SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1641 (3), Wednesday, February 2, 2011
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TITLE: Police Detain 75 at Strategy 31 Demo on Nevsky
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: At least 75 people were detained as the police thwarted a Strategy 31 rally in St. Petersburg on Monday. An estimated 500 came to Gostiny Dvor metro station on Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main street, to demand that the authorities uphold the constitution, Article 31 of which guarantees freedom of assembly.
The OMON special-task police, dressed in black helmets and masks, acted rough, seizing and pushing people, dragging them to a police bus and occasionally slamming the detained against the vehicle. An Other Russia party activist was taken to hospital after sustaining several blows from a masked officer near the bus, the party’s local chairman Andrei Dmitriyev told The St. Petersburg Times on Tuesday.
Maria Shariya was punched in the face and hit on the head several times, and was later taken by ambulance from police precinct 43 to Pokrovskaya hospital, he said. Shariya was diagnosed with concussion and after receiving treatment was allowed to go home as an outpatient.
Dmitriyev said the organizers of the rally would demand that legal action be taken over the beating of Shariya.
To protest against what they see as illegal detentions, a number of activists employed a new tactic of refusing to identify themselves at the police precincts. In cases where the police failed to identify the detained themselves, reports were filed using names that the officers made up, according to Dmitriyev. “I don’t know how the courts will deal with all this, we’ll see,” he said.
The rally started with a group of activists forming a circle to protect the speaker, who spoke into a megaphone demanding the right to free assembly. In seconds, they were pushed to the ground and dragged into a police bus by officers. From then on, the protests held around the site were of a more individual nature than collective. 
Several protesters held copies of the constitution. One person was arrested after reciting Soviet dissident poet and songwriter Alexander Galich’s poem “I Choose Freedom,” another after shouting that the police should obey the law, a third after beating a spoon against an empty metal pot. Most of the detained, however, were not given any concrete reason for being arrested, and were seemingly detained because they were present at the site.
Those detained were put into four buses and taken to four different police precincts, where they were charged both with violating the regulations on holding rallies and with failure to obey a police officer’s orders — an offense punishable by up to 15 days in prison — and kept overnight to be taken to court the next day. 
At least three reporters were detained, including the editor of the Shum web publication Pavel Smolyak, a correspondent of the political web site Sensus Novus Sergei Yeremeyev, and Andrei Smirnov, who was conducting an online video broadcast for his tv_live blog on LiveJournal.com. A number of onlookers and passersby were reported to have been detained as well.
Unlike in Moscow, where 11 activists were reported to have been detained as a preventive measure on the eve of the rallies, there were no preventive arrests in St. Petersburg. But Dmitriyev said that activists face more pressure in St. Petersburg after being detained.
In Moscow, only the leaders of the event received prison terms after the Dec. 31 rally, while ordinary participants were released after several hours in police custody. In St. Petersburg, however, all the detained — larger in number than in Moscow — were held overnight both after the Dec. 31 and Jan. 31 protests.
“We are seeing the absolutely stubborn attitude of the authorities. They refuse to speak to us or to compromise even slightly,” Dmitriyev said. “The situation in St. Petersburg seems to be worse than in many other cities. Apparently, it’s time to get rid of [City Governor Valentina] Matviyenko.”
By law, the organizers must inform the authorities about scheduled events, but City Hall uses various grounds not to authorize rallies it deems inappropriate. No Strategy 31 rally held in St. Petersburg since January 2010 has been authorized.
As in December, the Jan. 31 rally was not authorized due to “planned work by snow ploughs,” according to the organizers.
Strategy 31 is the nonpartisan, civic campaign launched by The Other Russia’s leader Eduard Limonov in July 2009. In St. Petersburg, the organizers include The Other Russia, the left-wing party Rot (Red) Front and former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov’s People’s Democratic Union (RNDS).
“Despite its drawbacks, its failure to become a mass movement or to put an end to the limitations on the freedom of assembly in Russia, it is nevertheless the only working oppositional idea in Russia today, the only focal point for dissenters,” Dmitriyev said.

TITLE: Roofing Anything But O’Key, a Baltic Drug Bust and Free iPods
AUTHOR: By Philip Parker
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In a week in which Russia’s cut-rate Mata Hari Anna Chapman got herself back in the news by registering her name as a trademark for jewelry, clothing, drinks and, bizarrely, educational services, a number of local stories have posed questions about the value of names, what they reveal, and what they can be used to hide.  
Despite the inexplicable apostrophe, “O’Key” always seemed an eminently suitable name for a chain of supermarkets that excels at being middle-of-the-road, mid-range, and middle-income-friendly. Nothing special, nothing exciting, but reliable for essentials. That, of course, was before the serious accident at the Ozerki branch of the chain last Tuesday evening, when the roof collapsed in the middle of the store, leaving one dead and 17 injured. The cause of the accident appeared, once again, to be failure to clear the roof of snow and ice, and a criminal case has already been opened against the store’s management for negligence. Suddenly the name seems hopelessly inappropriate. 
The chain’s management responded by closing all free-standing stores in the city last Wednesday, and three were still to reopen as of Tuesday. “We got scared,” Sergei Shamov, director of O’Key’s northwest division, told journalists at a press conference Friday. 
This panicked move may have inadvertently helped the Federal Drug Control Agency arrest a pair of drug dealers from the Baltics carrying 20 kilograms of cocaine last Thursday evening. The bust took place in the car park of the Elektrosila branch of O’Key in the south of St. Petersburg, and the lack of shoppers allowed the police to block the exits, leaving the smugglers surrounded and obliged to surrender peacefully. That wasn’t the end of the action, however, as a car parked elsewhere in the car park suddenly tried to make an escape, ignoring loud-hailer warnings and flashing lights, and hitting two policemen who tried to stop them. Once they were eventually arrested, the couple in the car, both office workers, told police that they had not heard or seen the warnings, and had been scared by the suspicious goings-on — most of the police officers were in plain clothes, it should be noted. What the pair was doing in the car-park remains a mystery. Bloggers implied that their desperation to escape and remain anonymous suggests they might not be entirely innocent, even if they had nothing to do with the drugs. 
Unusual and eye-catching surnames among the winners of a Pepsi promotional competition in the run-up to New Year led one disappointed entrant from St. Petersburg to suspect foul play. According to Fontanka.ru, the city resident mounted a determined daily effort to be among the first ten people to submit ten bottle-top codes after midnight, and thus win an iPod. Repeatedly thwarted in his efforts to fill in the online registration form and type in the codes fast enough, the disgruntled and presumably highly caffeinated Petersburger grew suspicious when he noticed that several eye-catching surnames — including Korobka (“Box”), Beriya, and Geinbikhner — were making repeat appearances among the winners. Unless the fast-typing Geinbikhner family really was lucky enough to win three iPods independently in one week, the allegation is that hackers were using robots to enter the codes, with various experts confirming that programs that can bypass Captcha technology were widely available on the net.  
It’s a change of title, rather than name, that has caused the biggest scandal of the week, with Kommersant reporting Thursday that Governor Valentina Matviyenko has applied to the federal government to have St. Petersburg removed from the list of historic settlements (see story, page 3). City Hall claims that the change is necessary to develop the outskirts of the city, while the historic center will continue to be protected by another set of regulations. Unsurprisingly, however, critics see it as another move in attempts to give greedy developers a free hand with historic sites and monuments.  
Finally, a bird (pictured) that appeared toward the end of the Strategy 31 protest outside Gostiny Dvor on Monday evening (see story, this page) and wandered idly among the demonstrators, OMON bruisers, and attendant journalists, caused confusion among those present as to whether it was supposed to be a penguin, pigeon, or a very dirty dove. What it wanted to say and which side it was on caused much speculation but remained unclear. The fact it wasn’t hospitalized or arrested suggest that ambiguous costumes may just be a good way to stay out of trouble, though.

TITLE: Foreigners Sought For $68 Bln Railroad Links
AUTHOR: By Roland Oliphant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Foreign investors will be invited to bid for 30-year contracts to design, build, finance and maintain new high-speed links as early as December, Russian Railways announced Friday.
Extensive high-speed lines stretching from Samara to St. Petersburg for the 2018 World Cup will cost 50 billion euros ($68 billion) and will be built under a concession system that will run over the next three decades.
High-Speed Rail Lines, the subsidiary Russian Railways created to handle the project, will present potential bidders with its strategy for development in March, and will open an international tender for the Moscow — St. Petersburg route in December.
Construction is expected to start in 2013, and the successful bidder will have to have the line ready by 2017 — one year before the World Cup kicks off in Russia in 2018.
The estimated price works out to be 14 million to 22 million euros per kilometer, but will vary from section to section depending on the local geography, said Denis Muratov, general director of High-Speed Rail Lines.
The state will shoulder up to 70 percent of construction costs, with the remainder coming from outside investors.
Most of that money is likely to come from international financial institutions, including the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Muratov said. Sberbank, VTB and VEB may also be interested.
The Moscow to St. Petersburg line is expected to cost “somewhere around” 10 billion to 15 billion euros, not including land purchases, Muratov said.
The 660-kilometer line will allow specially built high-speed trains to make the journey between the two cities in 2.5 hours. The trains will boast a top speed of 400 kilometers per hour and carry up to 8 million passengers a year.
At the moment, the fastest Sapsan trains that operate on the original line take four and half hours. A second class ticket costs 1,800 rubles to 3,200 rubles ($61 to $108).
Preliminary maps displayed by Russian Railways show the new line running through the Tver, Novogorod and Leningrad regions, parallel to the current Oktyabrskaya rail line on the western side for most of the route.
The state will have to acquire 8,000 hectares for the route, Muratov said, but he insisted that the exact route has not yet been finalized and would be chosen by experts depending on economic merits and “numerous other factors.”
“Building a railway line is not as simple as simply going from A to B,” he insisted, but would not comment on whether it would run through built-up areas or undeveloped countryside.
If the line goes through populated areas, it is likely to cause controversy among local residents, while routing it through the countryside would expose the project to the kind of opposition from environmentalists that has dogged the Moscow-St. Petersburg highway — something Muratov conceded he was keen to avoid.
The line is just one segment of a new high-speed network that the government hopes to have in place by the time several hundred thousand foreign football fans descend on Russia in summer 2018.
A 3,000-kilometer line toward the Urals will also link Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Samara and Yekaterinburg — all cities that will host matches during the tournament.
Long-term plans are afoot to build high-speed connections to Kiev and Minsk, “and to capitals throughout the former Soviet Union and Europe,” Muratov said.
The company has, however, decided to drop plans to build a southern route to Sochi, the 2014 Winter Olympic venue.

TITLE: Governor Tries to Remove City’s Historic Status
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Actor Oleg Basilashvili and author Boris Strugatsky were among artists, teachers and rights activists who wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Tuesday asking him to deny City Governor Valentina Matviyenko’s request to exclude St. Petersburg from the Register of Historic Settlements.
“Recent years have demonstrated convincingly that the city authorities are not capable and, more importantly, do not want to protect the historic center of St. Petersburg,” they wrote in the letter.
“The ‘planning mistakes’ that appear one after another, distorting the unique appearance of our city, are a direct consequence of the permits and authorizations issued by the city authorities.” 
The letter cites the new Stockmann building erected in place of two historic buildings demolished to make way for the Finnish department store, which has altered the view of the portion of Nevsky Prospekt close to Ploshchad Vosstaniya, and the 19th-century Literary House on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and the Fontanka River that is being demolished right now as the most recent examples.
Matviyenko’s letter to Putin, in which she asked him to strip St. Petersburg of its historic status, was leaked to the press last week. According to an article published by Kommersant on Thursday, City Hall deemed the city’s protected status as a historical settlement to be “excessive,” hindering investment projects and construction activities.
St. Petersburg was included in the Register of Historic Settlements in July, along with 40 other Russian cities. The status implies stricter control over valuable historical objects and demands that the local authorities authorize construction plans and regulations with Rosokhrankultura, the Ministry of Culture’s heritage watchdog.
“Considering that neither Pskov, Novgorod or Moscow have been included on the register, I am asking you to consider excluding St. Petersburg from the said register,” wrote Matviyenko to Putin, according to Kommersant.
Since taking office in 2003, Matviyenko has been accused of overseeing the gradual destruction of St. Petersburg’s cultural heritage. According to preservationist organization Living City, more than 100 historic buildings, including six on Nevsky Prospekt, have been demolished during her tenure.
Late last year, Matviyenko made moves toward preservationist activists, inviting them to take part in a discussion — an initiative that appears to have reached a deadlock over the scandal caused by the demolition of the Literary House at 68 Nevsky begun on Jan. 7.
“I appreciate the activities of preservationist organizations; they are sincere in their care for the city, and I am open to dialogue,” Matviyenko was quoted as saying in November. 
“Preservationists and the city authorities are interested in the same thing — in effective work to preserve historic heritage.” Matviyenko also offered the job of deputy chair of the state heritage protection committee to Living City coordinator Yulia Minutina, who works as a schoolteacher.
In late January, after film director Alexander Sokurov spearheaded an unsuccessful campaign to stop the demolition of the Literary House, City Hall’s stance seemed to change.
“Teachers should teach, doctors should treat patients, film directors should make movies; if people attempt to do a job for which they are not qualified, mess and madness ensue,” Deputy Governor Roman Filimonov was quoted as saying last week.
Meanwhile, the demolition of the Literary House continued Tuesday. “Maybe one third of the building remains, two thirds have already been demolished,” Living City’s Natalya Sivokhina said by phone Tuesday evening.
Activists of Living City and a newly formed group called Nevsky 68 continue to picket the building, collecting signatures for a petition to President Dmitry Medvedev. 
Their demands include a halt to all the work, the future conservation of the site, punishment of the city officials responsible for the destruction of the historic building, the withdrawal of permits and the site from its current owner and a broad public discussion on the restoration of the building.

TITLE: Leaking Roof Creates Chaos at Conservatory
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The St. Petersburg State Conservatory, which will celebrate its 150th anniversary next year, has found itself flooded by torrents of melted snow this week.
Masses of snow from the conservatory’s roof melted, flooding more than 40 classes, ballet rehearsal halls, the premises of the theater and the library.
If it hadn’t been for the academic vacation, the conservatory would probably have had to cancel some of the classes, Vadim Konoplev, head of the conservatory’s maintenance department, told reporters Monday.
Professors and other staff had to arm themselves with mops and buckets to clean their heavily flooded alma mater. Some of the halls now require thorough renovation work.
According to City Hall, in 2011, the state budget provided 40 million rubles ($1.35 million) for the maintenance of the Conservatory, its theater and student dormitories. The school’s management argues that the amount is comically inadequate, and the sum will not suffice to keep the venerable institution, which requires repairs and renovations of many of its premises, afloat.
Officials have not yet been able to estimate the cost of the damage caused by the flooding. In the meantime, Governor Valentina Matviyenko has contacted Prime Minister Vladimir Putin about the possibility of providing extra cash for the repairs.
The management of the Conservatory has been criticized for failing to prevent the flooding by arranging for the timely clearance of the snow from the roof, or by fixing the roof.
During the past 10 years, the Conservatory has constantly been at the epicenter of criticism for alleged misappropriations and mismanagement of state funds.
The venerable musical institution has changed leaders four times during the past five years and each time the replacement was the result of allegations concerning financial misappropriations.
The problems began in 2002 when Vladislav Chernushenko, who had been the Conservatory’s rector for almost twenty years, lost his job amid accusations of negligence, mismanagement and even embezzlement.
His successor, cellist Sergei Roldugin, an old friend of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, left after less than two years, when a financial inspection claimed some of his deputies were responsible for serious financial irregularities. Then followed composer Alexander Chaikovsky, whose tenure was equally short-lived.
In 2008, the Culture Ministry terminated the contract of the Conservatory’s then rector, composer Alexander Chaikovsky, who was accused of financial misappropriation and ousted after a ministerial inspection found financial irregularities and 15 million rubles unaccounted for.

TITLE: Investigators: Airport Bomb Targeted Foreigners
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Foreigners were specifically targeted in the Domodedovo Airport bombing that killed 35 people, investigators said as they announced that they had identified the suicide bomber.
The suspected suicide bomber was a 20-year-old male from the North Caucasus, the Investigative Committee said in a statement Saturday.
It withheld the suspect’s name and did not say which part of the turbulent region he hailed from, citing the ongoing investigation.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has said that last Monday’s blast was not linked to Chechnya. He did not elaborate.
Investigators said last week that they were looking for Vitaly Razdobudko, a 32-year-old native of the Stavropol region, located on the edge of the North Caucasus, in connection with the attack. Razdobudko is believed to be a member of the rebel group Nogai Jamaat (Nogai Battalion).
No one has claimed responsibility for the bombing in the airport’s international arrivals hall.
The Investigative Committee said the location was chosen because “the terrorist attack was primarily targeting foreign citizens.”
Eight foreigners were killed in the blast, including citizens of Austria, Britain, Germany, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Another 18 more are listed among the 130 people who remain hospitalized.
President Dmitry Medvedev saw another foreign angle to the attack, telling foreign investors at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week that the attackers had sought to undermine his trip aimed at raising investment.
Also Saturday, investigators said they had identified all perpetrators behind a Dec. 31 bomb blast in Moscow, but denied earlier reports that the explosion was carried out by the same group responsible for the Domodedovo blast.
Nevertheless, they confirmed reports that a North Caucasus rebel group was preparing an attack downtown on New Year’s Eve. Media said earlier that a suicide bomber was to blow herself up in a crowd of people on Manezh Square, but the device had accidentally gone off hours earlier, killing only the bomber.
“Some of the suspects have been put in custody, arrest warrants are pending for four people, and several people are wanted by the police,” the Investigative Committee statement said about the December blast.
News reports had linked Nogai Jamaat to both the New Year’s and Domodedovo blasts.
Meanwhile, the State Duma responded to the attack by speeding up the introduction of a color-coded terrorist alert system similar to one that the United States is about to discard as useless.
The Duma unanimously passed in a first reading Friday a bill to introduce a three-stage warning system modeled after the one implemented in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The bill, which proposes to rate threats as blue, yellow and red depending on their seriousness, was introduced by the Federal Security Service in November in response to twin suicide bombings that killed 40 in the Moscow metro in March.
The bill does not specify criteria for distinguishing between the alert levels. No date for the other two required hearings has been set.
The first reading was scheduled for February but moved up after the Domodedovo attack.
FSB deputy director Yury Gorbunov told the Duma ahead of the reading that the alert system was needed to inform the public about looming threats and to facilitate communication between security agencies.
But U.S. authorities said Thursday that their color-coded threat system will be scrapped and replaced by May after being deemed “unhelpful.”
Russian officials did not comment on the discrepancy in approaches.
Meanwhile, a wave of bomb scares swept Moscow and St. Petersburg over the weekend, but all the reports of explosives in shopping malls, airports and a train station proved false.

TITLE: ‘Crippled’ Police Bill Clears Last Reading
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The State Duma has passed a police reform bill in its second and third final readings, rejecting most amendments proposed by minority parties and the public, including a ban on beating women.
The majority United Russia party on Friday supported all the recommendations of the Duma’s Security Committee, a decision that critics said effectively cripples a bill that the Kremlin introduced last year with much fanfare after public discussion.
Among the amendments discarded by the committee were measures to increase public and parliamentary control over the police and to ban the force from the private security market, where it is currently a key player.
Critics said the bill’s biggest change would be the renaming of the force from the current, Soviet-era “militia” to “police.”
“We are not getting any reforms,” said Gennady Gudkov, deputy head of the Just Russia faction.
He said the bill effectively enlarges the powers of the police force, returning functions that earlier had been dropped at the request of President Dmitry Medvedev, Interfax reported.
At the same time, the bill will not provide police officers with the specific rules needed to help root out corruption, said Anton Belyakov, a deputy also with A Just Russia, Interfax reported. In particular, the Duma rejected amendments that would have banned police from breaking into people’s homes without a court order and from ignoring orders of superiors when they contradict the law, the report said.
Some restrictions were imposed on police, however, including a ban on the use of rubber batons and tear gas against peaceful demonstrators, even at unsanctioned gatherings, unless they disrupt traffic, communications or the work of an organization, RIA-Novosti reported.
But the Duma rejected an amendment that would have banned the police from beating women as discriminatory against men, Duma Deputy Speaker Oleg Morozov said, Interfax reported.
Several deputies applauded when the beating ban was introduced to the debate, but Vladimir Kolesnikov, deputy head of the Security Committee and a United Russia member, responded that women have killed dozens as suicide bombers in recent years, including 88 people on two airplanes in August 2004.
“Those who clapped, think for a second,” he said. “Only recently such women — if one can even call them that — bombed several planes.”

TITLE: Senior Traffic Policeman Tapped to Ensure Airport Safety
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The country’s top traffic cop was promoted on Monday to oversee transportation security nationwide after last week’s Domodedovo bombing.
President Dmitry Medvedev appointed Viktor Kiryanov to the new post of deputy interior minister in charge of transportation security and ordered him to draft a detailed plan of reforms in the area within the next few weeks.
“To work!” Medvedev told Kiryanov at a one-on-one meeting, the Kremlin’s web site reported.
The blast in Domodedovo Airport’s international arrivals hall killed 35 on Jan. 24. Medvedev has blamed poor security but not identified any specific areas that need improvement.
Kiryanov, 58, had headed the country’s notoriously corrupt traffic police since 2003, and the portfolio of road safety was added to his duties in 2004.
No replacement for him was named Monday.
The number of road accidents countrywide has declined from about 234,000 in 2007 to almost 200,000 last year, but motorists said it was because of the improved quality of roads and car safety, not Kiryanov’s achievements.
Kiryanov was mired in several scandals during his time in office, including a road accident when his car hit and injured a woman in 2008. No charges were filed against Kiryanov, and he received an award for his “big input into road safety” from the government later the same year.
Kiryanov also proved himself a pious man, helping facilitate the return of the Orthodox Icon of Tikhvin’s Godmother from the United States to his native town of Tikhvin in the Leningrad Oblast in 2004.
Kiryanov’s new duties were not spelled out Monday, but two defenders of motorists’ rights said they were not inspired by his track record.
Alexei Dozorov, head of the Moscow branch of the Public Committee to Protect Drivers’ Rights, complained that Kiryanov failed to fight rampant bribery among the traffic police.
Andrei Oryol, a senior member of the Federation of Russian Car Owners, said Kiryanov made “no radical changes” in the work of the traffic police during his tenure.

TITLE: U.S. Police Charge Man Over Human Trafficking
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK — A U.S. citizen who used a fake Russian passport while living in Ukraine has agreed to go to Michigan to face charges he was a member of a violent ring that lured Eastern European women to the United States and forced them to become strippers.
Veniamin Gonikman consented to the transfer from New York during a brief appearance in federal court in Brooklyn.
The jailed Gonikman, 55, has “agreed to go to Michigan as quickly as possible so he can defend himself against the charges there,” Jan Rostal, a public defender who represented him at the hearing, said outside court.
It could be several days before U.S. marshals make the transfer, the lawyer said. 
Court papers filed in Brooklyn on Friday allege Gonikman, who’s a U.S. citizen, was using a fake Russian passport while living in Ukraine. Officials there arrested him on Jan. 26 on immigration violations and ordered his deportation.
The officials notified the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which had agents board a U.S.-bound commercial flight in Kiev carrying Gonikman, the papers say. The agents took him into custody once the plane landed Thursday night at Kennedy Airport.
The Associated Press reported on the case involving Gonikman last year in a lengthy investigation of the exploitation of a U.S. cultural exchange program that provides foreign college students temporary visas to live and work in the United States.
One of Gonikman’s alleged victims, using the alias Katya, told AP that she was a 19-year-old sports medicine student and waitress in Kiev in 2004 when her boss, who she said was Gonikman, told her about the visa program. She asked the AP not to use her real name because she feared for her life.
Katya said she thought she was going to Virginia Beach, Virginia, to waitress. But when the plane landed in Washington, Gonikman’s son met her and other women at the airport and put them on a bus to Detroit.
There, he took the women to an apartment, confiscated their passports and told them they owed thousands of dollars for the travel arrangements and that they had to pay it off by becoming exotic dancers.
“I said, ‘That’s not what I signed here for. That’s not right.’ He said, ‘Well, you owe me the money. I don’t care how I get it from you. If I have to sell you, I’ll sell you.’”
The women were told that if they refused, their families in Ukraine would be killed, Katya said.
Over the next several months, the women’s handlers beat and sexually assaulted them, threatened them with guns and forced them to work 12 hours a day, six days a week at Cheetah’s strip club, according to court records.
Authorities say the victims were forced to turn over all their earnings — more than $1 million in all. Some of them finally escaped with the help of a club customer and notified authorities.

TITLE: U.S. Mother Denies Abuse Claims
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW — A U.S. mother shown on an episode of a popular American TV talk show disciplining her adopted Russian son by forcing him to swallow hot sauce and stand in a cold shower pleaded not guilty on Friday to child abuse.
The charge against the mother of six from Anchorage, Jessica Beagley, was based on footage from the daytime “Dr. Phil” show, which aired last fall.
Beagley was charged earlier this month by Anchorage prosecutors, who concluded that her discipline of her 7-year-old boy was “not reasonable.”
The “Dr. Phil” video shows Beagley “forcing [the boy] to swish hot sauce in his mouth while yelling in his face and then forcing him to stand confined in a cold shower while she yelled at him,” the charging document said.
The boy shown in the video is Daniil Bukharov, who was adopted with his twin brother when they were 5 from an orphanage in the city of Magadan. The Alaska case has prompted protests from Russian authorities.
Neither Daniil, his brother nor Beagley’s four biological children have been removed from the home by the Office of Children’s Services, the Anchorage Daily News reported Friday.
Beagley’s husband, Gary Beagley, is an Anchorage police officer who specializes in child abuse investigations. He’s not under investigation, said police spokesman Dave Parker.
“Ultimately, a jury will have to decide if that’s the case,” Parker said.
Jessica Beagley was not in court on Friday because she was charged with a misdemeanor instead of a felony and was not required to make an appearance before the judge.
Beagley’s lawyer Peter Ramgren told reporters that she is “a loving mother to all of her children, including her two adopted children.”
“Although one may disagree with her unorthodox style of discipline, it doesn’t rise to the level of child abuse under the statute,” he said.
A spokesman for the “Dr. Phil” program declined comment. In the show, host and psychologist Phil McGraw navigates guests through their personal problems.
The “Dr. Phil” episode aired in November and the videotaped disciplining of the boy took place Oct. 21. During her appearance, McGraw told Beagley that her actions were “totally outrageous” and “abusive.”
Beagley defended herself on the show by saying she imposed the punishment for the boy’s misbehavior at school. She argued that other methods failed to curb the problems.
(AP, SPT)

TITLE: Moscow Seeks End to Council of Europe Reviews
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russia wants the Council of Europe to end its practice of regularly monitoring the country’s compliance with democratic standards and has proposed a 25-item road map toward this end.
Andreas Gross, a Swiss lawmaker and one of two country rapporteurs for Russia in the council’s Parliamentary Assembly, confirmed Thursday that the Russian delegation had submitted the list but expressed doubt that it would be adopted.
“It is more of an overview of the main obligations plus a claim that practically all have been fulfilled,” Gross said by e-mail.
“This is a judgment which we can hardly share,” said Gross, who just completed a monitoring mission in Russia last week.
But members of the Russian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly, also known as PACE, said the document should pave the way to finally end the monitoring.
“In it we will list the obligations whose fulfillment allows Russia to leave the PACE monitoring,” an unidentified delegation member told Kommersant.
PACE is currently holding its winter session in Strasbourg.
The Russian road map contains the 25 obligations Moscow assumed after becoming a member of the organization in 1996, the newspaper said.
Among those obligations are some recently honored by Moscow, like the ratification of a key protocol of the European Human Rights Convention that the State Duma passed a year ago.
State Duma and Federation Council lawmakers want the 25 items set in stone now because they fear that Russia might be asked to meet new and possibly uncomfortable resolutions from PACE, Kommersant said. “We need to get the road map approved to avoid an exorbitant inflation of obligations,” Duma Deputy Leonid Slutsky was quoted as saying.

TITLE: Navigating the Media Maze
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
TEXT: A prominent theater critic friend rang up recently complaining she had been “ousted” from a major theater. What she meant was that she was being denied accreditation for any events at the theater — one of the oldest and most important in Russia — on the basis of a negative review she had written about a recent show. The bewildered critic was put through to the company’s director — a powerful businessman who made a fortune importing fruit and only recently became an arts patron — who explained to her that her opinions were beyond reasonable, and that a key member of the cast had threatened to quit if the boss did not make sure that the source of the bad press was kept away. Dealing with disgraced journalists that way is international practice, the man added for good measure.
Within days, three of four publications that employ the critic informed her that the theater in question would from now on be covered by different journalists. They admitted “getting phone calls” from the theater. Only one editor had the guts to remind the outraged director that any newspaper is free to choose its critic, and that critics are paid to express their expert opinion rather than to help build the reputation of a certain performer or company.
This may have simply been a problem of a specific director being sensitive to criticism and victimizing journalists, but there are more stories to tell. It’s not unusual for Russia’s rich and powerful to plant positive news about themselves, but sometimes they end up tripping over their own feet.
In another notorious recent case, a dancer playing a secondary role in a ballet drew unprecedented interest from the press, with numerous critics falling over themselves to sing the praises of this unknown performer. It so happens that the dancer who performed the minor role is a close relative of a powerful official who holds a plum job in a state corporation.
Unfortunately for the artist, the blatant hype worked to her disadvantage. It reminded me of something I once saw in the Russian parliament. A hugely self-important mobster-turned-businessman was struggling to grow into the role of politician, but he just couldn’t help peppering his speech with the kind of colorful prison jargon that spoke volumes about his shady past.
In both cases someone powerful, and with a gigantic ego, fails to see that his brazen behavior is making him, or someone he loves, a laughingstock. The case of the dancer has echoes of Charles Foster Kane’s decision to build an opera house for his failed-opera-singer wife.
Only a tiny fraction of publications manage to maintain full independence from the government, powerful state corporations, or influential tycoons. But, unlike in this case, planted articles are often difficult to detect. To the confusion of readers and the advantage of advertisers, these dark arts have become much more professional. This murky world of influence-peddling is another reason why newspaper circulations have dropped to almost laughable levels.
Corruption within the media in Russia — as the craven ballet reviews demonstrated — has so blunted journalism as a tool that it has begun to work against those who use it. This is happening because some of the people at the top have dramatically lost touch with reality. The powerful man has actually put his dancer relative in the position of the naked king in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes.

TITLE: Tourists Heading Abroad Again
AUTHOR: By Alla Tokareva
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: The number of outbound holidaymakers, which dropped during the financial crisis, is rising again but travel agencies need to lower prices to attract them.
Passenger flow through Pulkovo Airport in 2010 rose by 25 percent to 8.4 million according to preliminary calculations, said Olga Antipova, press secretary of the airport’s management company. Growth stood at 20 percent compared to the pre-crisis period. The number of passengers on international flights over 11 months was 26.1 percent greater, while some popular resorts saw up to 70 percent increases.
Carriage on Rossiya airlines to tourist destinations rose on average by 12 percent, according to the deputy director of the company’s press service, Andrei Kalchenko. He added that the most popular destinations were the resorts of Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus, and the cities of Spain. Over the festive period, traffic to Egypt rose by 50 percent, to Dubai by 12 percent, and to Salzburg and Geneva by 28 percent. The demand for tickets to Prague was also up 42 percent over New Year. 
Sergei Khokhlov, commercial director of travel agency West-Travel, said that demand has revived, but not returned to pre-crisis levels. The Solvex-Turne agency sold 25 percent more tours than in 2009, according to a spokesperson for the director of the company, Tamara Khaletskaya. Sales volume at West-Travel increased by roughly 20 percent, while the fall in 2009 had been in the region of 30 pecent, said Khokhlov. Sales at Avis (another local travel company) stayed at the same level as the previous year and even fell for some destinations, according to general director Olga Khamkhokova. Khalteskaya said that prices for tours have risen on average by ten percent, mostly due to transport increases. The cost of services abroad has changed little, adds Khamkhokova. By her estimate, air tickets have increased in price by 15 to 30 percent. Sergei Korneyev, vice-president of the Russian Travel Industry Union, says that on average tours, to popular resorts have increased in price by 5 to 10 percent, and profits to travel agencies constitute only half of the increase. 
Tourists still shun distant destinations such as India and Sri Lanka because of the high cost of flights, notes Khokhlov. According to Khamkhokova, demand is also low because of the lack of direct flights from St. Petersburg. Budget destinations are as popular as ever: “There has never been such a deficit of hotel accommodation in Egypt in January,” says Dmitry Smirnov, director of travel agency Atlas. 
However, company profits are not growing, claims Korneyev. In his estimation, revenue in the industry has decreased 1.5 to 2 times compared to pre-crisis levels, and it will take another two years for full recovery. High-volume tours brought the smallest profits, with offer exceeding demand and prices accordingly low, says Khokhlov. Khamkhokova notes that many Russians have bought property in resorts and, moreover, the number of travelers booking flights and hotels independently online has also grown.

TITLE: Brakes Applied to Bids For City Parking Project
AUTHOR: By Nadezhda Zaytseva and Maria Buravtseva
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: A request for a tender for the construction of a network of garages in St. Petersburg containing 250,000 parking spaces has been canceled.
The competition for the right to rent 462 plots totaling 3.8 million square meters for the design and construction of multistory car parks comprising approximately 250,000 parking spaces was announced by the city’s property fund in late December. The starting price was 16.5 million rubles. The conditions for a successful tender stipulated that the cost of one parking space in the garages should be no more than 390,000 rubles ($13,200), while owners of garages demolished in the course of construction should be granted a discount of at least 12 percent.  The results of the tender were to be submitted Feb. 4, and bids were to have been opened Monday, Jan. 31.
On Friday, Governor Valentina Matviyenko announced that the program would be frozen for a year.  She said that the instructions for tenders were a rough draft and in need of serious revision, and would be refined and adapted to reflect the views of city residents.
A representative of the property fund announced that tenders had been submitted, without going into further detail. Nevsky Garage (a subsidiary of SPB Renovation devoted to redeveloping construction projects from the Khrushchev era) had examined the possibility of participating in the tender, but ultimately declined, said Artur Markaryan, general director of SPB Renovation.
Last week Maxidom, which manages a chain of nine homeware stores, and industrial components distributor Tekkom filed a complaint with the St. Petersburg office of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) and claims with the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast challenging the government’s ruling on the tender. The transfer to a single developer of such a large number of parking spaces violates competition laws, explained a Maxidom representative. Maxidom had submitted a tender. Matviyenko had earlier stated that every 10,000 parking spaces built under the program would cost the developer 1.5 billion rubles. Thus, total investment in the program would amount to about  37 billion rubles.  
According to its director, Oleg Kolomiychenko, the St. Petersburg FAS did not cancel the auction; it was Matviyenko’s decision. The FAS has received a record 100 complaints in response to the decision, he noted. Several companies filed complaints because they were interested in individual sites that were incorporated into the project, Kolomiychenko said. In his view, finding the solution to the city’s parking problems could involve infringements of the law, and authorities may find it easier to control one developer than a hundred.

TITLE: City Hall Seeks Control Of Housing Management
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Tyomkin
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: The city authorities, which oversee the servicing of around 60 percent of residential property in the city, are trying to strengthen their influence over building management.
The executive branch has few effective levers of influence on private utility companies because companies that have signed contracts with homeowners cannot be dismissed by decree, said Governor Valentina Matviyenko in mid-January. But the governor promised that City Hall would push for alterations to legislation at the federal level. 
If the city gains the ability to dismiss private companies, however, the head of one private management company fears that the market will again be seized by state communal services departments. The government, which still owns unprivatized apartments, can already initiate meetings and press the issue of changing service providers, said Igor Yermolayev, general director of management company Pryamie Investitsii. In historic districts, he said, 75 percent of apartments have been privatized. Yevgeny Purgin, general director of the management company Stacks, estimated the value of the market for housing services in St. Petersburg at 16.5 billion rubles per year (excluding payments to monopolists). According to the housing committee, there are about 22,000 residential properties in the city. Until 2005, when a law allowing homeowners to choose a management company for themselves came into effect, about 99 percent of housing services were handled by state organizations, which have since been corporatized. Now 44 communal service departments report to district administrations, serving approximately 60 percent of the city’s housing, with the rest being served by private companies. 
According to SPARK-Interfax, there are 120 companies with the word “communal service” in their name in St. Petersburg. After the building management reforms, heads of government communal services departments established companies with similar names and got part of the housing stock, according to Purgin. This is confirmed by an official on one City Hall committee. A resolution from a general meeting of homeowners or a housing co-operative is required to change management companies. Otherwise, management companies are chosen through tenders conducted by the district administration. Former communal service departments often win these contracts, the official admitted.
State communal service departments, which by definition are not interested in value for money, get the lion’s share of monies from the federal Fund to Assist Housing Reform, said the head of a housing co-operative in one of the central districts. This is confirmed by the City Hall official. In 2009 to 10, the city budget received 8 billion rubles from the Fund, said Eduard Batanov, chairman of the Finance Committee.

TITLE: Exxon Signs $1 Bln Black Sea Oil Deal
AUTHOR: By Roland Oliphant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Rosneft and U.S. ExxonMobil have joined forces to hunt for and extract oil from the Black Sea floor, as the state-owned oil giant continues to woo foreign firms for their offshore exploration expertise. 
In a $1 billion deal signed in Davos on Thursday, the sides will form a joint venture to explore the Tuapse Trough, an 11,200-square-kilometer deepwater offshore area along the Black Sea coast of the Krasnodar region. 
“Cooperation with ExxonMobil once again underscores our commitment to the principles of transparency and vision of the Russian energy industry as a part of an integrated global market place,” said Deputy Prime Minister and Rosneft chairman Igor Sechin, who was at the signing.
In reality, the relationship between the two oil producers in the Pacific has been rocky. Last year, Exxon quarreled with the government over budgeting of Sakhalin-1, and there was speculation it could lose its contract altogether. 
The venture will be split 50-50 at the exploration stage and 66-33 in Rosneft’s favor at the development stage, Reuters reported. ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson said drilling could cost as much as $1 billion and Exxon would make the initial investment in the project, Bloomberg reported. The first well could be drilled in 2012.
The Tuapse Trough is estimated to hold 7.2 billion barrels of oil equivalent, said Valery Nesterov of Troika Dialog, “easily enough to justify spending a billion dollars on exploration.”
And Exxon is not the only company to experience a sudden reversal of fortunes in Russia.
Earlier this month BP and Rosneft struck an $8 billion share swap and agreed to joint exploration of Arctic offshore oil fields. Only last year TNK-BP had nearly lost its license to develop the Kovykta gas field. Symbolically, the deal was sealed by BP chairman Robert Dudley, who had previously been forced out of Russia as chief executive of TNK-BP in 2008. 
And in July 2010, Chevron took a 30 percent stake in a joint venture with Rosneft to explore the Val Shatsky field, a deepwater field that neighbors the Tuapse Trough in the Black Sea and has particularly difficult geology.
The consensus is that Sechin is sincere — Rosneft is looking to a global future, and it understands it needs Western partners to achieve that goal.
Russia’s difficult-to-reach offshore fields constitute one of the “last frontier” areas able to replenish the country’s depleting reserves and play a key role in Rosneft’s expansionist ambitions, said Nesterov of Troika Dialog.
“Rosneft is poised to announce a new strategy that implies consistent growth in resource positions and production,” Nesterov said, and this cannot be done without active participation in development of Russian offshore.
The payoff for foreign firms is simple, Nesterov said. “It’s the oil business, and as Jonathan Black’s novel ‘Oil’ describes it, it is a business where ‘dog eats dog.’ Business comes before everything.”
Sechin said the deal was proof that the investment climate in Russia had improved, telling Reuters that “we have managed to convince even Exxon of that.”
It is unclear whether Rosneft or the government offered either ExxonMobil or BP any specific assurances about a smoother relationship this time around in order to close the deal. In the oil business, as Nesterov pointed out, any self-respecting risk manager takes government promises with something of a pinch of salt anyway. 
“It’s lucrative. And if it wasn’t, they wouldn’t have signed.”

TITLE: Medvedev Unrepentant on Yukos
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Adynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: President Dmitry Medvedev has compared jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky to the mastermind of the biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history in an apparent attempt to present the Yukos case as triumph of justice and highlight his agreement with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
“An investor, Russian or foreign, should observe the law, otherwise they can get a jail term, as happened with Khodorkovsky and Madoff,” Medvedev told Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison in 2009 for organizing a Ponzi scheme worth $18 billion. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin also compared him to Khodorkovsky during a televised call-in show in mid-December, shortly before a Moscow court added six years to Khodorkovsky’s previous prison sentence at a second trial.
Medvedev also said on Jan. 26 that he did not wish to weigh in on the Khodorkovsky case because it would be an “interference with justice.”
He said he would not grant Khodorkovsky a presidential pardon — as Yukos supporters have repeatedly demanded — because it would mean that the Russian judicial system was so flawed that “you could ask the president to change the verdict.”
Medvedev’s attempts to highlight the legal rather than the political implications of the Khodorkovsky case were echoed by Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, who told reporters in Davos on Jan. 26 that the Yukos case had helped set out the rules for doing business in Russia.
“Killers and swindlers are jailed, the mess is ended, and there are rules to the game,” Sechin said, according to Vedomosti. “Business transparency has been increased.”
Medvedev has echoed Putin in the past, but the timing of this week’s message shows that he is determined to “demonstrate the team policy” between him and Putin ahead of a 2012 presidential election that neither has indicated their intention to run for yet, said Alexei Makarkin, an analyst with the Center for Political Technologies.
“Medvedev had to react and show that they are consolidated,” Makarkin said by telephone. “It is also linked to the upcoming elections, because he is signalling that they are staying together and will be ready to make their choice when needed.”
But the decision to make reference to Madoff is disadvantageous for Medvedev because he showed he is not his own man, said Lilia Shevtsova, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center.
“He proved that he is a carbon copy of Putin,” she said.
Khodorkovsky’s chief lawyer, Vadim Klyuvgant, declined to comment on Medvedev’s remarks Thursday, saying he had not seen the whole interview. But another member of Khodorkovsky’s legal team, Yury Shmidt, said on Ekho Moskvy radio that the Madoff comparison highlighted the ruling tandem’s “uniform position on the case.”
Still, Shmidt said, he had expected “a more elusive reply.”

TITLE: Steelmakers  Count on Building Growth
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Domestic steelmakers increased output last year and are optimistic about this year, as the market gradually recovers after the economic crisis. Igor Chepenko, chief executive of rolled steel trader Brok-Invest-Service, expects steel consumption to grow by 5 to 8 percent in 2011, led by the needs of the construction industry.
The construction sector accounts for 55 percent of steel sales, but overall demand for steel slumped dramatically in the crisis as projects were frozen.
Budget housing, including panel construction, should grow this year, Chepenko said, adding that residential construction in the regions is reviving faster than in Moscow.
Demand in other steel consuming sectors, including the transportation and railway industry, is also recovering, said Andrei Tretelnikov, an analyst at Rye, Man & Gor Securities. As such, steelmakers are likely to increase output this year, with analysts expecting production volumes to grow by 10 percent. 
Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works, or MMK, plans to increase steel output by 14 percent this year.The company opened a stamped components plant in St. Petersburg in November to supply the local manufacturing facilities of Ford, General Motors, Nissan, Hyundai and Renault, as well as a number of appliances producers including Indesit and Bosch und Siemens Hausgeraete. 
Severstal said last week that it would continue to supply rolled metal products to Renault in Russia and would start local supplies to Hyundai-KIA and Ford “in the medium term.” 
Last year, the country’s steelmakers produced a total of 67 million tons of steel, and the figure may reach the pre-crisis level of 72 million tons this year, said Aton’s Makarov.
Four steelmakers — MMK, Evraz Group, Mechel and Novolipetsk Steel — said they had increased production volumes last year, with MMK reporting the biggest increase, with 19 percent more crude steel produced in 2010.
Mechel may capture attention as it prepares an initial public offering of its mining unit, having said last year that it would be ready to list shares of the division in the second half of 2011. 
Analysts expect that 2011 will be the second profitable year in a row for vertically integrated steelmakers, which produce their own raw materials, as growing prices for coal and iron ore will drive steel prices up, by a predicted 10 to 15 percent this year. 
Chepenko said that most steelmakers had already increased this month’s prices by 8 to 15 percent for different types of sheet steel, and price growth in other categories is likely to follow. 
Meanwhile, the Economic Development Ministry proposed the introduction of export duties on rolled steel and iron ore as one of the measures to prevent steelmakers from hiking prices in the domestic market.
However, the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said Thursday that it hadn’t found any violations of the competition rules in Severstal’s increase of steel sheet prices for domestic carmakers after AvtoVAZ and Sollers filed a complaint to the watchdog late last year.
But, rising steel prices won’t be a significant factor in the price of your next apartment or car purchase. “The increase of steel prices is unlikely to affect consumers significantly,” said Dmitry Smolin at UralSib Capital.

TITLE: Billionaires Take BP Deal to Court
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Mounting a rare challenge to a government-backed deal, the Russian billionaire co-owners of TNK-BP said Thursday that they were seeking a court order to suspend a multibillion-dollar agreement between BP and state-owned Rosneft.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin threw his support behind BP’s alliance with Rosneft when it was announced earlier this month, while President Dmitry Medvedev said at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Jan. 26 that such cooperation would serve his goal of modernizing the economy.
But rather than seeking to annul the deal or risk an all-out clash with the government, the Russian billionaires are more likely initiating the legal battle to gain concessions from the authorities, BP, or both, analysts said.
A spokesman for AAR, the consortium representing Mikhail Fridman, Viktor Vekselberg, Leonard Blavatnik and German Khan, the Russian shareholders in TNK-BP, said only that the group had filed a lawsuit, declining further comment. 
A BP spokesman said a hearing was due at the High Court of Justice in London next Tuesday. 
TNK-BP, a 50-50 joint venture between the AAR shareholders and BP, has the right of first offer for any projects that BP wants to pursue in Russia under a shareholder agreement. AAR warned immediately after the deal was announced that — while the group welcomed foreign investment in Russia — it insisted on exercising its right to formally offer its consent or rejection for it.
BP chief Robert Dudley said in Davos on Jan. 26 that BP had adhered to the TNK-BP shareholder agreement in striking the Rosneft deal, which would allow the companies to swap shares and jointly develop three giant oil fields off the Russian Arctic coast. Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, who engineered the alliance on the Russian side as Rosneft’s chairman, said in Davos that he expected no problems after hearing BP’s assurances.
First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov spoke about BP’s new ties with Rosneft as a done deal on Jan. 27, also at the Davos forum. Implementing plans to privatize a stake in Rosneft over the next five years, the government will have to consult with a such major shareholder as BP, he said. 
“It will be impossible to ignore” BP, which will hold 10.8 percent in Rosneft on completion of the deal, he said. “It has to be understood that BP is now one of the largest shareholders that is interested in the development of Rosneft.”
Rosneft will own 5 percent in BP after the $7.8 billion share swap.
Konstantin Simonov, director of the National Energy Security Foundation think tank, said the court action targeted BP rather than the government for concessions.
“They are shrewd guys there,” he said of AAR. “They are trying to scrounge something from BP.”
He added that AAR had little potential to reverse the agreement. 
“The deal has drawn backing at the highest level and nobody is going to cancel it,” he said. “They will not cross a certain line.”
Chris Weafer, chief strategist at UralSib, said the court action was more about increasing pressure on the government to either allow TNK-BP access to new production or to have one of the state energy companies buy them out.

TITLE: Airport Bombing Serves as Wake-Up Call
AUTHOR: By Nikolai Petrov
TEXT: Last week’s horrifying terrorist attack at Domodedovo Airport that killed 35 people should serve as a wake-up call to the public. The suicide bombing reveals the unpreparedness of government officials at all levels to deal with attacks and their inability to mount an appropriate response. President Dmitry Medvedev singled out airport security staff for their inability to avert the disaster, although they were only the last of several agencies that failed to do their jobs. Although airport security could stand to make some straightforward improvements, that is hardly the main problem. The same argument applies to the transportation police, where Medvedev made several high-profile dismissals in the wake of the attack.
The authorities fail to learn the right lessons from their failures like inept generals who stick to the same strategy after losing battles. By requiring everyone entering the airport to pass through a metal detector, the Domodedovo security staff has created a thick crowd in front of the airport. The next explosion could take place there, or in any one of the countless locations in the capital where large throngs of people gather.
Complicating the problem was the conspicuous lack of political leadership following the terrorist attack. Addressing the Federal Security Service, Medvedev sounded more like a mid-level specialist on airport security than the leader of the country — if only nominally so.
Two days after the bombing, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin felt obliged to declare that it probably had no connection with Chechnya. That might be an understandable reaction from someone who claims to have restored peace to war-torn Chechnya, but it was politically irrelevant.
Through it all, FSB chief and head of the National Anti-Terrorist Committee Alexander Bortnikov avoided making a single public statement.
Undoubtedly, the situation in the North Caucasus both directly and indirectly provoked the attack at Domodedovo. Two wars in the past 16 years created and continue to create conditions for increased terrorism in the region itself and in Moscow. Since 1994, hundreds of thousands of Interior Ministry officers and soldiers from across the country have served in Chechnya. While there, they have learned to hate and managed to sow the seeds of hatred throughout the country. They were taught to belittle the value of other people’s lives, and even their own. The recent senseless mass murders in the Krasnodar and Stavropol regions are chilling examples of the lack of respect for life.
Clearly, the problem cannot be solved through the use of force alone. The trouble is that after every major terrorist attack, officials fall hostage to political clans and intelligence agencies that demand greater funding and authority to avert future attacks when they should instead thoroughly discuss what happened in order to identify exactly what went wrong. As such, after the Beslan school siege in 2004, then-President Putin announced a tightening of the political screws, and after the Moscow metro bombing last March, an amendment was passed giving broader powers to the FSB.
No security measures can fully protect a city of more than 10 million people after 16 years of open warfare in the North Caucasus — even if the conflict is officially at a “low simmer” today. Any long neglected disease must be treated at the source and not at the site of the metastasis. Lasting security can only be established when the problems of the North Caucasus are resolved. Those problems have been accumulating for years, even decades, and a serious solution can only be achieved by implementing an effective long-term strategy.
But Russia’s political elite has always looked for quick fixes, seeking to ease tensions in Chechnya before the 2004 presidential election and now again ahead of the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi.
There was a relatively short period from 2004 to 2007 when the federal authorities tried to modernize the ruling elite in the Caucasus republics with help from Dmitry Kozak, then the presidential envoy to the region. That met with some success. But it was the last serious attempt at nation-building and at tackling the socio-economic problems of the region. The federal government is now placing its bets on the elites of archaic local clans and on completely replacing local siloviki leaders with outsiders who constantly rotate through the region. However, it is painfully obvious that money and police measures alone cannot solve the problem of the North Caucasus.
Societal and political pressures in Russia were escalating even before the Domodedovo attack as evidenced by a wave of ethnic tension that culminated in youth rioting and street clashes in Moscow and other cities in December. Tensions are only bound to escalate ahead of upcoming elections as political campaigns increasingly rally supporters against “foreign enemies.” All of this creates difficult conditions for making sound decisions and tests the maturity and responsibility of the authorities and society. Without relying on leaders, society itself must initiate serious talks about the causes for the current difficulties and find ways to resolve it. People then should formulate their proposals and present their demands to the authorities.

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

TITLE: Let Them Eat Cowberries
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
TEXT: In an old Soviet joke, three elderly women go to the doctor. All have exactly the same health condition but they enjoy very different incomes. When the first woman — the wealthiest — tells her story, the doctor asks what her income is, and then suggests eating plenty of fruit and vitamins and recommends a trip to a seaside sanatorium. The next one, who has an average salary, is recommended to cut meat, sweets, and fatty foods from her diet. When the doctor examines the last one, who survives on a tiny pension, all he can prescribe is plenty of fresh air. 
It is an open secret that the cynicism of the Russian authorities today is no less than that of the doctor in the joke. And a 17-year-old Yekaterinburg high school student, Vitaly Nikishin, embarked on a crusade last month to expose this cynicism to the entire world. He launched a popular blog in which he recounted his attempt to survive for a month on 2,632 rubles, or $88 — the sum calculated by his regional government as the cost of the monthly “minimum consumer basket.”
“I am not going to manage more than three or four more days. If I continue like this I could at some stage just collapse,” Nikishin wrote last week, on the 25th day of his experiment. “I am feeling utterly emaciated, and have completely lost my appetite.”
“Our officials claim that one can really survive on as little as [the minimum basket], and I, a strong man in good physical shape — I exercise regularly and do not carry any extra weight — am showing what damage this sort of meal plan does to me,” Nikishin blogged. “After the first week of eating according to this budget, I lost more than a kilogram. After two weeks I began to feel constantly exhausted.”
At the end of the month, on Jan. 31, Nikishin wrote that he was scared to even think about how he would begin to recover from the experiment.
Nikishin’s campaign is far from a self-promoting publicity stunt. It is a kind of political protest. He became almost like a hunger-striker, and reminded us that millions of Russians face a very similar problem every month. Because his budget is approximately what they are left with after they have paid their rent and utilities bills.
According to official statistics, 19 million Russians live below the poverty line. In 2010, 4.3 percent of Russians had a monthly income of less than 3,500 rubles per month. A further 6.2 percent had to make do with between 3,500 and 5,000 rubles. One in 10 survives on 5,000 to 7,000 rubles a month. According to the same official survey, compiled by the federal agency Rosstat, only 10 percent of Russians have a monthly income of more than 35,000 rubles ($1,180) a month.
Nikishin’s diet consisted largely of bread, milk, potatoes, cereals, pasta, cottage cheese, fish preserves, chicken, and cabbage. He also added some fresh kiwis and frozen cowberries. Naturally, he couldn’t afford meat or fish every day, and the sizes of the portions he was eating were far below what he usually had. 
How on earth do you survive on that? That’s a common question many Russians are asking of their less fortunate neighbors. The discussion typically ends there. Everyone tries to cope as best they can. And when someone sympathetically asks the shabby-looking neighbor how they are coping, they do not need to hear the full account of miseries. And, in truth, neither do they have any intention of helping. Many are simply resigned to the scale of the problem of poverty. And most people just chalk it up as part of “the toughness of life.”
Young Vitaly Nikishin has shown exactly what the state-approved minimum food budget really means. 
“Both officials and people who earn a decent salary prefer to turn a blind eye to the plight of those who get ridiculously low salaries and pensions — and there are millions of these people,” he said. “Maybe I am na?ve, but I hope my campaign — even if it seems flamboyant — will ignite a public discussion at the very least.”
“I want to make poverty visible,” Nikishin says. But he says that a meeting he had with a group of parliamentarians in his region ended in frustration. “They apparently invited me to see them because my blog has attracted a lot of attention. But some were openly yawning at what I said, while the others offered only a nominal reply. The meeting lasted for an hour but after it I felt exhausted, as if I had run 10 kilometers in the heat of the deserts of Kazakhstan! And all in vain.”
In response to Nikishin’s blog, a senior government official defended the poverty line and basic food budget by saying that the minimum sums are calculated with the aim of allowing people “to stay alive.” But what sort of life you can lead with this kind of money, the authorities prefer not to think about. The tragic truth is that staying alive in this way, is, for millions of Russian people, the equivalent of slowly dying. 

A full version of this commentary is available at Transitions Online, an award-winning analytical online magazine covering Eastern Europe and CIS countries at www.tol.org

TITLE: Tequilajazzz  reincarnated
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Musician Yevgeny Fyodorov, who disbanded his celebrated local rock band Tequilajazzz last year, returns with a new band, which he says is not unlike his former one, despite a new name and new members.
Called Zorge, the new band’s core is Fyodorov, who sings and plays bass, and St. Petersburg-based German drummer Marc-Oliver Lauber. Formed in September as a duo, it has since been expanded to feature Vadim Sergeyev, the guitarist with Morekorabli, Splean and Optimystica Orchestra, and guitarist Dmitry Zilpert of the Moscow indie-rock band Tinavie.
Fyodorov announced the split of Tequilajazzz on the band’s web site in July, amid work on the new album. The news came as a shock to fans, who have grown used to the band being one of the staples on the St. Petersburg indie-rock scene since it first performed at TaMtAm, the city’s 1990s seminal local underground rock club, in September 1993.
“It was a proper, well thought-through decision, and everybody within the band, I think, was expecting it — but we managed to keep things so that nobody outside suspected it,” Fyodorov said.
“You know, it’s like when you live with a girlfriend for a long time. You don’t love her, and she doesn’t love you. You are forced to go and visit parents together, pretend to be a happy family, and so on. We were very good at pretending.”
The aborted album’s working material remained on hard disks until September, when Fyodorov took two new unheard Tequilajazzz songs and recorded them with Lauber and a couple of local musicians. The tracks, “Crimea” and “9999,” were released as a free Internet single on Sept. 4, intended as a gift for fans on Tequilajazzz’s 17th anniversary.
The recordings were the first joint project between Fyodorov and Lauber, who had not yet come up with the name Zorge at that time.
“I told audiences from the start: You are free to call the band whatever you wish,” Fyodorov said. “As far as I know, most preferred to call it Tequilajazzz.”
Fyodorov first met Lauber some ten years ago in Cologne, when the drummer played with the German version of the psychobilly band The Meantraitors, whose St. Petersburg frontman Stas Bogorad lived in Germany from 1999 to 2008. Lauber moved to St. Petersburg two-and-a-half years ago.
“I knew him, but didn’t know he had been living in Russia for some time,” Fyodorov said.
“It turned out that he lives here, and we found each other in a miraculous way, and launched a band with him as a duo in September. We didn’t plan to expand for some time, but wrote a lot of songs straight away, and now we have material for a full album.”
The new band’s name is reminiscent of that of the Soviet spy Richard Sorge, who operated in Japan during WWII under the cover of being a journalist.
“Firstly, espionage is this season’s hottest trend,” Fyodorov said, referring most likely to last year’s spy scandal, when a Russian spy ring was uncovered in the U.S. After a dramatic exchange of alleged spies from both countries, the deported Russians were promptly given an audience with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who is reported to have sung a patriotic song with them. The most famous of the spies, tabloid favorite Anna Chapman, joined the United Russia party’s youth wing in December and in January got a job on Russian television.
“But in fact, it’s a reference to adventure literature, to movies, whatever. It doesn’t have anything to do with any historic characters, it’s just a great word,” he said.
“I like books about spies — John le Carre, for instance — and I like spy movies a lot. Whatever political force they work for. The life of a spy— a person immersed in an environment that is foreign to him — is the most extreme expression of loneliness on this planet.”
Musically, the band’s material sounds not unlike Tequilajazzz (“Rough rhythmic structures, intricate jazz harmonies and the evident influence of modern and classical academic music,” Fyodorov wrote in Zorge’s press release), but is perhaps more complex and sophisticated.
“This is modern guitar music that has been seriously influenced by all the music that has existed in the world before it, including punk rock and new wave and art rock,” Fyodorov said.
“It’s difficult for me to say before the concert — I haven’t had feedback from listeners yet — but it seems to us that the group could be called the same name as before. We haven’t used it so far, because there were no key members of the previous band, in particular our remarkable drummer [Alexander ‘Duser’ Voronov].
“That’s why we came up with a new name, but the vectors for development have been kept, and in fact it’s a logical development of everything we did before. It’s just a new name. And new musicians.”
Fyodorov said he was no longer afraid of using the term “art rock” in regard to his work.
“We take pleasure in using certain things that were relevant for 1970s art-rock bands; it seems that their time has returned — but without knights in cloaks or any Tolkien nonsense,” he said.
“We’re about music and a normal balance between various musical trends. You should not get fixed on rock and roll just because you play the electric guitar. The electric guitar has many more possibilities than people usually think.
“What we’re doing now is much more experimental than what my previous band had been doing for the past few years — and much closer to what it started with in its TaMtAm days. 
“Without noise terror, but with very serious experimenting with rhythmic and harmonic structures. Here we’re talking not so much about radicalism of music as such, but about serious reconsidering of traditional forms of music-playing within the rock idiom. And this is pop music, for us.”
At Thursday’s concert, Zorge will perform 11 new songs written since September, plus eight Tequilajazzz songs, according to Fyodorov.
“I am the author of 100 percent of Tequilajazzz songs, except for a cover of a song written by my older brother. That gives me the full right to use them in our future concerts,” he said.
“We will perform Tequilajazzz songs that we deem appropriate for our new set — the ones that fit the aesthetics that we have chosen.”
Fyodorov did not reveal what the new songs’ lyrics are like, but he is prepared to say what they are not.
“Their persona will almost never be the same as the author, I have sung enough about my experiences and feelings from the first person — enough of that,” he said.
“It’s just some made-up stories sung from the perspective of certain characters. Nothing personal. No soul-searching, disrobing in public or anything like that. You can see it as musical theater.”
After the first concerts in St. Petersburg this week and in Moscow (at Sixteen Tons on February 18), the band will take to the studio to record its debut album.
“We will showcase our full album at the concerts, that is, we are doing it the old way, which is completely wrong from a showbiz point of view,” Fyodorov said.
“We’re a band without a demo, a band without a record; we go straight to playing concerts, and our material can only be heard live at concerts for the time being.”
In December, Fyodorov signed a letter from a group of rock musicians to President Dmitry Medvedev in defense of imprisoned businessman and Putin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who nevertheless was given a lengthy new prison sentence in his second fraud trial, which is widely viewed as politically motivated.
Fyodorov said he had done so after been called by Akvarium’s Boris Grebenshchikov, who read him a letter originally written by Vladimir Shakhrin of the group Chaif.
“It was not published, because it was a personal letter, but I can say it was written in a very informal way,” Fyodorov said.
His personal views do not spill over into Zorge’s music, however.
“We play pop music, even if it’s complex — nothing radical or revolutionary,” he said.
“Under the current conditions, one should simply play beautiful music, and do so with dignity. It’s the only thing we can do in this country now. The same applies to everyone — they should just do something good in their own way and place.”
“I’ve forbidden myself to think about politics so far in this period, we’ll see how I’ll feel about it in the summer.”
On Thursday, Zorge will perform as a trio, as the fourth member, Zilpert, will be on tour in Germany with his band Tinavie.
“But it will be an absolutely fully-fledged event, because we had been rehearsing the whole set as a three-piece band; the fourth member didn’t join until very recently — like two weeks ago,” Fyodorov said.
But Zorge is planning more local concerts in its full lineup in the near future, as well as an international tour after the album is completed. 
“It will be the same Tequilajazzz route,” he said.
“We just put it on hold, because we didn’t have a band. Now we have the band and the promoters are waiting for the recording. For sure, many think that I’ve gone mad and will start playing ballads with an acoustic guitar now, maybe.
“We must reassert our musical credibility, the fact that we’re qualified heirs to Tequilajazzz. But now everyone will see that it is so — we’re Tequilajazzz, only better.”

Zorge will play at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 3 at Zoccolo, 2/3 3aya Sovietskaya Ulitsa. Metro: Ploshchad Vosstaniya. Tel. + 274 9467.

TITLE: Chernov’s choice
TEXT: This week is a punk week. Scottish punk veterans <strong>The Exploited</strong> will return to St. Petersburg as part of a tour marking the band’s 30th anniversary and will perform at Glavclub on Thursday, Feb. 3. Formed in 1980 in Edinburgh, The Exploited is notorious for its politically-charged music and fast aggressive songs such as “Fuck the System” and “Beat the Bastards.”
The local concert was originally scheduled for Dec. 3, but was postponed along with the band’s other Russian dates due to the fact that Edinburgh Airport was closed because of the poor weather. 
The Exploited’s influence can be heard in <strong>The Casualties</strong>, the U.S. street punk band that will perform in St. Petersburg two days later. Formed in New York in 1990, The Casualties can be caught at Orlandina on Saturday, Feb. 5.
Punk veterans aside, the city will also welcome a newer, post-hardcore band from Sweden called <strong>Adept</strong>. “Adept is the archetypal example of a Swedish band who carries the tradition of gifted melodicism and high-impact hardcore onwards, but has enough urban connection to feel fresh, vital and who can relate to the strife most people struggle with,” the web site of their label, Panic & Action, says. The five-piece band was formed in the small Swedish town of Vagnharad in 2004 and will perform at Orlandina on Thursday, Feb. 3.
The week’s highlight is the debut of <strong>Zorge</strong>, the new band of Yevgeny Fyodorov that he formed in September after disbanding <strong>Tequilajazzz</strong> in July. Tequilajazzz is still sadly missed, especially the joint anniversary parties that the band shared with the club Fish Fabrique. It was undoubtedly the end of an era, even if in both music and approach, Zorge will be not unlike Fyodorov’s old band, according to the musician (see article, this page). 
Tequilajazzz used to hold traditional winter and summer concerts at Zoccolo club, just as it had previously at the now-defunct Moloko, whose legacy is Zoccolo. To stress continuity, Zorge’s forthcoming concert is also called “Traditional Winter Concert at Zoccolo.” So perhaps it’s not the end of an era after all? Zorge will perform on Thursday, Feb. 3.
<strong>Chufella Marzufella</strong>, the great if underestimated local garage-rock band, will perform at Zoccolo on Wednesday, Feb. 2. 
“We only do things that we get pleasure out of,” singer and guitarist Pavel Ryabukhin told The St. Petersburg Times two years ago.
“We take pleasure in making music like this, and that’s why we do it. We don’t play much, and we don’t record much.” Ryabukhin admits to listening to Frank Zappa, jazz drummers and 1960s garage bands.
Friday, Feb. 4 will see a gig by <strong>Pep-See</strong>, the “extreme-disco” band fronted by three women and notorious for its dark humor and amusing if cynical songs. The band will perform at Kosmonavt.

<em>— By Sergey Chernov</em>

TITLE: A one-soprano show
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Stunning bel canto phrasings, impeccable fioritura, vitality and spontaneity — one would think St. Petersburg’s best-loved soprano Anna Netrebko was born to sing the part of Adina, the main character in Gaetano Donizetti’s sparkling opera “L’Elisir d’Amore” that premiered at the Mariinsky Theater on Jan. 24.
Directed by Frenchman Laurent Pelly, the production, originally staged at the Opera de Paris in 2007, is showing in its fourth incarnation at the Mariinsky, having already seen the stages of Milan’s La Scala and London’s Covent Garden. One of Europe’s most sought-after directors, Pelly is responsible for a series of some of the most striking operatic productions of recent years, including Donizetti’s “La Fille du Regiment” in Covent Garden in 2008, Rameau’s “Platee” at the Opera National de Paris in 2001 and Handel’s “Giulio Cesare” at Paris’s Opera Garnier in January this year — the latter two both starring star French soprano Natalie Dessay.
Pelly’s successful staging was imported to the banks of the Neva at the personal request of Netrebko. The singer is very much at home with the production, having performed in this rendition of the opera in 2009 after it originally premiered in France. The diva soprano has also recorded a DVD of the opera, partnered by the popular Mexican tenor Rolando Villazon.
Netrebko thrives in the role of the flirtatious village girl Adina, who has a lot of fun teasing her two admirers, the clumsy peasant Nemorino and courageous if somewhat dumb Sergeant Belcore.
On the opening night, Netrebko was paired on stage by her real-life partner, Uruguayan bass-baritone Erwin Schrott, the father of her son Thiago. Schrott, whose macho appearance renders him no less glamorous than Netrebko herself, created a fabulous portrayal of charlatan doctor Dulcamara, who sells a dubious love potion to the desperate Nemorino. Sporting an enormous fake belly, the slim and agile Schrott created a highly humorous “duck” walk to produce a grotesque and hilarious interpretation of his character.
Visually, the production has been designed in the neorealist aesthetic — a popular approach to this opera. Set in a 1960s Italian province — the style of dress, vintage bikes and period truck leave no doubt about the timeframe of the story — the production has the bare-legged Adina resting atop a pile of hay polishing her nails, indulging in energetic folk dances and happily fooling around with her fellow peasants. Putting her background in acrobatics to admirable use, Netrebko demonstrated grace and speed that rivaled the sparks of her fiorituras. 
The unfailingly cheerful singer, whose charms and infectious laugh have won her worldwide admiration, has clearly injected a lot of her personality into the role, leading to speculation that it is light-hearted, jolly, girlish beauties that suit her best, rather than tragic heroines such as that other Donizetti character, Lucia in “Lucia di Lammermoor.” “Lucia” was another production imported by the Mariinsky — in January 2009 — especially for Netrebko, on that occasion from the Scottish National Opera.
The Mariinsky’s artistic director Valery Gergiev was absent from the premiere. The maestro was in Moscow conducting the other division of the Mariinsky Symphony Orchestra in Bela Bartok’s “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle,” on tour in the Russian capital as part of the “Golden Mask” national theater festival and awards.
The choice of Luciano di Martino as conductor remains obscure and difficult to understand, especially considering that Pavel Bubelnikov, who had produced a hugely popular version of “L’Elisir d’Amore” at St. Petersburg’s Zazerkalye Theater, was available. The rapport between the orchestra, the singers and the choir was ragged to the extent that it seemed as though there were several clone conductors handling the show who could not quite agree on their tempi. 
Apart from the disjointed work between the singers and the orchestra — which could be ironed out and harmonized with the help of a few more rehearsals — the premiere of “L’Elisir d’Amore” highlighted another problem of the world-famous company: Its stars don’t always have the supporting cast to match. Tenor Sergei Skorokhodov, suffering from the flu, coughed his way through Nemorino — one of the most poetic and lyrical characters in the opera repertoire — demonstrating a lack of flair and understanding with the orchestra. Baritone Vladimir Moroz was more technically adroit but dramatically miscast as Belcore, lacking the bravado and sex appeal of his character, coming across instead as rather hard-headed and narrow-minded. 
The opening night received a standing ovation, but it is worth noting that this was exclusively down to the Netrebko-Schrott bonus. To maintain its status as a leading opera troupe, the Mariinsky has to wake up to one of the simplest truths of the theater world: A successful production needs a bit of teamwork. No star can save a show single-handedly — not even if their spouse flies in to the rescue.

“L’Elisir d’Amore” will next be performed at 7 p.m. on Feb. 8 at the Mariinsky Theater, 1 Teatralnaya Ploshchad. Tel: 326 4141. www.mariinsky.ru

TITLE: Russian Slant At Globes
AUTHOR: By Nellee Holmes
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: LOS ANGELES — With the Oscars looming at the end of this month, last month’s Golden Globe Awards revealed a pervading Russian influence in Hollywood.
Of five nominations for the Golden Globe Awards, three of those nominated for best foreign-language film were heavily influenced by Russian culture, though the eventual winner, Susanne Bier’s “In a Better World” (Denmark), was one of the two without a Russian connection.
The main character of Luca Guadagnino’s “I Am Love” (Italy), Emma (played by Tilda Swenson) is the passionate daughter of a Russian art dealer, who comes to Italy as the wife of the uptight heir to a rich Milanese industrialist.
“I have a fascination with Russian culture,” Guadagnino admits. “At the same time, I like the idea of contamination of places and identities. We had a crew that was French, Spanish, Brazilian, and so on, otherwise we make inbred movies.”
The central character of Romanian-born Franco-Israeli writer-director Radu Mihaileanu’s latest picture “The Concert” is also Russian. Andrei Filipov (played by Alexei Guskov) is a once famous Soviet conductor purged by the KGB in 1980 for his dangerously decent treatment of Jewish musicians who now works as a cleaner at the Bolshoi Theater.
The action in Alexei Uchitel’s “The Edge” (Russia) takes place shortly after the end of World War II in the Siberian hinterland. Ignat (the excellent Vladimir Mashkov) is the embodiment of the larger-than-life image of the victorious Soviet warrior who, in fact, proves to be shell-shocked, sick and broken, though not completely destroyed.
“Russian or otherwise, it doesn’t matter,” said Uchitel. “You have to explore what really interests you, what bothers you. World War II is the main event in our history, and we won, but the important thing for us is to look at it from the other angle, and to understand what really happened, and this is one of the main goals of Russian cinema makers.”
Uchitel also insists that the problems depicted in “The Edge” are still relevant today. “When I was making this film I wanted to project something that was contemporary, to find the emotions that remain today. I was always interested in the subject of people who speak different languages and who at once start killing each other. It is important to understand that the problem is contemporary — why do we hate each other?”

TITLE: The Word's Worth: At the End of Your Rope
AUTHOR: By Mychele A. Berdy
TEXT: Ęîíĺö: end, finish, death, rope, trace

Ęîíĺö is a cool word.
The primary meaning is an end to something either physical or temporal. But ęîíĺö can take you around the world, drag you under water, cast you out to sea, haul you to the edge of town, bring you to meet your Maker and even hide the evidence. Not bad for five letters and two syllables.
It’s a word you probably use in the office every day. ß îďîçäŕë č ńëűřŕë ňîëüęî ęîíĺö ĺăî äîęëŕäŕ (I was late and only caught the end of his speech). Řĺô őî÷ĺň ďîëó÷čňü îň÷¸ň äî ęîíöŕ íĺäĺëč (The boss wants the report by the end of the week).
The annoying abbreviation COB (close of business) — usually concluding an unexpected e-mail from the home office requesting a fully loaded, 50-page proposal — might be neatly rendered ĘĘÄ (ę ęîíöó äí˙ — by the end of the day). And certainly your response to such a request might be the laconic but expressive: Ęîíĺö! (We’re screwed!)
Out in the world, ęîíĺö can mean the edge of a town: îí ćčâ¸ň â ęîíöĺ ăîđîäŕ (he lives on the outskirts), or a place far away: îí ćčâ¸ň â äđóăîě ęîíöĺ ăîđîäŕ (he lives on the other side of town). Ńî âńĺő ęîíöîâ means “from everywhere.” Ęîíĺö can also mean an end of a trip. A one-way ticket is áčëĺň â îäčí ęîíĺö (literally, “a ticket to one end”), and a round-trip ticket is áčëĺň â îáŕ ęîíöŕ (literally, “a ticket to both ends”).
On the water, ęîíĺö refers to the mooring rope, which I imagine must create Monty Pythonesque situations when there is a landlubber on board. A sailor shouts: Äĺđćč ęîíĺö! (Grab the rope!), and the nonsailor clutches the end of a pole. Îňäŕňü ęîíöű (literally, “to give up the rope”) means to cast off, but in slang it means “to die.” Context, as always, is everything.
I assume that the rope and nautical meaning of ęîíĺö has given us the visually vivid expression č ęîíöű â âîäó (literally, “and the ropes into the water”), which means that there will be no trace found.
Sometimes this means that a person gets disappeared: Îí áîëüřĺ íĺ îáú˙âë˙ëń˙, ďđîďŕë — č ęîíöű â âîäó (He never showed up again — he disappeared without a trace). In other contexts, it means that no evidence will ever be found: Âńęđűňü řęŕô, âç˙ňü äĺíüăč č ęîíöű â âîäó (Bust open the cupboard, take the money — and no one will be the wiser).
Probably the image of tangled ropes or threads has produced the expression ęîíöîâ íĺ íŕéňč (literally “to not find the ends”), which can mean that you can’t find the source. When a friend sent me a wonderful parody of newscasts, I asked who the author was. The reply was: Ęîíöîâ íĺ íŕéä¸řü! (You’ll never figure out who wrote it!) In other cases it means not being able to get to the bottom of something: Âńĺ ďĺđĺďóňŕëîńü, č ęîíöîâ íĺ íŕéä¸řü (It’s all a mess and you’ll never sort it out).
This is different from the ability to make ends meet: ńâîäčňü ęîíöű ń ęîíöŕěč. To do so, you can đŕáîňŕňü áĺç ęîíöŕ (to work endlessly). But íŕ őóäîé ęîíĺö (in the worst case scenario), you can always file Chapter 11.
True, declaring bankruptcy is ďŕëęŕ î äâóő ęîíöŕő (a double-edged sword). But it’s not the end of the world.

Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter, whose collection of columns, “The Russian Word’s Worth,” has been published by Glas.

TITLE: One man’s hero, another man’s villain
AUTHOR: By Olga Khrustaleva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: “Chosen by Clio,” the alternative name of the “Heroes and Villains in Russian History” exhibition currently showing at the State Russian Museum, illustrates the complexity and ambiguity of the subject. So often politicized, history has become both a source of pride, helping people and nations to define their identity, and fertile soil for speculation. An intricate and complex fusion of facts, their interpretations, legends and myths, history can easily be turned upside down if desired. If centuries ago, people had no concept of PR, spin or image–making, every age had its heroes and villains, who were frequently one and the same person.
The organizers of the exhibition have attempted to cover the vast period of Russian history from Rurik to Yeltsin, cramming years of studies into several halls of the Benois Wing. And overall, they have succeeded in their ambitious mission.
“Who do you think Clio is?” asks Natalya Aniskina, a guide and senior researcher at the Russian Museum. “She represents History, but she is still more of a muse than a science. And we are usually more inspired by legends and tales than by bare facts.” 
And indeed, before Nestor the Chronicler began his “Primary Chronicle” in the 11th century, there was no record other than oral folk traditions.  
“Take Igor, the 9th-century ruler of Kievan Rus,” said Aniskina. “We hardly remember his two successful sieges of Constantinople, but everyone knows how viciously he was murdered by the Drevlyans.” 
When collecting a tribute, Igor and his troops decided they had not taken enough from the Drevlyans, and returned to demand some more. The enraged tribe killed all the soldiers and then tied Igor to two bent trees which, when released, tore him in two. 
Igor’s wife, Olga, avenged her husband’s death in a cunning yet feminine way, destroying the tribe completely. According to legend, as a supposed token of peace she took three sparrows and three doves from every house, then tied a piece of cloth to each of the birds and set a match to the cloth. The birds flew home and the Drevlyans were burned in their homes, and Olga was later canonized as one of the first figures in medieval Rus to adopt Christianity. Her grandson Vladimir, now remembered for converting the country to Christianity, had five wives before he adopted the religion, and was also sanctified, though his rule can hardly be described as holy.
The exhibition brings together various works of art from different museums of Russia, some of which have never been shown before. Painted in assorted styles, created at various times, offering diverse interpretations, they are all united by one theme: People whose names are familiar to most Russians and many foreigners. The contingent of those “Chosen by Clio” is very diverse: Dukes, tsars, monks and saints, mutineers and revolutionaries, writers, musicians and philosophers. Some are iconic figures such as Peter the Great and Alexander Pushkin, revered for their contribution to Russian history. Others are less well known, but no less important to Russia’s past. But despite the exhibition’s title, none of them can be defined as either heroes or villains. They all made an immense contribution that is impossible to measure, since it is impossible to put all the noble or evil deeds committed by one person on the scales to see which outweighs the other. And after all, heroes are human too.
Leo Tolstoy, one of the mighty figures featured in the exhibition, effectively denied the role of individuals in history. “In historical events, so-called great men are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels, they have the least possible connection to the event itself,” he wrote in “War and Peace.” 
“Every action of theirs that seems to them an act of their own free will is in a historical sense not free at all, but bound to the entire course of history, and predestined from all eternity,” was Tolstoy’s fatalistic point of view. Or perhaps it’s Clio herself, or History, who selects heroes and villains for every epoch. “Time levels out negative traits and adds those that were needed,” said Aniskina. 
The images tell visitors a lot, not only about their subjects, but also about the time period in which they were painted. Works painted during World War II, for example, tend to be very gory, but at the same time triumphant, depicting Russian bogatyrs in all their glory.   
“We can understand history through these masterpieces,” visitors from Taiwan have written in the comments book. 
“We should take schoolchildren to the exhibition so that they learn Russian history,” many Russian visitors have commented in the same book. However, there is no such thing as a single history: The exhibition draws attention to the story of each person depicted and each artist whose work is exhibited. And though it merely pushes ajar the door to “the imposing drama named Russian History” (as the museum’s press service puts it), this journey — about seven museum rooms and twelve centuries long — is captivating and very enriching. 

“Chosen by Clio. Heroes and Villains of Russian History” runs through March 28 in the Benois Wing of the Russian Museum. 2 Nab. Kanala Griboyedova. Tel: 595-42-48. www.rusmuseum.ru.

TITLE: Anna Chapman’s TV Show
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: Russian spy Anna Chapman intoned “I will reveal all the secrets” in her new television show, which started last Friday on Ren-TV. Although the show abounded in bleeding wounds and starred Chapman in slashed velvet and high heels, somehow it managed to be a bit dull.
The weekly show has the catch-all title “Secrets of the World with Anna Chapman.” The first episode covered Dagestani baby Ali, who became famous in 2009 when Arabic quotes from the Quran began appearing on his skin. The story went quiet after the parents stopped showing him to experts or the public. How fabulous it would have been to see Chapman cradling the baby in a strange celebrity collision. Sadly, it did not happen. Chapman just read out the links in a darkened studio, wearing unflattering eye makeup and sounding stiff and headgirlish.
To sex it up, she wore a red and black velvet dress with a slashed neckline and her trademark high-heeled boots. The makers also added gore by including people who claim to spontaneously bleed in the same places as Jesus’ stigmata.
Television critic Irina Petrovskaya said on her Ekho Moskvy radio show on Saturday that she “had a good laugh” watching the show. Chapman “has a purely decorative function,” she complained.
The tabloid Express Gazeta, which likes women to have a purely decorative function in very few clothes, wrote mean-spiritedly that Chapman is guaranteed to become a television star — for one reason only. Out of her rivals for the crown, Tina Kandelaki struggles with her weight while Ksenia Sobchak isn’t curvy enough, it concluded. “Chapman has one advantage: her figure,” it said, calling her “slim, with big breasts and graceful.”
The next step will be a seat in the State Duma, following in the footsteps of gymnasts Alina Kabayeva and Svetlana Khorkina, Express Gazeta predicted, while ultimately she will end up singing the Russian anthem at the opening of the Winter Olympics in Sochi.
In Komsomolskaya Pravda, columnist Arina Sharapova criticized Chapman’s “super-erotic image” as unwholesome and demoralizing for her undercover colleagues. “Maybe it would be better to get her married and show her off as an ideal wife and mother,” she suggests. “What girl does not secretly dream of this?”
Meanwhile Britain’s The Telegraph harrumphed in a review of the show that Chapman did not reveal any secrets and was only good at pouting.
Chapman has already appeared on the channel’s ratings-topping “Let Them Talk,” where in a surreal moment she was given a lion cub by host Andrei Malakhov. She also acted in a parody of the “17 Moments of Spring” scene, where undercover Soviet agent Shtyrlitz agonizingly looks across a Berlin cafe at his wife, to whom he cannot speak.
Those appearances made it a surprise that Chapman did not grab the ultimate prize of her own show on Channel One. I think she could be a good straight woman on its hip current affairs comedy show, “ProjectorParisHilton,” although I’m not sure whether she does jokes.
In any case, Channel One aired an affectionate parody of Chapman on its “Big Difference” show on Saturday. “Big Difference” imagined Chapman as an auburn-curled cabaret singer in high heels and trilby, with male backing dancers in raincoats. “It’s very easy being a spy,” she sings, explaining that her looks alone will make everyone “run to serve Russia.”
“Of course I’m not very pleased that I got sent back,” she confides, but explains that now, “I’m going to recruit everyone from the television screen and from the pages of newspapers.”
Stripping down to a satin negligee, she sings “I’m not Batman, I’m not Spiderman, I’m Chapman.”

TITLE: Great expectations
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: My guest confessed to me with a cheeky smile that she had not been able to sleep the night before. Indeed, when you are set to have dinner at a place titled as promisingly as “Wishes” (Zhelaniya means wishes in English), high expectations abound.
Housed in the basement of an apartment building on Ulitsa Dobrolyubova, a stone’s throw from the Tuchkov bridge, Zhelaniya has one room, decorated in creamy pastel colors in a style resembling Provence family restaurants. The homey ambiance can be felt straight away: Zhelaniya is a very warm place in every sense of the world, from genial service to good heating that was especially appreciated on one of the coldest days of the year so far.
We were greeted by the restaurant’s only waitress, who, with her discreet and professional air, was hospitality personified, providing competent and delicate advice on the menu. 
The restaurant’s plum location, less than a ten-minute walk from the Baltiisky Dom theater, makes it a great pre-theater choice. Still, the theater-going crowd has yet to make the most of this opportunity — when we had our early dinner around 6 p.m. before attending a performance on a Friday night, the venue was virtually empty, with only two other tables occupied.
The goat’s cheese and strawberry salad (340 rubles, $11.70) immediately winked from the menu, but it transpired that Zhelaniya had run out of fresh strawberries. The chef offered to replace strawberries with persimmon — a juxtaposition we had never heard of before, but they clearly knew what they were doing. The impromptu substitution was a winning combination. Full of spice and flavor, the persimmons offered a great contrast to the acerbic aroma of the cheese. A Norwegian salmon salad with sesame sauce (230 rubles, $8) — a simple dish that is hard to ruin — was likewise rendered expertly.
Other tempting starter options include duck breast and orange salad (480 rubles, $16.50) and veal salad (220 rubles, $7.50). 
Invited by the waiter to sample something from a special pasta festival menu, we investigated but eventually resisted a tantalizing choice of around ten pastas accompanied by tuna, basil, spinach and cep mushrooms, among other things.
Perhaps the most thrilling main courses on offer are reindeer fillet with pumpkin (490 rubles, $16.80) and rabbit in a creamy sauce with mushrooms (460 rubles, $15.80), which we resolved to look forward to trying on a future visit, before repeating the fantastic experience of the chocolate cheesecake (160 rubles, $5.50), elegant and succulent, that went down extremely well.
For mains, we settled on scallops with broccoli puree (460 rubles, $15.80) and grilled tuna with mixed salad and avocado (460 rubles, $15.80). Both dishes were light — the broccoli puree was a heavenly concoction that deserves a special mention — yet perfectly filling. The portions at Zhelaniya can hardly be called hearty, but there is little risk of leaving the place hungry. Everything we tried was very delicately cooked: The salads were sprinkled with aromatic sauces, rather than drowned with them, and no fatty oil was spotted on the mains.
As we waited for our main courses, we flipped through some 19th-century Russian classics scattered about the place, along with a Soviet cookbook. The lounge music was not intrusive and allowed us to enjoy a quiet chat. Although the restaurant is not large — it boasts about 10 tables — it does not feel crowded, and guests’ privacy is not compromised; we couldn’t hear a trace of the conversation of a young couple sitting next to us. Another loved-up couple was sitting a few meters away, clearly enjoying themselves, hugging, sipping their wine and reading French quotations on the ceiling: With its enveloping charms, Zhelaniya is sure to be overbooked for Valentine’s day.

TITLE: A Practical Guide to the Country of Smiles
AUTHOR: By Anna Asriyants
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Vietnam is a country of smiles. Although its recent history has been stained by horrific conflict, which has left terrible scars on the country, the people have managed to preserve many of their cultural and architectural treasures, as well as their remarkable hospitality and friendliness.  

Getting there
Several airlines operate services from Moscow to Hanoi or Moscow to Ho Chi Minh. It is possible to get acquainted with both the north and south of the country in one trip. Aeroflot flies to Hanoi three to four times a week, and includes a free connecting flight from St. Petersburg. Transaero also flies twice a week, while Vietnamese airlines fly to Hanoi once a week and to Ho Chi Minh three times a week. 
Russian citizens can spend up to 15 days in Vietnam without a visa, while CIS citizens and other nationalities can obtain a visa upon arrival at the airport in one to two hours (upon presentation of an invitation, completed form and two color photographs), or in advance at the embassy in three working days. 

Currency
U.S. Dollars are accepted almost everywhere in Vietnam, including in hotels, restaurants and taxis, but it is advisable to buy local currency — dongs. One U.S. dollar is equivalent to 20 dongs. Money can be changed in hotels, jewelry stores and tourist centers.

Travel Tips
Vietnam’s tourism infrastructure is rapidly developing, and for getting around the country, visitors can choose from most kinds of transport imaginable, from internal flights, trains and buses to motorbikes and boats.
 Every Vietnamese city abounds with tourist information offices, where visitors can book excursions, find a room in a hotel or guesthouse, rent a bike, buy plane tickets or extend their visa. 
Virtually every caf? and guesthouse offers free WiFi, and local networks are available, even for international phone calls. 
It is not essential to book a room in advance when traveling to Vietnam, as the choice is immense and you will certainly find something to suit your requirements.
When arriving in Hanoi, it is important to keep your head. Tourists who are fresh off the plane stick out like a sore thumb.
Moving around Hanoi is best done on foot (within the borders of the old town at least), or by bike. Driving a vehicle oneself is certainly not an easy option. 
In the cities, traffic is chaotic, with most people traveling around by motorbike, in a seeming absence of any traffic rules whatsoever. Even the sidewalk offers little shelter and is clearly not intended for people walking on foot. Instead, it is dominated by traders, hawking their goods around a multitude of stalls and shops, including street food, and by parking and repair points for motor transport.

Eating
Vietnamese cuisine deserves thorough investigation. It may take some time to get used to the country’s culinary customs such as soup for breakfast, fruit being served under a dusting of salt and pepper, and steamed potatoes that are conversely very sweet. But regardless of where you eat, there is no cause to worry over the quality or freshness of the food — returning home from Vietnam without having suffered from any gastric ailments is perfectly possible. Meat, seafood and vegetables are always fresh, and anything left over from lunch or dinner is mercilessly thrown away.
One essential culinary experience when visiting Vietnam is traditional Fo soup (chicken or beef broth with rice noodles, herbs and much more). It seems that people in Vietnam are constantly eating, though the locals are enviably slim.
Essential attractions

A significantly enhanced outlook on the country, everyday life and the Vietnamese people can be obtained by a trip to the Ethnographic Museum in Hanoi. This remarkable open-air museum portrays a wealth of information about the life and customs of 54 different peoples. Just an hour or an hour and a half is enough to complete a virtual journey around the country. Performances of puppet theaters on water are often given on the museum’s territory, and such performances — a unique feature of 11th-century Vietnamese culture — are popular not only among tourists, but with Vietnamese people too. 
If you are in the north of the country, it’s worth including Sapa and Ha Long Bay in your list of must-see destinations. Numerous travel companies offer two-day tours to Sapa District, a mountainous region on the Chinese border. Sapa charms newcomers with its rice terraces, majestic mountains, bamboo woods, and gigantic butterflies. The villagers from the surrounding countryside stand out on the town’s streets like visitors from another planet. Their clothes, jewelry, and headwear are a tourist attraction in their own right. Sapa is home to six different ethnic groups, each of which lovingly maintains its lifestyle and cultural traditions. If you come here with a tour group, the itinerary is bound to include the villages of Cat Cat and Sin Chai, home to Black Hmongs, and Lao Chai, where there are Tay and Dao communities. Inimitable ethnic jewelry and handmade clothing are well worth buying.
Ha Long — the name of which means “where the dragon descended into the sea” — is an astonishingly beautiful bay 160 kilometers from Hanoi, on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sights.  
Ha Long Bay consists of about 2000 tree-covered rock islands of all different shapes and sizes, as well as cozy inlets with beaches, mystical caves and caverns, floating fishing villages, and rickety junks. 
It’s better to book tours in advance on boats where you can choose between Lux or Standard class berths. Whichever, make sure you don’t sleep through sunset and sunrise, which are particularly spectacular in the area.

TITLE: Brazil: Exploring the Neighborhoods of Sao Paulo
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Travel to Brazil is typically associated with the divine beaches of Rio de Janeiro. The city’s bigger brother and Latin America’s fast-beating economic heart, Sao Paulo, by contrast, is often avoided by leisure visitors — in a similar way in which tourists often seek to escape the Babylonian spirit of fast-paced Moscow in favor of the more relaxed atmosphere of elegant St. Petersburg.
This common attitude hardly does justice to this beehive of a megalopolis, which gives you a sense of what makes Brazil one of the world’s most fast-developing economies and allows you to see the changes happening literally in front of your eyes. Sao Paulo tells visitors far more about Brazil than its stereotypes as a country known for coffee, soccer and bikinis.

URBAN JUNGLE
The wealth gap in Sao Paulo is shocking, and exploration of its neighborhoods — which include Liberdade, the largest Japanese community outside Japan, as well as Italian and Spanish districts — gives rise to the feeling that the architectural landscape here consists almost exclusively of skyscrapers. The downtown area, where the three-block facade of the Edificio Martinelly, the city’s earliest skyscraper, is one of the most eye-catching landmarks, creates an atmosphere similar to the grandeur and glitz of New York City.
The pulse of life in Latin America today can be felt distinctly in Sao Paulo. A number of city districts — including the area around the Sao Paulo cathedral — are considered unsafe for individual female travelers. Wear your shabbiest clothes, leave your wallet at home and take a watchful Argus approach — this is the sort of advice you are likely to get from the locals if you insist on venturing to see that part of town. Once there, the urban environment is dotted with homeless people cozying up under the trees or lying on the ground smoking suspicious-smelling substances, and gangs of muscular rough-looking men in ripped jeans whose eyes you may not want to meet. Police cars can be seen on every other corner on an ordinary day.
Culture vultures will want to set aside a day at MASP (Museo de Arte de Sao Paulo), which boasts works by Picasso, Van Gogh, Cezanne and Renoir. With a cutting-edge design by Lina Bo Bardi, the museum’s building is an attraction in itself.
Vila Madalena, Sao Paulo’s answer to London’s Portobello, is a bustling bohemian neighbourhood, its winding narrow sidewalks abundant with tiny arts galleries and handmade chocolate shops. Look out for trendy designer ateliers of some of the biggest names in Brazilian fashion, like Ronaldo Fraga, who deservedly enjoys the reputation as Brazil’s most intellectual and conceptual designer, and who has made provocative theatricality his signature style. Rich in color and refined in shape, Fraga’s chic and sophisticated creations — which experiment with volume and cut — are intended to be striking. 
The area has a wealth of cafes, bars, casual restaurants and nightclubs frequented by the glamorous and casual crowd alike. Cafe Aprendiz mounts cutting-edge exhibitions, and there is an excellent open-air graffiti gallery round the corner.
The southern part of the city houses the vast Ibirapuera park, which covers more than 1.5 million square meters and receives at least 200,000 visitors every weekend.
Those eager to sample the national cuisine should make sure to have a bite at Mercado Municipal, the city’s central market and Sao Paulo’s gastronomic temple, a less expensive alternative to dining in the upscale restaurants of the Jardins district. Do not be put off by the Brazilian idea of fusing tropical fruit into just about any dish, from pasta to beef Stroganoff — the result is never disappointing.
 
FASHION CAPITAL
As unlikely as it may seem, shopping in Sao Paulo is a must for fashion-conscious travelers. 
To the uninitiated, the notion of Brazilian fashion is often closely linked to tropical exoticism and one bright image in particular — a colored bikini. Some might expect the country’s fashion weeks to be something of an echo of Rio de Janeiro’s carnival. What stuns newcomers is that local designers observe the industry’s key rule: To become a fashion capital you have to offer designs that are at the same time unique and cosmopolitan, which is to say universally appealing.
International fashion experts who research emerging trends now travel reguarly to Brazil, and regard Sao Paulo as an emerging international fashion Mecca.
Designer Alexandre Herchkovitch, who is something of a Brazilian fashion icon, has a store in the Jardins district. The chic Oscar Freire street, also located in the Jardins area, is home to some of the finest boutiques. An alternative is to pay a pilgrimage to the gigantic Iguatemi shopping center in the financial district.
Other names and brands to look out for include Maria Bonita, Isabela Capeto, Triton and Osklen. And of course, it is hard to leave Sao Paulo without one of the world-renowned swimsuits by Rosa Cha or Lenny.
Brazilian fashion offers an astounding fusion of faces and voices. One of the most ethnically diverse regions on the planet, the country is inhabited by more than 200 ethnic groups representing local nationalities as well as descendants of immigrants from Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe.
The country is a melting pot of various cultures and traditions, and the Brazilians bring to the catwalk their own particular way of life, celebrating sensuality, openness, sincerity and happiness. Most people in Brazil take pride in their physical shape, and readily invest in their looks and health. The resulting interest in fashion is a national trait that brings people together regardless of their social status.
How to get there:

Most major airlines, including British Airways, Air France, Lufthansa and Swiss International Airlines offer regular flights to Sao Paulo with a connection in Europe. TAM, Brazil’s premier international airline, flies to most European cities but does not yet operate in Russia.
Russian and British citizens do not require a visa but U.S. citizens must obtain one.


Places of interest:

MASP art gallery, http://masp.art.br, Av. Paulista, 1,578, Tel. 3251-5644

Sao Paulo Se City Cathedral, Se Square, Tel. 3107-6832, Praca da Se metro station

Mercado Municipal, Rue da Cantareira, 306, Tel. 3313-1326, Luz metro station

Iguatemi shopping mall, Avenida Brig. Faria Lima, 2,232, Tel. 3816-6116, Cidade Jardim metro station, www.iguatemisaopaulo.com.br

Oscar Freire street, Trianon-MASP metro station

Ibirapuera National Park, Brigadeiro metro station then take bus 5100 or 5131