SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1422 (86), Wednesday, November 5, 2008
**************************************************************************


TITLE: Russia, 
Libya In Nuclear Talks
AUTHOR: By Denis Dyomkin and Salah Sarrar
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia and Libya are negotiating a deal under which Moscow would build nuclear research reactors for the North African state and supply fuel, officials said on Saturday.
Russia earns billions of dollars each year by exporting its civilian nuclear expertise, but it has faced criticism from Western governments who say the nuclear technology could fall into the wrong hands.
Officials said a document on civilian nuclear cooperation was under discussion at talks on Saturday between Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, on his first visit to Russia for 23 years, and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Under the deal, Russia would help Libya design, develop and operate civilian nuclear research reactors and provide fuel for them, said a Reuters reporter who saw a draft of the document.
A spokesman for Putin said the deal was under discussion. “The agreement has not yet been signed. Negotiations are underway,” Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
Russia is in a three-way race with Europe and the United States to secure lucrative contracts with Libya after it emerged from international isolation by giving up its weapons of mass destruction program.
Putin said last month Russia was ready to consider building nuclear power plants for Venezuela, which under President Hugo Chavez has been a fierce adversary of the United States.
Russia is also building a nuclear power station for Iran, suspected by the United States and others of seeking to build an atomic bomb under cover of its nuclear power program. Tehran denies it has any such intention.
In keeping with his tradition on foreign visits, Gaddafi — who was born into a family of Bedouin herdsmen — pitched a tent in a Kremlin garden for his visit. A barbecue grill was set up in front of the tent.
Gaddafi later joined Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for a public Kremlin Palace concert by Mireille Mathieu. Itar-Tass state news agency said they were met with thunderous applause when they entered the hall.
They chatted with the French singer, enormously popular in Russia since Soviet days, over tea at the intermission.
At an earlier meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Gaddafi said he wanted more energy cooperation.
“Unfortunately, in the past our relations have been mainly focused on military and diplomatic contacts and there was virtually no cooperation in civilian sectors,” Gaddafi told Medvedev at the start of talks in the Kremlin.
Shokri Ghanem, Libya’s top energy official and head of its OPEC delegation, had come to Moscow “so he could discuss coordination with his Russian colleagues,” Gaddafi said.
“I believe such cooperation is especially appropriate in the current conditions. Moreover, we are linked by a common vision of energy policy,” Gaddafi said, in an apparent reference to the sharp fall in oil prices in the wake of the financial crisis.
Diplomats say Gaddafi’s trip to Moscow is intended to counter-balance his fast-expanding relations with the West. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went to Tripoli in September for the first visit by a U.S. secretary of state in 55 years.
A Russian newspaper reported on Friday that the Libyan leader planned to offer the Russian navy a base in the port of Benghazi, but the proposal was not mentioned during the part of Saturday’s talks when reporters were present.
Libya has Africa’s largest oil reserves, and Russian companies including gas exporter Gazprom and oil majors Rosneft and LUKOIL are keen to participate in energy projects there.

TITLE: Medvedev May Skip Largess in Speech
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky and Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writers
TEXT: MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin ordered massive spending increases in his last state-of-the-nation address as president, but his successor will have to think twice about making lavish pronouncements in his debut at the podium on Wednesday.
The global financial crisis has sent oil prices plummeting, threatening the outlook for budget revenues next year. The ballooning expenses that have already been offered to aid the economy coupled with major capital flight further complicate a generous promise of funds in the annual address.
Nonetheless, some are still hanging on to hope.
President Dmitry Medvedev could announce extra spending on the economy but it would not be significant, said Oksana Dmitriyeva, a senior State Duma deputy with pro-Kremlin party A Just Russia. 
If ordered, the money would likely pay for turning the economy around from its reliance on oil and gas exports by developing high technologies, a task advocated by now-Prime Minister Putin, she said. Medvedev could also propose tax incentives for that goal, Dmitriyeva said.
Ivan Melnikov, a Communist deputy speaker of the Duma, said he was sure there would be talk of more spending. 
“The question is whether the favors will be extended to the banking lobby or the real sector,” he said in comments passed through his spokesman.
Kaluga Governor Anatoly Artamonov ducked a question on whether he expected the president to announce more spending. Several other regional leaders did not respond to calls for comment on the address.
For any spending increases to materialize, the Duma would have to revise the budget for the next year, which it passed in the final third reading Friday. 
Increased spending would help the economy withstand the credit squeeze and slowing demand, said Danila Levchenko, chief economist at brokerage Otkritie. He said he was certain Medvedev would raise spending.
In his last state-of-the-nation address in April 2007, Putin ordered a 12 percent increase in spending that year on new roads, electricity facilities and relocating people from poor housing. The increases amounted to 650 billion rubles ($24 billion). In the previous year’s speech, Putin told the government to pay women 250,000 rubles for every child they have after the first, starting in 2007.
Others doubted, however, that Medvedev would push to drain state coffers more. “I don’t think the address will have expenses as its main ideology,” Mark Urnov, dean of the political studies department at the Higher School of Economics, said ironically. “It would be great if the budget … didn’t develop a deficit.”
Medvedev will speak as the attention of the world’s media will be glued to the outcome of the U.S. presidential elections, which Levchenko thought was intentional. Medvedev, he said, wanted to stay out of focus of the spotlight because he was going to rail against the West.
“There might be a lot of hard-line rhetoric designed exclusively for domestic use and not intended for the front pages of Western newspapers,” he said. “It’s not very good to make harsh statements at this point due to the capital outflow and huge pressure on the currency. In short, it’s not worth it to scare investors.”
Urnov from the Higher School of Economics countered that Medvedev would use a moderate tone for the foreign policy part of the speech. “There will be no imperialistic pathos,” he said.
The address, which Vedomosti said was originally scheduled for Oct. 23, was delayed amid reports that Medvedev was not satisfied with its treatment of the financial crisis.
Medvedev, who aides said was personally amending the speech, first touched on its contents Friday, when he revealed that changes to the global financial system would be a topic.
“I will definitely pay some attention to this matter in delivering my address,” he said.
Artamonov, the Kaluga governor, and Dmitriyeva, the A Just Russia deputy, said Medvedev would probably talk about fighting corruption. One of the themes could be supporting sports in the regions, Artamonov said, describing it as a “very hot topic.”

TITLE: Groups Gather to Promote Tolerance, Slavic Nationalism
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: An annual anti-Nazi rally drew hundreds of supporters in St. Petersburg on Sunday, followed by two less-well supported nationalist rallies held on Tuesday, one of which was banned by the authorities.
Sunday’s pro-tolerance March Against Hatred rally was held in memory of Nikolai Girenko, a local scholar and hate-crimes expert who was shot dead at his apartment in June 2004. No one has yet been convicted of the murder.
An estimated 300 to 400 protesters gathered for Sunday’s event, which has been held every year for the past five years. The rally was sanctioned by the city authorities, but the number of protesters was fewer than at last year’s rally, which drew an estimated 800 supporters.
Activists included members of rights organizations Russia Without Racism and Memorial, opposition parties United Civil Front, Yabloko and the Libertarian Party of Russia, youth movement Oborona (Defense), African Unity, a group of gay rights activists carrying rainbow flags and banners and a large group of anarchists and radical anti-Nazis, many with their faces partly covered to avoid being targeted by neo-Nazis afterwards.
The anarchists were perhaps the largest single group, with about 100 young men and women carrying banners reading “Go Out to the Street, Take Back the City,” “Trash Nationalism” and “Freedom to Peoples, Death to Empires.”
Neo-Nazis had also prepared for the rally by leaving graffiti on a building next to the march’s gathering point near Yubileiny Sports Palace celebrating the murders of Girenko and Timur Kacharava, a punk musician and anti-fascist activist stabbed to death in the city center in November 2005.
Surrounded by OMON special forces, the procession, led by Russia Without Racism coordinator and March Against Hatred organizer Alexander Vinnikov, moved down Ulitsa Lomonosova, across the Birzhevoi Bridge and on to Ploshchad Sakharova,  where a stationary meeting was held.
When the marchers approached a University building, several left-wing activists of the Street University, a group that has held free outdoor classes since the temporary closure of the European University earlier this year, displayed banners reading “Universities to the Streets” and “Knowledge in Action” out of the window on the second floor. Several policemen entered the building in search of the activists but reportedly got lost in the unfamiliar corridors.
Next to the Kunstkamera museum where Girenko worked, Vinnikov halted the march and announced a one- minute silence in memory of the late scholar. When the procession reached the square, a stationary meeting was held, with speakers including Maria Gaidar, a Union of Right Forces member and the daughter of Yeltsin-era reformer Yegor Gaidar, United Civil Front leader Olga Kurnosova, singer/songwriter Alexander Gorodnitsky, rights activist and artist Yuli Rybakov, and Malkhaz Zhvaniya, a theater director and representative of the Georgian community in St. Petersburg.
Several speakers accused the Kremlin of provoking national hatred after the Young Guard, the youth wing of the Kremlin-backed United Russia party, held an anti-immigrant rally in Moscow on Saturday. During the event, entitled “Our Money to Our People,” the pro-Kremlin activists demanded that the authorities “send immigrant workers out of Russia.” 
Governor Valentina Matviyenko was invited to speak at the rally but no city officials showed up. Although Matviyenko claimed in August that no extremist crimes had been committed in the city in the first six months of 2008, rights activists say the number of hate crimes against ethnic minorities and foreigners actually went up.
According to Sova Center, which monitors hate crimes, between January and August 2008 at least 42 people in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast were the victims of racist and neo-Nazi attacks. Thirteen of them died.
Despite a massive presence at the rally, the police did not intervene, although a police cameraman filmed the event. Several anarchists were also cornered on the square for passport checks. A policeman copied their personal data into his notebook, but no arrests were made. A police spokesman said Sunday’s March Against Hatred “passed off quietly,” speaking by phone on Tuesday. 
Meanwhile, Tuesday’s Day of National Unity, which was introduced by the Kremlin to replace the traditional Soviet Nov. 7 October Revolution Day and celebrates a Russian victory over Polish invaders in 1612, was marked by two nationalist rallies, one sanctioned and one banned.
Although the authorities did not give permission for the Russian March that nationalists traditionally attempt to hold on this day, a Slavic Union-organized rally was sanctioned and drew an estimated 100 nationalists, who spoke against non-Russian ethnicities and freely made Nazi salutes at the Chernyshevsky Gardens on Tuesday. 
Although the Russian March, organized by DPNI (the Movement Against Illegal Immigration), which was to progress from Sennaya Ploshchad to Kazan Cathedral, was banned, the activists began to gather in the early afternoon at the square, where the district authorities had installed an inflatable stage and held a patriotic-themed concert under Russian flags.

TITLE: Ingushetia’s Parliament Names Yevkurov as New President
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Ingushetia’s parliament on Friday confirmed Yanus-Bek Yevkurov, a hitherto obscure military officer, to replace Murat Zyazikov as president of Ingushetia, a day after Zyazikov resigned suddenly as the head of the troubled republic.
Ingushetia’s parliament confirmed Yevkurov’s appointment Friday, with 16 deputies voting for, one against and one vote being invalidated, Interfax reported.
The departure of Zyazikov, who had become increasingly unpopular after months of escalating violence in the republic, was welcomed by the local opposition and most of the population after the Kremlin’s announcement Thursday evening.
“There is dancing in the streets. ... There is exuberance everywhere,” opposition leader Magomed Khazbiyev was quoted as saying by the Kavkaz-Uzel news service.
Ruslan Aushev, Ingushetia’s president during the 1990s, and whose return to the post had been called for by the opposition, said Zyazikov’s departure was long overdue.
“Yevkurov is the best solution for Ingushetia,” he was quoted as saying by Kommersant.
A source in the regional presidential administration said the new leader was not a temporary appointment. Yevkurov “will be president for five years,” the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

TITLE: Ecologists Slam Nuclear Power Plant
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: As work started on LAES-2, a complex of six power station units with VVER-1200 reactors that is due to complement the existing four 4 RBMK-1000 units of Leningrad Nuclear Power Station (LAES), environmentalists began a protest campaign against what they call an illegitimate and potentially hazardous construction. 
The project’s estimated cost is $10 billion.
Environmentalists at the St. Petersburg branch of the international environmental pressure group Bellona say the simultaneous operation of the existing and new plants will have a strong negative radiological and bacteriological impact on the population of the town of Sosnovy Bor, 80 kilometers south of St. Petersburg, where the station is located. The Bellona experts' allegations include a claim that the stations’ cooling towers could spread dangerous toxic microorganisms into the nearby Gulf of Finland. 
Bellona members stress that there has not been an independent analysis made of LAES-2 and that the analysis carried out by the state was biased.
“Our organization has been trying in vain to get access to documentation relating to the construction of LAES-2,” said Rashid Alimov, who heads Bellona’s office in St. Petersburg and is the editor of the Russian-language environmental news site www.bellona.no. “Proper public hearings have to be arranged and an independent analysis done before construction advances.”
LAES’ management has made a series of reassuring statements claiming that safety standards at the station and for the construction of the new plant are fine and should not be questioned.
“I would like to remind the residents of St. Petersburg that until the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Russian officials used to say that nuclear reactors were so safe that they could be placed on Red Square,” Alimov said. “So why should we believe the officials now, especially if they refuse to allow an independent pressure group to conduct their own analysis? It smells fishy.”
Bellona’s activists are collecting signatures for a petition to send to President Dmitry Medvedev urging the Russian leader to ratify the Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary Context (Espoo, 1991) that allows citizens of foreign countries to engage in open discussion of any industrial projects implemented by other countries that could potentially have a negative impact on the common environment.
In the meantime, ecologists from the Greenworld environmental group based in Sosnovy Bor are accusing authorities at the plant of financial mismanagement and routine safety violations.
Greenworld’s experts claim, among other things, that there have been numerous incidents of theft of non-ferrous metals from the station, including “important functional components for 40 operating safety control devices.” 
Greenworld further alleges that drunkenness among workers is widespread. Sergei Kharitonov, who worked at the plant from 1973 until March 2000, and who is now a Greenworld council member,
argues that “there have not yet been serious fires at LAES, but that is just sheer luck.” He said that more than 100 fire-safety violations are registered at the plant every year.
The ecologists say that the west should stop providing financial support for LAES projects, especially a plan to prolong the lifespan of LAES’s four RBMK-1,000 Chernobyl-type reactors. 
LAES officials insist that the plant is safe, none of the violations are significant and that generally, a high level of safety has never been questioned.
The plant’s officials point out that LAES is inspected annually by the Russian State Nuclear Inspectorate, or Gosatomnadzor, and by official delegations from neighboring countries such as Finland and Norway.
There have never been grounds for a scandal, the plant’s press-office says, and although the plant’s management receives a list of recommendations after inspections, these are nothing more than minor reprimands. 
Many Russian and international environmental groups have called for Russia to follow the example of some Western countries that have dismantled their nuclear reactors in recent years. 
Vladimir Slivyak of the Russian environmental group Ecodefense points out that Germany is committed to decommissioning all of its nuclear reactors by 2020. Sweden’s nuclear industry will be shut down by 2010. 
“The absurdity is that while the West is giving up nuclear energy because it is expensive and dangerous, Russia, which finds itself in dire financial straits is planning to construct new reactors,” Slivyak said. 
LAES supplies approximately 40 percent of St. Petersburg’s electricity. It employs more than 10,000 people.

TITLE: Communication Club Aids Cross-Cultural Learning
AUTHOR: By Andrea Hewitt
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Communication is the key to building cross-culture relations, says the creator and organizer of the Russian and International Students’ Educational Network, a local program that brings together young people from Russia and abroad.
“I had this desire to put curious people in the same room together ... where they can have a dialogue and see what happens,” says Gregory Sandstrom, 33, a PhD student at the sociology faculty of St. Petersburg State University. 
“The primary objective [of R.I.S.E.N] is to create a place where students and recent graduates can come and meet,” he says. “Mainly it’s in English, [but] we have offered discussion groups in Russian because the key is to have dialogue, conversation, communication about issues that are close to the lives of young people in St. Petersburg.”
Originally from Vancouver, Canada, Sandstrom first came to St. Petersburg in 2000 when he participated in a 10-month Russian language program.  He returned in 2004 to conduct postgraduate research.
But it was during a conversation with a group of other international students in 2006 that the concept for R.I.S.E.N. came about.
“We were discussing the challenges of being an international student here,” says Sandstrom. “And we thought: Why don’t we form a type of association”
“And it came to be that we wanted to have Russian students as well because part of the difficulty was how foreign students interact with Russian students so that there’s a shared understanding of what it’s like for a foreign student in St. Petersburg.”
Sandstrom took the initiative to arrange the first gathering of about a dozen participants. And under his direction, R.I.S.E.N. has come a long way in the last two and a half years.
A Saturday meeting at the Mayakovsky Library, which currently donates space and equipment to the R.I.S.E.N. program, attracted a crowd of about 80 people, roughly a quarter of which were international students hailing from a dozen different countries. 
Since its inception, R.I.S.E.N. has welcomed visitors from almost 40 countries, says Sandstrom.  And the number is always rising. Phillipp Zagozsky,19, of Cape Town recently had the distinction of being the first ever participant to come from South Africa.
Nevertheless, Sandstrom says he would like the program to be even more diverse.
“I think that’s the really neat thing, when you meet someone from a place you don’t know about,” he says, adding that one of the main features of R.I.S.E.N. is that it promotes international awareness and connectivity.
“You might meet someone from a country you’ve never [been to] and think: ‘Hey, they’re a really cool person. I’d like to know more about that country and maybe I’d like to go there someday because they told me some neat things that were really appealing to me.’”
On the evidence of a recent gathering, R.I.S.E.N. participants seem to share Sandstrom’s enthusiasm, as they quickly introduced themselves to one another before the activities begin.
A typical meeting starts off with what Sandstrom calls “ice breakers” — “a sort of human scavenger hunt where players must find people who share with them certain characteristics, likes, dislikes, strengths or weaknesses, or who can affirmatively respond to questions like: Have you ever lived as a visible minority in a country for over three months?”
It gets a little chaotic as everybody scrambles to find people to add to their list of names.  But some players don’t get very far before they find themselves engaged in a conversation with a new acquaintance and forget about the game.
The meetings also feature trivia questions and music from around the world, group discussions, occasional guest speakers, and, for the more adventurous sort, a “quest” activity that places a group of volunteers into a separate room to explore a specific scenario followed by a presentation of their conclusions. 
Questers were recently asked to create a hypothetical nation of 20,000 citizens in a region willingly ceded by Russia. The group considered questions ranging from politics and religion to labor and education.
Meanwhile, the other groups discussed questions related to the meeting’s theme. A recent topic was: How intertwined is our world? 
The questions are designed to fall into eight categories, says Sandstrom: “art, music, sports, culture, environment, relationships, science, and spirit.” 
The idea is that it can be inclusive so everybody can participate and not be shy or not feel like they don’t belong, explains Sandstrom.
The questions are also designed to incorporate current issues and events.
“The more accessible, the more relevant the topics are, the easier it is to create this discussion environment,” says Sandstrom.
“Sometimes the discussions get quite heated and people take sides, but we encourage [everybody] to listen to people and hear their positions and to discover that your view is not the only one,” he added.
Another objective of the program is to showcase Russian culture, says Sandstrom, adding that he is always looking for Russian songs and quotes to include in the trivia section.
The program is somewhat of a labor of love for Sandstrom.  He says he invests 10 to 15 hours planning a given meeting.  And he relies on donations from participants to help pay for the prizes he gives to the winners of the ice breaker and trivia challenges.
But coming from a family of educators, Sandstrom says hes committed to the project to have the experience of organizing it — “to see that it’s contributing something that’s needed or appreciated by the people who come.”
And R.I.S.E.N. participants appreciate his efforts. Denis Voytenko, 30, says he enjoys the program because it offers the possibility to meet very interesting people, adding that the meetings always generate new and creative ideas.
Olga Kudryavtseva, 24, a new-comer to the program, says she will definitely come again because “it’s very well organized and there’s a very good mood here... I like very much to communicate with people from different countries, to know about their culture and interests.”
“One of the things I like about it the most,” says Sandstrom, “is when a shy person will come out of their shell and feel like they can participate and contribute, or they can be important, or they can be active ... and they change during the course of the event.
“Because that’s one of the things that’s a real challenge in Russia ... There’s a real feeling that the state will do everything.  Whereas, no, you just have to get out and do it and build it.”
Sandstrom calls this countering fatalism and he sees it as one of his roles as the leader of R.I.S.E.N.
Quoting the Canadian communications specialist Marshall McLuhan, Sandstrom says, “I guess I bought into this idea that education is a dialogue and it’s about discovery; it’s not about being programmed.”
“I was always curious to ask new questions and if I can help facilitate other people asking questions, then maybe it’s a good thing and worth taking the time to do.”

Upcoming R.I.S.E.N. events are scheduled for Nov. 8 and 22 at 5p.m. at the Mayakovsky Library, Fontanka 46.  For more information, contact Gregory Sandstrom at risenspb@gmail.com.

TITLE: Details Revealed Of Brutal Priest Murders
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Two Jesuit priests found slain in their central Moscow apartment might have been killed a day or two apart, a senior Catholic official said Thursday. 
Otto Messmer, 47, a Russian citizen and top Jesuit in Russia, and Victor Betancourt, a 42-year-old Ecuadorian citizen, were found dead with battered skulls in an apartment on Ulitsa Petrovka on Tuesday evening.
Father Igor Kovalevsky, the general secretary of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Russia, said Betancourt was killed “earlier,” but it was unclear if it was a matter of hours or days.
He said he last spoke to Betancourt on Friday evening. The priest was planning to hear confessions on Sunday at St. Louis Catholic Church on Malaya Lubyanka but didn’t turn up.
The other priest, Messmer, was killed after he returned from a trip to Germany on Monday evening, Kovalevsky said.
The Investigative Committee released a statement on Wednesday saying that the deaths had probably occurred 24 hours before the bodies were found. A spokeswoman said Thursday that she could not make any further comment while the investigation continued.
Both priests came to St. Louis Church every Sunday to hear confessions, Father Eduard Shatov, a priest at the church, said Thursday.
“For all of us, it’s a really tragic event,” he said. “We are shocked, and we don’t know what is happening because the police are making their inquiry.”
Shatov said he had visited the apartment on Ulitsa Petrovka. Another priest who lives there is traveling in Belgium, he said.
The bodies were found by members of the order and accountant Pavel Subbotin, Kovalevsky said.
Subbotin earlier telephoned the apartment several times asking for Messmer, and an unknown man’s voice said he was sleeping, Kommersant reported Thursday, quoting a police source. 
Interfax reported that witnesses saw a short man, age 40 to 45 with Latin American features and wearing a blood-stained white shirt near the apartment. The Rusbalt.ru web site quoted an anonymous police source as saying investigators are looking for a Cuban man who studies at the People’s Friendship University.
Several newspapers have speculated that the crime might have had a sexual motive. Kommersant quoted a police source as saying two used condoms were found at the scene. 
Kovalevsky said he had no comment about reports in the “yellow press.” “We only trust the work of the investigators. It’s up to everyone’s conscience whether or not they believe the reports,” he said.
The Investigative Committee statement said a “domestic incident” might have led to the deaths, saying there were “traces of a party” in the apartment. Gazeta.ru reported that open wine and absinthe bottles were found in the kitchen.
Kommersant said police confiscated several possible murder weapons, including a large souvenir mug.

TITLE: New Flemish Art Goes on Show
AUTHOR: By Larissa Doktorow
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Since it opened in June 2007, the Ivan Slavinsky Gallery has launched a series of ambitious shows of works by contemporary artists — including by that of its owner, Ivan Slavinsky. The gallery is situated just across from the incubator of local artistic talent, the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts, on Vasilievsky Island.  
Starting Thursday, the gallery embarks on its latest and largest project so far. For a month it will be exhibiting the work of three living Flemish painters, giving St. Petersburg art lovers a rare occasion to get acquainted with modern trends in Belgian pictorial art. The exhibition has been organized to celebrate 50 years of the special relationship between the twinned cities of Antwerp and St. Petersburg.
The genesis to the forthcoming show goes back to the start of October, when Antwerp’s art world was treated to an exhibition of paintings by Slavinsky that were shown in the downtown venue Art Mix Gallery. The 20 works by this young and popular St. Petersburg artist that were taken to Belgium were highly representative of his style: a combination of realism, fantasy, Romanticism and historicism. Slavinsky’s large-size canvases depict knights in armor and Moulin Rouge beauties, St. Petersburg landscapes and prophetic images. 
In the 17th century, Flanders, of which Antwerp was the leading artistic center, together with Holland, gave the world the best painters of its time, including Peter and Jan Brueghel, Rubens and Van Dijk. These traditions are perpetuated at the Antwerp Fine Arts Academy to this day. The three Belgian painters in the forthcoming exhibition in St. Petersburg are all graduates of that school. Although they are all different, this common artistic heritage unites their art. 
The more than 40 paintings transported from Antwerp show the influences of realism, illusionary works, acid humor and the grotesque. Yet they also pay tribute to the later flowering of art in their region, as we see in the occasional artistic reference to the leading Belgian Expressionist of the early 20th century, James Ensor, or the Surrealist master Paul Delvaux.
In his still lifes, Jef Diels (born in 1952) devotedly follows the methods of the Flemish artists of the 17th century. After studying the style of the Old Masters for many years, he acquired the technique of the epoch and he uses traditional craft methods such as special sable brushes that enables him to achieve a special effect in his work called “beau fini.” 
Despite the technical references, the painter does not simply imitate paintings of the past. His choice of objects and brighter colors mark out the works as contemporary. Although he depicts optical illusions in the style of Jan Siberechts and creates almost tangible objects in high relief that are easily accepted as “Trompe l’oeil,” the objects in question and the psychological message they carry belong to our epoch. One vivid example is his large painting on wood entitled “The Son of the Emperor,” in which two embroidered slippers wait on a wooden bench for their long-gone owner.
For Renaat Veris (born in 1940), nature is the permanent source of inspiration as it was for Flemish Symbolists of the 19th century. His artistic output is enormous, including oils, watercolors, pastels and graphic art.
His paintings celebrate God’s creation. The paintings in their stillness evoke works by the famous 20th century Belgian painter, Paul Delvaux. It seems that nothing can violate or destroy the frozen, ideal beauty on show. Veris is the keeper of the keys to the Garden of Eden.
The world of fantastic realism is the inspiration for the macabre works of James Ensor, a painter from Ostende famous for portraying funeral processions and carnivals with figures wearing death masks and skeleton costumes. “Yesterday’s snow” is a typical example of his capricious, whimsical combination of realism and fantasy. 
Meanwhile, during his long and successful career, Walter Brems (born in 1947) has remained a faithful adept of realism. He works in oil and makes collages from his own graphic works, etchings and lithographs. His gray-blue paintings give off an atmosphere of melancholy, sadness and submissiveness. The use of chiaroscuro and cool shades of blue and white in such a manner that it approaches monochrome art can be traced to Flemish painter of the 17th century, Adrien Van Utrecht.  
As the painter explains: “The general theme of my works is alienation. I am trying to portray the lack of contact between people which leads to discomfort. That is why I place my characters in compartments, where they only get a limited space, which symbolizes the deprivation of freedom.”

“Flemish Realism: The Silence of Light” at the Slavinsky Gallery, 5/5 Sixth Liniya, V.O. Tel: 328 2222.

TITLE: Malevich Painting Fetches Record Price at Auction in New York
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: Russian painter Kazimir Malevich’s geometric 1916 “Suprematist Composition” sold for a record $60 million on Monday at Sotheby’s in a disappointing start to New York’s year-end auction season.
Of 70 lots in the evening sale, 25 found no buyers. The auction’s total came to $223.8 million, less than two-thirds of the $338 million low estimate. Christie’s International will hold its impressionist and modern art sales on Nov. 5-6.
Malevich’s colorful abstract work, anchored by a royal blue square floating diagonally on the canvas, surpassed his $17.1 million auction record set eight years ago at Phillips in New York.
Edgar Degas’ graceful 1879 pastel and gouache of a resting ballerina, “Danseuse au repos,” fetched a record $37 million including commissions, below its $40 million estimate.
The sale of the Malevich, which carried a $60 million estimate, lacked drama. Sotheby’s had indicated with a new symbol in the auction catalog that it had an “irrevocable bid” on the work, meaning that a party was contractually required to buy it even if there were no other bidders.
Before the auction, Simon Shaw, Sotheby’s senior vice president of impressionist and modern art, estimated there were five potential bidders from Russia and former Soviet states who might compete for the painting.
French billionaire Bernard Arnault sold another Malevich privately this year for about $50 million, according to Sotheby’s staffers.
Tonight’s Malevich had been featured in 20 exhibitions, including the artist’s breakthrough 1927 show in Berlin that established his international reputation. As a leader of the Russian avant garde, he was celebrated for his radical abstraction and rejection of representational art.
Tonight wasn’t ideal for selling a Russian art trophy.
“Most of the Russian high-net-worth individuals experienced margin calls in the last month and saw their wealth being destroyed,” said Sergey Skaterschikov, chief executive officer of Moscow-based IndexAtlas, which oversees a $50 million fund for art industry investments. “I don’t see how Russian high-net- worth individuals will put much money in art when they have so many other opportunities.”
The sellers were descendants of Malevich who received the painting, along with four others, in a restitution settlement with the city of Amsterdam.
The unnamed seller of the Degas was Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. co-founder Henry Kravis, who purchased the drawing at Sotheby’s in 1999 for a record $28 million. Sotheby’s promised Kravis, who served on the auction house’s board from 1997 to 2003, a guaranteed amount, regardless of the outcome of the sale.
Prices include a buyer’s premium, or commission, of 25 percent of the hammer price up to $50,000, 20 percent of the price from $50,000 to $1 million and 12 percent above $1 million. Estimates do not include commissions.

TITLE: Helsinki Ferry Gets No Help From City
AUTHOR: By Gleb Krampets
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: City Hall has declined to become a shareholder of the ferry line operating between St. Petersburg and Helsinki.
Talks with the ferry line operator, Stella Naves Russia, about selling a share packet to the city were not successful. The Finnish company invited the city to become a shareholder, valuing 51 percent of its shares at three million euros ($3.8 million) and consequently 10 percent at about 300,000 euros ($383,000), said Igor Glukhov, general director of Inflot Worldwide (the agent for Stella Naves).
The news was announced by Nikolai Asaul, chairman of City Hall’s Committee for Transport Policy on Friday. The city’s position on the matter is one of principle — if the project is cost-effective, then funds can be found from private investors without help from the state, he said.
The most recent ferry route between St. Petersburg and Helsinki was suspended at the beginning of October, having operated for just over two months.  The 1,000-person capacity ferry was never more than 50 percent full, and passengers were mostly Russian tourists. Stella Naves Russia canceled the ferry link due to insufficient revenues, and banks stopped issuing funding, Glukhov said at the time.  Stella Naves Russia and Inflot then appealed to City Hall for help. 
“If the city had bought shares in the company, it would have helped to attract private investors. They would have seen that the St. Petersburg government was interested in developing the route,” he said.
Stella Naves Russia has debts amounting to about 11 million euros ($14 million) — representing the cost of the cruise liner, which was bought using a loan, said Glukhov. Three million euros ($3.8 million) have to be paid back within four years, and a further eight million euros ($10.2 million) over eight years. Reports of 11 million euros of debt were also heard by a source close to the Committee for Transport Policy.
According to Glukhov, the ferry “Julia” will be sold at auction if the Finns are unable to find private investors.
The general director of InfraNews research agency, Alexei Bezborodov, said that Stella Naves Russia will not find investors now. “Why acquire a problem company whose main asset will soon be sold at auction?  And in any case, the ferry link between Helsinki and St. Petersburg is unlikely to be revived in the near future due to the difficulty of obtaining a Russian visa,” he said.

TITLE: Russia OKs Pipeline Blueprints
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia gave Gazprom’s Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic Sea a positive environmental assessment, even as other countries along the planned route seek additional information on the project’s safety.
A committee under the auspices of the country’s industrial safety watchdog approved the section of pipeline passing through Russian territorial waters, the Natural Resources Ministry said in an e-mailed statement Saturday.
Nord Stream, a planned 1,200-kilometer natural-gas pipeline connecting Russia directly with Germany, has raised concern that construction could dislodge World War II munitions on the Baltic seabed and hurt the ecosystem. The project has also run into political opposition as it would increase Europe’s reliance on Gazprom, which already supplies a quarter of the continent’s gas.
The Gazprom-led project, chaired by former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, has already delayed the first delivery of gas to the end of 2011 and raised its budget because of additional environmental demands by Finland and Denmark.
At an Oct. 21 meeting, project shareholders determined the project was “well on track” and said they didn’t view the global financial crisis as an obstacle to borrowing, Nord Stream said on its web site.
Nord Stream plans to submit an environmental impact assessment by the end of the year, the project’s financial director, Paul Corcoran, said in July.

TITLE: Audit Chamber to Monitor $4.5Bln VEB Loan to RusAl
AUTHOR: By Nadia Popova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Audit Chamber will oversee the use of $4.5 billion in financing that Vneshekonombank loaned to United Company RusAl, the chamber said Friday on its web site.
Auditors Valery Goreglyad and Mikhail Beskhmelnitsyn will carry out a review in November, the chamber said without elaboration.
The announcement comes amid speculation that the government might informally seek more active oversight of the miner after VEB broke lending rules to help RusAl pay off its debt to a syndicate of foreign banks.
Audit Chamber spokespeople were unavailable for comment Friday. 
A RusAl representative, who declined to be identified in line with company policy, said Friday that the company could not comment on the loan issue until VEB itself reported the figure.
VEB, which has not confirmed giving a loan to RusAl, did not respond to e-mailed requests for comment.
RusAl, the world’s biggest aluminum producer, owned by billionaire Oleg Deripaska, borrowed $4.5 billion, according to the Russian press, from VEB earlier this week to repay a loan to a syndicate of foreign banks, including Royal Bank of Scotland and Merrill Lynch, newspapers reported.
The financing is part of a $50 billion bailout package provided to VEB by the Central Bank to refinance the foreign debt of domestic companies. The bank had said the maximum loan for any one company would be $2.5 billion and must be returned by Dec. 31, 2009.
RusAl had borrowed the money from the foreign banks to buy 25 percent of Norilsk Nickel, the country’s biggest miner, from Mikhail Prokhorov in April. The shares were pledged as collateral for the loan, which had to be repaid Friday.
The loan agreements required the assets to be valued at least $6.75 billion to serve as collateral, media reports said. 
Norilsk shares have fallen 75 percent since May, leaving the value of the stake well below the collateral requirements.
One of the conditions for VEB granting the over-the-limit loan might have been for VEB to gain access to RusAl’s stake in Norilsk, said Mikhail Styskin, a metals analyst at Troika Dialog. 
A planned board expansion from nine to 11 members could be put to a vote at the next shareholders meeting on Dec. 26, adding to speculation that VEB might be trying to gain influence on the board.
“VEB representatives could get into the Norilsk board,” Styskin said.
Such an arrangement would have to be informal, however, as it would not be possible from a legal standpoint, said Dmitry Zelensky, a managing partner at Dia Law International. 
“If a stake is used as a collateral, the lender has no rights to its use until the borrower breaks the credit agreement conditions,” Zelensky said. 
A source close to the Basic Element, Deripaska’s investment vehicle, said last week that the government was going to intervene in the long-standing conflict between Deripaska and Vladimir Potanin, 30 percent shareholder and chairman of Norilsk.
Norilsk closed up 13.5 percent at 2,651.34 rubles on the MICEX, while its Global Depositary Receipts finished up 8.8 percent in London on Friday.

TITLE: Crisis Results in Lowest Manufacturing Rate in 11 Years
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian manufacturing shrank at the fastest rate in 11 years in October, as the global financial crisis cut demand, a gauge of industrial production showed.
VTB Bank Europe’s Purchasing Managers’ Index fell for the third consecutive month to 46.4 from 49.8 in September, the bank said in an e-mailed statement Tuesday. A figure above 50 indicates growth, below 50 a contraction. The bank surveyed 300 purchasing executives.
Russian industries are getting fewer new orders as a global economic slowdown squeezes demand in export markets. The five-day war in Georgia, a slump in the prices of commodities and the credit crunch has triggered a capital flight that threatens to cut growth.
“The recent escalation of the global financial turmoil had a clear impact on clients’ spending decisions,” the bank said the statement. “The overall fall in new orders was apparent in both domestic and export markets, with the latter registering a decline for the third time in four months.”
Russian manufacturers cut staff at the fastest rate in almost a decade in October on weakening demand and in attempt to reduce costs, VTB also said.
In October, prices that manufacturers charge increased at a slowest pace since at least January 2003 as producers aim to boost falling sales, PMI showed.
The PMI is derived from indexes which measure changes in
output, orders, employment, suppliers’ delivery times and stocks, according to VTB.

TITLE: Shuvalov Announces New Measures Against Speculative Capital Outflow
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia will tighten restrictions that seek to prevent banks using emergency state loans to sell rubles, First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said.
“We’re forming a mechanism to stop the outflow of speculative capital,” Shuvalov said in an interview broadcast on state news channel Vesti-24 on Tuesday. The additional measures may be introduced as early as next week, he said.
The government has pledged more than $200 billion to stem the country’s worst financial crisis since 1998, including $50 billion for banks and companies to pay off foreign loans. The ruble had its biggest monthly drop against the dollar in almost a decade during October, raising concern the currency was on the brink of devaluation.
Russia will also raise total lending available for small and medium-sized business to 30 billion rubles ($1.1 billion), Shuvalov said. State-owned VTB Group, the country’s second-largest bank, has already provided 9 billion rubles to more than 60 regional lenders to pass on to companies, he said. 
Russia’s planned three-year budget through 2011 will be implemented “in full,” Arkady Dvorkovich, a Kremlin economic adviser, said in a separate interview on Vesti-24 on Tuesday.
“We aren’t afraid of the falling oil price,” he said. “We will be able to compensate losses from our reserves and all our obligations will be met.”

TITLE: Aricom Set to Delay Major Projects Near Chinese Border to Reduce Costs
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Aricom, a developer of iron-ore projects in Russia, will probably postpone one of its projects near the Chinese border to reduce the need for external funding, Chief Executive Officer Jay Hambro said.
The $700 million Garinskoye development or the $500 million K&S project is likely to be shelved to reduce costs, Hambro said in a telephone interview. Aricom said Oct. 8 it was seeking as much as $1 billion to develop them.
“We are reviewing running one of those projects rather than two,” Hambro said Tuesday. “It will take us some time to get to a decision, but we can make significant savings.”
Iron-ore producers from Brazil’s Cia do Vale Rio Doce, the world’s largest, to Ferrexpo, which has its operations in Ukraine, are curbing output or reining in expansion plans as demand for steel slumps and the credit squeeze makes it harder to access funding.
Aricom is looking at alternative development plans and is reviewing its budget, the London-based company said earlier Tuesday in a statement distributed by the Regulatory News Service.
Aricom’s financial position isn’t “materially different” from that reported June 30. It maintained a cash balance forecast of $254 million for the end of the year, the company said.

TITLE: Financial Crisis Forces Banks to Sweeten Offers
AUTHOR: By Maria Levina
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — One only has to look over Standard & Poor’s ratings list of commercial banks operating in Russia to see that lately life for them has been no slice of apple pie. Even some of the largest retail lenders have seen their outlooks cut and deposits wane, forcing banks to be creative — and unusually lavish — to keep customers’ cash on their books.
After a round of ratings cuts earlier this month, six of the 10 largest banks in Russia by net assets now have a negative outlook, including subsidiaries of major European lenders Raiffeisen and UniCredit.
“We have a negative outlook on many banks, but the ones most at risk are those with short-term debt that is difficult to refinance and exposure to sectors considered risky, such as construction and retail,” said Yevgeny Tarzimanov, an analyst at S&P in Moscow. 
As if the shutting of debt markets were not enough, clients have taken more than 10 percent of funds out of the country’s private banks over the past six weeks, Tarzimanov said. The outflow makes it more difficult to maintain capital ratios, service existing debt and attract new financing, all of which are needed for banks to keep lending and create more revenue.
Mikhail Zadornov, chief executive of VTB retail unit VTB-24, said Thursday that households pulled 1.5 percent of deposits from banks in September and warned that the figure would be even higher in October.
The commercial bank model depends on having money to create money. With profits dropping because of securities-trading losses and a shortage of financing, banks are freezing lending, raising interest rates and cutting expenses to stay afloat.
“Although many banks have not officially announced their plans to reduce personnel,” Tarzimanov said, “this is going to happen in an environment where banks are unlikely to see any growth for the next year.”
In what would have been seen as an act of madness just a few months ago, banks are now offering very high rates on deposits to stop their individual and corporate clients from leaving. 
Russky Standart Bank has introduced a new program called Srochny, or Urgent, which offers interest rates as high as 14.5 percent on ruble deposits of more than 100,000 locked for six months and as high as 11.5 percent for dollar deposits. Interest can be paid as often as every month. 
Russky Standart on Oct. 24 successfully bought out 96 percent of its series eight bond obligations, totaling 4.8 billion rubles ($181 million), after investors asked for their money to be returned early. But its obligations in circulation have been trading at low prices in an indication that investors are concerned about the bank’s outlook.
And in a situation where corporate credit may come due sooner than expected, it is as important as ever for banks to convince their clients to stay put. Binbank went even further, introducing a new program called Yubileiny, or Anniversary, which offers clients 15 percent on three-year deposits of more than 1 million rubles, as well as a chance to win a new Ford Focus.
Alfa Bank has launched an offer called the “Autumn Marathon,” valid through Dec. 31, which offers a 10.8 percent rate on ruble deposits above 50,000 locked for six months and 11 percent for 12 months. Clients can secure 8.5 percent and 8 percent on dollar and euro deposits, respectively, with minimum amounts of 2,000 in either currency. There is no commission for withdrawal of funds after the lock-in period is over. 
Still, if a bank is seen as unreliable, enormous rates and flashy giveaways may not keep clients from pulling out their money. As a result, many lenders are emphasizing their reputation by connecting themselves with people deemed reliable. Alfa Bank, for example, now features a photo of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visiting with bank president Pyotr Aven at a branch in Novosibirsk in its branches and on its web site. According to the bank’s web site, Putin “noted with satisfaction the dynamic style of work at Alfa Bank branches and, among other things, the presence of high-tech products such as Internet banking.”

TITLE: Medvedev, Putin Hang On to Rubles
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — The ruble may have shed 10 percent of its value in two months, but both President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin are clinging onto their rubles in favor of the U.S. dollar.
The government is pumping billions of dollars into propping up the ruble, with the Central Bank saying Thursday that it had spent a record $13 billion last week alone as ordinary Russians cashed out their rubles for dollars and euros.
The ruble started out the week at the official rate of 27.35 to the U.S. dollar, an 11 percent drop from 24.57 to the dollar on Sept. 1. The Central Bank on Friday set the official rate at 26.54.
In an apparent appeal for calm, Medvedev and Putin said this week that they would keep their savings in rubles — and in the bank.
“I have kept all my accounts at the bank. I have not taken the money out, not changed rubles into dollars and not bought any shares,” Medvedev told Argumenty i Fakty newspaper.
“I am convinced that my savings — and the money of other Russian depositors — are not under threat,” Medvedev said Tuesday in response to a reader’s question.
Medvedev has savings of 2.74 million rubles ($102,675) in eight bank accounts, according to an income declaration he filed ahead of the March presidential election. 
Reporters traveling with Putin to Kazakhstan on Thursday pressed him over whether he was also sticking to the ruble.
Putin said he had not touched his savings at Sberbank and VTB. “I don’t see any need to change anything,” he said, Izvestia reported Friday.
Asked whether he had lost any money because of the weakening ruble, he said, “I haven’t had time to count, but I don’t think that I’ve lost anything.”
Putin said his savings were mainly in rubles. It was unclear how much money he has in the two banks.
Russians pulled 5.98 trillion rubles ($225 billion) out of their bank accounts in September, representing 1.5 percent of all savings, the Central Bank said this week. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the trend picked up pace in October. Newspapers are rife with reports of people spending their savings on cars and furniture as a hedge against a depreciated ruble.
But Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the exchange of rubles for other currencies as “insignificant” and said it was “triggered by an emotional reaction” rather than by any real threat of ruble depreciation.
“There will be no acute fluctuations of the ruble rate,” Peskov said. 
A Central Bank spokeswoman said the best advice she had for ordinary depositors worried about a depreciating ruble was to “stay calm.”
Banking analysts said it was next to impossible to predict what would happen to the ruble but expressed confidence that the government would do all within its power to keep it stable.
Natalya Orlova, chief economist at Alfa Bank, said people should keep their savings in the currency that they mainly use. “For example, if a person travels abroad a lot, he should keep it in a foreign currency,” she said.
Alexei Moiseyev, managing director at Renaissance Capital, said savings could be kept in the currency used to pay debts. That way, a person who makes apartment mortgage payments in rubles should keep his savings in rubles. 
“The last thing you should do is rush to a currency exchange booth,” he said. “You will lose on exchange operations more than you will gain.”

TITLE: Alfa Bank Seeking $400M Loan From VEB
AUTHOR: By Courtney Weaver
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Alfa Bank will apply to Vneshekonombank, the state development bank, for a long-term loan of $400 million, Alfa Bank president Peter Aven said at a crisis-related summit Friday.
With help from the Central Bank, Alfa Bank could be in a position to bail out Russian banks in danger of bankruptcy, he added.
Speaking on a panel that included Arkady Dvorkovich, an economic adviser to President Dmitry Medvedev, and Pavel Medvedev, a member of the Duma’s budget committee, Aven and his fellow participants remained relatively optimistic about Russia’s ability to survive the financial crisis.
Both Aven and Dvorkovich highlighted Russia’s preparedness for the challenge, especially compared to countries such as the United States.
Aven said the crisis would not be catastrophic for Russia, especially since mortgages are only 3 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Still, Aven said, the Russian real estate sector would experience a significant downturn following three years of ballooning property prices.
Russia’s deep reserves will play a critical role in the country’s ability to handle the crisis, Dvorkovich said, adding that the banking sector could expect substantial reforms by the end of the year, specifically in terms of the laws governing the sector.
Both Dvorkovich and Aven spoke favorably about a potential consolidation of the Russian banking sector, but speaking after Aven, Dvorkovich said the government would still do everything to ensure each bank got a chance to survive.
“We want every financial institution to have a chance. We want everyone to have a security cushion. It doesn’t matter if it’s a big bank or a small bank,” he said.
“The most important asset a bank has is its reputation,” Dvorkovich continued. “If the bank [is in trouble and] already has a good reputation, we will work quickly so that over the course of a few days everything normalizes.”
Other speakers, such as MDM Bank chairman Oleg Vyugin, who spoke on a subsequent panel, drew comparisons with the United States to put Russia’s current economic woes in perspective and highlight its ability to take on a bigger global role. 
“[Compared to the United States,] our situation is a lot easier,” Vyugin said. “Thank goodness credit doesn’t play the same role in Russia that it does in other countries.” 
Dvorkovich and Alexei Timofeyev, chairman of the board of the National Association of Stock Exchange Participants, brought up the goal of Moscow becoming what Dvorkovich called a “strong financial center.”
While Timofeyev admitted that it would not be easy for Moscow to step into this role at present, he insisted that the goal had been in place long before the current financial crisis and that Moscow should continue to strive toward it. 
“We have these global financial centers that have gained prominence because of various political and economic factors,” Timofeyev said, citing London and New York as examples. 
“They have not demonstrated the best decision-making.”

TITLE: The U.S. Leader the World Needs
AUTHOR: By Chris Patten
TEXT: Around the world, the U.S. presidential election campaign has attracted as much attention as domestic political controversies in each of our own countries. The interest the world has taken in the U.S. vote is the best example of the United States’ soft power and a lesson in democracy from the world’s only superpower. If only we could all vote as well as watch and listen, because the outcome is vital for everyone around the world. 
What does the world want — and, perhaps more importantly, what does it need — from a new U.S. president? 
Much as some may hate to admit it, anti-Americanism is a sentiment that has been fed and nurtured during the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency. Yet the world still needs U.S. leadership. 
Yes, we are witnessing the emergence of China, Brazil and India as important global economic players. Yes, we have watched the humiliating fall of Wall Street’s masters of the universe. Yes, U.S. military prowess has drained away into what Winston Churchill called “the thoughtless deserts of Mesopotamia,” and its moral authority has been weakened by events in places from Guantanamo Bay to Abu Ghraib. 
All that is true. Yet the United States remains the world’s only superpower, the only nation that matters in every part of the globe and the only country capable of mobilizing international action to tackle global problems. 
A new president’s first task will be to return the United States’ economic competitiveness and self-confidence. It will not be easy to rein in overspending and overborrowing, to restore the real family values of saving, thrift, responsibility and fair reward. Achieving these goals is bound to involve a greater regard for social equality, after a period in which the very rich have been able to protect a “Roaring Twenties” lifestyle.
With the United States turning away from its global role of borrower of last resort, the rest of us will need to sharpen our competitive edge to sell in other markets. What is imperative is that this should not be impeded by a return to protectionism. A new U.S. president would do well to remember the disastrous consequences of protectionism in the 1920s and 1930s. President Herbert Hoover’s failures should be a sanguinary lesson. 
We all look to the next U.S. president to re-engage with the world community and international organizations, accepting that even a superpower should accept the rules that apply to others. The United Nations is far from perfect. It needs reform, as do the bodies that provide global economic governance. That will take time. But a necessary if not sufficient condition for change is the U.S. commitment to and leadership of the process. Forget the distraction of trying to create an alternative to the UN — the so-called League of Democracies. It won’t work. 
We want a new president who will aim to make a success of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty renewal conference in 2010 by scrapping more weapons, abandoning research into them and challenging others to do the same. That would be the best backdrop to establishing tougher surveillance and monitoring, beginning to engage with Iran and searching for a way to involve India and Pakistan in a global nuclear agreement. 
Ahead of that, a new president should unleash the United States’ creative potential in boosting energy efficiency and developing clean technologies. It would be a welcome surprise if a comprehensive follow-up to the Kyoto treaty could be agreed next year. But at least we should aim to agree on the process that will move worldwide discussions in the right direction and, as part of that, the United States should aim to engage Europe, China and especially India on technological developments like clean coal. 
The U.S. relationship with China will be a key to prosperity and security in this new century. I do not think that a struggle for hegemony is inevitable or that it would be desirable. The United States should focus more attention on China, without ever pretending that Beijing’s record on human rights can be swept under the carpet. China cannot sustain its economic development without political changes and environmental improvements. 
In the Middle East, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered wise advice to the next U.S. president upon his retirement. Israel and Palestine have become, he said, the hopeless and bloody prism through which U.S. diplomacy often seems to see the world. It has long since been time to move on, making a sustained drive for the sort of settlement that was almost achieved in the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency. 
There is a paradox in all this. The world has for years called for a multilateral approach from Washington. When we get one, will the rest of us — Europe, for example — actually respond with sufficient commitment and drive? It would at least be a welcome challenge to be required to put our efforts where our mouths have been. 

Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, is chancellor of Oxford University and a member of the British House of Lords. © Project Syndicate

TITLE: The Biggest Insider Trade in History
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: The United States calls its own crisis the mortgage meltdown. Banks went on a lending splurge, handing out mortgages to every homeless and unemployed Joe Blow who walked in off the street. Not surprisingly, they defaulted on their loans. 
But I have never once heard U.S. authorities try to pin the subprime mortgage crisis on the KGB. There was a real estate bubble and it burst.
The most amazing thing about Russia’s financial crisis is what the government calls it. We are told that the economy was going gangbusters until those underhanded Americans withdrew all of their speculative investments and our market collapsed through no fault of its own. 
A banker recently complained to me: “After the stock market crash, Severstal is now worth no more than its bank account balance. Is that a fair price?” 
Excuse me, but how much is Severstal supposed to be worth?
Question: How much should a Russian company be worth in a country where the prime minister threatens to “send a doctor” to clean out Mechel or send tanks to clean out Georgia? 
Answer: Nothing.
The market economy is remarkable, but not because it prevents people from making mistakes. People do make mistakes — and very big ones. 
What will happen next? The collective debt of all Russian banks and companies exceeds $510 billion, which is roughly equal to the combined total of the country’s stabilization fund and foreign currency reserves. It would be impossible to refinance such a debt in the midst of a Russian financial meltdown. Only the state can partially refinance it using its reserves and stabilization fund.
That means that the government’s reserves and stabilization fund have replaced the prosecutor general and the Federal Security Service as the state’s most effective tool for seizing coveted companies. As a result, experts adept at orchestrating takeovers of debt-burdened companies through government bailout and buyout schemes have become more important than those who rely on trumped-up criminal charges to accomplish the same goal. 
Put another way, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin has become more strategically important to the country’s leaders than Kremlin Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin. Maybe that is why imprisoned Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak, whom Kudrin has always supported, was unexpectedly released on Oct. 21 pending his trial on fraud charges.
Company takeovers orchestrated through government bailouts and buyouts have a clear advantage over the arbitrary strong-armed tactics of the prosecutor general. The latter tends to evoke cries of authoritarianism and abuse of government powers, including lawsuits brought against Russia in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. But when it is done with debt bailouts and stock purchases, the sinking company shows real humility and even says “thank you.” 
Seizing a company with the help of the Prosecutor General’s Office and special forces in masks is a hostile takeover. When the foreign currency reserves and stabilization fund are used to effectively nationalize companies, the government somehow becomes a white knight.
Thus, as it turns out, Putin’s “house call” to Mechel and the five-day war in Georgia was the biggest insider-trading deal ever carried out in history. This is how it was done: First, the authorities built huge reserves from the taxes levied on the country’s oil companies. Second, they wrecked their own country’s stock market by destabilizing the economic and political environment. Finally, they used the reserves and stabilization fund to buy stock on the cheap in heavily devalued companies. 
Most likely, it was all just a fortuitous accident, but then again maybe the government played its cards brilliantly, coming out big winners in this amazing financial scheme.

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

TITLE: Crisis: A Silver Lining for Lovers of the Silver Screen?
AUTHOR: By Maria Levina
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: While the global economic downturn has businesspeople in many sectors wondering whether they will survive, many of the people in the country’s film industry seem to believe that a little belt-tightening could actually help.
After suffering along with the rest of the economy in the 1990s, the Russian film industry has staged something of a comeback. If Andrei Tarkovsky, one of the Soviet Union’s most acclaimed and enigmatic film directors, was right in saying that people go to the movies to fill gaps in their own experience, then Russians have had a good number of gaps to fill.
Last year, the number of tickets to movies sold topped 100 million for the first time, according to industry magazine Russian Film Business. The total of 106.6 million people paying at the box office was 10 times the figure of 11.2 million in 2000, when the country was still experiencing the aftermath of the 1998 financial crisis.
Box office revenues were $565 million, with $148 million of that generated by Russian films, compared to only $6 million in 1997. 
And while foreign films still hold the lead, there were 85 Russian theatrical releases last year and another 200 projects in production, compared to just 42 releases a decade earlier.
Notwithstanding the industry’s spectacular growth in recent years, there are still factors that have hindered growth.
“Distribution remains the biggest issue,” said director Mikhail Kalatozishvili, whose film “Wild Field” was presented at the Kinotavr festival in Sochi in June and at the Russian Film Festival in London late last month. “We still have only about 1,500 modern screens, and although this number is increasing it will be a few years before there are enough theaters to show many of the films produced.”
Despite tough economic times looming, some film industry insiders actually say the sector may be protected better than other areas of the economy. 
“The Russian film industry may be relatively insulated compared to other sectors,” said Nikita Trynkin, chief financial officer at First Media Fund, one of the country’s only private investment funds focusing on the film industry. “There are not enough movie theaters, theater attendance is low compared to other countries, and as selection criteria tightens, less promising prospects may not get financed and the promising ones may benefit.”
Trynkin said up to half of all projects currently under way are not commercially viable and are being funded for reasons other than artistic or economic potential — like vanity, access to state funds, personal favoritism and even money laundering.
“These projects will be the first to go, making the market more efficient and, hopefully, resulting in increased quality in Russian films,” Trynkin said.
Risk, a concern that has moved front and center as global financial troubles have set in, has always been a standard in the film industry, where there are no guarantees of any financial return and the end product is intangible until the film is complete and reaches the theaters.
Last month, the Culture Ministry confirmed that Natalya Bondarchuk would stop production of her film “Gogol. Up Close,” one in a series of three films about Russian classics, because she had run over budget and securing new money in the current economic situation was difficult. 
Aram Movsesyan, head of production at Central Partnership, a film production and distribution company, said the minimum outlay for a private investor looking to get involved in a film project is about $500,000, or about one-third of the average budget for a Russian film.
With the risk involved in picking one title, it makes more sense to invest in a portfolio of projects, reducing the losses if one is a flop. This, in turn, raises the minimum entry price for an investor into the $5 million to $10 million range.
First Media Fund plans to spend $23 million in 2008 and 2009 on 12 film projects and says interest among investors remains strong, despite the imminent global downturn.
“There is no indication that our investors will stop investing in projects already selected,” Trynkin said. “On the contrary, some are more keen to invest, as traditional investment areas like the stock market have become too volatile.” 
Igor Tolstunov, director of the Profit film production company, is less sanguine about the industry’s prospects.
“I think that next year we will see fewer films produced, as some private investors will choose to hold on to their capital,” Tolstunov said. “Banks have already stopped lending to production companies for working capital needs.”
Central Partnership, one of a handful of big private investors in the Russian film industry, is part of Prof-Media holding, which in turn is a part of Interros, an investment group controlled by Vladimir Potanin.
Interros’ industrial and financial holdings have suffered drastically in the past several months, with stock prices of Norilsk Nickel and Rosbank down over 70 percent and Polyus Gold shares down more than 55 percent for the same period.
Falling share prices and resulting margin calls, increasing difficulties in getting loans and slowing growth may distract Interros from thinking about its film interests.
Central Partnership has spent more than $30 million on the releases of just three big-budget productions — “Wolfhound,” “Revenge” and “Streetracers” — in 2006 and 2007, according to information posted on its web site, but with less box office success than it had hoped for, market insiders said.
“I wouldn’t say people have started going to the movies less,” said Mikhail Andreyev, head of business development at Cinema Park, a chain of movie theaters also owned by Interros. “Through the ages, people have always looked for bread and circuses. The number of tickets sold is determined more by the quality of films shown, time of the year and weather.”
Cinema Park today has 84 screens at 11 theaters throughout the country and plans to be operating 200 screens by the end of next year.
“So far, we do not plan to cut back on investment in the construction of movie theaters,” Andreyev said. “We have not received any signals from our shareholders that this might happen.”
Investment in domestically produced features was in the $200 million range last year and could be as high as $300 million this year. Two giant projects — “Burnt by the Sun 2,” produced and directed by Nikita Mikhalkov, with a budget of $70 million, and “Obitayemy Ostrov,” directed by Fedor Bondarchuk and produced by Alexander Rodnyansky and Sergei Melkumov, with a $30 million budget — have bumped numbers in the industry up just by themselves.
Konstantin Ernst, director of Channel One television, is another big player. His film “S Legkim Parom-2” grossed a record $56 million in Russian and Ukrainian theaters last year. This year, he co-produced “Admiral,” a film about White Army leader Alexander Kolchak, released by 20th Century Fox last month.
One major source of funding has been the government, which invested $80 million into feature films in 2007 and a further $85 million in 2008, said Igor Kallistov, deputy head of the cinematography department at the Culture Ministry. This makes the government one of the largest investors in the sector, providing 30 to 40 percent of all funding for Russian films.
“The Culture Ministry is working on a program to allocate up to 300 million rubles ($11.4 million) in subsidies to producers whose films attract over 1 million viewers in 2009 and 2010,” Kallistov said. “These subsidies will be in the form of marketing and promotion reimbursements and may be as high as 10 percent of box office receipts.”
In addition to this, the government has proposed that up to 2 billion rubles are allocated to 10 “national” film projects that are geared to achieve Russia’s social and ideological goals. The themes and selection criteria for these projects will be determined later in the year by a separate commission, and the funds will be awarded on a project basis, Kallistov said.
If all of the proposals the government has made for the film industry are realized, state spending on domestic feature and documentary films will increase by $95 million in 2009 and 2010, vital support during times of a slowdown. 
But falling oil prices, in particular, have raised questions as to whether the government will come through. Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin has said the government will be able to meet its spending commitments and still run a budget surplus as long as the price of Russia’s Urals blend oil remains above $70 per barrel — the range in which it lies at present.
Although some market participants say there are signals of a slowing economy — with counterparties delaying payments, banks cutting financing and service providers pushing for cost increases — most producers continue to be optimistic. 
“Film budgets are likely to fall, and production companies will evaluate each film project much more scrupulously,” Tolstunov said. “But I do not expect that we are entering bad times for the industry.”
The problems experienced by the industry in the 1990s suggest that things could get tough again, but that was also a case where an industry that had long been state-run had to switch to operate in a world for profit for the first time. The reaction this time could be more like the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s, when film attendance surged as people spent what little money they had on escaping with horror films and Marx Brothers comedies.
“During the Great Depression, movies saved America — they created a dream image of America, and it started living by that dream,” said director Nikita Mikhalkov to a group of film students last week. “During this crisis, production in many small companies may stop due to lack of financing, and they will seek to become part of larger studios.” 
Market participants say a slowdown in film production is inevitable, as big private investors focus on problems with their core businesses and banks cut production financing. But for those that can create quality content, the crisis may create more opportunities than dangers.

TITLE: Soviet-Born Authors Prove Popular in United States
AUTHOR: By Maria Danilova
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CHICAGO — A steaming bowl of homemade borshch that brings memories of the Russian homeland. An elderly Soviet immigrant who falls victim to the affection of two lonely fellow countrywomen. A young woman looking for a sense of belonging in a country where even snow feels alien.
With her new collection of short stories, “Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love,” Lara Vapnyar, 37, is one of a growing group of Soviet-born immigrants to emerge as popular writers in the United States.
Mixing drama, satire and personal experience, they explore the bitter, confusing but often comic tales of Russian and Soviet immigrants stuck between their troubled homeland and the country where they have long sought to live but to which they have not yet adjusted.
Some of these authors, who all write in English, moved to the United States as small children and adopted English as their primary language. Others, such as Vapnyar, immigrated in their late teens or early 20s and had a tougher time learning the language.
Drawing on the richness of their native tongue, their writing offers a glimpse into the Russian language with its colorful metaphors and descriptions — in works by such writers as Vapnyar; Gary Shteyngart, “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook” (2002) and “Absurdistan” (2006); Canadian David Bezmozgis and his short story collection “Natasha and Other Stories” (2004); Olga Grushin, “The Dream Life of Sukhanov” (2006); Ellen Litman, “The Last Chicken in America” (2007); and Anya Ulinich, “Petropolis” (2007).
Much of the work is devoted to Jewish characters and topics, since most immigrants are Jewish. And while America is often called a melting pot and immigrant literature is abundant, the authors insist that immigrants from the former Soviet Union stand out because they had a harder time finding their way.
Most came here as educated professionals who often had to accept unskilled jobs. The communist system from which they escaped was also drastically different from the life they found here — most had no clue what a mortgage or a credit card was.
“There is definitely a trend,” said Boris Fishman, a literary critic who served as an editor at the New Yorker. “American audiences have proven to be very, very interested in reading about the Russian-American ... because it is funny and poignant, because these people are ridiculous in lots of ways but they are also heroic in lots of ways.”
Back in the “previous life,” as one of Vapnyar’s characters puts it, lines to buy toilet paper at a store were longer than lines to visit Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin’s tomb on Moscow’s Red Square; desperate customers stormed grocery stores to buy imported puffed rice and kindergarten children were made to sleep strictly turned to their right side.
In the new American life, supermarkets teem with delicious broccoli, but immigrants find themselves separated from their lifelong friends and relatives and even snow “doesn’t crunch the way it did in Russia.” Jobs are hard to find and immigrants are clueless about managing bank accounts and paying their utilities and medical bills. In the Soviet Union, salaries were paid in cash and house heating and medical care were provided by the state.
With immigration “you win an opportunity,” Vapnyar said.
“Every person is given one life and immigration gives you the opportunity to live a second life, but you lose touch with your country, with your language, with the people you grew up with, with your childhood,” she said. “That is why food is so important to them — they are trying to reconnect with their childhood.”
In the story “Borscht,” for example, Sergei, who came to America to earn money, battles solitude by hiring a clumsy Russian prostitute, who feels as homesick and manipulated by his family as he does. When their sexual encounter fails, the two find pleasure and comfort in sharing homemade borshch.
Vapnyar’s vivid and colorful stories are inspired by her own experience. She moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., with her husband and two young children in the early 1990s, and plunged into a deep depression.
The cumbersome English she had learned from Soviet text books proved nothing like the language spoken in the United States. Her degree in Russian literature became useless and she was reduced to teaching English to elderly immigrants who needed to pass a language test to receive a U.S. citizenship.
“The first year, I had such a horrible depression that I cannot remember a single pleasant surprise,” Vapnyar said.
Life improved when she began writing — in English. Her first book, “There Are Jews in My House” (2004), which mixes snippets of Soviet and immigrant life, won high acclaim. It inspired her novel “Memoirs of a Muse” (2006), about a naive Russian woman who tries to inspire talent and love in a mediocre and selfish American writer.
Shteyngart was born in St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad, and spent the first seven years of his life as a typical Soviet child, playing hide-and-seek with his father beneath a giant statue of Lenin. “I was in love with him,” Shteyngart said of the revolutionary.
The family moved to New York when Shteyngart was 7. It was 1979. The Cold War. When being Russian was not popular here. In the Hebrew school where Shteyngart enrolled, he felt humiliated and lonely. Classmates mocked his accent and wardrobe — he only had two or three T-shirts. The school organized a campaign to aid the boy, calling him into the principal’s office and handing him a bag full of donated second-hand clothes as other students watched.
“This is a country that celebrates winners and we weren’t winning,” Shteyngart said over vodka and Russian beet salad at the Russian Samovar, a kitschy New York restaurant that’s been a favorite among the Russian immigrant community.
Reluctant to open his mouth to avoid being teased, he turned to writing in English. The effort eventually paid off.
In “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,” he describes the adventures of Vladimir Girshkin, a confused and insecure 25-year-old immigrant who yearns for love and a sense of identity. Shteyngart, 36, uses bristling satire to convey his character’s struggle to find a place in life, caught between a demanding Jewish mother and a hard-to-get American girlfriend in New York, a homosexual mobster in Florida and Russian mafia in a fictitious Eastern European city.
The author identifies himself as a New Yorker, but asked when he began feeling himself an American, he said, “Never.”
In “Natasha and Other Stories,” a collection of succinct but highly moving short stories, Bezmozgis, 35, details the childhood and adolescent years of Mark Berman, the son of Jewish immigrants from ex-Soviet Latvia living in Toronto, just like the author himself.
As Mark’s father struggled to make ends meet, his mother suffered from constant nervous breakdowns and Mark was painfully discovering his Jewish identity at a Hebrew school.
“I think it was much harder for them,” Bezmozgis said. “For me, the only difficulty was to watch your parents struggle. It’s not what a child wants to see.”
Although many of the works are colored by sadness and pain, Vapnyar remains optimistic: “Immigration is trauma, but it’s not a deadly disease and most people get cured.”

TITLE: Champion Hamilton Set to Dominate F1
AUTHOR: By Alan Baldwin
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: SAO PAULO — Lewis Hamilton will only get stronger over the next decade even if, as Formula One’s youngest champion said on Monday, he has no burning desire to break Michael Schumacher’s records.
Taking the title after a heart stopping last lap in Sunday’s Brazilian Grand Prix, the 23-year-old McLaren driver has in two seasons already ripped up the time-honoured script that newcomers are supposed to follow.
The Briton has won nine of his 35 grands prix, started on pole 13 times, scored more points (207) and taken more podiums (22) than any other driver in that time period.
Schumacher, winner of seven titles and 91 grands prix, had savoured just one victory by the time he was the same age as Hamilton.
“Just to get to one (title) has been unbelievably hard, hopefully the next one will be easier,” Hamilton told reporters.
“The rules change every year and its going to be just as competitive every year.
“I have great drivers like (Ferrari’s) Felipe (Massa), Heikki (Kovalainen), my team mate. They are always going to be pushing me, so to beat them every year is going to be tough.
“But each year I will get stronger. People say the second year is harder, but I don’t particularly agree,” continued Britain’s first champion since Damon Hill in 1996.
“I think you just get stronger, you learn from your mistakes, and hopefully I will continue to grow as a driver. If that means winning more championships, then so be it.”
McLaren’s team boss Ron Dennis, who has worked with multiple champions like the late Brazilian Ayrton Senna and Frenchman Alain Prost, had little doubt that he had another such talent on his hands.
“Of course, no racing driver goes very far if he’s sat on the grid in his underpants,” he said, revelling in McLaren’s first title since Mika Hakkinen in 1999.
“They have to have the car, and it’s our intention to try and give it to him. But at the moment, I can see no reason why the momentum of his career is going to falter.
“He has become even more mature both in and out of the car and the experience yesterday will only be another stepping stone in his career.”
The rules are changing significantly next season and Hamilton, who said losing the title last year had also made him stronger, faces tough competition from a new wave of drivers just as young as him.
BMW-Sauber’s 23-year-old Robert Kubica won plenty of votes in the paddock for most consistent driver of the year while Toro Rosso’s 21-year-old German Sebastian Vettel emerged as the youngest ever race winner.
Massa has shaken off his reputation for being quick but inconsistent and Renault’s double world champion Fernando Alonso is likely to be far more of a contender next season after scoring more points than anyone in the last eight races.
Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen, the 2007 champion, cannot wait to wipe the slate clean and start again.
The fact that the drivers’ championship has gone down to the wire in the last three years, with the last two being decided by a single point, speaks volumes for the intensity of the competition.
If Mercedes-backed McLaren can build Hamilton a quick and reliable car, and if the Briton is not overwhelmed by his fame and fortune, he can expect to be a contender for years to come.
“Going into next year we are going to analyse everything that has happened this year and try and correct things, subtle changes that could have a huge impact on the result,” said Hamilton on Monday.
“We’re going to work hard on the car, I want to be fitter when I get to the first race...just focussing on trying not to make those mistakes, trying to keep things more consistent.
“I’m not saying I’m going to change my driving. That’s what got me here. I will always take it to the edge,” he added.
“From this race I learned to take a step back, knowing I had to score a certain amount of points, which I did. Having that experience, that I can do it when I need to, means next year I’ll be stronger.”

TITLE: ‘Getting Whacked in the Head, Every Day’
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — By the time Jeffrey Frankel got to bed it was past midnight, but sleep did not come easy. Twice during the night, the broker had climbed out from the covers and returned to the television, trying to get a read on what investors were thinking in Tokyo and Hong Kong and to see what the futures market foretold about the trading day ahead.
Now, the digital board hanging over the New York Stock Exchange’s maple hardwood floor showed 9:24 a.m.

Six minutes left until 
the open
But in one corner of the trading floor, brokers for Stuart Frankel & Co. had been at their stations for more than 2 1/2 hours. Frankel, president of the company founded by his father, had been on the floor since 8, working the phones, swigging coffee, “trying to get ready for what seems to be getting whacked in the head every day.”
After weeks of riding the Wall Street whipsaw, this new day — Wednesday, Oct. 29 — held out both reason for hope and the potential for even more pain.
The previous session had ended with an adrenaline-pumping 889-point surge in the Dow Jones industrial average. The gain was welcomed warily on the floor. But it did little to clarify the doubts or ease the fears of the people whose lives and livelihoods are staked to a market down 40 percent from a year ago.
In minutes, the world’s investors — from millionaire hedge fund managers to ordinary workers trying to protect decimated retirement savings — would turn their attention to this trading floor, studying the televised frenzy in a search for reassurance and direction.
If they chose, they could look ahead to the promise of a cut in interest rates, likely to be announced at mid-afternoon. But who could blame them for looking back? This, after all, was the anniversary of the 1929 market crash, perhaps the darkest day in exchange history.
There was only one certainty. This would not be an ordinary day on the floor. There are no ordinary days here anymore.
The electronic board showed investors were betting on stocks to open near the previous day’s close, a good sign. Now it was up to Frankel and his trading floor compatriots to figure out whether yesterday’s brief exhilaration signaled the edge of the oasis a parched Wall Street had been searching for, or just a cruel mirage.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” Frankel said.
But for now the only answer was the sound of the opening bell.

9:39 a.m., Dow down 88.97.
Traders greet the bell with light applause. But it fades in seconds. Wall Street has plenty to think about today and isn’t wasting time on formalities.
Just over an hour ago, it looked like stocks might start the day strong after the Commerce Department reported that orders for products like cars and appliances rose in September.
But that bit of good news doesn’t appear to be enough for a market where half of the stock drop has been compressed into just four weeks. After Tuesday’s big gain, some investors appear ready to claim a little profit, and it’s easy to understand why.
Standing at his booth, broker Theodore Weisberg cranes his neck, peering up at the board. Weisberg sports a tie covered with silhouettes of the Buttonwood Tree, under whose branches 24 traders founded the NYSE in 1792. It’s a souvenir of his four decades on the trading floor. But even with that tenure, he acknowledges it’s harder than ever to read the market.
“In times like this you need to be more of a psychologist than a trader,” he says, “because so much of stock trading is driven by human emotion.”
Still, Weisberg likes what he sees. Citigroup stock is holding above $13 a share, a good sign for banking companies beaten down by the financial crisis. Just the fact that the overall market is sustaining most of yesterday’s gains is encouraging, he says.
Sure enough, 12 minutes later, and the Dow has narrowed its drop, down just 37. Still, even 40 years of trading can’t tell Weisberg whether yesterday’s jump and today’s steadiness is a sign that battered stocks have bottomed out.
“Wall Street is the only business in the world where when they have a fire sale nobody comes,” he says. “And they don’t come because they’re scared to death.”

10:30 a.m., Dow up 52.09.
After some early fluctuation, traders and investors seem to be settling into waiting mode.
At least part of the explanation for the previous day’s rally is investors’ expectation that this afternoon the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates, continuing its battle to save the financial system.
There’s wide agreement that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and fellow policymakers will cut a key rate by 0.5 percent to 1 percent. But until the decision is announced at 2:15, investors seem uncertain whether to buy or sell.
“It’s been a very quiet morning, actually,” says Jennifer Lee, a partner in independent broker Mogavero Lee & Co.
The quiet, though, shouldn’t be misread as calm. Most of Lee’s clients are mutual funds, state pension funds and hedge funds. And most remain wary of the market, planning to buy eventually but for now mostly watching from the sidelines.
“This is a very difficult market to predict, very difficult to trade,” says Doreen Mogavero, one of Lee’s partners. “It’s not historically like anything we’ve seen before.”
Mogavero believes, at least for this moment of this morning, that the previous session’s surge and the focus on the Fed is distracting investors, lifting stocks in a way that may not be sustainable. Soon, she says, they’ll have to refocus on the long-term prospects for businesses and consumers. Her doubts are confirmed by TV reports before she left this morning of fresh rounds of layoffs by several large companies.
“When all is said and done and people start to look at the underlying economy, that’s what really tells a story,” she says.

11:43 a.m., Dow up 2.47.
Seen on television, a day on the trading floor looks like one more repeat of the same controlled chaos. But from trader’s eye level, it becomes clear neither is true.
What looks like a frenzy is actually remarkably organized. Under the gilded tobacco leaf motif woven across the exchange’s 50-foot ceiling, brokers work the perimeter, fielding orders and gathering information for client investors trying to read the market. In the middle of the room, specialists work the trading posts, horseshoe-shaped counters decked in flat screen monitors. Each specialist runs trading in five or six stocks.
In much the way they’ve done for decades, brokers and specialists converge on the building at Wall and Broad streets each day, arriving in colored mesh-back jackets with their nicknames embroidered on the front.
But only about 1,200 people work the floor now, down from 3,000 a few years ago. Trading used to fill five rooms. Today, it’s down to two — the main floor and the adjacent Garage, rumored to be the site of a long-ago horse stable.
Traders whose jobs were eliminated have been replaced by technology. In the old days, floor workers typed more than 40 million keystrokes a day processing orders. Now, more than 95 percent of all buying and selling is done by computers. Brokers dash around toting e-brokers, a wireless handheld device.
The NYSE’s management touts the resulting hybrid as the best of both worlds — the speed of automation but the judgment and care that only a human being can offer. Skeptics, including those at other exchanges, most now entirely run by computers, say the Big Board is a relic.
Those still on the floor think the extreme volatility of the past few weeks confirms both the value of the human component — a computer, after all, can’t console or advise an uncertain investor — and tests its limits.
“I’m half human and half machine, which is OK with me,” Mogavero says. “As long as both halves are working — and it has been tested several times in the last two weeks.”
1:20 p.m., Dow up 42.69.
David Henderson has two trader’s coats in his closet. When stocks are tanking, he dons the red one. It’s been very well worn recently. But for two weeks now, Henderson’s been telling others on the floor that the bottom may be near. Other brokers rib him about this. But Henderson is steadfast. To show he means it, the trader — whose family has worked the floor for 150 years — got his green jacket off the hanger.
“I told a few people if we don’t get a good rally, I’m going to burn this jacket,” he says.
Now, with less than an hour before the Fed weighs in, Henderson at last sees justification for his optimism.
Yesterday’s gain was sweet. But even today, he spots glimmers of what could be good news. The price of oil is up about $5 a barrel, good for energy stocks that have been battered recently. General Motors, one of the 30 blue chip stocks that make up the Dow, is up 41 cents — about 6.5 percent — on reports that fuel investor hope of a merger with rival Chrysler. Investors seem to be moving to stocks like McDonald’s Corp., whose value meals draw consumers even in a down economy.
Henderson isn’t kidding himself. Stocks never rise in a straight line and there’s no instant gratification in this market. But, maybe, the massive plunge in the market and equally massive moves by federal policymakers to rescue the economy set the stage for better days.
On the digital board overhead, the latest headline flashes past: “Time to Give Bernanke Some Credit.”
“No joke, Sherlock,” Henderson says.
Beneath the headline, the board shows the Dow gaining steam — up nearly 100 points in 17 minutes.

2:14 p.m., Dow up 76.78.
Just a minute to go now before the Fed is expected to speak.
But traders have been whispering “shhhh” since noon. Now the whispers grow louder and more frequent, a joking way to let off steam.
“Quiet on the set,” one trader shouts.
But 2:15 ticks by. Then 2:16. Finally, two minutes past due, the headline flashes past on the digital board: “Fed Funds Rate 50 BPS to 1 percent. Door open to more cuts.”
The only reaction from the floor is a murmur. Almost immediately, though, investors begin parsing the Fed’s statement for clues to the future. At 2:18, the Dow is down 18. A minute later, it’s up 14.
Warren Meyers stands at trading post No. 5, his e-broker in hand, his eyes still fixed on the screen. Another headline pops up, noting that investors — based on the Fed’s assessment — are betting there’s a 100 percent chance of another rate cut in December.
That might be good news for stocks, but offers a grim verdict on the economy.
“What does that tell you?” Meyers says. “We’re nowhere near the end of it.”

2:52 p.m., Dow up 17.44
Can this market hold its ground? If it does, it will be the first time all October the Dow has sustained two consecutive gains.
It’s striking, though, that for all expertise clustered on the floor, there’s little agreement on just where things might go next.
“It would be a great day if we were plus 50 or down 50,” Frankel says. He turns to Anthony Riccio, a fellow broker, who’s tracking incoming orders for Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and other banks stocks. Buyers outweigh sellers, Riccio reports. The market seems to be building momentum.
By 3:16, the Dow is up 165.
Three minutes later, it’s up 186.
Eventually it peaks up 290.
At 3:40, specialists post sheets on the sides of their computer monitors, showing trade imbalances for the stocks they supervise. There are many more orders to buy than to sell, and the sheets are posted to draw more sellers into the market. That could make for a strong finish.

3:31, Dow up 220.64.
As the session enters its final half hour, the market waffles.
“Oh, they’re giving up some of the gains,” shouts Steve Grasso, who trades for Frankel. “Hold, hold!”
But the Dow catches itself. At 3:48, it is up 276.
“Pretty impressive,” says a smiling Weisberg, the longtime trader. “We’ll take it.”
Minutes later, though, the market seems to come off its tracks. Just why is not easy to figure.
At about 3:45, one of the financial news channels relays a report about General Electric Co., quoting its CEO as saying the company forecast a 10 to 15 percent drop in its revenues. Before the afternoon is out, a GE spokesman will clarify that the comments were merely hypothetical.
But that will come too late for the market, where investors are rushing to sell GE — one of the mainstays of the Dow — pushing it down sharply.
The selling seems to beget more selling. To Weisberg, the longtime trader, it hints darkly at hedge funds and others gaming the market. He blames the Securities and Exchange Commission for allowing shortsellers — who bet that stocks will fall — to do so even when the stocks are already dropping.
The gains of the day are disappearing fast. But the Dow clings to a small gain until, at 3:57, it loses its toehold.
“Ring the bell! Hurry up!” a trader shouts from the middle of the floor.
But Weisberg, disgusted, has seen enough. He grabs his baseball cap, wraps a scarf around his neck and bids his co-workers good night.
A moment later, the board shows 4 p.m., and the bell sounds. Dow down 119.
The market has fought bravely. But it has lost today’s battle.

TITLE: Local Ace Has High Hopes Of Home
AUTHOR: By Barry Wood
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: DOHA — Svetlana Kuznetsova is hoping a switch of training base from Spain to her native Russia will help spur her to the kind of form that saw her capture the U.S. Open crown earlier in her career.
Despite reaching five finals this year, the 23-year-old is the only player competing this week at the WTA Championships who is without a tournament win in 2008.
The 2004 champion at Flushing Meadows has decided to leave the tennis academy in Spain where she has spent most of her professional career, and work instead with Russian compatriot and former French Open and Wimbledon finalist Olga Morozova.
“It’s been a big move for me to move from Spain to Russia, but I feel very positive about it,” Kuznetsova told reporters.
“I missed my home country very much. It just gives me some incredible support from inside, the feeling of being with all my family and my friends.
“And Olga, she’s a great coach. She has experience, and definitely she helps me. Olga is very understanding and she helps me a lot and supports me, so that’s great.”
Kuznetsova originally left Russia because she needed better training facilities, and the coaching she received in Spain from Emilio Sanchez and Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario allowed her to reach her potential.
“I achieved much in tennis, and now I have different possibilities in Russia. I have more courts, more things the Russian Federation is also going to help me with.
“And in Spain I was kind of bored. I started coming back to Moscow or St Petersburg two years ago. Every time I would come there I would not feel like leaving and it was very hard for me.”
Kuznetsova will open her Doha campaign on Tuesday against fellow Russian Vera Zvonareva, and will later play Serbian pair Jelena Jankovic and Ana Ivanovic in her round-robin group.
The second group contains Dinara Safina, Elena Dementieva and the Williams sisters, Serena and Venus.
The two players at the top of each group will advance to Saturday’s semi-finals.

TITLE: Tsonga Says Mixed Heritage Helps Him Succeed on Court
AUTHOR: By Julien Pretot
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PARIS — As a little boy, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga was taught to finish off everything on his plate and he did just that when he won the Paris Masters on Sunday.
The 23-year-old Frenchman, who beat Argentine David Nalbandian 6-3 4-6 6-4 in the final in front of a jubilant home crowd, started sobbing after clinching victory and the tears kept rolling during his post-match news conference.
“My parents taught me not to complain, to always go forward,” the son of two teachers said.
“They taught me to always finish what I had on my plate. It seems ridiculous but these are little things that in the end make you stronger.”
Born in Le Mans, western France, Tsonga has mixed heritage having a French mother, Evelyne, and a Congolese father, Didier, who moved to France in the 1970’s to play handball.
Tsonga, who saved eight break points against Nalbandian, started his tournament with little appetite but eventually had a feast.
“I was hurting everywhere but I told myself that I had to give it all as I had the chance to play this Masters Series,” said the Australian Open runner-up.
“Two years ago, I was 250th in the world and loafing around in the minor tournaments.”
Tsonga admitted the partisan crowd played a big part in helping him to subdue defending champion Nalbandian.
“I played with 15,000 thousand people today, sometimes they were so loud I was almost losing my focus,” said Tsonga, who beat world number three Novak Djokovic and Americans Andy Roddick and James Blake en route to the title.
Having been sidelined for three months earlier this year with a knee injury, Tsonga said his mixed heritage helped him to believe in himself in Paris this week.
“I’ve got a bit of the eccentricity of Africa and a bit of Western calm,” he said.
“I love being able to pass from a feeling of euphoria to one of calm and serenity.
“I have both origins running through my blood. Sometimes, when I look at my mother, I can think ‘well, you are on the court, stay calm, pick yourself up and go ahead.”
Tsonga, who climb to seventh in the world when the new ATP standings were published on Monday, will now head to Shanghai to play in the Masters Cup.
“I’m going to go there to represent France and all my family and my friends,” he said.
“I’m going to represent everyone and do my best.”