking feeling brought on by the dismal clutter of the Soviet landscape. I walked beaches littered with washed-up machine parts, rode tattered trams past shabby housing blocks, and tripped over rebar in concrete-clad playgrounds. I left the Soviet Union and spent the next six months in the orderly affluence of Western Europe and then returned home to the United States. Home at last. Riding the train between New York and Washington, however, I had an uncanny sensation of return. The speeding train rushed past Trenton, Philadelphia and Baltimore revealing a series of unseemly tableaux vivants: overturned grocery carts mounting rusted cars, garbage strewn like lingerie outside shuttered factories, whole cities of abandoned row houses, bedding expelled. How had I missed it? My American landscape looked so Soviet.
Richard Rhodes’ account of the “folly” of the reckless American and Soviet nuclear arms race narrates the great, shared tragedy that befell both the Soviet Union and the United States in the second half of the 20th century. While Europe quietly rebuilt from the shards of war, stockpiling good will and prosperity in the form of public housing and health care, high-quality schools, public transportation and a well-maintained infrastructure, the United States and the Soviet Union were furiously burying their public wealth under the ocean, in desert locations and deep inside hollowed-out mountains, where military strategists hoarded tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. This was public wealth that would do no one, except for the arms dealers and threat-inflating political operatives, any good. Rhodes points out that no nation in human history has ever so wantonly spent “a waste of treasure” to secure not peace, not even security, but a persistent and carefully husbanded fear.
This is not the first time Rhodes has visited this topic. In 1996 he won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” In “Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race,” Rhodes shifts his focus from the scientists who created the bombs to the political leaders whose generosity made them possible. And in this latest account, he doesn’t hold back. Rhodes places the blame for the careless folly of the arms race on the American cycle of political opportunism that encouraged politicians — both liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican — to continually inflate the Soviet military threat from the very first days of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union lay in shambles after World War II. At the time, Josef Stalin begged President Harry S. Truman for aid to help rebuild. Truman’s State Department not only left Soviet requests for help unanswered and pulled the plug on U.S. wartime aid, but added insult to injury by pouring Marshall Plan funds into Western Europe and giving generously to former enemies, even West Germany.
In August 1949, American generals and politicians were dumbfounded to learn that the Soviets had detonated their own bomb. A few months later, North Korea launched a surprise attack on South Korea. To Americans, it appeared that the communist menace was on the march. In the subsequent months, the American arsenal became formidable. In 1950, the Atomic Energy Commission had eight sites and 55,000 employees. By 1953, the nuclear weapons complex had expanded to 20 sites and 142,000 employees, and from that point the numbers floated upward. By the mid-1950s, the nuclear weapons complex ate up 6.7 percent of total U.S. electrical power and exceeded in capital investment the combined capitalization of Bethlehem Steel, U.S. Steel, Alcoa, DuPont, Goodyear and General Motors. By 1960, the U.S. arsenal had climbed to 18,638 bombs and warheads yielding 20,500 megatons. This uncontrollable growth troubled even the old war hero President Dwight D. Eisenhower. “We are piling up these armaments,” he said in 1956, “because we do not know what else to do to provide for our security.”
Despite years spent clamoring over the “missile gap,” Rhodes argues, from the beginning to the very end of the Cold War, the United States led the Soviet Union in the nuclear arms race. Not for one moment was there ever a chance the Soviet Union could attack the United States with nuclear weapons and not itself suffer severe, if not total, devastation. Soviet leaders, on the other hand, lived until the 1970s with the knowledge that they were vulnerable to an American first strike that could annihilate Soviet defense.
Rhodes places the blame for the tragedy of the arms race on hawkish American nuclear strategists. It fell to these men to explain why the United States needed tens of thousands of bombs, when 50 bombs would have reduced the Soviet Union to a smoking ruin. Rhodes features the usual suspects in this narrative: the H-bomb-loving physicist Edward Teller, the commie-hating Harvard historian Richard Pipes, and the ever-anxious weapons analyst Paul Nitze. In addition, other familiar faces enter the picture: former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, an early protege of Nitze, as well as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. The biggest threat for these men was not nuclear war, but detente, which threatened budgets and with them the power and authority of the Cold Warriors. When detente set in, these men created an advocacy group, The Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), where in the 1970s we find Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Cheney cutting their teeth in the arts of manipulating intelligence data and radically exaggerating the threat of the enemy. By the second Iraq war, they were old hands at seeing threats where none existed.
The CPD, in fact, threw up so many obfuscating clouds — asserting that the Soviet Union was stronger than the United States, that the Soviet Union sought to dominate the world, that arms control was a Soviet trap — that CPD analysts, along with the intelligence and scholarly community, missed the real story: beginning in the mid-1960s the Soviet economy was starting to tank. The same analysts overlooked the American side of this story as well; during the same period of phenomenal American economic growth, the United States’ cities were falling into decay. The military was siphoning tax money from the healthy economy and diverting it to weapons.
And then President Ronald Reagan came along and appointed no fewer than 31 members of the CPD to office. In just his first five years, Reagan spent more than Presidents Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter combined, and more than the cost of both the Korean and Vietnam wars. And he spent all that money on a fiction. Yet for some it was a useful waste of public funds. Reagan had long trumpeted the evils of big government, which he linked to the evils of communism. To build more bombs and missiles, Reagan joyfully cut domestic programs, which dropped by 21 percent, while increasing defense funding, which spiraled a whopping 45 percent. This shift in spending priorities was critical. As Rhodes writes, “Far from victory in the Cold War, the superpower nuclear arms race and the corresponding militarization of the American economy gave us ramshackle cities, broken bridges, failing schools, entrenched poverty, impeded life expectancy, and a menacing and secretive national-security state that held the entire human world hostage.”
There are only a few heroes in this history. The one who emerges, Ulysses-like, is the stocky, balding Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev, shocked into fear by Chernobyl, stubbornly and insistently convinced Reagan to approach the negotiating table. Reagan’s advisers, plotting to corrode negotiations, advised Reagan to demand unreasonable concessions from the Soviets. Gorbachev disarmed American negotiators, notably Secretary of State George Schultz, by agreeing to one concession after another until there was nothing left to do but sign the death notice on the arms race. The agreement came decades too late and did not accomplish what Gorbachev had planned — the total eradication of nuclear weapons. Reading Rhodes calls up Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, where, in the corner of the underworld, Michelangelo painted himself peeking out through fingers clapped over his face, watching in horror as men engaged in their great folly.

Kate Brown, author of “A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland,” is writing a history of the world’s first two plutonium cities in the Soviet Union and the United States.

TITLE: The first living thing in space
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian officials last Friday unveiled a monument to Laika, a dog whose flight to space more than 50 years ago paved the way for human space missions.
The small monument is near a military research facility in Moscow that prepared Laika’s flight to space on Nov. 3, 1957. It features a dog standing on top of a rocket.
Little was known about the impact of space flight on living things at the time Laika’s mission was launched. Some believed they would be unable to survive the launch or the conditions of outer space, so Soviet space engineers viewed dogs’ flights as a necessary precursor to human missions.
All dogs used in the Soviet space program were stray mongrel dogs — doctors believed they were able to adapt quicker to harsh conditions. All were small so they could fit into the tiny capsules.
The 2-year-old Laika was chosen for the flight just nine days before the launch.
Stories about how she was selected varied: Some said Laika was chosen for her good looks — a Soviet space pioneer had to be photogenic. Others indicated the top choice for the mission was dropped because doctors took pity on her: Since there was no way to design a re-entry vehicle in time for the launch, the flight meant a certain death.
“Laika was quiet and charming,” Dr. Vladimir Yazdovsky wrote in his book chronicling the story of Soviet space medicine. He recalled that before heading to the launch pad, he took the dog home to play with his children. “I wanted to do something nice for her: She had so little time left to live,” Yazdovsky said.
The satellite that carried Laika into orbit was built in less than one month after the Soviet Union put the world’s first artificial satellite into orbit on Oct. 4, 1957.
Due to last-minute technical problems, Laika had to wait for the launch in the cabin for three days. Temperatures were low, and workers heated the cockpit through a hose.
When Laika reached orbit, doctors found with relief that her heartbeat, which had risen on launch, and her blood pressure were normal. She ate specially prepared food from a container.
According to official Soviet reports, the dog was euthanized after a week.
After the Soviet collapse, participants in the project told the real story: Laika indeed was to be euthanized with a programmed injection, but she apparently died of overheating after only a few hours in orbit.
Several other dogs died in failed launches before the successful space flight — and safe return to Earth — of the dogs Belka and Strelka in August 1960.
After a few other flights with dogs, the Soviet Union put the world’s first human — Yury Gagarin — into space on April 12, 1961.

TITLE: Leisure
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: With St. Petersburg’s leading soccer club Zenit winning the Russian Premier League last season and currently defending its title — and now having booked its place in the semifinals of the European-wide UEFA Cup competition — there’s no better time to catch a match at Petrovsky Stadium.
On the day of Zenit’s second-leg match against Germany’s Bayer Leverkusen in the UEFA Cup quarterfinals on April 10 thousands of Zenit fans rushed to the stadium forming a blue and white wave with scarves and flags in Zenit’s traditional colors of siny, bely, goluboi (dark blue, white, light blue).
Zenit supporters already knew that the team was almost certain to advance to the semifinals after it had beaten Bayer Leverkusen 4:1 in the first-leg in Germany. Even Bayer Leverkusen’s coach Michael Skibbe said at the press conference on the eve of the match that Zenit had a 99 percent chance of progressing in the competition.
At least on this occasion then, the fans were friendly and polite to each other and in a very optimistic mood.
However, dozens of police and OMON special forces patrolled the crowd on the way to the stadium and at the entrance. The police asked the visitors to show their bags and to take out any bottles.
The fans held their traditional Zenit scarves above their heads as they stood before the match to the sound of the Zenit song. Boys, who came to the stadium with their fathers, proudly held their scarves, too in a gesture of St. Petersburg pride.
As the game began, the whole stadium held its breath. But only for a short while, since soon thousands of men began to comment on the match.
The commentary differed, with one group encouraging the team with cries of “come on, come on,” another sat in strained silence, while a third gave a masterclass in Russian swearing.
Many fans’ hopes laid with Zenit’s star forward Andrei Arshavin, who is known for his passing and scoring skills. However, in this match Arshavin and his partner upfront Pavel Pogrebnyak couldn’t do anything to score. The only goal of the match came from Bayer Leverkusen — ironically thanks to its Russian player Dmitry Bulykin.
The crowd was disappointed with the 1:0 scoreline, but Zenit had done enough in the first-leg of the two-leg quarterfinal to ensure that it would advance to the next stage of the competition.  Zenit now plays Bayern Munich at the Allianz Stadium in Munich on April 24, with the second leg played at Petrovsky Stadium on May 1.
Zenit coach Dick Advocaat said it was “a historical moment to have Zenit in UEFA Cup semifinal.” The St. Petersburg team has never gone so far in European football.
Meanwhile, Zenit’s fans expressed great hope in Zenit’s further success.
“I believe in Zenit’s victory in UEFA Cup semifinal. What else can any fan who loves Zenit expect from the team?” said Andrei Smirnov, 35, after the April 10 match.
“In any case it’s always a joy for me and my friends to attend Zenit’s matches — even if they lose sometimes,” he said.
www.fc-zenit.ru

TITLE: Stravinsky’s songs
AUTHOR: By Richard Taruskin
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: No composer of classical music was ever more attuned to the power of publicity, or courted it more ardently, than Igor Stravinsky. A celebrity by the age of 30, he learned the art of reclame from his early mentor Sergei Diaghilev, the master press manipulator of his day.
The earliest “typical” Stravinsky interviews — charming, crafty, hyper-articulate, unerringly self-serving — appeared in St. Petersburg newspapers in 1912, and the stream, or torrent, continued unabated for nearly six decades, in dozens of languages and on every continent but Antarctica. By the end of his life he said he was living in a perpetual state of interview. The last of them actually appeared almost three months after his death, in The New York Review of Books on July 1, 1971.
By then it was an open secret that Stravinsky’s public words had long been ghosted by his close associate the conductor Robert Craft, who kept the words coming long after Stravinsky’s physical infirmities precluded his participating in their collaboration. Craft admitted the deception, or rather explained the reason it had to be maintained, in the author’s foreword to “Themes and Conclusions,” a miscellany of writings attributed to Stravinsky that appeared posthumously in England in 1972 — though he did so, as always, over Stravinsky’s signature.
“The balance between my income and my needs,” wrote the ghost, “has, for a decade or more, rested on the ‘deductibility’ of the latter; and my deductibility ‘status’ has depended, in turn, on the production, if not of music, then, faute de mieux, of words. For to write, in America, is to ‘write off.’ ”
But Craft was only the caboose in a long train of Stravinskian ghostwriters. Others included Walter Nouvel, an associate of Diaghilev, who wrote Stravinsky’s “Autobiography”; Alexis Roland-Manuel, a French composer, and Pierre Souvtchinsky, a Russian emigre intellectual, who together wrote Stravinsky’s Harvard lectures, “Poetics of Music”; and Mercedes de Acosta, Alexis Kall and Arthur Lourie, who had at various times played the roles Craft later permanently took on.
Surely it is obvious that the deluge of verbiage was meant to hide the man from the world rather than to expose him. Stravinsky, whose music waged unending war on the assumption that art was a medium of self-revelation, hugely enjoyed the game of misleading the curious. One favorite ploy was to plant a “fact” or manufacture a recollection that would send program annotators afield. Asked by Craft in a mock interview published in 1960, “What do you love most in Russia?” Stravinsky answered, “the violent Russian spring that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking.” It’s a sentence that has been recycled, as planned, in at least a gazillion essays on the composer’s violent balletic masterpiece, “The Rite of Spring.” (Google just turned up 57.)
The very first memory recorded in the ghosted autobiography of 1936 was of “an enormous peasant seated on the stump of a tree.” He sang a song “composed of two syllables” that were “devoid of any meaning, but he made them alternate with incredible dexterity in a very rapid tempo,” accompanying them with his right hand, which, placed under his left armpit, produced “a succession of sounds which were somewhat dubious but very rhythmic, and which might be euphemistically described as resounding kisses.” Anyone care to guess how many learned disquisitions on Stravinsky’s devotion to “pure music” or his “liberation of rhythm” this morsel has unleashed?
And yet an unprejudiced listener can circumvent the plants, the ghosts and the recyclers, and learn a lot about Stravinsky from his music. For in that lifetime of work there lurks, inevitably, a true — if partial and implicit — autobiography.
Solo song was not a major genre for Stravinsky, but that is precisely what makes it possible to present a full, fascinating retrospective in a single evening. That paucity is a telling fact in itself. When we think of art song, we think of lieder, pre-eminently the genre of intimate disclosure, and intimate disclosure (as we’ve been noticing) was anything but Stravinsky’s bag.
Besides, his father, Fyodor Stravinsky — a stern, unbending figure toward whom the future composer harbored feelings far more complicated than the Freudian minimum — was a famous singer. Any wonder then that Stravinsky became the greatest of all composers of ballet: the one music-theatrical genre that excludes singers? Or that when he finally did write a great opera, it would be about King Oedipus?
But skimpy though it is, the list of Stravinsky’s songs is unusually comprehensive. It covers all phases of his career and includes both his earliest extant work and his last finished composition.
The early item, “Storm Cloud,” was composed in 1902 on assignment for Fyodor Akimenko — a pupil of Stravinsky’s eventual teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov — to whom Stravinsky had been farmed out for preliminary (actually, remedial) instruction. It is a thoroughly conventional setting of a short poem by Pushkin, the sort of piece every 14- or 15-year-old composer-in-training turns out. But Stravinsky wrote it at 19. A wunderkind he was not.
The last piece, a past-masterly setting of Edward Lear’s “Owl and the Pussycat,” was composed nearly 65 years later, in the fall of 1966, and is lovingly dedicated to the composer’s second wife, Vera, who had learned the poem when studying English. Like all the music Stravinsky composed in the last two decades of his life, it uses 12-tone technique. Far from conventional, the piece is anything but forbidding. It is not even dissonant, its tone row having been calculated to yield up pretty harmonies. And the piano part, easy enough for a non-pianist to play, was actually played by Craft in its first recording, making the piece doubly an intimate family portrait.
That intimate portrait has many earlier counterparts among Stravinsky’s songs. The second in order of composition, “How the Mushrooms Prepared for War,” is a setting of a nursery rhyme every Russian child of Stravinsky’s generation knew by heart, cast with hilarious incongruity as a huge concert aria for bass voice. It turns out to be a salad of allusions to Fyodor Stravinsky’s favorite opera roles, composed in memoriam in 1904 and dedicated to the composer’s best friend at the time, Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov, a son of Stravinsky’s surrogate father.
Its sentimental significance seems obvious because Stravinsky kept the manuscript with him throughout his life but never published it; he never quite finished it. It was reassembled from two incomplete drafts by his son Soulima, who had it published by Boosey & Hawkes in memoriam in 1979, thus repeating the gesture of homage an ambivalent Stravinsky son paid to an illustrious, loved but also resented Stravinsky father.
Complex family relations inform the next Stravinsky vocal opus as well: a little cycle called “The Faun and the Shepherdess,” based on a set of erotic poems by Pushkin. It was conceived during Stravinsky’s honeymoon with his first wife (and first cousin), Catherine, whom he betrayed (but never forsook) for Vera 18 years before death did them part. Though listed as Opus 2, it was Stravinsky’s first published composition. The first edition (1908) carried a dedication to Catherine that was removed on reprinting.
There are also songs dedicated to each of Stravinsky’s children. Most poignant is a lullaby composed in 1917 for his daughter Ludmila (or Mikushka, as the endearing text calls her), who died of tuberculosis at 29 in 1938. It was published (as “Berceuse,” with a French text replacing the original Russian) only in 1962, in the appendix to one of Stravinsky’s books of memoirs as dictated to Robert Craft.
Besides these family glimpses, Stravinsky’s solo songs include elegiac settings of verses by Dylan Thomas in memory of the poet, who at the time of his death in 1953 was planning to collaborate with Stravinsky on an opera, and by W. H. Auden in memory of John F. Kennedy.
There are settings of Russian Symbolist poetry of a kind that every Russian composer was setting in the period before World War I. There are imitations of Debussy in the form of a pair of Verlaine settings made in 1910, after Stravinsky met the great French composer, and settings of Japanese poetry in Russian translation that show the dual influence of Stravinsky’s new French friends with their passion for japonaiserie and of Schoenberg, whose “Pierrot Lunaire” provided the immediate model. A more significant influence from Schoenberg can be seen in Stravinsky’s late conversion to serial techniques, of which “Three Songs From William Shakespeare,” composed in 1953, was a harbinger.
These are all minor works. But there is one spate of songs that, taken collectively, signify a major watershed in Stravinsky’s musical development. These are the four sets that he composed in Switzerland during and immediately after World War I: “Pribaoutki” (“Jingles”), “Berceuses du Chat” (“Cat’s Lullabies”), “Trois Histoires Pour Enfants” (“Three Children’s Tales”) and “Quatre Chants Russes” (“Four Russian Songs”). They have French or French-transliterated titles because they were published by a Geneva printer with French texts by the novelist Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and they were the work of a stateless person, but they are the most intensely Russian pieces Stravinsky (or perhaps anyone) ever composed.
Homesick and imbued with a nationalist fervor he had never felt at home, he became obsessed with Russian folk verses of a kind that had been published in quantity by 19th-century ethnographers but had never been of much interest to composers of art songs because they were, well, artless. But Stravinsky — inspired by the work of the painters associated with Diaghilev, who found not only subject matter but also stylistic models in folk art — saw in Russian folk verses the foundations of a far more authentically Russian art music than his teacher’s generation had achieved.
The consummation of this quest was “Svadebka” (or “Les Noces”), Stravinsky’s choral ballet recreating a Russian peasant wedding, thought by some (well, by me) to represent the composer’s absolute summit of achievement. The songs, written on the way to that towering work, were successful enough as imagined folklore to convince Bela Bartok that they were based on genuine Russian folk melodies. Actually only one tune in all the songs (the first in the “Pribaoutki”) was “genuine,” that is, found in a book. That Stravinsky managed to take in a connoisseur like Bartok shows he had learned to make up rather than look up genuine folk melodies.
One of the ways he did this was to notice that the verbal accent in Russian folk singing was movable. It could fall on any syllable of any word, leading to all kinds of “wrong” accentuations that produced delightful rhythmic and metrical effects.
Stravinsky’s account of these effects in his autobiography, as told to Nouvel, immediately preceded, and inspired, the famous declaration there that the true value of music was not to be sought in its expressive dimension but in the sound patterns. No public words of Stravinsky’s were ever more potent, more overstated or more thoroughly misconstrued.
To realize what he meant, one need only compare the enchanting songs of the Swiss years, based on distorted folk texts, with Stravinsky’s conventionally expressive, and (say it softly) rather pallid earlier songs. All of a sudden Stravinsky’s music springs from watery pastels into blazing Technicolor.
Stravinsky continued to set words this way for the rest of his life. In languages other than Russian, his willful misaccentuations are often taken as errors. (Rarely does any reviewer of “The Rake’s Progress” refrain from setting the poor old Russian straight about English pronunciation.) But in Stravinsky’s manhandling of words he asserted the sovereign power of music, and he did it first in his songs.

TITLE: A game of two halves
AUTHOR: By Tobin Auber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Nevsky 106 // 106 Nevsky Prospekt. Tel: 273 2966 // www.nevsky106.spb.ru // Open 24 hours // Menu in Russian  // Dinner for two without alcohol 2,200 rubles, $95

Nevsky 106 is, putting it very mildly, a mixed bag. Some very high highs, and some staggeringly low lows. In terms of atmosphere, it gets a definite thumbs up — this is certainly somewhere to come back to. But be warned: some of the food here deserves further investigation only in the sense that a team of crack scientists could spend months working out what it’s actually made of and in which planetary system it is farmed. Some of the dishes we tried were excellent. Some, however, were not so much dry — they were arid.
The restaurant, on a second floor overlooking Nevsky Prospekt, is actually a two-in-one affair: Nevsky 106 offering European dishes, and Takao providing a full sushi menu (don’t be confused by the Takao sign on the outside of the building). 
The 106 menu is laid out as a spoof newspaper, the logo font and design even parodying (emulating?) your own St. Petersburg Times. The newspaper ads are cut-out discount coupons and special offers, along with assorted photographs of, for some reason, The Rolling Stones, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, Audrey Hepburn and Midnight Cowboy’s Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. Why? Absolutely no idea, but it’s a fun gimmick. 
On the weeknight we visited the place was packed, there was a great three-piece jazz ensemble playing and the atmosphere was buzzing. Like a number of new places across the city, with Dve Palochki being a notable example at the other end of Nevsky, 106 draws a young, reasonably affluent student crowd looking for some fun. There’s even a “meeting corner” coupon on the menu, which you can tear out, put your name and phone number on and then put in the lucky dip. 
The walls are covered in more random photographs — Scorsese, Monroe again, Louis Armstrong — with a huge shot of a pair of breasts for good measure. Still no idea why.
It all started so well. The serdechki starter (299 rubles, $13) — chicken hearts in a cream sauce with mushrooms — was rich, packed with taste, filling and very well prepared with fresh ingredients. Similarly, the Cafe Anglais salad (329 rubles, $14), comprising seafood, fresh tomatoes and soya sauce was also a treat. 
And then disaster struck. We should note that, despite obviously being rushed off his feet, our waiter was great — friendly, helpful and charming. In the restaurant’s lively hubbub, however, instead of the “Charlie” beef medallions, he heard beef “Churchill” — a beef steak “decorated with onion and a Bulgarian pepper” (459 rubles, $19.50). 
To start with, it looked foul. The St. Petersburg Times is a family newspaper and our style guide prevents me from telling you which part of the anatomy my dining partner said it looked like. Suffice to say that everyone’s got one and it rhymes with pass. As well as being bereft of any spices or herbs and appearing to have been prepared without any cooking oil, it also appeared to be made out of some sort of alien matter that is totally and utterly devoid of taste. This is where the team of crack scientists would have been useful. 
Its garnish featured the aforementioned Bulgarian pepper, but sliced into three strips so thin that you could have easily garnished another two or three hundred Churchills with just one pepper. 
The minced beef Torro (389 rubles, $16.50) was only a minor improvement, which is not saying much — a roulette with beef (allegedly), minced tomato (missing in action) and a spicy sauce (nowhere in sight). There was also a small bit of cheese in the middle, although this is only mentioned for form’s sake as it was almost Churchillian in its lack of any perceptible flavor. This all came wrapped in some strange form of batter that could have been better used packing light bulbs or other delicate objects. 
And then, suddenly, with the desserts, we were back in the land of delicious, value-for-money food that you would go out of your way to try again. The tiramisu (289 rubles, $12) was easily the best I’ve had in St. Petersburg, and the banana pancakes (119 rubles, $5) were also excellent.
We were left, then, scratching our heads about Nevsky 106. Culinary calamity or an oasis? Both.

TITLE: Love will tear us apart, again
AUTHOR: By A. O. Scott
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: In 1973, when we first encounter him, Ian Curtis (Sam Riley) is a lanky schoolboy in Macclesfield, a red-brick English town outside of Manchester, with intense but not unusual interests. Apart from cigarettes and his best friend’s girlfriend (whom he will shortly marry), these are mainly musical and literary. In his debut film, “Control,” about the last seven years of Curtis’s life, Anton Corbijn notes some of the figures in the young man’s personal canon — the expected proto-punk culture heroes (David Bowie, Lou Reed, J. G. Ballard), yes, but also William Wordsworth, whose “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” Curtis quotes from memory.
Of course, from its very first frame, “Control” is shadowed by intimations of its main character’s imminent mortality. Curtis, the lead singer in Joy Division, the great post-punk Manchester quartet, committed suicide in 1980, just before the band was to embark on its first American tour. He was 23, and in the years since his death he has become a canonical figure in his own right. Even as Joy Division’s austere, brooding songs — “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” “Isolation,” “She’s Lost Control” — have continued to influence musicians from all corners of the musical cosmos, they have lost very little of their glum, haunting power.
The challenge facing Matt Greenhalgh, the screenwriter, and Corbijn, a celebrity photographer who took pictures of the real Joy Division a few months before Curtis died, is how to tell this story of great promise and early death without turning it into yet another exercise in pop martyrology. How, in other words, to take account of Curtis’s artistic life and its premature end without treating them as simple cause and effect. The worst and most common failing in movies of this kind — biographies of artists, musicians in particular — is that they turn creativity into a symptom and fate into pathology. One of the great virtues of “Control” is that it does not fall into this trap. Where it might have been literal-minded and sentimental, it is instead enigmatic and moving, much in the manner of Joy Division’s best songs.
You hear a lot of these on the soundtrack, flawlessly performed by Riley and the other members of the cast (Joe Anderson on bass, James Anthony Pearson on guitar and Harry Treadaway as the wisecracking drummer) who turned themselves into an uncannily persuasive tribute band. (Just how good they are may not become fully apparent until you hear the real Joy Division’s version of “Atmosphere” over the end credits.)
Joy Division’s two albums were artifacts of their time that became permanent fixtures in the pop universe, available to any listener with a good reason to want a few minutes of voluptuous bad feeling. In tracing them back to their origins, Corbijn resists the temptation to pile on the evocative period details or to wallow in nostalgia for the early days of the Manchester scene. Shot in a pale, Nouvelle Vague black-and-white palette, “Control” manages to be both stylized and straightforward, avoiding overstatement even as it generates considerable intensity.
Riley, hollow-eyed and gentle-looking, is crucial to the film’s effectiveness. Since Curtis is known more by his deep, plangent voice than by his face or his physical presence, Riley does not labor under the burden of mimicry, like the recent portrayers of more famous singers like Ray Charles or Johnny Cash. His performance is quiet, charismatic and a little opaque, in keeping with the movie’s careful, detached approach to its subject.
Samantha Morton, playing Curtis’s wife, Deborah (on whose 1995 memoir, “Touching From a Distance,” the film is based), provides a necessary measure of hurt and warmth, reminding the audience that Ian Curtis’s great subject as a writer was heartbreak.
But Corbijn and Greenhalgh, to their credit, do not presume to probe the depths of Curtis’s psychology, or to find the hidden emotional sources of his songs. Instead their film shows, plainly and sufficiently, how those songs were made. They were written down in a notebook, practiced with the rest of the band and then performed in front of ever larger and more ecstatic audiences.
But the group’s progress — it wins the favor of the Manchester music guru Tony Wilson (Craig Parkinson) and acquires an aggressive manager in the person of Rob Gretton (Toby Kebbell) — is accompanied by increasing complication and strain in Curtis’s personal life. While still a teenager, he marries Deborah and becomes a father just as Joy Division is recording its first album. He begins to suffer from epileptic seizures and to worry that the medicine he takes to treat the condition will affect his moods and his mind. He also falls for a Belgian journalist named Annik Honore (Alexandra Maria Lara), and love tears him apart, again.
“Control” tells a sad story that is also a chronicle of success, and it declines to find an easy moral either in Joy Division’s rapid rise or in its lead singer’s early death. These are things that happened, both on the intimate stage of individual life and in the larger arena of popular culture. Corbijn, no doubt aware of what this movie will mean to devotees of post-punk melancholy, sticks to the human dimensions of the narrative rather than turning out yet another show business fable. You don’t have to know anything about Joy Division to grasp the mysterious sorrow at its heart.

TITLE: Beijing ‘Bird’s Nest’ Opens Without Ado
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING — The centerpiece of the Beijing Olympics rises 230 feet tall, its lattice of steel beams sometimes vanishing in a thick blanket of smog.
Quietly and without fanfare, officials have opened the National Stadium— nicknamed the “Bird’s Nest”—and it’s ready to hatch its first sports event.
The final touches on the $450 million, 91,000-seat stadium won’t be completed until next month, but organizers let journalists in Wednesday to look around.
Inside, Franco Destefanis of Italy knelt as he installed the last few slabs of the rubberized running surface for track events.
“The design, the new-style architecture and the size is impressive,” said Destefanis, who has worked on 150 stadiums around the world and is doing his fifth straight Olympic track and field venue. “The outside catches your eye, particularly with the lights at night.”
Its unusual design was created by twisted steel beams that wrap around the exterior to resemble silver twigs binding a nest together. The icon of the Beijing Games, it’s been called the best work produced by Switzerland-based architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.
However, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who was a consultant on the project, has since criticized it. He has likened the stadium to a “fake smile,” designed to hide social and political problems in China, which hopes to use the Olympics to show off its new political and economic power.
Of China’s 37 Olympic venues, the stadium is the last to be completed. There have been minor delays, although organizers have denied construction problems. They have said that preparing for the Aug. 8 opening ceremony has required adjustments to building schedules, pushing back the stadium’s completion by a few months.
Officials confirmed three months ago that two workers died during construction on the stadium, but denied media reports that at least 10 had died.
In addition to the opening ceremony, the stadium hosts track and field events and the closing ceremony.
The first event at the stadium will be on Friday and Saturday—a low-key race-walking meet. No glitzy ceremonies, political speeches or fireworks are scheduled.
On the inside, the fancy exterior lattice work is hidden from view. The roof that partially extends over many of the seats is covered with a canvas-like material that will keep rain off most fans. It also blocks strong sunlight from casting shadows on the field that could ruin TV pictures.
The stadium’s indoor color scheme is red, gray and black. There was no sign of where the Olympic cauldron will be located.
From the outside, the size of the stadium overwhelms everything else, even the neighboring swimming venue, known as the “Water Cube.”
Police have cracked down on cars stopping on the shoulder of a nearby highway to snap photos of the stadium. Curious pedestrians still line a 12-foot-high wire fence to have a look.
“When I first saw the stadium, I didn’t know what it was,” said Duan Jingxuan, leaning a shoulder on the handle of his shovel as he landscaped a small pine grove bordering a pond just east of the site.
Like thousands of migrant workers who have come to Beijing to build Olympic venues, Duan earns about $150 monthly and sends most of it home to his family in central China.
“As soon as I found out what it was, I wanted to know what it cost,” Duan added. “I called my son right away—he’s working at an oil field—and told him I was doing work for the Olympics. I’m proud to work here and it shows China is getting richer.”
As organizers opened the stadium to journalists on Wednesday, a thick haze of pollution made it nearly invisible from a half-mile away.
Officials say strict pollution controls will begin no later than July 20. This means closing cement factories and foundries, and halting work at hundreds of building projects. Plans are also afoot to ban about half of Beijing’s 3.3 million vehicles.
The International Olympic Committee has said it will postpone outdoor endurance events if air quality is poor, and IOC President Jacques Rogge has acknowledged that athletes’ performances might be “slightly reduced” because of the pollution.
In the last month, the image of the Beijing Olympics have been sullied by protests along the torch relay route as pro-Tibet and human-rights demonstrators have focused world attention on China’s policies.

TITLE: Relay Continues With Top Security
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW DELHI — Runners carried the Olympic flame Thursday along a heavily guarded route through central New Delhi, protected by about 15,000 police who kept Tibetan exiles and other anti-China protesters from disrupting the ceremony.
Much of New Delhi’s leafy British colonial-era center — where the presidential palace, Parliament and government ministries are located — was sealed off to traffic and pedestrians in some of the tightest security ever seen in the capital.
India is home to the world’s largest Tibetan exile community and while there were scattered Tibetan protests Thursday in New Delhi and other Indian cities, police kept them under control.
To avoid the chaos that has marked the torch runs in London, Paris and San Francisco, Indian authorities cut the relay route to less than two miles. That meant each of the 70 runners in the relay could jog with the flame for only a few seconds before handing it to the next person.
The torchbearers were surrounded by rings of jogging security forces — first Chinese forces in blue tracksuits and then Indians in red ones — as they ran from the presidential palace to the historic India Gate monument, where an Olympic cauldron was lit. Several buses of police followed the runners, who included tennis star Leander Paes.
The public was allowed nowhere near the relay, and crowds amounted to just several hundred young people sitting on bleachers wearing T-shirts of an Olympic sponsor, Coca-Cola, and several hundred members of India's Chinese community.
Shortly after the Olympic flame was flown to New Delhi early Thursday from its last stop in Pakistan, some two dozen Tibetan exiles chanted anti-China slogans and protested along a busy highway to the airport. Several of the protesters were detained by police.
Thousands of Tibetans took part in their own torch run to highlight the Tibetan struggle. That run began with a Buddhist, Hindu and Sikh prayer session at the site where Indian pacifist icon Mohandas Gandhi was cremated. The torch was then lighted and Tibetans put on a show of traditional dancing.
Several dozen prominent Indians, including former Defense Minster George Fernandez, joined the Tibetans.
Public sympathy in India lies with the Tibetans, who have sought refuge in the country since the Dalai Lama, their spiritual leader, fled Tibet after a failed uprising against Beijing in 1959, setting up his government-in-exile in the northern town of Dharmsala.
On Wednesday, about 100 protesters tried to breach the security cordon around the Chinese Embassy. Police dragged away about 50 of them, loading them into police vans — but not before they managed to spray paint “No Olympics in China” on a street near the embassy.
Because of repeated protests at the embassy in recent weeks, it is now surrounded by barricades and barbed wire. Exiles also have gone on hunger strikes and shaved their heads to protest China's crackdown on protests in Tibet.
In Mumbai, India’s financial capital, police detained some 25 Tibetans who tried to breach the barricades surrounding the Chinese consulate there. Protesters shouted “Free Tibet” as they were dragged into police vehicles.
The protests reached the isolated Indian Himalayan region of Ladakh, which borders Tibet, where at least 5,000 Tibetan exiles and local Buddhists marched amid a strike call that shut down all businesses and schools, said M.K. Bhandari, a senior local official.
Chanting “Free Tibet!” and “Down with China!” the protesters carried Tibetan flags as they marched through Leh, the region’s main town. Ladakh is home to about 7,000 Tibetan exiles.
Tibetan exiles, who number more than 100,000 in India, have staged near-daily protests in New Delhi since demonstrations first broke out in Tibet in March and were put down by Chinese authorities.
The exiles said the torch run was a perfect opportunity to make their point, despite the fact that the Dalai Lama says he supports China’s hosting of the Olympics.
“By speaking out when the Chinese government brings the Olympic torch to India, you will send a strong message to Tibetans, to the Chinese government, and to the world, that Indians support the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan people's nonviolent struggle for freedom and justice,” according to Students for a Free Tibet, an exile group.

TITLE: Democrats Debate on TV
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PHILADELPHIA — Hillary Rodham Clinton said emphatically Wednesday night that Barack Obama can win the White House this fall, undercutting her efforts to deny him the Democratic presidential nomination by suggesting he would lead the party to defeat.
“Yes, yes, yes,” she said when pressed about Obama's electability during a campaign debate six days before the Pennsylvania primary.
Asked a similar question about Clinton, Obama said “Absolutely and I've said so before” — a not-so-subtle dig at his rival who had previously declined to make a similar statement about him.
In a 90-minute debate, both rivals pledged not to raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000, and said they would respond forcefully if Iran obtains nuclear weapons and uses them against Israel.
“An attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation by the United States,” said Clinton.
Obama said, “The U.S. would take appropriate action.”
They differed over Social Security when Obama said he favored raising payroll taxes on higher-income individuals. Clinton said she was opposed, her rival quickly cut in and countered that she had said earlier in the campaign she was open to the idea.
Under current law, workers must pay the payroll tax on their first $102,000 in wages. Obama generally has expressed support for a plan to reimpose the tax beginning at a level of $200,000 or more.
The debate was the 21st of the campaign for the nomination, an epic struggle that could last weeks or even months longer
Pennsylvania, with 158 delegates at stake, is a must-win contest for Clinton, who leads in the polls and hopes for a strong victory to propel her through the other states that vote before the primary season ends on June 3.
Obama leads in the delegate chase, 1,643-1,504, with 2,025 needed for the nomination. And despite a recent gaffe, he picked up endorsements during the day from three superdelegates from a pair of states with primaries on May 6 — Representatives Andre Carson of Indiana and Mel Watt and David Price of North Carolina.
After primaries and caucuses in 42 of the 50 states, Obama leads his rival in convention delegates, popular votes and states won. She is struggling to stop his drive on the nomination by appealing to party leaders who will attend the convention as superdelegates that he will preside over an electoral defeat at a moment of great opportunity after eight years of Republican rule.
The former first lady has never denied published reports that she once told New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson that Obama couldn’t win when he called to tell her he would be endorsing the Illinois senator.
And at a news conference earlier this month in California, Clinton sidestepped when asked directly whether Obama would win if he were the Democratic nominee. “I am sure we will have a united Democratic Party. I will do everything possible to make sure we can win and I am confident we will have a Democrat in the White House next year,” she said at the time.
Asked a similar question at the debate, she provided a similar answer at first. “I think we have to beat John McCain and I have every reason to believe we're going to have a Democratic president and it’s going to be Barack or me.”
Pressed by George Stephanopoulos of ABC News to answer the question directly, she said, “Yes, yes, yes ... Now I think I can do a better job.”

TITLE: Martial Arts Event Arrives
AUTHOR: By Ali Nassor
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Martial artists from across the globe are to arrive in St Petersburg this week to take part in the three-day Second East-West Open Martial Arts Olympiad, held at the SKK arena starting Friday.
More than 7,000 participants from Russia, the CIS and about 30 countries from the six continents are due to take part in individual events and stage shows, individual battles and team contests to be held on 27 stages in the city’s largest sports complex. 
“It’s interesting to see that the contestants will far outnumber the number of spectators, but this is what makes this kind of Olympiad especially active since most spectators are sportsmen themselves,” said Nikolai Smirnov, president of the games’ chief organizing institution, Aimak International College of Martial Arts, a general director of the Martial Arts Olympiad and the event’s chief judge.
“After all, 7,000 participants are just a drop in the ocean of the more than 4.5 million active martial artists the world over,” said Smirnov.  
“St. Petersburg would have enjoyed more spectacular events had we possessed enough resources to promote the Olympiad in the farthest corners of the world,” said Smirnov of the annual St. Petersburg event. He said world martial arts celebrities such as Vincent Lyn, a partner to Jackie Chan in his movies; Alfredo Tucci, publisher of Budo martial arts magazine; Santiago Sanchis, head of Valencia International School of Martial Arts; and Den Netherland have confirmed their participation. 
“We hope we will be able to recruit newcomers next year amid plans to extend our geographical arena to New York where we will stage our third such Olympiad. Diplomatic representatives in Russia have shown some enthusiasm, promising us promotion in their countries,” Smirnov said of the future plans. 
Events, starting from 10 a.m., will involve battles and shows of sports that were until recently not considered martial arts. They include knife throwing, Sambo, Greco-Roman wrestling and even the Native American and other traditional ethnic martial arts.
Taekwondo, karate, kiokushinkai and sanshou contests for children aged between 8 and 14 and teenagers below 18 will dominate the opening day until 6 p.m. It will be finalized with a colorful “budo show” in which several martial arts shows in their cultural and historical contexts will be staged. The events will also include judo, kobudo, kata, and kumdo displays.

TITLE: S. Africa Calls for Results
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: HARARE — South Africa’s government, in a major change of stance, called on Thursday for the rapid release of results from Zimbabwe’s presidential election, saying it was concerned by a delay that has increased fears of violence.
“The situation is dire,” said government spokesman Themba Maseko in Cape Town. “When elections are held and results are not released two weeks after, it is obviously of great concern.”
President Thabo Mbeki has previously said the electoral process must take its course and there was no crisis following the March 29 elections.
His stance was seen as backing Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe over the delay. Although Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party lost control of parliament for the first time in the vote, no results have been released from a presidential poll.
“The Zimbabweans need to be informed about those reasons for holding the results. But the most important thing is that the results need to be verified and released as soon as possible,” Maseko said, briefing reporters on a Wednesday cabinet meeting.
The government of regional power South Africa had previously hesitated to join international expressions of concern about the delay in issuing the result of the vote, in which the opposition says Mugabe was defeated.
But ruling party leader Jacob Zuma, who toppled Mbeki from the head of the African National Congress last December, has made several statements calling for release of the results.
Maseko used similar language to Zuma in expressing concern about the results delay.
Mbeki is under criticism at home for his insistence on quiet diplomacy in dealing with the crisis in Zimbabwe, where the economy has collapsed, bringing hyper-inflation, shortages of food and fuel and 80 percent unemployment. Millions of people have fled to South Africa.
“South Africa, like the rest of the world, is concerned about the delay in the release of the results and the anxiety that this is generating,” Maseko added.
Earlier, Mugabe's government accused opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai of treason and of working with former colonial power Britain to topple the veteran leader. Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa said Tsvangirai was a British puppet.
At a summit of the United Nations and African Union on Wednesday, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: “No one thinks, having seen the results of polling stations, that President Mugabe has won.”
Chinamasa responded: “It is clear from the correspondence that Tsvangirai along with Brown are seeking regime change in Zimbabwe, and on the part of Tsvangirai, this is treasonous.”
He added in a statement in state media: “There is no doubting the consequences for acting in a treasonous manner.”

TITLE: Johnson Named Manager
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON — Former captain Martin Johnson is to become England team manager and Brian Ashton will step down as head coach, the Rugby Football Union (RFU) said on Wednesday.
Johnson, 38, who skippered the side to their 2003 World Cup triumph, will take up the post on July 1 with his contract lasting until Dec. 31, 2011 after the next World Cup in New Zealand.
Ashton, who steered England to the 2007 World Cup final in France, has been offered the job of head coach of the national academy. The 61-year-old also led the team to second place in the 2008 Six Nations.
"It is a great honour for me to be offered this position," said Johnson, who has no previous coaching experience.
"I am passionate about the England team and delivering success for it," he added in a statement.
While Johnson's appointment was widely expected, Wednesday's announcment marked a turnaround by the RFU who gave Ashton an "indefinite" contract in December to continue as head coach despite criticism of his methods by senior players.
The RFU said it had unanimously approved a report and recommendations from director of elite rugby Rob Andrew.
"Reporting to Rob Andrew, Martin will have full managerial control of the England team including the appointment of the coaching and management team as well as the player selection process," the RFU said.
Forwards coach John Wells and defence coach Mike Ford will retain their roles in the new set-up, with Johnson to name an additional coach in due course.
Until Johnson takes over, Andrew will fulfil the role of team manager for the two New Zealand tests in June.
"Whilst I cannot take up my position until July 1 for personal reasons (his wife is expecting their second child) I will be working closely with Rob and the coaching team on selection for the Barbarians match and the New Zealand tour, as well as selecting the first senior elite player squad of 32 under the new agreement between the RFU and Premier Rugby," Johnson said.

TITLE: Sports Watch
TEXT: LONDON (AP) — Chelsea, which is owned by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, will play in a preseason tournament in Moscow this summer along with AC Milan, Sevilla and Lokomotiv Russia.
Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon said Wednesday the Blues would play in the Russian Railways Cup on Aug. 1-3.
Chelsea also is scheduled to tour Asia this summer, playing in Guangzhou, China, on July 23 and in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on July 29.

MOSCOW (AP) — Svetlana Kuznetsova will lead defending champion Russia against the United States in the Fed Cup semifinals next weekend.
Russia captain Shamil Tarpishchev also Wednesday named Anna Chakvetadze, Dinara Safina and Elena Vesnina for the match, which will be held April 26-27 on clay at the Luzhniki indoor arena—where Russia beat the Czech Republic in the Davis Cup quarterfinals last weekend.
Australian Open champion Maria Sharapova will skip the match as part of what Tarpishchev has said was an agreement with Kuznetsova.
The United States has won the Fed Cup title for a record 17 times.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The chief of the Russian corporation that is supervising building work for the 2014 Winter Olympics has resigned, Russian news agencies quoted Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov as saying on Thursday.
Zubkov said he had appointed the mayor of host city Sochi, Viktor Kolodyazhny, to replace Semyon Vainshtok as head of Olympstroy, the state agency in charge of Olympics construction, Russian news agencies reported.

OEIRAS (AP) — Second-seeded Nikolay Davydenko rallied to beat Ivo Minar 2-6, 6-2, 6-4 Wednesday in the second round of the clay-court Estoril Open.
Davydenko struggled with his serve in the first set and was broken twice before recovering in the second with two breaks of his own.
In a closely fought third set, the Russian broke Minar’s serve in the opening game on the way to a 4-1 lead. But Minar came back with two straight breaks to even at 4-4 before Davydenko — the 2003 champion — closed out the match.