SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1489 (51), Tuesday, July 7, 2009
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TITLE: City Faces Dresden’s Fate At UNESCO
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova and Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writers
TEXT: In a move that many believe could be repeated for St. Petersburg, the UN cultural body UNESCO has dropped the city of Dresden from its prestigious World Heritage List as a result of the construction of a controversial  four-lane bridge over the Elbe River. 
UNESCO has previously warned that the siting of a new skyscraper headquarters for the energy giant Gazprom in St. Petersburg could have a similar result.
According to the UNESCO website, for the second time in the history of the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage adopted by UNESCO in 1972, a site was removed from the World Heritage List when the Committee decided that Germany’s Dresden Elbe Valley could no longer retain its status as a World Heritage site of outstanding universal value.
St. Petersburg lawmaker Alexei Kovalyov is convinced St. Petersburg may soon find itself in the same boat due to the planned construction of a new Gazprom Neft headquarters known as the Okhta Center. “Like Dresden, St. Petersburg refuses to compromise,” he said. “And, as in Dresden, a large-scale, modern construction project threatens to distort the cultural landscape. The analogy is obvious, and if the Russian officials continue to ignore it, the outcome will be identical.” 
UNESCO sounded its first warning to St. Petersburg back in 2007, when Marcio Barbosa, UNESCO’s deputy head, said that Russia has been asked to halt all development work on the Okhta Center project until the organization has investigated its possible risks to St. Petersburg’s architectural legacy. The tower, he added, could cause St. Petersburg to lose its prized place on the list of UNESCO’s World Heritage sites. St. Petersburg is one of only three Russian cities on the list. 
“To use soccer terminology, we have issued a yellow card to the city,” Barbosa said. “If the situation does not improve, the next logical step is a red card. This means we will have to move St. Petersburg onto the list of endangered sites.” 
The new Gazprom building has been designed as a twisting 396-meter tower, no less than eight times higher than the current official limit for new buildings in the city’s historic center. It will stand close to where the Okhta River flows into the Neva on the opposite bank from the famous white-and-blue Smolny Cathedral. 
The tower is to be the new headquarters for Gazprom Neft, a subsidiary of the national energy monopoly, in St. Petersburg. It is tentatively scheduled for completion in 2012. 
The U.K.-based World Monuments Fund, a leading heritage protection body, has already placed St. Petersburg on its list of the world’s 100 most endangered historic sites, alongside war-torn Iraq, sinking Venice, and hurricane-ravaged New Orleans. 
In Dresden the decision on the bridge’s construction was taken following public debates and a referendum on the issue. 
In St. Petersburg, protests have been numerous but fruitless. When the local branch of the liberal party Yabloko called for a citywide referendum on the project, the move was blocked on a technicality in the city’s Legislative Assembly. 
Meanwhile, in the midst of advertising campaign for the Okhta Center tower project, the defenders of the historical St. Petersburg launched an exhibition called “Outlaw Skyscraper” on Monday. 
Organized by the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments (VOOPIiK) and  ECOM, a think tank run by the St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists, the exhibition demonstrates how the planned 396-meter Gazprom tower, if built, will ruin the city’s protected sights and skyline.
But the organizers’ main argument is that the project violates the Russian law that forbids buildings higher than 100 meters in such areas as the site reserved for the tower.
“Our main position is that there are no legal grounds for the [structure], that is they neither have a right to exceed the height limits, nor for evading the borders of the protected zone, where the strict ban for such intrusions is imposed,” Alexander Kononov, the chairman of the VOOPIiK’s St. Peterburg branch, said on Monday.
According to Kononov, the whole construction site is within the protected zone, where strict limits are applied.
“There also can’t appear any new dominants and, moreover, a high-rise object that breaks in law-protected panoramas,” he said.
“The view on Smolny Cathedral, on Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral, the Palace Square, the Summer Gardens and the Field of Mars, the embankments — wherever they will meddle, it is not legally possible,” he said. “With the law passed in spring that recently came in force, this discussion is closed.”
The exhibition opened in the run-up to a public discussion of the Okhta Center project featuring pressure groups and movements as well as the representatives of ODTs Okhta, the company behind the construction, set for Friday. 
According to the Town-Planning Code, which is a federal law, the owner or user only can ask for a permission to exceed from the limits if the site has drawbacks that do not allow the structure to be built as permitted, Kononov said.
“I’d love to listen what arguments can be – the site is ‘so bad’ that they cannot build a 100-meter structure, but only can build a 400-meter one?” he said.

The Outlaw Skyscraper exhibition at the Union of Architects, 52 Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday, and at the European University, 3 Gagarinskaya Ulitsa, from July 10 through July 30.

TITLE: Obama Arrives for Summit in Moscow
AUTHOR: By Ben Feller
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Barack Obama opened his first Moscow summit with confidence on Monday, predicting “extraordinary progress” out of meetings set to test his diplomatic skills on important priorities such as nuclear arsenal reductions and the fight in Afghanistan.
“The United States and Russia have more in common than they have differences,” Obama said he sat down in an ornate Kremlin room with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
With both men showing signs they are eager to reset damaged relations, Obama’s host launched the high-stakes summit with similar good will.
“We’ll have a full-fledged discussion of our relations between our two countries, closing some of the pages of the past and opening some of the pages of the future,” Medvedev said, through a translator.
The first U.S.-Russia summit since the early part of the George W. Bush presidency finds Russia home to a wary public, a two-headed leadership and lingering hard feelings toward America.
The foundation set now could affect how much cooperation Obama gets in areas in which the U.S. needs Russia’s help — in pressuring Iran and North Korea to give up their nuclear weapons ambitions, but also in tackling terrorism, global warming and the economy.
Agreements negotiated ahead of time gave Obama something to take home even before the summit started, including another step toward the world’s two largest nuclear powers reducing their arsenals. Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, said, according to Russia’s ITAR-Tass news agency, that the document Obama and Medvedev will sign is concise and won’t contain details of a new treaty but nonetheless amounts to a “road map” for a future deal.
The START arms control agreement expires in December and the two nations are working toward a replacement pact. The eventual deal could cut warheads from more than 2,000 each to as low as 1,500 apiece.
The leaders also were announcing Russia’s agreement to let the United States use its territory and air space to move arms into Afghanistan for the forces fighting extremists there.
Other side agreements meant to sweeten the talks included a new joint commission to try to account for missing service members of both countries dating back to World War II and fresh cooperation on public health issues.
Yet, the two sides remain stalemated over the U.S. pursuit of a missile-defense system in Europe, pushed hard by Bush and under review by Obama. Both sides hardened their positions ahead of the summit.
The U.S. contends the program is designed to protect U.S. allies in Europe from a potential nuclear attack by Iran. But the Russians see it as a first step toward a system that could weaken their offensive nuclear strike potential.
The summit starts a weeklong trip for Obama that also features G-8 meetings and a visit with the pope in Italy, and a speech in Ghana.
After Obama landed in Moscow under drizzly gray skies, he introduced his wife, Michelle, and their two daughters to the Russian officials waiting to greet them on the tarmac. The entourage then headed to a wreath-laying ceremony at Russia’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
While in Moscow, Obama will devote a prominent amount of time to leaders of Russia’s civil society. Having enjoyed adoring crowds in Europe, Obama will face a far more skeptical Russian population.
Just 15 percent of Russians say the U.S. is playing a positive role in the world; most said the United States abuses it power and makes Russia do what the U.S. wants, according to the University of Maryland’s WorldPublicOpinion.org out Sunday.
“I would like to see America meddle less in other countries,” said Valentina Titova, a 60-year-old retired economist strolling not far from the Kremlin.
Obama will outline his vision for U.S.-Russian relations at a speech at the New Economic School. 
It is unclear how many people will see it. Russian leaders control the television outlets.
As Obama told a Russian-language news channel in the days before the summit: “We want to build relations where we deal as equals.”
Yet he also caused a stir in Russia by telling The Associated Press last week that Medvedev’s predecessor and mentor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, has to learn that “the old Cold War approaches to U.S.-Russian relations is outdated.”

TITLE: ‘Europe’s Last Pagans’ Worship in Marii-El Republic Grove
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MARISOLA, Marii-El Republic — More than 50 worshippers gathered in a sacred grove on a hot June afternoon outside the village of Marisola. The crowd, mostly women dressed in national costumes and colorful headscarves, stood on a glade opposite a spruce where men were busy conducting prayers. 
The congregation kneeled while the men under the spruce, dressed in suits, white felt hats and linen towels cast over their shoulders, said prayers in a low, monotone murmur. 
They prayed to Osh Kughu Yumo — Mari for “Great White God” — who was being revered that day as Agavairem, which means both deity of creative energy and the feast marking the end of spring labor. 
The women lined up in the grass in front of piles of thick homemade pancakes, white cheese, dumplings and brown kvas, the fermented rye drink. Pots and kitchenware were adorned with burning candles, as was a makeshift table in front of the spruce. 
The extraordinary ceremony testified to the little-known fact that an animist faith has survived centuries of Christian and Muslim hegemony in this obscure region 800 kilometers east of Moscow. 
The Mari, a Finnic people of roughly half a million whose language sounds a bit like a strange mixture of Finnish and Turkish, are said to be Europe’s last pagans. Yet their priests, called kart in Mari, reject that notion. 
“We are not pagans. We call our faith the Mari Traditional Religion, and we are registered officially in the republic,” said Vyacheslav Mamayev, who oversaw the ceremony as the chief kart of the local Sernur district. 
He went on to explain that for the Mari, God has nine substances, or hypostases, ranging from the life-giving Ilyan Yumo to the birth goddess Shochinava. 
Asked about the theological foundation of his faith, Mamayev smiled and said, “Everything works through nature.” 
Indeed, like most animist religions, the Mari faith traditionally knows no written scriptures and no sacred edifices. Prayers are chiefly held in sacred groves, where some feasts include the ritual slaughter of animals as sacrifice. 
“Nature is our temple,” said Zoya Dudina as she walked with worshippers on a winding path through high grass after the ceremony in the grove had ended. 
Dudina, a poet and intellectual from the republican capital, Ioshkar-Ola, expressed pride that her people had regained the possibility to practice their traditional faith. 
In Soviet times, she said, villagers would sneak out to the sacred groves after midnight, hoping that nobody would report their forbidden prayers. 
Indeed, unnoticed by much of the outside world, the Mari faith has made a remarkable recovery since the end of Soviet Union. 
In Marii-El, the Mari Traditional Religion, dubbed MTR, is recognized as one of three traditional faiths, along with Christianity and Islam. 
The Mari High Kart Alexander Tanygin regularly attends official ceremonies alongside local Christian and Muslim leaders. 
About 15 percent of the people of Marii-El consider themselves adherents of MTR, according to a survey conducted in 2004 by Sociologists of the Mari Institute for Language, Literature and History. Because Maris make up just 45 percent of a population of 700,000, this figure means that probably more than a third of them follow the old religion. 
Even local Orthodox clergy acknowledge the traditional faith’s dominance in the republic’s northern rural districts. 
“This is certainly the weakest parish in all of Marii-El,” said Father Sergy of Marisola’s Pokrovka Church. 
Of the local population of 2,500, only 10 to 15 believers attend his services regularly, he said, standing outside his small 19th-century church. 
In the local district center of Sernur, the Eparchy of Marii-El is building a new church, but construction, which began in 2003, has stalled because of a lack of funds. 
Yet Father Sergy, a gaunt man with a scrubby beard and a kind voice, made it clear that he bore no grudge against the pagans. “We have friendly relations. We are not foes,” he said. 
He noted that about 1,500 locals were baptized, although he added that he considered practicing traditionalists to be lost souls. “They have no hope of being saved — that can only happen to believers,” he said. 
The Mari faith is no isolated phenomenon and has been described as syncretic, combining elements from various religions. 
Many Mari villagers have icons in their homes, and drivers stick miniature images of saints on their dashboards, just like anywhere else in Russia. 
On their way out of the grove at Marisola, women turned around and crossed themselves, just as Orthodox believers do when leaving church. When one of the karts saw them, he mildly told them to stop. 
“You should not put too much significance in this,” Dudina explained. “Our people have lived with the Russian church for generations, but our faith is older.” 
Christianity, she said, had not entered Mari rites, but rather the rites had entered Christianity. “There are so many pagan traditions in Christianity. Look at the Christmas tree,” she said. 
Other Mari classify themselves in groups with varying degrees of Russian-Orthodox influence, including “Rush Vera” followers, who might even go to church at times; followers of “Marla Vera” who are baptized; and the nonbaptized “Chi Mari.” 
Mamayev, the Sernur district kart, said the various groups should be allowed to coexist. “Many who come to our prayers are baptized. We will not exclude them. Everyone should be allowed to pursue his own form of worship,” he said over a traditional meal of pancakes and kvas held in the Marisola village after prayers. 
Juha V?liaho, a Finnish Lutheran missionary who worked in Marii-El for 10 years before moving to Bashkortostan, estimated that 60 percent of the Mari are baptized into the Orthodox Church. “But in their hearts, they are all pagans,” he said in an interview in the Finnish Lutheran Church in the outskirts of Ioshkar-Ola, the capital. 
The city of 280,000 displays few signs of animist traditions. More striking here is the Orthodox Church’s construction activities, which can be seen at numerous churches and religious schools. 
V?liaho said that while traditions are strong in the villages, pagan structures are weak in the city. 
“It is a totally rural phenomenon. You don’t really hold on to these beliefs in a city,” he said. 
Asked about the local success of missionaries, he said the Lutheran parish in the capital had more than 150 members. Despite the low numbers, he mused that Protestants might be more successful in proselytizing here than the Orthodox. “Many Mari do not want to go the Orthodox church because it is perceived as quintessentially Russian. We, however, can offer worship in their own language,” he said. 
Even Father Sergy, the Orthodox priest in Marisola, suggested that he did not see much sense in his church winning over the traditionalists. Asked about the future of the Orthodox faith in Marii-El, he said he did not worry so much about paganism but rather about people with no faith at all. 
“Look at the youth in our villages,” he said. “They have little hope of finding work. They either start drinking or move away to the cities, where they find all sorts of bad things but no religion.”

TITLE: Two Children Seriously Injured in Dog Attacks
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Residents of St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast were shocked by at least two cases of dog attacks on children last week.
In the first instance, an Akita dog nearly scalped an eight-year-old girl in the village of Osinovets on June 29. The second incident occurred near the St. Petersburg suburb of Sestroretsk on June 30, when a 13-year-old boy was attacked by three South African boerboel dogs. 
Thirteen-year-old Kirill, whose last name has not been released, was walking along a path when he met a woman who was walking the three dogs on long leashes. The woman, who was the dogs’ caretaker, failed to hold the dogs back as they attacked the boy.
One of the dogs bit the boy’s leg, causing him to begin crying, at which point the two other dogs also attacked him. The dogs almost bit off the boy’s legs and also gave him wounds to the head. The woman tried to shield the boy with her body but couldn’t help him, Fontanka.ru reported.
When police reached the scene, they shot one animal dead and injured the second one. The third dog ran away.
The governess was hospitalized but has since been released from care. The boy, however, remains in a severe condition after doctors of the St. Petersburg Pediatric Academy performed a 12-hour operation on him. After the operation, the boy was unconscious and was put on artificial-lung ventilation.  However, on Sunday he regained consciousness, Rosbalt reported.
On Monday the condition of the boy remained serious, the head of the pediatric academy told The St. Petersburg Times. 
Academy Director Vladimir Levanovich said the doctors’ managed to save the sensitivity of the boy’s legs and arms, adding that he can even move his fingers, Fontanka.ru reported.
According to the report, the owner of the dogs returned from abroad after he received word of the attack. His lawyer, Igor Terekhov, said the owner was very sorry for the accident and will provide material help to the boy’s family. They are also trying to figure out why the governess took all three dogs for a walk at the same time despite being prohibited from doing so, he said.
The prosecution opened a criminal case under Article 118 of the Russian Criminal Code (grievous bodily harm through negligence).
A day before the boerboel incident, an Akita, a Japanese breed of dog, attacked eight-year-old Vika in the village of Osinovets in Leningrad Oblast. The dog attacked the girl, who had come from Khabarovsk to visit her relatives, in their yard. Doctors at the Central Vsevolozhsk hospital managed to save the girl, according to Fontanka.ru.
A relative of the girl who witnessed the attack wrote a letter to Fontanka’s editorial staff in which she described the incident. The woman said that the girl was in the territory next to the family’s dacha, which is fenced in with a bar to protect it from strangers and cars. The children were under the supervision of adults, but were about 30 meters away from them. 
Around midday an elderly man with a dog approached the children and offered to let them pet the animal. Vika was the quickest, and when she ran up to the dog the animal knocked her down and attacked her. The man seized the dog, but it had already managed to tear the girl’s scalp. The man quickly left the scene, the witness wrote in her letter.
A neighbor of the family had a car and they immediately drove the girl to the hospital, where surgeons managed to save the girl’s scalp, she said.
The Prosecutor General’s Office of Leningrad Oblast has opened a criminal case over the incident, also under Article 118 of the Russian Criminal Code.

TITLE: Moscow Urges Calm on N. Korea
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Foreign Ministry has called for calm after North Korea stoked regional tensions by firing seven ballistic missiles on Saturday, its biggest barrage of ballistic missiles since 2006. 
The ministry said Russia and China had agreed that all sides should refrain from any steps that could further destabilize the region and were calling for a return to suspended six-party talks involving China, South Korea, North Korea, Japan, Russia and the United States aimed at coaxing North Korea to give up its nuclear program. 
“There is still no alternative to the six-party talks, which remain the most effective instrument for resolving the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula, and we call on them to be renewed as soon as possible,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. 
North Korea launched seven ballistic missiles into waters off its east coast Saturday in a show of military firepower that defied UN resolutions and drew international condemnation and concern. It also fired four short-range missiles Thursday believed to be cruise missiles. 
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said the missiles were “Scud-type,” marking an escalation of recent saber-rattling by the reclusive North, which has fired several nonballistic, short-range missiles since the May 25 nuclear test. North Korea is barred by United Nations resolutions from firing ballistic missile such as the Scud. 
It was the biggest barrage of ballistic missiles the North has fired since it launched seven, including its longest-range Taepodong-2, in 2006 near the July 4 holiday. 
The launches came as the United States has cracked down on firms suspected of helping the North acquire arms and missiles, which were subject to Russia-backed UN sanctions imposed after the nuclear test and are a vital source of foreign currency for the cash-strapped state. An anonymous South Korean official quoted by Yonhap said the launch may have been intended to send a message to Washington. 
In Washington, a State Department spokesman urged North Korea to avoid further stoking tensions. 
The North Korea problem is likely to be discussed during talks between Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama in Moscow this week. 
On Thursday, Obama praised Moscow for its cooperation in international efforts to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear development programs. 
After North Korea conducted the nuclear test in May, the United Nations approved “the most robust sanction regime that we’ve ever seen with respect to North Korea,” he said. 
He expressed optimism that he could get international agreement for even tougher action if North Korea persists in defying demands that it dismantle its nuclear weapons and stop production. “In international diplomacy, people tend to want to go in stages,” Obama said. “There potentially is room for more later.” 
With concerns rising about another North Korean long-range missile test, two independent scientists said Kim Jong Il’s government may be using an old Soviet ballistic missile to boost a rocket capable of reaching the West Coast of the United States. 
North Korea is not known to have nuclear warheads and faces years of research and testing before it could build such a reliable weapon. 
But the scientists say that if North Korea does have such a Russian-made ballistic missile in its arsenal, it could modify the rocket into a two-stage missile that could reach across the Pacific Ocean to Seattle, Washington, carrying a 900-kilogram warhead, or San Francisco, California, with a 700-kilogram charge. The design of a long-range missile tested by North Korea last April “represents a very significant advance in rocket technology,” said Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Ted Postol and Union of Concerned Scientists’ David Wright in a June 29 assessment published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. 
Using data and imagery from North Korea’s April 4 launch, Postol and Wright calculated that the second stage of the North Korean rocket had the external dimensions, engine power and key features of an SS-N 6, a Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missile first deployed in 1968. 
Their theory is at odds with U.S. officials’ skepticism of the recent North Korean long-range missile launch, which they dismissed as a failure. 
In Moscow, residents have included  concern about a North Korean-initiated nuclear war on notes hung on a wish tree on Ploshchad Revolyutsii. The wish tree, placed by City Hall on the square near the Kremlin, is a metal stand reminiscent of a coat rack with many hooks. Among the notes on a recent day was written, “I want a nuclear holocaust on Mars. Glory to Earthlings!”
(AP, SPT)

TITLE: Review: The Last Days Of the Romanovs
AUTHOR: By Daniel Beer
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Nicholas II was not the first Russian tsar to die at the hands of revolutionaries. Alexander II had been killed by a terrorist’s bomb in March of 1881, but the People’s Will’s “hunt for the tsar” in the years leading up to that assassination had at least the asymmetry of a small band of desperate revolutionaries attempting to take the life of the head of a powerful Empire. Nicholas II, his wife the tsaritsa Alexandra and their children Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei and servants died in very different circumstances. They were executed in cold blood by the new Soviet state on July 17, 1918, in the cellar of a merchant’s house in Ekaterinburg following 16 months under house arrest. Entirely defenceless, the family was murdered in an orgy of gunfire and bayoneting which lasted a full twenty minutes. The killing was one of the defining acts of the new regime, revealing its ruthlessness and willingness to slaughter.
Helen Rappaport meticulously reconstructs the final days of the Romanovs in the Ipatiev house in Ekaterinburg and the unfolding political situation that sealed their fate. The decision to execute the family was one of political expediency — the advance of anti-Soviet forces towards Ekaterinburg during the summer of 1918 presented the real risk of the Romanov’s falling into the wrong hands. But there was also pressure from Germany: If the Tsar was liberated by anti-Bolshevik forces and became a rallying point for an anti-German resurgence in Russia, then the Brest-Litovsk treaty which had bought the Bolsheviks peace with Imperial Germany at the expense of ceding huge swathes of territory to the advancing German army would be dead in the water. 
Yet Rappoport also points quite rightly to the murder of the Imperial family as a litmus test of the regime’s violent radicalism. As Trotsky later coolly observed: “The Tsar’s family was a victim of the principle that forms the very axis of monarchy: dynastic inheritance. For that reason alone, their deaths were necessary.” The “necessary liquidation” of various individuals, groups and ultimately entire classes was to become a hallmark of the Bolshevik regime and the mobilising power of its belief system was clearly laid bare on that July night in Ekaterinburg in 1918. 
In the 78 days that the family spent inside the Ipatiev house, which came after 13 months of house arrest in the Alexandrov Palace in St. Petersburg, Nicholas and Alexandra seemed increasingly resigned to a fate that was clearly no longer theirs to control. The couple’s piety, strongly inculcated from earliest childhood, bound them together and clearly shaped their responses to the unfolding chaos around them. Rappoport writes that “together as a family the Romanovs now sought to transcend the forces of irreligion that were destroying Russia…. Perhaps too, the Tsar, in his final 16 months of passive Christian acceptance of fate, had in some way redeemed the sins of his own deeply flawed monarchy.” Rappoport writes with verve, imagination and great empathy for her characters. The detail is formidable, perhaps a little too formidable at times, and the boundaries between evidence and conjecture in her account are sometimes difficult to discern.
It’s difficult, however, not to read the chapter detailing the actual execution and the botched attempts to dispose of the bodies without a mixture of horror and fascination. The badly trained, drunk and ill-disciplined killers ensured that what should have been a clinical execution descended into a veritable bloodbath with some of the victims fending off bayonets with their bare hands and the children witnessing the gory killing of their parents before themselves perishing in a hail of bullets. The jewels carefully concealed in the fabric of their clothing deflected some of the bullets and denied many of them a swift death. Even the Bolsheviks were aware that the murder of the children would prove deeply unpopular in the country at large and so perpetrated the myth that only Nicholas had been executed, the other members of his family having been moved to an undisclosed location for their own safety. 
Rappaport claims that “across Russia as a whole, the murder of the Romanovs marked the beginning of an orgy of terror, murder and bloody reprisal that would characterise the savage Russian Civil War — a war which would claim 13 million lives.” But this view of the killing as somehow opening the floodgates of slaughter ignores the fact that after four years of brutal war, revolutionary upheaval, pogroms, and inter-ethnic violence, they were already well and truly open. 
The dignity of the Romanov family in their final months of captivity has fed their steady sacralization in post-Communist Russia. A sanitized commercial image of the Imperial family has, following their exhumation and reburial in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, become a firmly established part of Russia’s nascent tourist industry. Under the auspices of the Orthodox Church, Ganina Yama, the location of the mine shafts into which the corpses were hurled, has now become a site of pilgrimage for Orthodox Christians, a cathedral has been erected on the site of the Ipatiev house and Nicholas has been canonised as a saint. 
And yet this sacralization of the Romanovs as martyrs of the Bolshevik regime in recent years has perhaps strangely coexisted with a triumphalist and nationalist interpretation of Russia’s Stalinist past, Stalin having recently been voted third in a poll of greatest Russians in history. Neither does there seem to be general disquiet about the fact that this act of cold-blooded murder was one of the foundational acts of the Cheka, the state security service which, having mutated into the KGB, nurtured the Russian Federation’s former president and current prime minister, Vladimir Putin. 

Daniel Beer is a lecturer in Modern European History at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

Helen Rappaport, Ekaterinburg:
The Last Days of the Romanovs
Windmill Books, 2009
IBSN 978-0099520092

TITLE: Tall Ships Head for City As Baltic Series Kicks Off
AUTHOR: By Sue Pelling
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Tall Ships’ Races Baltic 2009, which runs from Gdynia, Poland, to St. Petersburg began on Sunday.
 There were reports that over a million spectators turned out to see the ships off. They are due to arrive in St. Petersburg for the event’s conclusion next weekend.
"Mir," a white-and-blue-hulled Russian ship, with Captain Yury Galkin at the helm, demonstrated a textbook start and led from the committee vessel end of the line. However, hot on her heels was the Sail Training Association of Poland’s barquentine "Pogoria," with the eye-catching green barque "Alexander von Humboldt" from Germany third across the line.
The Class B fleet started half an hour later at 6.30 p.m. and here it was the gaff schooners who took control, with the pretty Finnish ship "Albanus" crossing the line in first position, with "Rupel," Jan Vandenborne’s ship from Belgium in second and the Dutch gaff schooner "De Gallant" in third.
With a steadily increasing breeze as the start sequence progressed, one of the entries — "St IV" (Estonia) — in the highly competitive Class C fleet had a false start and had to sail round the end of the line to restart correctly. Meanwhile the Latvian sloop Spaniel was seen jostling for a position and in true America’s Cup style crossed the start line bang on time. The Polish sloop "Gaudeamus" was also in the hunt and took second over the line just ahead of another local yacht, "Purga." The Class Ds were probably the most line shy, but it was "Hebe III" from the Czech Republic that led the way to St. Petersburg ahead of the Russian yacht "Siberia" and Timo Lappalainen’s ketch "Feelings" (Finland).
As the fleet sailed off into the sunset, teams were hard at work planning their route to St Petersburg after leaving the Swedish island of Gotland to port and working out their strategies for the first of two waypoints at Glotovi Madal Light. The second waypoint is at Tallin Light, which must be left to starboard.

www.tallshipsraces.com

TITLE: Violence Rocks North Caucasus
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova, Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — An unusually large number of attacks have roiled the North Caucasus in recent weeks, including a bloody ambush Saturday that killed at least nine Chechen police officers in Ingushetia, raising new fears that the situation is spiraling out of control in the restive region. 
The chief of the Investigative Committee warned that insurgents have found new sources of financing from abroad, while analysts said the attacks looked like a reaction against a counterterrorism operation in the region. 
The Kremlin faces a quandary over what to do in the North Caucasus, where Ingushetia’s president was badly injured in a suicide bombing and Dagestan’s top police official was killed by snipers last month. Chechnya’s top police official said Friday that a plot had been thwarted to assassinate Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov. 
After the attack on Ingush President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov on June 22, President Dmitry Medvedev authorized Kadyrov to dispatch law enforcement officers into Ingushetia to quell the insurgency there. 
A Chechen police convoy was traveling toward the Arshty settlement in Ingushetia’s Sunzha district at about 8:30 a.m. Saturday when gunmen opened fire with grenade launchers and automatic weapons, killing nine and injuring 10, the Investigative Committee said. The officers were traveling from Chechnya to Ingushetia on a joint counterterrorism operation, it said. 
Insurgents took responsibility for the attack. The rebel web site Kavkaz Center reported Sunday that 48 policemen had been killed in the attack and 14 others were wounded. The report could not be independently confirmed. The web site is known for inflating casualty ?figures, while the government has minimized its casualties in the past. 
Kadyrov denounced the ambush and threatened to seek immediate revenge on the rebels. 
“Those bandits must be identified, found and eliminated as soon as possible. There can be no mercy or leniency for them,” Kadyrov said in a statement. 
He said the rebels had opened fire on the police officers from behind. 
He said the officers, led by Achkhoi-Martan regional police commander Valid Batsilov, who survived the attack, had returned fire and forced the rebels to retreat into a forest. 
Kadyrov declared Saturday a day of mourning in Chechnya and ordered all entertainment events canceled. 
Adam Delimkhanov, who represents Chechnya in the State Duma and is wanted by Dubai on an Interpol warrant for the murder of a rival of Kadyrov, said there would be “no mercy” for “the bandits.” 
The Investigative Committee sent a team of investigators from Moscow to Ingushetia to work at the crime scene, the committee said in a statement. 
Kadyrov traveled to Ashty, the destination of the police officers, where he met with Chechen Interior Minister Ruslan Alkhanov and Ingush Interior Minister Ruslan Meriyev and told them to punish the attackers. 
“Those who are involved in the crime will find their deaths in the forest,” said Kadyrov, who has been accused by human rights groups of resorting to brutal tactics in an attempt to maintain order in Chechnya. 
On Saturday night, a joint Ingush-Chechen force surrounded a group of about 20 suspected rebels in a forest near the Chechen settlement of Bamut, close to the Ingush border, killing at least two as of Sunday evening. 
Chechen police foiled an assassination attempt against Kadyrov on Thursday when they surrounded suspected militant Said-Selim Abdulkadyrov and a female accomplice in a private house in the village of Staraya Sunzha near Grozny, Alkhanov, the Chechen interior minister, said Friday in a statement. Abdulkadyrov was killed in an exchange of fire, while the woman was wounded and arrested. 
Alkhanov accused an Arab mercenary named Mukhanad with ties to al-Qaida of being behind the plot. 
Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin told reporters Friday that one of the reasons behind the surge in rebel activity in the North Caucasus was a growth of financial support from abroad this year.

TITLE: Duma Gives Approval to Anti-Graft Bill
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The State Duma on Friday approved anti-corruption legislation proposed by President Dmitry Medvedev that has been broadly welcomed by campaigners, Reuters reported. 
The bill gives prosecutors the right to probe new legislation for loopholes that could be exploited by corrupt officials. It was passed in its third and final reading by 447 of 450 votes in the Duma. 
The new bill gives prosecutors and the Justice Ministry the power to demand through the courts changes to any law deemed to contain “vague, difficult or burdensome requirements” or that give officials too much discretion. 
The bill is expected to secure easy approval in the Federation Council, where it will go now before arriving on Medvedev’s desk for his signature. 
Yelena Panfilova, a researcher at Transparency International’s office in Moscow, said the legislation — like Medvedev’s broader anti-graft campaign — had the potential to be “very significant” but that its success would depend heavily on how it is implemented. 
“Under Medvedev, anti-corruption legislation that was very fragmented and vague is now getting systemic spine,” Panfilova said. 
“But given the level of bureaucratic resistance, it would be naive to expect to see real results soon.” 
Corruption is deeply embedded in Russian society, and successive leaders have tried, unsuccessfully, to stamp it out. In its 2008 index ranking countries from the cleanest to the most corrupt, Transparency International placed Russia in 147th place, alongside Kenya, Syria and Bangladesh.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <strong>Madonna’s Curse</strong>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Lawmakers have complained to Governor Valentina Matviyenko after pop star Madonna used a Russian swear word to describe her concert next month on the city’s Palace Square. 
The lawmakers said Madonna damaged St. Petersburg’s reputation with an Internet promotional clip for the concert that shows her saying, “Okh----o! [It’s f---ing amazing]. This is Madonna. I hope to see you Aug. 2 on Palace Square in St. Petersburg. Don’t miss it,” RIA-Novosti reported Friday. 
The lawmakers want Matviyenko to collect a percentage of Madonna’s concert proceeds in damages. 
The head of PMI, Madonna’s local management, said the clip had “accidentally leaked onto the Internet,” RIA-Novosti reported. 

<strong>Markelov’s Killer</strong>
?MOSCOW (SPT) — Investigators have established who killed human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov in central Moscow in January, Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin told reporters Friday. 
“We know how this man looks, that is, we have identified him,” Bastrykin said, Itar-Tass reported. “We haven’t found him yet, but we know who to look for.” 
Bastrykin would not disclose the name of the suspect, but he said investigators knew the age, social status, “ideological positions” and “social network” of the gunman. 

<strong>Court Clears Satirist</strong>
MOSCOW (SPT) — A Moscow court cleared satirist Viktor Shenderovich on Friday of libel charges filed by State Duma Deputy Sergei Abeltsev, Ekho Moskvy radio reported. 
Shenderovich called Abeltsev of the Liberal Democratic Party a “Yahoo animal” on his talk show on Ekho Moskvy last year. Abeltsev filed a defamation suit, demanding 1 million rubles ($33,000) in damages. 
Shenderovich maintained in Moscow’s Presnensky District Court that “Yahoo animal” is not an insult but only a reference to Jonathan Swift’s book “Gulliver’s Travels.” In describing the “deformed” Yahoos, Swift wrote, “Their heads and breasts were covered with thick hair … but the rest of their bodies were bare. …. They had no tails and often stood on their hind feet. … I never beheld in all my travels so disagreeable an animal.” 

<strong>Custody Case</strong>
MOSCOW (SPT) — Irina Belenkaya, the Russian mother involved in a child custody battle with her French ex-husband, has been granted temporary visitation rights with her daughter, Interfax reported. 
A French court ruled Friday that Belenkaya could see her 3-year-old girl, Elise, three times a month and ordered the parents to try to reach a custody agreement before it issues a final decision.

TITLE: Obama Is Prepared To Call Medvedev’s Bluff
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Frolov
TEXT: U.S. President Barack Obama descends on Moscow on Monday in the first major encounter between U.S. and Russian leaders since they both agreed to hit the “reset” button.” 
Obama’s push to re-engineer the troubled U.S.-Russia relationship has already turned into a policy challenge for the Kremlin. President Dmitry Medvedev’s team is finding the Obama administration increasingly difficult to deal with because unlike former U.S. President George W. Bush, it is prepared to call Russia’s bluff. 
While slowly moving to allay some of Russia’s worst fears, Obama is challenging Russia to put its money where its mouth is and prove that it can bring value to the deal. 
Obama’s call for a replacement agreement to START I came with a suggestion to drastically reduce nuclear weapons, something that Russia cannot agree to without undermining its security but cannot reject out of hand either. Moscow’s wrenching deliberations on the issue were on full display in Medvedev’s tortured response two weeks ago. 
Obama has decided to seriously explore Medvedev’s call for a new security architecture in Europe. When in Moscow, he will prod Medvedev further on the details of his plan, which the Russian side might find it hard to provide. 
Washington surprised Moscow last week with an unanticipated offer to immediately reboot the Russian-NATO relationship, which has been frozen since Russia’s war with Georgia. In exchange, the Obama administration wants much more Russian logistical and military support on Afghanistan. 
Obama is purposefully bypassing Kiev and Tbilisi on his third European tour in three months, signaling his pragmatic choice of priorities. Change can be enacted by constructing a new relationship with Paris, Berlin and Moscow, not with Warsaw, Kiev or Tbilisi. 
Obama’s intention to secure Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization early next year as a prelude to graduating Russia from the infamous Jackson-Vanick amendment was scuttled by Moscow’s decision to apply for WTO membership as a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan. 
Obama is challenging Medvedev to prove that he is interested in solving problems and not grandstanding on them. Medvedev wants Obama to show that the United States will listen to what Russia had to say. Both should be careful what they wish for. 

Vladimir Frolov is president of LEFF Group, a government-relations and PR company.

TITLE: Advice for President Obama
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Dear President Obama, 
Welcome to Moscow! 
We expats are delighted that you’ve come for a visit and wanted to give you a few tips for negotiating the city, your hosts and those tricky arms treaties. 
First, as you zip around the city at approximately 200 kilometers an hour, you’ll notice that the streets are packed with millions of parked cars. These are actually vehicles filled with frustrated drivers stuck in ïðîáêè (traffic jams; literally “corks”). 
On a good day, the traffic in Moscow is horrendous. During your visit, it’s frankly going to be a friggin’ nightmare. To generate good will, the first thing you should say at every meeting, interview and speaking engagement is: Ïðèíîøó ñâîè èçâèíåíèÿ çà ïðîáêè (I’m terribly sorry about the traffic jams). 
Then you need to know how to address your host … er, hosts … er, host. Whatever. 
“Putin” is easy to pronounce, but “Medvedev” is a mouthful for English speakers. Happily, you can avoid their last names and address them as ãîñïîäèí ïðåçèäåíò (Mr. President) and ãîñïîäèí ïðåìüåð-ìèíèñòð (Mr. Prime Minister). If you’re not sure who’s in charge, don’t worry: No one here knows either. If you wind up in the same room with them, you might look in their general direction and address your comments to ãîñïîäà (gentlemen). 
Here in Moscow, it’s hard to tell which official statements are: for internal consumption and can be ignored; for external consumption and should be noted; or blurted out on a bad hair day. So who knows what you’ll hear at the negotiating table. Heck, for all I know, you guys just crack open a couple of beers, kick back and get down to some good-natured horse-trading. 
But you might hear the oft-repeated phrase, ìû âñòàëè ñ êîëåí (We’ve gotten up off our knees) as if Russians had crawled their way through the 1990s. I recall those years well, and I don’t remember anyone on their knees in humiliation. To the contrary, at the time, they were impressed by the aid we were giving them, especially considering that they still had all their nukes pointed at us. In any case, we gave billions to them so they could get on their feet, and now they say they are — so we’re copacetic, right? ïðîåõàëè (Moving right along … ) 
Another theme is: Íàñ îêðóæàþò âðàãè (We’re surrounded by enemies). This one’s easy. If it comes up, just ask: Åñòü ó âàñ êàðòà? (Have you got a map?) Then you show them that their country is one-seventh of the world’s land mass. Nothing surrounds it. In fact, nothing and no one could ever surround it. Íåò ïðîáëåì! (No problem!) 
This treaty stuff is a snap. 
A more serious problem is the Russian image of Americans. On the one hand, we are all-powerful and personally responsible for every crime, natural disaster, economic problem, riot, coup and war anywhere on Earth. On the other hand, we’re the stupidest people who ever lived. True, the latter image is the United States’ fault. Whose idea, after all, was it to make “Dumb and Dumber” an international release? 
In any case, you might hear yourself referred to as ÏÏ - ïðåçèäåíò Ïèíäîñòàíà (PP, the President of Pindostan). Pindostan is the home of ïèíäîñû (the pindos), a slang word for Americans that is rich with obscene and comical overtones. But don’t take it personally. The original meaning of the word is a pony from the Pindos mountain range. Take the high road and say: Ñïàñèáî çà êîìïëèìåíò! Ýòè ïîíè ñìåëûå è âûíîñëèâûå, õîòÿ ïîðîé èçëèøíå óïðÿìûå - êàê àìåðèêàíöû. (Thanks for the compliment! These ponies are brave and sturdy, although sometimes too stubborn — like Americans.) 
Finally, you should know the word ðåãèñòðàöèÿ, translated as “visa registration” or “the bane of expats’ existence.” This is the process by which foreigners register, deregister, and reregister their visas approximately every five minutes. I know the registration system is Russia’s internal affair and you can’t meddle, but please, can’t you trade something to get us exempt? How about giving them back part of Alaska? Or canceling plans to deploy missile defense? Believe me, it’s worth it. 
If you have any other questions, just ask us expats. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy our magnificent adopted city. 

Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter.