SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1604 (65), Friday, August 27, 2010
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TITLE: Beer and Music Festival Aims to Help Homeless
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A beer and rock music festival that kicks off at the city’s Treugolnik center on Friday looks set to become Russia’s answer to beer-drinking culture from Belgium, the U.K., the Czech Republic and other countries, while helping the local homeless.
All profits made at the Magerfest festival, which runs through this coming weekend, will be donated to programs targeting the city’s homeless people. St. Petersburg is home to nearly 30 independent breweries, though only the biggest players are well known among the general public. The new festival is designed to serve as a springboard for smaller breweries, a full range of which will be presented at the event.
The rock music element of the event is by no means small, with top Russian and Western bands including the U.K.’s The Tiger Lillies and The Real Tuesday Weld, and Russia’s Auktsion and Markscheider Kunst slated to perform at the festival.
Nochlezhka, the long-standing local charity created with the aim of making life easier for those who have lost their homes, will use the proceeds from ticket sales to fund projects that will help the city’s homeless to survive the winter.
In past seasons, the charity has found it difficult to get funding for night buses serving hot food in several districts of the city.
In 2009 and 2010, volunteers were forced to reduce the size of portions, owing to a lack of funds. 
Nochlezhka has been operating in Russia for more than 17 years, helping the city’s most vulnerable people who live in extreme poverty and are deprived of access to housing, medical care and employment. The charity regularly organizes campaigns aimed at changing the attitude of the public, media and government toward homelessness.
In June 2009, Nochlezhka organized an event on Malaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa to draw attention to the plight of homeless women. Dozens of volunteers pushed each other roughly to compete for a place on the only bed available to them. The city’s shelters provide just 46 beds for women, and there are at least 200 people competing for each place. Nochlezhka has appealed to City Hall to open a shelter for women, but the request was turned down.
City police do not issue figures on the number of homeless people who freeze to death every year on the streets of St. Petersburg, but local charities say hundreds of people die or become seriously ill from hypothermia from October to April.
Every year, volunteers campaign among local residents to get funding for heated tents. The cost of operating a tent for one day is 4,000 rubles ($130), while the cost of running an overnight shelter during the whole winter season comes to more than 600,000 rubles ($20,000).
The city’s homeless also encounter problems obtaining access to medical care. In a particularly shocking case this summer, a 24-year local homeless man, Vitaly Kuznetsov, who was suffering from cancer in its final stages, was denied admittance to a hospital because he did not have any documents showing where he was registered as living — an official Russian requirement that has outlived the Soviet Union. Although the man was reportedly crying due to the excruciating pain he was in, the doctors did not even give him any anesthetic. Social workers from Nochlezhka spent the last six weeks of Kuznetsov’s life trying to convince one of the city’s medical institutions to accept the patient, or at the very least, to provide him with painkillers. In the end, Kuznetsov was taken to a local hospice, where he died within 24 hours.
“I find it inexplicable and utterly cynical that none of the doctors whom we were contacting for help when we discovered that Vitaly was unwell actually told either the poor man or us that he had cancer, and that it was in its terminal stages,” said Zoya Solovyova, a spokeswoman for Nochlezhka. 
“We simply came to understand that eventually ourselves, when we saw Vitaly’s condition rapidly deteriorating. The young man himself realized he was dying when things got so bad that he was not able to move or talk.”
The key reasons people become homeless in Russia include family problems (35 percent of all homeless people) and economic migration (24 percent), according to the homeless.ru web site. 
People who have been recently released from prison account for 18 percent of the country’s homeless population. A further 15 percent lost their housing due to fraudulent real estate operations.

TITLE: Violent Cop Faces Criminal Charges
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A police officer who was especially brutal during a police clampdown on the July 31 demo in defense of the right of assembly may face a prison term, after a criminal case regarding the police exceeding their authority was opened this week. 
The rally’s organizers are also calling for the senior officers who gave the orders to break up the event to be punished.
The Investigative Committee of the Russian Prosecutor’s Office in St. Petersburg has opened a case into allegations of an unnamed policeman exceeding powers while “taking measures to support the public order,” it said in a statement Wednesday.
The news came after the police’s actions at the event became a hot topic of discussion in the media and blogs.
The investigation has established that the police officer hit an “unidentified” man on the head with a rubber baton at least once “without having sufficient grounds,” the committee’s statement said. The offense of exceeding authority is punishable with three to 10 years in prison. The man who was attacked, Dmitry Semyonov, filed complaints with the prosecutor’s office and the police chief soon after the incident.
The statement made no mention, however, of the fact that the same officer was also seen dragging a young woman, Svetlana Pavlushkina, by her hair and beating at least two other men. One of the men, Alexander Kormushkin, was left with a bleeding head after the police officer hit him twice with his baton, while the other, Eduard Balagurov, was left with bruises on his face, head and body.
There was also no mention of other officers who were reported to have beaten people, both while detaining protesters and subsequently in buses where the detained were held.
Video footage distributed widely on the Internet shows the officer, who is seen to be wearing pearl beads on his right wrist and who has a paratroopers tattoo, heading into the crowd shouting “F***ing animals, who else wants some?” A young man is heard asking, “Why are you swearing?” in response to which the policeman seizes him by the hair, hits him across the face with his baton and takes him to the bus. During the rally, 67 were arrested and several were beaten.
“We are not out for blood, we don’t demand that he be put in prison, but we think it’s essential that he is fired, because such psychologically unstable men should not be working with law enforcement agencies,” said Andrei Dmitriyev, the local leader of author and oppositional leader Eduard Limonov’s banned National Bolshevik Party (NBP).
“We don’t want people to have their heads smashed in and arms broken at our events.
“We are drawing attention to this particular officer because it was him who inflicted all the injuries. The rest were just doing their job without being overzealous; they were ordered to detain people and so they did.”
The rally’s organizers demand that the officers who gave the orders to break up the event should also be punished.
“The tradition formed within the bureaucratic apparatus is that the people actually responsible for dispersing a peaceful rally go unpunished; the senior police officers who gave the orders to break up the event should be held responsible on a par with their subordinates,” they said in a statement Thursday.
Meanwhile, the investigation launched by the St. Petersburg Department for Interior Affairs (GUVD) earlier this month will not be finished until Sept. 2, a GUVD spokesman told Interfax on Thursday.
The rally was part of the Strategy 31 civil campaign, which was named after Article 31 of the Russian constitution that guarantees the right of assembly. Campaign events have been held across Russia on the 31st day of months that have 31 days since July 31 last year. 
In Moscow and St. Petersburg, the rallies have never been authorized and have been broken up by the police each time when demonstrators gather on Triumfalnaya Ploshchad in Moscow and next to Gostiny Dvor in St. Petersburg. 
Earlier this month, the Moscow mayor’s office banned any events on Triumfalnaya Ploshchad from now on and announced previously unplanned construction work on the square. The square was surrounded by a fence on Wednesday.
In St. Petersburg, City Hall refers to regulations that allegedly ban any public events being held near metro stations, but according to Strategy 31’s organizers, the city authorities have failed to show them the regulations, despite repeated requests. 
“We suspect that these regulations simply don’t exist,” said Dmitriyev.
On Aug. 18, the authorities refused to authorize the Aug. 31 event near Gostiny Dvor, suggesting that the organizers hold the rally in the remote 50th Anniversary of the October Revolution Park on the city’s northeastern outskirts.
“We have filed another application proposing that we move the rally 20 meters to the side,” said Andrei Pivovarov, the local leader of former Prime Minister-turned-opposition leader Mikhail Kasyanov’s Russian People’s Democratic Union (RNDS) and one of Strategy 31’s organizers.
The Strategy 31 organizers said that Tuesday’s rally would go ahead as planned despite the ban.

TITLE: Cereal Buying Fever Hits City
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Buckwheat disappeared from some St. Petersburg stores this week as prices for a number of basic food items in the city grew by an average of 12 percent in August.
The reasons behind the shortage are not only the drought, which has damaged many crops in Russia this summer, but also the buying fever sparked by rumors, officials say.
“The disappearance of buckwheat from the shelves of St. Petersburg stores could be connected to the buying craze that was created artificially, and also due to the mass media forcing the situation,” said Sergei Palinchuk, head of the trade department at City Hall’s committee for economy, industry and trade policy.
“It’s too early now to say whether or not St. Petersburg will have a buckwheat deficit,” Palinchuk said at a press conference Wednesday. “Until the whole harvest has been gathered, we can’t assess the real situation. We’ll only be able to talk about that in September.”
Palinchuk said that those who deliberately inflated product prices would be punished.
“As soon as we identify the sector where price growth is happening, we will take measures,” he said. Palinchuk said that the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service is already carrying out a number of inspections into the matter, and will publish the results in early September.
The city’s leading supermarket chains had either run out of buckwheat or had little left and at higher prices than usual on Thursday. 
Moscow is seeing a similar situation, with buckwheat being found only in small stores for 60 to 80 rubles ($2 to $2.60) — up to 2.5 times more expensive than as recently as July.
Analysts have said that buckwheat production could run into problems due to low stocks of that cereal and unfavorable forecasts for the buckwheat harvest this year. Suppliers have accordingly increased prices for it by 40 to 60 percent, Argumenty i Fakty daily reported. 
In 2007 and 2008, Russia harvested about one million tons of buckwheat. In 2009, that figure had almost halved to 564,000 tons. This year, only 400,000 to 450,000 tons of the cereal crop are expected to be harvested in Russia.
China is prepared to help Russia boost its buckwheat supplies, and some buckwheat has already been bought. Retailers are offering Chinese buckwheat at 34 to 36 rubles ($1.10 to $1.17) per kilogram. It is the first time in seven years that Russia has imported the product, Argumenty i Fakty reported.
Prices for a number of other food items rose this month in St. Petersburg. The average increase in August on eight basic food items in the city was 12 percent, said Alexander German, director of the St. Petersburg Products, Work and Services Control Center.
Flour and millet, for example, became on average 10 percent more expensive in the city, he said.
The size of the price hike varied at different chain stores, however.
At the discount chain retailer Dixy, prices for frozen beef increased by 20 percent, millet increased by 16 percent, potatoes by 17 percent, eggs by 11 percent and vegetable oil by five percent, German said.
At Perekryostok chain stores, the price of eggs grew by 20 percent.
O’Key chain store maintained the most stable prices, though during the last week, the price of milk at the stores grew by 17 percent. On average, milk became two percent more expensive in the city, German said.
Igor Podlipentsev, vice president of the St. Petersburg Food Companies Union, said that the price of milk increased due to a shortage of milk caused by the abnormally hot summer.
“The fact is that in hot weather, the milk yield decreases by about 20 to 30 percent, and the yield can’t be restored quickly, even when the temperature falls,” said Podlipentsev.
Podlipentsev said that the price of milk could rise if agricultural enterprises do not receive any state support.
Not all food items are becoming more expensive. Some items in local chain stores have become cheaper. At Perekryostok, the prices of vegetable oil fell by 22 percent, sugar fell by five percent, and rice by 37 percent. At Dixy, rice also became cheaper, but only by 16 percent, German said. The same trend was observed among certain items at other chain stores.
Meanwhile, the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS) warned that the price of bread in Russia could grow by 10 to 15 percent at the end of August or in early September, Lenta.ru reported. 
For the time being, no dramatic price rise for bread has been registered in Russia, according to the FAS.
The Russian Federal State Statistics Service, Rosstat, said the general price rises for food items in Russia from January through July stood at 5.9 percent, — 4.2 times higher than in the European Union, where that figure was 1.4 percent, Interfax reported.
In July, food items in Russia became 0.3 percent more expensive, while in the EU, prices fell — a 0.1 percent price decrease was recorded.

TITLE: Young Guard Reshuffles After Fake Video Scandal
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The leader of the United Russia party’s youth wing is quitting amid criticism that his organization not only failed to shine during this summer’s devastating wildfires but found themselves mired in scandal for making a fake video of members fighting blazes.
Ruslan Gattarov, 33, confirmed on Wednesday that he would resign as the leader of Young Guard in October, but he denied that his departure was linked to the group’s poor performance during the fires.
But pro-Kremlin activists said the group all but failed to join the firefighting efforts, which attracted thousands of volunteers nationwide earlier this month.
The official reason for Gattarov’s departure is a change in policy that will introduce a 28-year age limit for members of Young Guard’s political ruling council.
But he is actually being fired over the scandal caused by a photo and video shoot that showed Young Guard members pretending to fight a fire in the Ryazan region earlier this month, Vedomosti reported Wednesday, citing sources within United Russia, the ruling party led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
The incident, which created a hubbub in the blogosphere, has drawn criticism from Vyacheslav Surkov, the deputy chief of staff of the Kremlin administration who is believed to oversee both United Russia and all pro-Kremlin youth groups, the report said.
The “amateurish” staging of the firefighting effort showed that Young Guard was filled with “dull people” and prompted Surkov to demand new leadership, said Vladimir Pribilovsky, an analyst with Panorama, a think tank.
Gattarov, who became a Federation Council senator in April, denied that he was leaving in connection with the scandal.
“The decision was made in the spring to bring in fresh blood, and it hasn’t been changed since,” Gattarov said on his LiveJournal blog.
He insisted that Young Guard had actively combated fires in the Ryazan region and accused journalists of ignoring invitations to watch the group in action.
But not everyone was convinced — even those in fellow pro-Kremlin youth groups.
“I have been to several regions, including the Ryazan region, and not even once did I see any Young Guard members,” Alexander Khodorovsky, a coordinator of the Nashi youth group in the Ryazan region, told The St. Petersburg Times.
Khodorovsky, a Ryazan native, said he spent a week assisting Emergency Situations Ministry firefighters alongside a team of Nashi members and other volunteers not affiliated with any organized groups.
“I wore a Nashi T-shirt, but nobody paid attention because this was not important during a nationwide disaster,” he said.
Khodorovsky said the efforts of pro-Kremlin groups could have won them more support if they had been given more publicity.
The failure to capitalize on the wildfires has shown that both Nashi and Young Guard lack skilled public-relations strategists, while their current PR teams are working “within the existing system of corruption,” said Alexei Mukhin, an analyst with the Center for Political Information.
He said, though, that Nashi could not have expected to boost its reputation through firefighting because of its “damaged credibility.”
“They have such a bad reputation that even their good efforts are viewed with suspicion,” Mukhin said.
He said Nashi is better remembered for stunts like an exhibit at last month’s Lake Seliger youth camp that featured portraits of former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, human rights leader Lyudmila Alexeyeva and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov mounted on stakes and wearing hats with swastikas.
Pro-Kremlin groups are capable of harassing opposition leaders but do not live up to the Soviet-era youth movement Komsomol, said Ilya Yashin, a leader of the Solidarity opposition group.
The pro-Kremlin youth groups are widely considered to be reincarnations of the Komsomol, which numbered 36 million members at its peak in 1977 and was de-facto disbanded during perestroika in the 1980s.

TITLE: Plan to Reform Police Force Faces Major Amendments
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev’s bill to reform the country’s notoriously corrupt police force points in the right direction but faces major changes as it undergoes unprecedented public debate, lawmakers said Wednesday.
“There are some weak spots and contradictions in the bill, and I think the text that will be forwarded to the State Duma will differ from the text we are debating today,” Federation Council Senator Viktor Ozerov told reporters after a round-table discussion in the upper house of parliament.
Ozerov, who chairs the Federation Council’s Defense and Security Committee, promised that lawmakers would listen to popular demands and praised the level of debate as unprecedented in the country’s post-Soviet history.
“I think this is the first time since the adoption of the Russian Constitution that there is such an all encompassing discussion, and this will have positive effects,” he said, Interfax reported.
Medvedev took the unusual step of publishing the 11-chapter bill, which would also change the name of the police force from militsia to politsia, online on Aug. 7 and inviting Internet users to comment. As of late Wednesday, the draft on Zakonoproekt2010.ru had attracted more than 17,800 comments.
Yury Volkov, a deputy State Duma speaker and a member of United Russia who participated in Wednesday’s round table, also welcomed the level of discussion.
“We have taken the most all-encompassing form of debate, allowing extreme and insulting comments to appear,” he told The St. Petersburg Times. “But among the thousands of comments, some will allow us to take a fresh look at the bill, and that is a big plus.”
But economist Mikhail Delyagin said the bill actually increases the powers and reduces the accountability of the police force.
In an article published Wednesday in Yezhednevny Zhurnal, Delyagin argued that the draft declares any police action to be legitimate until proven otherwise by a court decision.
He also said the police’s right to enter private homes and to check citizens’ documents would be widened.

TITLE: U2 Singer Invites Putin Critic on Stage
AUTHOR: By Lyubov Pronina and Ilya Arkhipov
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — As U2 wrapped up their first concert in Moscow on Wednesday night, lead singer Bono surprised about 55,000 fans in the audience by calling Russian rocker Yury Shevchuk, a critic of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, on stage.
“You might know this man,” Bono said to the crowd. The pair performed Bob Dylan’s classic “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” with Shevchuk, frontman for the Russian rock group DDT, singing a Russian version before joining Bono on the original tune. Shevchuk left the stage shouting “Russia.”
On Aug. 22, as U2 arrived in Moscow, Shevchuk took part in an illegal rally in downtown Moscow to protest the construction of a highway through a forest northwest of the capital. At a meeting with Putin in May, Shevchuk assailed the suppression of opposition protests.
U2’s concert at Moscow’s Luzhniki stadium, part of its 360 Degree tour, had a human rights focus that ran afoul of law enforcement officers. Tents set up by Greenpeace and Amnesty International were closed and five Amnesty activists were detained.
The rights groups didn’t receive permits for the tents, Interfax reported, citing Zhanna Ozhimina, a Moscow police spokeswoman.
The concert came a day after Bono met with Dmitry Medvedev at the Russian president’s residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi to discuss issues such as AIDS. Bono asked Medvedev to suggest a Russian company that might join his Product Red program, which fights the spread of AIDS in Africa.
Bono described former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who attended the concert, as “a great hero of ours” who “has been a friend of mine for 10 years.”
During the concert, as U2 performed their song MLK, the first six articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights spooled across video screens. As the Irish rock group sang a tune in support of Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who is under house arrest, a group of people holding lanterns with the Amnesty International logo walked around the stage.
“Our activists were supposed to take part in the procession, but after the police shut down our stands, the concert organizers told us we weren’t taking part in the event,” Sergei Nikitin, head of Amnesty in Russia, said by telephone.
“This is just more proof of civil rights violations in Russia,” Nikitin said. “There was fear in the eyes of the policemen who were dealing with us yesterday. The authorities are afraid of their own people.”
Shevchuk appealed to Bono in an open letter on the eve of his meeting with Medvedev, asking the singer to raise the issue of police breaking up the Aug. 22 rally in Moscow. Bono didn’t mention the incident in the portion of the meeting released by the Kremlin.
“As I understand it, Bono simply didn’t receive Shevchuk’s appeal before the Sochi meeting,” Nikitin said. 
U2 also dedicated a song to the memory of those who lost their lives in Russia’s recent wildfires.

TITLE: United Russia Appeals Over Khimki
AUTHOR: By Tobias Kuehne
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Prime Minister Vladimir Putin-led United Russia Party issued a request to President Dmitry Medvedev to suspend work on the planning and construction of a highway through the Khimki forest, Fontanka.ru reported Thursday, citing Lenta.ru, which quoted the party’s press service. 
The party did not specify any reasons for its decision. 
“We consider it necessary to investigate this matter more thoroughly until we come to a final decision to either change the route of the road or continue to work according to the previous plan,” Boris Gryzlov, chairman of United Russia’s Higher Council and State Duma Speaker, was quoted by the party’s press service as saying, Dni.ru reported.
The period of time for which the completion of the Moscow to St. Petersburg highway, for which about 150 hectares in the Khimki forest have been allocated, should be suspended was not given. Earlier, the vast majority of United Russia and its youth associations in particular were in favor of the highway’s construction, Fontanka.ru reported. 
“We have different views on this issue in the United Russia party. The situation is not an easy one,” Gryzlov said, according to Dni.ru.

TITLE: Soldier’s Death Still a Mystery
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — It’s been more than seven years since the border guards, a unit of the Federal Security Service, returned Alma Bukharbayeva’s teenage son in a sealed casket.
Marat Burtubayev, 18, was serving with his unit in the Khabarovsk region, near the Chinese border, for his required two years of military service. He was eight months into his service when commanders said the young recruit hanged himself in January 2003.
But what they did not explain — and what Bukharbayeva has been trying to learn ever since — is what happened to her son’s internal organs.
The FSB returned Burtubayev’s body to his family in the Omsk region of West Siberia shortly after his death so he could be buried in accordance with Muslim traditions. But when the family’s imam examined the body, he found that most of the vital organs were missing and that his torso had been crudely resewn.
“The bridge of his nose was broken and there were stitches running up his body,” Bukharbayeva, a nurse by profession, said in a video appeal for justice posted on YouTube last year.
She also said her son’s neck showed no evidence of the rope he allegedly used to hang himself. Her suspicion that the border guards were trying to hide something only grew after she received another letter from the commanding officer saying her son “tragically died in the line of service.”
An official examination of the body was not conducted. A military court in the Khabarovsk region later convicted private Ruslan Belonogov, who was just arriving to begin his service, of hazing Burtubayev and sentenced him to two years in prison.
But Bukharbayeva believes that Belonogov was innocent and has since said ultimate responsibility lies with Omsk Governor Leonid Polezhayev and even then-President Vladimir Putin.
On Tuesday, an Omsk city court sided with Polezhayev — regional boss since 1995 — in a civil defamation suit. Bukharbayeva was ordered to retract allegations she made during a rally outside the city’s main recruitment office in June.
Joined by a group of mothers, Bukharbayeva had carried a sign reading: “Putin, Polezhayev are killers of our children. Kill us, mothers.”
Polezhayev’s office was not immediately available to comment on the ruling. But a spokesman for the governor, Roman Onopriyenko, told The St. Petersburg Times on the eve of the decision that the suit was filed “only because incorrect information was widely distributed.”
The civil suit “was made as delicate as possible, since the governor understands the mother’s grief,” Onopriyenko said. Polezhayev sued as a private citizen and was seeking only a retraction, he said.
The governor cannot be blamed for the death, as it happened in another region, Onopriyenko said.
But Bukharbayeva said Polezhayev — as chairman of the local draft commission — was responsible for soldiers drafted into the military or security services from the region.
“By suing, he didn’t shame me, he just shamed himself,” she told The St. Petersburg Times by telephone from Omsk, following the court’s ruling.
Bukharbayeva, who said she planned to appeal, was joined in court by two other women who lost their sons in the same FSB border guard garrison.
Galina Bereluk, mother-in-law of Omsk native Roman Suslov, said she did not believe that her son-in-law hanged himself in May.
“He wasn’t afraid to serve. He wanted to serve,” she said by telephone.
Suslov’s body contained the same stitch as Burtubayev’s, she said, and the family believes that he was killed so his organs could be harvested.
An investigation into Suslov’s death is ongoing, but chief military prosecutor Sergei Fridinsky has told reporters that investigators are not looking into the alleged organ theft.
According to Pamyat, an Omsk-based soldiers’ mothers group, seven border guard recruits have died in the Khabarovsk region since 2003.
Valentina Aparina — whose son Alexei was also reported to have committed suicide after a year and a half of service in the same unit — said officials told her to be satisfied with financial compensation and a tomb to honor her son.
“They said to us, ‘What else do you need?’ But we just want to find out the truth,” Aparina said by telephone from Omsk.
Khabarovsk regional prosecutors opened an investigation in 2004 amid allegations that a local hospital — in a district not far from the FSB garrison — had taken organs from patients without their approval.
More than 100 kidneys were taken from patients over several years, Interfax reported at the time, citing prosecutors.
But the case never reached court. A spokesman for the Khabarovsk regional branch of the Investigative Committee said Tuesday that the relevant materials had been archived and he could not immediately comment. The border guard service could not be reached for comment.
Presidential human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin made an appeal in the case in May 2006, asking Fridinsky, the military prosecutor, to conduct a probe into the investigation of Burtubayev’s death.
Fridinsky’s office said Belonogov’s conviction for hazing — ultimately leading to the alleged suicide — was justified. The official response, based on photographs of the body, said there was no evidence that organs had been removed from Burtubayev’s body.
“The traces on the body, believed to be damage, were post-mortem changes of the soft tissue,” Fridinsky wrote in a letter published by Novaya Gazeta in 2006.
Mother’s Right, a group helping parents of soldiers who die noncombat deaths, has seen other cases where murky deaths have been presented as suicides. Violent deaths, including from hazing, are common in the military, which has since cut its mandatory service to one year.
“The key is having an independent medical evaluation, which would justify the parents’ allegations,” said Veronika Marchenko, the group’s head.
Marchenko said her organization does not have any proven evidence that organs have been harvested from soldiers.
But the practice is not unheard of in nearby China. United Nations human rights officials have regularly investigated cases of alleged organ theft there, particularly from practitioners of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement.
Burtubayev’s grandmother, Mariam Kunanbayeva, told The St. Petersburg Times that she also did not believe that her grandson would have hanged himself.
A week before the death, Burtubayev was preparing to celebrate the New Year, she said. “He wrote a letter to me to send him some money to buy sweets for the holiday. I sent him 100 rubles,” or about $3, she said.
Finding justice may be an uphill battle for the family, which is struggling to survive on Bukharbayeva’s monthly salary of 14,000 rubles ($450) since her husband’s death last year. The family lives in a three-room apartment on the outskirts of Omsk, leased from the city.
Despite Tuesday’s setback, Bukharbayeva said she was ready to fight on for her son — and to help other mothers find justice.
“I’ve gone through hell and high water. No matter what, I’ll take it to Strasbourg,” she said, referring to the European Court of Human Rights.

TITLE: Government Blamed for Wildfires
AUTHOR: By Lucian Kim
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia’s fight against wildfires during the hottest summer on record was hampered by legislation signed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin during his eight-year presidency, Russian environmentalists said.
“Our government is possessed by myths,” Nikolai Shmatkov, the head of forest policy for WWF Russia, told reporters in Moscow on Thursday. “The myth of Russia’s boundless forests led to the passing of extremely flammable legislation.”
The Forest Code, signed by Putin in December 2006, led to a lack of rangers, prevention measures and a unified command center to battle fires that raged across central Russia, said Ivan Blokov, a spokesman for Greenpeace Russia. The cuts were a “clumsy attempt” to save budget money, he said. 
Record high temperatures and the worst drought in half a century led to fires that killed at least 53 people, scorched villages and shrouded Moscow in a smoke cloud. While rains and cooler temperatures have helped firefighting efforts, the country will still feel the effects, with the Economy Ministry estimating the drought may have cost as much as 0.8 percentage points in economic growth this year.
Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, discarded the idea that the government is at fault, saying Russia faced an extreme situation that no country would have been able to prevent. 
“Without a doubt, the system needs to be corrected, but not the Forest Code,” Peskov said by phone. “It’s absurd to blame the legislation.”
The government is analyzing what went wrong in individual situations and will make the necessary changes, for example in clarifying the competencies of federal and regional authorities, Peskov said.
While fires were inevitable given the heat wave that gripped Russia, inadequate preparation exacerbated the problem, Greenpeace said in a statement distributed Thursday. The situation will repeat itself in the future unless state control over forest fire prevention is restored, the organization said.
Often local authorities denied the existence of fires or lied that blazes were under control, said Grigory Kuksin, a Greenpeace activist who specializes in forest fires. As a result, local residents in affected areas ended up fighting fires themselves as no professionals were dispatched to those areas, he said.
There is no replacement for rangers who patrol forests and can detect and extinguish fires before they get out of hand, Kuksin said. Airplanes that drop water on fires are largely ineffective and more useful for public relations stunts, he said.
The U.S. spends $4.20 per hectare (2.5 acres) of forest land on firefighting, while Canada allots $1.70 and Russia 3 cents, according to Greenpeace.

TITLE: Zenit Relegated to Europa League After Losing Playoff
AUTHOR: By Tobias Kuehne
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Local soccer squad Zenit F.C. fell short of qualifying for the UEFA Champions League on Wednesday with a 0:2 second-leg playoff loss to French side AJ Auxerre. 
A 1:0 victory in the first leg, played in St. Petersburg on Aug. 17, was not enough to ward off elimination after Zenit’s 1:2 aggregate loss. 
“The match was a tough one because Auxerre were playing at a high tempo,” head coach Luciano Spalletti told L’Equipe after a fiercely fought game that featured some contested refereeing decisions.
Auxerre got off to a perfect start as defender Cedric Hengbart easily scored a header after a corner kick. Zenit generally showed poor marking during set pieces, and was punished for not protecting its posts during corner kicks. With Auxerre’s early lead of a goal in the match, Zenit’s 1:0 win from the first leg was equalized, and so the two squads were effectively starting from scratch.
Zenit was able to put Auxerre keeper Olivier Sorin’s goal under pressure several times but, as in the first leg, was unable to properly convert its control on the pitch into goals. In the 42nd minute, Auxerre defender Stephane Grichting touched the ball with his hand in the penalty area, but referee Damir Skomina’s whistle remained silent.
Matters turned from bad to worse for Zenit in the second half, as striker Ireneusz Jelen scored Auxerre’s second goal from its second corner in the 52nd minute. While this score meant elimination for Zenit, a single goal by the Russian squad would have put it through to the Champions League, due to UEFA’s away goal rule in cases of a tied aggregate score.
However, Auxerre’s goal appeared to have shocked Zenit’s players, who visibly lost their composure as the game went on. 
“We made a lot of technical fouls and Auxerre were able to seize their opportunities,” Spalletti said in his post-match analysis. Vladimir Bystrov and Sergei Semak saw consecutive yellow cards for complaining to the referee, who also sent off goalkeeper Vyacheslav Malafeyev with a red card in the 64th minute after he played a hand ball outside of his penalty area. 
Zenit was decimated further after Tomas Hubocan received a yellow card in the 76th minute, only to be booked again and sent off five minutes later. 
“I do not want to talk about the refereeing. We must respect the referee’s choices. I have nothing to say on this subject,” Spalletti said afterwards. The game saw few scenes in the penalty areas after that point, and Auxerre was able to hold on to its lead and advance to the Champions League.
Zenit will play in the Europa League competition, the successor of the UEFA Cup, which the squad won in 2008 under current Russian national team manager Dick Advocaat. Spartak Moscow and Rubin Kazan will represent the Russian Premier League in the Champions League. Having missed the Champions League, Zenit will miss out on millions of euros in prize money.

TITLE: Harvest Down 31% This Year
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: MOSCOW — Farmers have reaped 41.5 million metric tons of grain so far, 31 percent less than a year earlier, after the country’s worst drought in at least a half-century damaged crops, the Agriculture Ministry said Wednesday.
Production had reached 60.5 million tons at this point last year, the ministry said in a statement on its web site. This year’s harvest is halfway through, and yields are 22 percent lower. Wheat output reached 29 million tons, or 26 percent less than last year, and barley 5.9 million tons, for a 47 percent drop.
Russia has declared drought emergencies in 32 crop-producing regions and has cut its grain-crop forecast to 60 million to 65 million tons from 97 million tons. The country banned grain and flour exports from Aug. 15 through Dec. 31 to ensure domestic supply and damp prices.
In the Volga Federal District, production fell 59 percent to 6 million tons as yields lost 31 percent, the ministry said.

TITLE: City to Sell Bonds After 5-Year Break
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: St. Petersburg plans to sell bonds this year for the first time since 2005, Eduard Batanov, head of the city’s finance committee, said Tuesday.
The municipal government will issue 5 billion rubles ($163 million) of bonds at the end of October or in November with a maturity of “at least” five years and will sell a further 5 billion rubles before the end of the year, Batanov said. The city has no outstanding debt, he said.
City Hall “doesn’t rule out” selling eurobonds in two or three years, he said. St. Petersburg is rated Baa2 at Moody’s Investors Service, one level below the government, and BBB by Standard & Poor’s, the same level as Russia’s sovereign rating.
St. Petersburg was forced to delay $13 billion of infrastructure projects last year after credit markets seized up and investors fled emerging markets. The city’s economy has since recovered, helped in the first half of the year by growing retail sales and a 10 percent jump in manufacturing output. The hometown of President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is a production hub for carmakers, including Toyota and Hyundai.
The city’s budget posted a surplus of 29.8 billion rubles in the first six months of the year, the government said on its web site, without giving the figure for last year.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <strong>Pessimism Grows</strong>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian confidence in the health of the economy plunged in August, with more people predicting “hard times ahead,” according to a poll by the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion, or VTsIOM.
The proportion of people who are optimistic about the Russian economy dropped by 7 percentage points to 41 percent, while those who are pessimistic rose by 12 points to 36 percent, according to VTsIOM. People living in central Russia and the Ural region tend to be more pessimistic, while those in the south and far east are more optimistic, the survey shows.
A separate survey found that the proportion of people expecting “hard times” rose to 30 percent in August from 27 percent in July, VTsIOM said. 

<strong>Stock Markets Jump</strong>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian stocks jumped by their most in more than a week Thursday after oil and metals gained, boosting the outlook for producers. 
Preferred shares of Transneft, Russia’s pipeline operator, rose 2.3 percent. Novolipetsk Steel, the country’s biggest maker of the metal by market value, gained 2.5 percent. Oil producers Rosneft and Gazpom Neft added at least 1 percent, helping to push the Micex Index of 30 stocks higher by 1.1 percent to 1,348.82 at 10:58 a.m. in Moscow trading.
Oil, Russia’s main export, advanced as much as 45 cents, or 0.6 percent, to $72.97 a barrel in New York. Copper, zinc, lead and nickel also increased.

<strong>Voronezh IKEA Delayed</strong>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Swedish furniture retailer IKEA said Wednesday that it postponed construction of a Mega mall near Voronezh to the end of next year, Interfax reported.
The company attributed the delay to the global economic slump, the Voronezh governor’s press service said.
IKEA, which now runs 11 stores after investing $4 billion, said earlier that it would suspend expansion in Russia because of bureaucratic barriers. 

<strong>Airlines Boost Numbers</strong>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian airlines led by state-run Aeroflot carried 30 percent more passengers in January to August than in the same period last year, the Federal Air-Transportation Agency said on its web site Thursday.
Passenger numbers rose to 31.1 million passengers in the period from 24 million. Aeroflot’s numbers rose 33 percent to 6.3 million, followed by Transaero at 3.6 million, a gain of 39 percent on the year.

<strong>AvtoVAZ Profits Return</strong>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — AvtoVAZ, Russia’s biggest carmaker, swung to profit in the first seven months as the country’s cash-for-clunkers program boosted sales.
Net income for the period was 24 million rubles, including 636 million rubles of profit in July alone, after a loss a year earlier, Igor Komarov, AvtoVAZ’s president, told reporters Thursday at the Moscow International Automobile Salon.

<strong>Drought Effect Assessed</strong>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia’s worst drought in at least half a century won’t dramatically increase overdue bank loans, since agricultural loans account for about 5 percent of total loans, Mikhail Sukhov, a central bank board member, told a conference in Nizhny Novgorod on Thursday.
Profit for the banking sector this year should be at about the 2008 level, Sukhov said.

<strong>$300 Bln of Forest Lost</strong>
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia lost forests worth $300 billion in the recent wildfires, according to Alexei Zimenko, who heads the Moscow-based Biodiversity Conservation Center, Agence France-Presse reported.
Zimenko said damage amounted to $25,000 per hectare, based on the market value of timber and the cost of reforestation, the news wire reported.
Russia’s Emergencies Ministry says a total area of 935,286 hectares have been devastated since the start of the year; environmentalists put the figure at 10 million to 12 million hectares, AFP reported.

TITLE: Founding Partner to Leave Odnoklassniki Social Site
AUTHOR: By Timofei Dzyadko and Igor Tsukanov
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Odnoklassniki founder Albert Popkov plans to sell his stake, allowing Digital Sky Technologies to raise its share in the social network to 100 percent.
The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service has approved a request from DST, owned by Yury Milner, Grigory Finger and Alisher Usmanov, to purchase rights allowing it “to establish the terms of the entrepreneurial activity” of Odnoklassniki, according to a statement on the service’s web site.
DST now owns about 80 percent through Forticom Group, while the remaining 20 percent belongs to Popkov, who founded Odnoklassniki in 2002.
Talks for DST to purchase Popkov’s stake are nearly completed, an executive close to Odnoklassniki’s shareholders told Vedomosti. One of the site’s owners said the deal was being drafted. 
Popkov confirmed that he was in talks on selling the shares. “The sides [of the deal] have known each other for a long time, and we’re in regular talks. So I wouldn’t rule out a scenario in which I would exit Odnoklassniki,” he said. If the deal is reached, it will happen “fairly quickly,” he added.
Vedomosti’s sources declined to comment on the possible terms. A DST spokesman declined comment. 
DST gained control of the site in 2008, raising its stake in Forticom to 75 percent. It now fully owns the holding. 
Getting full control of Odnoklassniki is part of the preparations for a London initial public offering of DST Russia, planned for fall 2011, Vedomosti’s sources and an executive close to the IPO organizers said.
DST is rapidly consolidating its Russian assets. In late 2009, DST’s Mail.ru bought games developer Astrum Online Entertainment, and in July, DST raised its stake in Mail.ru to 99.9 percent. 
That month, DST acquired ICQ, an instant messaging platform popular in Russia, from AOL for $187.5 million. In addition to those three companies, DST Russia includes blocking stakes in the Vkontakte social network and in OE Investments, which manages the OSMP and e-port electronic payment systems. The holding also has a slew of stakes in smaller assets, including HeadHunter, Free-lance, Nigma, Sape and others, sources close to the Russian Internet companies have told Vedomosti.
Odnoklassniki may be worth seven times its 2009 profit, or about $70 million to $80 million, while optimists who see the site as a venture project could pay twice that, or about $140 million, Finam analyst Leonid Delitsyn said.
Odnoklassniki’s audience has peaked, Delitsyn said. But its revenue may still grow as the site adds new services and users, he said.
The $140 million price tag is far too low, said the executive close to Odnoklassniki’s owners, citing the network’s traffic. As of June, Odnoklassniki had 20 million unique visitors, compared with 15.3 million for Mail.ru, according to TNS Web Index. 
Mail.ru was valued at about $1.2 billion during DST’s recent deal with the South African holding Naspers.
An executive at an Internet firm said he heard DST hoped investors would value its Russian assets at $6 billion.

TITLE: Bout, Sechin and a Political Firestorm
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: Once again, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has expressed support for a Russian citizen wanted by the United States. This time, the person in question is Viktor Bout, the suspected arms dealer whom a Thai court ruled last Friday should be extradited to the United States to face trial. “I assure you that we will continue to do everything necessary to push for his return to his homeland,” Lavrov said, adding that the court decision was “unlawful and political.”
Bout was arrested on charges of offering to sell 100 Russian MANPAD anti-aircraft weapons to FBI agents posing as members of the Colombian militant group FARC. To get some perspective on what 100 MANPADS can do, I will cite another figure: The CIA gave the mujahedin about 500 Stinger surface-to-air missiles during the Afghan War, and after the war ended in the late 1980s, it launched a program to buy back the remaining Stingers at $183,000 each. It purchased about 300 missiles this way. That means the 200 anti-aircraft missiles that were used during the war were sufficient to knock out Soviet air domination.
In other words, the delivery of 100 Russian anti-aircraft missiles appears to be a government-sponsored program. It is difficult to imagine that such deliveries could be made without a blessing from above. The ideology is clear: Russians supply FARC in the same way the Americans supplied the mujahedin. That is Russia’s asymmetrical response to those damn Yanks.
According to U.S. think tank Stratfor, a man named Igor Sechin served in Mozambique in the 1980s along with Bout. Today, many consider Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin to be the second-most powerful person in Russia after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
In another twist, an Il-76 jet was impounded in Bangkok with 35 tons of weapons on board on Dec. 12, 2009. The airplane had flown from North Korea and was previously owned by a firm controlled by Bout. Immediately after the seizure, state-owned RIA-Novosti news agencies cited a report in the Bangkok Post as saying the airplane was registered in Georgia. However, the article in the Bangkok newspaper said, “The aircraft, an Ilyushin-76 transport registered in Kazakhstan …”
That would have been unremarkable, except the fact that the aircraft was indeed re-registered from a Kazakh company to Air West Georgia, a company registered in Kutaisi, Georgia, was not confirmed publicly until the next day.
The question arises: How did RIA-Novosti know the plane was registered to a Georgian company if it flew from North Korea, was impounded in Thailand, and even the Thai authorities thought that it was registered in Kazakhstan?
The answer is easy if you know anything about Air West Georgia. The company’s legal address is at Kopitnari Airport in Georgia, but its actual location is at Vnukovo Airport in Moscow, according to AviaPages.ru, an industry web site. A third address for Air West Georgia is also listed in the business directory Gde24.ru, this one near the Okhotny Ryad metro station and just a stone’s throw from the Kremlin and the headquarters of the Federal Security Service on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad.
Despite the international scandal, nobody has searched the airline’s offices at Vnukovo or near Lubyanskaya Ploshchad, and those addresses are still posted on the Internet. What’s more, Lavrov has spoken out in defense of Bout.
In one respect, I must agree with Lavrov: The Bout case is undoubtedly political. In fact, it is frightening to consider what Bout could tell U.S. authorities about who promised to provide him with 100 Russian anti-aircraft weapons.

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

TITLE: Ballyhoo Over Nothing
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kozin
TEXT: Russia has heaved a sigh of relief that Russian businessman Viktor Bout (not “suspected arms dealer,” since everyone is presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court) was not extradited from Thailand to the United States on Wednesday as earlier planned.
The problem is that the Bout case is an unfair and unfriendly gesture initiated by the United States. Bout must be released from his long and illegal detention.
Let me explain.
Bout, a 43-year-old former Russian army officer, was arrested in March 2008 in Bangkok in a sting operation at the request of the United States, which accused him of illegally trading arms. Thus, he has already spent nearly 2 1/2 years behind bars without any court ruling on whether he was directly involved in any sort of wrongdoing.
Furthermore, his wife, Alla, has complained that he is undernourished because he only gets meals twice a day. The Russian Consulate in Thailand has demanded that he be transferred to a larger cell with other inmates and be treated fairly.
Viktor Bout has denied all charges, saying in an interview in February that they appeared “to be a response to my refusal to cooperate with U.S. special services and because of unfair competition from Western companies, and, in particular, from companies controlled by the CIA.”
Bout also said he was a victim of “a political chase that has lasted for many years.”
In August 2009, the Bangkok Criminal Court ruled in Bout’s favor, denying a U.S. extradition request because of lack of evidence and because it believed that the case was politically motivated. But the United States appealed the ruling and filed new charges against him. On Friday, a Thai appeals court ruled that Bout must be extradited to the United States within three months. His Thai lawyer said the ruling was solely on the merits of the extradition case and did not consider whether Bout was innocent or guilty of charges filed in the United States. The lawyer also noted that the new charges could prevent the extradition because a new case might have to be opened in Thailand.
Bout’s Russian lawyer said in an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio that his client was innocent and promised to do his utmost to secure his release from prison.
Washington is concerned that the extradition order will expire and Bout will be released from prison. Consequently, the United States is trying to withdraw the new charges in a bid to speed up his extradition.
Russia reacted strongly to Friday’s court decision. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called it unlawful and politically motivated, suggesting that it was made to appease Washington. He also said Moscow would seek Bout’s repatriation to Russia.
The same day, the Foreign Ministry said in a diplomatically balanced but strongly worded statement that it was “extremely bewildered and disappointed” to learn of the extradition decision. Incidentally, the form of the statement — officially called “A Statement by the Russian Foreign Ministry” — was intentionally selected to highlight the issue. It is the highest in political value, as other forms of the ministry’s official reaction are called “Commentary” or “Press Release” and carry less political significance.
Moscow argues that the verdict appears highly questionable because the Thai Criminal Court last August found that the Americans had not provided sufficient proof of Bout’s guilt. Moscow also says Bout never committed any illegal acts on Thai soil and notes that Thai law enforcement agencies have dropped all charges against him.
Russia’s concerns were also personally delivered by a Russian deputy foreign minister to the Thai ambassador in Moscow on Friday.
Under the Russian Constitution, any Russian citizen is presumed innocent before a legal verdict is issued (Article 49). The Constitution also prohibits the extradition of any person to a foreign state over his or her political convictions (Article 63). As such, the Foreign Ministry has provided Bout and his family with complete legal and consular aid over the past 2 1/2 years. The Russian side has also promised to continue to offer Bout all possible assistance with the ultimate aim of securing his release and return home.
Taking into account Moscow’s firm support of Bout, who remains innocent under U.S., Thai and Russian law, the ballyhoo created by Washington over him may inevitably affect Russian-U.S. relations to the detriment of the U.S. effort to “reset” them.
The case is unfair, and Bout must be freed.

Vladimir Kozin is deputy director of the information and press department at the Foreign Ministry. The views expressed here are his own.

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Bono, U2’s outspoken frontman, was strangely closemouthed after the Russian police arrested five Amnesty International volunteers and shut down the stands of Amnesty International, Greenpeace and U2’s own anti-AIDS organization, ONE, before the band’s high-profile concert in Moscow on Wednesday.
The police and plainclothes agents qualified stands, posters and leaflets as an “unsanctioned” rally and ordered them to stop their “illegal” activities. The activists, who say their presence and activities were authorized by the concert’s promoters and were part of the concert agreement with U2 itself, were even ordered to take off their T-shirts.
In the late 1980s, St. Petersburg rock band Akvarium refused to perform when a musician in the audience was arrested, and was fully supported by the public, who kicked up a storm of noise until the police were forced to release the man.
In today’s Russia, the world-famous band U2 swallowed the sanctions, and duly played a full set to the audience of 55,000 without even mentioning the incident from the stage. No mention was made of Sunday’s banned concert in defense of the Khimki forest, which is being destroyed to make way for the construction of a Vladimir Putin-backed highway, despite the fact that the band had met activists and musicians who opened Bono’s eyes to the issue earlier on Wednesday.
Words were found for President Dmitry Medvedev, however. “President Medvedev could not have been more gracious to me,” he told the audience.
The arrested activists were taken to the police station and released several hours later, when the concert was over. 
“A spokeswoman for U2 said the band did not yet have the details of the detentions and could not immediately comment,” Reuters reported later. No mention of the incident was to be seen on U2’s web site Thursday, when the situation was widely reported by news agencies and the media.
Defending harassed activists is not, perhaps, quite so much of an ego-massage as drinking tea with Medvedev in his Sochi residence, discussing musical tastes and global issues, without daring to touch such sensitive topics as the human rights situation or ecology in Russia itself.
To be fair, Bono did manage to do one good thing. He invited Yury Shevchuk to sing a song with him. DDT frontman Shevchuk is a well-known opponent of the Kremlin and defender of the Khimki forest who had to sing without a microphone at Sunday’s protest concert because the police had impounded a truck carrying the PR system. Handing a microphone to Shevchuk was a great symbolic act, even if the song was the safe “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” 
This weekend in St. Petersburg, check out the three-day Magerfest event, which opens with a concert by Auktsyon on Friday and features British bands 
The Tiger Lillies (Saturday) and The Real Tuesday Weld (Sunday). See gigs for the times and address.
<i>— By Sergey Chernov</i>

TITLE: Following the trail of a feline killer
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: All that remained of beekeeper Vladimir Markov were stumps of bone sticking out of his boots, a bloodied shirt with an arm still inside, a severed hand, a faceless head and a gnawed femur.
A Siberian tiger carried out the gruesome 1997 slaughter in the remote Primorye region of Russia’s Far East, sparking a grim investigation that John Vaillant chronicles in “The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival.”
Vaillant, who wrote about logging, conservation and a sacred tree in “The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed” (2005), takes a wilderness adventure saga and enriches it with historical, political and economic context. Maybe it is too rich for some: His look at the philosophy of predators and prey includes a section on why young children are fascinated by dinosaurs.
The core story, though, will carry most readers through the heavy bits. One of the principals is Yury Trush, a squad leader with a group of game wardens called Inspection Tiger, which Vaillant describes as a “wilderness SWAT team” formed to investigate cat-related crimes. Trush must sort out why the tiger attacked so viciously, while also finding and killing it.
Before 1992, there were about 400 wild Siberian tigers in Russia. By 1994, a quarter of them had been killed, with most sold to China, where parts are prized for use in traditional medicine. The whiskers, for example, make you bulletproof, while the penis addresses other shortcomings.
One of the names given to tigers in the Far East is Toyota, “because during the 1990s, that is what you could buy with one,” Vaillant writes. Pressure from foreign conservation groups caused the formation of Inspection Tiger in 1994.
He attributes the surge in poaching to perestroika and the reopening of the Russian-Chinese border. Primorye, like all of Russia, became a place where “the line between politicians and mafia, and between legitimate business and crime, has blurred,” Vaillant writes.
The author also points to other contributing factors in Markov’s case that might explain why this cat seemed to target the beekeeper specifically, and why the big cats and the people in Primorye’s forests lost what had once been a mostly peaceful coexistence.
Markov’s town depended entirely on a state-owned logging company for its livelihood.
The economic restructuring of perestroika killed many such businesses that had come to rely on state support (and so, the movement was soon nicknamed “Katastroika”). Those, like Markov, who chose to stay had to rely on the forest to survive.
He started a honey operation and began poaching with homemade bullets and unregistered guns, using game to barter for essentials like sugar.
Markov could not hunt legally because licenses and approved guns were too expensive.
Russia’s policy “effectively re-created the medieval laws that forbade peasants to own weapons or to hunt,” Vaillant writes.
For Markov, it was “poach or starve,” and his situation set the stage for a desperate act, like bagging a tiger to sell on the black market.
Vaillant writes that a Russian gang member offered a game warden $50,000 for a tiger he shot.
The story takes many twists and turns as Vaillant uses pointed digressions to flesh out and add tension to the pursuit.
He also offers a stark surprise in the final section: another victim whose fate attests to the tiger’s determined stalking.
Trush does not have an easy time of it. The townsfolk are frightened, knowing the injured man-eater is among them. Yet Markov’s friends do not trust Inspection Tiger; they withhold information and hide Markov’s shotgun.
As Vaillant explains, Russian people “have learned through painful experience that information is a weapon that can and will be used against them.”

“The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival” is from Random House (329 pages, $26.95).

TITLE: Pulling the strings
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The First World Festival of Puppet Schools opened Thursday in St. Petersburg to show all the diversity of puppet theaters from around the globe.
The festival runs through Sept. 4 with a program featuring professional and graduation performances by leading theater schools from 16 countries including Russia, Germany, the U.K., France, Croatia, Iran, Israel, Lithuania and Poland.
The participants of the festival will hold stage-directing forums, master classes and an awards ceremony for the first Kukart prize for the support and promotion of puppet theaters in the Russian regions.
On Wednesday, St. Petersburg’s leading puppet theaters will organize an event titled “Theater Lesson” and will perform their most popular shows for children starting school for the first time next week.
The same day will also see a street theater program titled “Petrushka in St. Petersburg,” as well as a presentation by the Kinoostrov film school, whose program features 10 children’s movies made by children themselves.
The festival’s program also includes a project titled “Trust Yourself” for children with physical disabilities.
The Brodyachii Vertep (Wandering Nativity) theater and children Kukly integration theater for children with limited physical abilities will give a performance titled “World of Silence” for children with hearing difficulties, while St. Petersburg’s Bolshoi Puppet Theater will give a performance for young patients from the Pesochnoye cancer center.
President Dmitry Medvedev, a native of St. Petersburg, welcomed the festival participants “to a city of long-standing theater traditions” in his address to the festival.
The program includes highly diverse and often innovative performance styles.
London’s Central School of Speech and Drama brings with it a performance titled “Concertina for the Gods” in which director Nenagh Watson presents what she calls “ephemeral animation.”  The term is used by the director to describe the animation of debris by natural elements, such as a plastic bag blowing in the wind.
After a year of research, Watson has taken the concept into the studio to take a fresh look at object animation. The approach begins with allowing the object to be autonomous and dictate its own movement in order to discover a more equal relationship between puppeteer and object.
In another performance by London’s Central School of Speech and Drama called “Hands Up,” two puppetry students explore the endless possibilities of their most important tools — their bare hands.  The show was created from a desire to return to simplicity in puppetry.
On Saturday, Sept. 4, the St. Petersburg Theater Academy will present a performance called “Masks of St. Petersburg,” in which the characters are buildings, monuments and images of the city: the Kazan Cathedral, the Admiralty, New Holland, griffins and other city icons. The show will take place at the St. Petersburg Interior Theater at 4 p.m.
Israel is represented in the festival by Tel-Aviv’s School of Puppetry and Drama, which will present its play “Overhanded Life,” featuring various materials, objects, puppets and body parts, at 12 p.m. Friday at Dom Aktyora.
The Lithuanian Music and Theater Academy will present “The Bee Tales of Six Senses,” which is performed not only for general audiences, but also for those who cannot literally be spectators, for instance the blind.
The author’s objective was to put to the test all five human senses and find a sixth sense that would bring people together. The director of the play makes use of touch, sound, smell, heat and cold — everything that is not visible and can only be sensed.
The performance will take place at the St. Petersburg Interior Theater at 3 p.m. on Aug. 28.
Berlin’s High School of Acting Arts brings to the city its play “Lacrimosa,” which runs for only 10 minutes but shows a man who watches TV while his life passes by. After he dies and his soul is taken by God, he has to watch his life again, like a TV show. But since nothing is happening, he tries to get himself out of his TV chair and back to life. The performance will take place at the Fyodor Dostoyevsky Museum during the day on Saturday, Aug. 28.

A complete festival program can be found at www.puppet-fest.ru

TITLE: Arctic Lisbon
AUTHOR: By Tobias Kuehne
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: When applied to a restaurant, the epithet “simple” can carry various connotations. It could suggest that the interior is minimalist and scant. It could mean that the atmosphere is rustic or crude. “Simple” could imply that the food is uninspired and bland. All these inferences of the word do not apply to Delfim’s Bar and Restaurant. In this case, “simple” means a straightforward upscale restaurant. Case in point: The restaurant derives its name from its founder, Delfim Martins, who recently immigrated to St. Petersburg from his native Portugal to open a Portuguese/European restaurant.
The interior has a classic design. Dark chestnut, cream and gold predominate, while white-clothed tables for a total of 80 diners raise the wine aficionado’s expectations with tall, curved glasses. Apart from the forks and spoons suspended from the subtle wall chandeliers, nothing extravagant strikes the eye. The lack of decoration borders on the plain, while the dark polished, reflective ceiling and a conspicuously bulging surveillance camera provoked an awkward note of self-consciousness in us. Delightfully soft booth couches and Genesis’ “Another Day in Paradise” tried valiantly to compensate for the somewhat cold ambiance, but were foiled by the air conditioner’s arctic draft.
The atmosphere of Delfim’s Bar, however, stood in stark antithesis to the immediate dining experience. The expansive menu was far from minimalist (to say nothing of the beverage menu’s encyclopedic dimensions), prices ranged from reasonable to extravagant, and the dishes were inspired and original. When asked what she could especially recommend to us, our prompt waitress replied: “Everything we have is delicious.” The evening would prove her to be correct.
The “Lisbon” seafood soup (400 rubles, $13.50) offered everything that could be expected from Portugal’s Atlantic coast: Shrimps, muscles, calamari and small octopods huddled in a spicy, refreshing Mediterranean brew. The Italian Carpaccio (400 rubles, $13.50) featured fresh arugula on thin, tender Italian ham, topped by a tipi of three triangular slices of Parmesan. Egged on by a drizzle of lemon juice, the meat, cheese and salad entered into a mutually beneficial competition over which one could be the zestiest.
The risotto with ceps (460 rubles, $15.50) arrived on a plate whose large white brim accounted for two-thirds of the dish’s surface area. The depth, however, was provided by the risotto’s rich, full taste — a steaming hot mesh of succulent rice, mushrooms, cheese and sauce that could not have tasted more authentic made us momentarily forget even the cold draught at our feet. Our waitress, who was otherwise very accurate and attentive, could not accommodate us in our request to raise the temperature — her tinkering with the air conditioner proved unsuccessful. Such incidents, coupled with the occasional mixing of Genesis with TV advertisements for ring tones reaching us from the adjacent bar area (seating 30), reminded us that the chef plays in a different league to the interior designer.
The lamb chops (920 rubles, $31) raised our spirits, although the quantity of meat was not excessive and its quality not the choicest. Continuing the tipi-theme, the three cutlets came arranged around a delectable potato and cabbage layer cake, topped with cheese and steeped in garlic. Thoroughly shredded lettuce with cherry tomatoes accompanied the dish, which was served on a wooden board with a metallic cow’s head on one corner.
Due to its original ring, we selected the strawberry soup (250 rubles, $8.50) for dessert, which came with a scoop of vanilla ice cream floating in it. Although the ice cream proved rather elusive for the spoon, the combination harmonized well, particularly with the contribution of a few mint leaves.
The sterile interior and atmosphere of Delfim’s Bar do not remedy potentially boring company, nor do its reflective ceiling and camera warrant a casual first date. However, those who are content with excellent food and do not rely on external stimuli for topics of conversation may consider paying it a visit.

TITLE: Series of Car Bombs Shakes Iraq, 53 Killed
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: BAGHDAD — More than a dozen apparently coordinated car bombs targeting Iraqi police and other attacks blamed on Al-Qaeda killed 53 people on Wednesday, just days before the U.S. military ends its combat mission.
The trail of bloodshed started in the capital Baghdad before stretching to the north and south of the country, hitting 10 cities and towns in quick succession in tactics that bore the hallmark of the jihadist network.
Some 250 people were also wounded, security officials said, as a total of 14 car bombs wrought havoc for police and soldiers whose ability to protect the country is under close scrutiny as U.S. forces have drawn down.
In the deadliest attack, a car bomb at a passport office in Kut, southeast of Baghdad, killed 20 people, including 15 police, and wounded 90 others, most of them police, Lieutenant Ali Hussein told Agence France Presse.
In Baghdad, a suicide bomber blew up his vehicle at a police station in the northeastern suburb of Qahira, killing 15 people and wounding dozens more, security and medical officials said.
The attack in the mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood took place at around 8 a.m. (0500 GMT), according to an interior ministry official who gave the toll. “The victims included policemen and civilians,” he said.
A doctor at Medical City Hospital said they had received the bodies of two women, two children and two police officers, and that 44 other people were receiving treatment.
A spike in unrest over the past two months has triggered concern that Iraqi forces are not yet ready to handle security on their own, especially with no new government formed in Baghdad since a March 7 general election.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blamed Wednesday’s attacks on Al-Qaeda and remnants of the Baath party of now executed dictator Saddam Hussein, who he said wanted “to shake people’s confidence in the security forces.”
“They (the security forces) are ready to bear the responsibility after U.S. (combat) forces withdraw at the end of August,” Maliki said in a statement.
The U.S. army announced on Tuesday that troop levels were below 50,000 in line with President Barack Obama’s directives as part of a “responsible drawdown” of troops, seven years on from the invasion which ousted Saddam.
The reduction has raised fears that Al-Qaeda-linked insurgents will step up their attacks.
A separate car bomb in Baghdad killed two police and wounded seven civilians in the city center, while two other police were shot dead in Al-Amel, a southern district, the interior ministry official said.
In the north of the country, a car bomb in the ethnically divided oil hub of Kirkuk killed one person and wounded 11, said Colonel Adel Zain al-Abideen, the city’s acting chief of police.
In Iraq’s main northern city of Mosul, a car bomb killed four civilians and gunmen killed a lieutenant colonel at a police checkpoint.
In Muqdadiya, northeast of Baghdad, a car bomb exploded as a police patrol passed, killing three civilians. When troops arrived to investigate, a second bomb exploded, wounding six soldiers.

TITLE: Manila Victims Remembered
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: HONG KONG — Teeming Hong Kong observed a mournful silence Thursday for eight tourists killed in a Manila bloodbath, after their bodies were returned home amid mounting outrage against Philippine authorities.
The southern Chinese territory held three minutes of silence with flags lowered to half-mast at a special ceremony overseen by Hong Kong leader Donald Tsang and a large crowd of black-clad people on the city’s harbor waterfront.
A tearful woman at the ceremony said she wanted to take care of two children aged 15 and 12 whose parents were killed in Monday’s day-long hostage siege on a bus in the Philippine capital.
“My heart hurts. I hope the pain they feel will fade soon. I am willing to be the mother of the two orphans,” the woman, who did not identify herself, told the Cable News broadcaster.
Expressing his grief over the tragedy, Tsang said at the ceremony: “We can’t help but ask why human nature is so ugly? In the eyes of the gunman, apart from his personal interests, had he thought about others?”
Staff from travel agency Hong Thai lowered their heads to mourn Masa Tse, the 31-year-old tour guide who was praised for alerting his Hong Kong office to the hijacking by cellphone from the back of the tour bus.
Emotions are running high in Hong Kong over blunders by Philippine police in the chaotic climax to Monday’s events, when a disgraced former policeman held a group of Hong Kong tourists hostage for 12 hours.
The victims were aged from 14 to 58.
The bodies of the eight killed — including Ken Leung and his two daughters — were on Wednesday night flown back to Hong Kong, with bagpipers playing “Amazing Grace” at a poignant airport ceremony.
Leung’s wife Amy Ng stayed behind as their 18-year-old son Jason fights for his life in intensive care with serious head injuries.
The government said a medical charter flight is scheduled to return the pair to Hong Kong Thursday night.
Chek Lap Kok airport, one of Asia’s busiest, took part in the three minutes’ silence with tannoy announcements just before 8 a.m. (00:00 GMT) urging passengers and staff to pay their respects.
Hong Kong legislators were to debate the bloodbath later Thursday, with tempers in the territory frayed. Internet sites such as Facebook are awash with public anger against the Philippine authorities.
There are as many as 200,000 Filipinos living in Hong Kong, the vast majority of them working as maids, and union leaders have reported reprisals against the community by Hong Kong employers incensed at the hijacking.
The tragedy unfolded live on television, allowing viewers around the world to watch as ill-prepared Philippine police commandos failed in attempts to storm the bus before the tourists, and the gunman, died in a hail of bullets.
Autopsies on five of the victims showed they died from gunshots mostly in the head and neck.

TITLE: ID Begins Of Mexico Massacre Victims
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: SAN FERNANDO, Mexico — Authorities on Thursday began the difficult task of identifying 72 suspected migrants believed murdered for refusing to become hitmen for a drug cartel.
Mexican officials hoped to send consular agents from Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador and Honduras to the ranch where Mexican marines found the bodies of 58 men and 14 women after a clash with a suspected drug cartel near the border with the U.S. state of Texas, Brazilian diplomat Marcio Lage told Agence France Presse.
An injured Ecuadoran man claiming to be the sole survivor of the massacre who alerted the military to the killings has been placed under federal protection, a navy source told AFP, requesting anonymity.
The man told police the group had been kidnapped and killed by members of the Zetas drug gang, known for extorting migrants.
He told officials the gunmen offered to pay the migrants 2,000 dollars a month to work as hitmen for them, and began shooting when they refused, according to a spokesman for the state prosecutor’s office, who declined to be named.
“Preliminary unconfirmed reports suggest (the victims) could have been immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Ecuador and Brazil,” Alejandro Poire, a Mexican security official, told a news conference.
At least four Brazilians were among the dead, a Brazilian foreign ministry official said.
If the victims turn out to be undocumented migrants, the case “will turn into an emblem of the capacity or incapacity of Mexican officials to face up” to migrant abuses, said Alberto Herrera, director of Amnesty International Mexico.
“The level of impunity in this country is scandalous,” he added.
Around half a million clandestine migrants cross Mexico each year, mostly from Central America, according to Mexico’s Human Rights Commission.
Some 10,000 undocumented migrants were abducted in Mexico over six months from September 2008 to February 2009, the commission reported last year.
The Mexican state of Tamaulipas has recently seen scores of brutal clashes between the Gulf drug cartel and its former allies, the Zetas, over control of trafficking routes into the United States.
The Zetas are comprised of Mexican military deserters and corrupt former police officers. The U.S. government has called them the most dangerous organized crime syndicate in Mexico.

TITLE: Kim Jong-Il Believed to Be in China Ahead of Succession Party Meeting
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: SEOUL — North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il is believed to be visiting China, possibly accompanied by his youngest son and heir apparent, ahead of a looming power shift in the communist state, officials said Thursday.
The apparent trip coincided with a mercy mission to North Korea by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, who is trying to win the release of a jailed American.
A special train believed to be carrying Kim Jong-Il and his entourage crossed the border into China early Thursday, avoiding a route that would have taken them through a flood-stricken area, a government official in Seoul said.
“The special train passed (North Korea’s northern city of) Manpo in Chagang Province and headed for China’s Jian City early Thursday,” the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
“This is a different route from the usual one that would have taken him to Dandong,” he said, referring to a Chinese city that faces North Korea’s Sinuiju City across the Yalu River.
Both Dandong and Sinuiju were badly hit by a recent flood when the Yalu, swollen by torrential rains, broke its banks. China is offering emergency flood aid to Pyongyang, North Korean state media said.
Residents of another city in northeastern China, Jilin, said a North Korean delegation believed to include Kim visited a school attended in the 1920s by Kim’s father, communist North Korea’s founder Kim Il-Sung.
“They arrived in the morning. There were many police in the streets and the roads were blocked,” a woman who works at a restaurant adjacent to the Yuwen Middle School told AFP by telephone.
“They have left. The police have left and the roads were reopened,” she said, declining to give her name.
The trip — which would be the ailing Kim’s second to China this year — comes as speculation mounts about his successor and as Beijing strives to revive talks on dismantling North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
Tensions on the Korean peninsula have been acute for months, after South Korea accused its neighbor of sinking a warship. Pyongyang has responded to that accusation, and to U.S.-South Korea military exercises, with threats of war.
Analysts said Kim, 68, was seeking to obtain China’s blessing for his successor, widely expected to be his youngest son Kim Jong-Un, and gain desperately needed economic assistance.
Yonhap news agency said Kim might be accompanied by the 27-year-old son, who is expected by analysts to be named to the North Korean communist leadership at a rare party meeting next month.
It will be only the third such gathering since the communist state was founded in 1948.