SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1488 (50), Friday, July 3, 2009
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TITLE: Jobless Rates Expected To Spike By End of Year
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The number of registered unemployed is likely to rise 18 percent by the end of the year, Federal Labor and Employment Service head Yury Gertsy said Wednesday, a figure that calls into question the efficacy of the government’s multibillion-dollar anti-crisis plan.
As many as 2.6 million people will be registered as unemployed by the end of the year, Gertsy said at the presentation of a joint report by the service and the World Bank. The report called the situation on the labor market difficult but in the process of stabilization.
Registered unemployment dropped 0.8 percent in the third week of June, Gertsy said, bringing the number of registered unemployed to 2.18 million.
Total unemployment rose to 10.2 percent in April from six percent a year ago, while the number of jobs in the economy fell 21 percent year on year in May, the report said. Total unemployment rose from 4.5 million to 7.7 million people in April, the report said.
April’s real wages were down an average of four percent from the same period last year, while the fall in construction wages reached 13 percent.
Labor markets in wealthier regions have seen a sharper fall, narrowing income disparities among regions. Unemployment has risen the most in the Vologda, Nizhny Novgorod and Chelyabinsk regions.
Moscow remains the job center of the country with an unemployment rate of 0.83 percent in June — the lowest in the country. It is followed by the Krasnodar region and St. Petersburg. The republic of Tuva still has the highest unemployment rate at 8.9 percent.
Government officials have been expressing optimism on the improvements in the job market since April, when registered unemployment dropped for the first time this year.
After seeing the April figures, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov said in May that regional programs will prevent a second wave of the crisis.
“In general, we have reversed the situation on the labor market, and it will keep improving,” he said
The government is funneling 25.4 billion rubles ($816 million) this year into programs aimed at boosting employment.
But recent improvements are largely caused by seasonal trends, and the summer drop in unemployment is “not as prominent as in recent years,” the report said.
Registered unemployment figures can fluctuate by about 300,000 jobs over the course of a year, said Vladimir Gimpelson, who directs the Center of Labor Studies at the Higher School of Economics. The slight improvement seen right now is entirely seasonal, while the effect of government measures will “most likely be zero, and possibly negative,” he said. Government measures to keep unemployment down amount to “people sweeping the factory courtyard rather than standing next to their machines,” which does not improve the economic situation.
The vast majority of the anti-crisis money, nearly 80 percent, was poured into organizing public and temporary works, according to the report.
Even government officials are acknowledging that state support has not lived up to its promise. In the Northwestern Federal District, anti-crisis measures seem to be ineffective, as only 14,000 people were employed through regional anti-crisis programs instead of the planned 95,000, Yevgeny Lukyanov, presidential envoy to the district, said last week, Baltinfo agency reported.
“These efforts are like gargling to cure a serious illness,” Gimpelson said. If the government is serious about improving the economy, it should rethink its strategy of heavy intervention in the economy, he said. “The crisis was worsened by the government’s interference in business agreements, as well as the monopolized economy and dependence on raw materials,” Gimpelson said.
TITLE: Rusnano Seeks Tax Breaks From Obama
AUTHOR: By Nadia Popova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Rusnano, the state nanotechnology giant, hopes to press President Barack Obama for tax breaks for Russian technology as it wraps up plans to create a $1 billion venture fund with U.S. companies to invest in Russia.
Rusnano chief Anatoly Chubais said Wednesday that his company had prepared a “concrete proposal” for President Dmitry Medvedev and Obama to discuss when the U.S. president visits Moscow next week.
“We have one absolutely concrete proposal,” Chubais told reporters after making a speech to the innovation committee of the Russian Union of Entrepreneurs and Industrialists, Interfax reported.
“Rusnano’s initiative concerns both nanotechnologies and several other spheres,” Chubais said. “We have completed quite a significant amount of work preparing for this visit.”
Obama will start his three-day visit on Monday.
Chubais declined to elaborate on the proposal, but a senior Rusnano official involved with its drafting told The St. Petersburg Times that it sought preferential U.S. treatment, including tax breaks, for Russian innovative products.
“We are asking for the most favorable treatment for our innovative products on the American market,” said the official, who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
He said Rusnano was lobbying the Kremlin to raise the issue at the presidential level during Obama’s visit. Medvedev has named nanotechnology as a priority industry in his drive to wean the economy off its dependency on energy.
“If there is political support at the presidential level, it will be easier for us to reach agreements with U.S. banks and funds and promote our innovative projects on the local market,” the Rusnano official said.
Kremlin spokesman Alexei Pavlov said he did not have time to comment Wednesday.
It was not immediately clear how the Obama administration might respond to the Rusnano proposal.
The Rusnano official said his company wanted to build cooperation with U.S. firms in energy efficiency, medicine and other spheres. “The companies in both of our countries understand that they have to become more technologically efficient in crisis times,” he said. “We know there are lots of funds in the U.S. interested in cooperating with us.”
A major area of cooperation would be the $1 billion fund under which U.S. companies would help bankroll the development of new technologies in Russia. Chubais said Wednesday that Rusnano was at the final stage of negotiations on creating the fund, and its investors would include “companies from the Silicon Valley.” He declined to elaborate, and the Rusnano official said he had few details about the negotiations.
Rusnano said earlier this month that it was holding negotiations with the California-based Draper Fisher Jurvetson venture fund to create a fund in which the Russians would invest $50 million.
Sasha Johnson, the official responsible for Russia at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, or DFJ, said Rusnano was interesting as a partner “as it had access to an enormous number of scientists and the famous Russian expertise.” Johnson, who heads DFJ-VTB-Aurora, a U.S.-Russian venture fund through which DFJ will invest in the new fund with Rusnano, declined to put a figure on the possible investment.
Chubais said Wednesday that the U.S. venture funds market was 1.5 times bigger than Russian GDP.
“The U.S. is the world leader on investment, and we have a lot to learn from them,” the other Rusnano official said. “But we have a strong scientific base, so cooperation would be mutually beneficial.”
A U.S. venture fund manager said Rusnano had every chance to become a world major player should it become more flexible. “They have too many rules on where they can and can’t invest, which doesn’t work with the market majors,” said the manager, who didn’t want to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Medvedev offered criticism of his own May 6, saying the creation of large, state-owned companies like Rusnano was “unlikely” to prove successful.
TITLE: City Police Raid Former Casinos in Bid to Enforce New Ban
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: As all casinos in the country should have closed from July 1, 2009, Dmitry Nevelsky, head of the St. Petersburg Association of Gambling Businesses announced that the industry had come to an end.
“It’s a dead field now,” Nevelsky said at a news conference at the Rosbalt news agency on Thursday.
The law on gambling zones that stipulated the establishment of four large gambling zones in the Primorye region, Altai region, Kaliningrad Oblast and Azov region (the area connecting the Rostov Oblast with the Krasnodar region), was passed by the State Duma on Jan. 1, 2009 and came into force on Wednesday.
At present, the Russian government has allocated land for the zones, but construction has not even begun in any of the designated regions. The governments of the Altai region and the Kaliningrad Oblast, for example, are getting ready to announce the first tenders to win plots of land for the construction of casinos and gambling clubs.
St. Petersburg Deputy Governor Mikhail Oseyevsky expressed confidence that the reform will go smoothly, yet many critics agree that the situation in its current form — with none of the gambling zones ready and little enthusiasm among the country’s gambling business community to relocate to those zones — is courting trouble. Some smaller gambling clubs have already taken advantage of the lack of clarity in the Russian law on lotteries, which remain legal, by posting “lotto clubs” signs on their doors. Rumors are spreading around the city that a network of private undercover VIP gambling clubs will soon emerge in St. Petersburg.
“Let’s face it: The zones are not ready and nobody would dare to estimate when they will be ready, even very approximately,” said Nevelsky. “Especially in the current time of economic crisis, businessmen are not ready to take risks and put up serious investments without solid guarantees.”
Owners of gambling businesses in Russia find themselves at a loss as to where to turn to keep their casinos afloat.
“The European market is tightly packed and the chances for a Russian business to squeeze themselves in are less than scarce,” said Nevelsky. “Nearby Belarus is not an option either, because the moods of the country’s leader are unpredictable.”
In the meantime, the city police on Wednesday started raiding premises to check whether the owners had indeed closed their businesses.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Vyacheslav Stepchenko, head of the city police press office, said the squads raided ten former casinos on Wednesday and found no violations. “All ten places were duly closed,” Stepchenko said. “All the former entrances were marked with special notices explaining that the casino or club had stopped its operations. Some of the casinos have already removed the gambling equipment.”
Stepchenko said the raids are set to become routine and are scheduled to continue indefinitely.
St. Petersburg had a total of 109 casinos that employed over 10,000 people and occupied 127,000 square meters of commercial space.
“The new law on gambling zones has just come into force, and unless it is repealed or amended, we will have to watch out for illegal gambling businesses and keep control over those who previously had gambling businesses in their possession,” said Stepchenko.
At the same time, all locally based electronic casinos are continuing their work. Some experts say that Internet gambling sites may see a major boost in visitors now that the real casinos have closed.
As Viktor Yevtukhov, a United Russia lawmaker with the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, pointed out, the law aimed at reforming Russia’s gambling business fails to stipulate a punishment for any violations. In practical terms, the law does not say what charges the owner of an illegal casino would face if discovered. The law contains no mention of a fine or prison term for the criminals involved in setting up an illegal gambling enterprise.
Officially, the appetite for gambling in Russia is relatively modest. In a public opinion poll conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center, or VTsIOM, 94 percent of respondents said they were not interested in gambling. Only six percent of the poll’s participants confessed to a keen interest.
According to the same poll, only one percent of respondents are planning to visit the gambling zones — when they are created. Another one percent of the poll’s participants said they were willing to take a risk and visit an illegal gambling venue in their place of residence.
TITLE: Train Bombing Suspects Claim Torture
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Two Ingush suspects charged in the 2007 bombing of a Moscow-St. Petersburg train told a court Tuesday that they had been tortured by police and subjected to interrogations in a forest and a cellar rather than the police station.
The suspects, Maksharip Khidriyev and Salambek Dzakhiyev, both 41, maintained their innocence in opening statements made to a Novgorod court at the start of their trial for the bombing, which injured 30 passengers and derailed the Nevsky Express train.
Prosecutor Alexander Brusin read out the charges against them to the court, including organizing a terrorist attack, causing injuries and trafficking explosives, court spokesman Alexander Prokofyev said.
If convicted, Khidriyev and Dzakhiyev face up to 20 years in prison.
Khidriyev told the court that he had been tortured with a stun gun during the investigation and had been taken by police to a forest and cellar for questioning, RIA-Novosti reported.
He called the charges against him “madness.”
Dzakhiyev said Federal Security Service officers had tried to arrange for him to escape while questioning him in the forest as part of a frame-up meant to add new charges against him.
“There is no evidence of my guilt,” he said, RIA-Novosti reported. “I’ve been sitting in jail for nothing for 18 months.”
Investigators could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
Khidriyev and Dzakhiyev are accused of acquiring explosives and transporting them to the Novgorod region to be assembled into a bomb, the Novgorod Investigative Committee said earlier in a statement. It gave no motive for the bombing. Investigators say the suspects are members of a rebel group headed by warlord Doku Umarov.
A bomb planted on the rails exploded at about 9:30 p.m. on Aug. 13, 2007, as the train carrying 251 passengers traveled through the Novgorod region toward St. Petersburg. Investigators say the bombers had hoped to derail the train while it was crossing a bridge.
The suspected mastermind of the attack, former Russian military cadet Pavel Kosolapov, remains at large. Investigators also accuse him of building the bomb.
One of the passengers has sued the defendants for damages of 250,000 rubles ($8,000), Prokofyev said.
A representative of an insurance company for Russian Railways also attended Tuesday’s trial, he said. The railway estimates that the bombing cost it 236 million rubles ($7.6 million).
The court scheduled the next hearing of the trial for Monday.
TITLE: Most Russians Ignorant Of Pikalyovo Events, Poll Shows
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Less than half of Russians have heard anything about the recent events in Pikalyovo, where unpaid workers blocked a federal highway and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin publicly berated factory owners, state pollster VTsIOM said Tuesday.
The conflict over wage arrears in the Leningrad Oblast town threw the government into action to head off further protests. The situation was covered widely in newspapers, but it was shown only once on state television, where most Russians get their news.
According to the survey of 1,600 people in 42 regions, just 41 percent of Russians said they had heard of the incident. Sixteen percent said they were well aware of what happened in Pikalyovo, while 25 percent of respondents “had heard something.”
Three-quarters of respondents said residents in Pikalyovo were justified in blocking the federal highway.
TITLE: Belarus Releases Jailed U.S. Lawyer
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MINSK — An ailing U.S. lawyer who was imprisoned in Belarus last year on charges of using fake documents and attempted industrial espionage has walked free after a presidential pardon.
Emanuel Zeltser, a 55-year-old diabetic, was sentenced to three years in prison in August 2008 after being convicted in a closed trial on charges that his supporters called politically motivated.
In November, Zeltser was placed in a prison hospital after arriving at a penal colony in eastern Belarus where he was denied medicine, lawyers said.
On leaving the prison clinic in the eastern town of Mogilyov, Zeltser said Tuesday, “I am glad about my freedom.
“I have problems with my health, I plan to get better. I am not making any plans,” he said by telephone outside the prison.
He refused to comment further.
Zeltser, slightly limping, was met by U.S. officials and entered a car with them to head for the U.S. Embassy in Minsk.
President Alexander Lukashenko signed a decree pardoning Zeltser earlier Tuesday.
Lukashenko is on a drive to court better political and economic ties with the West, and Washington had said Zeltser’s release would help the process.
U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said of Zeltser’s release, “The United States welcomes this positive step.”
He added in a statement that consular officials were working with his family “to arrange his swift and safe return to the United States.”
The Russian-born Zeltser is a high-profile lawyer who headed the nongovernmental American Russian Law Institute in New York. He is a renowned expert on organized crime and money laundering, particularly in former Soviet republics.
TITLE: Singer Zykina Dies at 80
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: MOSCOW — Lyudmila Zykina, one of the Soviet Union’s best-loved folk singers who rose to stardom from the factory floor to charm millions at the height of the Cold War, died Wednesday at the age of 80.
The ITAR-TASS news agency quoted her doctor Vladimir Konstantinov as saying that she had died in a Moscow hospital on Wednesday morning.
Born in Moscow in 1929, Zykina worked during World War II as a turner in a Moscow machine tool factory, and her singing career took off after she won a pan-Russian singing competition in 1947.
In a career that spanned Russia’s postwar history, she sang in a choir in front of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and also met former president and post-Communist strongman Vladimir Putin.
Zykina came from a family of singers and her father had sung as a bass. She said she learned her first Russian folk songs from her grandmother Vasilisa.
With her powerful, deep voice, she symbolized the Soviet style of Russian folk singing, using traditional songs but performed in an almost operatic style with orchestral backing.
Dubbed the “Russian Edith Piaf” in some quarters, Zykina even received a proposal from the Beatles to record an album, Russian state media said.
She charmed millions of Soviet television viewers with songs like “Volga,” a paean to the famed Russian river, or “I am flying over Russia” and remained a revered figure even after the collapse of Communism.
She had been decorated as a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union and a hero of socialist labor and also won the prestigious Lenin Prize in 1970.
Zykina told a news conference in May that whether she was working in a factory or singing on stage her aim had always been “to be useful and needed by people.”
“When they say, ‘Zykina, she’s a great singer,’ I don’t understand. All I have ever tried to do is work,” she said, quoted by Russian news agencies.
Tributes poured in from prominent Russian figures, with condolences coming from President Dmitry Medvedev.
Russian baritone Dmitry Khvorostovsky said, “Russia has lost one of its great voices.”
TITLE: Medvedev Appalled by Alcohol Statistics
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: President Dmitry Medvedev has expressed surprise at how much alcohol Russians drink and ordered the government to develop a program to discourage drinking.
“The alcohol consumption we have is colossal,” Medvedev told Health and Social Development Minister Tatyana Golikova at a meeting this week.
“I was astonished to learn that we now drink more than we did in the 1990s, although those were very tough times,” Medvedev said, according to a transcript on the Kremlin’s web site.
He told Golikova to devise an anti-alcohol strategy. “We need to prepare a corresponding program and take appropriate measures,” Medvedev said.
A report by The Lancet medical journal last week said alcohol-related diseases caused about half of all deaths of Russians between the ages of 15 and 54 in the 1990s.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin highlighted the problem at a meeting with World Health Organization chief Margaret Chan last Friday and promised to promote a healthier lifestyle.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who initiated a 1986 anti-alcohol campaign that led to a boom in illegal production of low-quality alcohol, called on Monday for a new drive. “We are destroying ourselves, and then we will look for those who destroyed our country, for those who made us drink,” he said.
(SPT, Bloomberg, Reuters)
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Professor Detained
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A senior professor at a St. Petersburg university has been arrested on suspicion of accepting bribes on two occasions this summer, according to the prosecutor general’s office.
Lyubov Zhigar, a senior professor at the St. Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, was arrested for allegedly taking bribes in exchange for giving out diplomas, the Investigative Committee of the St. Petersburg Prosecutor General’s Office announced Thursday on its web site.
According to the charges, Zhigar accepted bribes of 90,000 rubles ($2,890) and 86,000 rubles ($2,760) from an intermediary to give diplomas to people who had not in fact completed their education. The money was handed over in a caf? on Nevsky Prospekt on June 25 and July 1, the release said.
Zhigar, who was born in 1944, is a professor of metrology and metals at the university, which is the oldest of its kind in Russia. According to the release, the exact nature of the charges is still being decided.
Lawyer Accused
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A local legal consultant has been arrested for allegedly committing sexual crimes against children while disguised as a doctor, the Prosecutor General’s Office announced Thursday.
According to the web site of the Investigative Committee of the St. Petersburg Prosecutor General’s Office, police have arrested Alexei Degtyarev, a legal advisor with the United Consulting Group, in conjunction with three sexual assaults on children in different areas of the city in 2005 and 2006. The crimes have been attributed to a criminal who was nicknamed “The Doctor” because he presented himself to children as a doctor, the release stated.
The prosecutor general’s branch in the city’s Primorsky district is currently investigating a series of sexual crimes against children committed by a man pretending to be a doctor, the release said, Interfax reported.
Degtyarev, who was born in 1966, faces charges of coercive actions of a sexual nature and sexual abuse.
Lenin to Get Funds
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Communist party is collecting money to restore the Lenin monument at Finlandsky Station, which was damaged by an explosion on April 1, Interfax reported Thursday.
The St. Petersburg branch of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is raising money for the restoration of the 1926 monument due to a “delay on the part of the government” in allocating funds, the party’s web site said.
Unknown vandals blew a hole through the middle of the statue of Lenin at Finlandsky Station early on the morning of April 1. A city committee decided to perform restoration work on site without dismantling the statue.
According to the Interfax report, the Museum of City Sculpture has prepared a tentative set of plans for the restoration that will need to be agreed upon by the Committee for the Control, Use and Preservation of Historic and Cultural monuments.
TITLE: Finland Gives Nod To Pipeline
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Gazprom-led Nord Stream’s proposed Baltic Sea gas pipeline poses no serious environmental threat to Finland and can move forward to the next step in the approval process, Finnish environmental authorities said.
Finland “considers the performed environmental impact assessment to be sufficient in its fundamental aspects,” the Helsinki-based Uusimaa Regional Environment Centre said in a statement Thursday, adding additional studies of the fishing impact and how follow-up monitoring will be conducted are necessary.
Nord Stream, a planned 1,200-kilometer natural-gas pipeline connecting Russia directly with Germany, will pass through Russian, Finnish, Swedish, Danish and German waters. The project has raised concern that construction could dislodge World War II munitions on the Baltic seabed and hurt the ecosystem.
Thursday’s approval of the environmental report moves the Finnish permitting process forward, allowing the government to begin considering an application for the use of Finland’s Baltic Sea economic zone. The Western Finland Environmental Permit Authority will also consider permits for clearing naval mines from the pipeline’s route for building the actual construction.
“This is an important step forward,” Sebastian Sass, Nord Stream’s permitting manager, said in an interview in Helsinki. “We are committed to providing further investigations if required.”
TITLE: President Instructs Shipbuilder
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered shipbuilder Sevmash to complete the overhaul of an aircraft carrier, the Admiral Gorshkov, for India after delays and cost overruns.
“We should think of this as a first, very difficult experience,” Medvedev said Thursday in the northern port of Severodvinsk. “We need to complete” the carrier “and deliver it to our Indian partners. Otherwise there could be graveconsequences.”
Russia and India in 2004 signed a $1.5 billion agreement for the sale and overhaul of the Admiral Gorshkov along with 28 MiG-29K fighter jets and other components. Four years later, India said Russia had raised the asking price by $1.2 billion.
“We didn’t appreciate the scale and complexity of the job from the start,” Nikolai Kalistratov, chief executive officer of Sevmash, told Medvedev.
Kalistratov said costs of the overhaul had risen “very significantly” and that mistakes had been made in calculating the price of the project. The carrier will be delivered by the end of 2012, he said.
Delays and cost overruns have forced “everyone to make excuses, you to me and I to our Indian partners,” Medvedev told Kalistratov.
TITLE: Unilever Plans Mammoth Ice Cream Plant
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Unilever plans to spend $140 million on building Russia’s largest ice cream factory to tap the country’s increasing appetite for cones and popsicles.
The plant is expected to produce its first ice cream at the start of 2011, Antoine de Saint-Affrique, executive vice president of Unilever’s central and eastern European businesses, told reporters Thursday at the building site in the Tula region south of Moscow. De Saint-Affrique said the facility will be Russia’s biggest factory dedicated to making the frozen food.
The plant will be Unilever’s eighth production facility in Russia, including one factory that belonged to Baltimore, the ketchup maker acquired in April. Unilever, which sells ice cream under such brand names as Magnum and Ben & Jerry’s, and rivals Nestle and Kraft have said they’ll increase spending and will look for acquisitions in the country, where a decade of economic growth has spurred consumer spending.
“The potential for growth is enormous here,” said De Saint-Affrique. Russia is “a key strategy priority” for Unilever, as it has “been raising market share” and will “continue to do so,” he said.
Unilever, based in Rotterdam and London, last year bought Inmarko, the biggest ice cream maker in Russia with a market share of at least 16 percent. Inmarko, the maker of Magnate and San Cremo ice cream, runs three factories in Novosibirsk, Omsk and one in Tula, according to its web site.
“We are extremely active in this country,” De Saint-Affrique said.
TITLE: Giving China a Piece of Russia
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: On June 17, President Dmitry Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao signed an agreement in which Russia will sell 300 million tons of oil to China over 20 years for $100 billion. That breaks down to $57 per barrel.
In order for Russia to deliver that oil, a new pipeline must be built to China. This is something that Yukos had originally planned to build by the mid-2000s at a cost of $4 billion.
By March 2008, however, the price for the project had risen to $29 billion. At that cost, oil deliveries through the pipeline would only recoup expenses given oil prices of at least $80 per barrel. But Russia has agreed to a price of just $57 per barrel for its exports to China.
Russia built the Chinese Eastern Railroad in the early years of the 20th century. That railroad was a symbol of the Russian Empire’s dominance over the Chinese Empire. The Soviet Union began construction of the Baikal Amur Mainline, or BAM, railroad in the 1970s that essentially served as a line of defense against the Chinese. Now, Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin are building a pipeline to China that will turn Russia into a raw materials appendage to its huge neighbor in the east.
The contract Medvedev signed with Hu means that Russia will inevitably lose its Far East. If you want to see how this process has already begun, take a trip to Blagoveshchensk on the Russian-Chinese border. You will see a dilapidated, depressed town on the Russian side, while just a stone’s throw away on the Chinese side you will see the skyscrapers of the booming town of Heihe.
One reason for this stark contrast is that the Kremlin is killing off the Far East by prohibiting exports of round timber and hiking import tariffs on used Japanese automobiles. By contrast, the Chinese government has set a national goal of helping its business community to prosper.
It is entirely possible that a serious conflict could break out between Russia and China in the near future. Once the Kremlin realizes that it has tied an oil-and-gas noose around its own neck, it will start its usual backtracking, ending in an intractable argument with Beijing — much like its recent “gas war” with Ukraine and “milk war” with Belarus. And in so doing, it will only tie that noose even tighter around its neck.
It is not difficult to see that the Kremlin’s China strategy is identical to the course pursued by former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky — with only one significant difference. If you build an oil pipeline for only $4 billion, develop the region’s oil deposits and sell that oil to China at market prices, you turn eastern Siberia into an extremely powerful economic zone in which the interests of both countries are fused like Siamese twins. This would make a war between Russia and China far less likely since a conflict would result in unacceptable economic losses to both sides.
But if you build the world’s most expensive oil pipeline for $29 billion while signing a contract to export that oil at a loss and if your idea of developing oil deposits in eastern Siberia boils down to dismantling Yukos and appropriating its assets, then the loss of those territories becomes inevitable — without a single shot being fired.
Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.
TITLE: Microscopic Art Makes Russian Fiction a Reality
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The well-known Russian story about the left-handed craftsman (“Levsha” in Russian) who shod a life-sized mechanical flea has been transformed from a fairytale into reality.
Although its author, the writer Nikolai Leskov, said that he had made up the subject of his novel and that the brilliant craftsman was no more than a fantasy, real miniature masterpieces can now be seen by visitors to the city’s Peter and Paul Fortress.
The legendary flea is accompanied by, among other things, figures of Russia’s best-loved cartoon characters, Cheburashka and Crocodile Gena, and a caravan of camels traveling through the desert at dusk. The exhibits are so small that they can only be seen through a microscope — for the cartoon heroes sit on half a poppy seed, and the entire camel composition is situated inside the eye of a needle.
During the last 10 years, their creator Vladimir Aniskin has produced many such miniatures that have already been shown at two other exhibitions — one in St. Petersburg and another in his native city of Novosibirsk.
There are about 10 miniature masters in the world, most of whom live in Russia. Creating miniatures is an ancient art with a history of more than 2,000 years, and has its roots in Japan and China.
In these countries, the skill of micro-watercolors was sometimes practiced. Pictures were painted on seeds, thin wooden plaques and silk. The collection of the Louvre in Paris includes a watercolor painted on a grain of rice 13 centuries ago in China.
Another real life miniature that may have inspired Leskov was a picture by the 18th-century Japanese artist, Katsushika Hokusai, who painted a pair of sparrows on a corn seed. A magnifying glass had to be used in order to view them.
Such stories have inspired talented modern artists to produce something similar. Ten years ago, Aniskin was a student of the Novosibirsk State Technological University and wanted to make jewelry. While searching for relevant literature, Aniskin came across a book — “The Mystery of Invisible Masterpieces” — that was a collection of novels about masters of microminiature art.
“I was impressed by the works that were described in the book,” said Aniskin. “The desire to create something similar appeared and stuck in my head like a splinter.
“For the next three months, I studied how to burnish grains of rice and starch out letters upon them. And on New Year’s Eve 1999, I wrote a New Year’s greetings and gave it to my mother.”
The earliest work in the present exhibition is a rice grain featuring a 2,027- letter text. Aniskin made it using a high-quality binocular microscope, while his first experiments were done using a children’s monocular microscope that inverted the image. As a result, the artist had to inscribe the letters from right to left and upside down so that they were legible when viewed through the microscope. After obtaining a new instrument, he had to learn anew the skill of writing on the rice grains the right way up.
There is no special academy or school where this difficult, delicate craft is taught.
“All my technologies and tools I invent and make on my own,” said Aniskin. “The small drills and engravers are on display at the exhibition. I also have two little homemade machine units — a lathe and sharpening tool. Each of them fit in the palm of a hand.”
Aniskin said that the main difficulty in working with microscopes and miniscule elements lies in the beating of the artist’s heart.
“If the size of the object is this small and you need to do something with it — to move it, cut part of it or glue some tiny pieces together, the pulse is transmitted to the top of the instrument,” he said. “It begins to shake, and the vibration is often bigger than the size of the object. There is only one way to get around this — by working between heartbeats. You have approximately half a second in which to do such delicate work. It is not as impossible as it first seemed; it simply requires patience, persistence and assiduity.”
Far more time is required to devise the technology for putting, for example, a submarine on the tip of a horse hair. One of the most astounding masterpieces is a rose with leaves and a stem made from green dust, the whole composition of which is located inside a hair. Aniskin spent three years developing the technology, and then two weeks carrying out the laborious work.
“On average, every miniature requires from one week to half a year — it depends on the complexity of the work and on the experience you have,” said Aniskin. “But this is only the time required to actually make the thing, without taking into account the time spent devising the technology and crafting tools. That takes several years.”
The artist said he found it most simple to make inscriptions on hair, and that his favorite place for housing miniature figures was poppy seeds.
“First of all, it is a convenient medium, and furthermore, poppy seeds represent the scale clearly,” said Aniskin. “Everyone has seen them, everyone knows their approximate size. So it helps to appreciate the size of the object and those scales that one can feel and understand.”
Although visitors can observe Aniskin’s masterpieces only with the use of a microscope, almost every work has its specific features that people often fail to notice, such as Crocodile Gena’s teeth, or the fact that the mini-snowman has fingers and is even standing on one leg while trying to reach the top of the Christmas tree. The bucket on his head has a handle made of dust, and there are even decorations on the side of the Christmas tree that is not seen by viewers.
Aniskin’s art is dominated by two main themes — cartoon characters and Russian military might, depicted in miniature medals.
“These two trends are very close to my heart,” said Aniskin.
The exhibition is a new permanent installation at the Karetnik (Carriage House) of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
TITLE: Chernov’s choice
TEXT: Morrissey roamed through St. Petersburg this week, bequeathing a sweaty shirt to his fans, which means that this summer’s main music event is safely behind us and only a few smaller things are left.
One of those, however, is Nick Cave, who is far better known among Russian fans than the ex-Smiths singer. Although he has already been to St. Petersburg back in the 1990s, the news is that Cave, who is due to perform on July 17, comes with a new mustache.
Genuine passions, however, are raging on the anarchist punk scene. Alexei Nikonov, the frontman of local punk band PTVP, or Posledniye Tanki v Parizhe (Last Tanks in Paris), threw down the glove to Moscow anarchist writer Vlad Tupikin this week.
“We’ll fight with knives,” Nikonov said in an SMS text message, according to Tupikin’s blog entry on Livejournal.com.
A couple of weeks ago, Tupikin accused Nikonov of attacking him with a microphone stand and breaking his camera lens while he was taking pictures of the band performing at local underground club Zoccolo on June 19.
“Incidentally, Nikonov has deprived me of a means of production, a means by which I make my living,” he wrote.
“I have no permanent job, there is a crisis right now, and to break a camera belonging not, for example, to Channel One, but to a jobless journalist might not mean condemning him (i.e. me) to immediate death by starvation, but is still a ‘mighty ethical deed’...”
The verdict was that Nikonov “has started to feel like a rock star who can do anything he likes and who needs a scandal at any cost in order to maintain interest in his aging persona.”
“PTVP are of absolutely no interest to me from now on,” Tupikin wrote, calling activists not to help Nikonov with his band’s new album and his new book of poetry that are currently in the works.
The anarchist’s readers reacted, almost unanimously, by claiming that Nikonov is neither an anarchist nor a punk, and is as such of no interest, although many added that they had never heard of his band.
Having published this article both on the Bakunista! anarchist web site and in his blog on Livejournal.com, Tupikin continued to campaign against Nikonov with articles and comments on his blog.
As a result, the designer of Nikonov’s poetry book has decided to destroy the work he has already done, Tupikin reported with satisfaction. “With this posting I hit him more painfully than if I had hit him in the face,” he wrote. That’s when the challenge from Nikonov allegedly arrived.
Speaking by phone on Thursday, Nikonov said he chose not to comment on the situation. “What’s the sense in entering into a discussion? I don’t want to speak in such a tone — when objectivity is measured with the price of a lens, that’s not my style at all,” he said.
Nikonov might be guilty, but it is time to stop. Russia has lost enough poets in duels. Or in harassment campaigns similar to this one.
— By Sergey Chernov
TITLE: An eye for detail
AUTHOR: By Alec Luhn
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The “Nuddles” on the English menu would have been highly perplexing without the Russian original to hand (“Lapsha,” or “noodles”), and the true nature of the mysterious additive “Rosswater” remains a mystery (“Rosewater,” perhaps?). Dyslexic English translation aside, Fiolet bowled this diner over with its impeccable attention to detail and well-crafted Euro-Asian fusion cuisine.
At 8.30 p.m. on a weekday evening it was easy to secure a table on the outdoor patio, which featured a chic, glass-walled but spacious design that maximized the view on the Fontanka River while closing out the grime of the busy street. The patio was busy with sharply dressed patrons, but didn’t feel too crowded, and even heavy-duty renovations going on across Ploshchad Lomonosova couldn’t ruin the ambience.
All of this is no accident: Fiolet has taken pains to pay attention to the tiniest details, as was obvious when the Chilean Merlot (350 rubles, $11) arrived in a slightly larger glass than a glass of Chardonnay from the same country — slightly chilled, of course (300 rubles, $9.60.) Two warm moist towelettes, presented in special dishes and exuding a faint scent of mint, followed on the heels of the wine.
The waiter was patient with our indecisiveness, returning promptly to finish the order when we vacillated over the main course, although he could offer no concrete suggestions to help navigate the exhausting menu.
Along with the usual cold and hot starters and soups ranging from 320 rubles ($10) to 5,000 rubles ($160) for black sturgeon caviar, plus fish, meat and poultry dishes, the menu also includes a pizza, pasta and dim-sum page that was the best deal on the menu at 200 to 580 rubles ($6 to $19). As if this wasn’t enough, there were also entire pages devoted respectively to Indian-inspired Tandoori dishes, “Nuddles,” various flatbreads and desserts, as well as several pages of sushi, sashimi and hot Japanese dishes.
The attention to detail slipped just a tad at the appetizer stage, when the service ended up being a little too prompt: The waiter brought out the appetizer of “Tandoori Nan with tomato ‘Concase,’” grapes and Parmesan cheese (120 rubles, $4) after the first main dish had arrived. Although really just a glorified mini-pizza, the flatbread lived up to its claims of freshness and the topping of halved grapes and olives provided a great sweet/savory counterpunch.
The premature seafood dish, salmon and tiger shrimp in “sweet tomato Rosswater flavored sauce” with spinach and garlic (520 rubles, $17), was an innovative if not entirely scintillating take on a classic taste. The filet was tender and well suited to the syrupy sauce, which was indeed very sweet, but in such a way as to accentuate the fish meat. The expected zest of the garlic was conspicuously absent, although not very much missed; the dish was likely better without it.
The star of the evening, however, was the stir-fried spiced lamb filet with red onion, ginger and jalapeno over “mild curried creamy KHAO NEOW STEAMED STICKY RICE” (740 rubles, $24). Although not as spicy as the name might imply (the jalapenos were so well cooked they could just as easily have been plain green bell peppers), the entr?e was jam-packed with various enticing flavors. The lean yet rich meat oozed its own savory juice, whereas the vegetables featured a traditional stir-fry taste. The plate was drizzled with a sweet chili-based sauce evoking American Chinese cuisine.
Meanwhile, the “KHAO NEOW STEAMED STICKY RICE” was just as striking as its all-caps title would suggest, matching the gout-inducing creaminess of a classic risotto with a whiff of Indian spice. The compact rectangle of rice and meat was sprinkled with sesame seeds and topped with tiny slices of red bell pepper delicately cut into whorl shapes — a fitting end to a finely-tuned dining experience.