SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1518 (80), Friday, October 16, 2009
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TITLE: Governor Backs Down Over Park Construction
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko said on Thursday that plans for the construction of a controversial 10-story residential building on the site of a public park by 40 Komendantsky Prospekt will be scrapped.
The city government’s decree giving Severny Gorod construction company permission to construct the building will be revoked, Matviyenko said at a press conference.
Matviyenko said that talks on the matter had already been held with Severny Gorod, and that the construction company did not intend to appeal the decision in court, Fontanka.ru reported. 
Residents of 40 Komendantsky Prospekt and the surrounding area, who have been campaigning against the construction since early October, welcomed the governor’s decision.
“We see this as a rational step on the part of the person in charge of the city,” Yelena Gavrilova, a local resident who was among the park’s defenders, told the St. Petersburg Times.
“I think that our case has shown that it’s possible to stand up for one’s honor. People now feel really optimistic about this!” Gavrilova said.
On hearing news of the governor’s decision, local residents organized a spontaneous celebration, decorating the park’s trees with colored ribbons.
Severny Gorod announced on Thursday that it had agreed to cancel the project because it “cares for its reputation and the trust that clients place in it.”
“That trust is worth more than the economic profit that the company could get from realizing the project,” Eduard Tiktinsky, president of Severny Gorod, said in a statement on Thursday.
“We understand the governor’s decision on the issue. We won’t be continuing the construction of the residential building — not because we’ve been scared by the protests by the area’s residents, and not because we’ve been scared by the public relations attacks that the company has suffered during all this,” Tiktinsky said.
“We just don’t want to build something under the conditions that we have at that address, in the face of active opposition from the residents, who went as far as to storm the site. We support the governor’s decision because the profession of construction is one that calls for creation,” he said.
The residents’ fight for the park began on Oct. 1, when Severny Gorod workers built a construction fence around the park and began to cut down the trees and bushes that local residents had planted a few years ago. Hundreds of residents then built a tent on the park’s territory and organized a round-the-clock vigil to prevent construction of the building. 
Residents argued that Severny Gorod’s actions were illegal, as the park had been placed on a list of the city’s protected areas in 2007. They also maintained that the site was too cramped for another residential building.
Support came from the local mass media and representatives of A Just Russia and Communist parties, as well as deputies at the city’s Legislative Assembly. The city’s prosecution service also began a review of the case.
Severny Gorod argued that it had the right to carry out construction on the site on the basis of permits issued by the city government in 2004, prior to its inclusion on the list of protected green territories.

TITLE: 3 Factions Boycott Duma Over Vote
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — In a surprise protest, State Duma deputies representing three factions walked out of the parliament Wednesday to denounce weekend elections swept by United Russia.
The deputies with the Communist, Liberal Democratic and Just Russia parties demanded a meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev, who had endorsed the election results Monday.
The first Duma walkout in nearly a decade put Medvedev in an awkward position. Following the lead of his mentor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, he has never bowed to demands from other politicians. But Medvedev also has adopted a liberal stance recently, publicly calling for more political competition and the inclusion of the opposition in politics. He also warned United Russia this summer that it would not always have a monopoly on power.
Medvedev made no comment about the deputies’ demand for a meeting Wednesday. His spokeswoman, Natalya Timakova, said the president would not have time to meet with them in the next 10 days, Interfax reported.
Putin, who leads United Russia and was visiting China on Wednesday, called the walkout regrettable and suggested that those unhappy with the election results turn to the courts.
Municipal and regional elections held in 75 of Russia’s 83 regions on Sunday were blatantly rigged in favor of United Russia, rival parties and independent election monitors said. In Moscow, United Russia won 32 of the 35 seats in the City Duma, with the remaining three going to the Communists. The other four competing parties did not clear the 7 percent threshold.
Central Elections Commission head Vladimir Churov refused to comment on the State Duma protest, saying it was “politics,” Interfax reported.
United Russia has 314 deputies in the State Duma, a constitutional majority of more than two-thirds of the seats, and they continued Wednesday’s session without the 136 protesting deputies, hearing reports from Industry and Trade Minister Viktor Khristenko and other officials.
Igor Lebedev, head of the Liberal Democratic Party’s faction in the Duma, told The St. Petersburg Times that the walkout was to protest “total falsifications and violations” in favor of United Russia during the elections.
Lebedev said his party, known as LDPR, and the Communists have compiled a list of demands that they want to present to Medvedev personally, including the annulment of Sunday’s results in several regions, the dismissal of many governors, the re-election of the Duma’s speaker and a number of anti-crisis measures for the economy.
“Until the president reacts, we will not return to the hall,” Lebedev said in a telephone interview.
A meeting between Medvedev and the Duma factions was previously scheduled for Oct. 27, Lebedev said, adding that LDPR and the Communists wanted it moved up to an earlier date.
He said LDPR had planned the protest the day before and the other two parties had unexpectedly supported it Wednesday.
Senior Communist officials also demanded a meeting with the president.
LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Communist chief Gennady Zyuganov told reporters that their parties would stage street protests over the elections.
A Just Russia, led by Putin ally and Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov, took a more moderate stance, saying its faction would rejoin the Duma’s next session Friday if it received guarantees that “the Duma’s and the country’s leadership listens to the faction’s voice,” faction head Nikolai Levichev said in a statement.
Communists and Just Russia deputies said they walked out of the Duma after United Russia refused to let them take part in compiling the agenda for the day, including time to discuss Sunday’s elections. Oksana Dmitriyeva, a senior Just Russia deputy, said by telephone that her party was outraged with “the uncivilized behavior” of the Duma First Deputy Speaker Oleg Morozov, a deputy with United Russia, who “cut short the speeches of our deputies.”
The Communist Party said in a statement that it was upset with United Russia’s “refusal to hear the opposition’s point of view, which represents the opinion of millions of voters” and “the falsification of the people’s will” in the vote.
State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov called the protest a “populist action deprived of sense,” according to a statement on United Russia’s web site.
Gryzlov urged the boycotters to rejoin the Duma, appealing to their “sense of responsibility before the voters” and saying their return would be “a constructive way to solve the problem.”
Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the Federation Council’s International Affairs Committee, said Wednesday’s developments were a “part of the normal political process.” “You cannot please all political parties — not in any country of the world. But we do understand that our political culture needs to be improved,” Margelov said at talks with a delegation of Canadian senators.
Vladimir Pribylovsky, a political analyst with the Panorama think tank, predicted that the protest would end like a similar boycott in January 2000, when three liberal and centrist factions walked out over a deal between the Duma’s two biggest groups, the Communists and Unity, a pro-government party that evolved into United Russia, to divvy up control of most of the chamber’s posts. The boycotters rejoined the Duma after three weeks, even though they did not receive any additional committee chairmanships.
Liberal opposition politicians agreed that the rebellion would be short-lived.
Alexander Morozov, a political analyst and former spokesman for A Just Russia, said the parties had reacted so sharply because of the previous liberal promises made by Medvedev.
“They never would have acted like this if Putin were the president,” he said.
He said the walkout gave Medvedev a chance to reassess his quick enforcement of Sunday’s elections. “Now these factions have given Medvedev a chance to pronounce a more balanced view of the situation,” Morozov said.
The U.S. State Department on Wednesday expressed “concern” about reports of irregularities at the elections and made clear Medvedev ought to respect his own commitment to build a law-abiding state, Reuters reported.
 Nikolaus von Twickel and Nabi Abdullaev contributed to this report.

TITLE: Russian Mother Given Suspended Sentence in Finland
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova and Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: An international custody battle over a child with Russian-Finnish citizenship continued this week when the Russian mother was given a suspended sentence in Finland for taking her son out of Finland to Russia without the Finnish father’s permission.
The Russian prosecutor’s investigative committee is meanwhile preparing a legal request for Finland to extradite Paavo Salonen, the ex-husband of Russian citizen Rimma Salonen, to Russia. He is accused of subsequently kidnapping his son in Russia and smuggling him back to Finland.
Russia’s investigative committee (SKP) will ask Finland to give up Paavo Salonen on the charge of kidnapping his son on Russian territory, Vladimir Markin, spokesman for the SKP, said Tuesday, RIA Novosti reported.
“This concerns the fact that the crime was committed on the territory of Russia and that it was the Nizhny Novgorod investigation committee that was conducting the main investigation,” said Markin. 
The Finnish authorities say that Russia has no chance of having Paavo Salonen extradited. Merja Norros, an advisor with Finland’s Justice Ministry, told reporters on Thursday that Finland would turn down the Russian request. “Both Russia and Finland are members of the Council of Europe, and both countries have signed a treaty that allows member states not to extradite their citizens,” Norros said. “Finland never gives up its citizens. All of them are protected by the treaty.”
Norros said that Russia is also not in the habit of giving up its citizens to other countries.
The case has now been passed on for further investigation to the Main Investigation Board of the Investigation Committee. The investigation is at its final stage now, Markin said.
The investigation alleges that Paavo Salonen plotted together with a Finnish citizen and four Russian citizens to attack his ex-wife Rimma Salonen, and after doing so kidnapped the former couple’s son Anton, who was five at the time, in the town of Balakhny in the Nizhny Novogorod Oblast on April 12 this year.
Later, Paavo Salonen took his son to Finland, hiding him in the boot of a car belonging to a member of staff from the Finnish Consulate in St. Petersburg, Simo Pietilainen.
“The preliminary investigation is now over,” Markin said. “Currently the committee is considering bringing charges against all those involved in taking the child out of Russia. The investigation has prepared a request that Finland provide international legal help with the case.”
On Tuesday, a Finnish court gave Rimma Salonen an eighteen-month suspended sentence for kidnapping her son from her ex-husband in 2008. The court also ordered her to return about 30,000 euros to her ex-husband in compensation for moral damages and his expenses in bringing the child back to Finland from Russia, RIA Novosti reported.
Rimma Salonen was facing up to seven-and-a-half years in prison – the maximum term for kidnapping set by the Finnish legislation.
Rimma and Paavo married in 1995. Both had children from previous marriages. Anton Salonen was born in October 2003, after his parents had already divorced. The child originally lived with his mother until, in 2008, Rimma Salonen decided to return to Russia, taking Anton with her, without securing an official agreement with her ex-husband. Paavo Salonen had twice taken Rimma to court in order to move Anton back to Finland to live with him. He lost the first trial but won the second one.
Before the trial, a Tampere court allowed Rimma Salonen to meet her son twice a month in conditions of special guidance — in the presence of Russian-speaking police officers and social workers on neutral territory in the city of Pori.
The Russian side maintains that in 2009 the father kidnapped the child from his mother.
The Nizhny Novgorod investigative committee opened a criminal case against Paavo Salonen under article 126 of the Russian Criminal Code, part 2: Premeditated kidnapping of a minor.
Rimma Salonen’s lawyer, Johan Beckman, said she would appeal the Tampere court verdict in a Turku court and seek a full acquittal.
“I have to stress that in the summer of 2009, Rimma Salonen was deceitfully lured onto Finnish territory, when Finland’s authorities promised to organize a meeting between the mother and her son, and give her money for an apartment she had sold in Finland,” Beckman said. “Instead, the woman was placed behind bars. It caused my client a lot of distress.”
Tampere’s court made a decision to free Salonen on Aug. 3 under condition that she would not leave the country.
The Salonen case and the actions of the Finnish diplomat who allowed Paavo Salonen to take his son out of Russian in his diplomatic car caused an international argument between the Russian and Finnish diplomatic services in May.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made a scathing comment on an official visit to Helsinki, suggesting that Pietilainen should change careers and start working in a church, if his actions were dominated by his conscience. Within days, Pietilainen was declared persona non grata in Russia.
On Sept. 25, Finland’s Prosecutor General opened a criminal case against the police officers and reporters who had disclosed secret information about the Salonen case. 
Russian ombudsman Vladimir Lukin said on Tuesday it would be fair to punish Paavo Salonen as much as Tampere’s court had punished his ex-wife Rimma, Interfax reported.
“In principle I agree that this citizen (Rimma Salonen) should be given some punishment for her illegal actions,” Lukin said. “In this respect, the Finnish court did everything according to the law. Now I think the Russian court should do the same.”
Lukin said both parents had behaved incorrectly “because they haven’t managed to agree how to bring up a child using human and civilized methods.”
“It is completely obvious that they both behaved like partisans in a civil war. One kidnapped the child from his mother, the mother kidnapped the child from his father,” he said.
Lukin said that he expected that the Russian court would charge Paavo Salonen with the same crime with which the Finnish court charged Rimma Salonen.
“Then they should both count to 10 and concentrate on taking care of the child instead of on court hearings and their ambitions,” he said.

TITLE: Canadian Senator: Visa Refusal Helped Relations
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Canada’s decision to deny a visa to Senator Mikhail Margelov paradoxically helped to improve political ties between both countries, a senior Canadian lawmaker said Wednesday.
Senator Consiglio Di Nino told The St. Petersburg Times that he personally got involved when Margelov failed to receive an ordinary visa for an interparliamentary conference last month.
“I met with him in Ottawa and had a wonderful discussion,” Di Nino said. “Frankly, this gave us both an opportunity to make new friends.
He said the two created “a relationship which I think will be of benefit to both countries.”
The two senators head the international affairs committees in their countries’ respective upper houses of parliament. Di Nino spoke after a meeting of members from both committees in Moscow. His six-member delegation is visiting Russia to improve trade relations.
Margelov ended up traveling on a restricted permit rather than a visa to Ottawa in September.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Cop Murders Girlfriend</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — A policeman in Siberia shot his girlfriend to death and then killed a taxi driver before committing suicide, Russia’s Interior Ministry said.
A lieutenant detective in the Omsk region’s police force shot his 21-year-old girlfriend three times in the back during a quarrel late Monday and then fled the scene, the ministry’s Investigative Committee said on its web site.
The officer later shot a taxi driver in the chest in downtown Omsk, the regional capital, and drove 60 kilometers on the highway to Tyumen before shooting himself in the head, according to investigators.
The detective committed the first murder in an “act of jealousy” after leaving work at about 5 p.m. with his service pistol and 16 rounds of ammunition, the Investigative Committee said.

TITLE: Cultural Watchdog Demands Legal Steps
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: As a report by the Ministry of Culture’s heritage watchdog on the controversial Okhta Center skyscraper project sent by Culture Minister Alexander Avdeyev to St. Petersburg Prosecutor Sergei Zaitsev was leaked to the press this week, Governor Valentina Matviyenko said on Thursday that a final decision on construction had not yet been taken.
The state cultural heritage watchdog, Rosokhrankultura, found that City Hall had broken at least two laws — the town-planning code of the Russian Federation and St. Petersburg’s law on protected cultural heritage zones and their use — during the preparatory stages of approving the building, known as the Gazprom Tower, and asked Zaitsev to take legal steps, Kommersant reported on Wednesday. 
According to the news report, the agency said that no buildings taller than 40 meters can be built on the Okhta Center construction site, since it is in fact a protected heritage site where the Swedish fortress of Nien was once located. By accepting the new protected cultural heritage zones law in February, which extended the height limit in the area to 100 meters, City Hall violated the protected status of the site.
Matviyenko signed a decree allowing the construction of a 400-meter skyscraper on Oct. 6.
Rosokhrankultura also found that the grounds given for exemption from the height limit contradicted the federal law on architectural activity and were therefore not valid. City Hall can legally only approve a 10 percent (four meter) exemption from the height limit “on the condition that the panoramas and views of St. Petersburg’s historic center are preserved,” Kommersant reported.
The agency also drew attention to gross violations during the Sept. 1 public hearing, citing complaints about the police’s “aggressive” behavior and the presence of “young men” who took “physical action” against the skyscraper’s opponents.
Rosokhrankultura’s report, which was also sent to Matviyenko, has not yet been published officially. 
“We said from the very beginning that until this story is finished, we won’t publish anything,” said a press officer for the Ministry of Culture by phone from Moscow on Thursday.
Speaking at a news conference on Thursday, Matviyenko expressed her support for the project but said that a decision about construction had not yet been taken. “I can’t see grounds for the cancellation of this project, given that it still has to pass a state review, which is a complicated process,” she said.

TITLE: Clinton Urges Russia to Open Political System
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KAZAN — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday challenged Russians to open up their political system and embrace diversity and dissent, saying Cold War-era thinking would limit their prosperity in the 21st century.
Clinton spoke to Moscow State University students and then traveled east to Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan. The informal meetings, which wrapped up a five-day tour of Europe, were aimed at helping redefine U.S.-Russia relations.
Clinton stressed to the students that Russia’s prosperity was dependent on its willingness to cultivate core freedoms, including the freedom to participate in the political process.
“Citizens must be empowered to help formulate the laws under which they live,” she told about 2,000 students at the university. “They need to know that their investments of time, money and intellectual property will be safeguarded by the institutions of government.”
Her message appeared aimed in part at countering the fears of Russia’s beleaguered liberal democrats that the United States would no longer seek to hold the Kremlin accountable for violations of democratic norms and human rights in exchange for Russia’s cooperation on Iran and Afghanistan.
“In an innovative society, people must be free to take unpopular positions, disagree with conventional wisdom, know they are safe to challenge abuses of authority,” Clinton said.
“That’s why attacks on journalists and human rights defenders here in Russia is such a great concern: because it is a threat to progress,” she said, standing in front of a monumental Soviet mosaic topped by a red hammer and sickle, the showcase of the university auditorium.
Clinton told the students that one of the books that most affected her life was “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoevsky, in particular the parable of the Grand Inquisitor, which she saw as “an object lesson against servitude.”
“I believe one of the greatest responsibilities we have as human beings is to open ourselves up to the possibility that we could be wrong,” she said. “One of the greatest threats we face is from people who believe they are absolutely, certainly right about everything and they have the only truth and it was passed onto them by God.”
Clinton returned to a favorite theme of President Barack Obama’s — the need to move past the Cold War.
“We have people in our government and you have people in your government who are still living in the past,” she said. “They do not believe the United States and Russia can cooperate to this extent. They do not trust each other and we have to prove them wrong.”
In closing, she expressed hope that Russians and Americans would come to feel like partners.
“I choose partnership and I choose to put aside being a child of the Cold War. I choose to move beyond the rhetoric and the propaganda that came from my government and yours,” she said. “I choose a different future and that’s a choice every one of us can make every single day and I look forward to sharing that future with you.”
The students responded with polite applause.
The United States is seeking Russia’s support for tough new sanctions if Iran fails to prove its nuclear program is peaceful. But Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned against intimidating Iran and said talk of sanctions were “premature.” “There is no need to frighten the Iranians,” Putin told reporters in Beijing after a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on Wednesday.
In an interview that aired Wednesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Clinton insisted she was still “very pleased by how supportive the Russians have been.” “I believe if sanctions become necessary, we will have support from Russia,” she said.
Clinton said she chose to travel to Kazan because she heard that it was a beautiful city where Muslims and Orthodox Christians live peacefully together. “I want to see that for myself and hear how successful that has been,” she said in an interview on Ekho Moskvy radio Wednesday.
She is the first U.S. secretary of state to visit Kazan, which bills itself as Russia’s third capital, and Tatarstan, an oil-rich moderate Muslim-majority republic that is often hailed as a model of multicultural tolerance. Clinton was met at the airport by Tatarstan’s longtime leader, Mintimer Shaimiyev, who took her on a tour of the Kazan Kremlin, including its Kul Sharif Mosque and Annunciation Cathedral.
“You are well-known as someone who has fostered religious tolerance,” she told Shaimiyev. “It really is a wonderful example of what can be done if people work together.”
Clinton departed for Washington late Wednesday.

TITLE: Sberbank Pilots Scheme For Debt Collection
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Federal Court Marshals Service, long an innovator in the field of forcing individuals to pay their debts, is now looking to make collection less of a hassle for small-time delinquents owing less than $1,000.
The service is working with state-controlled Sberbank on pilot projects in the Altai and Volgograd regions, where people with small debts — typically for taxes or utilities — can repay the sum at any of the bank’s automated teller machines. Under the program, which bypasses the paperwork traditionally required, the debtor simply uses a bank card to pay the loan, plus a 3 percent commission to Sberbank.
“We’re partnering with Sberbank because its branches are almost everywhere in Russia. If these projects are successful in the regions, we’ll launch it all over Russia,” Sergei Sazanov, the service’s first deputy chief, said at a news conference Wednesday.
The service, a part of the Justice Ministry, also plans to start collecting debts through the ubiquitous terminals where Russians often pay bills for their cell phones and utilities. That project is being tested in the Tyumen region, where the number of terminals that can accept debt payments will reach 600 by Dec. 1.
“A debtor just has to choose the option to pay a debt and enter his identity number to see how much he owes,” Sazanov said. “This system is used for debts of less than 30,000 rubles. A debtor can pay his debt through the terminal immediately. Then he receives a check that he can show the court marshals.”

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Georgian Denial</b>
TBILISI (Bloomberg) — Georgia’s Security Council chief Eka Tkeshelashvili denied a Russian claim made on Thursday that Georgian security services have been conspiring with the terrorist organization al-Qaeda to send terrorists into Russia’s southern Chechnya region.
“To say that Georgia is helping al-Qaeda is groundless and laughable,” Tkeshelashvili said by telephone in the capital Tbilisi. “This statement is proof that Russia is trying to stoke tensions in the region again.”

TITLE: Russia Pressures Renault Over AvtoVAZ
AUTHOR: By Paul Abelsky
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s government increased pressure on Renault, France’s second-biggest carmaker, to help AvtoVAZ restructure debt and stay in business.
Renault, which owns 25 percent of AvtoVAZ, needs to help Russia’s largest carmaker develop a broader range of cars to remain competitive, the Industry and Trade Ministry said in a statement. Plunging sales will push AvtoVAZ’s debt to creditors and component suppliers to about 86 billion rubles ($2.9 billion) in the next three months, the ministry said.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Oct. 2 that Renault would have to put more money into Tolyatti-based AvtoVAZ or provide more of its technology if the French carmaker wants to avoid having its stake diluted. Renault paid about $1 billion for the holding, which has lost more than half of its value since last year.
AvtoVAZ will outline an “anti-crisis” strategy Tuesday, a company official said Thursday in a phone interview, dismissing news reports that the carmaker faces bankruptcy. AvtoVAZ needs to cut about 50,000 jobs, almost half its workforce, to avoid insolvency, Kommersant reported Thursday, citing an internal Industry Ministry document.
Renault fell as much as 38 cents, or 1 percent, to 35.91 euros and was down 0.3 percent as of 12:05 p.m. in Paris trading. That pared the stock’s gain in 2009 to 95 percent, valuing the carmaker at 10.3 billion euros ($15.4 billion). 
AvtoVAZ dropped as much as 4.6 percent to 15.06 rubles in Moscow. The shares have more than doubled this year, giving the company a market value of 21 billion rubles.
The Russian manufacturer of Lada sedans may need to seek a partner other than Renault because of the Boulogne-Billancourt-based partner’s “unwillingness to share technologies,” the Moscow-based newspaper cited the document as saying. The carmaker remains committed to its ties to Renault and Nissan Motor Co., the French company’s Japanese affiliate, AvtoVAZ said Thursday.
The Renault-Nissan alliance, headed by Carlos Ghosn, plans to produce vehicles based on the no-frills Logan sedan on a shared AvtoVAZ assembly line, the Russian carmaker’s President Igor Komarov said last Friday.
 “We’re still working with all partners to find the best solution for AvtoVAZ, including the possibility of sharing our technologies,” Renault spokeswoman Caroline De Gezelle said by telephone Thursday.
Renault is “not aware of AvtoVAZ being on the verge of bankruptcy,” she added.
Industrywide sales of new cars and commercial vehicles in Russia fell 52 percent last month, according to the Association of European Businesses.
The Russian government has given AvtoVAZ 25 billion rubles in emergency loans, while the carmaker has slashed salaries and announced plans to eliminate at least 5,000 jobs. AvtoVAZ will owe 76.3 billion rubles to financial backers and 9.8 billion rubles to suppliers by the end of the year, the IndustryMinistry said.
Alyona Shipilina, a spokeswoman for the ministry, declined to comment on the Kommersant report.

TITLE: EBRD Predicts ‘Fragile’ Post-Recession Recovery
AUTHOR: By Agnes Lovasz
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Eastern Europe’s emergence from the worst recession since the collapse of communism two decades ago will be “patchy” and “fragile,” the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development said.
The region’s economies will grow about 2.5 percent next year after contracting an average 6.3 percent this year, the EBRD said in a statement Thursday. The bank raised its 2010 forecast from a May estimate for a 1.4 percent expansion.
“The situation has stabilized and we’re looking for recovery, but it will be a slow recovery,” said Erik Berglof, the London-based development bank’s chief economist, in a Bloomberg Television interview Thursday. “It’s still a region that suffers from the wounds of the crisis.” The recovery will be “constrained by the strains in the banking system, rising unemployment and the worsening portfolios of the banks.”
The 30 emerging European and central Asian nations in which the EBRD invests are struggling to escape the deepest recession since they adopted free-market policies. The bank, which helped limit the impact of the financial crisis by persuading western European banks to stay in the region, has doubled its investment to more than 6 billion euros ($9 billion) this year.
The recovery will be curtailed by continued tight lending conditions as western lenders shrink their balance sheets in the region and adjust to slower economic growth. With non-performing loans rising, they remain cautious in extending loans to consumers and small businesses. People won’t feel the effects of the recovery next year as mounting corporate bankruptcies will keep pushing up unemployment, the EBRD said.
“A subdued pace of export market recovery” particularly in the euro region, the main market for goods produced in countries such as the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, will also hamper a rebound, the EBRD said.
The International Monetary Fund said on Oct. 3 the euro-region economy including Germany, France and Italy will expand 0.3 percent in 2010 after shrinking 4.2 percent this year. The 16 countries using the single currency face headwinds from the euro’s advance against the dollar and the highest unemployment rates in more than a decade.
East European economies show a significant variation, the EBRD said. Bulgaria, Latvia and Lithuania, which all have fixed exchange-rate regimes, will see further contractions as they improve competitiveness through cutting wages, prices and government spending.
Recovery prospects in Russia and Kazakhstan, which are expected to grow 3 percent and 1.5 percent next year after shrinking 8.5 percent and 1.5 percent in 2009, respectively, will depend on the ability of the authorities to clean up their banking systems and on the strength of the rebound globally for commodities, the EBRD said.
The “internationally competitive” economies of Albania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, and their relatively unharmed banking systems will result in faster growth next year compared with their neighbors, the EBRD said. Poland will expand 1.8 percent after 1.3 percent growth in 2009, the bank predicts.
Hungary’s “sound domestic policies” to contain the crisis, which included austerity measures, will weigh on the growth potential, resulting in a 0.9 percent contraction next year, according to the EBRD.
The development bank is seeking a 10 billion-euro capital increase from shareholders to meet the increased financing needs of banks and businesses.
The EBRD has focused on 12 “systemically important” western parent banks, such as UniCredit and Societe Generale, as well as some large local lenders, including Latvia’s Parex Banka and Hungary’s OTP Bank Nyrt. to prevent a banking crisis. It is now planning to strengthen companies through loans and shareholdings, EBRD President Thomas Mirow said in an Oct. 6 interview.
The EBRD was created in 1991 to invest in former communist countries from the Balkans to central Asia to help them transform their economies.

TITLE: September Sees Easing Of Industrial Output Slump
AUTHOR: By Paul Abelsky
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian industrial production contracted in September at the slowest pace in 10 months as domestic demand picked up and the global economic recovery spurred demand for raw materials and metals.
Output fell 9.5 percent from a year earlier after a 12.6 percent drop in August, the Federal Statistics Service in Moscow said via e-mail Thursday. Production rose a non-seasonally adjusted 5.1 percent on the month. The median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of 12 economists was for an annual contraction of 12.1 percent and a monthly decline of 2.1 percent.
The slump in industrial production, which has been sustained for 11 months, dropped into single digits for the first time since the end of last year. Prices for crude oil, Russia’s main export, advanced on improved prospects for an economic recovery and metals and coal producers sought to meet reviving demand from manufacturers.
“Car production picked up in September and electricity consumption has also shown a positive trend,” Renaissance Capital analysts led by Tom Mundy said in a report. Economic data last month may show “a moderation in the rate of decline in the real economy.”
The economy contracted a record 10.9 percent in the second quarter after the sharpest economic contraction on record slashed consumer spending and curbed production of raw materials and industrial goods. Oil prices gained 1 percent between July and September, the third quarterly gain in a row.
The Economy Ministry raised its forecast for industrial production this year by 1 percentage point, predicting an 11.4 percent decline, according to a report on Oct. 1. The ministry expects output to resume growth next year, rising 1.9 percent in 2010, 2.6 percent in 2011 and 4.4 percent in 2012.
Russian Railways, the country’s rail monopoly whose sales made up 2.5 percent of gross domestic product last year, said cargo shipments declined in September at the slowest rate this year.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <b>Beer Decline Drops Off</b>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — A decline in Russian beer production slowed last month after worsening in August, according to figures released Thursday by the country’s Federal Statistics Service.
Output fell 5.7 percent compared with September, 2008, an improvement on August’s 15.3 percent decline. On a month-on-month basis, production declined 20.6 percent, the figures show.
In the first nine months of the year, Russian beer output declined 7.9 percent to 838 million decaliters, according to the report. Last year, production fell 0.6 percent to 1.1 billion decaliters, hurt by the “economic crisis” and a cool summer, the country’s Beer Producers Union reported in January.
Russian beer sales growth will slow to 4 percent in rubles this year as consumers spend less and switch to cheaper local brands, Renaissance Capital forecast on March 2. Beer consumption in the country will decline 1.5 percent in 2009 after reaching “saturation” at 81 liters per capita last year, according to the Moscow-based investment bank.

TITLE: Office Developers Becoming Hoteliers
AUTHOR: By Natalya Samarina and Svetlana Danilova
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — With new Class B office space in Moscow available for rent at an annual $50 per square meter, developers of business centers — both planned and under way — are seriously considering a new direction, particularly remodeling as hotels.
New office buildings in Moscow are like a memorial to development — possible tenants walk around outside, sizing things up, but not many bother going in. The city’s average occupancy rate, according to Knight Frank, is 80 percent, but that includes older buildings with long and solid rental histories.
Yelena Denisova, from the office department at Jones Lang LaSalle, described the situation diplomatically. “There are difficulties signing contracts in buildings where the construction hasn’t finished,” she said.
Demand for Class A business centers has fallen sharply, brokers say. Clients are now mostly interested in Class B properties available for minimal prices compared with their precrisis levels. Kira Smirnova, of GVA Sawyer, said Class B space was being rented at the end of the first half of this year for $200 to $550 per square meter, excluding value-added tax and maintenance, while Class A offices were being offered for $550 to $800.
But those were average prices. A square meter in the Nagatino i-Land technical park could be rented for just $50 per year with an agreement to rent 1,700 square meters, and the company is willing to make other concessions, said Alexei Chertkov, head of Nagatino i-Land’s commercial department. For the first year or two, tenants can move into finished space for just the cost of utilities.  
“The choice now is so big that landlords are being forced to offer all kinds of things: discounts, interior work, rent holidays, longer contracts,” said Anzhela Kuzmina, director of the commercial property department at Unicor. She is in “active talks” with Western companies that Unicor hopes will become the main tenants in the office space (19,000 square meters) of the Summit complex, which is planned for completion in late 2010.
“Requests from renters have become much more modest,” said Anzori Khasia, an adviser to the president of Otkritie-Real Estate. “Some are leaving office space, others are cutting back on what they have.”
Generating revenue streams that will satisfy investors has become much more of a challenge. “Offices have really sagged,” said Vladimir Poddubko, director of Unicor’s hotel department. When the company started working on Summit in 2005, its office component was the largest. Now the project is turning into a hotel, and InterContintental is on board as its operator.
And they’re not alone. Many developers are thinking about converting office centers into hotels, said Grigory Zvenigorodsky, of OPK Development.
A former office building on the property of Danilovskaya Manufaktura has become a hotel in the Azimut chain, said Alexander Gendelsman, chief of Azimut Hotels Company.
He said virtually any office building can be redone as a hotel — the only question is how effectively it can operate. His company is interested in buildings with at least 5,000 square meters that could house no fewer than 90 rooms, as well as restaurants, conference halls and so forth.

TITLE: Gas Tops Prime Minister’s Deals in Beijing
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Russia and China signed deals worth $3.5 billion and reached a tentative agreement on gas trade during a trip by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to Beijing on Tuesday, an indication that the countries have taken their relations to a new high.
In the accord with the most potential for future revenues, Gazprom and Chinese National Petroleum Corporation, or CNPC, reached agreement on the amount and timeline for gas deliveries to China, said Gazprom chief Alexei Miller.
Key talks on gas trade still lie ahead, however, because Russia and China have been in a deadlock over the price since 2004.
Tuesday’s agreement merely linked the price of gas to the price of oil products, Miller said in a speech at a Russian-Chinese business forum in Beijing.Gazprom uses the link in all its exports, including for deliveries to Europe.
A gas supply contract would marry Russia’s capacity as the world’s largest energy exporter to China’s demand as the world’s second-largest energy consumer after the United States.
Other deals signed Tuesday centered largely on Chinese investment in Russian mining and construction projects and for cooperation in building high-speed railways.
“The key potential deal is the gas deal,” said Clifford Kupchan, director for Europe and Eurasia at Eurasia Group, a consultancy in Washington.
Miller told reporters that supplies to China could reach 68 billion cubic meters of gas per year and travel in two pipelines that have yet to be built.
Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin said Gazprom and CNPC might set a price in the course of further talks and sign a contract in early 2010. In that event, supplies would likely start in 2014 or 2015, he said.
Gazprom is under pressure to find a consensus on price because China is also looking at other suppliers, including Turkmenistan, Qatar and Australia.
Even so, an analyst warned that the clause linking the gas price to oil could ruin Gazprom’s hopes of selling any new gas to China and elsewhere because of the emergence in the United States of a new technology to produce cheap shale gas.
“Gazprom does not take into account the modern-day reality,” said Mikhail Korchemkin, director of U.S.-based consultancy East European Gas Analysis. “The situation on the market is totally different.”
The host of other deals that Russia struck with China was unprecedented, reaching $3.5 billion in value, said Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov.
“It’s the first time that such major commercial deals have been signed in such a great number between Russian and Chinese businesspeople,” he said, Interfax reported.
Zhukov praised the outcome despite the fact that the figure fell short of the $5.5 billion that he predicted last week.
“These deals show continuing improvement in Russian-Chinese relations,” Kupchan said. “In my view, that relationship is as close as it has ever been.”
Putin, addressing the business forum, said China, the holder of the world’s largest financial reserves, was welcome to invest further in Russia. “Our Chinese partners have accrued significant financial resources,” he said. “We are interested in actively attracting them to the Russian economy, including the Siberian and Far Eastern regions.”
IHS Global Insight analyst Lilit Gevorgyan said the global economic crisis has helped boost bilateral trade since Russia’s own investment potential has dwindled. “After the crisis, Russia is becoming more cooperative,” she said from London.
In other deals, Russia will take part in building two nuclear power reactors for the Tianwan Station, Sechin said. Rosneft and CNPC will build a refinery 100 kilometers from Beijing and plan to open 300 to 500 gasoline filling stations in China, he said.
Putin, known for his tongue-lashings of the United States, used markedly saccharine language in what may be compliance with Asian diplomatic etiquette at the start of a meeting with Premier Wen Jiabao.
“China has turned into a potent industrial power and taken a place in the world that is worthy of the Chinese people,” Putin said. “And we take delight with our neighbor, our friend — China — we take incredible delight in your success.”

TITLE: Poll: Just 5 Percent Blame Chubais For RusHydro Disaster
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — More Russians believe that plant management and even President Dmitry Medvedev are at fault for the August dam disaster than they do Anatoly Chubais, the former UES chief blamed in a government investigation, according to a VTsIOM poll released Tuesday.
Thirty-nine percent of Russians say the management of the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power plant is responsible for the Aug. 17 accident that killed 75 workers, the poll said.
Firms connected to top management at the dam were doing repairs on the turbine where the accident started and the executives’ commercial side projects could have distracted them from their responsibilities at Sayano-Shushenskaya, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin said last month.
Fourteen percent of respondents blamed Medvedev and the government for the accident, while workers at the plant, controlled by state-run RusHydro, were blamed by 7 percent.
Chubais — who was named in a report by the Federal Service for Environmental, Technological and Atomic Inspection as being among those responsible for conditions leading to the accident — was named by 6 percent of the poll’s 1,400 respondents.
The survey’s margin of error was 3.4 percentage points.

TITLE: VEB Gets $500 Million for Property Project
AUTHOR: By Alexander Beskov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Vneshekonombank received a five-year, $500 million loan from the state-controlled Chinese Development Bank for the construction of a shopping and office complex on Leningradsky Prospekt, VEB announced Tuesday.
The planned 480,000-square-meter complex will be built on the site of Clock-Making Factory No. 2, located near Belorussky Station.  
Russian lenders, especially state-owned banks like VEB, have been trying to develop the real estate they acquired from companies that have fallen victim to the crisis. The site, once owned by Globex Bank, came into VEB’s possession after the state development bank acquired Globex, which had acute liquidity problems, in October 2008 for a symbolic 5,000 rubles ($170).
VEB said in June that it would merge Globex and Svyaz Bank — which together cost the state some $5 billion to bail out — and sell the new company to a strategic investor.
Before the crisis hit, Globex planned to develop the territory into a 26-floor, 220,000-square-meter business and shopping center, Vedomosti reported.
VEB declined to elaborate on the terms of the loan.
Analysts, however, said it would likely be just above the London interbank offered rate.
“Assuming that the pricing is market based, it could be 1.5 to 2 percentage points above LIBOR, as the credit default swap on the Russian market is 179 basis points right now,” said Mikhail Galkin, an analyst at VTB Capital.
The Chinese Development Bank probably would not be looking for a large rate, said Stanislav Bozhenko, an analyst at UralSib.
“This is part of the broader partnership between Russia and China,” he said. “In addition, there is a load of cheap money on the market again as LIBOR is close to its historical minimum, and China Development Bank chose this option given VEB’s credit quality.”
VEB would not say who would act as the project’s developer.
Globex received a green light for the complex’s construction in early 2008, a VEB spokeswoman said. The complex could also include at least one hotel, she said.
VEB also received a separate, $500 million loan from the Export-Import Bank of China, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov said from China on Tuesday.
Zhukov, who was accompanying Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and other top officials to Beijing, also said the countries were discussing ways to settle trade using the ruble and yuan, rather than the euro and dollar, Bloomberg reported. They also discussed increased cooperation in combating smuggling, Zhukov said, Interfax reported.
It would be a long time, however, before the currencies would replace the dollar as the preferred means of settling trades, he said.
In other lending deals, VTB Group, Russia’s second-largest lender, said it received a $500 million loan from the Agricultural Bank of China.

TITLE: Anti-Monopoly Service Takes Longer Look at Four Dairy Goods Producers
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said Wednesday that it prolonged a price-fixing investigation into dairy processors Wimm-Bill-Dann and Groupe Danone by two months after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin pledged support for farmers.
The competition watchdog will seek more evidence of price fixing by the Moscow region’s four biggest dairy processors, which also include Campina and Ehrmann, said Dmitry Strelnikov, a spokesman for the service. The companies conspired to lower wholesale milk prices by 25 percent, he said.
Wimm-Bill-Dann denies the allegations, spokeswoman Marina Kagan said. Danone’s Russian unit is cooperating with the authorities, spokeswoman Marie-Liesse Calmejane said. Campina and Ehrmann officials were not immediately available to comment.

TITLE: A New Wave of Privatization, Russian-Style
AUTHOR: By Martin Gilman
TEXT: Just as the rest of the world finally seemed to acclimate itself to a particular Russian form of state capitalism, the government has decided to begin privatizing a perhaps significant amount of its corporate stakes. On Oct. 5, First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov mentioned that up to 5,500 companies could be targeted for privatization over the next three years, and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin added that Russia should reduce state and regional authorities’ ownership of business to 30 percent or less, from about 50 percent now.
Maybe we should not be so surprised. The purported state capitalism model, with government at various levels owning all or large stakes in a broad range of companies, especially large and strategically positioned ones, was always more of a concept than a reality. After all, state ownership in Russia, even after the recent increase in ownership stakes to deal with the negative impact of the financial crisis, is still lower than in most countries of the European Union. At a government meeting last week, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin acknowledged that the state had widened its presence in the economy during the financial crisis, but he promised to initiate a new privatization drive.
Despite the encroachment of the state in some highly publicized cases in recent years, the government’s official long-term strategy calls for more, not less, privatization. This stance is predicated on the usual arguments that the state is rarely an effective manager in a market economy and the state holdings are a revenue drain.
In fact, in late 2007, if we can remember so far back, the market was anticipating an unprecedented number of initial public offerings by state holdings. But then the crisis intervened, virtually shutting down the international market for IPOs.
In a sense, the government’s initiative to privatize state holdings starting next year is just a reaffirmation of its earlier strategy. Of course, the actual timing will depend on market conditions. But with low inflation, abundant liquidity and a booming stock market, foreign investors seem keen for higher yield in emerging market shares. The Russian government may oblige, assuming that global markets continue to shed their risk aversion in the months ahead. Unlike two years ago, though, the government has more than just a strategic reason to unload its corporate holdings. Now the federal budget is in deficit, and there is a sound fiscal reason to raise revenue from privatization. The draft 2010 budget foresees 7 billion rubles ($237 million) from privatization, but reports on last week’s government meeting indicate that the possible amount could be up to 10 times higher.
If Russia does go down the route of privatization, it will follow a pattern typical in European countries such as Britain and France, which have gone through periodic swings between nationalization and privatization. In some ways, Russia would be catching up with the trend toward privatization just as the crisis has forced many European countries to do just the opposite.
In Russia, privatization has been an emotive issue, no doubt because of the initial starting conditions of a completely state-owned and controlled economy in Soviet times as well as the sometimes controversial results of the previous waves of privatization. It was a mixed story. The initial wave of so-called spontaneous privatization in the late Soviet period involved managers seizing control of their companies and was followed by the large-scale and generally successful voucher privatization and housing privatization from 1992 to 1994. It then led to the much-maligned loans-for-shares scheme in 1995 that systematically favored groups with ties to government interests in the transfer of control of 12 companies. The resulting scandal still gives privatization in Russia a bad name, even though, as UCLA’s Daniel Treisman concludes in a forthcoming book, the amounts involved relative to the size of the economy were not so large and the underpayment for the assets acquired was not in most cases so outrageous considering the actual market conditions and political prospects at the time. In fact, subsequent privatizations have generally been seen to be conducted at fair-market values.
Hopefully, the forthcoming wave of privatization in Russia will fare better than in the past. Last week, Putin went out of his way to stress that federal property should be sold at the real market price without any discount or privilege. Assuming that market conditions are favorable to the privatization of state holdings next year, how likely is it to happen? Here it is important to appreciate the underlying motive as well as the more obvious ones. The clear motives include the desire to raise revenue and future productivity. The underlying motive is more complex and specifically Russian. It is useful to recall that the initial strengthening of state control starting in 2004 seemed to be fueled more by strategy and personal interest than any ideology. Unlike Western Europe during earlier phases of nationalization, the move toward state ownership was devoid of any ideological baggage.
Now, the latest move toward privatization is likewise fueled by the same pragmatic elements. With the designation of strategic sectors in May 2008, the state can now logically divest of its not so strategic holdings or reduce the extent of holdings even in strategic sectors.
Perhaps one of the most potent reasons to move ahead now is that it would clearly be in the personal interests of those who, purportedly acting on behalf of the state, grabbed the assets in the first place. These officials and their associates now occupy senior management positions and directorships as a result of state control in a wide range of companies and banks. However, their positions — and the associated wealth and power — are only secure as long as they personally occupy those functions. What better way to ensure that these new-style silovarchs and their families enjoy their newfound wealth than to receive shares on a personal basis as a result of a market IPO of all or part of the state holding in compensation for services rendered? It is much more remunerative than any pension plan.
If I am right that many siloviki and their associates are seeking to make permanent the benefits of their power grab, then the timing of the forthcoming IPOs could be meaningful. If they collectively start to think that Russia may become a more normal country with transparent corporate governance and the rule of law, then it may be time to cash in.
This is good news for the rest of us. In moving forward with a possibly significant scale of privatization, Russia may be pursuing the right policy for the wrong reason. It would not be the first time. Does it matter? Probably not in the long run. As the late MIT economics professor Rudiger Dornbush said of an earlier wave of Russian privatization, it was “done without much care for niceties … yet, in the end, it worked.”

Martin Gilman, former senior representative of the International Monetary Fund in Russia, is a professor at the Higher School of Economics.

TITLE: Digging Their Own Graves at the Polls
AUTHOR: By Nikolai Petrov
TEXT: Sunday’s elections were depressing. The problem is not that the results suggest that the authorities remain hugely popular despite the crisis, but that the authorities seem to be digging their own graves.
The country’s leaders are spending enormous amounts of money to calm nerves and maintain order. But they are failing to prepare themselves to cope with future problems or to restructure the political system to meet those challenges. They are simply squandering Russia’s accumulated reserves and burying their heads in the sand.
Last spring, the authorities seemed to have gauged the situation accurately and chosen to loosen the reins a bit in the electoral process by introducing a few elements of liberalization. But now their political adaptation to the economic crisis has undergone a reversal. The authorities have apparently concluded that the worst of the crisis is over and that they can gradually tighten the reins again. A perfect illustration of this is the contrast between last weekend’s mayoral election in Astrakhan and the mayoral election in Sochi six months earlier.
What did the Oct. 11 elections reveal?
For one, the vote showed that public order remains relatively undisturbed and ordinary people have yet to feel the full brunt of the economic crisis. It also indicated that people are largely indifferent to elections and violations in electoral procedure. Most people see elections as a type of contest in which they can root for this or that person, not unlike the Russia-Germany football match that many voters stayed up watching so late Saturday night that they slept through the elections Sunday.
In any case, most voters seem to feel that elections have no direct bearing on their lives. Voters are not ready to invest their time and energy into elections or to defend their right to vote for the candidate of their choice, rather than to choose from a list of candidates handpicked by United Russia.
Sunday’s vote also showed that the authorities are satisfied with the current party system — a system that in reality is unable to meet the needs of a huge country in the throes of an economic crisis — and that they are not preparing any alternative to United Russia. Ruling parties in other countries have felt the effects of the crisis or even lost their hold on power as a result of it. But in Russia, as in the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, time has stopped, and the authorities are reassuring everyone, including themselves, that they are more popular now than before the crisis started. This means that instead of simply preparing to change the ruling party, the authorities may one day face the more colossal task of having to change the entire political system.
The country’s leaders have not only failed to prepare a “backup” political party, but they also have effectively shot themselves in the foot by knowingly compromising the electoral system, making it impossible for two of the few parties that still have some life left in them, Right Cause and Yabloko, to enter the Moscow City Duma.
Were the election results widely falsified? Without doubt, many official election results do not reflect the real picture. It doesn’t really matter if the cheating occurred by misrepresenting the votes cast, having people use absentee ballots to vote in multiple precincts, or disqualifying unwanted candidates or parties. Typically, the first 25 percent to 30 percent of voting results are reported more or less accurately, and all subsequent votes are attributed to United Russia — a tactic for falsifying results that has been recognized since the late 1980s and that was clearly employed in the Moscow elections.
Elections were held in almost all of Russia’s regions. In outlying areas such as the cities of Rzhev and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and the Amur region, the authorities exercised looser control over the electoral process and the results were comparatively more realistic — primarily by showing an increase in popularity for the Communist Party. The dirtiest elections turned out to be those in Moscow and Astrakhan. We saw an interesting shift in trends: It used to be that Russia’s largest cities showed the proper way to conduct elections, and their example gradually spread to the provinces. This time, the elections in major cities resembled those in Chechnya and Dagestan, and the most honest elections took place in the more remote regions.
The elections also suggest that the social contract instituted by then-President Vladimir Putin — which saw the authorities guarantee a steadily increasing standard of living in return for the people’s willingness to act as nothing more than passive observers in the country’s political game — is still in place, despite a belief in some circles that the crisis had changed the arrangement.
The belief that those in power will modernize for the sake of their own survival was also proven unfounded by the elections. Karl Marx once said, “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers.” It appears that the authorities already have their shovels in hand.

Nikolai Petrov is a scholar in residence at The Carnegie Moscow Center.

TITLE: The Dam Buck Stops Nowhere
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: The report issued by the Federal Service for Environmental, Technological and Atomic Inspection on the cause of the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant accident is chock full of senseless data designed to divert attention away from the core issues. In plain English, the report’s findings read as follows:
Following repairs, an unbalanced GA-2 turbine unit was labeled as “satisfactory” and installed at the plant in March. The GA-2 unit reached the maximum allowable level of vibration from the moment it began operation, with the vibrations increasing fourfold by August. For this reason, an effort was made not to use the GA-2 unit at all. But a fire at the Bratsk hydroelectric plant on the evening of Aug. 16 prompted dispatchers to increase demand on the Sayano-Shushenskaya facility.
The GA-2 unit was brought on line at 11:05 p.m. and operated for exactly nine hours and nine minutes before the disaster occurred. During those hours, the GA-2 lost power three times, and the turbine exceeded the safe vibration level six times. But with stubborn perseverance, the unit was repeatedly turned back on. At 8 a.m., 13 minutes before the accident, a tremor was felt at the station, and at 8:05 a.m., gauges indicated malfunctions. An engineer, L.M. Misyukevich, reduced power, but the GA-2 continued working. If Misyukevich had shut the upper water gate to the station at that moment, the tragedy would have been averted. At 8:13 a.m., the lid of the GA-2 unit tore off. Of the 49 bolts that were supposed to be holding the unit in place, 41 showed signs of “fatigue fracture,” six were missing and only two were normal. Plant directors fled the premises, including the head of the safety department and the civil defense chief.
The conclusion drawn from all of this? Former UES CEO Anatoly Chubais was at fault.
Several grave conclusions must be drawn from this report. First, the primary cause of the tragedy was the complete deterioration of the country’s technical infrastructure. Even in Soviet times, only a handful of people possessed the specialized knowledge and skills required to balance those kinds of turbines. Those people have since died.
Second, the disaster was not caused by a bizarre confluence of circumstances but by a lack of technical discipline prevailing at the plant.
Third, Russia’s power system — including hydroelectric power — is supervised by Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin. Officials under the patronage of the siloviki typically consider themselves immune to punishment, and although I cannot be absolutely certain that that factor led to the disaster, it definitely played a role. Fourth, the degree of impunity enjoyed by the siloviki and their proteges is mind-boggling. Those people can hire a maintenance firm with close ties to the plant’s owners, put a “repaired” but malfunctioning turbine unit into operation, report that rusted bolts are in “satisfactory” condition, stubbornly start and restart a failing unit despite tremors shaking the building and gauges warning of a malfunction, hightail it out of the place when the unit finally ruptures — and blame it all on Chubais.
But what I find most shocking of all is how badly Russia’s technological infrastructure has degenerated and the government’s overriding instinct for self-preservation and denial. We have entered a period of technological catastrophes, and yet the government is unable to establish who is responsible — only who is an enemy. The report’s chief author, Nikolai Kutin, initially said the catastrophe might have been a terrorist act. But later, Chubais, not terrorists, was blamed. The next version will probably peg the CIA as the culprit.

Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.

TITLE: Lord of the dance
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The biggest international arts festival St. Petersburg has seen for some time got underway at the beginning of this week.
One hundred years ago, the talented Russian impresario and dedicated patron of the arts Sergei Diaghilev took Europe by storm with his Russian Seasons — a combination of Russian ballet, art and music presented to audiences in Paris, London and other European capitals. The centenary is being celebrated with the Diaghilev P.S. festival, a suitably diverse showcase of arts and culture, including ballet performances, concerts, art exhibitions and conferences.
“The main aim of the festival is to bring Diaghilev’s name back to Russia,” said Natalya Metelitsa, the festival’s artistic director. 
Diaghilev’s name is closely connected with that of St. Petersburg. As a young man, he moved to the imperial capital from Perm to study law, but soon began taking music lessons at the St. Petersburg Conservatory as well as at the university. He was one of the founders of the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) movement, as well as the publisher of the eponymous journal at the turn of the 20th century. 
Diaghilev began his self-declared mission of taking Russian culture abroad in 1906 with an exhibition of Russian art in Paris. The next year he returned to Paris with concerts of Russian music, followed a year later with Russian opera. The Ballets Russes premiered in the French capital the next year with a dance troupe that included Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina.
During his lifetime, Diaghilev brought together an unprecedented wealth of musicians, dancers and artists. Ballet scores and operas were composed for him by Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Debussy, Ravel, Satie and Richard Strauss, while choreographers included Mikhail Fokin, Nijinsky and later, George Balanchine. Exotic, evocative sets were designed by the leading artists of the time, including Nikolai Roerich, Alexander Benois, Leon Bakst and later Pablo Picasso. Diaghilev’s quest to break with tradition and establish original directions in the field of ballet influenced its development for decades after his death in 1929.
The Diaghilev. P.S. festival opened on Monday evening with performances by the Hamburg Ballet, whose director and chief choreographer John Neumeier is one of the festival’s key figures. 
“Since I was 11 years old, I have been fascinated by this very important era of Diaghilev and by dance, which I always knew I was called to,” Neumeier said at a press conference devoted to the festival on Monday. “This era, which produced so many important new scores written for ballet — probably the most since the 18th century — was a very important time for me.”
Much of the U.S.-born choreographer’s work has focused on the life and work of the great dancer and choreographer Nijinsky, who was at various points the prot?g? and lover of Diaghilev. 
Both Monday and Tuesday saw performances at the Alexandriinsky Theater of a trio of Neumeier ballets devoted to Nijinsky: “Le Pavillon d’Armide,” “Vaslav” and “Le Sacre.” Local audiences were the first outside Hamburg to see “Le Pavillon d’Armide,” which premiered there earlier this year.
Fittingly, “Le Pavillon d’Armide” was the title of the first ballet performed by the Ballets Russes one hundred years ago. Neumeier was however quick to explain that his latest production is not an attempt to recreate the original ballet, but a completely new version.
“It is a lost work,” the choreographer said of Fokin’s forgotten work, which was choreographed to a score by Nikolai Tcherepnin. “There is no complete recording of ‘Le Pavillon d’Armide.’”
Neumeier’s ballet does, however, take its inspiration from the original, in which a young man shelters from a storm in a pavilion, where a tapestry of the enchantress Armide hangs. In his dreams, the young man is transported to the world of Armide and falls in love with her. When he awakes, he finds himself back in the pavilion — holding Armide’s scarf.
“I have tried to combine the essential idea of the story — spending a night in a strange place, with a picture representative of another time, and dreaming oneself into this time,” said Neumeier. 
Neumeier’s production takes as its starting point an event from the life of Nijinsky. The dancer, who suffered from severe mental health problems later in life, arrives at a Swiss sanatorium with his wife, only to find Benois’ painting of Armide’s garden hanging in his room. 
“This, as in the original ballet, makes the main character, Nijinsky, go into a series of memories,” said Neumeier. “Characters from the past appear and reappear; fragments of his colleagues, like Tamara Karsavina, become part of this dream.” 
The unstable mental state of the ballet’s hero was perfectly captured by the nervous, jerky, almost involuntary movements of the principal dancer, Otto Bubenicek, which contrasted with the fluid, dreamlike quality of the figures from his past, whose costumes and even, in parts, choreography recreated the original ballet, in which Nijinsky had danced as a young man.
“Vaslav,” the second ballet performed, was the first ballet written by Neumeier to be devoted to the life and work of Nijinsky. Created in 1979, the ballet is set to music by J. S. Bach, and depicts a scene described by Nijinsky’s wife in which the choreographer listened to Bach being played on a grand piano and began to improvise to the music.
The final ballet performed Monday and Tuesday was “Le Sacre,” which takes its name and score from Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” (“Le Sacre du Printemps”). The 1913 premiere of the original ballet in Paris, as part of the Russian Seasons, went down in history for causing a near riot. Members of the audience, shocked by the discordant music and violent, graceless choreography, hissed and booed so loudly that the dancers could not hear the music. Diaghilev, who was far from averse to a succes de scandale, was reportedly delighted, and “The Rite of Spring” remained one of his favorite ballets.
St. Petersburg audiences on Tuesday proved far more receptive to Neumeier’s ballet, which premiered in 1972, giving the choreographer an extended standing ovation and prompting numerous curtain calls.
Tuesday also saw a concert at the Shostakovich Philharmonic titled “Homage to Diaghilev,” featuring arias and duets from Russian operas connected with the Russian Seasons, including those by Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Borodin.
Those who missed the beginning of the festivities should not despair, however, as the festival has plenty more to offer, including a plethora of art exhibitions. Two opened at the State Hermitage museum on Wednesday: “Dance. For the centenary of Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons,” showcasing portrayals of dance from the turn of the 20th century, including works by Degas and Matisse, and “George Kolbe: Drawings in Blue Ink,” comprising drawings of female figures in motion by the German sculptor Kolbe, who was fascinated by the Ballets Russes and sketched both Nijinsky and Karsavina in his studio. 
A third installation, titled: “Diaghilev. Beginning,” which opened Thursday at the Russian Museum, focuses on Diaghilev’s early projects, such as a vast, all-encompassing portrait exhibition of historical Russian figures organized by Diaghilev at St. Petersburg’s Tauride Palace in 1905, as well as portraits of the impresario himself. 
Two more exhibitions devoted to the Silver Age of Russian culture are due to open this week as part of the festival. “Le Spectre de la Danse. A Century Later,” which opens Friday at the Samoilov apartment museum, will showcase drawings of legendary ballet dancers by the contemporary graphic artist Alla Buryakova, including a series devoted to Nijinsky, while the Russian Ethnography museum will host an exhibition titled “Inspired by the Silver Age” showcasing artifacts and costumes from the collection of the city’s Theatrical and Musical Arts museum, as well as contemporary jewelry and porcelain inspired by the period. 
On Friday, students of the city’s Vaganova Ballet Academy will give a concert at the Hermitage Theater featuring choreographic miniatures and excerpts of ballets by Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and other composers. The dance academy, then known as the Imperial Theatrical School, trained many of the dancers and choreographers who went on to star in the Ballets Russes.
Also Friday, St. Petersburg State University will host a conference focusing on Diaghilev, the World of Art movement and Ballets Russes, to be continued the following day at the St. Petersburg House of Music. 
The week of festivities ends Monday with a gala concert by ballet stars from all around the world at the Alexandriinsky Theater. The program includes Russian choreographer Alexei Ratmansky’s ballet “Russian Seasons” performed by Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet. There will not be any shortage of homegrown talent, however, with performances by the Mariinsky’s Uliana Lopatkina, Diana Vishneva, Irma Nioradze and many others. 
The festival’s organizers hope to make it a biennial event, ensuring the legacy of Diaghilev would return to the city in 2011 and for many years to come.

Both exhibitions at the Hermitage run through Jan. 17, 2010.
“Diaghilev. Beginning.” runs through March 10, 2010.
www.hermitagemuseum.org, www.rusmuseun.ru.  
“Le Spectre de la Danse. A Century Later” runs through Jan. 31, 2010.
For a full festival program, visit: www.diaghilev-ps.ru



By Shura Collinson
Staff writer
The biggest international arts festival St. Petersburg has seen for some time got underway at the beginning of this week.
One hundred years ago, the talented Russian impresario and dedicated patron of the arts Sergei Diaghilev took Europe by storm with his Russian Seasons — a combination of Russian ballet, art and music presented to audiences in Paris, London and other European capitals. The centenary is being celebrated with the Diaghilev P.S. festival, a suitably diverse showcase of arts and culture, including ballet performances, concerts, art exhibitions and conferences.
“The main aim of the festival is to bring Diaghilev’s name back to Russia,” said Natalya Metelitsa, the festival’s artistic director. 
Diaghilev’s name is closely connected with that of St. Petersburg. As a young man, he moved to the imperial capital from Perm to study law, but soon began taking music lessons at the St. Petersburg Conservatory as well as at the university. He was one of the founders of the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) movement, as well as the publisher of the eponymous journal at the turn of the 20th century. 
Diaghilev began his self-declared mission of taking Russian culture abroad in 1906 with an exhibition of Russian art in Paris. The next year he returned to Paris with concerts of Russian music, followed a year later with Russian opera. The Ballets Russes premiered in the French capital the next year with a dance troupe that included Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina.
During his lifetime, Diaghilev brought together an unprecedented wealth of musicians, dancers and artists. Ballet scores and operas were composed for him by Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Debussy, Ravel, Satie and Richard Strauss, while choreographers included Mikhail Fokin, Nijinsky and later, George Balanchine. Exotic, evocative sets were designed by the leading artists of the time, including Nikolai Roerich, Alexander Benois, Leon Bakst and later Pablo Picasso. Diaghilev’s quest to break with tradition and establish original directions in the field of ballet influenced its development for decades after his death in 1929.
The Diaghilev. P.S. festival opened on Monday evening with performances by the Hamburg Ballet, whose director and chief choreographer John Neumeier is one of the festival’s key figures. 
“Since I was 11 years old, I have been fascinated by this very important era of Diaghilev and by dance, which I always knew I was called to,” Neumeier said at a press conference devoted to the festival on Monday. “This era, which produced so many important new scores written for ballet — probably the most since the 18th century — was a very important time for me.”
Much of the U.S.-born choreographer’s work has focused on the life and work of the great dancer and choreographer Nijinsky, who was at various points the prot?g? and lover of Diaghilev. 
Both Monday and Tuesday saw performances at the Alexandriinsky Theater of a trio of Neumeier ballets devoted to Nijinsky: “Le Pavillon d’Armide,” “Vaslav” and “Le Sacre.” Local audiences were the first outside Hamburg to see “Le Pavillon d’Armide,” which premiered there earlier this year.
Fittingly, “Le Pavillon d’Armide” was the title of the first ballet performed by the Ballets Russes one hundred years ago. Neumeier was however quick to explain that his latest production is not an attempt to recreate the original ballet, but a completely new version.
“It is a lost work,” the choreographer said of Fokin’s forgotten work, which was choreographed to a score by Nikolai Tcherepnin. “There is no complete recording of ‘Le Pavillon d’Armide.’”
Neumeier’s ballet does, however, take its inspiration from the original, in which a young man shelters from a storm in a pavilion, where a tapestry of the enchantress Armide hangs. In his dreams, the young man is transported to the world of Armide and falls in love with her. When he awakes, he finds himself back in the pavilion — holding Armide’s scarf.
“I have tried to combine the essential idea of the story — spending a night in a strange place, with a picture representative of another time, and dreaming oneself into this time,” said Neumeier. 
Neumeier’s production takes as its starting point an event from the life of Nijinsky. The dancer, who suffered from severe mental health problems later in life, arrives at a Swiss sanatorium with his wife, only to find Benois’ painting of Armide’s garden hanging in his room. 
“This, as in the original ballet, makes the main character, Nijinsky, go into a series of memories,” said Neumeier. “Characters from the past appear and reappear; fragments of his colleagues, like Tamara Karsavina, become part of this dream.” 
The unstable mental state of the ballet’s hero was perfectly captured by the nervous, jerky, almost involuntary movements of the principal dancer, Otto Bubenicek, which contrasted with the fluid, dreamlike quality of the figures from his past, whose costumes and even, in parts, choreography recreated the original ballet, in which Nijinsky had danced as a young man.
“Vaslav,” the second ballet performed, was the first ballet written by Neumeier to be devoted to the life and work of Nijinsky. Created in 1979, the ballet is set to music by J. S. Bach, and depicts a scene described by Nijinsky’s wife in which the choreographer listened to Bach being played on a grand piano and began to improvise to the music.
The final ballet performed Monday and Tuesday was “Le Sacre,” which takes its name and score from Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” (“Le Sacre du Printemps”). The 1913 premiere of the original ballet in Paris, as part of the Russian Seasons, went down in history for causing a near riot. Members of the audience, shocked by the discordant music and violent, graceless choreography, hissed and booed so loudly that the dancers could not hear the music. Diaghilev, who was far from averse to a succes de scandale, was reportedly delighted, and “The Rite of Spring” remained one of his favorite ballets.
St. Petersburg audiences on Tuesday proved far more receptive to Neumeier’s ballet, which premiered in 1972, giving the choreographer an extended standing ovation and prompting numerous curtain calls.
Tuesday also saw a concert at the Shostakovich Philharmonic titled “Homage to Diaghilev,” featuring arias and duets from Russian operas connected with the Russian Seasons, including those by Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Borodin.
Those who missed the beginning of the festivities should not despair, however, as the festival has plenty more to offer, including a plethora of art exhibitions. Two opened at the State Hermitage museum on Wednesday: “Dance. For the centenary of Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons,” showcasing portrayals of dance from the turn of the 20th century, including works by Degas and Matisse, and “George Kolbe: Drawings in Blue Ink,” comprising drawings of female figures in motion by the German sculptor Kolbe, who was fascinated by the Ballets Russes and sketched both Nijinsky and Karsavina in his studio. 
A third installation, titled: “Diaghilev. Beginning,” which opened Thursday at the Russian Museum, focuses on Diaghilev’s early projects, such as a vast, all-encompassing portrait exhibition of historical Russian figures organized by Diaghilev at St. Petersburg’s Tauride Palace in 1905, as well as portraits of the impresario himself. 
Two more exhibitions devoted to the Silver Age of Russian culture are due to open this week as part of the festival. “Le Spectre de la Danse. A Century Later,” which opens Friday at the Samoilov apartment museum, will showcase drawings of legendary ballet dancers by the contemporary graphic artist Alla Buryakova, including a series devoted to Nijinsky, while the Russian Ethnography museum will host an exhibition titled “Inspired by the Silver Age” showcasing artifacts and costumes from the collection of the city’s Theatrical and Musical Arts museum, as well as contemporary jewelry and porcelain inspired by the period. 
On Friday, students of the city’s Vaganova Ballet Academy will give a concert at the Hermitage Theater featuring choreographic miniatures and excerpts of ballets by Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and other composers. The dance academy, then known as the Imperial Theatrical School, trained many of the dancers and choreographers who went on to star in the Ballets Russes.
Also Friday, St. Petersburg State University will host a conference focusing on Diaghilev, the World of Art movement and Ballets Russes, to be continued the following day at the St. Petersburg House of Music. 
The week of festivities ends Monday with a gala concert by ballet stars from all around the world at the Alexandriinsky Theater. The program includes Russian choreographer Alexei Ratmansky’s ballet “Russian Seasons” performed by Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet. There will not be any shortage of homegrown talent, however, with performances by the Mariinsky’s Uliana Lopatkina, Diana Vishneva, Irma Nioradze and many others. 
The festival’s organizers hope to make it a biennial event, ensuring the legacy of Diaghilev would return to the city in 2011 and for many years to come.

Both exhibitions at the Hermitage run through Jan. 17, 2010.
“Diaghilev. Beginning.” runs through March 10, 2010.
www.hermitagemuseum.org, www.rusmuseun.ru.  
“Le Spectre de la Danse. A Century Later” runs through Jan. 31, 2010.
For a full festival program, visit: www.diaghilev-ps.ru

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
TEXT: A new underground music club was launched Thursday, having failed on open on Saturday due to a severed power cable. Called <strong>Ulitka Na Sklone</strong> (The Snail on the Slope), after Arkady and Boris Strugatskys’ 1966 sci-fi novel, the venue will be orientated toward live music and ignore trendy styles. 
“The concept is simple; we are working for ordinary people, we’re not orientated toward hipsters and do not follow fashion,” the club’s manager, who asked to be referred to as Ulitka in the press, said by phone on Thursday.
“We will host concerts by good, simple rock bands and will welcome diverse subcultures, from psychobilly fans to goths, industrial music fans to anime fans — everything that ‘trendy’ young people don’t pay much attention to.”
Ulitka Na Sklone is located in the infamous Maly Gostiny Dvor building (9 Dumskaya Ulitsa), the home of Datscha, Belgrad and Fidel, in the rooms formerly occupied by the ill-fated Second Floor bar. As there is no room on the first floor, the new club occupies rooms on the second and the third floor.
“We want to be good to musicians, so we have directed all our energy and savings into buying a good PA system,” Ulitka said, adding that the new club is in the tradition of Zoccolo and the now-defunct Moloko club, known for their underground attitudes and attention to musicians.
With the concert hall capable of holding 150 to 200 fans, Ulitka Na Sklone will only sell 200 tickets for each show to ensure the venue is comfortable for the public as well. The club’s website, www.ulitkaclub.ru, urges fans to buy tickets in advance to guarantee admission.
If it follows this policy, the club, which is located between Datscha and Belgrad, will offer a refreshing difference from neighboring venues, which continue to admit customers even if there is no space to sit or even stand. Tickets will cost 150-200 rubles for shows by local bands and up to 700 rubles for shows by better-known international acts.
Prices in the club’s two bars will be reasonably low, 60 rubles for a vodka and 80 rubles for a beer, according to the management. The club will be open daily, from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., with concerts starting at 8 p.m.
The venue has been totally redesigned and bears no resemblance to Second Floor.
Forthcoming concerts include the Berlin-based electro-industrial band <strong>Gothika</strong> (Sunday), the Petrozavodsk-based Karelian folk band <strong>Myllarit</strong> (Oct. 24) and the Bayern, Germany-based electro-industrial-gothic band <strong>Das Ich</strong> (Oct. 31).
Another club, called <strong>Tantsy</strong> (Dances), headed by Denis Rubin, the former art director of now-defunct clubs Platforma and Sochi, will open with live concerts and DJ sets at 49 Gorokhovaya Ulitsa  at 8 p.m. on Friday. 
<strong>Griboyedov</strong>, one of the city’s oldest and most respectable local clubs, will celebrate its 13th anniversary with an all-nighter featuring Markscheider Kunst, Tequilajazzz and 2 Samaliota,at 8 p.m. on Sunday. The club is located in a bunker at 2A Voronezhskaya Ulitsa.

<em>— By Sergey Chernov</em>

TITLE: Flavors from Korea
AUTHOR: By Patricia Pluijmers
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The city’s third Festival of Korean Culture, titled Scent of Korea, opened Wednesday and runs through Sunday.
The Week of Korean Culture has been organized by the Consulate General of the Korean Republic in St. Petersburg, along with the Korean Youth Cultural and Educational Center in cooperation with the Russian-Korean society.
The festival includes a photo exhibition, “Russia through the eyes of Koreans and Korea through the eyes of Russians,” displaying photographs taken by Russian students during a visit to Korea, as well as the work of Korean artists who work in Moscow and St. Petersburg. 
The concept of the exhibition is that the distance between countries and the different languages people use to communicate are a reason to be curious about the countries’ respective cultures. The photos represent the curiosity (and sometimes surprise), admiration and respect of people from Russia and Korea for each other’s culture.
An exhibition and master class of traditional Korean paper art titled “Handy” offer visitors the chance to become acquainted with ancient Korean applied arts. The objects on display include women’s accessories, jewelry boxes, lamps, paintings and furniture.
On Friday, Yan Ming, a graduate of the Sociology Faculty of St. Petersburg State University, will give a lecture on traditional Korean dance and folk arts, complete with corresponding demonstrations. The Korean people carefully preserve their traditional dance and folk arts, some of which are traditionally part of Korean village theatre, and continue to surprise and impress modern viewers with their elegant subtlety of line and energy.
Another lecture given Friday as part of the festival focuses on the Korean Hangul script, which was created in 1444 and is absolutely unique. 
The festival will close Sunday with a musical performance titled “One destiny.” Using traditional musical instruments and dance, the play tells the tragic story of Russian Koreans: The struggle for liberation of Koreans against the Japanese, the settlement of refugees in Russia’s Far East, the deportation to Central Asia and the years after World War II when a new wave of refugees settled in CIS countries. 
“Russia through the eyes of Koreans and Korea through the eyes of Russians” runs from Wednesday through Sunday in the exhibition hall of the Mikhail Shemiakin Fund, Sadovaya Ulitsa 3.
The “Handy” exhibition runs from Wednesday to Sunday at the exhibition hall of the national library at Moskovsky Prospekt 165. The master class will be held in the same place on Friday from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
The dance and folk arts lecture takes place on Friday from 5 p.m. to 6.30 p.m. in the conference hall of the national library.
The Hangul lecture will take place at 2 p.m. Friday in the House of Friendship at Liteiny Prospekt 60. 
The musical performance will take place at 6 p.m. Sunday in the Na Mokhovoi Theater, Mokhovaya Ulitsa 35.

TITLE: Finnish comfort
AUTHOR: By Alex Dizer
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Fransmanni is a French-style restaurant situated behind a small park in the Sokos Hotel Olympic Garden, about five minutes walk from Tekhnologichesky Institut metro station. While the entrance to the hotel has harsh strip lighting of the kind found in offices, the restaurant itself is a candlelit, homely haven.
Despite the size of the restaurant, which can easily seat over 100 customers, Fransmanni feels cozy. The high ceilings do not detract from the country house atmosphere, whilst the real log fire adds a warming, ski lodge feel to the deceptively large establishment. Accessories such as brass pots and pans and aged black and white photos add to the rustic feel, while a rocking horse conjures up images of kids having been sent upstairs to bed while the adults enjoy a dinner party.
The servers, though they took too long to meet us at the entrance, were afterwards very attentive, serving quickly and making every effort to speak English. The menus were made from printer paper, which was more reminiscent of the hotel lobby office lighting than reflective of the warm atmosphere of the restaurant, but the waiters assured that this was just a temporary measure, as the restaurant has recently changed its menu. The menus themselves were very user-friendly, complete with suggestions for alcoholic accompaniment for each dish. 
The onion soup (260 rubles, $9) was very flavorsome but overly sweetened and lacking cheese, which slightly spoiled its usual warming flavor. The country-style French treats (450 rubles, $15.50) were all very enjoyable, except for the salmon and dill served on raisin bread, which lacked any subtlety. This was more than made up for however by the fantastic veal, which was pink and tender, and by the eggplant and bacon terrine, which achieved a perfect combination between the delicate bitter taste of the eggplant and the strong smoky flavors of the bacon. 
It was initially hard to believe the waiter when he said that Fransmanni was part of a Finnish chain, as the restaurant seems to have a very individual, personal feel to it. But on closer inspection, a certain clash in the interior design is the sign of a large chain’s eagerness to please everyone. The white brick pizza oven was juxtaposed with the wood stacked up either side of the fireplace, as if a budding lumberjack had been cutting away in the mountains. However, the slightly deceptive decor did little to spoil the evening, as customers drank whisky on the sofa by the fire and admired the quaint rocking horse and rustic memorabilia. 
The grilled steak with garlic (890 rubles, $30.50) was fantastically tender and well seasoned. The knife cut through it like soft butter, and the meat melted in the mouth with a flavor as intense but not as sharp as good beef stock. 
The mutton loin a la Valence (780 rubles, $26.50) was also very tender, with the meat falling effortlessly off the bone. The forceful taste of the meat and bone fat was well paired with the equally strong flavors of the Burgundy, champignons and tomato sauce. The textures combined into a rich but well-balanced melange that lingered, left and returned like a half forgotten memory. 
Vegetarian options are also available, including salads, pasta dishes and soups, but the main focus of the menu is for animal lovers of a different kind, including a massive grill for two people for only 1,400 rubles ($48.)
The music started off subtly, but strayed into Rhianna’s “Umbrella” by the end of the meal, slightly undermining the personal feeling that Fransmanni successfully creates, and revealing a glimpse of the more tacky chain establishments. Possibly the restaurant had run out of music and reverted to the weekend playlist — Fransmanni gets busy and boisterous at the end of the week, according to our informative waiter. 
The desserts were slightly disappointing after such fantastic main courses. The crust of the creme brulee (180 rubles, $6) was not hard enough, allowing the spoon to sink through to cream that was too runny and more akin to milk. The warm chocolate cake (240 rubles, $8) was little better, as it was dry, crumbly and refused to disappear, despite valiant chewing efforts. 
The desserts did not however detract from an overall very enjoyable evening. The bill came with a feedback sheet with ratings for service and quality of food ranging from a frowning face to a smiley, which makes the customer feel that their opinion is valued, but also offers a final revealing flash of larger chain habits.

TITLE: Gunmen, Bomber Hit 4 Sites in Pakistan
AUTHOR: By Babar Dogar and Munir Ahmad
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LAHORE, Pakistan — Teams of gunmen attacked three law enforcement facilities across the eastern city of Lahore on Thursday, paralyzing Pakistan’s cultural capital, while a car bomb devastated a northwest police station, killing a total of 38 people in an escalating wave of terror in this nuclear-armed U.S. ally.
Another bombing in the northwestern city of Peshawar later in the day wounded five people, further rattling the country.
The bloodshed, aimed at scuttling a planned offensive into the militant heartland along the Afghan border, highlights the militants’ ability to carry out sophisticated strikes on heavily fortified facilities and exposes the failure of the intelligence agencies to adequately infiltrate the extremist cells.
No group immediately claimed responsibility, though suspicion fell on the Pakistani Taliban who have claimed other recent strikes. The attacks Thursday also were the latest to underscore the growing threat to Punjab, the province next to India where the Taliban are believed to have made inroads and linked up with local insurgent outfits.
President Asif Ali Zardari said the bloodshed that has engulfed the nation over the past 11 days would not deter the government from its mission to eliminate the violent extremists, according to a statement on the state-run news agency.
“The enemy has started a guerrilla war,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik said. “The whole nation should be united against these handful of terrorists, and God willing we will defeat them.”
The wave of violence practically shut down daily life in Lahore. All government offices were ordered shut, the roads were nearly empty, major markets did not open and stores that had been open pulled down their shutters.
The assaults began just after 9 a.m. when a group of gunmen attacked a building housing the Federal Investigation Agency, a law enforcement branch that deals with matters ranging from immigration to terrorism.
“We are under attack,” said Mohammad Riaz, an FIA employee reached inside the building via phone by The Associated Press during the assault. “I can see two people hit, but I do not know who they are.”
The attack lasted about 1 1/2 hours and ended with the death of two attackers, four government employees and a bystander, senior government official Sajjad Bhutta said. Senior police official Chaudhry Shafiq said one of the dead wore a jacket bearing explosives.
Soon after, a second band of gunman raided a police training school in Manawan on the outskirts of the city in a swift attack that killed nine police officers and four militants, according to police and hospital officials. One of the gunmen was killed by police at the compound and the other three blew themselves up.
The facility was hit earlier this year in an attack that sparked an eight-hour standoff with the army that left 12 people dead.
A third team of at least eight gunmen scaled the back wall of an elite police commando training center not far from the airport and attacked the facility, Lahore police chief Pervez Rathore said.
A family barricaded itself in a room in their house, while the attackers stood on the roof, shooting at security forces and throwing grenades, said Lt. Gen. Shafqat Ahmad, the top military official in Lahore.
Two attackers were slain in the gunbattle and three blew themselves up, he said. One police nursing assistant and a civilian also died in the attack, he said.
Television footage showed helicopters in the air over one of the police facilities and paramilitary forces with rifles and bulletproof vests taking cover behind trees outside a wall surrounding the compound. Rana Sanaullah, provincial law minister of Punjab province, said police were trying to take some of the attackers alive so they could get information from them about their militant networks.
Officials have warned that Taliban fighters close to the border are increasingly joining forces with Punjabi militants spread out across the country and foreign al-Qaida operatives, dramatically increasing the dangers to Pakistan. Punjab is Pakistan’s most populous and powerful province, and the Taliban claimed recently that they were activating cells there and elsewhere in the country for assaults.
An official at the provincial Punjab government’s main intelligence agency said they had precise information about expected attacks on security targets and alerted police this week, but the assailants still managed to strike. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.

TITLE: Italy Denies Paying Off Taliban In Afghanistan
AUTHOR: By Alessandra Rizzo
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ROME — The Italian government on Thursday denied a newspaper report that its secret services paid the Taliban thousands of dollars to keep an area in Afghanistan controlled by the Italians safe and did not tell allies about the payments.
Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s office called the report in the Times of London “completely groundless.” The defense minister denounced it as “rubbish” and said he wanted to sue the newspaper.
The Times reported that Italy had paid “tens of thousands of dollars” to Taliban commanders and warlords in the Surobi district, east of the capital, Kabul. The newspaper cites Western military officials, including high-ranking officers at NATO, speaking on condition of anonymity.
It accused Rome of failing to inform its allies, misleading the French, who took over the Surobi district in mid-2008, into thinking the area was quiet and safe. Shortly thereafter, the French contingent was hit with an ambush that killed 10 soldiers and had big political repercussions back in Paris.
“The Berlusconi government has never authorized nor has it allowed any form of payment toward members of the Taliban insurgence,” a statement by the premier’s office said. It says it does not know of any such payment by the previous government. Berlusconi won elections in April 2008, replacing a center-left government headed by Romano Prodi.
French Defense Ministry spokesman Christophe Prazuck said he had “no information to confirm what has been written in the Times” and stressed that troops in the region share information and enjoy mutual trust.
NATO spokesman James Appathurai refused to comment on the report.
The Aug. 18, 2008 ambush of the French in a mountain pass in the Surobi district was the biggest single combat loss for international forces in Afghanistan in more than three years. The attack, which killed 10 French troops and injured 21 others, shocked the French public. French officialdom came under heavy pressure to explain how its troops got caught in such a well-planned and unusually bloody ambush.
The statement by Berlusconi’s office noted that in the first half of last year the Italian contingent suffered several attacks, including in the Surobi district where one soldier was killed in February 2008.
It said at the time the Italian contingent was praised by the ISAF, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. It quoted the former U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, as saying the Italians had achieved results in the area, especially in the construction of wells, bridges, schools and through aid to the agriculture.
Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa said Thursday that the Times report was “absolutely rubbish and we take it as such.” He said he had asked his lawyers to look into a possible lawsuit.

TITLE: Da Vinci Fingerprint Reveals $150M Artwork
AUTHOR: By Rob Gillies
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TORONTO — Mona Lisa has something new to smile about.
A portrait of a young woman thought to be created by a 19th century German artist and sold two years ago for about $19,000 is now being attributed by art experts to Leonardo da Vinci and valued at more than $150 million.
The unsigned chalk, ink and pencil drawing, known as “La Bella Principessa,” was matched to Leonardo via a technique more suited to a crime lab than an art studio — a fingerprint and palm print found on the 13 1/2-inch-by-10-inch work.
Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, said the print of an index or middle finger matched a fingerprint found on Leonardo’s “St. Jerome” in the Vatican.
Technical, stylistic and material composition evidence — including carbon dating — had art experts believing as early as last year that they had found another work by the creator of the “Mona Lisa.”
The discovery of the fingerprint has them convinced the work was by Leonardo, whose myth and mystery already put him at the center of such best-sellers as “The Da Vinci Code” and “The Lost Symbol.”
Biro examined multispectral images of the drawing taken by the Lumiere Technology laboratory in Paris, which used a special digital scanner to show successive layers of the work.
“Leonardo used his hands liberally and frequently as part of his painting technique. His fingerprints are found on many of his works,” Biro said. “I was able to make use of multispectral images to make a little smudge a very readable fingerprint.”
Alessandro Vezzosi, director of a museum dedicated to Leonardo in the artist’s hometown of Vinci, Italy, said Wednesday he was “very happy” to hear about the fingerprint analysis, saying it confirmed his own conclusion that the portrait can be attributed to Leonardo with “reasonable certainty.”
“For me, it’s extraordinary there is confirmation” through the fingerprint, although “it’s not like I had any doubt,” he said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.
Even before the fingerprint discovery, Vezzosi said several experts agreed with his conclusion, which was based on “historical, artistic, stylistic (and) aesthetic” considerations.
Based on its style, the portrait has been dated to 1485-1490, placing it at a time when Leonardo (1452-1519) was living in Milan.
Canadian-born art collector Peter Silverman bought “La Bella Principessa” — or “The Beautiful Princess” — at the gallery in New York on behalf of an anonymous Swiss collector in 2007 for about $19,000.

TITLE: China Sentences 3 More to Death For Xinjiang Riot
AUTHOR: By Alexa Olesen
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING — China sentenced three more people to death on Thursday for murders that were committed during riots in the far western Xinjiang region in July, bringing to nine the number of people facing execution for the unrest.
Nearly 200 people were killed when Muslim Uighurs and members of China’s dominant Han ethnicity turned on one another in the streets of the regional capital, Urumqi. First, Uighurs assaulted random people in the overwhelmingly Han city. Days later, Han vigilantes retaliated in Uighur neighborhoods. It was the country’s worst communal violence in decades.
The official Xinhua News Agency said three new defendants were sentenced to death by the Urumqi Intermediate People’s Court and three others were sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve — a penalty usually commuted to life in prison.