SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1524 (86), Friday, November 6, 2009
**************************************************************************


TITLE: Red Tape Increasing Despite Promises
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — For being just a small strip of gray paper, a foreigner’s registration can become quite a bureaucratic nightmare — especially when you lose it.
This is what happened to Austrian businessman Alexander Schachner this summer. He left the country without handing in his registration. When he tried to re-register upon returning in August, his consultancy firm was fined 400,000 rubles ($13,700).
Apart from the hefty sum, Schachner said, the biggest hassle for him was the many hours he had to spend at police stations and with Federal Migration Service representatives.
“I was forced to fill out incredible amounts of paperwork. I sat with officers who seemed to have little understanding of what they were doing but said there was no way out for me. All for a tiny piece of missing paper. It was so bizarre,” he said in an interview last week.
Schachner challenged the fine with an official complaint, and the fine was waived after he received backing from the German Chamber of Commerce.
The registration hassle is just one facet of a bigger phenomenon felt by everyone in the country: Despite President Dmitry Medvedev’s latest pledges to fight for modernization, the country’s infamous bureaucracy continues to grow.
“This kind of modernization cannot take place in an economy overtaken by other processes, one that is infested with corruption and is ruled by an ineffective bureaucracy,” Medvedev told the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 5.
“A research historian once wrote that even as far back as the 18th century, the Russian government bureaucracy grew at the same pace as society, swallowing the society as it expanded. This is a well-known but highly unwanted scenario that must be avoided,” he said.
Schachner got off lucky. The Austrian had clearly violated a regulation that mandates employers to inform authorities whenever their foreign staff members leave the country for more than three working days.
The law, whose logic is not clear even to experts, was introduced back in 2007 and is causing an increasing number of headaches, especially to foreign employers.
“The rules are very strict, and there is no room to determine whether someone acted willfully or just negligently. Fines can be exorbitant for even small violations,” said Frank Schauff, CEO of the Association of European Business, a lobby group.
The registration rule was actually introduced to make life easier for expatriates by moving the obligation from landlords to employers, said Alexei Filippenkov, head of the Visa Delight agency, which helps companies navigate Russian bureaucracy. But at the same time, he said, the de-registration requirement was changed from visa expiry to every departure.
In another layer of red tape, an amendment to the law on limited liability companies required all such firms to re-register this summer. While the amendment’s rationale was to ease corporate acquisitions, its implementation resulted in long lines and angry company owners, who by law are required to present the registration personally in front of a tax inspector.
“And there is only one tax inspector for all of Moscow,” complained Ruslan Rajapov, owner of the Correa’s chain of cafes who was preparing to submit documents.
“I am planning to queue up outside the tax inspectorate at 4 a.m. in order to get that done in one day,” Rajapov said, speaking from his cell phone while waiting at a notary to get his paperwork ready.
He said he would have to repeat the process because the inspectorate accepts only one legal entity at a time and his company consists of more than one legal entity.
“This also creates a great opportunity to take bribes,” Rajapov said.
In a sign that bureaucratization is spreading in other areas as well, St. Petersburg State University decided last month that scientists seeking foreign grants or wishing to present or publish their work abroad needed to obtain permission from administrators.
After the decision was leaked on the Cogita.ru web site, worried scientists asked whether a new “iron curtain” would cut off the country’s academic community, already hit hard by the 1990s exodus of many of its brightest talent.
But the university denied that the decision would have any negative effect on international academic relations. Because the submissions will be done by deans, scientists’ work will not be affected, Igor Gorlinsky, a first vice rector of the university, said in e-mailed comments last week. Gorlinsky also said the university had simply clarified a rule that had been in place since 1999 and that conformed with federal law.
Yet spokespeople for both Moscow State University and the Russian Academy of Sciences told The Moscow Times that no comparable rule existed at either institution to their knowledge. “This would clearly result in worsening conditions for international research,” Moscow State University spokeswoman Olesya Bezler said.
Amid a growing media flap, St. Petersburg State University issued a statement Friday saying that the new rules would not apply to researchers in humanities and social sciences and only to those working with “dual-use technology,” nonmilitary techniques that could have military applications.

TITLE: Police Come Out In Force for Unity Day
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev trumpeted ethnic diversity during the People’s Unity Day holiday on Wednesday, as tens of thousands of police officers hit the streets of major cities to make sure that fights didn’t break out between rallying youths.
The only fight erupted in St. Petersburg, where several nationalists attacked a small group of anti-fascist activists who had unfolded a banner reading “Fascism kills.” Police detained several participants of the fight (see story, Page 3).
In previous years, nationalist young people left the government red-faced by marching through central Moscow while chanting racist slogans and raising their arms in Nazi-style salutes. This year, city authorities confined the nationalists to the Lyublino district in southeastern Moscow, where an estimated 7,000 marched peacefully.
People’s Unity Day was established by former President Vladimir Putin in 2005 to replace the Soviet Union’s biggest holiday, the Nov. 7 anniversary of the 1917 Revolution. The new holiday, which most Russians view as little more than a day off work or school, commemorates the liberation of Moscow from Polish invaders in 1612 by Prince Dmitry Pozharsky and Kuzma Minin.
Russian Orthodox believers also celebrate a religious feast Nov. 4 in honor of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God, which they believe helped Pozharsky in the 1612 victory.
Medvedev congratulated Russians on both holidays Wednesday while attending the opening of a chapel dedicated to Pozharsky in the Moscow region town of Suzdal.
Referring to the 1612 victory, Medvedev said, “I am sure that events of this kind … give us reason to believe that we are truly a united people capable of solving the greatest problems,” the Kremlin’s web site reported.
More than 40,000 police officers and soldiers were to be deployed nationwide to maintain order among the more than 203,000 people expected to rally for the holiday, Deputy Interior Minister Mikhail Sukhodolsky said in a statement Tuesday.
In Moscow, more than 6,000 police officers and soldiers patrolled 20 big rallies Wednesday, city police spokesman Maxim Kolosvetov told The St. Petersburg Times. He could not say how many people had participated in the rallies, saying the figure would only be available late Wednesday night.
The pro-Kremlin Nashi youth group appeared to stage the largest rally, with about 30,000 people attending its so-called “Russian March” on Naberezhnaya Tarasa Shevchenko, according to its web site, Nashi.su.
“Nov. 4 is the day when Russia remembers its great history. All those with a Russian passport, who know Russian, who study the laws of our country … are invited irrespective of ethnicity,” Nashi said in a statement ahead of the rally.
For the past four years, the nationalist Movement Against Illegal Immigration, or DPNI, has staged what it also called “Russian Marches” on Naberezhnaya Tarasa Shevchenko on Nov. 4. But this year, Nashi managed to ask City Hall first for the location, and DPNI received permission to rally in the Lyublino district.
About 7,000 DPNI supporters took part in this year’s march, the group said on its web site.
Leaders of Russia’s four state-recognized religions — Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, chief rabbi Berl Lazar, chief mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin and Moscow’s top Buddhist monk, Sanjai-lama — led a column of thousands of youth activists and military servicemen from Kazan Cathedral in Red Square to the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall, RIA-Novosti reported.
Before the march, the patriarch offered a divine liturgy in honor of the feast of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God at the cathedral. Afterward, he opened an Orthodox exhibition in the Manezh.
United Russia and its youth branch, Young Guard, gathered about 7,000 people for a pro-Kremlin rally titled “Go, Russia!” at Poklonnaya Gora in western Moscow, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported on its web site. “Go, Russia!” is the name of Medvedev’s recent article calling for Russia’s modernization.
Liberal Democratic Party supporters held a rally on Pushkin Square, while the Communist Party, which refused to recognize the holiday, said it would hold nationwide rallies Saturday, on the anniversary of the 1917 Revolution.
About half of the 2,000 activists from the pro-Kremlin youth group Young Russia and the Russian Union of Rural Youth who showed up on Triumfalnaya Ploshchad formed a pyramid on a platform, each holding a piece of paper with the name of a famous Russian or the date of a Russian military victory.
A rally participant, Vladimir Urazov, 20, said he had come to support United Russia.
“United Russia supports the youth,” Urazov said, eating steaming buckwheat porridge and meat from a plastic plate distributed for free by rally organizers.
Urazov said People’s Unity Day united Russia’s numerous nationalities and he supported it because he was “not a nationalist.”

TITLE: Medical Stocks Depleted on Fears of Increase in Swine Flu
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As the number of confirmed A H1N1 flu cases in St. Petersburg reached more than 150 people on Thursday and seasonal flu and cold viruses continued to spread, feverish purchasing of anti-flu medicine led to a deficit in local drugstores.
By Thursday, the majority of drugstores in the city had run out of the most popular Russian anti-virus medicine Arbidol, as well as Oksolinovaya anti-bacterial ointment. Protective surgical masks could be found in only a small number of the city’s drugstores.
The city’s drugstore directory service named a few stores in every district where at least one of those items could be found, but calls to those stores showed that they had fairly limited quantities of the medicine.
Yulia Sazhina, marketing director at the Doctor drugstore chain, said the chain was currently out of masks, adult Arbidol and Oksolinovaya ointment.
“We have only Arbidol for children left, and as for the other items, we have no information about any forthcoming deliveries of them yet,” Sazhina said on Thursday.
Calls to branches of Pharmacor, another popular pharmacy chain in the city, also showed that a number of drugstores had run out of adult Arbidol, Oksolinovaya and masks, while many more had run out of masks but not medicine.
Natalya Dukhonchenko, head of Pharmacor’s PR service, said the company’s management had declined to comment Thursday on the situation regarding anti-flu medicine and masks, and future deliveries of the items at the chain. 
The situation has caused concern among some of the city’s population, including elderly people and mothers. A number of people could be seen in the city’s pharmacies asking for masks and Arbidol.
“I wanted to buy some Arbidol just in case, but when I could not find it or masks in at least five drugstores, I got seriously worried,” said Alina Panfilova, 41, the mother of three children. “I began to feel really vulnerable, especially regarding the children, and I felt like buying three times more of the medicine if I find it,” she said.
Yevgeniya Semyonova, spokeswoman for the city’s Health Committee, said that reports of a lack of masks and Arbidol in the city were exaggerated.
“According to our information, there are about 521,000 masks available in various drugstores in the city, and distributors are ready to deliver a further 200,000 masks,” Semyonova said.
“Besides, if in the evening they say in the pharmacies that there are no masks, it doesn’t mean that they didn’t have masks in the morning.  It just means they have all been sold very quickly,” she said.
A representative of a Nevis pharmacy branch said that in the space of four hours on Tuesday, the store had sold all 600 masks that it had. By Thursday, the store still had no masks.
Semyonova said that “people should not panic about the masks,” and that if they can’t find them anywhere, they can make them themselves.
The committee official also said that the city’s drugstores currently have about 10,000 packs of Arbidol.
The population of St. Petersburg is about five million people.
Doctors also advise people to have flu vaccinations, which are the best protection against the flu, Semyonova said, adding that vaccinations would continue until at least the middle of November.
If the situation in the city gets worse, the city has prepared 20,000 extra hospital beds, Semyonova said. Final-year medical students may also be recruited to help patients if necessary, she said. The city’s hospitals also have stores of medicine for treatment of A H1N1, she said.
According to data from the city’s Russian Consumer Rights Watchdog (Rospotrebnadzor), during the week from Oct. 26 through Nov. 1, the weekly rate of colds viruses in the city exceeded the norm by 20 percent — by 15.4 percent among adults, and 93.2 percent among children between seven and 14 years old, Fontanka reported.
A number of classes at various schools and kindergartens were subsequently placed in quarantine.
Rospotrebnadzor said that by Thursday afternoon, the number of swine flu cases in St. Petersburg was 160 people. No deaths from the disease have been registered in the city, Interfax reported.
Two schools and an orphanage were closed due to cases of A H1N1. At least nine students of St. Petersburg’s Civil Aviation University contracted A H1N1 and were taken to the city’s Botkin Hospital.  Another 47 students of the university were hospitalized with symptoms of the cold virus. The university suspended classes until Nov. 12 to stop the disease spreading.
Interfax reported that 642,728 people have been vaccinated against seasonal flu, which is 64.7 percent of the plan. At least 156,600 children have also been vaccinated with the Grippol Plus vaccine, the news agency reported.
Rospotrebnadzor advised city residents not to go to countries with an epidemiological situation during the epidemic, to have vaccinations, wear masks and wash their hands well.
Veronika Skvortsova, deputy head of the Russian Health and Social Development Ministry, said that “masks are the most effective protection against A H1N1 flu on the metro and on public transport,” Interfax reported.
In Russia’s Zabaikalsky region, where eight people have died from the A H1N1 virus, masks have become part of everyday life. The Zabaikalsky regional police have been given orders to fine anyone not wearing a mask or otherwise violating sanitary and epidemiological rules.  The measure is particularly directed at catering staff, police, railway employees and other people providing services to the population, Vzglyad newspaper reported.
Pharmacy companies have hurried to take advantage of the situation, raising the price for anti-virus medicines twofold, and the price for masks fivefold in the Zabaikalsky region, Novye Izvestiya daily reported. At the beginning of this week, Russia had registered about 2,000 cases of A H1N1 flu, 1,600 of whom have already recovered, Novye Izvestiya reported.
A serious situation has been registered in Ukraine, where 95 people had died by Thursday from pneumonia caused by A H1N1, Urkbusiness reported.
Drugstores in the Ukrainian capital Kiev also had shortages of masks and anti-flu medicine.
The number of A/H1N1 cases around the world reached 440,000 people by the beginning of this week. At least 5,700 of them died, Novye Izvestiya said.

TITLE: Two Suspects in Killings Of Lawyer, Journalist Arrested
AUTHOR: By Lynn Berry
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Investigators said Thursday they have detained two suspects in the killings of a human rights lawyer and a journalist who were shot in central Moscow in January.
Stanislav Markelov, 34, and Anastasia Baburova, 25, were shot after leaving a news conference in a brazen attack by a lone gunman wearing a stocking-style mask.
Two suspects were detained this week, said Vladimir Markin, spokesman for federal investigators. He identified them as Yevgenia Khasis and Nikita Tikhonov, both Moscow natives in their 20s.
Investigators were still firming up their evidence against the man and woman, who would undergo psychiatric examinations, the spokesman said.
A city court was to rule Thursday on investigators’ request to hold the two suspects, city courts spokeswoman Anna Usachyova said.
No further information was immediately available about the pair or the roles they are accused of playing in the killings.
Russia has seen a string of contract-style killings of human rights workers and journalists in recent years. Few of the killings are ever solved. In the rare case when people suspected of taking part in a killing are brought to trial, the mastermind is rarely identified.
The news agency Interfax, citing law enforcement sources, reported that the suspects were former members of an extreme nationalist group.

TITLE: Antifascists Beaten, Then Arrested
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Four antifascist activists were detained by the police after being beaten by nationalists at a “Russian March” rally in St. Petersburg on People’s Unity Day, a recently introduced public holiday, on Wednesday. They were charged with disorderly conduct and forced to spend the night at a nearby police precinct before being taken to court and released at 2 p.m. on Thursday.
Six activists had unfurled a banner reading “Trash nationalism” and chanted an anti-fascist slogan at a nationalist rally at the remote Polyustrovsky Park in the city’s north when they were attacked by the nationalists. 
A Rosbalt video shows the antifascist protest being disrupted by a young man wearing a camouflage jacket, who ran at the protesters, kicking and punching an activist. More nationalist marchers joined the beating immediately, before the police had time to stop it. The whole antifascist protest only lasted about one minute.
“There were many of them; about five jumped on me alone,” Katya, an activist who asked for her last name to be withheld, said by phone Thursday. She described herself as “a member of the antifascist movement.”
“They surrounded us, and the first one jumped on and kicked our comrade, causing him to fall down, and the rest followed suit.”
The police, who soon intervened, detained four antifascist activists and one attacker. The detainees were brought to Police Precinct 66, where they were charged with disorderly conduct.
“We were accused of using profane language,” Katya said.
“I don’t know which of the words we used was the most profane — we were chanting “The fascists kill people, and the authorities cover it up” — perhaps ‘authorities’ [was the most profane word.] 
“But you could say that the slogan we were chanting came true, because the fascists jumped on us, and the authorities arrested us — even though we were standing there peacefully without going for anybody. We simply came and expressed our opinion about the gathering.”
On their way to court on Thursday, the detainees were taken to the Interior Ministry department to have their fingerprints taken. They refused because the procedure cannot by law be insisted upon for minor offences, according to Katya.
“They took offence, but didn’t beat us,” she said.
At the activists’ request, the judge transferred their cases to their respective local courts. The offense they were charged with is typically punished with a 500 to 1,000 ruble ($17 to $34) fine. However, offenders can alternatively be sentenced to up to 15 days in custody.
Organized by the Slavic Union, the “Russian March” drew around 250 activists from different nationalist groups, including extreme ones. Formed in 1999, the Slavic Union (Slavyansky Soyuz) describes itself as “national-socialist,” frequently abbreviates its name to “SS” and uses a swastika-like symbol as its emblem.
The People’s Unity Day holiday was introduced in 2005 as a replacement for the Great October Socialist Revolution Day (the Day of Accord and Reconciliation since 1996), formerly celebrated on Nov. 7. The new holiday marks a 1612 victory over the Poles.
From its inception, the holiday has been used by nationalists for holding “Russian Marches,” nationalist rallies held in a number of Russian cities. In St. Petersburg on Wednesday, the nationalists, unhindered by the police, chanted “Russia Is for Russians” and openly racist slogans.

TITLE: Poll: Generation Gap Exists in Russia, East Europe
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — Twenty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, a sharp generational schism has formed in how people in Europe’s former communist countries view the shift to democracy and capitalism, a survey has found.
People who were born shortly before or after the Berlin Wall disappeared were markedly more approving of the move to a multiparty political system and a market economy than older generations.
The survey conducted by The Pew Global Attitudes Project mirrored one carried out in 1991.
The new poll revealed an overall slip in approval of democracy and capitalism among most countries surveyed, with some countries like Bulgaria and Ukraine dropping sharply.
Despite the slip in approval, many more people surveyed in the latest poll expressed satisfaction with their lives than those asked in 1991.
In Poland, for instance, 44 percent said they were satisfied this year, compared with 12 percent in 1991. In other countries the change was less marked. In Bulgaria and Hungary, just 15 percent of people polled this year said they were satisfied, compared with 4 percent and 8 percent, respectively, in 1991.
Paradoxically, a majority of respondents in many countries that reflected this boost in satisfaction also said that people were worse off than under communism. In Ukraine 62 percent of those polled judged their people worse off. In Russia, 45 percent said people were worse off versus 33 percent who said they were better.
Only in the Czech Republic and Poland did a majority of respondents say the people were better off since the transition from communism.
Most of the countries polled revealed small differences in 1991 between generations in respondents’ satisfaction with life. For instance, 13 percent of Poles aged 18 to 29 in 1991 said they were satisfied with life versus 15 percent of those over 65.
By 2009, polls of most countries showed a split between the generations. Half of young Poles in the new survey said they were satisfied, versus only 29 percent of those over 65.
A similar generational gap was reflected in attitudes toward the shift from communism to capitalism and democracy. For instance, more than 60 percent of Russians aged 18 to 29 said they approved of the change to a multiparty system and to a market economy, while only 27 percent of those older than 60 approved of the shifts. A generational gap was reflected in all eight other countries polled.
The survey found a divergence among countries in how respondents view democratic principles. For instance, nearly two-thirds of Hungarians said freedom of speech was very important versus 37 percent of Russians. More than 60 percent of Bulgarians said honest elections were important, but only 39 percent of Lithuanians did.
The polls appear to illustrate a rise in nationalism in Russia. While only 26 percent of respondents in 1991 said Russia should be for Russians, 54 percent said the same in the recent poll. The two polls also saw a 10 percentage point rise to 47 percent of respondents who said it is natural for Russia to have an empire. Fifty-eight percent of Russians in the new poll agreed that it is a great misfortune that the Soviet Union no longer exists.
In other former communist countries, views on Russia’s current influence varied. Forty-six percent of Ukrainians and 45 percent of Bulgarians viewed Russian influence as good, compared with 18 percent in Poland and 15 percent in Hungary.
The latest survey was conducted Aug. 27 to Sept. 24 among 14,760 respondents in 14 countries, including Germany and 8 ex-communist countries in Europe.
The margin of error in the polls conducted in local languages varied between plus or minus 3.5 and 5 percentage points.

TITLE: Medvedev Goes After Gangsters
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev has signed a tough anti-gangster law under which so-called thieves-in-law, or traditionalist gangster leaders, could be jailed just for admitting their roles.
“We are talking about individuals who identify themselves with the criminal world and don’t hide this,” Medvedev said during talks with Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin in the Kremlin on Tuesday.
“As I understand it, mere involvement in the criminal community already constitutes a complete legally defined crime and is enough to bring such an individual to criminal punishment,” he said.
Tradition dictates that thieves-in-law never hide their status in the criminal world, including from law enforcement officials.
Medvedev said he had signed amendments to the Criminal Code that envisioned up to life in prison for gangster ringleaders and increased prison terms for people convicted of participating in organized crime.
Medvedev recently unveiled several other initiatives against organized crime, including banning jury trials for organized crime suspects and moving their trials away from the regions where the crimes were committed. These measures, the president argued, would shield judges and juries from pressure from gangster friends of the suspects.
Bastrykin praised the new amendments Tuesday, saying they would boost the effectiveness of law enforcement agencies. “Under this law, we will punish an individual only for his title, for his image, for his position of criminal leader [and] for taking such a status in the criminal hierarchy,” he said.
He said investigators also would be able to target gatherings of gangster leaders, a veiled reference to the funeral of legendary thief-in-law Vyacheslav Ivankov last month. Dozens of criminal bosses openly gathered in a Moscow cemetery in early October to pay their respects to Ivankov, who died from injuries sustained in a July shooting.

TITLE: Swedes Give Approval to Nord Stream Pipeline Construction
AUTHOR: By Niklas Magnusson
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: STOCKHOLM — Sweden became the second country to grant final approval for Gazprom’s Nord Stream natural- gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea, ending almost two years of Swedish opposition and wrangling over the energy project.
The country approved the 506-kilometer Swedish stretch of the 1,220-kilometer link that will pump gas from Russia to Germany, Zug, Switzerland-based Nord Stream and the government in Stockholm said Thursday.
Opposition to the project was widespread in Sweden, where the public, politicians, media and fishermen questioned its impact on fish breeding grounds and the environmental risks of laying pipes on a seabed littered with mines and chemical weapons dumped during two world wars. Russia’s motives behind the project were also questioned, including concerns that pipeline facilities may be used for espionage.
“The government has made tough demands to secure that the sensitive environment in the Baltic Sea isn’t jeopardized,” Swedish Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren said Thursday.
Denmark gave permission on Oct. 20 and Germany, Russia and Finland also have to give a go-ahead for the project on which construction is planned to start early next year. 
The venture, which also includes BASF SE’s Wintershall Holding and E.ON Ruhrgas, seeks to transport 55 billion cubic meters of gas a year when completed in 2012 and is designed to ease supplies from Russia to Western Europe by avoiding Ukraine.
“Nord Stream is aiming to obtain all required permits by the end of 2009,” the company said Thursday.

TITLE: H&M Opens With Big Ad Spend
AUTHOR: By Yelena Dombrova, 
Yelena Zborovskaya and 
Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: H&M retail chain has spent hundreds of thousands of euros promoting its first store in St. Petersburg. The advertising market has not seen campaigns on such a large scale for more than a year.
H&M opened its first store in the city on Thursday in premises occupying 2,300 square meters in Mega Dybenko retail and entertainment center. The retailer began advertising a month before the opening, using outdoor advertising including on the metro, on electronic boards and on the radio, said Yekaterina Prosvirkina, a representative of H&M in Russia. 
Fredrik Famm, head of H&M’s Russian operations, said that the Swedish company’s entry onto the local market had been accompanied by a large-scale and aggressive campaign, but declined to say how much the company had spent on it.
The retail giant bought space on 10 electronic boards in the city center, including on Nevsky Prospekt, Sennaya Ploshchad and Ploshchad Vosstaniya, said a representative of Trety Glaz company, to whom the advertising boards belong. Displaying a 20-second advertisement for 24 hours on one of the boards costs from $300 to $420, according to the company’s web site. It is a significant order, the Trety Glaz representative admitted, but declined to specify a sum. Other H&M contractors also declined to discuss the volume and cost of advertising contracts. 
The retailer also bought 5 x 12 meter spaces in prime locations on the city’s embankments, Leninsky Prospekt, Prospekt Slavy and the Obvodny Canal, said Vadim Ivanov, the head of the sales department at Poster agency.
Ads for the store have been put up in 500 spots belonging to the company Metronom in the metro, said a representative of Prospect Group, which is acting as an intermediary. The average cost of displaying an ad in 500 spaces in the metro is about one million rubles per month, according to public data from advertising agencies. 
Prosvirkina said that in Moscow, H&M occupied all the advertising space at Voikovskaya metro station, next to which the store is located, and the experience proved a success, so the company decided to place an emphasis on advertising in the St. Petersburg metro. 
Metro passengers are the company’s main target audience, said Vyacheslav Dobrin, the former top manager of a clothing retailer. His colleague estimated investment into the store at $4 million to $5 million. Expenses on an advertising campaign on the scale of H&M’s could amount to $200,000 to $400,000, he said, while before the crisis it would have cost $500,000 to one million dollars. Due to the crisis, outdoor advertising has become 30 percent cheaper, said the manager of a company operating on the market. He estimated that the retailer had spent several hundreds of thousands of euros on advertising in St. Petersburg.
H&M advertisements are noticeable around the city, and people would likely have to stand in line to enter the shop, said Irina Staroverova, a representative of Melon Fashion Group that includes the Zarina and Befree brands. She estimated the cost of a minimal campaign for a new store entering the market at several million rubles. During the past year, no one has conducted high profile campaigns, despite lower prices, said the head of the advertising department at a local bank. 
H&M has delivered a huge blow in just one month; there has not been such a major promotion campaign for 18 months or two years, said the senior manager of a chain of clothing stores. Before the crisis, Sela and Mango conducted campaigns for three to four months, but their budgets did not exceed $500,000, he said. 
H&M’s sales in Russia from Dec. 1, 2008 to Aug. 31, 2009 amounted to 243 million Swedish krona ($34.4 million.) This year, four H&M stores opened in Moscow, and the second St. Petersburg store is due to open in 2010 in the Stockmann Nevsky Center that is currently under construction on Ploshchad Vosstaniya. Famm said that H&M is concentrating on developing its brand in Russia’s two biggest cities for the time being.

TITLE: General Motors Ends Opel Talks, Surprises Russia
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: General Motors abruptly ended negotiations on the sale of its European unit, Opel, to a consortium of Magna and Sberbank, scuttling a deal that the Russian government hoped would help rescue its auto industry and further integrate its economy with the West.
The U.S. automaker’s board of directors voted late Tuesday in Detroit to scrap the sale, following seven months of heated negotiations in Europe and the United States.
The decision drew outrage in Germany, where many of Opel’s factories are located, after Chancellor Angela Merkel helped broker the deal for Magna and Sberbank to buy 55 percent in Opel and British unit Vauxhall for 500 million euros ($738 million).
The Russian government is “surprised” by the decision, said Dmitry Peskov, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s spokesman.
“The purchase was already approved by the Opel Trust, and now there is this board’s decision,” he said, adding that Magna, a Canadian auto parts maker, and state lender Sberbank would undertake a legal analysis of the situation.
Putin has personally supported the Canadian-Russian bid, saying in early June that the Opel deal “should be incorporated into the strategy” to develop domestic carmakers.
He has discussed the deal with Merkel several times and praised it during a July meeting in Moscow with the head of the influential IG Metall union, Berthold Huber.
“It’s a pleasant thing. … I hope it’s one of the first steps that will lead us to a real integration into the European economy,” Putin said after the September agreement.
GM’s announcement comes just a week before a key government meeting where a commission headed by First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov will present its proposals for reforming the Russian car industry.
Peskov said the commission had been considering the Opel purchase, but that the government already had a plan for the auto industry, some details of which Putin announced at a government meeting late Tuesday (Story, Page 5). The commission, led by Industry and Trade Minister Viktor Khristenko and Economic Development Minister Elvira Nabiullina, is scheduled to meet on Tuesday.
Reactions from other Russian officials ranged from relieved to angry that the U.S. government-controlled auto giant had backed out of the deal.
“We have so many problems with domestic auto producers. Their future should be our primary concern,” Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov told reporters in Nizhny Novgorod on Wednesday after an opening ceremony for a bridge.
The city’s GAZ plant, controlled by Oleg Deripaska, was long seen as the frontrunner among potential industrial partners for Opel in Russia. GAZ had said it was ready to produce Opel models on its production lines, currently used for the unprofitable Volga Siber.
Oleg Morozov, a first deputy speaker in the State Duma from the ruling United Russia party, called the decision a “political rather than economic” move.
“I’m inclined to suspect that this didn’t happen without direct or indirect [U.S.] participation, and the motivation is very simple — to keep Opel in the sphere of political and economic influence of American business and American politics,” he told Interfax.
Morozov’s remarks indicate that the corporate decision by the board may put the U.S. government, which owns 60 percent of General Motors after its bankruptcy this summer, in an awkward position.
In June, President Barack Obama said GM executives would continue to make decisions for the company, despite receiving a $50 billion bailout.
But now some of those decisions have irritated both the German and Russian governments, which made major political investments to see the sale go through for Canada’s Magna and Sberbank.
The decision also flies in the face of Merkel, who met with Obama in Washington and made a historic address to the U.S. Congress just hours before the GM announcement. Merkel was a strong supporter of the Magna-led bid because it promised to keep job cuts in her country to a minimum.
GM Europe president Carl-Peter Forster said Tuesday that the company may close up to three plants and fire as many as 10,000 workers as part of the restructuring process.
German Economy Minister Rainer Bruderle called GM’s actions “totally unacceptable” and said Berlin “will get the taxpayers’ money back,” referring to a bridge loan provided by the government to keep the company afloat during months of negotiations.
GM owes Germany about 900 million euros, having repaid some of the 1.1 billion euros that it borrowed, Dirk Pfeil, a member of the Opel Trust board, told Reuters. The trust was established to keep Opel out of GM’s bankruptcy proceedings in the United States.
“We understand the complexity and length of this issue has been draining for all involved,” GM president and CEO Fritz Henderson said in a statement. “This was deemed to be the most stable and least costly approach for securing Opel/Vauxhall’s long-term future.”
“GM’s overall financial health and stability has improved,” giving it confidence to restructure the company without help from other investors, the statement said.
The sale has been discussed as a practically done deal since September, when the sides announced agreement on key issues. But U.S.-based GM officials had hinted that they were interested in hanging on to Opel and had deep reservations about Russian participation in the deal.
The Obama administration “was not involved with this decision, which was made by GM’s board of directors,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a statement Wednesday..
Opel workers also lashed out at GM, with the company’s works council calling a strike to protest the decision beginning Thursday, The Associated Press reported.
Klaus Franz, a representative for Opel’s workers, called GM’s decision detrimental to Opel plants, particularly three in Bochum, Kaiserslautern and Antwerp, Belgium, according to a statement posted on the web site of the IG Metall union. He demanded that the German government not grant GM the financial aid that it had promised for the Opel sale.
Berlin had promised 4.5 billion euros to help a potential buyer for Opel.
“The federal government would not tolerate blackmail, especially since there is an alternative with Magna,” Franz said.
Under the deal with Magna and Sberbank, Opel workers would receive a 10 percent stake in Opel in exchange for concessions on labor costs. The remaining 35 percent would remain with GM.
“Where GM is going to get the money to fund the Opel restructuring is still something of a mystery, as none of the money that it has received from the U.S. government may be used for overseas operations,” said Aaron Bragman, an auto analyst with IHS Global Insight in Detroit, Michigan.
Still, GM may have purposely been “delaying” the sale until it held a better financial position, he said.
Sberbank’s press office said it was preparing a statement but had no immediate comment when contacted by The Moscow Times. Wednesday was a state holiday in Russia.
Magna appeared to take the news in stride, despite having invested months into the negotiations.
“We will continue to support Opel and GM in the challenges ahead,” Magna co-chief executive Siegfried Wolf said in a statement. Magna “has been advised by General Motors that the GM board of directors has decided to terminate the sale process.”
Magna’s shares were trading up 7.9 percent in New York and 6.9 percent in Toronto on Wednesday morning.

TITLE: AvtoVAZ Gets Extra $2Bln in State Aid
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that the government would provide another 55 billion rubles ($2 billion) to support near-bankrupt carmaker AvtoVAZ and to settle its debts.
The government plans to pay off the company’s 38 billion ruble debt, most of which is owed to state-owned banks such as Sberbank VTB and Vneshekonombank, Putin said at a meeting on economic issues at his residence in Novo-Ogaryovo.
In addition to its debts, AvtoVAZ needed another 12 billion rubles “to make new cars that could be competitive at the market” and 4.8 billion rubles to create new jobs, Putin said.
Putin did not reveal details of the plan, but a source told Reuters that the government planned to give AvtoVAZ the cash directly from the budget and raise the money by issuing sovereign bonds later.
Putin said the government had already held talks with the Finance Ministry on raising the money on the open market.
The decision comes before a meeting on Nov. 10 in which the government and stakeholders will discuss a plan for AvtoVAZ’s development.
Putin said he expected all AvtoVAZ shareholders to propose a plan for the carmaker’s further development. Investment bank Troika Dialog and state holding Russian Technologies each own an additional 25 percent of AvtoVAZ.
The government could allow Renault, which currently holds 25 percent in AvtoVAZ, to take control of the company as part of a broader plan to save the carmaker, the source told Reuters.
Putin said the government would seek creditors’ understanding while settling the ailing carmaker’s debt. “I assume that creditors also take into account our economic climate and the state of the company to which they have lent money,” he said. The government will likely buy the debt at a discount, he added.
“There will be a symbolic discount — 3, 5, 10, 20 percent — whatever they agree on,” the Reuters source said.
“At the end of the day, the government will search for a strategic investor — and it will likely be Renault,” the source said, adding that the French carmaker was interested in the possibility of gaining a controlling stake.
Renault said it would support Putin’s decision to provide more financial help to AvtoVAZ.
“We are happy with Putin’s decision, as it will be good for AvtoVAZ,” Renault spokeswoman Sylvie Blanchet said Wednesday.
She also reiterated that Renault was not ready to invest more money to support AvtoVAZ and that the French carmaker could only provide new technology, as it didn’t have enough cash.
Earlier this month, Christian Esteve, leader of Renault’s Eurasia management committee, told a news conference that the group aimed to keep its AvtoVAZ stake at 25 percent.
Russian car sales have slumped this year as recession-hit consumers have cut their spending. As a result, AvtoVAZ posted a net loss of 19.4 billion rubles in the first half of 2009.
The automaker is planning to cut thousands of jobs in an attempt to rein in excess capacity. The government, trying to avoid possible unrest that massive layoffs could cause, and AvtoVAZ have rolled out programs to help place fired workers in new jobs. First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov was quoted as saying last month that the firm needed to shed 21,000 jobs in order to operate efficiently.
The group has repeatedly warned that it might have to enter bankruptcy after experiencing a collapse in demand. “Seeking protection from creditors is one of the options that our company is considering,” Alexander Shmygov, an AvtoVAZ spokesman, said in October.

TITLE: Deputy Finance Minister Pankin: Government May Sell Less Debt
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — The government may sell “considerably” less debt than the $18 billion that it previously announced, given the current price of oil, Deputy Finance Minister Dmitry Pankin said Tuesday.
The final figure will “depend on the amount of revenue and the situation with the world economy next year,” Pankin said. “The draft budget for next year includes a limit on foreign borrowing, which is $18 billion. That doesn’t mean we will look to borrow $18 billion.”
The government is planning its first international debt sale since the 1998 default to help plug the country’s first budget gap in a decade. The deficit will reach between 7.5 percent and 7.7 percent this year, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Oct. 21. The government plans to narrow next year’s shortfall to 6.8 percent.
Prices for crude oil have risen 78 percent this year.
Pankin said the government aimed to complete “technical” preparations for the debt sale by March though it had not yet chosen managers for the sale.
The amount of cash that the government needs to raise may be as low as $8 billion to $9 billion, compared with the government’s estimate for about $18 billion, according to Luis Costa, an emerging markets debt strategist at Commerzbank in London.
“They’ve announced the program long before the rally in oil, and I think the $18 billion number we have doesn’t take into account the very benign levels of oil prices for Russia,” Costa said.
Russia will start a roadshow in London on Thursday to attract investors. The country’s 2009 debt is equivalent to 10.5 percent of gross domestic product, well below debt ratios in Germany and Britain.

TITLE: Naftogaz Says It Plans to Pay Gas Bill for October on Time
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Naftogaz Ukrainy will pay a $470 million gas bill to Russia on time, Ukrainian Energy Minister Yury Prodan said Wednesday, easing concerns that the state energy company might miss its payment for October supplies.
“There’s still time to accumulate the funds, and Naftogaz will make its payment,” Prodan told a news conference, Interfax reported. He said the company could seek loans if necessary.
Naftogaz has not missed any payments since Prime Ministers Vladimir Putin and Yulia Tymoshenko brokered a deal in January to end a supply disruption that left large swaths of Europe without gas for several weeks.
But external financing for gas payments, including from the International Monetary Fund, has fallen into doubt amid political bickering in Kiev ahead of a Jan. 17 presidential vote. Both Tymoshenko and President Viktor Yushchenko are in the running.
About one-fifth of Europe’s gas comes from Russia through Ukraine, and Putin warned the European Union presidency Sunday that the situation in Ukraine could lead to another disruption of supplies.
Bohdan Sokolovsky, an energy policy aide to Yushchenko, said Tuesday that Naftogaz would need to find as much as $360 million to settle the bill after earning just $130 million to $140 million in the month.
Ukraine will have “to borrow money from other sources” and will probably request the money from Moscow, Sokolovsky said at a news conference. Ukraine imported only 2.4 billion cubic meters of gas last month, instead of 3.5 bcm under the terms of the contract signed in January. The country is also unlikely to import the stipulated volumes in November and December, he said.
As a result, Gazprom could impose penalties of $7 billion on Ukraine, as the deal required Naftogaz to buy at least 40 bcm in 2009.
But on Wednesday, Prodan brushed off those concerns, saying Gazprom would not demand payment of the penalties. Putin said several times earlier this year that Gazprom would not demand the fines because of the country’s economic hardship.
Tymoshenko told Putin by telephone Friday that Yushchenko was impeding “the normal partnership was blocking a money transfer for Russian gas.

TITLE: Missile Defense Could Be the Silver Bullet
AUTHOR: By Dmitry Trenin
TEXT: In the eyes of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the “resetting” of U.S.-Russian relations became a reality only six weeks ago, when U.S. President Barack Obama announced his decision to reconfigure U.S. missile defense plans for Europe. Putin called Obama’s step “courageous,” which, coming from him, is perhaps the highest form of personal approbation. It helped everyone that Obama’s decision was a unilateral U.S. move, not a concession to Moscow. Obama’s decision kept all U.S. options open for future development of missile defense, and it required no quid pro quo from Russia. Nevertheless, the cancellation of former U.S. President George W. Bush’s missile defense plans in Poland and the Czech Republic had a strong impact on Russia’s leaders, who tend to emphasize the lingering Cold War mentality in Washington’s corridors of power. Hence, Putin’s choice of words, referring to Obama’s “courage.”
Quid pro quo or not, Moscow felt compelled to respond. After meeting with Obama in New York in late September, President Dmitry Medvedev made it clear that he was leaving the option open for tough sanctions against Iran. It would be unrealistic to expect a radical shift in Russia’s policy toward Iran, of course, but an increased willingness to use the stick as well as the carrot may be in the cards. What has probably changed the most is the Kremlin’s attitude toward the U.S. administration. Moscow now feels that it can do business with Obama. Thus, the “reset” may be real indeed.
The missile defense story, however, is not over. European missile defense has been redesigned, not dismissed. There will be a new configuration. Its elements will be in place sooner than had been previously scheduled. Deployment will not be confined to southeastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. The SM-3 system of missile interceptors might one day appear in Poland, too. Originally designed to shoot down shorter range missiles, they can be modernized and upgraded in the future.
More important, however, U.S. plans to build a global missile defense system, which caused so much consternation in Moscow, is by no means off the agenda. Obama has ordered the reconfiguration of some plans and the scaling back of others, but he has not abandoned the global program. By 2015, this program will have progressed substantially. Faced with the reality that U.S. strategic missile defense capabilities will be strengthened in the next five years, Russia may decide to err on the side of prudence, which means it may overreact.
It should be remembered that the Kremlin interpreted plans to deploy elements of a missile defense system in Central Europe — the so-called U.S. “third position” after Alaska and California — as part of much larger U.S. plans to construct a global shield. What concerned the Kremlin the most was the prospect, however remote, that the United States would be protected against Russian missile strikes, thus completely undermining the strategic balance between the two countries and destroying the concept of deterrence, which has done so much to prevent a military conflict between the major powers for more than 60 years.
To demonstrate how serious the Kremlin views the issue of U.S. missile defense capabilities, look at Russia’s national security strategy, released in May. The document calls a U.S. first-strike capability, which is attainable once the United States builds a seamless global missile defense system, the most serious external military threat to Russia. Short of an actual first strike, a shift in the strategic balance would allow the United States to blackmail Russia politically. This may be paranoia, but there are reasons for it. In a situation when the United States and Russia are not allies, or even strategic partners, nuclear deterrence has become the unique pillar of Moscow’s strategic independence vis-a-vis Washington.
Can anything be done about this rift?
Negotiations to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, are progressing well, and this can only help U.S.-Russian relations. But no amount of START can completely close the book on the Cold War. Offensive nuclear arms reductions do not change Moscow’s fundamental strategic paradigm that defines the bilateral relationship: mutual assured destruction, or MAD. In addition, further reductions in strategic arms beyond the levels that the two sides will agree when the new treaty to replace START is signed are highly unlikely. Considering the degree to which Russia’s conventional military forces lag behind those of the United States, the Kremlin relies on its nuclear deterrence more than ever.
Of course, Russia’s accession to NATO or its formal alliance with the United States could theoretically eliminate the need for MAD. Back in the early 1990s, there was a window of opportunity to achieve these two goals, but now it is clearly unrealistic — at least for the foreseeable future.
Russia’s acquiescence to U.S. strategic superiority can be easily ruled out. The country’s political and foreign policy elite are the only ones in the world to flatly reject this notion, which it sees as limiting its sovereignty. The Chinese, for example, are relatively relaxed about the issue, content for decades with a minimum of deterrence postures. But not the Russians, who have been historically obsessed with attainment of nuclear parity with the United States and continue to cling to the idea of parity in force capabilities.
It may be that the “silver bullet” to replace the remaining aftershocks of the Cold War with a nonadversarial strategic relationship could be missile defense, the present bone of contention. If one can imagine that the United States and Russia could agree on building a joint missile defense system, then the Kremlin’s national security strategy would have to be updated. This could actually be a 21st-century equivalent of Russia’s membership in NATO or a bilateral security alliance with the United States.
Both Moscow and Washington seem to welcome cooperation on strategic defenses on a declarative level, but when action is required they move gingerly. The United States is focused more on working with Russia on building a U.S.-designed theater missile defense system, while Russia is talking more about a global system without offering a lot of details about what it might look like.
Moscow and Washington need to put missile defense at the heart of their post-START strategic agenda. A good starting point would be unfreezing the 1998 agreement on the joint data exchange center in Moscow and expanding U.S.-Russian cooperation to include NATO allies. Building trust and improving cooperation would allow joint development of a new generation of interceptor missiles and new space-based tracking and targeting systems.
Today, this may look like a fantasy, but the failure to work more closely together could mean 40 more years of MAD. Surely, there is a much better paradigm for ensuring global peace and improving bilateral relations.

Dmitry Trenin is director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.

TITLE: Hunting Tourists and Pensioners
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: At their latest training exercises, Russian riot police learned how to disperse a protest staged by disgruntled pensioners. This could come in handy because the new “protest season” has just opened. But it would be very difficult to classify these protests as liberal or democratic.
For example, AvtoVAZ workers in Tolyatti recently staged a demonstration. Most Russians do not have many positive associations with the word “Zhiguli.” The factory loses about $1,000 on every car that it produces, and the huge government credits given to AvtoVAZ since the crisis hit have evaporated into thin air. The protesting workers were not demanding that the management stop stealing. They only wanted their paychecks to continue.
During a summer vacation in Altai, I visited the village of Aktash where protesters blocked a federal highway demanding repairs to a local school. Aktash was built in 1949 to support the opening of a nearby mercury mine. All of the mercury was removed by the early 1990s. Then all the equipment was stolen. The owners of the mine wanted to earn money by processing the mercury tailings, but since the ovens used to burn off the impurities had been pilfered, the tailings were dumped in a heap outside the village.
The mine is dead, and the village is toxic. The people have no work and no hope. When I asked why they didn’t move to another city, they answered, “This is our home.”
Not far from Gorno-Altaisk is a village named Urlu-Aspak. When Prime Minister Vladimir Putin vacationed in Altai last summer, the villagers there also blocked a major road. The reason was that in the early 1990s, when farmers had the right to obtain shares in the local kolkhoz, the villagers of Urlu-Aspak left the land in the hands of the state. A few years later, that land was bought up by the Sistema holding owned by billionaire Vladimir Yevtushenkov.
Sistema built the Altai Resort Village on that land near Urlu-Aspak. Because many of the villagers are chronic drinkers, they cannot get jobs at the resort so they support themselves by gathering pine nuts and hunting badgers in the nearby woods. Two to three jars of fat can be rendered from a single badger — about one-fourth of a barrel. The resort is protected by a high wall. Without it, apparently, the destitute villagers would be hunting tourists instead of badgers.
When the Altai Resort Village expanded last summer, it blocked the road into the woods that the villagers had used, forcing them to trek an additional 14 kilometers in search of nuts and badgers. When the villagers learned that Putin was scheduled to visit the resort, they used stones to spell out a message near the helipad where he would land. It read, “Putin, give us back our land!”
Protests by pensioners, AvtoVAZ workers and Altai villagers have one thing in common: They are staged by people who either cannot or do not want to work. Their one request is that the government put them on the dole.
To be sure, there is a spattering of good protests in Russia — for example, the Dissenters’ Marches and protests staged by automobile owners. But on the whole, the Kremlin has little to worry about since the threat from protests is very low. The riot police held extensive practice excercises on how to round up a bunch of frail pensioners. There was no need, however, to include excercises on how to disperse a demonstration of businessmen. 

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

TITLE: A complex legacy
AUTHOR: By Elmira Alieva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Days of Knut Hamsun in St. Petersburg are set to enable city residents to get acquainted with the legacy of one of the most controversial writers in the history of Norway.
In 2009, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Knut Hamsun, Norway launched a year-long international program commemorating its best known writer. The Hamsun Fest Finale that takes place in St. Petersburg this month is part of this program. 
The Days of Knut Hamsun is a series of unique theatrical and musical performances, exhibitions and literatary events that aim to highlight the controversial writer’s work and promote the cultural heritage of Norway. The festival has been organized by the Nordland County Council in Norway, with the support of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Consulate General of Norway in St. Petersburg.
“There will be a wide-ranging and exciting cultural program during the Days of Hamsun in St. Petersburg,” said Fredrik Langeland, adviser at the Nordland County Council. “There will be an opening reception and concert at the Sheremetyev Palace. We also want to draw particular attention to theater performances, lectures and film screenings at the Dostoevsky museum, a book exhibition at the National Library, a unique film program at Dom Kino cinema with showings of Hamsun films with Russian subtitles for the first time, and the play “On Overgrown Paths” at the Lensoviet Theater.”
Hamsun gained popularity with his epic “Growth of the Soil,” for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. Hamsun’s works were determined by the idea of connection between characters and their natural environment. The author had a significant influence on European and American literature, with Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Maxim Gorky, Stefan Zweig and Henry Miller all admitting that they tried to write like Hamsun. Ernest Hemingway said, “Hamsun taught me to write.” 
Albert Einstein regarded Hamsun as an eminent man, while Thomas Mann compared the writer to Homer and Dostoevsky. Biographer Robert Ferguson (1988) wrote that Hamsun was one of the most influential and innovative literary stylists during the last hundred years, and that there was hardly a writer living in Europe or in America who was not consciously or unconsciously indebted to him.
“Hamsun was highly popular in Russia when Scandinavian literature gained popularity in Russia in the 1890s and early 1900s,” said Langeland. “His plays were performed on Russian stages even more than in Norway, his books were soon translated and quickly sold in large quantities. The first biography of Hamsun in Russia came out as early as 1910, when Maria Blagoveshchenskaya stated that Hamsun was really similar to the Russian nature,” he added.
Hamsun is now remembered for his controversial political views as much as for his work. He supported Nazi Germany both before World War II and after Germany occupied Norway in April 1940. For this reason, following the war Hamsun was considered to be a traitor by Norwegians, and angry crowds in major Norwegian cities burned his books in public places. Hamsun went from being wildly popular to being despised; he faced legal charges and found himself first in a psychiatric hospital and then a retirement home.
“Hamsun is still a controversial author, as many have strong opinions about him,” said Langeland. “The purpose of the Hamsun year in Norway has not been an attempt at a one-sided tribute to the author. On the contrary, it has been a critical and nuanced view of both the author and the man. There was, for example, a major international Hamsun conference recently at the university in Oslo in which leading academics from several countries participated. Among the topics was a critical perspective on Hamsun and his legacy.”
Hamsun is now once again a popular writer in Norway. In 2009, a new 27-volume edition of his complete works was published, including novels, short stories, poetry and articles. The Hamsun year has seen diverse events across Norway, the most notable of which was the inauguration of the Hamsun Center in Hamaroy, which was opened by the Norwegian Crown Princess, Her Royal Highness Mette Marit. Along from Norway, the Hamsun year has been celebrated in several other countries, including Latvia, Germany, China and Romania. The Hamsun Fest Finale in St. Petersburg is a final chord of the international comemmorations of the writer.

The Days of Knut Hamsun in St. Petersburg runs from Friday through Nov. 29. A full program is available at http://www.hamsun.spb.ru

TITLE: ‘Tsar,’ a Tale of 16th- and 21st-Century Politics
AUTHOR: By Olga Katkova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — “Tsar,” a powerful psychological and philosophical drama about the nature of Russian power, opens in Moscow on Wednesday.
The film, about Ivan the Terrible, is one that connects to how the country is ruled today, director Pavel Lungin said in an interview.
“Ivan the Terrible prevented Russia from moving into the Renaissance by keeping the country in the Middle Ages,” Lungin said. “After his reign, Russia was left behind in the process of progress throughout Europe. We have made no headway since that time.”
Pyotr Mamonov, better known as a musician and performer, and the late Oleg Yankovsky, an acting legend who died earlier this year, play the two main characters, Ivan IV and the head of the Russian church, Metropolitan Filipp.
“The aim of my film is to make people think about themselves, about their place in our society, about our history… I think modern viewers don’t want to think, they just want to consume and have a good time, so my film is an attempt to make them reconsider some values,” Lungin said.
The film was shown last month at a special screening at the State Duma for deputies.
Opening in 1565, a time of troubles in Russian history the film shows the tsar, with Polish armies moving in, growing paranoid about threats to his throne. He creates his own special police force, the oprichniki, who crush mercilessly any real and imaginary traitors. Lungin said they were like today’s corrupt police.
“Ivan the Terrible was the first Russian tsar who created the character of Russian power,” Lungin said, calling the tsar “in many respects bright and talented, but at the same time pathological, cruel.”
The bloodshed and injustice prompt the head of the Russian Church to resign in protest, and Ivan calls on his childhood friend Filipp Kolichev to accept the post.
His friend though soon realizes that he too must oppose the tsar.
Ivan believes that he is the one chosen by God and that it was the tsar’s right to take the place of God on earth. “There is no greater sin than disobeying the will of the tsar,” he says in the film, declaring himself the supreme judge who has the right to administer divine justice on earth.
“We can see a lot of the characteristics of his power today,” Lungin said, adding that there is still no real agreement between the population and those in power, only “a senseless people’s love for the ruler.”
“The oprichniki were to punish people for a lack of love,” he said, adding that they have continually reappeared in Russian history from the time of Peter the Great to Stalin.
Mamonov is a favorite actor of Lungin’s, playing a monk in the much acclaimed film, “The Island” and appearing in “Taxi-Blues,” his 1990 film which won two awards at Cannes.  
“I thought about Pyotr Mamonov from the very beginning when I decided to begin the film,” Lungin said. “There is something like a dual quality in his character: he can be deeply religious and cruel at the same time.”
Ivan the Terrible says in the film that, “As a man I may be a sinner, but as a tsar I’m just.” But Filipp, now Metropolitan Filipp, refuses to accept the tsar raising himself above the church.
It is a battle between “a heathen who worshipped power and strength, and a true Christian,” Lungin said, describing Filipp as “a Renaissance man, a great architect, engineer, a saintly man, a real Da Vinci ... He sacrificed himself in order to stop the bloodshed.”
The movie has had mixed reviews from the film industry, but there has been nothing but praise for Yankovsky in his last role.
“Nobility, selflessness and inner beauty — these are the qualities I saw in Metropolitan Filipp when creating the film and Oleg Yankovsky was the very person to express them. I saw chastity and beauty in his face. He was a great artist,” Lungin said.

TITLE: chernov’s
choice
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Paper Chase, a Dallas, Texas-based alternative rock band, will perform at A2 on Sunday. Formed in 1998 by producer-engineer John Congleton (vocals, guitar, programming), the band (sometimes spelled “the pAper chAse”) is known for its concept albums. The most recent, “Someday This Could All Be Yours, Vol. 1,” is a two-part effort centered around natural disasters.
Although it is a concept album, Congleton said he had tried a different approach on this album.
“This album is obviously a concept album, there are concepts behind it,” he told The Aquarian Weekly.
“But I didn’t feel any need to tie the songs together with recurring melodies. I wanted to make 10 really good songs that stood on their own.  I’ll be the first to admit that on past Paper Chase albums there are some songs that don’t make a ton of sense on their own.  I just didn’t want to do that again.”
Also featuring keyboard player Sean Kirkpatrick, bassist Bobby Weaver and drummer Jason Garner, The Paper Chase is somehow connected to (and released a split EP with) Xiu Xiu, a band that has come to Russia a few times already. The band’s music has been described by Allmusic as “a jagged structure of avant-garde jazz, noise, indie, and punk” and is worth a listen. 
(Incidentally, Xiu Xiu’s frontman Jamie Stewart will perform at A2 on Dec. 18.)
Chufella Marzufella, one of the finest and underestimated local bands, will perform at Cheshire Cat on Friday. On its most recent album, called “Zapakh Khvoi,” (“The Scent of Pine Needles”) the band fronted by singer/guitarist Pavel Ryabukhin, added a brass section to its psychedelia-tinged garage rock sound.
A refreshing exception on the Russian music scene, Chufella Marzufella sings in Russian, but does not sound anything like the ugly “Russian rock” performed by bands such as DDT or Korol i Shut.
Formed in January 1994 by fans of The Rolling Stones and The Who, Chufella Marzufella performs original material in Russian, although it was previously known for performing covers of songs such as “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “I Can’t Explain.”
Auktyon, a respected art-rock band stemming from the “Russian rock revolution” of the late 1980s is alive and well and will perform at Glavclub on Friday.
The band’s frontman, Leonid Fyodorov, who sings and plays guitar, will also perform with prominent avant-jazz double bass player Vladimir Volkov at A2 on Thursday. Volkov, in turn, will perform with his instrumental band Volkovtrio at JFC Jazz Club on Tuesday.
Deti Picasso, a Moscow-based band that blends indie rock and Armenian folk, will perform at A2 on Friday. The five-piece group was founded by vocalist Gaya Arutunyan and her guitarist brother Karen Arutunyan in 1997.

TITLE: Moving pictures
AUTHOR: By Elmira Alieva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The second international MUSEEK music video festival kicks off in the city on Friday and runs through Nov 13.
The name of the festival, MUSEEK, is derived from the words “music” and “seek,” because its aim is that each spectator will be able to discover various music styles as well as recognize that music video is a form of art. The festival is organized by Tour de Film and Loud Media, and it comes back to the city after a successful premiere in 2008, when it became the first event of its kind in Russia.
“We are still the only people in Russia focusing on the music video genre; so our aim is educational,” said Alexei Dmitryev, the festival’s art director. “We’d like to familiarize spectators with this genre and to show innovations to those who visited our festival last year.”
This year, the festival’s organizers received about 300 applications, from which almost 100 video works were selected to be screened during the festival. There are videos from all over the world, including from Russia, Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia and smaller countries such as Luxembourg, Macao and Malta. 
“Music video is a kind of symbiotic genre; it is a mixture of music and video,” said Dmitryev. “The video must be expressed in a skilful cinema language. It shouldn’t be a banal video narration of the song’s lyrics — the music and video must be linked by close bonds. They could be linked by rhythm or by the mood of a song, but not only by the lyrics. This is why we have tried to select works that bring together these genres,” he explained. 
The program of the festival features diverse music videos that differ considerably in terms of their technical, musical and genre content. There are abstract videos, works close to experimental or live action films, documentaries and pseudo-documentaries. The musicians featured include Royksopp, Oi Va Voi, Dolphin, Hauschka, Lily Allen, Everything Is Made in China, Paul McCartney, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, Tiesto and Splin, as well as a retrospective of Tequilajazzz videos and a selection of independent Finnish music videos.
“There is an interesting Metallica video called ‘All nightmare long,’ a nine-minute pseudo-documentary work about the beginning of the third world war,” said Dmitryev. “There are also remarkable music videos by Lily Allen and Luv Delu.” 
“We’ll also screen animated videos using sand and textiles,” he said. “Audiences can see pictures drawn on glass using sand, or images created with thread that are animated to produce a video.” 
The festival’s jury, which comprises musicians, journalists and film critics, will choose one winning video, whose director will be awarded a special prize and 500 euros. There will be also a viewer’s choice prize for the video voted for by spectators. 
“This year we have concentrated on competitive videos,” said Dmitryev. “The fact is that last year there were a lot of visitors, for instance, to Lily Allen or Michel Dongry, which is natural. However there were not so many viewers for competitive videos, even though they were the most interesting. This is why this year we’d like our visitors to appreciate competitive videos and realize that these videos are worth watching on the big screen,” said Dmitryev.

The Second MUSEEK International Music Festival runs from Friday through Nov. 13 at Rodina cinema. A full program is available at www.museekfestival.ru and www.rodinakino.ru

TITLE: Italian Judge Convicts 23 Defendants In CIA Case
AUTHOR: By Colleen Barry and 
Victor L. Simpson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MILAN — An Italian judge found 23 Americans and two Italians guilty Wednesday in the kidnapping of an Egyptian terror suspect, delivering the first legal convictions anywhere in the world against people involved in the CIA’s extraordinary renditions program.
Human rights groups hailed the decision and pressed President Barack Obama to repudiate the Bush administration’s practice of abducting terror suspects and transferring them to third countries where torture was permitted. The American Civil Liberties Union said the verdicts were the first convictions stemming from the rendition program.
The Obama administration ended the CIA’s interrogation program and closed its secret overseas jails in January but has opted to continue the practice of extraordinary renditions.
The Americans, who were tried in absentia, now cannot travel to Europe without risking arrest as long as the verdicts remain in place.
One of those convicted, former Milan consular official Sabrina De Sousa, accused Congress of turning a blind eye to the entire matter.
“No one has investigated the fact that the U.S. government allegedly conducted a rendition of an individual who now walks free and the operation of which was so bungled,” she said, speaking through her lawyer Mark Zaid.
Despite the convictions capping the nearly three-year Italian trial, several Italian and American defendants — including the two alleged masterminds of the abduction — were acquitted due to either diplomatic immunity or because classified information was stricken by Italy’s highest court.
The case has been politically charged from the beginning, with attempts to mislead investigators looking into the cleric’s disappearance and derail the judicial proceedings once the trial was under way. But the Italian-American relationship, conditioned on such issues as participation in the Afghan campaign, is unlikely to be hurt by the convictions.
Three Americans were acquitted, including the then-Rome CIA station chief Jeffrey Castelli and two other diplomats formerly assigned to the Rome Embassy, as well as the former head of Italian military intelligence Nicolo Pollari and four other Italian secret service agents.
Only two Italians were in the courtroom to hear the verdict, including Marco Mancini, the former No. 2 of Italian military intelligence, who embraced his lawyer outside the courtroom after he was acquitted.
Former Milan CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady received the top sentence of eight years in prison. The other 22 convicted American defendants, including De Sousa and Air Force Lt. Col. Joseph Romano, each received a five-year sentence. Two Italians got three years each as accessories.
U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said the Obama administration was “disappointed about the verdicts.”

TITLE: Israel: Arms Cargo Headed for Hezbollah
AUTHOR: By Amy Teibel
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JERUSALEM — Israeli defense officials said hundreds of tons of weapons seized from a commandeered ship could have given Lebanese guerrillas an extra month of firepower in a war with Israel, but the militants denied Thursday that the arms were bound for them.
Israeli naval commandos, acting on intelligence reports, boarded the Antiguan-flagged Francop before dawn in waters off Cyprus on Wednesday and discovered that the cargo included hundreds of crates of rockets, missiles, mortars, anti-tank weapons and munitions. The weapons, Israel claims, came from Iran.
The arms shipment was the largest Israel has ever seized, and it shone a spotlight on dangerous tensions between Israel and the Islamic Republic. Israel considers Iran a strategic threat because of its nuclear program and long-range missile development, and says Tehran is lying when it denies it is building atomic arms.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrilla group, which fought a bruising, month long war with Israel three years ago, denied Israeli claims the arms cache was meant for its fighters.
“Hezbollah categorically denies it has any connection with the weapons which the Zionist enemy claims it seized aboard the Francop ship,” Hezbollah said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press in Beirut.
Israel had not provided evidence the arms were meant for Hezbollah.
State-run Iran TV said in a commentary that the “Israeli propaganda” was aimed at diverting attention from allegations of Israeli war crimes during last winter’s war in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli defense officials said the weapons haul consisted of arms already in Hezbollah’s possession, and would have given the Lebanese guerrilla group the ability to fight a full month longer in the event of a clash with Israel on the scale of the 2006 war.
Friction between Israel and Hezbollah have persisted since that conflict, but there has been no fighting. During that war, Hezbollah bombarded northern Israel with nearly 4,000 rockets.
The defense officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the military has yet to formally comment on the potential value of the shipment’s contents to militants.
The ship was released late Wednesday and set sail for Syria, the military said.
The weapons were sealed in containers carrying Iranian shipping codes and provided Israel with a rare opportunity to showcase its longtime claim that Tehran was arming militants on Israel’s northern border — and implicitly, Hamas militants in Gaza.
Government spokesman Mark Regev said Thursday that he hopes the capture of the weapons will be a “wake-up call to those few in the international community who up until now have still held illusions about the true character of the extremist, radical regime in Tehran.”
The presence of Iranian proxies in the Mideast, combined with worries over Tehran’s nuclear program and arsenal of long-range missiles, have made Iran the Jewish state’s most formidable foe.
Neutralizing Iran’s bombmaking ability remains Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s top priority — and Israel has not ruled out a military strike against Tehran’s nuclear facilities.
The arms shipment eclipsed the previously largest haul, in 2002, of 50 tons of missiles, mortars, rifles and ammunition headed for Palestinian militants in Gaza. Israel has said that shipment came from Iran as well.
On Thursday, the UN General Assembly is expected to resume its discussion of a report accusing both Israel and Gaza’s Islamic Hamas rulers of war crimes during their conflict last winter. Both sides deny the charges.

TITLE: Rogue Afghan Policeman Kills 5 Britons
AUTHOR: By Elena Becatoros and 
Deb Riechmann
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KABUL —The killing of five British troops by a rogue Afghan policeman underlines concerns about training and discipline within the ranks and possible insurgent infiltration of a police force that the U.S. hopes will be its ticket out of Afghanistan someday.
The attack caused anguish in Britain, where public support for the war has been waning. Britain is the largest contributor to NATO forces in Afghanistan after the United States, and its continued presence there is central to President Barack Obama’s strategy as he weighs dispatching tens of thousands more U.S. troops.
The five British soldiers, who had been advising Afghan policemen, were shot and killed Tuesday at a checkpoint where they were living in the volatile southern province of Helmand. Another six soldiers were wounded, as were two Afghan policemen when the soldiers returned fire, officials said.
The gunman escaped and his motive was unclear.
The incident, which echoed two police shootings of U.S. soldiers last year, raised questions about whether international forces are trying to recruit and train Afghan police too quickly.
“There isn’t a lot of vetting of police before they are hired,” Peter Galbraith, the former top American official at the UN mission in Afghanistan, told BBC Radio 4.
In September, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., called for increasing the size of the Afghan army and police “much faster than presently planned” instead of sending tens of thousands more Americans to fight here.
In Washington, Defense Department press secretary Geoff Morrell defended Afghan forces and the international training effort, a main part of the U.S. strategy for the war.
“However tragic and criminal this act was, it represents a rare and, luckily, thus far isolated incident. (NATO) troops continue to partner effectively with the Afghan national security forces and continue to build their capacity to take the lead in ultimately defending their country on their own.”
In October 2008, a policeman threw a grenade and opened fire on a U.S. foot patrol, killing one soldier. The previous month, a policeman opened fire at a police station, killing a soldier and wounding three before he was fatally shot.
Training and operating jointly with Afghan police and soldiers, as the British were doing Tuesday, are key to NATO’s strategy of dealing with the spreading Taliban-led insurgency and, ultimately, allowing international forces to leave Afghanistan.
But obstacles are far greater with the police than with the army.
A Defense Department Inspector General report, released in September, found that Afghan police are crippled by serious corruption and subject citizens to frequent street-level “shake-downs.” Senior officials lack control of their personnel and do not routinely monitor job performance, the report said.
“Unlike the Afghan National Army, which is the most respected institution in the Afghan government, there is a wide consensus that many elements of the Afghan National Police are too corrupt, and too tied to politics and power brokers,” former Pentagon analyst Anthony Cordesman wrote last month.
“Realistic efforts to shake out new units, give them continuity of effective leadership, deal with internal tensions and retention problems, and help them overcome the pressures of corruption and power brokers take time,” Cordesman said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai sought not to highlight the Afghan policeman’s role in the deaths of the five British soldiers. His first statement condemning the attack said it was carried out by a member of the national police. A corrected statement, released about an hour later, didn’t mention the police at all.
Downplaying the incident, Karzai’s spokesman Humayun Hamidzada called it an isolated attack.
“In the U.S., people shoot up people in a shopping mall,” Hamidzada told The Associated Press. “There are crazy people everywhere.” 
However, Karzai’s main challenger in the recent election, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, said the ongoing violence showed Karzai’s administration has failed to stabilize the country despite eight years of assistance from international forces. 
“In the absence of a credible and reliable and legitimate partner, more soldiers, more resources” are needed to fight the war, entering its ninth year, Abdullah told reporters.

TITLE: British Pilot Project Uses Genetic Tests On Immigrants
AUTHOR: By Maria Cheng
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — Britain is using genetic tests on some African asylum seekers in an effort to catch those who are lying about their nationality, drawing criticism from scientists and provoking outrage from rights groups.
The United Kingdom Border Agency launched the pilot project in September amid suspicions there might be a large number of asylum applicants lying about their home countries. An agency spokesman said Britain was the only country using genetic tests in this way.
Experts, however, say the tests are based on flawed science and there’s no way genetic swabs can provide meaningful evidence regarding nationality.
Concerned about potential fraud, the Bush administration launched a pilot DNA testing project in 2007 to vet applicants to a program that allows family members of African refugees already in the United States to join them.
The project, which wrapped up in March 2008, found an extremely high rate of fraud — 87 percent — among applicants claiming to be related to each other, the State Department said, and the resettlement program was suspended until those concerns could be addressed. The U.S. does not use genetic tests to try to prove nationality.