SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1437 (101), Friday, December 26, 2008
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TITLE: Don’t Look To TV For Crisis-Time Laughs
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — On a recent episode of television show “Comedy Club,” a comedian downplayed the crisis in Russia.
“Why are people talking about a crisis, when there’s a traffic jam of Bentleys?” Alexander Nezlobin asked.
He went on to list what would be real signs of a crisis: Zenit football team agrees to trade its star Andrei Arshavin for potatoes, a McDonald’s Happy Meal comes with salt, matches and soap instead of a toy, and you need to take out a mortgage to buy pelmeny.
“There isn’t any crisis,” Nezlobin concluded his monologue, as the audience of pop starlets and sportsmen clapped and sipped champagne.
While in the West, the crisis is creating plenty of material for comedians, Russian comedians are steering clear of the topic on television or going for light, uncontroversial jokes. Even a late-night show on Channel One where comedians discuss current affairs has made few mentions of the crisis.
This reflects news coverage on state channels, where anchors are avoiding mentions of the crisis and concentrating on upbeat stories.
Meanwhile, people’s fears about the economic situation are reflected in dark gallows humor that is circulating through word of mouth and on the Internet.
Nezlobin brushed off a question about censorship. “We’re forbidden to mention the word crisis more than 37 times in a show,” he joked in a statement forwarded by “Comedy Club’s” press secretary.
“We live in this world and talk about what affects us. Everyone knows about the crisis. It’s like a cold sore. We can talk about cold sores, why not about the crisis?” he said.
On a recent “ProjectorParisHilton” show on Channel One, comedians discussed only one crisis story — stingy anti-crisis advice from Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who said he had given up haircuts and advised people to save money by sharing a newspaper with their neighbors.
The improvised current affairs show features four comedians leafing through newspapers and commenting on articles. It’s the closest Russia has to a show such as Britain’s “Have I Got News for You,” but the comedians generally stick to fluffy or patriotic pro-Kremlin stories.
The rest of the recent show was taken up with non-crisis stories including President Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to Venezuela and the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Awards.
One of the hosts, Garik Martirosyan, who also appears on “Comedy Club,” talked openly of his political position on a talk show last month. He said he would not parody Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who “saved a great country from falling apart.”
A request to Channel One for comment from the comedians went unanswered after repeated calls.
Jokes on the crisis are flourishing outside the restrictions of television, passed on by word of mouth, blogs and specialized joke sites.
Viktor Shenderovich, former screenwriter for the political puppet show “Kukly” on NTV television, said he no longer watches comedy shows on television, but he had heard jokes on the crisis from friends.
He told one: “What’s the difference between a divorce and a crisis? With the crisis, you’ve lost half your money and you’ve still got the wife.”
Sergei Dorenko, former Channel One news anchor and now editor-in-chief at the Kremlin-friendly Russian News Service, said he had not seen any comedy shows because he had not watched television for a decade. Russian television is “for poor, uneducated old women,” he said.
Dorenko said he’d heard jokes about the crisis, but that they are being recycled from the 1998 default.
He told one about two businessmen. Both complain they don’t pay their staff but they keep coming in to work anyway to save money on their bills. One says he introduced a system where people pay to get into the office, “but they’re cunning and come in on Monday and stay until Saturday.”
A Internet survey carried out by Kommersant Dengi magazine in the fall found that more than half of respondents found crisis jokes funny, while only a quarter called them inappropriate.
Ad agency director Alexander Tsaryov has a LiveJournal blog where he writes jokes about office workers and the crisis.
One of his jokes is called a “Checklist for Socially Responsible Bloggers and PR People.” It lists politically correct ways to rephrase bad news about the crisis. For example, “there are no dollars at the exchange point” should be replaced by “banks prefer Russian currency” and “I’ve been fired” should be replaced by “I’ve gone freelance.”
“Everyone understands that humor is probably the only way to react to the crisis,” Tsaryov said. “Being grumpy or staying silent about it isn’t an option.”
He said he now rarely watches television. “Society has divided up into people who use the Internet and people who watch television,” he said, calling the television audience “badly informed.”
Jokes on the crisis are among the most popular on web site Anekdoty.ru, said its founder, Dmitry Verner.
Some people have sent political jokes about the crisis, and they have gone online. “We don’t have any censorship on the site and publish whatever we are sent,” Verner said in answer to e-mailed questions.
All the same, the political jokes haven’t been particularly good. “I think it’s because the current political leaders are not making such a strong impression,” Verner said.
Back in 1998, President Boris Yeltsin and Prime Ministers Viktor Chernomyrdin and Sergei Kiriyenko were popular subjects of jokes, he said.
Asked for the best of new jokes, he cited one about a son asking his father, “Will we be affected by the financial crisis?” “No,” he answers. “The financial crisis will affect people who have finances. The people who don’t will just be f****d.”
Another joke he told is about a man going to a bank and trying to withdraw money. The manager pays no attention to his appeals for funds to buy food and pay bills until he says, “Maybe I need the cash so I can pay for a prostitute.” “Take your pick, the manager says, pointing to the cashiers.
TITLE: Gas Exporters Downplay OPEC-Style Cartel
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia played host Tuesday as 11 gas producing countries agreed to work more closely to control supply levels on world markets and vowed to step up other cooperation, upgrading the Gas Exporting Countries Forum into a more official and potentially influential group.
The intensified contacts between gas-supplying nations have drawn close attention from major Western energy consuming countries, worried that the organization could move to try to influence world prices in the same manner as OPEC.
The gas exporting countries have maintained that they would remain unable to fix prices because supplies are tied to fixed pipelines and long-term contracts.
Ministers from the 11 member countries, which include Iran, Libya, Qatar and Nigeria, adopted a charter making provisions for an organization headquarters, secretariat and chief executive.
The ministers chose Doha, the capital of the Gulf nation of Qatar, as home for the headquarters, despite a strong push by Russia in favor of St. Petersburg. The chief executive for the group, a secretary general, will be elected at a meeting in Doha next year.
“We finally created a full-blown international organization with very ambitious and outstanding goals,” Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko said after the meeting at the President Hotel. One of the goals will be consulting each other on future investment so the countries don’t produce more than the market needs, Shmatko said.
“Avoiding the creation of an unnecessary oversupply of gas in one region or another, which would undoubtedly end up putting pressure on prices, is of paramount importance,” Shmatko said during the meeting.
The group would also consider alternative mechanisms for determining gas prices to the current method of tying them loosely to the price of a basket of oil products, Shmatko said.
Addressing the event, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said that any rise in gas prices as the Gas Exporting Countries Forum morphs into a closer-knit group should not be blamed on cartel agreements.
Putin said that rising prices will result from the fact that extraction is getting more difficult and expensive as companies move to tap more remote deposits.
“Despite the current economic slowdown, and even despite falling prices for energy … the era of cheap energy resources, including an era of cheap gas, is, of course, drawing to an end,” Putin said.
The gas trade is becoming more flexible, as countries increasingly move to buying and selling liquefied natural gas, which is transported by tankers rather than pipelines, Putin said, appearing to offer it as one more reason for gas producing countries to work together.
The Gas Exporting Countries Forum could gain a role in EU policy making for the energy market, Putin said, while charging that European officials were creating uncertainty for gas producers.
“The problem of erratic legal regulation has become really prevalent,” Putin said of the EU. “Obviously, it takes joint efforts by all the parties concerned to make regulations more stable.”
In a sign that Russia was vying to take a leading role in the group, Putin offered to pay the bill for a headquarters located in St. Petersburg.
The city’s governor, Valentina Matviyenko, arrived to deliver a presentation praising the city’s historical legacy. She quickly left the meeting before Shmatko announced that Doha had won the vote. Algiers and Tehran were the other two candidates.
Officials offered no further comments about the event beyond Shmatko’s 10-minute question-and-answer session following the meeting and prepared speeches by visiting minister’s broadcast on closed-circuit television.
The group’s 11 members are Algeria, Bolivia, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Russia, Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela. Norway and Kazakhstan have observer status.
The contents of the charter they signed appeared to be a closely guarded secret.
Asked if the Gas Exporting Countries Forum will make the contents of the charter public, Deputy Energy Minister Anatoly Yanovsky answered simply, “Why would we do that?”
A member of the delegation from Trinidad and Tobago, David Small, declined to let a reporter look at a copy of the document. To a suggestion that consumer countries might get suspicious if the charter remained out of the public domain, Small said, “They will be suspicious no matter what we do.”
The mines, industry and energy minister from Equatorial Guinea exemplified the information value of the prepared speeches in his address.
“For those of you who have heard little of Equatorial Guinea,” Marcelino Owono Edu said, “it is located in the Gulf of Guinea.”
TITLE: Georgia, U.S. Sign Strategic Treaty
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: TBILISI — Georgia and the United States will on Jan. 4 sign a strategic partnership treaty, the Georgian foreign ministry said on Thursday, in a move that risks again provoking Russian wrath against Tbilisi.
“Georgian Minister of Foreign Affairs Grigol Vashadze and the U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will sign a strategic partnership treaty on Jan. 4 in Washington,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Khatuna Iosava said.
The accord, similar to a strategic agreement Washington has recently signed with Ukraine, risks raising tensions with Russia, which earlier this year fought a brief war with Georgia over the breakaway region of South Ossetia.
Post-war tensions between Russia and Georgia are already running high, a fact underlined Wednesday when Russian President Dmitry Medvedev launched an extraordinary personal attack on his Georgian counterpart Mikheil Saakashvili.
“We suspected that our Georgian colleague had problems in his brains but we did not realise that it would be as serious as that,” Medvedev said in an end-of-year television interview.
Saakashvili has hailed the U.S.-Georgia treaty as a “historic” move that will allow the two countries’ relations to progress towards a new stage.
“The United States has never before said that Georgia is its strategic partner,” he said on December 22.
Georgian opposition politicians and analysts agreed that the accord was a positive step but warned not to get carried away by its importance.
“No doubt it is a step forwards in strengthening Georgia’s security. But Saakashvili is exaggerating its importance,” the leader of the Georgian Republican Party, Levan Berdzenishvili, said.
“This accord is not a substitute for NATO membership, which is the only way to ensure Georgia’s security,” he added.
An analyst with the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs, Tornike Sharashenidze, said “the accord in question is not about creating military guarantees for Georgia’s security. It’s mostly of moral force.”
The U.S. signed similar strategic partnerships with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1998, when the three countries were seeking to join NATO in the face of fierce opposition from Moscow.
The U.S.-Baltic Charter was seen as a key tool in moving the countries towards membership in NATO, which they joined in 2004.
The United States and Ukraine on December 19 signed a similar strategic accord that calls for a U.S. diplomatic post in Crimea, a Russian-speaking area where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is based.
NATO ministers agreed at a meeting earlier this month to boost ties with both Georgia and Ukraine, but without granting them the status of official candidates to join the alliance.
Russia sent troops into Georgia, a strong U.S. ally, in early August to repel a Georgian military attempt to retake South Ossetia, which had received extensive backing from Moscow for years.
Russian forces later withdrew to within South Ossetia and another rebel region, Abkhazia, which Moscow simultaneously recognised as independent states.
TITLE: Russia Grapples With Financial Part of Crisis
AUTHOR: By Jessica Bachman
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — In the past three months, “financial crisis” has become a ubiquitous phrase for Russians: it glosses newspaper headlines daily and is more and more frequently appearing on billboard, print, TV and radio advertisements for banks and other private companies.
But does the average Russian citizen understand the “financial” in “financial crisis?”
The answer, according to global financial literacy specialists, is no. But officials at the Finance Ministry, Central Bank and State Duma say they’re working on a program — together with banks and nonprofit organizations — to improve the situation.
“We are taking concrete steps toward the creation of a state program in 2009 that will raise the level of financial literacy in different segments of society, from school children to retirees,” said Andrei Bokaryov, deputy director of the Finance Ministry’s department of international financial relations.
“The program is mainly aimed at minimizing the effects of this type of crisis, at raising the population’s level of trust in the banking system, at understanding credit risks and at promoting family budgets,” said Bokaryov, who is working on the project.
He said the Finance Ministry was seeking $100 million from the federal budget for the program, the country’s first at the national level, and that it would be voted on in the Duma early next year.
The World Bank is already carrying out preliminary research and setting up pilot programs in schools around the country.
At a recent conference on financial literacy, Andrei Markov, the World Bank’s senior human development specialist, stressed that the dangers of financial illiteracy grow considerably during a financial crisis.
“People with less financial knowledge and knowledge of the banking system are more inclined to panic in a crisis, to withdraw all their money from the bank and put it under their mattress,” Markov said.
According to a survey conducted in July by the National Agency of Financial Research, 50 percent of Russians over the age of 18 rated themselves as having no or insufficient financial knowledge and skills. On the other hand, 90 percent of 10th graders said their financial knowledge and skills were either satisfactory or good, compared with 44 percent of adults.
In an October survey of 1,600 people in 42 regions, the agency found that only 2 percent of the population trusted private banks, while 17 percent had faith in state-controlled Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank.
“Such a low level of trust in private banks is surprising because as of 2004, state deposit insurance guaranteeing deposits in the case of bankruptcy has been in force in Russia,” the agency said in the report.
But the survey also found that 44 percent of those with savings or debit accounts were not aware of the existence of state deposit insurance. In October, the government increased federal deposit insurance to 700,000 rubles (now about $25,500) per depositor from 400,000 rubles, but 57 percent of all respondents were not aware of the change.
Amid incremental devaluations of the ruble, Russians in October pulled 6 percent of their deposits, or 355 billion rubles ($13 billion), from banks, the largest monthly withdrawal in at least two years. Deposits in foreign currencies, however, were up 11 percent.
To reverse such trends, the program that will focus heavily on educating students by setting up finance classes in schools and universities. Retirees, too, will be targeted, with information available at places they frequent, including medical clinics and Sberbank, said Bokaryov, the Finance Ministry official.
Brook Horowitz, the executive director of the International Business Leaders Forum in Russia, said that increasing the population’s financial literacy was key to bringing about greater personal fiscal responsibility in the country.
“Such a huge task of increasing the awareness of the people about their financial responsibility can be resolved only by joining efforts of all stakeholders: government, business and the media to get that message across to all groups of the population,” said Horowitz, who with the forum and other partners has established a financial literacy program and educational web portal called Azbukafinansov.ru.
A financially responsible person plans a household budget; is aware of the risks and consequences of using financial products such as credit cards and auto and home loans; puts money away in the bank, saves for a rainy day and plans for financial needs in different stages of life, such as retirement, she said.
By that standard, Russians have a long way to go in terms of financial planning and responsibility.
TITLE: Dents Put In Putin’s Teflon Image
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s reputation as a Teflon leader is showing scratches as some Russians start to see a growing disconnect between the realities of the financial crisis and Putin’s public posture as the nation’s savior.
Posters openly insulting Putin were among those waved at a rally of thousands of motorists against a hike in import duties for used cars in Vladivostok for the past two weekends. Earlier, only radical members from the banned National Bolshevik Party had dared to attack Putin in public.
For the first time since Putin stepped down as president in May, Duma deputies on Wednesday called for Putin to be summoned to explain why the country posted a sharp decline in industrial output in November. The motion by Communist deputies was axed by the Putin-led United Russia party.
Political commentators who earlier refrained from criticizing Putin are now openly attacking him in Russian print, radio and online media.
The days of Putin being considered a political “sacred cow” were numbered when he left the Kremlin, but the financial crisis has greatly accelerated the process, political analysts said Thursday.
It is the seat in the Kremlin that is sacred, not the occupant and his powers, said Sergei Markov, a United Russia deputy in the Duma and a Kremlin-connected spin doctor.
And the crisis naturally pushes people to speak up louder for their interests, he said.
Tatyana Stanovaya of the Center for Political Technologies said public respect and trust for Putin were part of a “social contract” in which Putin’s role was to provide stability, make sure living standards improved and “tease America from time to time.”
Now, in an environment of salary cuts, job losses and soaring prices, people are growing discontented with the man who had assumed the role of the country’s shepherd, she said.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov could not be reached for comment Thursday, Friday or Monday.
No figures on the public’s trust in Putin have been released since October, when state-run VTsIOM placed it at 59 percent.
But a survey by the independent Levada Center released last week indicated that the number of people who believe the country is headed in the wrong direction has jumped from 24 percent in September to 40 percent this month.
Fotki.yandex.ru
“Mr. Putin, you ride in a Mercedes. Why not a Volga? Aren’t you a patriot?”
The number of people who believe the country is moving in the right direction fell from 61 percent to 43 percent.
The Dec. 12-15 survey of 1,600 people in 46 regions had a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points.
The survey’s finding that more Russians have faith in the government than those who don’t indicates that people still trust Putin. But when the people understand that the government is effectively Putin, he will become a source of despair rather than hope, said Dmitry Oreshkin, a political analyst with Merkator, a research center.
“Things will get worse when the gap between what he promises on television and what happens in real life grows wider,” Oreshkin said.
In the past several weeks, Putin has publicly promised financial assistance to virtually every segment of society, from pensioners and the unemployed to bankers and industrialists, in the form of direct cash payments, fiscal benefits or tax cuts.
But the regions have not rushed to join Putin’s efforts in cutting taxes or freezing planned tariff hikes for communal services.
This will leave an impression among Russians that they are being manipulated, and Putin’s “untouchable” image will suffer, Stanovaya said.
Putin has taken care to protect his image from the very beginning of his rise to power. Shortly after he became president in 2000, the Kremlin took over control of all the national television channels, turning them into the effective propaganda tools.
Last week, VTsIOM released a study that said television is the most trusted source of information among Russians, with 70 percent of respondents making that assertion. Fifty percent said they trusted information from the print media, while 26 percent trusted friends and relatives.
No national television channels reported about the motorist protests on Dec. 14 and last weekend, infuriating many, who expressed their anger in the Russian blogosphere and through phone calls to radio talk shows. Among the signs carried by protesters were “Putin, we are sick of you. Get sacked!” and “Mr. Putin, you ride in a Mercedes. Why not a Volga? Aren’t you a patriot?”
On a popular morning show on Serebryany Dozhd radio, well-connected and high-flying host Vladimir Solovyov, who has been generally loyal to Putin in his remarks, lashed out at him and his Cabinet almost daily last week.
Political analysts Leonid Gontmakher and Oreshkin, who never belonged to the opposition camp, openly criticized Putin on the opinion pages of The Moscow Times last week.
Putin as president showed a remarkable ability to distance himself from the country’s problems, thanks in part to fawning coverage by state-controlled television. He has never been shy about assigning blame to others. As president, he frequently dressed down government officials in front of the television cameras.
Now, as the crisis starts to take its toll on the well-being of common Russians, most of Putin’s recent rhetoric has been directed at the United States, which he has accused of causing the global financial crisis through irresponsible fiscal policies.
Both Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev have tiptoed around acknowledging that any domestic factors might have contributed to the national economic slowdown.
It remains unclear whether Putin’s popularity will survive the crisis and allow him to run for the presidency in 2012, should he decide to do so.
“Instead of trusting in him as a savior, people could trust him as a devoted fighter against the crisis,” said Markov, the Duma deputy.
He said that even if Putin’s achievements on this front turned out to be modest, people would value him for his aspirations and tough leadership style.
Stanovaya said people would cling to Putin because there were no alternatives after an eight-year presidency in which political and social activism were strongly suppressed.
The country also lacks an appealing alternative ideology that could help such a leader to emerge, because most Russians do not want to return to Communist-like totalitarianism and have bad memories of the liberal reforms of the 1990s, Markov said.
Oreshkin noted that most critical comments in the print and online media are directed against Putin but avoid attacking Medvedev, in a sign that the political and business elite are divided between the two.
‘We see a cracking in the consensus of the elite. It looks like the previous consensus was glued together by high oil prices,” Oreshkin said.
TITLE: Test of Bulava Missile Fails for the 5th Time
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — A test launch of the Navy’s new Bulava submarine-based intercontinental ballistic missile ended in failure Tuesday, in just the latest setback in attempts to revamp the country’s nuclear arsenal.
The missile went off course after being launched from the Dmitry Donskoi submarine and was ordered to self-destruct, a defense industry source told Interfax. No casualties or damage were caused by the explosion, the source said.
Navy spokesman Igor Dygalo said Tuesday that the test launch had been carried out in the White Sea, but would not speak about the results, saying only that they were being studied.
Tuesday’s test launch was the Bulava missile’s 10th, five of which have been unsuccessful. The Navy had said before Tuesday that a successful launch this time would have allowed the missile to enter service next year.
Capable of carrying up to 10 warheads and with a range of up to 8,000 kilometers, the Bulava is being counted on to replace rapidly aging Soviet-era missiles to maintain strategic parity with the United States.
Further tests of the Bulava will be conducted next year, with three or four launches planned, a source within the military said, Interfax reported. Earlier this year, the head of the Federal Space Agency, Anatoly Perminov, said that 12 to 14 launches would be necessary to complete the tests.
The Bulava was designed for the Navy’s newest nuclear submarines — the Yury Dolgoruky, Alexander Nevsky and Vladimir Monomakh, each of which can carry up to 12 missiles.
The Yury Dolgoruky was launched this fall but has yet to be commissioned because it is still undergoing tests.
The other two submarines are still under construction at the Sevmash plant in Severodvinsk on the White Sea.
During his eight years as president, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin repeatedly stressed that the further development of the country’s nuclear forces, including the Bulava project, was vital to defending against foreign states that he said wished to take the country’s natural resources under their control.
“Measures to ensure the support and development of strategic nuclear forces will be given top priority,” Vladislav Putilin, deputy head of the government’s military industrial commission, told journalists Monday.
Putilin said the armed forces would procure 70 strategic nuclear missiles from 2009 to 2011.
He also said the government planned to allocate 4 trillion rubles ($141.5 billion) from 2009 to 2011 for a procurement program to modernize the army.
TITLE: OSCE: Mission in Georgia Due To Be Closed in 2009
AUTHOR: By Mark Heinrich
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: VIENNA — The OSCE said Monday it would start shutting down its mission in Georgia on Jan. 1 after Russia blocked a proposal to extend it in a standoff over the status of the breakaway South Ossetia region.
Moscow wants to split up the international democracy and human rights group’s mission in Georgia to reflect Russia’s recognition of South Ossetia as an independent state after crushing Georgia’s bid to retake the territory.
The United States and European allies in the 56-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have not recognized the independence of pro-Russian South Ossetia, which enjoyed autonomy when Georgia was part of the Soviet Union.
They sought a short-term “technical extension” of the OSCE’s Georgia mandate beyond Dec. 31 to allow time for negotiations on a solution but Russia rejected the idea. The OSCE takes decisions by consensus only.
An OSCE meeting at its Vienna headquarters Monday failed to overcome the stalemate over Moscow’s bid to strip OSCE operations in Georgia of any mandate over South Ossetia.
“A consensus for a three-month technical extension was not possible today, so it means we have to start withdrawing the mission, ceasing activities, on Jan. 1,” Ambassador Antti Turunen of Finland, the current OSCE chairman, said.
“We had one side defending the territorial integrity of Georgia and the other the ‘independence’ of South Ossetia. The sides are so far apart it made no sense trying to bridge the gap before Dec. 31,” Turunen said.
In Helsinki, Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb said the deadlock was regrettable but held out the prospect of talks resuming in the new year as it would take two to three months to dismantle the 200-person mission.
Around two-dozen military monitors can remain until Feb. 19 under the provisions of an August ceasefire brokered by the EU.
Finland’s proposal was for the OSCE mission to be revamped to restore monitors’ ability to cross internal conflict lines — they have been barred from South Ossetia since August — and be overseen by a special OSCE envoy based in Vienna.
Russian Ambassador Anvar Azimov said that was a non-starter. He blamed the breakdown in negotiations on a Western refusal to accept “the new political reality that exists for us, and that is the independence of South Ossetia.”
He said that talks in the new year should focus on a mutually agreeable compromise, but added: “Russia favors an independent presence of the OSCE in South Ossetia. ... Even if we do not come to a deal, it is no tragedy.”
Georgian Deputy Foreign Minister Giga Bokeria accused Russia of pursuing a “consistent policy of infringement of Georgia’s sovereignty, independence and interests.”
“The presence of international organizations in Georgia impedes this process. That’s why they are against any international presence in our country. It’s one more demonstration of their uncivilized attitude,” Bokeria said. U.S. Ambassador Julie Finley said Russia’s stance was a “debacle” for the OSCE but that Moscow was isolated.
TITLE: Gazprom to Invest $24.7 Bln in 2009
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Gazprom’s board approved on Tuesday its investment program and budget, which calls for 2009 capital spending of 699.88 billion rubles ($24.7 billion).
The company also plans long-term financial investments of 220.56 billion rubles, bringing total spending to 920.44 billion rubles, Gazprom said in a statement.
The 2009 budget provides for total cash income and revenue of 3.72 trillion rubles. It estimates liabilities, expenditure and investments at 3.8 trillion rubles, financial borrowings of 90 billion rubles and a budget surplus of 500 million rubles. Gazprom expects an 11.3 billion ruble effect from cost-cutting measures.
Chief executive Alexei Miller said separately on Tuesday that the price of oil and gas did not reflect true supply and demand for energy. Miller met with ministers from the Gas Exporting Countries Forum.
Gazprom will start loading Russia’s first cargo of liquefied natural gas in two months, as it seeks to supply consumers beyond the reach of the pipeline network. LNG is gas that has been cooled to a liquid to allow transportation by tanker.
Loading will begin Feb. 19 at Gazprom’s Sakhalin-2 project north of Japan, Deputy CEO Alexander Medvedev said Dec. 19. The process will take several weeks, he said.
Gazprom, which now only exports to European customers via pipelines, aims to become a global energy supplier by selling LNG. LNG from Sakhalin Island will reach customers in Japan, Korea and North America.
UBS said Monday that Russian stocks including Gazprom could rebound next year following a “triple whammy” of negative factors in 2008.
A slowdown in global economic growth that hurt commodity prices, the global financial crisis that boosted borrowing costs and Russia-specific ailments including “deteriorating” corporate governance and forced selling to meet margin calls pushed the 50-stock RTS Index down 71 percent, UBS said.
TITLE: Holiday Offers Chance for Market Rally
AUTHOR: By Jessica Bachman
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — With investors preparing for the holidays and many international funds closed until January, Russia’s equity markets look set for a quiet last two weeks. But the state may also seek to use the Christmas lull to buy up domestic equities as a consolation boost to finish out 2008.
The state’s main bailout vehicle, Vneshekonombank, or VEB, will likely take advantage of the low trading volume on the MICEX and RTS exchanges in the coming days to prop up prices, analysts said, which could mitigate — if briefly — what has been a particularly dismal year for Russian stocks.
The ruble-denominated MICEX Index and dollar-denominated RTS Index are down 65 and 70 percent on the year, respectively.
Vladimir Osakovsky, head of strategy at UniCredit, said the pre-holiday period was a “good time” for VEB to stage a major intervention. On days when few are trading, “the probability of creating a positive movement in the market is much stronger,” he said.
VEB, which is charged with loaning billions of rubles to help companies refinance foreign debt, has also been given access to 175 billion rubles from the National Welfare Fund to invest in domestic equities.
The bank, which has already bought 90 billion rubles of domestic stocks and bonds, does not disclose the names of companies in which it invests.
But with Urals crude trading at $36 per barrel Tuesday afternoon, analysts said there was little reason to expect any major state investment in oil companies. Chris Weafer, chief strategist at UralSib, said VEB would focus more on Gazprom and state banks.
“The bulk of international funds are already closed and there won’t be any sellers, so it will be easier to push prices higher. I think VEB will take advantage of this to push Gazprom, Sberbank and VTB up, and there is a good chance that this push will be reflected in London GDR prices when they open on Monday next week.”
How markets move following the long New Year’s holiday strongly depends on the interim performance of Russian stocks on Western markets — in the form of American and Global Depository Receipts — as well as any change in crude prices and exchange rates.
“Russian stocks will be trading indirectly during the holidays, so there may be a gap to be closed on Russian domestic markets depending on how London moves,” said Alexander Zakharov, head of equities at Metropol.
“We may see jumps on the 12th, especially on the MICEX Index if the dollar strengthens in the first two weeks of January. But if the oil price remains more or less unchanged over the holiday, I don’t believe the Russian market will react much,” Zakharov said.
The MICEX Index finished up 4.4 percent on Tuesday, while the RTS Index posted a gain of 4.4 percent.
The Central Bank will set the official exchange rates on Jan. 31 and has no plans to change them until the end of the state holidays, a spokesman said Tuesday.
Between now and Jan. 1, however, most expect the Central Bank to continue widening the band in which the ruble trades against a dollar-euro basket. The Central Bank has widened the band nine times since Nov. 11, allowing the ruble to depreciate in small increments.
“There is a need for much stronger devaluation now, and the gradual devaluation policy is unlikely to be interrupted anytime time soon,” said Osakovsky, of UniC redit.
He and other analysts said the Central Bank would continue letting the ruble fall after the holidays, although oil prices will determine how far.
“There will be further devaluation after the holidays, that’s for sure. It won’t be on the first day of opening but within the first working week,” Osakovsky said.
“If oil prices recover a lot, then it may be less.”
TITLE: MMK Board Forfeits Pay in Rare Decision
AUTHOR: By Nadia Popova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW — Board members with Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works will forfeit their salaries for the four months from January until their contracts expire, the company said Tuesday.
The move is a rare one in Russia, where company executives have been reluctant to follow the lead of their colleagues in the West in waiving compensation in times of crisis, and it comes after workers at the company complained of being pressured to quit.
“The decision is caused by the need to cut company expenses during the uneasy conditions of an economic crisis that has hit the whole world,” Viktor Rashnikov, chief executive and a majority shareholder of Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works, or MMK, said in an e-mailed statement.
Rashnikov said the executives had volunteered to forfeit their salaries for their work on the board. An MMK spokeswoman refused to provide salary figures for board members.
The company has lost 3,800 employees since September and is operating at 35 percent capacity.
The MMK board, elected in April for one year, includes Rashnikov, Managing Company Renaissance Capital managing director Kirill Levin, Polymetal deputy chief executive Zumrud Rustamova and BP regional director Peter Charow, among others.
The practice of foregoing salaries and bonuses has become widespread among Western managers as their companies’ profits and capitalization sank. But few Russian companies have adopted the practice. “Our top executives still feel they are worth it,” said Natalya Orlova, chief economist at Alfa Bank.
Several MMK employees complained in interviews last week that they were being forced to resign voluntarily so the company could avoid severance pay.
In October, several Rosneft independent directors — including VTB president Andrei Kostin and Barclays Capital chairman Hans-Jorg Rudloff — agreed to forego their annual salaries of $200,000, Kommersant reported.
Troika Dialog, the country’s oldest investment bank, paid $180 million in bonuses in 2007. A Troika spokeswoman declined to say Tuesday whether top Troika executives were forfeiting any compensation payments this year.
Norilsk Nickel and Belon, a coal producer, said their executives were forgoing compensation for some responsibilities.
Yevgeny Plaksenkov, chief executive of Miel, a leading real estate company, said many Russian managers were forfeiting compensation this year, including those at his company.
TITLE: Urals City’s Property Market Faces Ruin Due to Collapse
AUTHOR: By Konstantin Zalmanov
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — At one time considered an investment bonanza, the Yekaterinburg real estate market is now on the edge of collapse, experts and market players say.
In October, three of the city’s major developers — Atomstroikomplex, LSR-Ural and Nash Dom — announced a revision of their plans for completing new construction projects.
Atomstroikomplex general director Valery Ananiyev said that, in 2009, his company would not be able to match its 2008 volume of close to 200,000 square meters; LSR-Ural has frozen construction on a 60-hectare plot of land in the western part of the city, said the company’s general director, Andrei Bibikov; and Nash Dom chief Sergei Lekomtsev said that his company had pushed back the completion dates on a number of projects in the city’s Verkh-Istetsky and Zheleznodorozhny areas.
The unpromising economic climate has buyers shying away from unfinished projects, experts said. According to data compiled by Yarmarka, a market analysis firm, the average price for property in Yekaterinburg is 57,000 rubles ($2,025) per square meter and is expected to fall by 20 percent to 25 percent in the next year.
To attract buyers, builders are sweetening deals with a variety of discounts and bonus offers.
Aston Group is offering to provide buyers with a complimentary sunroom in their newly purchased apartments. Another builder, Fin-Invest Stroi, is touting a 20 percent discount for the first few buyers who purchase apartments in one of its newly built residential buildings.
Many other developers are throwing in a complimentary parking space with the purchase of an apartment. Builders aren’t the only ones trying to keep the city’s real estate market afloat.
The state is planning on buying out residential projects, and the Agency for Housing Mortgage Lending will restart the process of mortgage lending to allow people to purchase apartments on credit, said Igor Sukhanov, the general director of Oboronsnabsbit, a regional real estate management company.
The Ministry for Regional Development has also thrown the market a lifeline of sorts, announcing plans to buy 226 apartments at a cost of 35,000 rubles per square meter to provide housing for military personnel in the Sverdlovsk region.
The city’s commercial real estate sector is facing a struggle as well.
The shopping center market is in a state of over-saturation, said Alexander Zasukhin, the head of Ural Germes property consulting company. He named three major builders who were freezing a total of 500,000 square meters of retail construction projects in the city.
Office construction in the region has come to a virtual standstill. Among the biggest projects to be postponed is the 120,000 square meter Antei office complex, whose completion date has been moved back from summer 2009 to some time in 2010.
Experts expect to see a spate of acquisitions next year, as better-positioned companies snap up competitors who are in dire financial straits.
“Many of the regional developers have run out of resources, and they still have to make good on outstanding loans,” said Anton Bushmanov, director of the Most management company. “We can expect some major acquisitions in February and March of next year.”
TITLE: Putin’s Biggest New Year’s Wish
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Ryzhkov
TEXT: In 2009, as the frequency and intensity of protests across the country increase, the people will start demanding fundamental changes in the country’s political course and leadership.
Russians are increasingly worried about the economic crisis -- and rightfully so. A Dec. 15 survey by the Levada Center found that 60 percent of adults feel uncertain about the future, and 88 percent consider the condition of the economy to be from “fair” to “very bad.” More than half of the respondents feel that the worst is yet to come. Almost 40 percent believe the crisis has already hit Russia, and another third believe it hasn’t hit yet, but will. Furthermore, 75 percent of respondents expect unemployment to increase in their regions, and a whopping one-fourth of the respondents reported that they either had been laid off, hit with pay cuts or experienced delays in getting paid on time.
The government’s attempts to play down the seriousness of the crisis are becoming increasingly difficult to pull off. There is simply too much bad economic news hitting Russia from all sides. For example, industrial output fell 11 percent in November. The AvtoVAZ, KamAZ and General Motors auto plants have announced temporary halts to their production lines. There have also been major production cuts in the construction, metallurgical and chemical sectors. The crisis has struck hard in regions that had shown strong export-oriented growth over past years, such as Kuzbass, Chelyabinsk, Lipetsk, Belgorod and Cherepovets. After the long New Year’s holiday, hundreds of thousands of employees will learn that they have just been laid off. An even larger number of workers will face cuts in their salaries even though the average salary before the crisis was only $600 per month.
Exacerbating the problem is the fact that the economies of about 700 Russian cities are dependent on a single major local industry or factory. If those factories shut down, the majority of the people in those cities will have no way to make a living. Kremlin leaders do not have a clear strategy for coping with this looming disaster.
As the crisis is spilling over into the real economy, the people’s tolerance level for government policies is reaching its breaking point. Even before the crisis, the people’s anger over runaway inflation and their eroding purchasing power had been building up over the past few years. In addition, corruption has gotten markedly worse as the level of monopolization in the economy and bureaucratization of government has increased. All of this is pushing people’s discontent to the surface.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s decision to raise import duties on used foreign cars in an attempt to support the country’s struggling automakers unleashed a wave of demonstrations by drivers who will now be forced to pay through the nose for their favorite foreign models. In essence, the government is trying to force new car purchasers to buy far more inferior Russian models -- something they would have never done absent the import duties. Drivers protested all across the country -- from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok. Riot police brutally dispersed demonstrators at protests in Vladivostok during the past two weekends -- a rare example of police using force against ordinary citizens defending their everyday interests. This marks an escalation in the government crackdown on dissent, which up to now was limited largely to breaking up Dissenters’ Marches and roughing up and arresting their members.
The anger over increased import duties is particularly strong among residents of the Far East, the majority of which -- perhaps as high as 80 percent -- make a living either directly or indirectly connected with the sale or servicing of imported automobiles. The government’s decision only exacerbates the region’s sense of alienation from Moscow. It also strengthens the region’s separatist tendencies and increases the already high rate of emigration from that area.
In Alapayevsk in the Sverdlovsk region, 17 miners are staging a hunger strike to protest unpaid wages. In Magnitogorsk, people have held rallies against layoffs at the city’s iron and steel works and against price hikes for utilities and public transportation. People are also staging rallies in the city of Senezh in the Karelia region where the local pulp and paper mill is on the verge of closing, and the cost of heating and water have shot up by 20 percent and 27 percent respectively.
Moreover, hundreds of banks across the country might go bankrupt in January and February. That could lead to protests by depositors who are unable to retrieve their money, despite the limited government guarantees on bank deposits. In addition, people are upset with the government’s decision to increase utility prices for all homeowners in 2009. This might have been tolerable during a time of steady economic growth and rising standards of living, but it is unacceptable in the midst of a crisis.
For the first time in eight years, demonstrators not affiliated with marginal opposition parties are making harsh political demands. Drivers in Vladivostok demanded that Putin step down, that media censorship cease, that the government reverses its decision to amend the Constitution on increasing presidential and State Duma deputy terms, that the proposed changes to the Criminal Code broadening the definition of treason be annulled and that popular elections for governors be reinstated.
Despite the increasing number of protests against the government, Putin is still maintaining a 83 percent approval rating. But this won’t last for long as the crisis spreads and the protests intensify next year. When Putin gathers with his friends and family on New Year’s Eve, he should forget about raising his glass of champagne and toasting to his eternal popularity. Instead, he should make a wish for a lot of good luck in 2009 -- the only thing that can get him out of this terrible mess.
Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007, hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy.
TITLE: Mr. Belykh Goes to Kirov
AUTHOR: By Nikolai Petrov
TEXT: When President-elect Barack Obama decided to name former opponent Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state, many observers considered it a dubious staffing choice in terms of foreign policy but a brilliant move in terms of domestic policy.
Similarly, the Kremlin’s decision to name Nikita Belykh, the former leader of the Union of Right Forces, or SPS, as governor of the remote and economically depressed Kirov region may be a smart political move.
Rather than being a friendly gesture toward the opposition, Belykh’s appointment appears to be a slight directed at United Russia and the party’s own candidate for the post. This is the same “party of power” that President Dmitry Medvedev only recently suggested take over the function of proposing candidates for the governor posts. Thus, Belykh’s appointment underscores the hollowness of United Russia’s platform, and this won’t change even if Belykh ultimately decides to join United Russia, as have a number of his former SPS colleagues.
The outsider factor is perhaps the most important element in Belykh’s appointment. It is the latest in a long list of gubernatorial appointments coming from outside the regions they serve. The Kremlin installs outsiders to weaken the internal conflicts among rival political factions in the regions and increase the regions’ dependence on Moscow. In one sense, this builds regional pluralism, especially when the appointee is a politician — like Belykh — and not a member of the siloviki. It also provides some checks and balances against the local political elite. In the case of Belykh, who had some experience managing a region as deputy governor of the neighboring Perm region for two years before moving to Moscow, it would be hard to find a better outsider.
But with the country entering a deep crisis and the governor having to act quickly and decisively to manage a depressed region, appointing an outsider may be doomed to fail. Appointing a “Varangian” is always risky and is more often than not unsuccessful. What’s more, during a crisis, the governor has neither the luxury of making mistakes nor the time needed to correct them.
Belykh’s appointment, which was lobbied by State Nanotechnology Corporation head Anatoly Chubais, continues a long series of gubernatorial appointments representing the interests of large, powerful state corporations such as Russian Technologies and Russian Railways. The Kremlin’s decision to nominate Belykh was motivated not only by Belykh’s strong personal and managerial merits but also by the interests of large state corporations that stand behind him.
Many of Belykh’s former colleagues in SPS and other liberal opposition parties condemned his decision to “collaborate with the enemy,” but his desertion caused only a minor ideological blow to their cause. Belykh claimed a long time ago that democracy cannot be built in Russia without educating a new type of citizen and instilling in the people a new appreciation for democratic values and institutions. Belykh understands that this is a long process that requires small steps over the course of several decades.
In this way, Belykh is not a revolutionary but an evolutionist, and for the Kremlin this makes him a reliable manager and functionary. In ordinary times, that would probably qualify him to be an above-average governor, but whether he will remain an effective manager during a severe crisis remains to be seen.
The real question is whether he can cope with a situation that affords him almost no time to learn the lay of the land — one that will require highly professional crisis-management skills from his first day in office.
Nikolai Petrov is a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
TITLE: That was the year that was
AUTHOR: By Matt Brown and Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writers
TEXT: As is customary at the end of the year, we look back at some of the events that shaped culture, arts and ideas in St. Petersburg and Russia in 2008.
JANUARY
The heavily promoted sequel to the classic Soviet New Year film “Irony of Fate” —titled “Irony of Fate: Continuation” — storms the box office, breaking records for cinema attendance in Russia. The film, directed by Timur Bekmambetov, is criticized for product placement and lackluster performances from its young cast but had taken about $40 million in ticket sales by mid-February in Russia alone.
In St. Petersburg, the State Hermitage Museum reveals a complete conceptual plan that will lay the groundwork for renovating the museum by 2014 when it marks its 250th anniversary. Architect Rem Koolhaas, part of the team behind the plan, describes the approach as “modernization through conservation.”
St. Petersburg’s legendary grunge bar Tsinik serves its last grenki.
FEBRUARY
Russian-British classical music prodigy and St. Petersburg Conservatory student, 15-year old Alex Prior, becomes the youngest composer to have a work performed in the Kremlin with his ballet “Mowgli.”
A straight-to-DVD film about the love life of a fictional Russian president is released on Valentine’s Day. The hype around the movie, “A Kiss Off the Record,” centers on its parallels to the life of the actual Russian president at the time, Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile, Putin’s choice to succeed him as president, Dmitry Medvedev, realizes a childhood dream when he meets veteran Britsih rock group Deep Purple. The band was hired to play at a Kremlin concert marking the 15th anniversary of the state energy company Gazprom. Tina Turner, Alla Pugachyova and Dmitri Hvorostovaky also perform.
Siberian punk icon Yegor Letov dies in his hometown of Omsk at the age of 43. The police arrest 60 fans who try to pay their homage to the late Grazhdanskaya Oborona frontman in St. Petersburg and, later in the day, stop the memorial concert at Orlandina club.
The politically-charged, Televizor-headlined “Other Song” concert scheduled at Roks club is banned. The management claims it did so not by an order from the authorities but because the club is “outside the politics.” Nobody believes it.
MARCH
The $160-million restoration of the old Senate and Synod building on St. Petersburg’s Senate Square is revealed. Russia’s Constitutional Court is moving into the lavish palace from its former headquarters in Moscow.
The Mariinsky Theater treads water when six of the ten performances in its annual ballet festival are reruns of its 1950 version of “Swan Lake.” In the weeks following a dispute about the theater’s ballet division erupts publicly between its director Makharbek Vaziev and his boss, artistic director Valery Gergiev.
Yury Shevchuk of massively popular rock band DDT joins Televizor’s Mikhail Borzykin at a Dissenters’ March, an opposition rally protesting the March 2 presidential elections as “unlawful” for multiple violations.
A new rock music venue for St. Petersburg, A2, opens at 12 Razyezzhaya Ulitsa.
APRIL
A spectacular reworking of Aram Khachaturian’s 1954 ballet “Spartacus” opens at the revived Mikhailovsky Theater in St. Petersburg. Featuring live tigers and dozens of special effects, the sword-and-sandals epic will leave an impression on London critics when it goes on tour during the summer: “A brazen… barrage of camp,” (The Daily Telegraph); “Lurid, gaudy and flamboyant…[and full of] vulgarity, bombast and melodrama,” (The Evening Standard); “A massive Bollywood extravganza,” (The Times.)
In Moscow, a monument to Soviet space dog Laika, who became the first living mammal to orbit the Earth and the first to boil to death in a rocket a few hours later, is unveiled at a military research facility.
Local channel TV100 bans a performance to be given live by Televizor when gets wind of Mikhail Borzykin’s anti-Kremlin and anti-authoritarian lyrics. Editor Andrei Radin denies political censorship at his channel, saying that the show was canceled due to Borzykin’s “profane” language.
MAY
Opera singers Olga Borodina and Bryn Terfel are among the guest performers at the Mariinsky Theater’s two-month long Stars of the White Nights Festival. The festival opens in May with a revival of Rimsky Korsakov’s 1873 opera “The Maid of Pskov.”
The St. Petersburg Times celebrates its 15th year in business.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin opens an exhibition of the important collection of Russian art assembled by the late cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife Galina Vishnevskaya at the restored Konstaninovsky Palace and presidential residence outside St. Petersburg. The glittering palace, said Putin, “serves as one of the symbols of our country’s revival.”
Pop star Dima Bilan, aided by ice skater Yevgeny Plushenko, wins the Eurovision Song Contest in Belgrade with power balled “Believe.” Moscow will host the 2009 contest.
JUNE
Bob Dylan performs in St. Petersburg on his only Russian date on a European tour. Between 4000 and 5000 fans attend. During the same week, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters appears on Palace Square as part of the St. Petersburg Economic Forum. VIP tickets cost more than $600.
Zakhar Prilepin wins Russia’s top book prize for his novel “Sin.” An earlier Prilepin novel, “Sankya,” will become the subject of a critique by oligarch Pyotr Aven for its dystopian depiction of Russian provincial life later in the year.
Film director Timur Bekmambetov (“Irony of Fate: Continuation”) makes his Hollywood debut with “Wanted” starring Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy. “Even nihilism requires commitment of a kind but this, by contrast, is a movie built on indifference,” sniffs New York Times critic Manohla Dargis.
Football mania, already at fever pitch after Zenit St. Petersburg wins the Uefa Cup in May, becomes deafening when Russia reaches the semifinal of Euro 2008. Russia lost to eventual champions Spain.
JULY
The Mariinsky Theater premieres two entirely new operas: “The Brothers Karamazov,” (music Alexander Smelkov, libretto Yury Dimitrin); and Rodion Shchedrin’s “The Enchanted Wanderer.” Both ruminate on Russia’s spiritual future.
Gogol Bordello, Manic Street Preachers and Blondie are among international rock acts appearing in the city during the White Nights season.
AUGUST
Swiss-Italian impresario Juliano Di Capua revives “The Vagina Monologues” for the St. Petersburg stage. The title of the 1996 play by U.S. author Eve Ensler caused Di Capua trouble with the city’s Public Ethics Committee during a previous production so this time he used Latin letters, as opposed to Cyrillic script, for the offending word on the poster.
Days after the Russia-Georgia War, Valery Gergiev flies with his Mariinsky Theater orchestra to the capital of South Ossetia to conduct a patriotic victory concert in the bombarded city. According to The Times of London, Gergiev, a native Ossetian, says: “If it wasn’t for the help of the Russian Army here, there would be thousands and thousands more victims. I am very grateful as an Ossetian to my country, Great Russia, for this help.”
“Rock for Freedom,” an outdoor concert to celebrate the 1991 coup’s failure is turned into an anti-war event with musicians and politicians speaking out against Russia’s invasion of Georgia. Televizor headlines.
Alexander Solzheninsyn, author of “The Gulag Archipelago” and literary giant, dies near Moscow, aged 89.
SEPTEMBER
The annual Earlymusic festival is held with a revamped format that puts Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music into a diverse range of contexts, including the early music of Finland presented by harpsichordist Aapo Hakkinen.
The 50th birthday of the late St. Petersburg artist Timur Novikov is marked by a series of retrospectives, notably at the Hermitage. Novikov was an exponent of the Neo-Academic school of semi-official art in the 1980s.
Moscow prosecutors take cartoon TV channel 2x2 to court under “extremism” laws over an episode of “South Park.” Other U.S. favorites such as “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy” also came under fire for not complying with “legislation on protecting the moral and psychological development of children,” prosecutors say.
Thousands attend a pair of anti-war stadium concerts by DDT in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Called “Don’t Shoot,” after the song the band’s frontman Yury Shevchuk wrote during the Soviet war in Afghanistan in 1980, the shows also feature Georgian and South Ossetian acts.
Punk pioneer Iggy Pop and The Stooges perform in St. Petersburg for the first time.
OCTOBER
A publicity stunt claiming the U.S. State Department had “banned” a new Russian movie — as it apparently had Michael Moore’s Oscar-winning “Farenheit 9/11” — is reported as fact on Russian television news. But it does not save Yury Grymov’s “anti-American” film “The Strangers” from failing in box-office by only collecting around $118,700.
St. Petersburg’s first Lesbian and Gay Film Festival more or less takes place in private after fire inspectors suddenly shut down the two venues planned to host the event. The venues had been hurriedly booked after Pik Cinema mysteriously withdrew its support. Earlier in the year, gay clubs Central Station and Bunker had been subject to police raids.
Guitarist and singer Eduard Nesterenko, whose band Petlya Nesterova was one of the leading indie-rock bands in St. Petersburg in the late 1980s and early 1990s, dies aged 45.
Stalin’s court cartoonist Boris Yefimov dies aged 108.
NOVEMBER
An obscure St. Petersburg group make world headlines once more for condemning Hollywood as Russophobic. A Soviet spy villain in the latest Indiana Jones movie was attacked in the summer — this time Ukrainian-born actress Olga Kurylenko became the target for appearing (as a Bolivian) in the latest James Bond film “Quantum of Solace.” The group accuses Kurylenko of betraying the Slavic world.
Glavclub, or the “Main Club,” is pompously launched by Moscow impresario Igor Tonkhikh with a concert by the once-shocking yet still-popular band Leningrad on October Revolution day.
Modernist British composer Michael Nyman performs at the Shostokovich Philharmonic Hall. Some puzzled regulars leave the hall before the concert concludes.
Finnish retro innovators Desert Planet perform vintage video-game inspired music at Elektro Mekhanika, a weekend-long festival of electro music.
DECEMBER
The Arts Square Winter Festival comes and goes in a shortened program of classical music events compared to previous years. Organizer of the event based in venues on St. Petersburg’s Arts Square and Shostakovich Philharmonic maestro Yury Temirkanov celebrates his 70th birthday.
Stalin’s favorite ballerina and longstanding Soviet culture bureaucrat Olga Lepeshinskaya of the Bolshoi Ballet dies aged 92.
The Offspring comes to Russia and performs in St. Petersburg, for the first time.
Sergei Shnurov disbands Leningrad, apparently.
TITLE: Heaven sent
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The same team behind the smash hit Ruan Tai (a Thai restaurant) has created a charming new Chinese restaurant, Dary Podnebesnoy (China’s Gifts) next door.
Two halls seating 50 people, one with an impressive dragon mural and the other with attractive tiling, will welcome guests seeking authentic Chinese cuisine with a modern twist. Unlike common-or-garden Chinese eateries, this classy restaurant does not have an exhausting menu. Instead there is a targeted menu with selected, specially-constructed dishes.
For starters, a warm salad with duck-meat balls and steamed vegetables in a sweet and sour sauce (251 rubles, $8.70) will go down a treat, and a large soup bowl of glass noodles, shredded Chinese leaves and (too few) shrimps (131 rubles, $4.50) is filling and satisfying. Large tofu cubes floating about in the clear liquid of the soup offset a sharp ginger taste, and this dish improved as it cooled.
Wonton — disarmingly described as “homemade pelmeni” on the menu — in this case filled with duck meat (181 rubles, $6.30), were served steaming in a bamboo pot, with a dish of soy sauce for dipping.
Main courses include pork dishes, beef dishes and chicken dishes but a standout choice is the rabbit dish (351 rubles, $12.20). Two fulsome, meaty legs of rabbit are presented in a glistening sweet glaze on a mound of slithery glass noodles, and the dish is enormous.
The managers assure the public that a real “Peking Duck” will be available soon but in the meantime “Shanghai Duck” can be prepared on request.
For desert there are happily fried bananas draped in chocolate sauce (119 rubles, $4.15), moreish corn biscuits with fruit syrup (119 rubles, $4.15), or three flavors of ice-cream (including green tea) presented in scoops with a scattering of fresh fruit salad (119 rubles, $4.15).
Heavenly Gifts is an appropriate name for this restaurant: everything is presented lovingly and professionally. The team that made the Thai restaurant next door such a hit can be proud of this attempt at Chinese cuisine.
TITLE: Slimming down
AUTHOR: By Elmira Alieva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: More than eighty works by Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti are on display in St. Petersburg to demonstrate the full range of objects made by the artist in different periods of his life, including the sculptures of slender, elongated human forms that became his trademark as well as early works and lesser-known paintings and drawings.
Giacometti (1901-1966) grew up in Italian-speaking Switzerland and came from an artistic background — his father, Giovanni, was a well-known Post-Impressionist painter. Alberto studied in Geneva and traveled to Italy, which was his first inspiration. In 1922 he moved to Paris to study sculpture under the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. It was there that Giacometti experimented with cubism and surrealism. Much of his art became influenced by primitive and African sculpture.
“At the exhibition this period is illustrated by several sculptures, such as ‘The Couple’ from 1926, in which the sculptor used the symbols to characterize the genders and to express the characters of the figures,” said Maria Shlikevich, junior research assistant at the State Hermitage Museum and one of the curators of the exhibition. “Another example is ‘Spoon Woman,’ from 1926, that explores the African Dan culture metaphor, in which the bowl could be equated with a woman’s womb. The surrealistic influences are more evident in ‘Reclining Woman Who Dreams’ from 1929,” Shlikevich added.
Giacometti was not satisfied with his art, so he gradually separated from the Surrealists and returned to working from life models. He concentrated his sculpting on the human head, focusing on the model’s gaze. During World War II he avoided the Nazi occupation of France by living in Geneva and began to make standing figures from memory. At this point the sculptures became miniscule.
“When he packed up to leave Switzerland, his total output fitted into half-a-dozen matchboxes. It was only when he returned to Paris after the war that he found himself able to make sculptures of more normal dimensions, but now they were tall and thin,” wrote Edward Lucie-Smith in a book “Lives of the Great 20th Century Artists.”
The sculptor’s contemporaries claimed that his art reflected their philosophical ideas. Andre Breton, the French surrealist, believed that Giacometti’s sculptures illustrated Surrealism. Jean-Paul Sartre, on the contrary, identified the artist with the Existentialist movement.
“In fact Giacometti had a unique view or reality. He experimented with many styles and finally produced his own peculiar manner. This is why in 1962 he was awarded the major prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale,” Shlikevich said.
The recognizable tall and attenuated bronze Giacometti figures are widely presented at the Hermitage exhibition. “Other remarkable sculptures are ‘Striding man,’ which was made by Giacometti for a square in New York, ‘The Chariot,’ a filament-thin woman rising above two high wheels, ‘Hand,’ ‘Big Woman’ and many others,” Shlikevich said.
The exhibition also allows visitors to see several paintings by Giacometti, including a self-portrait from 1920, drawings and illustrations for a book by Michel Leiris and his own book “Paris Without End,” as well as photographs of Giacometti and his family.
“Alberto Giacometti. Sculpture, paintings, drawings” at the Hermitage Museum, through Feb. 8.
TITLE: Screen legends
AUTHOR: By Matt Brown
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Russian fashion critic and author Alexander Vassiliev has amassed an unusual collection of photographs of Russian and Soviet figures with a Hollywood connection that is now on display at the National Center of Photography.
Vassiliev has been collecting the material — much of it comprised of publicity shots produced by the Dream Factory in its 30s, 40s and 50s heyday — for more than two decades.
“Having moved to France, eventually I engaged in searching for rare films with ‘Russian’ plots or those featuring Russian actors,” Vassiliev explained. “I found films and photographs both in Paris and the U.S.A. where I worked with various American ballet companies. Throughout recent years, I have been putting together a large collection of unique vintage photographs dedicated to this theme. My St. Petersburg audience is now introduced to best examples from this collection.”
Waves of Russian emigration to the west during the 20th Century exerted new cultural influences in literature, ballet, Paris fashions and American cinematography, Vassiliev said.
“‘Beauty in Exile,’ my previous exhibition at National Centre of Photography, was dedicated to Russian beauties and their engagement in the world of fashion,” Vassiliev said. “The present exhibition takes up the story in a certain way, showing unique portraits of those who were involved in the creation of Hollywood films in the 1920-1960s. This is when Russian participation in American cinematography was most intense and interesting.”
The new exhibition features Russian artists that were engaged in Hollywood such as Alla Nazimova, Olga Baklanova, Anna Sten, Eugenia Leontovich, Maria Uspenskaya, Lila Kedrova, Tamara Tumanova, Irina Baronova, Ivan Lebedev, Vladimir Sokolov, Mischa Auer, Leonid Kinsky, Akim Tamirov, and Yul Brynner to name a few.
Such figures made an impact on the American movie industry.
“Vladivostok-born Yul Brynner and Moscovite Lila Kedrova were awarded acting Oscars,” Vassiliev said. “And the outstanding costume designer Varvara Karinskaya, born in Kharkov, received an Oscar for the film Joan d’Arc with Ingrid Bergman.”
Although such emigres were active in Hollywood, their contribution went unmarked in their homeland because of Soviet censorship.
“One of our aims is to fill this gap and to reconstruct, at least partly, the contribution of Russian emigres to world culture in the 20th Century,” Vassiliev said.
“Russian Hollywood” at the National Center of Photography, 35 Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa. www.ncprf.org.
TITLE: Guinea Coup Head Issues Deadline to PM
AUTHOR: By Abou Bakr and Rukmini Callimachi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CONAKRY, Guinea — The leader of a coup in Guinea called Thursday for the prime minister to come out of hiding and present himself at the group’s military barracks within 24 hours along with the country’s other heads of government.
Renegade army Capt. Moussa Camara said in a radio broadcast that the leaders of Guinea’s government and armed forces were to go to the Alpha Yaya Diallo barracks.
Prime Minister Ahmed Tidiane Souare has not been seen in public since the coup was declared Tuesday, but maintained in a telephone interview from an undisclosed location Wednesday that he remained in control of the West African country.
“If tomorrow arrives without them presenting themselves, we will organize a search across the entire country,” Camara said.
Camara, who has declared himself head of Guinea’s 32-member interim government, was unknown to most Guineans until Tuesday, when he and other members of the military announced the coup after the death of longtime dictator Lansana Conte.
Initially the coup leaders promised elections within 60 days, but Camara later said the group calling itself the National Council for Democracy and Development would organize a presidential election in two years.
“As the head of the junta, I am reassured and convinced that I am the president of the republic,” he told the nation in his address Thursday morning. “But it is not my intention to be a candidate in the election of December 2010. Because one should never have the ambition to become something which one is not.”
On Wednesday, Camara paraded through Guinea’s capital, Conakry, along with several thousand soldiers. Cautiously at first and then by the thousand, people lined streets to applaud Camara. It was the first time the capital’s residents had ventured outdoors since the coup.
TITLE: Man U Boss Expects Title Boost
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: MANCHESTER, England — Sir Alex Ferguson believes Manchester United’s success in winning the FIFA Club World Cup in Japan can propel the team towards retaining the English Premier League title.
The European champions added the global crown to their honours list by defeating Ecuador’s Liga de Quito in Yokohama last Sunday, with Wayne Rooney netting the winning goal for Ferguson’s side.
Having now returned to Old Trafford, however, United face a testing trip to Stoke City on Friday as they bid to close the seven-point gap on current league leaders Liverpool.
But having become world champions in Japan, United manager Ferguson expects the confidence generated by that achievement to boost the club’s prospects of winning more trophies in the second half of the season.
“I hope that happens,” he told reporters at United’s training ground here Wednesday.
“There is no question that winning in Japan has given the club and the players a great boost. It was a great achievement.
“The most important thing is that the team played well, which was surprising really because a lot of the players found that their sleep patterns weren’t quite so good over there,” the Scot added.
“That proved a bit difficult, but nonetheless, the lads showed good enthusiasm during the games and good concentration, which was the key thing.
“We have come through it well and put in some good performances.
“After the game against Quito, the players had a great time together.”
TITLE: Little Consensus Over Pros, Cons of Doping
AUTHOR: By Howard Fendrich
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON – Gather a roomful of anti-doping experts, administrators, academics and athletes alike — something a conservative think tank did Thursday — and there is no consensus as to whether gene doping, thought by some to be the next frontier in Olympic cheating, is at hand.
Indeed, there isn’t even consensus on whether it would be a bad thing.
Turns out there is a school of thought — “pro-doping,” it’s called — that suggests anything athletes do to improve performance is OK, even, for example, manipulating DNA or surgically enlarging the webbing between fingers and toes in order to swim faster.
So says Andy Miah, who teaches at the University of the West of Scotland and was among about 10 panelists who participated in Thursday’s conference on “The Coming Age of the Uber-Athlete: What’s So Bad about Gene Enhancement and Doping?” at the American Enterprise Institute.
Gene doping, which is banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, is a spin-off of gene therapy, which typically alters a person’s DNA to fight diseases.
Miah advocates “celebrating the value of performance enhancement,” he said.
“I don’t think a public health crisis would arise from enhancement technologies,” he added.
Miah said there is a growing group of professors around the world — “Four years ago, there were half as many people as now,” he noted — who back his “World Pro-Doping Agency” thought experiment. One of his premises is that sports wrongly are thought of as a separate entity, different from other pursuits or professions — music, art, medicine — where no one objects to, essentially, doing whatever one can to be the best one can be.
“We are more willing to embrace these enhancements, with the caveat that we need them to be safe enough,” he said.
“We don’t all want to kill ourselves by using these things, but we are interested in exploring the realm of human embodiment that is beyond our current capabilities — and that might be cognitive, it might be physical. And I think that’s where sport isn’t quite at yet,” he said.
Other speakers Thursday included Olympic champion hurdler Edwin Moses and U.S. Anti-Doping Agency CEO Travis Tygart, who believe gene doping should be banned, worry what it could do to athletes — and agree someone is likely to try eventually.
TITLE: Death May Be Linked To Madoff Scandal
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: NEW YORK — U.S. officials pressed on with a probe into the apparent suicide of a French investment manager ruined in the alleged pyramid scheme of Wall Street titan Bernard Madoff amid more fallout from the widening scandal.
Thierry de la Villehuchet, 65, who lost more than a billion dollars in the scam, was found dead in his Manhattan office early Tuesday with pills around him and his arm slit with a box cutter, the New York City police said.
As chief executive of Access International, Villehuchet was managing some two billion euros (2.79 billion dollars) for European clients, of which three quarters had been invested with Madoff, a source close to the fund manager said.
City authorities carried out an autopsy Wednesday, though results would not be ready until next week pending the outcome of laboratory tests, city officials said.
“Now blood’s on Bernie’s hands,” read the headline of the New York Post.