SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1373 (37), Friday, May 16, 2008
**************************************************************************


TITLE: Fans Crowd Streets Wild With Joy
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Young schoolboys and elderly women were among the soccer fans who stayed up well past their bedtimes on Wednesday as seemingly the whole of St. Petersburg sat glued to their television screens to watch FC Zenit’s historic 2-0 victory in the UEFA Cup final played in Manchester against Glasgow Rangers.
Just before midnight in the 73rd minute of the match, Zenit’s Igor Denisov scored the first goal and cheers could be heard from apartments across the city. Konstantin Zyryanov’s second goal in the final seconds of injury time 20 minutes later capped the Russian champion’s best-ever performance in Europe — and sent fans, wild with joy, onto the streets of the city.
“I was breathlessly happy! I cried — I’ve been waiting for a victory like this almost my whole life!” said pensioner Vadim Turikov, 69, who has been a Zenit fan for more than 50 years.
Turikov said that before the game he took pills to regulate his blood pressure in preparation for the excitement of the match.
“But my blood pressure still went up!” he said.
At around 1 a.m., thousands of Zenit fans flooded the streets, with about 2,000 gathering on the city’s central Palace Square. Police temporarily stopped the traffic on Nevsky Prospekt to make way for the crowd in an atmosphere that strongly resembled New Year’s Eve celebrations. 
With many wearing blue-and-white Zenit scarves and waving flags, fans hugged and kissed each other, drank beer and champagne, and shouted “Zenit are the Champions!” at passing cars, whose drivers repeatedly honked their horns in noisy celebration. 
Interfax reported that a group of fans went to the Kempinski Moika 22 hotel, where Zenit’s Dutch coach Dick Advocaat reportedly lives, and shouted “Thank you, Dick!”
On Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt drivers parked their cars, which were adorned with Zenit flags, in a row, opened the windows and exchanged hi-fives with people walking along the pavement. Nearby, a belly dancer from a local restaurant came outside and performed with a Zenit scarf — much to the delight of the crowd, the majority of whom were young men. 
“It seemed like there was complete unity between all the people who went out onto the streets last night — and across the country,” student Stanislav Shchetinin, 22, said, his voice hoarse after hours of screaming.
Shchetinin, who watched the game with four friends at home and later celebrated outside until 5 a.m., said he was “delighted by the atmosphere in the streets.”  
“People were so friendly and polite to each other, they offered each other beer, and hugged. It didn’t matter what nationality they were, Russians, Africans or Arabs.  Everyone congratulated each other. I think soccer is one of those phenomena that can unite the country better than anything else,” Shchetinin said.
Denis Gabrush, 36, who has been a Zenit fan for 20 years, said on Thursday that he had not yet recovered from Zenit’s victory.
“What Zenit did in this UEFA championship was really heroic in the kind of way that I remember from Soviet times,” said Gabrush, who watched the game in a bar and later celebrated on Nevsky.
Governor Valentina Matviyenko, who along with an estimated 10,000 Russian fans attended the game in the City of Manchester Stadium in Manchester, northern England, was one of the first to congratulate Zenit.
“The team showed all its might. We have become champions. I’m very happy and proud for Zenit.  They stood up for the honor of our country, our city and the club itself,” Matviyenko told Interfax.
Matviyenko also thanked fans who had traveled to Manchester.
“I don’t think there are any fans with as much solidarity as Zenit’s. They supported the team so wholeheartedly that their participation is also part of the victory,” she said.
President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin — both reportedly Zenit fans — also sent messages of support.
Alexei Miller, chairman of state energy giant Gazprom, which owns Zenit, said the game was “fantastic.”
“This game proved that St. Petersburg is not only the capital of Russian soccer, but also of European soccer,” Miller told Interfax.
Zenit are only the second Russian side ever to lift a European trophy after CSKA’s 2005 UEFA Cup victory.
“The 2005 CSKA victory was something of a false dawn for Russian football,” Marc Bennetts, the British author of Football Dynamo, a new book about Russia and soccer, told RIA Novosti. 
“Zenit could go on now to challenge the Champions League.”

TITLE: Museums Open for One Night Only
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Visiting an open-air military camp manned by French Napoleonic hussars, watching documentaries on the wall of the Fountain House, taking a sneak look at monkeys putting their babies to bed and reading your own poetry to whoever will listen at the Alexander Blok Apartment Museum are things people can do at a one-night-only, not-to-be-missed event at twenty St. Petersburg museums this weekend as they open their doors later than usual on Saturday for Museum Night. 
Visitors to the Dostoyevsky Museum, the Sheremetev Palace, the Anna Akhmatova Museum, the Alexander Blok Apartment Museum, the Sergei Kirov Museum, the Museum of the Political History of Russia, the city’s zoo, the Krasin Icebreaker and other venues will be able to enjoy an intriguing cocktail of concerts, film screenings, walking tours, boat trips, and historical battle reconstructions, running, in some cases, as late as 1 a.m. 
Nina Popova, director of the Anna Akhmatova Museum in the Fountain House, believes the concept of Museum Night would have been very close to the heart of the great Silver Age poet.
“The idea of a museum night reflects a poetic angle of perceiving St. Petersburg, and life in general,” she said. “It also captures the essence of what I would call the Akhmatovian way of thinking. This event is certainly not for your typical, straightforward tourist who buys a ticket, listens to a guide, and is done with it. Rather, it calls for those who need to see a museum in a new, unusual light, seeking for revelations.”
On Museum Night, the Fountain House will refrain from conducting regular tours but will take the guests on a romantic walk around the garden and relate little-known stories from the life of Akhmatova and other literary legends associated with the place.
A “literary buffet,” created specifically for the occasion, rewards visitors with exotic and exquisite delicacies featured in the poet’s writings if they can remember lines from Akhmatova.
The annual St. Petersburg event is part of a much larger series of international events that sees around 2,000 museums and galleries from 40 countries mounting special late programs. 
Museum Night, also known as the Long Night of Museums, began in Berlin in 1997 as an attempt to bring more people into museums and galleries, focusing on younger people who may not be regular museum-goers.
A group of popular Moscow art galleries including Artplay and Winzavod will keep their doors open until 5 a.m. Fifty Moscow galleries, four DJs and 72 artists will take part in nine performances, seven concerts and one masterclass.
The St. Petersburg event takes full advantage of the onset of White Nights, the summer season when the sun barely sets. 
A ticket for admission to all 20 venues is a bargain at 150 rubles.
Free shuttle buses on three routes will circulate between the museums. 
Guides from the Blok Museum will take guests on a literary walk around the Kolomna district that continues onboard a boat on which the music of Igor Stravinsky and other Russian composers whose life was associated with the area will be played. The museum courtyard will host a literary evening with ordinary locals joining Russian poets in a program of poetry readings.
The Artillery Museum is going to take full advantage of its outdoor space.
“We will be giving center stage to military camps from different eras that will change hourly and feature, in particular, Roman warrriors, Medieval knights, French Napoleonic hussars and the Red Soviet Army from World War II,” said Alexei Aranovich, a senior curator at the museum. 
The city’s zoo will run a series of evening walks through the premises with a livestock specialist who will be on duty that night. 
Leading the horses to the stables, feeding crocodiles and polar bears, and listening to night birds will be some of the tours’ highlights. Because the tours — which will each last around 40 minutes — will not be regular excursions but rather an opportunity to observe the zoo staff at work, each one will be different.
Bus Route 1 connects the Yelagin Palace, the Kirov Museum, the Museum of the Political History of Russia, the Anna Akhmatova Museum, the Sheremetev Palace and the Alexander Suvorov Museum.
Bus Route 2 will operate between the Alexander Popov Museum of Communications, the Samoilov Brothers Museum Of Theater and Music, the Dostoyevsky Museum, the Alexander Blok Museum, the Nikolai Roerich Museum and the Icebreaker Krasin.
Bus Route 3 will link the Printing Museum, the Museum of the Political History of Russia, the Artillery Museum, the zoo, the Central Naval Museum, the Alexander Popov Museum of Communications, the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall and the Narva Gates Museum.
More than ten other museums are offering a parallel program for a separate fee.
For example, the colonnade of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the highest publicly accessible point from which to view the city’s skyline, will be open until 6 a.m. 

A complete schedule of events, opening times, addresses and further information is available on the project’s website: www.museumnight.ru

TITLE: Violence Follows Victory
AUTHOR: By Darren Ennis
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BRUSSELS — Rangers and Zenit St. Petersburg are unlikely to face any punishment over the events that led to the stabbing of a Russian fan at Wednesday’s UEFA Cup final in Manchester, a top UEFA official said.
But the Russian club may face sanctions over their fans running on to the pitch during and after their 2-0 victory over the Scottish side at the City of Manchester Stadium, UEFA’s director of communications William Gaillard said on Thursday.
“We’ll have to await the delegates report... but regarding the stabbing, firstly we wish the victim a speedy recovery. Yes, it did take place within the parameters of the stadium and these Rangers fans managed to get into the Zenit zone.
“But this was a small group of individuals for which the clubs and the majority of fans who behaved very well cannot be punished nor held accountable,” he told Reuters.
“But clubs are responsible for the behavior of their fans inside the stadium, so yes, we could take action over the pitch encroachments if we find any blame with the club.”
Five Rangers supporters were arrested and later released without charge by police after a Russian fan was stabbed in the back, while 42 fans were arrested and 15 police officers injured after trouble flared in the city center.
Police said the majority of the more than 100,000 Rangers fans who descended on the city without tickets were well behaved but said they were sickened by the troublemakers.
“There was a group of 200 plus who chased six officers up a road. They managed to trip one of them and they jumped on them like a pack of baying wolves,” Greater Manchester Police assistant chief constable Justine Curran told a news conference.
“It was quite sickening to see.”
Rangers’ chief executive Martin Bain told Sky Sports News:
“Those scenes were dreadful but we have been informed they were caused by supporters who don’t normally attach themselves to our support.
“We’re obviously extremely disappointed and will do everything we can to help Manchester police find out who those perpetrators are.”
Rangers head of security Kenny Scott added: “... many of these people will have no association with Rangers and that exacerbates our difficulty in dealing with what happened.
“If there were 120,000 fans in the city center then 200 or so let down this club.”
Despite Wednesday’s violence in Manchester, UEFA does not expect a repeat at next week’s Champions League final between Manchester United and Chelsea in Moscow and certainly does not foresee any retaliatory attacks on British fans.
“Retaliation? No I don’t think so. United and Chelsea fans had nothing to do with this and it is the media’s responsibility not to make something out of nothing on this,” Gaillard said.
“We expect a great final in a great atmosphere. We expect a warm welcome from the Russian people in a safe and secure environment.”
Gaillard said European soccer’s governing body would not be making any extra security arrangements in light of Wednesday’s violence, but said the issue of violence, notably caused by ticketing problems, may require a “revolutionary rethink”.
He said he could envisage fans requiring biometric entry into stadiums in the future such as a fingerprint or eye scan.
“I don’t see this (biometric) happening at this stage because it would take a cultural revolution. But, yes, if the current trend continues we will have to move in that direction.”

TITLE: Deputy PM Aims to Increase Oil Production
AUTHOR: By Miriam Elder
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his new energy policy director, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, went on the offensive Wednesday to battle claims that the country’s oil production was in decline. 
“You think oil production is declining?” Sechin said in an interview with Interfax, a first for the secretive former Kremlin insider who has been thrust into the spotlight with his Cabinet appointment this week. 
“Let’s wait until the end of the year. I’m sure there won’t be a decline, but an increase instead,” he said, declining to provide reasoning for the claim. 
After growing by just 2 percent in 2007, the country’s oil production has been sinking since the start of the year as oil firms face heavy taxes while trying to develop untapped fields in Russia’s most difficult regions. 
Putin offered some hope Wednesday, saying he would support extending tax breaks to regions beyond eastern Siberia, sending the RTS to a new record high of 2406.05. 
The index surpassed its previous high, hit on Dec. 12, when Putin endorsed Dmitry Medvedev to succeed him as president. 
On a visit to the Baltic Sea port of Ust Luga, Putin said he supported introducing seven-year tax breaks for firms working on the continental shelf, in the Timan-Pechora Basin and the Gazprom-dominated Yamal Peninsula. 
“It is necessary to introduce tax breaks for companies exploring and developing new deposits,” Putin said, adding that he expected oil production to rise by 1.3 million barrels per day by 2015. 
That figure represents over 13 percent of the country’s current oil production, which was nearly 9.9 million bpd last year. 
Putin said he had arrived at the expected increase through forward-looking calculations submitted to oil-pipeline monopoly Transneft by the oil firms that use it.

TITLE: Medvedev Vows Cash for Security
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev pledged on Thursday to ensure that Russia’s nuclear deterrent remained properly funded to ward off threats to national security.
Medvedev made his first domestic trip since taking power last week as Kremlin leader to a top-secret missile base, a visit that underscored the strategic role of nuclear arms in Russia’s assertive foreign policy.
“It is obvious that our task in the next few years is to ensure strategic missile forces get all the necessary funds to be ready to withstand the existing threats,” the president told soldiers and officers over lunch at the camouflaged base in a forest 250 kilometers from Moscow.
After the missile base Medvedev visited a military academy where young officers train for Russia’s nuclear, bacteriological and chemical forces.

TITLE: Familiar Faces Follow Putin to Take New Jobs
AUTHOR: By Anna Smolchenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin unveiled his Cabinet lineup on Monday, reappointing most key ministers and taking several powerful Kremlin allies with him to the White House. 
President Dmitry Medvedev, who took over from Putin last week, quickly approved the candidates during a carefully choreographed meeting in the Kremlin. He said he and Putin had worked on the makeup of the Cabinet for the past two months. 
State television showed Putin proposing the names to Medvedev while conspicuously seated at the same spot at the Kremlin desk that he occupied as president. Putin also announced the reshuffle to reporters. 
“I would like to underscore the fact that we acted from a need to reinforce the performance and efficiency of the government and the potential of its staff by changing and optimizing the executive power structures,” Putin said at a government meeting. 
Among the major changes are the promotion of Igor Shuvalov, Putin’s key economic aide in the Kremlin and Russia’s Group of Eight sherpa, as one of the two first deputy prime ministers. Putin appeared to counterbalance the liberal appointment with the promotion of Igor Sechin, his powerful hawkish deputy chief of staff at the Kremlin, to the post of deputy prime minister. 
Shuvalov will promote economic freedoms and oversee foreign trade, WTO talks, small business, state property and anti-monopoly policy, while Sechin will be in charge of energy and industrial policy, excluding the defense portfolio, the use of natural resources and environmental, technological and nuclear oversight. 
Sechin’s appointment brings the man believed to be the behind-the-scenes master of a siloviki clan into the public spotlight for the first time. Sechin has Putin’s ear and is thought to wield enormous influence among other senior officials. 
Former Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, plucked from obscurity last September to ensure a smooth Cabinet handover for Putin, was appointed the other first deputy prime minister. Zubkov, a former collective farm boss, will be in charge of the agriculture, fishing and forestry industries. 
Along with Sechin, four other men were appointed deputy prime ministers. Sergei Sobyanin, who headed Putin’s administration in the Kremlin, was named government chief of staff with the rank of deputy prime minister, while Deputy Prime Ministers Alexander Zhukov and Alexei Kudrin retained their posts. 
Sergei Ivanov — a former first deputy prime minister who at one time appeared set to become president — was demoted to deputy prime minister. In what might be seen as a further snub, Putin at the government meeting introduced each of his new deputies and their roles with the exception of Ivanov. 
The appointments appear to be in line with Putin’s long-standing practice of balancing various interest groups while staying above the fray. Top liberals Shuvalov and Kudrin could provide balance against Sechin and Ivanov. 
Sobyanin will oversee the division of power among the federal, regional and municipal levels of government, as well as legislative initiatives, among other things, Putin said. 
Zhukov will spearhead government attempts to improve health, education and housing — known as the national projects — and oversee art, culture, tourism and sports. 
Kudrin, who also kept the post of finance minister, will be in charge of socio-economic and monetary policies, the state budget and financial markets. Observers have linked Kudrin’s political longevity to Putin’s appreciation for his help when the future president first moved to Moscow from St. Petersburg. Putin slept on a cot in Kudrin’s kitchen in his early days in Moscow, Vladimir Solovyov, a television celebrity close to the Kremlin, wrote in his recent book “Putin: A Guide for Those Interested.” 
Other new faces in the Cabinet are Justice Minister Alexander Konovalov, the former presidential envoy to the Volga Federal District who replaces Vladimir Ustinov; and Communications and Press Minister Igor Shchyogolev, the former head of the Kremlin protocol department who heads a new ministry. 
IT and Communications Minister Leonid Reiman, whose name has been tainted in corruption scandals, lost his job, and his ministry was disbanded. 
The Culture and Press Ministry was renamed the Culture Ministry, and Alexander Avdeyev, previously Russia’s ambassador to France, replaced Alexander Sokolov at the helm. Vitaly Mutko, head of the Russian Football Union, was named the head of the new Sports, Tourism and Youth Ministry. The State Committee of Youth Affairs, headed by former Nashi leader Vasily Yakemenko, was folded into the ministry. 
In a sign that energy will continue to play a central role in the country’s economy, the Energy Ministry was created from the Industry and Energy Ministry. Its minister is Sergei Shmatko, head of Atomstroiexport, the country’s nuclear power equipment and service export monopoly. Former Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko was named head of the new Industry and Trade Ministry, which took over the trade portfolio from the Economic Development and Trade Ministry. That ministry, in turn, was renamed the Economic Development Ministry, and Elvira Nabiullina kept her job as its chief. 
In other changes, a new federal agency in charge of ties with the Commonwealth of Independent States has been set up on the basis of a department of the Foreign Ministry that dealt with those countries. Under Putin, relations with most of the country’s post-Soviet neighbors have soured. 
Medvedev appointed former Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Naryshkin as his chief of staff. Alexander Bortnikov, head of the Federal Security Service’s economic security division, was named the head of the FSB. Former FSB director Nikolai Patrushev was made the head of the president’s Security Council. 
Putin’s key economic adviser, Arkady Dvorkovich, who reportedly had coveted a ministerial post, did not make it into the new Cabinet. Medvedev promoted Kremlin deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov to first deputy chief of staff and Alexei Gromov, formerly Putin’s influential spokesman, as deputy chief of staff. 
In a separate shuffle, Viktor Cherkesov, chief of the Federal Drug Control Service, was moved to the federal agency that procures weapons and military hardware, replacing Alexander Denisov. Cherkesov is thought to lead a siloviki clan at loggerheads with Sechin’s group. The war between the clans spilled into the open last fall when Cherkesov said in an open letter that infighting was threatening national security. 
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov retained their jobs. Yury Trutnev kept his post as natural resources minister, while receiving a new portfolio to oversee the environment. Other officials who kept their positions were Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev, Regional Development Minister Dmitry Kozak, Education and Science Minister Andrei Fursenko, Health and Social Development Minister Tatyana Golikova, and Transportation Minister Igor Levitin.

TITLE: Small Businesses Lack Confidence in Future
AUTHOR: By Yekaterina Dranitsyna
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) underinvest into development because entrepreneurs are not confident about their future, the results of a recent survey show. According to research carried out by ROMIR-Monitoring and sponsored by TRUST National Bank, most entrepreneurs are content with the present condition of their businesses but do not expect secure growth in the future.
“The results of the survey were most surprising. Paradoxically, entrepreneurs are optimistic about the present situation, but the future seems highly obscure to them. The smaller the company, the greater the pessimism of its owners,” Andrei Sogrin, director for internal relations at TRUST National Bank, said at a press conference Tuesday.
As a result of the lack of confidence, SMEs are not investing sufficiently into development, which slows down economic growth, Sogrin observed.
Since March last year ROMIR-Monitoring has conducted six surveys at two-month intervals. Researchers used methodology developed by Michigan University, adapting it to correspond to the Russian business environment.
Irina Krylova, deputy director of ROMIR-Monitoring, said that researchers questioned 1,000 business owners and, in rare cases, top managers. 60 percent of them represented micro-businesses, 30 percent were from small enterprises and 10 percent from medium-sized companies. About half of the respondents represented wholesale and retail companies.
According to the most recent survey, conducted in January this year, the index of the present situation stood at 150 points and the index of future expectations at 133 points.
The index varies from 0 to 200, with 200 indicating full positivity, and 0 representing zero positivity.
“Microbusinesses demonstrated the lowest index of future expectations. We tried to compare the index dynamics with macroeconomic factors — GDP, inflation and unemployment rates — but so far we have not found any correlation,” Krylova said.
This year ROMIR-Monitoring will conduct the surveys once every three months and the number of respondents will increase to 1,200 people. Krylova said that the researchers had written a hypothesis, which is yet to be proven.
Last year, for the first time the growth rate of loans to SMEs in Russia was higher than the growth rate of corporate and retail loans, said Nadia Cherkasova, managing director for the development of small business at TRUST National Bank.
However, Cherkasova warned, the lack of confidence demonstrated by entrepreneurs is a dangerous trend.
According to official statistics, eight million individual entrepreneurs and one million SMEs are registered in Russia. They employ 24 percent of the workforce and contribute 22 percent of the GDP.
“The role of SMEs in the GDP and active workforce in Russia is half of that in developed countries,” Cherkasova said. In Japan, SMEs employ 78 percent of the workforce and contribute 55 percent of the GDP, she said.
Cherkasova and Sogrin suggested that support of small businesses could be provided as a national project.
“The national projects that are being realized are mostly social and require state subsidies. This project could bring positive results quickly and easily with minimum effort,” Cherkasova said.
Over the last two years TRUST National Bank has granted loans of a total of more than $630 million to 19,000 entrepreneurs in 115 Russian cities. 
TRUST focuses on microloans for a period of up to seven years. About 92 percent of its credit portfolio consists of microloans of up to 1.5 million rubles ($63,000).  The maximum size of a loan is 75 million rubles ($3 million), and loans of up to one million rubles ($42,000) are issued without collateral.
Sogrin said that private banks in Russia are not very willing to finance start-ups. “The state budget has been quite plentiful in recent years and could afford to support SMEs. In most developed countries, state budgets guarantee 50 percent of high risk loans issued by private banks,” he said.

TITLE: President Pledges Support for SMEs
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev told his new government on Wednesday to step up efforts to help small and medium-sized businesses choked by red tape and corruption. 
Medvedev promised during his election campaign to free the sector from the arbitrary checks officials use to extort bribes and said he would provide solid state support for what he has called “a cradle of the middle class.” 
Elected in March with the backing of his popular predecessor, Vladimir Putin, Medvedev has said creating a strong middle class interested in political and economic stability is a top priority. 
“You will receive a special order concerning the so-called ‘extrajudicial’ rights of police to check businesses,” Medvedev told a Kremlin meeting of top government officials summoned just two days after a Cabinet headed by Putin was formed. 
“This should be done in accordance with the general order banning arbitrary visits by law enforcement bodies to small businesses,” Medvedev added, Itar-Tass reported. 
The country’s transition to a market economy accelerated under Putin, who presided over eight years of uninterrupted economic growth fueled by high energy prices. But critics say that in large part only big firms, especially those with close ties to the Kremlin and well-protected against a swelling state bureaucracy, benefited from the boom. 
Small and medium-sized companies, harassed by the mafia in the 1990s and bureaucrats this decade, have failed to flourish. They produce less than 20 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, compared with Medvedev’s target of at least 50 percent. 
Medvedev told officials to offer small firms financial support, especially with rising energy costs. 
“You will receive orders concerning ... the procedure of giving small companies access to power networks and minimizing their expenses when switching to these networks,” he said. “We should consider subsidizing these expenses through [state] budgets.”

TITLE: Ruble Ends Its Decline
AUTHOR: By Emma O’Brien
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s ruble on Thursday halted a two-day decline against the basket of dollars and euros it is traded against on speculation the central bank has finished deliberately weakening the currency to discourage speculators.
The ruble has lost 0.5 percent versus the basket since Monday. Bank Rossii said Wednesday it will buy and sell rubles at different, unpublicized levels to inject volatility into the currency. The central bank used to enter the currency market to keep the ruble steady within a 30-kopek range versus the basket so as to limit the impact of fluctuations on manufacturers and exporters.
“The central bank has made its point, and pretty forcefully,” said Olivier Desbarres, a currency strategist at Credit Suisse Group in London. “They’ve made it clear they’re going to pursue an unpredictable path for the ruble in order to flush out speculative positions.”
Merrill Lynch & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG have all forecast the central bank will let the ruble gain by at least four percent this year to curb increases in prices on imported goods that helped drive inflation to a five-year high of 14.3 percent in April.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Computer Plant Started</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Foxconn and Hewlett-Packard will start the construction of a computer assembly plant in St. Petersburg on Friday, the governor’s press service said Tuesday in a statement.
The plant will start operating in 2009, producing 20,000 units a year. Total investment into the project is planned at $50 million. Foxconn, which is registered in Taiwan, reported global sales last year worth about $55 billion.

<b>LSR Plans New Center</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — LSR Group’s subsidiary has acquired land plots covering a total area of 1.8 hectares alongside the Leningrad Highway in Moscow, Interfax reported Tuesday.
The land was acquired through the acquisition of two companies, Agentstvo Triada and Kentavr Management. The price was not disclosed. LSR Group plans to invest $280 million into a 115,000-square meter business center that will be built on the territory.

<b>Port Terminal Planned</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Forum holding company will invest $1 billion into the construction of a new port terminal in the town of Lomonosov just outside St. Petersburg, Interfax reported Wednesday.
The terminal complex, whose capacity is planned at 1.45 million TEU and 130,000 units of rolling stock, will be completed by 2014. A container terminal will be constructed on a 45-hectare land plot close to Bronka railway station, and a terminal for rolling stock on 80 hectares of reclaimed land.
Pulkovo Revenue Rises</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Pulkovo airport increased its gross revenue by 21.4 percent last year up to 3.57 billion rubles ($150 million), Interfax reported Tuesday.
Revenue from aviation services increased by 24.5 percent up to three billion rubles ($125.5 million), while investment increased 2.6 times up to 494 million rubles ($20.65 million), and passenger turnover increased by 20.3 percent last year up to 6.14 million people.

<b>Baltika Purchases Baku</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Baltika brewery is acquiring the Azerbaijan-based Baku Castel brewery from Brasseries Internationales Holding at an undisclosed price, Interfax reported Thursday.
By 2009 Baku Castel will start producing Baltika’s beer brands as well as continuing to produce its own brands. According to Baltika’s data, the St. Petersburg brewery occupies 3.5 percent of the Azerbaijan market.

<b>Tax Cut Idea Progresses</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — The Russian government has “virtually agreed’’ on tax cuts for oil producers to help the industry, Economy Minister Elvira Nabiullina said.
“The oil industry has always been the foundation for the Russian economy, the foundation for its competitiveness,’’ she said, speaking after a Cabinet meeting in Moscow on Thursday. “A slight stagnation of extraction is alarming for us,’’ Nabiullina said in comments broadcast live by state-run Vesti-24 television channel.
The economy of Russia, the world’s biggest energy exporter, expanded 8.1 percent last year, fueled by oil and gas sales. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin urged government officials to lower the extraction tax rate, saying the bill is “ready’’ for parliament.

<b>Pipe Request Refused</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Russia doesn’t plan to resume sending oil to Lithuania by pipeline, said Igor Sechin, Russia’s deputy prime minister in charge of energy and industrial policy.
Russian oil pipeline monopoly Transneft stopped exports to Lithuania after a spill in July 2006. The Lithuanian government has said the closure is politically motivated, a charge Transneft has denied.
“Their demands are without merit,’’ Sechin told reporters in the Baltic seaport of Primorsk on Wednesday, referring to Lithuanian requests to reopen the link.

<b>Putin Opens Terminal</b>
ST. PETERBURG (Bloomberg) — Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin opened an oil-products terminal on the Baltic Sea as the country seeks to increase exports from refineries and bypass transit countries.
“The new terminal will allow us to diversify the export routes for our main consumers,’’ Putin said at the Primorsk facility Wednesday.
Primorsk, Russia’s biggest oil port, will be served by Transnefteproduct’s $1.3 billion Sever pipeline, which will run 1,056 kilometers (656 miles) to the terminal. 
The state-owned operator of Russia’s oil-product pipelines expects initially to ship 8.4 million metric tons of fuel a year and later double annual capacity to 17 million tons.
BP Seeks Higher Price</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — BP Plc’s Russian venture, TNK-BP, may increase its registered gas reserves at the Kovykta project to 2.1 trillion cubic meters and seek to add $300 million to the sale price it’s negotiating with Gazprom, Kommersant reported.
Regulators may approve an additional 600 billion cubic meters of reserves at the Khandinsky block, part of the eastern Siberian project, by the end of June, Kommersant said, citing Nikolai Suslov, who heads the Irkutsk region’s subsoil agency.
TNK-BP plans to use the extra reserves to negotiate a price higher than the preliminary $700 million to $900 million agreed last year, Kommersant said, citing an unidentified person “close to’’ the venture.
Gazprom wants to acquire Kovykta by gaining control of TNK-BP, the newspaper said, citing unidentified officials at both companies.

<b>Russia Set for Wi-Max</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Group Ltd. will start a high-speed broadband Wi-Max service in Russia, as it looks to profit from the growing market.
Virgin Group and partner Trivon Group will start the service in 32 Russian regions, including Moscow and St. Petersburg, London-based Virgin Group said Thursday in an e-mailed statement. Virgin Connect forecasts that it will have a ten percent market share within five years.
Trivon and private equity firms Delta Partners and Eurasia Capital Management also invested in the venture. WiMax is a mobile technology capable of providing high-speed, low-cost Internet connections.

TITLE: Rescuing a Revolution
AUTHOR: By Elmar Brok, Jas Gawronski and Charles Tannock
TEXT: There is no more depressing sight in politics than a leader who, desperate to cling to power, ruins his country in the process. By his recent actions, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko now looks like he has joined the long list of rulers who have sacrificed their country’s future simply to prolong their misrule. 
Yushchenko’s recent moves in both politics and economics suggest that his instinct for self-preservation knows no limits. Once a proud supporter of the free market and the man who banished hyperinflation in Ukraine in the 1990s, Yushchenko has in recent weeks vetoed — sometimes on flimsy grounds and sometimes for no stated reason at all — a series of vital privatizations. He blocked the sale of regional energy companies, for example, because he claims that their privatization will threaten the country’s “national security,” though it is corrupt and incompetent state management of these companies that is threatening Ukraine’s security by making it vulnerable to energy cutoffs. 
Yushchenko seems motivated only by a desire to damage his prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, whom he perceives as the biggest threat to his re-election in 2010. To undermine the Tymoshenko Cabinet even more, Ukraine’s Central Bank, under the leadership of a presidential crony, is pursuing a policy that is importing high inflation. When confronted about this, Volodymyr Stelmakh, the bank’s governor, is said to have told Tymoshenko that his policies would destroy her government before they broke the back of the economy. 
In politics, too, Yushchenko is playing with fire, having lost the support of most of Our Ukraine, the party he created. Since his victory in 2004, Yushchenko’s popularity ratings have plummeted to about 8 percent. As a result, the party has been reduced to junior-partner status in Tymoshenko’s coalition government. 
Instead of trying to recover support by pursuing the reforms and privatizations that he promised during the Orange Revolution, Yushchenko is planning to take the few members of Our Ukraine that he still controls and forge a strategic alliance with the Party of the Regions, the very party that opposed the country’s turn to democracy and an open society. To clinch this deal, the Party of the Regions would dump their unelectable leader, Viktor Yanukovych, as their presidential candidate and adopt Yushchenko as their standard-bearer. 
Yushchenko has only himself to blame for his political predicament. His decision in 2006 to bring Yanukovych out of the wilderness and back into the premiership was an act from which he has never recovered. Only when Yanukovych sought to use the parliament to strip the president of his powers did Yushchenko summon the will to fight back, dismissing Yanukovych’s government and calling for a special election last year. That election, however, was won by Tymoshenko, who has parlayed her return to power into a commanding lead in the polls for the coming presidential election. 
Throttling Ukraine’s economy and political system need not have been Yushchenko’s legacy. After he came to power in 2005 on a huge wave of popular support, he started off well. The economy was growing, and he and Tymoshenko began to tackle the country’s black hole of corruption. Moreover, he seemed genuinely committed to reconciliation between the country’s Russian-speaking east and Ukrainian-speaking west. Throughout his presidency, he has overseen fair elections and a free and vibrant press. 
But Yushchenko’s chronic dithering and poor political judgment consistently undermine his fundamental democratic credentials. Sadly, he now appears poised to make another serious political miscalculation, because he is backing a radical constitutional reform aimed at creating a purely presidential system. That proposal has no chance of success in the parliament. Yushchenko sought to circumvent the parliament by way of a national referendum, but the Constitutional Court has ruled that only the parliament may determine how constitutional reform is to occur. 
Although Yushchenko seems unable to save himself politically, Europe can help both him and Ukraine’s democracy. Tymoshenko is prepared to offer Yushchenko a compromise that Europe’s leaders should urge him to accept. Her proposals for constitutional reform would make Ukraine a pure parliamentary republic, while retaining a president as head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces. Yushchenko can yet secure an honorable place in history if, instead of undermining and obstructing Tymoshenko at every turn, he supports her anti-corruption initiatives and constitutional reform, the latter aimed at bringing the country’s political system closer to Europe’s parliamentary democracies as well as to facilitate the country’s European integration. 
Given that Yushchenko has almost no chance of winning the next presidential election, Tymoshenko has made him a generous offer. If accepted, it promises Ukraine, which aspires to European Union membership and is currently negotiating a free trade agreement with the EU, the stable, effective and democratic government that it needs. Europe’s leaders, who helped broker a peaceful and democratic end to the Orange Revolution, should once again help Kiev avoid political deadlock. 

Elmar Brok, Jas Gawronski and Charles Tannock are members of the EU parliament. © Project Syndicate.

TITLE: Olympic Gold in Abkhazia
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: The day before Victory Day, Zvezda television, run by the Defense Ministry, reported that Georgia was planning an invasion of the breakaway republic of Abkhazia on May 9. 
This situation is painfully reminiscent of when Russian intelligence services announced that the United States would attack Iran on April 6 at exactly 4 a.m. in an operation code-named “Bite.” Both stories contained remarkably specific details, but in both cases, no war ever started.
There is no doubt that Georgia would like to regain Abkhazia. If Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili were Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, he would probably send troops into Abkhazia as Putin did with Chechnya, and he would either capture Abkhazia or at least gun down a lot of Abkhaz citizens. As badly as Saakashvili wants to restore Georgia’s territorial integrity, Georgia’s desire to join NATO and to achieve high economic growth, however, take precedent.
The type of scare tactic used by Zvezda has been used before in totalitarian states. Nazi Germany, for example, announced the “attack of the Poles” just before seizing Poland. The Soviet Union raised the alarm about the “aggression of the White Finns” after it staged the shelling of the Russian village Mainila. This incident served as the casus belli for initiating the 1939-40 Winter War. 
But the propaganda campaign against the “aggression of the Georgians” is different in one important way — construction companies for the 2014 Sochi Olympics have more to gain by annexing Abkhazia than the Kremlin does.
The commercial aspect of the Abkhazia conflict is clear. After all, why is Moscow’s interest concentrated in Abkhazia instead of the other Georgian breakaway republic, South Ossetia? Because South Ossetia is poor, sparsely populated, and it has little more than flooded mines and a president who occasionally exposes assassination attempts on his life.
Abkhazia is a different matter entirely. It is a subtropical region with pristine natural beauty. More important, Abkhazia, which is located just 30 kilometers from Sochi, is a key source of construction materials that are badly needed to build all of the infrastructure for the Sochi Olympics. 
Foreign analysts link Russia’s rankling over Abkhazia with two external events — the West’s recognition of Kosovo’s independence and Georgia’s desire to join NATO. But there was one other event — purely domestic — that preceded the country’s heightened interest in Abkhazia. This was the management shakeup within Olimpstroi, the company that will be allocated billions of dollars to prepare Sochi for the Winter Olympics. For construction companies that have contracts for Olympic projects, Abkhazia has “strategic corruption value.” First, it will be a major source of crushed stone and other building materials. Second, thanks to the enormous development planned for Sochi, real estate prices and hotels in neighboring Abkhazia will most likely shoot through the roof. 
As soon as Olimpstroi head Semyon Veinshtock was given his pink slip, the idea of “Project Abkhazia” came to the fore. It started as an “offshore company” of sorts, established to make a load of money quickly and without a lot of transparency. (Perhaps this is what Putin had in mind when he spoke last month of the need to give economic and legal recognition to the unrecognized republics.) Then, it was presented as the need to “defend Abkhazia from the Georgians!”
The moment Russian businessmen start buying up Abkhaz hotels and shipping its construction materials into Sochi, it will be clear to everyone why it is so essential to have 3,000 Russian peacekeepers stationed there. And if, for some strange reason, the local Abkhaz leaders are upset that they are left with only crumbs from this deal, the peacekeepers can simply explain to them that this is the price they have to pay for being protected against Georgia’s aggression.

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

TITLE: Speak, Nabokov
AUTHOR: By James Marson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev famously told the West, “We will bury you.” Over 50 years later, in her new book “Imagining Nabokov,” titled “V Gostyakh U Nabokova” in Russian, his great-granddaughter, Nina Khrushcheva, suggests that Russians need to bury the centuries-old myth of their own uniqueness.
“Russians need to stop being obsessed with being so overwhelmingly Russian,” Khrushcheva said in a telephone interview from New York last week. “Russia is a Western country, but it is afraid to be one.”
The idea that Russia has a special messianic status has pervaded the country’s culture for centuries, from the notion of Moscow as the Third Rome to Russian imperialism. “You can’t understand Russia with the mind,” wrote the 19th-century poet Fyodor Tyutchev. “You can only believe in Russia.”
This belief in the greatness of the Russian soul, Khrushcheva argues, is simply smoke and mirrors used to excuse the country’s backwardness. Russians prefer to fall back on this dreamy myth rather than take responsibility for their own lives. Rational individualism has never taken hold with Russians, and it is instead external forces such as fate and the state that provide meaning to their lives. Living in an idealized, poetic world — “a childish Russian paradise” — they are unable and unwilling to engage in practical activity.
The Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, Khrushcheva writes, offers a way out of this backward state through the example of his own life and his characters. As a member of a wealthy family, he went into exile after the Revolution. His past and country destroyed, Nabokov was forced to rely on himself and create his own meaning for his life.
The book mixes literary criticism with biography, personal memoir and an imagined conversation with the writer in Switzerland. It is filled with copious quotations, and Khrushcheva seems determined to let Nabokov speak for himself. “The genre is not important,” she said. “I hope I somehow touched something in Nabokov’s universe.”
Khrushcheva’s reading of Nabokov comes through her personal story, which she compares to that of the writer. She left Russia in 1991 and enrolled in graduate school at Princeton University. “It was an exciting time,” she remembered. “It was like another universe that was not supposed to be open, especially to a Khrushchev.” It was Nabokov who helped her escape from “the vast undifferentiated Russian collective” and adapt to the new world by taking responsibility for her actions, much like a character in one of his novels.
For Khrushcheva, Nabokov represents “the next step after Chekhov in Russian literature, its Westernization and rationalization.” Wallowing in a dreamy, poetic world, blaming fate for their problems, the characters of Russian literature, from Dostoevsky to Chekhov, are defined by their pensiveness and suffering. Nabokov, however, placed his heroes in “normal” life. “[He] forced them to live as people live from day to day ... refusing to perceive suffering as a sign of great spiritual depth.”
Khrushcheva contrasts Western and Russian attitudes to happiness. “In the West, happiness ... is not the passive patience of Russian literature, but Western perseverance. Happiness in an evolutionary striving forward, and you have to gain it and create it yourself.”
The book, which was published under the title “Imagining Nabokov. Russia Between Art and Politics,” met with a series of positive reviews on its U.S. release in November. In Russia, where a translation was published last month, her views on Nabokov have been received with a mixture of hostility and puzzlement.
“When I spoke in St. Petersburg in 2006,” Khrushcheva said, “I was almost shouted off the stage.” People were asking who she, someone living in the United States, was to comment on Russia. Furthermore, Russians are used to reading Nabokov as an apolitical author, she said. “His dissidence was an escape to another, pure universe and people didn’t like my attempt to interpret him politically.”
At a recent book presentation in Moscow, the reaction was more one of confusion. “The first question was, ‘What is happiness?’” she said. “This just wouldn’t happen in the United States. Sometimes we are unhappy and life stinks, but the American attitude is, ‘OK, moving on now.’ It’s not that they’re shallow — they just don’t need to think about these things 24 hours a day.”
There are differences between the Russian and the English versions, Khrushcheva said. “The English version reads more like a story. In Russia it is more of a message. I tell things as they are, and people can decide for themselves whether to listen or not.” One chapter in the Russian version emphasizing the difference between patience and perseverance was not included in the U.S. version. “To Americans, this idea is obvious,” she said. “But not to Russians.”
Khrushcheva fell in love with New York, where she now teaches international affairs at the New School. Like Nabokov, she believes that she has remained a Russian, but has become a Westerner at the same time. “I am as Russian as they come,” she said. “But I am also as New York as they come.”
This political argument is at the center of her book: Russia does not need to become American, but to combine its Russianness with aspects from other countries. “Russians don’t need to give up their Russianness, so much as give up the totality of their Russianness.”
Khrushcheva’s idea is certainly not new. In the 1830s and 1840s, two groups of philosophers clashed over Russia’s future. The Westerners argued against the nationalist Slavophiles — propagators of the idea of Russian uniqueness — that rational individualism offered the best way forward.
But the individualism of these great thinkers, such as Alexander Herzen and Vissarion Belinsky, had limited resonance with the Russian population. And this is the main problem with Khrushcheva’s idea — How can it be transmitted to Russian people?
Nabokov wrote, “I am the perfect dictator in that private world insofar as I alone am responsible for its stability and truth.” But he was a strong spirit, a man who refused to bow to the blows of chance and external forces. Khrushcheva herself notes, “It is hard just to live for yourself when life itself seems to have turned away from you.” To escape from the comforting support of a national idea and to take responsibility for oneself is not an easy task, and Nabokov and Khrushcheva both had to move abroad to achieve it. But Khrushcheva is encouraged by Russians’ love of reading and their veneration of writers, and she hopes that this enthusiasm can be harnessed for Nabokov. In 2001, she spent a semester at MGU teaching a course on Nabokov. “The students understood the message,” she said. “They themselves said we need to learn from Nabokov.”
If the philosophical idea at the center of Khrushcheva’s work is not strikingly original, the approach to it through Nabokov certainly is, and the text is refreshing in its avoidance of the didacticism and dryness of a political or philosophical tract. And its publication is certainly timely, as Russians continue to search for a way to reconcile their own history with the possibilities of democracy. “Around 20 years ago, communist commonality was replaced by democratic individualism,” she writes. “Now the time has come to turn away from Dostoevsky to new examples to follow and new authors to canonize.”

“Imagining Nabokov” is published in Russian as “V Gostyakh U Nabokova” by Vremya.

TITLE: Chernov’s
         choice
TEXT: A local performance by <b>DJ Lethal</b> — of House of Pain and Limp Bizkit fame — due to take place at The Place last Friday, was canceled, with the club mysteriously blaming an “unscrupulous promoter” and promising to return money to those who bought tickets in advance. As a result, a concert by the local ragga-metal band <b>Grandshuttleband</b> which was scheduled to open for the DJ and which was profiled in this newspaper last week was canceled as well. In a wave of cancelations, <b>Sabot</b>, an experimental instrumental punk duo, whose concert at Zoccolo was announced last week in this space, was also canceled, citing in an email problems with obtaining Russian visas.
Luckily some previously canceled acts are returning. Jamaican ska veteran band <b>The Skatalites</b>, whose scheduled concert at Orlandina was canceled due to a flight delay last year, are rescheduled to perform at Griboyedov on Sunday. The band has released a new album, called “On the Right Track” since its no-show last year.
<b>J.D. and the Blenders</b> will be playing at Zoccolo on Saturday in the second in a series of farewell shows. The soul and funk band will be put on hold as its frontwoman leaves St. Petersburg (after nearly eight  years) in June to attend graduate school in New York state. 
The shows, according to Davis, will feature the original lineup of the band formed by Davis and the former members of funk band Froglegs in 2005.  (The very last chance to catch the band will be at Mod on May 31.)
<b>Alexei (Lyokha) Nikonov</b>, the frontman of punk band <b>Posledniye Tanki v Parizhe</b>, or PTVP, will do a poetry reading at Manhattan on Tuesday.  An earlier reading by Nikonov at  GEZ-21 was like a good punk concert. Nikonov even reported fights in the audience at a similar reading in Moscow.
Apart from old poems, Nikonov said he will read a lot of new ones that he plans to release as a CD ROM audio collection called “Hallucinations” at some point in the fall. You will be able to read the poems on a computer running like “the opening titles of ‘Star Wars’” on the screen, Nikonov said of the release’s format. 
Meanwhile, it was announced that <b>Blondie</b> will perform in St. Petersburg on July 8. The concert is due to take place at the unlikely venue of the Oktyabrsky Concert Hall. The band’s frontwoman, <b>Deborah Harry</b>, came to St. Petersburg as a solo artist to perform at two opening nights of the now-defunct Hollywood Nites nightclub in 1996.
Apart from that, <b>Bob Dylan</b> is due to perform at Ice Palace on June 3, <b>P.J. Harvey</b> will perform at Music Hall on June 7 and <b>The Sex Pistols</b> are scheduled to perform at Yubileiny Sports Palace on June 23. Sounds like quite an exciting summer.
No more cancelations, please.

<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: The balalaika and the tailcoat
AUTHOR: By Olga Sharapova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: This summer, the Vasily Vasilyevich Andreyev Folk Orchestra is celebrating 120 years since it was founded, firstly with a concert at the Grand Hall of the Shostokovich Philharmonic on Wednesday and then other concerts in June. Wednesday’s concert will feature Songs performed by opera stars including Asya Davydova and Stanislav Leontiyev. 
This most Russian of Russian orchestras was founded in 1888 in St. Petersburg by amateur balalaika enthusiast Andreyev, who revived and transformed the unknown instrument into a world famous symbol of the nature’s culture. 
What is more, Andreyev created a new musical trend which became very popular in different countries. He combined “primitive” folk instruments with classical and symphonic music. Andreyev was the first musician who performed compositions of Tchaikovsky, Glinka, and Schuman on such instruments as the balalaika and the domra.
At this time, these ancient Russian instruments were brought to life by Andreyev and became something new and exotic for foreigners and Russians alike. With the recognition of Tsar Alexander III, Andreyev joined together “the balalaika and a tailcoat” and singlehandedly popularized the instrument. 
After triumphant tours to The Paris World Fair in 1900, Germany in 1909-1911 and others to the U.K. and the U.S., the London Times wrote that “every nation should be proud of having such an orchestra of folk instruments. Andreyev revived and presented to Russians a real national orchestra.” 
The attention to Russian folk music became so great that in Paris, the conservatiore opened balalaika classes. 
Almost all kinds of Russian art and culture from the first quarter of the 20th century saw an unprecedented renaissance from avant garde painting and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to performances by the Moscow Arts Theater directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky.
But after the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 the situation changed. Folk culture wasn’t initially supported by the Soviet system and Andreyev’s orchestra for many years had neither a proper name nor a suitable place for rehearsals and performances. Andreyev, who was born in 1861, died a year later. 
However, in 1936 the collective became part of the State Leningrad Philharmonic society and the most productive and successful period came after 1951, when the orchestra began radio broadcasts. With these professional and official changes, in 1978 Andreyev’s musicians started giving concerts in France and Germany for the first time in many years.
For the last 22 years the orchestra has been headed by Dmitry Khochlov, a graduate of the Moscow and Leningrad Conservatories.
Khochlov maintains a repertoire of old Russian songs and compositions, classical music, and modern compositions specially written for the orchestra. The orchestra remains popular abroad, but Khochlov said he is disappointed by the lack of interest shown by the state, local audiences and potential sponsors. 
Although bearing the title State Academic Orchestra, the 70-strong ensemble does not have its own presmises and needs to seek different places for rehearsals. The orchestra’s state funding is also very low, which often discourages young and talented musicians from remaining with it. 
“Foreigners very often are surprised to know that we haven’t got the opportunity to go on international tours regularly,” Khochlov said. “I can’t forget our performance at the Carnegie Hall in U.S. when we celebrated our centenery [in 1988]. The hall was completely full and it was so warmly received that I can’t believe that in Russia we have to find halls for performances.”
As part of its 120th birthday celebrations, the Andreyev Folk Orchestra will perform a concert of world music at the State Academic Capella on June 10, while on June 30 it appears at the Mariinsky Theater.

TITLE: Pomp and politics
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Pomp, glitz and bravado ruled the Mariinsky stage on Friday at the opening of the Stars of the White Nights festival. The prestigious international event opened with a reconstruction of the company’s 1952 staging of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Maid of Pskov” — a triumph of the grand Soviet style that blended imperial grandeur, patriotic ardor and visual sumptuousness.
Rimsky-Korsakov’s first opera, “The Maid of Pskov” is based on Lev Mei’s eponymous melodrama. Set in 1570 in Pskov, a town in northwest Russia, the opera revolves around the doomed love of Ivan the Terrible’s illegitimate daughter Olga, who is also the niece of Prince Tokmakov, the governor of Pskov, for Mikhail Tucha, who leads local rebels against the tsar. The romance is set against a political backdrop as Ivan the Terrible gears up to ransack the cities of Pskov and Novgorod to subject them to his will. Both Olga and Mikhail are killed by the bullets of the tsar’s oprichniki (death squads) after Ivan the Terrible orders them to suppress a rebellion.
The composer first contemplated an opera inspired by Russian history when he was just 24. “The Maid of Pskov” first saw the Mariinsky stage in 1873, prompting an emotional response from the audience but getting sour reviews from the more conservative media.
The 1952 staging — the third take on the opera during the theater’s history — gained fame primarily owing to the spectacular designs by Fyodor Fyodorovsky, one of Russia’s most well known set designers of the 20th century. The designs feature many layers gauze with churches, palatial interiors and woods painted beautifully on them. The sumptuous, very traditional sets and costumes both dictate and restrain the performers’ movements — the main reason why this production has always been associated with the name of the designer Fyodorovsky, rather than with that of the director, Yevgeny Sokovnin. The designs dominate the stage, and the acting is rather static, which is a conscious choice: the visual attraction here is not a creative direction but a wealth of richly decorated costumes, stately horses carrying noblemen, bell-ringing, and chaotic crowds of peasants ecstatically greeting the tsar.
Yury Laptev, a former Mariinsky singer and opera manager who has spent the past five years serving as a presidential advisor on cultural issues, was responsible for the reconstruction. Whether his proximity to the Kremlin has affected Laptev’s work is anyone’s guess, but the resulting show — which premiered in the same week as President Dmitry Medvedev’s inauguration, and was then performed in Moscow — was curiously reminiscent in style and flavor of the ceremony at St. George’s Hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace that saw Medvedev assume his presidential duties. Political allusions were prominent in the new production.
Reviving a historic production’s aesthetic values is often an artistically thankless task. In the case of “The Maid of Pskov,” at least a political justification emerges: in modern Russia, a global energy giant where the leaders restlessly flex their political muscles and intimidate their critics, the appetite for a historical grand opera is great indeed.
Ivan the Terrible and his faithful guards, the oprichniki entered the stage on horses to be greeted with a massive round of applause.
The audiences gave the new production a very enthusiastic welcome and a standing ovation at the end. The Mariinsky Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Valery Gergiev was at its inspired best, with sublimely transparent lyrical themes. The vibrant, haunting and intense strings and the earthy, profound thundering of the percussion were mesmerizing.
The production showcased the younger generation of the Mariinsky’s talent. The tall and imposing young bass Alexei Tanovitsky rendered ponderous lines as generous in range and color as Ivan the Terrible.
Tanovitsky offered a very personal take on the notoriously brutal Russian tsar. Yet his Ivan the Terrible — a little too fussy, awkward and somewhat neurotic — appeared too human to be threatening. On a dramatic level, Tanovitsky has yet to find his way to the role. At times, Ivan’s edgy gestures even brought to mind another tsar, the hero of Rimsky-Korsakov’s later opera, “The Tale of Tsar Saltan” (1900), while on other occasions the tsar’s movements appeared to have been borrowed from the monumental epic “Ivan the Terrible” created by the renowned filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in the 1940s.
The performance of lyrical soprano Irina Matayeva as Ivan’s daughter, Olga Tokmakova, was one of the staging’s greatest highlights, creating a palpitating and passionate princess. Bass Gennady Bezzubenkov spiced up his character, Prince Yury Ivanovich Tokmakov, the tsar’s deputy and governor in Pskov, with a hint of servility and humbleness.
The Mariinsky nurtures plans to soon complement “The Maid of Pskov” with Rimsky-Korsakov’s one-act opera “The Noblewoman Vera Sheloga,” which tells the story of Olga’s mother, a noblewoman who had an affair with Ivan the Terrible while her husband was away on a military campaign. Vera, whose husband died in the war, gives birth to a child of whom the Russian tsar knows nothing until Olga is grown up.

TITLE: An art collection returns
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Monday opened an important exhibition of Russian art collected by the late cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his widow, the opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya.
“Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya kept for the world, for all of us, for Russia, genuine masterpieces of art, sketches, and decorative and applied art,” Putin said at the opening of the exhibition in the Konstantinovsky Palace near St. Petersburg in the historic settlement of Strelna.
Putin said that only people who were “very talented and had a good understanding of the genuine standards of national culture,” could have amassed such a collection, Interfax reported.
The former president, who was appointed prime minister last week, also thanked the people who had helped to return the collection to Russia for continuing “the best traditions of the national patronage of art and charity,” singling out Russian billionaire metals tycoon Alisher Usmanov.
After Rostropovich died in April last year, Vishnevskaya put the collection up for auction at Sotheby’s in London, but before the sale took place, Usmanov bought the collection and donated it to the Russian state.
“It is not by chance that the Konstantinovsky Palace has been chosen for the new home of the collection,” Putin continued. “The palace was restored practically from ruins, and today it serves as one of the symbols of our country’s revival.”
It was Putin himself who ordered the reconstruction of the building and grounds at Strelna when he was president in 2001. The former palace of the Konstantinovsky branch of the Romanov dynasty was destroyed during World War II and left ruined until Putin chose it as the site for a new presidential residence and conference center. In 2006 it hosted the Group of Eight heads of government summit.
The Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya Collection includes art from a wide range of eras and a rare diversity of materials in differing genres. Works by Russian artists such as Vladimir Borovikovsky (1757-1825), Alexei Venetsyanov (1780-1847), Karl Bryullov (1799-1852), Valentin Serov (1865-1911), Ilya Repin (1844-1930) and Nikolai Roerich (1874-1947) are among the exhibits.
The collection, which consists of 450 works of art, also features decorative and applied art, including objects made of carved Kholmogorsky bone, malachite, decorative glass, silver, bronze, Velikoustyuzhsky enamel, and porcelain. It also includes items of furniture.
The collection originally belonged to Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya, who left the Soviet Union in 1974 under fire for their support of dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. They began collecting 30 years ago. 
Usmanov reportedly bought the collection for significantly more than the $40 million it was expected to fetch at the Sotheby’s auction, and in doing so prevented it from being broken up.  
When speaking last year about his decision to buy the collection, Usmanov said it was “improvised.”
“Two of my friends came over with the catalog and began to change their plans to buy certain lots. I opened the catalogue by chance and saw [Ivan] Bilibin’s picture of Oriental faces [The Hunt, 1929] on the first page. It surprised me,” Usmanov said, Interfax reported.
“Then I thought about saving the whole collection. I called Mikhail Shvydkoi [head of the Russian Federal Culture and Cinema Agency] and asked if he would support my intention to pass the collection to the state if I won the auction. When he asked if I was joking, I gave him my honest word,” he said.
Usmanov said that from the very beginning he had the aim of saving the collection in its entirety, and returning it to Russia from Paris where Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya had kept the collection in their apartment. He also took into consideration the wish of the sellers to place it in one of St. Petersburg’s palaces.
After consulting experts and the culture ministry, Usmanov realized the newly-restored Konstantinovsky Palace did not have a permanent art collection. 
The collection was opened to the public on Thursday. It is due to open every day except when state events or other public activities are taking place at the palace. Depending on the schedule of the palace, visitors can book a guided tour — in Russian only unless special arrangements are made — between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. A ticket to the exhibition costs 350 rubles, the palace said.

For more information: www.konstantinpalace.ru Tel: 438 5360, 438 5351

TITLE: Kiss me Kate
AUTHOR: By Conor Sweeney
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: YEKATERINBURG, Russia — Sex, power and fabulous wealth are images of modern Russia and also the theme for an ambitious new musical evoking one of Russia’s most famous rulers.
“Catherine the Great” opened on Thursday in the Urals city that bears her name, Yekaterinburg. The show combines rock, operatic arias and Russian Orthodox religious music to recall the German-born princess and her path to imperial power.
Catherine’s personal story contains all the right ingredients for a musical. The story follows her arrival in Russia in 1745, aged 15, and her Russification as the wife of the future Tsar, before assuming power and ruling as an autocrat over a “golden age” of the Russian empire until she was 67.
Best-known outside Russia as the place where the family of the last tsar was murdered 90 years ago, Yekaterinburg now hopes to stir memories of one of the country’s best-loved rulers. Catherine uses a 45-piece orchestra and bursts of electric guitar to complement the arias, choral interludes and ragtime routines that look very much like another musical, ‘Chicago.’
“It must become a Russian global hit,” classically trained composer Sergei Dreznin told Reuters in an interview.
He compares his work to another famous historical musical, set at the time of the French revolution, “Les Miserables.”
Though he denies any parallel with Russia’s dominant political figure, Vladimir Putin, Dreznin says that buried behind the arias and choreography is an underlying theme about how Russia gravitates towards strong leaders.
“Everything in the script says Russia doesn’t change and asks what is the price of power? How did such a gentle German princess became a tyrant? Sure, she was trying to chop off as few heads as possible, but she ruled with an iron fist,” he said.
Apart from unifying the center of authority in St. Petersburg’s imperial palace, Catherine vastly expanded Russia’s empire, winning numerous wars against the Ottomans.
“The logic of power is that if you want to be a great queen you have to be tough, you must sacrifice so much on the way to power, there’s almost nothing left,” the composer said.
The genre leaps will not be to everyone’s taste, but the stars and producers are confident their show has the right mix of court costumes, big dance routines, Russian folklore and the storyline to reach well beyond a domestic audience.
Dreznin has worked on his spectacle around the life of Catherine the Great for almost a decade in between other projects that have taken him around the world.
Naturally, the musical dwells on Catherine’s numerous romantic dalliances, though it doesn’t ever run to the explicit. Dreznin says he would have preferred less subtlety but had to accommodate Russian taboos.
“The subject of young Catherine is romantic love while older Catherine is approached with humor, but we’re talking about sex ...it’s absolutely implied, but it’s enough for a Russian audience,” he said.
In one scene, a young prince cavorts in a Russian banya with numerous ladies, though none are naked — an unlikely scenario since Russians don’t normally wear clothes in the steamhouse.
With strong interest from Germany, Dreznin says he’ll stick more sex in other versions, if they want it. He’s also pondering linguistic questions — like how to make a story told in Russian work elsewhere, possibly by using subtitles.
Star actress Maria Vinenkova, 23, who plays the younger Catherine, says the musical follows a very “Slavic style.”
“She’s a real woman, who had total power. I know some people who are very skeptical of her, but I think she lived in a difficult time, she didn’t control power, power controlled her,” she said, just before a final run-though.
In a nearby dressing room, the actress playing the elder Catherine, Nina Shamber, prepared for her performance, which dwells on her trysts with aristocratic favorites.
“I think it will be a fantastic, historical musical spectacle,” she says. “We want it to be a big success, not just in Russia, but everywhere.”
The 17-million ruble ($712,800) budget is vast by Russian standards. But the director of Yekaterinburg’s Theater of Musical Comedy believes it’s a fitting venue for the premiere.
“Our theater was the laboratory of the Soviet period,” said Mikhail Safranov.

TITLE: Monumental folly?
AUTHOR: By Clifford J. Levy
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A memorial to Boris Yeltsin was dedicated late last month in a central spot in Russia’s most illustrious cemetery, a landscape of earnest tributes to generals and composers, mathematicians and diplomats. The veil was lifted, and there it was: a slab that brought to mind a giant, wobbly, tricolor birthday cake.
Many passers-by do not know what to make of it, which seems fitting, given that it honors a man whose legacy these days remains just as confounding.
Yeltsin, who died a little over a year ago, is still glorified by some as the founder of a Russia that rose from the debris of the Soviet Union, a visionary who spurned the old order and tried his best to lead his people through troubled times. Others scorn his name, holding his erratic style responsible for the deprivation, lawlessness and anxiety of those early years.
And so it was that when people viewing the monument were asked their impressions of him, they first tended to let out a sigh.
“He did a lot for Russia,” said Yekaterina Cherpak, 63, a teacher. “He gave new life to it. We all know what the 1990s were like. Naturally, things are better now. Was it Yeltsin’s fault? You can never say that it was only Yeltsin, Yeltsin alone. He began everything, and beginnings are tough.”
This dissonance was exemplified at the dedication of the Yeltsin memorial, in Novodevichy Cemetery on April 23, the anniversary of his death.
When then-President Vladimir Putin spoke, it was hard to ignore his own tortuous relationship with his mentor. Yeltsin essentially created Putin, plucking him from back-room obscurity in St. Petersburg and promoting him to head of the security forces and prime minister before resigning and relinquishing the presidency to him.
Yet, in substance and style, Putin has repudiated Yeltsin. Putin’s political movement in recent years has been grounded in the fundamental message that he saved Russia from the ravages of the Yeltsin tenure. Putin presents himself as sober, wiry, acerbic and always in command. Yeltsin had the image of a bombastic backslapper who was not particularly inclined to say no to a drink.
Some of Yeltsin’s admirers say Putin turned his back on the pluralistic democracy that Yeltsin was seeking to build. Putin’s backers have a ready retort: The Yeltsin years sowed instability, and a strong hand in the Kremlin was needed to steady the country.
At the ceremony at Novodevichy, Putin — now prime minister under President Dmitry Medvedev — spoke loftily of his predecessor while hinting at the contrast between them.
“His road as a politician and a citizen was not easy,” Putin said. “More than once in his life he was faced with difficult choices, choices of principle. But his road was every bit as unique as was our country’s destiny, the destiny of a country that went through unprecedented transformation and difficult upheavals, but held firm to its statehood and to its right to free and independent development.”
Putin was at the ceremony with Medvedev, whom Putin chose as his successor as president, and their presence together seemed to highlight another contrast. Yeltsin left the Kremlin abruptly and under a cloud, while Putin ended his term at the height of his powers. 
The Yeltsin sculpture is supposed to represent the tricolor Russian flag, which Yeltsin introduced. The memorial has little in common with others in the cemetery, which often feature chiseled portraits or busts, as well as traditional touches.
Though many famous Russians are buried at Novodevichy — from the playwright Anton Chekhov to the aircraft designer Andrei N. Tupolev — the only other national leader there is Nikita S. Khrushchev, the former Soviet general secretary. Other party general secretaries are buried at the Kremlin, but Khrushchev had been stripped of his post before he died.
Like Yeltsin, Khrushchev was in some sense a reformer who ended up shunted aside and discredited.
Yeltsin’s family was at the ceremony and approved of the design of the memorial, which was created by the sculptor Georgy Frangulyan.
“This is a portraiture piece, but one that is solved by different means,” Frangulyan said on Russian television. “The shape itself expresses his spirit, and even the outward appearance is crazily resembling him — crazily resembling him. You will see it yourself.”
Visitors to Novodevichy last week, however, were not always enchanted by the monument.
“It’s horrible, just horrible,” said Anastasia Kandaurova, 21, a paramedic.
Then again, she was also hostile toward Yeltsin. Like many young people, she knew more of the crises at the end of his presidency, including the financial collapse of 1998, than of his earlier heroics, like leading the fight against the coup that temporarily overthrew the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev.
“I believe that he did nothing good for the country, especially at the end of his time,” Kandaurova said of Yeltsin. “Everything was terrible, salaries, everything. It was not only him, it was the people around him. Putin, of course, is much better.”
Another visitor, Vasily Dardonov, 67, was bothered by the imagery. “It looks like they threw the flag down on the ground,” Dardonov said. “It’s like an insult. Do you like it if your American flag lies on the ground? Do you walk on it or near it?”
Nina Antonova, a retired doctor, found the memorial puzzling, but took some solace in the knowledge that it pleased Yeltsin’s wife, Naina. Antonova said she wanted to see the memorial because she continued to think fondly of Yeltsin.
“I voted for him, and I personally believed in him,” she said. “He managed to overcome a lot, to make a break with the past. But in the end, things didn’t turn out so well.”

TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: They stand by the roadside in ill-fitting gray nylon, ignoring all traffic offenses that look unlikely to bring in any funds — cars parked on pedestrian crossings, municipal trucks belching out carcinogens, state officials’ cars breaking the sound barrier — so that they can concentrate on stopping drivers for near-invisible violations and pocketing a few hundred rubles folded into their licenses. But you’ve got to love them, haven’t you? Rossia television certainly thinks so, because it has started a new comedy-drama series on the lives of friendly neighborhood traffic policemen, named after their nickname, “Gaishniki.”
The series, which started Monday, stars Sergei Astakhov as a maverick St. Petersburg policeman whose wife and child were killed by a car bomb after he tried to investigate the local drugs mafia. He is demoted to the traffic police, or GIBDD, after he goes round to the drug baron’s house and takes him out, along with a few of his guards. Luckily, there’s always room in the traffic police for an emotionally disturbed, trigger-happy loner with a grudge against the human race.
So far, so reminiscent of the “The Big Heat” and every other film noir. But Rossia doesn’t want to alienate any of the thousands of traffic policemen watching, so it introduced some comedy elements, such as a jolly fat traffic policeman who is assigned to work alongside Astakhov’s character. Yes, he takes bribes and has an implausibly large apartment for someone who earns 8,000 rubles per month, but he is a nice guy who makes his own moonshine — with horseradish — and has a plump wife who bakes pies for his lunch.
The first episode introduced a pretty implausible element — 
Astakhov’s character, also called Sergei, insisted straight away that he wouldn’t take any bribes. “You shouldn’t ever besmirch your reputation for money. You should only do it for the sake of justice,” he said. It wasn’t made clear how Sergei was planning to pay his rent on 8,000 rubles. Naturally, the fat policeman was not too happy about this, as apparently gaishniki always divvy up their loot at the end of the day. But he had his hands tied by a drugs-related subplot.
The fat policeman’s son was forced into drug dealing after he crashed a friend’s car and couldn’t pay for the repairs. He left a bag of cocaine in the pocket of a dressing gown at home, and the scriptwriters had think up a way for Sergei to put his hand into said pocket. It wasn’t easy, but they found one: Sergei discovered a bomb in a bag on the street, he ran with the bomb and threw it in the river. The explosion made him very wet, so he went to the fat policeman’s apartment to get dry and drink some horseradish moonshine. And the only item of clothing that the fat policeman could find to fit him was his son’s dressing gown.
Then things got even more absurd, with radio DJ Roman Trakhtenberg playing a drug baron with a tiny fluffy dog, which was not harmed during filming. Sergei ran around an abandoned warehouse in a camouflage vest and fended off machine-gun-wielding attackers with his puny GIBDD pistol.
Sadly, there wasn’t much gaishnik on driver action in the first episode. But if Sergei keeps up his principled position, I really don’t know how the makers are going to fill up the time. I mean, it rarely ever happens, but theoretically all that gaishniki do is take down drivers’ details and give them a payment slip, which they have to take to a police station. Hardly the stuff of blockbuster drama.

TITLE: South of the border
AUTHOR: By Tobin Auber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Tequila-Boom // 57 Voznesensky Pereulok // Tel: 310 1534 // Open daily from midday until last customer // Menu in Russian and Spanish // All major credit cards accepted // Dinner for three without alcohol 2,336 rubles ($98)
Part of a chain that can trace its history back to a Mexican cantina opened in 1873, and with outlets in Mexico, Acapulco and Los Angeles, the presence of Tequila-Boom in St. Petersburg is developing at a brisk pace with six branches already operating in the city. Providing good service, reasonable prices and hearty food that is by Russian standards dangerously spicy, the chain’s prospects on these shores look good, although aficionados may find even the hottest dishes on the menu surprisingly mild.
The newly opened Tequila-Boom on the corner of the Fontanka and Voznesensky Prospekt comprises two rooms and is decked out in appropriate Mexican hat-and-rug paraphernalia, contrasting with the view of snow, and later hail that could be seen out of the windows this week and a much higher room temperature would have been appreciated. A large flat-screen television showing Mexican-Latin American hip-hop videos bordering on the pornographic also made for something out of the ordinary.
The waiter was excellent, speaking fluent English, and the lack of an English version of the menu was more than made up for by its photo illustrations. The menu also featured a very helpful symbol system, indicating which dishes were vegetarian and which dishes could be prepared as vegetarian options. Red chili pepper symbols indicate the spiciness of the dish, but even those dishes with multiple-chili counts are unlikely to blow your head off. You have to remember the extraordinary delicacy and sensitivity of the Russian palette — this is a cuisine where it’s believed that adding chopped grass will spice up a dish (travy can also be translated as “herbs,” but I know something that’s been taken out of the back of a lawnmower when I see it). 
Despite the exemplary service, there was one glitch in that the dishes came in an apparently random order. A baked potato with chili con carne (80 rubles, $3.50), which had been ordered as a side dish to accompany a main course, came first and would have sufficed as a meal in itself. Chicken tacos (180 rubles, $7.50) starter was also a large portion, very crisp and fresh. A chicken quesadillo (190 rubles, $8), prepared without chicken for a vegetarian, was billed as spicy, though the heat was only to be found in the very center of the cheese-rich dish, and the small portion of salad that came with it was swimming in oil. 
A seafood cocktail (220 rubles, $9) that at first glance resembled a dull prawn cocktail, served in a tall glass, proved to be a jazzy mix of mussels, shrimps and squid in a peppery tomato relish. Decorated with sweet slices of Chinese cabbage and a wedge of lime, it could have done with less parsley and fewer olives, but was nevertheless a satisfying overture to the main course.
The Pachuca (690 rubles, $29), part of the restaurant’s new steak menu, was a brick sized lump of flame-grilled stuffed pork served on a wooden platter with sour cream and chili sauce — and two peculiar tortillas wrapped around string beans, cheese and bacon. Leaving them aside, the meat was sizzling and its juices mixed temptingly with its pepper seasoning. 
Gringa (310 rubles, $13) — two tortillas with pork in cheese, guacamole and pineapple — was a filling dish, though you shouldn’t be fooled by the three-chili warning on the menu.
The vegetarian burrito (actually a pork burrito without the pork, 360 rubles, $15) was laced with three delightfully contrasting sauces, and was complemented by some tangy kidney beans in a chili sauce.

TITLE: Solid Gold Zenit Take UEFA Cup Title
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MANCHESTER — Russian champions Zenit St. Petersburg won their first European silverware when second-half goals from Igor Denisov and Konstantin Zyrianov secured a 2-0 victory over Rangers in the UEFA Cup final on Wednesday.
Denisov slotted home after 72 minutes and fellow midfielder Zyrianov sealed victory with a close range effort in stoppage time at the City of Manchester stadium to secure the trophy for Zenit in their first European final.
It was the second UEFA Cup success by a Russian side in four seasons following CSKA Moscow’s triumph in 2005.
“Winning a prize like this does not come often in your life,” Zenit coach Dick Advocaat told a news conference. “We are very proud that Zenit won tonight and after the way we played in this tournament, we really deserved it.”
Rangers supporters traveled south from Glasgow in their thousands, easily outnumbering the Zenit fans inside the stadium and thronging the city center to watch on big screens.
However, trouble flared when one screen broke down and riot police had to move in to restore order under a hail of bottles. 
On the pitch, the defeat suffered by Rangers ended their quest for an unlikely quadruple with the Scottish League Cup winners still contesting the league title and also lining up in the Scottish FA Cup final later this month.
“I cannot speak highly enough of the group of players we have,” said Rangers manager Walter Smith. “We didn’t think this season would lead to a European final. Obviously, we’re disappointed to lose after a good campaign for us.”
Zenit failed to reproduce their impressive demolition of competition favorites Bayern Munich in the semi-finals but their attacking qualities, honed by Dutch coach Dick Advocaat, were too much for a spirited Rangers side.
Zenit gave an early demonstration of their counter-attacking prowess when captain Anatoly Tymoschuk robbed a hesitant Brahim Hemdani in midfield and a swift break ended with Andrei Arshavin shooting narrowly wide.
Rangers quickly settled though and Zenit’s Victor Fayzulin made a well-timed interception to clear Jean-Claude Darcheville’s dangerous cross into the goalmouth in a good start for both sides.
The Russian side enjoyed plenty of possession with Tymoschuk at the heart of some intricate passing moves. Fayzulin headed over an Arshavin cross, then Alexander Anyukov tested Rangers goalkeeper Neil Alexander with a rasping drive.
Rangers were content to soak up the pressure, showing little attacking intent of their own as Zenit probed away with Arshavin a menacing presence on the left flank.
Walter Smith’s side conceded only two goals in eight games en route to the final and their organised defence held firm.
Zenit’s Turkish forward Fatih Tekke, handed a place up front by Advocaat in place of suspended striker Pavel Pogrebnyak, was given no opportunity to gain from a succession of Arshavin crosses into the danger area.
Alexander rushed out of goal to intercept a long clearance downfield but Arshavin was first to the ball. Rangers were fortunate to have two defenders alive to the danger and Sasa Papac got back to clear Arshavin’s curling strike off the line.
Zenit finally found a way to beat Alexander when Denisov and playmaker Arshavin split the Rangers defence through the middle with the former slotting the ball home.
Konstantin Zyrianov hit the post from close range a few minutes later before the midfielder converted Tekke’s cross in added time after a fine passing move to spark a Russian party.

TITLE: Henin Quits Tennis In Shock Move
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BRUSSELS — World number one Justine Henin announced she was retiring from professional tennis with immediate effect on Wednesday.
“It’s the end of a wonderful adventure but it’s something I have been thinking about for a long time,” the Belgian told a news conference.
Henin, the winner of seven grand slam titles, had been expected to defend her French Open crown later this month but instead opted to turn her back on the sport at the age of just 25.
“I am leaving as the world number one and that is important and it is always better to go out at the top,” said Henin, who won 41 titles since turning professional in 1999.
She also became the first woman to quit the sport while ranked number one.
“I have been driving my career based on an emotion but I didn’t feel that emotion anymore since [last year’s season-ending championships in] Madrid,” said Henin, whose final match turned out to be a third-round defeat by Dinara Safina in Berlin last week.
“At Madrid I felt I had reached the climax of my career. I had thought about taking a break, but in the end I didn’t think this was the right decision.
“I decided on returning from [last week’s tournament in] Berlin to stop now. I leave without any regrets and I know it is the right decision.”
Henin became the first Belgian to win a grand slam title with her triumph at the French Open in 2003 and despite suffering numerous turmoils throughout her career, she did not let it affect her form on court.
Credited with owning the best backhand in the game, she bucked the trend of the power players on the tour by climbing to the top of the world rankings despite her slight 1.67 meter frame.
A winner of four Roland Garros crowns, two U.S. Open titles and one at the Australian Open, Henin admitted the lure of completing her collection at Wimbledon was not enough to prolong her career.
“Winning Wimbledon would not have made me any happier,” said Henin, who also captured Olympic gold in Athens four years ago.
“I didn’t feel I was capable of winning there [Wimbledon]. I stopped before Roland Garros because I asked myself if I could produce a better Roland Garros than last year and I realised I couldn’t.
“I wanted to play in the Olympics for my country and would have been proud to do so despite the current problems. Some people never realise their dream of an Olympic medal and I have realised that goal.
“But I couldn’t go to Beijing and do my country proud. It’s time for a change.”
Men’s world number one Roger Federer, to whom she has often been compared, was surprised by the timing of her announcement.
“It’s obviously a shock for the tennis world,” Federer said at a news conference after his first match at the Hamburg Masters.
“It’s a particular surprise before Roland Garros and Wimbledon, which she’s never won. It’s quite surprising and unfortunate that she’s out of the game but she will have her reasons.”

TITLE: Russia Advance to Semis In World Ice Hockey Tourney
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: HALIFAX, Canada — Russia and Canada have cruised into the semi-finals while Sweden and Finland needed overtime to advance as the World Ice Hockey Championships now converge on Quebec City for Friday’s semi-finals.
Defending champion Canada and Sweden both kept streaks alive Wednesday, with Sweden advancing to their eighth and Canada reaching their sixth consecutive semi-finals at the Worlds.
Canada, who will face Sweden on Friday, are trying to capture their 25th title and become the first country to win on home ice in 22 years.
Derek Roy scored a hat trick as Canada crushed Norway 8-2 and Yegeny Nabokov stopped 22 shots as unbeaten Russia blanked Switzerland 6-0 in their quarter-finals on Wednesday. Russia will face Finland in the other semi.
Both Sweden and Finland had to work overtime to get past their opponents. Mattias Weinhandl scored the game winner in overtime as Sweden beat the Czech Republic 3-2 and Finland needed an extra-time goal from defenseman Sami Lepisto to beat the USA 3-2.
For the first time in the 100-year history of the International Ice Hockey Federation, Canada is hosting team for the men’s championships.
Canada and Finland now travel from Halifax to Quebec City to join the two other teams for the semi-finals, bronze medal and gold medal games.
With Wednesday’s victory, defending champion Canada extended its winning streak at the tournament to 16 games, including a perfect 9-0 record in 2007 at the Moscow Worlds.
“They are a very disciplined, quick team with great mobility up front and they have one of the best goaltenders in the world,” Canada coach Ken Hitchcock said of Sweden.
Rick Nash, with two, Jonathan Toews, Dany Heatley and Ryan Getzlaf also scored Wednesday for Canada, who won gold in 2003, 2004 and 2007.
“It was one of those games,” Roy said. “On the first goal I knew where I wanted to shoot it, but I didn’t know where the goalie was. But on the second and third goal I looked up and saw a huge gap.
“That’s when you just have to shoot and trust your shot.”
Morten Ask and Mathis Olimb scored for Norway, who were making their first appearance in the quarter-finals since 2000 when the current playoff format was introduced.

TITLE: Tommy Burns Dies at 51
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: LONDON — Former Celtic midfielder and manager Tommy Burns has died aged 51, the Scottish club confirmed Thursday. He had been suffering from skin cancer.
“It is with great sadness that Celtic Football Club confirmed this morning that Tommy Burns has passed away,” the Glasgow giants said on their website.
“Tommy, a true Celtic legend and wonderful man, will be sadly missed by us all.
“Clearly, our thoughts are very much with Tommy’s wife Rosemary and his family at this extremely difficult time.”
The club’s first-team coach originally contracted skin cancer in 2006. Although he received treatment, the disease returned in March.
He had been undergoing treatment in both Glasgow and France in recent weeks.
Burns spent 15 years as a player at Parkhead, making 352 appearances for the Hoops between 1975 and 1989, scoring 52 goals.
He managed the club for three seasons between 1994 and 1997, winning the 1995 Scottish FA Cup.
Burns played eight times for Scotland between 1981 and 1988.
Tommy Gemmell, one of the ‘Lisbon Lions’ who won the 1967 European Cup for Celtic, got to know Burns well despite playing for the club at different times.
Gemmell said: “He was a tremendous player and a great manager. And a great person.
“I don’t think you will find anyone on this earth who will say a bad word about him.
“My feelings go out to Rosemary and his family. It is a very sad occasion for someone so young. It’s a sad loss.
“I never had the privilege of playing with him but I watched him many times. He was a superb player with a lethal left foot.
“He will be sorely missed.”
Another former Celtic team-mate, Frank McGarvey, said: “I’m shattered and I think everyone is shattered.
“He was one of Celtic’s greatest servants and was one of the players who would try and go to every event that involved the supporters.
“He was only 51 and it’s very hard to understand why this happens.
“He was one of the good guys, a winner, with a great sense of humour and he will be badly missed by everyone.”