SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1503 (65), Tuesday, August 25, 2009
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TITLE: German School 
Prepares 
To Open
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The German federal government will be opening a school in St. Petersburg on Sept. 1 where almost all subjects will be taught in the German language.
The school, which is ready to receive German, Russian and foreign pupils, will offer the traditional German school program and German school certificate.
“Our goal is to become one of the top schools in St. Petersburg,” said Marcus Stadthaus, head of the Culture and Press Department at the German Consulate in St. Petersburg.
At the preliminary stage the school will offer its program to pupils from the first to the seventh grade.  Later the school will add another grade each year, up to the 12th. The school will also have a kindergarten which children can attend from the age of three. 
“Previously, the lack of a school working within the German educational program has prevented many German enterprises and organizations from sending employees with children of a school-going age to St. Petersburg,” Stadthaus said.  
“As a result, the German specialists who used to come here either had no children at all, or kids who were still very young or already adults. The opening of this school will create wider opportunities for German experts to come and work here,” he said.
At the same time, the German school certificate will give the school’s graduates a chance to enroll at German universities straight after school graduation, Stadthaus said.
“On top of that, our experience shows that German schools — and we have 133 worldwide — have become one of the main anchors for bilateral relations.  In such schools, both German and international pupils establish life-long relationships with another country,” Stadthaus said.
“Many international graduates from such schools go on to have professional links with Germany,” he said.
The school, which is due to open at 19 Ulitsa Odoyevskogo on Vasilievsky Island, will be located in its own four-story building with a courtyard covering 2,000 square meters.
The initial intake for the school and kindergarten currently amounts to 35 children. Nevertheless, the school has the capacity to take 164 children, Stadthaus said.
“That means that the school is ready to receive new students at any time, even in the winter,” he said, adding that they are expecting to have an average of 10 children in each of the school’s classes.
To enroll at the school, children won’t have to pass complicated exams or tests.  Kindergarten and first grade Russian pupils can enter it without any knowledge of German.  Those who enter the school in later grades will need to be capable of a brief chat on simple subjects with a teacher in German.
Most subjects at the school, including math, history, geography, physics and chemistry will be taught in German. Both Russian and foreign students will also have lessons where the Russian language is taught, as well as English. Other languages will be optional. Arts, sports and music will also be taught in Russian.
“The school is very flexible, and if a student wants to study Korean, we’ll invite a teacher of Korean in,” Stadthaus said.
Of the initial intake, about two thirds of the pupils are German or international children, and the rest are Russian.
“The international nature of the team gives children an excellent opportunity to learn from each other and to be part of an international community,” Stadthaus said.
The school fee will amount to 8,000 euros per year ($11,500), while the kindergarten fee will be 7,500 euro per year ($10,760), Stadthaus said.
The German government is financing the majority of the expenditure at the school, while its main sponsor, Siemens, is also making significant contributions, Stadthaus said. 
The school will have both German and Russian teachers, though the majority of the Russian teachers will speak German with the children.

More information on the school can be found at www.deutscheschule.ru.

TITLE: Winnie the Pooh Debuts on Extremism List
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Winnie the Pooh share a dubious honor: Anyone who depicts either of them with a swastika can be punished under the law.
The Justice Ministry published the latest — and biggest — update to its list of extremist materials on its web site this week, and many of the 414 new entries are so vague or controversial that analysts say they threaten to discredit the list all together.
The list is important because police officers and other law enforcement officials use it in street checks, apartment searches and criminal cases.
Among the new entries, extremist material is identified as “a picture of Winnie the Pooh wearing a swastika,” “a self-made template for a future newspaper, comic or other print materials,” and “a flag with a cross.”
The flag entry theoretically makes it an offense to produce or distribute Georgian or Swiss flags and Russian Orthodox banners, all of which have crosses on them.
Even the possession of these materials in mass quantities — and it is up to a court is to decide how many items comprise a “mass” in each individual case — carries the threat of punishment.
A Justice Ministry spokeswoman said Thursday that the ministry has no authority to modify or in any other way change the list, which is based on court decisions defining extremist materials.
If caught with extremist material, a private individual faces a fine of up to 3,000 rubles ($95) and up to 15 days in jail, while a legal entity could be fined up to 100,000 rubles ($3,150) and closed for up to 90 days. No criminal charges would apply.
But if a person is under investigation for another crime, the possession of extremist materials can and often is used to add extremism charges to the case, thus stiffening the punishment. For example, beating a Tajik citizen would be classified as simple assault unless the police found extremist materials in the attacker’s home. Then the case could be classified as assault with the motive of ethnic hatred, which entails a stricter punishment.
Dozens of the new entries from the Justice Ministry’s list were defined by the Ordzhonikidzevsky District Court in Bashkortostan’s capital, Ufa, last December.
The acting chairman of the court, Ramil Karipov, told The St. Petersburg Times on Thursday that its contribution was based on materials collected at the home of an Ufa resident sentenced on extremist charges in 2006. “Prosecutors came to us with the list and an expert’s conclusion that these items are extremist. So, we decided that they are extremist,” he said by telephone from Ufa.
The list included the flags with crosses, Winnie the Pooh and “two sheets of A4 white paper with the picture of a swastika and the words ‘White Fist National-Socialist Newspaper.’”
Karipov could not say whether his court had critically studied the list and the expert’s opinion before making the rule, and he directed all other queries to Ordzhonikidzevsky district prosecutors. No one picked up the phone Thursday at the district prosecutor’s office or the press office of Ufa’s chief prosecutor.
An official familiar with the case, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said the Justice Ministry had twice ordered Ordzhonikidzevsky district prosecutors to ask the local court for more precise definitions on extremist materials, but both letters were ignored.
“The thing is, most provincial courts have no idea that their rulings made in individual extremist cases will have an impact on the whole country,” said Galina Kozhevnikova, an analyst with Sova, a watchdog that tracks extremism in Russia.
The law on extremism, which stipulated the creation of the list of extremist materials as a tool to fight extremist propaganda, was adopted in 2002, but the first entries onto the list appeared only in 2007.
Kozhevnikova said she had witnessed policemen with the list in hand as they approached activists distributing leaflets, newspapers and books during nationalist gatherings in Moscow. The officers compared the activists’ materials against the list’s entries. “It was clear and rational at the very beginning,” Kozhevnikova said of the list. “Then came an avalanche of decisions from the regional courts, and the whole idea of the list as of a tool for law enforcement officials turned into a mess.”
She called the latest addition the “apotheosis of absurd” and said it would make it impossible to use the list in practice and only encourage abuses by law enforcement officials interested in beefing up their extremism crime solving statistics by cracking down on the innocent. “The worst thing is that no one is moving to create mechanisms to repair the system,” she said.
Appealing to courts to remove certain items would be a way to clean up the list, said Natalya Kryukova, deputy head of the Russian Institute for Cultural Research, which examines cultural materials for possible antisocial content.
“This would stimulate the courts and experts to be more critical when they consider which materials will be declared extremist,” she said.
This, however, would be a slow process given the lack of developed civil consciousness among Russians who lived several generations under totalitarianism, she said.
Kozhevnikova expressed doubt that court appeals would work, noting that the law on extremism provides no procedure for a removal even with a court decision.
She said she knows at least five instances when courts have ruled that items on the list were not extremist. But the list has not been changed.
Kozhevnikova said the Justice Ministry could ask the Supreme Court to order judges to stick to stricter standards when defining materials as extremist.
A closer look at the list brings other surprises. For example, item No. 402 is the LiveJournal blog address Reinform.livejournal.com.
The blog has not been suspended by LiveJournal’s abuse team and is being updated almost daily. Its owner wrote on its front page that he had opened the blog after seeing prosecutors mistakenly name the then-nonexistent blog as extremist.
A puzzling entry on the list reads “Text document ‘Putin’ in folder ‘Decrees’ in folder ‘Declaration CDR disk No. 2,’” which was named extremist by the Akhtubinsk City Court in the Astrakhan region.
There are also dozens of documents related to Islamic studies on the list. Russian Muslim religious leaders have repeatedly called for some of them to be removed, but to no avail.
The appearance of Winnie the Pooh on the list this week is not surprising given his popularity, Kryukova said. Jokes about the honey-obsessed bear are plentiful and have entered modern Russian folklore after Winnie the Pooh made his Russian debut in a well-known Soviet cartoon.
A picture depicting Putin in a Nazi uniform with a swastika armband was published in 2007 by the Saratovsky Reporter newspaper, and resulted in a criminal case against its editor for insulting a state official and another case in which the government sought to close the newspaper for extremism. Courts threw out both cases.

TITLE: Charities Come to Aid of Orphanage for New School Year
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Two local charities have joined forces in a campaign aimed at helping children at a Gatchina-based orphanage to get school supplies. Usually, the city’s orphans get everything they need free from stores, but this year many shops have stopped donating school supplies, citing financial difficulties resulting from the economic crisis.
Two charities, Vremya Pomogat (Time To Help) and “Peterburgskie Roditeli” (St.Petersburg Parents), were approached by the head of the Gatchina orphanage and told that the children risked starting the new academic year without exercise books, pencils, erasers, diaries, drawing albums and all the other basic  school essentials. The charities’ volunteers tried approaching a number of stores selling school supplies but were repeatedly turned down.
“In one of the shops they told us they might be able to give us something around October, while another shop director said they might be able to do something for us, but only closer to Christmas,” recalls Oksana Rumyantseva of the Vremya Pomogat charity. “These promises are no help at all because the children have to prepare for classes now. The academic year is starting within days. It really is an emergency.”
The Gatchina orphanage, to the south-west of the city, provides a home for 77 children aged between seven and 15.
Rumyantseva and her colleagues who regularly help several orphanages in the Leningrad region, are now campaigning among ordinary citizens, asking them to buy school supplies for the orphans. The donations are being collected in the local headquarters of the International Red Cross at 11 Millionnaya Ulitsa.
“Orphaned children, deprived of parental love, are especially sensitive to care, support and attention; they appreciate every little bit of help,” said Yulia Tsygankova of the Peterburgskie Roditeli charity. 
The volunteers said the response from ordinary locals has been overhwelming.
“We have seen so much more understanding and support from the people than from business circles, it’s amazing,” Tsygankova said. “Everyone brings very colourful, gorgeous-looking stuff, and it’s obvious that the donors mean to brighten up the orphans’ lives a little bit. It’s very touching.”
According to official estimates, it now costs between 6,400 and 10,900 rubles ($200-$344) to equip a pupil for the new academic year.
Rumyantseva said St. Petersburg orphanages are not unique in facing difficulties with school supplies. Similar charitable campaigns are now running in many Russian towns, including Moscow, Arkhangelsk, Vladivostok, Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk.
Those wishing to donate school supplies to local orphanages can take items to the International Red Cross office at 11 Millionnaya Ulitsa, Monday through Friday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

TITLE: Power Industry to Face Tighter Controls
AUTHOR: By Alex Anishyuk
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — As the power industry recovers from the shock of last week’s disaster at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydropower plant, the government was told to develop regulations to keep price volatility — for wholesale power and generators’ shares — in check.
RusHydro’s largest plant was knocked completely off-line when an engine room flooded early Aug. 17, and officials have said it could take at least five months before Sayano-Shushenskaya is even partly operational. The facility accounts for some 2.5 percent of the country’s overall capacity.
On a visit to the dam Friday, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ordered Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko to submit proposals by Sept. 10 for regulating the wholesale power market to avoid sharp price increases. The regulatory measures may be in force for up to 12 months, he said.
Analysts reacted calmly to the announcement, saying the measures would primarily affect the Siberian region and would only seek to prevent rival generators from hiking up prices.
“As far as we’re concerned, the government decree issued by Vladimir Putin will only regulate earnings by certain generators that are currently replacing the damaged hydro plant,” said Vladimir Sklyar, an analyst at Renaissance Capital. “The government is aiming to fight rising prices in the areas where some generators have become monopolists and may wish to gain speculative profits.”
The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service will curb any unjustified price increases in Siberia, its head, Igor Artemyev, said Friday at a news conference.
“We sent a warning letter to power generating companies and will keep monitoring the situation,” Anatoly Golomolzin, a deputy chief of the anti-monopoly service, told The St. Petersburg Times. “We will see if price fluctuations are economically justified, and in case speculative activity is proven we’ll take action.”
The service will continue using the existing regulatory system to track possible monopolist activity, he said.
“Companies that abuse their dominant positions will be penalized 1 percent to 15 percent of their revenue on the market for the previous year,” Golomolzin added.
Putin’s order to protect consumers will be applied primarily in the regions where an artificial deficit of capacity was created after Sayano-Shushenskaya went off line, including the Krasnoyarsk, Tomsk, Omsk, Irkutsk, Kemerovo and Altai regions, said Sklyar, of Renaissance Capital.
But there may be no drastic price increase at all, because reserve power capacities are efficiently operating and there is a sufficient supply of fuel in stock, said Vitaly Bushuyev, director of the Energy Strategy Institute.
“The necessary energy balance has been restored, days after the disaster, while a long-term balance is being calculated now,” he said. “A price increase of 5 to 10 percent is possible because of the increased costs of fuel for energy generators, but the government needs to strictly curb speculative trends.”
Bushuyev said the government might go as far as fixing administrated prices, although that looks like the most pessimistic scenario.
“The accident has tested the principles of the free electricity market in Russia: Electricity prices in Siberia were up 25 percent on Monday, reflecting the load of more expensive, coal-fired gencos,” VTB Capital wrote in a research note Friday.
As a result, the Trade System Administrator and Federal Anti-Monopoly Service received more control over market participants and are using nonmarket mechanisms to try to calm the situation. The system administrator put a price cap of 628 rubles ($20) per megawatt hour for energy in Siberia, 45 percent above the current level, VTB’s Dmitry Skryabin and Mikhail Rasstrigin wrote.
“The devil, of course, will be in the details [of the government regulations]. … The news might be negative for stocks that have rallied of late … and positive for RusHydro, as it would need less money to fulfill its power supply contracts,” they wrote, citing Irkutskenergo, OGK-3, and TGKs 12, 13 and 14 as stocks that had gained.
RusHydro, which had its Russian shares frozen for most of Monday and all of Tuesday last week, seems to be on its way to recovery. The blue chip’s shares rose 4.5 percent on the MICEX on Friday, still 13 percent off the previous week’s close.

TITLE: Drunks, Under-14s Face Limits on Dog-Walking
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The St. Petersburg administration discussed the first draft of a bill on walking dogs last week, with plans to fine owners for walking dogs without muzzles, Fontanka reported.
The draft bill was drawn up on the orders of St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko following a series of vicious dog attacks in the city and its suburbs this summer. 
Matviyenko also promised that lawmaker will take into consideration the opinion of dog owners, who have complained that they have witnessed a wave of aggression towards dogs.
The draft bill proposes dividing dogs into two groups — those under 30 centimeters in length or younger than three months and those that are over those limits. The older and larger dogs will be required by law to be muzzled when being walked and to be on leashes of no longer than 40 centimeters.
Infringements of the rules will entail fines of two to four thousand rubles ($63-$126), though guide and service dogs will be exempted.
The draft law also proposes that children under the age of 14 be forbidden from walking the larger or older dogs, and those under the influence of drugs or alcohol will also be banned from walking dogs altogether.
Anna Mityanina, head of Smolny’s legal committee, said that the body’s specialists would have liked to propose even higher fines, but federal limits on fines for such violations prevented them from doing so, Fontanka said.
“Our task is not to punish the owners financially but to form responsible attitudes to keeping pets,” Mityanina said.
Many St. Petersburg parents support the proposed measures.
Marina Sinichkina, mother of a three-year-old daughter, said she often feels nervous when owners of dogs and their pets approach children’s playgrounds.
“Dogs’ owners often think and say that their pets are harmless and friendly, but you never know how a dog is going to behave towards strange people or children, who also may not know how cautious they should be with dogs they don’t know,” Sinichkina said.
Meanwhile, dog-lovers were indignant at such tough measures. Representatives of such organizations as Help for Stray Dogs and Poteryashka said animals would suffer if put on short leads, and that it would take longer to walk them on such short leads. 
Annually the city registers about 10,000 cases involving animals biting members of the public. In about 90 percent of these cases the dogs were identified as having owners. 
Calls for stronger restrictions on dog ownership came about as the result of two severe attacks in the city and its suburbs this summer. 
On June 29 a dog almost scalped an eight-year-old girl in the village of Osinovets, in the Leningrad Oblast. On June 30, three pedigree dogs severely injured a teenage boy not far from the St. Petersburg suburb of Sestroretsk to the north of the  city.

TITLE: Democrats Mark Own Flag  Day
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: While the authorities celebrated Russian Flag Day with pomp and ceremony on Saturday, they attempted to hush up a meeting dedicated to the victory over the 1991 coup — an event which took the then-banned tricolor flag as its emblem. The flag was first raised over Mariinsky Palace, which, as the home of the city parliament became the center of democratic resistance, when the coup failed on August 22.
Earlier this month, City Hall rejected the planned site for the meeting, which was due to take place at 6:30 p.m. on Friday and was to be called “Against Totalitarianism” on the grounds that works to check the water supply system prior to the winter season would be underway close to the site at the same time, organizer Olga Kurnosova said on Monday. Instead, it suggested an alternative location at the 50th Anniversary of the October Revolution Park on the city’s outskirts.
“We didn’t choose the site by accident; it was at the Mariinsky Palace that the headquarters for the resistance to the coup were set,” Kurnosova said. When a district court ruled last week that the authorities’ refusal was legitimate, Kurnosova announced that a gathering of friends and like-minded people, rather than a public meeting, would take place near Mariinsky Palace.
Kurnosova, who now heads the local branch of Garry Kasparov’s United Civil Front (OGF) and coordinates the Solidarity democratic movement in the city, was a deputy of the Lensoviet (then the city parliament) that was based in Mariinsky Palace and was instrumental in resisting the coup.
When around 100 demonstrators arrived on the scene on Friday evening, they did find several city repair works trucks and orange-jacketed workers, who hung around their vehicles without even pretending to be working, as well as policemen and OMON riot police.
The coup’s failure was received with widespread popular enthusiasm in 1991, but the participants were not in a celebratory mood on Friday. 
“The plotters of the coup have won,” said former Lensoviet deputy Leonid Romankov, now a member of the St. Petersburg Human Rights Council. 
“What we were fighting for in August 1991 was freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and free elections. All this has been taken from us.”
Soon after the event began on Friday, policemen with a megaphone approached the gathering to demand that the “illegal meeting” be stopped, but, after protesters said that as they were not using any amplification equipment the gathering could not be qualified as a public meeting, the policemen retreated. No arrests were made.
The current Russian flag was officially adopted by a decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin on Aug. 22, the day the coup was suppressed. The day was made an official holiday in 1994.
City Hall, which hung posters with the words “The Day of Russian Flag. We Have Something to Be Proud Of” on advertising pillars around the city, celebrated the day with a series of events featuring bureaucrats, sailors, bikers and pop singers on Saturday. 
At the Peter and Paul Fortress, the main site of the official celebrations, participants linked up with scarves in the Russian Flag’s colors around the fortress while camera and photo crews in a helicopter documented the event for possible inclusion in the Guinness Book of Records. A giant 1,000-meter, 60-kilogram Russian Flag was unveiled in Kupchino, on the south of St. Petersburg. Two hundred participants unfurled the flag. 
Details as to how the tricolor reemerged as a state symbol in 1991 were omitted from the official celebrations and reports.

TITLE: Alleged Hijackers Of Cargo Ship in Court
AUTHOR: By Conor Humphries
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The eight suspected hijackers of the Arctic Sea cargo ship that went missing in the Atlantic Ocean appeared in a Moscow court on Friday to be formally charged with piracy and kidnapping.
“We were saving ourselves, we were drowning,” Igor Borisov, 45, told the  Basmanny District Court. “We didn’t hijack the ship.”
A lawyer for the defendants, Konstantin Baranovsky, said the suspects were “peaceful environmentalists.”
All eight men pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutor Zelimkhan Kostoyev said the ship was carrying $2 million worth of timber to Algeria, dismissing suggestions that it was carrying illegal weapons.
The authorities have so far not released a detailed account of why pirates would target a ship carrying timber in some of the world’s best-policed seas.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <strong>Korean Drowns</strong>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A Korean boy fell off the St. Petersburg museum ship Aurora and drowned in the Neva River on Monday, Interfax reported.
The boy and his parents, all three of them from Korea, were on a tour of the historic cruiser when the child fell overboard and drowned, said a source from the St. Petersburg Central Internal Affairs Directorate. Around 1 p.m., a guide called the police to report that the child had drowned, according to the source, who did not give the boy’s age.
The Cruiser Aurora, which is permanently docked at the confluence of the Bolshaya Nevka and the Neva near Liteiny Bridge, fired a blank shot to signal the beginning of the Bolshevik assault on the Winter Palace in 1917 and remains a popular landmark and tourist destination.

<strong>Foreign Students Up</strong>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — About nine students competed for each available spot at St. Petersburg institutions of higher education for the 2009 incoming class, according to new statistics from the Committee for Science and Higher Education.
A total of 246,164 applications were filed for 27,914 budgeted spots, or approximately nine applications for each place, announced committee spokesman Andrei Maximov at a press conference on Monday, Interfax reported. Although 58 percent of applications were from females, 56 percent of those accepted were males, Maximov said.
The 2009 admissions process also saw an increase in foreign students – they now form three percent of the student population, up from two percent in 2008 – and students from other Russian cities, the percentage of whom increased from 47.8 percent to 51 percent. 
Vladimir Vasilyev, the spokesman for the Committee of Directors of St. Petersburg Institutions of Higher Education, furthermore noted that this year the number of majors in the humanities and social-economic and educational areas decreased, while the number of engineering and technical majors increased (Russian students typically declare their majors before entering an institute of higher education).

<strong>Exam Complaint</strong>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — St. Petersburg university directors will complain to the Russian Ministry of Education about the administration of the country’s controversial standardized test, according to the Committee of Directors of St. Petersburg Institutions of Higher Education.
The committee will propose changes to the way the Unified State Examination is currently administered and used in university admissions following this year’s drawn-out admissions process, committee spokesman Vladimir Vasilyev told reporters Monday.
This year marked the first time that most institutions of higher education accepted scores from the Unified State Examination (known by its Russian acronym, “YeGE”), which high school students take to graduate, rather than insisting on using separate university-administered examinations. 
Students were admitted based on YeGE scores in three waves in 2009, lengthening the admissions process, Interfax reported. Vasilyev proposed admitting students in one wave on a single date, to be followed by additional enrollment only for those students who didn’t apply during the first round, “so that there won’t be jumping from one institution to another,” he said.
The admissions process officially ended August 21, the first time it has lasted so long, Vasilyev said.

TITLE: Watchdog Threatens to Rein in Oil Giants
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Anti-monopoly chief Igor Artemyev promised an imminent crackdown on the country’s oil producers if they continue their tactics of collusion, saying rules going into effect Sunday would give him expanded powers to punish violations.
“Greediness must be contained,” Artemyev said at a news conference Friday. “Companies should realize that a new reality is beginning for them.”
The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service began an effort to bring down prices for refined oil products, including gasoline and jet fuel, after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned its leaders in July 2008 to “wake up” or find new work.
Artemyev lobbied hard for revisions to the country’s anti-monopoly law, and at a news conference last month he thanked Putin for helping get the changes passed, including amendments to the Criminal Code that would allow him to hold executives responsible for collusion.
Legal analysts said the legislation strengthened the service’s position considerably and widened its net, so that now companies with small market shares can also be targeted for antitrust violations.
But Artemyev will only be able to call on his biggest weapon in two months. On Oct. 28, revisions to Article 178 of the Criminal Code will allow the service to go after individual executives found guilty of three offenses in three years. If convicted by a court, they could face up to six years in prison.
President Dmitry Medvedev signed the changes into law on July 29.
“[The article] has been practically dead after it was amended in 2002,” Artemyev said, but now carries the criminal punishment for anti-monopoly violations, such as limiting competition or abuse of dominant market position.
Collusion can be punished on the first offense.
The service has about 200 active court cases against oil companies and “will start a new series of cases if needed,” Artemyev said, adding that the current increase in oil prices was likely happening through agreement among the dominant companies.
Crude prices passed $74 per barrel in New York on Friday, the first time in 10 months.
Russian gasoline prices have been growing by up to 1 percent weekly in the past month, according to the State Statistics Service. “Our gas prices don’t fall when they fall everywhere else, and once they start decreasing they decrease more slowly,” Artemyev said.  
The reason, he said, is that most oil is processed by about 10 refineries, so prices are formed at the wholesale level and transfer to the pump.
“Criminal prosecution is not ideal, but if the fines are still smaller than the profit companies are getting through illegal actions we will have to bring in law enforcement,” he said.
Artemyev also blamed high prices on low export tariffs, which create an “artificial deficit” on the domestic market, and a lack of sales on the oil commodity exchange.
Legal experts said the new rules could create more risks for all companies, no matter their size or position on the market.
The amendments clarify the procedure anti-monopoly officials can use in the course of checks, said Yelena Gurbatova, an antitrust lawyer at Yukov, Khrenov and Partners.
“It’s hard to judge their effectiveness, but the changes to the Criminal Code … deserve close attention,” she said. “Article 178 is now more clearly tied to the law on competition. Before the article was practically disabled.”
“Accusations of collusion become more important and risky, as they can be extended to companies that don’t control a significant part of the market,” said Ivan Smirnov, a partner at Baker & McKenzie.
“The new amendments create a real threat that the anti-monopoly service may abuse their legal authorities more often,” Smirnov said.
Rosneft spokesman Nikolai Manvelov said his company “has and will operate under Russian law,” and that “not one of [the service’s] decisions regarding Rosneft has taken effect, since all of them are being contested.”
LUKoil, the country’s largest private producer, was not immediately available for comment.

TITLE: Payments Doubled For Dam Victims
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Friday ordered that compensation be doubled to 2 million rubles ($63,200) to the families of victims killed in the Siberian dam disaster.
“We will rebuild the equipment. The people cannot be brought back. This is the greatest sorrow,” Putin said as he opened a disaster relief meeting in the village of Cheryomushki, near the dam.
Putin said the federal government would match each 1 million ruble payment from RusHydro, the state company that operates the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station.
The federal compensation will cover not only the victims that have officially been declared dead, but also the missing persons, Putin said, adding that there was little hope of recovering anyone else alive.
The death toll from the accident rose to 69 people on Sunday, as emergency workers found two more bodies, said Sergei Shaposhnikov, chief of the Emergency Situations Ministry’s disaster relief headquarters at the dam. Six people remained missing, he said.
The federal government will also pay additional compensation to victims’ children who are under 18, Putin said, without naming an amount. He ordered that children from affected families be provided with free higher education.
RusHydro could rebuild the station within three years, or at least one year earlier than previous estimates, RusHydro acting chief executive Vasily Zubakin said Sunday.

TITLE: Officers Stranded, Disenchanted by Army Reform
AUTHOR: By Karina Ioffee
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KUBINKA, Moscow Region — Nikolai Kulikov, a 51-year-old officer, says bitterly that he gave his best years to the Russian army.
Kulikov did a series of assignments across the Soviet Union and spent the past 10 years as head of security at the Air Force base in Kubinka, 65 kilometers west of Moscow.
But now he is one of 200,000 military officers who face early retirement as the armed forces conduct a sweeping reform that will eliminate the jobs of six out of every 10 members of its top-heavy officer corps.
The government says reducing the ranks of senior officers is just one of the changes needed to turn an institution of more than 1.1 million personnel into a modern army trained to fight terrorism and regional conflicts. But many in this army town say the reform doesn’t take people into consideration.
“When I entered the army back in 1975, I thought I’d be given a certain kind of lifestyle, you know, stability, housing, status,” said Kulikov, sitting in the temporary two-room apartment he shares with his 23-year-old son. “But after two decades, I have nothing to show for it. This place is exactly the size of a jail cell.”
Kulikov has been waiting for a new apartment for 13 years but claims he was removed from the waiting list several times because he angered his bosses. He also says corrupt officials are demanding $40,000 for his “free” apartment.
The reforms to the army were announced after Russia’s conflict with Georgia last year. The army was designed in the Soviet era to fight huge tank battles with NATO on the plains of Europe, and it had a surprisingly hard time crushing Georgia’s tiny, lightly armed military. The Georgians shot down at least four Russian aircraft in five days, leaving Prime Minister Vladimir Putin outraged.
But the government is not shrinking the size of the armed forces, the world’s fifth largest. As it reduces the number of senior officers, Moscow plans to increase military spending and promote or recruit more junior officers — molding a fighting force that more closely resembles that of the United States, among others.
Most critics of the restructuring recognize that it’s needed. But many here are worried about the backlash from, in effect, firing hundreds of thousands of officers at a time when the economy is shrinking and millions are already unemployed.
To soften the blow, the military is offering its retired officers a pension of about $400 a month and a free apartment. But many say they’ve been waiting for permanent housing for years and no longer believe in the government they spent decades defending.
“I feel very disappointed and bitter,” said retired Colonel Vyacheslav Solyakov, 51, smoking on the porch of the trailer his family has been living in since 2002. The trailer sits at the edge of a parking lot and is home to 12 families, who share two bathrooms and one kitchen. It was supposed to be temporary, but seven years later they are still there.
“During the upheaval, they needed the army to protect the country, but when we need the government it’s not there,” Solyakov said.
Inside the trailer, the conditions are dire. Some rooms have mold on the wall, and most are only big enough to fit a bed and a small table.
“I feel totally betrayed,” said Solyakov’s wife, Nina. “On the weekends, when everyone is home, people have to stand in line to wash the dishes. It hurts to even think about it.”
Solyakov retired last spring. But like thousands of other families, the couple has been in limbo, living in temporary housing provided by the military while awaiting a permanent apartment. They share a small room with their 13-year-old daughter, Valeria, where the walls shake from the washing machine next door. Their 32-year-old son, also in the army, sleeps in the living room.
Military analysts say the reforms are painful but necessary.
“The system we have is hugely inefficient,” said Alexander Golts, a commentator who frequently speaks on military issues. “We have two officers overseeing one soldier. It can’t continue.”
It’s not clear what kind of help the government will provide beyond the pensions and promised apartments. More than two dozen training centers have already been opened around the country, but what they can actually accomplish remains to be seen, Golts said. Many officers’ skills are outdated, making it a challenge to transition them into the civilian work force.
“What they really need to do is issue a one-time payment of 180,000 rubles ($6,000) to make sure people don’t starve in the first couple of months,” he said.
Retired military officers have staged protests throughout the country in recent months, saying the reform is not well thought-out and will actually make the country more unstable.
Meanwhile, some younger officers are getting restless, too. Their meager salaries — about $250 a month — are hardly enough to support a family on, making a civilian career more tempting.
“Why should I torture myself on this job when I can earn five times more in a civilian post?” said Vladimir, a 27-year-old airplane technician who declined to give his last name because he feared retribution from his superiors. “If I don’t get my free housing by the end of the year, I’m leaving.”