SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1650 (12), Wednesday, April 6, 2011
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TITLE: Opposition Declares Dissenters’ March a Success
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Dissenters’ March for the Dismissal of Governor Valentina Matviyenko that took place on Thursday was described by the opposition as one of the biggest and most successful protest events during the past three years, despite arrests and intimidation. 
Also called the March to Smolny (City Hall), the march — spearheaded by Moscow-based oppositional politician and former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov — was banned by the authorities, but protesters, whose number was estimated at between 1,000 and 2,000, managed to march most of the 4.5-kilometer route despite the police’s attempts to block them.
Many protesters were eventually stopped on Mytninskaya Ulitsa, where the most arrests were made. But a handful of marchers managed to reach the final destination near City Hall, and were able to chant some slogans before being surrounded and detained by the police.
According to the organizers, the police detained about 150 people near Gostiny Dvor department store on Nevsky Prospekt and alongside the march’s route, including Nemtsov, Moscow activist Ilya Yashin and the local Solidarity and United Civil Front (OGF) leader Olga Kurnosova. The police confirmed that “more than 100” were detained. More than 90 spent the night in police cells.
The authorities deployed a helicopter to follow the protesters and at one point hover over Nevsky Prospekt, drowning out slogans such as “Russia Will Be Free” and “Dismiss Matviyenko” and sending road dust and dirt into people’s faces. 
One policeman was hospitalized, having been hit by a car after “trying to save a resident by pushing him off the road,” the police reported. 
But a video made available on the Internet showed that the policeman was in fact hit by a passing car while dragging The Other Russia member Igor Chepkasov with two other policemen across Ligovsky Prospekt to a police bus. Fontanka.ru, which published the police report, later published a correction.
An estimated 500 people who arrived late at the march gathered near Gostiny Dvor, where arrests were also made.
At one point, a man in professional climbing gear descended from the roof of Gostiny Dvor and hung a banner from it that read “Free Khodorkovsky, Imprison Putin.” Oleg Ivashko, who does not belong to any political group, was detained and sentenced to three days in prison.
Four members of the Other Russia party who were detained near Gostiny Dvor — one of them, Maxim Gromov, while attempting to recite a poem — were also sentenced to three days in prison.
While most protesters marched along Nevsky Prospekt’s broad sidewalk, a group of anarchists carrying smoke bombs took to the road after the crowd passed the Anichkov Bridge, and when dispersed, were replaced by a group of The Other Russia activists carrying a banner reading “Dismiss Matviyenko!”
Members of art group Voina, two of whom have been released on bail after spending three months in a St. Petersburg prison for an art stunt that involved overturning police cars, marched with anarchists and carried plastic bottles containing urine to counter the police when attacked.
Speaking on Tuesday, Oleg Vorotnikov said he and other Voina activists were deliberately singled out and beaten, while Kasper, the toddler son of Vorotnikov and fellow Voina member Natalya Sokol, was taken from his parents and eventually sent to hospital with a suspected concussion.
Sokol, who is still breastfeeding her son, spent the night in a police cell but managed to escape when the police were preparing to drive her and other activists to court.
Vorotnikov said they took the bottles filled with urine exclusively for self-defense.
“We agreed to use them only if attacked,” he said.
“And we were attacked, but we didn’t use them until they attacked Kasper. When Kasper was attacked, the anarchists couldn’t stand it anymore and used our rather humble biological weapon — our own urine.”
Vorotnikov, who got Kasper back from the hospital with the help of his lawyer late Thursday, said that he, Sokol and their son had evidence of their injuries documented in a hospital. According to Vorotnikov, who described the police’s behavior as “senseless hysteria,” the activists were beaten both during detentions and at a police precinct.
“I am used to clashes with the police,” Vorotnikov said.
“I was beaten on March 3; we have collided with them before. I have spent some time in prison, too, but even I did not expect to face such absurd, ungrounded cruelty on that day.” 
City Hall refused to authorize the march organized by the OGF, Solidarity, The Other Russia, Rot Front, Oborona and Mikhail Kasyanov’s People’s Democratic Union (RNDS) on the grounds that building facades were being renovated along all of the five suggested routes. Instead, the authorities suggested the would-be marchers hold a standup meeting on Pionerskaya Ploshchad or a march in the remote Polyustrovo Park.


TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Toddler’s Body Found</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The body of a three-year-old girl who went missing in January was found Monday evening, Interfax reported. The parents of Alyona Shchipina have identified the body, Sergei Kapitonov, an official representative of the city’s central investigation department, told Interfax on Tuesday. 
Kapitonov said that establishing the cause of death would take investigators approximately two weeks.
The child’s stepfather, Roman Polevoi, is still a suspect in the murder, but has not been rearrested, Kapitonov told Interfax.
“Polevoi remains under house arrest by court order. We are not changing the conditions under which he is being held,” he said.
Polevoi claims that he left his stepdaughter at home for about 15 minutes in Alexandrovskoye, a village near Pushkin, while he went to buy cigarettes. Some time later, he and neighbors heard the girl scream. Polevoi says he ran home, only to find the girl gone.

<b>Car Plants Accelerate</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The city’s Hyundai car-making plant launched a second production line Monday, Interfax reported.
Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Rus launched the second shift after it received orders for the production of more than 14,000 Hyundai Solaris cars. 
The second shift will enable an increase in production of up to 9,000 cars a month and a reduction in waiting times for customers.
The plant is planning to launch a third production shift by the end of this year.
Also Monday, Ford Motor Company launched a third production shift at its plant in Vsevolozhsk in the Leningrad Oblast in order to meet growing demand for Ford Focus and Mondeo cars, Interfax reported. 

<b>Zenit Enters Top 10</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — FC Zenit is now ranked one of the world’s top ten football clubs, Interfax reported.
Zenit has moved up to eighth position ahead of Estudiantes FC (Argentina) and Villareal FC (Spain).
Inter FC (Italy) remains the world’s top-ranked club, followed by Barcelona and Real (Spain), Porto (Portugal), Intenacional (Brazil), Manchester United (England) and Bavaria (Germany).
Moscow’s FC TSKA and Spartak are ranked 31st and 65th, respectively.

<b>Okhta Treasure</b> 
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The archeological remains uncovered during excavation work carried out at the Okhta Cape in St. Petersburg, where Gazprom’s controversial Okhta Center skyscraper was planned to be built, will be reburied to prevent their destruction, Interfax reported.
The decision was taken by a group of experts consisting of city activists, representatives of Okhta Center who own the land, archeologists and City Hall officials.
A group of experts will determine the area of the plot that needs to be covered.
The experts have also asked the Culture Ministry to provide cultural and historical analysis regarding the objects found, which include remains from the last Stone Age and early Metal Age, traces of Bronze Age and early Iron Age dwellings, and fortification constructions from the 14th-century Swedish Landskrona fortress.

TITLE: Ferry Passengers Receive Warm Welcome 
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Princess Anastasia ferry returned to St. Petersburg more than five hours late on Monday from its first trip to Stockholm. 
The ferry was delayed due to thick ice that continues to cover the Gulf of Finland. Ten icebreakers, including the nuclear vessel the Vaigach, are still helping to free cargo vessels and passenger ferries. According to data from the administration of the St. Petersburg seaport, 76 ships remained trapped by ice in the Gulf of Finland on Monday. 
The ice means that the schedule of the Princess Anastasia is subject to change. According to ferry staff, the journey to Stockholm could take up to 35 hours instead of the scheduled 23 hours, though on its first journey last week, it arrived in the Swedish capital just two hours later than expected. The onward journey to the ferry’s next destination — Tallinn — passed without incident. 
Monday’s delayed arrival left many passengers scrambling to adjust their plans: The ferry was due to arrive in St. Petersburg at 8 a.m., and many people were planning to go directly to work. Despite expectations of increased tourism between the three countries as a result of the new ferry, travelers should be warned not to rely on the ferry’s schedule. Furthermore, the arrivals procedure is not an attractive one. 
On Monday, passengers returning from the ferry’s first trip — already delayed by several hours — were then made to wait with their luggage in the ferry’s entrance hall for more than an hour before they were allowed to enter the port terminal and go through customs. Potential passengers should also bear in mind that the old St. Petersburg passenger port does not have gently sloping stairs like most international ports. Instead, there is a long, steep staircase leading down to the ground from the fourth deck, and passengers have to take their luggage themselves. So travelers would be advised to think carefully about the weight of their bags and how exactly they will get them on and off the ferry.
The Princess Anastasia ferry was built 25 years ago for a British ferry line, and originally carried passengers from Portsmouth to Bilbao under the name The Pride of Bilbao. The ferry was renovated for the launch of the St. Petersburg to Stockholm route and renamed in honor of the youngest of the four daughters of Russia’s final emperor, Tsar Nicholas II. The ferry has a small photo exhibition devoted to Grand Princess Anastasia and the life of the tsar’s children, who were shot by the Bolsheviks in a basement alongside their parents, family doctor, servants and dog in 1918.
The eight-deck ferry has a capacity of about 2,500 passengers and about 600 cars, and houses restaurants, bars, a movie theater, swimming pool, casino, duty-free shop and children’s room. It also hosts a daily evening entertainment program, including performances by St. Petersburg’s Music Hall Theater and music by various bands. All this, along with the opportunity to spend 72 hours in St. Petersburg without requiring a visa — a special condition applicable only to those arriving in the city by cruise ship or ferry — should attract 300,000 more foreign tourists to the city a year, according to officials.
“I think the establishment of an additional transport connection, a tourist connection between Russia and Sweden — St. Petersburg and Stockholm — will increase the flow of tourists,” said Alexei Bakirei, deputy head of St. Petersburg’s committee on transport and transit policy. “It allows inhabitants of Sweden, the Stockholm region and residents of the European Union to share the culture and rich heritage of St. Petersburg. And for tourists from St. Petersburg, it is an easy way of getting to Europe.” 
The route’s organizers are marketing the ferry as the most comfortable way to travel to Stockholm and Tallinn with a car.
“Sweden and Russia are sea powers with sea traditions. The Baltic Sea separates us, and the ferry line can connect us,” said Alexander Davydenko, head of Russia’s Federal Agency of Sea and River Transport. “It’s very important in strengthening cooperation between the countries.”
The Princess Anastasia is the second ferry operating in the Baltic Sea. Last year, the Princess Maria ferry was launched to connect St. Petersburg and Helsinki. 
“The Princess Anastasia is about 30 percent bigger in size, in the number of passengers it can carry and in the area of public space,” said Igor Glukhov, president of the St. Peter Line company that operates both the ferries. “It is a big step forward compared to the Princess Maria; they will complement each other. 
“The ferry market in St. Petersburg has hardly developed in recent years, and the company sees high potential in it,” he added. 
The company also plans to expand the new route and launch a second ferry to Stockholm. The ferry will depart from St. Petersburg for Stockholm twice a week, only docking in Tallinn at weekends.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Boy Thrown Away</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — St. Petersburg police have arrested a man accused of throwing a two-year-old boy into a trash chute last week after the child disturbed him while he was watching TV.
The boy fell down the chute from the sixth floor and suffered serious injuries. Residents of the building found the child after they heard him crying. 
The arrested man is 34-year-old Sergei Konischev, who was reportedly living with the boy’s 42-year-old grandmother, who had reportedly fallen asleep while drunk during the incident.
According to preliminary findings, the man pushed the boy after he interrupted him while watching TV. The child fell and lost consciousness. Believing the boy to be dead, Konischev threw him down the trash chute in an attempt to cover up the crime, Fontanka.ru reported.

<b>Baby Left in Snow</b> 
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The body of a newborn girl was found in a snowdrift in the Rybatskoye dacha area of St. Petersburg’s Krasnogvardeisky district last week, Interfax reported.
The body of a baby measuring 35 centimeters was packed in a polyethylene bag and had been partly eaten by animals, police said. 

<b>Hospital Murder</b>
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Four medical workers at the city’s Yelizavetinskaya Hospital are suspected of beating a patient to death, Interfax reported.
City investigators have opened a criminal case against two nurses at the hospital: Stanislav Shakurov and Igor Yurkov, both 27 years old, as well as doctor Lyudmila Kovalyova, 35, and resuscitation specialist Vladimir Berezin, 46.
The male patient was brought to the hospital on Feb. 13, 2009, and admitted to the intoxication ward.
The nurses Shakurov and Yurkov then beat up the man, kicking and hitting him in the head, chest and stomach. The patient later died as a result of the beating, according to the investigation.
Both Kovalyova, the duty doctor in charge of the unit, and the resuscitation specialist Berezin, who knew about the crime, are accused of entering incorrect information about the patient’s condition upon arrival, falsifying information about treatment he received, and changing the time and date of his death in his medical file.


TITLE: Putin Gets Head Start on Duma Questions 
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — When State Duma deputies ask the prime minister about his annual report later this month, Vladimir Putin will know 23 of the 32 questions beforehand, his spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday.
Each of the four Duma factions may ask Putin eight questions — five of them written and three of them spoken — after his April 20 report. All written questions will officially be sent to the government after being approved by the lower chamber's council, Peskov told Interfax.
He added that the prime minister will also know in advance the three spoken questions from United Russia, the ruling party that is headed by Putin himself.
This leaves nine questions from the three oppositional factions — A Just Russia, Liberal Democrats and the Communists — that Putin will answer "not knowing them in advance," Peskov was quoted as saying.
A Just Russia, a left-leaning party created with the Kremlin's backing, and the ultranationalist Liberal Democrats tend to toe the government line, leaving the Communists as the only substantial parliamentary opposition and so the most likely to ask unpleasant questions.
The Duma council approved the written questions Thursday, the chamber's speaker Boris Gryzlov said in comments published on United Russia's web site.
Gryzlov also promised that the April 20 debate would be "long and detailed" because Putin will be given unlimited speaking time.
Some pundits voiced hopes that Putin could use the report for a major program speech that might even throw light on his plans for the 2012 presidential election.
"We might hear the first bits from a radically renewed strategy 2020," Dmitry Badovsky, a political scientist at Moscow State University, wrote in a Vedomosti article published Thursday.
Strategy 2020 is a vague blueprint for continued economic growth and diversification, promoted by United Russia.
Badovsky added that Putin might even demand from deputies a vote of confidence for his government.
Observers have expressed increasing frustration about the political uncertainty resulting from the fact that both Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev have left open who will run in the presidential vote next March.
However, Stanislav Belkovsky, an independent political analyst, predicted that both will leave the public guessing for a while and that the prime minister's report will be boring.
"It will be totally technical and uninteresting," he told The St. Petersburg Times.
Nobody should expect anything like a presidential campaign to begin soon, simply because there is no need for it, Belkovsky said.
"For a real campaign, there needs to be real democratic elections, but everybody knows there are no democratic elections in this country," he said.


TITLE: 9 Russians in Fight to Keep Citizenship 
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Imagine waking up one morning without your citizenship. 
That's what essentially happened to at least nine Russians after their names simply vanished from Foreign Ministry computers.
Viktor Gorn, 70, and his 72-year-old wife, Taisia Kirichenko, found out the hard way when they turned to the Russian consulate in Hamburg in 2009, Germany, to register their move from Leipzig. Consulate officials informed them that their names were not listed in the Foreign Ministry's database and confiscated their passports that were issued the same year in Leipzig, Gorn said.
When the couple applied with the consulate in Hamburg in 2009, they faced another rejection   and consulate officials confiscated their expired passports.
The rude treatment at the hands of their countrymen surprised the couple, who moved to Germany in 1993 and had immediately registered at the consulate. They later obtained German citizenship but had faced no trouble renewing their Russian passports until 2009.
"Authorities don't seem to realize that each Russian national abroad is a mouthpiece for Russia," Gorn said by telephone. "They can spread the good word about Russia, and therefore they have to be taken care of."
After repeated requests to consulate officials and a letter from the German Human Rights Union, the couple was promised that they would receive their passports this month, Gorn said.
Gorn and his wife are among the lucky ones. The German Human Rights Union says that at least 10 Russians living abroad have been mired in the same Kafka-esque limbo over the past three years. In many cases, officials said the applicants were not listed in state databases — even though the same agencies previously had no trouble issuing passports. One Russian was asked to go back to Russia for proof of his citizenship.
Officials have remained largely silent on the reasoning for the refusals, leaving ample room for speculation about bureaucratic indifference or disdain for emigres.
Russia uses two types of passports, internal and travel. The travel passport is the sole document that authorizes trips abroad and had to be renewed every five years until recently, when the period was extended to 10 years. It is the travel passport that has proved hard to obtain from abroad.
Of the 10 Russians refused travel passports, nine live in Germany and the 10th is a temporary worker in Brazil, said Leonid Belokonj, deputy executive officer at the Cologne department of the German Human Rights Union.
Belokonj provided The St. Petersbrug Times with contacts for nine of the Russians. Four of them refused to speak on the record, citing fear of reprisal from Russian diplomats.
Of the remaining five, two were eventually issued passports, but only after months of waiting and several official complaints to the authorities. Gorn and his wife are now waiting for their passports, while the fifth has a lawsuit pending in Russia.
Alexander Polozin, 60, never held citizenship in any country other than Russia, but consulate officials in Brazil, where he has worked since 2000, initially told him that he had to go to Russia to confirm that he was Russian.
He filed complaints and requests, and the office of federal ombudsman Vladimir Lukin even called the consulate on Polozin's behalf. The Federal Migration Service eventually confirmed that he was Russian, and his passport was renewed, the general consul in Sao Paolo, Dmitry Bushuev, said by telephone. 
Ljudmila Bannack, a translator who moved from Moscow to Germany in the 1970s, also got her passport renewed after some fuss. A consulate worker told her that her passport was renewed "as an exception" and only because she had "never held foreign citizenship," Bannack said by telephone.
But her son was not so fortunate. Born in Germany, Maxim Bannack, 32, first received a Russian passport in the mid-1990s. He had not renewed it until 2008, when the Russian consulate in Leipzig told him that he was not in the Foreign Ministry's database and could only get a passport if he gave up his German citizenship, his mother said.
He filed three complaints with the consulate through 2008 and 2009 and received a single reply, reiterating the refusal.
His mother also wrote to the consulate three times, twice each to President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and once to the Public Chamber. None wrote back.
Maxim Bannack filed a lawsuit with a Moscow district court last year, but lost. His appeal is to be reviewed by the Moscow City Court in June.
Repeated calls to Maxim Bannack went unanswered, and his mother explained that he was too busy to talk to a reporter. 
The state agencies involved in the passport problem also had no immediate comment. Inquiries submitted to the Foreign Ministry's press office, Russia's consulates in Leipzig and Hamburg, as well as to the Federal Migration Service, went unanswered Wednesday. Also unanswered were repeated calls to the head of the Foreign Ministry's consular department, Andrei Karlov; the head of the department's passport section, Vladimir Minchenko; and Konstantin Poltoranin, spokesman for the Federal Migration Service. 
Ljudmila Bannack, who described herself as a patriot, expressed "shame" with her homeland.
"I never thought it was better in Germany, and I didn't come here for the money," she said, adding that she felt "very attached to Russia."


TITLE: U.S.-Russian Crew Blasts Off
AUTHOR: By Nataliya Vasilyeva
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan — A U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts blasted off Tuesday in pre-dawn darkness, riding into orbit on a Soyuz craft emblazoned with the portrait of the first man in space in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight.
As the Soyuz TMA-21 launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome as scheduled at 4:18 a.m. (2218 GMT), it turned the darkness into broad daylight for several moments and warmed the chilly steppe of Kazakhstan with a bright orange glow.
About nine minutes into the flight to the International Space Station, officials announced that the spacecraft had successfully reached orbit.
“They’re feeling very good. They’re very happy,” said NASA astronaut Nicole Stott, who watched the launch from the viewing platform. Stott has been on two space flights, including the final mission of Space Shuttle Discovery, which landed March 9.
Live footage on NASA TV showed that a small stuffed dog hanging in front of the crew had begun to float, an indication of the weightlessness of space. The toy dog had been given to the Russian commander, Alexander Samokutyayev, by his daughter.
Mike Suffredini, head of NASA’s International Space Station program, said the launch went off completely as planned.
“It was perfect, quite appropriate for the anniversary,” he told The Associated Press at Baikonur.
The launch from Russia’s cosmodrome in Kazakhstan was the first for Samokutyayev and Andrei Borisenko. The NASA astronaut traveling with them, Ron Garan, had made one previous trip into space, on a U.S. space shuttle mission in 2008.
They are to travel for two days before joining three other astronauts already aboard the orbiting space laboratory: Russia’s Dmitry Kondratyev, NASA astronaut Catherine Coleman and Italy’s Paolo Nespoli, who have been there since December.
Tuesday’s launch was seven days shy of anniversaries of two space milestones: Gagarin’s flight into orbit in 1961 from the same launch pad and the first flight of the U.S. space shuttle 20 years later.
Speaking to reporters the day before the launch, Garan noted how much space flight has changed since Gagarin was launched during the space race between the two Cold War superpowers.
“Fifty years ago, one nation launched one man, basically as a competition,” he said. “Today, the three of us represent the many nations of the international partnership that makes up the International Space Station.”
In line with a now 50-year tradition, the crew earlier this week visited the cabin where Gagarin spent his last night before his flight. The American astronaut admitted getting “a little bit of chills” when he visited the cabin, where all the furniture and even Gagarin’s personal belongings have been kept intact.
Russian spacecraft are normally austere in their design, carrying only an identifying number. The decision to name the current mission’s spacecraft after Gagarin and decorate it with his portrait shows the reverence with which he is held in the Russian space industry. The Soyuz also was painted with Gagarin’s now famous line as he headed for the launch pad: “Let’s go!”
In his final message on Twitter before setting out on the six-month mission, Garan said:
“Thanks to everyone for all the words of encouragement. They really mean a great deal to me. Final preps are in work. We’re ready!”
Garan wrote earlier Tuesday on Twitter that he had picked U2’s “One” and Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms” as music to listen to during the flight.


TITLE: ‘Spying Devices’ Ruling Outlaws Cell Phones
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Got a dictaphone? A cell phone with voice recording function — say, an iPhone? Or maybe a laptop that can record your Internet phone conversations?
It’s up to three years in jail for you, or a fine of 200,000 rubles ($7,000), unless you obtained permission for your gadget from the Federal Security Service.
This, at least, can be inferred from the Thursday ruling of the Constitutional Court that upheld the law making “spying devices” the exclusive domain of the special services.
The problem is, the list of such devices takes a single page and is vague enough to allow law enforcement agencies to interpret it in wildly varying ways — a privilege officials do not fail to use.
The Criminal Code outlaws sale or purchase of “special technical devices intended for covert collection of information,” unless it is done on an FSB license and the gadgetry is used solely for investigative purposes.
The clause was contested by five people charged over it in separate cases, but the Constitutional Court threw out their lawsuits.
Purchase of such devices “may lead to the breach of privacy,” the court said in its ruling. The logic appears to contradict the presumption of innocence, but the verdict does not touch upon the subject.
The list of “spy devices” was compiled by the government, which does not specify models or even types of gadgets. Instead, it speaks only of things like “technical devices for covert collection and registration of acoustic information,” a description that most voice recorders fit squarely.
Of the five unsuccessful complainants, four are businessmen producing or reselling gadgetry — which remains available at electronics markets such as Moscow’s Savyolovsky.
The fifth, Alexei Trubin, was handed a suspended sentence in 2008 for equipping a lipstick with tiny microphones. He followed a schematic he found in a school magazine for radio enthusiasts, but the court ruled that he still needed a license.
One of the five, Igor Korshun, runs a company that produces ultra-small voice recorders in Moscow’s Zelenograd. Its products landed the firm, Telesystems, a mention in the Guinness Book of Records in 2009 for the world’s smallest dictaphone — only 4 centimeters long — but also brought it a lot of trouble with authorities.
“One day we are allowed to produce a device, next day it is banned,” Korshun told The St. Petersburg Times on Thursday. One gadget was recently banned by the same law enforcement agency that found it legal eight years prior, he said.
Korshun was sentenced to a fine in 2000 over a “highly sensitive acoustic control guard device” of his making. The gadget was intended to activate in case of burglary, allowing a home owner to hear over the phone what is happening in his apartment. But the device was once found installed in a private eye’s office — which prompted prosecutors to charge Korshun for producing it. Channel One said in February that the actual perpetrators remained unidentified. They never found out who installed it.
“In developed countries, free distribution of eavesdropping devices is banned, too,” Constitutional Court head Valery Zorkin said Thursday.
But this appeared to be a stretch, as in Germany, for example, only remote-controlled bugging devices and spy cameras that transmit live footage are prohibited.
“Under this legislation, things like telephones with adapters [for a voice recorder], which are freely produced by international companies — Samsung, for instance — can’t be produced in Russia,” Korshun said. He was referring to adapters often used by journalists to record phone interviews.
Korshun, who launched his company in 1991, pledged that his company will not go under even after the Thursday ruling. 
Telesystems produced the first Russian automatic telephone number ID system, among other things.The company is already looking for ways to avoid bans on its production, he said. “We always try to get an FSB expert conclusion for a device, even though the law doesn’t require it,” Korshun said.


TITLE: State Duma Looks to Fine Bureaucrats for Rudeness
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Some State Duma deputies hope $350 is the price for good manners.
A bill submitted to the Duma on Friday would levy fines of up to 10,000 rubles ($350) on bureaucrats who ignore suggestions from people.
Currently, bureaucrats must provide information about the activities of federal, regional and municipal agencies on request — a right granted by the Constitution — and failure to respond comes with a fine of 5,000 rubes.
But people often propose solutions for various problems, only to have their letters ignored by bureaucrats, said Vladimir Pligin, head of the Duma’s Constitution and State Affairs Committee, according to Kommersant. The bill will make these proposals harder to ignore, he said, without elaborating.
Bureaucrats are notorious for tardiness, indifference, formalism and rudeness, all of which can be traced back to the Soviet years, when civil servants did not answer to the public and wages and promotions were not linked to performance.
A 2006 law obliges officials to reply to people’s requests within 30 days. In “extreme cases,” the period can be doubled.
The reply must also be “to the point,” “objective” and “in-depth,” and if a person reports a violation of his or her rights, the official reviewing the complaint must take action to remedy it, according to the law. It is also illegal to forward complaints about wrongdoings by officials to the officials accused of committing them.
But these rules are routinely violated, not the least because officials face no direct penalties. People can ask a court to formally order an official to reply, but the law offers no punishment for not complying, Moscow-based lawyer Sergei Dikman said by telephone.
Officials can be reprimanded or even fired for failing to fulfill their duties — which includes handling public requests — but such dismissals have rarely been reported.


TITLE: Trains Planned To Berlin, Kiev And Paris
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Russian Railways will open new high-speed train routes to three European capitals in time for the 2018 FIFA World Cup that the country is hosting, the company’s vice president Mikhail Akulov said Tuesday.
One route will connect Moscow to Berlin through Minsk and Warsaw, while the other two will run from the Russian capital to Kiev and Paris, respectively, Akulov was quoted by Gazeta.ru as saying. He did not elaborate on the cost of the project.
Russia currently has only three high-speed train routes, which go from Moscow to St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod and from St. Petersburg to Helsinki.


TITLE: Policeman Sacked After Media Uproar
AUTHOR: By Natalya Krainova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A senior Moscow region police official was fired Monday for assaulting a journalist — but only after his superiors started receiving phone calls from reporters and television crews arrived at the scene of the attack.
Alexei Klimov, acting head of a department at the police precinct in the town of Moskovsky, just outside Moscow, was fired hours after assaulting Natalya Seibil on Sunday evening, regional police said in a statement on their web site.
Klimov attacked the woman because she reprimanded him over how he parked his car, the statement said.
But Seibil said the officer actually attempted to start a conversation with her as she walked her dogs in the yard of her apartment building in Moskovsky, RIA-Novosti reported. When she refused, he punched her in the face, bringing her down, and proceeded to beat her, kicking her and slamming her against a car, the report said.
Seibil said she sustained a concussion and numerous bruises in the attack, Interfax reported. A photo released by RIA-Novosti showed her with a swollen black eye.
Witnesses did not call the police, in part because Klimov waved around his police badge and threatened to “jail everyone,” Seibil’s son Pyotr wrote on his Facebook page.
His mother managed to call police herself, but the officers expressed reluctance in registering her complaint, telling her, “What should we do? This is our chief,” and “Would you rat out your own boss?” Pyotr Seibil wrote.
Local police also said it would be pointless to detain or question Klimov because he was so drunk that he would not be able to understand anything, Lifenews.ru reported.
Officers took up the matter only after the precinct began receiving calls from the media and film crews started  arriving at the scene, Pyotr Seibil said. Even then, police officers begged Natalya Seibil not to “raise a fuss” because otherwise “the actions of one piggy will reflect upon the whole precinct,” her son said.
Klimov was fired, and regional investigators opened a preliminary inquiry into Klimov’s actions, the Investigative Committee said in a statement. No charges were pressed immediately, and Klimov remained at liberty. Assault charges carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
Natalya Seibil said Klimov is a “danger to society” and promised to seek his arrest, according to Interfax.
“I hope this will never happen again because only real pros should remain on the force,” police Colonel Yevgeny Gildeyev said on the regional police’s web site. 
The country’s police force is undergoing a Kremlin-ordered reform that will see some 200,000 officers fired this year in an attempt to boost the police’s sometimes dismal performance.
Seibil, currently unemployed, has worked as a chief editor on high-profile Channel One talk shows like “Pust Govoryat” with Andrei Malakhov and “Zakryty Pokaz” with Alexander Gordon, Komsomolskaya Pravda said.


TITLE: Kashin Sued by Nashi Figure
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The head of the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs filed on Monday a 100,000 ruble ($3,500) defamation lawsuit against journalist Oleg Kashin for linking him to a brutal attack, the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi said.
Vasily Yakemenko may also demand a criminal case to be opened against Kashin, a Kommersant reporter who was beaten into a coma by two unknown men outside his Moscow apartment building in November, Nashi said in an e-mailed statement. No arrests have been made over the attack.
No date for a court hearing has been set, said Nashi, which was previously headed by Yakemenko.
Kashin did not comment on the lawsuit Monday. He wrote on his LiveJournal blog last month that he had no doubt that Yakemenko, whom Kashin had criticized in his reporting, was behind the attack. Nashi, known for organizing intimidation campaigns against opposition activists and journalists, has been accused of violence in the past but not been convicted of wrongdoing in court.
Yakamenko acted after Kashin refused to take down the allegations.


TITLE: UN Court Rejects Georgia’s War Case

PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: THE HAGUE, Netherlands — The United Nations’ highest court threw out Georgia’s complaint accusing Russia and separatist militias of years of ethnic cleansing in two breakaway Georgian provinces. 
Regarding Friday’s 10-6 ruling, International Court of Justice President Hisashi Owada said the court had no jurisdiction in the case because Russia and Georgia had never attempted to negotiate a settlement to the dispute before Georgia brought it to the court. 
Toward the end of a five-day war in 2008, Georgia filed a complaint that Russian authorities and militias allied to Moscow murdered thousands of ethnic Georgians and displaced some 300,000 people in a two-decade campaign of discrimination in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. 
Georgia’s deputy justice minister, Tina Burjaliani, said she regretted that the case had been dismissed “on a procedural technicality” but said the ruling left open the possibility of filing a new case at a later date. 
“We are certainly disappointed that proceedings will not immediately lead to the examination of the case,” she said. 
Georgia argued unsuccessfully that the court has jurisdiction under an international convention on the elimination of racial discrimination. But disputes under that convention can only be referred to the court if countries have tried and failed to negotiate a settlement. 
The court ruled that even though Russia and Georgia had been at odds for years over the status of the disputed territory, a dispute based on the convention only started during the 2008 conflict and no serious attempt was made to settle it before Georgia filed its case on the last day of the war. 
Georgia’s foreign minister, Grigol Vashadze, told reporters at UN headquarters in New York he was “tremendously disappointed” and said it appears the court “tried to find some kind of excuse not to consider the case.” 
“Russia and Georgia have been engaged in bilateral and multilateral talks since 1991, when Russia started undeclared war against my country,” Vashadze said, “and to cite this reason, absence of bilateral talks as something ICJ doesn’t want to consider Georgia’s case for, is absolutely, totally ridiculous.” 
Russia’s UN ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, said Vashadze was “ill-advised” to “try to smear the reputation of this important international legal institution … especially when another important international legal institution, the International Criminal Court, is going to consider the Georgian atrocities in South Ossetia — and we’re looking forward to the deliberations on that.” 
At hearings into the question of the world court’s jurisdiction last year, Russia portrayed itself as a mediator and peacemaker in the conflict and said Georgia had never complained of ethnic discrimination until it lost the 2008 war. 
A Russian Foreign Ministry legal adviser, Kirill Gevorgyan, welcomed the ruling. “It is a very, very good decision. It is exactly what we were trying to prove to the court,” he said. 
The war broke out just before midnight Aug. 7, 2008, and ended in a European Union-brokered cease-fire Aug. 12. Georgia filed its complaint to the Hague-based court on the same day. 
The case has now ended at the world court, which settles disputes between nations. However, across town, prosecutors at another tribunal — the International Criminal Court — are carrying out a preliminary investigation into individuals on both sides who are suspected of committing war crimes during the brief war.

TITLE: Book on Graft in Moscow Region Confiscated by Police 

AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Moscow regional police have seized the bulk of the print run of a book written by a Forbes Russia investigative reporter about the regions authorities’ purported links to corruption.
The confiscation took place after Deputy Governor Igor Parkhomenko filed a libel complaint with the local police over the book, titled, “Corporation ‘Moscow Region’: How Russia’s Richest Region Was Bankrupted.”
Police seized some 3,500 copies of the book, written by Anna Sokolova, at a printing office located in the Moscow region on Thursday, said Leonid Bershidsky, editorial director at Eksmo, the book’s publisher.
The other 1,500 copies of the book’s print run of 5,000 were shipped to bookstores, Bershidsky said Friday on his Facebook page.
The confiscated books were not delivered to stores after an obscure company asked Eksmo to hold off on the shipments because it wanted to purchase them all, he said. The request came two days before the confiscation, but the company, Konsard, never picked the order. 
Only several hours passed between Parkhomenko filing his libel complaint and police officers seizing the books, a turnaround time that is unusually fast, anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny said on his blog. He said similar requests that he has filed usually take weeks to process.
Navalny said the few hours before the confiscation were simply not enough time for police experts to read the book to decide whether its contents were libelous.
No one was immediately available for comment at the Moscow regional police’s office or the governor’s. Neither agency has commented on the matter publicly.
The book was listed as “unavailable” by online retailer Ozon.ru over the weekend. Forbes has released a sample chapter on its web site.
“Corporation ‘Moscow Region’” rehashes corruption allegations that have plagued the administration of Governor Boris Gromov in the years since he was elected in 2000. Among them are reports that officials stalled and harassed IKEA’s local business in attempts to obtain kickbacks and accusations that companies linked to regional authorities purchased agriculture land for illegal real estate developments. The book also includes the story of Alexei Kuznetsov, the region’s former top financial official who has been implicated in a 30 billion ruble ($1 billion) embezzlement scheme that brought the region to the brink of default in 2008. Kuznetsov moved to the United States in 2008, while his former deputy Valery Nosov was arrested last year and remains in pretrial detention pending trial on fraud charges.
No repercussions have followed for Gromov, one of the few veteran governors to remain in office after Kremlin-orchestrated shuffles over the past year. But media reports have speculated that he has fallen out of favor with the Kremlin and faces removal.
The book claims that Gromov, a veteran of the Afghan War, is aware of many wrongdoings outlined in its chapters because he appointed fellow war veterans to many posts in his administration.
Sokolova said the book is largely based on her coverage of Moscow regional affairs for Forbes. Many allegations in its chapters, however, have been reported by the media before.
“I knew that the Moscow region had many tricky problems, so I tried to write about them in plain language,” Sokolova said by telephone Friday.
She said Moscow regional officials ignored all her requests for interviews so she wrote the book based on their public statements.
Eksmo stands behind Sokolova and her book, Bershidsky said.
But Sokolova said she felt nervous, noting that a handful of other journalists who have written about alleged corruption by regional authorities have been hospitalized after vicious — and unsolved — attacks.
“I have written about people who face police abuse, and I don’t want to get into such a situation myself,” she said.


TITLE: Siberian Police Ban Films With Drug Use 

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Novosibirsk anti-narcotics officers have cracked down on Hollywood flicks, ordering a local web site to remove films touching on illegal substances, including “Saving Grace,” “Trainspotting” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”
All films were available for download at the local web site 211.ru. It was not immediately clear whether the films were pirated, but bootleg copies of movies are widely shared in Russian cyberspace.
The order was issued last week but only became public this week when a copy of the Internet service provider’s memo ordering the removal of the movies appeared online.
Linguistic and psychological examinations of the films held separately by anti-narcotics officers and the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences indicated that they promoted illegal drugs, an anti-drug police spokesman told Interfax.

TITLE: PPP Road Scheme Planned
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Tyomkin
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: City Hall plans to hold tenders by the end of this year for the construction of new roads and transport hubs, according to Alexei Chichkanov, a representative of the committee for investment and strategic projects. 
“Under the terms of such contracts — a type of public-private partnership — the winner of the contract builds the project at their own cost, and then is gradually recompensated from the budget,” said Chichkanov. “In this way, budget spending is spread out over an extended period and the contractor can make adjustments to the project, taking into account advances in technology and new building materials leading to an overall reduction in building costs. Under the terms of an ordinary contract, only the administration is allowed to make changes to the project after deciding on a team of developers,” he said.
“The investor will be reimbursed within three to five years after the road opens, during which time they will be in charge of its use,” added Deputy Governor Yury Molchanov.
The first projects built under the new scheme could be inner-district roads in the Yuzhny district built by Start Development, underground roads to the low-rise Baltros complex, the Novaya Izhora complex and the Slavyanka complex, and a slip road to the Sampsonievsky bridge, said Chichkanov. 
Each contract is worth up to 1 billion rubles ($35.4 million). Road building companies don’t have enough money to cover such large expenses and they’ll have to borrow the money, says Mevludi Bliadze, the general director of Pilon. 
“The building contractors may not be able to come up with the initial deposit, the scheme is only viable on condition of guarantees from the budget,” he said. 
His colleague disagreed: “Under a standard contract, they can take out a loan.” 
“The administration won’t offer any financial guarantees,” said Molchanov. 
“Even in this format, a government contract is still a good deposit,” said Pavel Lavrov, branch manager at Petrocommercebank. 

TITLE: Etalon’s Construction Plans Enhance Profile 

AUTHOR: By Nadezhda Zaitseva
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Ahead of its launch on the London Stock Exchange (LSE), the Etalon group of companies has revealed to investors plans to open three new sites across the city at 9 Smolenskaya Ulitsa, 110 Prospekt Obukhovskoi Oborony in the Nevsky district, and 2 Uralskaya Ulitsa on Vasilyevsky Island. The group plans to build a total of 335,000 square meters comprising both residential and commercial premises.
Information about these projects for future investors is available from Credit Suisse, which together with VTB Capital and Renaissance Capital is behind the IPO. According to a source with close links to the company, Etalon was due to launch a road show on April 4. The company aims to attract $500 million worth of investments.
According to information from Credit Suisse, the company intends to build 70,000 square meters of residential housing on 1.8 hectares of land on Smolenskaya Ulitsa that, according to a source, was obtained only several weeks ago. The source did not name the previous landowner. A real-estate market analyst and an employee at the neighboring Optima business center said they had heard that Etalon had recently acquired the land. According to reports produced by Credit Suisse, Etalon intends to have completed the project by 2013. 
A source told Vedomosti that Etalon intends to build 100,000 square meters at 110 Prospekt Obukhovskoi Oborony on land previously occupied by a color-printing firm, covering 3.6 hectares. In 2006, a representative of the developer Petropol told Vedomosti that his company intended to invest $100 million into a project at that address. The company was the developer for that territory until 2009 for an external investor, a representative of Petropol told Vedomosti last week.
Lastly, according to Credit Suisse’s report, Etalon intends to build 165,000 square meters at 2 Uralskaya Ulitsa by 2014. The land covers an area of seven hectares, according to a source close to the company. The land plots in the Nevsky district of the city and on Vasilyevsky Island have not yet changed hands, the source said. According to him, agreements have been signed with the landowners that allow Etalon to act as the developer for every stage of the process, from drawing up documents to the sale of the apartments.
Residential property together with commercial outlets will be built on both Uralskaya Ulitsa and Prospekt Obukhovskoi Oborony, although the source declined to comment on who the current landowner was. Etalon’s press office declined to comment.
Vladimir Kopylov, chief analyst at Setl City, estimated that the purchase of 1.8 hectares on Smolenskya Ulitsa would cost about 500 million rubles ($17.7 million). The plot of land in the Nevsky district could sell for approximately 400 million rubles, while seven hectares of land on Uralskaya Ulitsa have a market value of 36 million euros, said Kopylov. 
“These new projects from Etalon represent a serious undertaking — in recent years, the company has invested little in new assets,” he added. 
Nikolai Pashkov, general director of Knight Frank St. Petersburg, estimates that Etalon may have to invest as much as $1,500 per square meter into the projects. By investing in the projects before even buying the land, Etalon is expanding its profile and increasing its share value ahead of its IPO, he said.

TITLE: Salaries Are Going Up, Candidates Are Getting Picky 
AUTHOR: By Olga Razumovskaya
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Salaries across most sectors are projected to grow this year as the market recovers to pre-crisis levels and demand for job applicants is increasing, human resources specialists say, with IT specialists being especially sought after over the coming years.
As the country recovers from the 2009 slump and President Dmitry Medvedev pushes his modernization and innovation agenda before the presidential election next year, the demand for certain professions is growing and salaries are catching up.
Supported by continued output growth, labor market conditions improved noticeably last year, according to the World Bank’s Russian Economic Report, released on Wednesday, March 30.
“Real wages and incomes in the economy as a whole grew broadly in line with productivity, while dollar wages hit a record high,” the report said.
“According to [the State Statistics Service], real disposable incomes and wages grew 4.1 and 4.2 percent in 2010, respectively. The average dollar wage in Russia increased to almost $700 a month in 2010 (up 17 percent relative from 2009), the highest level on record since the beginning of the market transition,” the report said.
The World Bank study also indicated a greater-than-expected decline in unemployment in 2010, to 7.2 percent — down from 9.2 percent in 2009. The amount of people living below the poverty line shrank to 10 percent of the population in 2010, down from 12.7 percent the previous year.
This overall positive dynamic will prompt salaries to grow in 2011, as competition for qualified personnel heats up and the market returns to its pre-crisis state by year end.
As a result, almost all the industries that suffered during the crisis will restore their pre-crisis salaries, said Irina Kondratova, executive director at Kelly Services CIS, a human resources consulting company.
Salaries for most professions will grow by 12 percent to 15 percent this year compared with 2010, said Yury Virovets, president of HeadHunter, an Internet recruitment portal.
“It is a natural growth during high inflation but low productivity. If our productivity were at least at the level of Eastern Europe, the growth would be much more significant,” he said.
While Virovets believes that the remainder of the year will see balanced recruiting for employers, who will be reflecting on what happened on the market during the past two years and considering future plans, others, like Kondratova, think job candidates will regain the upper hand in their dealings with potential employers.
“Given that economic stability persists, qualified specialists will regain the opportunity to pick the best [working] conditions from those offered. 
Consequently, talking to HR managers will take a lot more time in the work schedule of general directors,” Kondratova said.
Human Resources as a company function stands a good chance of becoming a crucial part of running a business this year, Kondratova told The St. Petersburg Times.
Among the roles that are reaping the renewed prestige and the higher salaries on the market are information technology staff and accounting and finance specialists. 
An average gross salary for a project manager in IT and telecommunications companies is 99,100 rubles ($3,477) a month, according to a study by HeadHunter, which looked into 75,917 vacancies and 87,779 resumes to determine the number.
This is topped only by financing and accounting specialists, traditionally considered among the best paid positions, who are getting 156,000 rubles ($5,474) a month on average, according to HeadHunter.
Competition for these positions remains high, with six candidates per one IT project manager position and 17.2 candidates for the position of the head of accounting and finance.
The situation, from the employer point of view, is more desperate for other job categories. Only three accountants compete for one open position in Moscow, compared with 0.6 people applying for the average IT sales manager position. 

TITLE: Putin Calls for Salary Increases for Teachers
AUTHOR: By Olga Razumovskaya

PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin forecast an increase in the salaries of Russian teachers and encouraged opening deputies’ and officials’ tax returns to public scrutiny at the Cabinet session Monday.
As the presidential elections loom large, making post-crisis improvements evident to the citizenry — not just to big businesses and foreign investors — is becoming increasingly important, gradually forcing the government and ruling party to refocus their rhetoric on domestic problems.
In the run-up to the government report to the State Duma on April 20, the prime minister outlined key achievements of the government in 2010, including rolling out comprehensive health care reform and a 45 percent pension increase.
“I am happy we have made people of paramount importance to us during the past years,” Putin said.
As part of the Cabinet meeting, Putin ordered deputies and government officials to disclose information on their personal spending — a measure, he said, ardently supported by Russian citizens.
He also hoped it would be beneficial for fighting corruption and combating money laundering among state officials.
Putin also promised additional finances to support the labor market, which has started to recover from the crisis slump. The government will allocate 105 billion rubles ($3.7 billion) this year to extend unemployment benefits, he said. 
The total number of jobless fell to 5.7 million people in February, compared with 7.1 million during the same month in 2008, Putin said.
The prime minister also said that “in the near future, teachers’ salaries might grow by as much as 30 percent.”
In response to a question from Boris Gryzlov, the State Duma speaker and leader of the ruling United Russia party — who was also invited to the Cabinet session — about the situation of school teachers, Putin proposed gradually raising teachers’ salaries to the overall national average.
Now, Putin said, the average schoolteacher’s salary is 13,000 rubles ($460), compared with the average salary nationwide of 18,000 rubles.
The prime minister proposed helping regions with money for school renovations, which would allow them to focus their budgets on salary increases.
At a meeting with journalists following the Cabinet session, Education and Science Minister Andrei Fursenko discussed drug problems at schools.
“[Drug testing] will be only done voluntarily,” he said. “The goal here is not to catch anybody but to create an atmosphere of safety and security within the school.”
President Dmitry Medvedev first raised the issue of drug testing in schools and colleges in 2009, when he advocated making it mandatory, as drug addiction is becoming a big problem among youth.
About 10 percent to 15 percent of schoolchildren have tried drugs at school, according to estimates by the Moscow Scientific and Practical Narcology Center, Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported in late March.
Pilot school and college drug testing projects are being prepared now by the Health and Social Development Ministry.


TITLE: New Home for Dynamo Costs $1.5Bln
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — VTB bank might be close to an agreement with U.S. company  AEG on the construction of a $1.5 billion stadium complex in Moscow’s Petrovsky Park district.
The complex would include a 45,000-seat stadium, a 15,000-seat arena and a new five-star hotel, Sports Business Daily reported last week. 
The delivery date for the new facilities would be 2016, and they would be the “centerpiece” of the 2018 FIFA World Cup football competition. AEG is also in talks with the National Basketball Association on the creation of an NBA Club at the site, which would feature a restaurant, children’s play area, a small gymnasium and a retail store and would serve as a base for the sports league’s development in Russia. 
VTB acquired 74 percent of the Dynamo Management Company, or Upravlyayushchaya Kompania Dinamo, the corporate embodiment of the well-known Dynamo football team, in 2009. The bank promised to redevelop the team’s almost 90-year-old stadium at that time, Kommersant reported. 
The old stadium will be gutted and its outer walls will house a shopping complex, Sports Business Daily reported last week. The new stadium will be built over the old one in the AEG design.
VTB senior vice president and Dynamo chairman Andrei Peregudov said in an interview with RBC last summer that five designs, created jointly by Russian and foreign companies, were under consideration for the redevelopment project. AEG was not among them.
AEG, headquartered in Los Angeles, is part of the highly diversified Anschutz Company. It owns or controls a number of venues and sports teams worldwide and is also active in concert and exhibition promotion.


TITLE: PM Tests
Hybrid Prototype
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: NOVO-OGARYOVO — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin took a ride Friday in a prototype of Russia’s first hybrid car, the Yo-Mobile, which billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov plans to start mass-producing next year.
With Putin in the driver’s seat and Yo-Avto chief executive Andrei Biryukov riding shotgun, the pair drove 10 kilometers on Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Shosse from Putin’s out-of-town residence to President Dmitry Medvedev’s official home at Gorki for a Security Council meeting. Prokhorov followed in another Yo-Mobile.
Shortly before the ride, Putin discussed with officials, businessmen and scientists measures to produce more high-tech products, saying Prokhorov’s project was one of the attempts in this field.
Putin, however, expressed some doubts about the durability of the car during the meeting.
“I’d like to drive this Yo-Mobile of yours to Dmitry Anatolyevich’s and show it to him,” Putin said, referring to Medvedev’s residence. “Will it be able to go that long? It’s not far. It won’t fall apart?”
Prokhorov assured the prime minister that it wouldn’t.
Biryukov said later that the plant being built in St. Petersburg is scheduled to start producing the cars toward the end of the next year. Andrei Ginzburg, chief engineer of the car, said separately that they intend to buy some parts from Canadian maker Magna’s production facilities in Russia. He spoke at a meeting at the Association of European Businesses in Moscow.
The car will not cost more than 450,000 rubles ($15,900), Biryukov said. 

TITLE: Russia Leads In Retail Construction 
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — Last year, 165 malls, with a usable area of 5.2 million square meters, opened in Europe — 30 percent less than the year before.
For two consecutive years, the amount of completed construction has declined, and last year finished at the lowest level since 2004, according to Cushman & Wakefield analysts. 
The highest amount of new construction is in Russia, where 1.3 million square meters was put into commission last year. Turkey came in a distant second with 360,000 square meters, and Poland took third with 350,000.
This year will see initial recovery on the majority of European markets, Cushman & Wakefield forecast. By the end of the year, 6.9 million square meters are expected to be commissioned — 33 percent more than last year. “In many European regions, market conditions remain rather uncertain, so the amount of completed construction could increase or decrease as projects are reinstated or delayed, depending on economic growth, changes in retail sales and demand from renters,” the analysts explained. 


TITLE: Putin’s No-Participation Pact
AUTHOR: By Masha Lipman
TEXT: The Russian government, with its solid hold on power, has invariably gotten away with poor performance, inefficiency, corruption and widespread violation of political rights and civil liberties. Polls consistently demonstrate that Russians are not deluded. They routinely respond in surveys that government officials are corrupt and self-serving. According to a poll conducted last summer, 80 percent believe that “many civil servants practically defy the law.”
And yet Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has enjoyed high and steady approval ratings for years. A mild drop in early 2011 probably reflected frustration over social injustice and a growing sense of insecurity and uncertainty about the future. Even so, about 70 percent of respondents in a February poll said they approved of Putin’s performance. President Dmitry Medvedev’s approval ratings are only slightly lower.
Russian leaders’ high ratings do not, however, indicate a rational preference for the incumbents over potential contenders. With political competition in Russia eviscerated, comparison and choice are not part of the political left. Rather, these poll numbers are a “vote” for the status quo. They convey a broadly shared sense that political change is not desired, notwithstanding terrorist attacks, technological catastrophes, lawless police, an unprecedented level of corruption or rigged elections.
During the years of Putin’s leadership, the Kremlin has steadily pushed citizens further and further from decision making by virtually dismantling representative institutions. Gubernatorial elections were abolished six years ago, and even elected city mayors have been progressively replaced by appointed officials. Polls routinely indicate that more than 80 percent of Russians believe that they can make no difference in national or even regional affairs.
This system of political alienation is accepted by an overwhelming majority of Russians. Both the masses and the best and the brightest alike show no interest in political participation. Political opposition groups do not attract public support, which makes it easy for the government to suppress them.
Indeed, in the absence of political participation, the government enjoys easy dominance over society. The perennial Russian order — the dominant state and a powerless, fragmented society — remains largely in place.
Twice in the 20th century, the omnipotent Russian state was dramatically weakened: at the beginning, when the Russian Empire collapsed; and at the end, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Both times, however, the traditional pattern of state dominance was quickly re-established.
Although state-society relations in Russia adhere to a traditional pattern, different leaderships have shaped them in different ways. Stalin’s regime could be compared to a cruel, sadistic father who keeps his children in a state of fear and submission. Brezhnev’s model resembled a bad marriage, exhausted of love or respect, in which the spouses constantly cheat on and take advantage of each other and grab each other’s property, though the powerful husband occasionally reminds his wife that he is boss and demands at least a formal pledge of loyalty — or else.
Compared with these two models, Putin’s model of state-society relations looks like a divorce, or at least a separation: Each side minds its own business and doesn’t interfere with the other’s sphere. It is a model best described as a no-participation pact. The Kremlin may have monopolized decision making, but it is largely nonintrusive and enables citizens to live their own lives and pursue their own interests — as long as they do not encroach on the government realm.
Unlike in the Soviet Union, which massively infringed on citizens’ private space, Russians today enjoy virtually unlimited individual freedoms. The nonintrusive nature of the government is appreciated. People eagerly engage in their private affairs with little regard for the political realm, which they have willingly abandoned.
Nevertheless, the last 20 years of broad individual freedom and limited civil liberties have generated shifts in Russian society — if not across the board, then certainly among certain groups. In particular, Russians have acquired some organizational and community-building skills. The use of online social networks, for example, has grown faster than in any other country in Europe and has helped create some semblance of a public sphere, with the Russian blogosphere often a venue for angry public expression about social injustice, undeserved privileges, lawlessness and police impunity.
Socioeconomic protests have also become a feature of Russian life, especially during the economic crisis. Unlike political groups, which attract very limited public support, socioeconomic demands — such as the protests over monetizing pension benefits in 2005 — have repeatedly brought together thousands of people in various parts of the country.
In big cities, moreover, a new urban class is emerging — advanced and modernized Russians with good professional skills who feel at ease in the globalized world. It is mostly due to this group that private charity has developed in recent years.
But despite opportunities for self-expression, community building and activism remain marginal and do not alter or weaken the state’s dominance over society. Despite the recent rise in negative public sentiment, protest activity remains fragmented and invariably local in scope and demands.
For now, at least, provincial Russians and the new urban class alike have accepted Putin’s no-participation pact. In fact, should events turn out badly, critically-minded and well-informed urban achievers would be most likely to embrace the ultimate form of nonparticipation: emigration. In the current political climate, the more enlightened Russians would rather use their skills and talents for self-fulfillment abroad than be the driving force of Russia’s modernization.

Masha Lipman is the editor of “Pro et Contra,” a policy journal published by the Carnegie Moscow Center. © Project Syndicate

TITLE: How the Internet Turns Journalists Into Punks
AUTHOR: By Alexei Pankin
TEXT: It seems as if Russia’s best journalists have set out to completely undermine President Dmitry Medvedev’s stated ideology that “freedom is better than a lack of freedom.” At least, it seems that way after reading the nasty bickering between journalists on the blogosphere during the past week.
Six years ago, I served as the ombudsman for Izvestia. My job was to apply recognized professional standards and ethical principles in responding publicly to readers’ complaints about articles that appeared in the newspaper. For example, in September 2005 Izvestia published three articles by journalist Igor Naidenov about the situation in Beslan one year after the tragedy in which terrorists killed 334 people, including 186 children. One of Naidenov’s articles, titled “Envy,” described the feelings of Beslan residents who were jealous of victims’ families who received compensation. Another article, titled “Hate,” spoke of the negative feelings toward the Ingush, who made up the bulk of the Beslan terrorists.
The leader of the Beslan Mothers organization publicly cursed him for the articles. Naidenov returned from Beslan in a state of stress. As ombudsman, I sided with the journalist in this dispute. A few months later, Naidenov was given the Andrei Sakharov award for investigative journalism. His greatest advocate for that nomination was Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who explained her strong support by saying: “He wrote the truth about those unfortunate people. I also knew about it, but did not dare to make it public.”
And yet, even having this experience of independent ethical arbitration, I find myself unable to understand the current behavior of journalists in the blogosphere.
Nikolai Uskov, GQ’s editor-in-chief and a member of the media working group for the U.S.-Russia Binational Presidential Commission, was offended by an offhand remark about his work made by Leonid Bershidsky, former Vedomosti editor-in-chief and founder of the Slon.ru business web publication. Uskov posted a message on LiveJournal addressed to Bershidsky with the heading “Scumbag Bershidsky.” Of the 220 words in the message, 15 were obscene.
Oleg Kashin, the journalist best known for having been brutally beaten at the entrance to his apartment building, used obscene language in his blog to describe how Ren-TV — along with Marian Maximovskaya, clearly the most outspoken opposition television anchor on national television — tried to convince him to give an interview. And all of this was just an ordinary phone conversation, according to Kashin.
Similarly, Ekho Moskvy anchor Ksenia Larina made the unsubstantiated accusation that Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Russia Today television network, complained to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin about Ekho Moskvy’s supposedly “incorrect politics,” which, according to Larina, resulted in Putin giving a dressing-down to Alexei Venediktov, Ekho Moskvy’s editor-in-chief. Rather than resolve the matter in court, Simonyan responded with a post on LiveJournal that seemed to imply that Ekho Moskvy pays many of its employees under the table to avoid taxes. With passions escalating, the other side then accused Simonyan of being a stool pigeon.
To be fair, these journalists generally produce high-quality media products on the air and in print while working within the limits of their own editorial policy, legal requirements and perhaps some degree of censorship. But the moment they and others venture into the unregulated, free zone of the Internet, they begin behaving like street punks.
After this, how can Medvedev convince me that freedom is better than a lack of freedom?

Alexei Pankin is editor of WAN-IFRA-GIPP Magazine for publishing business professionals.

TITLE: Exploring the dark side
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: <p>Ten years after they first visited St. Petersburg, The Tiger Lillies, an accordion-driven Brechtian trio from London, have formed a solid local following. Accordion player, guitarist and falsetto vocalist Martyn Jacques — who fronts the band that also features drummer Adrian Huge and double bassist Adrian Stout — spoke to The St. Petersburg Times by phone ahead of their upcoming concert in the city.</p>

<b><i>You first came to St. Petersburg ten years ago, to perform at the Manezh exhibition center in May 2001. What are your memories?</b></i>
That gig, the first gig in St. Petersburg has got to be one of the top five gigs of The Tiger Lillies ever. How we walked down the big staircase to the stage and looked at all the people there — it was amazing! It was one of my favorite gigs of all time, I loved it.

<b><i>So you have established a long-term connection with Russia.</b></i>
Yeah, and that song, “Russians,” which I think is a great song. You know, “The Russians in the market square.” It was in Frankfurt, at the market... There were all these Russians selling off their old stuff. There was this guy who had a beautiful military coat and he offered to sell it to me. It was a very cold day. I wouldn’t buy it [off his back], because [of the cold]. Maybe he had more coats in the back, but it seemed symbolic to me that he was prepared to sell me his coat. I love that song.

<b><i>The 2009 DVD documentary, “The Tiger Lillies — The Early Years,” shows you performing at really small places in London.</b></i>
Those were great days. I remember doing a gig one night. It was only about 150 people; it was a magical time. It’s funny because many people think you have to be playing in front of 2,000 people to have a great gig. It’s just not true. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing in front of 40 people, 400 people or 4,000 people, if the people like what you’re doing. 

<b><i>You’re a more established, award-winning, Grammy-nominated band now. What’s changed and what is the same?</b></i>
I think lots of things are the same. It doesn’t really matter, time moves on, you still do great shows. We’re more successful now, but we’re not that successful. We don’t play football stadiums.
And you still keep that independent attitude, releasing records on your own, without a record label.
It’s great, because you can do whatever you like then. The next album we’re going to release is going to be one song and it’s going to be 42 minutes long. If we were signed to a record label, they would tell you what to do, what you can release and when you can release it. It would be one album every two years. It’s great to have actual control over your own career. A lot of it is about control and artistic freedom. It’s really important to do things the way you want and not have that kind of pressure from the record company.

<b><i>Every song on one of your recent records, “Cockatoo Prison,” is about a certain type of a criminal: “Molester of Minors,” “Rapist,” “Baby Killer.” It’s kind of a catalogue.</b></i> 
Yeah, it’s kind of a catalogue of criminals and crimes. We [premiered] it in Australia, on a little island in the middle of the Sydney Harbor, it was three nights and it was brilliant, really good fun. 
To be honest, it’s not one of my favorite records, but nevertheless I still like it, because it’s not a compromise. As long as you keep to your artistic ideals and you don’t compromise them, you’re safe. You’re never going to make a really bad record, because I think really bad records tend to be records about being commercial or trying to please someone. 
I think it’s a matter of selfishness, when you’re an artist. What you really have to do is to please yourself. 

<b><i>What makes you look into the minds of such people and deal with dark subjects?</b></i>
It’s what artists do, isn’t it? For example, I went to lunch last week at the Tate Britain, which is an art gallery in London. They have a nice restaurant. They had an exhibition last week, I think it was watercolor pictures. You know, watercolors tend to be a bit boring and commercial. They are usually pictures of flowers or landscapes. They are all kind of “nice” pictures. And the people who came to the exhibition, they were all in the restaurant. They were really boring people. 
Interesting art tends to be about dark things. And dark things are actually real things. Death, criminality, abuse — they’re all a reality, all these dark subjects are real things. Then you have Hollywood trying to make everything nice and pretty. That isn’t reality, it’s a kind of falsity, because beauty will always decay and fall apart in the end. The pure become corrupt. So it’s just a reflection of reality.

<b><i>It’s interesting that people like to read tabloids about horrible things, but tend to prefer pop music about love and roses.</b></i>
Music is supposed to be something to help you escape, something to dream to, it’s kind of background stuff. On the news you have things about gangsters or murderers or war and people are fascinated by that. It’s funny, isn’t it? Some things, people like to be dark, and other things they don’t. Music seems to be one of the areas where people don’t really want darkness. They want it to be pretty and light. It’s supposed to be showbiz, entertainment. But that’s fine, I’m quite happy to pervert things. That’s what I like to do — to pervert things and do things that you’re not supposed to do.

<b><i>In the film, you said that people often don’t understand your lyrics and tend to develop their own ideas about your songs.</b></i>
It’s not just me, I think it happens quite a lot with music generally. Something about it is ultimately a bit abstract, I think. It happens with very commercial pop music sometimes. They have songs about dark things, but they don’t sound dark. Or you get George Bush [sic] listening to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” and Bush wanted to use it for a Republican anthem. Of course, when Bruce Springsteen wrote the song, it was meant to be an anti-Vietnam war song. But Bush listened to it and actually thought it was a great song for America. 
People very often misunderstand what songs are about. I remember some guy coming up to me in St. Petersburg, he was a right-wing football supporter, kind of a Nazi. Presumably, he supposed that I was a Nazi, too, though it’s pretty obvious I am not, I think. But what’s obvious for some is not obvious for everyone.
There was a classic Russian article in Moscow that said that The Tiger Lillies was a neo-Nazi band and the bass player likes to wear dresses of dead prostitutes and everywhere in the world apart from Russia we play to an audience of 200 skinheads. It’s just completely mad!

<b><i>A friend of mine once said that if Russians understood what your songs were about, they would probably crucify you.</b></i>
Sure. We seem to have more success in countries where English is not the first language. We play a lot in Germany, Greece, Austria, Russia, where people don’t get it, they don’t understand what we sing about. Maybe it’s a good thing. Certainly in Germany, where we play in front of thousands of people — middle-aged, middle-class, respectable people. They think they came to see some kind of alternative, risque circus show. If they understood and analyzed the lyrics, they probably wouldn’t want to see the show at all. The lyrics of my songs are quite heavy, quite offensive, quite dark. They probably wouldn’t like them very much.

<b><i>Have you ever had any problems because of your songs’ subject matter?</b></i>
Yeah, we’ve had quite a lot of trouble in Australia. They’ve seemed to get quite offended by us through the years. There were a few articles in Australia in which people complained about us. We had a lot of bad press there, and people were actually saying that we shouldn’t be invited to play there and stuff.
Not so much in America and Britain. I think we’re marginalized. They never put us on television in England or America. They make sure they won’t allow us to become rich people. It’s kind of controlled media in America and the U.K., anyway. When we go to Europe, we can play on television. But people who understand us, they’re probably intelligentsia, they are not going to be bothered. The people who don’t understand it would be offended — but they don’t understand it, because English seems to be something that, I guess, educated, intelligent people speak in Europe. So we’re sort of lucky, the language works well for us. We go on national daytime television in Greece, we’ve been on national daytime television in Russia. Nobody’s bothered by us, because they don’t understand what we’re saying anyway.

<b><i>Could you say a few words about your most recent show and album “Here I am Human!”?</b></i>
For me, the show is about good and evil, God and the Devil and then the reversal of good and evil, turning things upside down. It’s about religion, about the church. In the show, there’s a character who is God and another who is the Devil. I am the Devil in the show. So I’m evil, am I? What is evil about me? What is good about you, God? Is God really good? Is the Devil really bad? It’s just a question, but it’s an interesting question.
For example, a Polish pope is going to become a saint soon, isn’t he? Well, he’s probably responsible for the deaths of millions of people directly because of his directive that the use of condoms is actually a sin. In places like South America or Africa, he’s directly responsible for the deaths of quite a lot of people, because if you don’t wear a condom people can get AIDS. He’s now being made a saint. [The show] is kind of questioning what is good. If that’s good, then maybe it’s all the wrong way round? Maybe you get a black metal band who are Satanists — are they necessarily bad? 
I am not saying specifically that I’m right —  it’s more like questioning the whole concept of who is good and who is right. And it goes on through history, whether it’s the church or politics.
I’ll give you an example. In Greece, if you were a communist, if we go back ten, twenty, thirty years, you were a good guy. You go back twenty years in Eastern Europe, if you were a communist, you’re a bad guy. The whole definition of who is good changes from different cultures and situations and histories. It’s not simple; it’s not black and white. 

<i>The Tiger Lillies will perform at 8 p.m. on Thursday, April 7 at Glavclub, 2 Kremenchugskaya Ulitsa. Tel. 905 7555. Metro Ploshchad Vosstaniya / Ploshchad Alexandra Nevskogo.</i>

TITLE: Chernov’s Choice
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Belarusian band Lyapis Trubetskoy, which performed in St. Petersburg last month, has canceled the rest of their planned concerts in their home country after sold-out concerts on the current tour in support of the band’s new album “Vesyoliye Kartinki” (Funny Pictures) continue to be canceled at short notice for alleged fire safety reasons, or with no reason given at all.
According to Lyapis Trubetskoy’s manager Yevgeny Kolmykov, the band has canceled planned concerts in Molodechno, Soligorsk and Zhlobin “so as not to torment people with pointless expectations” after planned concerts in Gomel, Mogilyov and Minsk were canceled by the promoters “for laughable reasons and at the last minute.”
Kolmykov linked the cancelations to blacklists of bands and artists allegedly issued by the Belarusian authorities, who continue to deny their existence. 
“In informal conversations, representatives of radio stations, executive authorities and promoters confirm that these lists are real, that they must be obeyed and that this is controlled by a higher authority,” Kolmykov said in a statement posted on the band’s web site last week.
Lyapis Trubetskoy’s frontman and songwriter Sergei Mikhalok, who has written a number of protest songs, including the anti-President Lukashenko anthem “Belarus Freedom,” and who signed a letter demanding the release of imprisoned oppositionists, said that artists in Belarus cannot now stay out of politics.
“I want to say that the word ‘apolitical’ has lost any sense in Belarus today,” he said in the same statement.
“A person who describes himself as being so joins the ranks of the servants of the regime a priori.”
Mikhalok described what is happening in Belarus as “a kind of cultural genocide.” 
“I know that many are leaving for the West now — to study or work, because they see no prospects inside the country,” he said.
“In fact, one can extend these blacklists to infinity. People like us are simply being pushed out of the country. We are not allowed to sing; others are not allowed to work in art, science or business. If previously, we were required to keep silent, now they are simply driving us out of here.”
Speaking to The St. Petersburg Times last month, Mikhalok suggested that Belarus’s authoritarian regime was a kind of “experiment” for post-Soviet countries, and that Lukashenko’s excesses that appeared outrageous to outsiders just a few years ago have since become commonplace in Russia and Ukraine.
Open Your Eyes, St. Petersburg’s anti-fascist film festival that was rejected by two state film theaters that had been happy to hold it since its launch in 2006, was shut down just four hours prior to its planned opening last week. The organizers said that a third venue, the Mikhail Shemyakin Foundation, dropped the event after receiving a call from the prosecutor’s office. The city authorities deny any involvement. Of course.


TITLE: On the catwalk
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: “Fashion Without Borders” is the slogan of the 23rd Defile on the Neva, the city’s homegrown fashion week that kicks off in Lenexpo on April 6 with shows by the renowned St. Petersburg designer Lilya Kissilenko as well as by Tatyana Sulimina, Polina Raudson and Natalya Soldatova.
Running through April 9, the fashion week features shows by 20 Russian designers of the caliber of Tanya Kotegova, Stas Lopatkin and Yanis Chamalidi, as well as a daily MEGA Fashion Show prepared by the omnipresent MEGA shopping center.
“However breezy and lighthearted the image of the fashion industry might be, the art of dress-making is something that should be taken very seriously,” said Irina Selyuta, director of the Lilya Kissilenko Fashion House. “A vast proportion of what, for instance, ethnography collections display to give an idea of a country’s culture during a certain period of time, is essentially fashion garments.”
For the first time in its history, Defile on the Neva is introducing a new format to its events, juxtaposing showrooms and the catwalk itself, meaning that each collection being presented will be promoted both through the show and the accompanying showrooms.
“The range of showrooms will be diverse enough to include not only the designers who are presenting their collections, but to introduce original jewelry and accessory brands as well as hair salons or cosmetics brands,” said Irina Ashkinadze, director of Defile on the Neva. “This approach should help to consolidate the rather fragmented Russian fashion market.”
Originally an invitation-only affair, Defile on the Neva has retained the unorthodox system of admission that was introduced when it was established in 2000. The easiest way to get a ticket used to be by shopping at the Defile boutique, where one could shop for any item seen on the event’s catwalk. The boutique has since closed down, and now, regular customers of the leading local designers that typically present shows at the event have the best chance of getting a ticket.
The project is, however, showing signs of opening up, and this spring, anyone interested is welcome to visit the showrooms at the event’s host venue, Lenexpo, free of charge during all four days of the shows, from 2 p.m. till 6 p.m. on April 6, and from midday till 4.30 p.m. on April 7, 8 and 9 (in the evening, when the shows take place, showrooms are only accessible to those who hold invitations to the actual shows). 
It is expected that this week, Defile on the Neva will attract from 12,000 to 15,000 visitors.
“My main ambition is that Russian people start to wear Russian designers and develop a taste for Russian fashion,” Ashkinadze said.
“Russian designers are often criticized, if not ostracized, for ‘not being as striking or commercially successful as Western European designers’ but I would argue that they have their own very interesting faces and they actually do not have to compete with anyone,” Selyuta said.
One serious problem faced by Russian fashion labels and designers is that there is almost no domestic textile industry to support them. Russian fashion is largely made using foreign fabrics, foreign buttons, and foreign zippers. Very often it is even produced abroad. 
Local fashion industry professionals and fashion historians alike nurture the idea of establishing a Costume Museum in the city.
Some argue that the roots of a widespread uninspired approach to fashion in Russia —plain dark clothes dominate, as if everyone works for the police and must be inconspicuous — can be explained not only by a lack of choice and financial limitations, but rather by a lack of historical connection and a sense of how fashion has developed in Russia during the past few centuries.
There is an unwillingness in Russia to stand out — both in the sense of producing a political statement that goes against the grain or making an original fashion statement. Individualism was not advised in the Soviet Union, and it is not among the modern concepts that Russians have embraced.
Restoring the historical connection, Defile on the Neva has teamed up with the Russian National Library and mounted a display titled “Messengers of Fashion” showcasing an impressive collection of Russian fashion magazines from the early 18th century through the present day.
The first samples on display show artistic sketches of high society ladies in fine clothing, and eventually the publications offer more and more practicalities. A few decades on, and the drawings are accompanied by detailed sewing patterns.
“Peter the Great was a genuine fashionista of his time: the Hermitage Museum collections hold at least 300 of the tsar’s garments, all of them works of art,” Selyuta said. “Indeed, if that much has survived, one can only imagine what a wealth of designs he once possessed… I assure you, if you ask any local whether Russia’s great reformer tsar had any connection at all to fashion, the question would be laughed at. But if there was a display reflecting the Russian ruler’s relationship with fashion, it would give our people an important insight into the country’s cultural development in general.”

For full schedule of the shows, visit www.defilenaneve.ru

TITLE: French Flavored Jazz
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The annual LeJazz festival of French music will take place in the city on Thursday, April 7.
St. Petersburg is famous for many things, but its jazz credentials have never been particularly strong. Russia’s doors were closed to Western jazz giants for much of the Soviet period; it wasn’t until several years after Stalin’s death that artists like Louis Armstrong were able to tour the country for the first time. The city’s jazz scene has steadily improved since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The success of the LeJazz festival, held every spring and now in its seventh year, offers clear proof of how much more vibrant St. Petersburg’s jazz scene is now compared to 10 years ago. The festival’s stated aim is to celebrate musicians who have been particularly associated with France.  
Its real value, though, is simply to have drawn a lot of first-class jazz talent to St. Petersburg. This year’s featured performer is clarinetist David Krakauer, who ranks as one of the most versatile jazz musicians working today. He has worked with everyone from the Kronos Quartet, avant-garde composer Luciano Berio, and Itzhak Perlman. But he is most famous for his explorations of klezmer music, and it is this side of his musical personality that he will display at LeJazz, along with the other members of his trio, accordionist Will Holhauser and bass guitarist Jerome Harris.

<i>David Krakauer and his trio will perform at 8 p.m. on April 7 at the Shostakovich Philharmonic Hall, 2 Mikhailovskaya Ulitsa. Tel: 710 4257.</i>

TITLE: <i>the word’s worth</i> Deep Pockets
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Êàðìàí: pocket, sleeve, pullout, money

As winter on Ice Planet Moscow marches on, broken only by brief harbingers of the end of the world — blizzard with sunshine accompanied by thunder and lightning — I’ve taken to entertaining myself with a game I call “Name That Thing!“ Discovering what something is called, in either Russian or English, is sublimely satisfying, and reminds me to count my blessings. So I thank all of the nut cases who write 14-page Wikipedia articles on road construction and advertising display paraphernalia. I hope you guys never get a life.
Several searches involved the word êàðìàí (pocket), which turns out to be a very productive little noun indeed. Êàðìàí refers to any pouch-like thing, including the paper or plastic holder for a CD inside a book cover. This was Round 1 of “Name That Thing!“ In English, it’s another piece of clothing — a sleeve.
Êàðìàí is also a stand-in for a person’s budget or financial capabilities. When something is affordable, you can say: Ýòî ìíå ïî êàðìàíó (literally, “it fits my pocket”). When it isn’t: Áîëüøèíñòâó ðîññèÿí èïîòåêà íå ïî êàðìàíó (The majority of Russian citizens can’t afford a mortgage). When something wrecks your budget, you can say áèòü or óäàðèòü ïî êàðìàíó (hits you in your wallet).
At the other end of the wealth spectrum, íàáèâàòü/íàáèòü êàðìàí (to fill your pockets) has the sense of getting rich, often quickly and dishonestly. Ïîêà îí êðàë, äåëàë ñäåëêè è íàáèâàë ñåáå êàðìàíû, íèêòî åãî íå òðîãàë (While he was stealing, cutting deals and lining his pockets, no one touched him).
Other Russian expressions use pockets more figuratively. If you work without pay, you can snarl: Ñïàñèáî â êàðìàí íå ïîëîæèøü (“Thank you” doesn’t pay the rent; literally, “you can’t put ‘thanks’ in your pocket”). If someone is a good speaker, you can say: Çà ñëîâîì â êàðìàí íå ëåçåò (he’s never at a loss for words; literally, “he doesn’t slip into his pocket for a word”).
And then there’s the odd expression äåðæè êàðìàí øèðå (literally, “hold your pocket wide open”), which is an exclamation of disbelief that something good will happen: “Right! Don’t hold your breath!” Huh? It turns out that êàðìàí was originally fastened on the outside of clothing, like a purse, and that the expression had a tagline, now mostly forgotten: Äåðæè êàðìàí øèðå, øèðîêèì êíèçó (Hold your purse wide open — upside down). So you think you’ll get paid? Dream on!
Round 2 of “Name That Thing!“ concerned êàðìàíû on roadways. They make more sense to English speakers if you think of them as pouches and recall the 12th meaning of pouch as a verb: to protrude or pouch out. So äîðîæíûå êàðìàíû are places where the roadway is extended out. In English, these extensions have various names: Ñäåëàåì ñïåöèàëüíûå “êàðìàíû” äëÿ ïîâîðîòà íàïðàâî è äëÿ îñòàíîâîê îáùåñòâåííîãî òðàíñïîðòà (We’ll make special right turn lanes and bus turnouts). Êàðìàí in the sense of a wide shoulder — a place to pull off and let speeding jerks pass you — is called a pull-off.
In Round 3, I sought the name of äîðîãà-äóáë¸ð, a small road running parallel to a major highway. Depending on where you live, this is called a frontage, access or service road.
So now you know. Satisfying, isn’t it? Not quite as satisfying as spring, but it will have to do.

Michele A. Berdy, a Moscow-based translator and interpreter, is author of “The Russian Word’s Worth” (Glas), a collection of her columns.

TITLE: New York, New York
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Before arranging to meet your date at Brooklyn Local cafe, beware: There are two doors to the cafe off the Griboyedov Canal, which lead to entirely separate sections. The menu and setup is the same at both, but make sure you agree on a side in advance, to avoid confusion.
The cafe, which opened several months ago, aims to recreate a Brooklyn-style bagel joint in the shadow of the Kazan Cathedral. The interior is more drab than Brooklyn-chic, however, an effect created by the dark floorboards, chocolate-colored paint on the walls and matching brown furniture. Even the fairy lights gamely draped around the exposed industrial ceiling pipe and miniature disco balls hanging from the ceiling can’t offset the rather somber atmosphere created — one that is not helped by the cafe’s chilly interior.
The New York theme is alluded to in the 50s-style neon sign of the cafe’s logo on the wall, in the wall fittings, which are in the form of take-away coffee cups, also featuring the cafe’s logo — a nice touch — and in some photos of the Big Apple sparsely dotted around the walls of the cafe’s compact non-smoking section.
Brooklyn Local has a few innovations up its sleeve. Visitors who order a minimum of 500 rubles worth of food and drink can borrow a notebook computer to make use of the free Wi-Fi, and the menu advertises the opportunity to download a podcast with music played in the cafe from its web site. For the first part of our visit, there was little temptation to take up this offer, as diners were being subjected to monotonous house music, though this later took an upwards turn and evolved into mixes of funk classics.
There are also a few authentic American twists: The cafe offers takeaway coffee (in the same cups that adorn the light fittings) with a 25-percent discount on the drink-in prices. The small food menu gives pride of place to several variants of the bagel, which it perhaps ambitiously claims is eaten for breakfast every day by practically every inhabitant of New York. The rest of the menu is given over to salads, sushi rolls priced from 280 to 350 rubles ($10 to $12.30) and dessert.
A “classic” bagel at Brooklyn local comes with cream cheese, tomato and pickled gherkin — though one can’t help suspecting that the gherkin is a local addition — and costs 120 rubles ($4.20). Both this and the bagel with trout (170 rubles, $6) were sadly stingy on the toppings. Though the cafe’s menu boasts of a chef who has spent many years in Brooklyn, perhaps he was absent from the kitchen on our visit, for it seems unlikely that most New Yorkers would have been satisfied by the dry, only vaguely warm bagels and their meager spreading of cream cheese. 
The same complaint applied to the very ordinary Caesar salad with shrimps (220 rubles, $7.80), which contained four shrimps (albeit large ones), two cherry tomatoes and a few isolated croutons. There simply didn’t seem to be enough of anything, including flavor. This could not even be remedied with some good old salt and pepper, since the table was curiously condiment-free: The chef is seemingly confident in the seasoning of his creations. 
Perhaps, then, Brooklyn Local is best visited as a place to enjoy an Americano (90 rubles, $3.20) and a slice of decent New York cheesecake (170 rubles, $6), which are less likely to disappoint than the bagel menu. Another true taste of America is offered by the banana milkshake (190 rubles, $6.70), which is at least 25 percent whipped cream floating on a thick, heavenly mass of blended banana, and may make it hard to find room for the cheesecake.
<div class="divider">&nbsp;</div>
<h1>THE GUIDE</h1>
<b>U.S.A. All the Way</b> 
There are a few corners of St. Petersburg where you can find American food (and American portions), a certain New York atmosphere, or, at the very least, a few friendly Americans. 

<b>The Other Side</b>
 
This friendly, American-owned gastro bar really is the place to come for those craving the authentic experience of a New York bagel, complete with lavish toppings of cream cheese — not to mention any of the other rare-in-St.-Petersburg international foods that can be found here. <i>1 Bolshaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa, tel: 312 9554.</i>

<b>Kompot</b>

At Kompot, it’s not so much the dishes on the menu, which range from Central Asian to Middle Eastern, that are reminiscent of New York so much as the funky surroundings and laid-back atmosphere. <i>10 Ulitsa Zhukovskogo, tel: 719 6542.</i>

<b>Carl’s Junior</b>
 
Visiting Carl’s junior is like going on a culinary journey to a real American burger joint. The burgers and fries here are certainly a cut above those at McDonald’s, which is helping the local outlets to gradually carve a niche despite being hugely outnumbered by the ever-popular Golden Arches. <i>8 Malaya Sadovaya Ulitsa, tel: 332 1600.</i> 


TITLE: Putin’s Former Supervisor Mines a Fortune in Shares
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Vladimir Litvinenko is a well-connected man.
The rector of the St. Petersburg Mining Institute oversaw Vladimir Putin’s dissertation, which in 1996 earned the current prime minister a doctorate in economics.
Last year, Litvinenko became chairman of the board of PhosAgro, the country’s largest producer of phosphate-based fertilizers.
Now he is a multimillionaire, worth an estimated $350 million to $450 million after an investor prospectus filed by PhosAgro last week showed he holds 5 percent of the company’s shares.
The fortune is raising eyebrows because Litvinenko, who has headed the state mining institute since 1994, was not previously known as a businessman. Litvinenko’s apparently rapid rise to riches speaks volumes in a country where who you know can be as important as what you know — if not more so.
Litvinenko seems to owe his luck to being the right man in the right place at the right time.
“He is an expert in that sector, and he has direct links with Vladimir Putin — what more can you ask for?” said Georgy Ivanin, a senior analyst with Alfa Bank.
Asked how Litvinenko became a shareholder, PhosAgro spokesman Timur Belov said by telephone that the company has a policy of not commenting on its shareholders beyond what is published officially.
The mining institute did not reply to written questions sent to Litvinenko’s office last week. One of his aides, who identified himself only by his first name and patronymic, Viktor Mikhailovich, said by telephone that the institute’s press service would look into the questions.
Litvinenko has proved his political allegiance to Putin more than once. In 2000 and 2004, he headed the St. Petersburg campaign team for Putin’s election as president.
His role in supervising Putin’s doctorate has been questioned since 2006, when Clifford Gaddy, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, demonstrated that key parts of the dissertation, which discusses resources planning in St. Petersburg and the neighboring Leningrad Oblast, appeared to have been plagiarized from a 1978 U.S. business school textbook.
Litvinenko has denied the allegations of plagiarism, and Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told The St. Petersburg Times that they were “slanderous.”
But Gaddy said in e-mailed comments that Putin’s dissertation, a copy of which he obtained at the Russian State Library in Moscow, “is a clear case of plagiarism.” He said Litvinenko probably just failed to detect it. “They just did not think it necessary to carefully read the thesis,” he said.
Recruiting a person with links to Putin would be considered a feat by many companies, but perhaps particularly by PhosAgro, a conglomerate of fertilizer producers built around a phosphate miner formerly controlled by jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
In a mission statement on its web site, PhosAgro says its basic policy is to balance state and company interests.
Phosphate mining, centered on the Arctic Kola Peninsula in the Murmansk region, is a topic widely studied in the St. Petersburg institute, which prides itself on being the country’s oldest technical university.
PhosAgro CEO Maxim Volkov told Vedomosti in an interview published Friday that it was his idea to nominate Litvinenko for the post.
Volkov said cooperation with the mining institute dated back to 2002 and its scientists advise PhosAgro in strategy and development. “About 1,500 members of our staff are graduates of this university, and some of them had Litvinenko as their dissertation supervisor,” he said.
But the relationship also extends into business. Volkov confirmed in the interview that in 2009 PhosAgro gave the institute a $119 million loan to build housing in St. Petersburg.
PhosAgro has faced Putin’s wrath in the past. In 2009, workers in the town of Pikalyovo in the Leningrad Oblast initiated public protests after local factories closed because of rising prices for nepheline concentrate, a key component of alumina produced there. The unrest prompted Putin to personally intervene by ordering component producers to lower prices. That producer was PhosAgro’s Murmansk-based plant, which subsequently agreed to supply nepheline at a price that it said was lower than its production costs.
Since then, the federal government has subsidized supplies of the agent to Pikalyovo’s plants with some 785 million rubles ($28 million), Putin said in December.
Now PhosAgro has big plans that require government support.
PhosAgro has actively lobbied the government to reach a merger deal with either Silvinit, the largest potash maker, or Canada’s Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan. In a letter, PhosAgro offered both the government and Sberbank a stake of the merged company, national media reported. The merger plans have yet to bear fruit.
Experts say the fertilizer industry needs to expand output as shrinking arable land and rising global food demand spur consumption of their products.
PhosAgro is also planning an IPO as early as this year, said Konstantin Yuminov of Rye, Man & Gor Securities, a Moscow-based investment firm.
Valued by analysts at an estimated $6 billion to $7 billion, PhosAgro had $3.2 billion of revenue in 2008, according to company data.
But at the same time, PhosAgro’s majority owners remain unclear.
The investor prospectus that brought Litvinenko’s shares to light lists a number of obscure Cyprus-registered companies with exotic names like Owl Nebula Enterprises and Fritton Management Limited.
The only other person who appears besides Litvinenko is a certain Yevgenia Guryeva, who owns 5.01 percent.
The name matches that of the wife of Andrei Guryev, a Federation Council senator for Murmansk who is widely believed to control PhosAgro.
Yuminov said it is well known that the company is owned by Andrei Guryev and that he is also behind the various shareholding companies.
“They probably wanted to show a little more openness before the IPO,” he said, adding that he expected more information about shareholders to be published later this year.
Belov, the PhosAgro spokesman, refused to comment when asked whether the company was planning an IPO.


TITLE: Talented Specialists Leave Country in ‘Third Wave’
AUTHOR: By Roland Oliphant
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Scared, fed up and feeling disenfranchised, many successful Russians are investing in citizenship in Western countries, according to consultants who have made a business of facilitating such emigration.
“It seems that the whole generation of 25- to 45-year-old Russians is actively thinking about running away, especially considering the prospect of seeing the same people in power for another 12 years, starting 2012. All dinner conversations tend to finish with this subject,” said the general director of a multibillion-dollar multinational company in Russia, who asked not to be identified because of the blunt nature of his comments.
Emigration consultants are seeing tangible results out of this subtle panic.
“We’re calling it the ‘third wave’” of high-end emigration, said Nuri Katz, president of immigrant investor consultancy Apex Capital Partners, who has been helping those wealthy enough to qualify — and afford his fees — through fast-track residency programs in Canada and Europe since 1993.
The first two waves Katz recalls came in the early 1990s and at the end of the millennium, following the 1998 default and ahead of the power transfer at the end of Yeltsin’s second term in 1999. Now, he says, he’s seeing a similar boom from clients who are fleeing economic uncertainty and are nervous about the presidential elections in 2012.
In an article in Novaya Gazeta, political commentator Dmitry Oreshkin in January called it the sixth great wave of emigration from Russia since the 1917 Revolution.
However you count, the consensus seems to be that those who are able are getting out. Exact numbers are difficult to come by — partly because there are no official figures and partly because few people in the demographic segment that qualifies for fast-track schemes completely uproot and depart. They often have too much to leave behind, and see it as a “Plan B” rather than a final departure.
But if movement of people cannot be measured, dollars can. Russia saw more than $38 billion in capital flight last year. Experts agree that although some of that comes from increased foreign investment by local companies and legitimate purchasing of foreign currency, a significant amount leaves under dubious contracts and other schemes to export capital.
Even Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin admitted last month that many investors are “hedging their risks” against the upcoming change of power in 2012.
“The crisis of 2008 to 2009 showed that for all that confidence the country picked up in the mid-2000s, this economy is only paper thin,” said Alex Aginsky, of Aginsky Associates, another emigration consulting group. “Then there’s the political uncertainty. What’s going to happen in 2012?”
The ousting of Mayor Yury Luzhkov in fall 2010 has also helped the emigration business, as entrepreneurs fed up with corruption and financial insecurity are being joined by civil servants suddenly worried that they too may need an escape route soon.
On the supply side of the equation are foreign governments competing fiercely to attract wealthy investors — and prepared even to sell citizenship for the right price.
The United States offers a fast track to obtaining a green card and then citizenship in exchange for an investment of not less than $1 million and the creation of at least 10 jobs.
For targeted employment zones in particular need of economic development, the minimum investment is $500,000. Applicants for the U.S. program are now allowed to pool their investments with one another, which can make it easier to generate the necessary employment. And the recent addition of “indirect job creation” — as when a domestic company grows its business as a direct result of the foreign investor’s activity — has made things significantly easier.
Through this program, an investor, their spouse and any unmarried children under 21 can get their green cards in two years and citizenship in another three.
Canada’s financial demands are much more straightforward — an 800,000 Canadian dollar ($826,000) interest-free loan to the government repayable in five years — but other regulations, including extremely strict transparency rules, make Canada “one of the hardest destinations in the world,” several experts said.
Other popular destinations include Britain, which is liberalizing rules for entrepreneurs and “super investors” even as it cracks down on student and working emigrants. Under new rules announced last month, anyone who deposits ?5 million ($8 million) in a British bank will earn permanent resident status after three years — which drops to two years if you deposit ?10 million.
Entrepreneurs can become eligible for permanent settlement rights in Britain within three years if they have created 10 jobs or achieved an annual turnover of ?10 million a year for their British business.
Other destinations include Bulgaria and the Baltic states — especially Latvia, which has been actively seeking Russian investors in exchange for much-coveted EU residence rights.
Katz and Aginsky function like old-world matchmakers — joining wealthy would-be emigres with the countries most likely to take them.
And business is booming.
Both men say they saw their turnover double in 2010 compared with 2009, and that it has tripled in the first quarter of 2011 compared with the whole of 2010.
That’s still not a stampede, however. Katz expects to serve about 20 to 30 clients this year. Aginsky estimates 16.
It is a narrow slice of a narrow demographic.
Both men characterize their customers as the “second-tier rich” — people worth between a million and several hundred million dollars, but few billionaires.
That’s partly because the highest-end players have already made their emergency arrangements — and partly because the really well-known figures can’t simply up and leave the country without a public scandal.
Clients tend to be driven by a mixture of personal concerns, lure of tax havens and a citizenship-based version of “keeping up with the Joneses.”
“In some circles having the latest yacht on the Riviera is not a status symbol. But if your kids have a blue [American] passport, that means something. It shows you’re providing a whole new ticket to freedom,” Aginsky said.
“I’d estimate a third of my clients are doing it for the sake of their children; one-third are simply sick of corruption; and one-third are people who’ve amassed enough wealth and just feel like doing it because they can now afford to,” Aginsky said.
But the choice of final destination is a personal one: The United States tends to benefit from the ineffable appeal of the American dream and its world-class universities; European destinations, from Britain to the Baltic states and Bulgaria, are closer to home and much more convenient if you want to carry on running a business in Russia.
But it is not simply a matter of handing out visas to those with the money, as former Mayor Luzhkov discovered when he was turned down for residency in Latvia in January — despite qualifying for its business emigration scheme, which entitles foreigners to a residency permit when they put $380,000 in a local bank account and leave it there.
Luzhkov was unfortunate enough to be included in a “black list of undesirable persons” — at least partly because of his dubious business reputation and unfriendly comments he had made about the Baltic states. But you don’t have to be a comic book villain of Russian politics to lose out.
Katz and Aginsky reckon they turn down one in every five potential clients for “transparency issues.”
Countries may want millionaires’ money — but they also require prospective citizens to demonstrate that their assets have been acquired legally.
But wealthy Russians — regardless of how legitimately they have come by their riches — have an unfortunate habit of concealing their assets by distributing their wealth among family members and friends.
“That can make it tough to prove that a man owns what he says he does,” said Katz.