SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1504 (66), Friday, August 28, 2009
**************************************************************************
TITLE: Mikhalkov, Anthem Lyricist Dies At Age of 96
AUTHOR: By Mansur Mirovalev
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Sergei Mikhalkov, an author favored by Stalin who wrote the lyrics for the Soviet and Russian national anthems, persecuted dissident writers as part of the Soviet propaganda machine and fathered two noted film directors, has died at age 96.
Mikhalkov died in a Moscow hospital on Thursday, said Denis Baglai, a spokesman for his son, director Nikita Mikhalkov. Baglai said he had no further details immediately.
The death of a man whose life and achievements embodied most of Russia’s Communist era was mourned by Russian leaders and received extensive coverage on state television.
“At all times, Sergei Vladimirovich lived up to the interests of his motherland, served it and believed in it,” President Dmitry Medvedev said in a statement.
In 1943, Mikhalkov, a young author and war correspondent whose poems were favored by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, was commissioned to write lyrics for a new Soviet anthem designed to inspire Red Army soldiers in the midst of World War II.
Mikhalkov’s lyrics, co-written with journalist El Registan and set to music by Alexander Alexandrov, lauded Stalin who “brought us up on loyalty to the people” and “inspired us to labor and to heroism.”
The anthem propelled Mikhalkov into stardom that outlived Stalin and the system he created. After the dictator’s death in 1953, the anthem was mostly performed without the lyrics, but Mikhalkov remained one of the most vocal and outspoken bards of Communism.
He received numerous state awards for his children’s books, film scripts, plays and fiction. He churned out adaptations of Russian and European classics — including Mark Twain’s “The Prince and the Pauper” — transforming them according to Politburo-prescribed ideological recipes.
Millions of Russians can recite lines from his other famous work — the 1935 children’s poem “Uncle Styopa,” about an unusually tall police officer — which is still taught in Russian kindergartens and primary schools.
His contributions to serious literature were more controversial.
As a functionary and later chairman of the government-regulated Soviet Writers’ Union, Mikhalkov became an integral part of the propaganda machine designed to indoctrinate Soviet citizens and weed out dissidents. He was part of smear campaigns against “anti-Soviet” authors such as Nobel laureates Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was deported from the Soviet Union in 1974.
In 1977, the Politburo approved adjustments to the national anthem, where Mikhalkov replaced references to Stalin with phrases glorifying Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, who “led us on to Communism’s triumph.”
After the 1991 Soviet collapse, the Russian government scrapped the anthem, replacing it with an instrumental piece by 19th-century Russian composer Mikhail Glinka.
But after Vladimir Putin became Russian president in 2000, he restored the old anthem. Mikhalkov adjusted the text again, replacing references to Lenin and the Soviets with a paean to Russia’s “divinely protected” forests and meadows that span from “southern seas to the polar lands.”
In 2005, Putin personally handed Mikhalkov a state award for “literary and social achievements.”
Mikhalkov refuted claims that he was subservient to the Communist Party.
“I have never been influenced by politics,” he told the Kommersant newspaper in 2003. “I always served the state.”
His line glorifying Stalin in the original anthem was restored just this week to the vestibule of the lavish Kurskaya metro station in Moscow. The line, written in large letters, had been removed during the “de-Stalinization” of the late 1950s. Its restoration reflects Russians’ growing nostalgia about the Stalinist period.
Mikhalkov’s death drew warm words from many of the country’s cultural figures.
“He’s an entire epoch that is now lost,” actor Mikhail Boyarsky told the ITAR-Tass news agency. “But his anthem will stay with us forever.”
Mikhalkov’s son Nikita won an Academy Award for the 1994 film “Burnt by the Sun,” about a family during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. His other son, Andrei Konchalovsky, has made a career as a Hollywood director, whose films include the Oscar-nominated “Runaway Train.”
His survivors also include his physicist wife Yulia Subbotina, ten grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
TITLE: Army Wants to Acquire French Warship
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s top general said Wednesday that the military wants to buy a French helicopter carrier, has deployed advanced air defense systems on the border with North Korea and will press ahead in developing the beleaguered Bulava missile.
Colonel General Nikolai Makarov, the chief of the General Staff, also said negotiations have resumed with the United States to set up a Moscow-based joint control center to track missile launches.
In what would be a landmark deal, the military plans to buy a Mistral-class helicopter carrier — capable of carrying 16 helicopters, 40 tanks or up to 900 troops — and then jointly produce three or four additional carriers with France in Russian shipyards, Makarov said.
“Before the year’s end, we plan to obtain contract agreements with a French company allowing the construction and purchase of this ship,” Makarov told reporters in the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator, where he was traveling with President Dmitry Medvedev.
This would be the biggest foreign military purchase for Russia, which for many years has relied on the Soviet-era principle of producing every piece of military equipment — from a pistol cartridge to a ballistic missile — domestically.
France’s navy has two of the 21,300-ton carriers in service, and one more is under construction at the Chantiers de Saint-Nazaire dockyards.
Speculation that the military was interested in buying the helicopter carrier, which costs about $1 billion, first surfaced in Vedomosti and Kommersant last month, but Russian officials denied the reports.
Several defense analysts have questioned the expediency of such a costly purchase in the name of national security. Any military conflicts likely to involve Russia would be with its neighbors, which would require land troops and equipment rather than a sea vessel, they say.
Makarov also said the military has put a division of its most advanced S-400 Triumf air defense systems in service in the Far East to intercept possible “unsuccessful launches of North Korean missiles and to guarantee that fragments of this missile don’t fall on Russian territory.”
A S-400 division comprises four to six missile systems that can track and destroy aircraft and missiles at a range of up to 400 kilometers.
Makarov also said that Moscow and Washington were discussing the possible creation of a joint monitoring center that would be used to notify each other about “unsanctioned” missile launches in order to avoid accidents.
The two sides discussed opening a similar center in 2000, but the idea was put on the back burner as relations worsened.
TITLE: Migrants Living on Factory Grounds Arrested by Police
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg police detained between 128 and 180 migrants from Central Asia on Wednesday who lived on the abandoned territory of the city’s Krasny Treugolnik rubber factory.
Police organized the raid of the plant as a part of a murder investigation.
Law enforcement officials were investigating the murder of a 47-year-old woman committed the night of August 12. The woman died in a hospital as a result of multiple blows to her head and body that she suffered from two men of Asian appearance after the three had been drinking together, the investigation department of the city prosecutor general’s office said.
“In order to find the people who committed the crime, the investigation department of Admiralteisky district, the district’s police and migration service organized the raid on the territory of the Krasny Treugolnik plant,” the prosecutor general’s office report said. “As a result of the raid, police detained about 180 migrants who arrived from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.”
According to the report, the detained migrants had no jobs and were residing in unsanitary conditions on premises not equipped for living. Criminal proceedings had previously been brought against the migrants for violation of public order, it said.
Meanwhile, St. Petersburg’s Federal Migration Service Board said that police detained 128 migrants during the raid, all of whom had their fingerprints taken. Only three of them did not have permission to work in Russia, the Migration Service said, Interfax reported. The three men without permission to work were fined 2,000 rubles each, while the rest were released, it said.
Wednesday’s raid is the latest in a series of detainments of large numbers of immigrants. It was reported August 19 that Moscow police had detained more than 300 illegal migrants from Azerbaijan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The migrants were living in condemned apartment buildings on Prospect Mira and Ulitsa Bolshaya Serpukhovskaya in the center of Moscow. On the same day, migration officials confirmed that police had discovered 65 illegal migrants from Vietnam living in a forest outside of Moscow in the course of police actions on July 30 and August 6.
In early August, Moscow’s police detained about 300 illegal migrants from Asia who were working as cleaners and loaders in the commercial center Moskva.
In recent years, Russia has become one of the biggest centers of migration in the world after the United States, according to a 2008 World Bank survey.
According to the World Bank report, about 12 million guest workers arrive in Russia annually, whereas 11 million leave Russia. Every year migrants send home more than 11 billion dollars, and experts say Russia’s dependence on migrant labor will grow continue to grow through the next decade, even as the country’s own labor resources will continue to decrease.
Most guest workers come to Russia from China (20.8 percent), Ukraine (16.9 percent), Uzbekistan (10.4 percent), Turkey (10 percent) and Tajikistan (9.7 percent).
According to a report by Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 40 percent of migrants work in construction, 30 percent in trade, 10 percent in industry, seven percent in agriculture, five percent in transport.
TITLE: Greenpeace Registers 3 Major Toxic Discharges
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Patrols carried out by the local branch of the international environmental pressure group Greenpeace on Wednesday detected three massive industrial waste discharges in the Neva, Izhora and Monastyrka rivers.
According to preliminary estimates by Greenpeace experts, at least several tons of industrial waste — most likely fuel oil— have been dumped into the waters of the Neva River through a single pipe located on the Arsenalnaya Embankment near Liteiny Bridge.
“We believe the dumping was taking place all day on Wednesday,” said Dmitry Artamonov, head of the St. Petersburg branch of Greenpeace.
“State treatment vessels have already recovered over 1.5 tons of waste, but unfortunately the lion’s share of the discharge has sunk to the bottom. Inevitably, this toxic waste will be poisoning the Neva for years to come. On top of that, large patches of a thin film of oil have been sighted floating along the Neva towards Sampsonievsky Bridge.”
Also on Wednesday, Greenpeace activists discovered large patches of white foam on the Izhora River. The ecologists are investigating the possible source of the discharge and have said they suspect Izhorsky Mills is responsible for the dumping.
The third discharge was spotted by Greenpeace volunteers on the Monastyrka River near the Mitropolichy Gardens of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. “A large pipe which is usually inactive was functioning, pumping out large quantities of waste with a strong, unpleasant smell — we are assuming there are a lot of chemicals in this discharge which has been dropped in the water,” said Greenpeace spokeswoman Maria Musatova.
Russian ecologists were joined on their recent patrols by counterparts from Finland. The Finnish ecologists spoke with bewilderment and shock about the scale of the pollution in the local waters. “I am not new to these problems and I expected things to be bad, but what I have seen really exceeded my worst expectations,” said Antti Korhonen, a researcher with the Marine Environment Research Center of the University of Helsinki who participated in the patrols on Wednesday.
“Massive discharges of industrial waste into the rivers of St. Petersburg directly concern Finnish citizens because all the waste ends up in the Baltic Sea," he said. "The Finnish government regularly allocates substantial sums to fund environmental projects in St. Petersburg — largely aimed at improving your water-treatment facilities — and it is most disheartening to see how bad the situation still is.”
TITLE: Management at Rakurs Denies Security System at Dam Faulty
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The management at St. Petersburg’s firm Rakurs, which designed the automated safety system for the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydro-electric plant, has denied accusations targeted at it by Russian Technical Watchdog, or RosTekhNadzor, in connection with the recent accident at the station.
“The automated safety system of the station’s second hydro unit worked absolutely normally right up until the moment of the physical destruction of the turbine,” Leonid Chernigov, general director of Rakurs, said at a press conference in St. Petersburg on Wednesday.
“The station’s automated system worked entirely in accordance with the technical parameters of its design. This has been proven by deciphering the archive, the equivalent of [a plane’s] ‘black boxes,’ that the Automatic Control System permanently provides,” Chernigov said, Fontanka reported.
Chernigov denied a claim made by Nikolai Kutzhin, head of RosTekhNadzor, who had said previously that all three of the automated safety systems at the station had failed during the accident.
Rakurs designed the automated safety system for the Sayano-Shushenskaya plant and it has been installed at another 12 electric power stations.
Earlier in the week the company was also criticized by Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu, who appealed to President Dmitry Medvedev with a request for changes to the laws on safety and technical regulations.
Shoigu said that his request was based on the fact that Rakurs had no relation “to machines, to turbines, to their production or to their design.” Shoigu said that Rakurs provided the station with the inferior equipment, Fontanka reported.
TITLE: State TV Caught In Reporting Scandal
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A Channel One documentary accusing Western journalists of misrepresenting the South Ossetia war is itself at the center of a scandal over bad reporting.
Novaya Gazeta journalist Arkady Babchenko said Wednesday that the film, “08.08.08: The War on Air,” featured a photograph that he took in Georgia without his permission and wrongly indicated that it was taken by a U.S. photographer in Iraq.
The 18-minute documentary — broadcast on the anniversary of the start of the five-day conflict on Aug. 8 and still available on Channel One’s web site — accuses the foreign media of using various tricks to improperly depict Russian aggression against Georgia.
U.S.-based war photographer David Axe appears in the film in the 16th minute and raises several questions about the U.S. media’s coverage of the conflict.
The films shows Axe questioning the authenticity of some pictures released by the Western media, saying they look staged. Then Axe points at a photo of a wounded soldier.
“This is a photo I took in Iraq. It hardly looks like it’s fake,” he says in the translation dubbed in Russian.
Through the dubbing, though, Axe can be heard saying, “This is a man who has been wounded in combat. It looks hard to fake.”
Babchenko said the photo that Axe is pointing to is actually one that he took of a Russian soldier in Georgia during the conflict.
“Weird. I’ve always thought that the photo had been taken by me, not David Axe. And in Georgia. Not in Iraq,” Babchenko wrote on his LiveJournal blog.
The soldier in the photo is wearing a Russian uniform and has an Orthodox cross around his neck. Babchenko said the photo had been published in Novaya Gazeta.
Babchenko said on Ekho Moskvy radio that he would file a lawsuit against Channel One in Moscow’s Ostankinsky District Court for 100,000 rubles ($3,180) in damages.
“Either David Axe is a liar or Channel One journalists are liars,” he said. “The rest of the film’s content is doubtful, too.”
Axe said the film misinterpreted his comments. “No, I did not claim that photo was mine. My words were taken out of context,” he told The St. Petersburg Times.
Channel One spokeswoman Larisa Krymova acknowledged that the photo had ended up in the film because of “a technical mistake” during the editing process.
“The author of the film didn’t know that the photo belonged to Babchenko,” she said in e-mailed comments.
She did not say whether Channel One planned to rectify the mistake.
TITLE: Cop in Shooting Spree Felt 'Inferior'
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A police officer who killed three and wounded six in a Moscow supermarket in April is sane but suffers from an inferiority complex, investigators said Wednesday.
Major Denis Yevsyukov went on a shooting spree after quarreling with his wife at his 32nd birthday party on April 27 in a case that shocked the nation.
“According to the results of a [psychological] evaluation, Yevsyukov has been found absolutely healthy,” the Investigative Committee said in a statement.
The statement said Yevsyukov was drunk at the time of the attack, but Investigative Committee chief Alexander Bastrykin denied that alcohol was the reason for the rampage.
“Yevsyukov understood everything,” Bastrykin said in an interview published Wednesday in Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
Bastrykin said Yevsyukov might have been suffering from an inferiority complex for a long time.
“He has a young wife, a beautiful wife, and there were some family problems, and they had a quarrel that day,” Bastrykin said.
Yevsyukov’s wife, Karine, is a blonde photo model and pop singer.
Bastrykin said tests had found no evidence that Yevsyukov was a drug addict.
The Investigative Committee said it was wrapping up the criminal case into the incident.
If convicted of murder, Yevsyukov faces from eight years to life in prison.
The shooting spree prompted President Dmitry Medvedev to fire powerful Moscow police chief Vladimir Pronin. Medvedev told reporters in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, on Wednesday that he would appoint a new police chief soon, Interfax reported. The police force is currently headed by acting police chief Alexander Ivanov, 59, who had worked as Pronin’s first deputy.
After the April shooting, the Interior Ministry launched a campaign highlighting its efforts to crack down on corruption and violence within the police force.
But opinion polls still to show that the police force is among the country’s least trusted institutions, and cases of wrongdoing continue to surface.
A 29-year-old Moscow traffic police officer has been taken into custody on suspicion of stealing goods worth 27 million rubles ($862,000), Interfax reported Tuesday. The goods came from a truck transporting items from the closed Cherkizovsky Market that traffic police stopped and forced to drive to a warehouse in the Moscow region, the report said.
Another traffic police officer fatally struck a pensioner crossing the street with his car in the Moscow region Tuesday, Interfax reported. A police source was quoted as saying the pensioner was not on a crosswalk and might have been at fault.
But police officers also end up as victims. On Wednesday, a traffic police officer was hospitalized with grave head injuries after he was hit by a car belonging to the presidential administration, Interfax reported. Further details about the accident were unavailable.
TITLE: Judge Faces Ax For Releasing Wrong Suspect
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A prominent Moscow judge faces dismissal over suspicion that her negligence helped a suspect charged with fraud flee from custody, a Moscow City Court spokeswoman said.
Moscow City Court Chairwoman Olga Yegorova has requested the dismissal of Judge Yelena Yarlykova of the Basmanny District Court, who oversaw trials involving Yukos executives and former senior investigator Dmitry Dovgy, court spokeswoman Anna Usachyova told Kommersant.
Yegorova has asked the Moscow Qualification Board of Judges to fire Yarlykova over a July 24 ruling to release Dmitry Bazhenov, who was accused of large-scale fraud. She mistook Bazhenov for Vladimir Grishov, who had been convicted of attempted petty theft. As a result of the ruling, Bazhenov went missing and was put on a police wanted list.
By failing to identify Bazhenov, Yarlykova broke several laws and “undermined the authority of the judicial power,” Yegorova said in the request, Kommersant reported.
Moscow Qualification Board of Judges will consider the request on Sept. 9, Usachyova said.
Moscow investigators, meanwhile, have opened a criminal case against a prison official who sent the wrong suspect to court. The Federal Prison Service said the official at Detention Center No. 4 in northern Moscow had confused the two prisoners because they looked alike, Kommersant reported.
TITLE: Dacha Magazine Sales Soar
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Media executives looking at business opportunities in Russia this year are dreaming of an unlikely place: the dacha.
With advertising budgets and readers’ incomes slashed by the crisis, the country’s magazines and newspapers are suffering together with media worldwide. Accordingly, revenue and readership numbers are down for many of Russia’s nearly 25,000 print titles.
But while newspapers are among the hardest hit, with weeklies losing up to 15 percent of readers, magazines about family, children, health and cooking are reporting strong growth.
According to a TNS Gallup survey, nationwide readership for family and health-related titles rose 16 percent from 5.3 million people in the five months to April 2008 to 6.2 million in the same period this year.
While the figures are telling of what readers want in times of economic hardship, they can be also taken to point to Russians’ apathy toward politics.
After all, the country’s daily papers’ already dismal readership figures are sliding further, with daily papers losing 17 percent of their readers between April 2008 and April 2009, according to TNS Gallup.
Just 9.6 percent of Russians read dailies between December 2008 and April 2009, the survey said. By contrast, daily papers in many European countries reach more than half of the population, with Germany’s figure standing at just above 70 percent.
Analysts said the trend reflected the fact that while Russians do not like political news in general, they have a strong distaste for negative news.
“When I am sitting on the bus and answer a phone call about politics, people around me fall silent,” said Alexei Makarkin, deputy head of the Center for Political Technologies, a think tank.
“The news these days is mostly about unemployment and other negative things, and people are irritated. They do not want to read that,” Makarkin said. “How to keep my dacha and gardening is much more attractive.”
Publishers beating the trend are betting on a new format focused on where Russians feel most at home: The out-of-town vacation home commonly known by its Russian name, the dacha.
Magazine titles like Moya Prekrasnaya Dacha (My Super Dacha) and Dom v Sadu (House in the Garden) have topped the latest subscription statistics, with orders for the second half of this year jumping a whopping 3,024 and 387 percent, respectively, compared to orders for the second half of 2008, according to data published by the Press Distributors’ Association.
While industry insiders warned that the figures were not representative because both magazines were launched only last year and subscriptions usually account for just a fraction of print sales in the country, one of Russia’s biggest publishers said there is a bright future for consumer- and advice-focused journalism.
“People want advice in times of hardship,” said Arnd-Volker Listewnik, CEO of the Russian division of Burda, the German publishing giant.
He said the dacha segment was promising, even though its market share was probably less than 10 percent.
“The dacha has always been a central place in Russians’ lives,” Listewnik said in an interview at his Moscow office Tuesday.
Dom v Sadu, which Burda Russia launched in March 2008, has jumped to a print run of 500,000. “And it is still growing,” Listewnik said.
He said the magazine was making 90 percent of its revenue from sales but suggested that advertising would grow significantly when the print run breaks 1 million.
Like its rival Moya Prekrasnaya Dacha, published by the St. Petersburg-based company Press-Courier, the pocket-sized magazine is sold monthly for a thrifty 10 rubles (30 cents).
Both focus on straightforward advice for the “dachnik,” be it on gardening or health, and they share a model that is wonderful for publishers’ costs and dreadful for journalists — they are mostly written by readers’ themselves.
Burda calls this “interactive,” and Listewnik said it is an example of the Internet influencing print. He said health topics were even more attractive, with an overall market share of up to 15 percent of the national audience.
Burda launched a similar 10 ruble monthly magazine called Domashny Doktor (Home Doctor) in September 2007, which by now has an official print run of 580,000.
TITLE: New Anti-Cheating Exam Leads to More Cheating
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Even as university hopefuls sat down this summer for the Single State Exam, designed to fight corruption and cheating in education, a number of them had managed to buy the exam’s questions and answers in advance.
A high school graduate from the Siberian city of Omsk bought questions for the Single State Exam for 1,800 rubles ($55), splitting the cost with several friends.
“Me and my five buddies chipped in 300 rubles apiece,” Vasily boasted on an Internet forum for high school graduates, Forum.postupim.ru, where he is registered as vaso26.
Vasily also posted scanned questions for the mathematics section of the exam together with his own answers, marked in pen beside the printed questions.
This summer, the Single State Exam, known as EGE under its Russian acronym, replaced oral and written exams for the first time nationwide. The exam, comprised of a series of multiple-choice questions, welds high school final exams and university entrance exams together into a single test.
The Single State Exam can make it more difficult to get a secondary education diploma on the first try because a graduate who fails sections of the exam is barred from retaking the exam the same year, a right they had before the Single State Exam was introduced.
President Dmitry Medvedev said earlier this month that a presidential commission would be created to “analyze the pluses and minuses” of the Single State Exam, which had been tested in several regions over the previous eight years.
“The results of the Single State Exam are dubious,” Medvedev said at a meeting with the leaders of State Duma factions on Aug. 10, RIA-Novosti reported. “In my mind, there are some positive points and some negative ones.”
Many educators fear that the new exam is damaging the quality of secondary education, and 3,000 sent a letter of protest to Medvedev late last week.
“Pursuing the Single State Exam … is producing graduates whose heads are devoid of any real knowledge,” said the letter, which is posted on a web site for educators, Zavuch.info.
Written requests for comment to the Kremlin, the government and the Education and Science Ministry went unanswered Friday and Monday.
While the government has touted the exam as a way to fight corruption and level the field for university hopefuls, the exam appears to be nourishing corruption among educators, creating a new business opportunity for crooks and leading to cheating among high school graduates.
Corruption in the university entry process has accounted for a major part of all crime in the field of education this year, a senior Interior Ministry official, Alexei Shishko, said last week.
The total number of crimes detected in the field of education has grown by 38 percent, or by some 2,200 crimes, Shishko said at a news conference last Tuesday, according to a transcript obtained by The St. Petersburg Times.
The head of the Federal Inspection Service for Education and Science, Lyubov Glebova, acknowledged at a news conference in late June that “there have been reports about officials using their positions to secure high results for the Single State Exam.” She did not elaborate.
She also said students cheated while taking the exam, using their cell phones to go online and search for answers.
A student and high school teacher interviewed for this article expressed mixed feelings about the new exam.
“The main plus of the Single State Exam is that a student has one exam instead of two,” Svetlana Zhyoltova, a history teacher at School No. 18 in the town of Nizhny Tagil in the Sverdlovsk region, said by telephone.
Yelena Alexandrova, who will start her first year as a journalism student at Moscow State University this fall, said she liked having “the whole summer free” because she did not have to prepare for entrance exams.
Zhyoltova also said the Single State Exam had allowed more Nizhny Tagil students to enter universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg this year because their parents did not have to pay for them to travel to those cities and stay there for entrance exams.
At the same time, Zhyoltova said, teachers had lacked sufficient time to prepare students for the exam, and students were forced to hire tutors, which not all could afford.
Alexandrova complained that the exam provided ambiguous answers to some questions. “I was irritated by the fact that questions were formulated in a biased way,” she said.
Zhyoltova said passing the exam involved a certain degree of luck because students who were nervous might have accidentally marked a wrong answer — a mistake that she said would not happen with the former oral and written exams, which required detailed answers.
Another drawback to the new exam is that it has led to a surge in prospective students that universities could not cope with, news reports said. Some university admission committees did not have time to process all the applications even though they worked overtime.
Nationalist sentiments have also surfaced with the introduction of the exam, with speculation swirling that students from the North Caucasus faked good marks on their Russian-language skills section of the exam to gain entry into prestigious universities but arrived on campus this month barely able to speak Russian.
State education officials have denied the rumors.
In a recent example of corruption among educators, authorities in Tatarstan detained the deputy head of the Tatar State University of Humanities and Education on suspicion of extorting a bribe of 90,000 rubles ($2,850) from a prospective student, Shishko said.
In another example, also in Tatarstan, the director of a local center where the new exam was being administered provided answers to students for 5,000 rubles, another senior Interior Ministry official, Yury Shalakov, said earlier this year.
The director and his aide admitted students who paid the bribe into the basement of the center several hours before the exam, sealed the basement door and slipped the answers under the door, Shalakov said.
TITLE: Lesbian Couple Locks Lips in Court Protest
AUTHOR: By David Nowak
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — A debate over whether to allow a lesbian couple to marry sparked an angry exchange inside a Moscow courtroom Wednesday, while outside the women locked lips to protest a holdup in proceedings.
The court postponed hearing a complaint from the gay couple over a refusal to let them marry. Judge Natalya Zhuravlyova said the reason for the postponement was the couple’s “disrespectful” failure to appear in the Tverskoi District Court. The couple, Irina Fedotova-Fet and Irina Shipitko, arrived 10 minutes after the hearing ended and kissed for the cameras. They said they had been held up in traffic.
The authorities “are using any excuse” to obstruct their quest for matrimonial recognition, Shipitko said.
“There is enough homophobia in this country. We are no different from any other couple,” she said.
Earlier in the courtroom, lawyer Nikolai Alexeyev protested the postponement, telling the judge, “The way you conduct a hearing is a disgrace.”
Alexeyev protested the new date, Sept. 9, saying he could not make it. The judge ignored Alexeyev, asking him instead to sign a court document setting the new date.
“I won’t be signing that. It’s a disgrace, your court session. A big disgrace,” Alexeyev said.
Alexeyev — also Russia’s most prominent gay rights activist and an organizer of gay pride parades — later said in an interview that the judge’s attitude reflected the official stance toward gays in Russia — “intolerant.”
Gay rights demonstrations are not permitted by Moscow, whose Mayor Yury Luzhkov has called homosexuality “satanic.”
TITLE: Car Show Attracts Meager Crowd
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Last year’s Moscow Car Show was hailed as an up-and-coming international event and a symbol of Russia’s surging market. At this year’s Interavto, many domestic carmakers were barely present, let alone the foreign firms.
Three guitarists and an accordion player provided the sound track to the modest opening ceremony. Clips of the “Star Wars” theme could also be heard.
KamAZ chief Sergei Kogogin —joined by Tatarstan Prime Minister Rustam Minnikhanov and Dmitry Bolshakov, deputy head of the Moscow region government — opened the show with a ribbon-cutting.
“The show has almost none of our foreign partners,” said Yury Korovkin, head of the Russian Automakers Union. “Everyone has cut their budgets.”
“You won’t see anything revolutionary,” said Alexei Rakhmanov, who heads the auto department in the Industry and Trade Ministry.
The lack of international brands focused attention on Russia’s big three: AvtoVAZ, KamAZ and GAZ. All are in a state of limbo, however, and executives were unable to shed much light on strategies or plans.
AvtoVAZ invested in the biggest display, but that was the extent of its presence.
The company canceled a news conference, a day after president Boris Alyoshin submitted his resignation. Officials there were tight-lipped, saying only that Russian Technologies chief Sergei Chemezov was in Mongolia.
TITLE: Car Loans Programs Give A Boost to Crisis-Hit Sales
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The number of consumers planning to buy a car in the next few years has begun to increase, as state measures such as subsidized auto loans begin to bolster demand for Russian-made cars, a poll released Tuesday found.
State pollster VTsIOM said the number of consumers planning to buy a car within a year has doubled since February, rising to 6 percent from 3 percent, while 13 percent expect to make a purchase within two to three years, up from 8 percent half a year ago.
Carmakers attributed the slight gain to state and private efforts to make loans more affordable. The state has been subsidizing interest rates on auto loans since May to boost demand for new cars made in Russia, and import tariffs imposed this year have also boosted demand for domestic vehicles.
The poll found that Russian-made cars have become more attractive since February, with 22 percent of respondents planning to buy a domestically made auto, up from 12 percent. The number planning to get a new foreign car grew just 4 percent since February, and fewer people plan to purchase a used foreign car, down from 25 percent to 23 percent.
Of those who know how they’ll pay for a new car, 42 percent plan to get a bank loan, up from 36 percent.
And while the results show a slight improvement since the start of the year, the market is still in the doldrums. Seven-month car sales are down 50 percent from last year for a decrease of nearly 900,000 cars, according to the Association of European Businesses.
AvtoVAZ’s Lada brand holds the top four spots on the country’s best-seller list.
As of Aug. 20, the state has provided 26,845 subsidized loans, approving just over half of the requests it received, according to Industry and Trade Ministry data. The program is “90 percent AvtoVAZ-oriented,” Alexei Rakhmanov, the ministry’s auto department head, said last week in an interview on the ministry’s web site.
Both state and private programs have brought a “slight increase of activity on the market and a slight increase of the share of cars bought with car loans,” said VTB-24 vice president Alexei Tokarev, who oversees the bank’s auto loans. The bank gave 23,000 car loans in the first six months of 2009, a figure that could grow by 40 percent in the second half if the trend stays positive, he said.
U.S. automaker Ford, whose Russian-built Focus is the country’s No. 5 best-selling car, is also seeing a “positive trend in retail finance programs’ penetration,” said spokeswoman Yekaterina Kulinenko. Ford’s retail finance program lending has doubled since the start of the year and is now part of 21 percent of new sales.
Ford saw sales rise 17 percent in July, month on month, while the Focus was up 27 percent because it was eligible for the state subsidies and Ford’s own in-house program, which started in June, she said. Nonetheless, the auto loans market is way down this year, with some banks lending 90 percent less in the first half, according to industry agency Avtostat.
TITLE: Mongolia Selects Rosatom For Uranium Mine Partner
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Mongolia on Tuesday chose a Russian government-owned corporation as a partner to develop a major uranium deposit, signing a joint venture agreement just a month after suspending a private Canadian firm’s license for the field.
The deal to set up the 50-50 venture was signed between ARMZ Uranium Holding Company, a subsidiary of state corporation Rosatom, and Mongolia’s state-owned MonAtom during a visit by President Dmitry Medvedev to Mongolia.
“Russia has became the first country with which Mongolia has signed an agreement on uranium cooperation,” Rosatom chief Sergei Kiriyenko said. “It’s an important political signal.”
Russia will invest “hundreds of millions of dollars” in the deposit, called Dornod, Kiriyenko said.
Uranium promises to be in high demand as governments across the globe are leaning toward building more nuclear power reactors instead of burning expensive and polluting coal and oil to generate electricity.
Canada’s Khan Resources said when it acquired the mining license for Dornod that it was betting on the so-called nuclear renaissance as well. But the company received a notice from the Mineral Resources Authority of Mongolia last month saying that the license had been suspended for three months because of an unspecified violation on the site.
Khan president and chief executive Martin Quick, who was previously president of the U.S. uranium mining giant Power Resources, did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment Tuesday.
Khan said on its web site that it planned to seek a strategic partner in developing the deposit.
Khan Resources signed a letter of intent with Japan’s Marubeni Corporation in October to discuss joining forces on Dornod.
Khan held the mining license for Dornod through a 58 percent owned subsidiary. The remaining shares were equally split between the Mongolian government and the Priargunsk Plant, an ARMZ unit.
The Russian-Mongolian venture may take off as soon as this year, and production at the field — discovered by Soviet explorers — will start “in the near future,” Kiriyenko said.
Annual output is expected to amount to 2,000 tons of uranium oxide, putting the life span of the field, which holds 50,000 tons of uranium in reserves, at 25 years.
Khan was going to produce 1,360 tons of the ore over the mine’s life of 15 years.
The Russian-Mongolian venture will export all of the uranium, but Russia will not import any of it, Kiriyenko said, declining to name prospective buyers.
Japan is one possible customer, as are China and India, where Rosatom is building nuclear reactors, said Dmitry Baranov, an industry expert at asset management company Finam Management.
Rosatom said the venture was open for companies from other countries to join as shareholders.
TITLE: Prime Minister Orders Revision of Olympics Financing
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Pismennaya, Maxim Tovkailo, Bela Lyauv and Yekaterina Derbilova
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — The state corporation model has made it difficult to oversee expenses for Olympics preparations, government sources say, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has proposed returning to the previous financing model — a federal targeted program.
The Regional Development Ministry is changing the way it finances construction work for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, sources in the Regional Development, Finance and Economic Development ministries said.
The construction program is spelled out in a government order from Dec. 29, 2007, which lists 235 sites and events that are part of the preparations. According to the Regional Development Ministry, the program’s overall cost is 1.3 trillion rubles ($41.5 billion).
The effort is being overseen by Olimpstroi, a state corporation created Oct. 10, 2007, whose supervisory board is led by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak. It received state assets worth 72 billion rubles in 2008.
The ministry sources said Putin issued an order that would reform the program for the work in Sochi. “The order goes like this: ‘Prepare a proposal on reforming the construction program for the Olympics sites and the development of Sochi as a mountain resort into a federal targeted program,’” one of the officials said.
“We’ll prepare such an order and get it approved with the relevant ministries and agencies,” a senior regions ministry official said.
Spokespeople for the Regional Development Ministry declined comment.
“When we won the rights to hold the Olympics, the federal targeted program was hastily turned into a government program, and the money just kept flowing out,” the regions ministry source said. “With the targeted program, that would have been impossible because everything was clearly spelled out with an explanation of the project’s costs.”
When told of the proposal, Olimpstroi president Taimuraz Bolloyev said that “any experiments conducted on the Olympics project will only lead to negative consequences.”
Another Olimpstroi official said the building needed to start later this year or early next year. “If it doesn’t happen, we won’t finish,” he said. “We’re just the administrators,” not the ones ordering all of the work, he added.
After weeks of discussion, it was decided not to create a completely new targeted program, a senior Finance Ministry source said. “It would be really strange, since we already had a big targeted program to develop Sochi as a resort, and in 2007 it was wrapped up, with most of its money going to Olimpstroi.”
Creating a new targeted program would mean a return to the past and the closure of Olimpstroi, he said. “Olimpstroi has become something of a black box: They approve the list of sites but with no numbers.”
But a deal was reached, he said. “The construction cost of each Olympic site will be determined, but the money will be deposited as equity capital, not through a federal targeted program.”
The arrangement is somewhat strange, the Finance Ministry official conceded. The planning element will be borrowed from the federal targeted program model, while the expenditures will continue to be made through the state corporation. “The aims justify the means. We need to strengthen oversight of the state corporation, as well as speed up, and most important, coordinate the Olympics building work.”
“Putting prices on the sites needs be done to make the construction more transparent,” Kozak told Vedomosti.
An Economic Development Ministry source said it was Kozak’s decision.
Now, money will be added to Olimpstroi’s equity capital as work on each project progresses, a regions ministry source said. “As before, we’ll need to oversee the money,” the source said.
An Audit Chamber official said the changes would also strengthen oversight of other state bodies involved, including the Transportation Ministry, the Federal Road Agency and the Office for Presidential Affairs.
The ensuing disagreements within the government over construction dates could put some projects at risk, however, a source in the Cabinet warned.
“We’re glad that the government has paid attention to the president’s comments on the need to rethink the organizational and legal basis of the state corporations,” a Kremlin official said.
He said the Kremlin had not yet seen the order. “Even the partial reformation of any state corporation is a step forward and the start of the transformation of these legal entities, which people are still questioning.”
Another source in the Kremlin said President Dmitry Medvedev had not given orders about any specific state corporation. “The change in financing Olimpstroi is an internal matter for the White House and isn’t at all connected with questions about the state corporations.”
TITLE: Double-Dip Dangers
AUTHOR: By Nouriel Roubini
TEXT: In the past several months, global asset prices have rebounded sharply. Stock prices have increased by more than 30 percent in advanced economies, and by much more in most emerging markets. Prices of commodities — oil, energy and minerals — have soared, and corporate credit spreads (the difference between the yield of corporate and government bonds) have narrowed dramatically. Moreover, government bond yields have increased sharply, volatility (the “fear gauge”) has fallen, and the dollar has weakened as demand for safe dollar assets has abated.
But is the recovery of asset prices driven by economic fundamentals? Is it sustainable? Is the recovery in stock prices another bear-market rally or the beginning of a bullish trend?
Economic data suggests that we are seeing an improvement in fundamentals. The risk of a near depression has been reduced, the prospects of the global recession bottoming out by the end of the year are increasing and risk sentiment is improving. But it is equally clear that other, less sustainable factors are also playing a role. Moreover, the sharp rise in some asset prices threatens the recovery of a global economy that has not yet hit bottom. It is clear that many risks of a downward market correction remain.
First, confidence and risk aversion are fickle, and bouts of renewed volatility may occur if macroeconomic and financial data were to surprise on the downside — as they may if a near-term and robust global recovery (which many people expect) does not materialize.
Second, extremely loose monetary policies — zero interest rates, quantitative easing, new credit facilities, emissions of government bonds and purchases of illiquid and risky private assets — and the huge sums spent to stabilize the financial system may be causing a new liquidity-driven asset bubble in financial and commodity markets. For example, Chinese state-owned enterprises that gained access to huge amounts of easy money and credit are buying equities and stockpiling commodities well beyond their productive needs.
The risk of a correction in the face of disappointing macroeconomic fundamentals is clear. Indeed, recent data from the United States and other advanced economies suggest that the recession may last through the end of the year. Worse, the recovery is likely to be anemic and subpar — well below potential for a couple of years, if not longer — as the burden of debts and leverage of the private sector combine with rising public sector debts to limit the ability of households, financial firms and corporations to lend, borrow, spend, consume and invest.
This more challenging scenario of anemic recovery undermines hopes for a V-shaped recovery as low growth and deflationary pressures constrain earnings and profit margins and as unemployment rates above 10 percent in most advanced economies cause financial shocks to re-emerge, owing to mounting losses for banks’ and financial institutions’ portfolios of loans and toxic assets. At the same time, financial crises in a number of emerging markets could prove contagious, placing additional stress on global financial markets.
The increase in some asset prices may, moreover, lead to a W-shaped, double-dip recession. In particular, thanks to massive liquidity, energy prices are now rising too high too soon. The role that high oil prices played in the summer of 2008 in tipping the global economy into recession should not be underestimated. Oil above $140 a barrel was the last straw — coming on top of the housing busts and financial shocks — for the global economy, as it represented a massive supply shock for the United States, Europe, Japan, China and other net importers of oil.
Meanwhile, rising fiscal deficits in most economies are now pushing up the yields of long-term government bonds. Some of the rise in long rates is a necessary correction as investors are now pricing a global recovery. But some of this increase is driven by more worrisome factors, such as the effects of large budget deficits and concerns that the incentive to monetize these large deficits will lead to high inflation after the global economy recovers in 2010-11 and deflationary forces abate. The crowding out of private demand, owing to higher government-bond yields — and the ensuing increase in mortgage rates and other private yields — could, in turn, endanger the recovery.
As a result, one cannot rule out that by late 2010 or 2011, a perfect storm of oil above $100 a barrel, rising government bond yields and tax increases (as governments seek to avoid debt-
refinancing risks) may lead to a renewed growth slowdown, if not an outright double-dip recession.
The recent recovery of asset prices from their March lows is in part justified by fundamentals, as the risks of global financial meltdown and depression have fallen and confidence has improved. But much of the rise is not justified since it is driven by excessively optimistic expectations of a rapid recovery of growth toward its potential level and by a liquidity bubble that is raising oil prices and equities too fast too soon. A negative oil shock, together with rising government bond yields, could clip the recovery’s wings and lead to a significant further downturn in asset prices and in the real economy.
Nouriel Roubini is professor of economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University, and chairman of RGE Monitor. © Project Syndicate
TITLE: Why Capitalism Is Doomed in Russia
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: A farmer named Khrebtov lived in the republic of Altai. He had always worked on 16 hectares of land, but for the past three years the government refused to renew the rental agreement for his plot of land. Khrebtov needed a stacking machine for his farm to gather hay, but when the authorities did not renew the rental agreement on his land, he was left with no collateral and was unable to get a loan from the bank. Only after Khrebtov slashed his wrists did he finally receive funding for his stacking machine.
There is another farmer in Altai named Onishchenko who has a sawmill and almost 4 hectares of land on the banks of a river. A few years ago, a top official told Onishchenko that he had no legal rights to his land. But Onishchenko found out on the Internet that land plots were being sold only 500 meters from his own plot for 4.5 million rubles ($143,000). He sued the authorities and won. When Onishchenko spoke with me, he sighed and said, “I spent so much time and money on that lawsuit. I could have built a banya or hotel for tourists with that money.”
The cases involving Khrebtov and Onishchenko illustrate the key points made in “The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else,” a fantastic book written by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto Polar.
De Soto contends that the overall amount of assets held by the poor in countries without a market economy exceeds the total amount of foreign investment in those countries many times over. But since property is not registered and held privately, the people cannot use property to secure loans that would otherwise fuel investment and economic growth in free market economies.
Although there were many economic problems in the 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin, Russia made tremendous progress in the one area that is a defining feature of capitalism: the protection of private property. Under Vladimir Putin’s rule as both president and prime minister, however, we have gone in reverse. Farmers and small entrepreneurs are no longer the source of economic growth. Russian laws are written and designed so that businesses have little other choice than to operate outside of the law. As a result, they are easy prey for bureaucrats extorting bribes.
Farmers are unable to use their property as collateral with the banks since they have no legal right to it. Bureaucrats, for their part, cannot put up their assets as collateral with the banks since their greatest asset is their jobs, which allow them to collect bribes. Although it is true that the country’s largest and most powerful businesses are able to get bank loans, you would have trouble finding a businessman stupid enough to invest that money in Russia, a country where your investments can be seized at any moment.
Justice and order are more important than freedom in a developing economy. Freedom with no private property protection is highly unstable and can easily lead to dictatorship. Capitalism generates not only profit, but also freedom.
We are constantly told that Putin consolidated the vertical power structure and restored Russia to its status as a great power. But nobody says he restored justice. If the “vertical power structure” is understood as the right to abuse the poor and rob the rich, then Putin has indeed built a powerful institution. At the same time, however, he destroyed the institution of private property rights that was built during Yeltsin’s rule.
Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.
TITLE: Stepping out
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Kindness is key to the coaching philosophy of Mikhail Messerer, one of the world’s most respected ballet teachers and the new Ballet Master in Chief of the Mikhailovsky Theater.
Apparently, this quality, along with ballet genes, is in his blood. His mother, Sulamith Messerer, an ?migr? teacher, coached all over the world, from Japan to the USA and Great Britain, enjoying a reputation as a leading teacher who had a talent, as Mikhail puts it, “for looking at a crowd and seeing an assembly of individuals.”
Mikhail Messerer compares a coach to a parent. For him, communicating with students has been one of the most pleasant, enjoyable and rewarding aspects of his career. “Just like a parent, a teacher should be kind: your pupils, just like your own children, depend on you, on your support and on your judgment, and they are extremely sensitive to your every word,” he explains. “Under no circumstances should they question you and your integrity. It takes a second to upset a performer, and it is an art to make someone feel better. Being kind doesn’t mean being all soft-spoken and complimentary or allowing everyone to use you. You can raise your voice, of course, but you have to make sure there is no hatred or anger in what you say or the way you speak. If I were to get annoyed with a student who repeatedly fails in a certain exercise I would be like a doctor getting mad at a patient who takes a long time to heal. The most important thing is that kindness is something that you can’t fake or imitate. It is actually an emotional need that is either part of your character or it isn’t.”
Born in Moscow in 1948, Mikhail Messerer comes from a distinguished ballet and theater dynasty that includes – apart from himself and his mother Sulamith – his uncle Asaf Messerer, a prominent ballet master; his aunt, the actress Rakhil Messerer; the renowned dancer Maya Plisetskaya and her brother Azari Plisetsky, both Mikhail’s cousins.
The internationally acclaimed dynastic line, however, began with a dentist, Mikhail Messerer’s grandfather. A man with a creative, artistic personality, he sparked a passion for the theater in his children by frequently taking them to shows and then getting them involved in giving domestic renditions of the episodes from the plays they saw together. As a result, one son became a dancer and another an actor, while one daughter – Mikhail’s mother – became a ballerina, and another two daughters became actresses. For Mikhail, who grew up in an atmosphere where ballet and theater were constantly the talk of the house, ballet was originally his mother’s choice. “She signed me up to ballet school without asking,” he recalls. “I didn’t mind, actually, so I didn’t resist and started absolutely loving it almost immediately.”
Remarkably enough, the most useful piece of advice he ever received came during a routine ballet lesson from his coach when still a child. It eventually became an integral part of Messerer’s character and could even be described as his credo: “Do not panic when performing a pirouette,” the teacher told his anxious pupil who has gone on to recall his mentor’s words in many demanding and challenging life situations, giving the coach’s advice a universal, philosophical sense. The lesson Messerer really learnt during that class was not to lose ground, however shaky it all may feel.
Indeed, one such tough occasion that tested Messerer’s self-control and emotional equilibrium to the limit came in Nagoya, in Japan, thirty years ago, while on tour with the Bolshoi. Leaving his hotel, he was suddenly stopped by minders from the Soviet security services who boldly inquired where Messerer was heading. Without a blink of an eye, he lied to the agents, saying he was taking empty bottles to a shop to collect the refunds. They believed him. In fact, Mikhail Messerer had planned to defect, his intention being to meet up with his mother, who was also working in Tokyo at the time, and contact the U.S. embassy to seek permission to go to America.
“The situation really did make it hard to keep your composure. We were leaving a country where every single element in a person’s life was strictly regulated and a certain level of poverty, at least, was guaranteed for all, and were taking a step into complete uncertainty,” Messerer recalls. “We were well aware of the fact that one day, in this new life abroad, we might find ourselves literally without a crust of bread or a roof over our heads, facing the prospect of living under the Brooklyn bridge.”
Admittedly, in Japan the Messerers had “more doubts than decisiveness,” but the decision was made and never regretted. Sulamith and Mikhail’s first day as an ?migr? in New York counts among Messerer’s most cherished memories. “My mother and I spent our last 25 dollars and bought lots of food to organize a little feast for the two of us,” he recalls. “I still remember the flavor of that chicken – it was so hot, so aromatic, so Western and, it seemed, so free! We were sitting in a flat, and before I had a chance to savor the very first bite of that chicken, the doorbell rang, and there were the owners of the flat telling us they actually had no legal right to let us in as they themselves were renting it from someone.”
So there the Messerers were in the streets of New York, but, thankfully, not for long. At a ballet class on the same day they met Russian emigrants who introduced them to an American arts patron who helped them find a new apartment.
“The only thing I can say I regret is that I didn’t leave the Soviet Union ten years earlier – professionally, I would have achieved so much more,” he says. “Life in the Soviet Union was suffocating: Lies penetrated everything, we were not free to say what we thought, to read what we liked, to travel where we wanted. I really thought that even for the sake of my descendants – who I would want to live in a free country – we must escape.”
For over twenty-five years Messerer has been a guest coach with the Royal Ballet in London. Over the years he has taught ballet classes to some of the world’s finest ballet troupes, including the American Ballet Theater, the Paris Opera Ballet, Maurice B?jart’s Ballet, the Monte Carlo Ballet, the Berlin Ballet, the Munich Ballet, the Stuttgart Ballet, the Tokyo Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, the English National Ballet and the Mariinsky Theater, among others.
“I honestly feel sorry for the colleagues who were hissing ‘Traitor!’ and ‘Defector!’ about me after my departure from the Soviet Union,” Messerer recalls. “Some people continue doing so even now, after all these years. I feel sorry for them because they are unable to understand what freedom is, what the liberty of choice is. I was recently helping one of those people, even though I am entirely aware of the trash talk he was using against me at the Bolshoi Theater.”
Life could probably have made Messerer vindictive. His father, a motorcyclist, died in a crash orchestrated by one of his students who planned to take over his show at the circus. Yet he didn’t become a bitter man and even made teaching his own much-loved profession. “I am extremely grateful to my mother that she brought me up not to bear grudges,” Messerer says. “Thanks to her, I grew up convinced that in life you need to be good to the others and accept the fact that people around you would often take it for granted. I have learnt not to be vengeful and when I do the right thing I don’t always expect the same in return. And actually, yes, my mother was right — life is easier that way.”
TITLE: Chernov’s choice
TEXT: Against all odds, the autumn season starts with a bang as Glavclub, the 2,000-capacity venue launched last November, will be hosting three concerts by international “name” artists in the space of a week.
GZA, a founding member of the seminal hip-hop group the Wu-Tang Clan, will open the trio of concerts on Friday. Pronounced “jizza,” the rapper is also known as The Genius, though his real name is Gary Grice. His most recent album, “Pro Tools,” named after the music production software program, was released in August 2008. It was his six studio full-length record.
GZA’s cousin (and also a member of the Wu-Tang Clan) RZA (born Robert Diggs) performed in St. Petersburg in May 2004, at the now-defunct club Port. Two Russian acts will open the show. Tickets cost between 600 and 1,500 rubles.
Keane, a British piano-rock band, will perform at Glavclub on Wednesday. According to a BBC feature from 2004, the band mentions The Pet Shop Boys, The Smiths and Queen as influences, and have been memorably described as “Radiohead covering A-Ha.” Keane has also been compared to Coldplay, though not always as a compliment.
Formed in Battle, East Sussex in 1994 as The Lotus Eaters, the band took its current name three years later. Now it features Tom Chaplin on vocals, Tim Rice-Oxley on piano and Richard Hughes on drums.
In a 2005 controversy, The Guardian described Keane as a “manufactured” rock band, to which Rice-Oxley responded with a letter.
“The journalist’s conclusion that many so-called indie bands are in fact manufactured products may well be correct for all I know. However, Keane is not one of those bands,” he wrote. Tickets cost 1,500 to 2,500 rubles.
Unlike GZA and Keane, who will be making their debuts in St. Petersburg, trip-hop musician and producer Tricky has already visited the city a few times.
Tricky, who was born Adrian Nicholas M. Thaws in Knowle West, Bristol, England in 1968, has released his eighth, and most recent, album, “Knowle West Boy,” in July 2008. Tickets cost between 1,200 and 2,000 rubles.
Meanwhile, the cream of the local music scene will be featured at MagerFest, a three-day outdoor event opening at the Treugolnik Business Complex’s courtyard on Friday. The complex is located at the defunct rubber factory Krasny Treugolnik (Red Triangle) on Obvodny Kanal.
Starting at 6 p.m. on Friday and noon on Saturday and Sunday, the event will feature art-rock band Auktsyon (Friday, 9 p.m.), La Minor, Dobranotch, Iva Nova, Skazy Lesa and Nino Katamadze and Insight (Saturday, 5 p.m.), and Spitfire, Optimystica Orchestra and Tequilajazzz (Sunday, 5 p.m.)
Basically, they are for the most part the best local bands, and this is a rare chance to see them all within a few days.
Tickets cost between 600 and 2,500 rubles.
-- By Sergey Chernov
TITLE: Last resort
AUTHOR: By Tobin Auber
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The combined effects of the crisis and the vagaries of Russian construction have played havoc with new restaurant openings this summer season out in the Kurortny Rayon — the city’s “Resort Region” along the coast of the Gulf of Finland. The new kids on the block should have all opened in May in order to really make the most of those heading out of the city for a bite to eat on the weekends. Instead, some are half-finished, alongside equally half-finished residential complexes, while others have had fairly soft openings. It’s all very far from the glitz and glamour of just a year ago, when any new opening would have been signaled with a vast advertising campaign and a party to be remembered.
Thus, after a series of delays, the Stroganoff Bar & Grill quietly opened its doors to the public earlier this month without any great fanfare. The original Stroganoff on Konnogvardeisky Boulevard has already proved a success with its pricey but delicious meats being imported from Australia, New Zealand and Argentina, and many (including this reviewer) would have you believe that it serves St. Petersburg’s finest hamburger.
Those familiar with the original’s menu will be reassured to hear that the selection of dishes has been transported to the Baltic coastline almost untouched. The selection isn’t vast, but all the old favorites are here, with steaks still priced at around a 1,000 rubles ($32) — not cheap, but it’s a succulent and very generous portion. There are three fish dishes and vegetarians should be warned that there’s little to choose from beyond a couple of green salads, some grilled vegetables and a pasta dish. At Stroganoff it really is about the meat, and there’s very little in the way of compromise.
Once seated on the spacious terrace at the back of the restaurant, our waiter gave us a brief but informed talk on the cuts of meat available, complete with a tray of examples — a bit of a gimmicky touch, but it’s carried off well.
We tried a new addition to the menu, deer tongue at 520 rubles ($16.50) per 100 grams, with a reasonably sized portion coming in at about 1,000 rubles ($32). True connoisseurs of good deer tongue, if there are any of you out there, may disagree, but the Stroganoff take on the dish was excellent — the light, delicate strips of meat had a subtle taste and went well with the creamed spinach garnish (180 rubles, $5.70), which was suitably understated, allowing it to complement rather than overpower the flavor of the meat.
In fact, the garnishes almost won out over the centerpieces of the main courses — the seasonal grilled asparagus (350 rubles, $11.50), with a very light cheese sauce, and the sauteed vegetables (190 rubles, $190). The steaks themselves (a rib-eye at 990 rubles ($32) and a filet mignon at 1,350 rubles ($43)) were well prepared, not overdone, and the meat was genuinely excellent. Stroganoff has placed its bets on superb meat, and it wouldn’t have survived with anything substandard.
All good news, then? Not quite. Yes, the food sees off the rather poor competition to be found along the coast to the north of the city, but is this restaurant really what you want when you’ve driven for the best part of an hour to reach the beach? The interior is great, comprising four rooms done out with a great collection of black and white, pre-revolutionary photographs and adverts, white walls and warm woods, but you are very definitely inside, and without much of a view. Unlike many of the other restaurants close by, there are no huge windows looking out onto the gulf, and the sea itself isn’t just a stone’s throw away. Throw a stone from the Stroganoff and you risk hitting a passing car on the Primorsky Highway or a cop coming out of the police station situated right next door. Round the back the restaurant has a fine terrace, but it looks out onto an as yet incomplete housing development (admittedly, it’s a very pretty one, with a great color scheme) and the restaurant’s own car park.
So, there are drawbacks, but for many the food itself will be enough, and this must be what the management are counting on — it has long been the complaint of those who have permanently moved out of the city to the Resort Region that the local restaurants aren’t up to much (albeit with a few notable exceptions). And the Stroganoff also has another trick up its sleeve — a deli section where you can buy meat for your barbecue should you prefer a meal with a view. And you can rest assured that you won’t find a finer cut.