SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1556 (17), Tuesday, March 16, 2010
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TITLE: Olympic Workers Unpaid For Months
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Hundreds of workers at an Olimpstroi-funded construction site in Sochi have not been paid in months, with some complaining that they are going hungry after giving up their passports as collateral to get food at grocery stores.
The scandal is the latest to hit Russia’s $13 billion effort to ready the Black Sea resort for the 2014 Winter Olympics. Residents displaced by construction for the games have complained that they are not being adequately compensated, while environmental activists say the work is blighting the region.
About 180 people were not working Friday, exasperated by months without pay and desperate for food, said Sergei Dykhalov, who was hired by general contractor Moskonversprom as the site’s crane operator for 36,000 rubles ($1,200) a month.
He said he hadn’t received his salary since December.
“People believed them. We thought it’s an Olympic project, controlled by the government. I thought it would be the pride of Russia. Instead, they have sent us like slaves into a mine,” Dykhalov told The St. Petersburg Times.
In July, Moskonversprom won an Olimpstroi tender to build 166 houses for residents in the Imeretinskaya valley. The company’s winning offer was 20 percent below the maximum bid price of 872.8 million rubles ($30 million), according to the Olimpstroi web site.
Work was to begin immediately and be finished by May 2010.
All sides agree that the project is now behind schedule, but the consensus ends there. Moskonversprom blames its subcontractors for the working conditions and delayed wages, but the subcontractors say they have not been paid. Workers for both the general contractor and one of the subcontractors told The Moscow Times by phone that they were not being paid.
Dykhalov said he could not return to his mountain village in North Ossetia because debt collectors are waiting for him to pay back a bank loan.
“I will not work until they pay me, and then I will quit, never to work here again,” he said.
In the meantime, he said, they cannot hire another crane operator because the machinery is signed out under his name.
Wage arrears shot up in Russia as the economy collapsed in late 2008, particularly at stalled construction sites and the industrial plants that supply them. Wage arrears rose to 4.1 billion rubles in January, or by 15.5 percent compared with a month earlier, according to the latest figures from the State Statistics Service.
If a company has funds and willfully does not pay salaries, its executives can be punished by up to two years in prison, according to Article 145.1 of the Criminal Code. Employers are required to prioritize salary payments ahead of other expenses if they have unpaid wages.
Solnechny Dom, a subcontractor on the project, said Moskonversprom owed about 5 million rubles ($171,000), making it impossible for them to pay salaries.
“I have not had a single day off for three months and have not seen a single ruble,” said Arnold Yeprikyan, a foreman with Solnechny Dom, whose 168 workers on the project were building 19 houses. The firm, based in the Krasnodar region town of Tuapse, was last paid an advance in December and has finished its project, he said.
“There are about 80 of our people still here, the rest gave up and left for home or to other jobs,” Yeprikyan said.
He estimated that as many as 400 workers at the site were not being paid.
“We saw Putin and Medvedev say on TV that people eat well at construction sites in Sochi. What they give us is not human food, and they charge us 200 rubles a day for it,” Yeprikyan said.
He sent a short video clip from his cell phone to web site Blogsochi.ru, which shows the area where 240 of the workers are housed. They live in 40 mobile housing units with six bunks in each, overflowing portable toilets, and an army tent that houses a kitchen.
The only shower is closed, the video shows.
Moskonversprom chief executive Valery Morozov told The St. Petersburg Times that Solnechny Dom provided faulty work and was responsible for the poor staff housing. The people who are protesting are no longer employed, and the work has not been disrupted, he said.
Workers said journalists have been barred from the guarded site.
“There are certain firms connected with bandits that gained access to Olympic construction projects,” he said, adding that several such companies were among his subcontractors.
Solnechny Dom should have finished all the work before New Year but took too long to hire enough workers and made mistakes during construction that the next subcontractor has to correct, Morozov said.

TITLE: Georgian Opposition Slams News Hoax
AUTHOR: By Misha Dzhindzhikhashvili
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TBILISI, Georgia — Georgia’s opposition politicians on Monday denounced the government over a hoax television broadcast that said Russia had invaded and the president had been killed.
The broadcast Saturday, which simulated a news program, sparked widespread anxiety in Georgia, which is still traumatized by the August 2008 war in which Russian troops advanced deep into the country.
Cellular phone networks briefly went down as panicked Georgians phoned each other. The show was identified as fictional only at its beginning — which many viewers apparently missed — and its end 30 minutes later.
Imedi, the station that aired the show, is private, but its director is a former chief of staff for President Mikhail Saakashvili. Opponents characterized the broadcast as government propaganda, aimed at discrediting them.
The main opposition, the Democratic Movement for a United Georgia, said in a statement that “the leadership of Georgia has shown its goal of preserving its power by creating a virtual reality in the country through information terror.”
The movement is led by Nino Burdzhanadze, a former Saakashvili ally who led last year’s extended protests aimed at forcing him to resign. The hoax report included the claim that Burdzhanadze welcomed the Russian invasion and thanked the troops.
“Saakashvili needs to have a permanent threat from Russia, it’s the last argument for his staying in power,” another one-time ally, former foreign minister Salome Zurabishvili, was quoted as saying in the newspaper Mteli Kvira.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko on Monday called the broadcast “irresponsible and amoral ... (it) brought concrete damage to security and stability in the region, substantially raising the degree of tension.”
He also criticized Saakashvili for his “approving attitude” to the broadcast.
Saakashvili on Sunday said that “Of course, the film was unpleasant, but the main thing that is unpleasant and that I want everybody to understand well, was that yesterday’s report was maximally close to reality, maximally close to what might take place.”
Imedi director Giorgi Arveladze on Sunday apologized for causing distress.
The 2008 war began with a Georgian barrage of the capital of a Russian-backed Georgian separatist region. Saakashvili and his government insist the assault was launched in response to Russian troops invading the territory.
A European Union-sponsored report last year said Georgia’s attack was unjustifiable under international law, but also noted Russia had taunted and provoked Georgia for years over the territory.
Georgians initially rallied behind Saakashvili during and after the war — or at least refrained from criticizing him — but dismay with his impetuous ways grew into weeks of protests last year.

TITLE: Hundreds Protest Against Hotel Construction
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Hundreds of concerned St. Petersburg residents and preservationists gathered in the historic Lopukhinsky Gardens on Saturday to protest plans to build a multistory hotel on the site.  
Last April, an area within the small scenic park located on the Petrograd Side was stripped of its state heritage status and sold for an extremely small sum to the private developer RBI, which opened the way for the garden’s destruction, preservationists say. They claim a number of laws were broken in the privatization process.
City Hall is now set to exclude the plot from the city’s register of public green areas, which could make construction work imminent.
The developer argues that the 4,586-square-meter plot, which covers the territory surrounding the abandoned Stalin-era boathouse, is not part of the Lopukhinsky Gardens and is located “nearby,” RBI’s press officer said Monday.
Following a series of protests last year, St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko said that there would be no construction in the Lopukhinsky Gardens. “The city will not allow any construction work here, even if this territory is owned by a private proprietor,” she was quoted as saying on City Hall’s official web site in October.  
In December, however, City Hall’s town-planning and architecture committee issued RBI with a permit for the construction of a hotel up to 33 meters in height on the land.
“The owner owns a piece of land, and it’s natural that they want to build something on it,” Matviyenko was quoted by Novaya Gazeta as saying in January. 
“But this private piece of land has nothing to do with the territory of the Lopukhinsky Gardens; it is beyond their border,” she added.
On Saturday, from 250 to 300 protesters gathered to call for construction to be called off and for Matviyenko’s dismissal.
The price for which the site was sold has provoked questions. According to the web site of City Hall’s land resources and land management committee, the 4,586-square-meter site was sold for 274,265.72 rubles ($9,356) — or 59.8 rubles ($2) per square meter.
According to Alexander Karpov, director of the ECOM Center of Expertise, the deal was illegal. 
“The law on public-access green areas, which clearly designated the gardens as a public territory, had already been in force for two years by the time the deal was done,” he said by phone Monday.
“The privatization of public territories is forbidden by federal law. Basically, the privatization of a plot that partly encroaches on public territory is against the law — that’s the essence of the outrage that is happening now.”
Karpov said he could not see any way in which the hotel could be built and operate on the site without affecting the rest of the park.
“All this is one big con game, undertaken in the hopes of getting permission to destroy the Lopukhinsky Gardens further,” he said Monday.
Legislative Assembly deputy Sergei Malkov has written a letter to the city’s prosecutor asking him to look into the legality of the plot’s privatization and annul it if it is found to be illegal.
Dating back to the early 19th century, the Lopukhinsky Gardens are a tranquil green zone in a prestigious area of the Petrograd Side near the Kamennoostrovsky Bridge on the bank of the Malaya Nevka River. The land was part of the estate of Count Pyotr Lopukhin (1753-1827), after whom it is named.
 “It’s important to obey the law,” artist and human rights activist Yuly Rybakov said by phone Monday.
“By law, the Lopukhinsky Gardens are a cultural heritage project and were also part of the green zone, when all of a sudden, at the whim of the investors, a section of the park was cut off and then a statement was made saying that this land has nothing to do with the park. That’s not supported by anything. 
“There’s no reason to cut off this section — it can only be accessed through the territory of the park, it’s all surrounded by trees and is a single complex. It’s a very pleasant area that is loved by locals. It’s an arbitrary decision obviously taken on behalf of business.”
Rybakov, who described the hotel design as an “ugly iron-and-glass box,” expressed concern about the fate of the Lopukhinsky Gardens as a whole.
“If a hotel appears there, then a parking lot will appear, then a restaurant, then a VIP zone — and the garden will cease to exist as a garden altogether.”

TITLE: University Dean Fired,  Disputes Official Version
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Marina Shishkina, the dean of the journalism faculty of St. Petersburg State University, was fired this month by the university’s rector, Nikolai Kropachev.
During the past year, Shishkina had made statements critical of Kropachev, challenging what she described as “the authoritarian style of managing one of Russia’s oldest and most prestigious universities.”
According to the official version, voiced by Mikhail Kudilinsky, the university’s deputy rector for legal issues, Shishkina lost her job for “failing to perform her duties and violating the university’s charter.” A date for the election of a new dean will be set in the near future and held within the next two months, Kudilinsky added.
Anatoly Puyu, the first deputy dean of the journalism faculty, has been appointed acting dean until the election takes place.
Shishkina’s troubles began in September last year, when the Dzerzhinsky district court began reviewing cases against Shishkina and her husband Sergei Petrov, the former dean of the medical faculty. 
Both cases were filed by the university’s president, Lyudmila Verbitskaya, who alleges that Petrov and Shishkina have made libelous statements discrediting one of Russia’s oldest and most respected academic institutions.
The investigators also allege that Shishkina embezzled university funds and abused her position. The investigation claims that at least half a million rubles ($17,000) have been misappropriated. Shishkina says that the prosecutors are trying to frame her, and that the real reasons behind the prosecution are entirely political.
Petrov began the conflict by publishing a revealing and critical interview on a popular web site, in which he accused the school’s management of authoritarian rule, rigid attitudes and the suppression of alternative opinions. Shishkina supported her husband’s crusade with a series of interviews in the media, in which she drew a sobering picture of what she described as the university’s “murky and non-transparent decision-making process” and “the oppressive rule of rector Nikolai Kropachev, who hides behind the facade of fighting corruption and instead uses all the administrative tools available to him to assert his personal power.”
Shishkina alleged that, having replaced Lyudmila Verbitskaya as the university’s rector in May 2008, Kropachev adopted a practice of launching vendettas against anyone who criticized his policies. The journalism dean said an atmosphere of fear and intimidation now reigns at the university, and that she and her husband are paying the price for being among the very few who dared to offer resistance.
The dismissed dean said the embezzlement charges were concocted using a bureaucratic trick. She insisted the journalism faculty has a transparent system of financial management. 
“I was getting a salary of 80,000 rubles ($2,700); that figure was never a secret,” she said.”The investigators argue that I did not have the right to sign payslips for extra-budgetary earnings for myself and my staff — which is not true. This practice is legal and fully transparent and it existed for many years with no complaints — until I dared to tell the truth about the autocracy that reigns at the school.”
In December 2009, in the wake of the investigation, which has so far led nowhere, Shishkina was suspended from her job.
Shishkina said she had only found out about her dismissal from the media, and that she was considering taking the case to court.
In addition to her position as the journalism faculty dean, Shishkina was also deputy head of the university’s trade union. “I have met with the union’s representatives and discovered that Kropachev did not get their approval before firing me,” Shishkina said.
In order to illustrate her accusations of Kropachev acting like an authoritarian leader, Shishkina often mentioned  in interviews the fact that the university’s rector had secured the right to personally dismiss any member of university staff, including faculty deans, despite the fact that the position of dean is an elected post.
“Now my own dismissal is a compelling enough illustration of the feudal principals of running the university that flourish under Kropachev,” Shishkina said, adding that she had not had a chance to discuss the situation with Kropachev face-to-face, though she would very much have liked to.

TITLE: Teen Smoking Called a ‘National Catastrophe’
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Moscow’s top doctor said Friday that smoking-related diseases are growing and warned that teenage smoking is leading to a “national catastrophe.”
Dr. Leonid Lazebnik painted a grim picture of the harm that tobacco is causing Russians, telling a round table that 65 percent of men and 30 percent of women have smoked at some time in their lives.
In contrast, Lazebnik said, the figures in the mid-1980s were 48 percent of men and 5 percent of women.
He said 24.6 percent of Muscovites are smokers.
“But the scariest thing of all is our future,” Lazebnik said. “In Moscow, 73 percent of boys and 65 percent of girls smoke. I see this as a national catastrophe.”
Lazebnik did not provide figures for the growth in smoking-related diseases.
City Hall and federal officials attending Friday’s round table promised to lobby for laws that restricted smoking in public places and limited cigarette sales.
“We will have no success without a legal base,” said Yulia Grimalskaya, deputy head of City Hall’s department for family and youth policies.
She said her department was lobbying for a ban on selling cigarettes in kiosks, the licensing of tobacco sales and high fines for smoking in public places, including restaurants.
Nikolai Gerasimenko, first deputy head of State Duma’s commission for health protection, called for higher excise duties on tobacco products, which he said would clear the market of contraband cigarettes and drive up cigarette prices, making them less affordable.
Russia has the lowest excise duties on tobacco goods in Europe, said Dmitry Yanin, chairman of the board at the International Confederation of Consumer Societies.
Yanin urged a ban on tobacco advertising and smoking in public places. “Smoking-free zones would boost Moscow’s tourist potential,” Yanin said.
Gerasimenko complained that foreign tobacco makers were making money at Russia’s expense.
“They get their profits, while we spend lots of money on medical treatment,” he said.
About 10 percent of tobacco traders on the Russian market are foreign, he said.
Lyudmila Stebenkova, head of the Moscow City Duma’s commission for public health protection, suggested that restaurants consider offering smoke-free days.
She also said the public needed to be educated about the dangers of smoking through anti-smoking billboards. 
Her commission is responsible for creating such billboards, including one that depicts a hand squeezing a dirty sponge, which is compared to a smoker’s lung, that was used in a citywide campaign late last year.

TITLE: United Russia Lead Dented in Elections
AUTHOR: By Stuart Williams
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s dominant ruling party United Russia was leading regional elections but suffered a string of surprising setbacks against the backdrop of the economic crisis, results showed Monday.
United Russia — whose overall leader is Prime Minister Vladimir Putin — won less than half the vote in some polls for regional parliaments and in a stunning reversal lost the election for mayor in the Siberian city of Irkutsk.
The polls Sunday only involved some of Russia’s regions but were being closely watched by the authorities after unusual displays of discontent in recent weeks rattled the Kremlin.
United Russia won over 48 percent of the vote in elections for the local parliament in the Khabarovsk region, a key economic hub in the Far East on the border with China, results published by the Central Election Commission showed.
In the region of Sverdlovsk, which includes the Urals economic capital of Yekaterinburg, it polled just 40 percent of the vote. However in the sparsely populated Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region it won 86 percent.
The most unsettling news for United Russia came in Irkutsk, a city of more than half-a-million people, where its candidate in elections for mayor was thrashed by a candidate supported by the Communist Party.
Communist-supported Viktor Kondrashov won over 62 percent of the vote, while United Russia candidate Sergei Serebrennikov only mustered 27 percent, results showed.
Adding to United Russia’s Siberian woes, in the mayoral elections for the nearby city of Ust-Ilimsk the candidate of opposition party A Just Russia also trounced the United Russia candidate.
The speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament and top United Russia official Boris Gryzlov admitted that these local elections had been tougher than the last set of polls in October due to rises in utility prices.
“We need losses at a regional level so that we recognise the causes of these losses and then correct them,” he said in comments published on the United Russia web site.
Another top United Russia leader, Vyacheslav Volodin, emphasized that the results showed that Russians were continuing to support the political course of Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev.
In the battles for local parliaments, United Russia’s closest challenger was the Communist Party, which polled around 20 percent in the key zones. “The electorate has listened to us,” said its leader Gennady Zyuganov.
Third place went to the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of veteran firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
The anti-Kremlin liberal opposition, which has no seats in the national parliament, remained sidelined while turnout in several of the main regions reached little more than 30 percent.
Close attention is being paid to developments in Russia’s regions after 10,000 people attended a protest in the western exclave of Kaliningrad in January, by far the biggest protest since the economic crisis began.
The organizers had planned to hold a fresh mass protest in Kaliningrad on March 20 but called it off at the weekend, saying that this was the only way to prevent bloody clashes with police.

TITLE: Sochi Olympic Chief Slams ‘Unconstructive’ Ecologists
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak accused environmentalists on Friday of taking an “unconstructive” position over preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.
As the four-year countdown to the games begins, ecologists charge that picturesque areas surrounding the Black Sea resort of Sochi have been destroyed, spring water has been contaminated by heavy metal waste and the construction of the facilities is hazardously amateur.
Referring to Russian environmentalists, Kozak, who is in charge of Olympic preparations, said that “instead of trying to solve ecological problems and compensation measures, people are taking an absolutely unconstructive position.”
Many of the domestic NGOs, Kozak said, are “simply targeting the derailment of the games project,” adding that experts from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) had arrived at that conclusion after consultations with the groups.
Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for UNEP, refused to comment on Kozak’s claim, saying the report was not yet complete.
Last month, Igor Chestin, head of the Russian branch of the World Wildlife Fund, said the group had ceased cooperation with Olympic organizers, complaining that their concerns were being ignored. Greenpeace Russia has also withdrawn from discussions, said Andrei Petrov, the group’s World Heritage program coordinator.
Also Friday, Kozak warned state Olympic constructor Olimpstroi that it should increase the pace of building. The building of the luge and bobsled track is now slightly behind schedule, he said, adding that it would come into operation by the end of 2012, a six-month delay.
All facilities are being built from scratch for the Sochi games, to be held in two clusters outside the city itself. Ice-rink-based events will be held at a coastal cluster, while a mountain cluster will feature skiing, snowboarding and bobsledding, among other sports.
Activists say the chief environmental threat is to the Mzymta River, which connects the two clusters. Thousands of beech trees have been felled to clear the path for a road and rail link that skirts the river.

TITLE: Putin Signs Raft of Deals in Delhi
AUTHOR: By Alex Anishyuk
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin won support for Rosatom to build a dozen ultrasafe nuclear reactors in India, part of more than $10 billion in deals in energy, arms, telecom and other cooperation signed during his visit Friday.
The trip, Putin’s first to India since December 2007, came as Moscow drives to maintain its position on the lucrative markets for arms and nuclear energy, even as India boosts cooperation with rival suppliers like the United States and France.
Putin promoted safety as one of the Russian reactors’ biggest selling points, saying the International Atomic Energy Agency has called them among the world’s safest and that Russia had learned lessons from the 1986 explosion in Chernobyl.
“Unlike other reactors that are being built in the world, ours can survive a direct hit by a midrange airplane weighing several tons,” Putin said, Interfax reported. “We have a big national program to develop atomic energy. … Naturally, we, using this technology at home, in Russia, are starting with the necessity of providing safety above all else.”
Rosatom chief Sergei Kiriyenko, who accompanied Putin on the trip, said half of the 12 reactors would be finished between 2012 and 2017 as part of the agreement for nuclear cooperation signed Friday. The figure includes reactors that Rosatom unit Atomstroiexport is already building at Kudankulam, he said.
Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said Russia hoped to build a total of 16 reactors in India, and officials in New Delhi said ahead of the visit that Moscow would be invited to bid for the contracts alongside Washington and Paris.
Financial terms of the nuclear cooperation were not announced, but Kiriyenko said last year that India — which is seeking to raise its nuclear capacity fivefold by 2020 — was offering “tens of billions of dollars” in work.
Putin and his Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh, signed an agreement to build the third and fourth generating units of Kudankulam nuclear power station. Putin also met with Indian President Pratibha Patil and Sonia Gandhi, head of the ruling coalition in the parliament. 
“No matter in what capacity I come to India, I always see that India, without any exaggeration, has been our strategic partner for many decades now,” Putin said at an Internet press conference with business and social representatives, according to comments posted on the government web site.
“And that’s a reflection not only of the sympathy between the peoples of Russia and the peoples of India … but also, above all, evidence of the nearly complete coincidence of our geopolitical interests,” he said.
Singh was equally warm in his praise. “Putin has been the architect of the strategic partnership between India and Russia,” Singh said after meeting Putin, Reuters reported. “Relations with Russia are a key pillar of our foreign policy.”
Moscow hosted Singh for talks in December, and Putin visited the country repeatedly during his presidency. President Dmitry Medvedev visited India in December 2008 and hosted a summit with the heads of the three other BRIC emerging market countries — Brazil, India and China — in June.
The countries have sought to formalize their ties in recent months for greater clout in world economic and financial affairs.
Russia, which intends to double its trade with India to $20 billion by 2015, will open a free economic zone in the country, investing a total of $3 billion and attracting investors from other countries, Yury Medvedev, a deputy head of the Federal Property Management Agency, told Rossiiskaya Gazeta on Friday.
The core of the project will be shaped by Titanium Products Private, a titanium joint-enterprise that will be set up as a means of repayment of Indian debt to Russia, he said. The enterprise will receive $120 million in investment, with 51 percent of shares owned by Russia.
The results of this pilot project will be an indication of whether other countries may also repay their debts to Russia under similar plans, he said.
Moscow and New Delhi also agreed to cooperate in the hydrocarbon sector, Putin said Friday.
“At the prime minister’s initiative, we agreed that we will … sign an intergovernmental cooperation agreement in this area soon,” he said.
The two sides also signed off on a joint venture to be located in India that will produce navigation equipment compatible with both the Glonass system — developed by Russia — and its U.S. equivalent, GPS.
During the Internet conference Friday, Putin admonished foreign banks operating in Russia for capital outflows during the recession, despite the support they received from the government.
“Not all countries included foreign banks in their stimulus programs, but we did,” he said. “We did not impose limits on capital outflows amid the recession. Some foreign financial organizations working in Russia promoted capital outflows from Russia under these circumstances.”
But Putin immediately sweetened the pill, saying the activity of the subsidiaries of foreign banks was market-driven. “They behaved very responsibly, and we have no necessity to lay serious claims against them.”
Capital outflows hit $52.4 billion in 2009, according to the Central Bank, an improvement from a record $129.9 billion drain a year earlier.

TITLE: Aeroflot Travelers Angry Over Treatment in NYC
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Aeroflot passengers complained Sunday that they had to sleep on the floor and chairs at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport after bad weather delayed their flight by more than 24 hours.
An Aeroflot representative turned down the passengers’ demand for hotel rooms for the night, the passengers said in a collective complaint sent to The Moscow Times.
Under Russian transportation regulations passed in 2007, airlines are required to provide food and accommodation for passengers stranded because of bad weather. The rules say they apply to domestic and international flights so long as they do not contradict the regulations of another jurisdiction.
U.S. federal law does not require airlines to provide for passengers in weather-related delays.
Sunday’s incident could deal a blow to Aeroflot, which has made great strides toward building a world-class reputation since its Soviet days of dour flight attendants and notoriously poor service.
A help desk attendant at the state-run Aeroflot said late Sunday that the airline had provided rooms and meals to the stranded travelers earlier that day.
But one of the ill-fated flight’s passengers, Ksenia Galouchko, contested that statement. “We are still stuck here. … It is not certain whether we will be flying out tonight either,” she said by e-mail from the airport. “No sign of Aeroflot representatives for the past 11 hours.”
Galouchko, a former Moscow Times intern, said passengers of several other airlines with rerouted planes were provided with hotel rooms.
Flight SU 316, originally scheduled to take off from JFK at 8:05 p.m. Saturday, was delayed to 8:55 p.m. Sunday, Aeroflot’s web site showed. 
A powerful rain storm that hit the U.S. Northeast on Saturday, knocking down power lines and cutting off electricity to more than 500,000, prevented Aeroflot’s incoming flight from landing in New York. Air controllers redirected it to Washington, the airline said.
Aeroflot did offer $15 food vouchers to passengers, the e-mailed complaint said, but only once in over 13 hours. A man who identified himself as Aeroflot representative Gennady Galkin came out to speak with the stranded travelers about six hours after the flight had been due to leave and suggested that they stay at the terminal for the night, the complaint said.
The representative denied people access to their luggage — and therefore to most of their personal belongings, including warm clothes — saying it had been sealed in storage containers, the complaint said. Airport officials who could have helped the situation had left, he said, according to the passengers. When the man left, airport employees called the police to force the people from the terminal. Police chose not to intervene.
Calls and an e-mail to Aeroflot’s press office in Moscow went unanswered Sunday.

TITLE: Zenit Tops Soccer Rich List
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Zenit St. Petersburg, sponsored by gas exporter Gazprom, topped Russian soccer’s rich list with a 2010 budget of $99 million, 52 percent more than its nearest rival, Finans magazine said.
Zenit, UEFA Cup winner in 2008, will match its 2009 budget as some clubs in Russia struggle to stay afloat amid the country’s worst economic slump since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the magazine said in a report Monday, citing its own calculations. Zenit is owned by Gazprombank, Finans said.
Manchester United, the world’s most valuable club, had annual revenue of $512 million, Forbes magazine reported in April 2009, while Real Madrid, the second most valuable, had revenue of $576 million.
Of Russia’s eight richest clubs, only one, CSKA Moscow, increased its budget this year to $64.3 million from $49 million a year earlier as sponsors reined in spending or withdrew support, Finans said.
Zenit, which finished third in Russia’s Premier League last season, is trailed by Lukoil’s Moscow club Spartak with a budget of $65 million and Dinamo Moscow at $64.7 million, financed by VTB Group and billionaire Alisher Usmanov’s Metalloinvest.

TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: <strong>Metro Tender Awarded</strong>
ST. PETERSBURG (Vedomosti) — The entrance complex to the new Obvodny Kanal metro station will be built by the company Nevsky Dom.
The results of a closed tender to construct a 30,000 square-meter multifunctional complex comprising the entrance to the new metro station on the corner of the embankment of the Obvodny canal and Ligovsky Prospekt were announced last week by Petersburg Metropolitan. 
The project is due to be completed by the first quarter of 2012, according to Yulia Koroleva, deputy director of Nevsky Dom.
According to SPARK data, at the beginning of 2008, Nevsky Dom was headed by Igor Leitis, president of Adamant trade and industrial holding. 

<strong>Car Sales Hiked by Plan</strong>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia’s “cash-for-clunkers” has prompted the sale of more than 6,200 new vehicles a week after the government rolled out the program that boosted the car industry across Europe and the U.S.
“The first results are much better than some dealers had anticipated because of the government’s aggressive public relations campaign,” said Oleg Datskiv, founder of Auto-Dealer.ru, a Moscow-based industry research group.
The government issued 6,227 vouchers of 50,000 rubles ($1,677) each out of 200,000 allocated for the program, the Industry Ministry said on its web site. The vouchers toward new Russian-built automobiles are available to people who turn in a car more than 10 years old.

<strong>Electric Stake for Sale</strong>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Far East Energy is in talks to buy out Fortum’s stake in the St. Petersburg electricity retailer for 1 billion rubles ($34 million) within the next three months, Interfax reported, citing unidentified Russian officials familiar with the negotiations.

<strong>U.S. Chicken to Return?</strong>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia may allow U.S. chicken imports to resume after talks with American officials, RIA Novosti said Monday, citing Gennady Onishchenko, Russia’s public health chief.
Onishchenko didn’t say what steps suppliers would have to take or give a timeframe for a possible renewal of deliveries after U.S. poultry imports were halted on Jan. 1, RIA said.

<strong>Metro Stores Face Probe</strong>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Metro Cash & Carry’s Russian unit is being probed by the local antimonopoly watchdog after suppliers complained about relations with the retailer.
“The probe is being conducted after complaints from Metro’s suppliers,” Irina Kashunina, a spokeswoman for the Russian Antimonopoly Service, said in a telephone interview from Moscow on Monday. She declined to provide the names of the suppliers.
The investigation includes checking the unit’s contracts with suppliers for the years of 2008, 2009 and 2010, according to Kashunina. It will be completed next month, she added.
“This is a regular probe by the Antimonopoly Service into our relations with suppliers,” Oksana Tokareva, spokeswoman for Metro Cash & Carry’s Russian unit, said by telephone from Moscow. “From time to time we have such probes conducted by the service and no violations have been found before.”

TITLE: Baby Woolly Mammoth Sets Out on U.S. Tour
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CHICAGO — Some 42,000 years after, scientists say, she fell into mud near a river and suffocated, an intact baby woolly mammoth from the Ice Age is to go on display for the first time in the United States at The Field Museum.
Scientists say the mammoth calf, named Lyuba, is the best preserved and most complete mammoth specimen known. She was found in 2007 by a reindeer herder in northern Siberia’s remote Yamal-Nenets autonomous region and named after his wife.
“Her preservation, her really lifelike qualities allow you to form a better impression of what the past was really like,” said Dan Fisher, a University of Michigan paleontologist and the museum’s exhibit curator. “It becomes more immediate. It’s real.”
In the exhibit that opens Friday, visitors can see the folds and creases in Lyuba’s skin, the bottom of her foot and small patches of hair on her ear and leg. At 114 centimeters long, Lyuba weighs about 42 kilograms and if fully grown could have measured 2.4 meters tall at her shoulder and weighed between 2.7 metric tons and 3.6 metric tons, Fisher said.
Lyuba has been a boon for scientists, who have done MRIs, CT scans and DNA testing among other analyses on the baby mammoth.
“The things you can learn from a fleshy specimen like this you can’t learn from studying a skeleton,” said Tom Skwerski, The Field Museum’s project manager for the exhibit. “It’s as if all of a sudden you’ve been given this great gift to be able to reaffirm a lot of your theories.”
Scientists have analyzed Lyuba’s stomach contents, including her mother’s milk. They say she was 1 month old when she died and was in excellent condition.
Scientists first analyzed Lyuba’s baby tusks and chewing teeth, looking for details about diet, environment and health.
“The important thing about Lyuba, though, is that in a sense she gave us the answers to many of the questions we would ask through those analyses,” Fisher said. “Because there’s her whole body preserved in its entirety.”
Experts say the baby mammoth remained well-preserved because she was frozen in permafrost for thousands of years. Fisher also said her body was colonized by naturally occurring bacteria that produced lactic acid, which kept her body in a “pickled” state.
Lyuba’s body was immersed in preservative solutions for her Chicago display, scientists said.
The baby mammoth’s home institution is the Shemanovsky Museum and Exhibition Center in Salekhard, in the Yamal-Nenets autonomous region.
The exhibit is to travel to other North American cities: Jersey City, New Jersey; Anchorage, Alaska; St. Louis, Missouri; San Diego, California; Denver, Colorado; and Boston, Massachusetts.
Skwerski called the baby mammoth a “singular object” and said she has been valuable to scientists around the world.
“To get Lyuba for our exhibition is like getting the Mona Lisa for your exhibition on Italian art,” Skwerski said.
The baby mammoth’s true value may be in her ability to bring people closer to human history, the history of the Earth’s climate system and climate change, Fisher said.
“If Lyuba opens people’s minds to any of that, then she’s doing a great job for us,” he said.

TITLE: In the Spotlight: Eurovision
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Last Sunday, Russia chose Pyotr Nalich, a quirky singer who became famous through YouTube and isn’t part of the glitzy Russian pop scene, as its entry for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.
Nalich and his band won a convincing 20 percent of votes, both from the public and the professional jury, which included two movers and shakers in Russian pop: songwriter Igor Krutoi and producer Maxim Fadeyev. But his performance could not have been less glamorous: His shirt and trousers were in need of an iron and the only special effect was a piece of paper that he pulled out of his pocket. And opinion was divided on whether he will cut it at the contest final in Oslo in May.
“Is this a sign that we will soon be sending random passers-by to the Eurovision?” Moskovsky Komsomolets asked. Its pop music expert, Artur Gasparyan, called Nalich’s chances “very moderate” in an interview with RIA-Novosti.
The 2008 Russia winner, Dima Bilan, told Komsomolskaya Pravda that he thought the song was “pretty weak.”
Nalich became famous in 2007 when he posted a song called “Guitar” on YouTube with a deliberately cheesy video in which he sat in a Lada and danced around a dacha. His initial success was probably based on novelty value, but Nalich — who studied opera singing at a music college — has gone on to give full-length concerts at big venues like Moscow’s B1.
He said Sunday that he entered the competition to get a wider audience but was so relaxed about the whole thing that he admitted that he didn’t even know when the final was.
His Eurovision song, “Lost and Forgotten,” is a simple, sing-along guitar ballad that isn’t a million miles away from last year’s winning song, “Fairytale,” by Norwegian singer Alexander Rybak.
It beat competition from Russia’s most desperate Eurovision wannabe: pretty boy Alexander Panaiotov, who made his fourth unsuccessful attempt. There were also a lot of interchangeable female singers in tiny dresses and a few oddballs, such as Oleg Bezinskikh, who sang in an operatic falsetto with backing dancers sprayed silver.
The biggest cheer went to a group of elderly women called Buranovskiye Babushki, who come from the Udmurtia republic and wear traditional embroidered dresses and coin necklaces. Their act involved a little dignified dancing on stage by the six singers, who were all victims of Soviet dentistry.
While Nalich made it from the Internet to the cheesiest music stage in Europe, Soviet-era pop star Eduard Khil has inexplicably moved in the opposite direction to become a hit on YouTube.
Almost 2 million people have watched a video of his song “I’m very glad that I’m finally coming home,” after it was seized upon by American hipsters. Fans of what they call the “Trololololo Song” have set up a web site where you can sign a petition asking Khil, 75, to go on a world tour.
The song originally had lyrics about a cowboy riding over the prairie, but they were deemed un-Soviet so Khil simply warbles along to the tune.
The incredibly cheesy video is now a viral hit and got even more publicity when Christoph Waltz, the Oscar-winning actor in “Inglourious Basterds,” mimed to it on an ABC television show in the United States.
It’s a strange twist of fate for Khil, a besuited, clean-cut crooner, who was awarded the title of People’s Artist of Russia but perhaps never quite made the top echelon of stars. Let’s hope he makes some money from it, since he told Komsomolskaya Pravda last month that his pension only stretches to pay household bills. And I hope he never realizes that there is an element of sneering to his newfound fame. He told Life News that he had never heard of his Internet popularity, “but what can I say, it’s pleasant. Thanks for the good news.”