SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1652 (14), Wednesday, April 20, 2011
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TITLE: Governor Wants to Phase Out Trolleybuses
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg’s famous trolleybuses may disappear from the city to be replaced with high-speed trams, City Hall announced last week.
The idea of getting rid of the city’s trolleybuses was announced by City Governor Valentina Matviyenko at a meeting with representatives of Germany’s MAN Truck&Bus company on Thursday. The governor did not say when the change would take place.
The City’s Transport Committee said Friday that local trolleybuses would not disappear overnight, but that their number would be reduced gradually. At the same time, the number of new vehicles will also be reduced, while old or broken trolleybuses will be removed from the roads, Fontanka reported.
Matviyenko said that city authorities were looking into the possibility of developing high-speed trams and additionally converting the city’s regular buses to gas.
The governor said that City Hall had been negotiating with Gazprom Neft over on a project to convert local buses to gas. The project will start with bus depot number 7. Under the terms of the project, Gazprom Neft would convert the buses at its own expense, Interfax reported.
The city’s transport organizations have yet to comment on the governor’s idea to do away with trolleybuses, saying that no decision has yet been taken.
Tatyana Bryndina, a spokeswoman for GorElectroTrans (City Electric Transport), the city’s main enterprise in charge of electric transport such as trams and trolleybuses, said it was difficult to comment because the company had not yet seen an outline of the plan or had any official meetings on the subject.
Bryndina said trolleybuses were no more cumbersome than buses, at least in terms of size.
“Trolleybuses and trams do not themselves cause traffic jams, traffic jams arise when an accident or another traffic incident blocks their way and, due to being restricted by electric cables, they can’t get past,” Bryndina said.
“So they are slightly less flexible than regular buses, but both trams and trolleybuses are, of course, the most ecologically friendly mode of transport,” she said.
An expert who preferred not to be identified in print told The St. Petersburg Times that every day, about 100 trolleybuses serve the Nevsky Prospekt area with an interval of 2.5 minutes. If all those trolleybuses were replaced with regular buses, the pollution on Nevsky Prospekt would get a lot worse, the expert said.
“Moreover, when trolleybuses get stuck in traffic jams, they don’t use electricity, unlike regular buses that continue to burn fuel and consequently carry on polluting the environment,” the expert added.
In addition, due to their design features, trolleybuses only require maintenance work to be carried out on them every 20 years, unlike buses that need repairing every six years.
Sergei Malinkovich, leader of the city’s Communists of Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast organization, was quoted on the organization’s web site as saying that “the left-wing faction was outraged at City Hall’s proposal to deprive St. Petersburg of its trolleybuses.”
“It would be another wrong move for the development of the city’s economy,” Malinkovich said, adding that “undisciplined and badly trained drivers were to blame for causing traffic jams, and not trolleybuses.”
“Trolleybuses are the cheapest and the most democratic public transport. Since they run at low speeds, they are also the safest. Their removal from our roads will inevitably lead to increases in transport costs,” he said.
The organization said that if necessary, its members would organize pickets and do everything possible to save the trolleybuses.
Currently, a total of 700 trolleybuses operate on 50 routes across the city. About 4,000 people work on the city’s trolleybus network, Fontanka reported.
Experts say that it won’t be possible to replace all the trolleybuses at the same time, since they are used by around 350,000 people daily —10 percent of the number of metro passengers.
Replacing trolleybuses with trams will also require a lot of additional investment. Both the rails for modern high-speed trams and the trams themselves are expensive. One line planned to run from the Moscow Railway Station to Pulkovo Airport is estimated to cost from 13 billion rubles to 14 billion rubles ($460 million to $495 million).
The statement comes not long after after the government announced plans to develop electric transport. Since 2007, City Hall has bought dozens of new trolleybuses, spending 300 to 600 million rubles. By 2012, the city’s trolleybus depot was due to expand by 350 new vehicles.
TITLE: Court Says Rally Arrests Were Illegal
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: People who attended Strategy 31 rallies to demand that their constitutional right of assembly be respected by the authorities were within their right to do so, while the police acted illegally in breaking up the rallies and arresting protesters, a St. Petersburg court has ruled.
The ruling was made in response to a complaint lodged by photographer Vladimir Telegin, who was detained along with dozens of other people while taking photographs near Gostiny Dvor at the Oct. 31 rally. He was acquitted in an appeal hearing last month.
In the written decision made public Friday, Judge Nadezhda Novikova of the Krasnoselsky district court cited article 31 of the constitution that states that “citizens of the Russian Federation have the right to assemble peacefully without weapons, hold assemblies, meetings and demonstrations, marches and pickets.”
She wrote that according to the law on assemblies, meetings, demonstrations and pickets, it was enough for the rally’s organizers to notify City Hall about the event in advance, which they did.
Furthermore, City Hall — which refused to authorize the rally on the grounds that snow ploughs would be operating on the site — failed to properly issue an official ban of the event.
“Therefore, the police officers’ orders to citizens to disperse were not motivated by the law,” Novikova concluded.
Specifically, Novikova pointed out that taking photographs on the territory of the city is not forbidden and is not an offense punishable under the law.
Speaking this week, Telegin said he was detained at the beginning of the rally. He said he was not participating in the rally, but taking photos of it.
He was charged with two administrative offences with which arrested protesters are often charged: Violating the rules on holding a public rally (the police claimed he was shouting slogans in their reports) and failure to obey a policeman’s orders, i.e. remaining at the site after the police shouted through a megaphone at the public to disperse.
At two hearings in November, Magistrate Alla Ivanova of Judicial District No. 100 of the Krasnoselsky district found him guilty, and fined him 500 rubles ($17.6) for each of the two charges, Telegin said. According to him, a judge at one hearing refused to call the police witnesses for questioning, saying she had no grounds not to trust them, while the other hearing was held without Telegin’s presence.
Telegin said that one of the court rulings — the fine for violating the rules on holding a public rally — was canceled by an appeal court in February due to contradictions in the police reports, two of which were written in the same handwriting and signed with the same squiggle, but bore two different names. “Like Sergeant Petrov and Private Ivanov,” he said.
He said he took a number of photos at the police precinct, whose time stamps showed he was there from 6:40 p.m., while the police reports claimed that at that time he was on Nevsky Prospekt demonstrating and shouting slogans.
According to Telegin, Magistrate Ivanova, who found him guilty in November, refused to consider the photographs as evidence. “She said to me ‘We’re not about to watch movies here, and I trust reports from the police officers,’ without summoning them — and fined me,” he said.
Commenting on the latest court ruling, Boris Gruzd, a lawyer with Yury Shmidt and Partners, said that the ruling could influence other judges, but not necessarily affect their decisions.
“Because this ruling deals with one specific mass event, this citizen, who was detained and then acquitted, can demand compensation and accountability of the officers who broke the law,” Gruzd said Tuesday.
“Whether the principles and approaches stated in this court ruling will be extended to other such events depends exclusively on the sense of justice of judges examining specific cases. Certainly, it will not be an obligatory precedent for other courts, but its legal principles and approaches may be taken into account and repeated in other rulings.”
The Strategy 31 civic campaign was launched in St. Petersburg on Jan. 31, 2010 and has been held on the 31st day of every month that has 31 days. Every event so far has been broken up by the police, with dozens arrested each time.
The next Strategy 31 rally is due to be held on May 31.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Stray Dogs on Increase
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — There are more than 7,000 stray dogs in St. Petersburg and attempts to control their population are futile, local experts say.
“There are more than 7,000 stray dogs in St. Petersburg now, and in the fall their numbers usually increase to 10,000 after dog owners leave their pets behind when leaving their dachas,” Yury Andreyev, head of the city’s Veterinary Board, was quoted by Interfax as saying last week.
Andreyev said the city authorities catch stray animals, vaccinate and neuter them, inject them with identification chips to register them in the database, and then return them to the places where they were found.
Local dog shelters struggle to solve the problem, Andreyev said.
“It’s hard to find families for stray animals, while people bring new puppies to the dog shelters every day,” he said.
Restaurant Burns Down
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — One of St. Petersburg’s most famous restaurants, Podvorye, burned down on Tuesday morning in the St. Petersburg suburb of Pavlovsk, the city’s emergency services said.
The restaurant was famous for the extensive list of famous guests that had dined there, including Vladimir Putin, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder, Sharon Stone, Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones and many others.
St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko was also a regular visitor of the cult venue.
The fire spread through the two-story wooden building, which was built in the style of Russia’s northern wooden architecture, destroying the building completely within an hour and a half. An investigation is underway to establish how the fire started, emergency services said.
MAN to Build Plant
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Germany’s MAN Truck&Bus company said last week that it would build an assembly plant in St. Petersburg.
MAN will invest 25 million euros ($36 million) into the construction of the plant.
The company said in a statement that the plant would start production next year and in the medium-term, the annual production capacity will be about 6,000 trucks.
MAN said that by as early as 2012, about 25 percent of trucks sold in Russia will have been produced locally. It will also develop local suppliers.
Plant Exports to Oz
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The city’s Severnoye Siyaniye perfume and cosmetics factory, which is part of the Unilever Group, has begun exporting to Australia, Interfax reported.
This year the factory plans to make 1.7 million deodorant sticks available to the Australian market, corresponding to three percent of the company’s production.
The first batch of 380,000 deodorants will be shipped this week from St. Petersburg’s port.
Severnoye Siyaniye is one of Unilever’s biggest factories in Europe exporting perfume and cosmetics products to many EU countries.
TITLE: Matviyenko Earns Less Than Her Subordinates
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko was far from the highest earning city official last year, earning just 2.3 million rubles ($81,000) — far less than some of her lower-ranking officials.
Matviyenko’s husband, who earned just 227,000 rubles ($8,000), also lagged far behind a number of city officials’ spouses.
At least, this is according to City Hall’s annual register of official income for 2010, published this week.
Out in front, Deputy Governor Roman Filimonov earned more than 25.4 million rubles ($896,000) last year. In addition, his wife contributed 15 million rubles ($529,000) to the family budget and Filimonov’s son and daughter earned six million rubles ($212,000) each.
Filimonov, who works in various areas of city construction, told the Fontanka news site that he wasn’t paid a large salary, but that his family received money from property deals that were processed for the whole family and then divided between them all.
Filimonov and his wife also own the most impressive array of automobiles, including a Mercedes-Benz GL500, a Cadillac Escalade, a motorcycle and snow and swamp mobiles.
Deputy Governor Alexei Sergeyev, who oversees housing, communal services, energy and ecology, last year made 6.711 million rubles ($236,600).
Deputy Governor Mikhail Oseyevsky, who heads City Hall, earned only 2.5 million rubles ($88,000), outdone by his spouse, who earned 11.2 million rubles ($395,000).
The wife of Deputy Governor Yury Molchanov turned out to be the most prosperous among city official’s spouses, earning 30 million rubles ($1 million) last year. Molchanov himself, who is in charge of investment policy and transport, earned only 1.9 million rubles ($67,000).
Molchanov and his wife share a Mercedes-Benz SL500 and Toyota Land Cruiser Prado 120.
A number of other city officials made less than Matviyenko. Deputy Governor Igor Metelsky made 2.2 million rubles ($77,000) compared with an income of five million rubles ($176,000) that he made in 2009; Deputy Governor Lyudmila Kostkina, who is in charge of spheres connected with society and health, earned a little more than two million rubles ($70,000), Deputy Governor Anna Manilova, who oversees education, culture and media, made 1.6 million rubles ($56,000).
According to Petrostat, the city’s statistics agency, last year, the average income rose by 9.7 percent to a monthly wage of 25,897 rubles ($913).
TITLE: Samson Returns to Pedestal
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The iconic sculpture of Samson pulling open the jaws of a lion that crowns the central cascade of fountains in the suburb of Peterhof returned to its pedestal after restoration on Sunday.
Three months ago, the symbol of Peterhof left its historical home for the first time since 1947.
Restoration experts painted the sculpture with a double layer of gold leaf, using about a kilogram of gold. Samson is now expected to be able to go without restoration work for at least 12 years, as long as the fountain’s water system does not contain abrasive substances.
Yelena Kalnitskaya, director of the Peterhof museum, said that museum workers and the local authorities are trying to resolve the issue of water quality in the Staropetergovsky Canal that feeds the fountain, RIA Novosti reported.
“We had trouble last year when lime from a nearby construction site got into the water due to the rain. We want to prevent these kinds of pollutants because they may contain sand, which can seriously erode the layer of gild,” Kalnitskaya said.
A restoration of the statue on this scale hasn’t been completed since 1947. Previously the sculpture of Samson, weighing in at five tons, was gilded several times in loco. However, last year it was decided to perform more thorough repairs on account of the statue’s serious condition.
The sculpture of Samson was first erected in 1735, in honor of the 25th anniversary of the Battle of Poltava that took place on the day of Saint Sampson. The statue was based on a model by the Italian architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli.
In 1801 the sculpture was in disrepair and was replaced by a bronze copy. After Nazi troops invaded Peterhof, the statue disappeared completely.
In 1947, the sculpture was restored using pre-war photos.
TITLE: Brits Host LGBT Reception
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The British Consulate General in St. Petersburg hosted a reception and presentation for representatives of the local LGBT community Tuesday.
“The United Kingdom government is committed to defending the basic rights and freedoms of vulnerable groups, not least gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people,” Deputy Consul General Ben Greenwood said in an email Tuesday.
“We are delighted to welcome a number of Russian LGBT organizations to the British Consulate-General in St. Petersburg to demonstrate the diversity of cultural activity in support of LGBT issues in Russia.”
The British Consulate General has been an active supporter of LGBT rights in St Petersburg in recent years, according to Greenwood.
“For example, in 2009 and 2010 we cooperated with the ‘Side by Side’ LGBT International Film Festival. Last year, we also lent our support to the St. Petersburg International Festival of Queer Culture,” he pointed out.
“We believe events like these play an important role in highlighting, peacefully and lawfully, the issues that affect LGBT people.’
Igor Kochetkov, the chair of the Russian LGBT Network, said that thanks to the British Consulate General, the LGBT community had gotten a rare chance to speak to local officials.
“We’re very grateful to the British Consulate for providing us with such a platform for a meeting between representatives of the St. Petersburg authorities and of civil society,” Kochetkov said Tuesday.
“To be honest, we’re planning this event not for the British Consulate, but to speak with our fellow Petersburgers.
“Unfortunately, there is a high level of distrust and fear of the LGBT community and LGBT organizations, and that’s why it’s important for us that diplomats offer a mediatory opportunity for communication between civil society and the authorities.”
According to Kochetkov, invitations were sent to a number of City Hall’s committees, including the international relations committee and the committee on youth policies and interaction with NGOs. Greenwood said that an official from the international relations committee had represented City Hall at the event.
In recent years, the St. Petersburg authorities put pressure on several events organized by the LGBT community.
The “Side by Side” LGBT International Film Festival was shut down after fire inspectors visited and closed the venues it was due to be held at in 2008.
City Hall also refused to authorize a Gay Pride march last year on grounds described by the organizers as “ridiculous.” When the activists held it without the authorization, the march was broken up by the police and a number of participants were detained.
TITLE: Official Denies That Artist Is on Wanted List
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The St. Petersburg Investigation Department of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation denied Tuesday that Oleg Vorotnikov, a key activist in the award-winning radical art group Voina, has been put on the federal wanted list after he left a routine interrogation fearing he would be put under arrest by counter-extremism Center E operatives on Saturday.
Vorotnikov and Voina’s Leonid Nikolayev spent three months in prison for a September art stunt before being released on bail in February.
On Monday, Vorotnikov and his lawyer Dmitry Dinze told the media that he might be put on a wanted list on Tuesday according to information from investigators.
In an email, Vorotnikov explained that while he was in the investigator’s office, the investigator received a phone call and he heard the caller saying, “We’ll detain him afterwards.”
Vorotnikov left the office under the excuse of having to make a phone call and left the building.
On Tuesday, Vorotnikov’s investigator, Daniil Fedichev, declined to comment on the situation, while the Investigation Department’s spokesman Alexander Kapitonov denied the news. “No, he’s not been put on a wanted list yet,” he said by phone, without elaborating.
A second criminal case on three alleged offenses was filed against Vorotnikov on Thursday.
TITLE: Russia-NATO Rift Remains
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: BERLIN — A critical rift between NATO and Russia over a European missile shield appeared to ossify Friday, even as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov toned down Moscow’s criticism of the alliance’s military operation in Libya.
Lavrov, speaking at a news conference after a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council in Berlin, reiterated Moscow’s stance that a joint missile shield should be formed to defend both NATO members and Russia from potential missile threats.
But NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen made it clear that NATO sees things differently.
“We are thinking about two systems — one NATO’s and one Russian — that will cooperate and exchange information to make us more secure,” Fogh Rasmussen said.
He did not elaborate.
President Dmitry Medvedev urged NATO during a Lisbon summit in November to consider creating the joint system, a compromise on a shield that Washington has sought for several years to protect the United States and its NATO allies from a potential missile strike by Iran.
The initial U.S. plan — to deploy a radar station and anti-missiles near Russia’s western borders — infuriated the Kremlin, which said it would tip the strategic nuclear balance away from Russia by undermining Moscow’s capacity for a retaliatory nuclear strike if it was attacked first.
NATO leaders agreed in November to consider Medvedev’s proposal, which would see Russia assuming responsibility for dealing with missiles flying over its territory toward NATO countries and NATO countries protecting Russia from missiles flying in its direction. A task force of Russian and NATO military experts will present a first assessment of the joint system at a meeting of NATO and Russian defense ministers in Brussels in June.
Several U.S. politicians have opposed Russia’s proposal, arguing that the United States cannot entrust its security to another country, especially to a former Cold War adversary. Most recently, a group of 39 Republican senators sent a letter to U.S. President Barack Obama on Thursday, warning that cooperation on the missile shield could undermine national security and urging him not to share information about missile interceptors and data from satellites with Moscow.
Lavrov dismissed the initiative in Berlin as a populist stunt.
A NATO diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said consultations over the joint system were progressing with difficulty because of a lack of trust between parties. “When we ask the Russians what they can contribute to the possible future shield, they don’t talk,” he said.
Moreover, Russia lacks the capacity to intercept ballistic missiles in the design of the missile shield envisioned by Medvedev, said Russia’s leading specialist on nuclear security, Vladimir Yevseyev of the Center for Social and Political Studies.
Development of the S-500 advanced anti-aircraft system capable of destroying ballistic long-range missiles is expected to be completed only in 2015, according to Defense Ministry officials. The S-400 systems that are in service can only intercept short- and mid-range missiles.
The NATO diplomat said even if Russian and NATO experts fail to reach common ground by June, they will have at least one more year to continue consultations.
Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have threatened a new arms race and to position tactical missile systems targeted against Europe on Russia’s western borders if Moscow’s interests are ignored in the creation of the missile shield in Europe.
Still, Lavrov did not push hard on this issue Friday, saying only that his meeting with NATO foreign ministers aimed to give the experts a push in their consultations.
Lavrov also stepped back from Russian leaders’ criticism of NATO’s dealings in Libya, where the alliance has United Nations’ approval to intervene to prevent human rights abuses perpetrated by forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
Putin condemned NATO’s military intervention in Libya as a “medieval crusade” last month, even though Russia abstained from the UN Security Council vote that endorsed the intervention. Medvedev, who rebuked Putin for his remarks, said Thursday that the actions of some countries go beyond the UN mandate in Libya.
Asked by journalists how Russia would react to allegations that some NATO countries were seeking to provide arms to anti-Gadhafi forces, Lavrov replied mildly that responsibility lay with the UN Security Council, not Russia, to act as a watchdog in such situations. He also said Fogh Rasmussen made the “right noises” during talks about the Libyan crisis.
TITLE: Tajikistan Forces Kill 10 Islamic Insurgents
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DUSHANBE, Tajikistan — Tajik government forces haves scored a significant victory in the fight against Islamist insurgents, killing at least 10 suspected militants in the turbulent eastern Rasht Valley.
Interior Ministry chief of staff Ikrom Umarov said Friday that armored vehicles and aircraft took part in the military operation in the village of Samsolik, about 140 kilometers east of the capital, Dushanbe.
Local media, citing security sources, said militant leader Abdullo Rakhimov was among those killed in Thursday’s raid, but Umarov said that information could not be independently confirmed. He said one police officer was wounded.
Authorities have accused militants led by Rakhimov of conducting last year’s ambush on a military convoy in which at least 25 soldiers were killed.
Rakhimov, also known by his nom de guerre Mullo Abdullo, was a top warlord during Tajikistan’s 1992-97 civil war between President Emomali Rakhmon’s secular government and his mostly Islamic opponents called the United Tajik Opposition.
Residents in the Rasht Valley say military operations have been intermittently taking place in the mountainous Tajikabad and Nurabad districts for some months.
In January, authorities reported killing Islamist fighter Alovuddin Davlatov, who was also believed to be involved in the military convoy attack.
The success of these military operations appear to mark the culmination of government efforts to repair relations with important power brokers in the Rasht Valley, such as former warlord Mirzokhodzha Akhmadov.
Authorities said last year that they were seeking to arrest Akhmadov on suspicion of involvement in the convoy attack. An escalation in violence and terror attacks at the time had aroused fears of a new outbreak of conflict.
But Akhmadov later surrendered to the government and promised to assist security forces in capturing prominent militants.
Also last week, the Interior Ministry announced that former United Tajik Opposition field commander Shoh Iskandarov had joined government forces.
Officials said Iskandarov was appointed to a senior position in the police in the Rasht Valley area in April.
TITLE: Medvedev Makes Surprise Visit to Apartment Building
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev took a step toward fulfilling a promise to examine residential neighborhoods nationwide Monday, dropping by a six-story apartment building during a trip to Irkutsk to inspect its courtyard and mailboxes.
Medvedev stopped his cortege while driving to a local youth sports school, exiting his car to take a walk through the courtyard and enter the building’s hall, where he poked his finger in unlocked gray-green mailboxes.
He praised local authorities for sweeping fallen leaves and constructing a children’s playground in the yard, but said more effort could have gone into upkeep of the yard and the building, both of which require repairs, RIA-Novosti reported.
Medvedev, who was accompanied by Irkutsk Governor Dmitry Mezentsev, told reporters that the stop was a spur-of-the-moment decision. But he promised at a recent meeting with heads of several municipalities nationwide that he would conduct such examinations regularly.
He said at the time that he gets many complaints from people who claim local authorities fix the apartment blocks that he is scheduled to visit during regional trips but ignore other neighborhoods.
TITLE: Man Sets Himself And Court On Fire
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW — A man upset over the loss of his driver’s license set himself on fire in a Krasnoyarsk regional courthouse, killing himself and a court official when the blaze engulfed the building, police said.
Police spokeswoman Yelena Shchavelyova said five other people were injured in Friday’s incident, which occurred in the town of Irbeiskoye.
The man set himself ablaze just before the court was to hear his appeal on revoking his driver’s license.
Shchavelyova said the fire spread, killing a judge’s assistant.
TITLE: Zyuganov Announces Kremlin Bid
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — While President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin keep the nation guessing whether either will run for the presidency, Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov became the first politician to announce that he will stand in next year’s election.
“If the [party] congress nominates me, I will run,” Zyuganov told Channel One host Vladimir Pozner during his talk show late Sunday.
Zyuganov said he would even participate in the race if Putin and Medvedev decided to run against each other. “I do not exclude that both will stand, but there will definitely be a third [candidate] from our bloc,” he said.
Asked against whom he would prefer to run, Zyuganov said he did not see much difference between the president and prime minister, describing both as “members of one team with one course.”
Zyuganov, who has led the Communists since 1993, has run for the presidency three times since 1996, with increasingly lackluster results.
In 1996, he was a close challenger, winning 40.3 percent in a runoff with incumbent President Boris Yeltsin. In 2000, he was easily defeated in a first round by Vladimir Putin, who got 52.94 percent versus Zyuganov’s 29.21 percent.
In 2004, he decided not to run at all against Putin, and in 2008 he only got 17.72 percent, finishing a distant second to Medvedev, who won with 70.23 percent.
Analysts said Zyuganov’s announcement had less to do with his chances of winning than with his own position within the Communist Party.
“Zyuganov needs to secure his position well before the State Duma elections,” said Alexei Mukhin, head of the Center for Political Information, a think tank. Duma elections are in December.
Olga Mefodyeva of the Center for Political Technologies said Zyuganov needed to show that he still has political ambitions. “Public attention is very important for him to avert possible inner-party intrigues,” she said.
A poll by the state-run VTsIOM agency last December gave Zyuganov just 4 percent of the vote if he ran against Medvedev, who would win with 50 percent.
In last month’s regional elections, the Communists placed a distant second with 13 percent, while United Russia won 70 percent of all seats in regional legislatures.
However, Zyuganov was adamant that the Communists’ prospects were good. “Today more people are voting for us than during the best years, while honestly United Russia won’t get more than a third,” he said.
Meanwhile, United Russia said it would accept Putin’s choice on who the party should support for the presidential election next March.
“Putin is our unconditional leader, and his position will have unconditional priority for us,” Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov, the party’s No. 2 behind Putin, said in comments published on United Russia’s web site.
Last week, Putin defended his decision to leave the public in the dark about who would run, explaining that any announcement would disrupt government work.
TITLE: Transport System Close to Collapse
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Travelers driving to Sheremetyevo Airport dread the short stretch just beyond the Moscow Ring Road near the sprawling Mega shopping mall.
“Things are getting worse and worse,” said Georgy Idrisov, who regularly flies as part of his research work on national economic development. “I spent 1 1/2 hours driving these couple of kilometers last month.”
One of the reasons for the growing traffic — in addition to shoppers — may be the swelling numbers of airline passengers as the economy rebounds.
Predicting further expansion of the airline business, the government announced recently that it would finally invest an estimated hundreds of millions of dollars in building another runway at the state-owned airport in the next few years.
The resurrected runway plan, which sank into oblivion as the economy slumped worldwide, signals that the federal coffers are ready to open wider for spending on transportation in an attempt to facilitate further economic growth.
“Airports are in the worst situation,” said Vadim Dubovik, a Deloitte infrastructure expert in Moscow. “This very much inhibits traffic between regions.”
In the next five to seven years, the government needs to invest more than it has done since the Soviet collapse to upgrade the airports of the world’s largest country, he added.
There is reason to hurry. Sheremetyevo and the two other airports around Moscow — Domodedovo and Vnukovo — handled more passengers last year than they did in the last record year of 2008, said industry researcher Oleg Panteleyev. The rapid buildup in passenger traffic means that the new, third Sheremetyevo runway has to be operational in 2015, he said.
If the government wants to support airlines and its own ambitions to position Moscow as a global financial center, it has to spend its own money — rather than attract private capital — to finance the new runway because by law, runways have to remain state property.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned that the airports would soon approach their cumulative capacity of 65 million passengers a year. They need to be able to handle a combined 100 million passengers by 2020 — double what they served last year, he said.
Most transportation and infrastructure projects were put on ice during the crisis, as the government rerouted funds toward bailing out banks and other measures to stave off a full-blown social and economic collapse.
Runway to Subway
The federal government is buying 75 percent of Vnukovo Airport from the Moscow city government for at least 45 billion rubles, or $1.5 billion, as part of a strategy to ensure better coordination of airport development.
New Mayor Sergei Sobyanin is counting on the money in order to put his subway expansion plans on a fast track. The busy subway is bursting at the seams, carrying significantly more people than it was designed for.
Sobyanin wants 53 kilometers of new lines by 2015, or almost as much as the city has built since the Soviet collapse in 1991 — the time when the capital’s population began to swell as mobility restrictions eased.
This year alone, City Hall is spending 56 billion rubles on the work — a more than twofold increase from last year.
Famed for its palatial stations decked out with mosaics and chandeliers, the subway will lose much of its architectural luster with the new stations, which will have a standardized design.
City officials hope the subway expansion will alleviate the congestion above ground that has become damaging to businesses.
“I have to use the subway in Moscow increasingly more often,” Dubovik said. “Otherwise, one appointment may take as long as three to four hours.”
Moscow’s traffic jams are the longest among the world’s 20 biggest cities, a study by International Business Machines found last year. The Kremlin ordered Sobyanin to deal with the problem when appointing him mayor at the end of 2010.
In addition to subway expansion, City Hall plans to spend 126 billion rubles in 2011 on road construction.
Mandatory Roads
More testimony of the resolve to make driving a less grueling experience came with the establishment of the Federal Road Fund this year. Under a law that President Dmitry Medvedev signed in April, the government can’t re-allocate the fund’s money for purposes other than road construction.
The fund will draw 254 billion rubles, or $9 billion, from the 2011 federal budget. An additional 80 billion rubles, according to Transportation Minister Igor Levitin, will come from a new gasoline tax that came into force this year.
But the overall federal spending on roads this year will be even higher — up to 453.4 billion rubles — if the government fulfills several ancillary programs. Should that happen, road spending will set a new record in Russia.
According to the government, it spent 186.3 billion rubles on roads last year.
Idrisov, an infrastructure expert at the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy, attributed the planned massive expenditures across the country to the State Duma and presidential elections coming up in December and March, respectively.
“It’s more about politics than the economy,” he said.
If it happens in the intended proportions, the spending would also benefit Siberia and other eastern regions, where the absence of roads cuts off at least 30,000 settlements from the rest of the country.
Inadequate roads in the regions are a restraint to private businesses, including those helped by the International Financial Corporation, the World Bank’s private-sector lending arm. As companies grow, they need a link to the bigger market of the rest of the country or abroad, said Snezana Stoiljkovic, IFC director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
TITLE: Railcar Venture Eyes Market for Freight
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: TIKHVIN, Leningrad Region — In Soviet times this larger-than-life industrial plant in Tikhvin, a city near St. Petersburg, hummed with 20,000 employees and the manufacture of parts for giant tractors.
Those days are long gone. But the factory’s walls now will house a new venture: Investment conglomerate IST Group will use the plant to make freight cars using systems from a U.S. supplier of freight car mechanics.
With the volume of rail freight increasing, some of the billionaires behind IST Group, Nomos Bank and potash miner Uralkali are plowing roughly $1.2 billion into the railcar project. In doing so they are bringing U.S. railcar mechanics and products to Russia — as well as capital investment and workers to Tikhvin.
The ancient city of about 60,000 residents, a three-hour drive from St. Petersburg, is famous for its monastery, its nunnery and its birthplace museum for composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. In the eyes of IST managers, however, Tikhvin is about to rev up.
“From a small and quiet city, Tikhvin is turning into a stronghold of industrialization,” Viktor Tikhonov, head of Tetran-Express, an IST Group-controlled manufacturer of tank treads, told The St. Petersburg Times.
This isn’t the first major railroad enterprise to land in the factory. In the mid-1990s, it was a production site for the Sokol train, part of the VSM high-speed rail project planned by President Boris Yeltsin’s officials.
They wanted to use the Sokol train in a grandiose plan to link Moscow and St. Petersburg by rail. Though more than $30 million was spent on the train project, the plans weren’t realized. Only one train was made — and it was given to a railroad institute for teaching student engineers.
Tikhonov was at the factory for the Sokol venture. “If this project had reached its logical conclusion, the country would be riding on our trains,” he said. IST Group bought the plant from VSM, the would-be Sokol train producer, in 2001.
Today’s railcar program is operating in a market ripe for sales. The volume of freight on the country’s railways has been growing: It rose about 10 percent in January of this year compared with January 2010 figures, and those showed an increase of about 17 percent from January 2009, Interfax reported.
More than 96 million tons of freight were shipped by rail this January, the news service said.
Behind the Tikhvin industrial revamp is billionaire Alexander Nesis, co-owner of IST Group. IST bought a 13.2 percent stake in chemical powerhouse Uralkali last summer, and Nesis also controls Nomos Bank. As of March, his fortune was estimated at $2.5 billion by Forbes magazine.
In December, Nesis told Bloomberg News that IST Group would invest $1 billion in the Tikhvin rail project.
“We reckon upon a simple thing,” he told Bloomberg News. “Russia has one of the largest railcar fleets in the world, and the majority of these are old and need to be replaced soon.”
The Tikhvin factory will make freight cars using mechanical systems from Standard Car Truck Company, a maker of freight car systems based outside Chicago. SCT, part of Pittsburgh-area Wabtec Corporation, sells to North American railway majors such as CSX and Union Pacific, according to the SCT web site.
In March, the Tikhvin factory announced that it had received Russian federal certification to use SCT’s Barber S-2-R system for cars to transport mineral fertilizers. The Barber S-2-R is considered the basis for the “new generation of train cars” planned by the factory.
The railcar project at the Tikhvin Freight Car Building Plant is aimed at making freight cars that can replace the aging Soviet-made railcars.
The plant — which will have capacity for making 13,000 railcars and 65,000 wheelsets annually — will begin operations this year, IST spokesman Vasily Somov told The St. Petersburg Times. The company will work according to the railcar production standards used by companies such as Wabtec, Siemens and Alstom that had been unavailable in Russia, Somov added.
The company has already signed an agreement with Freight One, a major freight operator. In February, Freight One purchased six freight cars for transporting minerals.
With the overall market of rail transportation up 8 percent in 2010 compared with last year, according to Russian railway leasing firm Brunswick Rail, new freight cars will be in high demand. “The features make them more attractive than the cars made during the Soviet times, and sooner or later [the railroads] will replace them,” Freight One deputy director Sergei Kaletin told reporters.
For now, the Tikhvin factory has only one domestic competitor, the Uralvagonzavod plant that specializes mostly in making tanks. That company, however, is interested in purchasing Barber railcars, according to Somov. Another potential buyer is Slovakian company Tatravagonka.
In Tikhvin, relations between IST Group and locals got off to a rocky start. IST used to own a chrome iron plant in Tikhvin, and that plant was the object of protests by locals over ecological concerns. It became a source of bad public relations for IST. The group sold the plant, however, before the financial crisis to the Mechel mining concern.
IST Group also won support from locals after three of its owners — Nesis, Nikolai Dobrinov and Alexei Gudaitis — injected millions of dollars into the local budget by registering as residents of Tikhvin. They paid more than 3 billion rubles ($106 million) in federal taxes, and as a result the city received more than 1.7 billion rubles for its annual budget over three years. That money went toward items such as infrastructure, schools and repair of a local hospital.
In an interview last year with Forbes magazine, co-owner Dobrinov called the decision to register in Tikhvin “principal.”
“We did it because we wanted to do business in the city,” he said.
In addition to its capital infusion for Tikhvin, IST Group has been using Soviet-style approaches to attract workers and support.
The plant management announced a program to bring in qualified workers from throughout Russia’s regions. Company managers told The St. Petersburg Times that they would need 3,500 workers for the plant, and part of the work force will be local. Finding people suited for the job is difficult, since many of the experienced workers have already retired and some left to work for small businesses in the area.
In addition, IST is building several apartment complexes with more than 2,000 apartments for the future workers. They will be able to finance the apartment purchase with a 30-year mortgage with a 10.5 percent interest rate, the company said. Some of the employees are coming from as far away as Tolyatti, the manufacturing center of carmaker AvtoVAZ.
TITLE: Port Cargo Volume Slumps Due to Ice
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Tyomkin
and Yelena Dombrova
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Because of the ice coating the Gulf of Finland, the growth rate of cargo turnover in St. Petersburg’s port has fallen, and dockworkers have received about $10 million less than they could have, shipping experts said.
In St. Petersburg’s main port, cargo turnover — a measure of the amount of freight versus the distance it travels — fell 11 percent in March versus the same month last year, the port’s administration said.
That’s a new trend. In February, cargo turnover, also known as freight turnover, rose 8 percent in comparison with February 2010. For the overall first quarter, cargo turnover grew 5 percent compared with the same period last year. That first-quarter increase meant a cargo turnover of 11.8 million tons, the port’s administration said in a report.
Dockworkers belonging to Sea Port St. Petersburg reduced the transfer of freight by 14 percent in the first quarter because of the difficult situation with the ice, a company representative said, decreasing it to 2.2 million tons.
The leading three dockworker companies, which are part of the group, transferred 64 percent less fertilizer material and 86 percent less coal versus the first quarter of 2010.
About 400,000 tons of cargo have accumulated in the group’s warehouses, and the companies will gradually send out the goods to the cargo recipients, a group spokesperson said.
The biggest port in St. Petersburg, the First Container Terminal, or PKT, increased its processing of containers by just 0.3 percent in the first three months of this year. The processing decreased by 12.1 percent in March versus the year-earlier period, said a spokesman for National Container Company, which is owned by PKT.
Without the ice, the total growth for the first three months of the year could have been up to 10 percent, the spokesman estimated.
The second-leading container terminal, Petrolesport, has built up its cargo turnover by 98 percent, a Global Ports representative said. January’s year-on-year growth was 160 percent, February’s was 110 percent and March’s was only 55 percent, the press service for Global Ports said.
Ice with a thickness of more than a meter began to impede the movement of ships in the Gulf of Finland in mid-February. By mid-March the queue of expected calls at the port reached 160, according to the port’s administration. By Friday, that figure was only 14.
TITLE: Supreme Court Overrules Attempts to Fine Bureaucrats
AUTHOR: By Alla Tokareva
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: The Supreme Court has rejected City Hall’s attempt to fine officials for misappropriation of budget funds.
Bureaucrats from the city’s Avtovo administrative district are challenging a law concerning administrative violations relating to the St. Petersburg budget introduced in June 2010 that will result in fines being levied for misspending of state budget funds.
Civil servants could face fines of 4,000 rubles to 5,000 rubles ($141 to $176) and legal entities could face fines from 40,000 rubles to 50,000 rubles ($1,410 to $1,763). Failure to return public finances within agreed deadlines could result in fines of 4,000 to 5,000 rubles and 40,000 to 100,000 rubles, respectively. Similar measures will be applied in cases of unlawful diversion of funds from the state treasury, as detailed in the administrative offences code of the Russian Federation.
At the end of 2010, the Avtovo administrative district challenged four out of seven points included in the law. “Calling officials to account for the misappropriation of state funds is the jurisdiction of the federal, not local authorities,” said Igor Rulev, former head of the district’s local administration.
An attempt by City Hall and the city’s Public Prosecutor’s office to appeal against the decision in the Supreme Court was unsuccessful. “Petersburg doesn’t have the right to allocate responsibility for legal aspects of the budget,” stated the court’s ruling, dated March 30. The Public Prosecutor’s office declined to comment.
TITLE: Gazprom To Keep Design
AUTHOR: By Alla Tokareva
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: The architectural project for Gazprom’s planned business center that was originally intended to be built in St. Petersburg’s Krasnogvardeisky district will form the basis of the company’s new construction project on the Gulf of Finland, according to Okhta Public and Business Center, the company behind the project.
The original plans were for a controversial 400-meter skyscraper with around one million square meters of floor space, 20 percent of which was designated for the offices of the gas giant. Tatyana Yuryeva, a representative of the Ohkta Public and Business Center, didn’t say if there were plans to hold a new contest for the architectural design. Yuryeva said the company had not yet made any final decisions regarding the height or the exact function of the building.
A developer already familiar with Gazprom Neft’s plans said that the company does not intend to reduce the height announced earlier. According to the Committee for Urban Planning and Architecture, the directive to prepare documents related to the territory’s development was received on April 5. The company now has a year to work on the plans, said Yuryeva.
Konstantin Kovalyov, deputy director of the Okhta Group, said that making alterations to existing designs usually comes to about 30 percent of the cost of the original planning work.
The cost of creating a new design could be as much as $40 million, estimated a source familiar with the process. The decision to use the old design project will save time and resources, according to Kovalyov. The new Okhta Center will still need to be approved by the Directorate-General for the State Environmental Review, he added.
TITLE: Expats Push Up Rental Costs
AUTHOR: By Irina Filatova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Demand for high-end apartment rentals jumped by 40 percent in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period last year, as more foreigners are moving to Moscow due to stable economic growth, a real estate agency said Friday.
Moscow-based companies are hiring more foreign employees because the economy is recovering after the financial crisis, driving demand for high-end property, said Galina Tkach, head of the rental department at IntermarkSavills.
“We see the start of new projects, more merger deals. This results in companies bringing new employees,” she told The St. Petersburg Times.
Tkach said expats are the main tenants of high-end apartments, accounting for 70 percent of demand.
High-end apartments are in buildings constructed in the last 10 years, or pre-revolutionary structures that have been redone, and are usually located in prestigious parts of the city — like Ulitsa Ostozhenka, Arbat, Patriarch’s Ponds and Chistiye Prudy, as well as districts like Leningradsky Prospekt or Krylatskoye.
The chief executive of Penny Lane Realty, Georgy Dzagurov, also sees economic recovery as a key factor in market growth.
“A rental rate of $7,000 for a two- to three-room apartment doesn’t shock that much anymore, like it did two years ago. Tenants are psychologically ready to pay for expensive and quality housing,” he said in e-mailed comments.
Meanwhile, Russians also demonstrated a strong demand for such property because it’s more economically feasible to rent an apartment in the high-end sector than to buy one.
“The housing market hasn’t recovered yet, so people continue to rent apartments,” Tkach said, adding that mortgage rates are still too high.
An average mortgage rate stood at 14.99 percent for ruble loans and at 12.68 percent for dollar loans in the first quarter of the year, according to mortgage broker Kreditmart.
The first three months of the year saw demand for apartments of $7,000 and more from Russian tenants growing by more than 50 percent, compared with the first quarter of 2010, Dzagurov said.
While demand is up, the number of high-end apartments for rent with desirable locations declined.
Downtown Moscow, including Arbat and Ulitsa Tverskaya, remains the most popular location among tenants, while new apartments for rent were being offered in less attractive districts, Tkach said.
The lack of balance between supply and demand is contributing to the growing rental rates, with an average monthly fee staying at $6,681, up 14 percent from the first quarter of last year, she said.
According to IntermarkSavills, 74 percent of all requests from tenants were in the price segment of up to $6,000 per month, in line with the first quarter of 2010. Demand for the most expensive apartments — costing $10,000 per month and more — also remained at last year’s level of 9 percent.
Rental rates haven’t reached their pre-crisis heights yet, and analysts expect them to continue to grow throughout the year.
Dzagurov said rental rates are likely to increase by 2 to 3 percent by June 1.
TITLE: Bashneft Kick-Starts Work on Trebs, Titov
AUTHOR: By Howard Amos
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Midsized oil company Bashneft won a crucial jump-start for its development of the lucrative Trebs and Titov oil fields Friday when it signed a cooperation agreement with LUKoil, which will receive a 25.1 percent stake in the project.
“I have a personal love for Vagit and respect him deeply,” said Vladimir Yevtushenkov, billionaire owner of AFK Sistema, which controls Bashneft, of fellow billionaire and president of LUKoil, Vagit Alekperov.
The tie-up will allow Bashneft to use LUKoil’s existing pipeline system near the fields in the Nenets Autonomous District, as well as the $4 billion Varandei oil terminal on the Barents Sea, which loads tankers bound for the United States and Europe. Both the pipeline and the terminal have available capacity.
“The use of LUKoil infrastructure speeds up the pace for production,” said Alexander Korsik, head of Bashneft.
Alekperov said LUKoil would pay 4.7 billion rubles ($167 million) for the stake in the joint project, which will be run through a Bashneft subsidiary holding the licenses for the fields.
Trebs and Titov could come on stream between late 2012 and early 2014, Alekperov said, at a cost of about $6 billion. Production would peak at 140,000 barrels a day in 2017, he added, cautioning that this was a conservative estimate.
Alekperov declined to reveal the financial details of the deal because, he said, “that is a commercial question linked to the development of this project.”
State approval would not be required, he said, as both the companies involved are Russian.
The 25-year licenses for the Trebs and Titov fields in Russia’s Arctic north were won by Bashneft at a state auction in December from which all other companies, including LUKoil, were disqualified. The company paid 18.5 billion rubles ($668 million) for the licenses.
Proved listed reserves are 140.1 million tons of oil. The fields, located 25 to 50 kilometers from the coast, require relatively low operational expenditures and are anticipated, as greenfield sites, to enjoy high flow rates.
In an October research note, Troika Dialog said the project has a potential cash prize of $27.2 billion over its lifespan, of which 85 percent will go to the state — leaving $4.2 billion in free cash flow.
The partnership makes “supreme sense” for Bashneft, said Alex Fak, an oil and gas analyst at Troika Dialog, as it facilitates the quick exploitation of Trebs and Titov, the acquisition of which has made the company Russia’s fastest-growing oil major.
LUKoil will also provide key geological knowledge for Bashneft, which has no experience working so far north. The company already has several licenses in the Timan-Pechora Basin, where Trebs and Titov are located.
Though welcome, the partnership is not as significant for LUKoil as it is for Bashneft.
“It is clearly not a big deal for LUKoil,” Fak said. Even at peak flow, Russia’s second-largest producer will only gain 35,000 barrels a day, less than two percent of its current production.
But the close link to Bashneft could prove beneficial in other ways.
“LUKoil has had issues in the past with getting access to new large reserves in Russia, losing out to state-owned competitors,” a Renaissance Capital research note said Thursday. “Partnership with Bashneft would partially address this issue.”
Bashneft head Korsik said the deal represented a “real synergy” between the two companies.
“A high level of trust exists,” he added, “and I think that it will continue to exist.”
TITLE: Road To Skolkovo In Poor Condition
AUTHOR: By Olga Razumovskaya
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A recent VTsIOM survey indicates that Skolkovo, the high-tech research facility planned to be built outside of Moscow, is currently the key element associated with President Dmitry Medvedev’s innovation program; but the new roads leading to the hub are reportedly already in poor shape.
Forty-four percent of Russians believe that Skolkovo is key to the president’s innovation program, but only 2.6 percent of those surveyed consider it an analogue to Silicon Valley.
Thirty-five percent of respondents believe that, in a few years, Russia will be able to compete with the California hub in the number of scientific developments.
Medvedev’s team has not yet done enough to establish Skolkovo as a brand in Russia, as only 32 percent of Russians have a clear opinion of it, while about 12 percent are aware of its existence, but uncertain of the details.
Those who know what Skolkovo is place its importance among developments in Russia in the 21st century fairly high. It is rated third after the 2014 Olympic Games and the 2018 World Cup, both of which Russia will host.
While the attitude toward Skolkovo seems generally positive, most Russians (56 percent) know nothing of the center, and many problems connected with it remain unaddressed.
One of those problems is the road to the hub, which cost 5.75 billion rubles ($204 million) and is already in poor condition, according to reports in the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.
TITLE: Tax Evasion Charges Against Arbat Prestige Owner Dropped
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Investigators dropped tax evasion charges against the former owner of Arbat Prestige, once Russia’s biggest cosmetics retailer, and his business partner, a reputed crime boss, Interfax reported Monday.
The case was closed “due to absence of crime” in the action of Vladimir Nekrasov and his partner Semyon Mogilevich, who is also known as Sergei Shnaider and featured on the FBI’s list of “10 Most Wanted” fugitives, Nekrasov’s lawyer said.
The Federal Tax Service accused them in 2008 of tax evasion and sought to collect 155.1 million rubles ($5.5 million) in taxes and fines from Arbat & Co., the company that operated Arbat Prestige, which had some 100 outlets nationwide.
The case began to fall apart in October, when Moscow’s Tushinsky District Court returned it to prosecutors, citing procedural violations, and Moscow Arbitration Court in a separate ruling canceled the tax watchdog’s claims against Arbat & Co.
A district arbitration court upheld earlier this month the ruling to cancel tax claims against Mogilevich and Nekrasov, which made the closing of the criminal case against them all but inevitable.
Investigators did not comment on the story. Nekrasov and Mogilevich, who were not arrested, have earlier claimed that the case was fabricated by people looking to take over their business, but named no names.
Arbat Prestige had to close all its stores by 2010 after suppliers cut deliveries to the company. Dobrovinsky said earlier in April that Nekrasov has paid a debt of 341 million rubles ($12.2 million) to Sberbank but still owes about 1 billion rubles to suppliers.
TITLE: The Mystery of Oil Prices
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: With global demand for oil rising and Libya supplying about 1 million barrels per day less than it did before the coalition bombing started on March 19, analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch have forecast that there is a 30 percent chance that the price of Brent crude will reach $160 per barrel in 2011.
In March, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said he did not rule out a short-term rise in oil prices to $150 to $200 per barrel. Many investment bankers who agree with this prediction are quick to warn that an increase in oil prices in this range could be a drag on global growth and even trigger a new economic crisis.
The experience of the past 35 years shows that researchers have at best a very limited ability to predict not only a price range for future oil prices, but even whether prices will increase or drop at all.
For Russia, the stakes are huge. Each additional dollar per barrel results in another 60 billion rubles (more than $2 billion) for the state coffers.
Almost all scholarly works written on the subject of oil price swings agree that there are so many factors that influence prices that there is no firm way of predicting them.
For example, British television showed a film in the early 1980s titled “Death of a Princess” that sparked a negative reaction among members of the Saudi royal family. Fears that Saudi Arabia would retaliate by cutting oil supplies caused the price to jump $2 per barrel almost overnight. Although the Saudi royal family cooled down shortly after the incident, the price of oil did not return to its former level.
Now oil prices are determined not so much by supply and demand — as was long thought to be the primary factor — but by financial markets. Most oil is currently traded using derivative financial instruments that are not based on the physical exchange of crude between seller and buyer. In the 1990s, physical transactions accounted for about 30 percent of oil traded, but they now number less than 1 percent.
Oil prices began soaring in 2005 when U.S. pension funds were permitted to invest in oil futures not based on the physical delivery of oil. The U.S. Congress even convened a special hearing in 2008 to consider the influence that such speculation has on oil prices. It was reported that over the five previous years, institutional investors in the United States had driven up speculative demand by 848 million barrels — nearly equal to China’s 920 million barrel increase in actual demand for oil over the same period. U.S. analysts went on to calculate that each $100 million pumped into the oil market pushes the price per barrel up by 1.6 percent.
In effect, oil has become a speculative commodity whose price is determined by how investors anticipate its value will increase or decrease at a given point in the future.
That is why prices tend to reflect official projections. No sooner had Bank of America Merrill Lynch given its “bullish” prediction than the commodities market rallied and the price of oil surpassed $120 per barrel. Unfortunately, future trends are so dependent on subjective factors that prices at any given moment are impossible to predict.
Nonetheless, do analysts have at least some idea of an upper limit to prices?
The two dominant theories of the 1970s and 1980s held that oil prices were limited by the prices for alternative energy sources to crude oil or, by contrast, that the price ceiling was determined by the purchasing power of oil consumers who are also unable to reduce demand. This is partly true today.
But a new factor has entered the picture — energy efficiency. The main “energy resource” of the past 40 years was not oil but energy efficiency — the ability to save money by reducing consumption and using alternative energy sources. From 1972 to 2003, the power consumption component of global gross domestic product fell by the equivalent of 4.2 billion tons of oil, which was equivalent to the total production among all oil-producing nations in 2003.
Theoretically, then, a ceiling does exist for oil prices. But judging by the condition of the world’s financial markets, prices are still far from hitting that peak.
This comment appeared as an editorial in Vedomosti.
TITLE: Dealing With a National Meat Grinder
AUTHOR: By Alexei Bayer
TEXT: The Soviet era was comprised of two roughly equal parts. During the first half, which lasted from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 until Stalin’s death in 1953, the country was put through an extraordinary reign of terror and a radical experiment in social engineering and national reorganization. Counting the two world wars, in which Russian losses were also huge, the country endured a bloodletting of proportions unprecedented in history. Over the course of 36 years, at least 50 million people — although the number is probably much higher — were killed, expelled, starved or died in the gulag.
The second half was an attempt to deal with the consequences of that national meat grinder, to restore relative normalcy and to adapt the Communist system to the realities of the 20th century. That period lasted slightly longer, 38 years, and culminated in the collapse of the Soviet empire.
The nation that emerged in 1991 is therefore the creature of the Soviet era and reflects both its failures and successes. It is a surprisingly divided nation, considering that it had been so deliberately and brutally homogenized. Divisions in today’s Russia are many, but the most important one concerns the attitude toward Stalin and his policies. One side regards Stalin as a butcher who drowned the nation in blood, while the other sees Stalin as a strong leader who built a great nation, admittedly by harsh means. In other words, the choice is whom you identify with: the murderers or the victims.
But here is where it gets tricky. This choice is completely arbitrary. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, there was no such division. Under him, the system was a mixture of despotism, human sacrifice, pagan cult and brutal modern ideology. There was no “us versus them” as in the U.S. Civil War, which featured the North against the South, or the civil rights movement, which pitted African Americans against the white establishment. In the Soviet Union, no ethnic, geographic, religious or ideological lines were ever drawn. Proletarian origin, ideological purity or loyalty to Stalin — or even personal friendship with him — never gave anyone protection from being purged. The prison guard and the inmate were indistinguishable and often switched places. The system was both totalitarian and totally irrational and unpredictable, and today’s Russians are heirs to both sides.
The reign of terror is what makes this division in today’s Russia different from the 19th-century debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles. Now, it is based on an all-too-real political model.
The division will determine Russia’s future. The anti-Stalinists believe that Russia needs to reform its political system, society and economy and rejoin the international community. Stalin’s admirers, meanwhile, want Russia to remain separate and even to undo key economic and social reforms of the past 20 years.
There is so little common ground that it often seems that this national rift will never be healed. But it will be. As Russia slides back toward an ersatz Soviet Union and grows increasingly corrupt and isolated under the pretext of building a strong state, the anti-Stalinists will simply leave, as so many educated, independent-minded people have already done. But more to the point, Russia’s ethnic makeup is changing. Largely because of the policies pursued by Stalin and his successors, the once-populous nation is dying out. Its indigenous population is being replaced by immigrants from the former Soviet empire and China. They and their children will have different concerns and will no longer care whether Stalin was a bloody despot or a great leader.
Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.
TITLE: The art of seduction
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Mariinsky Theater created a sublime and detached rendition last week of Angelin Preljocaj’s ballet “Le Parc,” deservedly praised as the visual epitome of sensuality. The ballet saw its local premiere on April 14 as part of the Eleventh International Mariinsky Ballet Festival, starring Diana Vishneva and Konstantin Zverev as the two protagonists.
As the choreographer himself puts it, the ballet, written for the Palais Garnier in 1994, was inspired by the story of a woman’s resistance to love, and took inspiration from Madame de La Fayette’s novel “La Princesse de Cleves” (1678), and Choderlos de Laclos’ “Les Liaisons dangereuses” (1782). During the three acts of this 90-minute ballet, the audience watches the female character put up a fight against love — until she capitulates completely in the finale.
The plot is built around three choreographic encounters between a couple that begins with playful temptation and triumphs with glaring physicality. Although the ballet master designed his graceful show using 18th-century visual aesthetics and set it to a selection of Mozart’s adagios, each act is interwoven by the entrance of four gardeners. Dressed in plain black clothes that cause them to bear more resemblance to guards than to horticulturalists, the shady quartet almost appear to be “grey cardinals” who mastermind the show and seem to manipulate the main characters into a carefully set emotional trap. To make the distinction between the gardeners and the rest of the dancers more distinct, Preljocaj contrasted the regular harmony of Mozart’s adagios with the harsh sounds of electronic music fused with the sounds of whispers and passionate moans.
The choreographic triptych begins on a flirtatious note, with a gaggle of minxes dressed in men’s clothing indulging in a coquettish game of musical chairs with a gang of curious male youths. Yearning and languor reign in the second act, in which the men attempt to make the connection more physical — something that they will have to wait for until the third act — to which the crinoline-clad ladies respond with a chain reaction of fainting.
In a sense, “Le Parc” tells the story of a woman’s transformation from a pure Odette — the white swan — into a voluptuous Odile (her black double), reveling in unrestrained sensuality. In this respect, the role in Preljocaj’s masterpiece is no less demanding than that of the main character in “Swan Lake,” with the only difference being that instead of performing two opposite female characters, the female soloist faces the task of portraying the mysterious awakening of the sensuous side of a woman that had been trapped by her emotional restraint.
There are few ballerinas who can master Odette and Odile with equal ease. Every dancer — and indeed, every person — is naturally more attracted to one of the emotional poles. With Diana Vishneva’s performance in “Le Parc” on April 14, audiences witnessed the depiction of a reluctant opening up of Odette, rather than the story of Odile’s desperate sublimation and ultimate failure to control her passions.
Even at the height of the final scene, Vishneva, partnered by Zverev, held on to the note of purity and chastity that forms the core of the classical Odette. Although fully seduced and conquered in the end, Vishneva’s heroine remains unspoiled, her perception of sex apparently being synonymous with feelings and emotion, and not with vice.
While Preljocaj clearly sought to inject every single move in his ballet with an ever-growing dose of eroticism, Vishneva and Zverev performed the role as if delicately filtering the intense and intricate choreographic language to preserve the Mariinsky’s signature classical backdrop. Muffling down the physical aspect and blending in a note of ethereal flair to the performance, the dancers delivered a daydream rendition of Preljocaj’s ballet, as if the whole story was developing in the mind’s eye of the heroes, fantasizing about their loved one all day long from dawn till dusk.
“Le Parc” will next be performed on April 22, with Yekaterina Kondaurova and Yury Smekalov in the main roles. For more information, visit www.mariinsky.ru
TITLE: Mistranslating Hollywood
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: It’s late Saturday afternoon, and having finally accepted that spring has been canceled this year, the downcast expat trudges to the local shopping mall. Loaded down with booze and bags of high-calorie food (why not, if you’re never going to take off your parka?), you (downcast expat) trudge to the video store. You stand in front of racks of DVDs, conveniently — for the non-native speaker of Russian — divided into genres like êîìåäèÿ (comedy), ìåëîäðàìà (melodrama) and òðèëëåð (thriller).
You’re thinking “Wag the Dog” would fit your dark mood. Only the film titles are in Russian, and you have no idea where to start looking. Of course, some titles are a snap to recognize: “127 Hours” is “127 ÷àñîâ”; “Black Swan” is “׸ðíûé Ëåáåäü.” But the puns, connotations and associations in film titles make them tricky to translate. Glancing at racks of DVDs, I find both hits and misses — and another opportunity to expand my Russian.
Take “Wag the Dog.” The title in English is an idiom that describes a situation when a small group or part of something (the tail) controls the whole (the dog). In Russian, the film is called “Ïëóòîâñòâî,” a deliciously gloppy-sounding word that refers to petty deceptions or cons. Although this conveys the deception at the center of the film — a political spin doctor manufacturing a fake war in Albania to distract voters from the president’s sexual dalliances with a minor — it misses the point of the title. I’d give it a thumbs-down. But I do recommend watching the film, especially in light of a certain European leader’s current legal woes. Life imitates art, you know.
I give a thumbs-up to the clever Russian title of the television series “The Closer.” In English, the phrase refers to a cop who nearly always closes her cases by getting the perp to confess. In Russian, it’s called “Èùåéêà.” From the verb èñêàòü (to search), èùåéêà is a tracker dog and, figuratively, a detective who hounds criminals. While the images are somewhat different, it’s terrific cop slang.
Thumbs-down on the title of this year’s Oscar winner, “The King’s Speech.” The title is a play on words referring to the British king’s speech defect and his radio speech that culminates the film. Russian has the exact same punning possibility: äåôåêò ðå÷è (speech defect) and ðå÷ü (public speech). So why did they call it “Êîðîëü ãîâîðèò!” (The King Speaks!)? It’s as if some film distributor misheard the title — and the rest was mistranslation history.
I’d give a thumbs-in-the-middle to the Russian title of another Oscar contender, “True Grit.” In Russian, it’s called Æåëåçíàÿ õâàòêà (literally, “iron bite”), which conveys the image of an animal that clamps down on something and won’t let go. The title misses the sense of indomitable spirit in the word “grit” and is a bit tougher than the original, but it does convey the heroine’s perseverance. Close but no Oscar.
My Oscar for the best improvement in a film title goes to “Áëîíäèíêà â çàêîíå” (“Legally Blonde”). A play on âîð â çàêîíå (top dog, crime boss), the title makes more sense in Russian than in English.
But I give a double thumbs-down to “Ìèññ Êîíãåíèàëüíîñòü,” a supposedly literal translation of “Miss Congeniality.” Americans know that the Miss Congeniality award at a beauty pageant goes to the friendliest and sweetest contestant. In the movie, the joke is that the irascible FBI agent working under cover gets it. But in Russian, the false friend êîíãåíèàëüíîñòü means a similarity in spirit or talent. Miss Similarity? Miss Kindred Spirit?
Ironically, you might find this word’s adjectival form, êîíãåíèàëüíûé, in the phrase: Ïåðåâîä êîíãåíèàëüíûé îðèãèíàëó (The translation is close in spirit to the original). In this case — not.
Michele A. Berdy, a Moscow-based translator and interpreter, is author of “The Russian Word’s Worth” (Glas), a collection of her columns.
TITLE: Fashion in film
AUTHOR: By Olga Khrustaleva
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: “What you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise... In fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff,” says Meryl Streep’s uncompromising heroine in the film “The Devil Wears Prada.” This week, St. Petersburg fashionistas will have a chance to learn more about those behind clothes design, as the Fashion Movie Week held in the city from April 21 to 27 allows spectators to take a peek backstage of the catwalk and follow famous couturiers just as the films’ directors did.
Having comprised part of last year’s Avrora Fashion Week project, this year, the Fashion Movie Week has evolved into a separate event that also includes parties, roundtables and debates. The program consists mostly of documentaries showing the creative processes behind the work, and the designers’ everyday life.
The week opens with the film “Sonya Rykiel. The Day Before.” “The Day Before” is the name of a series of documentaries about the final few frantic hours before a fashion show shot by Loic Prigent, a director who is well known in fashion circles. Another film from the series “The Day Before. Fendi” will be shown later this week.
“Punk queen” Vivienne Westwood is the subject of a documentary by Gillian Greenwood that will be shown Friday. Shot in 1990, the film portrays the everyday life of the designer, as the camera follows her everywhere. Fashion critics and Westwood’s star contemporaries, including her husband — the English performer, impresario and self-publicist Malcolm McLaren — speak about Westwood’s undeniably impressive contribution to the world of art and fashion. Often described as unpredictable, Westwood manages to combine provocation with elegance and chic in her works, which most recently included a wedding dress for the fictional Carrie Bradshaw, heroine of the U.S. TV show “Sex and the City.”
“The Story of Fashion” tells the history of French fashion starting with Marie Antoinette through to the end of the 20th century. The film illustrates Coco Chanel’s much-quoted statement that: “Fashion fades, only style remains the same.” The fact that the story is narrated by Karl Lagerfeld, a mysterious and fascinating figure of the fashion world, only set curiosity agog. The narrator of one story, Lagerfeld becomes the main character of another. The film “Lagerfeld Confidential” by Rodolphe Marconi was put together from 150 hours of footage of the designer’s life.
“Generosity and humor, derision and intransigence, a perturbing lucidity: these are the first words I think of when speaking of Karl Lagerfeld,” said Marconi. “I showed the film to Karl two weeks after the final editing; it was the same version that you will see: he has changed nothing. There was no censorship imposed upon me during the editing.”
Lagerfeld himself seemed quite satisfied with and even surprised by Marconi’s work.
“If you agree to have a movie made about you, you have to follow the rules of decent creativity and decent freedom, otherwise you cannot do it,” he said.
“I knew his work and I wanted a surprise, and it was a good one.”
Another iconic fashion designer featured in the week’s program is Yves Saint Laurent, who is the subject of David Tebloul’s film “Tout terriblement,” which brings together different interviews and videos of the gifted designer, romantic and philosopher.
“The most beautiful makeup of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy,” is one of many much-quoted statements by Yves Saint Laurent that show his admiration for women.
The legendary Christian Dior and his path to success and universal recognition are at the center of Philippe Lafranchi’s film “The Man Behind The Myth.”
The creative process behind the Dutch duo Victor & Rolf is depicted in the film “Because We’re Worth It!” by Femke Wolting.
Finally, Loic Prigent’s documentary “Signe Chanel” traces the history of the 2004-2005 Haute Couture collection by the House of Chanel.
“Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.” This statement by Coco Chanel, a revolutionary in the world of fashion, seems as relevant today as her most famous legacy, the little black dress.
For a full program and film schedule visit: www.aurorafashionweek.com/fashion-week-movie/about
TITLE: CHERNOV’S CHOICE
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The recent Sergei Kuryokhin Contemporary Art Awards distributed earlier this month not only honored and paid some artists for their work, but suddenly showed what kind of art the St. Petersburg authorities want.
The awards, as well as the art center where the ceremony was held, are named after the late local musician and backed by City Hall. It is no surprise, therefore, that City Hall used the ceremony to criticize what it sees as improper art — namely, the radical art group Voina, as well as the Culture Ministry-backed Innovation Awards that earlier rewarded the group for its art stunt ridiculing the Federal Security Service (FSB).
An Innovation award was also given to Artyom Loskutov, the Novosibirsk artist who spent a stint in prison after annoying the authorities with his Monsterations, a series of Mayday marches featuring absurdist slogans.
Speaking at the ceremony, the head of City Hall’s culture committee Anton Gubankov said that the Kuryokhin Awards were about “real art,” dismissing Voina as a “crappy publicity stunt.”
Anastasia Kuryokhina, Kuryokhin’s widow and the awards’ founder, agreed.
“We didn’t even discuss Voina, we decided it was not very interesting,” she was quoted by BaltInfo as saying.
But turning the Kuryokhin Awards into a sort of “Anti-Innovation” contradicts the spirit of the musician, who died in 1996.
The authorities saw Kuryokhin as a “music hooligan” and dissident from the time he first reached underground fame at the turn of the 1970s and ’80s. Kuryokhin played music that sounded remarkably “un-Soviet,” released records abroad, read forbidden books, mixed with foreigners and frequented Western consulates — none of which a proper Soviet citizen was supposed to do.
Kuryokhin’s 1981 album “The Ways of Freedom” conveyed a strong anti-Soviet message, and the Contemporary Music Appreciation Society was shut down for good by the Soviet authorities after his avant-garde performance there.
The act of blowing up a balloon onstage during the show — which happened to take place on April 12, the Soviet Cosmonauts’ Day — was interpreted by them as a mockery of the Soviet space program.
Who knows, maybe Kuryokhin would have supported Voina?
Late last month, City Hall’s cultural committee was criticized for shutting down an anti-fascist film festival for being “ideologically wrong.” According to the organizers, every venue approached refused to hold the festival, referring either to the cultural committee’s secret ban or pressure from the local prosecutor’s office.
Recently, Gubankov said that City Hall was planning to start supporting contemporary art financially in the near future.
Judging by this month’s Kuryokhin Awards ceremony, it’s clear what kind of art that will be: Safe, apolitical and avoiding any criticism of the authorities.
— By Sergey Chernov
TITLE: Around Russia in 800 square meters
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The world’s biggest country has been reduced to 800 square meters in a unique new exhibition depicting the whole of the Russian Federation — from its most Western point of Kaliningrad to Kamchatka in the East — that opened in a test regime in St. Petersburg this month.
The project, called the “Grandmaket” (the Grand Model), resurrects the technique of producing miniature models of well-known places and historical events that was once so popular in the Soviet Union. Given this tradition’s deterioration in post-Soviet years, the project is an attempt to both restore the tradition and to give visitors an overview of the whole country in a 1:87 scale model.
The model faithfully depicts natural elements such as lakes, rivers, mountains and forests, alongside cities and villages, bridges, ports, airports, railways, factories, mines, stadiums, military bases and other manmade aspects.
Denis Mikheyev, the project’s executive manager, said the model aims to “give a recognizable image of Russia, though it is not a complete geographical copy.”
“It is an attempt to give people the chance to learn more about Russia, to make them proud of their country, and also to attract children to new activities,” Mikheyev said.
Its creators hope it will also be an enriching experience for both Russian and foreign tourists to St. Petersburg.
The model is rich with details of the country’s sights and everyday life.
Against the background of Russia’s endless railways and roads, filled with moving trains and cars, visitors can inspect the country’s farms, factories, airports, space centers and city life.
A Siberian village features old-fashioned wooden houses at the center of a scene of rural life: A young couple sits on a bench, two women hang washing on a clothes line in the yard, and cabbages and pumpkins grow in the vegetable garden. A group of mowers with classic scythes make hay for winter.
The picture is accompanied by the sounds of roosters and the whistle of a locomotive on a nearby railway. The train passes by an old water tower, atop which storks have made their nest, and among hills crowned by a traditional Soviet sign in which huge aging letters read “Slava Trudu!” (Glory to Labor!)
The section depicting the Ural Mountains, covered with thick forests that are inhabited by wild goats, attracts children’s attention immediately, for at the foot of the hills, a forest fire rages. Every ten minutes a fire starts, and a number of fire engines rush to the scene to extinguish it with a jet of water.
In the same section, pressing a button makes an excavator start working at a nearby construction site. The organizers say that when the model is completed, it will have up to 100 buttons to ensure children are entertained while observing different aspects of life in their country.
The model will also illustrate the country’s nine time zones by showing one part lit up at nighttime while other regions are in daylight.
One of St. Petersburg’s iconic symbols, the Peter and Paul Fortress, is represented on the model not only by a fine copy of the Peter and Paul Cathedral, but also by reproductions of the chiming of its bells and the daily midday shot from its canon.
Irina Beglaryan, 35, a programmer visiting the exhibition with her son, said her family was most impressed by the detailed elaboration of different phenomena shown in the model.
“There are things that we can never see in life — it’s not possible to travel everywhere and to see everything. So this exhibition offers the best chance to see all that,” Beglaryan said.
Natalya Petrova, 29, an accountant, said she particularly liked the fact that “everything in the model works: Cars move, and street lamps are lit up.”
Petrova’s son Svyatoslav, five, said he most liked “the big locomotive and space rockets.”
Mikheyev said that the project’s author, Sergei Morozov, initially came up with the idea for the model to distract his son from spending all his time in front of a computer, and later the project grew to a larger scale.
Work on the model has been in progress for four years. Over 100 artisans, including electronic engineers, modeling specialists and artists have taken part in its creation. Work is currently underway on the model 24 hours a day, in order to prepare the exhibition for its official opening at the end of this year, Mikheyev said.
‘Grandmaket’ is located at 16 Ulitsa Tsvetochnaya, lit. L. Currently it is open in a test regime on Sundays from 2 p.m. through 5 p.m. Tickets are priced at 350 rubles ($12.40) for adults, and 200 rubles ($7) for children. For more information, visit www.grandmaket.ru or call 387 5888.
TITLE: A Spooky School
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
TEXT: As the children return for a new term at their well-appointed boarding school, everything seems normal. Except for the new cleaner who has just escaped from a psychiatric hospital, the bodies of dead hares scattered in the snow and the dungeon with its decaying skeletons.
This is the plot of CTC’s new show, “The Closed School,” which picks up on the trend for spooky, gothic shows like “True Blood.” Starting this week, it is set in a school for the privileged offspring of businessmen and film stars, which has a lovely white-columned building on a remote country estate. Outside its gates is a wild forest full of things that go bump in the night.
Surprisingly, the idea for the licensed show came from Spain, which had a show called “The Black Lagoon Boarding School” (El Internado Laguna Negra). While Spain is hardly known for its impenetrable forests, the idea works pretty well in Russia, where forests really are frightening and likely to be full of wild dogs, abandoned military installations and possibly even serial killers, like the one who has cast a permanent shadow over Moscow’s wooded Bitsevsky Park.
The show began with a young woman, Maria, escaping from a high-security psychiatric hospital and turning up at the school as the new cleaner. On the way, she decides to change out of her hospital pajamas in the woods. She is chased by a rottweiler and shimmies up a tree wearing only a bra and knickers. So full marks to the scriptwriters for getting a bit of titillation into the first five minutes.
As she cringes in the branches, the school’s hunky headmaster jogs up to the rescue. He is puzzled — “We don’t have any dogs, especially not mad ones,” he says.
She is immediately accepted at the school, and the staff turn off radio reports describing the escaped patient, sighing “That’s all we need.”
The school has wood paneling, leather-bound books and a chef who whips up Italian food for lunch. The pupils are driven for their first day back at school in huge jeeps, and one has a film star mother who poses for photographs with the dowdier mothers.
But under the placid exterior, there is something very wrong, the white-haired history teacher warns his pupils: “Terrible things are happening in the wood. It’s dangerous for the children, for the school, for all of us.”
The headmaster thinks he is a bit touched and tells him to take a holiday, but instead he heads into the woods, following an ancient map, and finds an underground bunker, reminiscent of the one in “Lost.” Inside, he stumbles upon a pile of skeletons in a barred cell.
The teacher manages to run away, but does not get far as he walks into a mantrap. Soon he is thrown into the dungeon himself by a mysterious stranger flanked by the savage rottweiler.
Meanwhile his teenage pupils wait for him in a cemetery full of leaning crosses, with dead hares lying mysteriously dismembered on the ground.
“This is gothic, it’s cool,” one comments.
CTC, which aims for a young audience, is pinning its hopes on the show to revive its fortunes after a drop in ratings and a few much-vaunted shows that disappeared without a trace.
The first episode was pretty eventful, although the chills were on the mild side — after all this show airs at 9 p.m., just as the toddlers are tucked into bed to watch “Good Night, Little Ones.”
The trailer on the channel’s web site promises plenty more blood and gore, saying: “There won’t be a prom. No one can run. No one can hide. Their home forever is ‘The Closed School.’”
TITLE: Medvedev Vows to Clamp Down on Illegal Drugs
AUTHOR: By Alexander Bratersky
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev called Monday for a crackdown on rampant drug use, proposing compulsory treatment for addicts and nationwide drug testing for grade school students.
He also proposed expelling drug-using college students, allowing employers to fire employees who use illegal drugs, and cracking down on clubs and web sites where drugs can be purchased.
Experts said the proposals resembled a Kremlin attempt to score points before State Duma and presidential elections, but also called the measures long overdue.
Drug addiction is a national disaster, Medvedev said, with the number of addicts estimated at 2.5 million, or more than 2 percent of the population, and steadily growing since the Soviet collapse. The number of drug addicts in Russia has increased by 60 percent in the last decade, according to the Service for Narcotics Control. UN figures indicate that Russia consumes 21 percent of all Afghan heroin — almost twice as much as China — and as many as 30,000 Russians die annually from heroin alone.
“As the largest national heroin market, Russia consumes more than 20 percent of Afghan heroin, but manages to intercept only a scanty four percent of the flow reaching its territory,” reads a UN report. Critics say the situation is aggravated by corrupt officials who make money from the drugs trade.
The government has done little to curb drug use, rejecting drug treatment programs and attacking foreign donors and nongovernmental groups helping addicts, even while accusing foreigners of fueling an HIV epidemic boosted mainly by drug use.
Now things are set to change, Medvedev said.
“There have been no changes for the better … even though the topic has attracted a lot of attention,” Medvedev said at a State Council session held in Irkutsk, where some 13,000 of the population of 2.5 million are drug users, according to local health data.
Medvedev said Russia was losing 2 percent to 3 percent of its GDP due to drug use, and there are some 200,000 drug-related crimes committed annually, Interfax reported.
Seventy percent of addicts are under 30, and the age of first-time drug users has dropped to 11 or 12 years over the past five years, Medvedev said.
He ordered the drafting of legislation to make drug testing in schools universal, although he gave no time frame and did not name the agency that will handle the task.
School drug tests, which are carried out in many European countries, have been embraced by parents in the Russian regions where the testing has been introduced as a pilot program, children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov said at the Irkutsk session.
Medvedev also said compulsory treatment should be the main legal punishment for drug addicts who commit minor crimes, with convicts only sent to jail if they refused treatment. He ordered the government and the Kremlin to study the idea and report to him in June.
Justice Minister Alexander Konovalov suggested making drug use a criminal offense at the same session. Medvedev did not comment on the proposal, which could land thousands of addicts behind bars.
Experts contacted by The St. Petersburg Times said the proposed measures were harsh but necessary considering the growing problem, but cautioned that the Kremlin should expand the crackdown to corrupt drug fighters to achieve visible results.
“This is an urgent topic,” Nina Ostanina, a State Duma deputy with the Communists, said by telephone.
“But,” she added, “when it is raised now, six months before the [Duma] elections, it does look like populism.”
She expressed concern that the measures would fight the consequences, not the causes, of drug use. “Drugs are a business that is protected by law enforcement agencies, among others,” said Ostanina, who sits on the Duma’s youth affairs committee.
“They should test not just grade school students but drug fighters within the police as well,” said Yevgeny Roizman, one of the country’s most renowned anti-drug crusaders.
Roizman said he welcomed Medvedev’s measures. “The war with drugs cannot be waged through weak methods. Even a small liberalization [of policies] can lead to a collapse,” he said by telephone from Yekaterinburg.
Roizman’s anti-drug group, City Without Drugs, has campaigned against corrupt anti-drug police in the region, seeking investigations and criminal cases against officers who patron illegal drug networks.
But the group has also taken flak from rights groups, some of which claim its tough rehabilitation methods are illegal. City Without Drugs activist Yegor Bychkov was jailed in October on kidnapping charges over his treatment of several addicts who were chained to beds as treatment. Bychkov has said the case was retribution by corrupt officials whom he criticized. Many journalists, bloggers and other public figures supported Bychkov. Desperate parents often turned to Bychkov’s center for help, because his measures, though tough, worked well. During one year the number of drug takers, as well as the drugs-related death rate, dropped dramatically in Nizhny Tagil.
“In our rehabilitation center we don’t consider addicts to be sick people,” Bychkov said. “What kind of sickness causes a man to lie, rob and kill?”
Bychkov’s prison sentence was suspended on appeal, but the case highlighted the shortcomings of current legislation on drug treatment.
Most drug experts agree that state-run programs are woefully insufficient. “Drug addicts usually come there just for detoxication to lower the dose and leave in a couple of days”, Bychkov said. His words are backed up by statistical data: More than 90 percent of addicts who undergo treatment start using drugs again within a year.
The situation may change if mandatory testing and treatment are introduced, but there is also a danger that the measures will only create a new “system of money laundering,” said Vitaly Bogdanchikov, head of a Moscow-based drug rehab center.
Bogdanchikov, who is also an adviser with the Public Chamber’s health care committee, pointed out that a drug test costs $10 to $15 per person, which implies the need to create a multimillion-dollar program for students across the country.
But he also said the situation is dire — possibly even more so than Medvedev paints it.
“Medvedev voiced the figure of 2.5 million drug users, but in my opinion the figure is much higher,” Bogdanchikov said. “Authorities are just afraid to speak about the real figures.”
Olga Khrustaleva contributed to this
report.
TITLE: The Dogs Who Paved the Way to Space for Gagarin
AUTHOR: By Olga Kalashnikova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: While the 50th anniversary of the Soviet Union putting the first man in space was celebrated across the world last week, less well documented are the many canine cosmonauts who preceded Yury Gagarin. Clothed in secrecy for many years, details of the experiments continue to come to light even now, half a century later.
A total of 42 dogs took part in experimental space flights during the Soviet Union’s race to put a man in space, as recently revealed in secret data released by Igor Bukhtiyarov, head of the state research institute of military medicine at the Ministry of Defense.
“After the satellite launch [on October 4, 1957] Sergei Korolyov, the leading Soviet rocket engineer and spacecraft designer, began to prepare animals for a seven-day flight,” said Mikhail Khomenko, a professor and leading researcher at the Research Institute of Military Medicine where the dogs were trained (then known as the State Research Institute of Aviation and Cosmic Medicine).
The finished version of the spacecraft was equipped with a life-support system and devices for recording the animals’ physical condition.
“A mixture of food and water containing all the necessary nutrients was provided as a gel and stored in airtight containers. The lid automatically opened twice a day, allowing the dog to eat the contents,” said Khomenko.
“Space clothing was designed for the dogs, resembling a sort of waistcoat equipped with a sanitation device. Modern clothes for pets take a lot of inspiration from those space suits,” he added.
Ten dogs took part in the training; among them were Laika, Albina and Mukha. Their training included being placed in centrifuges that simulated the acceleration of a rocket launch, being put in a recompression chamber, and being closed in a small cage to get them used to the confines of the cabin of Sputnik 2. Laika, a female stray, had the best reaction. Her destiny was to become the first animal to orbit the Earth and to give her life for the achievements of science.
“On November 3, 1957 Laika began her journey,” said Khomenko. “It was a great event. But scientists had not yet learnt how to bring animals back to Earth. It was a joy to be able to send an animal into orbit, but at the same time everyone regretted that Laika died due to excessive heat and stress after four orbits.”
In the media, however, it was reported that the dog had died painlessly about a week after take-off. Only in 2002 did an employee of the Institute for Biological Problems in Moscow reveal the truth at the World Space Congress in the U.S.
According a BBC News report dated November 3, 1957, the National Canine Defence League called on all dog-lovers to observe a minute’s silence every day that the dog was in space. Animal welfare organizations expressed outrage at news that the Russians had sent a dog into outer space. The statement that Laika was not destined to return alive caused anger and shocked many world observers.
The experiment, however, allowed Russian scientists to learn much about the prospects for human space travel. Laika proved that a living organism could survive for several hours in a weightless environment, paving the way for human space travel.
“Laika hailed the era of mankind in space,” said Khomenko. “This flight had enormous significance for world science, and for Russia’s prestige. Laika is identified with our country throughout the world. Every space museum has a stand devoted to her.”
In 2008, a monument to Laika was erected on the territory of the institute where the dog was trained.
The Russian space engineers’ next task was to send a living creature into space and bring it back alive.
Twelve dogs were trained for the next space flight. They had to meet certain criteria, including a weight of six kilograms and a height of no more than 35 centimeters. The dogs chosen were strays, on the basis that they are generally hardy and open to contact, and thus easier to train. Females were preferred as it was easier to make a sanitary device for them. They also had to be light-colored for easier observation and have an attractive appearance in case the experiment succeeded and they were presented to the media.
They underwent the same training as Laika, plus an ejection procedure. An ejection truck used in these experiments was recently exhibited at the Military Medicine Museum in St. Petersburg.
“The most difficult thing about training the animals was to adapt them to the conditions of the confined cabin of the spacecraft. They were kept in gradually smaller cages for long periods of time,” said Khomenko.
“Finally the dogs were put into a closed airtight capsule with the conditions of a real space flight,” he said.
Two strays nicknamed Belka and Strelka achieved the best results, and on August 19, 1960 they were launched in a Vostok spacecraft from the launch site that is known today as Baikonur. The dogs were dressed in red and green-colored outfits, and were accompanied by several rats and 40 mice, as well as flies, plants and fungi.
The life-support system allowed the animals to eat and breathe normally while inside the spacecraft. For first time in the history of space exploration, a video monitored the state and behavior of the dogs in space.
“After entering weightlessness, the dogs adapted to the conditions of space. There were no abnormalities and the 24 hours passed without any deviation,” said Khomenko.
“On the fourth orbit around the Earth, Belka began to show signs of stress, which was a sign that for the first human flight, it would be better to have only one orbit.”
The flight lasted for more than 25 hours, during which time the spacecraft made 17 full orbits around the Earth. On August 20, 1960 the ejection capsule carrying the dogs landed within 10 kilometers of the planned landing site. Both dogs were alive, and were later proudly presented to the press.
The news of Belka and Strelka spread all over the world. They continued to live in the Institute of Aviation Medicine and were often taken to schools and kindergartens. Strelka went on to have six puppies with another dog from the institute named Pushok, one of which, named Pushinka, was given by Nikita Khrushchev to Jacqueline Kennedy, the wife of the U.S. president.
“It’s nice to know that the descendants of our Pushok are still alive somewhere,” said Khomenko.
The taxidermied space dogs are now exhibited at the Moscow Museum of Cosmonautics.
Two more dogs named Pchyolka and Mushka became the next canines to be sent into space, but they died when their spacecraft disintegrated during re-entry.
“To send a man into space, we needed to make two successful flights that simulated the planned human flight, so the experiments continued and on March 9, 1961 Chernushka was successfully launched into space,” said Khomenko.
The dog Zvyozdochka was Gagarin’s immediate predecessor, being launched into space on March 25, 1961 — just a few weeks before Gagarin himself. Gagarin witnessed the flight take off.
Zvyozdochka was accompanied by a life-size cosmonaut mannequin called “Ivan Ivanovich.” They completed one orbit, re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and successfully landed in the Perm Region on the border with the Udmurt Republic.
The Vostok capsule in which Zvyozdochka traveled was bought last week at Sotheby’s by Russian businessman Yevgeny Yurchenko for nearly $2.9 million. It had earlier been sold to a collector outside Russia.
“I hope that Vostok will take its rightful place in one of the national museums devoted to the history of the Russian space program,” Urchenko was quoted by Reuters as saying.
The data obtained from the space dogs’ flights paved the way for human space travel.
“Without the dogs and their flights, we would never have been able to take that step in the certainty that it was safe,” said Khomenko.