SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1397 (61), Friday, August 8, 2008
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TITLE: 21 Wounded In Fighting Around 
S. Ossetia
AUTHOR: By Misha Dzhindzhikhashvili
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TBILISI, Georgia — Heavy shelling overnight in the Georgian breakaway province of South Ossetia wounded at least 21 people, officials said Thursday.
Tensions in the region have soared, stoking fears of full-scale war. Georgian and South Ossetian officials were scheduled to meet Thursday to try to find a resolution, but separatist officials said the meeting was off because of the Georgian shelling.
The provincial capital, Tskhinvali, and nearby areas came under heavy artillery and mortar shelling from Georgian-controlled territory, injuring 18 people, the South Ossetian separatist government said.
But Georgian authorities said South Ossetian separatist forces started firing on Georgian troops in the area and they had to retaliate. Three Georgian soldiers were wounded in the skirmishes, said Temur Yakobashvili, Georgia’s Cabinet minister in charge of separatist matters.
Eduard Kokoity, South Ossetia’s separatist president, warned in comments broadcast by Russia’s NTV television that the province’s military would move to drive Georgian forces out of their firing positions near Tskhinvali if the shelling continued.
Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili accused Russia of instigating hostilities in the region and urged it to use its influence with separatists to end fighting.
“It’s all a result of hysterical militarization, constant military rhetoric and real military propaganda conducted by Russian television stations,” Saakashvili said on a visit to a hospital where people wounded in the area were being treated.
He added, however, that escalation of the conflict wasn’t in the interests of Georgia or Russia. “We must pool our efforts to end this madness,” he said.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry voiced concerns about a Georgian military buildup near South Ossetia, saying Thursday that it looked like preparations for war.
Most of South Ossetia has been under the control of an internationally unrecognized separatist government since the end of a war in the early 1990s. Georgian forces hold several swaths of it.
Russia has close ties with South Ossetia’s separatist government and with a similar regime in Abkhazia, another Georgian breakaway province. Russia has granted passports to most of their residents, and Tbilisi accuses Russian peacekeeping forces in both regions of supporting the separatists.
Saakashvili has pledged to take both provinces back into the fold.
An outbreak of open war in either region could prompt Russia to send in more forces under the claim of protecting its citizens.
Russia sent warplanes to circle over South Ossetia last month while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was visiting the Georgian capital; Russian officials said the planes were sent up to try to deter alleged Georgian plans to mount on offensive on South Ossetia.
Relations between Tbilisi and Moscow worsened notably this year amid Georgia’s push to join NATO and Russia’s dispatch of additional peacekeeper forces to Abkhazia.

TITLE: Solzhenitsyn Laid to Rest at Monastery
AUTHOR: By Matt Siegel
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — It was as though someone had suddenly removed the stopper from an overturned bottle. As the great man’s body, hoisted high by a military procession, made its final turn on the path toward the cemetery, a sea of mourners poured down the church steps like water down a rocky crag. 
The crowds had to be held back as a salute was fired. They had to be held back as the choir, chanting a hymn about eternal life, hovered over the freshly dug grave. They had to be held back as Alexander Solzhenitsyn was returned to the Russian soil that he loved so much.
Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize-winning author and Soviet-era dissident, was laid to rest in the cemetery of Donskoi Monastery in central Moscow on Wednesday. The author, who revealed the horrors of Stalinist repression in his landmark works, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and “The Gulag Archipelago,” died on Sunday at age 89 from heart failure.
More than 1,000 mourners, including President Dmitry Medvedev and his wife, Svetlana, traveled to the grounds of the 16th-century monastery to pay their respects to one of the 20th-century’s towering literary and political figures. 
Many of the mostly elderly attendees, milling about the path leading from the church to the cemetery grounds where Solzhenitsyn was interred, spoke at length about what the author’s works had meant to them personally.
Edmund Akapov, 75, used to tune in to shortwave transmissions of BBC World and Voice of America in his native Tbilisi. Despite the danger of being caught listening to banned broadcasts, he continued to search the airwaves for information about the beloved writer, whose works he discovered as a young man. 
“About 40 years ago, I already knew about him and was reading his books in samizdat,” he said, watching a military honor guard walk into the church. “Frankly speaking, I never thought his funeral would be as organized as it is now.”
There was something odd, he said, about seeing Solzhenitsyn, a symbol of protest for so many, surrounded by the trappings of authority. 
Medvedev, who returned from his summer vacation to attend the funeral, arrived in his presidential motorcade just before noon. Unlike Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who attended Solzhenitsyn’s wake on Tuesday, Medvedev entered the building through a side door and attracted little attention from the assembled crowd.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who restored Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship in 1990, attended the funeral, as did Mayor Yury Luzhkov. Filmmaker and State Duma Deputy Stanislav Govorukhin, whose groundbreaking 1990 interview with Solzhenitsyn helped to reintroduce him to the Russian public, also attended.
Throughout the morning, Solzhenitsyn’s body lay in state, covered in flowers left by mourners and admirers. Despite the high-domed ceilings and soaring gilded walls of the church, the feeling was more intimate than at Tuesday’s wake, held at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Compared with the moderate turnout on Tuesday, the funeral was well attended. A stream of mourners filed in and out of the monastery’s grand cathedral in a steady procession all morning. 
Inside the church, visitors lit candles and offered prayers as they shuffled past the body. The smell of incense, carried through the grand hall together with the strains of religious chanting, hung heavy in the air. Family members, including Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Natalya, and son Stepan, kept a silent vigil beside the coffin. 
At one point, because of the heavy turnout, the path through the church became backed-up, leading to a momentary panic.
“Everything is blocked,” shouted a panicked young novice to the head priest. Calmly, the elder priest smiled and, seemingly with a wave of his hand, cleared the path of stragglers.
Putin and Medvedev have studiously avoided referring to Solzhenitsyn’s dissident works in the wake of his death. It was fitting then, perhaps, that politics could not be altogether banished from the funeral of a man whose life was defined for so many by his political courage.
The appearance of Eduard Limonov, a harsh Kremlin critic and founder of the banned National Bolshevik party, caused a small stir in the crowd. Although many of the aged attendees appeared unaware of his presence, their grandchildren pointed and whispered as Limonov mingled with a small group of supporters.
The normally talkative Limonov declined a request for a brief interview, citing the timing and nature of the event.
Despite the state-approved narrative, praise for Solzhenitsyn the radical has poured in from foreign leaders since his death on Sunday.

TITLE: Environmentalists Campaign Against Waste Facilities
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Environmentalists from the local branch of Greenpeace spoke out on Thursday about their campaigning to stop the construction of solid waste processing facilities in St. Petersburg. The organization argues that the technology used at the plants will severely damage the environment by contributing to air pollution.
“Burning silt, for example, means discharging 24 different pollutants into the atmosphere, including benzopyrene as well as dangerous dioxins which cause cancer,” said Igor Babanin, an expert on the effective use of natural resources with Greenpeace, at a news conference. “Just imagine what is going to happen if the new plants begin to burn unsorted garbage that contains chloride, mercury and other toxic components.”
In May, after Moscow announced an ambitious plan to launch six solid waste burning plants that are expected to treat up to 90 percent of waste in the Russian capital, St. Petersburg’s City Hall looked set to build similar facilities — and include the cost in monthly utilities bills paid by all local residents.
St. Petersburg does not have an incineration plant. The waste is either kept at storage facilities or rots at poorly kept garbage sites in the outskirts of the city.
However, in 2007, a silt-burning facility began operating at the Southwest Water-Treatment Plant which had been inaugurated in September 2005 by former president Vladimir  Putin, Finnish president Tarja Halonen and Sweden’s then prime minister, Goran Persson. 
The facility, which cost around $36 million in foreign investment to complete, is maintained by Vodokanal, the city’s water and sewage monopoly.
Greenpeace obtained a copy of a protocol of a recent session of the city government — that can be viewed at the organization’s website at www.greenpeace.ru — in which Governor Valentina Matviyenko took two decisions: to build four waste incineration plants and to start charging city residents for the “utilization and burial of waste.”
“There are four waste-burning plants in Moscow, and all of them are fully funded by the city budget,” said Alexei Kiselyov, head of Greenpeace’s toxic program. “The authorities in St. Petersburg are much more cynical: they want the residents to pay for the damage to their own health!”
Greenpeace experts said that incineration is the most expensive method of waste treatment. 
“Although the plants will be built with the state money, the maintenance of these facilities — that will have to be covered by the local residents — will cost 3 1/2 times more than using alternative waste treatment methods, like, for example divided recycling,” Babanin said.
Greenpeace activists are collecting signatures under a petition to President Dmitry Medvedev to introduce a moratorium for the construction of waste incineration plants and urge the passing of laws introducing the practice of divided waste collection and recycling in Russia.
“Waste burning facilities are an expensive and very dangerous method of waste processing,” the letter reads. “For example, one kilogram of polyvinyl chloride — the material that many kinds of wallpaper, plastic bottles, linoleum and window frames are made of — when burnt, produces up to 50 micrograms of dioxins. This amount is sufficient to cause cancer in 50,000 animals during laboratory tests.” 
Kiselyov said that in highly polluted cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg the construction of incineration facilities would emit unacceptably high concentrations of toxins.
In June, St. Petersburg was placed 85th out of the country’s 89 regions in a new rating compiled by the Russian Independent Environmental Monitoring Agency. 
Advocates of solid waste burning accuse Greenpeace of exaggerating the extent of environmental hazards.
Vera Izmailova, head of the press office of the St. Petersburg water treatment monopoly Vodokanal, rejected Greenpeace’s criticisms.
“Local smokers do much more harm to the environment than our plant would ever do,” Izmailova said. “As for the technology, there is no better alternative to burning silt. What else can we do? Local storage facilities cannot handle all the sewage.”
In the meantime, Greenpeace has published a map on its website with marked locations where the incineration plants are expected to be built.

TITLE: Interpol Reports on Petersburg Crime Stats
AUTHOR: By Ali Nassor
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Interpol has declared 2,000 Russian nationals to be fugitives, 60 percent of whom were suspects in economic crimes, in the 18 years in which the Russian Federation has belonged to the 186-member International Criminal Police Organization, Interpol representatives said on Thursday.
Russia joined Interpol on Sept. 27, 1990.
“Only five of those on the run from St. Petersburg and the Lenoblast were arrested and extradited to Russia this year, in connection with multiple charges, including drug trafficking and smuggling,” Dmitry Yemelyanov, the St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast Interpol Bureau chief, said.
He declined to mention the names of the arrested suspects.
“They don’t belong to the most loudly publicized cases,” he said, but added that the number accounted for  around 15 percent of the people wanted from his jurisdiction. 
Yemelyanov said St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast are Russia’s leading breeding grounds for Interpol-related crimes and fugitives because they share borders with the West and have a strategically located seaport. 
According to Interpol statistics, in 2005 alone Interpol’s “red notices” led to arrests of 3,500 people worldwide. Red notices are requests or provisional arrest warrants for wanted persons, issued by Interpol with a view to extradition.
While the list of fugitives did not include Alexander Malyshev-Gonzalez and Gennady Petrov, alleged members of the Tambov criminal syndicate — one of the city’s most feared mafia groups — arrested earlier this year in Spain, Russia’s Interpol representatives place tycoon Boris Berezovsky and ex-vice president of the Chechen Republic Ahmed Zakayev, both living in exile in Great Britain, at the top of their wanted list in connection with economic crimes and terrorism respectively, according to Yemelyanov. 
“They are clean before the law,” said Yemelyanov in reference to the Tambov members.
Although there have been widespread accusations in the world press that Russian criminal groups are involved in international human-trafficking syndicates, Yemelyanov said “I have never heard of anything like it here ... We don’t have such information.” 
Interpol deals predominantly with crimes involving terrorism, money laundering, drug- and human-trafficking, but not crimes relating to political or religious spheres.  
On Oct. 4 the organization will hold its weeklong annual session in Russia for the first time since, in St. Petersburg. 
The 650-delegate meeting will also elect someone to replace its secretary general, Jackie Selebi, who had held the post since 2004 but resigned in January following charges of corruption and abuse of office in his home country, South Africa.  Chilean Arturo Herrera Verdugo is the current acting secretary general of the Lyons-based organization.

TITLE: Last Russian Tsar’s Shirt Tested for Blood Traces
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Genetic experts and investigators from the General Prosecutors office arrived in St. Petersburg on Wednesday to begin analysis of blood traces on a shirt that belonged to the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, to assist in the definitive identification of remains believed to be those of the monarch, who was murdered in 1918. The shirt is kept at the State Hermitage Museum.
The remains were found near the city of Yekaterinburg in 1991. An investigation concluded that the remains were those of the tsar and his family and were buried, with full honors, in 1998. However, with scientific advances, a greater degree of certainty in the identification is now possible.
“We are not planning to take the shirt from the Hermitage. We’ll do all the necessary work right at the museum,” said Vladimir Solovyov, investigator of high priority at the Russian General Prosecutor’s Office, who is taking part in the analysis, Interfax reported.
Solovyov said they will soak the samples of the tsar’s blood in distilled water.
The blood dates from 1891 when Nicholas, then-heir to the throne, was attacked with a sword by a policeman in Japan in an unsuccessful assassination attempt.
The experts plan to compare the DNA of bone remains found in 1991, and stored, to that obtained from the blood.
However, Nikolai Nevolin, head of Sverdlovsk Oblast Court and Medical Expertise Bureau, said old blood spots are hard to extract, and that experts can obtain results only if the blood spots have been severely contaminated, the Novy Rayon news agency reported.
In July the investigators into the murder of the tsar and his family announced that exhaustive testing had established that remains discovered near Yekaterinburg were those of the last two children to be identified: Tsarevich Alexei and his sister Maria. The research is to be completed by the end of the summer.
The experts hope that the blood from the tsar’s shirt will help to not only identify the tsar’s remains but also help to confirm the identity of the remains believed to be those of Alexei and Maria, Novy Rayon reported.
The Russian Orthodox Church and some of the Romanovs’ descendants have raised doubts that the remains so far discovered and buried are those of the royal family.

TITLE: Site Editor Seeks Political Asylum
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The editor of the Ingush opposition web site Ingushetiya.ru has fled the country and will seek political asylum in a European country, a lawyer for the site said Wednesday.
Roza Malsagova, 51, traveled to Germany three weeks ago with her three teenage sons, lawyer Kaloi Akhilgov said, though he refused to say in which country she would apply for asylum.
The web site remains one of the only information sources criticizing Ingush President Murat Zyazikov in the mainly Muslim region bordering Chechnya, and it is known for its investigations into local corruption.
It has accused Zyazikov of corruption and of giving law enforcement agencies free rein to abduct, torture and kill local residents suspected of ties to Islamist rebels.

TITLE: Tsarskoye Selo Museum Director Sautov Buried
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The director of the Tsarskoye Selo museum Ivan Sautov was laid to rest at St. Petersburg’s Volkovskoye cemetery on Wednesday.
Tsarskoye Selo, 25 kilometers south of St. Petersburg, is the location of the Catherine Palace, built for Catherine the Great in the 18th Century but laid to ruin by the Nazis in World War II.
President Dmitry Medvedev sent condolences to Sautov’s family. Sautov, 60, had died of a heart attack last Friday when he was on vacation in Finland. 
“A talented architect and organizer, Ivan Petrovich [Sautov] enjoyed well-deserved respect among his colleagues in Russia and abroad. His purposefulness and devotion helped in great measure to save unique historical and artistic monuments,” Medvedev said.
Metropolitan Vladimir of St. Petersburg and Ladoga said before the funeral that Sautov had made important contributions toward the restoration of Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, and toward the restoration of the altar of St. Isaac’s Cathedral altar in St. Petersburg, Interfax said.
A civil service for Sautov was held in the Large Hall of the Catherine Palace. The funeral took place in St. Isaac’s Cathedral.
Sautov been in charge of the palace museum at Tsarskoye Selo — including the famed Amber Room — for 20 years. He is credited with the survival and renewal of the monuments during the enormous economic and political upheavals of the late- and post-Soviet years.
Under Sautov’s supervision, Tsarskoye Selo became one of the largest restoration projects in Russia. Sautov also opened new expositions and tourist routes, and introduced commercial arrangements that were unusual for former Soviet museums.
Sautov oversaw the opening of the Alexander Palace, the last residence of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, and his family, the restoration of the Chinese Village and the completion of the 25-year long restoration of the Amber Room.
Sautov began to help Russian churches many years ago, before it became fashionable and even when it was dangerous in the atheist Soviet Union. He was once summoned to the region’s Communist Committee who criticized him for such activities.
A new director of the Tsayskoye Selo has yet to be selected.

TITLE: Governor Turns to Banks for Aid
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Governor Valentina Matviyenko has asked St. Petersburg’s banks to help resolve a crisis with local investors who were cheated in off-plan residential property deals and who sought to draw attention to their plight by staging a ten-day hunger strike that ended last week.
Matviyenko on Tuesday addressed the heads of more than 120 city-based financial institutions and laid out her policy in the ongoing dispute between the swindled investors, property developers and the city government.
“City Hall has 700 ‘cheated investors’ in its registry, and of course, we have asked the Constructors’ Association to carry most of the responsibility in settling their cases,” Matviyenko said Tuesday at the meeting which was reported by the media. 
“We have already found suitable solutions for at least 200 investors. And, because I see the leaders of 123 financial institutions here, I would like to ask each institution to take up one case.”
Matviyenko suggested that the banks and other institutions step in to compensate cheated investors that have won court cases against companies that cannot or will not pay up. The banks can then go after the rogue firms. 
“I rarely ask anyone for a favor, and this time I am not asking for anything for myself,” Matviyenko said.
Eleven local investors who held a hunger strike at the local headquarters of the democratic party Yabloko between July 21 and 30, suspended the protest after they lost hope of winning an audience with Matviyenko. 
The protestors, whose only demand in the strike was to get Matviyenko to come and talk to them, described her behavior as callous and indifferent. The governor refused to meet with the protesters and suggested that they use judicial methods to solve their disputes.
Vladimir Dzhikovich, president of the Association of Banks of North-West of Russia, reacted positively to Matviyenko’s request. 
“Our organization acknowledges the importance of social responsibility, and is willing to support the governor,” Dzhikovich was reported as saying. “The best scheme of how we can help, however, has yet to be developed.” 
In the meantime, the group of investors that held the hunger strike looks set to continue their protest in Moscow. They insist the number of victims of construction scams in St. Petersburg amounts to more than 10,000 families. 
“Many of the victims were not able to even get their cases to court because the legislation on the matter is full of holes,” said Natalya Dunayeva, a coordinator of the protest.
St. Petersburg ombudsman Igor Mikhailov, who has met with Matviyenko several times to discuss the cheated investors question and convince her to take action on the matter, said he regrets that the governor divides the victims of construction scams into different categories.
“For Matviyenko, some of the victims — like for example those who paid their last money for property and those who have won court cases —  appear more worthy of support that others,” Mikhailov told The St. Petersburg Times. “I have been trying to convince her that such an attitude is wrong: these people were cheated regardless of their income and social status. And most importantly, the role of the state — that allowed such scams to flourish — remains the same.”

TITLE: 2 Dead, 3 Wounded in Sochi Bombing
TEXT: MOSCOW — A device exploded Thursday on a beach in the Sochi resort which will host the 2014 Winter Olympics, killing two people and wounding three, officials said.
The blast occurred in the southern city of Sochi when visitors touched the device on the Black Sea resort beach, the regional branch of the Interior Ministry said.
It said a man and a woman died on the spot and three other visitors, including an 8-year-old child, were wounded on the beach, which is 15 kilometers north of central Sochi.
Local authorities said they quickly evacuated visitors from all Sochi beaches and checked them for more explosives. None were found.
The explosion immediately drew the concern of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev who ordered his envoy in the region to oversee the investigation. The local governor rushed to the site.
An Interior Ministry official said the explosion could be part of a turf battle for control over the area between local criminal groups. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

TITLE: Ivanov Tipped to Replace Luzhkov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov could replace Yury Luzhkov as the mayor of Moscow in early September, the Tvoi Den tabloid reported Wednesday, citing unidentified government sources.
City Hall, meanwhile, denied the report, which said Luzhkov could become a Federation Council senator after leaving the Mayor’s Office.
Ivanov’s appointment to a new position “is due early in the fall,” Tvoi Den cited a source who works with Ivanov as saying. 
The report cited sources in the government and the presidential administration as saying that Ivanov — once seen as a likely successor to former President Vladimir Putin — could be appointed to replace Luzhkov.
Luzhkov could step down after the City Day festivities, Tvoi Den cited an unidentified City Hall source as saying. A presidential administration source said Luzhkov could be appointed to the Federation Council, the report said.
City Hall spokesman Mikhail Solomentsev dismissed the report as “a canard and total rubbish,” while an unidentified spokesperson for Ivanov refused to comment on “rumors,” Interfax reported Wednesday.
Luzhkov, 71, was first elected mayor in 1992 and was reappointed last year after being nominated by Putin. Luzhkov’s current four-year term ends in June 2011.

TITLE: Modernization Plan Under Way
AUTHOR: By Boris Kamchev
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In a bid to bring the country’s industry up to western standards, the government plans to give major financial support to companies working in the military sector. The Kremlin’s favorite is Rostechnologies, the state industry corporation set up by a decree from former Russian president Vladimir Putin in November 2007 to develop the Russian machine building industry. For this purpose, President Dmitry Medvedev last month signed a decree authorizing 426 companies with a 50-percent state stake to merge with Rostechnologies, which will work on homogenizing the fragmented sector of developing and producing new generation composite materials. 
The appointed head of Rostechnologies is Sergei Chemezov, a former intelligence general and close ally of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Their friendship dates back to the 1980s when both worked as KGB agents in the former East Germany. Until recently, Chemezov was head of Rosoboronexport, the main exporter of Russian arms and military technology. During Putin’s eight years as president the country saw sales of arms and military technology double.  
“Twenty-four holdings will have a defense profile. They will produce electronic parts, weapons, ammunition, explosives and aircraft industry components. Seven other companies will have a double purpose — specialization in military and civilian projects,” said Chemezov in an interview with Itogy newspaper last month.
He noted that Rostechnologies’ main task is to develop a particular part of the military industry that will later be the driving force for developing the civilian industry.
“The security of the country depends on the companies that merged with Rostechnologies. The corporation will consist of three dozen holdings capable of developing high technology production and holding their own against global competitors,” Anatoly Serdyukov, Russia’s defense minister was quoted as saying by news agencies last month.
Observers expect Serdyukov to be appointed president of the supervisory board of the state industry giant. The board is comprised of four government representatives and four representatives of the presidential administration.
Chemezov said that companies that work exclusively for the military sector would be subsidized from the federal budget.
“Up to $150 billion will be invested in the development of new technologies and reorganization of factories that are part of the state corporation,” he said.
Opponents of the creation of gigantic state corporations cite the impossibility of controlling their activities as one of the main problems.  
In the interview with Itogy, Chemezov said that the government had already signed an agreement with the Accounting Chamber of the Russian Federation, which will permanently oversee the corporation’s activities. He does not agree with those who say that the new corporation will generate more corruption in the country.
“Filing the necessary licenses and other documents will not be complicated, so officials will have no excuse to ask for a bribe,” said Chemezov.
The government will invest almost $3 billion before 2015 for the development and production of new strategic materials.  
“The newly created federal program will allow the industry to produce modern materials that can be used in new generation aircraft and rocket technology, as well as in submarines and shipbuilding,” said Putin during a visit last week to the Avangard machine-building factory in Moscow, part of the Almaz Antey rocket construction holding.  
Vladislav Menyshikov, the holding’s head, said that new materials are essential for rocket construction to determine whether the object would be located by radar systems or not.
“Unfortunately the state has not yet invested in the construction of new composite materials,” he added.
The government recently announced that up to 200 cutting edge facilities and factories in the chemical and metallurgical sectors would begin producing new technology materials. 
Experts say that the aircraft industry will reap great benefits from the production of the new composite materials, which weigh less than aluminum which is traditionally used, which could lead to a reduction in fuel costs. The new composite materials will be used for the construction of the fifth generation of Russian airplanes as well as for the new civilian rocket Angara.
A significant amount of money will also be invested in developing scientific institutions. 
“The creation of Rostechnologies will ensure the production of composite materials and components, a sector that has become fractured during recent decades,” Konstantin Makiyenko, an analyst at the Center for Strategy and Technology Analysis, was quoted as telling Vedomosti newspaper last week.
The new state industry giant will not integrate shipbuilding and airplane production companies into its structure, though observers predict that these sectors may cooperate with the state industry giant, which will be the cornerstone for the modernization of the country’s industries.
According to experts, the development of Russian industries will stimulate production and science sectors to export their products to the global market.

TITLE: Peat Costs Suzuki An Extra $50 Mln
AUTHOR: By Yevgeny Rozhkov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: City Hall has reallocated a land plot in the Shushary industrial zone and prolonged the exploration terms for the automobile manufacturer Suzuki Motors, which intends to build a plant there and has seen construction costs increase by 30 percent due to the discovery of two million cubic meters of peat that have to be removed from the site.   
In June last year, Suzuki Motor Corporation signed an agreement to build a $115 million plant on a 23-hectare plot in Shushary, just outside St. Petersburg, joining General Motors, Nissan and Toyota which also have plants in Shushary. With maximum manufacturing rates of up to 50,000 vehicles, the plant will at first make around 10,000 Grand Vitara sports utility vehicles — Suzuki’s bestselling model in Russia — and SX4 crossovers. Construction was scheduled to begin in the first half of 2008. 
The plot was then extended to 50 hectares but Suzuki failed to complete full-scale exploration by the deadline due to the discovery of the peat at the site. 
“We were late as [the site] was allotted to us before we were ready to initiate exploration works,” Shigeru Shozi, CEO of Suzuki Avto MFG Rus, told Vedomosti.
On Tuesday, City Hall reallocated the plot to Suzuki, which now faces construction expenses that have leapt from three billion rubles ($127 million) to 4.2 billion rubles ($180 million) as the company will now have to organize the removal and utilization of two million cubic meters of peat and carry out further reconstruction of the site. 
Maxim Sokolov, the head of the city’s Committee for Investments and Strategic Projects, told RBC Daily that City Hall was not considering offering Suzuki financial assistance with the removal of the peat, and would not allocate a different plot due to a shortage of suitable industrial areas. 
Grigory Dvas, the deputy governor of the Leningrad Oblast, named several 50-hectare plots in the region that would meet Suzuki’s manufacturing demands, RBC daily reported on Wednesday.  If Suzuki moved to one of these plots — in the Volosovsky district near the Tallinn Highway, the Vsevolozhsky district in Romanovka or at the intersection of the Kiev and Volkhonsky Highways — the company would avoid having to remove the peat from Shushary and the expenses involved in doing so, said Dvas.  The deputy governor also expressed surprise that the Toyota plant, which is located close to the Suzuki site, has not faced any problems with peat.  
According to Sokolov, the Japanese company’s plans to construct a plant have so far not been affected by the leap in costs, but a delay of at least one year in launching the plant may result.   
Some experts predict that the company’s executives may reject the plant project, despite a 56-percent rise in Russian sales during the first half of 2008 and growing demand for Suzuki vehicles, according to the European Business Association. 
Suzuki’s partners and representatives in Russia — Suzuki Avto MFG Rus — were not available to comment on the plant’s future, but according to previous plans the launch is scheduled for late 2009 or mid-2010.
In St. Petersburg, City Hall has designated 2009-10 as a period for the creation of a so-called automobile cluster, comprising carmaker giants such as Toyota, GM, Nissan, Ford, Hyundai and Suzuki, which have either already entered the local market or are in the process of doing so.

TITLE: Kudrin Sees Capital Inflows Despite Jitters
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Wednesday that he still expected net capital inflows in the second half, despite a falling domestic stock market and global financial turbulence.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sent shares into freefall in June with an attack on steel and coal firm Mechel. Russian shares extended their losses tracking global commodity prices.
“Naturally, capital inflows have shrunk due to a falling market,” Kudrin told reporters.
“I believe that we will have net capital inflow in the second half, but today it is difficult to estimate the inflow due to the continuing global financial crisis,” Kudrin added. Russia had net capital inflow of $12.3 billion in the first half.
The Central Bank has said it expects $40 billion in net capital inflows in 2008, but with investors fleeing the falling Russian market and firms finding it hard to raise capital abroad it was not clear where the inflows would come from.
“There can be various events that may have an impact on the full-year number,” Kudrin said. “We will analyze all the events which are taking place in the market.” Capital flows include direct and portfolio investment as well as debt issuance.

TITLE: Online Advertising Makes Market Gains
AUTHOR: By Tai Adelaja
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Internet advertising in Russia grew 73 percent to $260 million in the first half of the year and may top $600 million this year, according to the MindShare Interaction research agency. 
Foreign automakers now spend an average of 20 percent of their Russian ad budgets online, underscoring the huge preference media buyers now place on the Internet at the expense of traditional media, the report said.
Companies with considerable Internet ad budgets for Russia include Ford Motor, which plans to spend $4.6 million online this year, General Motors ($2 million), Peugeot Citroen ($1.6 million) and Nissan ($1.5 million), according to MindShare.
Also among the country’s big online spenders are the top three mobile operators — Mobile TeleSystems, with $2.5 million, MegaFon ($2.3 million) and VimpelCom ($1.9 million.) Samsung, Honda and Procter & Gamble all plan to spend from $1.1 million to $1.3 million on Russian Internet ads this year, the report said.
The number of Internet users in the country approached 37.7 million people this year, or 29 percent of the population, according to figures released by Public Opinion Foundation. Around 15.7 million, or 14 percent, go online daily.
Cheaper broadband access has led to an annual growth rate of 25 percent in the number of Internet users in the country, said Andrei Chernyshov, general director of the AdWatch advertising agency. 
“Advertisers are attracted by the Internet because the medium offers instant feedback, and it is easier to monitor how users behave,” he said. 
“With the introduction of social networks such as Odnoklassniki and VKontakte, the cost of advertising on the Internet has been halved,” Chernyshov added. 
The exponential growth in online advertising has cast a pall over more traditional media, which have seen ad revenues falling.
“With a new array of technical possibilities, the Internet in Russia would draw away media buyers from print publications,” said Vladimir Yevstafiyev, vice president of the Russian Association of Communication Agencies.
“But just as cinema and TV never destroyed the newspapers, newspapers and news magazines will continue to occupy a niche in the advertisement market.”
Soon all mass media will have to rely heavily on online ads for their economic survival, Yevstafiyev said. 
Since 2006, newspaper advertising volume has grown by just 23 percent and advertising in periodicals by only 12 percent, according to the Russian Communications Agencies Association, which tracks the industry.
At the same time, spending on online advertising has surged 53 percent to 2.7 billion rubles ($115 million) last year from 1.8 billion rubles in 2006. 
While the country’s newspapers are still learning to harness the potential of online advertising, the Internet ad market is not yet elastic enough to accommodate all players, analysts said.
“So far in Russia, most of the online ads are distributed among three major search portals — Yandex, Rambler and Google, which recently acquired Begun,” said Chernyshov, of AdWatch.
“Newspapers or news magazines so far have little space to maneuver in terms of using their portals as a platform for hosting context ads.”

TITLE: S&P Cuts Rating For TNK-BP
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: Standard & Poor’s on Wednesday became the second major international ratings agency to downgrade its expectations for TNK-BP over its shareholder dispute.
S&P said it had lowered its long-term corporate credit and senior unsecured debt ratings on TNK-BP to BB from BB+ with a negative outlook.
“The downgrade reflects our significant concerns over the major governance issues at TNK-BP in light of the stalemate between 50/50 partners BP and Alfa-Access-Renova, notwithstanding TNK-BP’s robust cash flow generation forecast for 2008, and adequate liquidity at end-June 2008,” S&P said.
It said the downgrade also reflected the increased unpredictability of TNK-BP’s strategic direction and financial policies and the heightened risk of future control issues and adverse legal and regulatory action.
It also noted the risk of delays to new strategic investments and therefore the risk of a decline in oil production in 2009.
S&P affirmed its B short-term corporate credit rating on TNK-BP.
On Tuesday, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded its outlook on TNK-BP Baa2 ratings to “developing” from “stable,” citing the shareholder battle.
Problems at TNK-BP have been escalating during the last few months with BP and four Soviet-born billionaires, grouped in the AAR consortium, clashing publicly over strategy and management at the country’s third-largest oil producer.

TITLE: Ruble Falls as Investors Ditch Weak Stocks
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — The ruble staged its biggest percentage fall versus the euro-dollar basket since mid-May on Wednesday, as a sharp sell-off on the Moscow bourse prompted foreign investors to repatriate their cash. 
The ruble weakened to nearly 29.41 versus the basket of 55 cents and 45 euro cents, retreating from the 29.26 level set Monday — which was its strongest since the current composition of the basket was set in February 2007.
The move came as the country’s benchmark RTS Index plunged below the 1,800 points level to a 14-month low.
“There was a sharp crunch in the equity market, and that led to an outflow of funds and the purchase of hard currency,” said Sergei Romanchuk, dealer at Metallinvestbank.
The RTS Index has lost more than 12 percent since Prime Minister Vladimir Putin began to criticize coal and steel company Mechel two weeks ago. He has accused the company of tax evasion.
Profit taking after Monday’s gains was also a factor, said Shahin Vallee, currency strategist at BNP Paribas in London.
“It’s very typical. ... Instead of accumulating long [ruble] positions, people tend to pocket the gains made on the revaluation and reduce their positions after that,” he said.

TITLE: Oil Delivery Costs May Grow 10%
AUTHOR: By Tanya Mosolova
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s decision to raise an oil shipping fee component will increase costs of oil deliveries by pipelines by 10 to 12 percent and further spur the country’s runaway inflation, analysts said Wednesday.
The Federal Tariffs Service said Tuesday that it had allowed oil pipeline monopoly Transneft to raise its oil dispatching fee to 15.41 rubles per ton per 100 kilometers, but gave no comparison or figure for the new overall tariff.
The dispatching fee is a special charge for coordination, which along with the pumping fee constitutes the overall tariff for shipping oil by pipelines inside and outside Russia, the world’s second-largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia.
Analysts said the dispatching fee rose by 19.6 percent based on Transneft’s latest disclosure of the fee at 12.89 rubles at the end of last year.
“Our calculations show that this translates into a growth of about 11.7 percent in the average tariff, given the approximate 40/60 split between the pumping and dispatching components,” said Alex Burgansky, from Renaissance Capital.
Transneft declined to disclose the increase of the average fee and said it would fulfill the service’s decision no matter how unpopular it could be with oil firms.
“We are a state company and [the tariffs service] is a state agency. We have to fulfill their decisions,” Transneft vice president Mikhail Barkov said.
The tariffs service said Transneft needed fresh money to pay interests on the debt it raised to build a new link to Asia, a major project meant to connect Russian oil fields with Asian markets by the end of 2009.
Analysts at Troika Dialog said the move would further boost costs for oil companies, which are already complaining that a heavy tax and tariff burden prevents them from investing in new fields to support declining oil output.
Poor oil output performance has become a major concern of the government, which has offered a series of tax breaks to oil companies to revive production growth. It has said it would consider more tax breaks in the future.
Transneft is usually allowed to revise its fees at the end of each year, and they have already risen by 19.4 percent from January.
The government usually requests the state-controlled firm to cap hikes at below inflation levels to avoid further spurring prices across other industries.
Inflation has reached 9.3 percent since the start of the year, already exceeding the government’s initial forecast of 8 percent for the whole of 2008. In 2007, inflation exceeded the target by a wide margin, reaching 11.9 percent.
Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Wednesday that he was not prepared to comment on the tariff service’s decision.
With services and material prices soaring, Transneft has already more than doubled its spending for its Asian pipeline, estimated at more than $14.4 billion to build only the first stretch.
Some firms, like LUKoil, are not planning to use it because they do not have oil fields in the region, but will nevertheless have to pay the new fee.
But a Western trader said oil companies were likely to find a way to compensate for the losses. “It is consumers who will eventually bear the costs,” he said.

TITLE: Solzhenitsyn’s Troubled Prophetic Mission
AUTHOR: By Richard Pipes
TEXT: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, viewed as a political figure, was very much in the Russian conservative tradition — a modern version of Dostoevsky. Like the great 19th-century writer, Solzhenitsyn despised socialism and yet had no use for Western culture with its stress on secularism, freedom and legality. 
I recall very well the commencement address that he delivered 30 years ago at Harvard University. The audience of students and their families, aware of Solzhenitsyn’s anti-communism, expected a warm tribute to the West — and especially to the United States, which had granted him asylum. Instead, they were treated to a typical Russian conservative critique of Western civilization for being too legalistic and too committed to freedom, which resulted in the “weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger.” At the bottom of this censure lay a wholesale rejection of the course of Western history since the Renaissance.
Solzhenitsyn blamed the evils of Soviet communism on the West. He rightly stressed the European origins of Marxism, but he never asked himself why Marxism in other European countries led not to the gulag but to the welfare state. He reacted with white fury to any suggestion that the roots of Leninism and Stalinism could be found in Russia’s past. His knowledge of Russian history was very superficial and laced with a romantic sentimentalism. While accusing the West of imperialism, he seemed quite unaware of the extraordinary expansion of his own country into regions inhabited by non-Russians. He also denied that Imperial Russia practiced censorship or condemned political prisoners to hard labor, which, of course, was absurd.
In some of his historical writings, there are strong hints of anti-Semitism, a common vice of writers of the conservative-nationalist persuasion in Russia. In his 1976 book, “Lenin in Zurich,” Solzhenitsyn depicts Helphand-Parvus as a slimy character who tries to persuade Lenin to return to Russia to start a revolution. In “August 1914,” published in its expanded form in 1984, he explains the assassination of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin by Dmitry Bogrov, a thoroughly assimilated Jew, on the alleged grounds that Stolypin’s plans for a better Russia promised nothing good for the Jews. Fortunately, in his last book published in 2003, “Two Hundred Years Together,” an ambitious history of Jews in Russia, Solzhenitsyn unequivocally exonerated the Jewish people of responsibility for the Russian Revolution.
It is difficult to envisage what kind of a Russia Solzhenitsyn wanted. He was not unhappy about Russia’s loss of its imperial possessions, yet he did not favor a state based on law and democracy. He disliked what he saw after his return to Russia in 1994, during Boris Yeltsin’s rule, but, strangely enough, he came to terms with then-President Vladimir Putin and his restrictions on both democracy and the free market. Although Solzhenitsyn vehemently rejected communism, in many ways he retained a Soviet mind-set. Anyone who disagreed with him was not merely wrong but evil. He was constitutionally incapable of tolerating dissent.
His comments on current events were sometimes bizarre. In 1999, he condemned the NATO bombing of Serbia in defense of Albanian Kosovo, action which he described as following the “law of the jungle: He who is mighty is completely right.” He went so far as to assert that there was “no difference in the behavior of NATO and of Hitler.” Yet he did not ask himself whether the Albanians, persecuted by the more mighty Serbs, did not have the right on their side. Nor did he compare NATO’s actions in Kosovo to those of Putin in Chechnya, where the Russian military not only bombed a population that sought independence, but destroyed the region’s capital, Grozny — a city that was part of the Russian Federation.
Solzhenitsyn’s assumption that he would become a prophet upon his return to Russia did not play well with the public. My impression is that he was widely considered a relic of the past. For this reason, his television program, “A Meeting with Solzhenitsyn,” attracted so small of an audience that it had to be canceled. His October 1994 speech to the State Duma was tepidly received, as was his ambitious historical novel, “The Red Wheel.”
When all is said and done, Solzhenitsyn will be remembered primarily for his remarkably courageous resistance to and criticism of the Soviet Union. Although many commentators claim that he was the first to alert the world to the horrors of the gulag, this is not true; there were quite a few books on this subject before the publication of his “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and “The Gulag Archipelago.” Nonetheless, it is correct to say that Solzhenitsyn’s works were the first to be issued from the Soviet Union and, in the case of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” the first to be published in the Soviet Union. The effect of these works was immense both in the Soviet Union and abroad, helping to discredit morally the communist regime among those who still entertained illusions about it. In this manner, Solzhenitsyn contributed to the Soviet Union’s ultimate collapse.
No one can deprive Solzhenitsyn of this honor. But when it comes to the recommendations he made to his compatriots, many doubts remain. Russians obviously have little in common with the Oriental nations; by race, religion and high culture, they belong to the West. Therefore, when Solzhenitsyn rejects Western values as inapplicable to his country, he leaves it in a cultural limbo — it belongs nowhere and only to itself. This is a recipe for isolation, and isolation breeds aggressiveness.

Richard Pipes is professor of history, emeritus at Harvard University and author, most recently, of “Russian Conservatism and Its Critics,” which has just been published in Russian translation.

TITLE: Justice According to Kadyrov
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: News agencies reported last week that Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov was the target of an assassination attempt. Chechen authorities immediately denied the reports; the president’s press secretary, Lema Gudayev, said Kadyrov had been in Yaroslavl watching Chechnya’s Terek football team play at the time of the alleged attack. Kadyrov was even more direct in his denunciation of the allegations, saying, “These provocative fantasies are thought up by extremists and their henchmen.” Translated from Chechen, this means: “Leave us alone. We’ll work this out ourselves.”
In the absence of facts, rumors about the assassination attempt spread like wildfire, which frequently happens in Chechnya. One report described an attempt on his life Thursday in Tsentoroi, a village southeast of Grozny. Another claimed he was attacked at a stadium in Gudermes on Monday. The web site Kavkazcenter.com combined those versions and announced that there had been two attempts on Kadyrov’s life.
What really happened? It is difficult to be sure since those who know the facts remain silent, which is a clear demonstration of how much control Kadyrov has over Chechnya and how much Chechens fear him. Whatever happened, it seems to have been more of a routine skirmish than an assassination attempt. A widespread rumor has it that Kadyrov was speaking to the nephew of one of his closest aides. When Kadyrov raised his voice and swore at the nephew, the young man drew his gun in response. The uncle then used his own body to shield Kadyrov from his nephew’s threats. From that point on, accounts vary. One version holds that the uncle is alive and well; another that he died saving Kadyrov’s life; and still another that the uncle was punished for his nephew’s misbehavior and is sitting in prison.
Some people claim that Kadyrov was injured in the encounter, that he has a visible limp and cannot move one shoulder. If this is true, Kadyrov’s appearance shortly after the attack at a football match in Yaroslavl is like Napoleon Bonaparte’s decision to attend an opera despite narrowly escaping a major assassination attempt on the way. By making public appearances, both Napoleon and Kadyrov wanted to show that nothing could faze them. 
Kadyrov has kept a tight lid on rumors surrounding the incident because it concerns interclan conflicts. And true to his leadership style, Kadyrov closed the investigation, delivered the verdict and carried out the sentence.
Nevertheless, it seems that the assassination attempt was used as a pretext for carrying out a major purge within Kadyrov’s inner circle.
Eyewitnesses claim that on July 20 in Tsentoroi, the screams of torture victims could be heard coming from the so-called Brat base on the western edge of the village. It seemed to them that these were sons and other relatives of high-ranking officials of the republic, including the son of a major economics official and the brother of a regional police chief, along with his two sons. Apparently, a shooting also took place as part of a cleansing of Kadyrov’s inner circle. 
Increased pressure has also been applied to the families whose relatives are fighting against Kadyrov in the woods. They are threatened with cruel retribution if they do not hand over their children, and some of their homes have been set on fire. But it is unlikely that these measures are linked directly with the alleged assassination attempt against Kadyrov. 
Although inflicting collective punishment is unthinkable in a government run by the rule of law, it seems to be the best way to fight insurgents in a clan-based society.

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

TITLE: Alexander Solzhenitsyn 1918-2008
AUTHOR: By Douglas Birch
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — When Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” appeared in the thick monthly literary magazine Novy Mir back in November of 1962, taboos were shattered. Buried secrets were unearthed. And the Soviet Union was shaken to its foundations.
Solzhenitsyn’s short novel described a single day in the life of a carpenter caught up in the Soviet Union’s secret network of slave labor camps, where starvation, bitter cold and punishing work regimes were the rule and, it has been said, the average life expectancy was one winter.
The author was working as a provincial math teacher, and his greatest work, “The Gulag Archipelago,” was still to come. But “One Day” was to shock the U.S.S.R. and the world.
Some of the crimes of the dictator Josef Stalin were exposed and denounced following a secret speech by Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, as part of his short-lived campaign to reform the brutal Soviet system.
But Solzhenitsyn’s novel, based on the seven years he spent as a prisoner, was the first real expose of the gulag — a word derived from the Russian “Glavnoye Upraveleniye Lagerei,” or Main Camp Administration.
Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature but was exiled from his homeland because of his work, died of heart failure Sunday at age 89, his son, Stepan Solzhenitsyn, told The Associated Press on Monday.
The gulag was, Solzhenitsyn wrote, the “human meat grinder” for processing what Stalin sneered at as “wreckers,” vermin and “enemies of the people” who allegedly sabotaged Soviet progress to the workers’ paradise. The grim process started, typically, with a knock on the door late at night, an arrest on charges of trivial or imaginary crimes, condemnation by a secret tribunal, transportation by unheated rail car and finally incarceration in the camps.
The prisoners formed a secret army of slave laborers who built railroads, worked in mines and cleared forests in some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain. In the end, by the most authoritative estimate, the gulag systematically ground down some 29 million souls.
Armed with his literary talent and prodigious memory, Solzhenitsyn spent more than 40 years working in secrecy, in fear and finally in exile as he chiseled away at the lies that supported the Soviet system. And in the end he, as much perhaps as any individual, helped to bring it down.
“One Day” was the critical beginning of this work.
“If the Soviet Union’s elite were to accept that the portrait of Ivan Denisovich was authentic, that meant admitting that innocent people had endured pointless suffering,” wrote Anne Applebaum in her book, “Gulag: A History.” “If the camps had really been stupid and wasteful and tragic, that meant that the Soviet Union was stupid and wasteful and tragic too.”
After the book appeared, readers of Novy Mir responded with an outpouring of letters describing their anguish and grief. “Now I read and weep, but when I was imprisoned in Ukhta for ten years I did not shed a tear,” one reader said in a letter to the magazine.
Solzhenitsyn’s novel would never have been published if Khrushchev hadn’t hoped it would undermine support in the Kremlin for neo-Stalinist policies. But perhaps in part because of the novel’s publication, Khrushchev was ousted by Communist Party leaders in 1964. The gulag, meanwhile, continued to incarcerate enemies of the people until two years before the Soviet collapse.
When Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in 1970, Soviet authorities refused to let him go to Stockholm to accept the award. In the text of the speech he could not deliver to the Swedish Academy, smuggled out of the U.S.S.R., Solzhenitsyn recalled an old Russian proverb: “One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.”
But Solzhenitsyn was not a storybook hero for his admirers in Europe and the United States. Many, especially in the West, found his political judgments as distressing as his literature was inspiring.
After he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and expelled from the U.S.S.R. in 1974, he settled in bucolic Cavendish, Vermont. There, he became frustrated with what he regarded as the West’s shallow obsession with individualism and liberty — which, in his view, had degenerated into narcissism and license. Democracy had brought paralysis, he believed, affluence and decadence.
In a 1978 speech at Harvard University, Solzhenitsyn — who with his beard and dour demeanor resembled a figure from an Orthodox icon — denounced the Western view that liberal democracy was fated to triumph in non-Western civilizations, which he called “worlds” unto themselves.
“There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life,” Solzhenitsyn said.
“It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all developing into similarity; neither one can be transformed into the other without the use of violence.”
After his return to Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn was outraged by what he found — a Kremlin, in his view, unable to stop the looting of Russia’s vast resources by politically connected tycoons and unwilling to stand up against what he saw as the encroaching threat of NATO and other Western institutions.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the Communist reformer, restored Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet citizenship in 1990 and dropped treason charges against him. President Boris Yeltsin, who dismantled the Soviet system, tried to woo the author.
Solzhenitsyn blamed Gorbachev and Yeltsin for Russia’s economic crisis, its military weakness and what he regarded as subservience to the West.
When Yeltsin awarded Solzhenitsyn Russia’s highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, in 1998 the writer refused to accept it. When Yeltsin left office in 2000, Solzhenitsyn wanted him prosecuted.
“I feel that Yeltsin permitted an enormous devastation of Russia,” Solzhenitsyn told the New Yorker’s David Remnick in 2001.
In the 1990s, Solzhenitsyn’s views were regarded by Moscow’s political elites and some disillusioned Western supporters as old-fashioned, out of step with Russia’s march toward integration with the West. In time, however Solzhenitsyn’s views would be echoed in the halls of the Kremlin.
The author at first seemed wary of President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer. But he gradually warmed to Putin, as the Russian president reined in the oligarchs, reclaimed state control of some of Russia’s natural resources and adopted a more assertive — at times confrontational — relationship with the United States and the West.
Solzhenitsyn, meanwhile, did not quarrel with the Kremlin’s drive to eliminate voices of dissent from the media, marginalize the political opposition and restore its role as the unchallenged center of Russian power.
Russian liberals are careful to draw the distinction between Solzhenitsyn the writer and Solzhenitsyn the political figure. They cherish the former, and are reluctant to criticize the latter.
“He wrote the ‘Gulag Archipelago,’” Andrei Mironov, who was sentenced to a term in a prison camp in the 1980s for possession of unauthorized books, told The Associated Press. “This was above all.”
Some Western critics, meanwhile, have been harsher, accusing Solzhenitsyn of becoming an apologist for Putin’s authoritarian rule.
Last year, after three years in relative obscurity, Solzhenitsyn granted a rare interview to the liberal weekly Moscow News, in which he warned that Russia risked a Ukrainian-style revolt because of Western interference. He also accused the United States of the “occupation” of Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Putin’s assertive foreign policy, he was quoted as saying, was “forward thinking,” while blaming the Russian president’s predecessors for the gulf separating Russia’s ultra-wealthy elites and its millions of poor.
On June 12, during the Day of Russia holiday celebrations in the Kremlin, Putin presented Solzhenitsyn with a state prize for his “humanitarian” contribution to the nation. The author, apparently too frail to attend, was represented by his wife, Natalya.
“Millions of people associate the name and work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn with Russia’s fate,” Putin said at the ceremony. “His academic research, outstanding literary work and, in fact, his entire life have been dedicated to the Fatherland.”
In a taped message, Solzhenitsyn said he hoped Russians’ experience during the “cruel and troubled years” of the Soviet era would help avert more suffering. “It will forewarn and protect us from destructive breakdowns,” he said, looking pale and thin in a gray suit and tie.
Solzhenitsyn had become, once again, a symbol of Russia: a nation caught between its tragic past and its uncertain future; between its faith in state power and its fear of new repression.
His journey was, after all, Russia’s bitter journey through the 20th century. And if the West sometimes had a hard time understanding Solzhenitsyn and his country, well, perhaps that’s because of Russia’s singular history.
“How can you expect a man who is warm to understand a man who is cold?” he wrote in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”

TITLE: Excerpts from Sholzhenitsyn’s work...
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: “Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state into another.
“We have been happily borne — or perhaps have unhappily dragged our weary way — down the long and crooked streets of our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood, rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never given a thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to penetrate them with our vision or our understanding. But there is where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away from us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous number of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in these fences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And all of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and four white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but nonetheless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap, ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.”
—“The Gulag Archipelago.” 

“We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. It is for this reason, and not because of the ‘weakness of indoctrinational work,’ that they are growing up ‘indifferent.’ Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity.
“It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!”
— “The Gulag Archipelago”

“Shukhov enjoyed it. He liked people pointing at him — see that man? He’s nearly done his time — but he didn’t let himself get excited about it. Those who’d come to the end of their time during the war had all been kept in “pending further orders” — till ‘46. So people originally sentenced to three years did five altogether. They could twist the law any way they liked. When your ten years were up they could say good, have another ten. Or pack you off to some Godforsaken place of exile.
“Sometimes, though, you got thinking and your spirits soared: your sentence was running out, there wasn’t much thread left on the spool! Lord! Just to think of it! Walking free, on your own two legs!”
— “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”

“Standing there to be counted through the gate of an evening, back in camp after a whole day of buffeting wind, freezing cold and an empty belly, the zek longs for his ladleful of scalding hot watery evening soup as for rain in time of drought. He could knock it back in a single gulp. For the moment that ladleful means more to him than freedom, more than his whole past life, more than whatever life is left to him.”
— “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”

“Shukhov felt pleased with life as he went to sleep. A lot of good things had happened that day. He hadn’t been thrown in the hole. The gang hadn’t been dragged off to Sotsgorodok (Socialist Settlement). He’d swiped the extra gruel at dinnertime. The foreman had got a good rate for the job. He’d enjoyed working on the wall. He hadn’t been caught with the blade at the searchpoint. He’d earned a bit from Tsezar that evening. And he’d bought his tobacco.
“The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one.
“Just one of the three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days of his sentence, from bell to bell.
“The extra three were for leap years.”
—“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” ending.

TITLE: Word’s worth
TEXT: Hygiene is real simple in English — at least in terms of language. For the basics, all you really need to know are two verbs: to wash and to clean. You wash with water (your hands, the dishes, clothes, floors, etc.). You clean just about everything else (the stove, your room, the family silver, etc.). 
I wish Russian were that simple. In Russian, the verb depends on what you are cleaning and how you are cleaning it. Here’s a mini-handbook of hygiene and housekeeping.
For surfaces — animate or inanimate, vegetable or mineral — cleaned with water: ìûòü. <i>Òû ïîìûëà ðóêè?</i> (Did you wash your hands?) <i>ß õî÷ó ïîìûòü ãîëîâó</i> (I want to wash my hair — literally, “head”). <i>Ñîíÿ ïîìûëà îãóðöû</i> (Sonya washed the cucumbers). <i>Ìîé ìóæ ïîìûë âñå ïîëû, îêíà è ïîñóäó</i> (My husband washed all the floors, windows and dishes). <i>Ìûòüñÿ</i> means to wash oneself, in the shower, bath or otherwise. <i>Ó íàñ ñåãîäíÿ ïðàçäíèê! Äàëè ãîðÿ÷óþ âîäó, è ÿ íàêîíåö-òî ïîìûëàñü!</i> (Today is a holiday. They turned on the hot water, and I finally took a bath!) Ìûëî (soap) is the stuff you use to wash yourself. 
For fabrics washed in water: <i>ñòèðàòü</i>. This verb is related to <i>òåðåòü</i> (to rub), which is how clothes once got washed. Remember the washboard? The Russian equivalent is <i>ðóáåëü</i>, and you can thank your lucky stars you never had to use one. But the concept stuck in the language, even if now the process involves dumping clothes in a washing machine (<i>ñòèðàëüíàÿ ìàøèíà</i>) and pushing a button: <i>ß ïîñòèðàëà ïîñòåëüíîå áåëü¸</i> (I washed the bed linen). <i>ß ñäåëàë áîëüøóþ ñòèðêó</i> (I did a big wash). 
For fabrics, inanimate objects and other stuff I can’t figure out how to categorize that are cleased of dirt or something unnecessary, unattractive or harmful, primarily without water and often with a tool: <i>÷èñòèòü</i>. (Hey, I’m trying my best. If you want a good definition, open a dictionary.) This refers to cleaning something off the surface or cleaning something out. <i>×èñòÿò çóáû, áîòèíêè</i> (They brush their teeth, polish their boots). <i>Ñîíÿ ïî÷èñòèëà îãóðöû</i> (Sonya peeled the cucumbers). <i>×èñòèë êîñòþì</i> is somewhat ambiguous: It can either mean that you brushed off the suit or had it dry cleaned. If you wanted to be clear, you could say: <i>ß îòäàë êîñòþì â õèì÷èñòêó</i> (I brought the suit to the dry cleaners). <i>×èñòèëè ìóñîðíûé áàê</i> (They cleaned out the dumpster). 
For messes, problems, bandits, mercenaries, rodents and other bad things that need to be made to go away: <i>Ðåéäåðû àòàêóþò: îáùåæèòèå ïðèêàçàíî çà÷èñòèòü îò æèëüöîâ</i> (Raiders are on the attack: The dormitory has been ordered to evict the residents). And then there is the <i>çà÷èñòèòü</i> that Putin made famous last week: “<i>Ïðèä¸òñÿ ïîñëàòü åìó äîêòîðà è çà÷èñòèòü âñå ýòè ïðîáëåìû</i>” (“We’ll have to send in a doctor and clean up all those problems”). 
<i>— Michele A. Berdy</i>
Sergey Chernov is on vacation.

TITLE: Hang on to your heritage
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: U.S. rock legend Patti Smith is worried about ongoing destruction of historic buildings in Moscow and St. Petersburg and urging people to act fast if they want to prevent redevelopment.
“Being in Moscow recently, I think they’re going to suffer a similar thing as New York in that they’re building too fast, and I would hope that in building and wanting to make economic progress that the history of the city is not destroyed,” Smith said, speaking from her studio in New York late last week.
“That is what’s happening in all great cities, certainly in New York, where a lot of historical and beautiful buildings are leveled to put up some, you know, modern hotel or condominiums, and I think it’s important that people in the great cities do not lose their sense of self, do not lose their sense of history, and that people remember that the most beautiful things about human beings are their accomplishments, what they’re like inside, what kind of people they are and not what they own, not what kind of car or apartment they have, but, you know, what their accomplishments are.”
“So, of course I can’t presume to understand all the changes that are going on in Russia, I’m still learning. But I do recognize that sometimes, from what’s happened in my own country is that you have people — sometimes very corrupt people — moving very quickly in a country that’s changing, and what often suffers is the common people and also architecture. Architecture and history. And we want to make new changes, but we need to have a sense of our own history. I think it’s very important.”
Smith, who last came to Moscow to perform at a private event for the Russian edition of Esquire magazine in June, first performed in Moscow and St. Petersburg in September 2005.
“St. Petersburg, first of all, it’s a very beautiful city, and the first thing that impressed me was how beautiful the light is,” she said.
“You know, it reminded me a bit of Florence. It just has beautiful, beautiful light. I went to the Hermitage, of course, and spent a day there and just walked about the city. Also I went on a boat on the water, so it was a very beautiful experience.
“And to play there was great, it’s exciting, you know, I was never in Russia before, so I went to Moscow, went to St. Petersburg, and saw Tolstoy’s house, I’ve seen places where Bulgakov lived and where Tarkovsky [worked]… It’s been a wonderful experience and I’m very much looking forward to returning.”
Smith expressed concern when she learned about recently destroyed historic buildings in St. Petersburg and the plan to build Okhta Center, a nearly 400-meter tall skyscraper for Gazprom, Russia’s energy behemoth, which will drastically change the city’s skyline.
“It’s tragic, because all that they will do is take a very unique city and make it look like everything else,” Smith said.
“They’re taking over the heart of our great cities and the soul of our great cities, and making them generic. And for who and for what? A lot of it is just money, it’s corruption, it’s entrepreneurs, it’s people like Donald Trump, and it should be fought. It’s very hard to fight.
“What will happen is everyone is going to suddenly look around and say, ‘What’s happened? We had a beautiful city, we had a beautiful lake, we had a place to go fishing, we had a sense of history, we had beautiful architecture. And now it just looks like everything else.’”
Both pressure groups such as Living City and individuals are struggling to preserve the city, as many people feel that something precious is being taken away from them.
“Yes, they’ve been violated, but you know, they have to react quicker,” Smith said.
“Because the thing is everyone is reacting too slowly. And once it’s done it’s done. Once you have a beautiful church or some exclusive piece of architecture, or some historic house of a great poet destroyed, and you put out ugly condominiums or some generic-looking hotel or office building, it’s over. You can’t bring them back. You can’t bring something like that back. It’s precious. And I see this everywhere.”
Smith will perform at B1 Maximum in Moscow on Sept. 2.

TITLE: Short but sweet
AUTHOR: By Katya Madrid
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A growing trend to make and exhibit short films has meant that short film festivals are experiencing an upsurge in attendance around the world, and traditional festivals are having to include shorts sections to keep up with demand. This is a trend worth taking a closer look at, in part to understand where St. Petersburg fits into the scheme of things.
Not only are short format film programs a platform for emerging artists, but established artists are choosing this means of expression as well. Like a demi-glace sauce, it concentrates style and ideas to their essential form to produce saturated, tasty treats.  
At the same time, regular platforms are few, and the early days of cinema when shorts always preceded the features in theaters have long since passed, although Pixar, the studio behind such animated films as “Wall-E,” has reintroduced the idea of showing shorts before its features.
Europe’s largest documentary film festival, The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), that celebrates its 21st year this November, has a strong tradition of including shorts.  It honors filmmakers in two different award categories for shorts:  The Silver Wolf award for works under 60 minutes, and the Silver Cub award for those under 30 minutes. 
This year’s Galway Film Fleadh, a short film festival on the western coast of Ireland, went by the name Telling Stories. One animated gem stood out: Nicky Plelan’s “Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty,” (2008, 5 minutes). Plelan is part of Brown Bag Films, which has been a presence at the festival for 15 years.  
Meanwhile, St. Petersburg is leading the trend towards access to short films.  Since 2005, the Open Cinema Festival has dazzled audiences with a wide array of films from all over the globe. The Fourth International Open Cinema Short Film Festival, which opens Friday, will transform the beach of the Peter and Paul Fortress into a magical labyrinth of theatrical wonder, music, even an interactive puzzle, and of course, film.
The vista of the River Neva that spreads out from the beach of the Peter and Paul Fortress resonates with the concepts of openness and freedom, as well as the aristocratic and exclusive nature of the architectural contours that mold its space. Open Cinema comes forth this year on the basis of this paradoxical combination of the open and the closed: the festival’s concept of a “labyrinth” on the beach supports the idea of something closed being out in the open, while the goal of bringing art films to a mass audience puts them out in the open too.
“A labyrinth isn’t only an interactive puzzle for the mind and body, it is a specific world which rejects ordinary logic and mechanical thinking, offering instead a mythological pattern full of enigmas and metamorphoses where you’re pursuing only one goal: freedom,” the organizers of Open Cinema explained in a news release about this year’s event.
Two renowned theater companies, the Akhe and the Barbuzony, will lead guests through a theatrical labyrinth. On all three evenings at the beach, the troupes will premiere a different tale, highlighting a unique aspect of the labyrinth myth (Theseus and the Minotaur).
Musicians Yoel Gonzales and Polina Fradkina, creators of the In-Temporalis project, will delight the audience with a “musical labyrinth” of Afro-Cuban, Brazilian and Mexican rhythms.
The film program, featuring dozens of shorts from Russia and abroad, is divided into a competitive program for new films and an international program featuring the best films from other festivals from all over the world.
Open Cinema will run on the beach of the Peter and Paul Fortress from Friday to Sunday while from Aug. 11-16 the festival continues at Dom Kino and Mirazh cinemas simultaneously. The beach events and screenings take place daily from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m.
For details of the hundreds of films due to be screened, consult www.artbereg.ru.

TITLE: Poetic license
AUTHOR: By Sally Laird
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Like his earlier novel, “I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company,” Brian Hall’s latest work is that fashionable hybrid: a “bio-fiction” which sets out to explore, with a novelist’s freedom, the inner world of a real person. Whereas Hall’s earlier subjects were two great adventurers — Lewis and Clark of the famous transcontinental expedition — the hero of the present novel is the American poet Robert Frost, whose greatest journeys were of the mind: from things to words, experience to verse. 
It is precisely these journeys that Hall, armed with a scholar’s scrupulousness, a lyrical turn of phrase and a sympathetic imagination, seeks to track. 
The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky remarked, apropos of Frost, that “if biography accounts for poetry, this one should have resulted in none.” But despite his being wedded to one wife and one homeland, Frost suffered far more than his fair share of personal calamity, losing his alcoholic father at the age of 11, three of his children to sickness and suicide, and both a sister and a daughter to mental institutions. Though these figures play only an offstage, spectral role in Hall’s book, their fate casts a long shadow over the story. Tragedy did not silence Frost, as it did his wife. If anything, Hall suggests, it strengthened his extraordinary tenacity — his will to mine the good from life and hone it into poetry. 
It is true that Frost traveled little; apart from a spell in England in his late 30s, he stayed mainly in New England, drawing inspiration from its farms, animals, birds, tools, woods and weather. But in the penultimate year of his life, at the age of 88, he did undertake an extraordinary journey to Russia, on a one-man mission to bring peace to the world by talking in person to Nikita Khrushchev. It is this incident that provides Hall with his faint skeleton of a plot, one that is particularly intriguing to anyone concerned with Russia. 
The story begins with Frost being introduced to the new Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, who, he is assured, belongs to a new post-Stalinist breed. Dobrynin, sophisticated and humorous (qualities hitherto unknown in the Soviet diplomatic corps), disarms Frost with the story of how he and his fellow diplomats-in-training “were taught table etiquette at the Kremlin, so they wouldn’t pick up the wrong fork or mop their plates with their bread at official dinners in the West. Their instructor, a disinherited Russian princess, named the dishes as they were brought to the table: vichyssoise, lobster Thermidor, boeuf en daube. But the plates were empty. This was 1946, and food was still scarce. The trainees used the correct forks on the invisible food and daintily sipped the airy soups, growing hungrier and hungrier.” 
Frost is charmed by the tale, and by the story of Khrushchev, the unlettered peasant boy who rose to power determined to take his people out of bast shoes, yet still remembering the feel of them on his own feet. 
Aspects of Khrushchev — his instinct for homespun simile, his earthy obscenities, his pride, his truculence, perhaps even his paranoia — chime with Frost’s own courageous and curmudgeonly character. No communist himself, the poet nevertheless sides with the fat little man in his panama, fighting his corner among the suave American country clubbers. At the meeting with Dobrynin, Frost expands on his view that Khrushchev alone has the power to save the world by cutting the Gordian knot of divided Berlin. Dobrynin suggests he tell this to Khrushchev personally, and so the idea of the journey is born. Despite his misgivings and failing health, Frost sets out for the Soviet Union in September 1962, determined to be of some last service to the world. 
Hall bases his account on the memoirs of the two men who accompanied Frost: F. D. Reeve, who acted as his personal translator, and Frederick B. Adams, Jr. 
Dragged about to give readings to uncomprehending audiences, fatigued by encounters with the poets Anna Akhmatova and Yevgeny Yevtushenko (such meetings serving little more than to prove that poetry cannot be translated), Frost is almost ready to give up when the call comes to meet Khrushchev near Pitsunda, on the Black Sea. The premier, hearing that the old poet is ailing, sends his personal physician to attend him before arriving in person with his entourage. Frost just has time to get his clothes on and smooth his hair before the familiar round figure walks into the room. 
Frost, as Hall shows in numerous vignettes, was used to improvising his monologues, dancing a tightrope before an audience, never quite sure if the right words would come or where they would take him. On this occasion they lead to a magnificent crescendo in which he speaks about the meaning of magnanimity — Aristotle’s crowning virtue — and the potential force of the unilateral gesture. Give away Berlin, he suggests, and you will prove yourself the greatest leader of all. Little does he know that, just a few hours later, Khrushchev will order nuclear weapons to be sent to Cuba, before settling down (the day is full of marvelous coincidence) to a reading of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” 
Khrushchev, of course, assumes that Frost has been personally sent by John F. Kennedy. Somewhat baffled by the poet’s meanderings on virtue and metaphor, he even wonders whether the old man may have forgotten to deliver the president’s real message. Whatever the value of the encounter, Frost squanders it on his return. Meeting with a crowd of reporters at the airport, he unwisely relays Khrushchev’s intimation that the West, in its dotage, is now too impotent to act. Kennedy, furious, becomes the more determined to prove the United States’ vigor. Thus Frost, far from saving the world, may unwittingly have contributed to the near catastrophe of the Cuban missile crisis. 
This is a fascinating anecdote, and Hall uses it deftly to illuminate Frost’s character: the curious mixture of suspicion and optimism, doubt and doggedness that seem to have propelled him through life. The real substance of the book, however, lies not so much in its account of outward incident (thoroughly documented elsewhere) as in Hall’s subtle recreation of Frost’s inner world. Ranging through the poet’s life — from early childhood, to the years of obscurity when Frost was an unsuccessful farmer and occasional contributor to the journal “Farm Poultry,” to his enthronement as America’s poet laureate and hoary sage — the book beautifully mimics the natural wanderings of an old man’s mind, alighting now here, now there in his long life, and returning constantly to moments of joy and pain. Interwoven with these passages from Frost’s life are numerous suggestive references to other writers — Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, Dante Rossetti, Virgil — who played a role in Frost’s formation as a poet. 
Many writers, not least Frost himself, have warned against trying to interpret literary works through the prism of their authors’ lives. Hall knows the danger, but braves the charge, subtly imagining the scenes that may have prompted “Stopping by Woods,” “Home Burial,” “An Old Man’s Winter Night.” I found these suggestions illuminating and moving, and was prompted to reread the poems in the light of them. No literary biographer could hope for more. 

Sally Laird is a translator from Russian and Danish and the author of “Voices of Russian Literature.”

TITLE: Beautiful resources
AUTHOR: By Marina Kamenev and Stas Shectman
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The headquarters of Nuclear.ru are located in an uninspiring building near Moscow’s Paveletsky Station. The company is an independent Internet portal providing the latest developments in the field of nuclear energy. But that is not what it is best known for.
Inside the small office sits Yulia Nagayeva, a tall, striking brunette. She is a senior manager for business development at TVEL, a manufacturer of nuclear fuel. She is also Miss Atom, the latest winner of the beauty contest that has been run by Nuclear.ru annually since 2004. Miss Atom is an online contest for women under the age of 35 who work in the nuclear energy industry. 
In addition to the country’s oil and mineral wealth, during the past decade Russia has been busy refining another one of its valuable natural resources: beauty. And while there have been no major international wins for Russia since Oksana Fyodorova won Miss Universe in 2002, numerous domestic competitions ensure that some of Russia’s most beautiful girls get to bask in the glow of a spotlight. 
“I think it’s every girl’s dream to see how they compare to other women,” Nagayeva said. She had entered the contest twice before she won this year and loves the process of taking part.
“It’s great. We get a stylist who chooses our dresses, a professional hairdresser and a photographer. Then we get photographed in beautiful locations. I really wanted to take part in this,” she said. 
“Our country is recognized for the beauty of its women,” said Tatyana Andreyeva, director of Beauty of Russia (Krasa Rossii), one of the longest-running beauty contests in Russia. “I consider ours one of a very few countries, perhaps even the only country, where female beauty is in the blood, where it is a national resource. Because of this, I feel that beauty contests here are very significant. They glorify these national resources.”
“It’s not that Russian women are more beautiful than other women,” said Fyodorova in a telephone interview. “It’s just that Slavic beauty is a universal kind of beauty.” 
Ilya Platonov, the director of Nuclear.ru, runs his competition for a rather different reason. “When people think of nuclear energy, they get scared, they think of Chernobyl. We want to show that the people working with and promoting nuclear industry are normal and the fact that the industry is filled with lots of beautiful women.”
On July 25, 63 beauties — as the organizers call them — represented the genetic wealth of cities, villages and regions across Russia and the CIS and strutted their stuff on a custom-built, 500-meter stage on the shore of Lake Onego in Petrozavodsk, Karelia, north of St. Petersburg. This year’s Beauty of Russia pageant was the first to be held outside of Moscow since 1995.
The winner, Sofia Larina, 20, a student from Siberia, will go on to represent Russia in Miss World. 
Preparation for the event involved a tight, 10-day schedule of rehearsals and a strict “no alcohol” and “no boys” policy for the contestants. And while carbohydrates and sweets were not officially prohibited, they were discouraged. 
“We don’t prohibit bread, but we try to limit it and put it far away so that it’s not easy to get,” Andreyeva said. “We serve a lot of vegetables, a lot of juice, a lot of liquids and try to get them to do a lot of exercise. Some of the girls still need to lose weight, but, you know, a lot of them are children; they’re still growing, and if they want to eat ice cream, there’s not much you can do about it,” she said before the contest. 
As well as rehearsing for their group and individual performances, which included a professional flamenco dancer, an opera singer and a magician, the women also took daily yoga classes. 
The classes were taught by Maria Kalinina, queen of the first Moscow Beauty (Moskovskaya Krasavitsa) competition in 1988. Kalinina, an honorary president of Beauty of Russia, lives and runs her own yoga studio in Los Angeles. She is also the president of a school of beauty in Russia called The First School of Aesthetic Development and Completeness, a place where women can learn to behave like beauty queens. 
“We try to achieve a golden mean between feminism and femininity,” said Zina Baldanova, who works for the school, which will open this fall. The courses, which will run for three hours daily, will include classes in stress-management and etiquette.
“We want a woman to be a good wife and housewife, but we also want her to be presentable in public,” Baldanova said. 
“The daily yoga will not only help the girls deal with the stress of the contest,” said Kalinina at a news conference. “It will also help give the girls the confidence they’ll need to talk to the media. Often a girl can do well in the beauty part of the competition, but when it comes to talking to the press or on stage she has trouble expressing her thoughts. The yoga helps with that a lot.”
The youngest participant this year was 15 years old, and the oldest was 23, although Andreyeva said that women as old as 26 could compete. This year the contest was also open to women who have children but are not married.
“Because of the small number of men in our country, there aren’t a lot of women who have kids and a full family,” Andreyeva explained. “We feel that a woman who has a child but not a husband is no worse than any other woman.”
As 2008 is the state-sponsored Year of the Family, this year’s Beauty of Russia is dedicated to “developing family priorities, the maternal spirit and female beauty as a national resource.”
Although her Miss Universe crown was taken away from her after four months for not completing her duties, beauty has launched Fyodorova’s career. She has a television show, “Goodnight, Little Ones,” and is also a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. Soon she will also release a book of beauty advice and style.
A rather different beauty contest has changed the life of another young woman. In 2005, Russia held its first, and so far only, Miss HIV-Positive beauty pageant. The winner of the contest was Svetlana Izambayeva, 24.
While physical appearance played a role in the contest, the focus was more on women who presented a positive outlook on life. “The contest was important not only for providing people with information about HIV, but also for helping the women work through some of their own issues,” says Izambayeva, who is married and recently gave birth to an HIV-negative girl.
For the winner, the pageant was one of the most memorable events in her life and a turning point for her activism. Thanks to the contest, she was able to found her own organization, the Svetlana Izambayeva Foundation, which helps HIV-positive women deal with the emotional, psychological and social stress of their illness.
“These kinds of events give people the power to open up, to deal with their self-stigmatization and help other people realize that this can happen to anyone, that people with HIV are regular people, just like them.”

TITLE: The greatest show on earth
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics will get the Summer Games — billed as the greatest show on earth — off to an explosive start on Friday.
You would not expect anything less from the nation that invented gunpowder, and fireworks are certain to play a major role in the 3-hour spectacular that China hopes will help dispel political controversies dogging the Games.
The firework show will include dozens of smiley face bursts and is expected to feature fireworks in the shape of a yellow dragon with red peony flowers in the background.
The main artistic director of the fireworks said they will be launched from more than 1,800 sites around the city, including major urban areas from Tiananmen Square to Beijing’s new national stadium, the steel-latticed “Bird’s Nest.”
The Bird’s Nest will host the lavish opening ceremony that is set to draw on about 10,000 performers and could net a global television audience of more than 4 billion viewers.
It will be the most expensive show in Olympic history, with media speculating that as much as $100 million has been earmarked for the opening and closing ceremonies — more than twice that spent on the acclaimed 2004 Athens pageant.
The world got a tantalizing glimpse of what is in store when a South Korean television crew slipped past the security cordon last week to film a secret dress rehearsal.
The footage, flashed over the Internet, showed aerial artists floating over the track, mass kung-fu formations and replica humpbacked whales cavorting around the stadium.
A second dress rehearsal was held on Saturday, with fireworks from the stadium lighting up the Beijing skyline and some 90,000 Olympic workers and their families and friends invited to watch. 
“The ceremony will be astonishing and magnificent,” said Frenchman Yves Pepin, an events expert who helped Chinese director Zhang Yimou devise the show and whose contract forbids him from revealing any details of the content.
“This will be a way for China to show the world what it is capable of,” he told Reuters. “I think it is going to be the biggest show of its type ever seen.”
One mystery is how the organizers plan to light the Olympic cauldron. The identity of the final torchbearer has been guarded like a state secret and a mock cauldron lighting was not a part of recent rehearsals.
Chinese media reports have speculated that the cauldron will be lit by a fire-breathing dragon or phoenix. Others say the ceremony will have five torchbearers who set ablaze a cauldron shaped like the five interlocked Olympic rings.
Another guess involves basketball star Yao Ming, saying he will hold aloft in his massive hands a child who survived the May 12 earthquake that rattled Sichuan province, with the child tipping the torch into the cauldron.
However, on Wednesday, Ming carried the torch through China’s symbolic Tiananmen Gate, below a portrait of Chairman Mao, as the first torch-bearer in the flame’s final relay around the Chinese capital. 
Like much of the Olympics, the opening ceremony has been enmeshed in politics, with Hollywood director Steven Spielberg quitting as an adviser earlier this year to protest at China’s close ties with Sudan.
Earlier, the actress and human rights campaigner Mia Farrow had asked in a letter published in the Wall Street Journal: “Does Mr. Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games?”
World leaders debated whether to skip the ceremony to protest over China’s human rights record, but the guest list for Friday’s big event suggests that the fear of losing Chinese business crosses continents and oceans, and ultimately outweighs outrage over China’s human rights failings.
U.S. President George W. Bush is going, as is Australia’s premier. So is French President Nicolas Sarkozy, after he backed off a threat to boycott. Even Taiwan is sending a representative to the ceremony as ties warm between the rivals.
Other leading democracies were divided. The leaders of Britain, Germany and Canada are skipping the show. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will only attend the closing ceremony and German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said, repeatedly, that the opening ceremony conflicts with her vacation.
Russia will be represented by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Zhang and his army of workers hope that for 210 minutes the world will focus on fun and not politics.
“The ceremony won’t make people forget all the controversies, but they might put them aside for just three hours,” said Pepin, who masterminded the opening of the 1998 soccer World Cup in France.
Zhang, who has directed films like “Raise the Red Lantern” and “House of Flying Daggers,” has spent three years working on the production, looking to condense 5,000 years of Chinese history into a 50-minute segment which will be slotted into the show.
“Some previous ceremonies have been truly extraordinary and I have no doubt that the Chinese will match that, at least, if not take it on to another plane,” said British events producer Harvey Goldsmith, who organized the 2005 Live 8 concerts.
“But frankly these things go on for too long and it is getting increasingly hard to wow people,” he told Reuters.
Leaving nothing to chance, the ceremony will kick off at 8 minutes past 8 p.m. Beijing time on the 8th month of 2008. Eight is a lucky number in China. 
Television coverage in St. Petersburg begins at 4 p.m. Friday on channel Rossia, concluding at 8 p.m.

(Reuters, AP, SPT)

TITLE: New Eating Policy
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: NEP
37 Naberezhnaya Reki Moiki // Tel: 571 7591. www.neprestoran.ru // Open daily from noon until the last customer leaves // Shows at 8.30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday // Menu in Russian and English // Dinner for two with wine 2,785 rubles ($118)
About a year ago, rumor had it that the flavor of the month for holding wedding parties was a new Soviet-themed cabaret restaurant on the corner of Palace Square. Even the most die-hard communists would surely struggle to find romance in Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), yet the rumors persisted. 
Connoisseurs of the local dining scene could well be forgiven for imagining a kitschy affair crammed with hammers and sickles, Lenin busts and waitresses dressed as pioneers, a la Lenin’s Mating Call, a long gone restaurant once famed for its porn and less-than-private toilets. 
But there were no waitresses in NEP — only immaculate, attractive waiters in waistcoats, who were so graceful that at times it seemed as though they were gliding on skates around the small interior of the restaurant.
Nor was there a hammer, sickle or Lenin in sight. NEP’s opulent interior is almost disappointingly lacking in kitsch, with its cream banquettes, pristine cream walls and spotless tablecloths.  A tantalizing alcove with deep red curtains and silver sequined tie-backs suggested however that NEP might yet have a few tricks up its sleeve.
Whether or not the restaurant is reminiscent of a Soviet cabaret or restaurant in the 1920s, this journalist is not qualified to say.  It is perhaps safest to say that it could have been used as the set in a Miss Marple television adaptation, a feeling that was encouraged by theme tunes from TV serials such as Inspector Morse playing softly in the background.
In this sophisticated and extremely pleasant ambience, we were presented with complimentary hors d’oeuvres of feta cheese and cherry tomatoes, which whet our appetites nicely and promised good things to come. 
Starters of copious spring rolls with vegetables (from NEP’s Thai selection) at 230 rubles ($9.20), accompanied by two sauces, and Caesar salad at 210 rubles ($8.40) were equally enjoyable. The latter was a particular hit, with its crunchy lettuce and thin strips of juicy chicken. 
Even more delectable was eggplant with parmesan cheese and Mexican salsa sauce for 210 rubles ($8.40) — an exquisitely crafted tower of layers of perfectly cooked eggplant and cheese doused in warm salsa, with a sculpted cherry tomato at the peak. The piece de resistance of the dish however were the sprigs of fresh oregano dotted liberally around the dish, which set off the flavors of the cheese, eggplant and tomato to perfection.  
But a devilishly good eggplant dish was not the only highlight of the evening.  
Chicken fillet in sesame seeds with Kenyan haricot and peanut sauce at 270 rubles ($10.80) was in fact four fillets which appeared to have been deep fried and were served on a bed of haricots and smothered in a creamy, nutty sauce.  Again, the contrast between the crunchy fried chicken, the crisp and somewhat healthier vegetables and dreamily rich sauce hit exactly the right note. 
NEP’s chef’s talents are not limited to Thai and Mediterranean cuisine.  His talent for his own national cuisine was evident in the solyanka soup, 180 rubles ($7.20).
With food this good, the promised entertainment was simply a bonus. Instead of drowning conversation and intruding into the refined ambiance as feared, the band that started playing shortly before 9 p.m. was a welcome accompaniment to the food. 
A charismatic singer in inter-war attire knocked out songs in Russian and French, accompanied by a band. But with 270 rubles ($11) per person – added to the bill for the entertainment – surely there was more to come? And sure enough, the cabaret proper kicked off in the form of two lovelies in costume performing a highly comical dance in which they vied for the attention of the audience.  They proceeded to alternate with the live band during the course of the evening, coming out again to dance around their handbags, and finally to perform a saucy can-can which went down well with the diners, most of whom were by then at the digestif stage.
A fun place to celebrate a wedding indeed, though some grooms may be tempted by the high-kicking wenches.

TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: Leonid Agutin isn’t the most famous Russian pop star. But whenever the curly-headed singer raises a glass of anything stronger than water (although water will do), a Zhizn photographer is likely to be snapping in the vicinity. The tabloid regularly writes stories accusing Agutin of enjoying his tipple too much. And it may have carte blanche to continue doing so after this week, after Agutin and his singer wife, Anzhelika Varum, lost a libel case against the paper.
Moskovsky Komsomolets reported that the case was about two articles published last year. One was headlined “Varum Boycotts Agutin” and said that his wife wasn’t talking to him because of his constant drinking at a song festival in Latvia. Agutin “was more likely to be seen with a glass of cognac than with a microphone,” the paper wrote. The other article included quotes from an interview with his mother. It was headlined: “Varum is Tired of Agutin’s Binges.” Both articles were illustrated with the same picture of Agutin drinking a small bottle of beer. 
Last October, Agutin told MK — seemingly the only tabloid covering the case — that the articles were “complete nonsense.” He added that his mother had not given an interview to Zhizn. He and his wife asked for 1 million rubles ($42,000) in moral damages.
Agutin and Varum lost the case because the judge said some of the statements in the article could not be checked for truth and therefore were not libelous, their lawyer told Moskovsky Komsomolets.
I don’t know if this is the full explanation, but it is certainly true that Zhizn switched on a folksy, chatty tone, with lots of vague but somewhat damning statements. One of the captions for the beer-bottle photo read: “If you haven’t drunk vodka, you don’t know how good beer tastes in the morning.”
My favorite line was at the end of one article, which said that Agutin “wandered around the wings like the ghost of Hamlet’s father with a guitar.” It’s always nice to see a tabloid invoking Shakespeare, even though I don’t think the ghost had a thumping hangover, or a guitar.
The campaign against Agutin has been going on for some time both in Zhizn and its sister paper, Tvoi Den, although I’m not sure of the reason for the venom. Agutin and Varum always seem fairly harmless, not to say bland, figures on the pop scene.
Agutin has been around since the early 1990s and specializes in Latino rhythms and displaying his chest hair, while Varum is known for her melodic songs and unusually tasteful outfits. They married in 2000 and have a daughter. This year, they were among the performers at the Russia Day concert on Red Square for the massed ranks of youth groups.
But the tabloids have been working hard to create a seamier picture. In September last year — a month before Agutin launched the libel case — Zhizn wrote that the singer “lives on the principle: I have drunk, I drink and I will drink,” paraphrasing a saying about Lenin, who lived, lives and will live.
A few months later, it wrote that he ordered a case of cognac for his dressing room in a Moscow nightclub. And in July, Tvoi Den wrote that Agutin ordered three bottles of vodka to his hotel room. 
Last week, Tvoi Den drew a red rip through a photograph of Varum and Agutin for an article about them being on the verge of divorce. The couple are at the Latvian song festival again, but they’re spending their time separately, the tabloid wrote. And Agutin was spotted ordering a whisky.

TITLE: China Defiant in Face of Bush’s Criticism
AUTHOR: By Paul Alexander
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BANGKOK, Thailand — China rejected President Bush’s criticism Thursday of its human rights record and restrictions on religion, diplomatically telling him to stay out of its affairs even as he flew to Beijing to attend the Olympics. 
In a speech outlining America’s achievements and challenges in Asia, Bush pushed for a free press, free assembly and labor rights in China, and spoke against its detentions of political dissidents, human rights advocates and religious activists. He said he wasn’t trying to antagonize China, but called such reform the only path the potent U.S. rival can take to reach its full potential.
He antagonized the Chinese anyway, setting the stage for an interesting reception when he attends the opening ceremonies Friday evening, attends some events — including the U.S.-China men’s basketball game — and meets with President Hu Jintao on Sunday after attending church.
“The Chinese government puts people first, and is dedicated to maintaining and promoting its citizens’ basic rights and freedom,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in response to Bush’s speech. “Chinese citizens have freedom of religion. These are indisputable facts.”
He said China advocates discussions on differing views on human rights and religions on “a basis of mutual respect and equality,” then indicated it didn’t see Bush’s criticism in that light.
“We firmly oppose any words or acts that interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, using human rights and religion and other issues,” Qin said.
Bush did offer praise for China’s market reforms. “Change in China will arrive on its own terms and in keeping with its own history and its own traditions,” he said. “Yet, change will arrive.”
Bush has been trying to walk a tightrope in attending the games, wanting to avoid causing Beijing embarrassment during its two weeks on the world stage while also coming under pressure to use his visit to openly press China’s leaders for greater religious tolerance and other freedoms. Chinese officials bristled when he met with Chinese activists at the White House last week.
“With this speech, Bush is trying to address two polar issues: easing the controversy created by those who oppose his visit during the Games and simultaneously maintaining America’s strategy with China,” said Yan Xuetong, an expert in U.S.-China relations at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University.
Making the repression issue timely, China has rounded up opponents ahead of the Olympics and slapped restrictions on journalists, betraying promises made when it landed the hosting rights.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd urged the international community “to speak with a strong and united voice” to maintain pressure on China over human rights. But he conceded Beijing’s record has improved.
“Remember, it was not all that long ago they were in the middle of the cultural revolution with people getting put up against a wall and basically knocked off,” he told Nine Network television before flying to Beijing.
The White House’s handling of the speech demonstrated the president’s balancing act. Bush’s address containing the criticism of China was delivered outside the country, in Thailand. The White House took the unusual step of releasing the text of it even earlier, about 18 hours before he spoke.
And the speech was followed by a string of events Thursday, by both the president and his wife, Laura, that were clearly aimed at shifting the focus to the repressive military regime in Myanmar, neighbor to Thailand, where Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej regards himself as a friend of Myanmar’s generals. Myanmar, also known as Burma, marks the 20th anniversary of a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy activists on Friday.
The Bush administration has become increasingly vocal about Myanmar in recent months, blaming a corrupt regime for failing to help its citizens after a devastating cyclone in May, in large part by initially failing to accept international help and then only with tight restrictions, and for violently suppressing democracy demonstrations by Buddhist monks in last September’s so-called Saffron Revolution.
Mrs. Bush, the administration’s highest-profile spokeswoman on the issue, flew for the day to northwestern Thailand to visit a border refugee camp. The Mae La camp is home to 38,000 Karen, an ethnic minority that human rights organizations say is the target of an ongoing Myanmar military campaign marked by murders of civilians, rapes and the razing of villages. 
She also stopped at a health clinic run by a woman known as the “Mother Teresa of Burma.”
Remaining in Bangkok, the president was briefed at the U.S. ambassador’s residence on recovery from the cyclone that devastated Myanmar’s heartland and killed more than 80,000 people, had lunch with nine Burmese activists and did an interview with local radio journalists in hopes of influencing events across the border.

TITLE: FIFA President Slams Court Decision
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING — The Olympic football tournament is in danger of being undermined by a court ruling that allows clubs to keep players out of the Beijing Games, FIFA president Sepp Blatter said Thursday.
Blatter launched an angry diatribe at the decision of the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which ruled Wednesday that Argentina forward Lionel Messi and Brazilians Diego and Rafinha can be stopped from playing in the Olympics by their European clubs.
“I gulped when I heard that decision,” Blatter said at the International Olympic Committee general assembly. “It’s a rather dramatic situation.”
He said he feared the ruling would have a “snowball effect,” prompting other clubs to withdraw their players from the Olympics and force them to return.
“If all the national squads will lose players, if clubs force them to return home, we simply will not have an Olympic football tournament here in Beijing,” Blatter said. “We could do beach soccer or a five-a-side tournament. That would be very sad and the world would not understand it.”
“We cannot have players who have been entered in the football tournament in accordance with all the rules, we can’t let them go, we can’t see them return home,” he added. “It’s really sad to see such a decision was handed down, putting in danger the entire football tournament.”
Blatter suggested some clubs might seek financial compensation to let their players stay at the Olympics.
“Is that Olympic solidarity?” he said.
IOC president Jacques Rogge also expressed concern and urged clubs to observe a “truce” and let their players stay at the Olympics.
“After the games we will take stock of the Olympic football tournament and decide on what measures to take,” he said. “In the meantime, we have to manage it in the short term and appeal to the clubs not to withdraw players and allow players who are entered in the football tournament to put their dreams into reality.
“I would like to appeal to the clubs, plead with them to respect this dream. Please observe an Olympic truce for this Olympic football tournament.”
Three European clubs — Messi’s FC Barcelona, Rafinha’s Schalke and Diego’s Werder Bremen — went to CAS to keep their players out of the Olympics.
Despite the ruling, Messi still wants to play for his country instead of returning to Barcelona, according to Argentina coach Sergio Batista. Barcelona postponed making a decision on whether to demand Messi’s return until its coach talked to the star.
Schalke and Werder Bremen later offered to let Rafinha and Diego stay with Brazil for the Olympic tournament.
CAS secretary-general Matthieu Reeb said the three-member panel ruled in favor of the clubs because the Olympic tournament is not on FIFA’s match calendar, and because there was no evidence that the football body’s executive board obliged the clubs to release the players.
FIFA ruled July 30 that the players must be released for the Olympic tournament because they are under 23.
The men’s Olympic football tournament is for players 23 and under, with three exceptions for older players.
Both Barcelona and Schalke are scheduled to play Champions League qualifying matches during the Olympics, and they could lose out on millions of euros if they fail to reach the group stage.

TITLE: Musharraf To Be Impeached
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: ISLAMABAD — Pakistan faced fresh political turmoil on Thursday after officials said the country’s ruling coalition had agreed to impeach President Pervez Musharraf, a vital U.S. ally in the “war on terror.”
The agreement came after three days of marathon talks between coalition leaders Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of slain former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, and Nawaz Sharif, another ex-premier.
“The coalition parties have agreed in principle to launch an impeachment motion against President Musharraf,” a senior coalition official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
The government had summoned the national assembly, or lower house of parliament, to sit next Monday but it was not immediately known when any moves to start impeachment proceedings would begin, the official added.
Musharraf’s spokesman was not available for comment but officials said the president had again delayed his departure to Beijing, where he was to attend the opening of the Olympic Games on Friday.
Spokesmen for the two main parties in the coalition said a formal announcement was due to be made later Thursday.
Musharraf seized power in a military coup in October 1999 and ruled nuclear-armed Pakistan for eight years with the backing of the United States, which has counted him as a key ally since the September 11 attacks.
But his popularity slumped after he ousted the country’s chief justice and imposed a state of emergency in November 2007 to prevent any challenges to his re-election as president.
Musharraf stepped down as army chief that month, and the parties of Bhutto and Sharif subsequently trounced his allies in general elections in February.
Coalition sources said the agreement to impeach came when Sharif assured Zardari that he could count on the support of some former members of the PML-N who are currently members of a pro-Musharraf party.
“There was a major breakthrough in the talks late last night. We have agreed to impeach the president,” a senior member of Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party said.
An official from Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party, now led by her widower Zardari, confirmed the decision.
The parties have also agreed to restore judges sacked by Musharraf under emergency rule but were still working out the details, party sources said.
They said that a charge sheet on Musharraf’s position and performance as president would be drawn up and submitted to parliament to be signed by at least half of all MPs in the coming days.
The speaker of the national assembly, or lower house of parliament, would then notify Musharraf and ask him to defend his position within seven to 15 days, they said.
As president, Musharraf theoretically has the option of dissolving parliament and holding new elections, or even declaring another state of emergency to deflect any impeachment attempt.
The coalition had been split by the twin issues of what to do about Musharraf and how to carry out their pledge to reinstate the judges.

TITLE: Arshavin Said to Be On Strike
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The star player of St. Petersburg’s FC Zenit, Andrei Arshavin, has gone on strike, refusing to play in a cup tie against Sibir Novosibirsk on Wednesday, British media reported Thursday. Arshavin, 27, took the decision to strike because he was upset with Zenit’s stubborn stance on his transfer fee to British club Tottenham, the reports said.
Zenit on Thursday denied that Arshavin was on strike.
Tottenham is losing hope of signing Arshavin, with Zenit refusing to lower their $27 million asking price for the Russian playmaker, British daily The Telegraph said.
Tottenham was hoping to talk the Russian club down, but a meeting with Zenit President Alexander Dyukov and Dennis Lachter, Arshavin’s representative, was canceled this week, with Zenit standing firm on their demands, it said.
Lachter told The Independent that the chances of Arshavin joining Tottenham were now “very, very weak.”
“This is the Russian way,” he said.  “Nothing will change because this is the old Soviet Union.  For the Russian sports establishment, the desires of a player mean absolutely nothing,” Lachter said.
“They are the big bosses. It is a dictatorship.  He is a slave,” he said.
Tottenham is willing to pay around $17 million for Arshavin, whose performances at Euro 2008 attracted international attention as he helped Russia to the semi-finals of the tournament, The Telegraph said.
Zenit denied there was any truth in the rumors.
“It’s complete nonsense.  Arshavin is a professional.  He has a contract with the club.  So what kind of strike can there be?” Dmitry Zimmerman, a spokesman for Zenit, said by phone on Thursday. Zimmerman said that Arshavin did not take part in Zenit’s last match with FC Sibir because the club’s coach, Dick Advokaat, had given him and some of Zenit’s other leading players the opportunity to have a break.
Anatoliy Tymoshchuk and Konstantin Zyryanov did not play in the match either, Zimmerman said.
Zenit lost 1:0 to Siberia.
Alexei Blinov, Zenit’s PR director, also said there was no strike.
He refused to give details about Zenit’s negotiations on selling Arshavin to Tottenham, however.
“I don’t know the details of the negotiations.  Besides, it’s a matter of the private opinion of the player on the matter,” Blinov said.
Blinov said that at the press conference after the match with Sibir, Advokaat had said that the transfer window was open until August 31.
¦ In other transfer news, Manchester United winger Cristiano Ronaldo, who has been linked with a move to Real Madrid for weeks, despite being under contract for another four years, told Portuguese newspaper Publico that he would stay at Old Trafford “for at least another year.”
“...It was settled that the best for both parties would be for me to stay,” he said, Agence France Presse reported.

TITLE: Kinder Surprise Labeled Unsafe In Germany
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: BERLIN — Despite being a massive hit with children and adults alike, German lawmakers want to ban Kinder surprise eggs on safety grounds, press reports said on Thursday. 
Millions of the chocolate eggs with a toy inside are sold every year in Europe’s biggest economy, but according to a parliamentary health commission it is dangerous to combine food and toys in one product, the Bild daily said.
“Children cannot tell the difference between a toy and food,” the Welt newspaper cited Miriam Gruss from the commission as saying.
A spokeswoman for Ferrero, the Italian confectionery firm that has made the eggs since 1974, said a ban would be unjustified as the figures or toys are enclosed in a yellow plastic capsule.
“There is absolutely no evidence that there is an increased danger from the combination of food and toys,” Ferrero spokeswoman Elise Glaab told Die Welt.

TITLE: U.S. Basketball Player Chooses Russian Citizenship
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HAINING, China — Becky Hammon imagined this moment for a long, long time: Playing in the Olympics, hitting the winning shot, climbing the medals podium. She still might. Only her vision now comes in a different shade.
Raised on the Prairie, schooled at Colorado State and now starring for the San Antonio Silver Stars, she’s going to Beijing wearing the Russian red.
“We always used to watch the Olympics as a family growing up,” Hammon said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press. “My dream was winning a gold medal for the United States.”
“Now even though the dream changed a little bit, it’s been kind of bigger than I expected in a way because this story has caught the world by storm. I’m wondering why this girl from South Dakota got caught up in this worldwide story.”
Hammon’s odyssey began in March when she wasn’t in the 29-player pool picked for selection to the U.S. Olympic team. So she chose another option.
The 31-year-old point guard plays for a Russian club team during the winter and became a naturalized citizen there. Because she hadn’t played for the United States in any major FIBA-sanctioned international events, she was allowed to compete for Russia in the Olympics.
Fluent on the court, Hammon admits she doesn’t speak Russian well and likely won’t improve much before Friday’s Olympic opener.
“Not very good,” she said, laughing. “I need to learn the language. I’m working on it. I’ve only been over there for a year or two, and it’s a difficult language. I know a few words, but I need to get a lot more words. Most of the girls speak English so it’s fine.”
Although some critics say she shouldn’t be allowed to play for Russia — she does have the backing of Maria Sharapova, by the way — Hammon said she thinks she’s OK.
“If people really do have a hard time with it they should take it up with the Olympic committee or FIBA. I’m playing well within the rules, and I think it’s a little strange. It happens all the time in the Olympics. For people to get maybe upset or bent out of shape about me is strange, because this is something the United States has done many times,” she said. “There have been many foreign athletes that have come and competed for the U.S. and won medals.”
If she can lead Russia to a gold medal, she potentially will earn $200,000. Given a choice, she’d prefer not to face the Americans along the way.
“I think everyone wants to see the Russia-America matchup.” Hammon said. “If I have to play the United States obviously I’m going to go out there and compete to win, but that’s not what I want. I know it’s what everyone else wants, but it’s not what I want.”
Hammon and her Russian teammates were blown out by the USA 93-58 Monday night in the FIBA Diamond Ball tournament.
Even though she was wearing a Russian uniform, Hammon had her eyes closed and her hand over her heart during “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“I think the pregame was worse than anything,” said Hammon, who scored 10 points in the loss. “Once the ball went up it was just another basketball game.”
If the United States and Russia meet again in the Olympics, it will be on a much bigger stage with most likely a medal at stake.
“You want to meet the U.S. as late as possible,” Hammon said. “I have been playing against those players for 10 years. I think when the ball goes up it’s just going to be another basketball game. You just go out there and compete and enjoy the moment since it’s not going to happen again.”
When she decided to play for Russia in March, the Olympics seemed far, far away. Now with the games set to begin this week, she’s starting to get really excited about competing.
“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity and I’m really looking forward to it,” Hammon said. “I’m glad I’m not doing as many interviews now. Just being able to be here and play basketball. I think it’s been put off in the back of my mind for so long just concentrating on what we’ve been doing in the WNBA and now is the first time I’ve been able to be over here and enjoy the experience.”
One Olympic experience that Hammon may not get to enjoy is marching in the opening ceremony. With Russia set to begin its pool play the next day against Latvia, the team might not be allowed to participate.
“I know it’s still up for discussion,” she said. “I’d love to go watch even if we’re not taking part in it. I hear its pretty tremendous.”
Hammon had a long journey to even get over and compete with Russia. Her WNBA season ended July 27. She was supposed to fly out to Russia the next day, but she missed three connecting flights and was stranded in New York until Tuesday.
From there she had one practice with her new team before heading to the FIBA Diamond Ball tournament in China.
“It’s been quite a whirlwind to say the least,” she said. “I’m still learning most of the girls on the team. Three or four of them I’ve already played with, and I have a history with them. They are really a good group of girls; they are really sweet. They have made me feel very welcome and tried to get me accustomed to them very quickly.”

TITLE: Bin Laden Driver Verdict Reached
AUTHOR: By Mike Melia
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — Salim Hamdan pleaded with a military jury on Thursday to spare him from a life in prison, saying he worked as Osama bin Laden’s driver because he needed a job. Prosecutors asked for a sentence of no less than 30 years.
Hamdan, a Yemeni man with a fourth-grade education, was convicted by the six Pentagon-appointed jurors of aiding terrorism by driving bin Laden around Afghanistan at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. But he said he merely had a “relationship of respect” with bin Laden, as would any other employee.
“It’s true there are work opportunities in Yemen, but not at the level I needed after I got married and not to the level of ambitions that I had in my future,” he said, reading in Arabic from a prepared statement.
The jury found Hamdan guilty of aiding terrorism but acquitted him of conspiracy Wednesday at the first U.S. war crimes trial since World War II.
Under tribunal rules, the jury imposes the sentence, not the judge. Their verdict does not have to be unanimous. A Pentagon legal official later reviews the sentence and can reduce but not increase it.
The military judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, has already ruled that Hamdan should receive five years of credit for the time he has served at Guantanamo Bay since the Pentagon decided to charge him.
The tribunals’ chief prosecutor, Army Col. Lawrence Morris, earlier said the failure to convict Hamdan of both charges would factor into his team’s recommended sentence.
A psychiatrist hired by the defense told jurors that Hamdan has the potential to be rehabilitated.
The verdict will be appealed automatically to a special military appeals court in Washington. Hamdan can then appeal to U.S. civilian courts as well.
Deputy White House spokesman Tony Fratto applauded what he called “a fair trial” and said prosecutors will now proceed with other war crimes trials at the isolated U.S. military base in southeast Cuba. Prosecutors intend to try about 80 Guantanamo detainees for war crimes, including 19 already charged.
But defense lawyers said Hamdan’s rights were denied by an unfair process, hastily patched together after Supreme Court rulings that previous tribunal systems violated U.S. and international law.
Hamdan has been held at Guantanamo since May 2002. The military has not said where he would serve a sentence, but the commander of the detention center, Navy Rear Adm. David Thomas, said last week that convicted prisoners will be held apart from the general detainee population.
Under the military commission, Hamdan did not have all the rights normally accorded either by U.S. civilian or military courts. The judge allowed secret testimony and hearsay evidence. Hamdan was not judged by a jury of his peers and he received no Miranda warning about his rights.
Hamdan’s attorneys said interrogations at the center of the government’s case were tainted by coercive tactics, including sleep deprivation and solitary confinement.
All that is in contrast to the courts-martial used to prosecute American troops in Iraq and Vietnam, which accorded defendants more rights.
The five-man, one-woman jury convicted Hamdan on five counts of supporting terrorism, accepting the prosecution argument that Hamdan aided terrorism by becoming a member of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.