SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1407 (71), Friday, September 12, 2008
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TITLE: Opposition Newspapers Shelved By Printers
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A newspaper that was to have been handed out during the March for the Preservation of St. Petersburg, which takes place this Saturday, has been rejected by two printing plants and will not appear in printed form, the democratic party Yabloko said in a news release on Wednesday. Meanwhile, law enforcement authorities are looking for evidence of “extremism” in two leftist newspapers, which had their print runs seized late last month.
According to Yabloko, the management of the Atlant printing plant, which should have printed 10,000 copies of the special march issue by Wednesday evening, said it had to obtain permission from the police before printing the newspaper. 
When Yabloko asked the printers to give them this same explanation in writing, Atlant dropped its story about the police and claimed it had “internal problems” that prevented it from printing the publication, Yabloko spokesman Alexander Shurshev said by phone on Thursday.
The March for the Preservation of St. Petersburg special issue was planned as a four-page publication. It features articles criticizing Governor Valentina Matviyenko’s city planning policies, the ongoing destruction of historic buildings, and widespread infill construction, which march organizers claim violates the rights of residents. Censorship is forbidden by the Russian Constitution.
Earlier, on Tuesday another printing plant, Kuryer, refused without explanation to print the newspaper despite a prior agreement, Shurshev said.
On Wednesday, Yabloko placed jpeg files of the publication on its website to be downloaded and printed. Officially, the march leaflet was to be published as a supplement to St. Petersburg Yabloko’s newspaper, “Vperyod, Peterburg.”
“Maybe it’s self-censorship, but I can’t rule out that there was pressure put on them, because two different printing plants refused to print one and the same paper,” said Shurshev.
The police’s clampdown on the unofficial press in St. Petersburg started on Aug. 27, when Alexei Drozdov, the publisher of a small-circulation left-wing publication, “Za Rabochuyu Vlast,” (For Worker Power) was detained by two Kalashnikov-toting policemen outside the Sea Port after he had spent around thirty minutes there distributing his newspaper to dockers leaving the port after the day shift.
The publication’s lead article, entitled “Peace Enforcement,” criticized the Russia-Georgia war as “imperialist.” A policeman at the 7th Police Precinct of the Kirovsky District, where Drozdov was taken, characterized this as “anti-Russian,” Drozdov wrote in his account of the event.
According to Drozdov, he was interrogated by policemen as well as by a man introduced to him as an officer of UBOP, the organized-crime task force that deals with “extremism” suspects under a law introduced in 2004 by then-President Vladimir Putin. On Saturday, President Medvedev signed a decree making UBOP officially responsible for “extremism” cases.
The next day, Drozdov, who had spent the night at the precinct, was charged with “using obscene language in a public place” (a standard charge applied to oppositionists) and taken to court, where he was fined 500 rubles ($19). After the hearing, Drozdov said he was taken to the 4th Department of the UBOP, responsible for “combating political extremism,” where he was interrogated once more.
On Saturday, Drozdov got a phone call from Sergei Nabokin, the head of the department, who said he had no more questions about Drozdov’s detainment, though he asked Drozdov to show him the next issue of “Za Rabochuyu Vlast” when it was ready. Later on Saturday, Drozdov, who had spent nearly 24 hours at the police precinct, wrote a letter to Sergei Zaitsev, the St. Petersburg chief prosecutor. In the letter, Drozdov described his detainment as “unlawful” and a violation of his rights, and asked for an investigation into the police’s actions.
After they confiscated the 314 copies of the newspaper that Drozdov had with him when he was detained, the police raided the Atlant printing plant, also known as Polyarnaya Zvezda, where “Za Rabochuyu Vlast” had been printed.
During their search of the plant, two hours after Drozdov’s detainment, the police discovered and seized the print run of another newspaper, Chto Delat (What Is to Be Done), a leftist art publication that law enforcers found suspicious.
Entitled “What Does It Mean to Lose? The Experience of Perestroika,” the new issue of Chto Delat focuses on the hopes and outcomes of the Gorbachev era. It was supposed to be distributed at the U-Turn Quadrennial for Contemporary Art, which opened in Copenhagen on Sept. 5. The newspaper’s editor, Dmitry Vilensky, had been invited to the exhibition along with several other Chto Delat contributors.
Vilensky, who was interrogated by the police and UBOP officers, had to leave for the exhibition without copies of the newspaper. According to his account, he was told by the police that the case had been taken over by Olga Moiseyenko, the prosecutor of the Kirovsky District, who ordered an inquiry into whether the publication’s content violates the constitution.
“It is not we who are the extremists, but those who prevent free expression of opinions, introduce censorship, and hinder creative work,” Vilensky wrote.

TITLE: President Says State Can Lift Markets
AUTHOR: By Tim Wall
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — As Russian stock markets suffered a second straight disastrous day of trading Wednesday, President Dmitry Medvedev played down the drastic falls of recent months and pledged that the government would restore the markets to their levels at the beginning of the year.
Hit by the news that second-quarter economic growth fell to 7.5 percent, from 8.5 percent a quarter earlier, and a year-to-date inflation figure of 9.8 percent, the dollar-denominated RTS fell to 1,309.49 points, a two-year low, closing at 1,334.33, a fall of 4.4 percent.
The more liquid, ruble-denominated MICEX fell 3.8 percent to 1,114.67 at the close, its lowest level in 27 months.
Medvedev, whose comments in late July soothed investors after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin attacked miner Mechel over its pricing policy, sought again on Wednesday to reassure the market.
“In the end these changes are not dramatic. … If the right decisions are made, the situation will straighten out,” Medvedev said, RIA-Novosti reported. “We will return to the levels that we saw at the start of the year. In any case, I believe this is within the power of the government.”
But he also appeared to try to lay the blame elsewhere, sounding a tough, anti-U.S. note.
“We cannot change the situation on the U.S. market. Let the Americans sort out their mortgage system themselves,” he said. “But of course … they have pretty much set everyone up for this.”
Medvedev’s words drew praise in some quarters, along with calls for the government to implement the reform agenda he set out when taking office in May.
“It’s important for the government to say it cares about the market,” said Roland Nash, head of research at Renaissance Capital, adding that investors were eager to see Medvedev spell out in greater detail his administration’s policy agenda.
Rosneft, after falling in early trading, rebounded to finish down just 0.01 percent on the day, following comments from Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin that he would consider oil-tax cuts as long as there was no cuts to the value-added tax.
Other Russian oil stocks fared worse, however, as even a 500,000 barrels-per-day cut in OPEC production failed to give global oil prices much of a lift. On the MICEX, Surgutneftegaz fell 8.8 percent, Gazprom Neft was down 6.2 percent and LUKoil fell 5.6 percent.
Gazprom fell 2.2 percent on the MICEX to 202.74 rubles, its lowest-ever level, after the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service this week ruled that it had unfairly restricted access to its pipelines.
Banking stocks also took a further tumble Wednesday, with Sberbank falling 8.4 percent and VTB down 6.8 percent. Metals stocks followed the trend, with Severstal down 9.6 percent and Norilsk Nickel off 4.6 percent.
Government spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday that there were “no obvious reasons for the markets to continue to fall,” blaming this week’s losses on “emotional factors” and saying more sober sentiment would ultimately prevail.
There was a lack of consensus on the issue of tax cuts, with some analysts saying they would be well received by the market, while others warned that they could dangerously increase the economy’s dependence on oil if implemented without a range of diversification measures.
“If private companies are going to develop east Siberian fields, they need to be incentivized,” Nash said.
But Chris Weafer, chief strategist at UralSib, said cutting oil taxes could send the wrong signal, and end up increasing the economy’s oil dependency.
“It would only be a short-term fix,” Weafer said, adding that Kudrin was right to link the issues of oil taxes and VAT.
“VAT is the biggest source of tax revenue outside the natural resource sector, so cutting it would make the country more dependent on the oil industry,” he said.
The only short-term measures that the government can employ to restore confidence are boosting liquidity, by investing money from the National Welfare Fund into Russian equities, and pumping money into the banking sector, Weafer said.
Such measures can work, Weafer said, pointing to the example of after Sept. 11, 2001, when central banks around the world joined up to boost liquidity.
Kingsmill Bond, chief strategist at Troika Dialog, said that if commodity prices kept falling, there was not much the government could do in the “short term to support the equity market, unless they decide to commit funds to it.”

TITLE: Migration Service Enforces Disease Tests for Expat Workers
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Federal Migration Service has abruptly canceled an informal arrangement that allowed hundreds of foreigners to avoid mandatory tests for leprosy, syphilis and four other diseases when applying for work permits.
The migration service has required foreigners to be tested for the six diseases — HIV, chlamydia, chancre, tuberculosis, syphilis and leprosy — since July 2005. But after intense lobbying by the American Chamber of Commerce, it relaxed the rule in late 2005 for the group’s more than 800 member companies, requiring their foreign staff to take only HIV tests.
The chamber said Tuesday that an agreement with the Federal Migration Service had been struck down by the Health and Social Development Ministry.
Ending the arrangement promises to create a major headache for hundreds of companies, and the additional red tape could discourage investors already worried about the global economic turndown.
Migration officials announced the change in notices posted this week on the walls of its offices around Moscow, said Alexei Filippenkov, director of Visa Delight, an agency that helps companies obtain work permits.
The notice says all work permit applicants need to provide all medical certificates from Monday, said Yulia Barbash, a specialist at Vista Foreign Business Support.
The American Chamber of Commerce said that it would push for a return to the relaxed testing regime.
“What happened is that the Health Ministry overruled the Federal Migration Service,” Andrew Somers, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia, said Tuesday evening. “The chamber will make every effort to restore the status quo because we consider this requirement to be inconsistent with international standards.”
A spokeswoman for the Federal Migration Service declined to comment and referred all questions to the Health and Social Development Ministry. Questions sent by fax at the ministry’s request went unanswered Tuesday.
In addition to the six diseases, all foreigners will now be required to take a test for drug addiction, the migration service said in the notice.
The agreement with the American Chamber of Commerce was unofficial and based on talks between Somers and the Federal Migration Service, Filippenkov said. “If you read the law regarding permits, you will find that there are no exceptions for anyone or any organization,” he said.
“You need to just go to Mr. Somers and ask him, ‘How did you do it?’ and ‘Please do it again,’” Filippenkov added, joking.
Signs of a reversal had been looming. Filippenkov said one of his client companies, a member of the American Chamber of Commerce, was inspected by the Federal Migration Service two months ago and denied work permits for four employees until they provided the full range of medical certificates. 
It was unclear whether the change would be applied retroactively.
“We hope that if these demands continue, at the very least there will be an agreement that [HIV] certificates issued earlier will be accepted,” Barbash said. Some of her agency’s clients have submitted only HIV certificates and are now abroad.
Under the rules, applicants must be tested in private or state clinics in Russia or, if they do the tests abroad, get the results translated into Russian and notarized. But test results issued in 25 countries, including Italy, Finland, the Baltic states and China, are not accepted.

TITLE: Georgian Killed Near Russian Checkpoint
AUTHOR: AP, SPT
PUBLISHER: AP, SPT
TEXT: COMBINED REPORTS
Raising tensions, a Georgian police officer was killed Wednesday by gunfire that came from the direction of a Russian checkpoint near separatist South Ossetia, a government spokesman said. 
The policeman was at a Georgian checkpoint near Gori about a kilometer from the Russian post, Georgian Interior Ministry official Shota Utiashvili said. It was not immediately clear who opened fire. The Georgians did not return fire, and the policeman later died at a hospital, Utiashvili said. 
An official at the headquarters of Russian forces in South Ossetia said Russian troops at the checkpoint did not open fire. 
Meanwhile, more signs of Russian troop pullbacks emerged Wednesday. Russian forces began to dismantle another post near Abkhazia. Rustavi-2 TV showed Russian soldiers removing a fence at the post near Khobi.
Russian forces also appeared to be getting ready to withdraw from two sizable camps on the outskirts of the Black Sea port of Poti, Mayor Vano Saginadze said. 
Since the war in early August, Russia has recognized Georgia’s two separatist regions — South Ossetia and Abkhazia — as independent countries and has deployed forces at positions ringing the two regions.

TITLE: Khodorkovsky Has Advice as Stocks Fall
AUTHOR: By Nadia Popova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — As investors fret amid a global economic downturn, the government needs to be forthcoming about its actions in order to boost confidence in the Russian market, jailed businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky told The St. Petersburg Times.
Khodorkovsky also offered rare praise for President Dmitry Medvedev, saying he had acted appropriately on Georgia, and expressed hope that new presidencies in Russia and the United States would lead to improved relations.
The Russian economy has bled billions of dollars since the Kremlin startled investors by sending troops into Georgia to fight a brief war last month. Foreign investment fell by $20 billion in August, according to some estimates, while the stock market has lost billions of dollars more — events Khodorkovsky has been closely following in the dozens of publications he receives in his prison cell in the Chita region.
“Investors worry most about uncertainty,” Khodorkovsky said in a five-page written response to questions submitted through his lawyers.
“From my own experience, I know that people will make the worst assumptions if you fail to explain what is happening. That is why restoring trust has to begin with regular, detailed explanations of [the government’s] position,” he said. 
Khodorkovsky said the government is taking a step in this direction but needs to go further by announcing pending rules and explaining its actions based on those rules.
A third step, he said, would be to “consolidating these rules on an institutional basis, which is the guarantee of their stability.”
“Any other kind of market is open season for adventurers and crooks, which is absolutely not in Russia’s interests,” he said.
Turning to Georgia, Khodorkovsky said Medvedev had little choice but to invade after Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili tried to retake the breakaway region of South Ossetia by force on Aug. 8. Khodorkovsky also backed Medvedev’s decision on Aug. 26 to recognize the independence of South Ossetia and another breakaway region, Abkhazia.
“It’s evident that Saakashvili, counting on the support of the West, decided to launch a military venture without the sanction of the United States and overestimated the chances of gaining backing,” he said. 
“It’s important to understand that President [Dmitry] Medvedev had no other choice given situations on Aug. 8 and Aug. 26.”
Khodorkovsky previously has been reserved in his comments about Medvedev, and his lawyers earlier this year voiced hope that Medvedev’s assent to the Kremlin would help facilitate the early release of their client. Khodorkovsky’s supporters accuse former President Vladimir Putin of orchestrating his eight-year imprisonment on fraud and tax charges and the state’s takeover of his Yukos oil company in retaliation for his business and political ambitions.
Medvedev has indicated that he would not get involved, saying the case has to remain within the framework of the law.
A Chita court denied parole to Khodorkovsky last month, and his lawyers have appealed. 
With Medvedev cementing his power in the Kremlin and Americans voting for a new president in November, there is an opportunity to salvage relations that have sunk to post-Cold War lows after the Georgia conflict, Khodorkovsky said.
“The coming change of presidential administration in the United States and the gradual building of the team holding power in Russia offer a great chance at a fresh start,” said Khodorkovsky, once a regular guest at events at the U.S. ambassador’s Spaso House residence in Moscow.
“I very much hope that we will not cast each other in the role of Evil Empire,” he said.
On domestic issues, Khodorkovsky criticized a government drive to develop innovative technologies as insufficient and said foreign money investment alone would not solve the country’s problems.
“I think that money is not the most important thing for Russia today — there is more than enough of it,” he said. “What is important is knowledge, markets and cooperation.” 
In his more than five years in prison, he has worked out his own economic and social development plan for Russia through 2020.
Another issue Khodorkovsky criticized was inflation, which might reach 12.5 percent this year despite government attempts to tame it, including by freezing prices for staples like bread and milk for several months.
“I am convinced that monetary methods alone are insufficient to fight inflation,” Khodorkovsky said.

TITLE: Museum Shows Georgian War Trophies
AUTHOR: By James Kilner
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — A military museum in Moscow opened an exhibition on Wednesday displaying the Russian army’s trophies from a war last month against Georgia.
In a room about the size of a tennis court at the Armed Forces Museum, families walked past captured rifles and uniforms from Georgia and studied photos of dead Georgian soldiers and victorious Russian tanks.
“I wanted to show my son this,” 27-year-old Maxim said as he led his two-year-old around the room.
“He has to see how strong and powerful the Russian army is. It was not the aggressor but it still won.”
Georgia invaded the Russian-backed breakaway region of South Ossetia on August 7 triggering an overwhelming counterattack from Russia that ended five days later.
Tbilisi has said that it had to attack to prevent South Ossetian shells from destroying Georgian villages, while Moscow has said that it acted to stop Georgia from killing innocent civilians.
The exhibition in central Moscow was unequivocal in its interpretation of the conflict.
A series of photos showed Georgian missiles soaring through the air. The next series showed destroyed buildings in Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital.
Georgian rifles and uniforms supplied by the United States filled several of the glass display boxes, a map covered with Georgian writing and showing military units and arrows sweeping into South Ossetia lay in another.
“They found it in Tskhinvali after the Georgians fled,” a middle-aged woman told her companion. “It’s all clear now.”
More photos showed weeping South Ossetian women, injured Russian soldiers and burnt, disfigured Georgian corpses.
A Russian graphic also showed equipment — tanks, armoured personnel carriers, body armour and rations — supplied to the Georgians by NATO countries.
Another display showed Georgian soldiers’ personal photos, posing with friends or eating at a banquet.
At the exit from the exhibition, which led into a long hall adorned with images of chiselled Red Army soldiers crushing the Nazis during World War Two, stood a photo collection underneath a large red question mark.
The four photos showed Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili — his mouth and eyes wide open — sheltering from what he thought was an impending Russian bombing raid, under body armour held by his guards. 
The pictures were taken in the Georgian town of Gori a month ago, on August 11.

TITLE: Lavrov Calls Missile Shield Direct Threat
AUTHOR: By Gareth Jones
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WARSAW — Russia’s foreign minister told Poland on Thursday a U.S. missile defence shield Warsaw has agreed to host poses a direct threat to his country’s security but said Moscow remains open to further talks.
Poland has infuriated Moscow, its former communist-era overlord, by agreeing to host 10 interceptor missiles as part of the missile shield project. Washington says the shield is aimed against what it calls “rogue states” like Iran, not Russia.
“We cannot fail to see the risks emerging as a result of U.S. strategic forces coming closer to our borders,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a joint news conference with his Polish counterpart Radoslaw Sikorski.
“We are certain this system in Europe can have no other target for a long time to come but Russia’s strategic forces.”
But Lavrov, on his first trip to a European country since last month’s Georgia crisis reignited tensions between Russia and the West, balanced his comments with a call for dialogue.
“We don’t see Poland itself as a source of threats to the Russian Federation … We don’t agree on everything but we appreciate dialogue,” he said.
In an interview for the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza published on Thursday, Lavrov urged the United States and its allies to provide “guarantees” to Moscow that the shield would not be targeted against Russia.
His comments in Poland marked a slight softening of Russia’s stance after President Dmitry Medvedev recently said Moscow would have to respond militarily to Warsaw’s shield deployment decision.
Sikorski stressed the need for confidence-building measures and also reiterated Polish and U.S. arguments that the shield — which will also include a radar installation in the Czech Republic — is no match for Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal.
Polish officials and political analysts have expressed surprise that Lavrov pressed ahead with his long-scheduled trip to Warsaw despite the missile shield row and Poland’s vocal support for tiny Georgia during the South Ossetia crisis.
They say it underscores Russia’s wish to repair ties with Europe after Moscow found itself largely isolated globally over Georgia. Poland, the largest ex-communist member of NATO and the European Union, is an important trade partner for Russia.
“The conference of ministers Lavrov and Sikorski has not really produced anything new. But it’s still good that it took place at all,” political analyst Waldemar Dziak told Reuters.
“Russia has to negotiate with us as an important partner, despite contradictory interests. There are still many issues to be resolved,” he said.
Russia provides some 95 percent of Poland’s oil and nearly half of its natural gas. Bilateral trade totals $18 billion.
Lavrov reaffirmed Moscow’s opposition to NATO expansion, a cause long championed by Poland which especially wants its big eastern neighbor Ukraine and Georgia in the Atlantic alliance.

TITLE: Long-Range Bombers Due To Return From Venezuela
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Two Russian long-range bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons will return to base from Venezuela in four days, the Air Force was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying on Thursday.
The bombers, known in the West by the NATO codename “Blackjack,” were not carrying nuclear weapons during the flight to South America and will return to Russia on September 15, Air Force commander Vladimir Drik told Interfax.
“There were no nuclear weapons on board these planes,” Drik said.
The visit by the Tu-160 bombers is a show of strength by newly-confident Russia at a time of tension with the United States after the war in Georgia and U.S. plans for a missile defence shield in eastern Europe.
On Wednesday Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said the planes were in the South American oil-exporting nation to strengthen military ties and counter U.S. regional influences.
The bombers arrived days after Russia and Venezuela said they would conduct joint naval exercises in the Caribbean later this year involving a nuclear-powered Russian battleship.
The Russian military also held out the possibility of future flights to Cuba and that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez may fly on board the Blackjacks currently in his country.
A close ally of Cuba who calls its former leader Fidel Castro a mentor, Chavez already joked he would greet his friend from one of the bombers.
“I’m going to fly one of those beasts,” Chavez said on Wednesday.
When asked to comment, the head of the Russian Air Forces long-distance command, Pavel Androsov said that any requests would be considered positively.
“If they ask us, then fine, if they give us such an order, we will safely transport him (Chavez) and show him the Caribbean from above,” Androsov was quoted as saying by Interfax.
Androsov said Russian military experts had studied Cuban airfields and there would be no problems landing there, but that this was not currently planned.

TITLE: Medvedev Calls For Extra Funds
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia must do more to pump extra funds into its financial markets as investors continued to pull money out of the country, crimping liquidity and pushing the stock market down, President Dmitry Medvedev said Thursday.
Liquidity is tight after investors pulled out between $35 billion and $40 billion from Russia since the start of its five-day war with Georgia last month, Vladimir Tikhomirov, chief economist at UralSib Financial Corp. in Moscow said. The central bank said last Friday that it sold currency to prop up the ruble after investor withdrawals sent the ruble to its lowest in almost a year.
The conflict with Georgia, which was condemned by the West, has meshed with concerns about spreading global credit losses to quash investors’ appetite for riskier stocks and bonds. Interbank rates rose Thursday to 8.05 percent, the highest level in two weeks.
“The government and the central bank must do everything possible to ensure the flow of additional funds into the financial market,” Medvedev said in comments shown by state channel Vesti-24. 
Russia’s central bank Chairman Sergey Ignatiev pledged “massive operations to refinance commercial banks,” the Interfax news service reported Thursday.

TITLE: Sea Terminal Welcomes First Passengers
AUTHOR: By Yevgeny Rozhkov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg’s new sea passenger terminal, Morskoy Fasad (Marine Facade), on Vasilievsky Island saw its official opening on Wednesday when the Italian cruise liner, the Costa Mediterranea, carrying 2,000 tourists from 20 countries, entered Russia’s northern capital to mark the end of the navigation season in the city.
Anelito Montesarcio, the captain of the Costa Meditteranea, complained that it was hard to dock due to the windy weather and partial incompletion of the seaport.
“Also, there is only one channel in the port so far, which complicated the passage of the vessel. The crew had to maneuver every minute,” said the captain. 
Russia’s first modern sea passenger terminal is built on 447 hectares of land reclaimed from the sea on the western part of Vasilievsky Island on the coast of the Gulf of Finland, close to the city’s historic center. The terminal is capable of receiving cruise vessels and ferries with a length of up to 311 meters and a draft of up to 8 meters. The new access channels are 10 kilometers long and 11 meters deep. 
“In a record two years, the former bottom of the gulf has been transformed into 100 hectares of new territory. Never since the time of Peter the Great has the city entered the sea that far,” said St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko at the opening ceremony.
There will be a total of seven berths, and the berth wall will be 2,108 meters long when the project is completed in 2011. Until then it is the property of the St. Petersburg Seaport — the Marine Facade open joint-stock company — which will then yield ownership to the city.
“The expected payback period for the project is five to seven years,” said Alexei Loginov, head of the Northwestern branch of Sberbank, who said that the developers have borrowed about $40 million to complete construction, which began at the end of 2007. 
The St. Petersburg Western High Speed Diameter will provide access to the site. It will take 10 minutes to get to the historic centre and only 15 minutes to reach the airport, the project claims. It is easily accessible from St. Petersburg’s residential districts, and two metro stations are scheduled to be constructed near the site. Tourists will be able to use river transport during the navigation season and yacht berths will be provided. 
During this fall and winter, the second terminal will be built, and is due to host liners in 2009. Alexander Shimberg from the PR department of Marine Facade said that significant expansion of the project’s territory is being considered. 
“In discussing the possible prospective layouts for the city, architects are exploring some variants in which the land mass would approach Kronshtadt,” he said.
As the largest waterfront project in Europe, according to developers, the creation of a new territory of a total area of 4,620,000 square meters will enable the passenger port to handle an annual traffic capacity of 1.5 million passengers, and become a new social and business district for St. Petersburg.

TITLE: Firm Owned by Governor’s Son Applies for Hotel Sites
AUTHOR: By Nadezhda Zaitseva 
and Gleb Krampets
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: A company under the control of the city governor’s son has applied to reconstruct two buildings in the historic center as hotels, it emerged late last month.
The company Parameter in April applied to reconstruct the building at 7 Kazanskaya Ulitsa, and at 2 Ploshchad Truda, said the press secretary of City Hall’s Construction Committee, Anna Mironova.  The applications have not yet been examined by City Hall, but City Hall’s Town-Planning and Architecture Committee said that it had already agreed the boundaries of the two plots with the company. Parameter is drawing up projects to turn the buildings into hotels, said the press secretary of City Hall’s Committee for Investment and Strategic Projects. Representatives of Parameter declined to comment.
Parameter, via another company named Imperia, is owned by Sergei Matviyenko, the general director and VTB Development and son of St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko.  The same week, Parameter was allocated another commercial building in the center to redevelop as a hotel.
According to the program by which properties are allocated for redevelopment as hotels, which was passed by the government in July 2004, investors can obtain properties planned for hotels either via a tender or by direct allocation from City Hall. As well as Parameter, both President Center and Stanley Property Corporation applied for the right to reconstruct the building on Kazanskaya Ulitsa, said Mironova.
“Our company submitted an application to build a hotel or business center here three times, the last time at the beginning of this year,” said Vyacheslav Kaigorodov, marketing and PR manager at Stanley Property.
“We are no longer hoping to complete a redevelopment project on this site,” he said last month. 
The total area of corpus A of 7, Kanzanskaya Ulitsa is 9,720 square meters, most of which has been let until 2012. One of the tenants is Stanley Property.
“By unifying all the corpuses of the building, it would become possible to build a five-star hotel or class-A business center of an area of 40,000 to 50,000 square meters,” said Kaigorodov. He estimated investment at $167-209 million.
Even with an area of 9,800 square meters, it would be possible to create a 150-room five-star hotel at a cost of $42 million, according to the head of the hotel real estate department at Praktis CB, Yelena Ignaty.
At a tender, the building could have fetched up to $60-70 million. At an auction the building could have been sold for $140 million, according to a representative of Caspian development company, Roman Lvov. 
The building on Ploshchad Truda has a total area of 4,800 square meters and is located on the embankment, not far from the ‘golden triangle’ of the city center, and would be an ideal location for a five-star hotel, according to Lvov. 
Obtaining such buildings and land plots without a tender is very difficult, according to the managing director of Interconsult, Sergei Kovalyov.

TITLE: 1,000 Hit Streets Over Soaring Fuel Prices
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — About 1,000 transportation sector workers gathered in central Moscow on Wednesday to protest rising fuel costs and demand that the government regulates prices for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.
The event, organized by the Russian Road Transport Trade Union, was held across the Moscow River from the White House and was one of this year’s biggest manifestations of discontent over rising prices. OMON riot police and Interior Ministry forces were out in force for the protest, which lasted about an hour.
“An oil-rich country like Russia should make monopolists responsible for collusion and the endless rise of fuel prices, which are threatening the survival of many other industries,” Viktor Mokhnachyov, president of the Russian Road Transport Trade Union, said from the stage as the crowd cheered and waved miniature flags with the slogan “No to Outrageous Fuel Prices!” 
Unexpectedly fast consumer-price growth forced the government last month to revise its annual inflation estimate to 11.8 percent, from the previous 10.5 percent.
Among the protesters’ demands, listed in a letter to the government, was state regulation of fuel prices, which the demonstrators said were artificially raised by oil companies, including state-controlled Rosneft. 
Average gasoline prices have increased by more than 20 percent since the beginning of 2008, while diesel fuel has risen by 30 percent, according to the State Statistics Service. 
“I drive my own car to the dacha or to see relatives, but with prices growing every week, I have to think twice about when to take the car and when to stay home,” said Sergei Mitrofanov, a truck driver from Kolomna who was holding a banner reading: “Oligarchs, Keep Your Hands Out of Drivers’ Pockets!”
The event also targeted aviation-fuel prices, which have risen 50 percent in Russia this year, leading to canceled flights and a state bailout of airline alliance AiRUnion.
“Hundreds of pilots are being laid off, and there is a whole generation of people in the Far East who can’t afford to go to Moscow,” said Miroslav Boichuk, president of the Cockpit Personnel Association.
Another banner advised oil oligarchs to try living on a bus driver’s salary. “Drivers get about 30,000 rubles [$1,170] a month, and conductors a maximum of 15,000,” said Svetlana Popova, a bus conductor from the Moscow suburb Lyubertsy, who wore protest stickers and flags showing a crossed-out gas pump. 
“When gas prices increase, our salaries are cut to meet the budget,” she said. “We want higher salaries.” 
Smaller events were held in cities across the country, including in St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, Yekaterinburg and Kaliningrad, organizers said.
This is not the first protest for the Russian Road Transport Trade Union. Mokhnachyov, the group’s leader, organized a demonstration against rising gasoline prices in 2005, which led to no visible results. 
This time, he said, if the government does not move to address their complaints, another “more serious” demonstration will be held Oct. 7.

TITLE: Kudrin Changes Stance On Tax Cuts
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin appeared to pave the way Wednesday for a compromise on taxes, saying he would look at new cuts for the oil sector as long as there are no reductions in other taxes.
That seemed to mark a turnaround for the staunch fiscal hawk, who on Tuesday said he saw no scope for tax cuts and that if any energy producers were unhappy with this, there would be plenty of others willing to take over their deposits.
Instead, he proposed tax hikes to help shore up the pension system.
The issue is a thorny one in Russia, where businesses and the growth-focused Economic Development Ministry have countered the Finance Ministry’s tax-hike plans with proposals for cuts.
“If we don’t cut value-added tax and others, then we’ll take another look at the oil taxes,” Kudrin said. “It’s possible. We will consider it. But I am not willing to give a time frame.”
His comments appeared to chime with calls for a compromise on the issue from Kremlin economic aide Arkady Dvorkovich on Tuesday.
President Dmitry Medvedev is expected to make the final decision on tax reform later this month.
There were signs that the business lobby, which had earlier described the Finance Ministry’s long-term budget strategy as “unacceptable,” could be ready for the compromise.
“This is a sensible approach,” Alexander Shokhin, the head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, told reporters after Kudrin’s latest remarks.
Another potential sticking point remains VAT, which the Economic Development Ministry wants to cut to 12 to 13 percent, from 18 percent currently.
Kudrin estimated that cutting VAT and offsetting that with energy revenue would drive inflation higher by 3.8 percentage points.
“It’s like fighting a fire with kerosene, from the standpoint of financial stability,” he said, adding that it would reduce the private savings rate and boost Russia’s fiscal dependence on oil.
Inflation is a big problem in Russia, with consumer prices already up 9.8 percent since the start of 2008.
Taxes are also an important issue for Russian companies, and Kudrin’s comments against any more cuts for the energy sector helped send the country’s stock market to fresh two-year lows.
Oil companies pay a progressive tax on the oil they sell, limiting their upside from high prices. Suggestions of changes to the oil-tax regime tend to drive swings in stock prices.
“With oil prices going down, the government may simply be unable to find room for further tax cuts in its 2010 budget plan,” analysts at VTB Capital said in a research note.
“Should the government decide to freeze the tax reforms that had earlier been hinted at by the Energy Ministry and oil majors, the oil sector could lose an important medium-term value trigger.”

TITLE: Metalloinvest Wins Udokan Auction Ahead of Schedule
AUTHOR: By Nadia Popova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — A unit of Metalloinvest, Russia’s biggest iron ore producer, has won an auction for the huge Udokan copper deposit for $585 million and will invest more than $5 billion into developing it with Russian Technologies.
The Federal Subsoil Resource Use Agency named Mikhailovsky GOK as the winning bidder on its web site Wednesday, a full week before the tender results were expected to be announced.
Metalloinvest, half-owned by billionaire Alisher Usmanov, said in a statement that it would invest more than 100 billion rubles ($3.9 billion) in exploring the deposit and would pay 400 billion rubles in taxes over the period of its development.
Metalloinvest will work on Udokan with state-run Russian Technologies, which said Wednesday that it would invest at least $1 billion into Udokan. Metalloinvest said it was open to other parties joining the project.
Mikhailovsky GOK, with a bid of 15 billion rubles ($585 million), outstripped a rival consortium comprised of state-owned Russian Railways, the country’s second-largest copper producer Urals Mining and Metals Co., and state-run Russian Development Bank. 
Wednesday’s announcement came a day after Usmanov, whose company has no experience in the copper industry, met President Dmitry Medvedev and promised a one-billion-ruble ($39 million) donation to refugees from South Ossetia.
Three other bidders — Mikhail Prokhorov’s Onexim Group, Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element and Norilsk Nickel — had previously pulled out of the auction. 
The results had been expected to be announced Sept. 17. 
“We simply managed to make the decision earlier,” said Natural Resources Ministry spokesman Nikolai Gudkov. The ministry oversees the subsoil agency. 
“One of the main criteria was the depth of the refinery the participants were suggesting,” he said, adding that money was also an important factor. The ministry set the minimum investment into developing the deposit at $1.6 billion. 
Dmitry Kolomytsyn, metals analyst at Morgan Stanley, said Metalloinvest managed to win the tender because it is rich with cash. “The company, which is not traded publicly, has lots of money to invest, and its owner is close to the Kremlin,” Kolomytsyn said. “The next step for Usmanov will be to go on with his planned cooperation with Potanin.”
Usmanov agreed in May with Vladimir Potanin, chairman of Norilsk Nickel and a 30 percent shareholder in the company, to merge their companies into a global mining giant and might work on Udokan together. When Norilsk withdrew from the Udokan tender last month, Potanin said the company could still work on the deposit with the winner.
Norilsk Nickel spokeswoman Yelena Kovalyova reiterated Potanin’s statement Wednesday.
The Udokan deposit, located in the east Siberian region of Chita, is believed to contain 14.4 million tons of copper, 7.3 million tons of silver and 1.9 million tons of gold and has the potential to produce 187,000 tons annually.

TITLE: Hard Russia vs. Soft China
AUTHOR: By Joseph S. Nye Jr.
TEXT: By Joseph S. Nye Jr.

China and Russia have just provided the world with sharp contrasts in the use of power. As the French analyst Dominique Moisi recently put it, “Whereas China intends to seduce and impress the world by the number of its Olympic medals, Russia wants to impress the world by demonstrating its military superiority. This is China’s soft power versus Russia’s hard power.” 
Some U.S. analysts, such as Edward Luttwak, have concluded that Russia’s invasion of Georgia proves the “irrelevance of soft power,” and the dominance of hard military power. In reality, the story will turn out to be more complicated for both countries. 
Soft power is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payment. It is not the solution to all problems. NorthKorean dictator Kim Jong Il’s fondness for Hollywood movies is unlikely to affect his nuclear weapons program. And soft power got nowhere in dissuading Afghanistan’s Taliban government from supporting al-Qaida in the 1990s. 
But other goals, such as the promotion of democracy and human rights, are better achieved by soft power, which can also create an enabling or disabling environment, as the United States discovered in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. 
Skeptics who belittle soft power because it does not solve all problems are like a boxer who fights without using his left hand because his right hand is stronger. Soft power alone is rarely sufficient, but it is often crucial to combine soft and hard power to have an effective strategy of “smart power.” As U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last year, “I am here to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use soft power and for better integrating it with hard power.” 
Military force is obviously a source of hard power, but the same resource can sometimes contribute to soft-power behavior. The impressive job by the U.S. military in providing humanitarian relief after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and the South Asian earthquake in 2005 helped restore the United States’ image. 
On the other hand, misuse of military resources can undercut soft power. The Soviet Union had a great deal of soft power in the years after World War II, but destroyed it by the way the Kremlin used its hard power against Hungary and Czechoslovakia. 
Russia is now going through a period of nationalistic reaction to what it regards as the humiliation it suffered after the Soviet empire collapsed. With the rise in energy prices boosting its economy, Russia has seen an opportunity to reassert its power over its neighbors. In addition, it felt aggrieved by plans for further expansion of NATO, a planned installation of elements of a ballistic missile-defense system in Eastern Europe, and Western recognition of Kosovo’s secession from Russia’s ally, Serbia. 
Russia has sought to weaken Georgia’s government for some time. In early August, it set a trap in South Ossetia, and Georgia foolishly walked into it. 
If the Kremlin had used its so-called peacekeeping force solely to protect South Ossetians’ “self-determination,” citing the precedent of Western actions in Kosovo, it would have done little damage to its soft power, and the benefits could have exceeded the costs. But by bombing, blockading and occupying many parts of Georgia, delaying its withdrawal, parading blindfolded Georgian soldiers and failing to protect Georgian citizens, Russia lost its claims to legitimacy and sowed fear and mistrust in much of the world. 
Neighbors such as Ukraine have become more wary. An immediate cost was Poland’s reversal of its resistance to a U.S. missile-defense system. When Russia appealed for support of its Georgia policy to its fellow members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, China and others refused. Longer-term costs may include the failure of Russia’s proposal for a new European security system, a revived European interest in the Nabucco and White Stream gas pipelines that bypass Russia and a decline in foreign investment. 
In contrast, China ended August with its soft power enhanced by its successful Olympic Games. In October 2007, Chinese President Hu Jintao declared the country’s intent to increase its soft power, and the Olympics were an important part of that strategy. With its establishment of Confucius Institutes to promote Chinese culture, increased international broadcasting, attraction of foreign students to its universities and softer diplomacy toward its neighbors in Southeast Asia, China has made major investments in soft power. Opinion polls show an improvement in its international reputation. 
But China’s government did not achieve all its Olympic objectives. By not keeping its promises to allow peaceful demonstrations and free Internet access, China undercut its soft-power gains. 
It will take more than a successful Olympics to overcome these self-imposed limits. For example, a recent Pew poll showed that despite China’s efforts to increase its soft power, the United States remains dominant in all soft-power categories. So, while China won the most gold medals, the Beijing Olympics did not turn the tables on Washington outside the sports arenas. Let’s hope that China’s leaders will learn the importance of free expression for establishing soft power. 
Of course, only time will tell the ultimate outcomes of the guns and gold of August for Russia and China. Unlike an Olympic competition, their recent performances will not be given a final score until well after their power games have been played. 

Joseph S. Nye Jr., professor of international relations at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, is the author most recently of “The Powers to Lead.” © Project Syndicate

TITLE: Russia’s Sandy Democracy Doesn’t Fly
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: By Yulia Latynina

As everyone who watches Channel One and Rossia television knows, the West does not have a lot of warm feelings for Russia and is definitely out to get us. The West wants to create a unipolar world — one that would like Russia to become its permanent appendage. 
In response, Moscow is trying to create its own unipolar world, recruiting countries like Venezuela, Libya, North Korea, Iran, Syria and Cuba to its anti-West axis.
Despite its deep dislike of the West, Russia’s patriotic elite drive Mercedes cars, educate their children in London, buy villas in Nice and keep their money in Swiss bank accounts. Its stores sell Finnish toilets, Western designer clothes and German refrigerators. Unfortunately, there is not much point in buying from Syria or North Korea. The only thing they can produce is a lot of anti-Western rhetoric and, unfortunately, you can’t package this bluster and sell it in stores. 
It is also interesting that the oil-trading company Gunvor, owned in part by Gennady Timchenko, who has close ties to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, is not registered in Venezuela, Syria or in its own native Russia, but in bourgeois Switzerland.
We all know why the West didn’t care much for the Soviet Union. After all, it built a progressive, democratic and affluent communist society that the Western bourgeoisie envied with a passion.
But I can’t understand why the West dislikes the current ideology of post-Soviet Russia. After all, it abandoned communism a long time ago, and it sells its precious oil to the West through Gunvor and gas through RosUkrEnergo at fair market prices.
If you take a closer look at the essence of the Kremlin’s ideology, you will be shocked. You shouldn’t believe all of the terrible stuff the West says about Russia. As it turns out, Russia is building a genuine democracy, not the sham democracy like in the West. Moreover, it is not seizing private property and nationalizing it to enrich high-ranking state officials; it is building a true market economy, not the kind found in the West. Finally, it did not initiate a war against Georgia as a result of Putin’s personal vendetta against President Mikheil Saakashvili. It carried out a peacekeeping operation in accordance with international law, and it enforced a genuine peace, not the pseudo-peace you see in the West.
Anthropologists have written a great deal about the 20th-century “cargo cults” that arose in Melanesia. Adherents of those primitive faiths believed that all the amazing Western goods (or cargo) such as automobiles, guns and clothing were originally created by spiritual means by their ancestors. These modern goods had been intended for the Melanesian people, but the cursed white people stole everything before the goods could be delivered to the Melanesians. After seeing real airplanes for the first time, the Melanesians built one from sand, thinking it would fly. 
The Kremlin has taken a leaf out of the cargo cult book. It is trying to build democracy, a market economy, and it is attempting to enforce peace. But the only problem is that all of these institutions are also made of sand. Like the Melanesian airplane, none of them can fly very well.
The Melanesian people were certain that those infernal white people didn’t like them, and they had two ironclad arguments to prove it. First, the whites had seized all of the wonderful goods that the Melanesians’ ancestors had intended for them. Second, their airplane of sand couldn’t get off the ground — probably because the white people had cast a spell on it.
There are two basic ways to approach life. In one, you build a real airplane and fly it. In the other, you build an airplane of sand and then blame the evil West and its insidious plots and machinations for the fact that it won’t fly. 

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

TITLE: From A to Z
AUTHOR: By Chris Gordon
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: “The Hermitage: An A to Z of Art” is a new book from Arca Publishers that sets out to teach a thing or two about art while introducing readers to some of the treasures to be found in the Hermitage collection. 
A handsome volume that is profusely illustrated with more than 500 colour images, the book is a good, general introduction to art history terminology as well as a useful, if necessarily laconic, guide to the great museum. Divided into 65 main headings, most of which take up a double page spread, the material is fully cross-referenced and indexed, making it easy to use and allowing readers to dip in and out rather than read from beginning to end. 
True to its name, the book opens with Abstract art and concludes with Watercolour — X, Y and Z apparently being too limited to provide much worth writing about. The book is generally well thought out on the whole, and should serve the needs of the masses of tourists that swarm the halls of Russia’s number one tourist destination. Or possibly the authors have a younger audience in mind – teenagers perhaps? 
Certainly the style, with its liberal scattering of exclamation points, aims to entertain. And generally it succeeds at conveying the love and enthusiasm for the museum that the writers obviously have. That it still remains relatively scholarly does them credit. 
But it is debatable how successful a strategy this is. 
More often than not it comes off feeling ever so slightly patronizing; authors Catherine Philips and Leah Livshits are no Sister Wendys. Entries like that for Historicism contain the particularly condescending explanation that Pompeii was “a Roman town buried by lava after an eruption of the volcano Vesuvius.” Surely anyone old enough to read the book already knows this. Or do they?
Perhaps the authors understand their audience better. An aside in the same section, however, sinks to even greater depths telling the reader that anyone that likes to mix styles from different eras in their home or clothing is said to have eclectic tastes. 
But all this is nitpicking. Certainly the guide is informative and will be appreciated by those who haven’t a clue about what they’re looking at and hope to learn. The design, rather unfortunately, apes the successful DK Eyewitness Travel Guides without ever reaching their level of legibility or intelligence. One is often left searching for where to look next and there seems no logic that would guide the reader through the maze of material comfortably. This could be its one major flaw. 
Perhaps the designers were trying to recreate the disorientation that comes of being lost in the museum itself but there seems little sense in trying to lead the neophyte through a maze of arcane terminology only to abandon them among a sea of unconnected paragraphs without headings. 
Where “The Hermitage: An A to Z of Art” really excels is in the selection of works used to illustrate it. Like the museum itself, there are plenty of gems to be found scattered throughout and the authors have often plumped for less familiar works from the collection, which is refreshing. Good then for a flip through and as a reminder of the lovely things that the Hermitage contains that are too often forgotten amidst the rush of daily life, as an excellent present for the budding art historian in the family or as a teaser to tempt friends and family over for a visit.

TITLE: Chernov's choice
AUTHOR:  By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Although many Russians are caught up in war fever in the wake of Russian-Georgian hostilities, stoked into it by state-controlled media, local rock band <b>DDT</b> is doing a great job by placing anti-war posters all around the city. 
With red letters saying “Ne Strelyai!” (Don’t Shoot!) against a black backdrop, the posters advertize the band’s concert that was put together to make a statement about the war in Georgia. It is due to take place at Petrovsky Sports Complex on Sept. 24.
Another “Don’t Shoot” concert will also be held in Moscow, at Olimpiisky Sports Complex on Wednesday. DDT’s website calls the concerts “unplanned.”
“God created people for peace, not for war. All the rest comes from the Devil,” DDT’s frontman Yury Shevchuk said in a news release.
“I take the recent events in the Caucasus as a personal tragedy. All our peoples — the Russians, Abkhazians and Georgians — have thousand year-old spiritual bonds. So it is impossible to stand back and watch how certain politicians blow up xenophobia and nationalism pushing people into the war. 
“That’s why we decided to speak out about peace, about kindness, about our spiritual unity. We can’t allow evil to chain our minds and hearts with the iron fist of ambitious primitivism.”
According to DDT’s website, the band is now working on the concept of the concerts. DDT plans to invite as yet unnamed musician friends to take part in the shows and give a portion of the proceeds to people who suffered during the conflict.
 “It is peace — not war — we’ll be talking about,” the band said in the statement. 
“About peace, the importance of which is felt against the terrible backdrop of military actions.”
The concerts will also be the last by the band this year.
“Shevchuk went public himself recently, and did it in a very powerful way,” said former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky in an interview with The St. Petersburg Times in April. He was speaking about cultural figures joining the political opposition.
“We don’t say now how many of these figures there are. But there are more and more of them, you see, and this tendency won’t die, it will go on,” Bukovsky said.
The song “Don’t Shoot” was written by Shevchuk in the 1980s during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Earlier this year, Shevchuk took part in the Dissenters’ March and made strong statements against the local authorities’ town-planning policy criticized for the destruction of historical buildings, building of skyscrapers that destroy the city’s skyline and infill construction. 
A rally called March for the Preservation for St. Petersburg will be held near Yubileiny Sports Palace at noon on Saturday.
<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: Killing Kenny: ‘extremist’
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prosecutors on Monday fired a broadside against 2x2 television, accusing the cartoon network of promoting extremism with an episode of the iconoclastic U.S. cartoon “South Park” and violating children’s rights by airing shows such as “The Simpsons” and “The Family Guy.”
The City Prosecutors Office said in a statement that a commission of experts had determined that the South Park episode “Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics” was extremist in nature because it promotes “hatred between religions.”
The scatological episode features Christmas carols performed by the characters and hosted by Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo.
Prosecutors have asked the Basmanny District Court to rule that the episode encourages extremism.
It was unclear what further steps would be taken against 2x2 should the court rule in favor of the prosecutors. Repeated calls to the City Prosecutors Office for comment went unanswered Monday.
The director of the network, Roman Sarkisov, disputed the findings of the commission’s report, which was issued last month.
“I don’t think there’s any extremism in South Park, which is shown all around the world,” Sarkisov said. 
In a separate statement Monday, the Prosecutor General’s Office said numerous cartoons aired on 2x2, including The Simpsons and The Family Guy, were found to be unsuitable for children.
The shows “do not comply with legislation on protecting the moral and psychological development of children,” the statement said. Prosecutors have asked the Federal Mass Media Inspection Service to “take measures” on the network’s content, it said.
Yevgeny Strelchik, a spokesman for the service, said an investigation would be opened after the service receives the request from prosecutors and that the network could receive a warning.
In March, the 2x2 received a warning from the service for showing the cartoons “Happy Tree Friends” and “The Adventures of Big Jeff.” It quickly pulled them. Under media laws, two warnings from the service can result in a media outlet losing its license.
Sarkisov said the condemnation of the cartoons was due to a misperception in Russia that cartoons are only for children.
“We are working for adults,” he said. “In Russia, people still think that animation is aimed only at children.”
Sarkisov also speculated that the channel’s legal troubles could be linked to business. “Someone is trying to get our frequency,” he said.

TITLE: Lion tamers
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: VENICE — Eleven days of red carpet galas, 21 films in competition and countless interviews, photo calls and parties at the Venice film festival boiled down to just one man in the end — Mickey Rourke. The festival, which unofficially kick-starts the awards season leading to the Oscars, will be remembered chiefly for Rourke’s performance in Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler”, which the actor and critics agree is his best yet.
“The roar of Rourke” read the headline in the Corriere della Sera newspaper on Sunday.
The movie about an ageing wrestler who despairs as his body gives up on him and friends and family turn their backs, won the coveted Golden Lion award for best movie on Saturday.
The award seals his comeback from the Hollywood wilderness, and comments that Rourke is ready to ditch his bad-boy image and cooperate with directors suggest there is more to come.
“A guy like me changes hard, I didn’t want to change, but I had to change,” the star of 1980s hits “9-1/2 Weeks” and “Angel Heart” said.
“It’s OK for me now at this point in my life to play ball, to be a team player,” added the 51-year-old, his face marked by surgery for various boxing injuries.
Rourke’s triumph, and unanimous praise for Aronofsky’s low-budget picture, means the festival ended on a high.
But critics were underwhelmed by many of the films in the main competition, and debated whether the Hollywood writers’ strike, selection mistakes or plain bad luck were to blame.
Italian newspapers said the choice of “The Wrestler” for Golden Lion may help Venice lure U.S. movies, and with them top stars, to the Lido waterfront in the future as it strives to compete with rival festivals like Toronto.
“A verdict that rewards Hollywood, albeit in its independent incarnation, could be very useful … in attracting other films of this genre to the Lido,” wrote veteran film writer Paolo Mereghetti in Corriere della Sera.
There was controversy at Saturday’s closing ceremony when jury president Wim Wenders criticised rules which prevent the Golden Lion winner also picking up best acting prizes — suggesting Rourke should have won that too.
Italian newspapers said the comments detracted from the best actor award to home-grown Silvio Orlando for his acclaimed portrayal of an overprotective father in “Il Papa di Giovanna” (Giovanna’s Father).
The Silver Lion for best director was won by Russia’s Alexei German Jr. for “Paper Soldier”, set on the windswept steppes of Kazakhstan and centering on the 1960s Soviet space program.
The best actress prize went to France’s Dominique Blanc in “L’Autre” (The Other One), a haunting tale of a woman who becomes dangerously obsessed with a young ex-boyfriend.
“Teza”, by Ethiopian director Haile Gerima, picked up two prizes — the special jury award and best screenplay.
The story chronicles the life of an Ethiopian intellectual who flees his country during the Marxist “red terror” in the 1980s, only to be attacked in Germany by racist youths.
Jennifer Lawrence of the United States was named best emerging actress for her role in “The Burning Plain”, in which she appeared alongside Kim Basinger and Charlize Theron.
As well as “The Wrestler”, “The Hurt Locker” by U.S. director Kathryn Bigelow impressed critics with its portrayal of the perils faced by a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, while actress Anne Hathaway generated awards buzz in “Rachel Getting Married.”

TITLE: Packing a punch
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Dutch Punch, an annual celebration of underground music and arts from the Netherlands, kicked off with an installation by Mediaontwerpers, an experimental film screening and Machinefabriek’s concert on Thursday.
Now in its fourth year, this year’s festival, supported by the city of Rotterdam and the Netherlands Embassy in Russia, also encompasses Moscow, Pskov, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Kirov, Izhevsk and Yaroslavl.
“The festival is to represent the Netherlands’ independent culture of today — music, experimental film and visual art,” said Natasha Podobed, whose Rotterdam-based promotion agency Kultprom is behind the event, by phone on Thursday.
“What we choose is at least more or less original — you can’t really judge Dutch art from what we bring, because there could even be nothing essentially Dutch about it, but it should be unusual,” she said.
However, some acts do sound Dutch. 
“For instance, Raaskalbomfukkerz performs underground hip-hop in Dutch and those of my friends who speak Dutch say they have very good, sharp social-themed lyrics, written in Dutch, so you have to speak Dutch to understand them,” Podobed said. Raaskalbomfukkerz will perform at Sochi at 9 p.m. on Friday and at Mod at 11 p.m. on Sunday.
Just as Raaskalbomfukkerz, Lushus, the punk band with a touch of jazz that features two women on bass guitars and a drummer, comes from The Netherlands’ independent squat scene, according to Podobed. Lushus will perform at A2 at 9 p.m. on Saturday.
Dutch Punch’s art program concentrates on the Antistrot art collective, whose exhibition will open at the Sergei Kuryokhin Modern Art Center (the former Priboi art center where the SKIF festival is held) at 3 p.m. on Sunday and will last through Sept. 23.
“Many of those who come know much about Russia and want to come here. For instance, the artists of Antistrot like Russian avant-garde art from the 1920s, 1960s and 1980s, read Russian books, feel something in common with the Russian mentality and wanted to come to Russia for a long time,” Podobed said.
The festival’s film program features work by experimental directors Frans Zwartjes and Paul de Nooijer, which will be screened at the Center at 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Sunday, and animation film screening at Rodina at 8 p.m. on Friday and the Sergei Kuryokhin Modern Art Center at 4 p.m. on Sunday. 
The film program was supplied by The Filmbank Foundation, whose aim is to find an audience for independent, experimental Dutch films. A selection of Filmbank offerings will be screened at the Center at 5:15 p.m. on Sunday.
Www.dutchpunch.kultprom.org

TITLE: Fade out
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kozlov
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: The once seemingly insatiable Russian appetite for Western music is showing signs of subsiding, with several big-name acts struggling to sell concert tickets in the region this summer.
Long after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, surging numbers of international acts have ventured here in recent years to serve pent-up demand. Sergei Melnikov, general director of promoter Melnitsa, said the number of 10,000-plus-capacity shows by Western artists in Russia had tripled in the last three years.
But this summer, acts including Kylie Minogue, the Sex Pistols and Lenny Kravitz have all struggled to sell tickets, with local promoters blaming market saturation, rising costs and the high fees demanded by artists for a number of loss-making events.
“The supply of shows by top Western acts exceeded demand this summer,” said Dmitry Zaretsky, senior talent booker at SAV Entertainment, which organized Kravitz’s June 14 concert at Moscow’s 20,000-capacity Olimpiisky sports complex and co-organized Minogue’s concert at the same venue two days later.
Minogue has proved a hot ticket elsewhere in Europe this summer, performing seven 18,000-capacity shows at London’s O2 Arena. But only a half-capacity crowd turned up for her gig at Olimpiisky, according to Mikhail Shurygin, president of promoter NCA.
NCA, which also promoted Minogue’s June 18 concert at St. Petersburg’s 14,000-capacity New Arena, coorganized her Olimpiisky show and took a loss on the concert, Shurygin said. NCA also lost money on the Sex Pistols’ St. Petersburg gig at the 6,000-capacity Yubileiny sports complex.
“People have enough cash to spend on tickets,” Shurygin said. “But if there are too many similar concerts one after another, they can’t attend [them] all. Still, our understanding is that [Minogue] did better than other acts at Olimpiisky at about the same time, such as Lenny Kravitz and Nelly Furtado.”
Zaretsky declined to give exact numbers of tickets sold, but said Kravitz’s sales “weren’t good.” He blamed high artists’ fees for cutting into promoters’ profits and driving up ticket prices. “Western stars demand higher fees in Russia than, say, in Europe,” Zaretsky said, although he added that the “costs they incur here are also higher.”
Hotel rooms in Moscow are among the most expensive in the world, with many rooms priced in the $1,000 range per night.
Melnikov claimed that top Western artists demand 20 percent to 30 percent higher fees to play in Russia than elsewhere in Europe.
“One of the biggest problems is that new [promotion] companies, operating on cash from investors, offer artists unrealistically high fees,” Shurygin said. “Unfortunately, agents sometimes opt for higher fees rather than established companies.”
Such fees are normally passed on to the consumer, with tickets for Minogue’s Moscow show ranging from 1,000 rubles ($41) to 30,000 rubles ($1,230) for a VIP package. By contrast, tickets for the Dec. 17 show by veteran Russian band Nautilus Pompilius -- the only domestic act scheduled to play the Olimpiisky — are all priced at 1,500 rubles ($62).
But Neil Warnock, chairman of London-based booker the Agency Group — who has been taking rock bands to Russia since the ‘70s and will have Deep Purple on tour here in October — said promoters had only themselves to blame.
“You should know your market,” he said. “If you allow the artist to be overpriced, that is the promoter’s fault. If the artists want a zillion dollars, promoters have the option to say no.”
However, SAV’s July 18 Metallica show at St. Petersburg’s 25,000-capacity SKK Arena sold out, demonstrating that Western acts can still command big audiences, provided their timing is right. Promoters now plan to space out shows by international acts. But most remain confident that the market will bounce back, especially as ticket sales for domestic artists have held steady.
“Within three to five years, Russia’s live market should stabilize,” Melnikov said. “Easy-come, easy-go companies will leave — and Moscow will not be different, in terms of artists touring, from, say, Paris.”

TITLE: Sex Bomb?
AUTHOR: By Catrina Stewart and 
Nataliya Vasilyeva
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — He reportedly saved a TV crew from the jaws of a tiger and flexed his muscles before cameras in Siberia.
Vladimir Putin’s macho image has made him plenty of fans among Russian women — but according to one magazine, that doesn’t quite make him the nation’s sexiest politician.
Sex & the City magazine’s ranking of the nation’s 20 sexiest politicians gives the top slot to Boris Nemtsov, a former opposition leader widely seen as a spent political force. Prime Minister Putin came in second.
“This is good news … but I don’t take it too seriously,” said Nemtsov, who is pictured sitting on a bed, barefoot and dressed in a gray silk shirt and chinos.
It’s rare that Putin loses out in any popularity contest at home — where he is widely admired for having restored national pride and stability after the difficult post-Soviet years under Boris Yeltsin.
Russia remains a country with limited press freedoms and carefully controlled images of its leadership — so it’s unlikely an opposition figure could have pushed Putin into second place on weightier matters like leadership qualities.
Still, Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin lawmaker, said he was taken aback.
“Putin is way better than Nemtsov,” he said. “He’s one of the sexiest politicians in the world.” His looks may be average, he conceded, but his “decisive, harsh and unbending” character makes him extremely attractive.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov gave an embarrassed laugh when asked about the result — and said it was hard for him to comment.
A black belt in judo and an accomplished skier, ex-KGB spy Putin has been snapped in an array of macho shots, from flying a fighter jet to strutting his stuff on a nuclear submarine.
Last summer, photographs of a bare-chested Putin fishing, horse riding and off-roading in Siberia with Prince Albert of Monaco prompted admiring women to flood local newspaper web sites with excited letters.
In his most recent escapade, Putin last month was said to have saved a TV crew from a gory death at the hands of a tiger, shooting it in the nick of time with a tranquilizer gun in Russia’s Far East region of Ussuriland.
Compiled from an anonymous poll among 20 Sex & the City female employees, most of them in their mid-30s, the results are sometimes surprising.
Eduard Limonov — an aging opposition figure who sports a tufted haircut and goatie — made the list at number 14. Thrice married, his current partner is some 30 years his junior.
“Putin’s just short — what’s sexy about that?” laughed Limonov, before conceding that Putin’s power gave him sex appeal.
Even Russia’s highest office couldn’t get Dmitry Medvedev into the top five: the diminutive president came in seventh.
Some readers were perplexed by the magazine’s ranking.
“Nemtsov? I haven’t heard his name for ages,” said one.

TITLE: Unnatural selection
AUTHOR: By Hugh Barnes
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In 1928, as the United States headed toward the Wall Street crash, Josef Stalin unveiled a “great breakthrough,” the first five-year plan for making the Soviet Union supremely modern at any cost. Not only was agriculture to be collectivized, nature itself was to be transformed by Soviet science. Unfortunately, the science in question was false. Its champion, a self-taught geneticist by the name of Trofim Lysenko, is now a byword for scientific fraud. His archrival, the subject of Peter Pringle’s new book, is a less well-known figure who might have saved the Soviet Union but instead was sacrificed on the altar of communist ideology.
Nikolai Vavilov was a man of extraordinary talents. Born in Moscow in 1887, into the family of a peasant who had made a fortune in the textile industry, Vavilov turned his back on a business career in the last chaotic decade of tsarist rule in order to study plant biology. Educated at the University of Cambridge under William Bateson, founder of the science of genetics, and a visitor to the fruit fly lab at Columbia University where Thomas Hunt Morgan was developing Gregor Mendel’s laws by proving that chromosomes were the carriers of heredity, Vavilov was a botanical Indiana Jones who crossed deserts and climbed mountains hunting lost specimens on five continents. From 1916 to 1933, he made expeditions to many parts of the world, including Iran, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, China and Central and South America in his quest to create what ultimately became one of the world’s largest seed collections.
Amid revolution and civil war, Vavilov became a professor of agronomy in Saratov, a Volga port on the edge of Russia’s fertile black-earth farmland, where he pursued research into breeding more productive crops, which the Bolsheviks would need to offset future famine. At first, Vavilov struck up a rapport with Vladimir Lenin, who understood the ultimate economic promise of his botanical expeditions. As head of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Vavilov established 400 research institutes throughout the Soviet Union and collected samples of 50,000 varieties of wild plants and 31,000 wheat specimens. With the death of Lenin, in 1924, the Kremlin’s enthusiasm began to wane.
Stalin hated genetics — and chromosomes in particular, not least because the idea of genes as physical structures passed down through the generations suggested that nature wasn’t changeable. His five-year plan for agriculture was a lethal mixture of science and ideology. It borrowed from the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck a belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics (e.g. that giraffes grew long necks because they stretched their heads higher and higher to reach the fruit on trees). Such a belief has never been experimentally verified, in spite of many attempts, but it fit perfectly with the Bolshevik view that people could be re-educated to think and act differently from their bourgeois predecessors, that one generation’s suffering and torment could produce a new kind of being: Homo Sovieticus.
Using a wide variety of memoirs and archival documents, Pringle shows how the internationally acclaimed Vavilov was outmaneuvered by the “barefoot scientist” Lysenko, an uneducated peasant whom Stalin no doubt preferred to the unreliably bourgeois professor. Lysenko promised the Soviet leader that he would turn the Russian wasteland into a grain-laden Garden of Eden, using the bogus science of “vernalization” to eliminate the normal two-year growth cycle of winter wheat.
At several plant-breeding congresses from 1929 to 1930, Lysenko denounced Vavilov as a purveyor of “Mendelist-Morganist genetics” but he always lacked a proper knowledge of the science. (At one Party meeting, Lysenko was advised to link vernalization with a known authority such as Charles Darwin. His reply was to ask who Darwin was and where he could meet him.) This Soviet need to unite theory and practice in science was a key difference between the U.S. and Russian approaches to agriculture. Stalin’s economist Nikolai Bukharin, for example, spoke about the “primacy of practice;” that a scientific theory was only “correct” if it led to practical success. Vavilov united theory and practice in a different way. His world-famous collection of seeds promised to “direct the evolution of cultivated plants and domestic animals according to our will.” Yet, while Lysenko vowed to produce miracle plants that would turn the deserts green, Vavilov patiently explained to the Soviet leader that, using the new science of genetics, it would take up to a dozen years to breed improved varieties.
In August 1931, Stalin issued an astonishing and totally impractical demand. The normal period required to develop new crop varieties was to be reduced to four years. It was clear that Vavilov’s rational arguments were losing out to Lysenko’s mystical theories. Lysenko rose to the top of the Soviet hierarchy in science, while his opponent was attacked as an anti-Soviet agent and kept under constant surveillance. The only reason he wasn’t arrested until 1940 was that Stalin feared the adverse reaction of Vavilov’s many international admirers. The outbreak of war gave the NKVD a perfect smokescreen to make the unwanted genius disappear.
He was imprisoned first at the dreaded Lubyanka in Moscow, and then in a concentration camp at Saratov. But his interrogators could never break Vavilov even under torture. Indeed, his resistance became a source of pride among his admirers. Vavilov, they claimed, did better than Galileo, who was accused of heresy by the Vatican for believing that the sun, rather than the earth, was the center of the universe, and who recanted his ideas under threat of being burned as a heretic. Vavilov never renounced his belief in genetics and Mendel.
A British journalist and longtime Russia-watcher, Pringle tells the story with great verve and even clarity in the face of sometimes complex science. Yet the real achievement of this biography is to show that the Russian Revolution left more than physical damage in its wake. Not only did it ruin millions of lives, it also destroyed science and culture. Pringle describes a world distorted by ideology, a terrifying place where ideas were literally a matter of life and death. To disagree with Lysenko risked the gulag.
The only false note is the title itself, “The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov,” which seems a little shrill, given that Vavilov, unlike many of Stalin’s enemies and even friends (Leningrad Party chief Sergei Kirov, for example), wasn’t actually murdered at all. He was arrested and sentenced to death, later commuted to life, and then died of malnutrition, in 1943, in the Saratov camp.
The bogatyr was posthumously rehabilitated and his reputation restored two years after Stalin’s death in 1953, but the negative effect of Stalin’s anti-Mendelian crusade damaged perhaps irreparably the Soviet Union’s capacity to fight the Cold War. Soviet agriculture was never able to match its U.S. counterpart in terms of improving yields. In that sense, you could say the persecution of Vavilov led directly to the fall of the Soviet Union, which people often attribute to the space race or industry or oil. The irony is that it was agriculture finally that killed off the Soviet Union because the Communists had to import grain from the United States. Unfortunately, you can’t grow peas in the desert, as Vavilov understood.

Hugh Barnes’ “The Stolen Prince,” the story of Alexander Pushkin’s African great-grandfather, was published in 2006.

TITLE: Shooting war
AUTHOR: By Louis Charbonneau
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW YORK — Russian soldiers aim rifles at students waving flags. Tanks, cars and buses burn. A mother and her small daughter tread through rubble in front of smoldering buildings pockmarked by bullets and shrapnel.
These are some of the images in a new exhibition of photographs of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 taken by Czech photographer Josef Koudelka.
Although they are 40 years-old, some of the nearly 250 black and white snapshots currently being shown at the Aperture Gallery in New York look surprisingly contemporary, and are made even more interesting in the wake of Russia’s recent invasion of the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
The fighting that followed the invasion left an estimated 72 Czechs and Slovaks dead. It was the first news event the 30-year-old Koudelka covered.
As he roamed the city with his camera, Koudelka was not afraid to climb on tanks or look down the barrels of guns.
In a recent interview with the editor of Aperture magazine, he described some of the dangers he faced during the shooting and shelling by the Soviet soldiers.
“I climbed to the top of one of the buildings, and the Soviets saw me. They thought I was a sniper and started to chase me,” he said.
“I ran through the hallways into another building, and by chance found that a friend of mine was living there. I left all the film I had shot that day — about 20 rolls — with him, just in case the Soviets caught me.”
Koudelka barely slept for seven days. His photos were smuggled out of Czechoslovakia and reached the Magnum photo agency in New York. When they were published around the world a year later — ascribed to an “unknown Czech photographer” — they caused a sensation. Koudelka decided it was time to flee before Soviet officials learned the pictures were his.
The images show that the fighting was fierce, especially in front of Czechoslovak Radio headquarters in Prague. Cars, buses and tanks were set ablaze while the invading soldiers fired live ammunition and shelled buildings.
A photo taken in front of the radio building shows two young men, whose clothes and haircuts would not look out of place in 2008, walking through the rubble and smoldering debris carrying a Czechoslovak flag.
Another shows the corpse of a young Czech man who was shot when he tried to drape a Czechoslovak flag over a Soviet tank.
Koudelka’s images also help tell the story of what happened behind the scenes in August 1968, when Moscow put a stop to the growing reform movement in the Soviet satellite state.
One image shows the license plate numbers of cars allegedly carrying Czechoslovakia’s detained leader Alexander Dubcek and other members of the Prague government who had denounced the Warsaw Pact invasion as illegal.
“Stop the black Volga (cars) AE-40-01, ABA-71-19,” a young man writes on a building in chalk in one of Koudelka’s shots. “They’ve arrested our leaders.”
This period of liberalization, called Prague Spring, began in January 1968 and was intended to create what Dubcek called “socialism with a human face.” The reforms went too far for the Kremlin, which said that Prague government officials had asked Soviet, Polish, Hungarian and Bulgarian forces to stop Dubcek.
Dubcek and other government officials issued a proclamation against the invasion but they were arrested, whisked off to Moscow and forced to capitulate. Dubcek was later ousted and Soviet troops stayed in the country until the Velvet Revolution in 1989 put an end to four decades of Communist rule.

TITLE: New collection
AUTHOR: By John Wendle
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Russian art world has been booming the last few years on the back of huge investment. But one group conspicuous by its absence has been young collectors.
The exhibition “Young Gallerist / Young Collectors” at Moscow’s Pop/Off/Art Gallery aims to set this record straight. “This is the first time there has been a show of young collectors. Two years ago there were no young collectors of contemporary art in Russia. This is a really new situation,” said Sergei Popov, the gallery’s art director.
As Daria Zhukova, one of Russia’s newest and most famous young gallerists, prepares to open her multimillion-ruble project next week, the show at Pop/Off/Art, a gallery that has been open for three years, brings together works collected by a number of young collectors, including the art director’s three-month-old son.
“The next generation is open right now to collecting. They have money,” Popov said.
The exhibition features paintings by many artists, including Dmitry Gutov and Oleg Dou — at 25, the exhibition’s youngest artist.
“Everyone was saying there are no young artists in Russia, but this year there was kind of a boom,” Popov said.
Dou’s work, “Red,” sits in one of the most prominent places in the gallery.
The large work is a striking portrait of a woman that has been digitally altered to make it seem as if red paint were streaming off of her sideways at high speed — as if a jet engine were drying her or she were being sucked, digitally, into a computer.
The diasec work — a print glued to acrylic glass — is valued at around 20,000 euros, although Popov said interest in the work had been high. “It might be worth more than that, especially since this picture was published on the cover of ArtChronika magazine.”
Tucked behind a pillar are the less eye-catching, but more emotive works by Dmitry Gutov.
One of the larger paintings shows the bare, impressionistic outlines of a young frog floating in the water in matte green and blue colors. Down one side is the stenciled, dystopian story of a policeman being attacked by fighter planes in World War II and, near death, smiling when he sees the happy frog.
Gutov, 48, has taken part in shows across Europe, including the Venice Biennale and in the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
“Gutov might be understood as the person who renovated Soviet ideas for today and with the help of this tradition makes a new type of image that connects the Soviet and the post-Soviet era,” Popov said. “He is thinking about the way we can understand what happened during the Soviet period.”

TITLE: Baroque and roll
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Ten years ago, St. Petersburg was introduced to something new — which was in fact something quite old — with its first Earlymusic Festival. The event highlights the musical heritage of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque periods and has become a high point of St. Petersburg’s musical calendar.
This year, the festival casts its net further than ever to include a diverse range of musical styles and cultures. 
“For the first time,” its organizers say, the festival “an artistic platform emergeswhere different cultures may interact with each other through their historical roots, through their music.”
The point is illustrated well by the first concert of the two-week festival presenting ancient Persian music in the halls of the State Hermitage Museum. Other highlights include concerts by Japanese, Dutch and British musicians as well as Russian early music specialists. 
As well the concerts there is a short series of lectures and masterclassses on related topics (see www.earlymusic.ru for more information.)
The festival organisers hope that the concerts will demonstrate their belief that “early music, when performed on historical instruments, in its original form, and cleansed of all the interpretative distortions of the 19th and 20th centuries, is the most contemporary and innovative of the performing arts.”
State Hermitage Museum, Sept. 13
Iranian musicians Nima Fereyduni on the Persian instruments the tar, setar, and tombak with Marzhid Pakhnama on ney and Farkhad Saidi narrating and playing the santur, present “Roses from Iran.”
The concert is part of the closing ceremony of the Hermitage’s main exhibition of the year “In Palaces and Tents: The Islamic World from China to Europe.”

State Academic Capella, Sept. 15
“The Melancholy of the Islands” concert will have both 16th and 17th century English music performed by the leading baroque harpists Andrew Lawrence-King and 17th century Japanese music played on the koto, an ancient Japanese plucking instrument, by Kaeko Nakagava from Kyoto. 
The music will be accompanied by traditional Japanese songs and poetry from the time of Elizabeth I (Shakespeare, Donne) in modern English but pronounced in the rhetorical, rhythmic and “effects” style of the period.

Chapel of the Knights of Malta, Menshikov Palace. Sept. 22
St. Petersburg’s Dutch-style Menshikov Palace will host two musicians from the Netherlands: Erik Bosgraaf (recorder) and Izhar Elias (baroque guitar). 
They will present their program “The Nightwatch” — music from the time of Rembrandt and named after his famous painting. 
Menshikov Palace. Sept. 24
The early music of Finland will be presented by harpsichordist, organist and artistic director of the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra, Aapo Hakkinen.

St. Sampson’s Cathedral, Sept. 25
The Male Choir of the Optina Pustyn Monastery in St. Petersburg was founded in 1996 by Alexander Semyonov and, thanks to the close cooperation between the choir and a group of medieval scholars, many vocal music manuscripts, once consigned to oblivion and kept in book depositories in monasteries and academic libraries, have found a new life. The choir presents their new program Ancient Church Singing from both Western and Eastern traditions from 9th through 16th centuries: Gregorian, Bulgarian, Byzantine, Kakhetian (Georgian) and Serbian chants and Znamenny polyphonic interpretations of Kievan and Greek chants.
State Academic Capella, Sept. 27
Soloists of the “Catherine the Great” Ensemble and British tenor Andrew McKenzie-Wicks present “Love and Death Songs” in a rousing celebration of Grand Baroque. McKenzie-Wicks previously worked on the European premiere of the baroque opera “Boris Goudenow” written by Johann Mattheson in 1710.

www.earlymusic.ru

TITLE: Glass half full
AUTHOR: By Matt Brown
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Russkaya Ryumochnaya No. 1 (Russian Vodka Room No.1)
4 Konnogvardeisky Bulvar
Tel: 570 6422.
Open noon through midnight.
Lunch for two without alcohol 3090 rubles ($130)

The company behind the hugely successful Stroganoff Steak House has added a new restaurant to its portfolio in another part of the grand palace on Konnogvardeisky Bulvar where it opened for business a year ago.
For Russians, the new restaurant has an inauspicious name. A ryumochnaya was a kind of street-level vodka bar with high tables and no chairs designed to satisfy the need of working class Russians for a stiff drink with no fuss. 
Apart from its vodka connection — St. Petersburg’s fascinating Vodka Museum has been relocated to the same premises and is set to reopen after a revamp next month — Russkaya Ryumochnaya No. 1 (Russian Vodka Room No. 1) could not be a more different kind of establishment from its forerunners.
It is, however, steeped in sense of history. The classic Russian dishes and drinks on its menu date from the Petrine, Imperial and Soviet epochs, while its interior recalls the aristocratic country house settings to be found in the work of Chekhov.
Discreet waiters in buttoned-up, collarless shirts, waistcoats and long aprons glide across the light birchwood parquet in its two airy halls that seat up to 120 guests. Old foxtrots and tangos play quietly as if from a great distance. 
Apart from a full range of posh vodkas, Ryumochnaya No. 1 features a range of home-brewed liqueurs and sweet, flavored alcoholic tipples (nastoiki and nalivki) unique to Russian country living — including drinks made with honey, pepper, bison-grass and cranberries. Coca Cola is off the menu; at this restaurant there is only kvass.
Starters include a classic sliced herring with new potatoes, salted cucumbers and diced pickled beet for 240 rubles ($9.35) and chicken liver pate, also for 240 rubles ($9.35). The new potatoes at Ryumochnaya No. 1 are the real thing — small and sweet, and served chilled in a sugary dressing. The spiced pate is rich and filling and served with warm, crustless toast. 
A standout starter is the fish platter for 790 rubles ($30). A plate of four types of smoked fish from the salmon family — cisco (omul) from Lake Baikal, sterlet from the River Dvina, salmon from the Baltic Sea, and whitefish (sig) from the Russian Far East — this simple dish balances flavors from salty to smooth to sweet, textures from slimy to flaky to meaty, colors from pale yellow to octopus-ink purple to rosy pink. 
Fish also featured in the main courses in the breadcrumb-covered form of a Lake Ladoga pike-perch rissole with mashed potatoes (360 rubles/$14). Prepared in the classic manner of a Chicken Kiev, this surprising and delightful dish is satisfying on every level. The mashed potatoes were also wonderfully buttery, joining the melted butter that ran seductively from the heart of the cutlet.
More conventionally but no less excellent was Russkaya Ryumochnaya No. 1’s Chicken Kiev for 460 rubles ($18). Served with a bone as tradition demands, and accompanied with home made potato chips, the cutlet was enhanced with a cranberry sauce and a side order of cracked buckwheat mixed with mushrooms and chicken hearts. 
White banquettes upholstered in cinnamon and gold match the tableware, while Edwardian curios such as pipes and gramophones complete the charming, genteel atmosphere.

TITLE: Russia Beats Wales in World Cup Qualifier
AUTHOR: By Gennady Fyodorov
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Substitute Pavel Pogrebnyak struck nine minutes from time to help Russia snatch a 2-1 win over Wales in their World Cup Group Four qualifying match on Wednesday.
The Zenit St. Petersburg striker, who came on for captain Sergei Semak just seven minutes earlier, fired home a rebound from close range after Welsh keeper Wayne Hennessey saved Konstantin Zyryanov’s header.
Roman Pavlyuchenko had given the Euro 2008 semi-finalists a 1-0 lead with a 22nd-minute penalty after midfielder Carl Robinson brought down Zyryanov in the box.
Wales, who beat Azerbaijan 1-0 in their campaign opener on Saturday, had squandered the chance to take the lead five minutes earlier when Pavlyuchenko’s Tottenham Hotspur teammate Gareth Bale had his penalty well saved by Igor Akinfeyev’s acrobatic dive to the right.
Defender Bale made amends for the miss midway through the second half when he set up the equaliser, running through two defenders and crossing from the right to allow Joe Ledley to slot in with his left foot.
It woke up the home team, who pushed forward again, eventually getting the breakthrough in the 81st minute.
Forward Andrei Arshavin showed the sort of dangerous edge he displayed at Euro 2008, crossing in from the left after a nifty run down the flank and finding Zyryanov in the box.
Zyryanov’s header was palmed away by Hennessey into the path of Pogrebnyak, whose scorching left-footed shot had the Welsh keeper well beaten.
The Russians were determined not to let the lead slip away this time round, with Pavlyuchenko unleashing a powerful left-footed shot from the right minutes before the end which Hennessey managed to touch behind for a corner.
Russia coach Guus Hiddink was happy with the outcome but he criticised his team’s performance in the second half.
“We played two different halves. In the first, we showed great attacking play, which was enjoyable to see. We dominated the central area and the wings and we had our opponents panicking,” the Dutchman told reporters.
“The second half we forgot how to play our game. We became somewhat arrogant, sloppy with the ball, played sloppy defence and paid for our mistakes,” he said.
“But we showed some character in the end. We didn’t panic and tried to change the situation. We deserved to win. It wasn’t down to luck. You play to win and the winner is always right.”
Hiddink’s Wales counterpart, John Toshack, was disappointed.
“We suffered a little bit in the first half,” he said. “But we were a better side in the second half and to lose like that, obviously, was disappointing.
“But I am proud of our young lads. They worked very, very hard. We deserved a point but, I think, the Russians also felt they deserved to win.”

TITLE: U.S. Government Staff Graft Scandal Exposed
AUTHOR: By Tom Doggett
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WASHINGTON — U.S. Interior Department employees who oversaw oil drilling on federal lands had sex and used illegal drugs with workers at energy companies where they were conducting official business, an internal government report said on Wednesday.
Employees at the department’s Minerals Management Service “socialized with, and received a wide array of gifts and gratuities from, oil and gas companies,” according to the department’s inspector general, Earl Devaney.
“When confronted by our investigators, none of the employees involved displayed remorse,” Devaney said.
The alleged activities occurred between 2002 and 2006 and involved 19 former and current workers at the Minerals Management Service’s offices in Denver and Washington. Devaney recommended that those still on the job be fired.
The workers were involved in the “royalty-in-kind” program that collects and sells oil and gas turned over by energy companies as royalties for drilling on federal lands. About $4 billion a year in royalty-in-kind oil and gas is collected and sold by the department.
The oil companies named in the report were Chevron, Shell Oil, Hess Corp and Gary Williams Energy Corp.
The findings came as Congress considers legislation to expand offshore oil drilling, a priority of the Bush administration, which has been criticized for having close ties to the oil industry. Drilling opponents are likely to use the report as fodder to try to stop such legislation.
“It just underlies the fact that we shouldn’t be putting the future of our coasts and beaches in the hands of people who obviously care nothing about the public,” said Anna Aurilio, Washington office director for Environment America.
“American taxpayers deserve to have confidence that their interests are being protected when it comes to collecting royalties from the production of public oil and gas resources, especially given the potential for expanded domestic drilling,” Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, said of the inspector general’s report.
Devaney said he discovered “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” among workers in the royalty-in-kind program.
He said one supervisor engaged in illegal drug use and had sex with subordinates. Several staff admitted to illegal drug use and “illicit sexual encounters,” he added.
There was also alcohol abuse among government workers when they socialized with employees at regulated oil companies, he said.

TITLE: Armstrong Ends His Retirement
AUTHOR: By Jim Vertuno
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: AUSTIN, Texas — Look out France, Lance Armstrong is making a comeback.
The 36-year-old Armstrong is breaking out of his three-year retirement and aiming to win yet another Tour de France in 2009, a move sure to shake up things across the Atlantic and give a boost to a sport that has missed its biggest star.
In a formal statement Tuesday, Armstrong called his comeback an attempt to raise global awareness in his fight against cancer. Just as likely, it’s also about his relentless desire to compete and win, especially at the Tour, which he won a record seven times from 1999-2005.
Citing the slow pace of last year’s Tour and the rush from last month’s Leadville 100 race, Armstrong decided it was time to return.
“This kind of obscure bike race, totally kick-started my engine,” he told Vanity Fair in an exclusive interview, referring to the lung-searing 100-mile mountain bike race through the Colorado Rockies. “I’m going to try and win an eighth Tour de France.”
Tour director Christian Prudhomme told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Armstrong would be treated just like any other competitor, and must “follow all the rules today, that are much more strict than they were.”
“If Lance Armstrong is at the start of the Tour de France, it will be the same thing for him and for his team,” Prudhomme said. “There won’t be any exceptions.”
Professional cycling and particularly the Tour have missed Armstrong’s allure, even though skeptics refused to believe he could win without the help of performance-enhancing drugs.
Prudhomme noted the suspicions of drug use that followed Armstrong, and suggested that it wasn’t guaranteed that the former champion would make it to the start line next July.
“Suspicion has followed Lance Armstrong since 1999, everyone knows that. But in this proposed comeback … you have to remember we are in mid-September and that much water will run under the bridge until the Tour de France departure in Monaco,” Prudhomme said.
Armstrong is determined to silence the doubters. He’s even hired a video crew to chronicle his training for 2009, as well as his drug tests, for a possible documentary.

TITLE: Victims of 9/11 Remembered
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — The nation paused Thursday to mark the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks with a heartfelt ceremony at the World Trade Center site, the dedication of a memorial at the Pentagon and a planned visit to ground zero by the presidential candidates.
Relatives of victims killed at the World Trade Center gathered in lower Manhattan for readings from dignitaries and a recitation of the names of the dead. Later Thursday, Barack Obama and John McCain were due at ground zero to pay silent respects.
“Today marks the seventh anniversary of the day our world was broken,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at the start of the ceremony, calling Sept. 11, 2001, a “day that began like any other and ended as none ever has.”
The ritual at ground zero included moments of silence at 8:46 a.m., 9:03 a.m. and 9:59 a.m. and 10:29 — the times when two hijacked jets slammed into the trade center buildings and the twin towers fell.
Services were also held in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon, where a new memorial was dedicated.
Among the speakers at ground zero were three children who were very young when their father went to work at the World Trade Center seven years ago and never came home.
“I remember playing in the yard with him. I remember him pulling my wagon. He was strong. He always made me feel safe,” said Alex Salamone, wearing the soccer jersey of his father, John. “I wish I could remember more, but we were so young when he died.”
Edward Bracken, who lost his sister, Lucy A. Fishman, said she was “murdered by cowardly men using their religion to say they are right and we are wrong,” then added, “Pray for the men and women who sleep on the ground every night in the Middle East to keep our world safe.”
Relatives of victims began arriving at dawn at ground zero, now a huge construction site. American flags were draped over silent cranes, and some families held signs saying “We miss you,” “We love you” or “You will never be forgotten.”
The family of Sept. 11 victim Michael Diehl went to ground zero wearing white T-shirts bearing his photo and 9/11/01.
“It’s still very hard for us to come here. It doesn’t get any easier,” said Diehl’s sister-in-law, Norma Linguito. “I just wish they’d get the memorial up so we can have something, a marker, to remember everyone.”
Family members and students representing more than 90 countries that lost victims on Sept. 11 read the names of 2,751 people killed in New York.

TITLE: Britain Leads Way in Paralympic Cycling With 12 Golds
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING — Britain won three gold medals in track cycling Wednesday in the Paralympic Games, solidifying its spot behind leader China in the medal standings.
China leads the medal table with 24 gold and 77 overall. Britain has 21 gold and 43 overall, followed by the United States with 15 and 34.
Britain has earned 12 gold medals in cycling, the most of any team. Sarah Storey of Britain won the individual pursuit cycling race for her disability class and American Barbara Buchan won in her class.
Britain’s Anthony Kappes, Barney Storey and Ben Demery won the sprint final, and Darren Kenny, Mark Bristow and Jody Cundy took the team sprint.
Of the 12 medal events in swimming, Russia, Britain and the United States each won two gold medals. The other golds went to South Africa, New Zealand, Greece, Ukraine, Canada and Australia.
Meanwhile, German wheelchair basketball player Ahmet Coskun was sent home from the Paralympic Games after failing a pre-games doping test.
German officials said Coskun’s urine test on Aug. 23 showed the presence of the banned substance finasteride. The substance is used as a treatment for baldness, but also can mask the use of steroids.
Coskun is the second athlete kicked out of the Paralympics for doping.
Earlier this week, Pakistani powerlifter Naveed Ahmed Butt was banned for two years after testing positive for steroid methandienone metabolites.